What's it all about, Alfie?

Today I needed to create a few new users on a fresh Ubuntu 12.04 install from the command line. Thankfully, I was in as root, so all I needed were the commands to get these accounts set up and ready to go. For each account I did the following steps - doing them twice for the two accounts isn't all that hard to do.

First, create the user (and make the home directory if not there):

  $ useradd -m drbob

next, change the password on the new account:

  $ passwd drbob

next, change the default login shell for the account: (/bin/bash)

  $ chsh drbob

finally, add the user to the sudo group so this user can, well… sudo:

  $ adduser drbob sudo

At this point, I was able to login, make sure I was there, then tar up my .ssh directory and what I needed from my Ubuntu 12.04 home directory on another box, and put it all on the new server with a simple sep command.

When I logged in next, it was all there and I was ready to go. Sweet!

They started the day off with bad news, and it just hurt. Ouch! Nokia is not looking very happy right now. They reported this morning that they are cutting 10,000 jobs - 20% of their workforce, and closing three research facilities. Then this happened:

It's a bad day for Nokia.

Which leads me to wonder what they'll be doing with NAVTEQ - the mapping company they bought not too long ago. If it's making money for them, then they might bleed it dry. I doubt they'd sell it as it cost them a bundle and they need the cash to stop the hemorrhaging. I hope things stabilize for them. And soon.

Today I spent time scouring the web looking for the basis of a good HTML/CSS design for my web site. I know my limitations, and designing a nice web site is one of them. But if you can get me close, I can fine tune things to be exactly what I want them to be. So it happens that I came across the Minimalist theme, and I was off to the races.

This is a lot more professional looking than the old "fields of dreams" style that I was using for more than a year. Probably more than two. In any case, it wasn't as processional as I wanted. I wanted a clean interface. Something that was not a fixed width. I wanted a lot of white, and very little graphics. There's no need on my personal site - it's just the information in a nice, easy-to-read format.

I'm very pleased with the design, and while I was in the pages, I added a few things like a complete page for DKit including the links to GitHub where they can get the code. I wanted to have the site be more of a showcase than it was. I think it's looking a ton better already.

Nice upgrade.

[6/20] UPDATE: this morning I went back in and fixed up a bit of the CSS to make it look quite a bit nicer. There were a lot of named class values that just didn't exist in the CSS, and I'm thinking it was planning as opposed to oversight, but we'll never really know. It's looking a lot better now, and that's what matters.

This morning I'm a little concerned about a good friend of mine. I've known him for more than a decade, and he's never been someone that I worried about - until now. I was chatting with him this morning when he dropped this one on me:

I'm expecting to get fired sometime this year.

and when I asked him why on earth his company of more than 5 years would dump him, he said:

They'll fire me when they decide that I am an obstructionist.

That doesn't sound like him at all. Not in the least.

He's never been one to do something negative or bad without a solid reason for doing it. He's just not that emotional a guy. I'm the emotional one. I'm the one that gets fired for being extreme. Not him. So I'm really concerned about my friend.

I'm not one to give advice to anyone - I learned my lesson decades ago. I'm more of the "there are too many sides to a story to know what's right", so I just try to support my friends and let them know that they have a friend in me, even if it seems to them that they are in the middle of a huge, black hole.

I'm going to hope it's temporary with him… that it's just a string of bad days, and maybe a little stress from home. We've all felt it. We allow our work lives to define the life we think we have. I know I'm guilty of that. This forced time off has been wonderful for me to realize that I have a life outside of work. It's been painful, but I'd like to think that I can take this painful part of life and extract some useful lessons from it as well.

I sure hope my friend does too… I'd hate to see him go through what I've gone through. But if it's going to go that route, I'll be standing right there beside him letting him know that he's not alone.

No one should be alone.

I'm looking at the chart of Facebook, and I'm thinking that maybe it's possible that it's stabilized out in the middle to upper 20's range. It had to stabilize at some point, and this looks to be a nice solid run for a couple of days, so maybe so… I'm sure there are a lot of folks that want it to.

There are plenty of ways to make a system exist, for a short time, in a state of dis-equilibrium… hype is certainly one of them. But in the end, the system will adjust to all factors, and achieve it's equilibrium. Feedback - it's a great thing.

This morning I saw that there were updates to iPhoto, iMovie, Thunderbolt drivers, and even the AirPort stuff… so of course I had to update all that. This is nice, but I'm not really using iPhoto all that much, and I haven't had the time or material to really get into iMovie, so the updates are really just so-so to me. But what wasn't so-so was the reboot.

For the first time ever, when I logged back in, BBEdit was back in the right place on Spaces. Xcode was too. The only exception was MacVim. Everything else was back in place and just where I left it. This was awesome!

The updates in OS X Lion that started this "clean reboot" were really nice, but a few apps never really worked with it, and BBEdit was one of them. It'd restart, but it wouldn't put the windows back where they "came from". It wasn't a horrible issue, but there were just a few apps that didn't do it right. Well… no more.

Now BBEdit and Xcode are back where they were, and the only thing I have to do is get back into the directories I was in with my Terminal.app sessions. Too bad they don't save that, but who knows? Maybe they will in 10.8?

This morning saw that there was an update to Google Chrome dev to 21.0.1171.0, and I needed to get it and check to see if they had gotten my bug report on the rendering of the Google Finance page. As I pulled it up, I was very happy to see that they had, indeed, fixed the problem. It seemed to be related to the zoom out level, but I can't be sure. In any case, it's nice to see the fix back to the way it was.

The release notes don't say a lot, but that's OK. The proof is in the rendering.

I was talking to a friend on chat this morning, and he pointed me to some code on GitHub that supposedly comes from Facebook, and has some interesting data structures designed for very high performance on highly threaded applications. It's similar to DKit, but larger, and I had a look at what was there. It's not that it's bad, but it's Facebook, and there's still something about that place that makes me think of Used Car Salesmen, and not in a good way.

While this code base has some interesting things, it's nothing that I haven't seen in TBB and other places, or that you could make with a simple TBB read/write spin lock, and a simple STL data structure. But it got me to thinking, and so I checked this morning, and the Facebook slide continues:

It's hard to get behind a company, and a person, that seems to act with such arrogance, and at the same time is in the middle of such a horrible IPO. I mean I'm betting there are people in Facebook that are close to jumping out the windows a la 1929. There are governmental investigations, lawsuits filed, and the stock still keeps sliding.

As some point, it has to match the real value of the company and stop, but I have no idea where that is. They have a ton of code (IP), and they have data centers, so it's not like they have no valuable assets - it's just that their valuation is based on their user base and expected returns and growth. But that's not necessarily anything like what the company is really worth.

I just wonder when it'll stop the slide.

This morning I finally put the finishing touches on the first good cut of SyncKitTouch - the iOS library based on the AppKit Library, SyncKit that I had built for a project Joel and I are working on. It's a simple cloud synchronization scheme where we know the data that's getting synced, and the database in the cloud is a peer to the clients on iOS and OS X. The interesting part of this is that I didn't initially expect to have to build a second version of the library - I thought that all the NSDataSources and ComboBox DataSources were going to be used on both platforms. Oh no, no, no… That would make too much sense.

It seems that the data sources, while pretty much functionally the same, they aren't actually the same, and since the headers for one platform don't exist on the other, the best way I found to make the code as reusable as possible is to have the complete library in one project/target, and then put the AppKit-specific DataSources into categories on the appropriate classes. Then in the UIKit-based 'touch' library, I simply included all the classes - and re-implemented the categories this time using UIKit DataSources and Controllers.

It wasn't too bad, as most of the code was in the original library, and while it's recompiled, it's not duplicated in the project, and that means change it in one place, and that's it. Much better than making a complete duplicate of the library - or making three - one for the base functionality, one for the AppKit extensions, and another for the UIKit extensions. That's too much - better to have two - one that's "Touch", and one that's not.

So I got all the code in and compiling - but I haven't really create a SyncKitTickle app to try it out. I'm just not sure how this will look and function. I'm hoping Joel can give me a few ideas there. If he does, the next thing will be to make SyncKitTickle and start trying this out on the simulator, etc. Just to make sure that what I'm building is really working as it should.

Still… it's a nice milestone to get done and send back to Joel.

I was a little shocked to see that Google Chrome dev has a serious rendering bug in it. I think it's most obvious (to me) on the Google Finance page, but I'll bet it's a lot of places. The blocking for the graphs is way off for the page. Hugh blank spaces in the layout should have been filled up with content:

I'm sure they have people working on it now, as I can't have been the first person to notice this, but it's a little surprising still… I find it hard to believe this got through Q/A. Or even simple checks of common web sites - like their own!