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I can’t believe I haven’t written on my blog in almost a year. I recently spoke with some friends and they had commented on the fact that I hadn’t updated my blog in forever so it is thanks to them that I even remembered that I had this sitting here. A lot has happened in the last year, and I have met several of the goals I had planned. More specifically I purchased a condo with my brother right at the new year (Jan 2010). For the last 6 months we have been in the process of renovating it. Given we both have full time jobs we have had to keep to only the weekends for working which slowed our progress greatly, but things are finally just about to start wrapping up. The condo is a 3 bedroom 2 bath with about 1200sq ft of space. We have a 1 car detached garage. Secondly, a few weeks ago I finally said Good-bye to my trusty Jetta of 7 years and bought myself a Porsche Boxster S which I am absolutely thrilled with. It has been a lot of fun and continues to be so. Recently I sat down and started to try and figure out what I would like to accomplish this year before I turn 24. I have always thought it best to build goals around the center of my year which is my birthday. So, here is the “short” list:

• I plan on taking another test flight at the flight school again in the next few weeks to re-affirm that I would like to pursue my pilots license.
• I would like to pay off all of the renovation costs for the condo this year.
• I want to establish an emergency fund in case any unexpected circumstances should arise.
• I would like to get roughly 30% of the Porsche paid off.
• Finish the condo renovations (there isn’t that much left, but this will feel like a huge accomplishment)
• I want to release an Android app into the market place. (I don’t even care to charge for it, just want to get something out there)
• Save for a trip up the coast of CA into OR
• Join PCA (Porsche Club of America) and participate in at least 1 race type even

I’m sure I’ll have a few things to change or add as I ponder on this list, but it should get me thinking and started.

Recently an issue came up at work with some brand new Dell Optiplex 760 systems. We are currently testing out Asterisk as a replacement to our current Toshiba phone system. We chose Xlite as our client of choice, because its free and has great call quality. We successfully deployed several copies on existing machines, but ran into problems on some of the newer systems. We experienced a strange techno-y distorition with beats and pops. All other Windows sounds work perfect, but as soon as you get into Xlite and click a button to dial you can hear the distortion, and it is most prevalent during a phone call. After trying out a PCI sound card we got clear phone calls once again. Rather angry that our brand new Dell’s were shipping with faulty sound chips or something of that nature we called up technical support. After a few hours on the phone the tech came across a side note mentioning a power save setting in the BIOS. At this point I wasn’t sure what could hurt trying to find the solution. Sure enough the C-STATE power setting in the BIOS was the culprit. I have tested the latest A05 and A03 BIOS versions successfully. The setting is under the Performance menu, C-STATE > there’s only one checkbox under there, disable it and you’re golden.

So, I spent most of last week trying to get the needed cable to run dual monitors off of my Mac Mini. I originally bought another mini-DVI adapter, which is what came with my Mac Mini. So, I returned that and bought a mini-DisplayPort adapter. Upon plugging in the adapter nothing was recognized. I restarted a few times, then did some research online only to find that most people are running USB video adapters. Upon reading this I assumed that the Mac Mini didn’t support dual monitors natively. I planned on returning the cable, and in my laziness kept it plugged in. Today I was browsing through my “System Profiler” when I noticed that it registered two monitors. I quickly turned on my second monitor to find my Desktop image greeting me. Surprisingly enough my dual monitors were alive and well. I’m not at all sure what happened or why they suddenly decided to start working, but I’m glad they did.

An interesting problem cropped up at work today. I wrote a script that uses our company database which is MySQL based. Everything has been running great. We were running MySQL on a Windows XP machine. Today, we cut over to a nice Dell 1950 server running Ubuntu Server 8.04.2 with MySQL server installed. As soon as we have the new server up and running with a restore of our data I test my script to make sure it is able to connect. To my dismay I find that it errors out saying that the MySQL object is returning nil (Ruby equivalent to null for you non-Ruby folks). I start thinking about the differences between the Windows and Linux versions of MySQL. I check that I can get onto the server using MySQL Client, which I can. After a bit more thinking and tinkering I finally figured out that Ruby was using an older version of the MySQL connector. Our Windows machine was running MySQL 4.3, and the new Ubuntu Server is running 5.0. One very important change took place between these versions, and that is how passwords are encrypted. A quick Google search revealed that you can force a user account to have a password encrypted using the older encryption format with a parameter. So, I created a new account just for my script with the necessary permissions, and like magic I’m able to connect.

As a side note, I haven’t abandoned my project. I have actually moved forward a fair bit. I have grabbed the necessary components, setup a bug tracking account, and setup an SVN repository for development. I have started development. I will keep you abreast of my progress. As of right now my tentative date for a first version is Saturday evening.

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Now playing: Maroon 5 - Harder To Breathe
via FoxyTunes

I am reminded of the Top Gear episode where a Ferrari Daytona is pitted against a high end speed boat. During the race Richard Hammond talks about how he is falling in love with the imperfect vehicle. I am reminded of this as I think about today and having spent a whole day on a Mac for the first time in my life. To be honest, I never thought this day would happen. I will be the first to admit that I, over everyone else, detested Macs for their locked down nature, and their Utopian, canned experience used to sell their products. After a whole day in their world, or sampling the Cool-aid as some might say, I’m growing rather fond of certain aspects. The big thing is that everything just works. As someone who has always loved the thrill of getting things to work on Linux this is a huge change for me. I bought the cheapest Mac made, the Mac Mini base model, expecting absolutely nothing short of a sad experience. What I found was something better than my supercomputer Windows components ever offered. In terms of gaming I don’t see myself switching anytime soon, unless Valve decides to port their games to Mac OSX. What amazes me is how well thought out every aspect of the experience is. The reason you get more done on a Mac is because you spend more time DOING what you set out to do, rather than working around problems, or getting things to work. Linux has its charms and speed when it’s setup properly. Windows was an ideal experience for me because compared to Linux everything worked very quickly. What I didn’t realize is how much time was invested in getting the little things to work. For example, iTunes is available for Windows, I personally wasn’t a big fan because of its closed nature, but say you use it on Windows and are playing your music and podcasts. You start compiling some heavy code, or launch a large application, your music will immediately begin to stutter or crackle. Eventually it comes blaring back after the load adjusts itself. Network hiccups like this happened to me constantly as well. On the Mac the load is handled beautifully. Music and media in general is such a large part of the experience it has the highest priority by default and never stops going. The concept of having 30 places where people can store data on Windows is so antiquated in comparison to the centralized nature of everything on OS X. Everything has a place, every type of data belongs somewhere. Applications are self contained, and run from these container, not installed and strewn across your system with hidden nuggets for you to find and clean up later.

The types of applications you find for OSX are so inspired as well. I don’t do any photo, video, or music stuff which Mac is known for, but even something as simple as programming web pages turns up results and applications that are so fun to code in that you are left wondering why you were punished all those years before. Coda is one such app, that adds little animations to show the completion of brackets or braces. Something that to a Linux efficiency freak such as myself is completely pointless, but I find myself intrigued and entertained at the same time that someone would thing to do something like that. The investment of time ensuring that things just work rather than look like they work is truly inspiring as a coder, knowing that such perfection can be attained through good and orderly code. The music sounds clearer, the networking runs faster, everything has a high shine polish on it no matter how seemingly insignificant it may seem. The drivers act as though they utilize every circuit the chips in my Mac Mini have to offer.

There are a few little bugs that do bother me, time may correct these, but seeing as I use a Windows machine everyday at work I think it’d be easier to fix them. The first one was that the “Home” and “End” keys didn’t take you to the beginning or end of the current line. This is a shortcut I use very frequently as a coder jumping to the start or end is something I do many times a day. I was lucky enough to find a small program someone had written to fix just that issue. There are still a few others which include: the “return” key in Finder should open the selected file (not try and rename it), F2 is for renaming files, low memory is becoming an issue (I didn’t expect to be using this machine this much). Most, if not all of these, are correctable. Tomorrow I will go pickup the converter cable to attach a secondary monitor.

I had a theory from a while back that the most important aspect of any operating system, aside from the kernel, was how the drivers were written. Effectively using the hardware you have as insignificant as it may seem is by far one of the largest things lacking on Windows. Windows uses hardware, Mac and Linux integrate hardware into how they function. I always could tell that music had more depth under Linux, and I can safely say the same on OS X.
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Now playing: Saving Abel - Beautiful Day
via FoxyTunes

Today was surprisingly full of things to do. I helped move around my parents new built in cabinets as each was painted in the backyard. After this we headed out for the afternoon where I purchased a Mac Mini. I had been thinking about buying a “cheap” Apple, if such a thing exists, for a while for iPhone development use. I’m no wiz kid at this sorta thing, but I thought if nothing else I’ll learn some neat stuff. So, I have spent the later half of the day setting up my new little machine. I’m rather impressed at how effectively it handles large loads. Being only the base model with 1GB of RAM I wasn’t expecting a screamer, but I have been rather nasty to it, and it just doesn’t give up. I’ve experienced only one lock up of a single application and that was iTunes, which I’ve experienced lock ups with on Windows when it was the only application running.

While I was installing updates and getting things settled in on the new system, I took the time to explore what IDE apps are available for OSX and stumbled upon a nice one called Coda. I’ve only played with it breifley and will have to use it to get a better idea of how well it works, but in terms of bragging rights it looks like a great program. I played with a few of the sample applications for the iPhone, but have a lot of reading to do before I figure out what I need to make various things work, or to write an application at all for that matter. Luckily I have tomorrow off from work, so I will have some time to play around with it some more. I didn’t however manage to get my timeline laid out. I still need/want to do this, my new toy kinda distracted me from that task. I will take another stab at this tomorrow and see if I have anymore luck, cause I sure as heck don’t have anymore money :-).

Happy 4th to everyone. Not a lot has happened since I last posted, but I have been thinking through some things and wanted to take the time to write them down here. I have put in some tentative start dates for some of my other Goals, such as Piano Lessons and Flight Lessons. These should be starting in Late Aug, which is also roughly when I will begin looking for a condo. Saving is going well and I’m roughly 1/3 of the way to my goal for a down payment amount. I’m excited to be starting some new endeavors which will hopefully help balance my work schedule with some outside time. I have also added a goal for starting a web based business. This is something I’ve tried to start in the past, and something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I have had several ideas about concepts for these web businesses all of which seem to be sound in principle, but have never launched. Seeing my time about to shrink again, I want to start taking measures to make this happen. So, my goal is to post daily status reports about my progress (or lack there of) towards starting a small web site. I’m hoping to start small, with something I can easily finish and manage, and then to build that out to something larger that will benefit many people and might even benefit larger corporations. For tomorrow, I want to establish a rough timeline with dates (this is a big deal for me, I never commit to dates for myself). I will create a page to keep my project status posted, but I don’t want to release too many details on the specifics of the site, as I don’t want somebody to get there before me :). Wish me luck, here’s t trying something new.

No, not a girl, the language. I doubt few have not heard of Ruby or Ruby on Rails. I personally had never used Ruby up until about, oh, say Monday. Later this week I will be putting my first Ruby script into production. I’m a little worried not having used Ruby for all that long, but I must say I’m quite impressed by how easy it is to do things in the language.

I was pushed to Ruby after all the other languages I normally use for web scrapping failed as I wrote about on Sunday. Today was initiation day, and my script passed on its first attempt. We had to change one tiny requirement to make the script work appropriately, we’re waiting to hear back if this will inconvenience our client. Hopefully all will turn out well. The script is very snappy and is going to easily replace and hour or two of a skilled workers daily routine making them more productive overall. Today’s change was to compress two files in a ZIP archive for a single file upload. Never having zipped a file in Ruby I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. A quick Google search, one gem installation, and 4 lines of code later, Success! I’m thoroughly impressed by the ease with which most common tasks are completed. It reminds me of what I love about PHP without the ; at the end of every line or the excessive ( )’s. I will definitely have to explore Ruby a bit further to see what else I might be capable of doing with it. Who knows, maybe I just found the language I needed to move some of my stalled projects forward.

Today I watched a biography on Philip Glass. I recently stumbled upon him as a composer after this last season of “House” used a small orchestral piece of his in their intro. I immediately jumped online to figure out if anyone recognized the piece, sure enough several others had beaten me to the question and there was a response. I browsed through the Amazon MP3 store to find that Philip Glass was not some new guy on the block. So I started listening to various pieces. I was drawn to his piano works first having so an affinity for piano pieces. I quickly fell in love with his 5 pieces of Metamorphosis. I couldn’t stop listening to them. For the last several months I have played these pieces nearly every day. The other day I went back to the Amazon store to find some more pieces to grab, and in the process came across a new biography that was recently released in the last few months. I decided to check it out and was thoroughly inspired by his cavalier attitude about his accomplishments and his different take on things. He reminds me of what I love about Tim Burton, a fresh take on things that you’ve seen before that never cropped up in your wildest dreams. I like to think I take a similar approach with computers, always wanting to push the envelope in terms of what I can dream up. My problem comes in with accomplishing those dreams. I still lack necessary skills in several subject matters that are holding me back. Luckily this is a problem that can be remedied.

On a side note, I have decided to add a small goal for the end of this year, to have read 25 new books. I have already plowed through roughly 5. I loved reading when I was little, and my Kindle has renewed that passion. I don’t think I have ever read through 25 books in 6ish months before, so I think it will be a great challenge for me.

Work has been zapping all of my time over the last 2 weeks. Amazing how that happens. I’m successfully 2 weeks in. I’ve noticed some major changes since I’ve started. I can definitely see my impact on the network as a whole which is very rewarding. I recently came across a problem that I was having a huge issue solving, and that was automating the upload and download of files from a client’s site. Now, I’ve done this dozens of times before using Perl’s WWW::Mechanize library with little to no problems. This time however I was quickly disappointed with a “You need JavaScript support” response page from the client’s site. I guess I had never tried to automate a JavaScript heavy site before, so I thought little of it and moved onto something else, Curl I thought might have support for this. Short of manually constructing some post backs with much time and little likelyhood of success I dropped that idea. Quickly running out of ideas I turned to full blown programming languages, HTTPUnit for Java. This also lacked Javascript support. Running low on Open Source esteem I turned to Microsoft’s .NET WebContent object. Immediately was shot down again with lack of Javascript support. Just about to concede defeat I came across a small forum where somebody had asked the same question. Turns out that Ruby has a gem (a.k.a. plugin for us non-ruby savy folk) named “watir” that controls  Firefox or IE like a human does. Now this sorta sounds like a macro, which I had looked at prior and had turned down because of the lack of control and feedback. Watir isn’t a macro though, every step through the code can throw exceptions, and you can handle them and report back your findings. It’s actually really fun to watch the code execute because you can see it find the form fields, click them, fill them out just like a human. I put together a small script to simulate logging in and had great success with it. So, for all those out there looking for a way to script a Javascript based web page, watir is a great solution. The only drawback is that since it acts like a human the machine is occupied while performing the script, so I’m going to create an Ubuntu VM to run the script in so I don’t have to waste a desktop with the task. A small price to pay to free up several hours of someone’s day at the office. I’ll let you know how the finished script works with the uploads and downloads.

As for this weekend it was quite fun filled and packed. Friday night we attempted to cutover to our new Dell servers which didn’t end up working out, we had major issues with the MySQL replication that had previously been quite content. As a result we decided to delay the cutover. After that, Rubio’s for dinner, then to the movies to see Transformers 2 which was very good (some quirky stupid stuff, but for a sequel very nicely done). Saturday was an all day geek-a-thon with Izzie. We went to the SoCal Code Camp at UCSD, which turned out to be a bit lackluster. We had envisioned something a little more informative and with more depth. Plus we were the only ones in our age group there. After that we cruised into the Gas Lamp district, had dinner at the House of Blues, and then went to the Sophie 103.7 birthday bash concert at the House of Blues. The concert was excellent. Today, I’m just lounging around. Getting some laundry done, and cleaning up. All in all a nice relaxing weekend after several weeks of non-stop go, go, go.