Crouching tiger, coding monkey

May the 4th be with you.

Watch and you’ll never get this five minutes of your life back. Consider yourself warned.

If that was the case he wouldn’t have stopped to get the spear instead. Although, upon reflection, now the octopus is armed (Ha! Get it? ARMED! Octopus. I need to take this act on the road) he can steal anything he wants.

So when you wear an Atari shirt like this to work:

…you get two things.

1. Comments like “Man, that’s old school!” Translation: You’re old.

2. Links to awesomeness like this:

PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Discover more animation and arts videos.

“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
—Albert Einstein

“‘Holy crap no way that actually worked’: doing something, failing, ignoring it for years, coming back, trying again and having it work.”
—Grant Lammi

“Insane in da membrane (Insane in da brain)”
—Cyprus Hill

One of the things about working on a product that is cross platform is that every so often you have to jump to some other operating system to make sure that the bugs you just wrote perform equally as well everywhere. The other day I dusted off my Ubuntu Linux virtual machine and fired it up to do some testing. I hadn’t started it in a long time, probably six months or so since I had been using a different virtual machine. As I got to working the “You aren’t up to date why aren’t you up to date don’t you want to be up to date” nag dialog popped up.

Normally I don’t pay these things much attention, particularly for a VM I don’t use that much, and just click whatever makes it install everything. (That’s the “Shut up” button.) Before I made it there though I saw the button above it:

Does that say a new distribution is available by just clicking an upgrade button?

Does clicking on that upgrade this entire distro to the new version and actually work?

No way.

Or way?

Now before I go into what happened after I pressed the “Super magic I can’t believe this is possible because of my old jaded Linux experience” button let’s take a walk down memory lane.

I first starting using Linux in college in 1994. Back then it was the perfect storm of:

1. Being able to run Unix at home and not have to go to the labs
2. Being able to run Unix at home for free which was good since I was broke
3. Having enough free time on my hands to spend all night monkeying with kernel compilation settings trying to get my Opti Mad 16 sound card to actually, well, play sound.

I did configure; make; make install.

I did rpm -Uvh *.

I broke my local system by installing Evolution and its 60 bajillion dependencies so many times I can’t count.

When it came time to upgrade the distro I popped in the InfoMagic CD, backed up my /home directory, did whatever the README said, then sat around and watched the kernel compile.

And then I got a Mac with OS X. A new perfect storm hit:

1. I was able to still run a Unix at home, this time with a nice UI.
2. I had a job and was no longer broke.
3. I had a job and no longer had the tons of free time I had before.

Installing and upgrading turned into an exercise of clicking the shiny blue button and then getting a soda. I gave Linux a hearty handshake, thanked him for his service and wished him the best of luck in all his future endeavors.

So back to today. I hadn’t done a Linux upgrade in years. I hadn’t compiled a Linux kernel in years. Anymore I’d just toss out the VM and install from scratch. Today, however, I clicked the “Magic upgrade my Linux distro” button.

(What? Did you think I wouldn’t click on it? What kind of blog post would this be then with all that lead up? I’ll tell you what kind, a darned funny one. Oh well, sometimes you sacrifice comedy for operating system upgrades.)

So after The Click this happened:

Followed by this:

Which after a reboot resulted in this:

*Blinks*

*Points*

*Blinks*

Wow. It worked.*

So color me impressed and man has this stuff come a long way since the olden days. Does this mean I’m going back to Linux and giving up my seamless, rounded cornered Apple Mac fanboy membership card?

Of course I’m not. I didn’t click the “Go insane” button.

*Yes, I understand that Ubuntu has had this ability for years and I’m super lame for just now noticing it. In my defense it has been the Year of the Linux desktop for a decade.

One of those overdue OmniFocus tasks is to write a blog post.

Talk about taking the cheap and easy way to cross something off my list.

On the plus side Wordpress for iPhone seems to work.

The other day I went to check my email and found this waiting for me:

From: Mom
Subject: Guess what?

Always interesting when something like that comes through your inbox. I opened it up and was greeted with this line:

“Guess what I bought today? A new laptop computer!!!”

Hmmm. Spidey sense was tingling on this one a little bit. Mom has never been a computer person, in fact she has never been a huge technology person of any kind. But hey, trying new things is cool, good for her. And if this means we can bump the resolution up from 1024×768 on my Dad’s workstation that he does CAD/modeling work on more the better. More from the email:

“When I saw this computer on sale, I knew it was time to jump in.”

At this point I’m starting to get a little concerned. Does Packard Bell still exist? Do they make laptops? Is this a floor model from 2002 running Windows ME? All questions going through my head.

“Dad hasn’t even seen it yet.”

Uh-oh.

Now I’m officially worried. Dad is kind of my tech support safety net in that he is there to solve all the crazy Windows/printers/virus scanners/misc problems. My first reaction is that he doesn’t even know she bought this thing. My second is that there is the potential for big time trouble since he is on a fishing trip in the middle of nowhere Michigan for a week.

That’s right, all I need now is a headset and I’m ready to be first tier tech support.

Not good times.

So I call mom to try to get some more details and a funny thing happens, actually it is a funny series of things.

1. She’s got the machine up and running and on Dad’s wifi network.
2. It is a brand new Compaq Presario running the *just* released Windows 7.
3. She’s got Skype installed and wants to try out the built-in webcam.

Err, huh? Really? No way.

I fire up Skype do a search for mom, find her no problem, click the call button, Skype does its funny little Skype noise and tada:

Holy cow. Talking to Mom on Skype on a notebook computer she set up completely by herself with Dad standing in the middle of a freezing river somewhere. If you had asked to me bet money on this situation working out well, and on the first try, I would have lost everything I own.

So, even though I’m Mac guy, and I’ve only spent about 30 minutes total with Windows 7, it must be pretty easy and straightforward to use. In fact, I would say it fits the old adage of being easy enough for your grandmother to use.

(Well, my son’s grandmother technically but close enough.)

Today I decided to look a into a bug we encountered when using the Sun Java JRE 1.6 on certain distributions of Linux. When we first found the defect it became pretty clear that something somewhere had changed between JDK 1.5 and 1.6. In 1.5 everything worked like a charm. In 1.6, the best case was a hang and the worst case seemed to be the JVM exploding internally.

Either way my pronouncements that things worked just fine thankyouverymuch on the Mac weren’t going to cut it as far as getting the defect fixed.

So, in order to debug the issue I started installing a bunch of different Linux distros into virtual machines.

And then I sat around.

And waited.

And watched the progress bar.

And then finally complained on Twitter.

Thankfully my friend Mike took pity on my plight and replied back promising approximately two minute worth of diversion.

Boy was that two minutes well spent. His link led me to this blog post which contained this bit of YouTube powered awesomeness:

My reply Tweet to Mike pretty much sums it up:

Naturally this all got me thinking about how little gunpowder was needed to hurl this anvil into the air. That then led me of course to Wikipedia’s History of Gunpowder page. I knew that it had been invented by the Chinese a long time ago but I had no idea that it was probably done by some master alchemist who was searching for the “elixir of immortality.” (Boy did he miss on that one.)

In fact here is an artistic representation of the master right before he accidentally blew himself into smithereens.

I guess that’s why the original inventor of gunpowder is still somewhat anonymous. It must have been up to his surviving apprentice to be in charge of the story after his master blew up like a JDK 1.6 on Linux.

And we all know that the apprentice isn’t the one that specializes in blatant self promotion…

So over the last few months I’ve taken up running. Even stranger is that I am actually enjoying it. To those who know me this pretty much confirms that I’ve gone completely bat-$#&@ insane.

Unlike the old days of doing conditioning laps for soccer, now I get to use modern technology to keep a permanent record of just how slow I can be. To do this I’ve been using Runkeeper for my iPhone 3GS. It is a really great piece of software and brain dead easy to use to track and map out with GPS where you run. There is, however, one small catch:

Using GPS while running on an inside track is completely and utterly useless. As evidence I present some screenshots from my run last night.

The starting in Mason part of the map is right. I most certainly did not run to Dayton though. Even more telling is my distance and speed.

That’s right friends, I have unequivocal, irrefutable evidence that I can run at 221mph, which is just 3mph off the pole sitter speed for the last Indianapolis 500. That does explain why when I finished running I had a hankering for a drink of ethanol fuel and a burning desire to have my tires shoes changed though.

*Looks for words*

*Scratches head*

*Again looks for words*

I’ve got nothing. Watch this: