January 2008 Archives

OMG I have so had this conversation more than a few times with other geeks... normally it goes something like this:

• [Random reference to some technology, such as a programming IDE]


• Yea, well back in my day we didn't have no steeking IDE, we used EMACS and were happy with it!


• Oh yea, well back in my day we had VIM


• Vim!? Luxury! We had VI and we loved it!


• VI? Why back in my day we had ed!


• Ed? Luxury! I used to use 'cat' and we were happy.
  [This is where my real life deviates from the comic]
  


• Cat?! My god man you lived such a pampered life, I used to write the binary code directly to disk with 'echo'.


• Echo! We used to use binary


• BINARY! You had both one's and zeros? Luxury! We only had zeros and we liked it!


• You had zeros! We used to have to use the magnetic pull of the moon to manipulate bits on the hard drive.


• You had a hard drive!?!?!


• [... and so on....]

I do have to say that I love XKCD! They have some good stuff in the forums as well.

Oh, and just for my coworker Len..... "PICO!" (in reference to 'nano' in the comic).

I'm so sorry to keep posting these, more and more..... I can only imagine what it'll be like when I have kids! Read on for more.

Surprise, surprise! Another kitten post, after I actually got to see it a bit today in real sunlight.... normally I get home late enough that it's already dark, and I have to change the white balance on all my pictures from the beautiful yellow color that is produced by my lights. I did get a new box for them today, but sadly it seemed to be a bit too small, or the blanket that they are in is too big, so I'm going to have to find a way to re-arrange them without disrupting things too much.

Anyway, on to the pictures!

Everybody now.... "Awwwwww...." :)

Today I went to my first Vancouver Ruby Camp, a set of talks by people in the local Ruby and Ruby on Rails community. Translation for non-techies out there... a complete geek-fest! It was great :)

Honestly my RoR experience is near nil, and my Ruby experience consists of reading a book on the train and poking away with it on my laptop, so a lot of the talking went completely over my head either in concept or technology. Course, I knew that going in, and was expecting to do nothing more than go there and asbsorb as much knowledge as I could.

I saw on their FaceBook page that there was a guy looking for a carpool out from Mission, so I volunteered. Nice guy by the name of Nathan, turned out to not be an axe-murderer, which was nice. We had some serious geek talk going in and out too, which was enjoyable... this is the kind of talk that would have made my wife jump out of the car too.... everything from the given Ruby and RoR discussions to Lua and OCAML.

Like I said, the talks were good... not only info to absorb, but also info to research and read up on. Such as:

• Project testing and collaboration
  
  
  
  • Mingle - Project collaboration
    
  • Continuous Integration
    
  • Cruise Control RB - A continuous integration tool
    
  • Selenium - Testing tool for web applications
    
  
  
• Other Ruby / RoR Implementations
  
  
  
  • jRuby - Java implementation of Ruby
    
  • TrimPath - Ruby on Rails implemented entirely in Javascript, allowing the application to run entirely within the client side browser, and when combined with something like Google Gears would allow users to do data changes while offline, and then the data will be synced back to the server when you go back online. There was a good demo of this, however, it didn't seem to go quite as well as it could have, so I'd say that the online/offline data storage and access might need a bit of work to make it more robust.
    
  • Merb - Like Ruby on Rails but light and fast
    
  • Merb tutorial
    
  • Rubinius - A re-implementation of Ruby in Ruby, to allow easier access to changes and bug fixes from the community. I'm the least sure about this one to be honest... it seems that the trouble of keeping this version of Ruby synced up with the "master" (which I assume is Matz's version)... however, I didn't know enough about it at the talk to do anything other than feel the conversation passing over my head at 10,000 feet.
    
  
  
• Interesting People / Blogs/Blog Entries
  
  
  
  • Loud Thinking (David Heinemeier Hansson)
    
  • How Ruby on Rails could be much better - Talks on shared hosting from Dallas who works at Dreamhost
    
  • Jamis Buck - Author of Capistrano
    
  • Why Rubinius and Merb matter
    
  
  
• Other Ruby Tools / Links (I'm sure they are all known to people in the Ruby world already of course)
  
  
  
  • Capistrano - Ruby on Rails deployment
    
  • MemCacheD - Caching system
    
  
  
• Other
  
  
  
  • Javascript SetTimeout() and SetInterval()
    
  • Book: Ship it! - Apparently a great book to make you think about how you design apps and systems from an architecture point of view
    
  
  

Due to popular demand, more kitten pics (and one of Scamper, my folks cat who we are cat sitting right a couple of weeks)!

My buddy Brian came over today and of course, wanted to steal the kitten. I didn't let him of course, though he got to hold her (I think it's a her anyway). Here are the pics of the little one at 13 days old. Click for higher res.

Tiny little kitten.... biiiiig man hands :)

For the most part she was ok, big adventure and got to go farther around the house than ever before... still a bit freaked out by the camera shutter noise though, and started squeaking, so we put her back in the box and ushered mommy cat in (as she didn't hear or ignored the squeaks of "get the huge hairless monkeys off of me!").

The Ikea Hacker blog has an interesting idea for a server in your living room. I'm not so hot on the "in your living room" as much as the idea for the cabinet which would look moderately nice (I do have access to a "real" rack but have yet to bring it home due to the fact it's pretty damn ugly and heavy).

Wish I knew why the Canadian version of the "Akurum" cabinet is almost double the cost of the US version.... $145 vs $86! Thanks for hosing us Ikea you hosers!

Anyway, looks like a potentially cool weekend project to hack around on to make the office look a little nicer.

File this one under "Note to self" and "TODO" :)

You know the drill by now.... this time though, eyes open! These are mostly for $coworker Mike who is very demanding of the cuteness :)

Eyes open and inquiring!

Click below for 6 more...

Update: Played around a bit in iMovie and made this video for your enjoyment.

Just a quick post as I needed to be in bed about two hours ago. Here are some new pics of the kitten, apparently his/her eyes are open or starting to open, though he/she has been asleep all evening, so I haven't seen the baby blue eyes. Here's some pics for you to "awwwhhhh" over.

The size comparison shot...

Click continue for more....

So last night I was running on fumes and had some really weird dreams involving this year's MacWorld and what mysterious new products may or may not be released. Figured I'd record it here a day early before i get caught up in the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field watching all the live blogging and news tomorrow.

First thing from my dream was an iPhone that was more like a flip phone, and slightly Star Trek like. Hey, it was a dream remember!

The second was to do with the Something In The Air banners. Basically a wifi receiver system in the form factor of a Mac Mini but with a big smiley face on it with teeth, and each of those teeth have a receiver on it, to make it so that you're not restricted to one flow of data.

Yea, I know it doesn't make sense, but after the last few days, it makes perfect sense!

First things first... I wanted to comment on Mike's post on photo organization:

I disagree with the 5 and 4 star ratings. After reading The DAM Book (DAM = digital asset management) the idea of scaling your star ratings so you have way more 1 star than 2 star ratings, way more 2 than 3, etc. Filling up your ratings with lots of 5 star ratings (especially right away) means you don't have anywhere to go as you get better. I've started giving 1-3 star ratings, where I only have a few (under 20) 3 stars, and those are what I really think is my best work. Eventually I'll have something that's a step up from that and then I'll go into the 4 star ratings. Going into 4 and 5 right away may make you feel good, but doesn't give any room for the future. YMMV, IMHO, etc.

So why am I quoting myself? Well, two reasons. First is that when I tried to post a comment normally (using Firefox under Mac OS/X) I got the following message:

Completely unhelpful, and unchanging the three or four times I tried over a 5 minute period or so. If something was blowing up I'd expect a service as huge as Spaces would have any errors or issues fixed within seconds. Or maybe it's a Firefox or OS/X hatin' bug (tinfoil hat mode engaged).

Ok, so there's a server error, I can deal with that, it happens, hell, it happened to me when I got an email saying that my MySQL server had stopped for no reason. I'm not a billion dollar company though :)

OK, so easy enough, I go to Mike's profile and clicked "Send a Message" and got the following screen down below.

At first glance you might think that you should put a subject in the subject box, and your message in the message box right? Then hit se... uhm... wait a minute, where's the send button? Oh, there's a note at the top saying that this user won't allow messages and the only option you have is to cancel. WTF? Why is there a) a 'send a message' button and b) fields to type in (and I typed in a big long message as well as my comment above before I noticed this.

Now, after typing all this up it looks like even though I was getting "server error" clicking the post button, it was in fact posting a comment each and every time, so poor Mike got about 30 posts of the same comment :( Sorry about that.

Maybe that's why Mike doesn't allow people to email him....

Anyway, Spaces, you have bugs, please fix!

Apparntly for the last few months comments on this site have been broken... no notifications came to me, and I had to really poke and prod the server to get it to show the comments that are there! Stupid MT :( It also looks like something with the new MT has made the 'continue reading' link come up regardless of if there's an extended entry.... *sigh*

Anyway, thanks to anyone (Erik, Shaggy, Dee, etc) who did comment in the last few months!

For non-cuteness lovers, feel free to ignore.... but know you died a little bit in your soul... :)

"Squeek! Squeek!"

Mom and Baby

So after a minor speed bump at the start of my watching experience (brother-in-law coming over and hanging out for an hour), I finally managed to finish watching jPod.... here's a few thoughts.

First of all, the first episode is the "introductory" episode, so it's a bit clunkier than I presume future episodes will be. The video tapes that the characters do to introduce themselves to their new boss (and of course the audience) feel a bit odd, but they are actually pretty much how the book starts. The Vancouver setting is nice as well, though the only parts you really see are a couple of shots of downtown and the marina. What can I say, I'm a sucker for Canadian content! It was filmed when there was snow on the ground though...

The plot also follows pretty much the start of the book, very accurately actually, surprisingly so. I'm sure that the various plot points will be hit in future episodes expand off into other storylines. I like the name of the company being made "Neuromatic Arts" (or whatever it is... it's as thinly veiled Electronic Arts Vancouver as in the book :)

The casting is great as well, Alan Thicke wasn't quite as good as I thought he'd be at the start, but again, I'm sure that things will settle down and get better. The main characters of Ethan, his Mother, Cowboy and John Doe are all sucked directly from my brain when I read the book. The character of Steven (the new boss) seems to be trying a bit too hard to be Steve Carell in The Office, with a real sweet bit thrown in as well.

The main problem this series is going to have is if you haven't read the book it may seem odd and disjointed, whereas if you have read the book, you'll be impressed with the accuracy to the book, and how well the characters have been fleshed out.

Episode 1 ends at the point that Ethan discovers his new "roommates" courtesy of his brother. I'm looking forward to episode 2!

All geeks..... don't forget that jPod starts tonight on CBC at 9pm PST. I finished the book in two days and am so hoping that the series lives up to it. There is such potential there for a great series....

So apparently the whining and slightly porkier look to my kitten Zoon was not just the Christmas season and extra turkey... I came home today after work and found her in a little nest we'd made her in the library with a tiny little striped kitten latched on! I'm giddly like a schoolgirl with a brand new pony kitten!

Pictures (of mediocre quality) of mom and baby who appear to be doing well:

I'm actually kinda glad I wasn't there for the birth, even though I witnessed many kittens entering the world when I was living at home, I vaugly remember it being a bit "yucky" and to be honest I was a bit scared as to what to do if something went wrong, etc etc. However she appears to be doing just fine and the baby, no more than a few hours old I'm sure, seems as happy as one can be.

Update: More Pics

(The artsy black and white version)

After being out late last night and getting home and to bed 1am-ish, was woken up around dawn (6? 7?) by my UPS downstairs beeping. Guess the windy night knocked out the power. Got up, hit the button to shut it up, and then went back to bed. Then was woken up by a call to my BlackBerry at 8:45 (I'm on call this week) saying that the Internet was broken in the office. Luckily by the time I got conscious enough to even start looking at it they called back saying that things were back up. Was a power blip of some sort knocking out the routers. Of course, by this point I had no chance of getting back to sleep, unlike the three cats laid out in the bed snoozing obliviously.

Being a new Mac user and a computer user of 15-ish years, I figured I'd list some of the things that were not the garden of eden utopia that the idea of a mac sometimes is. Where possible, I've included my solutions or findings. Anyone out there in the lazyweb who has ideas to address anything, feel free to chime in.

• Working in the big Dilbertesque corporate world I get to deal with outlook and exchange, and speaking as someone who doesn't have to deal with the administration side of the Microsoft Exchange server side of thing, I have to say that Outlook and Exchange seems to work fairly well. Email works OK though way too heavyweight (and not nearly as well as my precious and fantastically fast and efficient Mutt or as I heard recently, sylpheed), shared calendar is nice, and a global addressbook makes things all happy and good. Of course, I have a horrendous situation myself at the new location where I'm working downtown, but when I was on the north shore it was all good.

  On the PC I used Outlook 2003 (nice) and recently Outlook 2007 (slower, but had better search and more glitter). Microsoft Office 2004 for the Mac has Entourage which is a really horrible looking port in my opinion and seemed to lack the Exchange-over-HTTP protocol that I need to access my mail. I haven't gotten my paws on Office 2008 for Mac yet to see how that is. Mail.app (the built in mail client) looks and acts fairly standard for a GUI mail app, and supports exchange, but not over HTTP.

  My solution for this so far has been to run my working version of Outlook 2007 from the PC under VMWare Fusion in Unity mode (and waiting for Office 2008 for the Mac).

• BitTorrents (taking a 180 degree deviation from corporate work stuff).... I love uTorrent and of the Mac Torrent clients I've tried, none compares. The "official" Bittorrent client is ok, and missing some of features I like from the windows version. Also I'm scared of the corporateness of the company now they are legit. Tinfoil hat firmly in place. Transmission isn't bad interface wide, and seemed really slow to do downloading. Turns out that apparently it's banned by a bunch of trackers. Today I found BitRocket which has a nice UI, seems to do about 80% of what I like, and actually downloads files. Anyone know what the canonical OS/X bittorrent app is?

• Simple things like keyboard shortcuts. I really miss hitting WindowsKey+L to lock my screen. There are some really hacky solutions out there (IE: a wonderfully horrible solution of a shortcut of ctrl-f8 ctrl-shift-f8 or something like that), but the closest I've found is enabling the "show status in menu" option from the keychain access tool. Simple huh? Still just a mouse click, though not quite as easy as WindowsKey+L. Option number 3 is a screensaver hotcorner... doesn't feel quite right to me.

• I discovered that all funky-odd-craptastic random systems problems don't go away as soon as you move away from the Redmond giant. While trying to get the screensaver hot corner to work i found that my screensaver didn't seem to be engaging. In fact, it wasn't coming on at all. Reboot (lesson learned from the past)... same issue. OK, muck around for an hour or so. No luck. OK, reboot again. Works perfectly now.

  *sigh*

• An iTunes music library with 44,000 items loads just as slowly on a dual core 2.2Ghz, 2G of RAM Mac as a dual core 1.8Ghz, 1.5G of RAM Acer :)

• Having a built in terminal is great... however, when the backspace/delete key when SSHing into servers isn't 100% the same, and the terminal type isn't 100% the same as with say, the defacto Windows terminal program Putty, it is annoying. Not toe-chopped-off annoying, more one-mosquito-somewhere-in-the-bedroom-as-you-try-to-sleep annoying. Just not used to BSD I guess.

• Along with the Terminal twitchings, I really want quickputty for OS/X. Anyone? Please? Yes, I can save 40 odd sets of Terminal config files and access them from a folder on the dock... it's just not the same (or as quick and easy). Ironically, I can use the quickputty install in my VMWware machine to accomplish this if I want to do all my terminal work within the windows VM.
  

I'm sure most of these things are fixed by either just getting used to the new environment or finding the "right" tool for the job which I'm sure the mac-people know, and us windows/linux folks just don't know the right question to ask. I'll be back tomorrow or the next day with what's nice and better living in the Mac world.

I have hardly been reading at all in ages, other than instruction manuals. One book I borrowed and, while it has a really cool concept (detection of lies, personality, etc through kinetics) I just have had trouble getting into it. I'm about a third of the way in and have to force myself to pick it up, which I do every week or two. I borrowed jPod by Douglas Coupland from PeeJay at work after I couldn't find it in the stores around here. I'm halfway through.

I figured I'd get in tonight, watch a bit of TV, read a bit, then watch some more tv or hack around on the computer or something and go to bed at a decent hour was trashed when I got the initial "get home from work, make dinner, watch a bit of TV" part done, then started reading and all of a sudden it was 10pm. Then I threw on the Across the Universe soundtrack and suddenly it's quarter to midnight.

Fantastic book. I admit that part of the attraction is the fact it's Vancouver based. I'm sure I'm doing the same thing that some drooling fan at a concert does when the band inserts local landmarks into the songs and people go nuts, and I'm OK with that. It's also geek based, and I'm OK with that. It's also Dilbert-corporate-culture-big-tech based so I have (as I'm sure many others have) a vaguely disturbing thought that Mr. Coupland has been monitoring my life, relationships, coworkers and friends from the other side of the surveillance cameras that are hidden around my house and embedded into my brain.

There's also something vaguely self-referencal when a book involving characters doing bit-parts for Vancouver based studios ends up being turned into a TV series filmed in Vancouver.

I figure I'll be done tomorrow night and will have finished my first fiction book since I re-read Snow Crash last January on a cruise.

Peace out.