XP Unzip

15 Feb 2007

Definitely the slowest unzip app known to mankind. It just took about twenty seconds to unzip less than 60KB of files in 15 files and 2 folders on my moderately-powerful (Athlon 64 3200+/2GB) desktop PC.

Why is this?

OS X version naming absurdity

14 Feb 2007

Earlier this evening:

Claud… (6:08 PM):

i need mac OS X 10.4.8

josh.st (6:08 PM):

and have 10.4?

Claud… (6:08 PM):

no idea!

josh.st (6:09 PM):

leopard?

Claud… (6:09 PM):

no flippin idea

josh.st (6:10 PM):

panther?

josh.st (6:10 PM):

tiger

josh.st (6:10 PM):

?

josh.st (6:10 PM):

something with spots?

Claud… (6:10 PM):

OMGOSH!! STOP WITH THE ANIMALS! why!!

I had no answer why.

Josh vs. the Snake

13 Feb 2007

I’ve been battling a Python for the better part of a week now. Mostly just in terms of creating a nice habitat for it to inhabit, so that we can gather all manner of useful information about the habits of pythons and interactions of humans with things that the python does. I’d been winning most fights and attributing the fact they arose at all to my slowly becoming familiar with the way it worked at all.

I’d been doing some research on this particular kind of snake for a couple of months before I decided it looked like a GoodThingâ„¢ to be wrestling with, so I knew a bit about it relative to something else that I knew a bit about (enough to be dangerous, as is apparently the case with 95% of the world’s PHP developers). I knew that it was slightly more strongly typed than PHP, but didn’t really think that was something I’d have to know about.

Ba-baauummm.

Error in formatting:__str__ returned non-string (type int)

Oh, come on, just play with the pretty little number. Grumble grumble.

I am in the strangest place right now. It’s 1.30 in the morning on a weeknight and I’m writing code, but I’ve spent most of the day going between Photoshop and a cocktail of a couple of shell sessions mixed with phpMyAdmin and a bit of Django documentation. It’s cool being able to write useful code again (and, better still, I am working on code to solve problems I’d be itching to solve for our own ministry context at TACKLES/Matthias but am being paid to do it under the auspices of the CYIADA project, which means I can afford to spend more time and do it properly!), but it’s possibly even cooler to have ready access to great design tools at home since last week — quality tools are an awesome blessing!

Gandevia’s wedding DVD

11 Feb 2007

Snazzy huh? :P I was pleased at how it came out… I’m continually surprised by our Photosmart‘s capabilities, it really does well if you feed it slightly thicker stock paper (I usually use this great 190GSM stuff by Nopa — some European company, they don’t even have a website that I know of).

And yes, Photoshop was used in the production of this DVD cover ;-)

Ubuntu makes me sad

08 Feb 2007

I don’t even particularly blame it, but it’s not working on whisper (faithfully serving in a cupboard since early-2005) anymore. It was running 5.10 (I think) for yonks and then today I decided it might be easier/cleaner to pull the plug and re-install than just change the apt sources for a third time (or however many it’s been)

So I downloaded 6.10 (hence the torrent post) and it didn’t work.

Fine. I downloaded 6.06 LTS (the, you know, meant-to-be-überstable-and-longlasting release) and it hangs loading the kernel. No kernel panic message, it just gets stuck.

This is annoying.

I’m basically going to rebuild this entire server for Django‘s sake, because it’s so useful for non-programmers like me to build things that work. This has been an interesting week at church because a whole bunch of new things started/old things restarted and finally I’m in a position to evaluate where we can use technology from an “insider” standpoint with regards to what I’m being paid to do at Youthworks.

I’ve got two smallish (with potential for massive extension) apps that I want to build in under two days for ongoing internal use (one for TACKLES, another for my Switch small group this year) which will essentially form prototypes for revision/replacement as appropriate for use in a CYIADA global context once we get a programmer on board (God willing sometime soon! I’m meeting with someone who will hopefully be helpful in this regard on Friday, please be praying!) and make some more concrete decisions about architecture. I can draw flowcharts until there’s nothing left to flow but that doesn’t get business logic written!

I’m thinking the Ubuntu issue will be some stupid hardware thing that will go away once I take the computer apart. It probably needs a bit of a clean, anyway. I just so don’t have time to spend on sysadminy type stuff these days, only no-one else at work will/is interested in doing it, which is rather annoying — there’s free hosting, but it’s seriously the most vanilla hosting environment you’re likely to find anywhere. It’s a CPanel/WHM gig with zero redundancy, zero backups, PHP4 only, and blah blah blah no-one cares. Generic with a capital G set in Times New Roman. There is, of course, little interest in anything using a non-.Net platform. I’d actually quite happily use MSSQL, but ASP.Net is, by all reports, just gross from a web standards perspective. And whilst I’m slowly being de-radicalised in that regard (partially because I am caring less about standards and more about accessibility, which is bad long term anyway, and also because my viewpoints are becoming less radical as mainstream moves towards where I am now! CSS is the norm, and pure content/presentation separated sites are probably representing 50% of site refreshes at the minute), I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel that much just yet.

Nor should I be.

*soapbox off*