tech

I Am Full of Teh Happy

/ joeygibson

Yesterday was a good day for me on several fronts. Let me tell you them.

First, whilst searching for various things in the iTunes store, I saw that Metallica had released their new album, Death Magnetic. I had bought the first single, My Apocalypse, a couple of weeks ago when it came out, and I was excited that Metallica might be good again. I was a Metallica fan from way back in the 80’s. I loved, loved, loved every album up to and including …And Justice For All. I didn’t like “the black album” at all for several years, but then it grew on me. I thought everything after that, starting with Load, sucked out loud. I listened to the samples of the new album and immediately clicked the “Add to Cart” button. I’ve listened to the whole album about 5 times now, and it’s playing again as I write this. This album is full of awesome. It’s fast and heavy with glorious Kirk Hammett guitar solos throughout. If you liked “old” Metallica, you will love this album. Buy it. Memorize it. Love it. Standout songs include “My Apocalypse,” “Broken, Beaten & Scarred,” “The Judas Kiss” and “All Nightmare Long.” 

I was also happy to see that iTunes had finally added 0 + 2 = 1 by the very strange band NoMeansNo. I had this as a cassette, back when it was originally released, but I haven’t been able to find it in any format since. iTunes had one or two NoMeansNo records, but not this one. I have been checking periodically, but they never had it. Until yesterday. I’ve listened to it twice since buying it. It’s heavy and a bit odd, but very good. “0 + 2 = 1” and “The Valley Of the Blind” are the best songs on the record.

And if that weren’t enough musical goodness, Dar Williams’ new album, Promised Land, was also available. I think this is one of her best albums ever. I have her entire catalog, and this album has already moved to the top of the list for me. It has her signature lyrical twists, and it’s quite upbeat, with beautiful melodies. I’ve only listened to it twice since buying it, but it’s really good. My favorite songs, so far, are “It’s Alright,” “Buzzer” and “Troubled Times.”

Yes, I have eclectic musical tastes.

Next, as anyone with an iPhone knows, Apple released iPhone OS 2.1 yesterday. I was really looking forward to this update because OS 2.0.2 had lots (and lots) of problems and annoyances. The biggest problem I had was with how long it took to backup the phone. Every time I plugged it into my Mac, it would easily take over an hour to do a full sync. That’s absurd. I have less than 2 gigabytes of stuff on the iPhone and it took one-hour+. I have 60 gigabytes of stuff on my iPhone, and a sync never takes more than a few minutes. The other major annoyances were a terrible lag when using the onscreen keyboard, and the fact that when you updated an application, it didn’t stay where you put it, instead moving to the first available open spot. Not good. 

I’m very happy to report that iPhone OS 2.1 has fixed these problems, for me, anyway. A full sync is taking around five minutes, which is completely reasonable. The keyboard feels responsive, and after updating applications, they stay where I put them. Bravo, Apple. Keep the goodness coming, KTHX.

And finally, the first two discs of season 3 of Weeds arrived from Netflix. I watched the first three episodes last night, staying up far, far too late in the process. Damn, I love this show, even though I know I shouldn’t like it, if you know what I mean.

Problems With Latest Version of iTerm

/ joeygibson / 1 Comment

I love iTerm as a replacement for Terminal.app, but this morning after letting iTerm upgrade itself to “Build 0.9.5.0909”, all my settings, profiles and bookmarks were lost. I don’t know why, but that’s what happened. I pulled back the iTerm.plist from ~/Library/Preferences using Time Machine, but that didn’t seem to fix it. I also tried to restore iTerm.app using Time Machine, but there was something funky going on with TM, so I wasn’t able to.

In the end I just reset the preferences as best I could from memory and started recreating my bookmarks. You might want to wait to upgrade.

Microfortnights Make Me Giggle

/ joeygibson

A long time ago (15+ years) I worked on a VAX. If memory serves, it was a MicroVAX 3900. I don’t recall ever seeing this unit of measure mentioned in the docs, but I may have. It’s the “microfortnight” and reading about it always makes me laugh. From the Jargon file:

microfortnight n.

1/1000000 of the fundamental unit of time in the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight system of measurement; 1.2096 sec. (A furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is 1/4th of a barrel; the mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of water). The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and time at boot if it realizes that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in microfortnights!

Wikipedia’s article on microfortnights has a bit more info

The joke is in having a rather large unit (fortnight) combined with a fractional SI prefix (micro) to counteract that. The practical purpose is to discourage setting such parameters without some thought. The unit was selected because the time is only approximately one second, being established by some near-infinite loops rather than a real clock unit (which isn’t active at the time), and rather than field complaints about this being “not exactly a second”, the unit was invented.

Heck, I don’t even have to be reading it to laugh about it. Just thinking about it makes me laugh.

I’m Digging Java Again

/ joeygibson / 1 Comment

I first started doing Java back in 1995. That’s quite a long time ago. Once I got going, I wrote Java code every single day, for thirteen years. I co-authored a Java book, gave talks on Java and was an all-around, Java Guy™. And sometime around 2006, I got bored with it. Completely and totally bored. I was a one-man shop at a small company, my code was running just-fine-thanks-very-much, and I didn’t feel like doing anything new with it, at all. I was more interested in Ruby and, to a lesser degree, Rails, so Java changes didn’t really interest me. And thus, I failed to notice some really cool stuff that was going on in Java-land.

In June of this year I joined a new company that is doing some rather advanced Java work. I had to get current, tout de suite, and in so doing, I’ve really gotten interested and engaged again. Spring and Hibernate have really changed from the older versions I was using, and so has JUnit. All for the better, from what I can tell.

And with this renewed interest, I’ve bought my first new Java books in over 3 years. I bought Effective Java (2nd Edition) to replace my first edition and Java Concurrency in Practice, because I heard good things about it. So far, I’ve read about 2/3 of  Effective Java. I used to buy Java books all the time. I have tons of them. But when I got bored, I stopped shelling out the cash on the Java books.

Java-land is still a very nice place to play. Sometimes you have to get an outside perspective to realize that.

Chrome Is Cool, But No Mac Version Yet

/ joeygibson / 2 Comments

Yesterday, the internets were all a-flutter about Chrome, Google’s new surprise web browser. Sure, I downloaded it, like everyone else, and I was impressed by its rendering speed. I used it for a few hours without any problems at all. It works with every site I tried it with, and speedily. I’m especially juiced about the JavaScript JIT engine called V8, and the fact that each tab is its own process, separate from other tabs.

But here’s the rub: for now, it’s Windows-only. How can this be? It’s built on top of WebKit, which is Apple’s updated version of KHTML, and both run on OSX and Linux. So what gives, Google? I know they say that there will be OSX and Linux versions “soon,” but how long is that?

I found directions for building Chromium, which says on its homepage, “Google Chrome is built with open source code from Chromium.” So I downloaded all the source code and tried to build it. Here’s 2,000 words about how it went

I guess I’ll just have to wait for the official OSX release.

Google Reader May Trump Bloglines For Me

/ joeygibson / 2 Comments

I’ve been using Bloglines.com for feed reading for a few years now. I had tried Google Reader before, but I was quite happy with Bloglines, so I never switched. I’ve actually been using beta.bloglines.com, their beta site, ever since they made it public. But lately Bloglines has seemed really slow. Clicking on a feed resulted in a multiple second wait before the headlines showed up in the list. That may not sound like a long time, but it really is. And sometimes, clicking on a feed resulted in… nothing. The “working” indicator never went off and I never got headlines. Re-clicking the feed might work, but then the headlines had already been marked as read, so they didn’t show up without an extra click. Sometimes reloading the page was what was called for.

Another annoyance was that they kept rearranging the order of my feed folders. I am meticulous about organizing bookmarks and feeds; I have them categorized into folders, and those folders are in alphabetical order in the feed list. And Bloglines keeps moving them around, maybe once every two weeks, for no good reason. Very annoying, indeed.

So the other day I decided to give Google Reader another try. I exported all my subscriptions from Bloglines and imported them into Google Reader. Thus far, I’m quite happy. The response time is snappy and I like the fact that I can share things from my feeds into a public list which is available here and that can feed into my FriendFeed feed. I’m going to keep using Google Reader, and while I will check back in on Bloglines occasionally, it looks like I may have found a new feed reader.

Strange Firefox+Mac WordPress Admin Page

/ joeygibson

Below is a screencap of what part of my WordPress 2.6.1 admin page looks like when I view it using Firefox 3.0.1 on Leopard.

If you click on it to view it better, you’ll see the problem. The stats graph is shifted about 200 pixels to the right and about 150 pixels down. On Safari it looks perfect, but not on Firefox. This doesn’t happen with Firefox on Windows, so it’s some sort of quirk with the Mac version.

Has anyone else seen this, and do you have any suggestions?

My iPhone Battery Drain – Solved

/ joeygibson / 2 Comments

Ever since upgrading my iPhone to 2.0.2 last week, I had noticed a marked drain on my battery. I don’t use my phone that much, so it surprised me that the battery was going down as fast as it was. I never let it get fully drained, but it would easily have lost its full charge over three days, which is unusual for me.

What I forgot was that after installing 2.0.2 I also setup a mail account on the phone to my company’s Exchange server. The problem was that even though I had “Push” turned off in the “Fetch New Data” section of Settings, when I added the Exchange server, it defaulted to “Push.” Once I discovered this, turned “Push” off and told it to fetch every hour, my battery life is right back where it has always been.

So, if you’re losing battery life faster than you expected, check your “Push” settings, not just in the Settings tool, but for each email account you have setup.

Apple Still Working on MobileMe

/ joeygibson

I just received an email from Apple regarding MobileMe. Here’s what it said

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around.

It’s good to see the bit in there about this launch not being their “finest hour.” That shows that they recognize how bad this rollout has been. But they better solve it soon or they’ll be giving everyone a free year. We’re already up to 90 days of free service.

I really like MobileMe, though the only part of it that I really use is syncing bookmarks and stuff between my Mac Pro and iBook. I tried to setup the Outlook integration on my Windows laptop the other day, but it didn’t seem to actually do anything. I guess that’s part of what’s broken with the service, maybe.

iPhone OS 2.0.1 – Installed

/ joeygibson

I just finished updating my 2G iPhone to OS 2.0.1. Usually when I sync my phone, I skip the “backing up iPhone” stage because it takes too damn long, but tonight, I figured I’d better let it complete. That stage alone took over an hour. After the upgrade, the entire sync process took under three minutes. That’s a serious improvement. As for other changes, I haven’t had time to play with it yet. I will be sure to note any improvements or annoyances I find.