At OSCon 2006
I’m going to be at OSCon in Portland this year. I’ll be staying at the Doubletree, the main convention hotel. I’ve never attended OSCon before and I’ve only been in Portland twice so this should be fun. I’m going to propose a couple of BOF’s, one will be “Open Source in healthcare”. I’m not sure what the other one will be quite yet. I’ve got a couple of ideas.
Drop me a comment if you are going and want to hook up for a craft beer or two.
Windows Live Local – still no good
One of my first tests of any only mapping system is to see how it tells me to get to somewhere I know. I usually use my work place. It’s a pretty big location, well known in the Seattle area, and we’ve been in our current location for a while. So it’s a big target.
I saw the update to Windows Live Local and decided to give it a try. Check out the results.
First, there are two results given for the search term “Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center”. Neither one is correct, the “100 Fairview ave” address is less wrong, the actual address is 1100 Fairview Ave N, but it still won’t get you here since Fairview ave branches and heads east when you are going north on it to the lake. The first hit is no where NEAR the actual location. Heck, it’s not even near the OLD location on First Hill. When you open up the birds-eye view, you can see that the location is wrong.
Even more interesting is what I get when I type in “1100 Fairview Ave N Seattle, WA” in the search box.
I know what’s happening and it’s a usability issue. The top search box is for “Business or category” the bottom is for addresses. Now, how do you write an address on an envelope? Do you write the stree address above the city, state, zip? Or do you write the entire address all on one line. Current formatting norms are an important issue to consider when you are designing forms.
For the record, the real FHCRC is here.
Installing a game is hard
I’ve been spending some quality time with our new family laptop. It’s been a while, 6 years to be exact, since we’ve had a non-Apple hardware refresh at the ole’ homestead. The new laptop has a smokin’ processor, compared to the Athlon-850 I had before, and a nice mobile 3d graphics card. So I decide to buy a new game to see what games look like on a real computer. I start to install this game, it only cost $15. Get this. First it installed all the files, but it wouldn’t let me launch the game until I signed into Steam. I remembered I had set up a Steam account a long time ago, but I didn’t remember the username or password.
So to retrieve it, I had to go find my Half-Life CD and enter the key so it would send me the username, then I could use the user name to reset the password. Luckily the email address I used to register was one that’s still active.
Then I signed it and it STILL wouldn’t let me play the game, I had to activate the game first using the CD key on the new game. THEN it had to “decrypt the game contents”. So I think I can play the game now. I’m not sure what else they could possibly want from me.
Although it did remind me why I bought a game console in the first place.
Sahil mis-diagnoses one : Bad programmer diseases
Sahil Malik : Bad programmer diseases: “”
Sahil Malik lists some common programmer afflictions, but he mis-diagnoses one: The Fr-Agilist
This actually is a symptom of a larger disease, My-way-or-the-highway-oma. This developer clings tightly to whatever tools, technologies, methodologies, and terminologies they pick. Whatever you are doing, unless it’s EXACTLY what they are going, is WRONG. Whether it’s TDD, Waterfall, Ruby On Rails, Java, or even C# instead of VB.NET. This person ALWAYS picks one thing and sticks with it. For really horrendous cases, they will frequently change their mind. Usually after they have convinced others to change. As designated by the “oma” suffix, these folks are a tumor, a cancer, on your team if you have one.
This disease isn’t limited to the technology field. You’ll often find these people at your local super-church. You know, the one with the wall-sized plasma TV in their church and with the young, BMW driving “pastor skippy”.
Changing webhosts
I’m switching from Webhost4life to Site5. I’ve never been real happy with the performance of PHP on their Windows servers. Moving from WordPress to Subtext or CS doesn’t really work because I’d have to write some kind of importer. Besides, I do plenty of .NET development at work.
Enabling autorun for a USB flash drive.
I'm a big fan of USB flash drives.. I first heard about the U3 flash drives some time ago, seems like it was pre-baby so at least last fall. I liked the idea of being able to sync desktop settings to my usb drive and have them applied when I plug into another system. I'm considering picking up one of the U3 compatible drives, but in the meantime I thought I'd see if I could come up with a poor mans solution.
The heart of the U3 niftyness is the autostarting. You plug in the USB drive, programs launch, settings are changed, all without you doing anything. Autorun has been around for years, since Windows 95 at least. To make your CD automatically start an application when you insert it, you create a file called autorun.inf and place it in the root of the CD rom. Say you want a file called foo.exe to autorun, your autorun.inf file would look like this.
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[autorun]
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open=foo.exe
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icon=foo.exe
But with XP came something called Autoplay. Autoplay scans the media and pops up it's little nag window asking you what you want to do with your new found media. Without hacking the registry, you can't change this behavior. Some newer USB drives support autorun insertion. Out of the 5 drives I have, none of them supported it. All of them caused XP to display the Autoplay dialog. BUT you can add your own action to the Autoplay dialog box.
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[autorun]
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action= Run Foo
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icon=foo.exe
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open=foo.exe
Which then displays in the Autoplay dialog box.
For my main 512MB flash drive, I use the Pstart menu. This is a lightweight freeware menu program. It stays resident in your tray and allows you access to the menu by either right-clicking on it or opening up the full interface.
So with one click after inserting my flash drive, I have this nice menu to launch my portable applications from.
I'll investigate some of the syncing and automatic workspace configuration options in a later post. Right now I'm looking at Migo. None of the applications on my flash drive cost me a dime. Portableapps.com has a great listing of some of the more popular portible applications, as well as a couple of portable applications suites you can download and put on your flash drive.
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- Herding Code 132: Phil Haack, Keith Dahlby and Paul Betts on Git for Windows developers 1/20/2012
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- Herding Code 130: Dave Weaver on Loggr – a realtime analytics service built with MVC, MongoDB and SignalR 1/2/2012
- Herding Code 129: Rob Reynolds on Chocolatey and the Chuck Norris Frameworks 12/13/2011
- Herding Code 128: Corey Haines on Global Day of Coderetreat (December 3) 11/26/2011