Recently in Software Category

I've been using MovableType blogging software for many years. But with the announcement by Six Apart that they are moving in a different direction and the much larger community of developers, plugins, and themes available on Wordpress I've decided to cast my die and move to Wordpress. It's something I've been contemplating for a long time. But with the announcement by Six Apart that they are abandoning the platform I feel that, maybe, now is a good time to take care of that migration. There have been some Wordpress plugins that I wish were available on Movable Type and now I'll finally be able to use them.

Over the next couple of days thinks will start to change around here. If you've been a registered commentor you might find your username no longer works. Don't worry everything should be fine and I hope the migration goes the way I hope.

Also, you can always find me on twitter @yardie. WHile I'm posting here less frequently I'm pushing tweets constantly there.

Recently, I downloaded the iPhone application Zumocast after hearing a recommendation from Leo Laporte on the podcast MacBreak Weekly. I installed the server at on my Mediacenter PC and my Mac. In no time at all I was listening to music over my network, watching videos and browsing through photos. This is an application that shines.

In addition to watching videos, viewing photos, and listening to music you can also view some of your files. Because the iOS includes the foundations of the MacOS there are some files that can be read natively like txt, pdf, doc, rtf. I haven't gone through all of them. Because reading all of that on such a small screen is futile. But it is nice the capability is there.

One of my favorite features is the ability to encode and download videos to your iOS device. I've already done one, the documentary "Gasland". I have queued up a few episodes of the third season of the Boondocks and eventually I'll see if it can also download songs and integrate them into the iTunes library. Something I've wanted to do but not able to try because the Mac was off.

So if you are like me and have lots of media and a few iPods, iPhones, and other devices around the house give Zumocast a try.

If you’ve been under a cave than you probably haven’t heard that Valve’s Steam game service is now available for Mac. I’ve had an on/off relationship with Steam over the years. Using it on a PC, getting a Mac and all but forgetting about it, trying dismally to use it in Crossover Games, and finally using a native Mac version. You can grab it here at steampowered.com. There is also a limited time free download of Valve’s Portal to start the show and garner interest from Mac gamers.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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If you’ve already bought some of the games from outside the Steam store (in my case I have Tales of Monkey Island I bought through the last MacHeist nanobundle. You can enter your license key and it will be included in the steam menu. I haven’t tested the to see how it deals with Mac to PC and vice versa gaming. But all will be done in due time. Until then, I’m going to take this time to enjoy Portal. A game I’ve been curious for a long time that I didn’t work up the nerve into purchasing.

As for my PS3? It’s still dead to me until Sony gets off their high horse. With the price of quieter blu ray players coming down constantly that also have standard remote IR functionality. This device “that only does everything” has gotten less useful as more capable devices in my apartment have replaced it. It does less than my HTPC, it does less than my region-free DVD player, it doesn’t seem to connect to my ReadyNAS. I’m a little unhappy with it frankly.

Welcome

To get started, create a new entry by clicking on "New Entry" in the toolbar or choosing "New Entry" from the File menu. You can also drag files from the Finder in to the Sidebar or the Entries list to import them as an entry. Show the Inspector from the View menu to see settings for the current entry, journal, and document.

What's new in version 5?

• All new interface, built for Mac OS X Leopard.
• Add any kind of content, not just text. Drag PDFs, QuickTime movies, images, and more into the Sidebar to create an entry with anything on your computer.
• Open more than one MacJournal document at a time and save them wherever you want, or just use the default document and never worry about saving.
• Create Smart Journals from searches you perform.
• Create aliases to entries that you can store in other journals.
• Assign each entry a rating, status, and priority, and sort any journal by those values.
• Record video from your iSight and attach it to any entry.
• Performance enhancements for working with large numbers of entries.

I've downloaded MacJournal and linked it to my blog. So I'll never need to log directly into the system through the portal. This should make it more convenient for me. Instead of having to open a browser, enter the URL, login, and password. Then make a new entry, upload photos, and create the appropriate links. This system should do fine. I'll have to see on how it handles different image sizes. MT has a good system of creating clickable thumbnails for large images. This has been on my 'things to do' for a while, just never got around to downloading and registering MacJournal. Now I see why people like it.

Shout out to MacHeist who made it possible. I didn't really think about this program until it arrived in my bundle.

As a developer I don't enjoy paying for things when I don't have to. One of them happens to be Apples iPhone Developer program. I could find better ways of spending $99. Debugging my own stuff isn't one of them. So what is a developer to do when he can't or won't pony up the money to be allowed to load and debug his own applications. He uses that tiny developer brain to bypass all the checks that's how.

I'm not going to go into the ins and outs of jailbreaking the iPhone. There are plenty of tutorials on the net to do exactly that. If you are in over your head at this point you should probably bail now, shit is definitely not going to get easier from here on out.

You'll need your own self-signed certificate. iPhone OS will check for it, jailbreaking will tell it that it's good, regardless of who it came from. So crack open Keychain access and create one for yourself. It's in /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app. From the menu choose Certificate Assistant > Create Certificate.

Give it the name "iPhone Developer" and check overide defaults.

Give yourself enough time. 10 years sounds about right. And change the type to Code Signing.

Add as much or little information as you want to the personal information screen.

After here, click next until the end. It should be shown in your Keychain Access application list.

Update the Developer stack

We'll need to make a modification to the Info.plist of the SDK. Go to /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform. Create a backup of Info.plist and open the original in Property List Editor. Change all instancese of XCiPhoneOSCodeSignContext to XCCodeSignContext. There are 3 instances of them in SDK 3.1.2. There might be more or less in future versions.

Back to XCode

In XCode open your project and change the Active SDK to iPhone Device - 3.1.2. Run the build command with Command-B. Go to the Directory with your project, open the build folder and into the Release-iphoneos or the Debug-iphoneos folder you'll find the executable. We're going to need to get this file into the iPhone.

Copy your application to iPhone

You won't be able to get your application onto the phone using the normal channels. iTunes won't allow it. So the alternative is to copy it to the phone using SSH or iPhone Explorer. As with all things Mac, iPhone Explorer provides a GUI. And a GUI is always handy. Using iPhone Explorer go to the /Applications folder on the device. And upload your app folder. When complete it should appear like this. In some cases the app won't be set to executable. If this is the case you'll need to run the "chmod a+x" on the app folder to allow it to run.

Your application won't be present on the springboard. For that you'll need to restart the springboard. There are jailbreak applications that allow for this. You can also install the UIKitTools and run uicache from the commandline to update the springboard without restarting it.

For the Media Center enthusiasts, like me, I'd like to point out a new version of Media Browser has been released for the public. Except for the pictures and music, Media Browser is how I view most of my videos and podcasts on my PC. While the standard video library on WMC is fine for viewing videos, this plugin improves the interface by a factor of 10 if not 100. Some of the things I take advantage of is the screen previews for TV shows and movies, banners and background.

One of the things I especially like it about it that it automatically downloads all the show data, images, and season artwork. There is very little you have to do. Once Media Browser finds it it scans the filename to retrieve the internet data. This is great for those that don't like the overhead of having to manage your files, like mymovies. And it definitely is more informative than the default mediacenter browser. I've been looking into replacing my PC with a cheaper device, like PS3 or popcorn hour. The thing that keeps me staying is the interface of mediabrowser. Nothing else, I've seen, compares

Don't take my word for it download it yourself and give it a try.

I've been watching the Windows Home Server market for a while. It looks to be successful and Microsoft is aiming for version 2. Today, the screenshots of the next edition have been leaked. You can view them here. Some notable changes are the use of the Server 2008 platform (previously Server 2003 R2), 2 editions Premium and Standard, higher system requirements, and inclusion of a full Desktop. It appears there is some media integration but they don't work so it's not confirmed if it will make it into the final release.

Unlike the author of the other blog. I don't think its the biggest news since Apple released the iPad.

Imagine for a moment you are about to go to sleep. You've just been reading one of your favorite technical literary works and now it's time to go to bed. After finally falling asleep you don't have your normal dreams of family, beaches, and crazy stuff. Instead you dream of computer code. Pages and pages of it. And you're working on it. And it actually looks pretty good. But the alarm clock goes off and just like pulling the plug everything goes black before going to light.

Or does this only happen to someone like me?

Software development is still an industry that is still in it's infancy. I know there are a lot of computer scientists out there. I know a few of them. These guys and girls are just as inquisitive as I am about working with computers and how they work. And sometimes, like me, they encounter a phenomenon that fails to reproduce itself. Or if it reproduces itself it mysteriously vanishes back into the ether.

At our company we ship regularly. But our clients are quite slow at the uptake when it comes to deployment. I recently had a client with 2 previous versions of software in the testing pipeline. That means when they encounter a bug we fixed in a later version they can only complain about it. It sort of makes us look bad because the end user thinks we are unresponsive and slow.

Recently, after an update we encountered a bug that defied every method we tried to fix it with. What made it worse is the section of code where it was occuring hadn't been touched in this release so the bug couldn't have come from there. And it was only coming from a few servers. So we had no idea why it would occur on one server and not another. After much trial and error we discovered there might be a bug not in our software but in the operating system. After getting all the clients to run a serious of patches that may not work. We were in luck. The debriefing afterward was more like "blame it on Microsoft... they probably introduced a bug and then corrected it in a system update". Yeah, we blamed it on someone else.

Today I've been transferring my photo library from the "My Documents" folder that was on the PC drive into iPhoto. Well it didn't turn out great because that folder was no where to be found. I think I might have already it with the same folder from my laptop. The hoops I had to jump through were incredible. This drive was formatted for Time Machine backup.
Using Data Rescue II I did a bit scan of the drive. I'm looking for jpegs so any of its kind would be found. I was able to recover almost everything. But now the files don't have any real file names. except a short desciption of size and a serial number. Now I'm using Aperture to build out a quick library. Using the embedded EXIF information I sorted the images into folders by year and date. Since I know the approximate times we had family vacations, festivals, visitors, and parties, I'm able to quickly stitch together a working pattern.

Now all I have to do is explain to my wife how I almost lost over 3000 photos.

I'm in the process of moving from a Windows PC to a Mac. I haven't decided which Mac it's going to be yet, but it's going to be powerful for sure. I was a mac user for a long time but something went down and the mac was never seen again. I've been using a PC since. The price was lower for sure. But it's been quite apparent for a long time where the limitations creep in. My budget laptop is barely capable of running Windows Vista. But it carries that stupid capable sticker like a badge of honor. If only Intel didn't screw people around. And pulled Microsoft into the scam. My laptop was only bought a 4 months before the release of Vista. It wouldn't be the fastest on the block, but it damn sure should have worked the way it was supposed to.
Now as soon as the budget clears this month I'm going for it. But with change of operating systems comes slightly different, yet annoying ways of doing the same tasks.
For example. I was using iPhoto for a few years on the Mac. The equivalent on the PC was Picasa, bought by Google. My first impression of it was a pretty good one. The interface was similar to iPhoto in many respect. The editing tools were very nice. I didn't understand it's reliance on folders. I like the way iPhoto sorted this mess out for automatically based on year/month/day hierarchy. I have multiple cameras so when I download them to the PC I use the month of the download. Picasa really made a mess of things, because Albums of the same date weren't put in the same folder 2007_4 and 2007_4_1 for example. I'm using iPhoto once again. I hope the speed has improved, one thing I like about Picasa was the speed. and the integration with picasaweb. But as a long time Flickr user I prefer to use flickr.

I have a Mac... OSX86 :-P and it kicks ass. So after playing around with all the default stuff for a few days I download firefox. Not the crusty, memory hogging 2.0 but the brand new slick looking 2.0 beta, from here. And I must say it looks really really nice on OS X. I think the developers have been really working there ass off to get it up to speed on the Mac. It's got polish and it shows. I think a lot more Mac users are visually aware of their surroundings and you really have to bring your interface up to atleast the Apple HIG if you're going to get any traction at all. Else you face losing those users to Safari. Trust me, you don't have to try hard to get users off Safari, but first impressions are important. And if the end-user doesn't like what they see in the first 5 seconds you are dead meat.
So imagine my surprise when I download the firefox beta on vista. :-\ See what I did there? Yes it sucked that hard. I know windows users aren't the same as mac users and are willing to put up with a lot more slackness. But the windows firefox beta, looks like a beta. Garish ugly blue buttons and all it warts.
Basically, it didn't blend.

After trying to find a solution to a problem we were having with a neighbor, my wife moved my office into my son's room and moved our son into the office/dining room. She also took the opportunity to clean up my desk, through away old papers, and dig up my books. I was happy to find the books I've been reading or finished reading. Mom recently sent me a care package with a few of my favorite books. I've taken the time to rebuild my library in my new office.
Here are a few of the books I've kept in my collection through the years:

• Flash MX 2004 from the source.


• Code Complete


• Head first (or head start?) Design Patterns


• JavaScript (O'Reilly)


• Foundations in .NET C# edition MCAD book


• ASP.NET Web development MCAD book


• ADO.NET


• PHP professional application development


• Various DVDs videos in Flash


• Various DVDs videos in Final Cut Pro Express

I've also got a few language books: Chinese and French language books. I'm really looking forward to learning French and some conversational mandarin.

I've found the Code Complete to be the best and longest book I've read in a long time. And there is a lot of useful information to help improve my code as a developer. Hopefully, one day, I'll write my own book on some programming language that I really like. Maybe in a few years. Maybe when life at home gets easier.

I've been using OpenVPN at work for a while now. One of the things I was curious about was the difference between TAP and TUN connections. By default OpenVPN uses the TUN. The release notes said something about compatibility in other operating systems and I saw a nice split of Windows and PC users so I decided compatibility was the more important. But the cost was the performance of the system. I'm not sure on the network level what the difference between a TAP and TUN connection. I know a tun uses single port. and a type creates a virtual device that uses a tunnel. But I decided to switch our internal VPN to TAP.
What a difference that makes. Using TAP we can browse other computers on the VPN as if they were on a localhost. And the speed of file copies went up a little bit. Browsing the server improved dramatically.

So if you are using OpenVPN and are on a primarily windows environment I would suggest using TAP in the server and client configs. The steps are

1. open client config.ovpn in your favorite text editor.


2. change dev tun to dev tap


3. open the server config.ovpn in your favorite text editor


4. change dev tun to dev tap


5. change the server IP and subnet to: server 10.8.0.0 255.255.255.0 or whatever your iprange will be


6. restart all server and client openvpn daemons


7. breathe the fresh air of having local network speed on boxes far away

Cheers

Most of the posts on this blog comes from my problematic laptop. Recently on slashdot.org there was the announcement of the 5.0 release of Truecrypt. For a long time I've been looking for a solution to secure my files and my laptop. There has been other programs that create encrypted partitions or encrypted disk images. On windows this encrypts some of your data but rarely most of it. And for these there was no solution to secure your Local folder, where the meat of your information is (outlook.pst, thunderbird, firefox, etc). But the great thing about Truecrypt is it can do the filesystem level encryption on a running system partition. No need to boot up into a seperate system or CD and run an encryption script. In fact it makes securing your system so easy (and for laptop users, not having to swap drives around is a godsend) that there is no reason that it shouldn't be included with every computer sold. I've been using it for less that 24 hours and there hasn't been any visible performance hit (generally 5%) or lost files, or unrecoverable boots.

After weeks of screwing around with this laptop and thinking I was having a software problem. I blew away my windows partition. Twice. Installed Ubuntu and then Fedora Core Linux. I was still out of a fully functional laptop. I even went as far booting various LiveCDs and scanning the hardware and hard drive for errors. But this problem would still persist. The keyboard and mouse would lockup after a few minutes and be unrecoverable. Well now I'm back on Windows Vista...Basic. After using Business for a few weeks late last year I was hardly getting anything done. Click and wait was the operation of the day. Basic is supposed to be the lighter brethren of all things Vista. And frankly it's marginally better. Lots of features have been dropped in the name of making you pay more for the slightly better and resource intensive Premium. Turns out the same thing did happen. But after poking around on the internet I found other people who had the same problem.

Turns out there is a bug in Acer laptops. A bug where when the battery goes kaput it manages to lock the keyboard and causes hellish amount of problems. All this from a fooking battery? I should really slap the taste out of the engineers mouth that managed to let this slip by. I should also slap the design team for integrating the rubber standoffs into the battery. In my case I can't use it and I can't through it away unless I also enjoy trying to work on a three legged square table. You see the battery holds the ass end of the laptop up. And there you have it. The worlds largest manufacturer of portable PCs couldn't bother to think what would happen if someone tried to use the PC without the battery in the by. In other words "Get a Mac".

The great thing about using Linux is it's free and the rules are really basic. The bad thing about Linux is it's free and getting support can be a bit of a nightmare. It's been a week since I successfully installed Fedora Core 8. After using a variety of help guides I can say that it truly rocks. Whether or not I can use it productively is another question. You see I'm a .Net developer. which means I'm closely bound to the Windows side of doing things. On my ancient and underpowered laptop getting Windows to run on VMWare can be a virtual nightmare. While it's great as a server the GUI is pretty sluggish. But since connectivity is the safe word I can get around that by RDPing into a real windows machine.

I am a pragmatic and polyglot so I did install the Java IDE and Netbeans. Now seems like the perfect time to learn Java programming and compare it to C#.

Windows Vista Media Center. What can I say about it. I'm trying hard to like it but the fact that it doesn't play most of my files (Divx, MP4, MKV) means that it is just about useless to me. I'm hoping the situation improves as it becomes mainstream. But I built a media center PC to take advantage of the latest Microsoft features and they come up short. I'm sort of wishing I went with the Apple TV. Atleast I know I could quickly index my movie into something usable instead of dumping everything into a folder with a ton of useless thumbnails. But I see there is an SDK available and some of the sample applications look promising. So I just might engineer myself out of this problem. If the documentation is any good.

In software development I'm a bit of a polyglot. Here is a short list C# (weapon of choice), VB.Net, XML, SQL, CSS, PHP, HTML, and Javascript. I've been avoiding PHP because I want to. And now I'm working a lot in Javascript. Using Javascript is quickly becoming a fav. It wasn't long ago that the tools were mediocre at best, and debugging it was a nightmare. Between browser and platform incompatibilities I spent a lot of time starring at a screen looking for a bug that only occurs on a specific version of IE6 running on windows2000/XP SP#. If you wanted to do any serious productive work than staying in the compiled languages was the way to go, unless you needed another dropdown menu.

That's why I'm looking forward to the next version of Visual Studio 2008. I have the beta installed and I've been using it lightly. Javascript support was a good start in 2005 but the reflection works so much better on this version. 2005 would usually meet me 33% with the intellitype. 2008 is probably 50-75% there. And lots of lovely new features (note: I'm still not convinced Silverlight is going to approach Flash in the immediate future, but it will put a fire under Adobe's ass :-P)

I read an article I found on OSNEWS.com from the CEO of WebIS. The author was talking on the impact that piracy has on the small software dev house. As a developer I spend a good deal of our time creating software that the industry needs. I don't think we've had to deal with piracy per sé (clients usually abuse the license but we tolerate it to a point). But I know that it could devastate my employer heavily.

But I do wonder what goes through the mind of pirates who use it in a money making capacity. The kid making LOLcatz photos probably doesn't need Photoshop. But since he found himself a copy then might as well give it a try. There are other ways to goof off and a $600 license of photoshop is overkill. But what about the graphic designer charging clients real rates? They are doing a disservice to themself and to Adobe. You might not like the amount they charge or their business ethics. But there are alternatives out there.

Which brings me to the third pirate. Mac users. Believe it or not they actually have a low incidence of piracy on the mac due to the size of the community and the much higher income bracket mac users are associated with. I'm a Mac User. I've kept my installers but my computer was stolen while I was away. I hold my licenses because I don't have a choice. I bought it when there was a mac and now there isn't one for me. I've been experimenting with OSx86 because I'm almost ready to buy another one. I tried it on my laptop and it looks as good as always, and while most of my hardware was supported the important ones weren't (wifi).
I don't think apple wants to get into the complete software business. There idea of a computer is a solution and not just the hardware and software. I've browsed the boards and there always seems to be someone that says they don't feel guilty installing it because they bought it. I find this extremely unlikely for a lot of reasons.

1. the computer you are installing this on will receive no support whatsoever. And in software the support is a large part of the cost.


2. You have no chance of returning it if this "experiment doesn't work out". Who spends $129 on anything that has a 50% chance of working


3. The damn thing is ugly. I know the mac cases might not be all that, but the greatest from China is just...wow

--Gotta run

For my fellow developers that haven't heard yet, Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 has just been released from Microsoft. You can download it here. A service pack from Microsoft is a big deal. And along with the improved performance comes the critical bug fixes that exist in every product. But just a warning, this is a hefty service pack (431MB for me) and the installation is long as well. I would advise against doing the install first thing in the morning.

Last week I spoke of the virtues of using Ruby on Rails. If you are in the web development biz it's hard not to like a programming environment that doesn't make your life simple. For me, the closest comparison I can make is Coldfusion. If you've programmed in CF then you know it's closer to scripting then high level coding. Rails is the real deal, plus you get access to all the Ruby libraries to see how things are done.
The book I was refering to was not a ruby book but a book on PHP and MySQL programming. "PHP5 and MySQL from Novice to Professional", but I'm no novice.

As for the house, we've been getting a lot of interest from agents and buyers. I'm trying to renovate the guest bathroom and kitchen. Patch the leaks and rotted stones. And when its all done...and sold I'll be extremely pleased.

My french observation this week: They have a thing for cheese, not any cheese but really stinky cheese. Kamala's papa brought some cheese over and I spent days scrubbing and tearing apart the cabinets in the kitchen trying to find what died in there. It was that strong and that bad. I stick to emmental and italian. Nice and savory for me.

It came like a bolt of lightning. Rails that is. I've been complacent about it for the last coupler of months. Primarily because I didn't have the time to learn "another programming language", but the weather was particularly extra crap lastnight so I thought what the hell, why not. And it was good, real good, so good infact that I stayed up until 5:30 in the morning getting my brain wrapped around. I built a complete CMS (content management system) in one night using some simple logic and afew books scattered around the floor.
YES! I have entered the church of Ruby on Rails, drank from the special goblet and am on my way to being the evengelist. I've written CMSes in C#, PHP, and Perl. None of them was ever this simple and yet so powerful. By the end of this weekend I will be master of Rails and then I'm going to kick some AJAX ass.