My thoughts on iWork

Yes. I bought a Mac. It’s always good to explore things beyond your comfort zone, unless that thing is iWork. It was sold to me as “what you need to do word processing and stuff like that”. Well. Okay, you could use iWork, but wouldn’t it be easier to smash your hand with a hammer? Okay… all kidding aside, I’m sorry, the product doesn’t do it for me. Don’t waste your money– Open Office is way better, and.. it’s free. Microsoft Office would be nice on my Mac, but I’m not willing to shell out the cash for that.

Reflecting on my CS degree

I was told during my college days (2001-05/06) that “coding isn’t everything there’s more to computer science than just code”. I’d like to say.. well… yes.. this is true, for people who can’t code very well. Perhaps my professors were saying it to students who couldn’t code very well to make them not feel so bad.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m feeling that this whole software industry somehow got turned into a whole creamy mess with people saying things like “oh. you.. can get away with not coding and make a living out of it”, or “coding isn’t everything”. Why do we allow employees (of software companies) to be so divorced from code and allow them to do something like… go to meetings all day, or write papers all day, or.. something to that effect. With the rate of change in the software field, being divorced code for more than a couple of weeks just isn’t an option! People get out of practice, and somehow they get promoted along the years and somehow manage to reach a title as silly as “senior software engineers”, or as I would like to put “so far out of reach of developing software, you need to take a entry level position because you need to completely retrain yourself”. How do these people successfully design systems in the absence of code? (Unless they’re developing/designing the same thing over and over again– which in today’s technological saavy world seems not innovative..and.. well.. retarded.. perhaps a short-term profitable market?) The sad part is, they can’t.

By the time they design the system, they’re long gone trying to design something new, and when who do they call in when the design doesn’t work? The people who got the requirements? The awesome senior guys who forgot how to develop code? How about the Managers? No. It’s the freakin developers. CODE IS EVERYTHING. gah. Perhaps this is where Agile came from.. Designing the system with the presence of code — doing short iterations — getting frequent customer feedback– ahh.. yes… yes..

So, to all you current self-educating, self-motivated, constant-improving software coders– don’t let the requirements/design people (if your company/group has a separate group of people dedicated for that) tell you what to do– you’re the closest to the software, and you probably know it the best. You’ve been trained to write scalable, testable, robust, fault tolerant, secure, software — so do it.. don’t let guys 10 or 20 years out of college tell you what to do ( unless they’re guru’s in their field ) cause 99/100 times, they’re retarded.

emacs on MacOS (10.6) using Carbon Emacs

Ok, I’ve recently bought a mac book pro. To say the least, I’m not super excited about it.. In my opinion, it’s got a lot of the nice things Linux has, but a lot of features that I haven’t figured out yet, or that the Mac just doesn’t have. Then again, my mac is sexy as hell and lasts about 7 hours on a plane, so I can’t complain.

Anyways, not having an emacs where I could quickly “M-x query-replace (Alt-x query replace)” really pissed me off.. Having to Ctrl-Escape-x was just a road block in my retarded little brain, and to make things worst, Apple (like Lenovo) switched the stupid control button with the fn key. One month later, I said to myself, okay. I spent 2000 bucks on this machine, i should be able to figure out how to get a decent emacs on this thing.. I found aquaemacs.. but it was a little bit different from Gnu emacs, and to be honest.. nice try, but I since I work on Linux all day, coming home to something slightly different was just a bit of a pain. So here it is.. I stumbled up on Carbon emacs.. beautifully (so far) the same as what I use on Ubuntu 9.04.. First.. I found a comment posted on this posting:

http://www.lshift.net/blog/2007/11/27/emacs-in-macos-x-105-leopard

The comment suggested to use Carbon Emacs, and then went on to say to make a softlink to /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs so you can quickly call emacs from a terminal.. Well. that didn’t work for me. Carbon Emacs, for some reason, didn’t like being called from an absolute path. E.g. The following command failed:

/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

.. and softlinking

/usr/bin/emacs to /Application/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/Emacs

Also failed miserably.

So I created a script, to replace the original /usr/bin/emacs binary. So..
1. cd /usr/bin
2. sudo mv emacs emacs.old.leopard
3. Assuming you installed emacs into the Applications folder, copy and paste the script below into a file called “emacs”
4. sudo chmod 755 emacs
5. You should be able to use emacs from the MacOS terminal, just like on Linux


#!/bin/bash
EMACSHOME=/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS
ARGLIST=
while [ $# -ne 0 ]; do
echo "$1" |grep "^/"
if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
ARGLIST="$ARGLIST $1"
else
ARGLIST="$ARGLIST $PWD/$1"
fi
shift
done
cd ${EMACSHOME} && ./Emacs ${ARGLIST}


I had to append the $PWD variable to files that did not have an absolute path (those files listed on the command line that don't start with /) to allow opening of files, since we are having to 'cd' into the /Applications/Emacs.app folder

Cheers.

Audacious stopped playing mp3s :(… but.. (fixed!)

Yesterday audacious stopped playing mp3’s for me…

I fired it up in debug mode from a shell and I seemed to have had the same problem as this:

http://www.mail-archive.com/ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com/msg1088875.html

Unfortunately nobody seemed to have a solution.  So I downloaded beep media player and songbird.. I don’t really like either of them.. I’m (still) used to the old winamp 2.x days when .

Anyways.. I found the audacious folder under .config and moved it aside (while audacious is closed).. Seems like i can play mp3’s now..

mv ~/.config/audacious  ~/.config/audacious.old

So comparing the two directories… The only thing that looked fishy was that the log file grew to about 385kb… Other differences.. two files that were in the old directory: accels and playlist.xspf.. and the “config” file had a bunch of custom config stuff i messed with.

So trying to make it fail… i copied the log file from the “old” directory into the “new” directory… a-ok. rebooted audacious.. no prob.

Next, I copied the config file from the “old” to the “new” dir. KABOOM! i’ve re-created the problem.. what’s in that file you might ask? about 167 lines of “config” stuff… maybe i’ll get to the root of it.. i’m kind of tired. i need to get to work by 7:30 and it’s 1:20am.

Phillips DVP 5992 + Western Digital Elite 320 GB

I recently went to Costco and bought a DVP 5992 dvd player.. It’s got a USB 2.0 plug on there, so i was thinking.. awesome! I can hook up my external harddrive to the port and play all of my pictures/videos/mp3’s! right?! .. wrong..

I plugged in my Western Digital Elite 320 Gb drive.. and  the dvd player didn’t do anything but freeze.  Hmm i thought.. try it again!! . Hmm didn’t work!

So what went wrong.. after  searching the net.. Everyone says.. YOU NEED TO FORMAT IT WITH A FAT32 PArtition!!.. okay.. i know fdisk.. no prob.. I destroyed the fat32 partition that was already on there.. created a new one.. used mkdosfs to put another filesystem on there.. Same issue.. OKay so lets make a fat32 partition with only 4 gigs.. and put another filesystem on there.. NOPE!.. so that means it’s not a filesystem/size issue..

I did some more searching and I found out that the western digital drive requires about 650 mA, while the phillips dvd player only puts out 500 mA.  Shoot.. Okay.  Probably a power thing.. Even though i hear the drive spin up when attaching the drive to the dvd player..
Solution 1.. (Failed) So I thought I’d hook up a USB 2.0 Powered hub to the dvd player and then the harddrive to the usb hub.. Nope.. the dvd player says.. something like “USB hub not supported”

Solution2.. (going to try it tomorrow).  Buy a USB Y cable (one that allows you to give “Extra” power to the device.  Stick the data side into the dvd player, and stick the other cable into  a usb powered hub!  I hope this works, or that dvd player is going straight back to costco.. and you know how costco LOVES returns .

Solution3 : (Avoiding like the plague) the last resort.. buy one of those “not so portable” external 3.5 inch drives with an AC power plug.. this is most unattractive since i’d like to use this drive “on the go” and plug and un plug it wherever i go.

UPDATE:

Solution2 failed… I don’t think the WD 320 is compatible… I tried the Y cable.. and it continues to lock up the DVD player..

My final solution was to purchase another brand of a USB portable harddrive (SimpleTech 250Gb drive).. To get it working, I had to use fdisk/mkfs.msdos.   Unfortunately the phillips player can’t power the drive.. and the use of the USB Y connector is needed.. sooo I got my unused Asus WL-500 router.. plugged the “USB” power cable into the router, and the other into the USB port of the DVD player… not that sexy.. but. hey.. it works and i can watch movies… hooray.

Starbucks Gold card and….. some thoughts.

update:12/2/08
Well. okay. One “perk” i found out about the card today.. is that you can use your gold card and pay with cash..(you’re not forced to load the card with money) meaning. if you and your buddies go to starbucks.. they can all borrow the card to get 10% off.. (assuming the barista allows you two).  But wouldn’t this mean.. that by sliding the card.. shouldn’t the card automatically take 10% off qualitifed items off the bill?.. whatever.

————–

This post has nothing to do with linux, other than the coffee that fuels me to do work (on or off linux), and a rant on how starbucks should get on the ball.  Ok, so I bought a starbucks gold card today.  For those of you who haven’t heard of a starbucks gold card, it’s basically a 25 dollar annual membership, and you get 10% off most starbucks purchases.  They gives you this black card, they tell you to register it online, and you can use it like cash at any of their stores.  Great.. From a software developers point of view (or any sane person) you’d think. ok… you use this “special” card at their stores, you’ve registered it on their website, and you’d think that the 10% discount should automatically apply to your purchases.  Wrong. Based on current state of affairs, starbucks employees have to notice you have the card, press a button on their screen, and then you get the 10% discount.

Case in point, I go out for coffee tonight to use my card for the first time, I get my receipt expecting a 10% discount.. nada.  I’m thinking.. hmm maybe the card hasn’t been activated yet.. but no.. I ask the barista.. and she’s like.. “ohh maybe I rang it up wrong.. “  (like there’s a way to charge someone the wrong way?)  Another barista comes along, voids the first transaction, and then gets me my discount..

So what’s wrong here?  Starbucks doesn’t have a way to detect whether or not it’s a gold card or not?  I mean.. when I registered online, I punched in the starbucks unique identifier for my card, and it immediately detected as a gold card.  Ok… so that’s not the problem, Starbucks DOES have a list of cards that ARE indeed gold cards..  So then.. maybe it’s a matter of updating their Point-of-sale (POS) devices and they have no way of pushing updates to their POS devices.  It’s interesting because alot of desktop machines have automatic ways of recieveing updates (application layer, kernel layer, etc), but less prominent in embedded devices.  Some high end routers have this capability, but tv’s, cars, etc, .. not so much.  Why is this?

Anyways, what does this all mean?  I’ll go out on a limb here, I think that with the advent of agile software development and continuous integration, I believe that we’re going to see some generic frameworks come out for resource limited embedded devices to recieve/apply updates, run unit tests and return results, etc..  wouldn’t that be slick.

Quick thoughts on Ubuntu 8.10

Comming from Ubuntu 7.10, I installed Ubuntu 8.10 today.  (you can safely ignore that last post I made).  A couple things that I’m happy to see inside of Ubuntu 8.10:

Installation. Probably one of the things that most people take for granted.. but.. wow. what a breeze (as always).

Nvidia binary drivers that are actually up to date-  In Ubuntu 7.10, I used Alberto Milone’s to get the latests and greatest binary-only nvidia drivers.  It seems that Alberto is now a maintainer for Ubuntu’s Nvidia’s driver packages.. So i’m hoping that all the latest and greatest drivers will just be integrated into Ubuntu.  This is really cool since using Envy gave me some issues with turning on/off compiz.

DKMS – Dynamic Kernel module support – this is going to be cool to see what happens when nvidia, and the virutal box guys start releasing updates to their kernel modules.. hopefully things will go smoother than before.

Firefox-3… Wow. this version of firefox3 makes the firefox 3 beta version that came with 8.04 look like internet explorer 4.0.

Shortcomings?
The only thing that still doesn’t work is suspend… I think it has to do something with my laptop as I guess others have gotten suspend to work on a toshiba tecra A9. too bad for me.. i guess it’s time to upgrade the laptop.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/241407

Installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my Toshiba Tecra A9

Update: Turns out i guess my CD was bad… It’s weird that I can put the “broken” CD into another computer and do a ‘Verify CD for defects” and have it pass all the tests.. Ohwell.. I burned another copy, and everything seems a-ok.

So, I installed the Ubuntu 8.10 Release Candidate last week, and I’ve been doing some minor testing with it.. Looks like suspend still doesn’t work.. Too bad. But okay.. Ubuntu 8.10 (final) was released today, and since I’m home sick with a disgusting cold, why not!?  OK.. Lets download and install
Crap! Booting up Ubuntu 8.10 final, I’m noticing that I get kicked into a Busybox v 1.10.2 prompt looking something like this:

Loading, please wait…

BusyBox v.1.10.2 (Ubuntu 1:1.10.2-1ubuntu6) built-in shell(ash)
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands
(initramfs)

I get this prompt if I try installing ubuntu, or trying to run ubuntu without making anymods to the system.  I even tried checking the cd’s integrity.. and still, i get thrown into this prompt..

If i let the system sit there for a while, I get these messages: ( that seem to be coming from some sort  of kernel):

[ 69.401037] end_request: I/O error, dev sr0, sector 1431184
[ 69.401110] Buffer I/O error on devie sr0, logical block 178898
….

Strange thing is.. that if i put the cd into my other computer, and run an integrity check, the CD is a-ok!.. soo did something happen between the Release candidate and the Final CD where the installer no longer recognizes my cd-rom drive?   Maybe my cd-rom drive is busted.. but.. hmm i can load up my old operating system and still use the cd-rom..   Strange. I guess I’ll start googling around.. perhaps others are having this issue as well?  I’d hate to post something on launchpad, and have it turn out being a problem on my side…

projector to work with ubuntu and nvidia binary drivers

I stumbled upon…:

http://techxplorer.com/2007/11/15/getting-a-projector-to-work-under-ubuntu-linux-with-nvidia-drivers/

There was a comment below by Pik Master that lead me to my solution… i used:

Section “Device”
Identifier “nVidia Corporation G80 [Quadro NVS 130M]“
Driver “nvidia”
Busid “PCI:1:0:0″
Option “AddARGBVisuals” “True”
Option “NoLogo” “True”
Option “ConnectedMonitor” “DFP-0,CRT-0″
Option “UseDisplayDevice” “DFP-0,CRT-0″
Option “TwinView” “true”
Option “TwinViewOrientation” “Clone”
Option “TwinViewXineramaInfoOrder” “DFP-0,CRT-0″
Option “MonitorLayout” “LFP,LFP+CRT”
Option “metamodes” “DFP-0: 1680×1050 +0+0, CRT-0: 1680×1050 +0+0; DFP-0: 1680×1050 +0+0, CRT-0: 1680×1050 +0+0; DFP-0: 1680×1050 +0+0, CRT-0: NULL”

EndSection
simply awesome.

Virtualbox on Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy

I bit the bullet this morning on (finally) upgrading my kernel headers from 2.6.22-14 to 2.6.22-15 on Ubuntu 7.10. I was holding off because I knew my binary nvidia drivers would be a pain, and I’ve been loaded up with things at work.. So, naturally –July 4th weekend is a perfect time to sit down and wrestle with all the fun linux version dependencies.

K, Nvidia drivers– a bit of a pain, I had to go through a series of uninstall/install/xorg.conf/envy massaging before I got it back to normal, but.. fine.. Virtualbox on the other hand… ugh. It was literally firing some fireworks straight into my face. KABLooy. I could write about it but I found an article that expresses exactly what I ran into:

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2008/06/24/virtualbox-b0rken-by-gutsy-kernel-upgrade/

Basically moving from 2.6.22-14 to 2.6.22-15 — I guess there isn’t support for the 2.6.22-15 vboxdrv kernel module. Soo solution was to move from the OSE to the non-free binary under the PUEL License. Since this is for personal use– HOoorayY!. I tried compiling the OSE kernel modules for -15, but moving to this other version of virtual box was soo much easier. It even upgraded my Virtualbox config files under ~/.VirtualBox so that I didn’t loose any data from my host operating systems. Awesome!