What's it all about, Alfie?

This morning I was once again updating my Ubuntu 12.04 laptop and realized that were it not for a crummy hardware platform - the trackpad is horrible, and the display is very inexpensive, this would be a really nice laptop/development box. It's got all the tools I could ask for, it's got some wonderful fonts for the Terminal and such, it's got Google Chrome for all the web stuff… it's really pretty slick.

I gotta tip my hat to the Ubuntu folks. This is a much better distro than RedHat/Fedora was. I'm guessing Fedora is getting better, and it's probably as nice as you need, but the ability to do the updates easily - and have them on by default, is really nice. It's nice to have it all right there.

Certainly, I'm not giving up my MacBook Pro anytime soon, but I've looked at BestBuy, and you can get nice Wintel hardware for $700 to run this on… all of a sudden, it's something I might actually carry from time to time. Certainly nicer to work with than the crummy trackpad and display.

It's a great compliment to the MacBook Pro. Nice to have.

With the update of my web site, it seemed like a good time to look into refreshing the look of this blog as well. Specifically, look a a complementary theme - blue on white, with a "minimalist" sense, to keep the focus on the content, not the design. I was pleased to see that I'd done this search quite a while ago, and had a nice theme already picked out. Sweet!

The theme is called White as Milk, and it's a nice minimalist theme. There are a lot of little customizations that you can do, and I've had to do a few to get things looking the way I want - specifically, getting the style of a few elements looking right, and making the entire blog a fluid width page. I just got done doing that modification yo my basic web page and wanted to keep the same attribute in the blog.

This matches the look of the web site very nicely, while not trying to be a complete match to every style point. I think it's looking nice, and I'll live with it for a little bit to see how I feel about it.

This morning I noticed that Google Chrome dev 21.0.1180.0 was out with several changes for the Retina MacBook Pro as well as the latest V8 javascript engine. These are really nice updates, but what I noticed right off is the mistake in the rendering with the previous version left a slight tell-tale horizontal line in the background every "page" or so. It wasn't horrible, and wasn't even directly repeatable all the time, but it was somewhere on the page, and it was enough that it made me wonder if my machine was bad.

So it seems to be gone, and that's great news, but so are all the other fixes. These HiDPI changes are nice for a lot of people getting the new MacBook Pros, and one day I'm sure I'll have one too… but it's not where I'd hoped Chrome were adding features right now. But that's OK… it'll all work out I'm sure.

UPDATE: Spoke too soon:

Interestingly enough, these disappear if I scroll this section out of range, but will return to another location on the page if I just keep scrolling. Nasty bug, but it's in Chrome, and I'm not going to worry too much about them fixing it. They'll get to it - just like they did with the rendering of the Finance page on Zoom.

[6/22] UPDATE: this morning I see 21.0.1180.4 is out and this time, they say they fixed several "alignment issues", and I'm hoping they mean these lines. They also put in the V8 javascript engine 3.11.10.10, which is nice. I'm hoping these lines are gone.

I have been doing a fair bit of coding on a few projects this last week, and yesterday I spent a good bit of time documenting an Xcode project I've spent a couple of weeks on. This was all because I'd moved it to GitHub, and the standard there is to look for a README.md file at the root of the repo and render it in GitHub Flavored Markdown as an introduction or initial documentation on the work in the repo. Since I hadn't had it in GitHub before this, I didn't need to make the documentation. After all, there's only one other guy on the project, and he's not yet done any work with this library, so it wasn't important to do it previously, but it made sense to do it now.

After spending several hours on this documentation - complete with code samples, installation instructions for the server-side required components (PHP, PostgreSQL, Apache), and everything I could think of about the project, my partner in this venture looked at it, deemed it nice, but said "We have to work on de-personalizing the docs".

Immediately, I was taken aback. I worked very hard on the docs, and while they aren't perfect, I was surprised to see exactly how I felt about that comment from him. I wasn't upset - not really. I was just irked.

After 38 yrs of being a professional programmer, and all this is still not making me a dime, I think I was feeling that I deserved the opportunity to write docs the way that I feel they should be written. I'm writing code the way I think it should be written, so why not the docs as well? It's got a wealth of information in there, and while the comment wasn't a serious critique, it was something that I just didn't see coming.

More importantly, it got me to thinking: At what point in your life do you really get to do what you want to do? I suppose the answer to many is obvious: Never. Others will say just as assuredly: Always.

Clearly, neither is right. There are certain times you can do certain things and everything is fine. I'm sure he was thinking that the documentation needed for a 510k medical instrument was more formal than I was writing. Maybe so, and I understand where he was coming from, but it didn't really lesson the question any.

After all, I'm in the middle of my fourth month of forced unemployment, and I'm finding that there are a lot of people out there that are getting jobs after being laid off from the same company a lot faster than I am. I'm not jealous of them, I'm just very surprised at the difficult that I'm having. But I have faith - it'll all come together at the right time with the right company, and things will pick up again.

And my choice to take this time to write code for a project that by all accounts might never see the light of day, let alone generate anything more than lunch-money for me, is all on me. No one forced me into it. No one told me it'd make me rich. OK, I fibbed there, my partner in this said that, but I knew right off he was a little over the top on this.

But I'd still like to think that after 38 yrs of being a professional developer. I know how to document my own code. But maybe for this certain instance, for this certain licensing with the FDA, I don't.

Kinda bites to realize that.

OK, I am a big Twitter fan, and I've used several of the popular Twitter clients on my iPhone and MacBook Pro, but my latest client has been Hibari because it didn't have any of the reported problems that Twitterrific had with switching the graphics from integrated to discrete, as I've noted before.

Well… with the recent updates from Apple, I've come to realize that the display problems are now gone, and I can pick the Twitter client that suits me best. One of the things I really liked about Hibari was the fact that it showed the conversation that a particular tweet had. But this morning, I saw that Twitterrific did this as well:

Sweet! 🙂

So I'm back to Twitterrific as it's got the menu bar Ollie that lets me know when I have a new tweet, and it's visually a little easier to read the different colored tweets. I'll admit the inline pics are nice, but I almost always have to click on them to look at them anyway, and in Twitterrific I get the built-in viewer.

So for now, it's back to Twitterrific!

This afternoon I wanted to get a few things going on the new Rackspace Cloud Server Joel had reconfigured to run Ubuntu 12.04. Specifically, I wanted to get the latest JDK 1.6.0 installed on the box as we need that for Mingle, which is the point of all this reconfiguration and such.

As it turns out, it's not that bad you just have to know where to go and what to get, and what to do with it. Isn't that the same thing with all new software for linux? Yes.

OK, first, get the latest JDK 6 download from Oracle here. Then it's a simple matter of unpacking it:

  $ chmod +x jdk-6u32-linux-x64.bin
  $ ./jdk-6u32-linux-x64.bin

Then you need to move that to someplace useful. For me, that's /usr/local and then make a few symlinks to make it easy to upgrade:

  $ sudo mv jdk1.6.0_32 /usr/local/
  $ cd /usr/local
  $ sudo ln -s jdk1.6.0_32 jdk1.6
  $ sudo ln -s jdk1.6.0_32 jdk

Then we can put it into the path using the alternatives system on Ubuntu 12.04:

  $ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /usr/local/jdk1.6/bin/javac 1
  $ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/local/jdk1.6/bin/java 1
  $ sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javaws javaws /usr/local/jdk1.6/bin/javaws 1

and then set the default JDK (if needed):

  $ sudo update-alternatives --config javac
  $ sudo update-alternatives --config java
  $ sudo update-alternatives --config javaws

Finally, we can verify that the JDK was installed properly:

  $ java -version
  java version "1.6.0_32"
  Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_32-b05)
  Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.7-b02, mixed mode)

Today I moved my SyncKit project from Codesion (wanting more than $1000/yr) to GitHub (less than $100/yr) and with that move, it made a lot of sense to add in the standard GitHub README.md file so that the main page of the repo has some nice introductory documentation. While I was at it I did a lot of documentation - including how to set up the server-side box, and how to verify the set-up, and what the organization of the project was, and how it was all wired up to work. It was a lot of docs for a single day. But important to make sure that we are ready for any kind of documentation checking.

I'm glad to have it on the private GitHub side as well - there are just so many nice things about GitHub, I like to support it and use it when I can.

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.