Breaking the build

Andy Marks talks about determining how broken your build is. Two solutions are offered separately, in separate blogs:

• Vincent Massol wants to make the build unbreakable.
• Cedric Beust wants to keep developers from performing the build.

I think that Cedric means "full product build", and in that sense I think he's right. The last time I worked for a company large enough to have dedicated configuration management staff, they were responsible for the shipping build—not the developers. Unfortunately, many of us work for companies or organizations so small we barely have a development team, much less a dedicated CM team.

I really like Vincent's idea. The thing that's a little scary about it is the asynchronous nature of the SCM commit—I don't know if that's possible with current tools. I may have to play with this idea once I get a continuous integration server running locally.

How to fix Mom's computer

Thank you, Gina, thank you for your guide to cleaning up a Windows box. I haven't used Windows for anything more than compatibility testing for over four years now, so I've lost whatever mad skillz I may have had in that department. With this guide in hand, I'm cleaning up my wife's computer. I'll also be sending it to my father (for fixing Mom's computer) and my brother-in-law (his mother has been complaining of problems with her computer).

(Then again, the last Windows box in our house may become a thing of the past, if rumors of a sub-US$600 iMac come to pass.)

Christmas, apparently, is over.

Our tree just fell over, still fully loaded with ornaments. So far, it looks like we lost only one glass ball, but until I can put the tree back upright, we won't know for sure.

It... is... alive!

Some time back (I can tell already that this entry is going to get edited a lot) the backlight in my laptop died. Normally, this would be a problem——what good is a laptop if you can't see what you're doing?—but, as it's a PowerBook G3 Firewire, I plugged in the monitor on my desk and went on with that. (I did have to configure the external monitor as a mirror of the dead display, which involved shining a bright light on the display so as to see what my mouse was doing, but I digress.) Since I don't have a wireless network, and both batteries for the laptop are dead, I was pretty much tethered to my desk anyway.

I've been meaning all this time to replace the backlight. In anticipation of an upcoming business trip, I finally knuckled down and did so today. It wasn't as hard as I expected it to be. Now, a couple of hours later, I've got a working laptop display. I'd forgotten how bright and crisp this thing could be. The old display had been suffering from the PowerBook "pink screen of pain" for some time, and I'm happy to report that it's gone, gone, gone.

Heaping helpings of gratitude, for making this job possible, easier, and more enjoyable, go out to:

• the unfortunately departed website of "Scadboy" at http://homepage.mac.com/scadboy/lcd/, without which I never would have had the courage to attempt this myself
• js_30 on eBay, who sold me a display inverter board, at a reasonable price
• PowerBook Tech, who sold me a new backlight (shipped as a known-busted display with a working backlight attached to it), also at a reasonable price
• the disassembly guide at PBFixIt, which made removing the lid and display from my PowerBook much easier than if I'd tried to figure it out myself
• Connie Dover and Scartaglen, Sarah McLachlan, and Depeche Mode for providing the soundtrack

Whose life is it, anyway?

A Massachusetts telecom company is offering unlimited VoIP calls for life. What's left unsaid is whether that's your life, or theirs. (Thanks to A Welsh View for the link.)

A jukebox of my own

For the fourth or fifth time, I'm ripping our CD collection to MP3s. The first time I did this, I burned them to CDs to take to work. That was before I learned about ID3 tags, so they're basically a jumbled mess of files that depend on the file system for structure and identification.

The second, third, and possibly fourth times (I lost track somewhere) I ended up having to dump the MP3s to make room for something more important (and more ephemeral—at least the MP3s are backed by CDs). We have a decent amount of hard drive storage in the house; the problem is that it's spread out over 10 or so disks. That, and I could never figure out how to get iTunes to look both on my local drive and a remote drive for MP3s.

A couple of weeks back, I bought an 80GB drive for a terrific price after rebate. Even after replacing the three drives in my Linux box with this new one, I still have plenty of space left over. Enough, in fact, to comfortably hold our entire CD collection as MP3s.

Last night, the final piece fell into place—I finally figured out how to turn the Linux box into an iTunes server. There are instructions to be found in several places around the Web, but the simplest turned out to be from the guy who built a Debian package for the necessary software. One thing I had to figure out on my own is that the path to the MP3 directory in /etc/daapd.conf can't contain spaces—even if you escape them with backslashes.

Picking knits

Shortly before Halloween, links to the Hallowig—a knitted yarn wig—made their way around the blogosphere. Now, those wacky crafters at knitty.com are back with another, um, unusual project: a knitted yarn model of the human female reproductive organs. (Internal, not external. This is a (mostly) family-friendly blog.)

Angela just had her first knitting lesson on Monday, and while I'm not anticipating a spate of wigs or uteri any time soon, I do think it would be cool to have a knitted Tux for the top of my monitor.

Breaking News: Slashdot Reviews Flickr

Slashdot | Flickr Online Photo Service Reviewed.

In related news, Slashdot commenters prove once again that they just don't get it.

This... makes my head hurt

Inverting the Inversion of Control. (Warning: nerdy by nature.)

Worst. Holiday specials. Ever.

Whatever: The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time.

A marriage made in heaven?

Yesterday, I had one of those "million dollar" revelations that I occasionally have. The problem is, that I invariably have them too late to do anything about them. (This explains why I'm still working for someone else instead of sitting on a beach, drinking beer and getting a tan. But I digress.) Nevertheless, I'm still going to commit this one to the ages, so if it comes to pass I can point at it and say, "Look how smart I am!".

The latest rage seems to be Microsoft's Media Center PCs—computers that integrate into your home entertainment system, bringing the multimedia capabilities of modern PCs to the living room. With one of these, you can (I gather; I haven't seen one of these in person yet) play CDs, MP3s, DVDs, and PC games, view photos, and probably just about anything else that doesn't require a keyboard, while sitting on your sofa. The display is your TV, and the input device is a remote control. Built-in networking means that you're not limited to what's on the Media Center PC; you can pull data from any other computer on the network.

This feels like it's smack in the middle of the "digital convergence" space that Apple has been talking about for several years now. As a result, one is starting to hear rumblings about when they're going to move into this market. For example, The Register reports that "Merrill Lynch looks to 'killer' Apple home media server". This is why I figure that I'm too late with this idea; I suspect that Apple either has soemthing in the works already, or has decided to move in a completely different direction altogether.

Almost everything Media Center PCs can do, Apple hardware and software can also do, today. (I have used a 1999-era Powerbook as a DVD deck for our TV and an MP3 jukebox for our stereo in the past.) The only things missing that I can think of are the ability to run PC games, the hi-fi stack form factor, and the TV/remote control interface. I'm not going to spend any time on the first one; PC games won't run on Macintosh hardware, and while some games have Macintosh versions, many more don't. We're going to have to write this one off as unsolvable—although I have a peripheral idea that I'll get to at the end, assuming I remember to.

Apple tried the stereo component form factor before, with the Pippin. It failed to go anywhere, probably as much for being ahead of its time as anything else. Nevertheless, there's no magic in this form factor; it's just a laptop without a display or keyboard, and with more (but not substantially different) jacks and sockets. There's no technical reason Apple couldn't produce a Macintosh in a stereo component box.

As far as the TV/remote control interface goes, very few companies do user interface like Apple. They're not perfect—just ask Tog—but in my (admittedly biased) opinion, they know how to do simple, clean, usable interfaces. Just as important, they recognize good interfaces when others create them, and put them to good use; for instance, the iPod interface originally came from Pixo. So, while Apple could produce their own interface for a "digital convergence hub", I think they'd be better off turning to another company who has already done it, and done it well.

TiVo.

The CPU in TiVo PVRs is the PowerPC, same as in Macintosh. They run Linux, but I suspect that it could be replaced with Darwin (the foundation of Mac OS X). (Conversely, the Mac OS X applications that would power such a box could probably be ported to Linux without much difficulty. I'm not saying we'll ever see Linux versions of them outside of any such box, but porting from Darwin to Linux should be a lot easier than, say, porting from Darwin to Windows.) Series 2 TiVos already have many of the hardware bits necessary to make this work, so all that really remains is to get Apple and TiVo together.

Imagine that Apple licenses the hardware reference design and software from TiVo. They add the "digital convergence" applications that already exist—iTunes, iPhoto, iCal, GarageBand. Put Apple and TiVo logos on the front. Call it "iTiVo". Watch them sell like iPods. :-)

I've got some ideas for some new synergies that could come out of this, but I'm already running long. Two final thoughts, one of which was referenced above.

• Series 2 TiVos have jacks for cable TV and Ethernet. Add a wireless Ethernet connection (and why wouldn't you?) and cable modem hardware and you have a broadband router/firewall for the whole house.
• Remember how I said that a Macintosh-based box can't run PC games? While you could do it by emulating a PC in software, I doubt that the performance would be acceptable. Instead, consider that gaming consoles like the PlayStation/2 could probably be condensed to the size of a PCI card....

Barenaked Ladies: Barenaked for the Holidays

Our holiday CD this year is Barenaked for the Holidays by Barenaked Ladies, and let me tell you, this may be the holiday CD to end all holiday CDs. On one (one!) CD they give us:

• a rendition "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" recorded backstage at a concert (with guest vocals by Sarah McLachlan)
• "Green Christmas" from the soundtrack to How the Grinch Stole Christmas
• their own version of "Do They Know It's Christmas" that, while sounding sincere, makes you think that they're poking fun at Bob Geldof
• "Jingle Bells" and "O Holy Night" performed on the Hammond organ (Angela's reaction: "It sounds like they're at a baseball game")
• and "Deck the Stills"—the tune is "Deck the Halls", but the words are "Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young" repeated over and over

That last one has to be heard to be believed.

Enabling SSH access through the firewall

This isn't going to make any sense to the vast majority of you, and the others will point and laugh at something that can be looked up elsewhere. But I've been carrying this little piece of paper around for almost a year now, so I figure it must be important enough to write down somewhere a little more permanent.

At home:

    ssh -R 9722:localhost:22 servername

On the server:

    ssh -p 9722 username@localhost

How to de-stink a Volvo

From David Weinberger: How to de-stink a Volvo. It reminds me of how Dave Barry used to write:

Our Volvo has heated seats ("The Warm Ass that Cluetrain Bought"), so you have to remove some electrical bits first. On the bottom of the seat are two black boxes, each held on by a single torx screw. Remove and deposit at the bottom of a storm drain, just to teach yourself a lesson.

Trying out ecto

I'm giving ecto a spin 'round the block. Not that expect a fancy tool to make my blog posts any more interesting... or frequent, for that matter.

And so it begins

The turkey carcass is barely cold, and we already have our Christmas tree. We took advantage of the fact that we have an SUV for the week (long story, not worth repeating) to save ourselves the trouble of trying to cram it in the trunk of my Civic this year.

One bittersweet note is that our favorite tree farm is closing its doors (gates?) after this season. Granted, we've gotten a fir, imported from Michigan or some such, every year for the past 5 or so instead of a locally-grown Scotch pine (we got tired of the itchy, swollen hands that result from trimming the latter, with its stubby, inflexible needles). We should be able to go just about anywhere to get a fir, imported from Michigan or some such. Anywhere else we go, however, is going to lack the atmosphere that Warren's has. They will be missed.

We got snow

That's not why I didn't post yesterday. Yesterday was spent running around making preparations for today.

This wasn't just a light dusting of snow, either. We got about 6 inches. Not a bad way to start the holiday season.

First pass at the new layout

It's still a little rough, but it's most of the way there. Serious thanks to Tonico Strasser for his flexible layout; the good stuff is his, while any CSS bogosity is all mine.

We're all nit-pickers about something

My wife used to hate watching a movie with me where computers figure prominently in the story line. (That's probably incorrect. I'm sure she still hates it, but doesn't bother complaining to me anymore.) I've been a computer professional for about 15 years, and an enthusiast for almost 25, so I have a hard time suspending my disbelief long enough to swallow some of the computer-related nonsense we're shown—and a harder time keeping quiet about it. (I'll refrain from posting any specific examples; if you know computers, I'm sure you can think of your own examples. If you don't, a simple rule of thumb is this: If you find yourself asking, "Can computers really do that?", the answer is usually "no".)

Not that she's entirely guiltless herself. She used to work in television, so that's her area of relative expertise, and the topic for which she can't let inaccurate representations slide. I remember when we saw Up Close and Personal, and Michelle Pfeiffer's character broadcasts live from deep within a prison during a riot. My wife kept shaking her head. "How are they transmitting live footage? They left the live truck outside the prison walls. Did they drag cables all the way with them? If so, where are the cables?"

I bring this up because, well, I can. Someone once said that everyone is an expert on something. (According to Google, apparently everyone has said this.) And whatever you're expert at, you can nit-pick at.

Case in point. Mark Simonson, a professional font designer (and, therefore, an expert on typography), has catalogued on his website "the use (and misuse) of period typography in movies". In other words, what he notices is whether a movie set in the 1950's shows a typeface that wasn't designed until the 1980's.

An expert after my own heart.

It's beginning to smell a lot like...

I'm not going to finish that. It's bad enough that I'm alluding to (Holiday+1).

We've had a zip-top bag full of cinnamon sticks in the cabinet for several years now, waiting for a reason to use them. Now we have a reason, but we figured they're probably too old, so we bought a fresh new bag at Penzey's. It seemed a shame to throw out the old ones—just because they're old doesn't mean they're worthless—so I dropped five or six of them into a pan of water simmering on the stove. Instant ambiance!