Entries Tagged With 'Techno-babble'

I am a programmer and have been destined to be so ever since I was a wee lad, barely knee-high to a grasshopper as my grandpappy may have put it. Yet all the hacking, late nights copying code from C64 programming magazines, dabbling and schooling doesn't really prepare you for the work force. When I started my career I felt small, green and somewhat terrified.

The work force exerts certain demands and pressures that just can't be duplicated in school and that isn't even considering the managerial/political side of office life. Programmers that have been in the field for more than a decade have priceless experience, the kind of experience that can't be bought.

Luckily many older and wiser developers are freely sharing advice gathered from years of experience. These blogs are not concerned with the bits of programming, more the aspects of being a programmer and managing programmers. The all have great information on them so I suggest you fire up your RSS feed readers.

Joel on Software

http://www.joelonsoftware.com

This blog is probably the staple of my programmer diet. I really started paying attention to this blog once I found out Joel was my managers personal hero. Joel is pervasive, if you have searched for anything software related on Google you have probably already read a few articles.

There is a ton of good information here for managers and developers both, and many of Joel's rants/essays have been converted into book form (or you could just browse through the archives). Beware though, I always find that when I start to read articles on Joel's site they usually link to other articles that I want to read... before you know it you are twenty links deep and half your day is gone!

• Some of Joel's Favourite books
• Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html

Rands In Repose

http://www.randsinrepose.com/

I found out about this site from Joel when he reviewed by author titled Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineer Manager. I began to explore around his archives and I found some really good info in there, I am sure I will waste much time in the near future catching up on many of his old posts.

• A Glimpse and a Hook
• N.A.D.D.

The Codist

http://www.thecodist.com

The Codist is less pervasive than the aforementioned blogs and is less centered on development wisdom, but contains some good stuff nonetheless.

• Programmer Job Ads: It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's SuperCoderCoolMan!
• The Stupidity Of Interviews

So I have this scanner, an old HP ScanJet 4300C. It still works fine but it is suffering from the old ATI AllInWonder syndrome -- each version of the card only has driver support for one or maybe two OS releases. This ScanJet is still kicking, but there is no driver support for Mac OS X or Windows Vista from HP.

I have known about the linux SANE Project for quite some time, but I never suspected that it would be my saving grace. With zero driver support from HP I turned to third party solutions. Lo and behold, my scanner was completely supported by SANE and there were OS X packages that I could install. The packages installed flawlessly and the scanner just worked.

Kudos to the SANE Project developers and to Mattias Ellert for making it painless, easy and flawless. HP deserves a Colbert Report style wag of the finger for shoddy support.

I just caught wind of a new startup named Everyscape from Greg Sterling's blog post. From the post, "... which is seeking to take ordinary photographs and knit them into a “3D” image display for cities." Coincidently, this happened on the coat-tails of my discovery of Photosynth, and my marveling at the potential of a long-tail virtual earth.

My first impression was Google Streetview on steroids, but their preview held an eerie similarity to the Photosynth demo. In fact, this seems to embody exactly what I foresaw for the future of Photosynth. Many ordinary images stitched into a scene that you can navigate. One interesting point is that they use scape artists as well as regular images.

Occasionally, not often, but occasionally I find out about some new technology that is so cool it leaves me speechless. The demo of Microsoft's new Photosynth is one of these technologies. Photosynth is a combination of Seadragon and image research from the University of Washington.

Photosynth takes ordinary pictures off the web (flickr for example) and combines them together in a spatially coherent way. Once all these images are stitched together you can then wander through the space, taking a 3D tour. The truly cool part of this is that the source images are regular, vanilla images uploaded by average uses. In a sense this technique could be used to take any image with metadata, especially geograpahic metadata, to create a virtual earth on steroids, one could even call it the long tail of Virtual Earth.

Recall the impact that Google's satellite images had on mapping, now imagine that you can zoom in from the satellite photos to pictures taken by people around the world. No longer being limited to the satellite view, you will see pictures of it from every angle. You can switch between the pictures to get a view from the different angles. You can drill down to detailed close-ups or back out for a different view. The end result would be a staggeringly cool virtual tour of the Eiffel tower, but don't forget this technique could be used on any publicly available image with metadata potentially creating a virtual tour of the whole world. Now that is one really cool notion.

The technology behind Photosynth gives is a glimpse at the advancements with more visual search methods, it will be extremely cool to see how this technology is applied.

There are many sites out there dedicated to importing your email into gmail, this is not meant to be another. This little page is here to document the method that I used specifically to import sent mail into my gmail account with the correct date and have it show up in the sent mail section.

I used Mark Lyon's Gmail Loader on OS X (Mac specific instructions). Gmail loader just reads mbox files, parses them and sends them to you gmail account. When the mbox file is a sent mail folder, then it also sets the from address to be the gmail address you are sending to.

One catch is that the mail will be time stamped with the current time on google's servers rather than the time that the message was sent/received. A trick to get around this is to use a third gmail account. Use Gmail Loader to send all mail to a temporary gmail account, then setup your main account to pull mail from the temporary gmail account. When it pulls the mail it will correctly set the date and time.

This is where I ran into a problem. If I import sent mail to temp@gmail.com, it works fine in the context of temp@gmail.com. But as soon as it gets transferred to my real Gmail account it no longer is from me, but from temp@gmail.com. To get around this I simply edited the Gmail Loader python script. At the point where it sets the from field to be the destination gmail account (i.e. temp@gmail.com), I hardcoded it to be my real gmail account. For me this is at line 302:

TechCrunch is reporting that the rumors of Google buying Feedburner have been confirmed. Google is going to pay the tidy price of $100 million dollars for Feedburner.

"Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

"The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point."

This is obviously a fantastic service to acquire for Google, besides the obvious fit into their blogging system it also gives them a very, very rich data source to play with. They know what people (the non-blogger people that is) are publishing, what people are pulling feeds and all kinds of information.

Everyone is abuzz with how much more big brother like Google is becoming as they expand their services and increase their data stores through acquisitions. I have no doubt that Google will exploit the rich information locked away inside Feedburner, but Google's true strength is the power and profitability of online advertising. Feedburner will fit very nicely into Google's expanding ad platform.

It is very clear now that the internet and online advertising are the next big ad markets. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are in an arms race to expand their ad networks to take advantage this opportunity.

I was just upgraded from my old T60 (acquired in November 2006) to a brand new wide screen T60. Definitely an improvement over the old T60.

Pros

• Next generation CPU's (Core 2 Duo rather than Core Duo)
• Faster clock speed (2.33GHz instead of 1.8 GHz)
• Slightly better video card (ATI x1400 instead of x1300)
• Wide screen
• The brightness of the screen has significantly improved
• Speakers are now on top of the keyboard rather than on the bottom of the laptop (Who thought to put them on the bottom?!?!?)

Cons

• Hard shutdown on dock problem still exists (I guess it really is static on the dock)
• The new screen seems to be more sensitive to viewing angle

Other than that everything seems to be pretty much the same.

I just downloaded the latest Joost beta and it works perfectly on Windows Vista. I can browser channels and play videos without problems. I haven't had a long time to play with it, but I will report problems as I find them.

For those that don't know what Joost is, it is basically TV over IP. They provide channels that you can watch, this is probably the best IP over TV solution that is well... legit. [cough] torrents... [cough] newzbin... Unfortunately you do need an invite to get in on the beta.

Congrats to the Joost team!

In the past, Internet Explorer has always been required in order to download certain updates or Microsoft programs. When installing the PDF and XPS plugin for Office 2007, I used FireFox by default not thinking that I might need to use IE. I was very surprised when I saw that I could validate WGA and download the plugin from FireFox. Here is a quote from the site:

"Some downloads are made available only after users have validated their versions of Microsoft Office. Firefox and Netscape Navigator browser users may install a helper program, the Office Genuine Advantage plug-in, to enhance their download experience."

Perhaps Microsoft is embracing the the competition and letting people choose their own browser. Unfortunately http://update.microsoft.com still requires Internet Explorer.

Today I installed Windows Vista on my new T60, when I entered our corporate key for Vista the installer just died and the machine needed to be rebooted. This is a pretty embarrassing bug for the Microsoft folks given that a valid license key causes the installation to fail. My work-around was to redo the install but skip the key step so that I could enter it later.

During the installation it prompted me for the version of windows that was being installed. The CD is from the MSDN and it just says vista on it and I remember hearing that all version of Vista are the same, that the license used determines which features are enabled. So I chose Ultimate assuming that it would downgrade to business if necessary.

After I get the machine installed I enter the key and, low and behold, it won't accept it as an Ultimate key. But it also won't downgrade to Vista Business automatically either. So here I am reinstalling Vista again.