Experience is having the ability
to know what you don't know.
Experience requires the maturity
to admit your failures.
Maturity involves experiencing
failures and smiling.
Smiling is the most precious
experience that maturity brings.
Don't assume I'm not defending myself
because I think you are correct.
Sometimes, my silence just indicates that
you have already been presumed irrelevant.
A man of steel
until I am crying,
a man of stone
till I'm in love,
a raging warrior
tending a child,
a human man
intent in confusion.
I hate when I think of a cool line and the world thought of it first. I think this is a loosing race. Anyway, I can extrapolate, so there.
The first step to enlightenmentI take solice in the acceptence of my inability to know.
is an understanding of ones ignorance,
however, I expect that any enlightenment
that we achieve will only serve to
clarify our ignorance.
Thanks to Alex at Hack the Day I can finally turn off the Mac OSX startup sound.
Just in case you haven't experienced this before. The sound itself isn't bad. However, if you were listing to some Black Sabbath when you shut your machine down, then toddle over to a quiet coffee shop to continue your day, the entire store will be regaled with the startup sound at Black Sabbath volume and that is embarrassing.
Two pots of coffee, one sitting beside the maker, just brewed, the other sitting in the maker right under the spout, just finished brewing.
Which do you think will be emptied first?
Be aware of the person that switches the pots and watches, gleefully, while fellow drinkers think they are pouring the better cup.
As you may remember from a previous post, I became an American Citizen December last year, so this election has been particularly exciting for me. I had the opportunity to effect the selection of the president of the United States of America. Wow, just saying it gives me chills.
I am sure that I am not the first to notice but Eclipse has gone through some changes that are causing a significant slow down in my productivity.
This has been the premiere IDE for many years, offering best of breed user interface design concepts to optimize the life of the Java developer.
I now find it increasingly hard to use for one simple fact. The changes have made it really hard to run unit tests.
One of the magical features was that ctrl-F11 would run the last test I ran so I could continue coding, in any source file, and press this vital key combination to see if I had broken anything yet.
Now, this keystroke, and the action that it is associated with, have been changed in two ways.
Firstly, if you have to be in the test file to reliably run the last test. It is inconsistent in this regard. Most of the time it just asks "How would you like to run ''? On the server or blah blah blah".
Secondly, if it does remember the test I want to run, it now also remembers that last time I ran it in the debugger. So each subsequent run promptly stops on a breakpoint.
This is a flow problem and it is possible that non-test driven developers use the debugger a great deal. I understand, even sympathize, but couldn't Eclipse support both flows? Especially the original, and in my opinion, the far superior. Just run my tests, that's all I ask.
Now if I could just get NetBeans to stop deleting my "build" directory when it creates a project I could say goodbye to this annoying change.
and you thought Subversion was the latest thing. Ha. How old and slow you are.
You see how cool I can sound when I have just learned something new?
I have GIT installed and working under OSX Leopard and it seems pretty cool so far, given that I haven't done anything worth while with it yet.
First, don't do what I did, which was to goto github, download gitx and expect it to work. Ha, that route is for losers.
Instead, goto the git site itself and get the zip.gz file and go from there. Wait, no, don't do that either, only losers waste time compile from source.
See, how many pit falls I am saving you. This is a great blog.
So, ignore the links you have seen so far and aim for the Download link. This will not down the file, do not worry about that.
Amongst the download formats there is an OS X entry to the Google code site. Be patient, you are on the right track.
There, at the top of the list, is the git-1.6.0.2-intel-leoard.dmg file. Yes, this is the real download that will work. The download for non-losers like you.
This will give you command line GIT which is probably all you need, if you are a loser. I was a loser for a short time when I finally realized what I was doing. Man oh man these things take time to work out.
I love NetBeans. I also love Eclipse but its Ruby support blows by comparison so I love NetBeans more. And NetBeans has a GIT plugin. This is for non-losers. It's called nbgit.
Now remember, losers will try to install nbgit in their NetBeans IDE, and we all know that would be a dumb move. Unless you really love searching through reams of dependency errors, and what the hell is the NetBeans Presentation crappy thing that I don't have anyway.
Go get NetBeans 6.1 and install that first. Then, as a non-loser, you will be selecting Tools-Plugins-Downloads and selecting the nbgit nbm file that you download earlier.
git clone git:/reality
update to life version niner dot niner
git diff
See all the good changes that you have made
git commit
This is a video by someone I admire. I didn't have to watch much of it to recognize that this is a special person. A state thrust upon her by life, though she made the choice of what to do next.
It is time to get back into NetBeans. It used to be my primary IDE before Eclipse hit the scene and now with its excellent Ruby and now PHP support it seem appropriate to start re-learning how it works.
It is certainly faster now and the UI is cleaner than it used to be. Steps in the right direction.
This is where things went horribly wrong.
Import an eclipse java project into a netbeans java project. Netbeans decided that I didn't want my "build" directory anymore so replaced it with it's own. How assignign is that.
So, first hint, do not, import an eclipse project into a netbeans project if you have a build directory.
I have decided to resign from Photrade. We both decided that this relationship wasn't a good fit for either one of us.
because, one day, you will have too many customers, and generate more emails than the great Google deems appropriate for your company.
550 5.4.5 Daily sending quota exceeded.
421 4.7.0 Temporary System Problem. Try again later (WS).and
550 5.7.0 Mail Sending denied.all up in my face.
Sorry about the inflammatory title. Let me explain.
<input type="checkbox" CHECKED">
If you find yourself passing this or self to things instead of other things you are moving in the right direction.
public function doSomething()
{
return $someDoer->does($this);
}
A sample post of a Photrade image to my blog using the Share This API.
A Cincinnati local company offering a really nice way for our users to distribute their images. See it at a Photrade site near you soon.
Sell photos on photrade | By esumerfd
Posted using ShareThis
The Photrade site is improving by the day. With new features being added, tested and released in a daily release cycle, it is really exciting to see it grow.
We were written up on Mashable last night which ended up causing our CPU's to blink, pause, and go back to sleep. It increased our load around 500% but we have loads of capacity to spare. You have to love fast machines, I get goose bumps just thinking about it.
Checkout the launch party.
Reflection in PHP is a little clunky and I say that with the greatest of compassion.
First of all we have the standard function interface to all that is good, call_user_func, call_user_method, func_get_args, get_defined_functions and so on.
So you can imagine a call_user_func to start with and then when classes came in they added call_user_method that takes the instance as well (surmising the history, I don't have any facts).
class Fred
{
public function someMethod()
{
echo "Hello World\n";
}
}
$fred = new Fred();
$fred->someMethod();
// OR
call_user_method("someMethod", $fred);
call_user_func(array($fred, "someMethod"));
$method = new ReflectionMethod("Fred", "someMethod");
$method->invoke($fred);
class Fred
{
private function someMethod()
{
echo "Hello World\n";
}
public function testInvoke()
{
$method = new ReflectionMethod(__CLASS__, "someMethod");
$method->invoke($this);
}
}
$fred = new Fred();
$fred->testInvoke();
Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'ReflectionException' with message 'Trying to invoke private method Fred::someMethod() from scope ReflectionMethod'
class Fred
{
private function someMethod()
{
echo "Hello World\n";
}
public function testInvoke()
{
call_user_func(array($this, "someMethod"));
}
}
$fred = new Fred();
$fred->testInvoke();
$prop = new ReflectionProperty("Fred", "property");
$prop->getValue($fred);
$fred->$propertyName
It has been 3 months now since I started learning PHP, I have spent lots of time fixing an existing site and reading over the good and bad of the available open source PHP projects.
I would describe PHP as a function based language with object oriented dreams. PHP lives in the between world where functions rule and programmers try to work out how to make use of its new OO features.
These OO features are new and many are missing key functionality so this has to be looked at as the evolution of a language that isn't quite there yet. It has the functions to get anything done, it doesn't have the class libraries to get much done.
I am not saying you shouldn't use PHP. This is a versatile language that can be made to describe some advanced language constructs.
It is widely regarded as a slow language that scales well. Not an oxymoron when you consider performance a mixture of response time and throughput.
One thing to get used to with PHP is typing. Everything you want to do will take more characters than java, c# and especially ruby. Every method is a minimum of 19, every property reference roles in at 8 and I can assure you, we programmers do that a lot.
I spend my days developing an class model to support my web project. Some classes support the business functions I need and others just wrap the plethora of php function calls that perform the low level work I need.
Architecturally PHP offers some interesting problems. It relies a great deal of the tuning of the environment that it runs in but from a code design perspective you have to look at the transaction path as a primary and inevitable cost. In java you might start with a simple transaction path through your product layers with the realization that you can cache strategic parts as you advance your performance footprint.
In PHP there is no "cross transaction" static. So every PHP file is parsed and executed for every request. Now PHP does this pretty fast but the more you add into the transaction stream the slower things will go.
Performance is approached at the environment and code optimization level. You tune apache and add in PHP JITs to make the code run faster but you can't do much to dynamically improve transaction path across requests.
The local user group, OINKPUG, is an excellent resource full of great PHP programmers always ready to help.
All in all, I am enjoying PHP and look forward to continuing to twist to my will.
and life moves on.
Twenty five years playing with computers, ten years of consulting, two point one years in startups. It's time for another change.
March began my time with Photrade.com, a small startup in Cincinnati with a lot of promise. They are a great team of people and it is my pleasure to join them.
We will be building a solution in PHP, which is new for me, but has already proved itself in many other solutions. So, expect my blogging topics to change to PHP shortly, though I will probably still keep complaining about my Mac for a while.
If you would like to help mold the company you can start by completing this ten minute survey.
I am browsing the site of a hosting service checking on prices and a little window pops up with a simple question, "Do you want help with this site?".
This is not an ad but a means to draw their customers into IM conversations. I have to say it worked very well. A quick chat and I had all the info I needed. Saved lots of reading spec sheets etc.
At the end it asked me if I wanted to send the chat session to an email address. A useful and unobtrusive way to collect email addresses. Nice.
We talk of DRY code as in Don't Repeat Yourself. Instead, we should talk in terms of DRY bugs.
For every piece of code you copy you are also copying a number of bugs. Depending on your propensity for adding bugs to you code you may be copying lots of bugs or just the occasional one. In either case, bugs are really expensive, so stop it.
You may want to say, "It's faster to copy working code than to refactor it into a common module". We have heard it all before and you are deluded. Besides, DRY bugs are easier to pin and mount
As I pondered a question and worried about an outcome my son gently said, "the greatest rewards go to those who risk, you have nothing to loose and a family to support you, so what are you whining about".
It is my greatest honor to watch my kids grow up into fabulous adults.
I last blocked about a comparison between VmWare Fusion and Parallels but concluded that the click problem prevented me from using VmWare. Well I have found a solution to that problem.
Specifically, I am using a product called PinPoint to improve the visibility of my cursor and this appears to be causing focus problems in the executing virtual machine.
To show you I have prepared my first mac based screencast using a tool called ScreenFlick. This tool does most of the things that I wanted, with screen size and visibility control, audio recording and mouse and keystroke highlighing. It did hang on me a few times which seemed to be related to large recording sizes.
Just another of the many review out there but this explain why I can not use the Vmware Fusion product.
Both have the same $79 price so which should you buy. I bought Parallels with the machine because of the hype and a couple of recommendations from friends but with all the problems I have been having I though it worth a 30 trial of VmWare Fusion.
This is my experience.
Parallels
Installation was a problem because the CD contained a version that didn't work on Leopard. A download from the site fixed the problem.
Repeated crashes for various reasons documented in previous posts.
Ideally, I could work in the windows environment in full screen mode with the same keystrokes that I am used to in Windows. There is no way to do this in Parallels.
When in full screen mode, Parallels hides its menu bar and allows you to get it back by pressing the "ctrl-option" keys. This kind of "mode" switching makes it less likely to accidentally bring up the mac menu.
I wanted to play Virtual Skipper 5, a nice, graphic intensive game that allows me to continue sailing during he winter. The trial version of this game uses DirectX so initially it failed because my Windows Vista installation was not up to date. Once DirectX was upgraded it appeared to run correctly though in a small window that I couldn't full screen but having never played this game on a native windows machine I can't say if this is abnormal or not.
Vmware Fusion
Installation was perfect but I downloaded the trial copy from the web so we can't compare this with the difficult Parallels installation.
VmWare has not crashed on me but I haven't used it so much so this may be an unfair comparison.
VmWare has an option that allows me to ignore mac keystrokes. While very promising this didn't seem to work very well. Infact, when in full screen Vista, I tried ctrl-left to switch spaces and was moved to a mac space. However, the mac keystrokes were still disabled so I was not able to do anything. Fortunately, the mouse allowed me to select the other space and turn off this feature.
When in full screen mode, VmWare Fusion hides its menu bar and allows you to get it back by moving the mouse to the top of the screen. This is a little annoying when you are working in windows and accidentally get the mac menu. I prefer the Parallels solution.
The Virtual Skipper 5 test was not as successful despite the fact that VmWare Fusion boasts about support for DirectX. I still had to install the DirectX upgrade to Vista as expected but when the game started it complained that it would not run inside a virtual machine. Now presumably this is the games fault for doing this check and only doing it successfully in VmWare but I have to conclude that, for this game, Parallels was the better virtual machine.
There is a serious two click problem in VmWare Fusion. This is not a double click. It is hard to pin down the types of objects that require this. So, for example, browser links only require one click however icons on the desktop and menu options seem to require two. It appears as though the first click focuses on the object then the second actually selects it. This makes it impossible to use. I couldn't find any reference to the problem anywhere.
Conclusion
Compared to the two click problem with VmWare all the other issues are moot. This problem makes VmWare Fusion impossible to use.
So, despite the nasty crashes, Parallels remains the vm of choice for the mac.
We have already established that the Adium end key is a problem.
Well, yesterday I find that the Adium developers have implemented a solution but as an option that allows me to select the key to use to "Switch tabs" which, unfortunately defaults to the commonly used command-right arrow keystroke. I switched it to the shift-command-right arrow making Adium behavor like a well behaved mac application.
As you login to your Mac the menu bar contains a nice little silhouette of a human bust to represent my user information. Shortly, after that, this is replaced by my name. Do you think that telling a user their name might be a tad overly informative?
My primary complaint isn't that I am insulted by the idea that I need to be reminded but that it uses valuable space in an icon cluttered zone of the screen.
Is there a way to switch this menu option back to the simple silhouetted bust?
A group of us just complete the two day Scrum Certification class so I can add CSM after my name now. It actually doesn't feel any different from before the class and customers would refuse to use Agile to manage their projects.
It was a good class, taught by Peter Borsella, it covered all the usual parts of Scrum in good detail. There was enough time to talk about the Agile projects we have worked over the years and get feedback.
Refresher or not it is worth while remembering why we keep fighting this Agile battle. Renews your passion for doing it right.
Red splotches to protect the innocent and my liability. Feel free to contact me with authorization to show your picture and I will un-red-spotch you.
The mac Finder is just astonishingly bad, and, I hear, the Leopard version I am using is far superior to the Tiger version. What an atrocious experience that must have been.
I have made some comments on this window of woes already but there appears to be more to say.
Folder Creation
It turns out that it is not an easy process to create a folder. Perhaps one of the most fundamental of features is scattered and inconsistent, but let me show you.
We have to look at this problem from each View because they are all different. We have 4 possible views, Icons, List, Columns and the new Cover Flow. Windows Explorer only supports Icons and List equivalents but it does it in a consistent manner. You decide which is important in a UI but if you decide that lots of inconsistent features are better then you are wrong.
Icon view shows large images with file names below. Of all the views this view seems to remain consistent supporting the right-click "New Folder" and the command-shift-n option to create a new folder.
List view represents the folders in tree form with the details of each folder/file shown to the right. The right-click "New Folder" and command-shift-n both create a new folder in the current directory. The problem arises when you consider that the tree folders allow you to see and select a number of different locations in the hierarchy, however, you can not create folders at the different levels. The right-click on a sub-folder doesn't even contain the option. You have to navigate down a level to create the folder. It's like they replicated the Icon views features in a tree without considering what improvements the tree might offer.
Now I must admit that you might be able to find some twisted logic to conclude that each view allows you to create a new folder in the "current directory" which in the list view is the top level folder. However, this conclusion would be wrong because it would mean that you are a unix developer and have a brain limited to thinking in terms of current directory and changing current directory. This is a UI we are talking about here, you see it, you click it, you interact with it. Simple. Consistent.
Let's look at Columns view. This changes things a little giving you lots of options since it shows lots of "current directories" at the same time. So what does this image tell you is going to happen.
If you answered "create a folder under untitled folder 2" then you would be wrong since folders can only be created in the current directory. However the behavior is consistent with the a intent of my UI action. I actually right clicked on the white background indicating that I want to create a folder in that directory. What is bad about this is that the folder remains selected retaining the visual cue that I am working with that folder. Since this is not the case this is a poor UI feedback problem. Windows Explorer explicitly un-selects the selected folder when the background is left or right clicked since it is a good user interface offering quality feedback.
Cover Flow is the new view introduced in Leopard and offers a nice representation of files in picture form. It is a great way to scan through images. Since this is new it appears to be new code because they have fixed the selected folder problem, and introducing the new problems that I mentioned in the previous post on the Finder.
Cover Flow behaves in a similar manner to List view, you can see the folders but you can use them to create new folders. One might say, consistently bad.
Folder Movement
How to move a file/folder from one place to another. Not so simple. There are a few nice mousing features
Drag folder to move it
Drag folder with options key pressed to copy it
For such a great source control system this thing can certainly get a person down. Biggest road block from Clear Case is the checkout requirement. It doesn't sound too hard but when you consider that you can not refactor rename your code you start to get an inkling of how serious this is. This could be a problem with the Eclipse ClearCase plug-in of coarse.
It needs to do a rename first which doesn't require a file checkout, and then checkout the file to do change the class name. Then do the checkout for all the dependent classes and make the updates to them.
Well, it doesn't do this, so I have to fight the urge to leave the name alone. This is really hard because we all know that the manual rename of a commonly used class is going to take some time and leaving as the wrong name of a class is very bad.
The only option is to spiral back into a depression and wait for hope to arrive.
To all those coding in Ruby or javascript et al, with no refactoring IDE, you are like titans to me.
Ok, enough whining. Go depression.
I know I said that I wouldn't waste my time spouting about how great this machine was because everyone else does that. I have slipped a couple of nice things in but only when balanced by bad things. Well here it is, this is a good thing, all on it's own.
This is the simplest little thing but it is really nice. How many times do you have to click in your address bar before you can edit the URL?
Mac == one
Windows == two
We keep complaining about Parallels but we keep using it. What is our problem.
A Parallels Vista process ran beautifully yesterday, it was shutdown, the machine slept the night, and today it failed to respond. Would not quit, would not force quit, no response to "kill -9", nothing.
After much wastage of time, and hope, I start the shutdown and restart of a machine. The dialogs get amusing while OSX decides that it really doesn't have control over the machine either.
After the ctrl-options-command eject keystroke to shutdown the machine, I wait some time before this little gem.
The image doesn't show it but the cursor, hanging over the continue button is displaying the wait cursor so it can not be clicked. After some time OSX gets aggressive.
Unfortunately, I can not press the "Force Quit" button either. Of coarse it wouldn't have worked anyway, I tried that already.
I re-initiate the shutdown request.
Notice the current time and the promise the dialog is making to me. See, you need to trust you computer so these dialogs are like little contracts, just waiting to be enforced by the all knowing OS. Breath, OSX has it under control.
OSX is even trying to bend time for me. We traverse 3 seconds in 2 minutes, nice.
In the two months of ownership, this is the third time I am having to hold that power button down until all my problems go away. The common theme being Parallels. Perhaps its time to try vmware.
I have to apologies for complaining about something I know nothing about. I indicated that the Adium IM end key was reassigned to a different feature, command-right arrow switches IM windows much like the command-grave keystroke.
While this is correct, the Adium IM end key is the func-right arrow as opposed to the command-right arrow in other applications like the blogger text box I am typing this into. So, while I have to retract my innacuracy it does offer the opportunity to whine about another mac UI inconsistency.
When should I be using the func-right arrow over the command-right arrow. I would have thought that the concepts of home and end would have been fairly simple for a UI designer to grok. Such is the ineffectiveness of the mac UI.
Dave talks of Edvard Munch but I think, if my history is correct, Edvard used a mac. Infact, if you zoom in to the painting you can see that he is screaming in hatred and frustration as he tosses his mac over the bridge.
I had this post prepared to whine about the way that mac presents its' default buttons on its' dialogs. It was going to be o-so-contrite with subtle sneers here and there for effect and all toped off with the classic "windows does it better". Who could have hoped for anything more.
OK, I take it back. Tentatively mind you, because I am sure there is something subtle to sneer about here.
The mac dialog shows two types of highlighting. A complete fill-in or a subtle ring. Well, it turns out that the fill-in is activated with the "enter" key and the ring with the "space" key.
The Stickies application, on closing a sticky note, offers a ringed "Don't Save" and a filled-in "Save" option. Only one key is required to select an option. There is a third button with no highlighting that you have to tab to. The tabbing moves the ring highlighting allowing the "space" key to select the button.
The downside of this is my expectation that it is a non-standard feature of the Stickies application. There seems to be so many in-consistencies that I have come to expect them.
The latest inconsistency hearkens back to older post complaining the lack of a consistent end key. Command-right arrow doesn't work in gmail. Well now I find that Command-right arrow is assigned to a completely different function in Adium, allowing me to select the next IM window. Nice feature, bad key selection.
Is this Adium's fault or the fact that mac doesn't have a consistent end key.
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