What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I thought I'd spend a few minutes getting my fixes to the existing WordPress plugin - CodeHighlighter, up and into the WordPress site so that I could easily update it, etc. After all, there might be several folks that are looking for something like I wanted, and not finding it in the existing tools. I downloaded the version I'd hacked up on my site, and then placed it into a git repo, added a README.md, and then pushed it up to a new GitHub repo. I was then hoping to simply publish it on the WordPress site, and be done with it.

Silly me… Why should it be that easy?

Turns out, the WordPress plugin site is an SVN repo where you have to give them your code and then they give you access to an SVN repo (Sourceforge?) where you can put your code. A few years ago, I wouldn't have minded, but now… SVN… really?!? Nah… I think I can do just fine without that cruft.

I can simply use GitHub and clone the repo in any WordPress install that I have. There's no need to have anything fancier than that. In any event, I'm guessing that in a little while, the WordPress team will switch to GitHub anyway as the number of SVN users are going to dwindle like Perforce, Visual SourceSafe, PVCS, etc. all have. There's just no way to keep the project looking up to date with SVN.

So it's there, and it's easy to use, you just have to be a little smarter than the average WordPress blogger, but that's OK. I am, and that's all that really matters.

UPDATE: by simply getting into the wp-content/plugins/ directory and doing:

  $ git clone git@github.com:drbobbeaty/CodeHighlighterPlus.git

and then using the WordPress Plugins page, I can disable the old version, enable this new clone, and then delete the old one. After this, everything is OK, and it's all controlled by the GitHub repo.

To be true, this isn't going to auto-update from he WordPress Plugins page, but I didn't have to mess with the SVN repo either - and that's a win for me.

I don't know… maybe positive thinking really does work. This week I had a run-in with someone that was amazingly uninterested in being flexible. The next day, they changed the API on their system. I was starting to believe that this was just going to be status quo when dealing with them, but then today, I received an email and it amazed me.

Their leader totally reversed his position, and was asking me how I wanted the data. This was a real shock as I had never expected it, and was settling myself in for a series of constant changes to the API and fixes to the ETL to keep things working. Very nice to see.

I spent about 5 min thinking about it, and decided that what we originally had was a good plan, and we just needed to keep going. The original plan was to have an array of maps (this is all JSON) where each map represented a possible match and the array was a logical OR. This allows them to change the nature of the individual maps and the logical OR can include a region and a zip code… or a series of zip codes… or regions… all this was vey well thought-out for the geo-tagging.

I wanted that back, and then asked that for the taxonomy of the demand, we do something very similar - an array of maps where each is a tuple of the classification of the demand based on the default taxonomy. This will also be logically OR-ed to get the possible classifications that this demand can fulfill.

In short, I think it's clean and clear, and makes a lot of sense. I hope they accept it.

In any case, I'm shocked that I might have had an effect on the change of heart, but who knows? Maybe I'll step it up with the people on the train at night and see if they get a little nicer!

I decided that I needed to take the plunge and upgrade by VoodooPad Pro 4 to VoodooPad 5 - primarily to support Flying Meat, but also to get the latest features, etc. There are always a few things you want in an upgrade, and this time there certainly were.

Once I got the app downloaded (bought it directly) and the license key installed, I updated my VoodooPad docs very cleanly and easily. No problems there. Then I decided that I'd like to be able to really sync this one Dropbox. So I simply:

  $ cd ~/Dropbox
  $ mkdir Work
  $ cd Work
  $ ln -s ~/Documents/Work\ Info.vpdoc .

and the link will be sufficient for Dropbox to mirror it to all my other machines. On the flip side, I can do the symlinks as well, but I don't really need to - it's just my main box that has the docs in the "original" locations that needs the link.

I'm digging Dropbox for sure, and I can't wait to see how I can make use of it for more things like this.

This morning I'm riding in on the train, bus, and walking and got a text from Joseph thanking me for waking him up this morning:

I want to reiterate how much I appreciate you waking me up. I always feel like I seem really pissed at you because I'm late, but you've saved me a lot of trouble many times. So thank you.

I sent back:

Son, and I mean that with all the love in my heart, it's my pleasure, and I totally understand. You're very welcome.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm glad to wake him up. And deal with waking the girls, and their nasty morning attitudes. It needs to be done, but I have to say that it gets more than a little annoying to see and hear nothing but grief from them. Which brings me to this morning's realization.

Life is not an "even" game. Not even close.

The most contented people I know have given up the idea of "fair", and accepted that people will hurt them far more than they will, in turn, hurt others. It's not the "takers" that are happy, it's the "givers". Even when it's not a gift, these "givers" accept that they cannot expect fairness and equality in the world. They accept that life is what it is, and they can only do what they can. And just move on.

My Mom is a classic example. When I was growing up, my sisters picked on her all the time, and were merciless. It was bad. I wished they would stop, but I was the younger brother, and they did it to me as well. I could do nothing to stop it, and it always amazed me that my Mom didn't seem to mind.

Years later, I found that it was breaking her heart, and it made me all the more sad for her. I didn't understand at the time that she was doing the best she could, and rather than confront them - which would be pointless, they'd just make fun of her more, she chose to accept that life wasn't fair, and that her children were going to be making fun of her for this period in her, and their, lives.

Today I'm faced with the same thing. The kids are intelligent, and so are vicious in their attacks on Liza and me. It's to the point that I just don't speak in the car. When I forget, and say even the most unassuming thing, it's "source" for the girls. I'll hear about it for the rest of the day. I want to yell at them, but that'll just be more fodder for the guns.

While some will say "Fight back" - that just teaches them that anger and attacks are "OK". They know - deep down, that what they are doing is not nice. It's fun, but it's not nice. And they don't do it to most people - just family. So some day, like my sisters, they'll stop, and while they'll probably never apologize, they'll stop, and that will be good enough.

I can't even the score with them. That's not right, and it'll never happen. So I need to accept that life, certainly my life, at 50 is not really about fair. It's about making it through the day with as few a set of negatives as possible. Try to find something enjoyable about the day before I go home and have to listen to them.

I'm going to work really hard on this… I think it's really the key to long-term happiness.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 22.0.1229.0 was out, and the release notes are getting to be somewhat of a disappointment. To say they are sparse is an understatement. Take the UI change of the 'wrench' to the 'pancakes':

that's a change, and there's got to be a reason for it, but the release notes are totally silent about it. "Read the SVN logs" is hardly an answer - at least it better not be. There should be a lot more information in the SVN logs than this, and these are higher-level issues that need addressing.

Yeah, the quality of the release notes is really slipping on this project.

This morning I've finally gotten tired of the font choice for the Pragmatic Programmer's Programming Ruby 1.9 book. It's a lot smaller and not nearly as readable as every other Pragmatic Programmer's book I've got. I mean really bad. First, I read all my tech books on my MacBook Pro. I have a size I like to give them on the screen. I know the font is fixed on a PDF, but still… I find this very readable:

yet here's the PickAxe book at even more screen real estate:

To me, there's no contest.

So I wrote to the PP guys - on the off-chance that they might be interested in my feedback:

Guys,

I love your books. They are by far the "go to" books for learning anything I need for a new project or job. I have several. Wonderful stuff.

However, I have a slight bone to pick with you on the font choice for the Ruby 1.9 book.

What's up with the font? It's not the same font that I see on every single one of my other PragProg books. I like the "other" font. It's easy to read on computer screens as a PDF, and it's very nice and legible at a somewhat reduced size.

But the font for the Ruby 1.9 book is almost the exact opposite. Very hard to read. Nowhere near as clear.

It may be stylish, but as for me - give me back the old font and layout with the blue borders and the style that made PragProg the best tech books around.

I know it's just one voice, but hey... if you don't hear it from your friends, then others will just talk about you behind your back, right?

Dave Thomas wrote back:

As the person who picked the font, let me say I really appreciate the feedback.

The choice of font was difficult. The PickAxe had grown from a hefy 450 pages to a massive 950, and I really wanted to stop the trend. So I looked for ways to thin it down. One choice I made was to go for a font which was a little skinnier and a little more open, which would let me sometimes squeeze just a few more lines on the page. This one difference let me save about 60 pages overall. I also changed the layout of the standard library section and saved another 40 or so.

It's always a tricky compromise, but I hope that the marginal decrease in legibility is offset by the many thousands of pages that won't be printed 🙂

I can see his point - it would be a monster printed book, and a lot of people buy his books like this. I wrote back saying so, and he suggested reading it as ePub or mobi where I could set the font as I pleased. The problem with that is that there are no good ePub or mobi readers for the Mac that preserve the formatted text of the code samples. None. So I can read PDF that at least looks right, or nothing.

Not happy with the alternatives, but I don't have a lot of say about it either. It is what it is, and it's up to me to just suck it up and deal with it.

Shucks.

Today I had a nasty scare - I was trying to migrate my son's old MacBook to a new MacBook Pro we just got him at the Apple store. The migration was going over WiFi and was going to take 14 hours. I hooked up ethernet cables, but it wasn't smart enough to detect the new and faster transport. With each passing minute, the time to finish was going up! This was bad and getting worse.

So I decided to kill it by shutting off the old machine and then the new. I then restarted the process, but decided moving my account wasn't necessary - Huge Mistake! Mine was the Administrator account. So when I got done transferring his, mine was in an incomplete state - all messed up, and his wasn't an admin! We were sunk.

No install disk. No way around it. Well and truly hosed.

Then I saw this: How to restart the setup process. If I could get that going again, and transfer my account this time, we'd be set. So here's what I had to do: Restart the Mac holding down Cmd-s to get into single-user mode, and type:

  $ /sbin/mount -uw /
  $ rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone
  $ exit

at this point, I got to restart the setup process and I could re-transfer my account. Once that was done, I could make his account an admin and we're safe.

That was a close one. No fun at all.

I read this and have to wonder if the tide is really beginning to shift on the tethering debate. I'm an AT&T customer - with the (grandfathered) unlimited data plan, and I have always wondered why I wasn't able to transfer bits on my phone to my MacBook Pro? After all, Safari on my laptop vs. Safari on my phone, what's the real difference? Nothing. But that doesn't stop AT&T and Verizon from charging $20/month and forcing me off the unlimited plan. Well… maybe not for much longer.

The story is about the FCC smacking down Verizon for exactly that, and telling them to pony up $1.25 million for the practice. This means a Verizon iPhone will be able to be tethered for free. Sweet. I wonder if AT&T will go along, or if they will wait for the FCC to hit them with a million dollar fine before changing their policy.

I'm thinking it's only a matter of a few months before I can tether my MacBook Pro to my iPhone for no extra cost. That's going to be a sweet deal for the times I'm on the train and want to check mail or commit a change. Very nice indeed.

I've had a couple of really good days at The Shop. It's a really neat environment, and while I can't say it's been without friction, it's all my fault, and what I'm used to from the world of Finance. I've learned a ton about ruby, rvm, rspec, all the tools used in what I think is a traditional ruby stack. It's fun, it's very different, but what's struck me the most has been the really solid skill set of the people I'm working with.

These are some really solid guys. Amazingly so, when compared to the finance world. Maybe it's too incestutious, I don't know. But the folks I was used to working with on a daily basis in the past are not nearly as skilled in the fine art of software development as these guys. Maybe it's ruby?

There's far more refactoring. Far more iteration. Far more devotion to the best answer - and they don't sacrifice too much speed in the process. I'll admit it's not nearly the same stress level as Finance, but it's still getting done, and the business is happy, so who am I to argue with the speed of development?

It's amazing. Really. I like these guys. I really do. That's a new feeling for me.

And it's a nice feeling to be sure.

I think I'm going to really like being out of Finance for a while. Who knows… maybe it's permanent. That would certainly be fine with me.

I just noticed that Google Chrome dev 22.0.1221.0 is out and save the inclusion of a new version of the V8 javascript engine (3.12.16.0), the release notes are a little skimpy to say the least. I mean, would it really kill them to put more than 2 mins into the release notes? Are SVN commit logs really sufficient for release notes?

I'd like to think not. But I'm not in their group, so it's not my call. Still… it makes you wonder what their attention to detail level really is...