2012 Posts

Unless you’ve been living under an Internet rock, you know that Apple released a new version of iOS, featuring a much heralded new mapping application. This application replaces the old Google Maps application. You also probably know that it has been roundly criticized and mocked. Now, before anyone accuses me of blatant fangirlism (although, without a doubt, I am an Apple fangirl), the new Maps application sucks. It’s a step backwards from the previous one, lacks some of the features the previous one had, and is generally disappointing. I especially don’t like how it didn’t degrade gracefully on the iPhone 4 (no voice turn-by-turn, and, for some strange reason, it seems unable to count down the distance to the next turn). In general, it clearly isn’t ready for primetime, Apple over-advertised it, and I think Apple could have done better. But, other than being disappointing, the new Apple Maps application has no real impact on me because I never used the old one. It sucked also, and I think people are forgetting just how badly the old one was allowed to languish without significant updates. The Google-based Maps app in iOS 5 was essentially unchanged from the one that was released 4 years earlier. Here are some things that were wrong with the “old” Google-based Maps app as of iOS 5: No voice turn-by-turn directions. Had to manually advance while driving when doing directions. Searching sucked: you had to spell things exactly right or it wouldn’t find them. For some reason, it thought I lived in Madison, Wisconsin all the time. If you live in anywhere but a large city, it was essentially useless for navigation. You could maybe find an address, if you knew exactly what you were looking for, but you couldn’t safely get there in a car. In short, I long ago abandoned the built-in mapping application for better services available in the App Store. I’ve been using the free Mapquest app for the last couple of years, and it’s worked great. It’s gotten better with each iteration, to the point where it’s pretty much my sole navigation app now. My process flow as usually been search for an address in Safari (or get it from another app like Yelp or Urban Spoon) and paste it into Mapquest, or search in Mapquest (usually with a little better luck than the built-in Maps app). Bam. Reliable turn-by-turn voice navigation that actually works on my iPhone 4. Pair that with the new Bluetooth stereo I put in my truck, and it works like butter. If it would just do night colors, it would be damn near perfect. Now, if I lived in a big city, I can understand being upset with the new app. Lacking walking or biking directions and public transit directions seems a curious oversight considering how many of Apple’s iPhone customers live in those environments. I can’t really understand why Apple would leave that data out unless they simply could not get it, and I hope they address that soon for all the people that do rely on it. But, for me, the new Maps app sucks just as much as the old one did, and I will not use it just as much as I didn’t use the previous one. So, for me, nothing has changed. Just, more than anything though, I’m disappointed in Apple, for two reasons. One, that they couldn’t get this right, and two, that they released it in spite of what they had to know were serious problems with it, all while heralding it as one if iOS 6’s killer features. Especially in light of news that they still had a year on their Google maps contract, I would rather they have spent that year fine tuning it rather than release something that clearly wasn’t ready for primetime.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, one of my projects right now is ripping all the DVDs I own so that I can watch them on my AppleTV (or any AppleTV in the house). Well, one of the problems I’ve run into a couple of times is longer movies that are distributed on two discs. This is usually movies like the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition or The Ten Commandments. Really, they’re one movie, but are distributed as two separate movies because of the restrictions of physical media. Well, digital media imposes no such restrictions on us, so why have two separate movies listed on the AppleTV? So after much trial and error, I finally discovered a way to get everything play nicely together. Unfortunately, this is not an easy problem to solve and even involved me writing a small script that could merge chapter files together because every single method I could find would eliminate chapter markers. So here, in abbreviated form, is the process for merging m4v files together and preserving chapter markers. Note: This tutorial assumes some level of technical proficiency. This is not a point-and-click process (yet :P) and requires the use of multiple tools and the shell. Tools you’ll need: Handbrake or whatever tool you’re using for ripping your legally obtained DVDs. MetaX and/or iDentify Subler remux Quicktime, which is now built into Mac OS X. chaptermerge, a script I wrote that merges chapter files together. The proces: Rip both movies from their individual DVDs using Handbrake or whatever other tool you’re using. Be sure that you’re adding chapter markers. Load each movie into MetaX and download the chapter names. That’s really the only thing you need to add to the file. Save the files with chapter names. Load each movie into Subler and extract the chapter files. To do this, select the chapter track and select File -> Export. Now, open the first movie in Quicktime. Drag the second movie on top of the first one. Quicktime will add the two together. Save the movie for use on an AppleTV. Get a beer or 6, because this takes awhile. While the movie is saving, use chaptermerge to merge the chapter files together. See the docs on how it works. Once the file has finished saving as a Quicktime MOV (it’s actually still h.264 inside the file), fire up remux and convert the merged file back into an m4v. Drag the file into remux, set the output to m4v, and save. Should be pretty quick - a matter of minutes. Load the merged file back into Subler and add the merged chapter track. Drag the chapter file into the Subler window. Save the file. Load the merged file into a tool such as iDentify or MetaX and add the remaining metadata. That’s it! You now have a merged file with both parts of the movie, accurate chapter markers and full metadata, ready to be copied to iTunes and viewed on your AppleTV.

It’s always amusing to watch what happens when old media slams head first into a new world. NBC, the broadcaster holding the rights to Olympic coverage in the United States, seems not to have realized how much the world has changed since Beijing in 2008. Social media is huge now - much more so than it was then - and people routinely have access to a much larger amount of information than we did back then. Whereas most countries saw it, or could at least access it, in realtime, NBC decided to show the Opening Ceremonies on a 3 hour tape delay so they could cash in on the larger primetime audience. I actually had to turn Twitter off yesterday afternoon because I was already seeing tweets about the Opening Ceremonies from people in other countries and at least one person I know who was actually at the thing. Now, to their credit, NBC is actually streaming a lot of coverage live on their website and showing highlights for the American audience in primetime. So why not do the same with the Opening Ceremonies? Why not stream it live on the website for those of us who might have wanted to watch it in realtime, then show the tape delayed version later for the larger audience? Well, someone asked NBC that and this was, no lying, their response:  “They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context, which our award-winning production team will provide for the large primetime audiences that gather together to watch them,” the network told the Wall Street Journal. Right, because we’re all bloody mouth-breathing morons who can’t figure out what’s going on without their precious context. Is this the same “award winning production team” that didn’t know who Tim Berners-Lee was or realize the significance of the computer he was sitting at? Tim Berners-Lee is why I have a job. Tim Berners-Lee is why I’m able to type this right now, and why an economy that generates billions of dollars every year exists. The British thought it important enough to salute him in the Olympic Opening Ceremonies. They didn’t even know who he was? Is this the same “award winning production team” that made cracks about Kim Jong-Il while the North Korean team was walking in the parade of nations? Yes, he was a brutal dictator and his “11 holes in one” story is laughable to say the least. But first of all he’s dead now, and second the Olympic Opening ceremonies are not an appropriate time or place to be cracking jokes about other countries’  deceased leaders. I wonder if the BBC called Mitt Romney (who was sitting in the audience) “the American Borat” or made cracks about the French president? Is this the same “award winning production team” that never mentioned that Kenneth Branaugh was playing the role of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, perhaps the greatest engineer that ever lived? Here’s a clue, NBC: anyone with two brain cells could figure out what was going on, and your “award winning production team” was annoying. Not to mention the advertising EVERY FIVE MINUTES during the parade of nations got really, really old.

As a college football fan, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least have some thoughts on the biggest scandal ever to hit college sports. I remember when this first started to surface last year. I was very cautious at the time as everyone around seemed to be out for a pound of flesh. I generally try to avoid mobs and witch hunts - what I most wanted was to let the investigations play out, and find out who knew what and when did they know it. Because only once we know the facts of a case can we truly sit in judgement. Well, now we know the facts, and it’s worse than I could have ever imagined. Now, I haven’t read the Freeh report - I really haven’t had time (or desire) to digest a 227 page report detailing the actions of a child molester and the people who enabled him, even after they knew. But the report is the probably the single most damning thing ever to land on a college athletic program. It eclipses Kentucky’s point-shaving in the 50s. It eclipses Louisiana-Lafayette’s academic shenanigans in the 70s. And it most definitely eclipses SMU’s “Pony Excess” in the 80s. This is, without a doubt, the worst, most rotten thing I could possibly imagine. I don’t think this would have even been imaginable 15 years ago. And yet, here we are. All of those cases pale in comparison to what happened at Penn State. As the report details, the problems at Penn State were wider than just the football program. Many, many people, from the President down to janitors, knew what was going on … but nobody said anything. A culture of silence and, more importantly, a reverence for athletics beyond all reason, pervaded everything that happened in State College. Nobody would go against, or risk threatening, the almighty sacred golden calf that was the Penn State football program. For all intents and purposes, Penn State football and Joe Paterno were sacrosanct and any attempt to confront them would elicit the highest orders of outrage. What happened to those kids was terrible - and the justice system will see to it that those responsible are held to account for their crimes, as will the completely justified lawsuits which are sure to follow. But there are some other points surrounding this whole thing that I think are worthy of pondering here as well. For the longest time, I held Joe Paterno and Penn State as the paragon of stability that all athletic programs should strive for. I mean, here was a guy that was head coach for 45 years. In that same time period, Auburn had six coaches and Alabama had eight. In retrospect, I can’t help but wonder if that same stability allowed a culture to flourish that enabled something like this to happen. Is it good for one person to be allowed to accumulate so much power and hold it, unchecked, for so long? Would a few changes in administration have helped deter this situation? I would like to think so and, in truth, it may. But think the problem is bigger than Penn State and cuts right to the heart of the worship of college athletics in the United States. This same “athletics can do no wrong” culture can be seen at many major Division I schools. I mean, in my heart I would love to believe that something like this could never happen at Auburn. But I also cannot discount the power that the athletic department holds. The same can be said for Alabama, LSU, Oregon (whose program I think is absolutely rotten to the core on so many levels) and so many programs. Can I honestly believe that a janitor who sees something like that janitor at Penn State saw and has to decide between his job and reporting will do the right thing? And even if they keep their job, would have to constantly be on the lookout for some crazed “fan” much like we hear every week on Finebaum to do something insane? That’s the thing about this whole sad situation that I don’t think is getting enough discussion. This scandal is an indictment of the worship of athletics that pervades colleges across the US. Penn State just took that same worship that happens at every Division I program and turned the knob to 11. As a result, a culture of silence allowed a child molester to run rampant for years with the full knowledge of many people, who placed covering up for the name of the Nittany Lions above doing the right thing. This. Has. Got. To. Stop. The thing that is so damning about all of this is that it’s not the oh so loved “lack of institutional control” that we usually hear about when it comes to sports scandals. In this case, the institution was in such complete control of every aspect of Nittany Lion culture, that no one would dare go against it. This is unique, uncharted waters for college athletics. Now, I don’t know what the NCAA will do, if anything. Frankly, my opinion of the NCAA is right down there with the UN in terms of being able to do anything useful. But if there’s any justice in the world, the NCAA will drop the hammer on Penn State and end the program. At least for a couple of years. And if the NCAA doesn’t do it, Penn State should, for once, do the right thing and pull the plug themselves. Shut everything down, cool everything off and, in a few years, return with a new focus on what is really important. Because even though all the people responsible are gone, the culture is still in place. You have to change the culture. Yes, I said it. I’m talking the Death Penalty. A slap on the wrist - a few scholarships lost, a TV or bowl ban - would be insulting. To do anything less in this situation is to condone the very attitude that allowed Jerry Sandusky to molest children for years. A message needs to be sent, to universities and fans across the nation that there is a line of acceptable behavior and culture when it comes to college athletics, and that Penn State flew over that line at supersonic speeds. There must be accountability. SMU paid some played. Kentucky shaved some points. But at Penn State, a culture of silence and reverence for athletics enabled a child molester to go unchecked, with full knowledge of the administration, for years. If that’s not worthy of the ultimate penalty, the entire NCAA is s sham and should itself be disbanded. For the average college football fan, this should be yet another sobering reminder of the dark places that operate at some of alma maters. For as much as we would like to believe in the purity of sport, this scandal - perhaps the saddest and worst ever - indicates of the depths to which evil can spread.

About a year ago, I picked up a Drobo FS. It was something I had been wanting to do for awhile to support my ever growing data needs. In particular, I had three problems I was aiming to solve: Data security. In addition to the obvious suspects of photos and home movies, I have a lot of old files and documents I’ve been hanging onto for  years now. Papers I wrote in high school and college, some of the first computer code I wrote, etc. How I’ve managed to preserve some of this over the years is a miracle in itself - a lot of it was recovered a few years back when I picked up a 3.5” floppy disk drive and started going through boxes of floppies in my attic. But now that I have it all in one central place, I’d like to secure it. Media library. My wife and I own a lot of DVDs, and they take up a lot of space. They’re also not very portable. A while back I started the process of ripping all my DVDs into iTunes so that they could feed to any TV in the house with an AppleTV, essentially creating our own private video on demand system. This was rapidly outpacing the available space. Central backup location. I wanted a place where all the Macs in the house could backup to via Time Machine. After doing a great deal of research, I decided on the Drobo FS. In addition to being able to do all of the above, it had some other nice features that I liked: Thin provisioned, meaning you can hot-swap drives in and out while the device is running and not have downtime while it rebuilds the array. Also thanks to thin provisioning, your drives (theoretically, I’ll get to this in a bit) don’t need to be the same size or from the same manufacturer. Data protection that purports to examine the health of a drive and move data around to give it the best change of preservation. Now, to be sure, you’re trusting a black box. If Drobo fails, there is almost no cheap way to recover that data as they use non-standard, proprietary technology to accomplish all their voodoo magic. Nonetheless, in this case, it was a tradeoff I was willing to make. So after a year of ownership, how does Drobo stand up in fulfilling these promises? Well, there’s a lot of stories here but, overall, it does well with a few caveats I’ve learned along the way. When I first ordered the Drobo, at the same time I placed an order for 3 identical Seagate 2TB drives. I got them installed and got the array up and operational, and got all my data from various places moved over to the Drobo. The first thing I noticed while copying data over to the Drobo was that it was slow. Very slow. Transfer speeds to the Drobo across my gigabit network were in the ~10 megabit range. Upping the frame size to jumbo (9000) improved that a little but it was still very slow. Not a deal-breaker, as you’re rarely moving that much data around, but it was something I noticed. Then, the real problems started. The Drobo would just randomly vanish from Finder. No reason, just one moment it wouldn’t be there and you couldn’t even connect to it via IP address, although you could still ping it. I opened a support ticket with Data Robotics, who took me through a troubleshooting procedure that involved directly connecting the Drobo to my Mac via Ethernet. Of course it would work fine when we did that, so I figured it was a problem with my network. But even creating the shortest possible path between my iMac and the Drobo yielded the same results. I opened another ticket, and we went through the same procedure again. This time, however, we let it sit longer. Sure enough, about 30 seconds after it booted and appeared in Finder, it disappeared from Finder and from their Dashboard tool. I was able to SSH to it and see that the filesystem was now mounted in read-only mode. But we were able to get some diagnostic log files off of it. The tech looked them over and said that the drives were failing. And sure enough, the next day, Drobo reported one of the drives had died and that it was moving data around to protect things. Now, in my entire life, I’ve had 2 hard drive failures, with one occurring just a couple years ago. So I popped online and ordered another drive (this time, a Western Digital Enterprise 2TB drive). Popped it in the Drobo and it seemed happy, although still slow and occasionally vanishing from finder. Then, about a month later, I’m out working in the yard and boom, get an email on my iPhone about a second drive failure in the Drobo. So I order another Western Digital 2TB drive and put it in. The whole time, by the way, Drobo remains on and accessible. Pretty cool actually. And replacing a drive is pretty easy - you just pop the old one out and put the new one in, without even shutting down. Drobo then goes into a “protection” mode where it shuffles data around onto the new drive. But, with 2 of the 3 Seagate drives I bought failing within 6 months, I decided it probably wasn’t wise to continue to trust that last one since it was probably from the same batch. So I replaced that one as well. That was about seven months ago, which brings us to today. Between the better drives and several firmware and software upgrades from Data Robotics in the interim, Drobo is now virtually rock solid and (knock on wood) I haven’t had any further problems. It no longer randomly disappears from Finder or the Drobo Dashboard and, in a very Apple way, it just works. And I also want to say that, throughout the troubleshooting process, the Data Robotics guys were great to work with and wanted to see the problem solved. So overall, after a year and some growing pains, I’m pretty happy with it and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the Drobo FS with the following caveats: Use quality drives. Don’t buy the cheap drives and definitely avoid Seagate drives as the Drobo seems to hate those. When I upgraded to the WD drives, I bought the server-level Enterprise drives. Those have been rock solid. My guess is that Drobo is pretty hard on drives, with lots of reads, writes and seeks. Use the same size and manufacturer. Now, one of Drobo’s big selling points is that you can use different size drives and all that. This is one of those cases where what you can do and what you should do are two different things. You can use any size and manufacturer, but I’ve had better success and performance when all my drives are from the same manufacturer and are the same size. Be sure your firmware and software are up to date.  Kinda goes without saying, but the firmware upgrades for the Drobo have really helped with it’s stability. If you start having problems with your Drobo like I had above, get ready for a drive failure.

Been having some problems with my iMac upstairs. I’m pretty sure the hard drive is failing (again), although hopefully it’s just bad sectors. But, with hard drive prices currently still in the stratosphere, I decided to try one more last trick to see if I can save myself some money. That is, the old Windows trick: fdisk, format, reinstall. Or, well, the Mac Equivalent - Disk Utility, reinstall. About a year ago, a bought a Drobo. I’ve been meaning to write a review of the Drobo and maybe now I will (the short of it is, I had some growing pains with it, but now that I’ve figured out its quirks, it seems to work well). One of the reasons I bought the Drobo as to use a shared Time Machine backup store for all the Macs in the house. So, I thought, in addition to trying to save my Mac, now would be a great time to test my fancy Time Machine backup system. And, unfortunately, since Time Machine really isn’t meant to work with unsupported network volumes, it does require some gymnastics to get it to work. Even worse, it isn’t a very well documented procedure. But, ultimately, I was able to figure it out; I’ll post what I did hoping that maybe it will save someone some time and headache. First step is to format and reinstall as you normally would. If you are on/installing Lion, you may be presented with an option to reinstall from a backup as part of the install process. Don’t do this. Reinstall Lion as if you were performing a fresh install. When the installation is complete and you get to the Lion post-install setup screens, you will (eventually) reach a screen asking you to create a user account. Create your original user account (same username) as in your backup. Once you’re out of setup, go to System Preferences, then Users. Create a new administrative level user (I called mine “foo”). Be sure this is an admin-level user. Log out and log into the account you just created. Turn on unsupported Time Machine volumes. Open up a Terminal window and enter: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 Now, open up a finder window and navigate to your Drobo or other device and to whatever network share you have your Time Machine backups stored on. Mount it. Now, inside the share, mount the .sparsebundle that is your restore image (it should be the machine name). If you open it, you should be able to see a folder called “Backups.backupdb” in it. Next, fire up the Migration Assistant. Select “From another Mac, PC, Time Machine backup, or other disk.” Hit continue. Select “From a Time Machine backup or other disk.” Hit continue. It may take a second, but, eventually, you should see a drive image and the name of your old hard drive (usually “Macintosh HD”) appear. Click continue. It may take awhile for it to parse the image. My backup image was about 350gb, and it took about 20 minutes to parse out all the information. Select what you do or don’t want and click continue. You should be presented with a dialog stating that a username on the system is the same as one in the backup. Select “Replace…” Click continue. Wait. It will take awhile. It took about 5 hours for me to do a complete restore from a backup on the Drobo to my iMac. And that’s it. Once it finished and you reboot, your Mac should be just as it was during the last backup.

Over the weekend, I was having some hard drive issues. While I think I fixed the issues, I’ve been keeping a close eye on my console (Console.app) to look for any hints that the issues are more major than those that can be repaired by Disk Utility. However, while watching my console, I noticed something: there are a LOT of spammy Mac apps out there! Most Mac/Objective-C developers are aware of the NSLog() function, which, while in an Xcode environment, outputs data to the Xcode console. It’s usually one of the first things a new developer learns about and it’s very useful for debugging. What many developers may not realize is that NSLog() continues to output data to the system logs even when the app is not being run from within Xcode. As a result, the console fills up with messages that don’t mean a whole lot to people looking at the console. Now, I don’t want to come across as saying you should never use NSLog() outside of Xcode. There are times when outputting debug data to the console is fine. But some of the things I see are people echoing objects into the log or short text strings that are obviously method names. These aren’t helpful to people looking at the console and, arguably, aren’t helpful to a developer once an app is in the wild. Once your app is in the wild, data in the logs should indicate error conditions in your app. NSLog() is fine for debugging in Xcode, but you should be careful to remove them when you’re done. A good question I ask myself before leaving an NSLog() in place is, “if a user filed a support request with this data, would it help me fix their problem?” Most of the time, the answer is no. So before releasing an app, do a quick search in your project for all uses of NSLog() and evaluate whether they are really needed.

Among the many sites I follow for programming discussion is /r/PHP on reddit. While most of the discussion is more user-based than I would like - things like frameworks, use of PHP-based software packages and the like are usually discussed more often than actual programming - there are occasionally a few gems worth chiming in on. But it never fails that, at least once a week, I see the headline “How do I become a PHP developer,” or “What do I need to know to be a PHP developer?” My answer is simple: don’t. Just stop. Don’t be a “PHP Developer.” Don’t be a “Java Developer.” Don’t be a “Ruby Developer.” In fact, don’t be any kind of developer that depends solely on a single language. Languages come and go. Ten years ago I would bet the majority of web programming was still done in Perl. Fifteen years ago the web was still widely misunderstood and Java was promising that we would only have to write code once to run on any computer. Twenty years ago you found C, FORTRAN and COBOL on mainframes. Every few years a new language comes around and everybody moves to it. Sometimes they stay around, and sometimes they don’t. C has been around for many years and is just as valid now as it was twenty years ago. Even if you’re programming in C++ or Objective-C (both of whose roots go back further than you probably realize), you still need to understand the fundamentals of the C language. Will we still be using Clojure in 20 years? How about Coffeescript? Who knows. Maybe. Maybe not. My point is, don’t chain yourself to a single language. If you do that, you will be forever behind the curve. A good developer should be able to work independent of his/her tools, should be always willing to learn new and exciting things, and should be able to apply lessons learned in past development independent of the language they are working in. A good developer should be able to come up to speed quickly on a new language. And while it is true that every developer will probably always have a preferred language and a language they’re best at, we as developers should always place the craft of software development ahead of specialization in a single language, and we should be willing to use the best tool for the job independent of our linguistic preferences. While PHP is my primary language (and what pays the bills), I am not a PHP developer. I am a software developer who works in PHP among many other languages. It should always be the goal of every developer to remain at the forefront of our craft. That means not chaining ourselves to PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, Scala, Python, or any other language.

A couple of days ago, I upgraded to the most recent version of Netbeans - 7.1.1. I had been running a 7.1-DEV nightly from back in 2011 and just hadn’t bothered to upgrade yet. The first thing I noticed is that this version of Netbeans introduced a “feature” that allows you to zoom in or out of text. This is accomplished by, on the Mac, holding down the Command key and scrolling on the trackpad. The problem with this is that it is very easy to trigger accidentally - to the point where I was doing it multiple times a day. Even more irritating, there was no indication as to what the zoom level was or easy way to revert to normal view. If you trigger it accidentally, you just have to kinda zoom back out until you find a setting somewhat similar to the rest of your tabs. Fortunately, someone on the nbusers mailing list mentioned how to solve this problem, so I want to post it here in case anyone else gets as lost and frustrated as I was. Open the preferences page. On the Mac, you would go Netbeans Menu -> Preferences. Go to Keymaps. Search for “zoom”. Remove the bindings for “Zoom Text In” and “Zoom Text Out.” Double click on the Shortcut and hit backspace twice.

While this blog will still have my occasional musings about life in dot-com and software development, there’s a lot of other stuff I’d like to talk about that really doesn’t fit under that label. Carpentry? Home improvement? Relationships? I need a place to put a lot of that stuff. Well, me and my wife will be (re-)launching a new blog documenting our life. So if you’re interested in us at a more personal level, feel free to check out the new blog. www.robandsarah.org

This article and the accompanying discussion on Hacker News really got me to thinking tonight. I’m not going to say much about the post itself other than that I agree with Dan’s sentiments. I don’t know who in their right mind would address a guest at a professional conference using the term “sexy.” But it did get me to think a little bit more about professionalism, professional behavior and how it relates to software development. We as developers, and especially those of us in the Internet world, are used to a certain level of what would be traditionally considered non-professional behavior when it comes to the workplace. Most obviously, there’s the dress - T-shirts, jeans or shorts (depending on your climate) and sandals are common dress. Many companies’ offices are outfitted with lots of things you would not find in a traditional office - ping-pong tables, beer kegs, beanbag chairs. It’s all very collegiate. We tend to have very little patience for those who “don’t get it” - every developer has probably at one point labeled a user a PEBKAC. And then there’s the language - I think developers might be second only to sailors in finding creative ways to swear. Essentially, we get to be big kids. It’s a pretty sweet gig! I think a lot of this is because we, as developers, value one thing above all else: the ability to deliver. As I think about it, I can remember working with some brilliant people - and some of them had absolutely no social skills and no idea that some of their behaviors were not just unprofessional, but outright disgusting. If you can ship quality, it doesn’t matter if you wear a suit and tie every day or you wear a threadbare T-shirt and haven’t shaved since Nirvana first hit the radio. To us as fellow developers, what you produce is what matters above all else. As one comment said: The programming world is so used to breaking the norms, revolutionizing industries, and wearing T-shirts and sneakers to work that we forget, sometimes, that some aspects of “professionalism” actually do serve a purpose. While these things may be “okay” in our culture - the culture of dot-com, the culture of software developers - to outsiders, we are baffling, uncouth, at times rude and definitely unprofessional. Now, if you’re working in a startup, you’re probably around only a few other people who are like minded and are part of the culture and won’t think anything of strange behavior as long as you ship. My last job was with a startup that was 4 months old when I joined the team and was still very small. I remember hearing a story about someone in the company who, during a long night of coding in a small office, just got up, took his pants off, sat back down and started coding again. This may be kind of an extreme example, but this general kind of behavior is considered the norm for developers, especially in Internet startups. But, there comes a time when we have to drop - or at least tone down - the unprofessional behavior and actually start taking business seriously. I’m not exactly sure what that point is, but it’s probably about the time that people who are not part of “the culture” become involved. Marketing, sales, business development, management, accounting, and other more traditional business fields are not part of our culture and they don’t get our ways. Once these people become involved, and definitely once/if they outnumber the developers, we must begin to accept the fact that we have to modify our ways a little bit. The thing is, we criticize them as being “stiff,” “squares,” “boring,” “demanding,” “not getting it,” and the like. We begrudgingly work on tasks for them, the whole time complaining to our coworkers in our culture about what we have to do for marketing, or accounting or whatever and how they just don’t see the big picture. But we are unwilling to meet them even half way when it comes to working in a professional environment. I don’t know if they’re trying to understand us, but are we even trying to understand them? Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to raise the bar for myself a little bit when it comes to being professional. No more T-shirts and jeans or taking shoes off. I’ve tried to stick to “business casual” dress, although it’s tended to be a bit closer to the casual side (I still wear sneakers and my shirt is almost always untucked). But I’ve worn collared, button down shirts and khakis - something that would have been unthinkable a year ago. I’m actually even thinking about wearing a tie occasionally. I’ve been trying to tone down the language and start thinking respectfully about each task regardless of it’s interest factor. I guess what I’m trying to get to in my admittedly rambling diatribe is that professionalism starts with respect: respect for ourselves, respect for our craft, respect for our employers, respect for our coworkers whether they are developers or not, and respect for our peers. We need to begin to have more respect for what we do as a craft and profession, and more respect for the people we encounter every day. We should always strive to treat everyone we encounter with the respect they deserve at the very least as fellow human beings. That means not referring to users that break our software as idiots and not referring to women presenting at conferences as sexy.

Another small update to the Mac Oil Price Widget has been released. This fixes a small bug that resulted in the negative symbol continuing to be visible. Not really necessary because the widget itself says “Up” or “Down.” You can download it over on it’s page.

I’ve created a new repository on my GitHub account where I can commit some of the little scripts I’ve written for use on my server. The first one I’ve committed is gitcreate, a small script that automates the creation and bootstrapping of git repositories. I realized that, when I was creating a new repo on my server, I do the same things over and over. Create the repo, then add in some frameworks for whatever little thing I’m playing with at the time. Well, gitcreate can do all that for you. Create the repo and bootstrap in things like the most recent versions of CodeIgniter, jQuery, and Bootstrap. That way, when you clone the repo to start working, you’re already ready to start coding. Like most of my stuff, it’s licensed under the New BSD License.

A small update to the Mac Oil Price Widget has been released. This fixes a couple of bugs that would cause all prices to be displayed as positive and for the percentage of change to not be accurate. You can download it over on it’s page.

Because I’ve encountered this problem twice, I’m going to do a little write-up about it. As much for me as for the next person who encounters this problem. In a very un-Apple way, this process is very poorly documented and very un-intuitive from a user-developer standpoint. Everything that’s here, I’ve culled from Googling about aimlessly and finding on Stack Overflow. **Symptom: **You create a new app in Xcode with no changes and launch it. It launches just fine. You then go to the target summary settings and click “Enable Entitlements” and have an iCloud key/value store and or containers. Now you launch it and nothing happens. Nothing appears, but Xcode still thinks the app is running. **What’s Happening: **To understand what is happening, you have to go have a look in the Console application (note, the actual system Console.app, not the debug console in Xcode). Open that up and select “All Messages”. Look for something that looks like this: 1/28/12 7:49:03.945 PM taskgated: killed <your app ID>[pid 43838] because its use of the com.apple.developer.ubiquity-container-identifiers entitlement is not allowed What’s happening is that taskgated is killing your app because it’s not properly signed to use iCloud. And for some reason that is not entirely clear to me, the app being killed is not at all reported back to Xcode - Xcode thinks the app is running. So you just sit there waiting for something to happen with no clue that this sinister lurking background process has killed your app. How to fix it: There are two ways you can go from here to fix this. The first and easiest, if you are just turning on entitlements and aren’t intending to use iCloud, you can just remove the iCloud Key/Value Store and iCloud containers from the target summary. After doing this, it should work. But, if you are making an iCloud-enabled app, there’s a long list of things you need to do. First, understand that you need to be a paid member of Apple Developer Program. Log into ADC. Go to the Mac Dev Center, and the Developer Certificate Utility. Create an App ID by going to App IDs and clicking the Create App ID button in the upper right. Enter the name of your app and the bundle identifier. It usually looks something like “com.company.app”. Click Continue. Your app ID should be entered. Click the App ID you just entered, then click “Enable for iCloud.” Click save. Next, go to Certificates. If you haven’t created any certificates yet, click “Create Certificate” in the upper right and follow the directions. Note, you need both a development and an application certificate. Next, go to Systems. Be sure you’ve added your Mac (and, for good measure, any others you’ll use for development). Finally, go to Profiles. 1. Click Create Profile in the upper right. 2. Select "Development Provisioning Profile" 3. Give it a name. 4. Select the app you created in step 3. 5. Select the certificate you want to use. 6. Select the systems you want to use (I did all). 7. Click "Generate" It may take a few seconds, then it will give you a download. 8. Open the downloaded profile. It will open in the "profiles" preference pane (which doesn't seem to appear until you try to install a profile). Click install. Now, in Xcode: 1. Go to Window > Organizer. 2. Select "Devices" on the top, and "Provisioning Profiles" on the left. 3. At the bottom, select "Automatic Device Provisioning" at the bottom, and click "Refresh". If you've never done this before, you'll need to log in with your ADC username and password. 4. Give it a second, it should pull in your profiles. 5. Go to your project, select your app target and select "Build Settings." Scroll down to "Code Signing." You may need to go to "All" from "Basic" in the predicate selector. 6. Under Code Signing Identity, select the dev profile you just created. Note: don't use the wildcard one - it doesn't seem to work. Whew. Now, if everything went as planned (and you sacrificed a goat to Tim Cook and Tim found your sacrifice pleasing) you should be able to launch your app with no errors. But help! I got a weird failure on build! If you get a failure on build that looks like this: Command /usr/bin/codesign failed with exit code 1 Then it is possible that your developer certificate is set to “Always Trust” in Keychain. It needs to be set to “System defaults” for reasons that escape me entirely. Note, this may not be entirely accurate and may even be cargo-cultish. But I’ve encountered this “issue” twice now (once in December, and once now) so I decided to write down my steps so that, in a few months when this befuddles me again, I’ll know where to look for the answer.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget what an amazing modern world we live in. Even if I think back just 10 years ago, it blows my mind how much has changed. Just in technology, even. In 2002: Nokia was the largest cellphone manufacturer. Their top selling model that year was the Nokia 6100. I actually had one of these as a loaner phone once. At the time I was carrying this more modest model - a Qualcomm QCP-2700, complete with green screen. Tablets as we know them today didn’t exist. Oh sure there were primitive early tablets - Palm Pilots and the Newton come to mind. But they had as much in common with today’s tablets as a horse does with a Ferrari. HP was the leading computer manufacturer that year - following their purchase of Compaq. The same HP that almost sold it’s computer division late last year. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist, and the best site on the web for tech news was still Slashdot. Wikipedia had just opened the year before and was still seriously lacking content. Mac OS X 10.1 was released that year, and I spent all summer lusting over the Titanium Powerbook G4 with it’s PowerPC processor running at a blazing 800 megahertz and a huge 40gb drive. If you wanted to read a book, you bought a paper book. e-Book readers, while the existed, were clunky and difficult to use, and titles were mostly restricted to technical publications. Nothing like the Kindle, Nook, iPad and other readers. Using the Internet on a mobile device, if it was available at all, was extremely limited. Remember WAP? I remember being amazed in college that I could use my phone to check the scores of other games while I was at an Auburn game. Wanted to find your way around? You had a map or directions. GPSs as we know them today didn’t exist, and certainly weren’t integrated into phones. Contrast that to today. The phone in my pocket is more powerful, has more storage, than that laptop I spent a whole summer lusting over, and can be used to surf the web just as well as any computer. The tablet I carry with me has access to a whole library of books, can connect wirelessly to the Internet almost anywhere, and can be held with as single hand. If I ever get lost, I can pull up a map on my phone that pinpoints my location to within a few yards of my area, and can give me turn by turn voice directions to get where I’m going. Facebook and Twitter connect millions of people together. I can even connect to the Internet on my laptop _in an airplane at 35,000 feet! _Downstairs, I have a 60” widescreen TV that’s 1.5” thick and weighs so little that I could mount it on the wall. Every time I hear people complaining about how things suck, I’m reminded of this video. Because everything really is amazing right now. We are living in an amazing futuristic world full of fascinating advancements that are are happening all the time. And what is most amazing of all is how quickly we got here. The world of tech between now and 10 years ago are so different. What will the world of 10 years from now be like?

After a far longer wait than was intended, the Mac Oil Price Widget version 2.0 has been released. It was completely rewritten – like, I didn’t even look at the old code – and uses Bloomberg Energy as it’s information source. The display was also simplified – I really didn’t care about the chart in the old version, so the new version prominently displays the price and how much it’s changed. Download Here!

About ten years ago (summer of 2002), while I was working in Yellowstone National Park, I took a lot of time that summer for personal reflection. The the rocks beside the Snake River and the roof of the cabin where I lived became close companions of mine. I took a lot of time to examine where my life was at that time, and there were a lot of things that I didn’t like. Towards the end of the summer, based on my reflections, I started writing a short series of notes to myself. I titled these “Personal Initiatives” and set out what I wanted to change and how I was going to go about doing it. There were probably 50 or so entries. Some of these were fairly arcane and maybe even silly. Among them: Get rid of my acne by washing my face twice a day. Wear contacts any time I’m not at home. Take better care of my teeth. Get in better shape. Pursue financial independence and keep a budget. Get better grades and get at least a 3.0 from that point out. After I returned to Auburn that fall, I looked over my Personal Initiatives from time to time. And it occurs to me what a good motivation this was for me. As evidenced, my near term goals in many of my initiatives I achieved within the next 3 years. I never earned less than a 3.0 after that fall. I was financially independent in 2004. I’m in better shape now than I was. Not only that, but my plans gave me goals. Even the arcane ones (“wash your face every day”) gave me little things that I could do to feel like I had accomplished something every day. Not every goal had to be in outer space - I could accomplish 5 things just by walking out the door each morning. Of course, some of them I completely blew too. There were a lot of entries about future planning that involved me becoming a pilot. Some other entries concern wanting to have a family (not there just yet…). But overall, I would say my success rate for my personal initiatives in 2002 to today is probably close to 75%. The reason I’m thinking about this is that I kind of feel a bit like did in the summer of 2002. Lost. Listless. Unsure of what I want in my life but unhappy with where I am. And without a plan. Every day I get up and go to the same job and do the same things I’ve done for the last five years. Then I go home and do the same thing each night. The cycle usually never varies. Now, to be sure, my life is much better than it was in 2002. I’m married, a homeowner, active in my community. But that seem creeping, nagging unhappiness is still there. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of taking an entire summer off to work and reflect on my life. But I’m seriously thinking that it might be time to write down some more personal initiatives. Having passed 30 now, I can’t help but feel that I’ve entered a new stage of my life and, if I don’t want to spend this entire decade listless and unhappy, that I have to begin to plan some things out and set some goals for myself. Yes. I think it’s time for some more Personal Initiatives.

Just a little announcement about a maintenance release to dystill. 0.2.1 has been released, which brings with it a couple of bugfixes for issues I ran into recently. First, it will now optionally try to create new maildirs when they don’t exist (this is configurable in the config file). There’s also some more error checking to hopefully prevent crazy behavior. As always, the source is on github.

It’s funny. Even after nearly 10 years with the language, there are still little gotchas that sometimes get me. I ran across one today. Say you have two objects, and the look like this: <?php class ObjA { public static function test() { global $test; var_dump($test); } } class ObjB { public static function test() { $test = 1; ObjA::test(); } } ObjB::test(); ?> It doesn’t work. You get NULL. Say I were to do something like this: <?php class ObjB { public static function test() { $test = 1; global $test; var_dump($test); } } ObjB::test(); ?> You also get NULL. And this: <?php function a() { $test = 1; b(); } function b() { global $test; var_dump($test); } a(); ?> Also fails. The reason is that the global scope on PHP is just that: global. Any time you’re in a function or method, you’re in a local scope and all local scopes are independent of each other. So you can’t global in something from one local scope to another. Variables are either global or local. That much I get and makes sense (and is in the documentation). What threw me for a loop was that PHP won’t copy something into the global scope from a local scope that is already defined **and will happily overwrite your local scope with a null value from the global scope if one doesn’t exist in the global scope, **in the process of creating the variable in the global scope. If you want a variable in the local scope to be global, you have to declare it as global before you write a value to it. Or, to put it another way: <?php class ObjA { public static function test() { global $test; var_dump($test); } } class ObjB { public static function test() { global $test; $test = 1; ObjA::test(); } } ObjB::test(); ?> Works beautifully.

A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try exploring the Mac App Store ecosystem as a developer. I’ve been writing little Objective-C apps for myself for awhile, and I decided I wanted to see what it was like from the other side. So I wrote this little app called Airplane Setting. It was a stupid simple little app that made it easy to turn off your radios with a single action. I wrote the app and paid my $99 admission fee. And after a month of back and fourth with Apple and a couple of rejections for what I consider to be dubious reasons as best (especially seeing as how I could point out existing apps in the store that broke the “rule” they said my app was breaking, but whatever, their store, their rules…), my little App was finally approved for sale. It did moderately well, passing 1,000 downloads with virtually no advertising from me. I had big dreams for this little app. Plugins, global hotkey support, localization, Applescript support, and more potential functionality. But all that was dashed by “Entitlements” and Apple’s requirement that all apps must be sandboxed. Look, in theory, the idea of sandboxing an app is not bad. The problem here is Apple’s all-or-nothing approach to sandboxing. The selection of entitlements are just so limited as to be nearly useless for anyone creating a unique, new or complex app - especially one that requires hardware access. Your choice is either to sandbox your app, choosing from the available selection of entitlements, or not sandbox it and not be in the Mac App Store at all starting in March. There’s no reason to only provide such a limited subset of functionality that a developer must choose from. Would it not be better to provide us a wider set of entitlements and allow us to justify our reasons for needing them when we submit our app? The reason Apple gives for requiring sandboxing is to prevent “rogue apps” from destabilizing the system. But when you consider that the App Store itself is curated, this requirement makes even less sense. If Apple is curating the store, how does a “rogue app” end up in the App Store? I’m a huge Apple fangirl. I have almost all Apple hardware in my house, from my iMac to my Macbook Pros, to my iPad and iPhone and my wife’s iPod Touch. I had AppleTVs before they were cool (and there’s one on every one of my TVs now). I love Apple. But as an developer … I [expletive] hate Apple for this “innovation” that crippled my once-promising little app. So, at this point, my options are: Leave Airplane Setting in the App Store. Doing so will mean no further updates so I’ll likely cease development. Remove Airplane Setting from the App Store and start distributing it exclusively from the website. My original intent with Airplane Setting was to explore what it was like to be an App Store developer. I guess … now I know what it’s like to be an App Store developer, and living in constant fear of Apple as a sword of damocles hanging over your head.