July 31, 2004
heh, amusing
Remember my babble about C++? Anita has an amusing comment about that on her blog, courtesy of Sam Gentile (whom I don't know, but looks very Microsoft from his blog...)
convergence
No, I don't mean all the media on my computer crap. Something different this time.
I was reading this evening, and stumbled across the article Two Degrees of Freedom by Daniel Steinberg, which contains the quote:
Tim asked George Dyson to talk about his dropping out of high school to go to the Pacific Northwest to build kayaks. George said that formal schools tend to make a distinction between people who do things with their hands and people who do things with their minds. Instead, Dyson believes that we must encourage both.
The Tim is Tim OReilly, but the really interesting bit is George Dyson. I got to hear him speak at OSCON last year and as both intrigued and fascinated by him. So - when I get a chance to read anything about him, I do. I never knew that he dropped out of high school to build kayaks. Course, living in Seattle, that almost seems like a completely reasonable thing to do. Seattle is so full of strange and intelligent folks doing all sorts of weird things that the fact that a fellow who's now a director at Princeton would be the same guy that dropped out of high school to go build kayaks just sorta fits.
Anyway, his comment about working with both hands and mind really strikes a chord. Ok - granted I spent the afternoon ripping skin of my hands while working on the kitchen, but still. It's just, I dunno, a solid thing to say. Maybe it just appeals to my midwest sense of ethics of something, I dunno. Gotta think a little bit more on how I want to apply that to myself.
poor minivan
Karen and I have the kitchen torn apart again today. Made really good progress - we got all the beadboard cut and up, in place. Did the painter's caulk thing too and smoothed out all the lines. There was some other miscellaneous work regarding the kitchen we accomplished too, but that was the biggie.
So we went out for a bite this evening. Ivar's on north lake union (I enjoy getting fish & chips there and watchin' the boats). On our way home, I saw this poor minivan. Someone clearly sat on it. Okay, so maybe it wasn't a minivan, but it was one of the strangest lookin' things I've seen pretending to be car-like in a while. Usually, I'm shaking my head at those suburban wanna-be things, or a monster 4x4 pickup truck in downtown Seattle (what possible use is a 4x4 truck in seattle?). This thing was weird.
Sat 0:00
I just sat down with the laptop to write a little in the blog, looked up at the clock, and saw it reading "Sat 0:00". That seemed a little profound, but I couldn't really tell you why.
Karen and I watched Bablyon 5 tonight, episodes 5 through 8 from the first season. It's really surprising how relevant some of the topics and messages are from that show. I guess I'm just on another big science fiction kick - what with visiting the Science Fiction Museum, being engrossed in Alastair Reynold's latest work, and watching Babylon 5. Some science fiction is warning material or extrapolations on cautionary tales. Others work into what it means to be - (granted by often using something 'alien' to compare against)
The episodes tonight (as well as a great deal of the whole series) dealt with politics and acceptance, fear mongering, and digging out truths. I look around at what we've got going on around us in the USA, and think "Oh my god, how frightening that it's so relevant". I suspect, on a more philosophical note, that it may well have been just as relevant in Plato's time as well. How far we've come - and how much we've missed at the same time.
I'm also thinking about it in terms of people and expectations. A very good friend of mine is stunned by how some people do or don't react. His "model" isn't matching the actual evidence he's getting back. And I look at some of the same or similiar situations, and I'm not surprised at all - I may not have predicted it all, but it wasn't stunning. And I'm not sure which of the two of us has the better point of view to be honest. Am I just that more cynical? Or is it better to have higher expectations and be disappointed? I've seen high expectations work incredible wonders with staff when I managed them with it. I've also seen that fall completely on it's face, and I'm beginning to think that quite a large number of folks don't really give a shit about their jobs at all. Just something to make money that they put some effort at.
Obviously, that concept doesn't suit me all that well - and lookee, I've run off and joined a "startup" (when does a company go from being a start-up to being young? or mature?) where they're looking for people with passion and energy - absolutely required in some of the crazy assed things you see in a 'young company'. Fitting into that, I had a call from some consulting outfit from AOL asking to interview me about why I left. (If you didn't know, my previous employer was AOL). Karen accidently deleted the answering machine message, but I'm not all that upset about it. Maybe someone in AOL really does give a shit about why they're having terrible turnover - but from my point of view it's pretty darn clear. Now don't take me wrong - I didn't actually dislike AOL. In fact, they were a pretty darn nice transition from a certain consumer electronics company who creates the worst pieces of shit known to man - but like many large companies they have their problems. And in seeing AOL through my own eyes, I gauged how likely I was to be successful or happy within that environment. And yeah - I made choices. And other folks are obviously making similiar choices. I even went out of my way to be clear and honest with the HR staff when I left about why I was leaving and what some serious issues were. I'm not interested in making AOL a better place out of the "goodness of my heart", as I think corporations are souless beasts, and the larger the corporation, the more likely it is to embody some of the worst traits of mankind. Not always, nothing's universal, but I think that's a pretty workable model.
Now it's a half hour after I started rambling, and my brain is starting to leak onto other topics. Michael McCracken's Stackout and unit testing (had some fun with that this afternoon at work too), Apple, RealNetworks, and "hacking", the new magazine/book thing by OReilly: Make, and oh - by the way - Zinio SUCKS!!! (although I like the content of MacDeveloperJournal. I wish they'd just bag that crappy format and get on with something reasonable (pragmatic?) like PDF's...
July 28, 2004
movie ads
I was startled to see a particular advertisement at the movie theatre last night. Okay - so I actually really dislike that video advertising before a movie, sort of pisses me off. I like previews, but not really ads. But this one really caught my attention. It was for Halo 2. I was stunned. I'd seen a few games advertised in previous action genre movies, but I certainly didn't expect that!
Not too bad either. Course, I'd rather have the game right now - but it's well on it's way.
Bela Fleck
Whoa,
A crazy assed day ended the best possible way it could - by listening to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones perform live at the Woodland Park Zoo. The Zoo hosts this ZooTunes thing where they have a some really impressive names playing for a large open field. Take a picnic dinner, and viola!
I lucked out in parking on the street off the west entrance of the Zoo tonight - it was a race to get there, and I still missed the very beginning of the opening act. But getting out was smooth sailin' - right down the side of Phinney Ridge and into Ballard and away. Karen and I were home maybe 15 minutes after the concert ended, which I certainly didn't expect.
We'll be going again on August 11th!
Pragmatic Project Automation
While I'm at it, I thought I'd give Mike Clark's Pragmatic Project Automation a plug. I didn't buy the PDF like Gus, I bought the book from the pragmatic website. (I hear tell that's a good way to get the cash directly to the authors with as few middle men as possible). Yeah, PDF would be better for that - but I still like a physical book.
I've glanced through it, but haven't really dug in. Even still, just flipping through the chapters made me grin and say "Yeah, yeah" - seeing a bunch of pieces and tidbits that I had thought about doing or setting up at Singingfish. (much of which I never did, quite a bit of which I did do). At the moment, I do wish there was a more non-java emphasis from the book, but I can't really complain on that front - there's a huge amount of detail and effort that's out there in similiar form for Make and the various GNU tools - the concepts are all there in the book, and it's not like it's hard to port something like that to Python, Perl, Shell, or name your language here...
Also spent some time reading up on the nitty gritty details of BGP. There's a surprising amount of documentation out there on all these networking tidbits, if you just go looking.
Bourne
Karen's off visiting the islands - or the peninsula (not sure which) today, so after taking care of various house errands, I decided it was a good night to see the Bourne Supremacy. Aside from definately not being a movie for Karen, I really enjoyed it. The cutting was exceptionally good at causing confusion - but it actually (I thought) enhanced the effect of the movie. It was a shocking movie, which I really appreciated because it sort of stood up to Ludlum's novels in that respect. Anyway, if you're ready for a good spy/action flick (NOT like Spiderman or such), check it out.
July 25, 2004
netflix
So it looks like I've started a free trial with netflix. That whole Science Fiction Museum got us all wound up about actually seeing Babylon 5 from start to finish, and that appeared to be the easiest (possibly best) way of doing it short of buying the whole series outright.
So the netflix deal is $22 a month for "3 at a time" DVD rentals. We don't normally watch all that many, so it'll be interesting to see how it all works out and if we keep it. Seeing as we normally rent a few movies every other month or so, it may not last. Then again, maybe it'll be that chance to catch up on all the science fiction that I've missed with the advent of the SciFi channel on cable.
Bugzilla for tracking tasks... NOT
At my last place of employment, we diddled around with variations on trying to get Bugzilla to do more than defect tracking. In fact, we found the same thing Mitch Kapor & the OSAF did - that it sucks for project task/management tracking. It's great for logging detail on a bug, or storying the history of a problem - but it's just not flexible enough for the ever changing world of projects in any company, be they large or small. The biggest trick we have these days is turning bug reporting and tracking into something that makes sense with the XP process and user stories.
Yeah, yeah - I know that all bugs are supposed to be fixed before more work is done, but the concept of what exactly is a bug can be pretty damned flexible, and we're finding that some bugs aren't identified until a bit later in the game than we'd like. So pushing them back onto the stack is an appreciable effort, and there's choices to be made on which should get done first - stick with a known workaround, or head for that new feature to show it off...
Other saturday wanderings
In addition to the Science Fiction Museum, Karen and I checked out the new Seattle Public Library. It's been open for a little bit, but we hadn't been down to see the reality of the new building. The Seattle Times has a bit on the new building if you're curious.
As for what I thought about this new building? Wow.
Karen thought the colors inside were harsh, I thought they were vibrant. We both agreed that the "book spiral" from floors ten down through six was inspired and delightful. And perhaps a bit scary if you're near the edges and have any sort of vertigo.
I walked into this library and thought "So this is what the future of libraries with computers is all about." Wifi access points littered the building. A poster at the entrance talked about the librarians having access to Vocera communications badges - another star trek idea come right to life.
I only wish that all the hours that I spent in Ellis Library at MU could have been in a building as well outfitted and comfortable as the Seattle public library. It's just incredible. It's a building that I'm proud to say I helped pay for with my taxes, and I hope the library keeps on keepin' on. It is one of the single best (and I think most unappreciated) public services that we offer today.
playing on saturday
Karen and I were determined to spend Saturday playing. So after a bit of a lay-in, taking in what there was of cool morning goodness, we got up and ran our various errands and started thinking about what the do about the day. About mid-day, we found ourselves in our house - windows all shut up, and the temperature slowly rising outside. My knee was really bothering me, but we didn't want to just nap and lay in the house all day - so out we went.
We walked down to the city, went to a few bookstores, and ultimately ended up visiting the Science Fiction Museum. It was a lot of walking all the way around yesterday, and in some pretty darn warm weather, but we had a really good time. By the time we made it back to the house (10pm or so), we were both bushed. Inside the house was around 84, so we popped all the windows and immediately started the fans. I thought I'd read some, but fell asleep on the couch in minutes.
About 2am I woke up and the house was feeling cooler, so I migrated to the bedroom to finish out the night. Woke up this morning and the house was a LOT cooler - who would have though that this morning would be 60 degrees outside when yesterday was 95 - 101 on Mercer Island?
July 24, 2004
C++
C++ is an interesting language.
Yes, interesting. As in "may you live in interesting times". It reminds me that programming languages are completely made up mechanisms for giving instructions, and this one is really the class act. You can freakin' redefine anything - and it's equivilance to english is uncanny. You can speak plainly and with incredible obfuscation equally well. It's overloaded and added on multiple layers of language concepts, and it's just happily snagged concepts from just about anywhere to include into it's drama. And I imagine (although I haven't seen it yet myself), that you could create the analog of incredible poery with the language as well.
I'm getting reasonably savvy with Objective-C (and it's underlay - good ole ANSI C), but I'm not amazing bit slappin' and twiddlin' geek. I grok objects and OO concepts pretty darn well. I don't tend to think in terms of recursion and stacks (nope, never really got into LISP - sorry). And I'm not the kind of guy that really gets into fancy new algorithms to do something in a new and different way. I'm a systems/objects guy - give me the things that "just work" and I'll combine them in new ways and with other components and make some shit really happen.
I think, in some ways, c++ is just too flexible. You need significant restraint to really code well in the language - and frankly I think lots of people don't have that restraint. Hey, maybe I'm smokin' something... it just seems that way to me.
So it's been a hell of a learning experience to get into the guts of c++. I spent a good part of the afternoon and evening paired up and hacking through unit tests on top of C++. It's been a cool learning experience, although I wish I was more fluent in looking up methods (functions?) and understanding the nuances of the syntax to knock that stuff out. Still, made good progress and I'm feelin' pretty OK about it all.
July 23, 2004
heat of the day
Okay,
So I live in Seattle. If you haven't figured that out by now, you're not paying attention. Seattle is in the pacific northwest, noted for it's persistent rain and clouds, not it's brilliantly sunny days where the heat gets up to 95 at 7pm. At 11pm here, it's still 82 outside, and nearly 84 inside (the windows are open now with fans a runnin).
Yeah, yeah - I know. I've gone native and now I'm a heat wimp - but damnit, I'm PROUD of that. The temps didn't break 80 until nearly noon today (the sun was up at 5:30am and didn't set until 9:30pm), and just slowly crep up to that peak at 7pm. Wowza.
It was an unexpectedly long evening at work, but I can't even say I'm all that upset, given that work is air conditioned. Some last minute crap came up, and it took some heavy diagnostics to really nail down where the problems were occuring. Karen had an awesome munchy dinner waiting for me when I got home - you just can't really ask for anything more.
Looks like I'll be working at least part of sunday, and maybe tomorrow. Hard to tell at this point, so I'm just playing it all by ear.
July 21, 2004
weblogger meetup
Got out of work and headed over to the weblogger meetup at Ralph's this evening. That was fun, as a lot of the regulars were there - Anita has the list and a brief report. The most interesting of the evening was meeting Ian - who's become unfortunately relatively famous of late for being brutally harassed for taking photographs of the Ballard Locks. Those locks, by the way, are advertised as a Seattle tourist destination...
Of other interesting note, we talked about walking through downtown, and oddly enough of the strange things. A few folks asked about my walk over Highway 99/Aurora (which I don't do anymore since I left work at AOL) - but instead the topic turned to the Downtown Dog Lounge on Western. So it turns out that as you walk by, there's this truly hideous smell of dog urine that permeates the area. It's an otherwise beautiful walk - but that just knocks you out. I can't imagine anyone being terribly excited about taking their dog there given that smell.
July 20, 2004
el diablo...
hey cool,
Tara has a neat photo of the inside of El Diablo. Neat coffee house.
Pragmatic Automation
I met Mike Clark at WWDC, and have been avidly awaiting the announcement that Pragmatic Automation was printed and available. So.. I've bought it.
Can't wait....
absurd
Today was one of thos absurd days. The kind that you sort of reflect back on and think "what the fuck happened?", and then know all to well all the various things that led up to it. It's still tuesday, right? Hard to track right now, even with a computer under my fingers.
It all started out rather absurdly as well (fitting, eh?) with me being far, far more awake than I usually am and probably overly cheerful to my co-workers as they wandered in after me this morning. I even got a "what's so good about it" comment.
That all came crashing down this afternoon, when the reality hit the road and a vacation I'd assumed (bad thing - assumptions) would be OK was timed poorly and I wouldn't be able to take it. The worst part is, I had lots of opportunities to make sure people knew about it early up - and missed them all. Just completely forwent it, assuming (there's that word again) that it wouldn't be a problem.
So we've cancelled a week's trip in September that we had planned from last year. I need to arrange something with the plane tickets yet, but I expect we haven't really lost all that much money on the deal - and only delayed the vacation by some unknown amount of time. The worst was really Karen's disappointment. She'd been really looking forward to the trip, and had repeatedly asked me a couple of weeks ago if I was sure it was all going to be OK. Yep, yep - I assured her. Yikes, does that suck to try and reverse, or what. (I assure you, it sucks).
I took off from work early (that would mean that I left at 5pm) to spend the evening with Karen and apologize. Did a pretty shitty job of it too, but I guess it's working out. Blech.
July 19, 2004
UnitKit update
James posted an update to UnitKit today, bringing us to release 0.95.
Debugging while running unit tests is still something you need to add into place, but it's not too bad - and it's now documented in the Manual provided (page 12).
Now the cool thing is making the default target of your build have a dependency on your unitKit bundle so it enforces the unit test passing for builds to function - even when you don't have the UnitKit bundle target selected. To do this, select your default build target and click on the Info button. Select the tab labelled "General" and hit that little plus button in the lower right corner. From there, you should have a selection of the other targets already there, and you can choose the unit test target.
July 18, 2004
a little python goodness
I wandered across the AIMA python library a few weeks ago, but hadn't really looked at it much. Tonight I'm trying to keep both cat and laptop off me (it's too damn warm!) and had a chance to go through some of it. Man - that's a nice set of libraries and utilities!
I own a copy of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (first edition, not second) as yet another book in my truly monstrous library of voracious interests. It's a good book. I expect v2 is even better.
Anyway, if you're doing much python, grab the libraries and check'm out. They've got some lovely tidbits in there, even if you just use it for code reading.
on the darkly plus side
On the plus side, I got a note from Gus today that made me feel better about my stupid infinite loop trouble. He'd apparently gotten himself six ways from sunday with race conditions and deadlocks the same evening I was trying to figure out why UnitKit never finished it's run of my perfectly good code.
Hey, at least I'm writing unit tests! And I've got to tell you, after spending some time fiddling and fooling around and fighting with CppUnit, UnitKit is a dream!
In more "goofing off" news...
In more "goofing off" news, I wanted to report that while many LucasArts games are really quite good, the company really screwed up with the XBox edition of Jedi Starfighter.
Now I've loved spaceship sim/combat games ever since I remember. Flying games where you dogfight - that whole kit - are just some of my favorites. So it's particularly annoying when a genre and company to which I'm naturally sympathetic really fucks up with a game. In this case, the controls are just badly designed and played out for use on an XBox console. Blech. I loved playing Xwing vs. Tie Fighter years ago. I'd hoped that I could have something similiar again. I guess not.
I was further dismayed to realize that I'd completely screwed up my dates and the weblogger picnic was YESTERDAY, not next saturday. So in addition to being bummed that I would probably have to work and miss it, I completely screwed myself up and missed it when I had a completely free day! Doh! I'm such a dork. Well, with any luck I can swing the Meetup this wednesday at Ralph's and visit with folks.
gcc article
You know I've decended pretty deep down the rabbit hole when I think a new article on GCC and it's special characteristics on MacOS X is interesting. Oh well. Now, where's that little bottle that says "Drink Me"...
Center for Wooden Boats
Seattle's Center for Wooden Boats seems to be doing well. Decided to head down there today to just see what was going on. Turns out they were having a "classic speedboat" show - with a heady supply of Chris Craft circa 1950. Beautiful boats, beautifully maintained.
I was more interested in the sailboats themselves. I love the look of a gaff rigged wooden boat, and I'd never, never want to be responsible for the maintenance of one unless I was filthy rich and could hire all the work done.
The Center for Wooden Boats is offering a rather intriguing course though - build a small plywood sailboat (a 10' thingy) over two weekend this fall for $800. It's billed as a family boat building workshop. It sounds fantastic - except for the "where do you keep it" problem that will ultimately follow the building experience. I used to mock those guys in Missouri who had cars parked on their lawns. I can just see a collection of sailboats filling up our back yard....
Still, it'd be a boat that I could go putter around on Lake Union or Lake Washington with. I'm not sure how steady she'd be on the waters in the sound (or even a rough Lake Washington), but it's intriguing. Of course, I looked at prices for sailboats around here (gotta love Craigslist - they've got one of everything there) - and it was the same thing. Getting a boat isn't nearly so problematic as figuring out how to keep one. Moorage or storage, trailering, and then all the various upkeep functions. Phew.
porting some code for giggles
There's some code that I was working with quite some time ago in Java, and never really picked up and finished. So I've been hankering for an excuse to work UnitKit a little more, so I started porting the java code into Objective-C as a 'something to do that isn't work related' project.
That was a nice refresher course. I'm not finished, not by a long shot, but I got a good amount of baseline code ported over and unit tests created for the pile. I spent some time figuring out why I'd sent myself into an infinite loop (UnitKit doesn't deal with that pretty much as you'd expect - it just goes out to lunch and never comes back). I knew where I was heading into la-la land, but didn't spot the actual reason until I'd arranged for the whole darn thing to run under the debugger - which was an interesting trial in and of itself. I don't know if there's a way to make that easier or not - but debugging through the unit tests can be darned instructive.
And now it's near on 1am, and I'm ready to be done for the evening.
July 17, 2004
High Order Messaging
OReillyNet has an article on high order messaging. It reminded me of python's map function, which I haven't used yet - but seems incredibly useful. I guess Ruby has something akin as well - which isn't really all that surprising. Rob Rix references a paper entitled TaskMaster by Brad Cox. I imagine any lisp'ers out there will make the expected statement that all programming languages are still trying to make it back to what Lisp had years ago. maybe so... I'll bet squeak has the concept in there somewhere...
hyperbole and massive computing
In scanning blogs and stuff, I ran across this bit about IBM's Cellular Computing. It reads rather terribly, and complete assumes that you don't really have a clue what Von Nuemann actually wrote about (if you've never read any of his notebooks, it's well worth doing so). It also makes it sound like Thinking Machines and Danny Hillis' work didn't happen and weren't seriously profound (I bought a hardbound copy of his thesis I liked it so much). In short, it was long on babble, and short on why it was cooler than what the other kids did. I'm not saying that it's not cooler - just that the article was crappy.
Course, I thought it was about cellular telephone networks when I first read the headline. I was confused because I didn't think IBM was a player there, although that didn't seem beyond conception - so I took a look.
Speaking of radio communications, Posted by joe at 12:12 AM
July 16, 2004
I, Robot
Went to see I, Robot tonight, and I was actually very surprised. From the previews, I expected it would be much more action oriented than it was, and from my memory of the book it was much more action oriented than I expected.
Still, it was true to the concepts of Asimov's work (as I remember them anyway - it's been a few years), and I enjoyed the movie. I wonder what other directors woulda/coulda done with the science fiction classic. I can't help but compare it to AI, which is another movie with some of the same questions and consequences - although Spielberg left far too much of the backstory out of that.
Karen asked me to report back on if she'd like to see it - and aside from some of the (admittedly obvious) violence and a rather brutal car scene, I think she'd enjoy the movie. Course, I think those two things might cause her to really not enjoy the movie.
Anyway, I'm glad I saw it.
July 15, 2004
commodity OS
Doing a little random blog reading this evening, and through Ted Leung's site, I found Bryan Cantrill's weblog. Among the interesting tidbits in there was The de-commoditization of the OS.
Now I rather expect that Sun may have already lost this anti-commoditization game from a purely economic standpoint, but I really like what Bryan has to say about his perceptions and goals for the OS. As a fan of MacOS X, I guess I'm hoping that there will inherently be some value-add to my favorite OS, and in my case I think there is. For years I used AIX (yes, I admit that now) and file system they had on that baby was light-years ahead of a lot of the others (yes - I mean Sun). More recently, I've spent more than a few hours caring for Linux systems (Redhat, Debian, whatever) and Solaris (9 - never moved to 10).
Of course, I'm convinced that while Microsoft has a monopoly on desktops, there's a huge amount of value add to be had where monkeys aren't using the system. That would, of course, be the lack of raging security flaws. Course, linux does appear to be the ultimate commodity device there, eh? (now if we could just get the form factor down WITH the price, I'd be thrilled!)
In the meantime, I'll keep on truckin' with my iBook (even if it ain't a G4).
Hauling ass while sitting still
Had to take a walk tonight to figure out what I was going to write about. The topic du jour: 'Hauling ass while sitting still'. I signed the paperwork to join the gym today, although I haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to integrate it into my daily schedule. But I'm working longer hours these days, and remaining really pretty sedentary through all of it, so it seems like a pretty damn good idea.
Course, I feel like I'm getting a huge amount done - but that only reinforces my desire to stay still, remain focus - cause I'm "haulin' ass" if you will.
I'm spending a huge amount of time thinking about this build system we have. It's some wild requirements, and the upcoming set of things to really take into account includes compiling quite the load of C++ code on Win32 in a native environment. After doing a lot of looking around, I realized a huge number of folks are using cygwin or MKS to get that sort of thing accomplished (where they have cross platform code bases). And I keep finding that where the unix based systems are great at remote command execution and file transfer, the windows platform under cygwin just is not very reliable in that respect. For those curious on this particular build pain, I'm invoking a remote command over ssh hosted on cygwin, and periodically it just rolls craps and either hangs or refuses the connection. Damned annoying - because I haven't been able to reliably reproduce it either. Rebooting the cygwin host machine does cause it to become stable for a while, but the stability fades away after 48 hours or so.
So now I think I want to grok the whole Windows build world a little more. I've used Visual Studio, but never automated the darn thing. There's the various questions of how to keep the visual studio/win32 bits in line with the make/unix bits - basically how best to make it all play together. If you happen to have any suggestions, I'm all ears. (I've already pestered a whole slew of folks at WWDC about their various experiences in this respect).
Yeah, so. I'm getting a lot done. I feel good about it, I'm jazzed about getting to work each day, and I'm coming home late and exhausted. So I guess life is pretty good. The I guess is really because I'm getting excited about all these things I'd like to do, but when I come home I'm tired. I'm mentally wiping myself out pretty much each day - and there's a lot of other things I'd like to try out, to code, to fiddle with. When I had the time, I didn't use it. Now that I don't really have the mental energy, I'm more excited about it all than ever. Perverse, ain't it. I'm trying to keep a somewhat healthy look on it all though, and working very hard not to burn the candle at both ends and fry. I suppose it's not surprising that my version of "not working too hard" is probably way, way harder than many folks. Not all, mind you - but many that I've worked with.
July 14, 2004
kinda neat online radio
Not that I haven't seen this before, but D-Link is making available a kinda neat internet radio. It's a little too bad it's DLink, as they are known to cause some trouble because of some "custom modifications" to the 802.11g standard frame types.
I actually like AOL's radio service, even if I think they suck on quite a number of other bits.
July 13, 2004
workin' late
Not me, not tonight. Tonight Karen wins the "workin' late" award. When I got home (a little after 6pm) she was still going strong out back with her dyes, buckets of whatnot and cloth. I think she finally called it in about 8pm, and we wandered out to get dinner.
I thought I might work on the last threshold for the tiling work, but my relative tiredness and power tools (especially a big one like a table saw) didn't seem like the wisest move. I'm saving the power tools for another day when I'm not tired. Which probably really means "this weekend".
Meanwhile, I guess it's fair to say I'm working a little bit tonight. I didn't bring home the work computer - so I'm not codin' or pretending to. Tonight I'm just reading. I've been doing a LOT of reading lately, over a wide variety of topics. Tonight, the topic is wireless mesh networks, from which I've found a decent lead-on article at OReillyNet entitled Wireless Mesh Networking. It's really a continuation from WWDC, where I purchased a copy of Wireless Hacks and 802.11 wireless networks. Prior to all this, I'd been pretty confident that I knew a fair amount about wireless networking. Well, that was incorrect... I knew a little bit. But I'm picking up a whole lot more very quickly now.
Quite a bit of interesting technology in those 802.11 frames, let me tell you. The biggest problem in digesting it all is the shear number of dimensions this stuff has when I'm trying to overlay it with things I already know. It's cool, it's complex, and the possibilities are equally open. I'm not surprised that quite a few pundits just get all twitchy (in both good and bad ways) when you say "wireless" around them.
Oh - and had one of those "cool!" moments at work today. A few weeks ago, I'd thrown together some quick and short documentation on how a particular config file worked. Nobody seemed particularly interested at the time, but I thought that sooner or later someone would want to see it. Today, it came through. I've generated documents that nobody has read a bazillion or so times in the past, so it was particularly cool to not only have someone excited to see the document I'd created, but was actually able to immediately use it and got something done - all because I'd spent a few extra minutes a couple of weeks ago.
Singingfish
Hey, check it out - Singingfish is in the news. Course, I'm glad I was not at Singingfish when that announcement got made...
Subversion on the Mac
If you're using Subversion on MacOS X, and you happen to have installed from Fred Sanchez's wonderful packages, he has some updates on his iDisk.
heat
For the record, yeah - I think it's pretty warm here today (79) and yeah, I'm really, really glad I'm not visiting Gus, where it's a heat index of 111. Shoot, it was a delightful 62 degrees this morning when I walked into work.
July 12, 2004
spotlight
Heh, Gruber has a nice review of Spotlight that will be appearing in next year's MacOS X - Tiger. I was raving about it earlier - it's nice to see and read that I'm not the only search geek excited about this.
9pm
It's 9pm and I'm finally slowing down for the day. I was up at seven and running solid from there. Another terrifically busy day at work that I'm feeling really happy about - it was one of those good solid days that wind down and you think Damn, I really got a lot done today!. When you put in a 10 hour day, it's nice to feel that way at the end.
When I got home, Karen had made me a lovely stir fry and then we hopped to again. Cut the back yard grass, put up a pavillion/shade fly back there, and generally did the monday night regular routines. Karen's hosting a dye camp tomorrow, so I expect there'll be quite a pacel of people back there wildly working to make the grass (and maybe some cloth) a variety of different colors. Summers in Seattle are perfect for that sort of thing - dyeing.
Bought a new window fan at Home Depot from the last run. It's reasonably quiet, but most importantly it's small and has bi-directional control. Yep! I can make it blow in or out, and not have to flip that fan around in the window. I've got it running now to try and bring the house temp down to the outside temp. We have a number of west facing windows which let the house really heat up in the afternoon.
July 11, 2004
spidey
Just got back from seeing Spiderman at the Cinerama. I'm right there with Mr. Hay - Best superhero movie... ever. Hopefully someone will out do it, but it was really incredible. I liked the first one (I was a spidey fan from way back), but the second was far, far superior.
Not sure what I'm going to do for the rest of the day at this point - lots of it left, and being inside isn't supremely high on my list. Maybe I'll report back later.
mixed day of greens
That's sort of like a mixed bag of greens, only it was my day.
Got up kinda early for a saturday morning and had a nice wake-up coffee down at El Diablo. Shortly there after, I brought home some breakfast munchies for my sweetie, and we did a little house work. Yup, the kitchen momentum is starting up again. Karen's still got a lame shoulder, so I spent some of the morning yelling at her NOT to do this or that, which I think was probably more frustrating for her than for me. Even still, we made good forward progress and most importantly we started the ball rolling on the kitchen again. It was in that half-way state - you know, the one where you can easily live with it if you don't care all that much, but it looks like crap...
So we did a little more light demolition, argued, conversed, and mused on the various wall possibilities (we'll be putting up bead board and painting it for the lower walls in there - and actually making it uniform, which it isn't currently). I knocked out some thresholds for where the tile meets the wood flooring (I love having a table saw!), and we went to the hardware store to get ourselves a little better set up for more work in the future. I think I'm going to save tomorrow for completely goofing off time, so I expect some nights this week will go towards more work-on-the-kitchen work.
Nathan joined us for the afternoon and evening to help out (and encourage those various bits of musing and such about kitchen walls, mouldings, etc). After we were all said and done, I demanded that we go to the 5 Spot for a late night munchie snack (they've got a neat after-10pm menu that reminds me a little of the Broadway Diner in Columbia, MO). Anyway, after all that happy munchie stuff, we were chatting about Fark, Craigslist, and other things - and I was happily surprised to find out that Craigslist had an RSS feed that was composed of a search there. I found out that Nathan didn't really know much about RSS, or even about the really cool readers out there.
A couple of web pages later, and I'd found the article at OReillyNet talking about the top three readers for Windows - only the funny thing is I don't really agree with Wei-Meng Lee. He didn't mention FeedReader at all, which I think is a pretty good RSS browser on windows. And I've heard a couple of friends tell me that Trillian is really the way to go with RSS (at least if you'll be doing IM as well)
July 09, 2004
gym
Spent the first part of the morning walking down to work and checking out a gym nearby the office: Rain Fitness. It's a nice place - clean and new equipment. Gyms always feel stuffy and too warm to me, and this wasn't much of an exception on that. The actual space of the gym very nice - hardwoods throughout. And work offers a free membership as a perk of employment here. Since I've increased my hours at work rather significantly, seemed like it might be a good idea to plan in a daily break (while I don't have regularly scheduled meetings every 5 minutes) and get into a new routine there.
Nailing down a goal for the whole thing is what I really need to do next. I know if I'm not working towards something specific there, I'll just fade off from going before too long and the whole damn thing will be wasted effort.
Oops, I did it again...
So says the military: Pentagon Says Bush Records of Service Were Destroyed. I imagine that his records as Commander in Chief may share the same fate, but you never know.
July 08, 2004
settling down for the evening
Made it home a little after seven this evening (bad bus karma getting home - I left just before 6:30pm), and immediately changed clothes and started a new assault on the weeds that are making up far more of the green in our verge than I'd like. Of course, I'd like none - and even 1 of those damn cat's ear dandellion things offends me, so they all had to go. Tonight was the night.
While I was at it, I hit the side of the hill too - ripped out a while pile of clover, a bunch of broadleaf and narrow leaf plantain, and several sprouts and extended runners of nightshade. The damndest things seem to sprout up over there... Karen came out and kept me company - she's taking it easy on her shoulder at the moment. She overdid it while I was away and really pulled/stretched some of the shoulder muscles (trapezius I think) - so she's under orders to chill for a while. That's leaving me to do some of the heavier yard work, but it wasn't as bad I it could be.
The evening was cool and overcast, so it was actually very pleasant. There's still a few holly leaves (now VERY dry and pointy-sharp) buried in the dirt on the side. Found those, said bad words. Eh, it all worked out. I grabbed a bite to eat just a bit ago, and now I'm finally settling in for the evening. No big plans, and probably won't stay up all that late. I'm actually kind of tired this evening, although unwilling as yet to hit the sack.
Samurai
Karen bought me a copy of The Last Samurai on DVD. Got the widescreen edition with a bunch of special features that I haven't watched yet.
I'm not a supremely huge fan of Tom Cruise, but I respect his flicks and enjoyed them. I am, however, completely taken with this movie. As a movie, it has incredible cinematography combined with a detailed, well told, and well acted story. The costuming is sensational, and the movie is - to mind my - understated if anything. You might find it hard to believe that a "war flick" where Samurai die under the thunder of guns is understated, but none the less I stand by that statement. Ken Watanabe was incredible as Katsumoto.
Most of all, I think the movie resonates so very strongly with me because I've fought. Not japanese style, not with live steel (discounting a round or five of fencing in high school) - but in almost a "sport" mode within the SCA. I wasn't a natural at it, but I was decently skilled and I had some excellent teachers. For many years I was active in the SCA in the group known as Calontir. But it wasn't until I turned 29 that I decided I should really try and do something with the fighting. John Rucker helped me, as did Rick Howard and so many other people I can't even begin to mention. When I was 30 I "authorized", and shortly thereafter I'd fought in a couple of quite large battles. I was made a Fyrdman on March 13th, 1999. Although that wasn't my highest award, it's the one that I feel the most strongly about. Shortly after getting that award, I made the choice to focus on my career heavily, and fell away from both fighting and the SCA as well.
That has probably been an excellent choice, both physically and financially - but there are nights when I still think of it. There are some particular fights that I remember exceptionally well. I even still have my armor, although I'll probably never wear it again.
I dropped out of the SCA when I moved to Seattle in November of 2000. So it's been a while. But I can still feel the sword in the my hands, still remember the motions to swing it in those very precise arcs. It's amazing what your muscles remember, even years since you've done it.
July 07, 2004
leaving work early
I left work "early" today - just about five minutes after 5pm. It's sort of weird thinking of that as "early", but it is - at least compared to the hours to which I normally work. I'm really enjoying it, and I'm keeping ferociously busy (part of which is why I really enjoy it). I just thought it was funny that as I was leaving, I thought it was early.
On other news. James has had different messages going all day on iChat. Earlier it was "Danger - may bite", and more recently "Probably won't bite". Not quite sure what that's about.
For a while, I'd subscribed to Dr. Dobbs Journal. I let that subscription lapse a good year ago, but it still keeps rolling onto the doorstop periodically. I got frustrated with it, because the titles of the articles look so damn appealing, and then the writing fritters out into not being of much use at all. Either too much fluff, opinion, or not enough detail to really feel like it's a meaty article of particular use. In this case, they take off onto tangents of weird tidbits of technology. The article in Augusts' issue that really got my goat was entitled Performance & System Testing. It should have been titled "My C++ windows code to implement a service to automate the collection of performance monitors", which, by the way, I thought was much better illustrated at MSDN's documentation site on it. Grump.
Now for the really strange (but cool!) thing of the night - Gus is trying to find a German Shepard puppy a home (cute dog, actually), and throwing in a copy of VoodooPad to boot. Course, the dog is in St. Louis. But if I were you, I'd demand a copy of 2.0 ahead of everyone else.
steep curves...
In the readings to catch up this evening, I noticed a few people talking about Dave Sifry's Technorati having broken 3 million weblogs tracked. Dave has an article on his blog on it, including some curves that would make a 1998 venture capitalist wet his or her pants.
While I was at AOL, our VP talked about having met Dave and talked with him. I asked him about it offline later, just because I was curious, and the really funny thing while he'd pressed it as a big deal in his "dropping names" kind of talk, he couldn't remember Sifry's name. You can imagine what that did for my opinion of him...
On other web-based goodies and details, Dave Hyatt of the Safari/Webkit team talks about Apple's latest efforts with Opera and the Mozilla team to expand out innovation in the browser space with editable html and some of the other goodies that the new webkit comes with. (Man, I can't wait until Safari 3.0 hits the streets)
July 06, 2004
another MacOS X contest...
Looks like OReilly's decided to host another MacOS X Innovator's Contest. Gus' VoodooPad was one of the winners last year, and so far I haven't seen anything in the contest winners (or runners up) that left me thinking "huh? what?"
Speaking of Gus, looks like he's posted a picture of me (that was clearly photoshopped) at the Apple campus bash. I look a bit spaced out, and I had quite the headache about that point too - although you fortunately can't tell just by lookin' at me. (too much beer the night before)
July 05, 2004
wireless 2 button mouse
I've been meaning to get a 2 button mouse for the Mac for some time now. One of the goodies that we received at WWDC this year was a 10% off coupon for the Apple store there in Union Square.
Well, I ended up using it on a Kensington wireless 2 button usb mouse. It's a cute little thing, with a tiny usb receiver that actually slots into the mouse when you're not using it. In short, pretty damn perfect for a laptop. I've noticed it's not as flexible on the surfaces it'll deal with (the Apple optical mouse is better) - but it has the two buttons and scroll wheel, works reasonably well, and feels pretty good in the hand.
Fireworks
Had a great evening last night with the best view of 4th of July fireworks that I've ever had in Seattle. Nope, not at some office- Karen nabbed some great seats at Kerry Park. (There's a nice panaroma video/still VR thingy at http://freespace.virgin.net/electric.dreams/panor/kerrypark.html). We headed down there and had a picnic in the late afternoon, then just stuck around and goofed, chatted, and played a few games until the hour got late enough for some nice fireworks.
Afterwords, we made our way home - but I ended up staying up all night reading. Actually, it really was all night - I looked up from the book and the sky had lightened (it was about 5:30am), so I decided that was about the time to hit the sack.
Need to do something about food now... Stuff myself at the picnic, but that was more than a few hours ago at this point.
July 03, 2004
heh, proof
Just noticed this photo that Buzz took from the RSS BOF at WWDC - got quite a pile of us together, so you can place some faces with the assertions of when we think Tiger will actually ship...
snippets and parts (automator)
As I've been going through my list of "things to write about" from WWDC, I've submitted the majority of my bugs (I feel bad for the poor fellows that have to sync and analyze the dups on that - you know it's got to be done by hand). I've sent in my feedback mail to the various email addresses I had, and now I'm down to just scanning my notes from the conference.
Looking around, I see that Apple's announced Automator including some screen shots. I did manage to squeeze into the session at WWDC on it (303: Developing for Automator) and that really looks like a prime place to do little scrible bits of code.
I scrawled down maybe three or four ideas for panels to make in the automator tool. Course, it won't be available until 2005 sometime, but I suppose that just gives me a lot of time to figure out what I want to do with it. There was some idle speculation among a few folks that maybe those components could be sold and a small market created for it. I dunno, but it sounds pretty neat. I wouldn't mind shipping a "thingy" or two for it - half because I think I'll easily use it (automating build processes comes immediately to mind) and half because I like the basic idea of the whole thing.
Free WIFI in Seattle
Anita points out that the Seattle PI is running an article on Free WiFi in Seattle coffee houses. (She also points out that she heard about it from Glenn Fleishman at Wi-Fi Networkworking News). It's quite the detailed and comprehensive list!
Home again
I was supposed to be catching an evening flight home from San Francisco today, but I was really rather ready to be back here, so I went to the airport early and caught standby to get home. I made it back into Seattle around 5pm after a middle-seat flight between two pretty big (but very nice) dudes.
One thing I noticed, pretty much right off the bat, is how much cleaner downtown Seattle seemed to be. We were staying down near the Moscone center. It wasn't beautiful, and actually I guess Union Square is something like the shopping place of San Francisco - but it seemed pretty skungy to be completely honest.
The other thing that I noticed is that my home DSL network seems blazingly fast and responsive compared with the network capacity at the conference. You know it's going to be problematic, but it still really underwhelmed me. And on that note, I have a pile of "to do" items from notes that I made at the conference. Send feedback to X, write a bug about Y to encourage Apple to do something, etc.
The sun is starting to really set now, and it's not even the time I would have normally arrived back in Seattle from my original flight. Karen and I walked back in the early dusk (dusk is a 90 minute process in the summer here) from a wonderful dinner at Pete's Pizza. The weather was cool here (I guess today was the first rain Seattle's had in a week or ten days), and it felt really nice after being squeezed in that airplane. Time to catch up on those emails, submit some bug reports, and send a few emails myself...
UnitKit FAQ
Here's one for the UnitKit 0.9 FAQ page.
Well, at least I hope it's a FAQ and not just something incredibly stupid I did.
Last night after WWDC was finished, I wasn't really up to being social, so I stayed in the hotel and started working on a new project. I figured I'd do it up right, and added the UnitKit bits to the project.
Now when I started, I had a UnitKit test class and a Testing oriented Target. When I didn't have anything in the testing class, the whole project built perfectly with the result
Result: 1 classes, 0 methods, 0 tests, 0 failed
Now I'm being a good testing-first coder for this one, so I created a quick test that didn't do anything to make sure everything was working properly:
- (void) testNuthin {
UKFail();
}
And then I started seeing the following on a build:
ld: Undefined symbols:
.objc_class_name_UKTestHandler
Eeww!
After screwing around with prebinding, zero-link, and investigating the UnitKit binary itself, I realized (with Gus's help) that I wasn't getting it linked in properly. To fix, I removing it from the project and then re added it. I dragged it into the Frameworks group, then select the group and the testingTarget and checked the box to indicate it should be included in that target. That did the trick...
Result: 1 classes, 1 methods, 1 tests, 0 failed
yeah!
July 02, 2004
last day of WWDC this year
Well, we're at the end of the week now - the last day of WWDC 2004. Yesterday was a stumble through the day - the sessions weren't the best of the conference, I had a headache most of the day, and the Apple campus bash was fun, but still numbing.
Gus showed off his app compiling under XCode - so he scored a nice Xcode tools shirt. Ken Case of the Omnigroup was also in that line, but they wouldn't even let him get through the line - you'd almost think they've known him for a while.
Looks like a good day ahead...
July 01, 2004
OReilly, Beer, and cash
What do these three things have to do with each other? Well, I'd think it would be rather obvious. I've seen more of the first two and have less of the last. We've had a couple good evenings of chattting about a variety of Apple related (or almost somewhat related) topics, which has resulted in a few or more beers being consumed (Widmer Hefeweizen is very tasty - and who knew there would be a web link to beers...)
The OReilly booth has been more difficult than usual as well. For one, they have out their Subversion book, which I immediately bought, and then I kept lurking back by and picked up a couple of reference items on Wireless networking, which I've been feeling like I need to be learning a lot more about.
So the other tidbit that came out from last night's Beers of a Feather session (that followed the Birds of a Feather session on RSS) was a general polling on when a few of your favorite indie developers thought that MacOS 10.4 (Tiger) would actually show up in stores:
Gus Mueller - by February 28th
Michael McCracken - WWDC 2005 plus four weeks
Joe Pezzillo - April 2005
Jim Gaynor - May 22, 2005
Mike Piatek-Jimenez - May 15th, 2005
Brent Simmons - June 7th, 2005
You heard it here first.