Getting my head around Cocoa

I needed cvs on my new macbook, so I installed xcode, so I didn't have to figure out how to use macports.

I had xcode, so I cracked it open. And for the first time, I'm noodling a bit with a compiled version (I've compiled java from time to time, but was never sucked into actually playing with it the way I have with perl & javascript).

As always with a new toolkit, the radical differences are jumping out at me.

Messages! what a trip! [Receiver message]. So yes, I get that foo.bar() is basically, in many ways the same thing as [foo bar] (tell foo that it should "bar()". Somehow more elegant.

The other thing is passing named values is the default. Yes, you can make the default value an array, but now that I'm constantly context switching, I really can't remember what goes where in an array, so I really appreciate:

[foo bar:baz silly:YES]

And of course it's odd to be so illiterate that I can't even type two lines without generating warnings and errors. I'm such a noob!

Adventures in Vista Land

So I finally bit the bullet a few months back and bought a computer w/ Vista when the old home server running XP pro died.

First priority was to install itunes and get everything moved over. That took a bit of fiddling as I tried over and over to convince Vista that I wanted to be able to have access to all the CDs we worked so had to rip. Eventually i got the library moved over, and then I had to figure out how to keep the playlists, and evenutally I had that done as well. Some xml files I had to copy over or something like that.

At which point we just used it as DVD player and itunes server for a while. Everyone knows you can’t use vista for anything, so trying to use it as a computer seemed unrealistic.

Finally I really bit the bullet this week and dove in. Since Vista Premium isn’t premium enough to let me use remote desktop, I had to figure out how get VNC setup. TightVNC seemed to have trouble refreshing (wouldn’t show me the start menu when I opened it, for example), so I ended up with ultraVNC, which does everything you’d expect. And I don’t have to give M$ more money, that’s a nice thing.

Next was setting up all the shares I used to have set up on the XP box. That actually turned out to be super easy.  I’d actually had the easiest printer setup ever a couple months back, when I’d just plugged it in and been able to use it. So maybe Vista isn’t evil?

Then today it was time to edit an old ASP site. Did IIS still exist? Did it still support ASP? As it turns out, IIS is still part of Windowsland, and it appears that my old ASP pages will eventually work. I’m not sure I’ve actually used active server pages this century, but interesting to see that its all still there. Key things I had to figure out:

• I don’t like using inetpub, so had to set up permissions for IIS to use one of my document directories as root. Both IIS_IUSRS and IUSR needed to have read access to my site
• Once a local browser could access the site, I had to open a hole in the Vista firewall on port 80. Didn’t seem to be pre-defined, so I had to create a custom firewall rule that I decided to call “Port 80”

Makes me wonder if there’s some button somewhere I could have pushed to enable anonymous web access to this directory? But mostly it makes me wonder if I really want to mess with old crufty ASP pages. I already know how to edit Apache conf files. I don’t want to learn how to use a whole new interface.

Thinking about it, the thing that really gets me is that I don’t much care for learning new operating systems. I’m comfortable with XP (I use an XP laptop at work). I can get Linux to run all the web servers I need. And none of that seems to be much help with Vista, where whenever I need to do something new I find myself using google to find answers to newbie questions.

Another Blue Screen

When I opened my laptop this morning, the blue screen was counting down as it stored some kind of information on my hard drive. Evidence, should I need it, that the operating system had lost its bearing and collapsed suddenly.

I am struck suddenly by the realization that the computers I've been living with these last fifteen years are far less reliable than the VW bus I owned in the early '90s, an antique that stripped a spline on its drive wheel in the middle of death valley once, and another time stopped running on the freeway because the fuel hose had slipped off the carburetor and was merrily spraying gasoline across the entire engine compartment.

This thing, this machine, on which my livelihood depends, these contraptions that so many of us spend our days fiddling with, constantly grappling with mechanical and software failures of one kind or another. Somehow to realize that these ubiquitous computational devices are far, far less reliable than thirty-year-old VW buses fills me with wonder. The incredible patience of millions of computer users. The unfounded optimism that today's task will somehow be completed even as thousands of us are stranded on the side of the road, wondering how to bring the contraption back to life.

Quick! To the emails! To the presentations! To the spreadsheets! Before the next blue screen stops us in our tracks!

Javascript Cheat Sheet

Cause I don't write js often enough to remember its syntax

Add js file to a page

var s=document.createElement('script');
s.setAttribute('src','http://foo.com/bar.js');
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(s);

Add jQuery to a page

http://www.learningjquery.com/2008/06/updated-jquery-bookmarklet

Append js to a node in DOM w/ jQuery

$("#tab4").append("<script> alert("hello!") </script> ");

IT 2.0

After working in technology since 1994, my biggest impression is this: IT costs too much.

This won't change overnight, but 50 years from now, companies will be budgeting, per user, much less for IT. And they'll get a whole lot more value.

I've very little idea of how this will happen. But for the time being, I've got a ringside seat, working for the IT department of a fairly large company.

This week, economist wrote about how AdventNet is trying to play a role in the next IT revolution:

http://www.economist.com/people/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12052307&fsrc=rss

It Depends

I live in a land of partial questions, where folks are constantly asking me how long it will take to build a web site or a page weeks or months before we've figured out what that site or page should consist of.

So my answer to most questions is some variation of it depends, usually dressed up a little, as in "we typically like to schedule this sort of change 2-6 months ahead of time, depending on the number of integration points, reliability requirements, and impacted processes." Big words like that convey the impression that I'm paying close attention (which in fact is something I try to do), and I've found with experience that if I just say "It depends" folks will think I'm one of those annoying tech types who refuses to give a straight answer.

Or maybe I'm just a windbag with a rationalization? Some of both I suppose.

Of course some of the reasons that things depend have little to do with the difficulties folks have in understanding that for me to build something, they need to know what they want to build.  For example:

http://www.webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Because web browsers are wacky. Not in a way that I've figured out how to easily explain to folks who fall asleep the minute the gory details come up, and who never had to learn how hideous Netscape 4.7 was, or of the torture of working with  browsers from Redmond. Browsers are strange and twisted little things because they were coded by humans who had to make the best of of a bad set of options while on a ridiculous timeline.

So it goes.

Time

Somehow, this afternoon at least, there seems to be a connection between turning 40 and realizing how little time there are to attend to the myriad opportunities each day brings.

I stumbled over some nice writing on this topic today:

Accept that your workload exceeds your resources — that you are the first and last filter for what deserves your time — and you’ll already be better off than you were even two minutes ago.

Merlin Mann, http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/13/philosophy

Where am I?

Ok, windows knows where perl is now. But my htdocs is in a completely different place.  And the hostname changes too.

No idea if this will stand the test of time, but here's my figure out where I function right now, which appears to work on both my windows XP laptop and the linux host I use most often:

(my $script, my $path, my $script_url, my $script_url_path, my $host) = figure_out_script_and_path();

sub figure_out_script_and_path{
    my $script, my $path, my $script_url, my $script_url_path, my $host;

    if ($0 =~ m#^\w:#){ # should be true on a windows host
        $script = $0;
            $script =~ s#^\w:.*\/##; #remove path
        $path = $0;
            $path =~ s#(^\w:.*)\/[^\/]*$#$1#; # remove name of script
    }
    else { # assume path starts with a slash:
        $script = $0;
            $script =~ s#^\/.*\/##; #remove path
        $path = $0;
            $path =~ s#(^\/.*)\/[^\/]*$#$1#; # remove name of script
    }

    $script_url = $ENV{"SCRIPT_NAME"};
    $script_url_path = $script_url;
    $script_url_path =~s#(^\/.*)\/[^\/]*$#$1#;
    $host = $ENV{"SERVER_NAME"};

    return ($script, $path, $script_url, $script_url_path, $host);

}

Would you believe that windows live writer doesn't have a "code" option in the format menu? And I'm afraid I'm too lazy to edit the source. :)

#!/usr/bin/perl on windows

Thankyou perl monks for your wisdom:

http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=167481

I installed activestate in c:\usr, and now I can use the same shebang line on my windows laptop as on my linux box.

Life can be so extremely good!

8% slower

Breaking news, as I approach my 40th birthday. I'm slow, and getting slower:

"a 40-year-old user will take 8% longer than a 30-year-old user to accomplish the same task. And a 50-year-old user will require an additional 8% more time."

This, it turns out, is perfectly natural:

"The human aging process starts around age 25 and causes erosion of cognitive resources, loss of visual acuity, degraded reaction times, and reduced dexterity. People need more time for the same mental operations; they have less memory capacity and take longer to process the same perceptual input."

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/middle-aged-users.html

Javascript is Taking Over the World!

John Resig just created a map of the campaign so far:

Wireshark

I just spent a few minutes playing with wireshark, and definitely want to spend more time noodling with it next time I need to understand what's happening on the wire:

http://www.wireshark.org/

Money isn't everything

A recent economist article reviews some research McKinsey did on education, where, unsurprisingly, how schools are managed has a great deal to do with how they perform (How to be top, October 20, 2007):

• "the best performing countries do much better than the worst and ... the same countries head such league tables again and again: Canada, Finland, Japan, Singapore, South Korea."
• Schools "need to do three things: get the best teachers; get the best out of teachers; and step in when pupils start to lag behind."

My favorite part of the article was a discussion of being selective when hiring teachers (which matters a lot, as opposed to class size, which doesn't after primary school). Being selective isn't about paying people more. It's about being selective.

This is one of the critical issues in management: blinded by a simplistic view of the efficiency of markets (and so thinking that when it comes to hiring you get what you pay for), organizations fail to devote sufficient attention to being selective, which is crazy stupid. The best people are attentive with regards to money, but compensation is one factor among many. Many, for example, will reject a 50% raise in compensation that would require them to work with ineffective bores.

Singapore and Finland are extremely selective, so that in both countries "teaching is a high-status profession". Effective and high-status does not correlate with highly paid!

Anecdotally, I can confirm this with regards to the team I work on. We can't pay people extravagantly, but we can be very selective, and we are. The results are a team that is effective and has earned the respect of the various teams we collaborate with.

Windows Live Writer

Is it ridiculously web 1.0 of me to wonder if a desktop blogging client would be worth using?

 

Check it out. I took a screen shot of the post I'm writing, and pasted it into the post! I love recursion.

Mini Blogging is the new black

The cool thing about mini-blogging is that I was actually doing it on facebook before I read an article comparing different mini-blogging sites.

But mostly it just makes me feel old. Where did all of these sites come from? When? Why so many of them?

The web has clearly morphed from a place where I sort of had a sense of how technology worked and had a small sense about how it worked into yet another unfathomably large intractable human mess of activity.

The web isn't a black swan any more. It's freaking flock of swans, all flying in different directions. My head can't take it any more.

not such a nice view

I had my first close encounter with Vista this weekend on a laptop that my father-in-law purchased recently. He hates it with a passion, and it's pretty easy to see why. So far as either of us could tell, it's a lot like XP, except a zillion times slower. It's like back to the 1980s, where you have to go get a cup of coffee after you start an application and before it actually comes up.

He's an avid musician, and starting to look at using different music software and hardware. And he keeps tripping over the fact that he's got Vista instead of an older version of windows.

Since I work in technology, I of course don't know anybody else who'se using Vista. I guess we all know to stay away from new Microsoft operating systems for a couple of years.

Joel Spolsky, a tech writer who doesn't hate microsoft, agrees: "I've been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system -- it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled)."

I avoided XP for a while, and now am completely happy with it. And I expect Vista to be a fine operating system when I start using it around 2009 or 2010, when all the software and peripherals I need will have worked out the rough edges.

closures

I'm still a little annoyed that we haven't figured out how to download knowledge the way Neo learned kungfu while reclining in a dentist chair in the Matrix.

In the meantime, the next best thing for understanding javascript closures may be this post:

http://jibbering.com/faq/faq_notes/closures.html

I'm not ready to claim that I totally understand closures, or scope, or exactly what js objects are. But I will assert that I've read most of this page slowly and carefully, and suspect that I will be less likely to get create closures by accident or stub my toes on scope.

Baby steps!

thinking inside the box

Something called an active directory migration (AD is a tool for managing windows login accounts) has made it impossible for me to boot my computer unless I am connected to the corporate network. So much for telecomuting.

But XP is pretty stable, so I just need to not reboot while away from the office. The kicker was that somehow my laptop has decided recently that it can't recognize my home wireless network unless I reboot when I get home. So after I came back from the office Friday, I wasn't able to get back online until I went in again this morning. Ridiculous!

Until I realized that I still have a stack of ethernet cables that would be perfectly happy to connect me to my wireless router, and then to the Internet. So here I am, 1990's style, with a 25' cable running across the living room. And it took me less than a week to remember that I had this obsolete technology available as a failover.

I don't even want to think about what I would do in a blackout. mindlessly sit at the door, flipping the light switch on and off, over and over again?

ny to paris

Technology really does make the world better. See for yourself.

addons

Setting up my new laptop with:

The new delicious toolbar from mozilla wants to take over my bookmarks. Hopefully I won't regret handing over the keys to some yahoo subsidiary:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615

Web Developer, of course, although I wonder how long until it is completely subsumed by firebug:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Firebug. Gosh I like firebug. When I grow up, I want to be smart like Joe Hewitt.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843

I have to use greasemonkey if I want to see what Nathan's been up to:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

If you have to use FTP, doing it from firefox is nice:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/684

IEtab. Still trying to figure out whether or not this one is must-have. Still on the list for now:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419