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Things you don’t hear anymore

While finally getting into some more serious coding, I had this thought. THings you don’t hear very often anymore, but were pretty common back in the day.
“A snack? Sure, let me just start this compile running, it’ll hopefully finish by the time we get back.”
Compiles I’m running now usually take less than 6 seconds, sometimes a larger build and deploy and initialize may run for 10-15 seconds.
Ah the good old… days?

Come see me play!

This coming Friday, September 23rd, my band Deluded Blues will be playing at the Cottage Street Pub in Franklin, MA. This is the first time the ‘new’ band has appeared on stage in its current form, and we’re only doing a ‘mini-set’ in the middle of a longer set by the ‘old’ band.
We go on at 9pm, and should be playing for about 45 minutes. Much support from attending audience folks would be a huge win, as this is also the first time I’ve -ever- performed on stage 🙂
I’ll be heading down to Franklin earlier to pick up our gear and muscle it over to the gig (leaving home around 6:15-6:30ish). If folks want to ride along or caravan, ya’ll are welcome, but you may be drafted into roadie mode!
We had a great pre-gig practice tonight, going through the entire set beginning to end, and I think we sound pretty good, if I do say so myself. If you like bar-blues type music, leaning heavily on early 70’s blues (Allman Brothers, Free, CCR, etc), then you’ll know what to expect in our show.
Hope to see folks there!

Space Worms!

Spaceworms is a nice simple flash game, but fair warning! It will really suck you in.
The idea is you’re trying to out-maneuver the spaceworms. Use the arrow keys to move your ‘dot’. The worms are faster and more maneuverable than you, but have slightly slower reaction time. Use the edges of the screen to your advantage.
Avoid getting caught for 10 seconds, you go up a level, and get another Worm chasing you.
I got up to 7 worms chasing me, and almost wore out my arrow keys.
Thanks to Screenhead for the link.

Coming as no surprise to anyone…

OkCupid hosts another good ‘where are you on the political / social spectrum’ quiz here. I took it, and came out, unsurprisingly:

  • You are a SOCIAL LIBERAL (76% permissive)
  • You are an Economic Liberal (21% permissive)
  • You are best described as a: Socialist

Shocking. The entire results (With splufty display graphs showing how I show up on the grid), is available here.

Most marketable tech skills?

So while working with some other geeks this afternoon, the subject of Ruby on Rails came up. I’ve heard good things about it, but I voiced my skepticism about shelving my current workcycle (in Java) and learning Yet Another Language. I mean, how many folks can be looking for Ruby programmers nowadays?

Well. Gee. How many are looking? Good question!

So off to Dice, one of the better job / tech search boards out there, and I did a little keyword searching. The summary of what I found isn’t all that surprising, but still interesting…

Sampling 75,117 entries…

Keyword… Number of matches…
Java: 12210
C: 8235
C++: 6828
Basic: 6369
Perl: 3718
C#: 3516
Cobol: 1177
PHP: 639
Python: 383
awk: 138
REXX: 72
Ruby: 40
Pascal: 27
Lisp: 24

Interesting. How about platforms?

Keyword… Number of matches…
Windows: 10753
Unix: 11474
Linux: 4859
Mac: 461
VMS: 275

So apparently being a Java programmer on Windows is the way to go 🙂

Hard to talk down this reading.

I normally don’t comment on current events outside of politics, but this one struck me as worth bringing up…

According to AP via Yahoo News:

CHICAGO – A commuter train was going almost 60 mph above the speed limit just before it derailed, killing two people and injuring dozens, the acting chairman of the
National Transportation Safety Board said Sunday.
Mark Rosenker said the Metra train was traveling at 69 mph and should not have been going faster than 10 mph when it switched tracks at a crossover just before jumping the tracks Saturday.

Nothing wrong with the tracks or the train, it was just going ‘too fast’. Yeah, I’d say so. Sheesh.

Happiness is… and another reason why I love *nix.

… a successful off-site backup.
Now, to flesh out that commentary – most of our services are colocated at various Undisclosed Locations around the US (usually one door down from Dick Cheney). This means it’s sort of difficult to trot over to the machine, pop in a backup tape, make a copy, and toss the tape in the storage vault. Sure, colo facilities provide this capability, but it tends to be painful to work with, not to mention costing extra money.
With broadband now as widely available as sand, it’s possible to take on the concept really put forward 10+ years ago. “Why not back things up over the net?” When I was first approached with the idea (oh, 1995-ish), network connectivity was just edging out of dialup, and if you were SUPER lucky, you could have a T1 line, but it would most likely run you $800 a month. That sort of connectivity at home? Not likely.
Nowadays folks have DSL and Cable modems that have huge amounts of bandwidth. We’re no different here at Chez Geek, happily slurping at the nozzle from Comcast.
Last night I finished noodling a 4-5 line backup script that synchronizes various Important Directories [tm, reg us pat off] on our server (things like, oh, say, /home), and a spare 160gig USB drive I picked up at Microcenter for $80.
What does this have to do with Linux, I hear you cry? Because all of this was done with free software, and it did it fast and efficiently. Using the rsync utility, it takes one command to synchronize one set of dirs on one machine with another. It even compresses and optimizes the transfers, only copying those files that need to be updated.
So we have free software, cheap bandwidth, cheap disk space, and cheap hardware. It’s Geek Nirvana.
For the detail-oriented folks in the crowd, here’s the end result:

sent 3756414 bytes received 7763330071 bytes 530665.56 bytes/sec
total size is 13301911159 speedup is 1.71

That’s some nice throughput.

What I do…

In the midst of hyper-geekery today, Barb msgs me and asks what I’m working on.
So I answer…

publishing WSDL-driven servlets into an Axis environment to expose J2EE stateless session beans’ methods via webservices – then i don’t have to have the client apps deal with JNDI and RMI calls directly to the jboss server, they can just use SOAP calls, browsing via wsdl.

And just realized how much that looks like total gobbledygook. No wonder I sometimes feel like I’m in my own little world.

Mambo patching – a brief interlude

So one of my many hats involves helping out running the Arisia website. We changed the site over to being managed by Mambo several months ago, and have been ‘mostly’ happy with it, though it has its quirks.
One quirk raised its head today. We couldn’t upload files via the media manager other than graphics and pdfs. One of the users wanted to punch up a preformatted HTML page, and the system was not allowing it.
After digging around the code, I found the culprit. The system was hardcoded to only accept certain extensions, and I have to admit, the code that did it was… er… painful:

if ((strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".gif")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".jpg")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".png")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".bmp")) &&(strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".doc")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".xls")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".ppt")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".swf")) && (strcasecmp(substr($file['name'],-4),".pdf"))) {

Ew. Just. Ew. Bleah. Ick. In the immortal words of Tim Allen… “So I rewired it!” :

# The valid file extension list is:
$validList="fluff|gif|jpg|png|bmp|doc|xls|ppt|swf|html|htm|rtf|";
$fileInfo = pathinfo($file['name']);
if (! strpos($validList,$fileInfo['extension'] . '|')) {

Muuuuch better. This patch goes around line 139 of admin.media.php, if folks are looking for an update.

The Fake Dr. Pepper Collection

This is just too funny. A fellow has, in full and complete detail, documented all the Dr. Pepper clones he could find. Sample cans and pictures and taste-tests and everything.
As a long time Dr Pepper fan, I was shocked to hear that he ranked Mr. Pibb (the most popular Dr Pepper clone) only 2 out of 5 pepper points. It’s one of the few that is regularly on tap around here in the northeast.
Anyway, check out FakeDrPepper.com.

Carl and Phil – Monkey Ninjas!

Okay, okay, I admit it. I like going to Chuck E. Cheeses with Zach on occasion. It helps that there’s an open access point nearby. I get to geek on the laptop, Zach gets to play skee ball and run around in the hamster tubes.
I chanced to catch site of a video on their ubiquitous monitors. A very silly and somehwat simplistic animated piece called “Carl and Phil – Monkey Ninjas!. It was silly enough for me to remember to look it up when I got home.
Well worth watching a couple of these.

Firefox trick du jour: Blocking popups from plugins

Here’s a neat trick. Firefox has outstanding popup blocking in by default. I’m always amazed watching IE users as they close popup after popup, and take it in stride as ‘normal’.
Recently Firefox has started showing popups. The clever (?) ad writers are now writing their annoying functions in plugin-based languages, such as shockwave and flash. The page runs a flash program, which generates a popup. A popup blocker in HTML misses this, and you suddenly have a blinking bouncing button on your screen. Ew.
To tell Firefox not to allow popups from plugins, do the following:

  1. Type ‘about:config’ in your tool bar
  2. Right click anywhere, and select “New->Integer”
  3. Type in: privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins
  4. Set the value to ‘2’

Voila! The fellow who showed me this simply said “Hey, not my trick.” 🙂