lifebsideben

I upgraded to Leopard at home, which is awesome, because it’s a really great OS. Well, so was Tiger, and to be honest there aren’t a lot of really significant improvements, but lots of little ones that are nice. Definitely the new Finder is a lot more useful (I’ve stopped using PathFinder, sorry guys) and the speed of Spotlight is much improved (making Google Desktop Search a lot less critical). But, some software isn’t compatible, as to be expected. The worst bit is that you can no longer install the older Adobe apps.

You see, I own a copy of the ‘Adobe Design Collection’, which is basically what they called Creative Suite 1 before officially rebranding it that way. I use it occasionally (Illustrator mostly, but sometimes PhotoShop too.) I’m pretty happy with the older versions of the apps in it, but after upgrading to Leopard (and getting a new Intel Mac), it wouldn’t install and I decided to flip for an upgrade to the latest version, CS3, for $400. Pretty steep given my usage pattern, but heck, it’s pretty good software and I would like to be able to use it when I want to.

Some background: the Adobe Design Collection has all the exact same software as CS1 (PhotoShop 7, Illustrator 10, InDesign 2, and Acrobat Pro 5). It cost me $900 when I bought it. Since it has the exact same software as CS1, I thought the upgrade path would be the same. However, there is apparently two big differences between the ADC and CS1: 1. I have serial numbers for each individual product, instead of just one for the suite as a whole and 2. that means I can’t upgrade as if I had CS1, even though I own licenses for all the same versions of the apps. This really sucks, and I didn’t know that, and I didn’t figure it out until I got to the step in the installer (near the very end, 40 minutes in, after it’s actually installed) that my serial number(s) wouldn’t work. Grrr. I called Adobe sales and it went something like this: Read more »

Tags: Adobe, bitching, software

I got a new MacBook, and bought VMWare Fusion, so I could… well, I’m not exactly sure what I planned to do with it, but since I have no other machine in my house that runs Windows, I guess I thought I’d use it for that occasional windows app (PowerISO for example) or to test prince.org through the eyes of IE7. Well, I installed XP into it and that was just dandy, it really knows exactly how to handle hosting Windows, great vmware tools integration, the whole shebang, flawless.

More interestingly, I thought I’d install an Ubuntu instance, and maybe retire the big honking RAID5 Ubuntu server machine, and save the corresponding energy usage, etc. I mostly use it for mysql slave backups of prince.org, and some minor code development (it used to also host my music and photo libraries on the raid disks, but I’ve since moved that to an external drive on the MacBook with TimeMachine on a different device, providing the redundancy.)

Sounds well and good, and vmware also “understands” Ubuntu, but uh, not nearly as smoothly as Windows… the whole vmware tools setup is, while not painful, certainly not “one-click”. But, it works. Well, I thought it did–my networking was hosed. I futzed with it a bit thinking it was their special vmxnet drivers/devices, and then realized my host OSes networking was not working, either. Since I connect via 802.11n, and it’s sometimes flaky (hard to know if it’s Leopard or the wonky apple gigabit router), I turned airport off and then back on and it came back in the host… but Ubuntu was still not happy. If I reboot Ubuntu, it takes out the host networking again… hmmm. Try swithing to bridged mode instead of shared… same thing. Hmmmmmm…. a head-scratcher.

Finally, I hit upon the root cause… I bet the router isn’t happy with my “lock this IP to this specific MAC address”, when there are 2 OSes both sending packets, on that MAC! Yep, that was it. I removed the settings in the Airport itself that caused it to always hand out a specific IP via DHCP to a specific MAC, and assigned IPs manually to the MacBook and Ubuntu, and all was well. Yay. I’m still not sure what magic was going on to make networking in Windows work, but no worries.

I actually wonder if I were to use the “DHCP client ID” instead of the MAC address, if it’d work that way… I just don’t know where to set that in Ubuntu… something to try another day!

Tags: apple, debugging, mac, software, ubuntu, vmware

I was skimming this month’s Doctor Dobb’s Journal, which doesn’t take long in recent years due to the Microsoft-centricity of the ads and overall relatively lightweight article content (there’s always a gem or two, though, which is why it gets skimmed at all), but ran across an ad for a programmer’s editor that grabbed me, not in a good way.

The ad says “Need a Code Editor that’s Powerful - Flexible - Robust and Supports over 40 Languages?” (For the 1 person who reads my blog who isn’t a geek, by this of course, they mean programming languages)… “Introducing Dr Koder, The Powerful, Dynamic Code Editor(tm)”.

OK, this is fairly wrong on a few levels, as obviously it has to be powerful, and “dynamic” to some degree, and edit code. So why trademark that expression, I have no clue. But the more important bit is “Dr Koder”. No period after the Dr., but I would assume they mean it in the form of “Doctor”, even though there’s no crazy tagline like “heals your code quick!” or “diagnoses your code ills” or similar. So forgiving that, the main point is, “Dr. Koder”, with a K yet? What is this? No self-respecting developer, let alone software engineer, is going to proudly reply to “what editor do you use?” with “I’m a Dr. Koder man!” It just sounds lame. No wait, not just that… it IS lame. A terrible name. Obviously, the engineer(s) who wrote this thing, got naming rights. Don’t do this. Get some consensus, ask around, hire someone… something.

Adding to the hilarity, is the “ComingSsoon! Signup [sic] for your copy Today!” As if, developers wait around for that next great editor with baited breath, and stand in line to get it the first moment, etc. That’s for iPhones, not code editors. Here’s how it works with editors: you download a free trial. If the trial is cripped in any way besides time-limited (and that, something reasonable along the lines of 30 or 60 days), you ditch it. You try it with a small project. You read the manual (well, only after figuring out there’s something you’re “not quite getting”). You see if it compares to Eclipse. You see if it’s got some magical redeeming features / look and feel / behavior (a la TextMate on the Mac only), and if not, stick with Eclipse (or heaven forbid, the Microsoft Visual Studio tools if you’re so deeply stuck in that world), or emacs/vi if you’re a diehard Linux geek and don’t understand the productivity gains of a modern IDE. That’s how it works. Dr Koder has no chance at this point, in other words. Maybe they should get the free trial up and running, and only then advertise it.

Meanwhile, I’ll be using my free trial of Dr. Browzer to surf the web–it kicks Firefox’s ass!!

Tags: advertising, bitching, coding, engineering, software

I run Spamassassin on my server where I have my primary email account (yes, I still run my own email server, I know, that’s so 1995). Anyhow, I haven’t upgraded Spamassassin, or its rulesets, in about 3 years, and the volume of spam that’s been slipping through is really getting insane. Sure, the clients can weed out a bunch of it, but their rules aren’t as sophisticated as everything that SA can do. I finally took the plunge and upgraded it, which actually was pretty painless considering I am running an ancient version of RH (really ancient, don’t ask) and was moving from an old RPM to a new source-build. I still had to upgrade probably a dozen or more CPAN modules, although that generally went smoothly. And of course now, I actually set up a cron job to update the rules, which should keep things working nicely.

The results? Instantly, I saw a massive improvement in terms of what SA was able to correctly flag as spam! I got my inbox back! I estimate it’s catching about 95% of the spams that were slipping through prior to the upgrade, now. There’s also a couple false positives I need to deal with (from Bacula, most concerningly), but that is the next mini-project.

As a nice bonus (ok, the real reason I was doing this), the mail on my iPhone is now much more hammy, which makes it infintely more useful as a mail-reader!

Tags: Computers, email, linux, productivity, software, spam

I don’t know if there’s a TON of great Ruby-on-Rails jobs out there, but this looks pretty interesting, I’ve personally used the Blurb service and application and it’s really quite impressive… it’s sort of like the books you can make from within iPhoto, but taken a couple of orders of magnitude more powerful. The finished products aren’t too cheap (well, neither are the iPhoto books), but are quite nice. I don’t have any idea how much RoR there really is to do, seems like a lot of the work is in their client, but hey, someone can contact them and find out

Here’s the posting, cribbed from this post at Valleywag’s jobs section (yeah, I know, it’s a little weird they even have one… what is the catchphrase, “reaching more rumor-loving engineers than Craigslist”?):

Posting after the jump… Read more »

Tags: Books, coding, iPhoto, jobs, rubyonrails, sanfrancisco, software

[tags]TextMate, apple, software, coding, blogging, emacs, Ruby, rubyonrails, wordpress[/tags]

I’ve been trying out [TextMate][] for a couple of weeks on the Mac. So far, I’m really impressed, and very likely to fork over the license fee (around $75). Which is really quite a lot for an editor when you consider the wealth of good editors already out there, and free, not the least of which is Emacs, which I’ve been happily using on and off for hmm, probably 15 years at this point. Sure, I’ve forayed into the Visual Studio IDE when I was developing on Windows, and used the Borland (text-mode) environment when I wrote a lot of Turbo C++ before that; I’ve toyed with Eclipse as well more recently. But Emacs ports on the Mac aren’t too great (including stability issues), and TextMate pretty much seems to be written with an Emacs state of mind with regards to extensibility, etc. It even has some Emacs keybindings lurking in the default configuration.

But what got me on this kick was playing with [Rails, or RoR, or Ruby on Rails][rails], the almost sublime web-application framework built on [the Ruby language][Ruby]. It seems a lot of the influential RoR community, are Mac-heads and use TextMate for developing code. The Ruby support in TextMate is quite good, and there is special ‘modes’ to use Emacs terminology (’Bundles’ to use TextMate terminology) just for Rails as well. And they’re very nice.

My essentially frothing at the mouth praise for Rails and Ruby can wait for another post, although let me say they are both quite excellent, especially if you keep in mind the problem domain, and don’t think of them as C++ or J2EE replacements. (But PHP and typical Java web app replacements, well that’s another story… and I recommend reading [O'Reilly's Beyond Java book][Beyond Java] to get it.) The interesting bit is how much having an excuse to feel out the editor and understand some of the hooks and extensions available for it, have made me really understand how it can empower me. I guess it was always that way with Emacs as well, although the alternative was something edlin-ish (I don’t think the Prime I first started using it on had a vi port, even.)

But here’s my first words on this: TextMate is excellent, so far. Ruby (and Rails) are as well. I feel excited to be exploring this stuff.

and p.s., this blog post was written and edited from within TextMate using the ‘blogging’ bundle and [Markdown][], via the [PHP Markdown Extra][] plugin for WordPress! About all it needs now is to support the [Ultimate Tag Warrior][] plugin, and I’m never using WordPress’ writing interface again… from my Mac anyhow. (**Update** it seems you can still get the main tagging stuff to work if you turn on ‘embedded tag support’ in UTW and then use the SimpleTag format. Cool! Thanks to [this blog post][vimposting] about posting from vim of all things, for the hint!)

[vimposting]: http://coopblue.com/blog/2006/06/posting-to-wordpress-from-vim-with-tags-and-markdown/
[Ultimate Tag Warrior]: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
[Beyond Java]: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/beyondjava/
[Ruby]: http://www.ruby-lang.org/
[rails]: http://rubyonrails.com/
[TextMate]: http://macromates.com
[PHP Markdown Extra]: http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
[Wordpress]: http://wordpress.org/

Tags: apple, blogging, coding, emacs, Ruby, rubyonrails, software, TextMate, wordpress

Roxio is the company that makes Toast, the best disc-burning software on the Mac. Which is a little like saying they make the best anti-virus software for Windows, in that it’s something the OS should really provide a pretty robust solution for. Anyhow, it is pretty good, and although I think I’ve yet to get it to transcode video into a DVD without crashing, it manages to do the basics–jamming files onto DVD-Rs, reasonably well.

The catch to all this, is that it’s a really expensive piece of software, at least for what I have successfully made it do, with a list price of $99. Now, I’m sure no one pays the list price, I mean even on their own site you can get it for $79. Still, eighty bucks is a lot for software that basically copies files. Plus, between Toast 6 and Toast 7, they removed some features at the behest of the MPAA. I don’t like my software companies taking orders from bully industry groups. But anyhow, I bought 6, and upgraded to 7, which cost me $60 as I recall. So, I’m into these guys for well over $100, and basically, just to burn backup copies of my digital photos. I mean, there’s some features about making audio CDs–oh wait, I use iTunes (free) for that, and for video editing–oh wait, I use iDVD for that (iLife came with my Mac). Still, I’ve been relatively happy with it as a product, and it makes burning the occasional .bin/.cue easier than not having it.

Read more »

Tags: bitching, dvd, email, roxio, software, spam, toast, upgrade

Hmm, when you start working with a bunch of webservices that spit out JSON (really, it’s inevitable; leave XML for interfacing with the Big Iron, especially since almost noone seems to understand when to use attributes, and so most docs are 95% elements), you’re going to want a nice way to look at the output for visual debugging. That’s one thing the current crop of browsers finally got right, is being able to pretty-print XML, even without a default stylesheet. For example, here’s what I get in Firefox for part of a sample document (cropped, the doc is valid!): Read more »

Tags: coding, Firefox, javascript, JSON, plugins, software

jyte.com looks a little like a web2.0 weekend project from university students, and it probably is, but is somewhat amusing nonetheless. I’m pretty sure they’re hoping to get bought by Yahoo for 100x their investment

Jyte allows you to make “statements” or “claims” as they call them, and let people quickly rate them up/down, for realtime social interaction. Are you cool? Make a claim!

Anyhow, probably the most significant point about it is that it uses OpenID for login. This is really a great thing, I’m a huge fan of stuff like OpenID (I say “like”, because personally I prefer the Yahoo BBAuth stuff, as 400 million people already have the login credentials to use it.) It’ll be interesting to see if this takes off and gets really popular; it could, seeing how hotornot it crazy lucrative and Bix got bought by Yahoo… maybe I’m just jealous I didn’t come up with this super-simple idea

Tags: security, software, voting

I spent probably 6 hours today trying to get Bacula working fully. I’d never tried it, but have been thinking about trying to implement a “real” backup system for some time. By “real”, I mean, something that can back up the most important bits of my two Macs, my remote webserver, and even bits of the RAID5 array that are “super critical”, to a separate harddrive, handle incrementals, and not involve lots of hackery on the clients. Bacula does seem to fit the bill, and I picked up a 400G eSATA drive to add to the server last week for about $100 to be the backup media (tapes? we don’t need no stinkin’ tapes!)
Read more »

Tags: bacula, hardware, linux, mac, NAS, software