..since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been in the process of rewriting my site. I’m tired of Wordpress, tired of escaping code, tired of futzing with code to make it readable, and basically tired of Wordpress working against me rather than with me. So I took a look at other blogging systems… and none of them had all the characteristics that I wanted. So I’ve been busy in background developing my own using Django. This will allow me to write code in blogs much easier, and I didn’t have to jump through the pain of trying to design my own Wordpress template.
The other big change I’m going to make is moving this site to a hosting provider. This site is run out of a box in the corner on a machine that’s a number of years old… it’s definitely on it’s last legs. I’ve purchased a slice from Slicehost, and hope to be moving this site there in the not too distant future. I’m going to do my best to try and not break the RSS feeds… but I can’t make any guarantees.
I wanted a copy of my svnsync’d version of the SVN repo while at PyCon. It’s about 450MB (and it’s not up-to-date currently)… but it has quite a few files. In 20 minutes time, it only got about 60MB of data across the wire. I killed it and ran:
ssh host “tar jcvf -C /path/to/parent - dir” | tar jxvf -
and it was done in roughly 25 minutes. Nice.
It was an exciting first day at PyCon. I met Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian Fitzpatrick (who is just as down to earth as he appears to be), Ted Leung, Steve Holden (Director of the PSF), and many, many other great contributors to the community.
I was completely beat at the end of the day, especially after spending several hours editing slides for a talk I’m supposed to give back home. I slept longer than I have in a very long time–which is refreshing.
So, I’m getting geared up for today. I’m particularly excited about Alex Martelli’s talk on callback patterns and idioms in Python and Jono DiCarlo’s talk on Python Application Development. And I’m really looking forward to meeting a few more people. So if you happen to read this, and you’re at pycon, look for me! Here’s a picture of me (with my two kids):
So, I bought IWork ‘08 the other day and started playing around with it. I was glad to see they fixed a couple of things with IWork ‘06–there was some bug with gradient fills and tables that ended up leaving a thin line of background near the top edge of the cell… but only when you printed or made the PDF.
One thing I was kind of excited about was seeing Apple’s spin on Excel: Numbers. So, being an engineer, I opened up to a blank worksheet, filled column A with 0-360, and column B with SIN(RADIANS(A[X]))–where X is the corresponding row in A, and then created a chart from column B. So this chart has 361 points in it–relatively small considering some that I’ve done in Excel where in upwards of 40,000 points. Well, with 4 processors and 5GB of RAM, Numbers couldn’t be responsive while doing anything with that chart. In fact, I tried tweaking the chart in a couple of ways and ended up crashing the application. Backing the number of points down to ~180 made things work much better. It was a little disappointing. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to want to use 360 or more points in a graph. Anything that involves daily costs, or maybe daily inventories, or… well, you get the idea. I hope the next version takes care of some of these issues. From an engineering perspective, I really need to see more.
Yesterday I was setting up a new VM under VMWare Workstation when I noticed that mouse grabbing was not working. Now I use my VMs extensively, so I expect this feature to work as it slows productivity when it doesn’t. After digging around, I found that the VMWare Tools installer hadn’t modified the xorg.conf to handle the mouse. It turns out that they released the Xorg drivers as open source and now they’re maintained by the Xorg team! So, in this case, I fired up Synaptic and installed the vmmouse input driver, modified the driver line in my xorg.conf to be ‘vmmouse’ instead of ‘mouse’, and restarted X. Tada! I now have mouse grabbing without having to start the vmware-toolbox.
So, I just finished reading the The Book of Qt4 and it has almost convinced to do more C++ programming again. I say almost because there are Python binding for Qt4, so I’ll just use Python instead. However, I did sit down and write several simple applications with it and I must say it is the most well thought out, well designed C++ library I have ever seen. I’ve written several X apps (Motif), MFC, wxWidgets, and several other apps using some obscure toolkits and I must Qt4 is absolutely the best GUI framework I’ve ever seen. The signals and slots paradigm is awesome and exactly the loose coupling that GUI developers need. I wish Java had something similar… I could definitely use it on a project or two right now.
Probably one of the most difficult tasks in front of me at this point in my career is managing people. Unlike some of my counterparts, I was not born with the social side of my brain intact. :-) What I mean is that the social skills that I have are learned, and not instinctive. It took a lot of personal strength and mistakes to get where I’m at, and will take a lot more to get where I need to be. But one book that I’ve read recently was more insightful than I could have possibly imagined: Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp. Michael Lopp spends the entire book running through semi-fictiional stories that would hit home with any reader. He’s got a wonderful writing style, and his insight into management is inspirational. But, the best part of his book is not just how he handled difficult situations, but that he captured his thought process. For those of us who don’t have that innate ability to grok other people, it was amazing to see how that thought process works. For me, it was very inspiring to see a way to manage that wasn’t based on a dictatorship–not that I practice it, but it is something that I see all too often. I hate the idea of being a dictator, especially when I work with many very smart people. Now I see a goal that’s a lot more clear to me. Thank you Michael Lopp. You can purchase the book from here. And no, I don’t get any sort of money for doing this. I just believe Managing Humans is an amazing book.
I just added a new page called Recommended Reading that talks about some books that I’ve found invaluable as a software engineer. I’ve got a few more books to add, but the big hitters are on there already.
Well, that was an adventure I don’t care to repeat. For those of you who are suffering from the 10.4.10 update, use the Archive and Install from your install CD and rescue yourself. :-) It kept most of my preferences and applications. However, it does look like I need to re-install Python 2.5 (and a bunch of packages), XCode, and a VPN client. I’ll definitely think twice before accepting another update to the OS, that’s for certain. :-(
After working some ridiculous hours for a number of weeks, I managed to get RSI in my right arm. It wasn’t too bad. It mainly ached, no sharp pains or anything of that sort. However, I decided to take a look at a few things to see if there was something that I could change (posture, keyboard height, mouse, etc) or learn to help combat RSI. So, I bought a new keyboard tray (my keyboard sits just a little too high), switched to a track ball, and have been learning Dvorak. Continue reading ‘Ergonomics and Dvorak…’