Pastie << self

The Right Attitude

Wil Shipley talking about how the iPad iBooks app design is a copy of Delicious Library:

Although Delicious Library was the first to do it, we didn't try to copyright the idea of wooden shelves, or of showing books photo-realistically...

Not that you can copyright ideas in the first place. :-) But I like the overall attitude he goes on to reveal in what he says a bit later:

As a creator, part of what I seek is recognition, immortality. I don't work for Apple, or Google (I've been offered jobs & buyouts) because I want the fame myself. It's my shot at immortality. My designs are my children. So it stinks when I feel like Steve might get the fame for my innovation. I lose my children, as it were.

But your children aren't really yours. They have lives of their own. So when your designs do change the world, you have to accept it. You have to say, 'Ok, this was such a good idea, other people took it and ran with it. I win.

Full article at the Washington Post

Oniguruma on OS X Snow Leopard

Easy.


port install oniguruma5
sudo gem install oniguruma -- --with-opt-dir=/opt/local


Password retrieval should require e-mail address alone

Never make me give you two pieces of information to retrieve my password unless I'm guaranteed to know both of them (like SSN, birthdate, etc). What if I've forgotten my username?

Seen at: Project Euler

Western Digital, OS X, S.M.A.R.T, and Load Count

Not sure how helpful this will be for anyone, but I just learned way more than I wanted to know about how f#$%ed up hard drives can be. I just upgraded my 15" MBP with a brand new Western Digital 500gig Scorpio Blue drive and installed Snow Leopard. Previously my Leopard install had 9x% filled my previous 320gig drive and I'm sure it was fragmented to pieces. It was slow.

Now it's wonderful and fast... except sometimes it would randomly "lag".

• Beach ball for half a second while using Propane with no load
• Occasional strange lag after hitting enter or doing random stuff like scrolling a window in Safari (again with the system otherwise bored).
• Wesnoth would very briefly freeze randomly during gameplay.
• Right clicking an icon in the dock would take longer than it should.

Maybe I'm ultra sensitive to my responsiveness, but it was very frustrating. It "felt" a lot like the hard drive was spinning down and I was waiting for it to spin back up. Writing a quick Ruby script to keep the hard drive busy writing tiny bits of data seemed to help, but that was no solution.

Finally I took the bottom part of my case off to listen to the drive... and it was parking the heads every 5-10 seconds. It would get quiet, spin up, get quiet, spin up, turn off (sounded like it), spin up again... craziness.

I'll save you the rest of my research and just share what I've learned:

• You can measure load/unload (head parking?) counts via your S.M.A.R.T. drive's stats.
• A quick way to do this on OS X is SMART Utility.
• General consensus across the net seems to be that several hundred thousand load counts are bad. PDF specs for my new drive list 600,000 load/unload cycles.
• If you see a reason to tune this you can use hdapm (and set it to load on boot).
• Yes, I played with OS X's built in sleep settings. No, they had no effect.

Some people blame Mac OS X's built in power management, that it doesn't put all drives in the "right" APM mode... and claim that the same drive on Windows exhibits different behavior. I can't confirm or deny this, but if so it would be really annoying that OS X isn't doing the "right" thing here.

My 85 hour "New" Western Digital Drive

That's loading/unloading 162 times per hour! Or less than half a year to reach the drives rated spec of 600,000 load/unload cycles.

160gb Seagate Drive in my 2 year old 17" MBP

Loading/unloading 85 times per hour. One million load/unload cycles and counting. Funny thing is I've never noticed any performance problems on this system. Perhaps the half reduction makes a big difference in actual everyday use?

Summary

I'm just informing here. I'm not saying telling you to rush to check your drives (but if you do, share your findings!) or get all in a frenzy. I'm not saying that a load count of 1,000,000 is for sure beyond your drives capacity.

I found enough lunatics online raving about S.M.A.R.T. stats without ANY comprehension of them to join that crowd. I don't imagine that just because I already knew what SMART was and spent 30 minutes reading a few web pages that I'm now a SMART expert. However...

I had a performance problem with my new drive. I solved it by altering the power management settings with hdapm. I'm now much happier. :-)

If anyone knows more about this subject that I do and wants to share, it'd be greatly appreciated!

Pastie Learns Erlang, Lua, io, Haskell, Lisp, and more...

Following up on my previous post... Pastie adds support for over 15 new languages and some easy to guess/bookmark URLs to go with them...

Some of the new languages and URLs:

• Apache (config) - pastie.org/l/apache_config
• D - pastie.org/l/d
• Erlang - pastie.org/l/erlang
• Fortran - pastie.org/l/fortran
• Haskell - pastie.org/l/haskell
• io - pastie.org/l/io
• Lisp - pastie.org/l/lisp_common
• Lua - pastie.org/l/lua
• Makefiles - pastie.org/l/makefile
• Nu - pastie.org/l/nu
• Scala - pastie.org/l/scala
• Scheme - pastie.org/l/scheme
• TeX - pastie.org/l/tex

See the full list of supported languages at Pastie:

http://pastie.org/l

Pastie Learns Go

Thanks to Jim Dovey's work on a Go syntax for TextMate, Pastie now supports syntax coloring Go source code.

Pasting a lot of Go code? Pastie's Go site will pre-select Go as your Pastie language: http://go.pastie.org/

Perl, Java, or C# more your style?

If you aren't a fan of the default Ruby on Rails language setting you might be happy to know Pastie now supports passing your language of choice as a parameter. This should make it easier to bookmark Pastie ready-to-go for your favorite language.

Here area some examples:

• C# - http://pastie.org/?p=20
• Perl - http://pastie.org/?p=18
• Python - http://pastie.org/?p=16
• Java - http://pastie.org/?p=9

You can see the numeric for all available parsers by viewing the source of the language drop down on the new paste page. I'm also considering more URLs... We'll see how that works out. :-)

Friendship Survey Results

The results are in. I'd like to say Thank You to everyone who took the time to fill out my survey on friendship.

You may view the full results at Wufoo.

My Thoughts

One reason I created this survey is because I've grown tired of hearing "You can never have too many friends, right?". It's always rubbed me the wrong way. Yes, I think you can too many friends.

If we assume the following:

1. friendships require a minimum investment of time to maintain (which has always seemed evident to me)
2. the time a person has available is finite

Then we should quickly reach the following conclusions:

1. friendships can weaken or even end if enough time is not invested
2. one has too many friends when the time required to maintain ones friendships is greater than the time one has available to do so

A 68% majority of responses believed that friendships do require a minimal time investment. Interestingly, only 56% believed it's possible to have too many friends.

I also found it interesting that so many people stay friends after dating (40%) and after the end of a serious relationship (45%).

See anything interesting that I've missed?

Pastie learns C#

Today I added C# support to Pastie. I used the C# bundle referenced from this blog post. It seems to at least cover the basics. I would include some attribution here but have no idea who I should be giving the thanks to.

If anyone else has a better TextMate syntax file I'm all ears.

I've pasted a sample if you'd like to check it out.

Friendship

I'm doing a quick survey on friendship if you wouldn't mind helping out. Results will most likely be published here if I get enough responses.

http://joshgoebel.wufoo.com/forms/friendship/

There are 9 multiple-choice and 1 numeric answer question, so it shouldn't take much time of your time.

Invoicie: Blinksale for the iPhone

The recent launch of Logpost motivated me to build my own API-driven only app. That and my shiney new iPhone 3GS is just craving for me to build some apps for it. So here we go. You'll need a Blinksale account to try it out - but that is the entire point after all.

Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

I actually forgot the URL, but here you go:

https://go.invoicie.com/

For the security conscious: Invoicie doesn't store anyone's password. They are only used to access the API for your current session and are actually sent (securely over SSL) with every request. When you aren't using Invoicie it has no idea what your password or account is.

The Little Things

Isn't it always the little things that end up taking your time before launch?

Pastie <3 iPhone

A bit late to the party but I only recently started glancing at Pasties using TweetDeck on my iPhone. The usability sucked. So I fixed it. :-) Enjoy.

Google 1 / Wolfram|Alpha 0

But Spock and Uhura? Really?

WTF: "I never said I'm against testing, I just don't do it..."

Bit of wisdom from the #rubyonrails...

flankk: I never said I'm against testing, I just don't do it and these are some of my reasons. I'm mostly against those who think if you don't test, you are automatically stupid. I'm not writing a banking application, I can afford to fail sometimes. Usually your code fails in places you wouldn't think about, testing will not prevent that.

flankk: I can't stay agile when I'm rewriting 500 tests that failed because I changed the implementation of a method.

I think I'm going to start posting these short posts (mattly style) when I see something ridiculous or interesting on #ror.

Survive hard economic times in the Bahamas at RailsBizConf 2009

Looks like a potential new RailsBizConf in the works says Obie Fernandez in a message to the rails-business google group:

I am in preliminary stages of planning a business-oriented conference for principals of agile/rails consultancies. We will cover everything from sales and marketing, to financing, to keeping your clients happy and surviving in these tough economic times. [emphasis mine]

If you'd like to weigh in on RailsBizConf 2009 please do fill out the survey. The first question caught my eye:

My recommendation to Rails shops trying to trim some fat from the books: Fewer discretionary trips to exotic tropical island paradises.

Or if you absolutely must... vote Bahamas and fly coach. :-)