Blah blah blah iPad blah blah blah

Posted February 1, 2010 at 12:58 EST under technology.

I've refrained from discussing the latest technology news that seems to have all panties everywhere in a twist, but I was amazed at the number of smart people who just didn't get it.

I'm still not going to discuss the latest pants-twisting news because this post sums the whole thing up perfectly.

I will add one single comment here, though: hackers and geeks often make terrible choices when it comes to what the rest of the world actually needs from technology. There are design and usability trade-offs that trump ideals, no matter how lofty or technically correct.

There are some companies that, by and large, get that.

    Don't mess with Texas (Instruments Hobbyists)

Posted October 14, 2009 at 09:35 EDT under technology.

I still don't understand why companies that are such a big part of the homebrew explosion that powered the early history of computing want to sue their fans and hobbyist core into oblivion.

Case in point: Texas Instruments has sent DMCA take-down lawyer-grams to several sites for reporting that hobbyists have cracked the signing key used in some programmable calculators. These keys allow one to write their own applications for these calculators, which is a fine and honourable tradition among hobbyists. It hurts no one, and TI is merely alienating their hobby base and making themselves look like asses. It hurts no one that these keys are available to hobby coders so they can hack on their own devices. The mere publication of the keys means nothing for those TI calculator users who could care less.

Fortunately, the EFF has stepped in to assist with the legal wrangling. Basically, they issued a statement that challenges TI to put up or shut up. TI risks a lengthy legal battle if they sue their own customers, thanks to pro bono efforts by the EFF.

The DMCA is stupid and TI is being stupid. If I could trust my ISP to stand up to bullies I'd host the keys here (this site is hosted in Canada, so suck it) but TI is even harassing sites that provide links to where one might find these keys.

So it looks like I'm stirring this ant's nest a little anyway. Whee!

    Leeloo Dallas Multicore

Posted April 28, 2009 at 01:17 EDT under technology.

For those of you who have not seen this via Metafilter and are a little confused and alarmed by my semi-recent musings on multi-core computers and multi-threaded applications, this Intel document is one of the best lay descriptions of threading I have ever read.

    Self-portrait by Arduino

Posted April 16, 2009 at 12:10 EDT under technology.

A self-portrait taken by the Arduino Nikon control prototype I'm building. I'm going to present this informally at the KW Perl Mongers Arduino hacking show and tell tomorrow.

The little clear plastic thingy on the left senses any change in light. If that change is large enough the little clear plastic thingy in the centre sends the right sort of infrared pulses to the camera, telling it to take a photo.

I pretty much stole most of the ideas from the internet, except for the detection circuit which I dreamed up based on vague memories from high-school shop.

    All hacking and no play makes Clever a dull Monkey

Posted April 11, 2009 at 06:06 EDT under technology.

Another week, another Arduino patch. I'm spending more time hacking the Java IDE that you use to talk to the device than I am hacking the actual hardware.

I can't help it! My new computer compiles and debugs so fast I thought it was broken at first. I had to prove to myself that it was actually completing a clean build in the time it took to glance away to look at some documentation.

And so there's my incentive to use the Xcode Java debugger to track down weird multi-threaded race conditions, which are surprisingly easy to reproduce on a 8-core box. Go figure.

(For the benefit of those of you who have let you eyes glaze over while skimming for the droll comments, the preceding paragraph suggests that big, fast computers with many CPUs uncover a whole nasty subset of programming defects that are very difficult to solve in some cases. It is also the sort of defect that I have become pretty good at solving, mostly by pure feel and guesswork.)

Alas, you've come all this way, and no droll comment.

Well, off to Chez Zuckervati for an old fashioned sub-zero bar-be-cue.

    Beyond Blinky

Posted April 3, 2009 at 05:10 EDT under technology.

Well, I have my 3V1L plans for the Arduino, I think. They are super-sekrit so I can scale them back without looking like a quitter.

What's that? It has already been established that I am a big quitter, even by my own admission?

Yes, but I quit under my own terms. I don't want to actually share the depths of my quititude. We don't know each other well enough for that.

So, off to the local 'lectronics shop tomorrow to pick up some discrete parts for general and specific hackery. Stage 2a, section 5 in my Plan For World Domination With µControllers involves three LEDs. One for each primary colour. Of course, Stage 2a is simply a cover for Stage 5q, which involves IR LEDs and a photodiode. Mysterious!

You have been warned.

    Bugs R Us

Posted April 1, 2009 at 10:33 EDT under technology.

It's a little perverse, but on my time off I sometimes end up doing exactly what I do at work. It just doesn't feel like work, though. I can't explain why.

Case in point: I may have gone ahead and earned my second geek merit badge by fixing a bug I found in the Arduino IDE source. (I also happen to be Inbox Zero now for the better part of a year.) I was lurking on the Arduino user forum when I read that someone was having trouble with the Java-based Arduino app on Windows.

So, perversely, I offered technical support (as one does) and ended up hacking up a patch for them after a few days of back-and-forth.

I mean, to me this is just a tiny thing. One looks at a stacktrace and reads the code and then tries to figure out what the code is supposed to do. Then, one comes up with a solution to make it do the correct thing. Trivial, right?

Of course, the fact is that majority of the people reading this were probably lost at the word stacktrace. What with the who now?

And why not? Honestly, this stuff isn't important to the majority of people, nor should it be. It just occurs to me that these series of little things which are so obvious to me are further complicated by the fact that one has to do or know a great number of other little things just to get from, say, stacktrace to read code. The expertise is not in the individual knowing, sometimes, but in the knowing how to place all these discrete steps not just in order, but in the graph (if you will) of understanding.

Or maybe I'm just waxing on far too philosophical about the nature of specific knowledge.

At any rate, I'll do my best to submit this fix to the Arduino project, or at least a fix like it that addresses the underlying defect (I'm not convinced that the original code is doing what it the author intended, in which case my current fix is more of a band-aid than anything else.) And then I'll go to work tomorrow and do the same thing there. It's all so ordinary and, I recognize, a little weird, too.

That's just how I roll, yo.

    Das blinkenlights von Perl und C

Posted March 27, 2009 at 08:29 EDT under technology.

Here's my new toy that I talked about earlier.

Yesterday, I grabbed the latest IDE and dev tools for the Mac, installed the USB-to-TTY device driver for OS X, and dug the appropriate USB cable out of my box of random computer parts. I can now report that I have successfully (wait for it) MADE A LED BLINK ON AND OFF.

Today, I decided to see if I could get Perl to talk to it, so I built and installed the Device::SerialPort Perl Module and adapted (read: stole) a simply proggy off the internet to write data to the Arduino over the fake USB TTY serial port. A chunk of C code on the Arduino echoed that data back. Success!

Now that I am a l33t hax0r on the Arduino with Perl, I'm wondering what I should do with it. Part of me wants to go whole-hog and hack up a solderless breadboard shield for it so I can easily play with a variety of I/O. There really is so much packed into this little device that I'm limited only by my electronics skills and imagination. Sadly, both of these are quite rusty with age and disuse.

There is a 13-year old geek inside me that is all squee! about the lowered barriers to entry into electronic and computer hackery that these devices represent.

    Blinky lights

Posted March 3, 2009 at 10:59 EST under technology.

Just so you know that my life isn't all abject failure, I can let you know that our local Perl Mongers group is hosting an Arduino collective hardware hacking project. I've talked before about my stunningly weak Perl-Fu in the past, but decided to get in on the cool Arduino action anyway.

I mean, sure, why not hack on the thing in Perl? If I get lost I can switch to Forth or C.

The real question is, what sort of project should I do? Honestly, all I've ever done with microcontrollers and single-board computers is make motors turn and blinky lights blink.

As usual with me, when I want to try out some neat tech the hardest part is figuring out what to do with it.

Maybe I'll have the blinky lights flash Hello, World! in Morse code.

    The Outlook is grim

Posted February 1, 2009 at 11:35 EST under technology.

So, I recently switched back to Outlook as a mail client at work, after several years of Mozilla Thunderbird as my main mail app. Much has been made of this at the office, I presume because any movement between proprietary and open-source is seen as being part of some greater ideological struggle. That is, if one has ever suggested that open-source options are good, it might be easier to place one in the open-source zealotry camp simply because there is no room for any sort of nuanced view of this highly polarized issue.

Honestly, I just wanted more control over all the spam I get, and better integration to my corporate calendar. Since our back-end is some sort of Exchange with an IMAP bag hanging off of it, and Thunderbird was starting to really piss me off with its inability to manage a very large inbox, I decided to give the latest Outlook a try.

And let's face it: Outlook in 2001 or 2002 really and truly sucked. It was a pig, hardly worked for anything beyond basic replies, and made such poor decisions about authoring plain-text emails that once I took a position where I didn't need the inbox-sharing capabilities of Outlook, I switched to the then-new Thunderbird.

And T-Bird worked well for me for many years. It did 95% of what I needed at work, and the rest could be handled by the Exchange web client. But recently T-Bird has been spinning on my inbox. Or hanging when sending emails. Or being unable to open attachments. And it generally never had the inside information necessary to really get along with Exchange (which, of course, is not its fault).

Outlook 2007 is still retarded when it comes to replying plain-text to some emails. It just doesn't live in a strange world where some wacky person might not want to use WordPad or Word as an email editor. But the Exchange calendar integration is (of course) very good. Since I spend more and more time in my calendar these days, this is what the cool kids call a win. It also has a very customizable interface that lets me collapse all the user-interface clutter until I'm left with an email folder, and a view of that email. With a single gesture I still have access to all the bells-and-whistles, but they are hidden until I need them. Another win.

And really, when I enumerate all the reasons for not using a proprietary email client at work I come up short. I mean, shit, who cares if the mail is stored in some weird format that only the dark wizards at Microsoft understand, and one that is subject to change without notice? Every single email that goes to or from my corporate account belongs to my employer! They store it, they own it, and if they need access to it after the coming apocalypse, they are welcome to sacrifice whatever and whoever they need in order to retrieve it.

It just isn't my problem.

Of course, at home I store my email in a somewhat open format. Though, truth be told, between Apple Mail and Gmail, I have no idea if any of this data will last longer than a few years. Given the nature of most emails I have, I'm thinking it really doesn't matter. I'm more concerned with the archives of digital photos we are all going to lose over the years as image formats morph, cameras change and hard drives die. I've taken more steps to ensure that my raw digital images are (essentially) future-proof than any other document kind.

I'll consider this Good Enough data retention. Especially since I have Mutt (or, rather mbox, MMDF, MH, or maildir) to fall back on, which is where I archive my really important email.

So, it really isn't a big deal that I switched to Outlook, away from Thunderbird. I would never have switched to Exchange away from open mail and calendar standards like my company did (and I still think this was a bad decision) but what is done is done. They sign my cheques, which means I have to get along. At this point Outlook is the path of least resistance, especially since Thunderbird just can't seem to keep up anymore (to be fair, even Outlook choked on my decades-old account when I first started it up, but once it spent an hour indexing it all, it appears to be quite happy).

I still hate how the concept of plain-text email replies seems to be beyond the capabilities of Outlook, but since no one seems to use sane edit-and-reply techniques at the office when responding to emails, I've just given up on that anyway. If everyone thinks that lazily tagging a single line to the top of a grungy, useless email trail is the way to go, why wrestle with the tofu? I'll still force plain-text when I can (breaking all the formatting when I do so, which I take a sick sort of glee in doing) but, really, email has reached a point where it has failed as a business tool anyway.

Email is sort of a zombie tech, lurching its way to the next headshot.

    Apple Mail, Gmail and Notes

Posted December 6, 2008 at 11:41 EST under technology.

It is still totally beta, but I actually use the To Do and Notes feature of Apple Mail quite a bit. I like how it hooks up with iCal and centralizes my stuff in one interface that I always have enabled.

What I don't like is how flaky and buggy these features are, especially when you have references to IMAP mailbox accounts. For some reason Mail wants to update Gmail with changes to Notes before they are saved and even when you are making the Note on a local IMAP account.

The results are Notes that can't save, or disappear, and 10s or 100s of failed Notes that hang around forever and cannot be deleted. And I mean cannot, ever, ever be deleted, no matter what you do.

But I ran across a hint that suggested I revisit the Gmail account settings. Specifically, Gmail IMAP supports the IDLE state for remote accounts. This is, essentially, a way for IMAP servers to push updates to authenticated clients.

This means your client spends less time actually going to the server to ask for mail. It will sit patiently knowing that Gmail (or whoever) will let it know when there is new mail.

A side-effect of this change is that Notes and To Dos are much more friendly, and the confusing cycle-of-updates that was causing them to endlessly loop while you were creating them seems to have solved itself.

So, if you use Apple Mail, and subscribe to one or more Gmail accounts, make sure you use IMAP. Furthermore, for each one of those IMAP accounts in Apple Mail that support IDLE (your provider, like Google, will say if they do) go into the Advanced settings and clear the Include when automatically checking for new mail option.

You will still get your mail regularly as ever, but your client will spend less time hitting the server for no reason. As a bonus, To Dos and Notes will work better.

Hopefully posting this here will help lost internauts find a solution to this problem that I struggled with for months.

    Ice ice, baby

Posted June 1, 2008 at 11:36 EDT under technology. Updated June 19, 2008 at 10:56 EDT.

Because I've been a space nerd since I was a kid, I have been idly following the NASA Phoenix mission to Mars via Twitter. (Which, by the way, is a nearly ideal way to disseminate this sort of up-to-the-minute information using a pull model.)

Image courtesy NASA

Today, they seem to have found ice directly underneath the vehicle, which is very good since this is the whole rasion d'etre of the mission. Apparently, there was much cheering and aerospace high-fiving at mission control when they saw this image.

I'm not exactly sure the reasons why, but this stuff just turns my engineering crank (and by several turns, too). I also remember that one of my near-misses as a coder over a decade ago was a contract to help develop the command-and-control software for a low-altitude orbit vehicle being sent to Mars.

To this day I don't understand why I didn't jump at this chance and move to New Brunswick to spend the next six months of my life immersed in radiation-hardened Forth.

Oh well. The path not taken, and all that, eh?

[Read the rest...]

    The dichotomization of the human brain

Posted May 18, 2008 at 01:04 EDT under technology.

Why is it that us post-modern humans so often assume that criticism of some notion, item or expression immediately suggests support of some (real or imaginary) opposite notion, item or expression?

For example, at a recent geeky get-together I made note of the raft of problems I've been having with Windows XP at work, it was suggested that I should (of course) switch to Linux.

Er, what?

I mean, sure, I suppose one could try to use Linux as a primary desktop, and more than a few developers on my team have tried to do just this (with, shall we say, mixed results), but this is exactly the sort of advice that helping is not all about. However, expressing this does not automatically mean I'm some anti-Linux zealot. I'm a firm believer that zealotry is often a mark of weak thinking and a lack of understanding of one's own convictions.

[Read the rest...]

    Reason #125 why Nintendo will win the Gaming Platform Wars

Posted May 12, 2008 at 02:09 EDT under technology.

How can you win a war against legions of 22-month old gamers? It's unpossible.

Me, I'm honing my shell-tossing and skidding skills so I'm ready when hostilities break out.

    Well, that was weird

Posted February 24, 2008 at 11:57 EST under technology.

From the who-cares-I-just-want-my-mail-to-arrive dept.:

Something stupid, weird and incredibly arcane happened to the services that host Eco-Monkey World Domination Inc. over the last few days. If you want the long, boring and detail-filled version, just skip down below the fold.

Otherwise, a brief synopsis:

The edge box that handles all incoming traffic to our internal services (i.e., web, email and so on) seems to have been the target of a spam flood over the last few days. The effect on our network was negligible to the point of going almost completely unnoticed.

It's only because I snoop in system logs occasionally that I noticed something weird going on.

Because OpenBSD is all kinds of awesome, I tweaked one line in a configuration file and like magic all this pointless traffic was dropped at the modem. Easy-peasy and harmless, unless you happen to be surfing from some of these same locations from where this spam originated.

In which case you can't read this. My heart bleeds cold borscht for you.

[Read the rest...]

    Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Posted February 12, 2008 at 02:38 EST under technology.

Reason #137 for Why I Am A Big Geek:

It makes me squeal like a little girl when I see that the APC UPS (purchased on a whim even though I knew I'd have to battle with the USB support to get it to work on OpenBSD) now presents me with messages similar to these in the system logs:

Sun Feb 10 12:41:03 EST 2008  Power failure.
Sun Feb 10 12:41:05 EST 2008  Power is back. UPS running on mains.

Under the right circumstances, I can also expect to see the following (captured during a test of the software, where I just pulled the plug out of the wall):

Mon Jan 28 19:45:06 EST 2008  Power failure.
Mon Jan 28 19:45:12 EST 2008  Running on UPS batteries.
Mon Jan 28 19:45:48 EST 2008  Mains returned. No longer on UPS batteries.
Mon Jan 28 19:45:48 EST 2008  Power is back. UPS running on mains.

What is scary is how much power the UPS has available before it has to switch to battery power.

In other news, the UPS also tells me that the entire Eco-Monkey World Domination Inc. machine room bottom shelf of the Ikea corner unit consumes about 37W at idle.

I love that word, mains. It's so English. Whoops! There goes reason #138.

    Airtunes '77

Posted January 21, 2008 at 08:12 EST under technology.

So, at one point I purchased an Airport Express from Apple with the intention that I would use it to stream music to the stereo. I assumed (correctly, it turns out) that I could also use it to flood my locale with Wi-Fi signal by hooking it up to the Airport base station as a WDS relay.

However, I wasn't able to figure out how to get it to work properly. Either I had Airtunes and no internet, or I had internet but could not see the Airport Express. Or I had nothing at all. And the base station was never happy with the WDS marriage. I probably have an unexpected and non-standard config here. I pretty much let the OpenBSD edge box take care of host, naming and address sharing services, so the base station is used only as a bridge.

So, getting the second Wi-Fi device to do Airtunes or WDS or both eluded me for nearly a year. The internet informed me that it was possible, however, so I persevered. Last night I was able to figure it out, and was rewarded with a WDS system that allows me to stream songs hosted on my main desktop (or from any Mac, but my desktop hosts the bulk of the music I own) to the stereo via iTunes running on any Mac in the house.

Unfortunately, I have no clear idea how I managed to do this, since I just hacked at it until it worked. I think it involved some sort of deal with one or more lesser daemons, possible involving entrails of various mammals. Sorry, it was late, and I was a little out of it. There may have been heinous crimes against children. And easy-listening soft-rock radio. Sorry about that.

See, I had to do a manual WDS configuration (because of my correct, but complex, internal wired and Wi-Fi network) and Apple assumes you are doing this the easy way, where everything is automagically set up for you.

Still, I'm awfully pleased with myself that I was finally able to set things up so I can share out my iTunes library from my G4, through the router via Ethernet to the base station, to the G3 iBook via Wi-Fi, back to the Express via Wi-Fi and have the sound come out from the fancy stereo.

Anyway, I think it's rather apropos that I am currently streaming Bowie's Station to Station both to my local workstation and my stereo downstairs.

    A Leopard changes its spots

Posted October 29, 2007 at 10:03 EDT under technology.

So, we got ourselves Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard over the week-end. Installation was (as usual) fast and simple. It looks like Time Machine will solve most of the one-button back-up solutions I was trying to cook up for ecogrrl's trip to Ghana. I know she's also enjoying the Cover Flow Finder view to help wrangle large folders of documents.

All this and more has been discussed all weekend on other sites, and I have very little to add. In all the discussions on the new window look and behaviour, I did notice that I haven't seen a mention of iTunes being yet another exception to the new UI design rule.

Most folks will note that the active vs. inactive windows are much more obvious. The dark to light grey transition is even a little jarring, and is one of those things I noticed first, without really seeing exactly what was different on the desktop.

But not with iTunes. Perhaps because many people run iTunes in the collapsed view (or from a widget, or the menubar, or ...), where the whole app is essentially a window bar, iTunes does not indicate with a change in colour when it is in the background. It is always dark grey, the foreground colour. The only visual cue you have that it is in the foreground is the window shadow, which is much larger (and more diffuse) in Leopard.

I'm not sure I consider this much of a usability issue, given how I personally use iTunes, but it is a little odd.

Which shouldn't surprise me, since iTunes has always been a bit of a special case. I guess when you are working on the application that is the face of a lot of the prestige (if not profit, though I'm sure the iTunes Music Store is doing OK) Apple is currently enjoying you can pretty much do what you want.

Like most folks, I expect we will see updates in the near future that address the wacky translucent menubar and other funky artefacts that appear to be change for the sake of change.

Otherwise, Life With Leopard is just fine.

    Batteries not included

Posted October 10, 2007 at 11:31 EDT under technology.

Well, Moore's Law continues apace, folks invent new ways of storing more and more information on thin slivers of metal, and milliAmps are consumed in order to make the whole thing run.

And how we store those mAh has basically stayed the same.

There have been very few real breakthroughs in battery technology in decades. We've found ways of tweaking the basic chemical reaction that allows us to create volts, and ways of tweaking more of those precious mAh from each cell, but these are really just very small incremental improvements rather than technological breakthroughs.

For example, one of the ways that laptop batteries have improved is not by making the cells better, but by using little computers to finely tune exactly how those cells take and release a charge over time. That is, most modern laptop batteries aren't just a bunch of cells soldered together in parallel and serial, but are actually little packages with an on-board computer that controls to a fine degree how those cells go about their business.

This is all in the name of giving us consumers exactly what we want: free, unlimited energy forever. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Squeezing more and more mAh out of smaller and smaller packages eventually leads us to these sorts of situations. And these. And, of course, there was the largest single product recall ever, which affected all sorts of electronic devices from phones to computers.

Intellectually, I know why this problem exists, and I hope that the industry leaders will take the right steps to alleviate the worst effects of these problems. I'm just thinking of the Macbook Pro propped up beside my bed, charging away after a rousing game of Civ IV last night. And thinking that I let my insurance lapse. And thinking that we haven't even paid off said Macbook Pro.

Perhaps I should use my awesome powers of telepathy to send ecogrrl a message to maybe place the Macbook Pro back on the funky iCurve stand somewhere where it won't burn us to death overnight. Instead, we should place it where it will asphyxiate us with toxic smoke from afar. I mostly trust the G3 iBook (with its replacement battery obtained via the previously mentioned product recall [and let's face it: a 600MHz G3 is hardly drawing the same sort of energy that makes a Macbook Pro so hot on your lap]) and I'm hoping the recent Macbook Battery Update 1.3 is a stab at addressing this potential problem.

What else can we do? All things in life come with a certain amount of inherent risk. I mean, any number of our everyday portable devices now have enough stored energy in them that they could burst into flames at any time.

I'm sure this is (or will be) a nightmare for the airline industry. I mean, how can they be sure that any number of devices packed into our luggage and carry-ons might not decide to asplode at any time? As consumers demand more and more out of their portable devices, we have a situation where engineers have to squeeze more and more energy out of these power sources.

So, more people are carrying more devices, which are shrinking by the year, and which require higher and higher energy requirements. As these devices proliferate and age, I wonder if we will start to see a sudden upsurge in these sorts of random disasters?

Nah. Probably not. I mean, all these cheap devices are probably of the highest quality, designed to last years (if not decades), and are stress tested to work out these bugs, right?

Right?

    Pythons, Giraffes and Llamas, Oh my!

Posted September 20, 2007 at 12:01 EDT under technology.

Ok, so I haven't exactly kept up with my learn a new computer language a year regime espoused by the Pragmatic Programmer movement I talked about before, but I am keeping my hand in.

Basically, I choose a little language I'd like to know more about, often based on the most cursory research on the web, and get it onto my Mac. I'll either find a nice reference on the web, or buy the book recommended in the ubiquitous FAQ one finds on any official language website. The idea is to get enough traction to get a proper feel for the language syntax and problem spaces it is designed to solve. More of a gestalt than any sort of serious coding.

My current language obsession is Lua, a procedural glue language that is really small enough for a single person to understand it quite easily. I have vague ideas of writing plugins for Adobe Lightroom, which is written almost completely in Lua.

My last language obsession was Ruby, which is sort of the Web 2.0 langue de jour right now. (Perhaps even a cause célèbre, or l'enfant terrible. That's how cool it is: it's French new-wave cool.)

My criteria for choosing which language I take a stab at is pretty arbitrary. I fully admit that I often select a candidate language on how cool I think it sounds, or how much internet buzz it is generating. If I run across references to a language over at O'Reilly ONLamp or other techie sites I'm more likely to give it a try.

But, as most of you will know, my attention span is quite short, and while Lua is the craziest, coolest, most delicious kid on the block right now, I'm already looking for my next victim. I'm insatiable like that.

At this point, it looks like the next language on my list is Python.

Why Python? At this point the language is practically venerable. It already has crowds of haters hating on it. There are entire libraries of books dedicated to the language, and from a variety of publishers. O'Reilly alone has a boatload of titles with Python as the main subject. It has succumbed to a certain amount of featching creeperism and language sprawl. It. Just. Ain't. Cool 2.0.

And it tells me where I can and can't place whitespace in my programs. Blech.

So, again, why Python? Well, I'm actually trying to be practical for a change. I need a language I can use at work that is stronger and faster than a POSIX shell, less cranky than awk and, oh, isn't Perl.

Hey, I like Perl as a concept. I like the attitude of most Perl coders I've met. Perl is definitely king of its hill, and many of the cool kids use it. I just find it unreadable, inscrutable and opaque. I've sat with the Camel book on my lap for hours trying to script up a solution to a problem that I knew was perfect for Perl. I've only met with minimal success. I just can't seem to internalize the Perl Way of Thinking. I seem to spend more time in the index trying to puzzle out arcane details than actually coding. This, as you can imagine, is a problem for me.

One gotcha is that Python is not immediately available on every box I might choose to work with at the office. Perl, while apparently impossible for my brain to understand, is ubiquitous, and is even shipped with every copy of the POSIX toolkit I have on every box within my physical or virtual reach.

Still, Python comes highly recommended by Thingos and the internets alike for solving the sorts of parsing and text-crunching problems I encounter so often at work. I may as well give it a try on my main Windows box, since the Python installer is so easy to grab.

And, yes, I will continue to work on my Perl-Fu simply because, like vi, it is always going to be there. Perl is a lingua franca of sorts I can reasonably rely on to be installed pretty much everywhere. Given how often I have to cobble up a script to automate some debug or logging work on a customer install, this is nothing to sneeze at.

I've still made up my mind I don't like Perl, however, so don't expect me to not pout about having to use it.

Can anyone recommend a better Perl book that one that features Camels or Llamas? I don't think these animals are helping me very much.

    Can we please talk about something else now?

Posted September 11, 2007 at 05:46 EDT under technology.

About the never-ending iPhone bitchfest: can we just all stop talking about it? Seriously, this isn't funny anymore.

First of all, being an early adopter means deliberately choosing to make a trade-off. If one chooses to be an early adopter, one also implicitly chooses to pay more for something you want now; more in money and more in your time and effort as a late beta-tester. This is the way of the world.

Secondly, why is it that everyone can't say enough wonderful things about capitalism until they are confronted with the hard realities of freer markets? Like, for instance, when a company charges whatever the market will bear for a product, often arbitrarily setting the price based on minute changes in production costs and perceived demand.

Really, I'm surprised how many people can't seem to find and read basic definitions for early adopter and capitalism which would explain all.

If you bought an iPhone 60 days ago you should accept the fact that, in this modern world, 60 days can make a big difference depending on your expectations. You could have waited 60 days before buying an iPhone. No one forced anyone to buy an iPhone 60 days ago.

There might be hundreds of reasons that Apple priced the iPhone at some specific point when it was first released, but few of those reasons were completely arbitrary. Compare the iPhone with any comparable S-M-R-T phone from any other vendor. Note how the prices are all about the same (feature-for-feature) for these devices. Seeing if your product sells at the higher end of the scale before aggressively pricing once you have production details ironed out is called good corporate strategy.

Seriously. Stop whining. It's embarrassing.

    Oh look. More downtime.

Posted July 29, 2007 at 10:49 EDT under technology.

My ADSL connection was acting all squirrelly, which was probably a result of the modem getting too hot yesterday. (As an aside, I'd really like to find a supplier for a modem that supports ITU G.992.1 that can survive the deep duty cycles that always on connections require. One with a metal chassis that can properly direct heat away from the passive components would be nice.) I replaced the flaky looking RJ-11 cable and stood the modem up on its side in the hopes that this would aid passive cooling.

Anyway, since this meant our connection to the unwashed internet was busted again, I took the opportunity to switch our private netblock. I really didn't need the number of hosts a 24-bit block offers, and it was colliding with the netblock that I become a part of when I connect to the office via our VPN. So, greetings from 192.168/16!

I tweaked MySQL a bit too, since the runtime variables were suggesting that Textpattern sites need a little more juice from the RDBMS when serving up pages.

So, the modem has not had to retrain for 16 hours, I can get to the VPN to see all the work queued up for me on Monday, and it appears that all hosted services are responding in a timely manner.

Time for something else to go wrong.

    Wii!

Posted May 17, 2007 at 12:07 EDT under technology.

Well, the Nintendo Wii works.

Typing with a Wii-mote is less easy than you may think.

I don't expect to be blogging much from this interface in the future.

    Tech Puns and the 40 Inside Jokers

Posted April 20, 2007 at 02:31 EDT under technology.

For some reason, the fact that each OpenBSD release traditionally comes with a theme, including an original theme song, seems to piss some people right off.

Because, you know, Unix geeks are very serious, and would never participate in any over-the-top jocularity. (Anyone with arguments about the mythical time spent hacking up a theme song that would be better applied to fixing bugs are cordially invited to shut the fuck up until they learn how coding shops work.)

Fucking kids today need to respect their elders. Back in my day, Unix was an excuse to engage in long pun sessions and ridiculous one-liners. As far as I am concerned, it still is. I mean, come on. The name of the OS is Unix for crying out loud. How is that not instantly funny?

Don't get me wrong: the tech business is serious business. It runs the world and all that. It's just serious fun, and the day it isn't anymore is the day I quit.

Anyway, go get yer t-shirt and DVD set for OpenBSD 4.1. I've already pre-ordered mine, which makes me cool.

Don't you want to be cool?

    Wii have to respectfully disagree

Posted April 9, 2007 at 04:11 EDT under technology.

So, Mr Thurrott thinks that the Wii is just silly, and we would be better served if we, instead, spring for a PS3 or XBox 360.

Well, that's fine and all, but what if, you know, you don't like the games on those other consoles? Or, at least, you like a certain flavour of game that is not represented well by Sony or Microsoft?

Another question you might ask is why is the Wii outselling all those other consoles, at least one of which has not made a dollar in real profit since it was released?

I suspect that what we have here is less a matter of some console being arbitrarily better (in some as yet unspecified way) but a suggestion that the gaming market is not quite as monolithic as the pundits might assume it is. It seems to me that Nintendo has seized an early opportunity to embrace the non-hardcore-gamer market by providing an interface with a suite of games that appeal to someone other than twitchy teen-agers and stoned twenty-somethings. It almost looks like Nintendo is trying to grow their brand outside of the traditional gamer market by appealing to a wider audience while leveraging their valuable existing properties.

In the for-profit publicly traded corporate world this is usually referred to as a Very Good Thing that Reaps Valuable Rewards Now and Into the Future.

It sure seems obvious to me, a not very sophisticated casual gamer who has never owned a gaming console in his life until an NDS purchased on a whim, that the Nintendo Wii and the Xbox 360 attract a completely different sort of gamer. That is, gamer folks will naturally fall into a few broad groups:

1. Those who like the classique games of yore, and the cheap 'n' cheerful approach taken by Nintendo coupled with the unique game play, or casual older gamers. These people will naturally buy a Wii.
2. Those who like cutting-edge immersive multi-player games who will buy the latest, most expensive cutting-edge hardware to run their favourite titles.
3. Those who like a variety of games and have a fair amount of disposable income. These people will buy two or more consoles.

Really, this is a no-brainer.