21st Century Digital Boy

I was playing with Aptana over the weekend, and it’s really neat: except I currently don’t own a computer with enough horsepower to make it work worth a damn.

One thing I think is neat about IDEs and Eclipse, is their whole “internal HTTP server” thing. My users are, at times, silly, and making them maintain an Apache instance is problematic. I really wish I had a way to view content, wherever it may be, without making them (and me!) have to wrangle apache.

So here’s what I did.
Continue reading ‘A simple app server’

So I’m currently connected to a v100 over a serial line to a keyspan USB adapter thingee, and a terminal running `screen /dev/tty.usbserial 9600`. This works swell for talking to Sun boxes, right up until I need to send Stop-A.

Sending ‘break’ (cmd-.) doesn’t work, and I can’t make any of the screen break thingees do much of anything.

Halp?

Update. Apparently the answer is one of:
1. Purchase ZTerm, which is not a Universal Binary and seems like it never will be, or
2. Find a Windows machine that has a proper break key

Daniel Jalkut (by way of Brent Simmons) is right:

… I’ll invetiably start talking about the first-launch experience and how it relates to sales. I call it the “run away screaming” factor.

When building the automated signup thingee for our Big New Product, the original spec handed to me had, oh, 15 steps; and each laden with jargon and inane decisions.

Presently it’s 5, and I’m trying really hard to eliminate a step.

In our case, it’s an online store. Removing steps was really easy, eg:

• Does it make any sense to even ask users for an Excel spreadsheet of their products at signup?
• Will users want to buy a domain name right then and there?
• Do users care about email options? (put another way, is it safe to assume users have email?)

The answers, FWIW, are “not in the least”, “probably not”, and “no (or yes)”. So right there, 3 steps were removed.

(Currently every time I see an installer package, I consider running away screaming, as it conjures up memories of Windows “setup wizards” and 15 pages of “blah blah blah next”.)

I checked my sshdfilter SSHD table the other day on 2 boxes: one at our data center, and another on our office DSL, each machine having gone online within a few hours of each other.

The latter had something like 4x as many entries as the former. Which leads me to my question: are the Bad Guys specifically trolling known DSL (and ostensibly cable) IP blocks, assuming more/easier pickings? The logs also show the usual massive run of web attacks, although I don’t have stats for comparison.

Is this normal?

We recently changed HR/benefits companies, from a nationally-known brand to a local/regional one. This is mostly uninteresting, except if they dick us over (something that happened roughly every 8 seconds with the old one) the people responsible are just down the street, instead of elsewhere in the great wide world.

Anyway, one of the supposedly awesome things about this new company is that everything - EVERYTHING! - is stored in the cloud. Need to make any changes to anything WRT your HR “file”? Don’t pick up that phone - log in! Use the Web, it’s fantastic! We won’t even get a paystub - it’ll be downloadable online!

So today I tried just that. Here are the first 2 impressions the service made:

1. MSIE is the only supported browser. Gecko (all flavors) and WebKit (all flavors) are not supported.
2. The “Your browser is not supported” page it redirects you to is 404.

I can’t go any farther, even with a copy of Parallels handy, because my account isn’t set up yet (but I am technically required to be filing my time in the online timesheet app).

I really can’t understand building an app that won’t work at all in anything but IE, marketshare be damned: Firefox is no longer a bit player on the Web. Favoring IE, fine; but IE only? Is that even remotely sensible?

If their “web site” is a means to deliver binary artifacts over port 443, then we will be having words. I fear the binary artifact future; quite the silly season it will be, and we should be working hard to smash it to pieces.

Amazon SimpleDB, CouchDB … is this the sign that SQL is for suckers?

TUAW has a post, “Remove iTunes DRM easily and quickly with iMovie HD“, which talks about exactly that: the old iMovie/iTunes DRM “loophole”.

But the inexplicably, it goes on to say:

This makes you question why DRM is there in the first place.

It … does? 3 words, TUAW: Cory. Motherfucking. Doctorow. You can positively hear him jumping up and down saying “ARE YOU SHITTING ME?”. He has from time to time posted the occasional remark on the topic, in the general direction of Cupertino …

Maybe my dad’s not hip to the fantastic world of DRM, but anyone hip enough to know they need to break the DRM has already questioned why it’s there in the first place. UH DUH?

Critics: Toned down ‘Manhunt 2′ still too violent

Child advocates are urging parents not to buy “Manhunt 2,” a video game whose characters kill and torture using implements ranging from glass and shovels to a fuse box and a toilet.

I like your ideas, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Made for the Nintendo Wii,

So instead of hitting triangle-star-r1 in a Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs/Mountain Dew twitch fest, you actually beat fuckers to death with a shovel. I love you.

“There has been a reduction in the visual detail in some of the ‘execution kills,’ but in others they retain their original visceral and casually sadistic nature.”

“In my opinion, it’s the most senselessly violent and offensive thing I’ve ever watched,” said James Steyer,

In the meantime, let’s have a national debate about acceptable levels of casual sadism.

Steyer, who has not seen the version of the game being released this week, was talking about an unrated version that has been circulating free on the Internet since August.

Dude, wait, what? Why don’t I already own this? Anon fails.

That version contains more violence and sexually explicit content than the one being released commercially, including a scene where a man’s testicles are mutilated with a pliers.

Did I already make a torture joke? Shit. What’s Google have to say?

Results 1 - 10 of about 41,500 for testicles pliers .

Sounds about right.

“It’s disgusting,” Steyer said. “It’s so violent, it struck me personally as pornographic violence.”

Best kind, AMIRITE?

Similarly, the pliers-and-genitalia scene isn’t in the official version, but players may use pliers to torture.

Of course they can. (Results 1 - 10 of about 120,000 for pliers torture.)

Basically, this is the greatest game ever. I’m running out after work and getting this.

This is how Pinstripe (and several other themes) look on Mac OS X:

Pay close attention to the point where the window (as in “thing managed by Mac OS X”), specifically the title bar/window chrome, becomes the application (as in “thing managed by the application, specifically Firefox”).

Now this is how other themes look on Mac OS X:

Note the small line.

What the hell, man.

I’ve been fucking with userChrome.css and the theme for an hour, and I can’t make that line go away. From whence does it come? It’s not in the images, as near as I can tell.

Update: It seems the source of the line is browser.xml in the theme. I don’t really see much in the way of css differences, but a Mac-friendly theme has a far more complete browser.xml than “white-liners”.

Lately I’ve been in a mode wherein I dabble with various technologies. One of them I’ve been using more heavily is Komodo IDE, which I like a lot, but also, makes me fuckin’ mental.

It is not perfect, though, which makes me insane, because it seems like often the most trivial things inhibit perfection. To wit:

• it lacks the ability to use PHP as a shell for any reason, esp. my custom compiled-with-readline PHP, which is more than adequate for simple tests and so on. But I can’t tell it to open a shell.
• For that matter, I can’t open /bin/bash either, which is odd since 2/3 of the platforms it runs on have that very program.

Its documentation seems to have been written for an audience that is entirely familiar with the product, too; often I’m sitting, bewildered, wondering what the hell the docs are talking about and trying to figure out why nothing in my macro works.  Enough forum and web searches and I discover I’m barking up the wrong tree, led astray by unclear docs. Yay?

Don’t get me wrong, I like Komodo a LOT: if you’re going to go cross-platform IDE, which means “slow, non-native, weird” I’d rather have Mozilla than Java, and it’s written in and around languages that interest me (esp. JavaScript). But sometimes products miss features in such a was as to make me insane.