While I've been churning away bits at work, periodicall looking up and hearing the death toll is rising after the Tsunami, Karen's been working madly in her studio creating a new project - a donation project. She's made these wonderful cards, postcards, and bookmarks that she's working to sell for donations to Mercy Corps and Doctors Without Borders - two charities that we've been exposed to that are just really impressive.
The original thought she had was that she's try and sell these online - through Ebay or something. Only she found out that Artists bear a heavy burden when they're attempting to do a 100%-donation-straight through setup. So we're looking at local settings now - but if we figure out something for on line, I'll mention it here.
A huge congrats go out to Jon Nowitz! Google was smart to pick you up!
Nate, Leah, Karen, Mom, and I all went to see The Bobs at The Triple Door this evening. Man, was that a good show. I'd never heard of them before, but if Nate and Leah recommend someone - well, it's a damn good bet to be a good show. Karen, however, had heard of them (it was positive), and that only served to reinforce that it would probably be a good show.
So now it's pushing midnight, and I'm thinking I need to hit the sack, but the songs are still running through my head, so I don't know how successful this is going to be.
I caught the link that Mars Rover Opportunity has found the remains of it's heat shield. A lovely image of Mars Surface - I recommend the medium image that's a composite of the rover camera - it's a great photo.
So while Gus is posting about the same view I got today, I saw it from my office window where as he's still on vacation and bemoaning getting back under "the man". The view was incredible today - the Olympics were just glorious and clear all day long. Of course, my brother left this morning at 5:30am, long before the sun would illuminate any of that beauty. Hopefully he caught a little bit of it yesterday while we froze him sightseeing.
Work today was actually pretty darn effective. I'm viewing that as a major success, coming from a number of days off. Getting back into the swing was pretty easy, and we got a lot of good stuff done. I don't normally expect much in the way of productivity from folks between Christmas and New Years, and what we did today way outpaced expectations.
My chest is still all congested, which sucks. My voice is fading in and out, depending on the time of day. I really wish that would release and get gone, but it's not slowing me down too much. I'm getting a fair bit of sleep (this morning not withstanding), which is helping. Blech.
All around the back of my mind is lurking the exceptionally horrific news of this Christmas. The Tsunami and it's after effects, and the slightly more personal note from Mary, who's neighbors lost their house-in-progress on Christmas Eve. I'm not sure what to do about the Tsunami. I want to donate, I think, to help. Frankly, even if I could volunteer my time, I'm not sure I'd really be up to seeing that level of devestation and destruction. Not sure where to donate though, so if any of you have suggestions, I'm all ears. According to the BBC, the Red Cross is launching a massive fundraising campaign. That's where I've donated before, so maybe that's the place.
WTF!!
Singingfish's index appears to have gone damn near completely missing over Christmas! I just did a couple of searches and didn't find crap! "Star Wars" came back with 1100 results... On the entire web? Please! It wasn't ten days ago when I did this same query to compare against Yahoo's Video Search, which has 3789 responses to the same query.
I hope this is just some screw up that they'll fix when they get back from vacation!
Today turned out to be a lazy Christmas day. We thought we might leave the house and go visiting, but we ended up laying about the house, munching a little, playing with toys, and generally having a very relaxing Christmas.
Ben got an iPod mini for Christmas, which we immediately took to messing with. I also hooked him up with my midi keyboard and Garageband, which he had a blast fooling with. He's such a natural musician, it's - I don't know. Wild. There's a very funny family story involving Ben, a wooden flute, and my mother.
She had been trying to learn the flute for a couple of weeks (or maybe longer), and wasn't having much luck getting a sound out of it. Ben came home on a lark, picked it up off the table, and immediately played out a short melody. He snorted a quick laugh, set it down, saying "Cool, never played one of those before..." and walked into the Kitchen. My mother at that point said some very un-motherly things, which had me rolling on the floor laughing and Ben quite a bit discombobulated as to why he was the subject of such abuse.
I received a delightful book - Peter and Star Catchers, which was a quick read today and a thoroughly enjoyable tale about how Peter Pan began. So it seems like a fitting thing that we ended the day with the movie Big Fish, which Ben and Mom had never seen before.
Somewhere in the midst of the day, each of us sacked out for a good two-plus hour nap, Ben and I shucked a dozen or so large oysters (I bought way too many), and we nibbled on candy and leftovers. Not a bad Christmas.
It's Christmas Day, and Karen is awesome. I've got some sort of crap congestion lodged in my lungs, so getting up early this morning wasn't really in my cards. And Karen was awesome and let me sleep in on the day that she habitually gets up earlier and more excited than any other.
She didn't even use an air horn to wake me up.
Ben is still asleep, but I expect he'll be waking up before too long. The smell of coffee and muffins baking is permeating the house. It's so cool to be hosting Christmas for Mom and Ben!
We had Nathan and Leah over for our Christmas Eve dinner last night, had a great time. We have plenty of leftovers, and I expect that today will be a pretty typical family Christmas with munching, chatting, and playing with whatever toys we get. We're also planning on wandering around a little today, but I'm not sure how much. I'm afraid I'm the one holding us all back with my cough and low energy.
Time for some coffee!
Crawled out of bed this morning to a bit of congestion, which is unfortunate. My brother arrived safe and sound yesterday, and we headed out to Bellevue Botanical Gardens to see Garden d'Lights - a yearly display of some really impressive light sculptures. Afterwards was mostly rambling and a little shopping at Crossroads, and then dinner back here in Seattle.
It always feels a little odd taking my brother out to dinner, seeing as he's a professional chef. But he enjoyed it (Chinooks).
Today is more rambling. Ben has never been to Seattle, so we have a touristy trip planned out including Pioneer Square, Pike Place Market, and the Space Needle. I've a few errands to knock out before then - picking up some additional food bits for tonight and tomorrow, some vino, and stopping by the bank. All that good stuff.
So we're up and running I guess. I'm not yet really up, but I'm getting there. Might as well get some of the errand bits knocked out while Ben's asleep...
There's an interesting story on ZDNet about a virus using an intriguing view of the web to find it's potential victims - it's searching for them. Given that it's a phpBB bulletin board software that's the victim, it's a pretty savvy way of finding targets. Slashdot is reporting that Google stepped up pretty darn quick and is squashing requests from the worm to help stem the spread. Given their "do no evil" motto, that's perfectly in line with what I'd expect from them. Or maybe I sympathize that some slimeball might use my cool code to do something nasty somewhere else.
There's also an intriguing artcle on self-healing systems in computing at the ACM Queue. Nothing super stunning, just a good review of where the technology is today and what lies ahead in the autonomic computing path.
It was a bit of long evening tonight, and I did it completely to myself. At 4pm, I'd finally gotten a particularly difficult configuration working, after spending a good day and a half working on it. At 4:15, I retreived some initial numbers out of the system, and then promptly fell into the "I wonder what would happen if..." trap that can leave you playing with a system way into the dark of the night. In this case, that was only 8pm, but still.
The one-off experimental testing is hard to predict in a schedule, and not always of incredible explicit value, but I find it incredibly effective at helping me develop my understanding of the product and it's use in systems. Big darn puzzle I guess.
Oh - and I spent some time relearning Nagios configuration files. Damn, I'd forgotten how very ugly and bizarre those are.
So now I'm home, and chilling a bit. Mom and Karen are at a PNAAG holiday party, and I don't expect them home until a little after 9pm. I have myself some warmed leftovers for dinner, and I turned on a bit of Zevon for some very un-holiday music, which seemed like it might be a nice change.
Cool!
VoodooPad made the Essential Mac Applications list, and Gus just released a quick update...
I wish I could get more folks at work using it, it'd be so damn easy to pass around the notes I develop and maintain in it...
nope, I'm not dead, and I haven't been traveling this weekend. Well, a little, but mostly I've been around home and having a good weekend visiting with Mom and doing random enjoyable things that normal people do on weekends.
We drove up to Edmonds today. I had never been to the downtown area there before - always previously it had just been "on the way" to the ferry to head over to Kingston and the peninsula. But today the downtown core was our destination (and it's a very neat place) because some of Karen's art work is at a show hosted by PNNAG. She had three juried pieces in the show, so of course we had to go check it out.
And by the way, if you're looking for a bite to eat in Edmonds, I recommend The Red Twig, which was recommended to us by some locals. Nice chowder, savory crepes, and good coffee.
Other highlights from this weekend include seeing Ocean's 12, which I wasn't as thrilled with as I'd hoped. I liked Ocean's 11 more, and thought this sequel was a bit too formulaic. Also cooked (gasp! tell the newspapers!) dinner one night, and knocked off a bottle and a half of vino with friends. Picked up a bottle of south african wine labelled "Goats Do Roam", which was interesting and very smoky flavored. And we had a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau, which was highly drinkable, although not as good as past years as I remember it.
By my last post, it's obviously I've been listening to David Brin on IT Conversations, and while I've already commented on it being an interesting listen, there was something intriguing that he mentioned in that talk - that some folks were trying to put together some educational/simulation thing for a place like the science fiction museum - the idea being that you could "build your own alien" and then bring it into a alien terrarium to have it interact with other aliens and such. A little educational bit being choices made about what kind of solar system you start with impact and effect what kinds of life will be encouraged and discouraged - and the idea that you can choose...
I've also been struggling with Network Solutions online support mechanisms to try and reclaim an account with them that has a very, very out of date email address that I never updated like I should have. My bad, but it's still a pain in the butt to get back to being set up.
I've been having some interesting conversations with Mom and Karen (both active artists) about Joel Spolsky's latest bit entitled Camels and Rubber Duckies, which was really an article on what a pain in the ass it is to price software. Not surprisingly, it applies right over into the artwork world, which I'm coming to see as a common interest industry with independent developers; as they suffer many of the same problems with getting out there. And I guess Joel is going to be geeking out with (I expect) a fairly large crowd in Bellevue Square on January 18th. Rather tempted to head over that way myself, even knowing it'll be packed to the gills.
Now it's crawling well into the evening, and we're closing on Christmas pretty darn quickly. Looks like the next few weeks are going to be mixed, short weeks, and where many would discount and basically unplug for the holidays, I suspect we'll be quite getting some bits knocked out at work over the next few "short" weeks. This next week is the most important to me - it's the time to hit all the strategic pieces before most of the folks have fled for holidays.
If you're a fan of David Brin, you might be interested in the speech Evaluating Horizons on IT Conversations from Accelerating Change 2004.
What I didn't realize is that he has a blog too... Interesting fellow, and he was fun to listen to. Made some interesting points, and certainly didn't leave anyone off the hook. I snickered probably a little too hard at his calling mathemeticians our "insane bretheren who think they can actually prove something".
Anyway, it's a 45 minute MP3 or stream - I recommend a listen.
My father is a general contractor and estimator. My grandfather was a machinist and foreman. Worked on turbines for the Murray Iron Works. His name was Joseph Frederick Heck. Yep, the original. My great grandfather was a carpenter - Edward Heck. And tonight I received, in the form of a way-too-large-for-the-neighborhood truck, a parcel of my family's history.
A zinc lined chest that Ed Heck used on his jobs, with the tools still inside. His tools. And some of my grandfather's machinists tool. And some of my father's general around-the-house tools. And some really odd things too, but that's sort of what you expect with family history.
And a bed. A wonderful, four-poster that I'm not sure will fit easily in the house. But it's gorgeous - dark stained, solid wood mohogany. It's the bed (I've been told), that my grandfather was born in. Used to be a rope bed many years ago - and Dad's already warned me that I'll never find a standard sized mattress to fit it. Not sure how that all is going together, but we'll figure a way. And a chest of drawers to match it.
Yeah, I'm parking on the street for a while. My garage is FULL.
Karen had me snickering a lot this evening. After I got home, we had a nice dinner at the 5 spot before reviewing and culling my terrible mess of clothes (having a packrat mentality extends to not getting rid of clothes until more or less forced to by piles of cloth falling on my head). While we were at dinner, Karen caught me up on a lot of conversations she had today, and each time it was "And they already knew Ben was coming for Christmas!". Yes, that was the cause of the snickering...
So I thought I'd make a special note and snicker out loud, and let you all know that the next time I need to scoop Karen's delivery of news, I'll pitch it out here as you'd expect!
Looks like more kids are getting into the game of video search. In this case, I caught a link from search engine watch talking about Yahoo's video search beta.
Of course, I immediately had to try it out. One of my favorite searches for video is Shuttle Columbia, mostly because it marked me deeply when it happened. Yahoo doesn't do a bad job. They aren't nearly as good as Singingfish when it comes to finding porn (although Singingfish isn't so hot at that anymore either). Star Wars as a query comes out rather predictably on both sites, and the search term Kursk bring out more results from Fish, but more intriguing ones to me on the Yahoo site.
Yeah, I've got to admit - those pretty pictures really enhance the search retreival enthusiasm, even if they're not significantly more or less relevant. And no, I didn't do a formal review - although I bet Ted Diamond either has or will be. He's even more compulsive about search than I am. (Hi Ted!)
Just found out this evening that my brother has Christmas off and will be able to come out to Seattle to see us! Awesome!!!
Here's a strange set of interesting things... in no particular or useful order
1) my car appears to be paid off. Not quite sure how that snuck up on me, but I made my final car payment! WOOT!
2) linksys wrt54g wireless routers actually have a pretty good range on them. They punch through a good 50 feet of interior office space without all that much issue.
3) the processor inside a linksys wrt54g is really pretty weak. Maybe not by the old z80 standards, but by general linux wrt54g alternate-image-on-the-device hackery, it's not a very hefty processor.
4) there is no parking to be had around 200 West Mercer at any time of day or night. It sucks.
5) I'm a lot better at using netcat than I ever thought I would become.
6) my java skills have atrophied a bit in the past 6 months, but not completely died.
By all rights, I shouldn't have had a lovely sunday at all. After I learned what I had imbibed last night at the office holiday party, it was no surprise that I was still feeling the effects at 7am when I first woke up. Water and advil seem to have dealt with all the negative effects except being a bit tired most of the day. Oh - and I'm getting cold easily today, which is pretty rare for me.
So even still, when I finally levered myself out of bed at 10:30am, we got to work around the house and made some things move. We've been needing to do one of those intensive cleanings that you should do prior to setting up lights. So the table from my nook was finally cleaned off, disassembled, and stored downstairs. Moved all the furniture and vacuumed, cleaned off the dining room table - all that good stuff. Even put the hardware back on the drawers for the kitchen so we'd have a semi-functional kitchen for the holidays.
My nook now doesn't seem so "nook like". I was told some time ago that the room I have for my computer and our "library" was at one time a piano room. If it was, it was an upright, because you just couldn't fit both a baby grand and a human in this space. And now, it's feeling all open. The table I disassembled was a 4' round oak pedastal table that I've hard for years. It was our kitchen table when I was in high school - and I've dragged it along with me over the years. But a 4' round in a room that's 10' x 8' isn't a terrific fit. Still, with it gone, the place almost seems too open. Maybe I'll just get used to it.
And this evening we took in a movie - I wasn't so sure about it, but I was game to see it - The Polar Express. And I really liked it. I've heard some folks diss the movie, and it wasn't all around the most amazing story or animation I've ever seen, but it was delightful and fun, and I was surprised to find myself really enjoying all of it.
Now we're fixing a little dinner, I'm writing here, and we're listening to our holiday mix of tunes on iTunes. Earlier, it had been more of just enjoyable jigs and reels from Gaelic Storm, which is suprisingly difficult to find on the iTunes music store. It was recommended by a lady in a bookstore in Oak Harbor the last time I was being a bum and lurking about that town. So I'm out scouting for more of them... And currently playing is several albums in a row from Anonymous 4, another group you can't find at the iTunes place. Blech.
But let me tell you - if you decide to rip from Anonymous 4 into mp3's (or whatever format), go for the absolutely highest quality codec and bitrate you can - they're incredible voices with incredible range, and you can easily hear clipping in the upper registers if you try to trim down the size too much.
I think that's the full report from Seattle this evening...
just got back from our company holiday party - had a great time. I'm a bit lit, even still - and it was a great evening. I'm not used to being one of the guys closing the place down, but this time I was there far later than most. Spent some of the night chatting with just about anyone I could chat with - like I said, had a good time. Don't even think I made too much of a fool of myself. I just hope I don't have a vicious hangover tomorrow.... I've been drinking water for the past few hours, so hopefully not.
And if anyone offers you a car bomb (that's a drink, not a terrorist weapon), I recommend you only accept if you don't need to go anywhere any time soon.
Well, the third article in the "series" about Tiger technologies appears to be up and running at Apple: Developing Dashboard Widgets. Yeah, it's a kick over the Konfabulator guys, and while it's very intriguing, I haven't quite nailed what I'd use it for or how.
I rather suspect this article was ghost written by James - or maybe not even ghost written - but his name isn't on it, so I'm not sure. I've only glanced over it, and it seems like a nice quick overview of the technologies and putting them all together. The article mentions my favorite component of the whole thing - the place where I think it makes it's leap over Konfabulator - enabling the embeddeding of Cocoa API components right down into the same mix with Javascript. There's not much about it in the article, but since it's in a public article, I figure I can crow about how cool this will be without thinking that I may have shredded my NDA.
And I guess it's no real surprise to Mac developer geeks out there, but Apple's running a contest for creating "dashboard widgets" - win yourself a 40Gb iPod with the goodies. But like I said at the beginning, I'm not sure how I'll put it into place or use it - inspiration really isn't kicking me with this one.
not sure why I'm thinking about this today, but there's a new shop that's gone in near my office on Elliott Ave. Just across from the Seattle PI building, near the little coffee shop that's open weird hours and a printer's named "Ligature", there's a cabinet maker who's squeezed in his shop.
The front of the shop is all glass, and you can see his work - it's nice stuff. Classy, classic. Various forms going from shaker styles through the more ornate stuff I usually think from the revolution era northeast "yankee" woodworkers (haven't a clue what the style is called). I myself tend to be a fan of shaker simplicity in form, but there's one style of chair that I dearly love and don't see very often. Mostly I've found it in coffee shops, wine and cheese places, and old libraries. Oh - and just because I'm a shaker junkie, don't expect to see it in my house. I've a large number of other pieces of "real wood furniture" that I've picked up here and there (basement shopping, etc) such that we don't really have a consistent style of furniture in our house to be honest.
Anyway, looking into his shop you can see both new and old tools in a very organized and well laid out wood shop. The front area is reserved for showing his work, but the place is very clearly his workshop. Yesterday when I walked by, he was doing something with a lovely dark-wood end table. I haven't met the fellow, but I hope he does well. It's pretty awesome to think that people can still do the traditional woodcraft and make a living from it these days.
I generally have a lot of patience with corporate stupidity. But today, for some reason, Qwest's impersonal and overbearing policies just really pissed me off.
I received this nifty little note in the mail, offering to upgrade my DSL for free. Presumably because they're loosing customers to Speakeasy or other ISP's and this was a cheap way to purchase my loyalty. Only, it backfired.
You see, when I went through the process, two of the items they needed to "complete my order" was my birthday and federal id number. Now I'm sure neigther are particularly hard to find, but I was just damned if they were going to get this from me over the phone - and for an upgrade to a service for which I'm already a customer!
"Well, I can't complete the order without it sir" was the comment when I asked if they really needed that information. "I guess you won't be completing the order then. Good bye", at which point I hung up. Of course, now I'm thinking I should have been nastier (my good build up of pissed off hadn't really made it to the top at that point) and mentioned that they just lost a customer too. I let off steam by walking into the staging lab and shouting incoherently at Choong and Jeff, who were bemused by my ranting about Qwest, suckage, stupidity, and various copulating animals. Ultimately, I left them alone and wandered back out to go back to my tests and analysis (got some really good stuff nailed down today), but not before thinking that it's really time to check out Speakeasy and make the move if they're even priced or (obviously) better priced. They've given Nathan fantastic service, and I've heard nothing but good things about them from other friends (Jen! JR!) too - so it's time.
I don't have too much to say, but I'm writing anyway because I'm comfy on the couch and the cats have me pinned. It's dark - way dark - at 11:30pm, and the rain is coming down again. It's been a very wet day in Seattle - a few breaks, but mostly constant rain. Yesterday the rain caused some real trouble - or more specifically the sun did - when it came out, blinded everyone, and then disappeared again leaving a mess of traffic accidents in it's wake.
I think it was last week that I thought "Wow, it's really getting dark early!". I woke up at 7am, and it was pitch black outside. I've been working later these past few nights, but even still - if I'd walked out the door at 5pm it would still be dark. So it's just back into those "dark days" that are Seattle's winter.
Now the coat is drying on the back of a chair, the jeans are mostly dry from the walk home, and the rain sounds really nice to be honest - even if it is a heavy rain for Seattle.
While I was in the buying spree of goodies for my own office space here at home, I went ahead and finally fixed up Karen's PC to have a reasonable amount of memory - 1Gb.
Now there was a time when I would have blanched at the thought of picking up 1Gb of RAM. Not these days. Crucial delivered it yesterday, and I installed it this evening after we got back from running errands in Ballard. I didn't notice any amazing speed increases while booting her PC up or anything afterwards, but I expect she'll see a benefit in day to day use in no time. 256Mb was ok, but with XP it seemed a downward spiral when you had a lot of programs open (which she typically does - Word, Illustrator, etc). The older HP desktop she has supports up to 1Gb, so that's what went in.
Any of you python geeks played with SimPy? I'm sort of curious about it, but I haven't yet dived in...
I've been lurking about for ages keeping track of search and/or other technologies that make it easier to mine email for information about programming in Objective-C and/or with the Cocoa API's. One of those techniques has been to store all the darn email on my computer and do some wild ass grep'ing on the stuff. But that's tedious and annoying, and search has improved enough that you'd THINK you could find something worthwhile out there...
So I wanted to report, first off, that Apple's Mailing List Search is way improved over a year or so ago. I'd completely discounted it for ages because it had sucked so much, but in comparing it to some other options, I found it was actually pretty decent.
So my unscientific search terms were "variable height nstableview" - a pretty icky problem with one of the Cocoa API components as it stands today. Apple's search reports 26 results. The old "mamasam" search returns 39 results (although it searches the MacOSX-dev list too). My gmail account (yeah, I'm trying that too) shows 2 results - but it doesn't have nearly the archive length of the others. The new cocoabuilder site shows 35 responses (I suspect it's a reincarnation of the Mamasam stuff).. And finally the Haoli search/forums site shows 9 matches.
So CocoaBuilder and Mamasam are the first two I'd try (Mamasam if it was potentially an older question), and Apple's mailing list search should be right up there next!
What a read!
Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman complained about Apple's lock it has on the two products...
And you think Microsoft does? Or the music industry had even caught a clue before Apple busted open the doors with the deals that enabled someone to finally sell music online?
Gus posted the stats of his VoodooPad code today, and I thought that was pretty interesting. I remember looking at SLOCcount back at Singingfish, and thinking that "Hey, that's pretty accurate". Course, that was with 10 to 30 developers (depending on what time in the company you looked) working on the codebase.
I'm curious how other folks personal projects weigh out. I rather expect they'll show "efficiencies" like Gus' code. Now please don't think I'm encouraging lines of code as an effective measure - I tend to think reducing lines of code makes code better at this point - but it's a reasonable guesstimate (which is why it's probably still being used). I also rather expect that Objective-C/Cocoa code may show some efficiencies just inherent in the API's and language.
Anyone else with some Objective-C projects want to share their specs?
Had a nice evening - attended the XCoder meeting, which I made with a few minutes to spare. It's at 6:30pm in University Village, which is frankly pretty darn difficult to wrangle when you work past 5pm regularly and your office is on the shore of puget sound, west of Queen Anne. Ended up giving Chris (don't know his last name) a ride back here - he lives in lower queen anne (cough - I mean 'uptown'). Seems like a pretty reasonable thing to set up a carpool. He's mostly bussing it around town, and getting back to Queen Anne from UVillage at night, via bus, well - it's not where Seattle's public transit shines, let's say that.
I also received my latest copy of MacTech, which looks like it's received a fairly significant face lift. I guess I'm sticking there, as the MacWorld/OReilly publication thingy (MacDevJournal) appears to have fallen into the bottom of some barrel of fish guts and is now fairly forgotten. I'd had some high hopes, but that whole Zinio thing just sucked! Whomever convinced MacWorld to try that sold them a bill of goods.
Yeah!!! Karen's home.
And the cats aren't the only one happy about that. She had a great time at her class up in Oak Harbor, but is glad to be back home too.
Fairly quiet tonight - we had dinner at the Thai Kitchen up here on Queen Anne (had a lovely seafood curry and Phad Ke Mao). This is the same place that embarrased the bejezus out of me when I took Gus and Kirstin there and they completely fubar'd the meal. We still go, and they've been pretty good (although slow)...
Then home, although I don't think we're going to be up late tonight. She's fighting off a cold, and I'm just plain tired.
I've been fiddling with the beta's a little, but only a little - so it's really cool to see the final form. A great reason for an upgrade, or to get it if you don't already have it!
(yeah, Mac only)
I sometimes hear of requests to developers for features that are, uhm, well - far less than polite. And it reads like the guys at Rogue Amoeba maybe finally had it with those kinds of requests.
I've been scouring around for tools and pieces to help gather some development metrics - particularly unit test coverage. It's easy enough to find these goodies for Java, but when you move to variants of the *unit bits like pyUnit and CppUnit, it's a little harder.
So it was really cool to see Ned's post on getting stuck using Gareth Rees' coverage.py.
Gareth's site in turn references a nice little work entitled How to misuse code coverage by Brian Marick - a worthwhile read if you think code coverage metrics are the end-all of testing numbers (hint: it isn't)
So if you're doing anything with test coverage tools (like deriving metrics from CppUnit), I'd love to hear from you...
The old viewsonic is sitting on the sidelines, and I'm writing this with a Samsung SyncMaster 710V. Decent fellow, and well priced. Yeah - picked it up at Fry's today. It's a nice resolution and decently bright - well, brighter than I expected anyway.
In addition to the monitor, I finally picked up my own digital camera too - so now I've this really light weight little box of a camera. I was gushing over some of the thin Cannon powershots, but for half the price of those guys, I've a great little camera that I won't worry about leaving in my pocket. And if you know me, that translates to "I won't be emotionally crushed when my clutzy-ness destroys the camera".
On the way back from Fry's, I couldn't help looking around at the sky, thinking "I hope Nathan's got a nice day of flying in". He graciously allowed me to completely monopolize his MS Flight Simulator last night, and I'm pretty sure he's convinced that he'll never fly in a plane with me - I'll make him hideously seasick. Seems I'm not very consistent about that whole altitude thing.
So it's been a day of housework and updating. Cleaning mostly, some organizing, and finishing out the space for the computer. I think I might have to raise this monitor up some more to be ergonomically happy, but at least I don't have to look over my right shoulder to see the screen...
Oh - and I'm finally getting Tiger installed on a partition on my desktop. Using my iBook as a DVD drive via target-disk-mode and a firewire cable since my old G4 doesn't have a DVD drive. It's strange, but it works. Developer tools (the bits I'm really interested in) are installing as I write this.
Not quite sure what I'm going to do for dinner. Need to do something, and the cats are telling me that I need to do something about their dinner too, so I'll stop this here and go ponder that.
Gus pointed out the Tech Note 2124 - THANK YOU QUINN!!!
In case you're curious, this is Quinn's "debugging magic" document - going into all the detail (and probably more) that I saw at WWDC in the debugging learning sessions.
(GOOGLE READ THIS: Problems Security Update 2004-12-02 MacOS X 10.3.6)
If you're updating a Mac, be careful about this latest security update! I updated at work this evening, and then spent the next hour trying to diagnose why the damn thing wouldn't launch LoginWindow and get past. Finally gave up, came home, and found some relevant articles on the Apple Discussion Boards.
The best answer that looks promising at the moment is the following:
On my Mac i found:
The 10.3.6 update left a zero byte /etc/ttys on my G5, luckily there is also a ttys.applesaved which contains the line that getty needs to start the Login Window application:
console "/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow" vt100 on secure window=/System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer onoption="/usr/libexec/getty std.9600"
I was able to login with ssh to copy the file, but you could do this in single user mode as well (startup with CMND-S)
sudo cp /etc/ttys.applesaved /etc/ttys
I am not sure what the contents should be updated to, this is for Apple to solve. I had an issue with /usr/bin/sed not being there because i needed gsed a while ago, so this might have broken the update process?
Thanks to Maarten for reading the boot sequence from MacOS for Unix geeks over the phone! "init then runs getty ... /etc/ttys"
Thanks to macfixitforums for requiring dollars when you are in trouble!
Thanks to syslog for ???
Thanks everybody for all the standard troubleshooting tips reachable by Google, this small issue has cost me from 10:30 to 15:10!!!
Hopefully this will help someone somewhere. Oh - and here's an article in the TIL on some prescreptive bits for diagnosing this sort of thing
UPDATE:
Turns out that the ttys problem wasn't what I saw, and that it was indeed a screwed up library reference - the message: AppKit undefined reference to __HIObjectOverrideAccessibilityContainment expected to be defined in HIToolbox being the common grounds. As far as I can tell, we all had fink and some unixy stuff installed, but I haven't a clue why this thing blew up. My coworker installed the update with nary a glitch, so it's got to be some really screwed up rare bug that we found. Still a little gunshy about installing it at home though.
This is too cool. Nate pointed me at CASTLE MAGIC - a group in Idaho which appears to be doing some "unique home building" and creating castles for folks. I haven't looked too in depth to their site, but it's cool.
This is just too damn funny.
Ok, so there's been a lot of search goobering in the zine's lately, including some work and effort and the usual blathering about multimedia search. Now I just happened to work at one of those search companies for a while, and now it's hitting the news again:
Singingfish Unveils MultiMedia Search!
So, uhm... what they hell did they have three years ago then?
I'm spending a quiet evening listening to music and reading. Thought I'd pop out the laptop and write a bit.
The neighbors are all aware of the attempted breakin now, and I'm confident that while this won't deter a really determined burglar, it'll help put some pressure on the kind of folks who try back windows in the dark. A friend suggested other methods of stopped them as well, but those are currently illegal in Washington State...
Saw Karen off to her week long class up at Whidbey Island (Oak Harbor) this evening, so it's just me and the cats for a few days. She wasn't feeling very well, but hopefully she'll perk up after another good sleep and be ready to go for her work up there.
I also made it to Storables to return the parts of the shelving bits for my area that I didn't use, and to get an additional component. All in all, I ended up with a credit on my charge card instead of a charge - so I figure I'm coming out ahead there. Still need to do something about a flat panel display though.
Oh - and while I'm thinking of it, Happy Birthday John!!!
