Dev::Blog

Two changes to my news feed reading style lately - switching from (I can’t remember the name of the desktop app, it’s at home) to Google Reader, and switching to the “river of news” style of reading.  I’ve been trying it out with my “daily” folder (about 30 feeds) for a week or so now, and it’s working pretty well.  Why?  A centralized service means no synchronization problems.  If I ever need to read news offline (which is like maybe three times a year), the stuff’s still getting pulled down to the laptop.
I tried one of the web based aggregators quite some time ago, but didn’t care for the interface, lag, etc.  Google Reader seems to be “good enough” for now, but man, why oh why can’t you sort your news by date so the newest stuff is at the bottom?  Apparently I’m not the only one who’s whined about this, so hopefully that’ll be fixed soon.

I’m still using the desktop app for  my other feed folders (biz, dev, some internal administrative feeds for VP, etc.), but I’m finding I’m checking them much less with the daily stuff taken out, which means I’m still checking feeds too often for my own good, but the overall time I take is much less since when checking out the daily news I don’t feel compelled to read every one of the items in every feed in every other folder.

Technorati Tags: Google Reader, RSS

Global Nerdy has a post about extended warranties and why you should avoid them.  I learned a variant of this lesson recently - my mobile phone broke, which should have been good news, since I actually bought the extended warranty.  I don’t usually buy those things, but my purchase at the time was due to my previous phone going through the laundry, which meant there was a chance that the “bathtub curve” (follow the link)  would be too literal at some point.

So yeah, my phone broke, I took it in, and they’re fixing it for free.  I win, right? Heh…

I’m picking the phone up tonight.  I dropped it off for repair a month ago, to the day.  The loaner they gave me (after I begged them) didn’t work.  I’ve been without phone service for the number that’s on my business cards for a month (at least it’s forwarded).  So, take the $75 or so for the warranty, the $50 or so for the monthly bill that I didn’t get to enjoy, and an incalculable sum for the aggravation, and then compare that to the cost of a replacement phone.  eBay suggests that Motorola V551s are going for around $70.

In other words, don’t be like me!  Remember to account for depreciation and the cost of an outage before going for an extended warranty!

…Now what are the odds they fixed BOTH problems I reported?

I check my mail on at least three computers now (work, home. laptop), so IMAP is really useful for me - centralized access eliminates most synchronization problems, and Thunderbird’s available for most platforms, so my experience is pretty consistent. Consistently crappy, that is - everything worked great, but deleting messages over IMAP took forever. With the amount of spam I get these days, email triage was really sucking.
This morning I noticed things were moving a lot quicker. I was about to email my host’s support team to find out what they did when I realized I’d emptied my trash the day before for the first time since moving to IMAP. There were around 30,000 emails in there. Now things work faster. Go figure.

So there you go - for faster IMAP performance in Thunderbird, empty your trash early and often.

Technorati Tags: IMAP, Thunderbird

I fixed my PlayStation!

A few months back, I bought a copy of the “has to be awesome” Intellivision Lives! disc for the PS2 at the local used game shop. Sadly, it didn’t work, and I had to return it, attributing it to a bad used disc. This weekend, I stopped at a game shop while visiting my folks and found the same game, so I snapped it up. When I got home, it wouldn’t work either. The PS2 made a horrible crunking noise and eventually gave up with a “disc read error.”

I figured the odds of two used discs going bad were slimmer, and I noticed that the data side of this disc was blue. A few Google searches for PS2 blue disc problem revealed that this was pretty common - the system uses two different lasers or something, one for DVDs and one for CDs, and the alignment can sometimes be off for one or both of them.

This guide told me all I needed to know, from how to open the damned case to how to adjust the laser angle. The only pain in the butt is that you don’t know what the angle’s supposed to be, so the process basically involves turning a knob, turning on the PS2, trying to read a blue disc, turning it off, turning the knob, etc.

Of course, I broke Jason’s first law of hardware repair: don’t put everything back together right away. It turns out that the alignment isn’t perfect, and once in a while I still get disc read errors, but for now I can get around it by reinserting the disc until it works. If and when I get more blue discs, I’ll go through the process again. Or I’ll just get a new console.

As for the game, it’s pretty fun, but it suffers a bit from the Intellivision’s controller style, which doesn’t translate well. I wanted it for Shark! Shark!, which doesn’t need anything fancy, so I’m happy. There are also a few video featurettes that are worth watching, but not more than once.

Now that I’m feeling all handy, I think it’s time to fix the broil element on the stove…

Jeremy Miller claims that there are two types of developers in the world: those who say “goo-id” and those who say “gwid.” It never occurred to me to say gwid before, but I bet the compulsion will bubble to the surface whenever I’m in a developer conversation from now on, which means I should probably just lock myself in a bunker and stick to IM.

On the topic of pronunciation, I was happy to read that I’ve been pronouncing MySQL correctly all along.

I haven’t tried these guys yet, but it might be an option at some point if I’m in a crunch: hand coded markup from a PSD file in under 8 hours, prices starting at $117 per page. Link (via Angie McKaig)

Technorati Tags: HTML

Brent wrote about his upcoming changes to NetNewsWire’s Combined View, which apparently uses Javascript to communicate between the application and the web view.  I know next to nothing about Cocoa, but at my old job I used to rely heavily on so-called hybrid applications that embedded web functionality in a desktop client, and his post stirred up a lot of old memories.

I’m really suprised that we aren’t seeing more hybrd applications out there.  Sure, there are  some notable ones (I use the Yahoo Music Engine every day, for example), but in the age of “Web 2.0″ the focus seems to be on pure web plays.  They’re making great strides, and there are obvious advantages to being able to work on any modern browser, but how many times is the average person at a computer that’s not their own?  I’d submit that hybrid apps are easier to create, maintain, and version.

Again, I know nothing about Cocoa, but if you’re curious, the in the Windows/IE world you’d use Javascript’s window.external combined with IDocHostUIHandler and GetExternal to talk to the application (details here).  It’s a handy trick for “I can’t do that in a browser” kind of stuff.  We used to use it a lot for inter-app communication and linking with legacy data access modules.
Now, going back to something like an RSS reader, which can’t exist without the internet at come point to get feeds, that’s a kind of hybrid app already, but with awesome caching skills.  Kudos to Brent for picking up the other side of the puzzle.

In a recent post about a conference (which includes some interesting comparisons between the .Net and Ruby communities), Jeremy Miller covers some quotes from the weekend, including this one

“Low Truck Number” — A statistic measuring the healthy duplication of knowledge and understanding within a project team. If your Truck Number == 1, a single person getting hit by a bus, or offered more money across the street, effectively ends your project. I’ve been the “what if you were hit by bus” guy in the past. It wasn’t fun, and I learned to hate that phrase.

I used to be in a shop with maybe a dozen developers, but intense silos and a large number of applications led to a pretty low truck number.  In my new job, I am the tech department.  At least now I have a name for my pain.

I missed DemoCamp7 last night, which had me kind of bummed (true geek story: I was working all day on a laptop that was set to the wrong time zone, then wondered why I was feeling so hungry at only 5:30, when it was really 7:30…), mostly because Damian Conway was going to be presenting some Perl stuff, and then I saw this post on The Farm, which at first I thought was just a report on last night’s fun, but sweet mother of, well, whatever, Damian was giving a talk tonight!

After seeing Fun With Dead Languages, big one sentence paragraphs are all I’m capable of.   It’s been a long time since I’ve been so entertained while someone demonstrates how very smart he is.  OK, that was a 2 sentence paragraph.  Now 3.  Now 4.  Urg, need recursion.

Technorati Tags: Perl

Remember that new hardware I wrote about the other day? The idea, at the time, was to run the Vista beta 2. Except it didn’t install. OK, if I run another OS I can do it in Virtual PC and forget all this dual boot nonsense, right? Er… Ubuntu doesn’t work in Virtual PC, at least on my computer - I get a kernel panic on the install. Debian is installing OK so far - I’m using the network install. We’ll see how it goes.

While I was in the installing mood, I decided to finally take advantage of Microsoft Virtual Server R2, which is so free I don’t even have to hunt for the MSDN disks. I think they only officially support Suse and Red Hat, but I’m (apparently) in a Debian mood:

I ran Linux pretty much exclusively from 1995 to 1999, but I really haven’t kept up, so this will be exciting. All I know about Debian is it’s what Dreamhost runs (and even that I’m not sure about…)

I haven’t had the best of luck with these things as of late, but we’ll see how it goes. The end goal is to get Asterix working on one of the images to make use of that Unlimitel number I bought last month ($2.50 a month for a phone number is pretty decent, I reckon).