Deirdre Saoirse Moen: Category Development

MacBookPro Postgres tip

Deirdre — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 22:54:00 +0000

If you've tried to install the postgres ruby gem like so:

sudo gem install postgres -- --with-pgsql-include-dir=/usr/local/pgsql/include --with-pgsql-lib-dir=/usr/local/pgsql/lib

...and you get the error:

checking for PQsetdbLogin() in -lpq... no Could not find PostgreSQL libraries: Makefile not created * extconf.rb failed *

...then it's possible you didn't compile postgres with the --with-openssl option. Doing so made everything work perfectly.

New Shoes

Deirdre — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:56:00 +0000

I've got a new Mac, a Mac Book Pro. As this came at the end of a very long, exhausting week, I'm glad it's done.

Unfortunately, I bought it because I needed it. Saturday afternoon, after my mother was sprung from the hospital, I discovered that my Mac wasn't charging. Fortunately, it ran off batteries fine (though it had no charge at the time). Several long visits to the Mac store and some plastic later, and I had a new Mac with everything migrated.

Now it's time to send the old baby off to be repaired and enjoy the speed of the new baby.

Fun with Subversion

deirdre — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 16:06:18 +0000

So, this morning I did an 'svn up' on a project before I went to breakfast, then went off onto the other side of the hotel property to do some work and schmooze.

Later, I got this error:

$ svn up svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/reposname/!svn/vcc/default' svn: REPORT of '/svn/reposname/!svn/vcc/default': 400 Bad Request (http://domain.com)

See, I hadn't changed anything, and svn up on some other domains worked -- which made the problem significantly harder to debug, actually.

Ultimately, the problem was simply a blocked port. Thanks to Daniel for figuring it out while I still had some hair remaining.

Problems of Outsourcing, Specifically India

deirdre — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 01:05:27 +0000

If you are an un- or under-employed engineer, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Chad Fowler's book My Job Went To India. If nothing else, it will shine some light into a different culture and different values.

However, what might be of more interest in the short-term could be this article from Kevin Barnes.

Fascinating.

Java is Aristocratic; Ruby is Democratic

deirdre — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 10:53:32 +0000

A week or so ago, I was trying to explain to someone (who is not a programmer) what the difference in object inheritance between Ruby and Java is. I explained duck typing, but the person still wasn't getting at what I meant.

I blurted out something different. "Well, Java is aristocratic, and Ruby is democratic." I went on to explain that Java, in order to determine what you're capable of depends on what your parent was capable of, plus those special methods that make you you and not your parent. It doesn't matter if some other kid can do the exact same thing (with the exact same code), if it doesn't have your parent, Java will think it can't do it. Thus, aristocratic, because capability is determined by inheritance.

In Ruby, all you ask is "can you do this?" by invoking the responds_to? method. If it does, you're golden. Thus, Ruby is a meritocracy, which doesn't, strictly speaking, equate to democracy.

While this may not seem like a big deal, I should point out that it can be. For example, for my first large C++ project, we used zero class libraries from other vendors because none were ready yet. However, when they started coming out, it would have required huge chunks of re-coding to incorporate into another library because the inheritance would have changed.

At the time, when working with Windows coders as a Mac developer, I was keenly aware of how different the object hierarchies were: on Windows, everything was a subclass of window: text panes, buttons, everything. On the Mac, none of the other visual elements were subclasses of windows.

So, in other words, if we'd moved our custom framework into another company's, such as PowerPlant, we'd have had to do a lot of code changes -- probably more than if we'd used a C library -- because we'd have to have had everything inherited from the right classes to buy into the framework's inheritance model.

Had we been using Ruby (which didn't exist at the time), we might have been able to do this in small chunks rather than all at once -- because Ruby cares about what you can do, not who your parents were.

One of the geniuses of Sun was not the language per se, but the idea of releasing frameworks that helped standardize the use of the language. There's now a lot of competing frameworks, though, so that didn't last long.

On a completely different note, a couple of weeks ago, we went out to dinner with our friends. One of the people made a comment about Java being slow doing something or other. The person across the table, who works for Sun, commented, "You do realize that Java is a language invented by a hardware vendor...."

Happy 10th Anniversary BeBox

deirdre — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 15:47:16 +0000

As some of you know, I worked for Be briefly, so I feel some ownership in this even though the BeBoxen were a thing of the past when I was there.

Here's the story.

WOW Web Design and Project Management Conference

deirdre — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 01:31:40 +0000

Over the weekend, I attended the WOW design conference. My head is still threatening to explode from being overpacked with information.

When I signed up for the conference, I recognized the names, but (being somewhat bad with names) didn't realize how cool the instructors would really be. I haven't even begun to finish transcribing all my notes.

One thing I realized, I'd fallen back into a bad habit of using occasional presentational css class names. I won't do that again. Really.

I'd also had a site that vexed me, but, with a deadline, I used a single table to work around a browser rendering issue. Or, better description, what seemed at the time to be a browser rendering issue.

When I heard Andy Clarke talk about floats, I realized what I'd probably done wrong. I opened up my project, edited two files, and voila, the entire site was fixed in all the browsers I had on that machine, including the quirky old IE 5.2.3 Mac.

I'm working on some other tests before uploading the changed site, but that was a huge success.

I don't want to leave Molly or Aaron out, I'm just quite literally inarticulate right now. When I find the brain unpacking device, I'll post more. I hope.

::stumbles about::

It's around here somewhere, isn't it?

In the meantime, Craig Cook has posted a more complete review.

Last Day at Quova

deirdre — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 23:06:53 +0000

Today was my last day at Quova. I really think the company is doing some interesting and important work, it's just that where I needed to be was going one direction, and what they needed was going another.

It all kind of crystallized when I went to BarCamp and realized I was missing a lot of that je ne sais quoi that caused me to move up to the bay area in 1999. It's not that Quova's not that kind of place for other people, though.

And so I left what a coworker jokingly called "the cube of infinite sorrow," (it wasn't personal, it was a 4-person cube) off for a new and uncharted land. I'll miss the inflatable T-Rex mascot (named Fluffy).

I thought I'd mention a few things about Quova. What they do: network geography, specifically, where IP networks are located in the world. While that might seem simple, there's an awful lot of interesting wrinkles.

Of all the CEOs I've ever worked for, none have I respected more than Marie Alexander. She's got that insight into the tech industry, plus a southern charm that I admire.

And where else have you worked where the HR director baked brownies? Every week? And made oatmeal? Thank you Lynda for all those extra details that keeps the place humming.

Mood: Mostly townsville (which will mean something to those of you who've seen the defcon scale).

Thirty Years of Development

deirdre — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 12:43:31 +0000

I was asked a few weeks ago how many languages I've been paid to develop in during my thirty years as a software engineer and developer. At the time, I came up with twenty-five on the spot, so I'm obviously missing a few here and there.

I've excluded database languages (e.g. dBase II) and language dialects, but here's the list, in approximate chronological order:

Basic (and not that visual kind)
Fortran
PL/1
Assembly
Pascal
Ratfor (which, while a preprocessor for Fortran, is much more Algol/Pascal-like than Fortran like, thus listed separately)
Forth
Lisp
Ada
C
Hypercard
Smalltalk
C++
Prolog
Applescript
awk
sed
Perl
bash
Objective-C
Javascript
Python
PHP
tcl
Java

CocoaHeads

deirdre — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:31:00 +0000

Thursday night, I went to the first meeting of the Silicon Valley Cocoa Heads, which was a lot of fun. Unusual for a first meeting, there were 24 people there, including long-time Mac writer Scott Knaster. He showed off his latest book, and people introduced themselves and talked about their current projects.

Of those there, almost half either currently worked for Apple or had worked for Apple. I don't suppose that's surprising, it's just that BaNG! rarely got that sort of a crowd.

Anyhow, great fun.

Updated to add: Ah, found my notes. Knaster talked about his experience working on the Longhorn project, during which time he spoke with approximately a thousand Microsoft engineers, each of whom had a different view of what Longhorn was going to entail. When it was pointed out that Longhorn still hadn't shipped and that Microsoft hadn't had a major OS release in some time, Knaster quipped: "Microsoft has become the company that has forgotten how to ship software."

Tired, tired, tired

deirdre — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 23:28:30 +0000

I had a long day planning for the next version of BayCon's registration software. Yesterday, had a meeting with the database team.

My head is about to explode from all the info. Sometimes, when I've had one of those days, all my body wants to do is fall over asleep so it has time to index.

I have managed to get postgres installed on my machine (no thanks to fink) and working; now I just need a php that works with it for phppgadmin. Gosh, I haven't compiled php since I was using Linux as my desktop OS. Alternatively, I could just use another tool, but there's darn few for the Mac.

I've been working on my Javascript homework, but I'm just too tired to see the error in what I'm doing.

So I guess that means I'm going to sleep....

Tiger, at last!

deirdre — Sun, 17 Jul 2005 01:55:46 +0000

So, I decided to install Tiger yesterday when I read a blog entry about a Backpack Dashboard widget. One of my problems had been backups: I keep my home directory on a UFS partition so that I can use rsync for it. However, I'd never figured out a way to effectively back up my / partition, which is HFS+.

Having recently signed up for del.icious, I discovered the answer through searching through "backup" tags. In short, the answer is rsyncx.

Voila, by 4 a.m., everything was backed up. I woke up at 10:30 and began my install. What with having the DVD installed slightly wonky the first time (and the install failing as a result), then having my Mac not want to start up again for a bit (it got cranky), things weren't as smooth as I'd have hoped — but I did finally get it all installed.

By the time I got all the developer tools installed, the system updates installed, and so on, it was 4 p.m. So, for a fairly complex install, it took me 5-1/2 hours, not 1/2 hour. With an OC-3, a faster hard drive, a faster cpu, and a few gigs of ram, it probably would have gone faster. I just have a wee little iBook G4, though.

I've updated my ruby so that I can run rails directly from Tiger's install of the language (in Panther, you had to do an install into /usr/local/bin and shadow the 1.6 install in /usr/bin).

Well, I'm off to play.

Typography humor

deirdre — Wed, 22 Jun 2005 18:44:00 +0000

One of my favorite all-time "corporate answers" from the way-back machine.

Subject:   Medu Neter
From:       Anne Ogborn
Sent on:    Thursday, July 18, 1996 23:35:38
Message-ID:     199607182038.NAA24654@post-awful.apple.com

And one last question, I understand that Apple can handle scripts that go left to right or right to left. The Tameran Medu Neter traditionally follow a general flow of the main passage going from the center outward at the top of the page (left to right and right to left), with supporting passages usually being arranged in verticle columns. Also, the arrangement of the characters within a single word is involves changes in all four directions (left to right, right to left, down to up, and up to down) as well as leaps to the end of the word and a return to the previous location (all characters that are also deity names are placed in a position of honor at the end of a word as a sign of respect, regardless of where that corresponding sound falls in the word). Does Apple support languages that act in this manner?

It is true that Mac API's support both right to left and vertical text.

Apple does not currently sell a script system for Medu Neter, and I know of no plans to create one. Under Quickdraw GX it should be possible to create such a script system, however the mixed direction page layout would require it's own specialized page layout code above the API level. It would be a nontrivial task to implement such a system.

If you should decide to implement such a system you should place it in the smKlingon space, as we do not currently reserve a space in the script numbering system for Medu Neter. Obviously this will cause problems for Macintosh users who wish to compose mixed Klingon/Medu Neter documents, but hopefully this will be rare.

Engineering Support Engineer
World Ready Software Group
Apple Computer

Ahhh

deirdre — Sat, 18 Jun 2005 00:33:55 +0000

Proving that the Pascal part of my soul is not dead (merely resting), I was quite heartened to see that Ruby permitted the following syntax:

for i in 0..255

I miss Pascal's syntax. I rather liked that you could start at any arbitrary number and end at any arbitrary number, inclusive -- especially handy for arrays of things.

Ruby also adds the three dots syntax to exclude the last number: 0..255 = 0...256.

Ruby on Rails Hype

deirdre — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 20:29:23 +0000

Well, in the vein of "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," there are four Rails-like implementations in other languages that I know of -- and I haven't been looking.

Castle Project works on .Net with Ajax support.

Cake is a Rails-like framework for PHP, and Biscuit is another.

Lest the Java folks feel left out, there's also Trails.

Speaking of Java and Rails, I was talking with a coworker today about RoR and why I thought it was cool. He asked if I'd seen Trails. Well, I haven't "seen" it, I just know that it exists. I'm sure it's very cool.

I mentioned, though, that one of the things I liked about RoR was some of the implicit definitions. For example:

@submission = Submission.findby_marketidandmanuscriptid(params[:marketid], params[:manuscript_id])

I didn't have to create the function findby_marketidandmanuscript_id -- it's implied. That's what I like about RoR: the power of implication.

My coworker pointed out that you could write a function in Java, yada yada yada. Yeah, but the point is that you don't write one in RoR. Same thing for setters and getters. For setters and getters:

attraccessor :firstname, :lastname, :homeph

For getters only:

attrreader :firstname, :lastname, :homeph

Done.

SF/F of Color

deirdre — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 00:51:34 +0000

Bill Humphries over on whump.com posted a message about the Carl Brandon Society needing some web development help. I think it's a fine idea. I'd lend a hand myself, but the problem domain for what I'm now working on for BayCon and the problem domain for their needs doesn't seem to overlap much at first glance -- and, as we need to make a whole bunch of changes this year, I'm not sure I'll have any extra time at all.

Nevertheless, I wanted to say it's a laudable thing to do. There is still entirely too little sf/f published by (or about) people of color.

While I'm on the topic, I thought I'd utter a micro-rant about Andromeda -- one of the reasons I really liked it in the first two seasons was how subversive it was. For example, Tyr, the black character, came from a genetically engineered race and sneered at the humans such as Dylan Hunt. I thought it was delightful role reversal.

The show was so remarkable, especially when it came to racial and sexual politics. Then, alas, the studio axed the lead creative people (including Majel Roddenberry, for crying out loud) and Tyr became a villain. The fifth season was so unimaginably awful that I couldn't bear to be in the same room when an episode was on.

I just hope Robert Hewitt Wolfe gets another cool gig soon.

Ruby on Rails: First Glance

deirdre — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:56:52 +0000

A lot of Pythonistas dislike ruby because it's too perl-like. I can see what they're saying. However, the ruby code I've read is all organized very cleanly. I don't know if it's possible to be as ugly in ruby as it is in perl, but I haven't seen any evidence yet.

In concept, Ruby on Rails does kick ass. The ten-minute demo took me about an hour to run, in part because some of the rails syntax has changed since the video was shot. Since some of the people writing the wiki have killed questions related to some of those differences, which only made it harder. Add to that the fact that script/generate doesn't have the cool documentation that its predecessors did, and, well, it took an hour instead of ten minutes.

However, it is very, very cool.

Python for the Series 60

deirdre — Tue, 17 May 2005 02:09:14 +0000

I remember when they first got Python running on a Palm. Now it'll run on my phone: a Nokia Series 60. I'd just prepped Eclipse for SymbianOS development, though I haven't tried it yet.

Finally!

deirdre — Fri, 13 May 2005 02:47:14 +0000

I finally had an hour to play with my little bloggie. How I've missed you!

The problem turned out to be some nasty garbage in either the options or the comments. I cleaned out everything that didn't appear to be essential. Lo, everything worked again.

Anyhow, the initial round of BayCon programming schedules has gone out, so that's a huge load off my mind.

I haven't yet decided on my post-BayCon coding frenzy, but it's tied between learning even more WebObjects, learning Cocoon, and playing with Ruby on Rails. So far, RoR seems to be winning.

Things I learned from this year's BayCon project:

1) Things that didn't annoy me annoyed other people a lot; 2) Some things that annoyed other people could have saved me a lot of time; 3) Stuff like this really needs a larger monitor than a 14" iBook offers; 4) Next time, it'd be good to have a couple other people offer design suggestions.

Ah well, it's still a better project than it was last year.

WebObjects Meetup, RIP

deirdre — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 10:10:31 +0000

If you visit webobjects.meetup.com, you'll see the charming new message:

Your WebObjects Meetup topic has been closed. Thank you for your interest in the Web Objects Meetup. This Meetup has been merged with the Mac Meetup. Please click here to join the Mac Meetup: http://mac.meetup.com/

Charming.

Talk about missing the point entirely. Enterprise developers deploying on multiple platforms really have little in common with users of the primary development platform.

Feh.

I'd rather hang out with 2-3 WO developers talking about WO than with a larger, more generic, group talking about how much the latest Mac email client sucks (or doesn't suck).

WebObjects people are sort of their own little world, which is fine by me. Pardon me while I go back to work on my latest WebObjects project.