Moving blog entries

It's come to that time. I'm ready to switch blog engines. This is the last post on Movable Type, and now it is off to WordPress...

If you get this via a feed, please come to the site at http://www.rhonabwy.com/wp/ and switch up your subscription. I'll leave this active for a few days, but ultimately I'll clip it out. The front page of this blog, in fact, is already set to redirect.

Switching blog engines

It's come to that time. I'm ready to switch blog engines. This is the last post on Movable Type, and now it is off to WordPress...

If you get this via a feed, please come to the site at http://www.rhonabwy.com/wp/ and switch up your subscription. I'll leave this active for a few days, but ultimately I'll clip it out. The front page of this blog, in fact, is already set to redirect.

grumpy

It was a beautiful day outside today, and I'm getting really freakin' grumpy tonight. First I spent 30 minutes driving around Capitol Hill, looking for a place to park so that Karen and I could get a bite and chat for the 30 minutes or so until her class started. I wasn't willing to pay $7 for what would be 30 minutes of parking. I ended up just driving around looking for someplace to land while Karen just got nervous about the traffic. Somehow, my frustration just added to a negative cycle that was starting to develop...

Then tonight, ZoomInfo sends me a confirmation email wanting to verify who I am, but when I follow it they're asking me for either a credit card or a verification email at netscape.com - all because the data they have referencing me was from an article on netscape.com that listed me as an author. Then when I replied to the verification email, it bounced. Come on guys - that's just the freakin' basics. Get it together. Anything else I might say here will get personally derrogatory very quickly, so I'll leave it at that.

Oh yeah - and it was trash night. I hate trash night.

And the wireless crapped out halfway during my time at Uptown Espresso (waiting for Karen's class - I bagged this shitty parking in Capitol Hill and went down to Belltown). That was annoying too.

Blah.

Jerks.

Things that make you go "huh"

Well, it seems that my random "Shut up about the damn squares" paid off. That superbowl pool (first one I ever entered) seems to have made me a few dollars. I thought at first that they were all pulling my leg, but lo and behold - I appear to have nailed the final score. Got half the pool.

Guess I'll have a nice lunch today.

Django and darwinports

I was pounding away at the basics of Django tonight, and got myself terribly confused when I ran into a new error when attempting to set up the basic django databases (using django-admin.py init). It had worked previously, but tonight I received the error:


Error: The database couldn't be initialized.
You can only execute one statement at a time.


WTF? I thought at first that maybe it was because I was using the raw development branch of Django. After bothering the folks on the irc channel #django, that led me to trying out the code in the python interpreter. It just didn't make sense. After a few minutes, I resorted back to the Django release (0.91) and ran with that - still got the error.

Now my hackles were up. I started digging around in my prerequisites, and eventually figured out that one of the times that I had updated bits from DarwinPorts, I updated sqlite3 to 3.3.3. I still had version 3.2.7 around, so I dropped back to it. Viola! Everything worked!

After further digging, I realized that DarwinPorts doesn't make it easy to install older versions of sqlite3... so I took a look at the other component - py-sqlite. It turns out that the port is just slightly outdated - it's still referencing the 2.0.x branch, and they're up to 2.1.3 now. After a little more "sudo port ..." invocations, I had sqlite 3.3.3 back in place, and py-sqlite 2.1.3 and everything was working great.

I fiddled for a bit making a new Portfile for py-sqlite, but something in the testing and prefix setup of the whole thing knocked me sideways. I fired off what I thought should be about right for the updated Portfile to the maintainer and asked for help - hopefully I hear something in the next few days. In the meantime, I'll run from source that I manually installed - although I'd prefer to stick with the DarwinPorts setup. I probably just borked something making the new Portfile, or setting up to test it. I am NOT a port wizard, that's for sure.

Hopefully if some other poor soul runs across this problem (until we get the Portfile updated) maybe Google will help provide an answer.

The Sun! (and other sunday notions)

Woke up this morning to a sunny day. That's damned impressed compared to what we've been having here in Seattle for the past month. I had become used to significantly more "sun breaks" during the cloudy times than we received over the past 6 weeks - so the sun is a really welcome respite.

And since it's sunny, and the windstorm from yesterday died down in the evening, things are reasonably dry. Not my basement, of course, but the ground outside is at least not a mud swamp under grass waiting to suck you in to your ankles. Actually, the basement isn't too bad - just some leftover light puddling in the low spots. I'm now a firm believer in detailed finish work on basement floors to make sure they're level... or at least bevelled to a floor drain.

We took quick advantage of the dry and mowed the lawn - well, the backyard and the verge. Step in any of the planting bed areas and your feet will sink in an inch or two, and if Karen sees it... wow. You'll get this extensive lecture about compacted soil and effectiveness of flower and bulb growth. I am now staying off any flower bed areas - even to the extent of carrying the mower around the long way. The back yard wasn't fun, but it wasn't too bad for all that. If it had been summer hours (long days, more sun), it would have been significantly more nightmareish.

And if you didn't know, today is no hereby declared "Seattle's Vacation Superbowl Day". Since the seahawks are going to the Superbowl (a never-before-happenin' sort of thing), pretty much the entire darn city except the sports bars are closing up and heading to home (or their friend's home) to watch the game. I think I'm one of the few who won't be watching it this year - I expect I'll hear what happens.

I even have some dollars in a pool at work. God knows why - mostly because I was sick of hearing Gabe blabber about "almost full board". I think I just paid the money to shut him up.

I think that's it (for now) from sunny Seattle!

windstorm

The wind has been howlin'!

We've been having 30MPH winds, gusting up to 75MPH (!) in some places. Its causing enough havoc around the house that I'm sure it is going to be a delight all over Seattle. Oversaturated ground water, higher than normal tide - and now a lovely windstorm. So far we've picked up the bird feeder (chain broke) and chased two pots back from our front verge (they had been on the porch). Every window on our house is rain spattered, and it seems like a little vortex is forming on the south side of the house, where our front porch is. I'm really glad we're not at a hill peak or anything - it'd really be rough then. As it is, we're snuggled down behind other buildings without too much significant view or such.

The windstorm even made it into my dreams this morning - the wind sounds vaguely like heavy surf in the distance, so I was dreaming about heavier than normal surf surging over the house and washing things away on the inland side. Very odd. I think I'm glad I'm awake now.

Twisted

I think something maybe snapped inside my head. Somewhere deep down, a "cthunk" or something. Nothing terribly obvious to anyone outside... because I was reading some documentation on Twisted, and it suddenly all made perfect sense.

I'm not sure why these things happen this way, but for some reason it just clicked and I was thinking "Yeah... so why did I think this was difficult earlier?" Odd how that happens.

Ubuntu

I've been doing more with VMWare lately, and in the midst of generating (and breaking) various Microsoft win32 images, I snagged a copy of the Ubuntu image and started playing with it. The whole VMWare Player free application has made it really accessible, and I can't wait to see a VMWare application running on the intel Macs...

While I think desktop linux still has a way to go, I've got to admit that Ubuntu's distro is about the best I've seen so far. I fiddled around with the GUI update manager code, and felt equally comfortable diving into the command-line world to do apt-get's and get my own miscellaneous crap installed.

One of the fun tools that I've been playing with is Stani's Python Editor. I know I'm supposed to be able to make it all work on MacOS X - but I never did. There was a quick install package under Ubuntu, so I've got it all running on that image now. Very neat - I think I could easily loose a good few days to just exploring the IDE setup that he put together.

I'm with Wolf...

Ah, good lord Microsoft! - I'm with Wolf here - WTF?! Stop hurting the UI. You can do better than this. Shoot - Wolf's right on the money, you're making Metal look good. And THAT is hard!

Amazing profiling and tracing tool... Shark

Its been a while, but I still remember scanning the output of strace (and later ktrace) from unix machines, looking for that hint of what went "boom" or was causing significant unhappiness with the machines. So when I read the recent article from Apple Optimizing your Application with System Trace in Shark 4, I was like "What? They do that in Shark too?!"

Yep.

If you're a unix hacker, MacOS is the system to get. The development tools are good, but frankly the most amazing development benefits are in the CHUD tools - there's stuff that is thousands of dollars worth of software in there, and they're just handing it to you. I'd even bet that if you developed for Linux, you'd find Shark a hell of a benefit to you.

Most of what I knew about Shark I really picked up at the 2004 WWDC, where they had neverending repeats of the "how to use Shark" session scattered about in other sessions. I mean, shoot - you could even profile and use Shark to optimize your Java code! Let alone the wonderful assembly language reference that seemed to be tucked away under the covers in there (yeah, I thought that was cool - so shoot me).

I know a lot of people say that Shark is the best kept secret of the Apple development tools world. Boy, I think that's going to change. (at least I'm doing my part...)

Rum

Back over Thanksgiving (?? was it that far back), Nathan brought over some extra-fine rum for sipping before/while we made dinner and chatted. I've had it happily lurking on the side table since then - it's a neat looking bottle, plus you never know when you might like a little...

So tonight I popped the cork and poured a couple of fingers. Man, that is good stuff. This is NOT the rum for wildly mixing with coke. I have that rum under the sink - dark and raw carribean stuff. This one is smooth and with a lovely aftertaste (well, if you like rum) - as well as fire running down into the belly.

mmmmm.

cleaning the basement

This whole water thing is at least netting us something - a very clean basement floor. The rainstorms that ran through here over the past few days just added to the seepage and wetness in the basement. In fact, I spent about 30 minutes sweeping the puddles towards the floor drain to help the place out. Good lord, what a pain. In the meantime though, I suppose it is only reasonable to admire the nice clean floor that we have...

And while I'm moaning about sweeping some puddled in the basement, Byron is about to engage on a whole new freakish aspect of outsourcing. I'm not so sure I'd be as welcoming about this process as he is - there's a lot of institutional bagage that you carry along with a whole new load of bizarre stress. But then I'm often not good at defining a hard limit for something like that. For those that can - it can be a sweet way to move around.

Of course you know Byron - I'll help you find a gig in (wet) Seattle any time... Just to keep the options open. :-)

a couple of stouts

Tonight? Tonight was a good night.

We had a decent turnout at the XCoders meeting (16 folks) for an overview of Perl. And that was one very thorough overview of perl! There is stuff he covered in that preview that I hadn't known... dating back to Perl 4!

But probably more important to me was the beer afterward. A couple of stouts at Tangletown (an Elysian brewery outpost at 55th in Greenlake) and a whole ton of bullshitting and general tech talk among folks with a common interest. It was a really good night.

Selenium

Well darn.

I took a stab at developing some internal tests using Selenium to see if that might be a reasonable fit going forward. I was impressed with the cross browser functionality and focus, which would make a number of things a LOT easier.

Unfortunately what I learned is that if your web application takes over the window (i.e. reaches into the DOM and makes SURE that it's the dominant window and not running inside a frame), the selenium isn't a good choice. At least in FIT mode. I haven't yet tried to run it in driven mode - that might resolve the issue, but I'm not counting on it.

We've been doing a fair bit of using PHP to drive IE (similiar to Pamie or Watir), and that's been working pretty darn well. The only problem is that its specific to IE on the windows environment. And it would be really nice to get Firefox testing in there too...

Most interesting with Pamie is that there's a 2.0 beta release which came out just a little while ago (two weeks as of this writing). Its a pretty big change to the whole pamie setup (so a lot of scripts written with 1.0 will need to be slightly modified), but it is a LOT cleaner. There's still an assumption that you'll know what to do with the callable COM objects if you're fiddling around in the interactive mode, or if you want to invoke something odd and strange inside the DOM (clicking on images, etc). Still, its a great improvement - and it runs very smoothly.