Business at the speed of snail

Now what ?

2009-06-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

Well. Now I am on a 3 week weekend, a vacation if you like.

The big question is, did I take my MacBook Pro or my trusty Acer with me ?

Well I was tempted to take both. But the extra weight and then have one of the computers just sitting around collecting dust is not my thing. I picked the Mac. It was actually a simple decision. It is the computer I trust. I don't trust Windows. It can break anytime. I could get a virus anytime, and finally because Windows 7 is just Windows. But for the first time in 25 years it actually works. Doesn't say it is better than Mac OS X, just that Windows 7 is the best Windows ever.

I knew what I needed for the vacation. MySQL, PHP, CakePHP, mail and a good browser. I have everything of this on the Windows machine. I bought e-texteditor and all.

But it all comes down to DOS. I hate c:\Program Files and these kind of paths. I hate it. I don't like to have c and d and e drives. I can get cmd to work and behave, but it is no Terminal.app. I really like working in Bash shell, CTRL-A and CTRL-E and all these shortcuts actually make everything work better and nicer. Being able to split the screen and use 'screen' among other things is just the difference.

Many people think that since I am a "mac person" I always like the Mac and such. But that is not the case. I never liked the old System 9 and older. The machines crashed a lot, didn't multitask, did not have terminal. I have always liked NeXTSTEP ever since I first saw it and worked on it. I just wished I knew more back then.

I really like my Mac, Textmate, coda and all my other apps. Now I look forward to a clean Intel future with my Mac. But I will now be able to use Windows 7 machines without getting really mad and annoyed. I could work on a PC for a long periods of time if I needed to but nothing comes close to my Mac(s).

Windows 7

2009-06-04T06:29:00.001-07:00

Ok, as everyone knows ever since 2003 I have been using a Mac, and Linux before that and barely used Windows since 2000. I am doing all my work on a Mac and liking it. I hate working on XP and dislike it quite much to work on Vista. But since I have a quad core machine that runs Windows I use it to play games and do some heavy crunching. I like this computer.

I listen to Leo Laporte and his This Week In Tech and Mac Break Weekly. There he has been saying all these nice things about Windows 7. I mean, why ? It is still Windows, right ? One thing more than anything else that did catch me, was that he said it was snappy on these small crappy netbooks, and it just so happens that I have an old Dell D600 that I use as an e-book reader. This machine has P4 Mobile 1.7 GHz cpu and 2 GB memory. So I copy all my pdf books to the machine and use it to read on.

This machine worked quite ok with Ubuntu 8.04 but once I upgraded to ubuntu 9 it failed miserably. Becamse slow and buggy and later refused to boot. So I went to www.microsoft.com/windows7 and got myself a copy, I mean what is the harm since I had to re-install the machine anyway.

Remarkably the machine came back to life, and works great. I had to do go to Dell and get two drivers, 1 for the wifi card and one for the touchpad. It does go to 100% cpu load quite frequently, but given the limited usage I have for it it is ok. So then I took out my Acer Travelmate 8210, a Dual Core 2 cpu with 2 GB memory and large disk and re-installed it with Windows 7, clean.

Wow. This machine ran Vista and ran it well, but this is amazing. Windows 7 actually changes your working habits and streamlines your work to the point that it is actually a pleasure to use, I mean it, not joking. So I decided to take a journey and decide how useful it actually was. Was this just first time crush which fades away ? How actually is windows 7 usable for a Mac(aholic) for a stretch of time, doing actual work. Well in short, I am ashamed of saying, but I almost don't miss my Mac. If my Mac died right now, I am not sure I would buy a new one. I mean, I can get a quad core laptop and the new penryn i7 laptop, running windows 7 for quite a good price. I always liked using Mac OS X and never bought the machines just because they looked pretty.

So this is what I did, quite a longer story.

I installed xampp, Apache, php, perl and mysql for Windows. Installed openssh for Windows (not cygwin). Changed the font in 'cmd' to Consolas 9 points. Installed vim and fossil source code management. Went out and bought e-texteditor changed the default font to Consolas. E-texteditor is almost a clone of Textmate on the Mac. Another Danish guy who makes it, who is actually a friend of the Textmate author. Wonderful editor (both).

Then I installed Cakephp on the machine inside the xampp. Changed some of the default paths on the system (Environmental variables), so I can run mysql, cake, php, perl, fossil and vi straight from 'cmd'.

I then created from scratch, a to do list manager, full crud (edit, delete, create and all that) for the list. Had different views, MySQL and all. I made sure to set e-texteditor to UTF-8 (unicode) and use unix linefeeds (only \n and not \r\n).

The only minus to the whole experience is with the location of the <> button. It is on the right, and on European keyboards it is always next to the left shift, before Z. Nope, not on the Acer. Well i just swallowed and learnt to use it, not to like it though.

But the end result amazed me. I actually liked the experience. I liked developing on Windows. Now what is happening to me ? I have actually quit working for companies because they made me use Windows, and that was the big reason, and I am not joking.

Now what is it actually that I like so much about Windows 7. Well can't really say. The new Aero look and task bar is awesome. There is nothing in your face, there has in a week never been a dialog or yellow bubble saying something to me. I just can work totally focused on the machine and for example if someone starts talking to me on MSN, it just blinks a small icon on the left hand side on the screen, barely visible unless you actually look there. When I download a file, the download progress is displayed on the small browser icon and then fades away. Nothing to bother you.

When I want to do something. I just press the Windows button, type in 'cmd' and I am in command line. If I have to do anything else I just press the windows button and type in what I want. Want to change environmental variables, just type enviro and it pops up. Want to set the sound, well just type in sound. The search is really good. The new control panel does not have a Classic view, finally. I like the new look especially since the search works great.

I think I will have myself locked up now, the men in the white clothes are coming. Seeja...

Star Wars

2009-03-20T03:47:00.000-07:00

Not until after reading the blog of CAMBLR did I figure out why I hated the new Star Wars movies but liked about the old one's.

Remember, the new movies happen BEFORE the old ones. They are about Luke and Leia's parents. They are about Darth Wader as a teenager. I always thought it was because they have so much more and better technology in the past than they did in the future. But that was not it.

What really impressed me about the old one, was just how real it was. Everything is as close to normal as you can have it with flying space ships and robots. Everything looks used. Yup, you read me right. Nothing in the old Star Wars movies is never used before brand new. The space ships don't look like mirrors with impeccable paint job. The bar, the fortress, the millenium falcon all look dirty. There is even dust in the air, when the light shows through a window at Lukes home and in the bar in Mos Eisley is dusty and dirty. The roads are not paved, and everything looks like it has been there for years and years.

Counter that with the city where the replic is run from and the the jedi house. Everything is spotless and shining. The office of Palpatine and others are impeccable.

I know these are the big cities, New York vs Timbuktu, but New York is not spotless.

And I always thought I detested the new movies because of Yar Yar Binks, how silly of me :) Although George Lucas should really have released a version 1.5 of the first movie with Yar Yar deleted out. This character does nothing for the movies and is only really really boring and the scene where his accidentally wins a battle with the robots in the first one, should not have been in the movie at all. And Hayden Christiansen should not be allowed to call him self an actor

Fossil version control system

2009-03-11T02:28:00.000-07:00

For the last few years I have been using subversion. I can't say that I have been much of a power user as I have never actually branched a live project or done tags. All I have been doing is working in the trunk. Well these are strange words, tags, branches and trunk. Working in the trunk is that I work on live code and if I mess up I need to go back to my last commit change. This can be all of a few minutes or if I have been working with no internet (what ? how is that possible? ) I might loose more than a days worth of work. This is because subversion is a remote system, so if you need to checkin code you need to have a network relationship with your subversion server.

Also in subversion, branching is very expensive. How expensive ? 100 % more expensive. It makes a full copy of your code repository for every single branch you make. What are branches you might ask ? Well to put it simply, branching is where you have a full source and you might want to test out a new grid object in your project instead of your current grid. If you don't branch, you just go ahead and change your code all over the place and once you are done you might do a checkin if you like the result. If you don't like the result you just revert your code to the earlier checkin. Quite simple and this is why you have to use version control system. This is how I used to work. What keeps happening is that for the release version, people might report a bug, and bugs get top priority over everything else. So all my changes are either copied out of the repository or just deleted and I check out the earlier version, fix the bug and release a new version. Then I copy the development files back into the tree or start from scratch. WAIT A SEC HERE. Did I not just waste a few hours of changing the grids and have to start again ? Or what is even worse, I might have overwritten my bug fix with my testing. Now I have to remember to fix the bug as well.

Well this is just like playing chess. I need to keep a lot of info in my head, while speaking to my wife or kids or answering e-mail while typing away on my gtalk or msn account. I will admit it. I make mistakes. I have released a version with a bug I had fixed earlier. But never again.

Let me explain branches in short. What would be a much better way of working is this. I checkout the code, and when I want to try to change grids in my application I create a branch called "changing_grids". Then do my work there. Now if I get a bug report, I just commit my changes on the branch, checkout (change to) the master branch, fix the bug. Now you might think I just checkout my "changing_grids" branch, and you would be half right. What I might do before is to merge the master branch into "changing_grids" first, so my bug fixes go into my testing, and then I checkout my branch. This way, no time is lost, and I have full story of everything. And the best is, if I actually succeed in changing my grid to something else, and I like the result, I can merge the "changing_grid" into the master, compile and release. Now this is what I call work flow.

The above scenario is quite possible with subversion, but you can not do this while being offline, and you have to merge quite a lot of files, all this really takes some time, and wastes disk space.

I have been looking at GIT, git means idiot in the queens english and Linus Torvalds says it is named after him self. Pretty funny. I must admit that I really gained huge admiration on Linus for writing git in just 3-4 days and going live with it on the Linux Kernel. Thats just cool.

Git works offline, meaning I can do what ever I feel like with my code repository. I can branch, delete and change everything as often I like, and I can commit every single change I do and once I am online I can push all my changes to my central server. Best of all, GIT is cheap, I mean if I change 1 class in my project, the repository only increases by how much I changed. Creating branches only takes a fraction of a second, merging branches is really really fast, and everything is happening on my local computer so it is even faster.

What is the downside then ? Well, git is more complicated than subversion, a whole lot more. But if you just stick to the basics you will be much happier and doing branches and tags as if there was no tomorrow. Once you start doing branches your workflow changes dramatically, and there is no turning back.

Now as I am "growing up" as a software developer, I am finding out that I started doing things wrong in the beginning. I made the whole development directory structure a single subversion repository. This is the right way of doing things back then. But I am finding out that I should be doing one repository on each project, and one for icons and pictures and so forth. But setting up a subversion server is hard, and time consuming.

By using git or other distributed version controls, it is so easy to do new "servers" as I am not doing any webdav magic or any other configurations and restarting services. By using git I only need ssh to communicate with a central repository (note as I don't call it a server).

Now I can work 100% locally and only push changes centrally as I see fit, mostly for backup purposes and to keep my 2 development machines in sync.

But what about the title there ? Fossil version control ?

In walks Dr. Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite. He creates many projects and needed his own repository system and did not find it so he just created his own, just like Linus. But unlike Linus, Dr. Hipp he is not maintaing the Linux Kernel, with probably hundreds of millions of lines of code and tens of thousands active users. Gits biggest problem is that it is made for big projects, and even though it works great for smaller ones it shows its rather complex features rather quickly. Most messages are not helpful, and most commands are complex, and installing Git is rather complex and prone to fail, even on Linux. As I don't use Windows at all (well as much as I can) then that git really doesn't work on windows is not a failure in my books, but having over 130 git commands and only using less than 10 is weird, and fossil is just 1 binary file (one, that is it). There is no gui frontend to speak of. The repository is stored as a SQLite database. SQLite is really fast database and unless by act of god you can not corrupt the database as it is totally ACID compliant and never writes data to the database unless it is verified that it is written.

Fossil, the name is just wrong as it makes it almost impossible to find on google, has everything that Git has. It works locally, offline. Branching is cheap, merging is simple, administrating it is simple. But there is more. Fossil has built in Trac system, wiki and user accesses.

The Trac system is where you keep bugs reported, and history of the source. The wiki system could be like a manual system, where everything is explained and user access with password authentication will control if other users besides yourself can checkout code, edit the wiki, create and edit tickets in the trac system and more. These features are not in git, or any other version control system I am aware of. Fossil is really fast system, secure and easy to work with.

Give it a try, it is free, and if you go to the website that hosts the whole project, you might notice that Dr. Hipp eats his own dog food. The whole web site actually is a fossil site. Did I forget to mention that fossil has a built in web server, where you have access to tickets, wiki and other tools ? Well it does. So now I will create many many projects using fossil.

To download Fossil just go here : http://www.fossil-scm.org/index.html/doc/tip/www/index.wiki

There you will find more information, and keep in mind that site is a fossil repository

What makes the iPhone such a success ?

2008-11-10T00:38:00.000-08:00

I can't say I know the whole story, but here are some things as to why the iPhone is now bigger than Sony Ericsson.

First and foremost simple menus. If I want to change the ring tone on the iPhone I do this :

Settings -> Sounds and click on ring tone. How simple is this ? Everything regarding sounds, alerts, incoming e-mail and everything else is there, two clicks.

Everything is this easy. The iPhone does not try to put an equal sign between e-mail and sms, since they are not the same. Two different applications handling each one, and the sms application is an excellent sms app, and the mail application is a fully blown e-mail client. Why does Nokia think this is the same thing ? Trying to squeeze e-mail into a sub folder in sms ?

One other reason. Quite a big reason. Apple makes 2 gadgets. The iPod Touch and the iPhone. Lets leave the original iPod out of this. If Nokia or Sony Ericsson tried to market a symbian music player how would they do it ? They would take an existing phone and rip out the camera, rip out the phone and network and call it a day, well they do just that. Sony Ericsson actually makes a Walkman that is exactly like their telephone, shares a name and is located in the same shops next to their phones. I am sure there are people who bought it and thought it was a phone. Worst part of this is, their music player is not a good one.

Apple takes a different approach. The iPod touch and iPhone are NOT the same. They don't even share the same look, the same screen, the same hardware and they have different motherboards and they actually look different. The iPod Touch had better screen than the iPhone 2G, the iPhone had adjustable volume keys on the side. The iPod had a normal jack system to plug headphones and the iPhone did not. iPhone 3G is closer to the touch now.

They shared two things. The operating system and they shared the iPod application. Yes the iPod is just an application on the iPhone and iPod touch. This is a real computer running a real operating system called NeXTSTEP, ehh, sorry Open Step, ehh sorry, OS X. This is truly remarkable. Why isn't Apple saving a fortune on design cost by using the same hardware for the iPod touch and iPhone ? Because they are different, it is that simple. Totally two different marketing. One is for people who want a small portable music player that can do games and stuff, the other one is a phone that actually can do music. I own both. I both own an iPod touch and iPhone. I never wanted to buy the iPhone until I had tried every other phone out there, so now my great iPod touch is on my gadget shelf, sleeping it seems.

The iPhone and the iPod touch are truly remarkable gadgets. They seem to share quite a bit, but all they do share are some "bits", some software. This does cost somewhat more to make in the beginning, but the results are just that much better.

p.s. Buying the iPhone is surprisingly easy. You just buy it with the cheapest subscription. Then you call the operator and cancel the deal, pay some termination fee and restore the phone on iTunes. Now you can use any card you want, and this is trouble free, no jailbreak, no hacking, no measure that is deemed to stop working after a while.

GSM Phone update

2008-11-10T00:08:00.000-08:00

Well, I did give the E71 two whole weeks in use as my only phone, I almost got used to the kinks in the phone. Hardware wise the phone is quite good, but the trouble starts as soon as you turn it on. It takes a long time to send an sms, and a phone with a full keyboard should be quicker. It really takes a real long time sending e-mail, why ? This is a multitasking phone, meaning it can run tasks in the background. I don't care how long it actually takes to send an sms/email, but I don't want to wait almost 1 minute before I can put my phone back in my pocket.

Lets not forget that the E71 phone is quite powerful computer, it is 390 MHz computer, doesn't sound like much does it ? Go back 5 years, people still had their Pentium II running at 333-450 MHz, but they had like 4-16 MB of memory and 2-4 GB hard disk, running WIndows 95/98/2000, using Microsoft Office and outlook and everything else, this phone has almost 200 MB memory and much more space to store things. It is not running a full version of Windows 95/98, it is running a really tiny operating system called Symbian.

The E71 and N95 and N73, don't kid your self thinking otherwise, this is the exact same phone with a different look. If you don't like one Symbian (S60) Nokia phone, you are not going to like the other one. Nokia makes hundreds of different looking phones with different quality camera, but thats it, they are all the same.

In the end of the year 2008, why is it hard to make a better phone than we used to have in 2002 ? In 6 years Nokia has gone from making bad phones to even worse. How hard is it to make a decent phone ? You have the iPhone out now for almost 2 years, how hard is it to use that one as a goal ? Quite hard if you are Nokia, only reason Nokia is still selling quite a lot is because their phones are literally free. They come with a contract and don't cost much, practically free.

The solution for Nokia is not spending more good money to fix something that they haven't been able to do in many years.

Instead of making a gazillion different looking types of phones that are all identical, try this out. There are quite a few really good operating systems out there that actually work on the ARM processor with no troubles. ARM is in Playstation Portable (PSP), it is in Nintendo Gameboy, it was(is) used in a british workstation manufacturer called Acorn. They made computers called Archimedes (ARC) and RiscPC. These computers were able to do incredible stuff, even today. They were fully multitasking in 1987, they boot from ROM, they already have quite a lot of software, games, network and books. This is up for grabs now. Pretty cheap actually.

You also have the Amiga OS, and ATARI ST tos. Both have endless amount of games, good software and tried and tested operating system. Both can easily run on ARM cpu.

All these 3 operating systems only use a few hundred kilobytes for them selves, they are all incredibly fast. All of them can multitask (Amiga since 1985). All of them have hundreds of people who know how to program for it. The all have compilers for any language you want.

SMS, the actual phone it self, contacts, e-mail and every other function on a phone is just an application. Why not use one of these operating systems ? I can not think of any. Only thing is that some "fat cat" is sitting high up at Nokia / Sony-Ericsson and trying to fight out a company battle and staying with Symbian. Symbian was an ok system in 1990, let it die, please !!!

In the beginning I said I almost got used to the phone, but it was just so bad I don't have words to describe it. I gave up. After testing every other phone out there I gave up. I bought myself a 16GB iPhone. Now this is a great phone, and it just does everything I want it to do, and does a great job. Sure it can't send mms and contacts as sms. I don't do this that often, and it did not always work in the past, so these features I don't miss, and Apple is going to fix this, I know they will.

Nokia E71

2008-10-10T02:01:00.000-07:00

I have now owned my Sony Ericsson W880i for close to 18 months, that is a record, don't think I have ever had a phone last more than 1 year before I throw it out. The SE W800i (SE from now on) is different. One of the main reasons why I have kept that for so long is that I have not seen any better phone yet.

My phones need to take a lot of beating. I send a lot of sms every day, I look at my e-mail and go to certain web sites like to find the next bus home and gmail. My SE has done me quite well, and frankly is quite good. I just had started to panic, was I getting so old that I was getting complaisant ? Was I the old guy talking about vinyl records sounding better (who cares, the music matters). Was I the one still talking about how the games on the Commodore 64 totally beat todays games ? As for the games, they were great, but they don't age well.

Nope. There is just no phone that is clearly better than the old W880i. Sure there are higher prices phones from SE with better camera, but since I own a fantastic camera (12 MP) I only need it to take good instant photos and the W880i does so quite well.

Then you might ask, why switch ? if I find a better answer than "just because" or "duh, I needed to because of ... will get back to you on that", I will let you know.

Last year I got my hands on Nokia N73, I detest that phone. Any N73 phone that is not being recycled into jewelry right now should be. Every 3-4 weeks I get a Nokia N95 phone as a 24/7 on call phone. Good screen on that phone, but that is it. Louse keyboard, awful refresh rate, and even I could design better looking icons. The guy who designed the menus is a drunk, an alcoholic crack smoking idiot who should be designing cross word puzzles or any board games, not phones. I need to go at least 3 levels down to change my ring tone, if I can ever find that option again (still wondering why almost everyone with a Nokia phone has the same ring tone?, those that did change it only did it once and they also have the same ringtone).

Both Nokia and SE make these music phones, they are to be these really swell awesome players, still not as good as a 5 year old ipod. Just to name one thing, why is it difficult to know where you were last time when you listen to audiobook or podcast ? These things are hours and hours long, I don't want to know where I was last time, if I did that I could just as well read the book and not listen to it. Just this one feature is making me look like an idiot.

Why ? When I listen to music/podcast/audiobook on my iphone, I can't hear my phone. So I am the complete moron half a sleep on my twice a day hour long bus ride with earphones on and NOT ANSWERING his phone, making it ring out two or three times.

I would get an iPhone in a heart beat if Steve Jobs would want to sell it to me. Unfortunately he does not want to sell me the only phone that is actually better than my W880i. I do not want to do business with Netcom. I have nothing against Netcom, except I don't want to do business with them. I am happy where I am. I know I can get an iPhone and cancel the deal and pay some sum and get the phone, but for 5.400 norwegian kroner I can buy myself another server, or a fully loaded laptop with 13-15" screen, 250GB disk drive, DVD burner, 4 GB memory and so forth. So paying 5.400 for a phone is out of the question, at least up front, I don't mind paying 200 norwegian kr a month which include free minutes, and smses and free calls to my wife.

So I got myself an Nokia E71. Why did I get Nokia since I really think their other phones are so bad they should be melted into jewelry ? I thought it had this fantastic e-mail support since it is supposed to beat the Blackberry RIM/perl whatever and it has a full keyboard.

First impression, I like it. New look of the menus, still the same crack smoking vodka induced messed up menu system, but much faster overall than the N95. I have not tested to see if there is a better audio book support.
I can recommend the phone, I have ssh terminal client on it that works, I actually logged into my solaris box and created a new zone using just my phone, which is totally cool. Fonts are nice, not great but nice.

Only problem I see so far is that it takes 2 seconds from clicking on reply to sms/email until I can start typing, and it takes quite some time to actually send the mail.

I will see if switching the memory card will do anything.

Conclusion so far (will/might change). My W880i is better phone but I will keep the E71 for some time longer due to larger screen and ssh client and it doesn't hurt that the phone actually works and syncs with no problems or extra cost with my Mac.

I might change back, but not today.

Nokia, if you want to hire me to redesign your phones and make them so much better, contact me.

Opensolaris and Apple Timemachine

2008-10-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

I had an idea the other day. I created a NAS* box at home. I have always wanted a home server, and even though I really liked the HP Mediasmart home server, the biggest problem was that I have no Windows machines at home that I want to take backup of, I have one Windows machine I use to test and play games on, and I also have one VMWare machine. Nothing that could justify paying for the Mediasmart. Also I want my data to be safe, and the Mediamsmart does not offer any raids without doing so externally for double the price.

So I went out to a store called Digital Impuls, and they had everything I needed, although I had to go there 3 times, both due to my stupidity and because they forgot to tell me I needed a disk bracket.

What I ended up with was

4x750 Samsung SATA disks with 32 MB cache
1xWestern Digital Caviar IDE 190GB disk for the operating system
1 Intel 1000 network card
1 Gigabyte motherboard
1 Lian Li Cube case
1 AMD 2.6GHz
4 GB memory

Total price ca 5.000 norwegian kroner.

and to top it all off Opensolaris. The distribution I picked was Nexenta because I like the apt-get package system and my friend promised me I would not find easier install, well he was right.

I quickly made 2.6 TB Raidz 1 zpool. Created one directory, set cifs (samba) share on it and mounted it on my Mac, all in 1 hour or less. Speed was awesome.
Then I started to read on ZFS, and quickly saw something called iscsi. So I created a 2GB drive, set iscsi share on it and my Mac just found it, thinks this is a local disk and i am getting fantastic speed on this.

So I upped the ante a bit. Created a 210 GB partition, and as soon as I connected it, timemachine asked if I wanted to use it for backups, which I said yes to.

This is just too cool, because due to NATting on my router I can access my iscsi shares from where ever while I am connected on the internet.

I just wish there was a way to work with Solaris products again. Have worked very little with SUN and Solaris since I left SUN Microsystems in 2001. Now they have Solaris 10, SUN Thumper, Niagara threads cpu, ZFS, zones and I could count on for quite a while.
I just love what SUN is doing, they probably even rival Apple. I just hope more people use SUN products, this is one company I would not want to see go away.

* NAS is Network attached storage. In plain words, think about a hard disk that is connected to your computer with a network cable instead of a disk cable.

iTunes 8.0 - The iPod cannot be synced. An unknown error occured (13213)

2008-09-10T10:12:00.000-07:00

I got this error during the restore phase on the ipod. I got tens of these errors. But fortunately there is a very simple way to fix this error.

1. Unplug your ipod and shut it off (press and hold the button on top the ipod)
2. Quit iTunes
3. Start iTunes and start the ipod
4. Plug the ipod to the computer

Works like a charm

Ruby is slow ?

2008-09-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

All over the internet, there are a bunch of people that keep saying that Ruby is slow, and that it is so slow that it is unusable. Well I decided to find out just how slow Ruby actually was and how much faster PHP would be. So a benchmark between the beasts, PHP in the left corner and Ruby in the right corner, and a little later python and perl each got their own corner.

The test was a simple one. Since mostly what you do is reading data into hashes (dictionaries) and display some summary on the data set. So that is just what I did.

I made a file with 100.000 lines, each line had a consecutive number, 1,2,3..99.999. These would be read into an array, and then counted. Simple ?

Well I thought this would be simple and my assumption was perl would be fastest, then php, then python and slowest would be ruby. Here is the results,

1. Python 0.1 sec's
2. Perl 0.2 sec's
3. RUBY 0.24 sec's
4. PHP 5 sec's.

Well, this was a surprise. So I created a new file with 1.000.000 (1 million) lines. The results were

1. Python 0.2 sec's
2. Perl 0.4 sec's
3. RUBY 0.5 sec's
3. PHP. I cancelled the test after it run for over 5 minutes.

Wow, what a flat in my php pimpled face.

Python actually way fastest, and Ruby almost on par with Perl. Well perhaps I will start doing more ruby scripts, as ruby is now on all platforms that matter to me (all but windows).

Now why don't I do more python ? I actually really like python, and might move back to python. Python was my first scripting girlfriend, but then my boss told me in not so many words that we were doing perl and nothing but perl, so perl became my girlfriend. Then with all the hype surrounding ruby on rails, I did some web sites using the framework. But I was gullible, easy to manipulate, a fool. I started to believe all the people that kept saying ruby was slow.

Will I give up PHP ? Nah. I like php for all the wrong reasons. But I will definatly do more ruby on rails, that is guaranteed.

Delicious Library 2, take 2

2008-06-16T00:48:00.001-07:00

Ok, I have been testing DL2 for some time now. Besides much better barcode functions and some improvements, and quite cool "tools" database, I must say, I don't like it.

DL1 had 3 panes side by side. This works great on widescreen monitors like almost everyone has on the mac. DL2 has this apple mail bastard view, with directory listings on the left side, and then the cool bookshelf and the results/info pane sharing one, like messages and preview in Apple Mail.

This could have worked out much better, but Wil (or who ever decided on this) makes the info pane take up sooo much space that you only can have 2 rows of books/films/games to see any kind of info.

I recommend people to not upgrade until Wil decides he wants to fix this, unless of course you have tens of thousands of items, then you need to change due to speed. But listening on people whine on the internet (like I am doing here), it seems like people have gotten a reply from Wil, where it says he will not fix this as this is the correct function.

So, I say, Wil, like so many cool Mac Apps, why don't you allow people to choose ? NetNewsWire allows such and many more.

Delicious Library 2

2008-05-27T03:32:00.000-07:00

Finally the mother of all vaporware is out. Wil Shipley has finally shipped the continuation of coolest mac app.

Congrats Wil.

Of course I have purchase an upgrade

Does Windows Vista suck ?

2008-05-27T02:28:00.000-07:00

Call me a Mac fanboy, Mac fanatic and all you will, but I know windows and I have my opinions on windows.

I don't like XP. For me, XP is just Windows 2000 with a green start button. XP is just something everyone got used to, learned to like, and more importantly for 7 years people learnt like parrots how to do things.

When Is ay like parrots, I mean you can teach a parrot to say words, but the parrot has no understanding of the words, he doesn't know Polly wants a cracker or Polly wants something else. Windows people have learnt to do things blindly. This is exactly why you have so many Windows people with a lot of acronyms like MVP, MCP, MCSE who really don't know anything, they just know how to do things. One dead give away of these people is when they say "hmmm, this used to work at home".

Mind though, there are a few people who really know Windows, I mean deep down dark secrets, how to get sms, mom and all other weirdly named protocols to work. I have worked with a few of them, but many more of the other parrots.

So why do people really hate Windows Vista ?

1) It is different. Some things are on a different place, so the windows gurus just can't find them. Annoying but understandable since unlike XP, Vista is new.
2) All these popup dialogs asking if you really want to do something. This is needed as well. Just look at it this way, how many toolbars does your Internet Explorer have in Vista and how many installed themselves in XP ?
3) Crapware.
You can't fault Microsoft for this, you can blame the DOJ (Department of Justice) for this. Microsoft held all OEM manufacturers by the balls for years. One requirement to get cheap windows to OEM was to make sure you had a clean machine, only default Windows install (or MS-DOS back in the days). This worked well, until a company called Compaq wanted to help their clients by bundling Netscape to save people the time it took to download, and some other companies wanted to bundle Linux or BEos on their machines and have them dual boot. Microsoft just said, if you do this you will go bankrupt since your only margin on a computer is how much cheaper you get windows than the other guy.

Companies bailed and sold computers with WIndows 95 and 98 clean slate and people went crazy and bought computers like there was no tomorrow.

What Microsoft said and did was deemed illegal and OEM's were given the right to do whatever they wanted with the installation.

Now companies like Sony, Acer, HP (compaq) and Dell got paid money to include software. This wasn't unheard of, finance software and Microsoft Word had been bundled before. But when money sets in some things just go wrong. Now you have virus killers for 30 days with almost no way of removing them, and they keep telling you how many days you have left every single time, you have all kinds of software like napster, AOL and many many others all trying to get your attention, which makes any usage almost unbearable, and for me as an example living in Northern Europe, I can't use Napster, Zune, AOL or ost of the crap ware because I don't live in the USA, so why is it on my computer ?

All these reasons add up, and my view the talentless computer gurus and all the crapware has damaging effects.

If you get someone qualified to go over your Vista machine, fix it by cleaning up things and updating drivers you will like Vista.

With a clean Vista box, I actually like Windows, not so much to switch again but to use it. Just take one thing that bothers the heck out of me when using XP, all these yellow dialogs that pop up saying, "Hey your computer is insecure" and "To start experiencing XP, click here" and finally "New programs installed". All these will never stop in XP. These are not there in Vista.

When you start working in Vista, there is almost nothing that takes your attention away from the thing you are doing, I like that.

My money is that after like 2 years, people will talk about how much success Vista is, I mean 40 million copies is quite a success. Microsoft, stop talking down Vista and stop talking about Windows 7. WIndows 7 is not here, it does not excist. Microsofts biggest problem is bragging about things they haven't made yet. Start saying Vista is good.

Vista is good, just it is not MAC OS X

Surrender, I give up !!

2008-04-09T12:29:00.000-07:00

Oh man, these lizard feces sucking scum that are also known as spammers are totally destroying me. I get on average 150 spam e-mails every single day on my 3 main e-mail accounts, yup, that is over 450 spam e-mails every single day. My mail client is getting pretty good at identifying them but not enough and he has some failures.

I have given up. I don't think I have ever given up on anything in my life. When I started Studlar Software I had a laptop at home, installed Fedora Linux and built my own e-mail server, web server, ldap and some other things. All with my own hard work. I did install spam blockers on the server and grey listing. Grey listing works really well ( I might explain it a little later ). I got ca 2-3 spams in my mail client in a week, and I did not loose ANY real mail.

But once I started getting real traffic on my sites, I wasn't really happy with the uptime I had on my ADSL so I had to shell out some money and buy hosting. I decided on dreamhost.com. I really like them, and you can't argue with the price.

But when you are hosted, you don't have root access without paying quite a lot more, so at first and for the next 2 years I put up with spam. But no more. Now all my mail accounts go to gmail, and the funny thing is, I never liked gmail until 2 days ago when I finally "got it". Guess this is like so many other things, you need to use it to get it.

Well, gmail is doing excellent work, totally excellent.

But if you want to use dreamhost, use the coupon code trausti and it will give you a very nice discount.

Vacation finally

2008-03-30T06:01:00.001-07:00

Me and the family went to Iceland for 3 weeks vacation. I was born in iceland, and I have only been living in Norway for the last 5 years. Man this is awesome.

Some people might get their license key a little later than usual and I am very sorry about that. I now only have 4 days left of the vacation. Time sure flies when you are having fun.

But the time has not been totally wasted. I am currently working on the next release of Osk

What a fantastic year

2007-12-29T17:25:00.000-08:00

We will never be in a short supply of people saying that this year (2007) is the worst in human history, not that this is the same people who said that 2006 sucked.

I think the year 2007 is just fantastic. I learnt a lot this year. Me and my wife had our second child this year, a daughter. My business (http://www.studlar.net) had the best year in it's life, quite a short life, but I sold more than ten times as many licenses this year than the year before. Still not even close to be making a profit, but it pays for my licenses and shareware. Doesn't pay for computers and doesn't even come close to pay for my time. But that is not why I am doing this.

If I am not doing this for the money, then why am I doing this ? Why do I not give the software for free ?

I am doing this because of three main reasons.

First reason, I need this kind of software
Second reason, since I need this software, I need more feedback, and I like getting to know people. I have clients in italy, france, sweden, norway, iceland, loads up in Canada, quite a few in USA, and many in the UK.
Third reason, this makes a good showcase for what I do and what I can do, and of course, I would like to be my own boss

What did I do this year :

Became a father again,
Saw The Rolling Stones, live. Man they are fantastic.
Worked for a Dilbert company, and then started to work for a company that is, well, too good to be true (still there).
Had reviews and offers in many magazines, all favorable.
Just about, had a great year.

So many great and fantastic things happened this year. Lets not forget that. Major bad ones happened as well, and as the magazines and newspapers do, they put bad news first and put them again and again. It is so easy to dwell on the bad things, but I am saying MORE good things happened.

Hurt your knee ? Good thing you can still walk
Lost money ? Still have your health
Don't have your health ? The people you love still have their health

Try to see the good things in life, try not to dwell on bad things, if there is some crooked politician in a country you can't spell, it is none of your business anyway and nothing you can do about it. As tragic as it is seeing famous beautiful people doing bad things to themselves, there is nothing you can do about it, AND NO, YOU ARE NOT SHOWING YOUR SUPPORT BY BUYING THEIR ALBUMS.

A few years back I did not look forward to weekends, vacations and such, now I can't wait. I love my life, it is far from perfect, but it is my life and I can control some things about it.

- Life is what happens while you are making other plans. - John Lennon

Probably the best quote ever done. This is so true.

Make the best of what you have, make the most of what you have, and have a fantastic new year.

Mac programming

2007-10-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

Ever since I was a lonly Turbo Pascal programmer wondering about if a name should be string[25] or string[50], because if I put name as 50 characters, I had to put address as 23 chars, but I could keep address as 50 chars as 50 if name was 25. My full name is 23 character, 25 with spaces, Trausti Thor Johannsson (25 with english spelling). Then Delphi came out. Turbo Pascal on steriods. Strings became a 1 megabyte situation, in other words, no need to worry about. Man I almost sent a "l love you" letter to Borland. man I loved those people, making string a ONE MEGABYTE, they just could not have done ME more right.

Later when Delphi 1.0 beta was available, me, Kjartan, Kjartan, Siggi and Albert were choosen to show off our department in the Industrial school of iceland, later technical school of Iceland (thank you very much). We four, were choosen to demonstrate why industrial school of iceland was "the place" to study computer science. Between me and you, we were the place, that was before I knew what MVC and MFC was. We learned pointers, objects, records, quick sort, instert sort, bubble sort and a few other sorts, well before you could say "array.sort". But we decided, instead of just showing people what we were learning, we demonstrated Delphi Beta, Windows 94 beta (not 95 but 94). And we became the hit of the show.

Everyone loved us. Quite a lot of people let their children come to us because we were on the bleeding edge. We were it. Man those were the times.

At that precisese time, the universities were breething down our necks, you are not teaching C and C++. You are bad people, you are teaching bad stuff, you are only teaching Turbo Pascal, but bad tech.

At that time, I was feeling quite bad. I was feeling like I was missing out on something. I was missing out on pointers, C and C++. Later I got a job using Turbo Pascal. No one was looking for people using C or C++, everyone was looking for Turbo Pascal. Delphi was a huge plus. Knowing Paradox and Btree was a huge plus. Still I was feeling left out because I did not learn C.

Then I got a job at a huge company, like 200 people working there. Iso 9001 work preventions tactics. Either my report was to short or to long, no one complained about my code. I will fully admit today that my 1998 code was perhaps not very good, but it was not bad. Quite a lot of creation behind it. Anyhow, I got really fed up in this work prevention tacticts, so I left and became a programmer who did system administration instead of being a system administrator who did programming.

Now 2007, I am still a system administrator who knows programming. Only difference, I know I am good.. I am real good. Both as a programmer and system administrator. Easy for me saying I am good, but I am good. Need someone doing you work, system administration or programming, just ask me.

I know C, C++, Pascal, OOP Pascal, Basic, REAL Basic, Visual Basic, Python, Ruby, Perl, Ojective C and much more. I know IIS, Apache, Linux, Unix, php, perl, Solaris, HP /UX, A/IX, A/UX and much more. I love what I do and know exactly what I do.

I know I know nothing, I can do almost nothing.

One friend of mine, very very old friend of mine, BRE, one that wrote a irc server in java when it was supposed to be impossible, said, knowledge is a piramid upside down, when you know something you find out 2 square 2 items you did not know. If you think you learn 2 things, and find out about 4 and then 16, and you understand, then you do not know about 64 other things.

I know this.

My thing is this. I use REALBasic instead of Objective C or Visual C to make my software. For 20 years almost, people are still saying noting serious is made with "not C " language. Still amost no one is asking for C programmers, still no serious C application is being made. My idol, Wil Shipley is saying that no real application is made with garbage control language, but is making Delicious library 2.0 in Objective C 2.0 which is garbage controlled, so no one can be trusted.
Objective C and Cocoa is cool, real cool, just not cool enough, and yet, Real Basic is in the exact same situation as Turbo Pascal was in 1993. Not a real programming language, even though everyone was using it.

Bullshit, REALBasic is not Basic, not gosub 200, not goto 10, not 10 print "I am the bezt", it is a real object oriented language.

I am tired of hearing 20 year old bullshit, that something that is not C is not real programming language. Stop this shit. C is still not it, it is still not the language, go figure

Fantastic article

2007-09-07T01:50:00.000-07:00

One of the delicious monster people, Mike Lee, has posted what is probably the longest blog article in history of mankind. I usually do not read blogs that are lengthy, but after reading a few lines, I was hooked, totally.

How he managed to put Adam Smith together with hating SUVs is beyond me, but he did totally masterfully.

This article is awesome, and here is the link

PRESS ME HERE

p.s. Do not be put off by his blogs name

Genealogy software

2007-08-01T04:02:00.000-07:00

Like everyone who knows me knows, I make genealogy software called Osk, and I have a company called Studlar Software.

It has now been less than 1 month since I released the 4.7 version which I must say was one of the best versions I have ever made. The biggest problem with it was explaining to other people what was new, how do you put into 3-5 words that you can add siblings and the software will guess your parents, not only that, but it will guess which parent is the mother and which is the father ? A lot of these issues have been added, changed and fixed, and it is quite remarkable how these kind of changes are totally not describable !!

Well, anyway, everyone should go and grab a copy, visit www.studlar.net

Todays apps are not bloated

2007-07-09T07:43:00.001-07:00

640 KB is enough for everyone.

Well it used to be, I used to have no hard disk in my computer and my first hard disk was 30 MB. Now I have applications that are far bigger than 30 MB and that application does not do all that much, or does it ?

Back when 640 KB was enough for everyone, it actually was because applications were different.
Not only did one application tie your whole machine up, it had to have its own drivers for graphics, printers and its own spell checker if it had one. You can forget about using copy and paste between apps, you had to save a text to a disk (floppy or hard disk) quit your software (or reboot your machine even) start the other software and read in the file.

Wordperfect today and back in 1988 have almost nothing in common except for the name. Back in 1990 when designers were using heavy duty DTP (desktop publishing), all they did was edit text, line feeds and columns. Every single picture they used was just a black square. Wordperfect would allow you to have pictures, and these pictures were 3 KB or 13 KB and were only loaded when I went to a graphical viewer and viewed the page. So a final thesis of 50 pages or more actually did probably only take 300 KB in memory at a given moment, of course you thought things were fast.

Now when you use a simple word processor you dump pictures, fonts, layouts and more all into a file that is all in memory, of course you need Gigabytes in memory, you are doing a whole lot more than you used to, you just don't notice.

So if we do a simple calculation, if 640 KB was more than enough when you had 30 MB disk what are they same sizes today :

640 / 30 000 = 0.021

Now today, my computer has 2 GB memory and 120 GB hard disk :

2 000 000 / 120 000 000 = 0.0167
for those with 1 GB memory :
1 000 000 / 120 000 000 = 0.0083

So given a flaky logic to this, software today has actually gotten smaller and uses quite a lot less space and actually does a lot more and do not forget, one app does not take over your computer.

So to conclude, the app that people see as great engineering back when people took care of their code and that application only was 230 KB, well given above faulty logic that app was the bloatware, not the clipboard application that is over 5 MB.

Todays apps are not bloatware.

For those needing a clipboard application, turn to www.studlar.net and download Container

2007-07-09T07:09:00.000-07:00

When arguing, why does one have to completely die in order to prove the other one is better ?

The usual flame war on the internet goes like this :

C# is so good that soon perl will die.

or

JavaScript is so much better than anything else that soon we will all be programming in javascript.

This stuff makes me crazy. Especially when I think about that most of the kids that make these comments are well just kids. They learnt javascript and have probably done some real cool stuff with it and one always makes assumptions based on one experience, so for that kid to say something like that is fully understandable and in a few years that same kid will be saying something new.

I hate flamewars, I truly do. I used to think they were funny, I spent hours arguing why PC was better than Mac and why Turbo Pascal was so much better than C many many years ago. I usually did not know why it was better, it was just better because I was good at it and not the other thing.

I just wish that there not the usual repeaters in flamewars, then I mean less people saying the exact same thing as all the other persons.

2007-07-09T06:42:00.000-07:00

Programming languages are a pain in the behind. There is always one that does things the way you like them except for one really basic stuff, then there is another one that creates huge binaries and a 3rd one that is well Javascript.

Then there is the never ending internet flame war with this vs that, x vs z and why this is better than pepper even though it has nothing to do with pepper or cooking.

I am being torn right now. After doing business on the internet for like 2 years selling shareware and not getting any better idea than creating a genealogy application, I am thinking about what to do.

I decided early on that I would be using REALbasic for my application development, and for the biggest parts I have not been let down. Sure REALbasic is not perfect but as long as you are not doing 100.000 lines in one method call while creating a bazzillion (larger number) objects and trying to store them in a text file RB really does you well. And what can I say ? Business has been good for the most part, paying for licenses, books, magazines and such wile leaving some money behind. So what is it that I am thinking about then ?

Well, when I started with RB I was an old coder, even though I had just turned 30. I had been doing procedural programming and no real object oriented code for the last 12 years or more, even worked as a programmer. So I knew very little about MVC (model view controller) and design patterns and that stuff. So when I bought a Mac in 2003, I wanted to program for it, and it had always been a dream of mine programming for the NeXT station I have (same system almost).

The learning curve of Cocoa was huge, no it was HUGE. Objective-C wasn't hard, but all the methodology and how everything just fit together like magic and acted like magic there were a lot of things people just took for granted, like helper objects, datacontrollers and such.

Now a few years later, Apple is releasing Obj-C 2.0, and I like it, I like it a lot, you might even say I love it but it is still to early to tell.

So I can either create new projects in XCode or I can move my current projects over to Cocoa or do both. What to do ?

Well, I do not know.

2007-06-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

Well well. Fantastic news.

My wife just gave birth to our second child, healthy girl. So now I have two girls. The funny stuff is that the Doc had told us that the second kid would be a boy and when the nurse told us that it was a beutiful girl we just told her to check again :)

Just to be sure, I do not care if the baby is a boy or a girl as long as it is healthy and she is. 3.69 kg and 51 cm almost a duplicate of her older sister (2 years old now)