FireFox 3 Beta Pretty Neat
March 26, 2008

Daring Fireball's recent article on the FireFox 3 beta got me interested enough to give it a try. Wow, I'm glad I did - as its totally replaced FireFox 2 on my Macbook. For me, its main point above all else is the awesomeness of the default theme. I have dislike the way that the default FF2 (really, it is the FF1 default theme with a little icon work) theme held up to the newest wave of operating systems. FF3's theme is definitely a huge improvement.

Stability's definitely good, as I haven't had a single crash in the day or so that I've been using it. I'm also noticing helpful little features here and there, but like other's have said - there are no massive improvements. I'm happy enough - so... thanks for the awesome software!

Update - 2008-03-25

Ok, now that I've spent a bit more time with it I absolutely love it. Oh, that's right. I went there. The URI autocomplete box is revamped now to include titles and favicons which is an awesome feature, the file upload control is now revamped so that you no longer have to find the little "browse" button to pop the browse dialog and the <form> controls now finally use OS native widgets. Hearts!

How to Play Almost Any Movie in Windows
March 15, 2008

You've got a shiny Windows computer with an icon labeled "Media Player" and a video to play. Odds are, it won't. Windows Media Player by default only understands a very small subset of the possible formats that are out there - and most of that subset is unpopular. Watching movies under Windows really isn't that difficult though.

1. Download the Combined Community Codec Pack
2. Your movie should work.
3. If not, download the DivX codec.
4. Your movie should work. Tada!

If at all possible, try to use the program Media Player Classic which comes with the CCP.

Listforge.net Live!
January 31, 2008

I finally got finished getting Listforge live tonight and what fun it has been. This is my fourth large Ruby on Rails project and I'm really in love with it. Development was relatively easy and straight forward while I was inching towards my goal of having a useful "want to purchase" application.

The software is still in beta and has some rough edges. Error notification is ugly, but that will be improving shortly. I need some logo work done, because I frankly don't have the time for Photoshoppery at the moment and would prefer a beautiful logo done by David. I also need to get better friending preferences, RSS feeds and avatars built in - but that's down the road.

For now, it's out there for all to enjoy and test. Do go create an account and let me know what you think!

Linux Printserver With HP C3180
January 12, 2008

I fumbled through a good bit of this and would rather have found a simple how-to on getting this setup. Alas, one was not readily accessible and I hope to remedy this! Please note, this is a print server not necessarily a Samba file server so I will only highlight the portions relevant to printing.

First, you must install cupsys using "aptitude install cupsys" and the HP drivers by "aptitude install hpijs. This will get all the software installed that you need to get going. If you're doing this from scratch, you'll also want to install Samba at this point.

Now that you've got cups installed, you'll need to configure it by editing "/etc/cups/cupsd.conf". In here you'll be needing to change the "Listen" option to listen on your local ethernet interface and enabling /admin and /admin/conf access to all by doing the following:

<Location /admin/conf>
  AuthType Default
  Require user @SYSTEM
  Order allow,deny
  #Allow localhost
  Allow all
</Location>

for both "/admin/conf" and "/admin". This will allow you to connect to the admin panel from any machine on your network. You'll need to go in to the web site through the interface specified earlier and select "Add Printer" . I found that the "HP PhotoSmart P100 Foomatic/cdj1600" driver works quite well for the HP C3180 that I have.

Once you've gotten the printer added into cups, go ahead and print a test page through the web interface. Did that work? Good. You're almost there!

Now the Samba configuration is pretty simple. Just add printing = cups to the top of you /etc/samba/smb.conf and the following to the bottom:

[printers]
  comment = SMB Print Spool
  path = /var/spool/samba
  guest ok = Yes
  printable = Yes
  #use client driver = Yes
  default devmode = Yes
  browseable = Yes

This is from the Secure Office Networking guide from the Samba site. You'll notice that I commented out "use client driver", however. I did this so that I could use the printer as a delicious raw Postscript printer and not have to both with much clientside configuration.

That's it. Now you've got (or at least I've got) a shiny new print server. You should probably restrict your admin rights by re-editing "/etc/cups/cupsd.conf" and then you're golden. If you've got any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments section and I'll try to lend a hand. Good luck!

Playing with OSX86
December 11, 2007

Some of you may have noticed that my posting frequency has severely plummeted and I've sort of dropped off the series of tubes. It's true, I've been super busy with non-Internet related things. So busy, in fact, that my main workstation is torn apart and is being rebuilt at the moment. A friend of mine recently got ahold of a nice shiny copy of OSX for his PC. Well, not to be shy I of course listened closely to his tales and will relate to you the story all about how his life got flipped turned upside down.

The installation boot process actually went very smoothly - so smoothly in fact that it was decided to just go ahead and wipe the disk and start from scratch. Alas, OSX would have none of this. It would seem that the SATA controller was not recognized properly and ended up going AWOL every time any sort of drive activity was attempted.

I tried formatting the disk every which way, but it would simply keep timing out. How long was the time out? Almost a full hour did it sit at "Preparing to Erase". I also discovered that even Ubuntu Linux 7.10 has issues with my SATA controller and it took good old fdisk to even begin to partition the drive correctly. Note to Ubuntu Live CD Users With Display Issues: Boot Graphics Safe Mode with the added boot parameter (F6) "vga=771" might just help you out.

One fruitless night of labor later it was decided to simply remove the SATA disk and replace it with a plain old IDE. Loe, the install then worked smooth as things that are smooth. Sadly, this is not the end of our tale.

First boot yielded a nice kernel panic which forced me to go about the arduous task of tracking down what caused it. Offhand, it seems to have been NVDRESMAN.kext which was causing me issues - and simply moving it out of the Library directory rectified that situation. However, what that left me with was a depressing 1024x768 pixels of resolution on both my monitors.

Unacceptable. So the saga will continue... next stop - the MacVidia project!

Update - 2007/12/10

Sadly my foray into OSX86 has ended badly. I managed to get everything else working with a myriad of custom drivers and hacked packages, my display continually eluded me. My final attempt at getting MacVidia to run caused the whole display subsystem to fail and wouldn't boot at all. At that point, I realized that it was just too much work to get something running that I wouldn't even keep around. So sad. Oh well.

User agents from lighttpd access_log
September 24, 2007

Here's a simple way to figure out your UserAgents from a lighttpd access_log file.

The Final Verdict on Windows Vista
September 07, 2007

I've been using Windows Vista for almost five months now and I'm ready to get it said. I like Vista. No, I love Vista. Now, this is a very rare occurrence for me to love a Microsoft Operating System so early in the game - but it has happened.

Many have argued that Vista lacks "anything new" and it "fiddles with an interface that already works" , and to them I say hogwash! Many have complained and pointed out that Vista is just pretty icing atop an already well baked cake - and they're right. We can debate the quality of baking here, but it is primarily delicious icing atop an already baked cake of usefulness.

Many will argue with you about how the aesthetics don't matter, but I believe that it really does matter. For me, what makes Vista so great isn't one or two big new things that add up to create a much better feeling experience. All of the icing, as it were, ends up making everything a little easier to use and in the end makes the whole system better.

Many directly complain about Aero just being there to "look pretty". My rebuttal is simply, "what's wrong with that?". If my interface simply looks better and I feel like it suits my tastes better, won't it make me happier in doing whatever I'm doing? Aero's new rendering engine makes everything render much more smoothly and appear much more attractively. This isn't even to begin touching on Vista's amazing new font-rendering engine which makes looking at XP's ClearType (which is worlds better than Windows 98's Font Smoothing which is...) painful.

Little features, too, help to make the difference. The customizable side-bar in Explorer is a change made that utterly revolutionizes the way I use Explorer and mscom save dialogs. I no longer need to hunt for any of my common folders, I just click and there I am. I am constantly reaching for it whenever I use an XP box. Even the progress bar representing hard disk usage has a noticeable impact on my daily use habits, since I no longer need to do the old "Right Click - Properties" shuffle.

Also, while it is available for XP, Windows Media Player 11 fits right in with Vista. I have to thank Andy for turning me on to this one, but it ends up being the best media player that I've ever worked with. The views are wonderfully thought-out with genre breakouts, album breakouts and artist breakouts. If you pull up a search that returns multiple albums, they are each seperated - so you never have the googlie eyed stare at 1,000 music results that you get with iTunes.

What's not to like? Gaming Performance. I've still got my XP partition around for gaming, and I don't think that's going to change anytime soon. I can observe noticeable differences in frame rates in Warhammer 40k, Battlefield 2 and just about everything else that I've tried under Vista Vs. XP. It seems like there's a lot going on under the hood, that we don't really have control over.

So, where do I stand now? I love Vista. It's not there for gaming, but as a day-to-day workstation - it makes a wonderful OS choice.

Note: I'm not even considering licensing issues. The OS market is so woefully messed up that there's no point in even discussing them.

I'm Disabling Automatic Updates
August 30, 2007

Well, I'm finally disabling Windows Automatic Updates on my PC. Nothing major here, it's just that MS loves to make my machine reboot in the middle of the night. Since I've been back on Tuesday I've come in and found my machine rebooted TWICE. No offense guys, but twice in one week is a bad amount of "automatic reboots".

How do you do this, you ask? Go to Control Panel - Windows Updates - Change Settings - "Download updates but let me choose them". It's not the simplest process, but it's not very complicated either. This will cause Windows to at least notify you of updates being present.

Rsync, Windows, OSX and more!
July 30, 2007

Brian recently wrote in with a few questions regarding rsync and how I used rsync in my daily life. I felt much obliged to respond to him but while typing my response, I realized something. I had recently been trying my damnedest to find good information on rsync I was always coming up short. Why? I was always coming up short because I was looking to use rsync in a non-standard fashion. Rather than the tried and true Unix->Unix sync, I was trying to synchronize Windows->Unix and it was becoming a huge pain in the ass. Well, Brian's question is a bit different but along the same lines.

Brian wanted to sync a Mac OSX box with a Windows box. Well, lucky for us that OSX is Unixie and already has access to rsync - so all that leaves us with is setting up rsync on Windows and getting the right glue in between! I have a quick disclaimer, however. I have not completely tested this method. I've only pulled together what I can to help out a reader having very similar troubles to what I had. That said, if you guys have any comments or suggestions I will definitely incorporate them here.

So, here we go. We're going to setup a Cygwin installation with both OpenSSH and Rsync. There is a version of Rsync out there for Windows called "cwRsync", but in my experience its been incredibly unstable and is a poor implementation. Things might have changed, but I would recommend staying away from it for serious production.

Setting up Cygwin and OpenSSH On Your Windows Box

First, you'll need to download and install cygwin. Its a fairly straightforward procedure. When you get to the package selection dialog be sure to select "OpenSSH" and "Rsync" for installation. You might find this article a little difficult to follow without them.

Once installed you'll need to do a little configuration to get the OpenSSH server up and running. At this point, you'll need administrative privileges to continue. For Vista or XP, just be sure to run "c:\cygwin\cygwin.bat" as Administrator and you'll be fine. Go ahead and run ssh-host-config and mimic the following answers (some of which may not show up if you're running <Windows 2003. If not stated, simply accept the defaults.

Should privilege separation be used? (yes/no) yes
... [only on >= Windows 2003]
Should this script create a new local account 'sshd_server'
 which has the required privileges? (yes/no) yes
...

Now go ahead and start the SSH service manually by running "net start sshd". This may take a minute or two so give it time. You may also need to allow a "port exception" in Windows Firewall for Port 22. Just open up Windows Firewall in Control Panel and select "Change Settings". From there go to the Exceptions tab and select "Add Port...". You should now try SSH'ing into your Windows machine from a different machine, just to make sure that everything works at this point.

Running Rsync From a Remote Machine

At this point, most of the Windows configuration is done. You're going to want to begin working on your other machine now (in Brian's instance, his OSX machine) and start testing rsync. There's really no configuration to be immediately done for rsync to get it up and running since it will be using SSH as a tunnel to the Windows machine.

Go ahead and pick a small source directory to try to sync to your Windows machine. Also, make sure that there is a directory created on the Windows machine with a suitable user having access to it - here we'll call the user "rsync_access" and give him read/write permissions to "c:\rsync_repo". The source on the OSX machine will be "/rsync_repo" for simplicity.

rsync -e "ssh" -az /rsync_repo rsync_access@WINDOWSBOX:/cygdrive/c/rsync_repo

Tada! The files should be synced. One tweak I've noticed that helps Windows machines along is changing the "modify-window" option to be a little higher than usual by adding in --modify-window=15 to the command line mix.

If you're remote machine is Windows as well, you may need to install rsync via Cygwin the same way we did on the machine above. If you're on Linux, you may need to install it manually. "apt-get install rsync" will do the trick on most Debian distributions.

Fin!

At this point, everything is up and running and only needs some automation tweaks. I'll make an update to this article later with this content. Again, any comments or suggestions are warmly welcomed and will be incorporated into the article. I'm just trying to get this out there to help those in search of more rsync information.Until then, happy rsyncing!

References and Links

- cwRsync - not recommended

- Cygwin

- How to install OpenSSH sshd server and sftp server on a Windows 2000 or Windows XP [machine]

Happy Sysadmin Day!
July 27, 2007

Today is Systems Administrator Appreciation Day! It's a day to give thanks to your humble, or sometimes not so humble, systems administrator[s]. We work hard and diligently to ensure that all of our users have access to the resources that they need to get through the day. We're the ones keeping your Internets unclogged, keeping your mail working, making sure that Google doesn't suddenly poof in a puff of clustered-hard-disk failure and keeping your business-critical networking infrastructures working flawlessly.

So, everyone take a minute to thank the person most directly responsible for maintaining your systems. Buy them a nice root beer or a round of pizza - celebrate the guys keeping your business alive in the Internet age!

For me, I want to give a big thank you out to the admins over at Citescape for keeping our Internets up and running smoothly as well as all of the extra support that they've provided over the last year or so. I'd also like to give a nice shout-out to the admins over at ipHouse for keeping their network infrastructure rock-solid allowing us to run our web-app without any issues.

Quick Note
July 10, 2007

Phew. The Internets are back. Citescape was having some issues over the weekend, but everything appears to be in working order now. I'm up to my ears in stuff to do, so I'll be coming back with posts soon.

FastCGI on Apache >= 2.2
June 29, 2007

So, most people won't care about this but I know that I'll want it in the future. If you're running into "ap_null_cleanup undeclared" errors while trying to compile FastCGI with Apache >= 2.2 then the wiki entry for getting Ruby on Rails setup under Fedora will prove useful. Apparently backwards compatibility APIs were removed in 2.2, so there's a patch on that wiki for fixing fcgi.h to include the defines. Just in case that wiki dies, here is the patch:

@@ -73,6 +73,36 @@

#endif

My Favorite Vista Tweak for Gaming
June 25, 2007

With my recent purchase of Halo 2 I've been forced to use Vista for a bit of gaming and have ran into a bit of a performance deficit. Throughout my gaming sessions, I noticed that there would be huge amounts of slow-down correlating to a high amount of disk IO. I thinks to myself, wtf? So I do a little digging...

I discovered a process called LocalServiceNetworkRestricted that was continually waking up and eating huge amounts of disk IO causing my system to drag painfully during any gaming. I did a little more digging and discovered that this service may or may not be related to SuperFetch.

Well, I really don't care if my applications start up 1 or 2 nanoseconds faster if it nukes my gaming performance so I decided to disable the SuperFetch service. You can find it under the Services control panel applet ( Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Services ). Simply right click on it and select "stop". To my joy, it stopped the random disk IO load. If this helps you, you can make it permanent by right clicking on it and then going to "properties" and selecting "disabled" from the "Startup type:" option.

My scientific-in-the-way-that-Brainiac-is-scientific conclusion is that SuperFetch was causing an undue IO load on my system. Looking to improve your gaming performance? Give disabling SuperFetch a shot.

Halo 2 PC, Ok, It Doesn't Look That Bad
June 14, 2007

Ok, some of you may have noticed my rant a few days ago about the ugliness that is Halo 2. I realized that it was a bit too ranty for my tastes, and decided to delete it before anyone commented on it (I'll never delete a post after a comment has been made). Anyway, I made some correlations between Halo 2 and Quake 2... after a recent discovery, I have to take these back.

After being over at Andy's yesterday, helping him with some Vista printing issues, he showed me a quite nice looking run through of Halo 2 on his PC. I noticed something, it didn't look like ass. So, when I got home I sat down intending to do something about it! Ok, well - I did some packing and cleaning first - to be truthful.

I fired up the game and jumped right into battle thinking that I had maybe been looking at it wrong. No, it still looked like ass. I went into the Video settings and upped the anti-aliasing to 4x thinking that maybe it made a giant difference. Nope, still no difference. Well, now what? Andy's looked so good... so I decided to go ahead and register for a Live account and see if there were some updates. Man, that was a good half hour of my life I'd like back. Their server even responded with a TOTALLY blank page after successfully registering. Still no avail...

Then, before loading the game I decided to double check my anti-aliasing settings. Loe! There was a new setting available "Level of Detail". I pushed that puppy up to high and was greeted by a decent looking game when I loaded up my last checkpoint.

The LOD setting was deemed, too difficult to code to be dynamically set in game. Fair enough, a few other console ports are that way - your Indians aren't star programmers. I get it. However, what Microsoft decided to do instead was to simply drop the option from the in-game menu. The usual state of affairs is to dim or otherwise note that it is not able to be set during gameplay. Oh well.

So, Halo 2 actually looks halfway decent. It's got a kick-ass plot-line and the controls feel a lot better than Halo's did. They're not quite PC shooter quality, but they're standable now. I consider my money well spent.

Also, this FireFox add-on kicks major ass and this robot song will be stuck in your head until next Tuesday.

Another Vista Update
May 30, 2007

One more thing that I like about Vista - how it handles frozen programs. It used to be that when a program totally froze, itss contents were typically totally wiped. Even if the program was just not responding to GUI events - its contents were generally wiped out. Well, Vista caches the rendered window when it leaves the main buffer so that if the program stops responding, you can still see what the hell was on the screen.

One thing I don't like? How complicated they made scheduled tasks. It used to be a single click or so and then you'd have a nice new scheduled task. No more. There's something like four clicks and navigating a nested tree before you get down to being able to create a "basic" task.

An Update on the Vista DHCP Bug
April 26, 2007

I had started a thread awhile back to discuss Vista, and one of the things I've mentioned here has been a bug concerning Vista "randomly" dropping off the network with a large amount of work needed to get it back on. Well, I discovered the cause. It might be my specific machine - but activation triggers Vista to lose it's network address and be unable to re-attain one until "ipconfig" has been ran.

Also, if you are activating a different machine with the same key be aware that it doesn't work the first time around. You have to try to activate, and then "input a different number" except input your original number anyway. It worked for me. The joys of activation and changing hardware.

Vista Update
April 05, 2007

OK, here it goes. Wait for it. Wait for it...

I like Vista. No, seriously I do. The latest round of updates since RTM have made a /huge/ difference on performance and made it a pleasure to use. Sure, UAC is annoying. Sure, I'll keep XP around for gaming. For day to day use though, Vista is the Bee's Knees. The font smoothing is so much better than XP that it makes me no longer long for a Mac. Aero's interface really is lovely and I love how it always matches me wallpaper (being see through and all).

I love the new Explorer the most though. It is finally a well thought out filesystem interface. Configurable shortcuts abound. The location bar (with clickable folder paths which bring you to that folder) is a godsent improvement tha tmakes my life so much easier. Even thumbnails have improved with configurable sizes and sane filename display.

Oh, and the new file transfer dialogs are amazing. Gone is the "1 year remaining" style dialog box, and in is the "1 hour @ 100Kbp/s" transfer box that I always wished Explorer had.

So there, I said it. I like Vista. It's got my seal of approval. I'll post more as I find new little things.

Dell Express Upgrade, Wow.
March 30, 2007

So, some of you may be aware of the recent "Dell Express Upgrade" campaign. It was designed to get consumers to purchase new Dell computers right before Vista was released, instead of waiting until after. Supposedly, once Vista was released Dell would ship the consumer a lovely little Vista Upgrade Kit. Well, here's the thing... We still don't have our upgrade kit and Vista been out for a long time.

Now, some of you may also be aware that I've talked about this before. We purchased a new machine here at work with the express desire to have at least one machine running Vista full-time (to learn its quirks and what-not) and we thought that the Express Upgrade kit was a perfect plan. Wow, were we wrong. We still don't have our kit.

Dell apparently watches the blogosphere, but really doesn't seem to care. Their campaign got dugg as a failed affair, but they still haven't gotten back on their feet to fix the problem and deliver the goods that were promised to consumers. Thanks guys.

Vista Randomly Dropping Off the Network
March 27, 2007

AAACK! It's following me! We had a very similar issue with a co-located box of ours (PE 1850 + Gentoo + 2.6.12 don't work btw)... and now it's followed me home! My completely unrelated machine with a brand new Vista install is randomly detecting media-disconnection and dropping off the network when absolutely nothing has happened. Disable the interface, re-enable it and all is hunky dorey. Wow, weird.

Yes, I am sure that this issue is completely unrelated. Two totally different machines, totally different operating systems and totally different software. No worries, it's definitely Vista.

What sort of horror stories have you heard from customers Jesse?

Giving Vista Another Go
March 25, 2007

Ok, I'm giving Vista another go. I've re-arranged my hard disks such that I have a sizable chunk of available space in my main workstation - so I've decided to do a dual boot situation. Vista for "work" and XP for games.

So... how's it going so far? Interesting. I had to re-install Vista already because I made the OS partition too small. Eight gigabytes is not enough to hold Windows Vista. Jesus Christ, XP only takes 2.61G - and don't get me started on 98.

Additionally, Vista consumes 25% more memory than XP. Wow. No wonder I couldn't game with it.

If anyone has had issues, please let me know in this thread! I work in IT and want to know every last morsel of failure that comes with Vista.

Dijital Majik, Seriously Guys.
March 02, 2007

This afternoon the PSU fan in one of our non-critical server fans began to fail - making the telltale whirring and buzzing of a fan whose on its last legs. We meandered down to good old MinCo and waited awhile for a salesman to get to us to ring us out, and I mean awhile. After a good 25 minutes of watching them waltz by we gave up and headed towards Best Buy. Here we were faced with a $50 no-name brand and thought, "What the hell... we're right next to Dijital Majik, let's give 'em another try". Man. I wish we hadn't.

We walked in to find at least five guys sitting behind the counter salivating for a sale. One walks out and asks if he can help us find anything. "An ATX power supply", I say. "What size?", says he. "Uh... ATX.". We walk over to where they have the power supplies and loe, there is one choice. 450Watts of COMPLETELY no-name brand power. I had never seen the brand in my life. I ask if they have anything less and he tries to hand me a PSU for a mini-ATX. I laugh, one of the guys behind the counter says "No, you don't want that one". I ask him if there's a smaller one... "Oh no, you see... power supplies are all a bit different. Just because it says its 450W doesn't mean it is, it is definitely less. This aint no Cooler Master or Antec.". "Well, I only need a 300W - it can't vary by 150W."... either way, they only had one brand so we went ahead and bought it.

Here's where the fun comes in. The rest was typical computer store salesman bullshit. I popped open the package and began installing the PSU only to notice one glaring problem. The warranty seal on the PSU was broken. Now, anybody whose anybody knows - YOU DON'T OPEN A POWER SUPPLY. So I have our Office Manager contact them about a return and the salesman tries to offer an explanation... "Oh, it was probably part of our Quality Assurance Testing.". ... ... ... WHOAH there. One need not /open/ a box that says "DON'T OPEN ME UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES" to make sure that it works and then try to sell it to a customer. No. You apply power and test leads for voltage. FOLLOWED BY NOT SELLING THAT ONE AS NEW.

Keep in mind, these are the same guys who a little over a year ago told me "Oh no, they stopped making wired NICs a long time ago. It's all wireless now.". What's sad is that when they first opened they had very knowledgeable and savvy employees - it's just all gone way downhill.

Dell Dropped Ball With Vista Upgrade
February 12, 2007

So, just for the record - Dell's Vista Express Upgrade Deal flopped. We purchased a new machine here at $WeMakeLegalResearchSoftware in order to have a) a nice dev machine and b) a machine that would run Vista. We purchased it right around the time of RTM, so we figured that the express upgrade wouldn't be far off. Man, were we wrong. It's Feb. 12th and the public has had access to Vista since the 1st. Our order hasn't even been processed beyond "pending" status and all of the contact numbers (including other languages) have been disconnected. Way to go Dell! Dude, you're getting Vista ... someday.

You Know You're a Programmer When...
January 24, 2007

So, I woke up this morning from a dream about writing some code.

Learning Java
January 23, 2007

Well, the semester's began and I need a new time-killer while on campus. This semester, rather than continuing with Ruby on Rails like have been in the past, I'm going to begin embarking down the Java path. It would appear as though Java is /still/ somehow managing to be the programming language of choice in professional-land. NetBeans looks quite interesting as well...

Wish me luck.

What the Hell Tiger?
November 24, 2006

So, I'm doing a little Black Friday ad browsing and I surf on over to Tiger Direct's website hoping to find some stuff that isn't sold out. Now, Tiger Direct has historically bad pricing and hardware quality... but this takes the cake for crazy marketing.

AMD Athlon 64 FX Dual Core w/ Fan & FREE Far Cry Game [source]

Now, Far Cry is game that's somewhere around five years old. It doesn't even run correctly on modern nVidia cards - but here it's being touted as an amazing dealbreaker to get for free! Considering that the price of the product is around $600... I don't believe that something so small as a five year old game could even be fathomed to break the deal.

Hah, Tiger Direct - you make me laugh.

Low Level Optimization From Vendu
August 14, 2006

So, my good friend Vendu popped a link to an in-progress paper of his entitled "Tuning Code". I wanted to point this one out, since it's got some very nice *simple* term definitions in it that are wonderfully put and easy to understand. Be sure to check out the rest of his docs too, he's got some great low level stuff in there. 'Always good to know what you're working with underneath all this high level jazz of today's computing!

Laptop Setup
August 10, 2006

So, I've got a really old Toshiba Satellite laptop that I'm setting up for Emily and I's honeymoon trip to Mexico. When I say really old, many people fail to realize just what that means. I can't even install Ubuntu Linux on it. It's a P233 with 48M of RAM. 48 MEGABYTES. The battery doesn't even hold a charge anymore.

I've got Windows 98SE installed on it right now, and it crawls. If you want a sobering experience with Web 2.0... access it with two hundred and thirty three whopping *1024 cycles per second of processing power and forty eight megabytes of ram. I'm not even sure if Firefox fully fits into this little amount RAM!

Right now I'm definitely wishing that I could afford a MacBook. Mmm... Apple goodness. Ability to run emulators... do web development... from my living room... without Babbles sitting on my mouse...

Dvorak Update
July 17, 2006

Here are my stats so far. I'm measuring my typing speed with Dilip's WPM Tester. It's not the best, but it should be good for consistent results. I have to switch back to QWERTY every now and again and I think that's hurting my performance. Day 3 made no gains, I believe, as a consequence of a heavy instance of this.

• Day 1: 15WPM
• Day 2: 20WPM
• Day 3: 20WPM

Note that I usually type around 120WPM w/ QWERTY.

Adding Large Filesets to Subversion
June 26, 2006

So, you've just gotten done making a large sweeping addition to a fresh new project. One that doesn't quite require very fine grained version control, but you're still using Subversion for the large changes. Here's a code snippet to add a large number of newly added files to a subversion repository:

svn status | grep "?" | egrep -o "[^? ].*" | xargs -i svn add \{\}

BitTorrent and the Future of PC Gaming
June 23, 2006

So, a little bit ago the guys over at Penny Arcade poked fun at Blizzard's usage of the Bittorrent protocol - likening it to some form of evil gremlin. I have also just gotten done waiting on a download queue to download Prey, and I have to say - my love BitTorrent is immense. You see, illegal piracy (which helps global warming) aside, it is an enabling protocol that allows sites to serve up large popular content - without murdering their connections. While I understand that Fileplanet's profits would hit the floor if suddenly people could download demos and mods from the internet again - I believe that BitTorrent could be one of the best new things to hit modern video gaming.

Imagine; the latest demo is released and thousands descend on every site to download it. Only a few actually get to download. With BitTorrent though, the download goes faster when there's more people grabbing the files. It's a wonderful system where everyone wins. Site owners aren't hammered into the ground, and users get to download their files at their full bandwidth. I sincerely don't understand why no sites have (recently**) popped up offering these sorts of services. Goodness, to download the latest map pack for my favorite FPS at full tilt without paying money or having to wait in a queue... I salivate.

So when I see someone like Penny-Arcade bashing this protocol because it piggy- backs on their bandwidth, it annoys me. Imagine for a minute, that Blizzard didn't use BitTorrent. You would have three choices. a) wait three days for your 300Meg patch to download at 10kbp/s from Blizzard; b) wait three days for your place in the queue at Fileplanet to become available so it can crash on you and make you wait three more days, or c) use an illegal file trading network. I would much more prefer that the builtin client just hit up my upload bandwidth, shared the file with everyone else, and let me download the new patch at full tilt.

* Now, they did mention that the updater ran in the background. This would be legitimately annoying. I'm not sure if it does though. When I was playing WoW, it would update the game and then leave the updater running - which you could close before WoW restarted. They may have fixed that so that the updater is always running.

** I also know that FileRush used to offer up torrents of recent demos. I'm not sure why they stopped.

Microsoft Shenanigans
June 14, 2006

I love Windows Update. It's a wonderful delivery mechanism for Microsoft's latest anti-piracy scams! Screw actually updating computers, let's release a new Genuine Advantage thing every week. Oh, we know that the pirates can move faster than MS. They will never keep up.

The reason I rant though, is the "Windows Genuine Advantage Notification" update. Now I can get a popup telling me I wasted $300! Wonderous!

Rails Woes
June 14, 2006

I updated Ruby on Rails on one of our servers on Saturday, and noticed that today pages which used to take 0.056s to render are now taking around 84s. Restarting mysql seems to help the process, which is odd - because the bulk of time is supposedly (according to the logs) taken up in page rendering.

I'm noting that the primary difference between our working servers and this one is that this malfunctioning server is running mysql-ruby-2.5 instead of 2.7. I'm going to be upgrading it shortly to see if this is the problem.

Updating to version 2.7 of the mysql interface seems to have fixed the problems of long response times.

Dropping All Queued Messages in Postfix
June 14, 2006

sudo /usr/sbin/postsuper -d ALL

Fixing The Off By One Page Error in 'pdf/writer'
May 12, 2006

There's an off by one error in the total page count yielded by Ruby's popular pdf/writer library. You always end up with one more total page listed that simply isn't there. In a one page document - of - you will see "1 of 2" on the bottom of your pages. That's just not right. Apparently the bug has been around for awhile, so I delved into the source to fix it. Another win for open source! If this was a third party library in Microsoftland I would be SOL and have to find another library.

You'll need to edit the "writer.rb" file associated with the library. You can find it at (this may vary based on your system): /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/pdf-writer-1.1.3/lib/pdf/writer.rb

Note line 2298.

Original:

2291         if page

2292           total_pages = page

2293         else

2294           page = page_number_search(:stop_total_next, scheme)

2295           if page

2296             total_pages = page

2297           else

2298             total_pages = page_count
2299           end

2300         end

Fixed:

2291         if page

2292           total_pages = page

2293         else

2294           page = page_number_search(:stop_total_next, scheme)

2295           if page

2296             total_pages = page

2297           else

2298             total_pages = page_count-1
2299           end

2300         end

This has worked on two boxes so far. If anyone notices this not working, please let me know.

Windows Vista, Not All Its Cracked Up To Be
April 01, 2006

So I hosted a small LAN party last night (as I do every Friday night), and one of my friends happened to have just loaded the latest CTP of Windows Vista. I have to say that Microsoft's flagship product sank just after it exited the birth.

The first boot of the operating system yielded a beautiful display, with lots of dripping eye candy goodness. There were thumbnail previews of windows in the taskbar, there were gorgeous drop shadows, and and I have to say that the ClearType font aliasing got better. Then in crept the problems.

First my friend wanted to show me a Flash animation that he had found earlier that day, so he went to install Flash. It took him four tries to get it installed correctly. Microsoft--. Then, as this was a LAN event, he tried to install Neverwinter Nights. A lovely RPG in the spirit of D&D which is perfect for LAN gaming among those so inclined. He loaded up the installer and away it went. During the installation he frequently caused Windows Explorer to crash navigating around the filesystem, and playing with solitaire. The killer blow came after NeverWinter was finished installing. It didn't work.

Now, it's granted that this is a "Technology Preview", and I understand that certain things won't work perfectly fine. But damn, this has been five year in development, and it's far less stable than Windows 95. He had to restart more than a few times while trying to get NWN to run, because it completely locked Explorer up and failed to let him restart it correctly.

So, on the plus side - Vista looks great. The 3D graphics are... orgasmically lush. Everything pops out at you, it wiggles and sweens (not quite as nice as the OpenGL version of X Windows though - holy shit. That's a whole 'nother post.). On the down side, it's buggy and unstable.

No offense guys, but when you were reworking the NT4 kernel - it was excusable. Now you're working from a relatively stable base (XP) that shouldn't be five years of development to add wiggles.

(Disclaimer: This isn't an exhaustive look at Vista, this is a passing glance that's full of first impressions of a TECHNOLOGY PREVIEW)

Making a Shortcut to Your Home Directory in OSX
March 01, 2006

I've no idea why this is so complicated, but koudelka told me how to make a shortcut to my home directory - while maintaining the "home dir" icon.

[08:58] <koudelka> yeah, make the alias on the desktop, then get info on your home dir, click the icon in the getinfo window then apple+c, then get info on the alias, click the icon in the get info window and apple+v

Getting Ruby (running on Windows) to talk to MySql
January 27, 2006

So, I've given up on Visual Studio as a viable development platform. After I learned that I had to instantiate a completely seperate object (not directly documented, of course) for saving a set of database transactions, I was too pissed off to continue. Perhaps someday, when I don't need database usage, I'll look back at Visual Studio. But until then - wading through at least four unreferenced object types just to start up a fucking database is insane.

Now, back to Ruby. The Ruby One Click Installer is wonderful. I couldn't ask for an easier installation of a development environment. Sadly though, it doesn't ship w/ mysql support out the gate. Googling didn't turn too much up either. There were a few sites that had versions compiled for Ruby 1.6 or so (we're now at 1.8) - so that wasn't much help.

I finally stumbled upon HowToUseMySQLRubyBindingsOnWin32. Quite a mouthful, but it worked. I dropped his mysql.so file into the library directory for Ruby, and away I went! I've got a copy of the archives, if ever his goes down - so fear not.

Back to Ruby, my pleasurable companion.

VC++, Converting C-Style Null Terminated Arrays into Visual Studio String objects
January 24, 2006

I've been banging my head on this one. How to get the text of a C Style null-terminated (the best kind!) string array into a textbox or label. Oh no, you can't just assign. Oh no, you can't just call String(char_array). Here's what you must do:

 
String^ temp_string = gcnew String( char_array );
label3->Text = temp_string;

Now, it appears that the "^" is required because I am attempting to call this from a form. Perhaps it's not best practice, but MS doesn't really have a useful best practices document - and fucked if the intertron knows. Color me stupid, but I've never seen the carrot operator in C++ before. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Using Ifstream in Visual Studio 2005
January 23, 2006

Now, I'm not sure what the correct "Microsoft way" is to read files - but the classical C++ way has always been with ifstream. Loe and behold, it doesn't work in Microsoft Visual C++. You can try including , but that doesn't work. You can try "using namespace std", but that doesn't work. Intellisense will acknowledge that ifstream is a member of the std namespace, but the compiler/linker won't! Hah, classic Microsoft!

Anyway. I found the solution in a forum post at DevX. The solution? "Disable precompiled headers". I'm not joking, this seems to be what's required to use file input and output in MSVC++ 2005. Oh, and just try locating that in msdn.

Another Convert
November 10, 2005

Everyone knows that I love Linux, and I love seeing my friends switch over to it. David's been talking about switching over for a long time, and finally took the plunge. He now has no Windows boxes on his network. Better than me, but alas - I am a gamer, so I must have Windows. Frankly, with the ease of installation that Ubuntu provides - I'm amazed that ordinary people still put up with Windows. It's slow, crufty, crappily programmed, and chock full of security holes that get taken advantage of daily. Maybe it's simply because it's the OS that's already installed. *shrugs*

Ignoring Files With Subversion
October 25, 2005

I've wrestled with this a bit, and finally gave up and spent some time tracking down the correct solution. Subversion's "ignore" facility's a bit... off, and there are a bunch of web-sites that don't quite clearly explain a simple way to ignore certain files with Subversion. I mean, of course, data files generated by your apps. The following command will spawn your EDITOR or VISUAL program to edit the list of files to be ignored for a given directory. Just put each file on a line by itself, and Subversion will no longer bitch at you about changed data files.

svn propedit svn:ignore .

Viola, no more annoyance! Thanks go to Ned Batchedler for his piece "Ned Batchelder: Subversion on Windows quick start". If you're not keeping your source files in version control, you really should. It's saved my ass plenty of times - and made life generally a whole lot easier.

A New Machine, and Windows XP Home Sucks
October 23, 2005

So, we picked up a bunch of workstations at work recently from Dell. I'm not usually a fan of prebuilt systems, but these were nice. The best part was that they had phenomenonally nice displays. I actually enjoyed using them, even at the max res of 1280x1024 (which seems normal for flat screens; did I mention that they were flat screens? TFT, or LCD - whatever the prevailing standard is now-a-days). Anyway, I was browsing Dell.com later that month and noticed the machines on sale. All said and done, the entire machine + monitor was around 400$ (with shipping, and tax, and all other such items). Nice price. Suffice it to say, it is now in my posession.

Anyway, the price and display weren't my only motivating factors. I don't do Windows. I'll admit it. Everything here at home is Linux, BSD, or whatever OS of the month I'm playing with. Given that, and the fact that Windows still dominates that IT world, I figured "what a good way to get a Windows PC onto my network". Bad. Bad Jordan. It was XP Home. I knew that, I wasn't tricked into buying it.

I knew that XP Home would not participate in Windows Domains. What I didn't know was that Windows XP Home Edition wouldn't participate in Windows Networking at all; save for "Simple File Sharing" with other Windows XP clients. From what I can tell, it's actually incompatible with the "real" Windows Networking protocol (SMB, or CIFS whichever they're using). Um... ouch. I run a Samba server for my file sharing, and I'm rather unhappy with my inability to share files with my new Windows machine.

(I'm still studying the situation, to see if Samba can be coaxed into talking with XP Home - I'll post a comment if I find something that works)

No More LVM
October 20, 2005

I decided to no longer consider LVM as an alternative to manually mounting my disks at different mount points. Richlowe, from #Gah, pointed out to me that though LVM2 may be able to withstand losing a disk (which I'm not certain if it can), the filesystem most certainly couldn't stand losing a nice chunk of itself - which I'm apt to believe. So, for now, unless anyone can point out a way to achieve resiliency with two 120G (not identical) disks and a 60G disk, I'll still be mounting everything manually.

What Makes Good Windows Machines Go Bad?
October 19, 2005

I'm a Linux or OSX kind of guy. I hate Windows, for the most part. I think it's a terrible operating system, whose only real use is playing video games. One of my friends, however, thinks it's a wonderful operating system with just the right quantity of features and ease of use. He's an intelligent individual, but he likes Windows and Internet Explorer. I've tried to ween him off of IE, but to no avail. He thinks that the firewall and the popup blocker are helping him - but he's constantly plagued by spyware. I know this guy, he's extremely smart and wary of stupid Windows scams - yet he's still gotten infected. My question, to you guys, is what makes Windows machines go bad? Is Internet Explorer the only real vector for infection? Or is there something else that I'm missing totally?