SuperHappyDevHouse

June SHDH yesterday. Brenda has a writeup. I must admit, I also noticed the stares, and the people hurriedly looking away when you looked at them. Ah it feels great being misunderstood and feared ;)

In terms of actual work done, I added apache2 proxying support to autovserver - and did that mostly in the last 10 minutes of being there. I keep spending lots of time talking to everyone else there rather than coding, especially Andy, who is as die-hard open-source as they come. We were talking about cil, his little distributed command line bug tracker, and got on to talking about some kind of "Insta-Project"(tm) thing, that would populate a directory with a README, COPYING, basic debian packaging, a gitrepo (if it doesn't have one, which it should!) and a cil tracker so you can turn those little scripts you want to publish into a project with minimal effort. I'd like to see this implemented some day, though I can't see me having the time for a while because work is so hectic :(.

That's one thing I do like about SHDH. It's a chance, once a month, to go somewhere and code on something I want to work on. Not that I don't like working on Mahara - on the contrary, I love it - but it seems I have a million ideas for things I could do and not enough free time to do them. If I quit my job I don't think I'd ever get bored - at least, not until the moneys ran out ;).

Another MHDH in June. Themed "Hello World in strange languages". Should be a blast, and hopefully I'll get a chance to work some more on autovserver.

Meanwhile, my list of stuff to do at work has got amazingly long again. My current project, which is doing some performance benchmarking, is really interesting. A chance to play with some grunty hardware and see what the limits are. It's not often you get a chance to do such work - most of the time you're just causing the performance problems^W^W^W^W coding *ahem*.

Some Mahara work looms on the horizon as well. Yay!

Well the fact that you're reading this means that I've been successful in my SHDH mission - to fix the script that lets me blog! That's why the currymail was so late this week.

I can also upload images via a script too. So adding content to the site is dead easy now, which is the way it should be :)

The SHDH (actually a minihappydevhouse) had quite a few participants, I reckon we had 20 or more, which was a great effort. Good to see so many people hacking, eating or just talking about stuff. Things that happened, in no particular order:

1. Martin Langhoff was late (of course! He's from South America :)
2. Andy showed me cil. Command line bug tracking, git style. He's debian packaging it, so hopefully I can start using it for a few things soon. I think the idea has great promise...
3. I preached to a small crowd about performance of websites, only to be caught out when my site wasn't practising what I was preaching ^_^.
4. Francois and Andy found out about the sneaky requirement for tabs in Getopt::Declare
5. Lots of people found out about the OLPC. I presume some hacking may have been done on it. Ben spent his time playing Sim City on it instead.

There was a lot more, I'm sure.

but worth noting:

Andy has been chruning out useful opensource things yet again- including CIL, Commandline Issue Logger, that integrate with pretty much any VCS system, and AwsSum, a set of perl libraries for S3, SQS, SimpleDB and EC2.

I'm firmly not buying an iphone - i won't spend $1,100+ for a locked down smartphone. I might get a ipod touch, but really i shouldn't because the same locked down problems. If you're writing your own apps for these platforms, you need to get apple to sign the binaries before they run. It's like you own the phone but you don't get to choose what you do with it. suck.

still using my palmos TX to keep brain overflow.

i'm working on my nanowrimo :-)

Someone told me a cure for hangover is: "left over fish from fish and chips, add milk and tabasco sauce and heat". Not sure about that.

Deathklok's Dethalbum is getting lotsa plays in my ipod nano.

This is a worthy cause Orb Communicatons is working on. The company has announced a partnership with Women’s Refuge that will see women that Refuges are working with, given second-hand mobile phones pre-loaded with airtime credit. 

This is a New Zealand-wide initiative, which also encourages Kiwis to recycle their old mobile phones. The effort begins during the Women’s Refuge Annual Appeal Week, 21-27 July, and will continue indefinitely.
 
If you have any old mobile phone you can drop in at any one of Orb’s 40 stores around the country.  Orb technicians will refurbish the phones so they’re in good working order before adding airtime credit and giving them to their local Women’s Refuge. 

Of course if you do not have an old mobile phone lying around then you can still donate money at the collection boxes in store at Orb as part of the Appeal Week.
 
From the press release I received today, it looks like the Ministry for the Environment estimates there are up to one million unused mobile phones in New Zealand. 
  

Arghhh. I have installed Live Mesh to see if it would keep both my notebooks in sync. I decided I would give it a try because I can believe this is something that doesn't work out of the box (oh, wait this is a feature I want in "Consumer OS").

Anyway, since the update Live Mesh allows me to install the software on Windows Vista SP1 with no UAC requirements and allows me to sync folders directly between peers, I decided it would be worth trying it.

Hello, developers! Here's what's not working:

I have three folders I want to sync: My Documents, Pictures, Temp. Total is about 20 GB. So I made an exact copy of these folders on my second notebook and just for testing I enabled Live Mesh sync on Temp.

What was I expecting? That Live Mesh would be smart enough to look at the files, create a hash code and decide both folders are already in sync.

What it really happened? Live Mesh asked if I wanted both existing folders to be in sync, which I confirmed. And it started downloading 2 GB from Temp on my master notebook.

I am glad I did not enable this on Pictures or My Documents.

The folders are already in sync. Just accept it and go on with life, for goodness sake. We don't have unlimited bandwidth for initial synchronisation - and we don't need initial synchronisation if the folders are already the same.

I have submited this is a fault through the beta feedback form, but in the meantime I am back to Goodsync and the manual process.

If you want to learn about "The Customer Retention Journey at Vodafone New Zealand" you may well go outside New Zealand.

More specifically Vodafone's Rachel Harrison will be speaking at the Teradata Partners User Group Conference & Expo, happening 12 - 16th October in Las Vegas. Worth reading Rachel's summary for this session.

I got the information about this event today and it says


The conference is organised by the Teradata PARTNERS Steering Committee, and is the world’s largest annual data warehousing and enterprise analytics conference and exposition. The conference theme is “Beyond Intelligence” and occurs as Teradata marks its one-year anniversary as an independent company.
In more than 200 sessions, the event will focus on industry-leading and innovative practices in creating powerful data infrastructures for competitive business advantage.

The event is expected to attract about 4,000 participants from companies in every industry.  The keynote speakers are Dan Ariely, MIT professor, economist and author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, and Lance Armstrong, world champion cyclist, cancer activist and author of  It’s Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life. Teradata Chief Executive Officer Michael Koehler will speak during the opening session Monday and Chief Technology Officer Stephen Brobst will make multiple presentations during the week.


It looks like an interesting event for business intelligence users and practiotioners.

Looking for a free-as-in-beer issue tracker, forum, and generally flexible project management web application? If so, you could do a lot worse than checking out Redmine. We’ve been using it for a few days at work and I have to say it might be the nicest issue tracking system I’ve ever used.

Here’s the high-level feature list:

• Multiple projects support
• Flexible role based access control
• Flexible issue tracking system
• Gantt chart and calendar
• News, documents & files management
• Feeds & email notifications
• Per project wiki
• Per project forums
• Simple time tracking functionality
• Custom fields for issues, projects and users
• SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
• Multiple LDAP authentication support
• User self-registration support
• Multilanguage support
• Multiple databases support

Out of the box it works just great, but it’s also extensible and modular and thus easy to customize to your particular requirements. It’s Rails-based too, so diving into the source is pretty easy. We’ve customized how it receives emails and themed it up a little.

Kudos and thanks to the Redmine team for a great piece of software!

I am back home now after an interesting evening where we all got to taste the Armageddon. I met lots of local technologists and bloggers, plus beer lovers, thanks to Epic Beer.

From there a few (myself, Alan and Stuart) walked to the always good Nicolini's for some Italian food and lots of geeky talk.

Some very entertaining tweets during the evening. Epic Beer's Luke is doing a great job of using Internet-based social networks - the back of his business cards lists their addresses on Google, YouTube, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr and Twitter - and Luke is an avid Twitter user.

It always started with a tweet from Scott Hanselman yesterday evening: “ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 http://www.codeplex.com/aspnet”.

The ASP.NET MVC interim version has been released as source code + MSI with project template + release notes 7 weeks after the last official release of the P3.

Lots of people already wrote about the new features so I’d rather read what they already wrote then rewriting it myself.

Here is the list of the posts/documents I printed and that I’ll be reading today:

• ASP.NET Codeplex Preview 4 Readme (PDF) and Changes between Preview 3 and Codeplex Preview 4 (PDF) both available at the official release page on CodePlex (together with the source code and the installer)
• Release notes written by the PM of the ASP.NET MVC team Phil Haack
• Details of the new features and changes:
  • New filters (OutputCache, HandleError, Authorize) and Membership provider by ScottGu
  • Integration with ASP.NET AJAX by Scott Hanselman
  • Finally TempData is test-friendly by Matt Hinze
  • ComponentController has been removed, replaced by the RenderAction method by Rob Conery
  • First impressions on the new RenderAction method, again by Matt Hinze
  • together with some other small improvement by Matt Hawley
• Some other random thoughts:
  • By Steven Walther
  • By Keyvan Nayyeri
  • By Ben Scheirman on how he plans to update CodeCampServer to P4

Now time to take some time and download the latest bits and read all the docs.

Hopefully I’ll post more about ASP.NET MVC in the future: I really love this framework and I hope I can get more involved.

Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,links

Quick comment on Vodafone moving away from the confusing "walled garden" model and getting into the "charge $1 a day for up to 10 MB" casual data plan coming up in a couple of weeks: well done, about time!

Operators should have realised a long time ago that people see them as bit movers not content owners and creators.

UPDATE: Someone pointed to a related post with more information you can absorb. Good one Lance - I like your comment "As soon as they enter the content game then they are competing against the entire internet - and that’s a game they will lose."

On July 15th Wellington Perl Mongers hosted a 'HackOff' event.
http://wellington.pm.org/articles/hackoff2008/

I was in team orange, a random collection of php hackers who turned up on the day and banded together. Alas we were beaten by a team using Perl, and another using .NET. We were third, and ran out of time to finish. However we did beat 2 other teams who were using Perl.

Todd Ogasawara wrote something interesting about the value of a phone less device and I will expand:


1996: No one wants to type on the tiny keyboards on Windows CE Handheld PCs.

1997: Everyone wants a tiny keyboard (RIM).
2002: Everyone wants a smartphone with an operating system and user-installable applications.

2004: Everybody wants a phone and no one wants a PDA.

2007-2008: Apple decided that a physical QWERTY keyboard really wasn't needed after all. They also decided that user installable applications were not important (as of 2007).


Todd goes on to say he wants to be connected but not all the time - so instead he's got an Apple iPod touch, which allows him to browse the Internet and check his e-mail when he wants, and not when things are pushed.

Come to think of it, the Apple iPod touch is the same old PDA back in action...

The second New Zealand track to be locked down is the client and management track.  Here is how it looks right now, and hopefully it won't be changing much going forward.

Title

Speaker

Extending OS Deployment with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit Michael Niehaus MDOP: Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, formerly from Kidaro Eric Borst MDOP: Application Virtualization Features Sean Donahue Technical Introduction to Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager Jason Buffington Cross-Platform Monitoring with Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager 2007 Ran Mayron Application Virtualization Management: the Enterprise of the Future Using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 R2 and Microsoft SoftGrid Sean Donahue System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008 Overview Garry Gross Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager: Next Version Overview (Part 1 of 2) Deannah Templeton; Stu Fox Windows Vista - what does it enable? Service Pack 1 Update and Improvements! Adam Hall; Darryl Munro Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager: Next Version Advanced Features (Part 2 of 2) Deannah Templeton; Stu Fox

 

You'll notice that there is a session there on Mobile Device Manager which I'm happy about.  We have more on the mobile side which will be published in the next few days.

There is a reasonable emphasis on Virtualisation management technologies, and we also have a number of sessions on virtualisation in the server track.

Thanks to Deannah for getting this track nailed quickly!

TelstraClear sent a letter to their customers:


You have been receiving a credit for your broadband service over the past few months whilst we upgraded our network.

Our network upgrade is now complete with services now returned to normal. We will be removing your broadband credit from the 1st August 2008.


And this is a chart on my connection speeds from the isposure service, provided by Epitiro:



This is supposed to be a 10 Mbps connection. Ironically the lowest point in the chart is exactly the same day TestraClear says everything is working fine again. FAIL.

much frustration today, trying to find where in php's curl_getinfo i could read the http response headers for the request i just made.
I appears php5-curl is built for making the request, but not really built for reading what the response was.

Happily I found Neil, the guy with the php stuffed elephont on his desk - who recommended the ZendFramework to me.

In there is Zend_Http - a sensible no fuss http request/response api. It's a php file that i can just include on my already mostly working thingie i'm deploying, so i don't need to make apache change or install packages this late in the project

And I can read the response headers!!! in a sensible array format.

Yay for Zend.

Seems like the Borgification of the opensource .NET community is going on: Hamilton Verissimo aka Hammett, the father of Castle, is joining Microsoft as the PM on the MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) team.

Congratulation to Hammett for the achievement, and hope he has fun moving from the sunny São Paulo to rainy Redmond.

The good thing is that he will continue working on Castle.

How’s next? Ayende? or Scott Bellware?

Technorati Tags: Hammett,Castle,Microsoft,MEF

This is something I have been thinking about for some time now.

For starters, let's be clear, Microsoft Windows Vista works. I am not saying it works well, but it works.

There are the odd faults of course. Some have been fixed with a much expected Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Most are still related to device drivers (and almost 30% alone caused by NVIDIA software).

And of course the inevitable comparison with Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 - itself fast and quite solid.

But for consumers Windows Vista is just not there yet.

There are lots of things I don't like in the software. I won't list here everything - the fact it takes so long to start, why sleep won't simply work (device drivers again), or why does it need to keep the HDD activity constant even with the "search indexer" off (because really the search is not as good as promised and who but a geek goes to Microsoft's website looking for another indexer and search solution?).

There are three things that I think need quickly to be fixed: enterprise focus, device driver conflicts and multiple versions of the same OS.

Will Windows 7 fix these problems? From reading Paul Thurrottt's Windows 7 FAQ I doubt it:


Microsoft has publicly committed to only one feature for Windows 7--pervasive multi-touch and the company is currently still deciding what this next Windows release will look like. We do know a few other things about Windows 7, however: It will include a new version of Windows Explorer that is being built by the same team that designed the Ribbon user interface in Office 2007. It will likely include some form of the "Hypervisor" (Windows Virtualization) technologies that will ship shortly after Windows Server 2008. It will also likely include the WinFS (Windows Future Storage) technologies, though they won't be packaged or branded as WinFS. Microsoft says it might also make a subscription-based version of the OS available to consumers, but that's still in flux.


Multi-touch? Is that it? Seriously, after the Apple iPhone, everything must have multi-touch? Nothing better to do? Nothing actually original?

Microsoft Windows Vista must to go the way of the enterprise. Leave it for the corporate bodies.

Microsoft needs to work on a consumer operating system. One that doesn't join a domain. One that doesn't have IIS code in it. One that will actually do what consumers want.

"You can always use Windows Vista Home Basic" I hear you saying...

But I am looking for an operating system that is friendly and fool proof. Easy to use and feature rich. Not feature rich as in "this will let you run a FTP server" but as in "this is secure without having to run memory hungry slow third party security software".

Let's call it "Consumer OS".

"Consumer OS" should let users do what they want. Not what associations want. If you want to record a TV program to watch it later, so be it. If you want to share a user-generated file so be it. It should have solid synchronisation capabilities built-in. Something such as Live Mesh, but that works out of the box.

The "Consumer OS" is not the copyright police. It frees up people to use their content. Content want to be available. Make those codecs available - I am sick of waiting for Windows Vista Media Center to support the H.264 DVB-T broadcast (and the rumours are now that it won't, even though early betas seem to have it kind of working).

"Consumer OS" would run only on certain basic hardware - listed on a website. The basic hardware would be motherboard, video and networking devices. "Consumer OS" would have to make sure requests and responses to these devices would always be reliable, not cause exceptions - if any exception is caught them make sure things get into a defined range and a specific application stops, but never show a blue screen and crashes the entire system.

"Consumer OS" won't be a geeks paradise. It will be a family's paradise.

Is this too much to ask for?

I’ve been tagged by both Andrew and Jo so let’s knock off this programming meme…

How old were you when you started programming?

9.

How did you get started in programming?

I was working out what I wanted to do when I was older (at a rather early age it would seem) and basically looked at who the richest person in the world was and what they did. I can’t remember if Bill Gates was the richest or just very close but decided that industry was for me. I also enjoyed building things with Lego/Technics etc and programming seemed like an environment where the only limits were self imposed.

What was your first language?

QBasic, which came free with DOS at the time. 64K limit for the file size was always frustrating so I moved to C/C++ and eventually Visual Basic 3 in the first couple of years of programming.

What was the first real program you wrote?

I’m not sure what constitutes real - first program I ever wrote was a number guessing game. The first program I ever sold was one that cleared internet history/recently used files automatically on Windows 95 - this product seemed somewhat popular with the class mates at my all boys high school.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Delphi (Pascal), C, C++, Java, Haskell, Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, MASM.

What was your first professional programming gig?

I built several software systems for people while at high school but my first proper office job was with Intergen in Wellington (they have a great graduate program).

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Yes.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Explore outside your domain - every area of computing and every faction has their own unique ideas and innovations, borrow and learn from all of them. This is something that doesn’t come naturally but if you’re persistent you’ll benefit from it.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Optimising a media management system for better performance - I love seeing just how much performance I can get out of a computer and absolutely hate slow programs. Wringing out even an extra 50ms may lead you down the path of diminishing returns but you learn so much about performance optimisation going through the process that it’s entirely beneficial to the developer soul.

While not strictly programming, making a release of a software product is probably one of the best feelings you can have in the software product space.

I’ll tag:

Ivan Towlson

TechCult, a famous blog about what’s going on in the Net world just published the list of the top 100 web celebrities. The standing is mainly based on how many results they have on Google.

Pretty strange that Bill Gates or Steve Jobs don’t show up in this top 100, even though they influenced the web much more than Tila Tequila, Perez Hilton or  Beppe Grillo which are the top 3 web celebrities of the list.

The list is full of web developers, Web2.0 startups’ founders, but only 2 from the .NET blogging space:

• Jeff Atwood – ranked 97th
• Joel Spolsky – ranked 57th

Is this related to the fact that .NET is not enough web oriented or not enough Web2.0?

Anyway, congratulations to Jeff and Joel for being the first .NET bloggers to enter the blogging Gotha.

Technorati Tags: blogging,codinghorror,Jeff Atwood