new istuff

I'm sure it'll be all over the place shortly, but Apple has released their updated iPhoto and iMovie applications for download. Yeah!!!

I'm really looking forward to seeing the improvements in iPhoto, which I use quite a bit (and have a monstrous archive of photo's on my desktop at home).

Bookstores

Tonight?

Bookstore crawling.

A chance comment along with a book recommendation I received this evening sent Karen and I skittering to the bookstores downtown. There's a Borders and a Barnes n' Noble relatively close to each other, so after dinner we hopped a bus and away we went.

Well, it turns out that Borders closes up at 9pm, and we got there at 8:30. Annoying, but at the same time it didn't take more than 5 minutes to figure out they not only didn't have the book I was looking for, but they didn't really stock any books in the subject of interest to me. Karen, however, found a good 15 pounds of books. We had gift certificates from Christmas for Borders, so it worked out well - no cash spent. And she did find some neat books as a good price there. I picked up the latest copy of Amazon. The gift certificate spending continued - as a Christmas Gift, my office gave out Amazon gift certificates. Paid for 1 and a 1/2 of the books I bought tonight, which was just about perfect. Now I just wait for them to show....

Busy day

Today was uncommonly hurried for me. I spent the morning answering questions and getting some data processed that hadn't gotten done the night before, moving fast to get it all completed before the shutdown for maintenance. Once things shut down, I was whisked away into a meeting with some Sun system engineers and our Sun VAR going over the nifty details and tidbits that make up the differences between Solaris 7, Solaris 8, and Solaris 9. At a blush, it looks like we'll be jumping from Solaris 7 to 9 - with a translation that will be primarily just moving our Oracle instances from one box to another with a new OS. Our DBA wants to convert up a level or two of Oracle at the same time - I'm not sure what I think about that yet.

The rest of the day blasted past in similar fashion - I'm still working out some of the details of the recent performance reviews and collating that info and a plan and details for arranging training and so forth.

With five oclock rolling up on me, I hauled out of the office. When I got home, Karen had gone "missing", so I naturally snacked on whatever I could find in the fridge until she returned. That was about an hour later, when I found out she'd gotten "caught by a book" at the library. We whipped up some dinner together, and then it was just kicking back and taking it easy for the evening. Did a little reading, a little writing, and a little web surfin'.

So now it's gettin' on in the evening, and I'm actually fairly tired for 10:30pm. Think I might just go to sleep.

Another trip to Oak Harbor

Spent the afternoon and evening driving up to Oak Harbor to pick up my sweetie from her class. Got back this evening. There was a time when a 4 hour round trip wouldn't be so darn exhausting, but now isn't it.

I think of all the times we drove from Columbia to either Kansas City or St. Louis on a whim to go to a specific place for dinner, or just to visit a bookstore (at that time Columbia didn't have a Barnes & Noble). Seems odd that today I'm really wiped out from that kind of trip.

But I'm glad my sweetie's back. The work she did at the class was mostly color work, and she had lots of neat goodies to show up when she returned. All sorts of details, tidbits, and small projects. They were, without a doubt, busy while they were up there.

*smack* "Bad SysAdmin, no biscuit!"

Andy Oram argues against smackin' the blame for the SQLWorm on SysAdmins, which CNet is apparently doing with joy and jubilation of a pack of dogs on a hunt. I was lucky - our networking staff was way, way on the ball and we didn't run any systems that could be impacted by this particular nastiness. We certainly felt the traffic bump - anyone with big pipes did - but no major pain.

As much as I'd normally love to vilify those poor bretheren of mine that maintain systems, I've got to admit Andy has a point. There's plenty of Microsoft systems that I run or have run downlevel to insure that they keep running. Even got into quite a snit with one of my staff when I got agressive about updating - I've had three separate experiences with a Microsoft "patch" breaking some other functionality. Fortunately, we use replicated systems and it's easy enough to try one before working to the others. But ya know what? That takes a lot of time, energy, and logistical juice. It just does. And microsoft, for all it's TCO bullshit, doesn't really have a very low cost of ownership on any of it's services.

I think my favorite low total-cost-of-ownership OS's are: RedHat Linux with the up2date support functionality, MacOS X Server, and FreeBSD. I use the first most commonly to be honest - good java support and it runs on lots of intel (read inexpensive and therefore I got a lot of it for breakages) hardware. I really like FreeBSD, but until I can easily run java on it natively without screwing around with compatibility binaries, it just ain't worth the pain. I don't run MacOS X Server, although I'd like to - it feels nice and clean, and the XServe server hardware looks like a nice workgroup solution. But grunge computing is my history, and sometimes I think my destiny - so intel is way more common on the cheap.

At work, we use Win2K Server, RedHat Linux, and Solaris. Windows 2000 Server takes the absolutely highest amount of time in maintenance and running services - bar none.

Micropayments & PayPal is evil!

Wow. I was checking out Studio Log's website/blog in Safari when I noticed this Amazon Honor System thing. (Normally I just use NetNewsWire, but I like the site layout and check it periodically)

From reading it, it looks like they're taking advantage of their huge customer base to provide an additional micro-payment kind of service. I've got to admit, I'd way more readily deal with Amazon than I ever would deal with PayPal.

Gus, Rainy Seattle, etc.

I feel for ya Gus (by the way, your archives are busted again). I've been spending a lot more time out walking again and doing my best to not obsessively twiddle the bits at work. We've got a system that will take as much tweaking as you'd care to give it, but we're way, way past the point of diminishing returns in terms of monkey-tweak-time vs. performance gained.

Seattle's back to chilly after a pretty amazingly warm Sunday. Rained pretty much since the SuperBowl, and JDD is apparently getting to see the wet side of Seattle. It was good I took today off - the extra day on this weekend is really making a hell of a difference. I'm going to need to do another 3-day weekend again before I forget how nice they are. Karen's been talking about heading up to the mountains for a little "getaway" thing, so maybe we'll do that.

Since I was talking about JUnit recently, seems only fair to point out someone got upset with the guts of it, and since it was open source, they just forked, gutted, and rewrote the dern thing. Courtesy to /. as one of the very few non-repeated or completely daft articles of late. Yeah, Byron - I agree they're not paying attention anymore. It's clear those guys are even reading their own site, let alone communicating on what they're "reporting" on.

And for that little Mac snippet of the day, Studio Log reports on a technote 2065 which goes over details and tidbits on using the do shell script applescript command available in MacOS X.

mushrooms and black olives

Tonight dinner was at Pete's Pizza (No Gus, not quite the crust of Shakes, but it's pretty good none the less). Had the required Mushroom and Black Olive Pizza since I'm not eating with my sweetie at the moment. So I took my notebook and was scrawling thoughts down onto paper, just sort of taking it easy and enjoying the last of my unplugged evenings.

The place wasn't very busy tonight and a waitress I hadn't seen there before (Kaylynn) was reading Catch 22. I asked her if she was reading it for school or just for fun, and it turns out to be just for fun. I asked her what she thought of it, and got back:

"I like it. I like reading about crazy people. It makes me feel better about myself. I just finished that book by Dostoyevsky... "

"Which one? All of his books feature crazy people."

"That really famous one... uh.. oh yeah, Crime and Punishment. It makes me feel better about myself because I talk to myself, and that's nothing compared to those guys..."

I thought that was an intriguing thing to be commenting on, so I figured I'd share that with the world. Do only sane people worry about being crazy?

Unplugged

Totally unplugged. That's been my weekend. It's been terrific. I had planned to go up to Whidbey, but that sort of fell through when Karen and I realized she'd be in class almost all the time. So instead I opted for Nate' house on the SuperBowl. Watched the game (a very new occurance for me) and then spent the evening and early morning on a Soprano's marathon of the third season. Didn't get home until 4am, and didn't wake up until Noon.

Like I said, very unplugged. Which I'm going to do for the rest of my day as well - it's a free day, I'm takin' it!

Another massive DDOS attack/exploit

I wondered what had been happening last night. Looks like another distributed host attack, this time using a SQL Server flaw.

Depression and recovery

It's a hard thing to drag your ass out of, ya know? I've been more stable of late, and that's really refreshing. The ups and downs have been pretty rough, and they've been going on for quite a long time.

The past few days have been startling. Very. We had our performance reviews. The last one I had was a complete and unmitigated disaster. It was my fault, it was their fault, lots of people had a piece of the blame in that one.

This time around was 3000% different. The guy I'm reporting to now and I had a great talk, although to be honest it completely caught me off guard. I expected sort of the rote stuff, and instead got some serious questions about what I wanted to do and what would make me happy that I still don't have a good answer for. It's not something I've even thought of for 6 months. More even.

It's coupled with troubling and not so troubling news. One of the founders recently announced his resignation. Although he contributed quite a lot, his personality frequently sent me (and others) into fits. At the same time, one of our DBA's is leaving - one that's been reporting to me for a while. We had a going away lunch for her today. I'm sad she's leaving. I'm not sad the founder is leaving. Although he brought up lots of good points, issues, and ideas, he is really a difficult person. Thoroughly. The DBA wasn't. She was a gem, and I think we're really going to feel this hit.

I think the best thing I did six months ago was to back away from senior management at that place and report to one of my former peers. He's unflappable, direct, and ethical. In short, I really like him and it's a good fit for me. Sometimes I wish I didn't have these crazy emtional ups and downs, that I just didn't get into "work" that much. I tie myself into these crazy knots about malevolence and idiocy when it's mostly just plain common ignorance or disintrest.

I'm glad I went to the dor about this stuff. It's been helping a great deal. I should have done it six months ago.

Bimodal weather

Today it's sun. Actually, it was raining quite steadily through the night and up until about 7am. By 8:15am, when I was walking into work, it was clear and crisp - although the pavement was still damp from the night's washing.

I'm glad it's a clear day. We're taking one of our DBA's out for a "going away" lunch. She's resigned and is heading to another job that sounds like a real gem. Well, not the job itself, but the idea that she could retire early if she takes it. Can't blame her one single little bit for that!

So we'll be hoofin' it down to Niko's at the Westin (SUSHI!!!) in an hour or so.

evening

Well damn, that was annoying. While looking up a link off Whidbey Island's web page, I caught an exception in Safari that hung the entire browser. Oh well.

Er, as I was writing (which you never saw), tonight's been nice and quiet, allowing me to work on personal projects and whip up a little din-din for my sweetie and myself. I'll be taking Karen up to Whidbey Island in a couple of days for her to attend 5 days of classes as a part of a longer 18 month course she's taking. It'll be a long drive, but worth it - she's really looking forward to the course.

It'll be strange managing the house, cats, and food without her - always is. I'm sure my sleep schedule will get even more abnormal than my usual abnormal. Most likely in the reverse direction - going to bed early and waking up early. I don't know quite why that is, but it's happened before, so I sort of expect it to happen again.

Today I received a copy of the latest MacTech magazine - good articles in this publication. In fact, although it can be heavy on the ads, I think it's got the meatiest content in programming details that I've seen in almost any computer-programming related rag I read. I'll definitely be keeping up my subscription to this guy. Wired, now there's another story. Their customer service and deliver is pretty fucked up. I enjoy the content, but it seems a hell of a lot easier to pick it up at the newstand. Way more timely too.

snicker

snicker

WET!

I should have brought a change of clothes for work. After I walked in, I was soaked, regardless of a really good rainjacket. Ok, so maybe I should have worn hip-waders, as it's really only my jeans and shoes that are wet solid through, mid-thigh on down.

It's really coming down today - a steady rain that doesn't show signs of getting heavier or lightening either. About time too - although I'm soaked, this will help protect against a possible drought next summer, which I'm more concerned about. It's been a really mild winter here - too mild really. No snow, temperatures haven't dropped much, and not nearly as much rain as we need to keep things outrageously green.

Konfabulator

Gus is talking about Konfabulator, andhow it's feature complete and just about ready to rock. I've been waiting to see what this all would look like, but in a more general sense I thought it worthwhile to point out that the Konfab guys have some real style to their website. It's simple, elegant, visually appealing, and gets the job done. Check it out.

He's Back!

Ken Bereskin's back on his weblog with two updates today, but relatively minor. I'm just glad he's back to loggin' again, because he's outlining all sorts of neat things and some that I had no idea were buried in Jaguar.

the deluge

The deluge of email from having been unplugged for a couple of days was definitely noticable - partly because I was itchin' pretty bad in that raise-a-vein-information-junkie sort of way, and partly because I sometimes forget exactly HOW much email I receive and scan each day!

The cocoa-dev lists seemed to have been particularly active this weekend, but so were a couple of my friends. At work, I've been added to a list getting emails from automated processes telling me everything I never gave a shit about regarding some of our databases. Oh joy! Procmail, get over here!

So in two days time (to provide the raw numbers) and over three different email addresses, I received 382 messages with 15 attachments, one was spam, and none virus laden. I figure the spam rate was pretty good, because normally it's a hell of lot higher. All those spam monsters must be out celebrating MLK or something this weekend. I'm not, by the way, counting a Yahoo.com account I maintain, as they receives only spam, and it mostly a useless account. My veritable "sacrificial lamb" to the spammer thugs when I need to use an email account to get something.

For the exceptionally curious about my evening routine, after catching up on the personal email that passed the "does this appear to be remotely interesting email" test, I fixed a little dinner for Karen and myself, walked to the grocery store to get some tidbits for Karen, took out the trash and recycling, and caused the cats to attempt to climb the walls while chasing the small red dot of a laser pointer.

Unplugged

Saturday's race went pretty well - it was a bright, sunny, and somewhat chilly day out on the water. Unfortunately, it was also a day with relatively little wind. We finished the race, but only just - and a large number of boats were behind us - didn't even make it to the finish. In the later half of the day (between 2:30pm and 4pm) the wind died off from 6kts down to nothing. It was only a last minute 2kt's of wind that allowed us to recover from our drift and circle around into the finish line with 10 minutes to spare before the time limit on the race was called.

So - we finished last, but we finished - and three of the six boats in our start didn't even make that. I was trimming with Ron (captain of another boat: the Igniter), which made the cockpit pretty damn cramped. Neither of us are particular small people. I managed to get myself clocked a good one in the jaw early in the race, I ducked back and right into Dave's left fist as he was raising the main - smacked me a good one. I definitely didn't feel that this was my most coordinated race ever. The crew was good though - Tony and Luther up front on foredesk and mast, Jen and JR in back working the main and driving respectively. Jeff acting as our tactician, Dave in the pit, and Ron and I trimming. Although it was sunny, it was pretty cool out there, and by the end of the race we were all pretty cold.

I thought I'd come home and write it up in this blog, but when I got home I found that Karen's aunt and Uncle had already arrived (I wasn't expecting them until 6pm-ish). They (and I) were hungry, so I took a quick shower to warm up and we headed over to Chinook's for a nice dinner.

Sunday we spent doing all the touristy stuff. Went to the Space Needle, down to Pike's Place Market, that kind of stuff. We even went down to the ferry terminals and toured the Russian Cobra submarine that was docked there (that was cool!) The only downside is that Karen's uncle wanted to walk everywhere. So sunday was really a 7 hour walk from the top of Queen Anne down to the ferry terminals and back to the top! Ok, ok - with some neat stops in between. At least I got to watch him attempt to crawl through submarine hatches (he's 6' 4").

I've been wanting to see the inside of that Cobra submarine for quite a while. It was a neat exhibit, if sometimes excessively kitchsy. It's hard to imagine they had 72 men running that thing. Our tour guide was a submarine vet from the US Navy, and he'd apparently been on our version of the same boat - 72 men, 300 foot long narrow tube. Diesel/Electric hunter/killer submarine. The sub's had two hatches cut into the top and it's 500 tons of batteries removed, but it's still seaworthy (even if it can't dive anymore).

Got to work and immedaitely started the drill. At least I thought to snag my coffee and a scone before coming in.

JUnit, Ant, testing driven development

Clover is a tool that looks like it would be a pretty good complement to Unit testing with Ant and JUnit, if you're doing java development in that mode. We've used Ant very sucessfully at my office - to the point that it's become transparent to so much of the build process. We're also using JUnit (admittedly in a much more sporadic way) - would have been a shit load better if we'd done that from the get-go. Clover appears to do a nice job of giving everyone an objective view of how well unit tests have covered the code they're supposed to. A couple of open-source gigs are apparently using it, and the thing I like the best about it is that it's objective.

I mean, it's not an end-all-be-all tool, but it's pretty damn good if you ask me. I'm personally not in favor of writing getter and setter Unit tests, because they're so freakin' tedious - but hey, I've seen places where they'd make sense. In fact, I had to fix a bug just today that would have been about a thousand times easier if someone had written the original code with the thought of testing it with Unit tests intead of slamming data through a database to verify it was working properly.

Mindless surfing

Yeah, spending part of my evening mindless surfing the web tonight. Karen's fallen asleep early, and the whole exploding-giant-robot-game is out with her sleeping...

So, I found a neat little bit of code at SourceForge called Jalopy. I snagged the command line version (perfectly adaquate for me) and tried it out. I was really pleasantly surprised to see they had a default option for "Sun Java Conventions", which is what we're supposed to be using at work (with the variant of "NO TABS!"). Worked pretty darn good! And pointed out all the places where I hadn't documented a damn thing in my snippet-fast-now code bits.

Another fire fighting day, with a twist

Got to work after taking an easy breakfast down at the Crumpet Shop in Pike's Place Market. I was already feeling the crush of work at 7:30am, so I made myself not go straight there, but instead take the morning a little easier. I didn't have a meeting or any specific crap until 10am, so it seemed like it might be "OK". Heh. I'm glad I did - it was really relaxing, and they serve a really nice breakfast of groats and steamed milk there. It's not freezing or anything around here, but the mornings are getting chilly - and that is a nice complement.

The day was, as I expected, fire fighting. All sorts of things from the usual "Oh my god the data, the data!" to some new ones that may have me purchasing some otherwise freakish hardware on Ebay in order to "creatively reduce expenses".

The day was grinding down pretty good until Karen showed up at 3pm. "Come on! We're going to be late!" and dragged me out of the office with no warning. I was, being something of an idiot, reluctant to go. I'm glad I did - we caught the 3:45 matinee of The Two Towers at the Cinerama - a really fantastic 70mm theatre about 4 blocks from my office.

The evening after has been slower - thank god. I just got back from a little walk down the grocery store to snag a couple of things. Karen's aunt and uncle are coming in to visit Saturday evening through Monday morning, so we wanted to pick up a few items. In addition, I have a sailboat race tomorrow - so I grabbed some light snacky-stuff that I can eat without any prep or thinking. We're supposed to be down at the boat and leaving the dock by 10am, so I'll definitely need it for lunch.

I'm glad I've already committed to going on the race - I'm more of mind to hide in bed and pull the covers up over my head at the moment. It'll be good - both for the excercise and just to completely break the routine I've got now. I'm spending a lot of time trying to break my normal obsessive work habits at the moment - taking a breakfast down at the Market, going out on a race, walking to a coffee shop in the evening for a while. Anything other than that fanatical 12+ hour day watching the data sift through our pipes.

a little more self knowledge

Spent the evening doing a little yoga with Karen and then we walked down to El Diablo for a coffee and scone. (Ok, so I had a cookie and a Cafe Leche - same diff). Karen suggested that since I wasn't sure what my funk was really about at it's depths, that I should write in a private journal for a little bit - just some place where I could let the words flow without worrying about who might read them and fire my ass for slander or something.

Well, that worked pretty well. I'm definitely burned out, but I'm also housing some really deep seated anger. I'm feeling a lot better for ranting about it onto a keyboard for a while though, which is really what I probably needed. Just some time to explore what I was thinking and feeling, and not putting it out here for the world to all see.

I write like I'm talking to someone, especially in my journals. It's free flowing, fraught with speeling mistakes, and provides me with the best window into my subconcious that I have. Karen gave me a really good suggestion. I'm glad I did it.

But ya know, that's the funny thing. For many of the folks that read this little notebook of mine, I wouldn't give a shit if they read my incoherent rantings and slanderings of my fellow wage-monkeys. Shoot - every one of them has heard me in fine, fine form on all these topics (different monkeys though) in the past. It's the folks who I don't know who are reading that make me think twice before brutally slandering people. Oh yeah, and that since it's public on the web, you can just BET there's gunna be a record kept of it SOMEWHERE.

Well, time for some ibuprofen. This damn headache just isn't going away.

fried. burned out. toast.

That's where I'm at. Just kind of waiting, not really getting much movement on anything. I mean, like, I'm getting things done at work - projects are proceeding, tasks are getting accomplished, bugs are getting fixed. But the day to day stuff has been a serious drag lately.

The past couple of days both have been almost to the point of horrific for me, but there really hasn't been anything all that horrific in any instance. Just sort of that slow build up of ickiness that I'm not doing a good job of escaping. I'm in a hell of a funk - way down on the overall manic phases of my life.

I wondered for a while if I was just letting things "get to me". Sort of the usual corporate insanity that we all complain about, but letting it get under my skin. I don't feel like I am though, because I'm not really charged up about anything - not even angry. Just resigned. It's all just business, and that's how I'm running with it. I've stopped taking any of it personally, and stopped working the longer hours too. Of course, that means things are piling up even worse than before, but I suppose that's the price. Not everything needs to get done, and if you have more than you can accomplish in a reasonable time - some of it's just not to get done.

I'm fried. I'm just burned out. I know the symptoms - it's happened a gazillion times in the past with a volunteer organization I spent a long while with - you just burn out after a while. Unfortunately, I can't easily take a break - at least, not a complete break. Backing off the 12+ hour days is a start, but I know it's just going to take a while to recover.

It's funny, because as a manager I keep an eye out for things like this in the folks I manage. But I know nobody at my office is looking out for it in my right now. Or if they are, they're not saying anything or offering much support for it. Wait, that's not completely true - one of the guys I'm managing now seems pretty astute, and comes around periodically to ask "How I'm doing". Seems odd to have them coming from your own staff instead of who you report to - I always viewed that as a "support" role myself, but that's clearly not the way in this big wide world.

maintenance day

I'm spending part of my day learning the maintenance procedures that our DBA's use. Why would I do that? Well, I'm not saying, but I'll bet you could guess.

Something of an emergency has cropped up at work. I sometimes wish I didn't censor that stuff, because I know you guys would love to hear about the trash that crops up - good gossip stuff, ya know?

Lordee, not much else to report really. All the good stuff I can't really talk about.

Too appropriate

Saw this on the web page for CNN, and thought it was just too darn appropriate:

Deferred walk

I took that walk (intended for last night) this morning. Decided to work from home today, just to let the energy reserves build back up a bit. Have some code work to do, which is another good reason to hide from the world - fewer interuptions.

It's sunny out now - must have rained again early this morning though, as the pavement is all uniformly wet. Seattle, when sunny, is damn bright. Surprisingly bright. But it was never the less and lovely little walk. Down to the ave, around a bit, snag a latte and a muffin, and back again. Fairly quiet out there too - maybe I'm just more used to weekend traffic and crowds up here, but it seemed quieter than normal. Quieter than other days I've worked from home and done the same morning breakfast walk.

the rain has stopped

'bout 11pm, and it's quiet outside. Really quiet.

An hour ago it was coming down hard enough to really pull me out of the book. I haven't heard rain that hard in a long, long while. I mean, yeah - it's common as a day in Missouri in the spring, but Seattle just doesn't typically outpour water that heavily.

The air outside is crisp - it was a very cleansing rain. I always love the smell after something like that - the air, ground, paevment - everything has this crisp smell to it. I almost went out for a walk, but I knew that would bother Karen this late in the evening, so I stuck around indoors. Changed the sheets, started some wash, and settled down to some web browsing.

I should have called in sick today

I've succumbed to more than just the rioting sub-operating system known as Emacs, apparently I've picked up a virus or something as well. Yesterday was a typical "cold" day - achey and stiff. It seemed that every time I moved, something was popping, creaking, or cracking. I spent most of the day wrapped up on the couch or at the dining room table scribbling and scrawling.

So today I woke up feeling a little better. John left me a book that I finally started reading last night, and it caught me up reasonably well. So I stayed up late, and work up late - but I was feeling OK. It was one of the "OK's" that didn't last however. So I'm dragging pretty good at the moment. And there appears to be meetings for the rest of the day.

Today's also our internal company meeting. That might have some entertainment value, except that I'm not really up to more vitriol from the troops. Just sort of tired, really. We also appeared to miss getting any vegan food, so the local radical vegtable lovers are raving and ranting about not going to the company meeting at all.

Maybe there's always this level of nastiness around here, but I think today is just higher than usual. Or maybe I'm just more sensitive than usual.

Phone Training

We just received training for our new Nortel m3903 digital telephones. I feel sorry for the poor bastard assigned to train this group. Everyone was grumpy, and he didn't get a moment of rest. He hadn't even begun the training when they lit into him. All the regulars with the most acerbic vitriol you can imagine. They were mean, just plain mean. The phone guy took it like a trooper though. I was impressed with him.

Branding

It's always nice to see the masters fail. Thank god that name's dead! I wonder what's next...

Extreme Programming

Yes! Woo!!

There's a Dilbert on Extreme Programming!!!

(if you're not a geek, you probably won't understand this)

Coding on a Saturday night

Spending my evening coding tonight. Well, aside from writing here and the miscellaneous little things I do inbetween bouts of coding. It's pretty typical code for me - ugly, brutal, full of "global variables", and it works. I'm just testing some stuff out for myself, and I expect to throw all this stuff away anyway.

Most of the evening has been spent getting Ant, JUnit, and name-that-editor working on my iBook. It's actually working very well and easily - I just haven't kept up with the recent testing developments in Ant as well as I possibly could have, so figuring out how to nail down some of these tricks has been a learning process. Like.. adding JAR's to the classpath of a build. And integrating JUnit.

On a side note, I scanned my frequent reading weblogs and noticed that Chuq had a link to an Infoworld Article: Ahead of the Curve. What's interesting is that it's an Apple employee talking about Apple. That's not really all that common in public forums, ya know?

One of the employees of our mothership recently posted to Slashdot. Haven't a clue who he is (well, other than his name: Mark Leighton er). It got the sorts of responses you'd expect.

I guess I don't have that much else to say this evening. The infoworld article was pretty good though.

I have succumbed

There's a carbon build of the latest Emacs. Someone did it up all nice with lots of extra bits in there and support for all sorts of stuff.

It's in my dock. I'm using it as my editor. I got fed up with screwing with Eclipse, so it's out the window. Plain ole' Ant, JUnit, and Emacs.

God, I sound like a freakin' zealot.

Update: Why is it everyone freakin' responds to a little zealotry?

yes, far -far into the dark side.

Safari update

Build 51 is available

Eclipse

So in between responding the various emails and watching a log tail across my screen, I've been checking out the IDE Eclipse.

It's neat, but damn frustrating to me right now. The learning curve is biting, as it always does. At the office, we use everything from MS Visual Studio to emacs to wordpad to IntelliJ's IDEA. Heh - I didn't know shit about emacs before I arrived at my current job - do now.

So I think I prefer the IDE from IntelliJ at the moment - the cursor movement feels more "right" to me (then again, I've become used to emacs - ain't that sick?). I'm sure there's a way to customize it, but I haven't figured it out. One thing that bit me quickly was I didn't have a clue how to add a JAR to the classpath while building and running. That took a little googlin' over the eclipse site to find.

I'm still more comfortable with command line invocations of all the java stuff, but I know if I can get into an IDE, my coding will be much faster. Shoot - I can just see the speed and productivity increases that a good editor can make. To use the latest IDEA on Mac OS X, however, I need to have Java 1.4. I'm not quite ready to snag the preview version for this though, so it'll wait a bit...

MPEG4 LA fucked up

/., Cnet, and Damien over at OReilly have all recently commented on how Microsoft has undercut the MPEG4 LA in pricing for encoders, decoders, etc.

Well, lemme see...

DUH!!!

Of course they would! And the MPEG4 Licensing Association is completely fucked in the head by the greed of the 'patent holders'. Over a year ago, this stirred up as an issue when Apple pressured them to drop their pricing scheme to make the "standard" affordable for the home user. You think they might know something about competing with Microsoft?

What really burns me Rob Koenen's quote in the CNet Article:
"With MPEG LA, as with any license, you're getting insurance. It's buying off risk," Koenen said.

I hope that was taken out of context, and that this guy isn't really as completely moronic as this comes across. Buying insurance? Please, you're purchasing the right to implement a technology. They're just freakin' bits dude, and you're buying the right to not get your assed sued if you use an agreed upon standard.

So now turn around and wake up and realize what platform freakin' OWNS the desktop? There's no insurance here - MPEG4 LA isn't going to come to someone's rescue. Sure, Microsoft will screw a competitor, but they're completely and predictably sel in not screwing the customer too much. And so far, much better at it than MPEG4 LA.

Insomnia

Damn, it's struck again.

My mind is wired tonight, going off on all sorts of wild assed topics. I was thinking about GForge (the open source fork of the original SourceForge) and wondering if they'd done anything with RSS feeds for synopsis reports. That was spurred by a question that Chuq asked about churning a mail stream into an RSS feed.

I got to thinking about development environments, tasks, trackers, and how a number of folks at work get all offended when you assign them something in Bugzilla because it has the word "bug" in it.

I read an article, nope scratch that - book, that a friend referred me to earlier tonight. It was a good read, talking about software development companies and laying out this guys opinions on them. One of the items was training. Another was making sure the coders had a quiet place to work. All sorts of things in there that rang pretty true. Oh, and some that really didn't - but it was all worth thinking about.

Which is, unfortunately, exactly what I'm doing.

2:15am... maybe I'll try laying down on the couch for a while.

Score one for Adobe

Cory comments on link->link->link about Quark fuckin' itself (yes, I'm saying the CEO is the company)

Nifty little feature in Safari

Okay, so I'm just excited because I hadn't seen this before. If you're fortunate enough to be playing with Safari, drag a hyperlink around. It's a wonderful representative tag that shows up...

Safari bugs, er, fixes, er, blogging

Since I got turned on to David Hyatt's weblog, I've been reading it religiously (well, admittedly with NetNewsWire).

One of the things that I think it cool and an example of how communications can work for a company is this weblog. In particular, he's been reading Mark Pilgrim's weblog which complains about bugs, and has been responding with fixes. Now, I'm not saying that this is the only way to do it, but just that it's generating a huge amount of positive press and attitude towards Apple, Dave Hyatt, and Safari.

In the realm of technical folks who are accounted as "guru's", Mark's earned himself a name. XML-RPC, RSS feeds, proper CSS formating - he's a knowledgable guy. And because folks are listening to him, they're noticing his bugs, and that they're being responded to.

Now I don't think that Mr. Hyatt is reading this here Blog, but maybe he is. I'm not bitchin' about specifics that, frankly, I don't know much about. But if I was a 'leader' in this area, maybe he would be. Awright, enough caveats. I think it's great that he's writing, the Safari is getting better, and that's really all that counts.

Whoa, safari info... too much... brain overload...

Lots of links suddenly started appearing (to me) about Safari development. Turns out Dave Hyatt, creator of XUL and Chimera, is on the Safari team at Apple. He's got a huge amount of stuff at his site on the topic, and he's linked to an article about how to test Safari with alternate builds of the LGPL'd core's that Apple has derived from KHTML.

Latent Semantic Mapping

I caught this link off SixLog on NetNewsWire, and decided to have a look. So it seems that Maciej Ceglowski needs data for this project, which I completely understand. The same technology he's whipping together is what's being used by Apple in their spam filter, and their speech recognition software. In short, it's pretty darn powerful, but it needs a LOT of data to train effectively.

So.. I did my part. 1.4Mb of text later, I've shipped out an entire archive of this blog, minus this and later entries.

If you're using Movable Type, consider giving him an export. I mean, really - it's not like it isn't already on the web anyway...

Update: Maciej was kind enough to correct my misunderstanding about training sets in Latent Semantic Mapping - they are apparently not needed, and in this case not used. Cool! Still, you should send him your archives....

Way, way to late at work...

Left work at 10pm tonight.

Why is it the days I go in early are the days I stay so damn late? I'm definitely not workin' something right there.

One of our coders had some critical code that matched up with a database rollout he committed to today. Only he vasted underestimated the pain of making the updates that he claimed earlier were "trivial". Whoops!

Since I do the code rollouts, I stuck it out with him, helping him debug tests and problems throughout. Good thing we did too - cause some of the very last minute tests illustrated a bug that would have caused us some significant pain. I really am a fan of test-driven development. Or at least healthy regression testing in an automated fashion!

Code's rolled out, databases are up, and everthing's fine. And I'm going in to the office LATE tomorrow.

Apple's new browser, KHTML, code and licenses

Lots of mailing lists have seen a burst of conversation about Apple's choice of KHTML over the Gecko rendering engine for their new browser Safari. I think the most fascinating piece of this was that Apple is now shipping GPL code and running with it. Other pieces of GPL code haven't been shipped (such as Wget) with the base install, so to me this represents something really new.

Apple is following through on the GPL license as well - returning all changes to the Internet and world per the license, making them available for download. I wonder if they didn't include wget into the baseline of the system (that BSD layer) because someone might claim the OS is a derivative product. Interestingly, they're clearly making an implicit legal separation between browser and OS in this - I feel pretty confident in stating there's no way Apple would allow it's entire OS to come under the grasp of a GPL license. Big change, if you ask me, making this move. And I'm happy to see it. It's got some implicit legal precedences and statements, and it's good for everyone.

Aside from the fact that I liked that the choice was pragmatic - that KHTML was "good code" and that there was an evaluation. It's just nice to see. They're thinking.

Of course, I'm also exceptionally hopeful that these pieces will get wrapped back into places were I, as a developer, can take advantage of them too. GPL or not.

As a side note, I'm curious what OReilly thinks of this new name, seeing as they have a product labelled Safari.

New Entry with Safari

Duh, you know I had to try it.

Seems like a pretty OK browser. Doesn't appear to support the <CENTER> tag like I expected, but it's got this neat future that allows me to send the page source to Apple explaining what I expected to see. Bookmarks are easy, I've got to admit, and the rendering is fast.

We have a page at work that's like 32 large PNG's outlining the virtual workflow of our production environment that I created. It is, perhaps, just a little graphics heavy. It loads up very nicely - it's slow as a dog under IE.

I'm not incredibly keen on the "metal" interface. Apple appears to be breaking it's own rules again, but hey - who knows.

I think most interestingly with this is Apple's frameworks. We now have a JavaScriptCore.framework, a WebCore.framework, a WebFoundation.framework, and a WebKit.framework. You can bet I'll be digging through those to see what's available. Of course it's not public frameworks yet, but at least I can see what they're thinkin'. They could desperately use a newer/better core HTML viewer framework in the OS, that's the darn sure. They're clearly written in cocoa, but no header files have been included. Guess I'll have to class dump'em and see what's in there.

Note to self: Don't include tags in a weblog entry and expect everyone else to be able to seem them - they might just get used instead. Remember to convert > to &gt; and < to &lt; instead.

Mech Assault

Went to the microsoft playtest session this evening, and it was actually really short. Got a copy of Mech Assault in renumeration, and brought it home. The first couple of levels are pretty darn good too - nothing outstanding in the graphics (I know they could have done better), but it's a great blow-em-up game. You can run over the little infantry and everything!

Fun game, although Karen was getting a little sick of the screams, machine gun noise, and stuff.

Fire Fighting

Well, I was being prophetic when I determined there would be some terrible crisis to be resolved when I came in this morning. Only it took until this afternoon to hit. I'm still heading to the Xbox playtesting this evening, and most of it is hands off stuff - batch, if you like from the ole JCL days - but I still expect I'll be working late at home tonight.

I guess I won't be investigating Cactus much more this week...

to do list in the sky

I woke up reasonably early today and got into work. I'm in the middle of some weird bipolar sleeping freakishness currently - one day I'm up at 7am, the next it's not until noon. But regardless, it's clear I did a pretty good job of leaving "work behind" this weekend.

Why? Because when I stepped into my cube, I looked around and it was like a floodgate opened up. That giant to-do list in the sky turned over on it's side, and the details all came flooding right on in.

Probably the most interesting thing will be investigating the use of Apache's Cactus to automate unit testing web/servlet frameworks. The choice is that, or HttpUnit. Cactus is much more unit testing - small pieces testing, where HttpUnit is a lovely integration testing set for any web application (a "send this, expect that, send this expect that" sort of tool). Interestingly, the latest Cactus release appears to support HttpUnit integration right on in to it.

Man, if only the development tools would advance at this pace!

Sleepy sunday

Another day for exceptionally long periods of time spent sleeping. Yep, that's my sunday. I got some decent things done - a build and patch for the office, some personal research stuff, and drove Karen over to Ballard for a little shooping expedition (my expedition was into Tully's for an amazingly late breakfast).

Been reading a few rumors sites regarding the MacWorld Expo that's just begun. The big keynote is Tuesday at 9am PST, and is being webcast in Quicktime at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/mwsf03/.

Spent most of the afternoon over with Nathan and Leah. Nate and I played one of James Ernest's more recent games: DiceLand. If you like Cheapass Games, I'd recommend this one. It's fun, reasonably quick, and has some interesting strategy to it. We played a couple of rounds over New Year's Eve, and again tonight.

Also screwed around with a program called MetaStock, by Equis. It's got some crazy complex and detailed stock analysis stuff. If you're into that sort of thing, this is the bomb. I think the usability might need some work - it was a bit repititious where it didn't need to be, but damn was it impressive.

Fable

When I shanghai'd Karen into going to that little game store at Northgate, we walked out with a gaming magazine called "GameInformer". It's mostly useful, but it did have an interesting article on a game called "Fable". What caught my attention was that it was being done with Lionhead Studios. I guess it was originally called Project Ego - the core idea of it sounds pretty cool:

That you game in a simulation that really tracks in time. You start out as a boy, and age to an old man. And everything around you moves through time in some similiar fashion. The idea of a dynamic world simulation that you can effect is just really appealing to me. I've enjoyed seeing the AI that Lionhead dropped into Black&White, so I'm really looking forward to seeing what they do here.

MacWorld Expo... Tuesday

Nope, aint' going. Other than doing something like checking out Panic's booth, it probably wouldn't interest me all that much right now either. Although, I've got to admit, I do love to follow the ravings of everyone around the "Steve Jobs Latest Unveilng". This year, everyone's convinced that Apple's going to be charging $50 to $100 for their suite of iApps. Well, there's a shocker. Everyone was outraged that Apple was charging for the disk-in-the-sky Mac.com stuff. Like any company could reasonably provide that much service for free? With the usual tragedy of the commons that happens with no barrier to entry? heh, yeah right. Pass me some of that stuff...

$50 for three apps. That's what CNet is calling on it. Guys... that's fuckin' PIDDLY! If there's benefit to the apps, do you think you'd be able to get it from anyone else for $50? Have you taken a look recently to see what it costs to develop software? And those bug fixes don't just come for free... Ok, I'll shut up now. People will whine, because Apple made the mistake of setting the expectation that everything they would provide would be free forever.

The interesting tidbit is the "something" rumors that nobody really has quite pinned down. Some folks are saying video iPod, others are talking tablet and the handwriting recognition stuff. Who knows? I'll be watching the keynote on the web though, just to find out...

New games

Karen had me drive her up to Northgate last night in an attempt to get a class schedule at Northwest Sewing, where she'll be teaching soon. They were closed when we got there, so I made her accompany me to the local game shop there, which sells new and used Xbox games.

We walked out with two: Myst 3: Exile, and Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast. Okay, so I'm a complete sucker for pretty much any Star Wars game. That one was an easy sell, and the used copy gave me a whole $5 off!!! Yeah, I know. Weak. Yes, I'll purchase Knights of the Old Republic when it becomes available like a good little fanatic.

But when Karen said "This looks interesting..." picking up the Exile game, well - we had to have it. She loved the original Myst, so it wasn't hard to believe she might like this one too.

What's worse than the rain?

Easy answer in Seattle: The Sun...

especially when you're 15 miles north of the city on Highway 5, in late afternoon, running errands, and it's been raining for the past two days. So there's a viscious late afternoon glare on the pavement, on top of the whole mess being somewhat slick. On our way back home, it took us 50 minutes to drive those 15 miles. It took us 20 minutes getting up there... We fortunately abandoned Highway 5 when we got down to Shoreline (exit 178? 176? something like that) and took Aurora (highway 99) back down the rest of the way. In between Queen Anne and Shoreline, there were three accidents - each covered three lanes of the 4-lane southbound highway. Not surprising it was so backed up. Blech.

The worst part is I didn't have my sunglasses in the car (you don't exactly get to expecting the sun this time of year around here). They were safely at home in my sailing bag... dagnebit!

Home now, thank god. Taking it easy a bit before assaulting the final removal and packing of Christmas decorations. With karen's wrist messed up, it'll mostly be me doing the moving, packing, and hauling. Need to get some grocery shopping in there too.

I'm beginning to think of myself as "pack mule" for all the hauling around here I'm doing while Karen can't lift anything. Best this way, though - I really, really don't want her making that wrist worse. It's healing nicely, and she just needs to be careful with it. I'm probably somewhat fanatical about it because I know I wouldn't....

Amusing quote from William Gibson

Since I stopped watching television some seven or so years back, I thought this was particularly amusing:

(An individual who watches no television is still a scarcer beast than one who doesn't have an email address.)

Wordnet

One of the projects at work made reference to WordNet today, and from it I found out that someone has gone to some trouble to port WordNet to MacOS X as well as Java.

The code that William Taysom makes available (dmg compressed) is a really nice set of code, and I think could be converted into a framework without all that much pain. It even uses that very latest (1.7.1) WordNet files, so the bits are pretty up to date.

In terms of natural language processing, this is a hell of a boon. It has an attributive license, so it would be pretty easy to use in something else as well.

Waking up

Man, I had a terrible time waking up this morning. I even got to bed (and asleep) at a more reasonable hour (1am instead of 3am). 8:30am rolled around and Karen woke me up. At 9am, she woke me up again. I was sitting up at 9:15am, but not otherwise moving when she next checked in on me at 9:30am. It was terrible, I felt like I was in this horrific fog of sleep that I couldn't quite shake off.

I finally stumbled around for a while, which resolved some of the worst of the fog, but even after I got to work I was moving about in this sort of numbed state. It wasn't until 12:30, when I bailed on a design review meeting and grabbed some soup from SIDs, that I started to really come awake. Yes, I even had my morning latte...

New Year's Day

Karen and I had a terrific day yesterday. New Year's Eve lasted until 1am with friends (Nate and Leah were over to watch the fireworks from atop Queen Anne), and than to an additional 3am for me because I was wired and couldn't sleep. That translated into waking up at 10:15am, putting on my robe, brushing my teeth, and sitting down on the couch where I promptly fell back asleep.

Karen woke me up again right about Noon, as we were heading over to John and Sue's for an afternoon "thing" (get together, not quite party, not really an open house... thing). Had a really good time there visiting with them and some other aquaintances. Somewhere in there I made an unfortunate conversational segway that appeared to indicate I slaughtered chickens with a hydraulic wood splitter in my youth. I'm still giggling to myself at the look of pure horror on Cindy's face. It was a perfect delivery - probably because it was unintentional.

We stayed a little later over at John and Sue's playing a game call Sequence, which was a neat card & board game - kind of a combination of "connect 5" and Gin Rummy.

That evening we headed back over the Nate and Leah's, were I promptly spent 30 minutes talking to my mother. I hadn't managed to catch up with her until that point, so we chatted for a while. I felt a little bad coming over to Nate and Leah's place and then ignoring them for a while talking on the phone, but I guess since I lived with them for 8 months previously, they're somewhat used to it. Afterwards, we went out in search of dinner. Karen wanted to eat vegetarian at Cafe Flora, but it wasn't open, so we checked out a little place called the Tea Pot up on Capitol Hill. The food looked decent, but the menu was poorly written, and none of us were really excited about asian vegetarian food that night. That began the trek through the back side of Capitol Hill and Madison Park to find somewhere else to eat. We finally landed at Atlas Foods in the University District (U. Village) - a restaraunt owned by the same folks that run the 5 Spot up here on Queen Anne. None of us ate vegetarian in the end, and I might add they have a lovely cheeseburger. In between the Tea Pot and Atlas Foods was, I think, 8 other places that were all closed.

We landed back at our place at 9:30 or 10pm and both pretty much promptly fell asleep.

Redeye for Gus

Well, I imagine Gus is back in St. Louis now - hopefully no issues with rain, sleet, snow and ice in the process. He was taking a redeye (leaving at 12:55am this morning) and arriving in St. Louis at 6am (or something like that) and heading straight to work from there. Youch!

At least the sun came out for a couple of times while he was here. Don't know what people think when they choose to visit Seattle in December and January. Maybe just i want to see my girlfriend. :-)