Entries Tagged 'programming' ↓

I stumbleupon this great site today, it’s a comic strip kind of geeky but very nice. Check out some gems.

Here is a classic Pointers
This is an exam I’ll love to take some day Substitute
This one shows how creepy some people are Paths
Sudoku
Wikipedia hard truth
Command Line Fu, sadly I know several people to whom this may happen
This one isn’t a joke in fact it’s very interesting Map of the Internet
Beliefs, creationism all the way!
Delicious
Open Source

intelligent jokes
Marketing Interview
Jacket
I can think a couple of people that will think this is me Resonance
Random Number, so yea think your function names
Nash
Romantic Drama Equation

last but not least What xkcd Means, hehe I do the last one.

and many more I read before I decided to post this so, thanks Randall I had fun

and of course here a direct link to the RSS or for the old fashion Archive

Because we like it.

Programmers love to be “in the edge”. I love to do that; on my gentoo system I’m constantly doing emerge -u world, and in ubuntu I’m always clicking the little orange icon. Now i’m fine with it if it affects me… but we live in a bigger world.

I remember one of the mottos of servers administration is “DO NOT UPGRADE”. Why? Simple. you don’t need it because what’s there now it’s working; and this is why you see production systems running OS versions from 2-3 or more years ago, and eventually they do upgrade but sysadmins know it’s a problem and try to avoid it.

Now if your working with other people you need to think before upgrading and more important ASK before doing it so you don’t break everyone’s code.

The reason I’m blogging  about this is that it has happen twice in the past month, ironically with the same platform. Without going into the details of why I disagree with your upgrade it’s a matter of form rather then the fact itself. In both cases I have had the same two answers:

1. because it’s better
2. because I had that installed (one admit it the other left it implicit)

When confronted for a explanation of #1 both gave a fussy reason, mostly linked to all the hype around how great it’s performance is, now in both cases this was premature optimization because the system hasn’t been run ones. No really neither system is in production and it needs at least 2 months of work before it can even hope to.

So what piss me off was #2 your imposing on me your “in the edge” without looking at the consequences in the last case. I’m100% sure the overall project lost at least 10 hours of productivity because of this, this is because they are all newbie, so think about the first time you ran some code compiled for JVM 1,x,y and ran it on JVM 1,x,w and you will see how it adds up correctly. Add to that having to re-target all your tools to run on top of the new JVM, or you forgot about your tomcat instance? yes you did since your email says classpath.

Now I’m fine from you running the kernel off Andrew Morton tree, compiling everything by hard (using -o9 if you still think that’s good), that’s fine I do it on some of MY stuff. but I do not expect everyone to keep up, and you shouldn’t too.

A nice video my cousing send me the other day.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3014637678488153340

I know a LOT of people have said the same thing before, but jobs has a great way of talking. Ohh by the way it has spanish subtitles if you care about it…

I read this small post from FuManChu, in case you don’t know him he is the guy that gave us cherrypy3.0 I’m not sure if he was directing that to someone I know it wasn’t me :p But It got me thinking….

I guess my answer will be

You’re writting a program that will work forever, and I want to be homeless for the rest of my life.

by the way thanks Robert for CP3. TG2 will not be possible without it.

lets start with a wikiquote “in computer science, a user interface that allows navigation of objects with a connecting structure”, from Browser, Now most people when saying “browser” they refer to a Web Browser, now the only real difference is that the Web browser is specialized in reading html and anything related to it; therefore a web browser is just a UI to look at data, which if you look at it is the same thing most desktop applications do.

webapps now

Today webapplications are basicallly a db, and a logic layer that translate the db into something the web browser undestands. The best combination of this right now is implemented as xhtml + CSS with javascript async calls that return formatted XML that gets inserted by DOM manipulation into the original xhtml file, of couse the last part is the “heat” webapps are currently getting because today they are finally not slow.

Here are the current problems they have

• session management, the current implementation of this is very hackish
• offline access, most browsers suck at this and they can’t catch most data that is transfer today.
• of course 3D graphics is out of the question, since this is a whole new realm, although what could happen

webapps in the future

browsers are going to grow into more complex platforms the first steps are firefox extensions take something like flock which is a totally different app yet still firefox, or kupu that powers plone’s editor, look at it in action here (warning huge download) look at some of the most interesting extensions like allpeers

Now this is just the beggining lots of browsers are in the making like venice pro Joost, songbird and the democracy player to name a flew.

and many more will come…

So yes green IMO webapps are the future, it’s just that we don’t know what they are going to evolve into.

ok so I have spend some time this weekend on my site.

I have upgraded to wordpress 2.1 which has some nice features. I like the “new” editor, it seems to handle the code/visual switch in a much simple way. Also some people may like the fact that this new version has a spell checker build in. I like the autosafe too, lets see how it works if I leave a post open at work and then go home

I have finally finish setting up the wiki and I have decided to go with moinmoin and that was before of two reasons, mediawiki is too complicated too install, and I have a control panel script to run (thanks Remi), although I upgraded it to the latest version. and because it has a GUI editor and some people just can’t stand wiki syntax.

So I have added some default categories so we can have some fun.

• NickNames, the usual expect the first transcript of there “LowLander” soon.
• WallOfShame, things that we(or someone else) has done, and we (or someone else) are too a shame of taking credit for them.

In all cases if you add to the end CategoryFoo where Foo is one of the above they will automagically show up in the list. and I suggest although it’s not needed that you add the pages as “child” of the category for example NickNames/Mae. if you think there is another category that will be nice to have please just say so.

PS: the URL for the wiki is left as an exercise to the reader.

Disclaimer no this will not turn into a diary it’s just that this particular event should be told as one.

Dear diary (hehehe sorry I had to)

I believe it was tuesday went a friend of my mother call me and she said she needed a favor (background detail I’m from Costa Rica and live in Dominican Republic), it turns out her id expired and they ask her to bring two Costaricans to prove that the id is her, this is the kind of thing that needs it’s own post ummm I can write an entire blog about burocratic BS…

So I get to the embassy at 8:30 am and she is already there and we are waiting for the consul and the other witness, they arrive almost together so we went up all together talking.

We sit on the waiting room and my mother’s friend introduces us, so the witness asks what you do, and I reply I’m a software engineer I work at X and do Y,Z,etc. while I’m talking I notice the guy gets really interested (I though he was an economist or something) and I wasn’t really sure if it was anything other then a filler conversation. On the other hand the consul is still listening ones she realized I know about computers she did what all mortals do, hey I have a problem with my machine ….

The economists says I’m a software consultant, and I said to myself see that’s why you shouldn’t say things like “and then you plug the Java Sockets API into the RAM chips and the CPU will be overclocked at 4Gigabytes of storage”, I have a friend who loves to say stuff like that so mere mortal will go “ohhhhh”. Then the consul comes by look my skype is not working I let him (the consultant) know that I’m more interested in him then her (consul) and ask her to give me just a minute.
I’m sitting at the consul’s desk, the problem with skype was a weird tooltip on her spanish version, or at least that’s the best I could find.

I got the consultant’s number the guy is really interested in having me as a contact maybe he will never give me a job because I don’t do .net, but as one scene in this great movie says: (this is not exact, and since the movie is in spanish… by the way there is a copy of it in english

Marcos and Juan are in front of a lot of argentinan pesos (I believe it was the equivalent of 1 million dollars (fake money of course they are con artist))
Marcos: (takes a pack of bills) will you sleep with a guy for 10000 lucas (lucas = pesos in argentina’s popular culture)
Juan: No
Marcos: (takes another pack of bills) will you give him a blow job for 20000 lucas
Juan: No, are you crazy??
Marcos: (taking 2 packs) how about sleeping with him for 40000?
Juan : No, I won’t
Marcos: (taking a bunch of them) 100000 lucas
small pause….
Juan: NO
Marcos: (taking half the money) 1 million lucas
big pause…
Marcos: See it’s not that they aren’t enough faggets in the world it’s just that there isn’t enough money to pay them all.
So this huge quote means that I do .net

Back to the issue, all the paper work is done I say good bye to them all I have a paper folded in 4
2 halfs of blank 2 with numbers, one of the filled says to me small country’s embasy in another small country, cheap maintenance deal and lots of referals, the other filled one says to me international contact and a possible way home…

all this made me realize something that some people had told me but I never experience it myself

“you have to be out on the street”

by the end of the day I had only one blank and I spend 9 hours at work, what will happen if I didn’t?

for the impacient ones download it from here

Why?
Ok so after almost killing myself over bonobo I got this stable. if you read my previous post on this I didn’t found anything I really liked. While developing this I came across 2 very nice programs, although I have too say they both suffer from the “way too many features problem”, to be fair wp-tray and desktop drapes

Features
wallpaper thingy (please please someone give me a good name for it) will very very simple following the UNIX tradition (do something and be great at it), what is this something

• impress you with new wallpapers, therefore the default is random from a dir.
• and it will let you configure many aspects of this (change interval,wp dir, icon to show, and maybe go back to the one before)
• and that’s it. unless you have a very good addition.
• Provides a CLI and a gnome-applet interface with the same code thanks MVC

Instalation
download, untar, sudo make install, then add key to gconf as the README file says.

Usage
Please check the README file, but it’s very simple set your wallpaper dir.

1. As an applet, right click the a panel then “add to Panel” look for wallpaper thingy, then add, after that everytime you click the icon (or 60 secs pass*) you will get a new wallpaper
2. As a cli script, run wp_thingy.py script (no params)

* this will be configurable, if you can’t wait go to wp_thingy.py:34 and change it or delete line 36 so it will never autorefresh

Wanna help?

• Here is what you can do, check the trunk and send me some patches for all the TODO
• give me some feedback (please do not post at trac.)
• run time wp_thingy.py and send me that together with the size/structure of your wallpaper dir to see if the algoritm can be optimized.
• tell everyone about it

the guys at webfaction updated their control panel to the latest TG

If you have an older installation the best way to upgrade will be to make a backup of your existing turbogears project, delete your current app from the panel and then add the new one.

Just go to “Applications” submenu set Turbogears (1.0b1) then link it on the “websites” submenu, wait a min so the server will refresh, while at it copy your app back to your $HOME/webapps/appdir and your done.IMO webfaction is the best thing out there for shared TG hosting their servers are reliable and their support is great, it’s a very nice service even as a testing/temporary environment.

check out their hosting plans and if your interesting sign up

if you really find this “article” interesting then give me some credit

keep up the good work guys, specially Remi

ok so I have started looking into a way to post code so I first try this which seems to be the most acceptable.
I try it at the stock buttons post and it looks great (not really just ok) although it still ate all the whitespace, and no it also screws up this

[c]

#include

int main ()
{

printf(”why is it so hard?? it’s just ignore this…”);

return 0;

}

[/c]

and this too
[java]

//file Bla.java

public class Bla

{

public static void main (String args[])

{

System.out.println(”I hate to hit the indent button instead of tab”);

}
}

[/java]

very annoying indeed I’m going to try this other approach maybe having them both active could be a final solution.

and yes it totally ruins my layout