moment of truth

Published on August 30, 2006 in programming and work. 0 Comments by cflipse

Well, after about two months of solid work, with one other developer and a UI/graphics guy, we’ve managed to produce a webapp redesign for work. The system is basically a really big CMS, where the data gets fed to the database through some backend processing, and the producer side users are building the contents of various pages from those building blocks. It’s sort of like building up the pages of a newspaper site. At least, that’s the idea.

We demo today, which will basically determine whether or not we get to keep running with this little experement. At the moment it’s a very functional proof of concept. Covers all the basics, but … well, I wouldn’t call it robust just yet. Early demos have gone well, but this is the important one.

In all, I’d have to say that I’ve picked up a lot of Ruby on Rails knowledge, so it’s been a good experience in that respect, regardless of outcome.

I’m sure the demo will go well, but some of the guys havn’t gotten much sleep last night. Not much point in loosing sleep, what will be will be. And really, the demo will go well. Whether or not we get to take this beyond a proof-of-concept is, sadly, a matter of politics, and just a little bit out of my sphere of control. Hence, no sense worrying about it.

busy, busy

Published on August 17, 2006 in darksun and work. 0 Comments by cflipse

I’ve never been terribly good about writing to this thing, but this summer has been somewhat bad, especially if you consider how much time I’ve been spending immersed in new technology …

In the last two months at work, I’d have to guess that I’ve picked up a pretty strong working knowledge of Rails … still have hiccups, of course, but I’ve gotten a rather snazzy javascripty app put together for doing “news” page layout. It’ll never see the light of the ‘net, since the thing is intended to live on a private network, but it’s been a good workout, both of my Javascript skills, and my developing ruby muscles. So, yeah, really should be talking more about my experiences picking up that new langauge and platform. Whole thing is due for a set of demos over the next couple of weeks. The low pressure, “determine if we’re gonna keep funding the project” type of demo.

As for side projects, I’ve got a rewrite of athas.org in the works, which is going to be rails based. Really, I just need a couple of days without distraction. Once I get the “releases” section worked out and done, the rest is a cakewalk. Of course, those distraction free days have been kind of mythical. I’ll have a couple of days for it next week, I suppose — my girlfriend is getting knee surgury, and I’m taking some time off work (wonderful timing with the demos and all, but it’s been scheduled for a while).

And on the same lines, I’ve got an article due for Dragon magazine at the end of the month that I’m struggling with. It’s taking shape, but the constraints aren’t exactly what I’d call natural for the setting.

Other than that, my time has been tied up with the usual “summer” things — weddings, weekend trips, a bbq or two at the park … not much time for keeping up a blog. On the plus side, it also means that I havn’t had much time for keeping up with World of Warcraft … I think it might be safe to say that that particular distraction has finally let me go.

fireworks

Published on July 5, 2006 in life. 0 Comments by cflipse

So, this fourth of july, I decided to forgoe the usual trip down to *mumble* for fireworks, and instead hang out at home. This seemed to be an especially wise idea when it started pouring down rain at about 4:00 this afternoon.

I live in a highrise, on the eleventh floor. While I didn’t get to see any fireworks shows up close and overhead, I did get to see over a dozen — probably close to twenty — fireworks shows from a distance, including the ones in Washington DC and Leesburg. It was really quite an impressive vista, since most of the fireworks shows started at about the same time… I think I might have gotten whiplash, looking from one horizon to the other. Definately a very interesting view of the night’s events. I attempted to take pictures of the fireworks — if any of them are any good, I’ll post them later.

getting started

Published on July 3, 2006 in programming and work. 0 Comments by cflipse

First day at new project today.

Of course, I’m mired in various bureacratic setup issues … you know, little things like system accounts and network access.

Promises to be interesting though. My project manager has just come back from some kind of conference on agile development, and she seems to be quite fired up. My network access issues look to be somewhat mitigated by the fact that she wants to give pair programming a good try … so, it turns out that I won’t actually need my accounts and such right away. I’ve never really done pair programming before, but it should be an interesting experience… The other developer I’m pairing with knows what he’s talking about, as far as the depths of Ruby go, so at least I will get something out of it … ;)

Josh Bloch: nearly all binary searches are broken.

Published on June 7, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments by cflipse

Official Google Research Blog: Extra Extra – Read All About It! Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts are Broken

Just … wow.

this thing has gone unnoticed for over 20 years. And in most cases, probably wouldn’t affect you, since integer overflow isn’t a huge problem for you “typical” application.

It only took a second for me to pick out what the bug was. But, that’s after having the exact line of code pointed out, and knowing it was wrong.. These things are insideous.

Job on Rails

Published on June 1, 2006 in work. 0 Comments by cflipse

So, it looks like I’ve decided on a new position.

Not without some trepidation, of course. The bad is that I’m looking at what could easily be a painful commute through traffic. Though there are supposedly enough ways to the campus, and I’ll have enough schedule flexibility, that traffic really shouldn’t be a worry. Still, I have this irrational fear of Nothern VA traffic. I like driving, not stop and go.

The other fear that I have is that I’ll find out that I really just can’t stand working in a vault. I’m very much a product of a connected world. Lacking quick and easy access to the internet is like lacking access my temporal lobe.

But, the good: I’ll be working on a project in Ruby on Rails. In the community I’m working in, that’s pretty big. “Early adopter” means that they managed to get Windows 2000 on desktops in 2005, so this is pretty big. I’ll get to work on a Unix system (yay!) and the project is relatively green-field — it’s a total redesign of a rather cumbersome enterprisey system that can’t be upgraded. I sort-of know one of the guys I’ll be working with. Enough to know for certain that he knows Ruby really well. Whereas I’ve just sort of dabbled with it. I’ll be learning a lot on that front. To top it all off, the intention of the program is not only one that I can agree with, but one that I think will actually do something useful.

So … new working environment, opportunity to learn something, and the chance to do something good out of it? I’ll deal with the drive.

Ubuntu 6.06 beta

Published on May 30, 2006 in linux. 0 Comments by cflipse

So, I updated my laptop to the beta version of the next release of ubnutu over the weekend.

I’m just starting to get my teeth into it, but I’ll keep updating this posting as I make new observations.

Biases: I’m a longtime Debian user, and have come to take the magic of apt for granted. I have, in the past, configured my system using automount and udev to deal with USB drives appearing and disappearing. I’m a command line junky, so I have very little use for Gnome and it’s ilk. I long ago decided that X11 is for web browsers, and getting lots of terminal windows on the same screen.

The good:

  • As advertised, bootup times are much improved. And, since I’m currently running on a laptop, that’s important. The post-login, especially, noticably faster.
  • The fonts are terrific. I noticed an immediate improvement in web pages through firefox (which is my primary non-terminal application).
  • visually, the new theme is nice. There are a couple of small things I’m not quite so keen on, but it’s a good improvement in eye candy.
  • apt-get install sun-jdk-java5. What else can I say?
  • I’ve had at least one person shoulder-surfing at work remark with some surprise … desktop linux has come a looong way.

The bad:

  • I can’t figure out how to configure the Network Manager that the upgrade page advertises. From what I can find, it’s pretty much supposed to work automagically. It finds none of my wireless networks, either at work or at home — and there’s pretty much a whole building’s worth of wireless networks at my apartment. I havn’t found any config files to edit, and near as I can tell, I have everything installed that it needs. It’s not a huge deal, but hey … this is a laptop. networks change, and it’d be nice not to have to throw a password to do so.
  • It appears that there’s still no ruby gems installer in the base distribution. This is obstinantly due to some kind of packaging disagreement between the langague folks and the distribution … but, if it works with CPAN …

The Ugly:

  • My laptop has media keys along the far right of the keyboard. They’re your standard “pause, foward, back” type keys … I havn’t figured out how to get ubuntu to recognize them.
  • default desktop. This is more of a “I don’t like gnome” sort of complaint, but … I hate desktop icons. They’re not compatable with how I work, and they just get in the way. I havn’t figured out where I need to go to turn them off. In order to turn them off, you have to run gconf-editor (because the gnome people, for some reason, think a registry is a good idea. The mess in windows is apparently not enough of a deterrant) and disable the key /apps/nautilus/preferences/show_desktop.

apt-get install sun-java5-jdk

Published on May 16, 2006 in linux and programming. 1 Comment by cflipse

via SunMink:
JDK on GNU/Linux

Finally!

I’ve been running Debian for … oh, eight years or so, I think. Moved to debian during the libc6 update, because I didn’t want to upgrade my slackware system myself. Debian has, without a dobut, the best packaging system in the linux/unix world.

Of course, it also has some of the most opinionated, bigoted and stubborn people in the linux/unix world. And, by bigoted, I mean “against anything not Free”. The current fight is with the Free Software Foundation (!) over the GNU Free Documentation License. Debian seems to belive that it’s not free enough, and is currently removing whole swaths of manuals and documentation because of it.

This approach has actually been remarkably effective in the past — Debian is primarily responsible for changing KDE’s licence back in the late 90’s because they refused to distribute it.

So, in some sense, it’s not surprising to see that they were working on a mutually agreeable license with Sun. On the other hand, Java has been shipped under the same license for most of it’s 10 year history — ever since JDK2 came out, really. It’s surprising to see that inertia shift directions.

It’ll certainly make the packaging and distribution of java-based applications much easier. This goes in the “win” column.

Hello, World

Published on May 16, 2006 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments by cflipse

It seems that this is going to be a reincarnation of my blog, as I’m having problems getting wordpress to accept the old database, without locking out my ability to post anything new.

Online bug reports are less than helpful. Oh well, there wasn’t much in the old incarnation that was really worth holding onto anyway. So, it looks like I get to start from scratch.

So, “Hello, world”.