Tacky

Nothing says tacky like a 8 foot inflatable santa on sale. Boo-ya!

Night before night before Christmas

'Twas the night before the night before Christmas, and all through the apartment all the gifts were wrapped, with not-so-few exceptions. Ah well. I'll get them done soon enough. I'll post more about that later, or maybe not. I have not made up my mind about that. I DO want to take a picture of our Christmas tree after I get everything finally done. I don't feel too bad though. My mom told me that on their first Christmas they were wrapping gifts at 10 am Christmas morning. There is still tomorrow, so it's all good. ;-P

Media in 2014

When all the mirrors come back up, you should check out this interesting presentation that I read on slashdot. What will happen if there are no professional media and it's all just a popular contest? Something to make you go Humm...

WSAD using Java 1.4

It's all about figuring out the correct words. If you want to make a java app that runs in Java 1.4 in Websphere, you have to use WSAD 5.1.1 at least and have to change some configuration settings. But finding that configuration change is hard. You have to know that you have to change the "Server Targeting support" among other things. *sigh*

Non-power users will use the GUI

One thing that I was thinking about as I was setting up samba again is that it's nice to have a GUI when you are not familiar with something. And that's why I think until there is more support for linux users actually using just the GUI, it will never beat Windows.

The "typical" windows user doesn't even know how to set up their network card, so why would they switch to linux? I don't even remember when the last time I saw a Windows tutorial that said "Okay, now open a DOS prompt and...". But you're hard pressed to find a linux tutorial where at some point they don't open up a terminal and su to root.

So, along those lines I'll shortly do a writeup for how to setup samba from the lessons that I have learned. I think that it's really easy now, but I didn't before. It's pretty easy when you use the GUI too...

The only trouble with this is that there really isn't a "standard" linux version. The tutorials that are out there work because if you do them below the GUI it's going to be the same. Not true with so many distro's, install options, and desktops like KDE or Gnome. So, at best I think that my writeup will help 25% of the people that read it, but it may push the others in the right direction. And until there is more help out there for non-command line junkies, we're all going to be using Windows for a while yet.

Crazy

I mailed this to just about everyone already, but I thought that I would post it here anyways. Check out some intersting Canada / US relations by Fox News and CNN.

FC3: 6, Jim: 0

I've been trying to install the latest version of Fedora Core 3 the last couple of days to no avail. It's not that there is something wrong with me (well, no more than normal). It's that I can't seem to burn the media without errors. I did the checksum on the iso files so I "know" those are okay. When I actually try and burn any disks they fail the media test. *sigh*

I tried burning disks at slower speeds, on a different computer using a different cd burning sw, doing the verification on a different computer. No success yet. The only common thing so far is that I have been using CD's from the same spindle. Maybe they are all (?!?) bad, I don't know. So right now I am trying one of Laura's blank CD's. I'm burning it at 4x so it's taking a while for one disk...

I'll probably borrow the CD's from a co-worker of mine, but I'd like to be able to figure out why I am not able to burn these disks without troubles. Not happy about it.

Update: It seemed that it was a problem with the CD's. The BAD CD's are: Mitsumi. Bad, bad, bad... The CD's that did work are: TDK, which if you google them come up with the first hit as CD Media World - TDK Inferior Quality CD-R's. Too funny...

Check the default install

If you are making an installer for an application, check the default install on all of the OS's that you support. I was trying to install an app and it asked to put the files in my home directory which on Windows 2k is something like "C:\Documents and Settings\jim". Then from there I run the install file which opens a window and gives me choices. I click on the main choice and nothing happens. I wait for a bit. Nothing happens. I try again and still nothing.

Then I moved the file into a subdirectory of root and it worked. My guess is that because there was a space in the path the installer crapped out, but that is where the app asked to be put!!! So, at the very least assume that your users (at least some) will just click next next next... on the installer. Check that path. When that works, expand to give them more choices.

Frustrated

Ever find your exact question online and it not have any answer to it? *double sigh*

Adventures of Action Item

Sometimes the lingo and process can get in the way of getting the job done. Check out this comic to get an idea of what I mean. Sometimes I get annoyed with people saying "We'll take that offline" and other similar phrases, but they get the meaning across quickly (I think). *sigh*

About time

It took a long freaking time, but I finally have samba working. Cross your fingers that it will still be working tomorrow... I had a hard time with it, but I think that when I figured out that there was a firewall blocking my packets was the breaking turning point. I'm not sure that was the only fix, but it sure helped a lot. Other things like the work group name is case sensitive.

I'm using XP Home and there are tons of sites that say that you can't use Win XP Home, you must use Pro. That's only for if you are trying to use "domains" and have the samba box in another domain.

Another point of note, if you want to change the firewall settings in RH, use /sbin/iptables and the other associated commands. Don't try and modify the file by hand as some examples show you.

I feel very productive since I got home tonight. I'm not feeling too great but I got vnc and samba working. Next I'm going to move stuff over to the linux more and play with it as a file server. I may also make it a dev box and load it up with some RAM and just use my laptop as a terminal. We'll see. I wonder how well my laptop would run if I put RH on it...

It's finding the right tutorial

It's all about finding the right tutorial. Until I found this tutorial, I was having a lot of trouble setting up VNC at home. It wasn't until I got to the step where they talk about opening the firewall that I clued in. Of course RH would be running a firewall by default... *sigh*

Fat vs. Thin or somewhere in between?

One of the things that frustrates me often is having to try and make fat client-like functionality in a thin client. And I know I am not the only one. Instead of focusing on the business layer and other more "interesting" areas I end up spending my time making sure that a list can be sorted in a browser correctly.

But there are advantages of thin clients, including "no roll out", certain security measures build into the platform (which I pull my hair out about) and familiarity of the UI (more or less). Now I don't think that the fat client area is dead, but I don't think that web apps are going away any time soon either. I wonder if soon it will get to be more of somewhere in between. Somewhere I have not thought of before.

Since there are languages like XUL that allow the UI to be "easily" created. Will the future hold more of a hybrid where you pass some markup to the client to represent the UI and the data separate. The client will take care of doing things like displaying lists and various different widgets. I'm not talking about a fat client where the data is passed through some web service or SOAP. When you connect, if you have an outdated "UI" or don't have it already, you request that. Then you also request the data and it displays it in the UI you have on the client. This wouldn't really be too different than programming in JSP or ASP etc. where you load a collection into a tag and it iterates through it except that it is done on the client and not the server.

For applications that you would way to have more access than a web browser (freedom to print, save to the hard drive, etc.) you could have a part of the application with a permission list. Each app gets registered and uses only the parts that a user explicitly allows it to. I would think that this would be better than having users install "random" exe's on their computer.

If you have the computing part on a server, all the UI will be doing is dumb things like sorting lists, getting user input, dialog boxes, alerts, firing events etc. Any updates to the UI would get pulled in when they are on the server. It's sort of funny with desktops being so powerful yet this idea is just to use them as dumb terminals, but that's what happens with all these web apps anyways...

This "universal client" probably has tons problems that I have not thought of, but I have not seen other people talking about it. Have you? What other problems could you guys think of for this solution?

Digital Camera

I finally did it. I've been talking about it for a while, but today I went out and got a digital camera. It's a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P73 4.1MP camera and I'm happy with it so far, but it's only been like 2 hours. ;-P

I was reading reviews about it on Imaging Resource which I found to be really helpful. They really seemed to have done a lot of research into the cameras and tested them well. I didn't get a top of the line camera and from the review I feel I know what some of the shortcomings are.

One thing that "sold" me on it was how fast it takes pictures. You press the button, *snap* you have a picture. No waiting around for 2 seconds. A two second wait is forever if you are trying to take pictures of young children like my nieces and nephews.

Next step: figuring out how to make / buy cheaply a digital picture frame. ;-)

Funny blog

A well written funny blog. It looks new. Let's see if Gateman keeps up with it. ;-)

Biggest piss off

One of the things that really ticks me off is when you have a site that has a lot of broken links. One site that I hit a broken link like every 2 minutes is ibm.com. Not even links to external sites, but places to things within their site. Grrrr.... You'd think that they would have some fancy IBM tool that would go through a site and find all the broken links. I'm sure that they sell one, but I can't find it on their site. The link's broken. ;-P

Word of the Day

The word of today is POJO:

POJO (pronounced poe-joe)
noun from the latin root plainus objectus
Example usage: All my classes are POJO's, so nothing fancy here...

Simple tricks

One thing that I liked about coding with other people is the small but important tricks that people show you while you are pair-programming (or at least working closely together). One that Karen showed me a while ago is in what order you do a .equals() in Java.

Most people why they want to compare a variable against a constant would do something like this (forgive the formatting):
if (myLocalVar.equals(STATIC_CONSTANT)) {...}
Now this is all well and good except what happens if myLocalVar is null? Your code that wasn't protected throws a NullPointerException over something that you should have guarded against.

You could something like:
if (myLocalVar != null && myLocalVar.equals(STATIC_CONSTANT)) {...}
but that gets messy and more likely someone would forget to put that guard (or screw up the != for ==, ...)

Here is the simple trick. If you have a constant, you know that will never be null (assuming you didn't set it up to be null), so write the code like this:
if (STATIC_CONSTANT.equals(myLocalVar)) {...}
This protects you against myLocalVar being null and works (because equals is symmetric)

I like tricks and thought that I would share. ;-)

Gmail spam

I didn't post my gmail account to anything on the web (I think), but I have started to get spam already. My guess would be is that they are dictionary attacks, but even so it would suck if google wasn't filtering it so well. I doubt that spam will continue to be a good way to mass market a product, but it's got to work on some level now for people to making money doing it.

I just wonder how soon it will before google offers companies gmail for corp mail servers sort of like how they the google appliance and you rent the hardware and software. I wonder what they will call the mail box if they call their search engine an "appliance". Will the mail server be the "google toaster"? Maybe they are saving that for their google cluster which would "pop" out hard disks that crashed... god, that would be funny...

Teaching driving for the first time

Lately I have been teaching Laura to drive my standard transmission car. This is the first time that I have really helped someone learn how to drive and it's really an interesting experience. It's one of those things that you never know what it's like to be on the "other side" until you actually have to do it. I understand more now why when my dad or brothers were teaching me how to drive them sometimes had to really think about how to explain it. When you drive a lot and for enough time, it all seems to natural that it's hard to think about the steps / checklist that you use to perform the task.

Luckily for me I didn't learn to drive like 30 years ago. It was only like 8 so I am still able to recall a lot of the tricks that helped me out. Discovering how other people learn is interesting. I guess one of the hardest parts about teaching is putting yourself in other peoples shoes. ;-)

Snowing!

It's finally snowing! It's really wet snow and I don't have my winter boots yet, but ah well. I guess this might be a good reason to change my tires at my folks place this weekend. I'll probably take off my roof racks too since I don't think that I'll be doing any more kayaking this year... ah well.