Category: Geekery

What a day!

Got an piece of beta software that I’ve been waiting for for a while, but it required that I upgrade my Linux box from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. The upgrade seemed to work fine, but the kernel paniced when I rebooted. It booted on “Linux.OLD”, an older kernel, but my USB keyboard didn’t work and several other things weren’t working right. I re-ran “lilo” thinking it might get the proper kernel booted, but instead it removed “Linux.OLD” from the boot menu, and now I have no way to boot it. Downloading a Live CD right now.

Went flying for the first time in a long time. The plane is badly out of rig and with full left rudder trim, still required more left rudder to center the ball. I didn’t have any destination in mind, just flew around a bit to a couple of airports I rarely visit. My third landing wasn’t too bad.

Went with Vicki to buy her a kayak. She bought a Swift Saranac 14, which is a pretty good boat, and very popular. I hope she gets lots of use out of it.

Although the menu and other buttons on the new camera don’t work, I can still take pictures with it (just can’t change the ISO, or switch to shooting in RAW, or any number of other adjustments). First picture is here.

Damnit, Sun!

A while back I mentioned how much I love “kill -3” as a Java debugging tool. Today I decided that instead of having to put a redirection in the start up script for each app in the system, I’d change the logging class so that it would do a “System.setOut” to redirect standard output. And that’s when I discovered the horrible truth – that while setOut redirects things that are printed with System.out, it doesn’t actually affect the JVM’s actual standard output. WTF?

And the suckage continues

As predicted in Rants and Revelations » I have seen the future, and it sucks, they’ve hired a new Flash guy to write the new user interface. It really sucks to find out that your contributions are going to be even more marginalized just as you’re also finding out that they want you to become a full time employee at a significant pay cut.

I guess it’s time to stop antagonizing recruiters and start finding out seriously what’s out there. Either that or find out if the bank account would survive me taking off however long it would take me to get a masters in user inferace design.

Update: Oh, it gets better. New Guy has never even heard of source code control. In other words, he’s used to toy projects on toy operating systems.

Eclipse Part 2

This morning at work, I’m forcibly reminded of the other thing I like about Eclipse. Debugging. I had a guy come to me asking why this value wasn’t set at a certain part of the code, and so I put a breakpoint on it, attached to the running process with the Eclipse debugger, forced a schedule change, and when it hit the breakpoint, was able to single step through. I found the problem much quicker than if I’d had to keep adding “System.out.println” statements until I’d narrowed down the problem, like I would have in the past.

For 25+ years I’ve been debugging programs with print statements, core dumps (remember //SYSABEND SYSOUT=A?) and writing out the value of variables on a printout of the source code. Every now and then I’d step through something in dbx or gdb, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Now I can step through the code in the same editor I modify the source in, and actually fix it right then and there. I wonder why it’s taken me so long to discover this?

Eclipse

It’s now been 250 days since I started using Eclipse, first for a demo I was doing with GWT, and then for day to day programming. Yes, I’d used it a few times in the past, but I’d never stuck with it and gone back to vi/vim/gvim and ctags soon afterwards. I’ve got to say, I’m surprised. After 20 years of using vi, and having my fingers well trained for those particular commands, I can’t believe how much I’ve come to like and rely on Eclipse.
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