At some point in the future, I'll be taking this site down and making the address point directly to the wordpress site.
Thanks.
]]>Well, I had a chance to try out powershell 2.0 recently, as it claims to have built in support for remoting. Well, it does, but..
It reminds me of that old saying: "make simple things simple, and hard things possible". Powershell succeeds at the latter, but outright fails at the former.
My situation: I have two machines. No domain. I want to remote control one from the other. I'm sure many devs are in the same situation. It's still _way_ too hard to set this up. Just see here. Look at all those steps! Oh, and that's using the hacky trusted hosts thing. If you want to do a proper SSL thing: BAM!.
Compare this to: sudo apt-get install openssh-server, or on a mac, a few clicks in sharing preferences. I mean seriously, why did they make this so damn difficult? It's literally easier to install cygwin.
While I'm ranting about powershell, even for simple things, it's still too complex. Maybe I just am a newb, but I tried to do something basic today: generate a file containing a list of source files, then run ctags on it. Well, the ctags part is easy, but the command to generate the files was not:
PS D:\src\...> Get-ChildItem foo -include *.h,*.cpp -recurse |
foreach-object {echo $_.fullname;} |
out-file -filepath .\files.win.txt -encoding ASCII
Sigh. Really? I mean this is compared to:
% find foo -name '*.h' -o -name '*.cpp' > files.win.txt
So in the powershell example, I have to do the for-each thing because for some reason Get-ChildItem prints out paths relative to foo, and not a path including foo like find does. (Also, I need it to print just the FullName property, otherwise I get unusable output) Then I have to do the out-file thing because normal redirection will spit out a file in unicode with a BOM, which confuses ctags.
I understand that there's a possible impedance mismatch between ctags and windows (and powershell), and also that that "find" is an unix uber-command that has evolved over many years, but still, MS needs to step up to make the common things really easy to do.
They are already asking you to learn something that has a high learning curve and that is windows-only. At least make it easier to play with. Damn.
]]>Ok so that looks pretty bleak.
And here's some for this year.
And onto the rambling.
I'm quite happy with the Mac Mini. I had all kinds of performance concerns, but it turns out it's totally good enough, even with it's 5400rpm disk, and an external 7200rpm disk for photos and such. Maybe I just don't have time to push it, or maybe Lightroom got good enough. But once again, all that worrying beforehand seemed silly. And I still have room to upgrade to SSD or to 8GB of RAM when I need it.
Yes I paid the apple tax. But I think I stopped caring about that about a week later. And after hearing how much pain my friend just went through upgrading his box, I'm kinda glad I saved that time.
Win7 was nice, and it was lame, basically as I had thought it might be. It makes the core OS part of the windows experience slightly better, but lots of other problems remain. Shitty OEMs, disconnect from the unix/linux/oss activity, etc. Aero glass looked nice for a while there, but after using a mac for a while again, it just feels silly.
Over the winter break, I pretty much didn't touch Windows, and I was fine.. which made me realize that the only reason I need windows is for Exchange at work and Office (mostly for work as well). Actually, browsers worked better on windows until recently, but with the release of Chrome for linux, that's not really the case anymore. Chrome for linux might be a game changer. It brings a top-class browser to Linux, and it has process isolation, which really makes Linux browser annoyances go away (like Flash killing all your tabs). This makes a Linux-based browser appliance even more viable (thus ChromeOS). I know web apps aren't quite there yet, but you can definitely see the trajectory now.
A lot of people still don't really believe in web apps, and I don't blame them. But I think "web apps" will become more and more the code-delivery mechanism that things like Java were supposed to be. There always were and always will be things that make more sense to run on the client.. but there's basically no reason that those things shouldn't be delivered through a browser like experience. Back in the day we have all these thick client apps that were client-based by default and reached out to servers when necessary, but maybe we'll start to see a world where things are server-based by default, and code will only be delivered to clients as necessary. All the pieces aren't there, but you can't really deny the efficiencies of this model.
I dunno about this whole Apple tablet thing. The first version is probably going to be slick but have some annoying shortcomings, like the iPhone. It'll be about the "3GS" point in time which it may get interesting. I'll probably by a netbook first. These thinkpad x100e's look mighty tasty. I wonder if they run linux.
Another unexpected thing I did at home this past year was get a chorded mouse. I was happy with the MX1000 for the longest time, but nobody makes good mice anymore. The magic mouse was not very ergonomic, and new high end mice require too much software. Maybe I'm an old fart, but I just want a mouse to be a mouse. Three buttons, clicky scroll wheel. Why is it so hard?
On the photo front, I strongly considered a GF1 at the end of the year, but didn't get around to pulling the trigger. But after talking to my dad about it a little more, it might actually happen. I just want something that can take slr-quality images, but that is easier for me to bring places without having to think, "oh this is going to be a camera kind of outing". The nikon dslr is still big enough that it modifies my behavior when going out. Whatever camera gets me the same performance/quality as the dslr but has less of that negative effect is a winner in my book. I think.
The iphone's been good. AT&T sucks, but oh well. I like my bejeweled. I can see myself getting an Android in a year or two though. I like the trajectory more than the iphone. They just have to figure out their whole multitouch story, and make a good keyboard.
Hmm, not much to say this year I guess.
Sometimes other random weird shit happens, but those are the most reproducible.
The only difference with Linux is that, I trust Apple to fix most of these things eventually. With Linux, I'd have to dick around for hours and fix shit myself.
But really, is this how software is done these days? Was getting SL out before Win7 really that worth it?
On the performance front, I'm very pleased. 4GB seems plenty for light usage (even with a small VM), and having enough RAM makes me almost not notice that I only have a 5400rpm drive. I'll get around to the SSD upgrade some day (maybe when Intel SSD prices are no longer jacked up due to low availability), and knowing that 8GB is supported makes me thing this machine will definitely last a while. Graphics seem pretty good, though I don't do anything in my daily routine to really test it. Fullscreen HD or whatever seems fine. We'll see what happens when SC2 comes out, but my backup plan is still to build a mini cheap PC to play that.
]]>Purchased the mac mini with my friend's 15% discount. Turns out, I was speccing it wrong, so I saved an extra $70 or so from what I was expecting. $808 total including tax. Now I just have to get the SSD, and maybe a FW800 drive.
I managed to hook up my older mini to the tv, to use as a htpc. Loaded hulu desktop, but it seems like the cpu's not quite up to snuff to play the hulu videos. Why the hell does hulu require a c2d 2.0ghz?
]]>Here are the contenders this time around: a new Mac Pro, a new core i7 build, upgrade the current build with a ssd and a gpu, or a new mac mini.
Cost-wise, the mac pro is the most expensive, and the the ssd+gpu upgrade to my current machine is the cheapest.
Out of these options, the mac mini is looking the most attractive. I think I'm ready again for a mostly integrated computing experience. (This probably has something to do with the fact that I don't have time to use my computer very much these days) I've been playing with a 2006-era mac mini at home for a while, and it meets all my needs except for graphics performance, disk performance, and it's lack of memory. Ok so I guess it doesn't really meet my needs.. that's why I've been using my PC most of the time.
The new mini can address all three of these areas. The Nvidia IGP is supposedly leaps and bounds better than the intel chip it replaces. I can buy a new model with 4gb of ram (enough for a vm), and reports on the web claim 8gb is possible. I also plan to throw an intel SSD in there, addressing the disk performance. For large capacity data storage, I'll just use an external firewire 800 drive, or do something over the network (unfortunately, osx still doesn't sport an iscsi initiatior).
I can't help but feel though, that this purchase is essentially going to be a sidegrade. That worries me somewhat.
The 2.53ghz c2d with 3M cache in the mini is going to be a slight downgrade from the e6600 (2.66ghz with 6M cache). I'm going to have less memory (4 vs 6) and the GPU is probably about the same (7600gt). Then again, the mini is a 1/20th of the size of my PC, but still, I certainly am not going to get a huge computational upgrade.
That's mostly fine, I think. Even if I went the core i7 route, I'd probably be at a quad core (which is mostly useless.. I never even exercise the 2 cores that I have now), and 8gb of ram (since the lynnfield mobo's only come with 4 slots, and 4gb dimm's are still expensive). Upgrading my current box isn't to yield that much improvement -- ssd will help, but gpu upgrade probably not much, since I don't really play any games.
I've done a few "side-grades" in the past. One was getting the Vaio 505 thin laptop model (went from a 350mhz P2, to a 366mhz mobile p2), and then the picturebook (which was a transmeta, and pretty much only slightly faster than the mobile p2). There was one more side-grade: when I bought the powerbook. I tried to make that laptop my primary environment, but it was definitely slower than the P4 desktop that I had been using up to that point.
Ok, so I've done this a lot in the past. And I kinda think I regretted it in some way each time. Many of the side-grade's were desktop-to-laptop moves though. This time will be a desktop-to-desktop move, and it will be a bit weird paying $1k for essentially the same capability in hardware.
That must really mean I want OSX. Why do I want OSX this time around? I think there are a few reasons. Support for exchange means I eventually shouldn't have to run a VM just to access work email (plus MS also claims to be writing a native exchange client.. though I don't trust their MacBU at all). I also want iMovie. Yea it's a crappy little movie program, but it's by far the most productive if you just want to take your flip videos and stitch them together and add a nice looking text title. These days, all the important stuff exists on the mac.. Lightroom, chrome, picasa, fusion, skype. This was definitely not true the last time I had a mac.
Reading some of my older posts reveals some past thinking that I should have just bought a mac pro instead of the current pc I have. Perhaps I will think the same after I buy the mini. This time I played a bit with the mini in the store, and I also have the experience of using this mini at home for a while.
I'd definitely be happy with the mac pro performance-wise.. but can I really justify the price of that thing? By my math, I'm paying almost $1000 extra for the equivalent hardware + OS (also, geforce gt120? really?). With the mini, I think the mark-up is somewhere around the 200-300 range. Plus, for a form-factor that's not available elsewhere. That's a bit easier to swallow. I also like the idea of having a machine that idles at 13W, since most of the time I won't be using it.
Also the whole crux of this plan is that i'm only spending $1k now, so in 2 years, I won't feel bad spending another $1k on something else if this was a mistake. A Mac Pro locks me in with a ~$2.5k purchase that I will have to make last for 4-5 years, like it or not. I'm just not that sure that the move to the mac will be a good one this time around.
Also, if starcraft 2 finally comes out, and the mini can't handle it, I'll probably always be able to put together a 500$ PC to play the damn game. Hopefully blizzard will just make the stupid game scale down well. I mean, I'm not buying a 3 year old machine for anything.
So yea, that's a bunch of blathering about nothing. I just write this down for myself so that I can read it later and try not to make the same mistakes.
]]>Here's my stupid table I created from browsing through a bunch of Newegg listings for hard drives:
Model 4+ 1 egg total
----- ---- ------ -----
barracuda lp 1tb 83% 8% 62
1.5tb 64% 22% 55
2tb 85% 9% 47
barracuda 7200.12 1tb 76% 13% 287
500g 76% 16% 335
barracuda es.2 67% 13% 142
wd caviar black 1tb 87% 7% 1614
0.5tb 90% 7% 736
wd re3 1.0tb 89% 8% 116
wd green 1.0tb 85% 8% 1049
samsung f1 1.0tb 77% 14% 798
0.5tb 89% 10% 96
samsung f2 ecogreen 54 88% 7% 111
samsung f3 500gb 82% 8% 40
1tb 80% 0% 19
hitachi 0a38016 77% 15% 628
First column is the model, obviously. Second column is the % of 4-egg and 5-egg reviews (generally positive reviews). The third column is the % of 1-egg reviews, which are generally where reports of DOA drives show up.
Conclusions? WD or Samsung = Good, Hitachi or Seagate = Not so much. Caviar Black series seems to have a good record. Latest seagates don't seem too hot. Samsungs also seem to do well, though there are a far fewer number of reviews there.
]]>Here's the basic idea:
My main mail system at work is Outlook, so here's how I implement this there:
That's basically it. I have a similar scheme for gmail where I use archiving instead of deleting, but the idea is pretty much the same.
Things I like about this scheme:
For further optimization, I set up search folders that search through my archive folders if I want to keep tabs on particular mailing lists (and this works even for crossposted threads, some of which might end up in my inbox archive vs my list archive). I only ever read lists like this from one machine so that's fine.
It does require good search to exist. But with the gmail that's there, and with later versions of outlook and Win7, I can get that for work mail as well.
I was originally very concerned about preserving conversation threads in my inbox. If I delete messages after I read them, but then I get another message that's part of a thread for which I've already deleted, I was worried that I wouldn't be able to recover the context.
In practice, searching for messages with the matching subject line quickly recovers the thread. Usually that's good enough to build up any context, and it's faster than picking through a large inbox anyways (since Outlook's threading still doesn't quite work in all cases).
One thing that occurs to me that this is the first phone that I would consider using as an Internet device even after I've upgraded to a new phone in the future. The fact that it is a phone almost seems secondary.
]]>Can't you just figure out that you're the only that's using it? And that I asked you to eject it through the same goddamn window?
]]>Seriously. What year is this?
]]>Those who like the Pre like to point out that it can multitask: it can run more than one "card" at a time, and you get some interface to switch between them. This comes in handy, for example, if you want to an internet radio app while browsing the web with the browser app. On the iPhone you can't quite do this (though you can let the built in iTunes-based music app play in the background).
As I played with a friends Pre, I started using it like I use my desktop. Opening one application after another, not really thinking about how much memory was left. (When's the last time I've seen an out of memory error on a modern machine?) On the Pre, however, it's fairly easy to hit the memory limit. Seems to me like it takes about 4 browser windows and maybe a couple other apps.
Once you get into the out of memory state, things get annoying fast. Any action that would require a new card seems to freeze for a second, then the phone buzzes and tells you there's not enough memory, and that you need to close other cards.
Which card to close? Well, if you're a programmer, you may know that browsers are likely to eat the most memory out of the various kinds of apps you find a phone, so lets kill those first. Swipe to the card view.. and which of these cards are browsers? Actually, sometimes, it's quite hard to tell, especially since you're looking at thumbnails of web pages that can look like other apps.
In any case, the first time I hit this, I closed one card, then retried the operation. Still failed. Closed another, retried, still failed. Realized that there were still two other browser cards open, closed those, and finally I could open up my new contact.
The problems here are numerous.
In light of my experience, Apple's decision to disallow multitasking on the iPhone doesn't seem so dumb. Sure they make some things inconvenient, but it also prevents users from getting into a situation that probably 90% of them would have a difficult time dealing with. It would be a huge usability hit, and the relative benefit would be rather small.
I guess until we have swap space on phones, multitasking is going to be something that will be difficult to implement usably, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple continued to limit it significantly.
]]>It's so good that I almost prefer using it over my big Vista desktop.
I'm on a stint of trying to use RHEL 5.3 at work, but now I really don't know how long I'm going to be able to last.
Sigh.
Well on the plus side, at least for the next year or so, it's going to be clear what the best OS to run is. So at least I can stop being OCD about it.
Update: seem to be hitting some bug where the screen will stop updating for a while (feels like several minutes). If video's playing, then the audio keeps coming out, but the screen is frozen.
Also, for others trying this on the X60.. don't forget to install the "System interface driver" from the Lenovo page.. or else things like the hotkey driver won't work. Also I had to do the registry hack described here to get the hotkey thing to install.
A little scared to install the power manager and power management driver. Won't those things conflict with the new Windows stuff?
]]>Probably a driver problem. (Is it just me, or do Intel driver updates seem to be really flaky?) I managed to update the driver to the newest one available off the Intel site. Just go to support.intel.com and under the laptop chipsets choose 945 Express. Choose your OS, and download the zip file. If you use the standard "Have Disk.." path through the Device Manager than you can update the driver, even if running the Setup.exe claims that the driver is "not validated" by the OEM for the particular model.
In any case, now I'm running the 7.14.10.1504 version, and have been running on battery for the last 3 hrs or so, and no blank screen yet. I'm sure I'm going to get it as soon as I post this, but here's to hoping. In any case, it was still useful for me to find out that you can update the driver to the "upstream" intel version directly, so I figured I should write that down, for those people out there still hitting this problem or other driver issues.
In mostly unrelated news, I've been playing with the T400 at work, and the Vista install on it is god awful. i feel like the software side of the Lenovo experience is starting to go down the tubes. Not that it was that great before, but this machine launches so much crap when you start up that it adds a good 90 seconds to get to the desktop "steady state". It's really disappointing since Lenovo for the most part still makes the best PC laptpo hardware (at least compared to the same-generation Dell's and Lenovo's I've seen). Oh, except for the touchpad. This is my first Lenovo with a touchpad, and while I prefer them to track points, this particular one seems really flaky. Ok that was my mini review of the T400. Nice keyboard, shitty trackpad, uninstall most of the ThinkVantage crap and you're fine.
]]>A little digging shows that the fonts are still being worked on. The package version is up to 1.0.4.93. Changelog doesn't say much, except the occasional "fix bluriness for X" entries. In any case, the improvement is impressive. It's almost to the point that I can use it as an Arial replacement and it doesn't bother me.
]]>