Category — technology

For this week’s “Annoyance” entry, non-software developers beware, you might not feel my pain or understand what I’m talking about. This is a cliche joke in the software world, but it is SO TRUE!

Basically, the IWOMM syndrome a happens when a developer commits new code that relies on something specific to the offender’s computer or when the offending developer doesn’t sync with the team’s latest changes before committing. When someone else updates their working code that includes the offender’s new changes, his system ceases to build or be able to pass the tests. The victim then confronts the offending developer and the offender can often be heard saying, “But, it works on my machine!”.

Helpful recipe for IWOMM offenders:

1. Develop your feature/bug fix/whatever
2. sync with your version control system, Subversion users, for example: svn update
3. What? You don’t use version control? Oxygen … need oxygen … … you wouldn’t believe how many developers with “15 years experience” that I’ve met who I have to teach the fundamental principles of a VCS
4. Okay, you do use version control. Whew! Run a “clean” and do a build and run your system’s unit tests. I know you have unit tests, right?
5. All cool? No build errors? All tests passed? Now you can commit your changes:
   svn commit -m "It works on my machine and it'll work on your's too unless I'm a massive tool and I hard-coded something like database connection properties to my local database in the code!"

Thankfully, the IWOMM syndrome hasn’t been problem that I’ve experienced lately, I just jokingly said it today when someone was having a minor build problem.

I’d never seen these, “It Works on My Machine” Certification Program and Coding Horror’s Modification, until I Googled “it works on my machine” before I wrote this post. Good stuff!

The end.

This friendly post was brought to you by:

Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion

I’ve been keeping unofficial statistics at OSCON in my notebook as I attend sessions this week on two things:

1. Men vs. Women
2. Operating Systems on user laptops in the sessions

First of all, operating systems. You would not believe the number of MacsBooks. My data gives me 63%. I think based on just general perception, it could actually be higher. Surprising, Windows came in second with 22%. This is surprising because this is an open source conference with tons of anti-Windows and pro-Linux folks. Finally, Linux rolled in with a paltry 9%. I don’t know the official “real world” stats for operating systems on consumer computers, but it is probably something like 90% Win, 9% Mac, 1% Linux. Here’s my pretty picture of this:

Secondly, women vs. men. Women came in with 11%. This was shocking to me. Shocking? Yes, I thought it would be much lower, like engineering classes in college. At a glance, I would’ve guessed that there were at most 6% women here, but my numbers don’t lie! Here’s the pretty picture, enjoy!

One interesting stat that I didn’t keep but should’ve would be percent of men with beards and of those, what percent are long and scary. I bet the percentage would be much higher than the average in the rest of the US population. Not as high as a Harley convention, but pretty high

I am in Portland for OSCON (O’Reilly Open Source Conference). Beware non-geek readers … there may be some geeky posts over the next few days!

Right know I am sitting in the keynote sessions, and honestly, given my interests, I would call most of the talks BOOOOOOORRRRRRING! Intel and Microsoft peddled some stuff that I don’t care much out. Right now Tim O’Reilly is interviewing Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu and this is a bit more interesting.

The options for the sessions are almost overwhelming. Every hour has up to 14 session choices. For most hours, there are at least 5 that I would REALLY like to check out …

If you give a rat’s ass about this geeky stuff … stay tuned

I noticed that someone sent me an email to my GMail account using Firstname.Lastname@gmail.com when my account name is FirstnameLastname@gmail.com, but it still got to me. How nice. GMail treats uniqueness of usernames excluding the dots. From GMail help:

Because Gmail doesn’t recognize dots as characters within usernames, adding or removing dots from a Gmail address won’t change the actual destination address. Messages sent to yourusername@gmail.com and y.o.u.r.u.s.e.r.n.a.m.e@gmail.com are all delivered to your Inbox, and only yours.

Gmail allows only one registration for any given username. Once you sign up for a particular username, any dot variations are made permanently unavailable for new accounts. If you believe that a message was sent to you accidentally, we suggest contacting the sender to inform him or her of an incorrect address.

Good job Google. You probably saved a lot of people a lot of headache and embarrassment by preventing them from sending stuff to the wrong person. Kudos.

Macs have a fun command-line program called “say”. You type “say” and enter some text and it reads it to you. Fun stuff. I like pasting news articles into it and having it read them to me.

For the those that don’t know, you can open a command-line terminal by going to Applications > Utilities > Terminal. Open Terminal and then you can start entering text commands. Try typing: say hello, you are a geek and hit return.

Now that’s all fun and dandy, but then I got the brilliant idea that I could ssh (login remotely) into another Mac and make it talk. Oh the fun that you could have with co-workers, friends and family! Here’s how you can do that :

• Log directly onto the Mac that you want to make talk
• Go to System Preferences>Sharing. In the Services section, make sure that “Remote Login” is checked.
• Highlight Remote Login and take note of the text below the checkboxes. It should say something like: To log in to this computer remotely, type “ssh username@123.123.123.12” at a shell command
• Write down the exact text that looks like “ssh username@123.123.123.12”
• Log out of the computer and leave it however you usually leave it when you are not using it and wait for the next lucky person to use the machine

[by the way I am not advocating hacking into people’s machines, I assume that maybe you have a family computer that many people use ]

Now from another computer (on the same network) open up a command prompt and enter the text that you wrote down above, something like ssh username@123.123.123.12. You will be prompted for your password, enter it. You may be asked to accept a key or something like that, if so, type yes and hit return.

If your other computer is Windows, you can use something like putty to remote into the target Mac. Just download putty.exe , launch it, and then enter username@123.123.123.12 into the main textbox to login remotely (leave off the ssh).

Once you are remotely logged in, you can just enter the same “say” command but it will say it on the other computer! Here are some fun ideas for things to have the computer say to other people

• Make a sexy come-on from the computer to our lucky victim.
• Have the computer threaten to go on strike if he is not treated better.
• Speak from the perspective of a trapped little person in the computer.
• Have it sing “Mr. Roboto” Try: say domo ari got toe, mr. robot oh. domo. domo. Or to really have it “sing” try: say -v “Good News” domo ari got toe, mr. robot oh. domo. domo.

Sometimes the computer does not speak things perfectly, especially proper nouns. Try experimenting on your own machine before you attack your victim. Spell things out phonetically if it can’t say something correctly.

For fun you can change the voice with the -v flag. One example alternate voice is “Whisper”. So to act like there is someone trapped in the computer you could enter:

say -v Whisper Help, get me out of this computer. Garga Mel locked me in here again!

Here are a list of the available voices that come on a Mac. The names are case sensitive and enter the names in quotes if there is a space in the name:

Female Voices

• Agnes - relatively natural female voice
• Kathy - sounds like a computer, kind of like the computer voice in OK Computer
• Princess - kind of sounds like an old lady
• Vicki - most natural, kind of whispery
• Victoria - computery sounding

Male Voices

• Bruce - most natural male voice
• Fred - sounds like a computer
• Junior - sounds like a girl
• Ralph - deep voice

Novelty Voices

Albert - funny weak whispery high pitched voice
Bad News - very slow lo-pitched voice (put “Bad News” in quotes)
Bahh - choppy whispery weak voice
Bells - Melodic bells within voice, relatively slow paced
Boing - Mid-pitched typical computer voice with “boing” sound in each syllable
Bubbles - Whispery voice with bubble sounds in each syllable
Cellos - Melodic voice with cello voice, each syllable is a successive note in a simple tune
Deranged - Old man-ish voice, think Grandpa Simpson
Good News - Says words to the tune of “Pomp and Circumstance” or other tunes
Hysterical - Laughing/chuckling man voice (funny but hard to understand)
Pipe Organ - Low “pipe organ” melodic voice
Trinoids - Monotonous mid-pitched computer voice
Whisper - Whispery, kind of desperate sounding, sounds like it is having trouble breathing
Zarvox - Monotonous mid-pitched computer voice

Want to sample all of the voices? Paste the following into your Terminal and hit return:

say -v Agnes Hello, I am Agnes.
say -v Kathy Hello, I am Kathy.
say -v Princess Hello, I am Princess.
say -v Vicki Hello, I am Vicki.
say -v Victoria Hello, I am Victoria.
say -v Bruce Hello, I am Bruce.
say -v Fred Hello, I am Fred.
say -v Junior Hello, I am Junior.
say -v Ralph Hello, I am Ralph.
say -v Albert Hello, I am Albert.
say -v “Bad News” Hello, I am Bad News.
say -v Bahh Hello, I am Bahh.
say -v Bells Hello, I am Bells.
say -v Boing Hello, I am Boing.
say -v Bubbles Hello, I am Bubbles.
say -v Cellos Hello, I am Cellos.
say -v Deranged Hello, I am Deranged.
say -v “Good News” Hello, I am Good News.
say -v Hysterical Hello, I am Hysterical.
say -v “Pipe Organ” Hello, I am Pipe Organ.
say -v Trinoids Hello, I am Trinoids.
say -v Whisper Hello, I am Whisper.
say -v Zarvox Hello, I am Zarvox.

Happy practical joking!

You might want to turn off Remote Login when you are done playing, just to be safe!

I’m on the road, en route to a fun and exiting family Easter gathering in spectacular downstate Illinois. I got a Blackberry Pearl a few months ago and I can use it as a modem to get “the internets” on my MacBook. I know that this is nothing new, but I’ve never done it and it all just seems magic. My old lady is driving as we barrel down I-294 and I am sitting shotgun surfing the “information super highway”. It’s magical! The end.

A week or so ago, my MacBook battery started only holding a charge for 10 minutes, and it would just die without warning; the whole machine just shutdown without sleeping. Then last Thursday, at work, with the computer plugged in to the AC adapter, as I was typing, all of a sudden, my computer rose 1/2 inch; the battery had expanded. I took the battery out. It was 1/2 inch thicker than it should be. I showed some people and then set it aside. When I showed up at work today (Monday) it had expanded even more. This thing is probably dangerous, but that hasn’t stopped me from schlepping it around and showing everybody the comparison between the exploded battery and a good one.

I got a new battery last Friday at a Mac store and I asked if they had fixed this problem. The guy said that it was my fault for letting it get too hot. Bastard.

Anyway, the battery was under warranty and I think that I get a new one shipped this week, so now I’ll have two. Here’s the photos:

Normal battery:

“Exploded” Battery (I didn’t pry this open or anything, it did this all by itself)

It’s funny that this happened about exactly 8 months after I got this machine. Tons of folks are complaining that the batteries go bad and “bow” after 8 or 9 months on the 17 inch MacBook Pro. Seriously, go read these complaints here.

I love Apple products, but sometimes they suck. And don’t get me started on how expensive their parts and accessories are…

Zabada

I’ve been meaning to mention this for a while. Make sure you back up your important files! Maybe even backup your medium-important files.

Can you imagine if you were almost done recording an album and your hard drive died on you!? Can you imaging losing all of your digital photos from the past five years?

Two months ago, my notebook’s hard drive died on me. I lost lots of stuff. Nothing super-important, but it was still painful.

So take some time and think about what you need to backup on your computer(s) and then do it!

For your super-important documents, I’d recommend getting some off-site storage on the internet. For everything else, get an external hard drive and schedule your backups!

One final note, when you get an external hard drive, get one that lays flat horizontally, not one that sits vertically. The vertical ones get knocked over and break. Over the past five years, I’ve had two die this way. I’ve been pretty happy with my LaCie 500 GB Drive. The 320 GB version also looks like a pretty good deal.

Day one of RailsConf served up fantastic keynotes from Dave Thomas, Martin Fowler and Paul Graham; all in one day!

Dave talked about how huge Rails already has become and then he challenged the community to make three improvements to Rails. Martin talked about what makes Rails, Ruby and agile development so great (while admitting that he’s never personally used Rails). The last half hour was especially good. I didn’t take any notes so I hope a transcript is published so that I can remember the details about what I liked so much. I do remember him wrapping up with saying that more than technology and tools, the most important thing in a community is the people. He said that in the Ruby community, the PEOPLE are top notch. Paul talked about the huge advantage of being marginal. As always, Paul was funny, controversial and inspiring. Overall day one was fantastic. I personally have never been to a conference with that many homerun hitters slamming ‘em home in one day. Besides those three guys, the place was seething with all of the big players in the Ruby and Rails community and it was really great to be in the presence of so many smart and friendly folks!