Due to the fact that I like Linux and open source software in general, it has been a bit of an adjustment to transition to a place where almost every tool or technology I use is provided by Microsoft (Sonoma Partners is a Microsoft partner which sells, customizes, and provides consulting services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM software). Some might say that I have sold out to the man (in fact, several people already have), but I figure that as long as I am not paying for Microsoft software, I have no problem using it.

At least, that’s what I was thinking when I accepted the position. For the most part I still feel that way, but lately it seems like I’ve been spending a ridiculous amount of time troubleshooting installation/configuration errors and not very much time actually doing useful stuff. It’s not even the errors that I’ve been getting that I really have a problem with – it’s the error messages. If my software messes up, I would like it to at least tell me what happened that made things go wrong.

Here is an example of an error message that I got (after searching through the log – the original message just told me that my login failed) using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 yesterday:

Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 11.
Login failed for user 'DOMAIN\user'. Reason: Token-based server access validation failed with an infrastructure error. Check for previous errors. [CLIENT: ]

Now, that seems straightforward enough, except that it says something about an infrastructure error, which made me think that something with the actual application went wrong, not just that I have the wrong login. Furthermore, when I checked on that “State: 11″ business, I found that it means “Valid login but server access failure” (see here for reference). That made me think that something was wrong with my attempts to access the server, as well.

After a bunch of troubleshooting, I finally found out that it wasn’t any sort of strange problem, but rather a case of my Windows Authentication account not being a user in the database instance. All I had to do to fix my problem was start the database instance in single-user mode (by adding “-m” to the start-up parameters, see here for details), make sure that there were no other programs running that were connecting to the database instance, and add myself as a user.

So yeah, Microsoft, I’d like to see some better error messages. Why can’t you tell me that that user doesn’t exist in the database? That would be fantastic – please don’t give me this crap about it being for security reasons.

To see the forum thread that finally got me on the right track, go here.

Some of you may say…”Oh, it’s obvious. We’re in the coolest industry of our time.” or “Um, have you seen these gadgets lately????”
But, I think there’s more to it than what initially fires our neurons.

Quote of awesomeness…

Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna come work for you.

That’s from the first line of Joel Spolsky’s post titled “A Field Guide to Developers“.
If you think you have this problem then READ the article.

ParticleTree.com has some brilliant writing and information that should be read on this topic as well(and many other topics).

http://particletree.com/notebook/on-motivating-programmers/

This awesome video has a good explaination that kind of falls in with Joel Spolsky’s view.

Jason Fried of 37signals has an interesting outlook on this idea of motivation as well.

So what are some things that motivate us?

• Make money a non-issue. Salaries don’t have to be extravagant.
• Give us a real purpose and direction.
• Try your best to make us comfortable(Chairs, noise, etc).
• Attempt to reduce destructive politics and micro-managing.
• Don’t burn us out, we do that on our own.

Setting It Up

If you want to start a GoogleCode project you’ll need the project creation page. Enter a project name (all lower case), summary, and description. For version control, select Mercurial, and go with whichever license suits you best. Add a few labels and create your project. You should then be taken to your project page, which you’ll probably want to bookmark.

The second piece you’ll need (if you don’t have it already) is Mercurial for your source code version control. Before I had projects on GoogleCode, I use Mercurial in single-player fashion, saving revisions of my own projects so I didn’t have to worry about making major or possibly risky changes.

Mercurial

Presuming you are putting an existing project on GoogleCode, the first thing you’ll want to do is have a repository to push to the servers. Using the command line (or Dos prompt if you’re using Windows), navigate to the folder containing your code. You’ll need to create a repository, add your code to it, and commit it. You can use the following commands:

hg init
hg add
hg commit -m "Initial commit."

There are options for the add command, such as hg add -X [pattern]. This excludes files matching a certain pattern. I typically don’t include .pyc files in my repositories, so often I’ll use hg add -X *.pyc

If you haven’t used Mercurial before, you’ll need to set up an hgrc file somewhere. There are several places you can put the file (see the link), and you can even have multiple files that Mercurial will combine (more on this later). For now, create a new file in your home directory called “.hgrc” (again, see the link above for details). Put the following information in the file:

[ui]
username = Your Name <youremail@server.com>
verbose = True

This tells Mercurial who made a commit (useful when looking through your revision log) and instructs Mercurial to show more output when doing things rather than less.

When working with GoogleCode, user authentication is required to push changes. You’ll need your Google username and the code/password generated by GoogleCode (go to the Sources tab and click the link for “googlecode.com password”). If you don’t do the following steps to do authentication automatically, you’ll have to enter your username and password each time you push, which, given the kind of generated password GoogleCode produces, is a pain.

To authenticate automatically, add an authorization section to your hgrc file.

[auth]
project.prefix = https://projectname.googlecode.com/hg/
project.username = your.username
project.password = geNeRAteDpasSWOrd

You can put multiple prefixes, usernames, and passwords here, using something else instead of “project.”. One irritating thing is that you have to repeat your name and password for each project, even if they’re the same. It would be nice if there was a way to reference a variable containing the data, but if there is, I haven’t found it. If anyone knows how, let me know (but it’s not a big deal).

If you decide to do this, it’s important to make sure your hgrc file is not publicly visible, as in, stored in your repository somewhere. You can put an hgrc file in the .hg directory in your repository, and putting your password in there isn’t a good idea.

Speaking of the hgrc file in your repository, let’s make one. Create a file named “hgrc” in the .hg folder in the folder containing your code. This step is another convenience step, meant to make pushing your code easier. Generally, without this step, you’ll have to issue the command hg push https://yourproject.googlecode.com/hg/ Adding this section to the repository’s hgrc file allows us to use simply hg push

[paths]
default-push = https://yourproject.googlecode.com

You should now be able to push your code to the GoogleCode servers. One thing I learned when I first did this is that your entire version history will go on GoogleCode, not simply your latest revision. In retrospect, this makes perfect sense since version control is simply a history of changes, all of which you’ll need to create the most recent version.

Added Bonus: Externals and Subrepos

One of the issues I discovered with serving code from a repository is how to manage external dependencies. I have several modules I use on a regular basis, for instance, a module of commonly used decorators. None of this modules, however, warrants a project that I could upload and list as a dependency for all my other projects, and of course, you don’t want to simply copy the module and add it to each repository that uses it (maintaining the same code in different places is not only a pain, but a bad design idea in general).

Enter the helpful folks at subrepositories, an experimental feature in Mercurial version 1.3 and up. I’ve used it a little, and I’m still seeing how well it works, but on first glance, it seems to be the right idea. Here’s how I resolved my problem.

Put your external dependencies in a folder and make it a repository with the simple sequence hg init; hg add; hg commit -m "Log" You don’t need to worry about the hgrc file this time, since, if you put your username in the home directory, Mercurial will look there for it.

Now, navigate back to your main project’s folder. I keep my projects in a Code folder, among them a folder named “externals” with the code I often reuse between different projects. If you have a different scheme, you’ll have to adjust the following instructions accordingly.

You’ll have to do four things: create the .hgsub file, clone the externals repository, add the subrepository to the project, and commit. First, create the “.hgsub” file in the main project directory. Put in it the line externals = ../externals This tells Mercurial where to check for updates. For the other three steps, execute the following commands:

hg clone ../externals externals
hg add
hg commit -m "Added externals subrepository."

When you issue the “add” command, you might not see anything happen. That’s okay. I know I started trying to troubleshoot when I didn’t see anything happen, but it does the work on the commit, so you don’t have to worry. (Mercurial will also create a .hgsubstate file that it needs but you don’t need to worry about.)

The last thing to do is push your updated repository. Mercurial will pull changes for the subrepository from the repository listed in the .hgsub file. (I’m not sure if it does this on commit or push.) You can include multiple subrepositories by repeating the process.

Conclusion

That’s my experience putting projects on GoogleCode. Let us know yours in the comments.

Why does caffeine have such a following in the tech community? Well it could have to do with how caffeine works.

Caffeine helps your brain continue to work when it’s fatigued(which only makes it more fatigued later), it will appear to speed up your brain if you have caffeine while you are rested.

Why does this appeal to nerds and geeks? Well we want to be unstoppable.  Some may object to that but really think about it. When you’re working on something and it’s getting late or early as the case usually is, you don’t want to go sleep and wait until tomorrow! You want to keep working on whatever it is that is catching your attention at the moment!

I too have this egotistical delusion, but I’m trying to drastically cut back.

Why am I doing this? Well part of it is that I hit a point in my life that we all hit or live at continually. The point is that I realized I have been using caffeine as a crutch to get me through each day.

Also, I hit that wall where caffeine wasn’t doing the trick any more and I was still tired and I was drinking caffeine from 1pm-4pm just to remain concious.

I have been fortunate that I usually encounter no issues with headaches once I stopped having caffeine.

When I stop drinking caffeine in crutch format, as well as attempt to get sleep, eat bettter and exercise I find a lot of good things happening.

I find that I have more energy, I feel more positive, it’s not as easy to tweak me and over all things just feel and seem better.

I highly recommend dropping caffeine for a couple weeks and seeing if you notice a difference or not.

Pylint seems to be the most useful for the day to day developer. It’s fast and flexible, you can run it on the file you’re working in,a group of files or the entire project.

There are some problems with all of these tools when it comes to frameworks. I’ve been using django alot lately and with the way that it has it’s settings.py file integrated it kind of  tricks these lint tools. So you may see errors saying something like this…

ImportError: Settings cannot be imported, because environment variable DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE is undefined.

There are a couple django-lint checkers it appears.

django-lint is a project that appears to have died. I’ve tried to use this a little bit, but I haven’t really had much success.

It appears however that the project has moved or branched http://chris-lamb.co.uk/projects/django-lint.

I haven’t tried this version but I imagine it would be better since it was last updated in March 2010.

You can also set the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE environment variable like this…

$ export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=mysite.settings
$ django-admin.py runserver

So here’s my story:

I have some surprising elements that came out of looking for lint tools for python or any other programming language that you’re working in.

One, was that my team latched on to the pylint scoring mechanism instantly and it became a game of who could get a perfect score over all the code they were working in.  This is good for a few reasons, and I challenge those nay sayers out there.

Warning: POINT ahead!

Ok yes, maybe “your” coding style isn’t accomodated in pylint…you know what! It doesn’t matter.  The POINT is that everyone is meeting a STANDARD.

That’s the point! I don’t care if no one can get a perfect score unless all their variables start with “i” (which I assume is Apple’s policy).  The power that comes with everyone driving, pushing and accelerating in the same direction is far far far more valuable than “your” coding style.

Installing GeoIP

Requirements/Dependancies:

• Python 2.4+
• python-geoip
• libc6
• libgeoip1

More on dependencies here http://ns2.canonical.com/es/karmic/python-geoip. But don’t worry about these since most of them get installed by the package anyway.

A couple of basic principles before we get started.

1. Geolocation is gathered from an IP address.
2. There has to be a database that connects the IP address to a geographical location

I’m going to be using Python here because frankly it’s powerful, easy and has awesome libraries for geolocation. Which brings me to the GeoIP library! I’m using Ubuntu 9.10 so most of these libraries will just take an apt-get to install.

Then you can install python-geoip with

sudo apt-get install python-geoip

Or you can get the source from http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/api/python/

Now that you have this installed you can  test it with the following code put in the python terminal.

>>> import GeoIP
>>> gi = GeoIP.new(GeoIP.GEOIP_MEMORY_CACHE)
>>> print gi.country_code_by_addr("203.195.93.0")

I got that from MaxMind’s tutorial http://www.maxmind.com/app/python. At this point you have the ability to track IPs down to the country level. What you probably really want is to go down to the city level.

Geolocation – Cities

If you call some of the other functions on the GeoIP class like record_by_addr() you’lld get an error like this

“Invalid database type GeoIP Country Edition, expected GeoIP City Edition, Rev 1″

This is telling us that we don’t have the database for the city level information. You can get that for FREE from MaxMind!

http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz

There is a shell script available to update the city database for you in the python-geopip package (Don’t forget to “chmod +x” on it!).

/usr/share/doc/libgeoip1/examples/geolitecityupdate.sh

#!/bin/shGUNZIP="/bin/gunzip"
MAXMINDURL="http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/"
WGET="/usr/bin/wget -q -O -"
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
if [ ! -d "$DATADIR" ] ; then
echo "Data directory $DATADIR/ doesn't exist!"
exit 1
fi
if [ ! -w "$DATADIR" ] ; then
echo "Can't write to $DATADIR directory!"
exit 1
fi
cd "${TMPDIR}"
${WGET} "${MAXMINDURL}/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz" | ${GUNZIP} > GeoIPCity.datif [ $? != 0 ] ; then
echo "Can't download a free GeoLite City database!"
exit 1
fi
mv -f "GeoIPCity.dat" "${DATADIR}/"
if [ $? != 0 ] ; then
echo "Can't move databases file to ${DATADIR}/"
exit 1
fi
exit 0

What this script does is..

1. Download the database (http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/)
2. unzips the file
3. and moves it to /usr/share/GeoIP

Now this is the key! That database “GeoLieCity.dat” MUST be in that directory!

Then there is the magic piece of code that isn’t really documented anywhere…

Except here in ubuntu, along with many other examples(hence the folder name “examples”).

/usr/share/doc/python-geoip/examples

gi = GeoIP.open("/usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIPCity.dat",GeoIP.GEOIP_STANDARD)

or…

gi = GeoIP.open("/usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIPLiteCity.dat",GeoIP.GEOIP_STANDARD)

Depending on what you downloaded.

Creating a new instance of GeoIP with the path to the alternate database will give you access to all sorts of awesome information!

Ok, now all the code…

Find by IP address:

>>> gi = GeoIP.open("/usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIPCity.dat",GeoIP.GEOIP_STANDARD)
>>> print gi.record_by_addr("74.125.95.105")
{
    'city': 'Mountain View',
    'region_name': 'California',
    'region': 'CA',
    'area_code': 650,
    'time_zone': 'America/Los_Angeles',
    'longitude': -122.05740356445312,
    'metro_code': 807,
    'country_code3': 'USA',
    'latitude': 37.419200897216797,
    'postal_code': '94043',
    'dma_code': 807,
    'country_code': 'US',
    'country_name': 'United States'
}

Find by name:

>>> gi = GeoIP.open("/usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIPCity.dat",GeoIP.GEOIP_STANDARD)
>>> print gi.record_by_name("www.google.com")
{
    'city': 'Mountain View',
    'region_name': 'California',
    'region': 'CA',
    'area_code': 650,
    'time_zone': 'America/Los_Angeles',
    'longitude': -122.05740356445312,
    'metro_code': 807,
    'country_code3': 'USA',
    'latitude': 37.419200897216797,
    'postal_code': '94043',
    'dma_code': 807,
    'country_code': 'US',
    'country_name': 'United States'
}

Find PointlessRants!

>>> gi = GeoIP.open("/usr/share/GeoIP/GeoIPCity.dat",GeoIP.GEOIP_STANDARD)
>>> print gi.record_by_name("www.pointlessrants.com")
{
    'city': 'Brea',
    'region_name': 'California',
    'region': 'CA',
    'area_code': 714,
    'time_zone': 'America/Los_Angeles',
    'longitude': -117.86119842529297,
    'metro_code': 803,
    'country_code3': 'USA',
    'latitude': 33.926898956298828,
    'postal_code': '92821',
    'dma_code': 803,
    'country_code': 'US',
    'country_name': 'United States'
}

This week we talked about why Apple is looking at purchasing ARM, the iPad and some questions we have about Ubuntu’s user experience research.

• Apple to purchase ARM  (appleinsider.com)
• Ubuntu and notification area elimination (design.canonical.com)
• Ubuntu and making my freaking network settings disappear, disabling alt-tab, and disabling my task-bar when I tried to fix it…
• iPad hmmmm

Now that’s interesting, AMD has been in Intel’s shadow for a long time and it would be great to see them get something good going again. It would be huge if Apple decided to use AMD processors in their computers. AMD has ATI which has been making great budget graphics cards.  AMD also has a really decent platform for their CPUs right now. While both Intel and AMD are screaming about hex-a-cores there appear to be some differences between the platforms that Apple could indulge in. For example, AMD’s processors appear to use less power. This would be huge for laptops and cooling issues.

So here is what I think…

Apple should buy AMD.

I think it would just make sense and be a benefit to both companies. Apple could then have in-house CPU and GPU production and they wouldn’t have to worry about production delays. They would also have the ability to have their hand in the development of new CPU/GPU platforms which they have already  expressed an interest in by purchasing P.A. Semi for the development of the A4 chip in the iPad.

Apple would have the ability to really open up their creativity for a bargain price!

AMD’s market cap is $6 Billion…that’s just 1 quarter’s revenue for Apple ($223 Billion market cap).  Of course, I’m using these numbers wrong, but I just want to put into scale the difference in the sizes of the companies.

So these thoughts have really made me wonder, “What was AMD really doing at the ApplePlex?”

Ok, let’s be real here. Windows Mobile hasn’t really seen an update since PC2000 back in April of the year 2000(Wikipedia). That’s a decade of not really putting money into this OS and it dominated the phone OS market for a long time.

Microsoft made what I believe to be a good decision when they decided to no longer support Windows Mobil 5/6 applications.  Some people may be upset by this but let’s be honest, all your windows mobile 5/6 applications are not that good.   The applications have been driving the leading mobile OS’s for the last few years.  The iPhone lead the way with their very large and hyped app store and then Google’s Android followed suit.  I mean really, what’s the point of having a powerful and awesome phone if there’s nothing you can do with it?  Which leads me to the next question…

What applications are going to be available for Microsoft new mobile OS? Or will Microsoft leave the ability to use their shiny new operating system behind?

What Microsoft is offering is “SkyMarket”.  I couldn’t find a ton about SkyMarket but it appears that Microsoft is going to have an app store!

So the next question of course is, how good is their SDK?

Well you can download it here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=71deb800-c591-4f97-a900-bea146e4fae1&displaylang=en

I guess you’ll have to play with the SDK your self.

Overall I think Microsoft is heading in a better direction than they have in the past but I  don’t see any innovation or excitement around this release, which leads me to believe that it will not be nearly as successful as the current leaders in mobile operating systems.

Microsoft had a real chance to come out with guns blazing but I think they missed their chance again.  I guess we’ll see on April 12th when Microsoft unveils their shiny new mobile operating system.

I am critiquing the iPad in this post even though I have not used one and I probably will not get the chance just like I’ve never had the chance to use a Newton.

Now Apple has some great ideas and their products push not only technology but also many other industries. I think this may be the only thing that the iPad has any chance of accomplishing.

The hope that I noticed, seemingly being the agenda of Apple in this product release, is the hope of helping, if not solving the plight of the publishing companies in this digital age.

Bringing magazines and newspapers to a device isn’t a new thing(note: Amazon Kindle) but bringing the shiny,glossy look of a high class magazine or other published work doesn’t work so well on an e-ink screen. This fancy GQ, Vogue published material venue is, I believe, what the iPad is trying to shoehorn into.

A noble ambition and one with some potential for profit however it is a very risky one.

Firstly you have to get publishers on-board, and Apple has been working with them to get things started. They have not fully succeeded yet. Amazon and Barns and Noble have quite a lead in this arena.

Secondly, you have to get these published works into the hands of many. I’ve had a subscription to Wired for 3 years…and I only paid $30! The iPad is not cheap($499), but Apple says “oh, but you can use the iPad for so much more! Like work documents and…some websites”.   I could, or with the time I’d save using a real keyboard I could go watch a 2 hour movie each week.

Apple’s stock was on a great rebound from all this insane recession business, especially noted during the time leading up to the keynote announcing a new product that Apple was going to show off! However after the keynote…the stock dropped considerably.  Now I don’t think that the stock market is some kind of oracle but when you release a product and afterwards people think your company is worth less money than before…there might be a potential problem.

Apple hasn’t had a serious blunder in quite a while but I think this might be one.

The good stuff…

I want to be positive at first here, while there are some glaring mistakes I would like to focus on the good parts.

The first thing I noticed, and I mean the first, was the text for the prices (reference #5) in the list of products that you’re browsing. This I really like a lot. It’s cleaner and easier to read. Which I think is why I noticed it first, along with people always want to view the prices of the products they’re interested in. Bravo!

Another thing I noticed, probably the second thing was that the “Compare” section had changed (reference #4). This is very nice now as well. I can see and remove the products I want to compare from this point and they carry over to the next page of products.  Very cool in my opinion. The compare page itself was cleaned up a little as well.

The page turner is kind of middle ground (reference #3). I like it but I guess it didn’t really change enough for me to think it’s stellar like the previous two features. One thing that did change drastically with that work flow is the “Loading…” message you get when turning pages.  I’m kind of indifferent about that as well.

Ok, now for the critique part…

Ok, first off I have to say…that if you run newegg.com through validator.w3.org the site is quite flawed with 551 errors and 26 warnings. Now that said, I’m impressed that the page seems to display properly in my browser (ubuntu firefox 3.5).  I am kind of curious how well it looks in other browsers but I don’t think I’m going to probe it that deeply.  Part of their problem here is the DOCTYPE they chose, which happens to be

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">

So while part of their problem is that they are trying to write XHTML code, they’re trying to validate it against a HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE. I attempted to switch the DOCTYPE in the validator and found that there were more than double the number of errors, so at that point I gave up giving them the benefit of doubt. Seriously guys, step up your game! I know you can!

Another thing that seems strange is that the top navigation area that has dropdowns (reference #1), now seems to be very sluggish in responding to mouse movement. When you hover over them they are supposed to drop down with categories of products but this seems to take over 1.0 seconds now which is kind of aggravating to use. I don’t think this is a result of my computer being slow as a few others have mentioned this to me.

Also on this note, the title links for products in the listing page used to be underlined but that has now been removed (reference #2). This I found to be quite disturbing.  Even though I’ve used this site for at least 4 years, I found my self hesitating to click on this text since there was no indication that it was a link. A slight color alteration here would have made some sense in my mind, but to take away all indication that this is a clickable link just doesn’t add up to me.

All in all I was honestly disapointed by this update. The only really good thing I can say about it is the pricing text. I’m sure they spent thousands of dollars on this update and you would think you would at least get valid code. I don’t mean to be harsh on the developers but it’s really not impossible to write good XHTML markup. This problem of poor markup is pretty rampant on the internet and it’s a shame to take all the work that the W3C has done and throw it away. I hope Newegg.com’s next update has valid code even if that means cutting features.

Online

• Check GMail (find nothing new)
• Check the Drudge Report (read only the headlines)
• Download half-a-dozen RSS feeds to Liferea (predominantly Slashdot and Hacker News)
• Look stuff up (thank you, Wikipedia)
• Be bored by Facebook (after about five seconds)
• Buy stuff from Amazon (more frequently than I probably should)
• Watch TV and movies (TV network sites, Hulu, and Netflix)
• Coming soon: talking on the phone (Skype)

Offline

• Write stuff, use spreadsheets, make presentations (Office 2007)
• Write Python code
• Design stuff in CAD and Blender
• Edit images and video
• Watch TV (DVDs from Netflix)

While the Offline list may be shorter than the Online list, don’t let it deceive you. I spend an average of half an hour online per day. That’s all.

I know I could do my word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations on Google Docs, but I hardly see the point. Yes, I could access them from any computer (but why would I when I have a laptop to take everywhere?), and I could collaborate with others (but I’ve only needed that about five times out of hundreds). The overriding fact is that Office 2007 is better software than Google Docs: it’s faster, more power, and even with the hassle of installing it on Ubuntu, it works better.

When it comes to the personal organization stuff, I’ve become a bit eclectic. For calendar management I use Outlook at work and–believe it or not–an actual wall calendar at home. As for having a mobile solution, I’ve actually gone back to using Windows Mobile on an HP iPAQ I had lying around. Same for task management, actually. Despite the sleeker iPod Touch, I actually use the old PDA quite a bit (a lot of that has to do with a way better, if unconventional, keyboard).

It’s true that I’m carrying around four devices when I could be carrying around one smartphone: PDA, iPod, phone, and GPS, but what happened to the old adage, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? I suppose if it was all webapps, it wouldn’t matter if you lost or sat on your phone; just replace it and you’ve lost nothing. Of course, if the company providing the webapp goes under, then you’re in trouble (though I suppose the likes of Google and Facebook would be considered “too big to fail”).

It has occurred to me that perhaps I’m just not the sort of person who needs all those web services (or maybe I’m just not at a busy enough stage of life). Maybe…

…or maybe I’m the sort of person who spends most of my time constructing rather than consuming.

I’ve heard multiple reports that this will help you sleep better at night if you’re a regular late night computer user and the makers of f.lux have some research information here. I haven’t been sleeping too well lately so I’m giving it a shot. Let us know in the comments how it works for you.

However, I was excited when I first heard about their new upcoming event.  Many thought Apple would be cutting the iPhone loose from the ailing AT&T network and opening the door for Verizon.  Many others speculated the time was right for Apple to release a tablet PC… especially after seeing domains like iSlate.com being bought by shell companies to Apple’s name.  And the people who guessed tablet PC were right… but how right were they?

Is it fair to call the iPad a tablet PC?  It is certainly a touch screen device, but out of the box it’s a single user, single program machine.  Apple boasts that the iPad can get up to 10 hours of battery life, but that should not be difficult to accomplish if only one program can be run at a time.

The iPad should be great for watching video on the go.  Does it have an HDMI output?  No.  Does it have a DVI output?  No.  It can use an adapter to output VGA/D-SUB so you can connect it to a projector though.  You have to use an adapter?  What happened to simplicity and ease of use?

Does the iPad screen have an aspect ratio of 16:9 or 16:10 so movies will look great?  No, the iPad’s screen has an aspect ratio of 4:3… just like owning an old fullscreen TV.

But how much storage does it have?  For $499 you can get a 16 GB version and for $699 you can get a version that tops out at 64 GB.  Only 64 GB?  It’s a portable device, so that’s probably OK.  I can hook up an external drive to it when I need more storage.  Wrong.  The iPad has no USB ports, FireWire ports, or eSATA ports… not even any card readers.

Apple’s video iChat works great to connect people around the globe.  At least the iPad will have that.  Sorry, the iPad doesn’t have a camera on the front.  Or back.

So what’s the up-side to this device?  Does it do 3G?  It will in fact do 3G, but you’ll have to throw in another $130 for the 3G capability.  The capability… not the service.  If you want an iPad with a 64 GB SSD with 3G capability, you’re looking at coughing up $829.  Indeed a hefty price tag for features that netbooks at half the price can do better.

In all fairness, the iPad could work well as an e-reader, but reading from a bright, glossy screen isn’t likely to be easy on the eyes compared to the competition’s electronic ink.

It seems like the iPad could be good at so many things, but the it makes concessions on every front and does nothing well.  Is this all part of Apple’s plan?  It’s easier to make a better device when the device can be improved upon easily.  Has Apple set it up so the 2nd and 3rd generation iPads will rock our socks?  I sure hope so, because the 1st generation iPad is clearly an oversized iPod Touch (or  a limited iPhone if you have $130 to burn on data only 3G capability) that suffers from very obvious ailments.

The Specs:

1.6 Ghz N270 Intel Atom
512MB of Ram
8gb SSD drive

This is a pretty standard setup and I’ll get more into some of the other hardware in a second.

The laptop is pretty powerful, the only thing lacking in my case is the RAM but that’s fairly easy to upgrade.

It’s keyboard is a little cramped but not nearly as bad as some that I’ve played with at the local Buy More

As soon as I got it I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it and that was a really good decision. The 1010NR runs it fast even with only 512MB of RAM and it detected all the hardware flawlessly. The webcam worked out of the box, the sound, even my USB headset was detected correctly by the Pulse audio server.

There is a strange button by the tack pad that disabled it when you press the button. I think this is because HP assumed the the Mini’s layout is so cramped that you might accidentally hit the mouse when you’re typing but I leave the track pad enabled all the time and I haven’t run into this issue yet.

Ubuntu Remix also seems to work ok with the sleep and hibernate functions but sometimes when you open the lid from a suspend it will shut off or resuspend for some reason. Not a huge deal, as you just resume it with the power button and things are normal again. This happens about 20% of the time.

My biggest gripe at the moment is the wifi card.  The card is a Broadcom BCM4312b/g now most people won’t care about this but this card does not seem to support monitor mode. So if you expect to use the HP Mini 1010NR for wifi network diagnostics or war driving you’re probably out of luck for a little bit.

Some people might be able to get it working. I’ve read that it might be possible. I believe there are two versions of the BCM4312, one that is a/b/g and one that is b/g. My HP Mini 1010NR came with the b/g version so I think it has limited support for some features. If you can get Monitor mode working with this card let me know how you did it!

The battery life is par with other laptops and netbooks. I get about 2-3 hours depending on usage.  The screen can be very bright which is nice to look at but it drains the battery fast if it’s all the way up.

Over all this is a pretty decent netbook if you can get it for super cheap. There are some things I would like to see like an illuminated keyboard and bluetooth(option mine doesn’t have).

Some of them are pretty elementary to linux gurus but I’ve been using linux almost exclusively for 2 years and some of these were new to me. This is probably because I’ve been using mostly gnome and am not fully dependant on the CLI.

1. $ sudo !!
What this does is run whatever the last command you typed with sudo in front of it. Very cool, I know I’ve typed some long command before and forgot to add sudo to it. This makes those mistakes a lot easier to deal with. (I got this from hak5.org…good web show).

2. $ route -n
I felt ashamed for not knowing this one but it will help you find what your gateway ip is.

3. $ nmap -v -O ipaddress
Ok this isn’t really a build in command but if you have nmap installed this gives you a port scan and OS information from an IP address.

Iterate!

(Not to be confused with irritate…)

In software development there is a lot of emphasis on iteration. Iterate! Iterate! Iterate!

Iterating on a project is one of the aspects that allows agile to work so well. So in the beginning we tried 4 week iterations, thinking that longer sprints would ease the transition from our previous development process, which was a scrum hybrid environment, and already in a 4 week cycle. What we discovered after about two iterations(two months) was that these longer iterations didn’t seem to be working as well as we had hoped. They seemed to help with the transition somewhat, but as time went on a lot of us wanted to switch to the shorter sprint. One reason was that we realized that a lot can happen in four weeks when it comes to requirements, direction guided by business needs and critical defects. So in our particular case the biggest advantage to one week sprints was the tremendous increase in…

Flexibility!

Flexibility is the name of the game for a lot of companies, which is probably why they were even looking at agile in the first place. It’s also very useful in an environment with a lot of legacy software that needs to be supported. The flexibility is that if there is a product used inhouse in which a defect crops up then it’s only 5 days(max) until the defect will be addressed. That’s assuming that the defect isn’t a show stopper.

Sometimes business priorities change more often than once a month, especially in the software world. Sometimes these changes in direction can greatly alter the course of the project, even possibly rendering some portion of the project obsolete. With short iterations you can absorb these changes and change course with less wasted time and development on the project.

With one week sprints you also have an advantage of packing four retrospectives into the a space where we originally only had one. Doing this allowed us to critique our process more quickly and implement changes to improve performance.
This leads me to my next opinion based advantage of short sprints…

Reflection!

Reflection in agile is very important so that you can look back over the previous sprint and discover information that you can use to improve the following sprint.

In contrast to what I was explaining above, another thing that is very useful in short sprints is the ability to revert a change that you’ve made in the process promptly and wisely. If at the beginning of a sprint your team has decided to change a process based on feedback from a retrospective and you discover that the change actually turns out to be a detriment to the process then you can drop it and re-evaluate the change in a few days. So while you are iterating on your software, you are also iterating on the process too.

So to condense my thoughts here, I’m going to tell you something that you’ve probably heard over and over again…

Three Do’s!

1. Do…iterate!
2. Do…be flexible! AKA iterate often and be open to changes. (I know “do” doesn’t fit here..give me a break
3. D0…reflect! So you can make your process better!

StupidFilter is essentially a spam or junk filter but for stupid text.  If you play around with the demo, you can see how it works.  If you like pain, you can check the random page to see all of the random comments StupidFilter has stored in their database thus far.

I can’t help but think how useful StupidFilter would be to Google and YouTube.  While Google must use  a large amount of storage for inane response videos, the text comments that get stored must use a decent amount of storage at YouTube’s scale too.  It would save Google money and it would make YouTube comments easier on the eyes.

• Google: first two links are to Wikipedia articles; third link gives the right name, but only in the excerpt; the first name in big letters is Senator Darrell Steinberg in the fifth link.
• Bing: the first link is to the Wikipedia article; the first name in big letters is Senator Loni Hancock; Byrd’s name does not appear on the first page of results, but if “Senate Pro Temp” is clicked under “Related Searches” on the left side, Byrd’s name and state appear in the excerpt of the fourth link.
• Cuil: the second link is to the Wikipedia article; I gave up trying to find Byrd’s name by the fifth page; almost all of the results were about California politicians.
• Duck Duck Go: an excerpt from the Wikipedia article is presented first in foremost, with Byrd’s picture right in it; the first link is to byrd.senate.gov, but other than that the name is not given.
• ChaCha: the first two links both give both Byrd’s name and state, and the fourth link gives his party, all in the excerpts; there are a lot of redundant results.
• Sproose: the first link gives Byrd’s name, state, and party in the excerpt from Wikipedia. While it seems to be a home run, the results are in small text and the page is somewhat busy.
• LeapFish: like Duck Duck Go, the Wikipedia article is quoted first and foremost with a picture but no name; the name is given in the third link.
• Mugurdy: the first two links are to Wikipedia. Byrd’s picture appears twice in the screenshots of the first page results, but the name, state, and party are not listed until the second page. (Points for loading excerpts and links before waiting for the screenshots to load.)

A lot of the results are fairly standard, mostly just skinned versions of what you’re probably already used to (that is, Google). The largest difference I’ve noticed in using something other than Google is that the results don’t load as quickly.

In order to see if I missed Google, I removed it from my list of search engines in Firefox, replacing it with Bing, Cuil, and Duck Duck Go. Right now I’m defaulting to Duck Duck Go, which I’ve found will sometimes give results sorted categorically. Also going for it:

• Hitting the forward slash will jump to the search box.
• The bottom of a list of results has a “More Links” link which uses AJAX to load more links (like Twitter does with tweets).
• Hovering over a result and its excerpt will highlight the whole thing because the whole thing is a link.

Cuil brags that it has more sites indexed than Google, and I’ve got it on my list in case I have a hard time finding what I’m looking for. Bing made the list for some of its user-friendly features like Related Searches and the unobtrusive site previews that fly out on the right. Mostly, though, I haven’t found much need for anything other than Duck Duck Go. (Honorable mention goes to Goby which, though it didn’t like my search for “senate pro tem”, does look like a good place to search for local interests.)

If you’re interested in alternative search engines, check out AltSearchEngines. I encountered it while working on this post, and it looks like it has some interesting coverage of non-traditional search engines. If you find something there you like, or if you use a search that hasn’t been listed here, let me know in the comments.

Google news of late has gotten me thinking about search engines and what they’re supposed to do. As I mulled it over, I realized I’m not really interested in which web pages tell me what I want to know, I’m interested in what I want to know. Google only gives specific answers if you ask for something Google Calculator knows how to deal with. (Additionally, I often have the problem that a lot of results Google gives me are irrelevant to my search–many times I cannot even find my search terms on the page using the browser’s Find functionality.)

At the same time, I am starting to be concerned about putting all my eggs in one basket: Google Search, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Maps, the list goes on. Earlier this year, Google broke the internet (which could happen to any search engine) and accidentally shared Google Documents with contacts users hadn’t given permission to access (which could have happened to any online text editing service). Incidents like this are subtle reminders to me that it may not be a good idea to put too much trust in a powerful company.

A testamonial about interviewing for Google changed my perspective on the Mountain View company. The number of questions the interviewers asked that focused solely on advertising revenues (2 out of 4) made me associate Google less with internet services and more with advertising companies like Lamar. It struck me that they’re less interested in providing great products and more interested in providing products that increase their ad revenues, which, while perfectly fine, makes them seem lame.

It hasn’t taken long for me to start relate to articles like this one which question whether Google is friend or foe, and articles like this one and this one sparked my interest in Bing, which I’d played with when it premiered but didn’t find much different from Google. As the second article points out, Bing is starting to provide answers where it can rather than mere links, a tactic Google might avoid, since its business strategy is so wound around advertising revenues. It might not be a good business decision to start giving the answers rather than driving traffic to sites with the answers. While Bing makes its money from advertising, it’s backed by Microsoft, which has a pretty good source of revenue through other means; Google doesn’t.

Those are the high points of my case against Google, the points that have convinced me to start looking at alternatives. I’ve abandoned Google Search (which I’ll discuss in Part II of this post), and my experience with Google Wave lasted all of a week: it sounds cool, and it looks cool, and I want it to be cool, but it’s just not. I’m sticking with GMail and Google Reader for the moment, but when I start a new job in a couple weeks and no longer have wireless during the day, being able to access my RSS feeds on my iPod Touch will be much less important, and I’ll probably switch to a desktop aggregator. In the meantime, GMail is awesome, but I do hope a Google Glitch doesn’t start showing my emails in Google Search results, and if I find a good alternative, I’ll have to seriously consider making the change to it (if you have any suggestions, let me know in the comments).

For a rundown of alternatives to Google Search, jump to Part II of this post.

So from that point there is another question that must be asked and that is, who would know the information I’m looking for, other than Twitter?

So first I google’d around a little and I found this article on TechCrunch which had some excellent information on the subject.  Information about how user ID numbers on Twitter do not reflect the number of users that are on Twitter.

So who would know this information I seek? What company, organization or hacker would be able to tell me how many users Twitter has?? I would need to talk to someone that catalogs information, someone that knows nearly everything that’s on the web…oh yeah search engines!

Yeah I know this has probably been done already and that I’m totally over playing this but I thought it was cool ok!

I took searches for both “www.twitter.com” and “twitter.com” and started gathering numbers.

Google’s results:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Atwitter.com

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Awww.twitter.com

Yahoo’s results:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Ftwitter.com&bwmf=d&bwms=p&fr=yfp-t-701&fr2=seo-rd-se

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http://www.twitter.com&y=Explore+URL&fr=sfp

Bing’s results:

http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Awww.twitter.com

http://www.bing.com/search?q=site%3Atwitter.com

Here’s a breakdown of the information I gathered:

So to do some dirty math here we can take all the numbers there and add them together then divide them by six which gives us….

100,405,050

Then if we divide that by 6 ( the number of result sets we gathered) we get…

16,734,175

So my guess at how many twitter users there are is……

About 16 million!

This is interesting when you put into perspective that there are about 300 million Facebook users and about 100 million on Myspace I estimate.

Here’s a good link on some information and how I’m guessing the number of Myspace users…

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/social-networking-will-facebook-overtake-myspace-in-the-us-in-2009

If anyone has credible information on the number of Twitter users please comment! I think there’s a lot of people that would like to know that information.

Take a simple search in bing.com

http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford

This will give you page saying there are 160,000,000 results and you’re being shown 1-20 of them. That’s all fine and dandy but let’s say I want to just flip through the pages a little and see what’s new with Ford.

When you click on the pagination below the URL’s that your going to look something like this…

Page 2: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=6&FORM=PERE

Page 3: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=16&FORM=PERE1

Page 4: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=26&FORM=PERE2

Page 5: http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=36&FORM=PERE3

You’ll notice a couple things changing in these urls.  The first should be the “first” GET variable in the URL which appears to be some kind of page offset for the results.

The next is that FORM=PERE business which I’m not sure exactly what it does and it didn’t seem to matter if I removed it from the URL anyway.

The key thing I found was that if you click through the pages until you get to around page 21 or 22 the screen goes completely blank and the magic variable value is changing “?first” to a value that’s greater than or equal to 200.  This seems to only be an issue in Firefox as far as I can tell.

I checked the headers with this and there doesn’t seem to be any significant differences.

$ curl -I http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=16&FORM=PERE4

$ curl -I http://www.bing.com/search?q=ford&first=206&FORM=PERE4

Comment if you have any ideas?

And, since I like you guys so much, I’m going to head out on the proverbial limb and risk my shot at SparkFun’s Free Day, and share it with you guys in case you haven’t heard about it yet.  SparkFun is going to be giving away $100 worth of stuff on January 7th (you pay shipping) until time’s up or they hit $100k worth of free stuff.  Head on over to their post about it if you’re interested: Free Day is January 7th, 2010!

Can you say “give me a raise”…if you work for AMD that is.

They say that 1.25B was “a small multiple” of what they may have had to pay in court.  Now my question is, what kind of position does this put AMD in for the future? Their stock jumped 16% on the news and their market cap is only 4.38B, so 1.25B is over 25% of what they may be worth.  The down side is that AMD hasn’t posted a profit in a while.

The interesting part is that AMD doesn’t just make desktop processors anymore right? They also have ATI and a few other irons in the fire. So my question is “what is AMD going to do with their 1.25 billion?”

AMD’s processors have kind of let people down in the last few years but they’re starting to turn things around by doing things like making a processor that is capable of breaking the 7Ghz barrier(Gizmodo).

We’ve heard a lot in the past of AMD’s grand plans for new processor platforms and their crazy modular ideas but what is really feasible and what would be generally accepted and bought by people?

I think it could be time to start watching AMD again because there should be some crazy stuff coming down the pipes from them.  I mean heck what could you do with 1.25 billion?

So you might be wondering, “Is there ANY good news??”

The Good:

Yes there is. Technology has come a long way and so has the internet, which has allowed visually impaired people access to a lot more of the web than in the past.  There are also a lot more people that actually care about making their websites accessible.

The Bad:

This technology comes at quite a high price.   Some of the gizmos that were shown had a price tag of over $6000 once you buy the software that goes with them. Even screen reading software is quite pricey, reaching up past the $1000 mark. Even spending a lot of money on the latest and greatest screen readers and gizmos will still only get you as far as the markup on the page will let you.

Flash objects, buttons without the proper attributes filled out, images with no text describing what’s on them and CAPTCHAS are all semi-evil for accessibility right now. Things are getting better but there is a along way to go.

I think anyone that develops on the web should, before they write any code, watch a visually impaired person surf the web. This will change your outlook on how you develop, I promise!

And for the readers of Pointless Rants that don’t know me too well yet… </sarcasm>. 

It’s not that it’s slow (it is, even when typing in the search box). The problem is that the term that comes to mind to describe it is not “search engine” but “distraction engine.” The front page is littered with News, Celebrity News, Mashable, Popular Videos, Facebook, Twitter, Weather, and Deal of the Day. Ultimately, LeapFish shows me a bunch of things I don’t care about, but will probably get distracted by anyway. I know where to find the things that I want, and at present I’m not interested in finding more things to do online just for the sake of doing things online.

The LeapFish video quotes Charles Darwin in observing that the organisms which survive are those that adapt fastest to change. I take a much more Boyd-like approach when it comes to people: he who makes the change survives. If businesses are trying to keep up, they’ve already lost. This is why no one has yet become a Google-killer: Google changes the game faster than others do; that’s how they stay on top. I remember watching Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail play catch-up with GMail’s storage and archiving capabilities. Google constantly innovates, changing the game, not playing catch-up. If LeapFish thinks it’s ahead of the curve because it adapts fast, it’s already lost to those who are creating the change it’s adapting to.

This site has a few tips for beginners, but I was especially struck by the section about namespaces, in which the author says, “There’s ns and in-ns and use and require and import…”

What first clued me in to some bad design ideas, however, was Clojure’s sequence functions (see the bottom of the page). The fact that there are 7 separate functions for getting a specific element from a sequence (first, ffirst, nfirst, second, nth, when-first, last) is strongly at odds with my preference for Python’s there-should-be-only-one-way-to-do-it philosophy. Also, why the inconsistency of having first and second functions but no third, fourth, fifth, and so on? (I think we know why.)

I know Clojure is young, but there’s a difference between a language that’s not mature and a language that’s immature. Design features like this don’t make me want to say, “Boy this is great; I can’t wait ’til Clojure is more developed.” It makes me want to say, “Oh grow up.”

This concludes another Truly Pointless Rant.

I will not buy another Zune until Microsoft supports the Zune software on linux(or through wine).

It’s just too much hassle.  I bought a Sansa Clip and that has served me extremely well, even without video support. Also, for the sake of contrast, Apple’s iPod is supposedly supported through Rythmbox on Ubuntu 9.10.  But I won’t be getting an ipod anytime soon either(well unless I switch to Macs…).

Bottom line I think hardware and software need to come together and play nice.  This is something that soooo many vendors and big software companies have struggled with since the dawn of the circuit board.  Hardware is pretty useless without software and software is just an idea without hardware, so why hasn’t there been a stronger movement over the years to bring the two together?

Apple sort of solved this issue by only supporting “some” hardware and working on quality(sometimes successful, sometimes not).  Microsoft gained market share by supporting tons of hardware(…I didn’t say they support it well..that’s a different post) and let’s be honest…left quality behind on a napkin somewhere.

Somewhere between the $100 bills and the middle aged man crying because his computer system turns on but is totally useless, I’d like to think there is a happier place.  I could say that the happier place I’m talking about is open source or linux or whatever but that wouldn’t really be fair.  Open source isn’t perfect and linux by far isn’t perfect but I really truly think that the “happy trail” lies with these groups.

In what environment could there possibly be a merge between hardware and software that is not an open environment?  Apple constrained hardware to maintain quality, Microsoft constrained nothing to maintain market share and I’m running linux.

And that’s my pointless rant.

The Drobo works quite nicely and provides redundant storage for even the least tech-savvy users. You can add or remove drives on the fly and the Drobo will automatically move the data on the drives around to provide a solution that gives redundancy first and maximum usable storage second. It does not optimize for maximum throughput.

If you are just looking for a vat of storage, the Drobo will work well for you. However, I was expecting to be able to encrypt the Drobo with TrueCrypt and while it is possible, it’s much more inconvenient than doing so on a standard single drive or on some type of fixed-size array. Because the Drobo manages the disks and essentially has a dynamic size based on the disks you add or remove, you cannot use TrueCrypt to do device-level or volume-level encryption because the Drobo is not aware of how to resize with these types of encryption. If you want to use TrueCrypt on a Drobo, you have to use an encrypted file container.

If you’re curious about how much usable storage you’d have available from the Drobo based on sizes of disks you’d put in it, Data Robotics has a friendly calculator for this: Drobolator

Even though there is a slight annoyance when using a Drobo with TrueCrypt, I’d still recommend getting a Drobo. It provides simple, redundant storage that even your parents can install, use, and maintain. All they need to do is follow the information provided by the stoplight-type indicators on the right side of the Drobo (and there is a convenient legend inside of the cover).

Personally, I doubt that Android will really dent the iPhone market. That’s not to say I don’t think it won’t be popular, I just think it will cut into a different mobile OS: Windows Mobile. Android and the iPhone do not really compete in the same arenas. The iPhone is a high-performance device with some core (limited) functionality. Android, however, is more of an all-purpose OS, as demonstrated by the diversity of hardware it can run on. To date, the all-purpose mobile OS has been Windows Mobile. In fact, it’s so all-purpose that the mobile checkout devices used by sales reps in Apple Stores run Windows Mobile.

As Android takes off, I’m guessing that Windows Mobile’s days are numbered. I haven’t heard anything about it in some time, and media share sometimes counts for more than market share. After all, if you looked around, would you guess that only 1 in 10 people use a Mac?

5S is the name of a workplace organization methodology that uses a list of five Japanese words which, transliterated and translated into English, start with the letter S. This list is a mnemonic for a methodology that is often incorrectly characterized as “standardized cleanup”, however it is much more than cleanup. 5S is a philosophy and a way of organizing and managing the workspace and work flow with the intent to improve efficiency by eliminating waste, improving flow and reducing process unevenness.

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5S_(methodology)

Shall we dive a little deeper?

So what are the 5S’s

• Sorting
• Straighten or Set in Order
• Sweeping, shining or cleanliness
• Standardizing
• Sustaining the discipline

Now, how does this apply to people in the IT field?

Sorting

As a programmer, there are many things that need to be sorted on a project and sorting them will increase your productivity and decrease insanity.  Sorting can take place at many levels in a project and for a programmer.  A physical level could be cleaning your work areas and discarding things that may cause distraction. It’s always harder to focus when your workspace is cluttered and in disarray.

Simply, make sure that you know where to get all your tools and information that you will need and remove the rest as it will cause distraction.

Straighten

This S is more a focus on efficiency, so once you have your area clear you need to optimize. This is kind of like when you’re trying to figure something out in code and you just blast variables like “int k” or “string asdf” to kind of “just get it to work”, you now need to go back and “Straighten” all those things out.

Sweeping

This is similar to “Straighten” but here there could be some optimization I think.  Like oh I don’t need these fields in this query or I don’t need this extra variable.  Prune out the dead leaves and sweep off the dust in your code.

Standardizing

Ok, so now you’ve done all that and your code(provided you’ve worked in an environment with standards before) should be pretty much standardized, but you should double check things. Make sure that your spacing and documentation is setup correctly and you’ve met all the requirements.

Sustaining

Keep it up!  Basically just keep following the process and you should produce some good clean code.

Conclusion

I know that I didn’t really cover testing or quality assurance but those things are usually worked into a grander picture of development. The 5S methodology could be applied to programming on a programmer basis to help the output of the code you’re writing.  I pretty much made this all up so PLEASE comment on things you would add or things you don’t agree with me on!  I welcome criticism!

There are two choices: they can ignore the weirdos and leave their computational knowledge engine to normal people, or they can take a lesson from Wikipedia, which allows people with weird hobbies to create articles of interest to them (and possibly nobody else).

I’d like to see someone make a version of Wolfram|Alpha that allows the public to go in and edit the functions that compute results. Give it Wikipedia-like version control, allowing users to add or improve existing functions, while someone using the site for computational purposes and do so without ever seeing the code. The hard part, I expect, would be figuring out which function to summon given a particular query, but there are ways to deal with that.

Any thoughts? Do you use Wolfram|Alpha? Do you find it satisfactory? Would you use an open version?

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

On Multitouch Keyboards

I find the keyboard in the video a bit awkward. Whereas we now use a keyboard and small trackpad or mouse, the multitouch input (which I shall refer to as the multipad) would swell our motion input device to the size of another keyboard. Personally, the keyboard-multipad combination looks like a keyboard from the ’80s, but that may just be me.

It would be great if the multipad could be used as the keyboard, rather than having a separate device. The question, then, is how do people type without tactile response. We’ve seen people type on multitouch keyboards before, but most of that is hunt and peck, not speed typing like keyboards allow. Having keys be graphical rather than tactile means the user has to look at the keyboard while they type, a huge slowdown for those of us who have the typing habit trained into muscle memory.

The good news is, typing is muscle memory for touch typists. I can type on a tabletop with no physical keyboard and hardly think about where my fingers are. The problem of course, is that I have no idea if I’m in the right place. On a real keyboard, the physical keys inform my fingers they have hit the spot. On the tabletop, I know where the keys are in a general way (which direction with which finger), but the exact location is elusive.

I suggest that if this technique is to be employed, that the location of the finger strike become unimportant, that the relationship between the finger’s original position and where it hit be taken into account instead. Thus, if my right pointer finger hits a position north of where it usually rests (on the ‘J’ key), chances are I meant to hit the ‘U’ key. Northwest from its usual position would be the ‘Y’ key. Who cares if my fingers are twice as long as average and I hit four inches north of ‘J’ (or my fingers are short and I hit a quarter inch north of ‘J’), the fact that I went north means I want the letter ‘U’.

I don’t remember the name of it now, but I used a keyboard for Windows Mobile that used a similar idea. It had only 9 keys. Tapping those keys would give you the most commonly used letters. The other letters were attained by starting on one of the 9 keys and moving in the appropriate direction. It took some getting used to, but ultimately I got to be fairly good with it. It was one of the programs I missed most when I switched to using an iPod Touch.

The Graphical Multitouch Keyboard

Now, what if instead of a mere multitouch input pad, there was some sort of graphical display incorporated into that? We’ve seen OLED keyboards already in which keys can change for different applications, but at the moment the technology is still somewhat expensive. I suggest an e-ink display, the same display used by Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. While still expensive, there’s no great need for a keyboard to be in color (look at what we’ve lived with to date) or to refresh its appearance many times a second. The huge advantage of using e-ink is the low power cost.

I’m just thinking out loud here.

Yeah so here’s hoping it doesn’t crack in half and we have a real life armageddon on our hands because I don’t think Bruce Willis can help us out this time.

Fortunately, there is a simple way to edit the .bashrc file in Ubuntu to add a home directory folder to Python’s search path. Open up .bashrc in a text editor and add the following lines:

PYTHONPATH=$HOME/Python/lib
EDITOR=gedit
export PYTHONPATH EDITOR

$HOME, for me, is the folder /home/eric, so the Python folder is right in the main working directory. I’ve put the code for Balthasar in a subdirectory named lib. Now I can run examples that import balthasar from anywhere and they know where to look.

To verify that this worked, open the terminal and start the Python interpreter with python. Then type

>>> import sys
>>> sys.path

The list that prints out shows all the places Python looks for packages when import is used. The second item for me is /home/eric/Python/lib, meaning this folder will work for putting work-in-progress libraries in.

Background

I’d been hunting around for a widget library that would let me do stuff in 3D, but without luck. I knew OpenGL could do some things, but trouble picking objects with the mouse created roadblocks. Persistence, though, actually does pay off. Using Pyglet, I’ve built a library for interacting with 3D objects. I call it Balthasar, named after the turtle that lives in our kitchen sink, whose was named, in turn, after a judgmental terrapin.

What It Does

Right now features are sparse, but that’s not to say it can’t do some very important things. In fact, I got bogged down this week trying to get panning over a 3D scene to work intuitively. I can’t say it’s perfect yet, but it’s much better than earlier attempts and good enough to leave be for now. On the other hand, orbiting the camera around its target works brilliantly! (I’ve never found spherical coordinates to be so useful.)

The other major feature from the client’s perspective is the ability to create Widgets, 3D objects that can be selected. One nice thing is the ability to load .obj files, meaning one can (currently) create widgets of whatever size and shape in a program like Blender, export them as .obj files, then load them in a Balthasar app. This is significant since one of my big motivations is boredom with the plainness of standard widget libraries.

From the client side of Balthasar, there seem to be quite a few decorators. They’re used for changing an application’s event handlers and add drawing routines to the list of things to draw.

Examples

I’ve had a few applications in mind that I’ve wanted to make, and I’m developing them using Balthasar. The examples are a major driving force behind improvements to Balthasar’s library and client interface. So far the only example is solar, a solar system simulator based on actual planetary data. Because I wanted to be able to move around within the scene, camera orbiting and panning became important. Thus, those features are now in Balthasar.

I’ll be developing a few other applications as well, hopefully developing the widget part of ‘widget library’. I’ll include them in the trunk under examples.

Getting Involved

There are a few ways to get involved with the project. One way is the Google Groups discussion. Another is on Twitter, where I’ve started using the #balthasar hashtag when I make comments about the project. If you have any interest, I’d be happy to have your help, so drop me a line if you want to know more.

(Kudos to Steve for actually having contributed to open source projects.)

To make a long story short, I’m calling for help. Does anyone know of a way to make 3D graphics that respond to mouse clicks? Any other thoughts on a 3D widget library? I’d love to hear your ideas!

I used to use checkip.dyndns.org.

$ curl checkip.dyndns.org
<html><head><title>Current IP Check</title></head><body>Current IP Address: xx.xxx.xx.xxx</body></html>

It was pretty simple and straightforward, but it still had HTML code to strip out.

I came across a better site for this today, icanhazip.com.

$ curl icanhazip.com
xx.xxx.xx.xxx

Let me know what you think or if you know of one that’s better.  I’m betting you’ll have a hard time coming up with one that is more simple than icanhazip.com though.

1. Unclutterer
2. Unclutterer Workspaces (Flickr Group)
3. ghacks
4. lifehacker
5. Hack a Day
6. IKEA Cable Management
7. Linux Journal
8. Linux Journal – Add desktop notifications in your scripts
9. InterfaceLIFT
10. The Onion
11. milw0rm
12. attrition.org
13. L0phtcrack
14. Snipplr
15. Grooveshark
16. Neatorama
17. EPL Talk
18. EPL Standings
19. Server Fault
20. Stack Overflow

Have you ever seen this?

$ svn commit
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: Could not use external editor to fetch
log message; consider setting the
$SVN_EDITOR environment variable or using
the --message (-m) or --file (-F) options
svn: None of the environment variables
SVN_EDITOR, VISUAL or EDITOR is set,
and no 'editor-cmd' run-time configuration
option was found


Answer:
$ export SVN_EDITOR="/usr/bin/nano"

Problem:

I need to know what the changes I’ve made on my local copy?

Answer:
$ svn diff

Problem:

You want to know what the differences are between your local copy and the repository?

Answer:
$ svn status --show-updates

Problem:

I don’t understand merges!

Answer:

Ok, simplest way I know how to break it down…
If you want to bring changes into your branch from the trunk, like if other people have been committing to trunk and you want their changes, simply change directories into your branch and type:

$ svn merge http://the-address-or-path-or-ssh+svn-or-svn/repositoryname


This will bring in the new changes from trunk and show you what the conflicts are, but it will not commit these updates to your branch.
Make sure that once you resolve any conflicts you do an “svn commit”.

Problem:

I have conflicts!

Answer:

Well…good luck! haha jk.

First, you should notice that there is a “C” next to the list of files on the merge command that you ran.
These files should look something like filename.mine, filename.r234…etc

Step 1. What you want to do is find out which of these files has the changes that you want.
Step 2. Then, copy that file, let’s say the changes we want to keep in our branch are in filename.mine, the commands would look something like…

$ cp filename.mine filename.php  (your's might not be php of course)
$ svn resolved filename.php
$ svn commit

There you’ve just resolved a conflict!

Problem:

I want to merge my awesome changes into the trunk!

Answer:

Step 1. “svn update” in your branch
Step 2. What you want to do is make sure that you’ve committed all your changes in your branch!
Step 3. Change to the trunk directory (you will need this checked out)
Step 4. “svn update” in the trunk
Step 5. “svn merge http://repository-address/repository/branches/yourbranch”
Step 6. Resolve conflicts
Step 7. “svn commit”

Ok, so I didn’t say anything about trunk policy and that you should be really really careful what you put in the trunk but I’m assuming you know that!

If you want to know more about that then check out http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-version-control

If you want to know all there is about subversion then you need to be reading http://svnbook.red-bean.com

1. I always have a lot of links open in FireFox that I haven’t looked at yet.
2. Blog traffic drops like mad on Fridays

These are just some sites or articles that I found interesting or helped me in some way this week.

So here’s what I have this week!  (other posters can add to this page as they wish)

1. http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-version-control
2. http://kenai.com
3. http://oauth.net
4. http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/wiki/DebuggingTechniques
5. http://blog.lowkster.com/2008/01/getting-to-pesky-foreign-key-data-in.html
6. http://www.box.net
7. http://beanstalkapp.com
8. http://www.ducea.com/2006/08/11/apache-tips-tricks-deny-access-to-some-folders
9. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBugz
10. http://www.sitepoint.com/article/build-to-do-list-30-minutes

http://www.hackersforcharity.org/340/owned-or-not-crap/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/ihackstuff/status/3368594229

I have one of those Compaq Evo 610′s…pretty sweet laptop.  I would still use it except my sister has it But she just got a new macbook pro….hmmm….

Anyway, go Johnny! I really believe in giving people the tools they need to educate them selves.

UPDATE:

So it all worked out!

http://www.hackersforcharity.org/344/the-eagle-has-landed/

Yep, 1 / 50 = 1%.  Wait…

Click the image for the full view.

Python

>>> test = 123
>>> test2 = "ewfwef"
>>> test / test2
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for /: 'int' and 'str'

PHP

$test = 123;
$test2 = "werwe";
echo $test/$test2;

Warning: Division by zero in Command line code on line 1

It’s nice that python tells you what is really wrong here, you can’t divide an integer by a string! PHP on the other hand implies that $test2 is equivalent to 0.
It should be noted that python is doing a trace and PHP is not. Doing a trace on the error in PHP would give more information but since PHP is very weak with types, you would probably have to notice the error on your own.

If you work on many systems that can be similar, a tool like BgInfo would help a lot.  BgInfo rewrites the wallpaper image to contain lots of useful technical information.  The information it contains is highly customizable.  And the best part: because BgInfo just rewrites the wallpaper image and isn’t constantly running, it doesn’t use any system resources.