What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 19.0.1077.3 was out with a few little updates and a few known Mac issues. Interestingly, the new V8 javascript engine is there, but there are a few incorrectly drawn icons in the Mac version. Odd little combination of changes, but I'm guessing it's a merge that needs to be done, and then things will clear up. There's also a fix for the Flash plug-in, but it's going to be interesting to see what becomes of Flash now that Adobe is all but giving up on it. Google may go back to HTML5 and the more widely supported codecs. Hard to say.

I've spent a bit of time thinking about what to do in my forced hiatus, and when I happened upon a posting at North Central College, I thought "Hey, maybe it's something I should do?" So I sent in an email inquiry, and talked to a friend that loves teaching as much as I do, and was getting excited about the thought of teaching, doing a little consulting, and enjoying life a while lot more.

So I found the citations for all my papers, and put them on my resumes, and started thinking about writing up the first of many essays they wanted as part of the application packet.

Then I thought - I wonder if the pay is good enough? I don't need to supplement my complete salary from coding, as the consulting will help out quite a bit, but I need it to be enough that I can afford to take the job. So I hit up the web to see if there were anything with typical, maybe even average, salaries for faculty positions on campus.

And there were.

And it wasn't great news.

The average for Assistant Professors that I could find was in the high-50's. Then I looked nationally, and again, it confirmed what I had known in my years at Auburn, and that's the simple fact that faculty members don't make a ton of cash from teaching, it's from the books, and the consulting. So it's not really a great deal for me. I'd need to have such an amazing consulting income that I'd likely just skip the teaching and do more consulting. Or coding.

I was a little disappointed, but not totally surprised. It's something that you can do after you make your money - or if you can live on a lot less than downtown Naperville housing prices. It's just not really feasible at this time.

I may still go through with it - just to see what the actual numbers may be, but I know it's not going to be something I'm able to count on as my primary income. That's going to have to be back to the finance world.

Darn. It would have been nice.

This morning, sometime, I noticed that Google Chrome dev 19.0.1068.0 was released and the release notes seem focused on the Android stack and a few side things, but I guess not every release can come up with a new way of doing things, or a massive speed improvement. But progress is progress.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 19.0.1061.1 is out and it's got a few nice things in it. Like a new V8 javascript engine (3.9.13.0), and support for remote file systems - could be interesting stuff. Glad to see they are still making improvements in V8 - that's something that I think I'm going to end up in sooner than later, and it'll be nice to have some improved performance there.

Today I was thinking about FileMerge because I was talking to someone about diffing files, and FileMerge is the best tool I've seen for that. But I remembered that with Xcode 4.3, the entire /Developer directory was removed. So where did it go? Seems I had to go on a hunt.

The obvious places were out - /Applications, and that's about it these days with the App Store. So I got serious:

  $ find /Applications -name FileMerge.app
  /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications/FileMerge.app
  $

What? they put an entire Applications directory under the Xcode.app bundle? Why do that? Well… at least I can get at it and run it. It'd be nice if LaunchBar was able to see inside the app bundles, but I can force that on a custom scan. The next question was the command-line opendiff command.

Turns out, there's a command to "refocus" the location of the Developer Tools:

  $ sudo /usr/bin/xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

After this, the opendiff command works exactly as you'd expect. Good enough. They were lost (for a bit), but now they are found.

This morning I plugged my SimpleTech 1TB ProDrive into my MacBook Pro, and it wasn't there. I took apart the case, there's no loose wires, it's just a dead drive. Sad, but true. It's really sad to me because I've been moving that data from drive to drive since the beginning of TimeMachine from Apple. That's several years of data. All gone. Sad.

To be honest, it's not something that I used all the time. I did use it to restore from a dead laptop drive, and I'll be sure to get another tonight, so I can get it all backed up in the morning, but I didn't really go back in time all that much. I have all my source code in cvs or git, so I'm not losing anything there, but it's still the thought of all that data - now gone.

So I'm looking at the LaCie and the G-Tech drives, and while I like that the LaCie drives are wildly popular on the reviews, I haven't had a lot of luck with them, and I see I'm not alone. There are a lot of folks that this G-Tech isn't all that great, and there was talk of a series of bad drives, but I'm guessing that's over.

It's all going to come down to what's at the Apple Store, but I know they have the LaCie and the G-Tech, but I think I'm leaning towards G-Tech as they have a lot of FireWire 800, and I want to get back to that for the speed, and I've heard several good things from friends about the G-Tech drives. I think it's worth a shot.

I'm very sad that there's no way to get that data off the drive. In very real terms, it's not worth much, but it would have been nice to have replaced the drive last weekend, and gotten all the data off. But that's OK. I got a lot of good out of it, and now it's time to move on.

This morning I saw that Google Chrome dev 19.0.1049.3 was out, and with it, a few fixes, a new V8 javascript engine, and a few Mac GPU fixes that I'm not sure effect me, but it certainly can't hurt. I'm always glad to see the progress.

Today I've been tracking the disk space used by my feed recorders with the mis-configured drive arrays. It's important that I don't blow out the drives before I move the software into production because this data is very important to the high-frequency trading operations, and we have to have at least one reliable copy of the data.

So I tracked the disk usage for the three boxes: prod, dev, and backup prod. The first, prod, was running the old code that had no issues, the other two were running the new code that had issues with the disk space. But, after the reconfiguration, it appears to have been solved. I then set up crontabs on each box to send me the output of df -k, and then I started tracking it.

I put it all in Numbers, and here you have it:

It's just an amazing tool. Sure, you can do all this in Excel, but that's not with the Mac style and that's just as big a part of this as the data. It's just plain fun!

I primarily deal with a certain kind of recruiter - the kind that matches my personality: non-spastic, non-agressive -- not a used car salesman, but today I had a meeting with a recruiter that I first met several years ago while I was at O'Connor, and I was reminded why I didn't deal with him then, and I doubt he's going to bring me a useful lead this time.

The guy who could be a used car salesman comes across (to me) as a used something salesman, no matter what that is, and I don't think I'm alone on this point. I think most reasonable people react to this kind of salesmanship the same way - keep their distance, and doubt everything they say. I'm not at all sure I want to be represented by a guy like this, but I can also respect that if he's talking to people that respond to that kind of dealings, then he's the right guy for me.

I'm starting to look at my options, and part of that is using a recruiter. In this industry, in this day and age, I can't imagine getting a job without a recruiter - or a friend, in the company you want to work for. It's just so unusual anymore to receive good unsolicited resumes, that I'm not sure that anyone would really pay attention to one if it didn't come from a reputable source.

So I deal with the guy that might seem right at home on the used car lot. It's a necessary step to really find out what's out there. I have my fingers crossed that they look at me with a little better eye than they do him.

When I first heard this on Twitter, I thought it was a lie, but that's only because it didn't come through the normal channels. OS X (no 'Mac' on the front) Mountain Lion (10.8) is going to be released this Summer, and will then be on a yearly release schedule like iOS. Some of the new things I'm excited about are a more general inclusion of iCloud, the unification of Messages across iOS and OS X, and, of course, Gatekeeper. This is going to make it a lot harder for folks to slip in viruses and malware for my family. It's something I've tried to drill into them, but I'm afraid they still don't see it.

With Gatekeeper, the OS will do it for them. I like that.

I'm sure there will be a slew of other nice little updates, but the yearly updates are exciting too. The Mac is the best platform on the planet. I really believe that. Wonderful news!