the corner office : tech blog

I switched to Windows on the laptop last year to play EVE Online, but even though I'm no longer playing EVE Online the laptop still stays in Windows. This is an old laptop, XP still feels zippy on it, and studying means I don't spend nearly as much time coding or doing heavy lifting at home as I used to. So I've had no impetus to switch back to Ubuntu.

At work, after a year of living predominantly on a Windows desktop (a dozen Putty and cygwin sessions notwithstanding), I'm again using Linux as a dev environment. How I've missed Ctrl-Alt-Left and Right!

Miguel de Icaza: Learning Unix. Best quote:

Save yourself the embarrassment, and avoid posting on the comments section jwz's quote on regular expressions. You are not jwz.

C++0x is now C++11

Released this week. Some nice additions by the looks of things, but Eclipse 3.7 doesn't support it, and you need to download a separate Eclipse beta to get Java 7 support (from what I can make out). With some luck a patch will come along soon enough. In the meantime I may just plod along with Java 6 for a while longer.

What Inside Job Got Wrong:

What’s remarkable about the financial crisis isn't just how many people got it wrong, but how many people who got it wrong had an incentive to get it right.

Announcing Xamarin

I remember when SATA was the shiny new technology and the old IDEs were ubiquitous. Now, it's the other way around. I need to replace the hard drive on the dog-old laptop. The number of PATA 2.5" drives available these days is pretty low, and a WD 320GB PATA drive costs around £75. The equivalent SATA version is £35, which is cheaper than the 45 quid the 120GB IDE version will set you back. Sheesh.

I also recently upgraded the Ubuntu VM I use when I'm in Windows from 8.04 to 10.04. That broke my Samba configuration, giving me 'Access denied' errors when I tried to follow symlinks which went outside of my shared home directory. Per this and this, the way to fix this is to add the following three lines to the [global] section of smb.conf:

follow symlinks = yes
wide links = yes
unix extensions = no

The clincher seems to be the unix extensions setting. Whether that's evil or a security risk I don't know (and don't care on my home PC) - but it works for me.

I'm pretending that I don't have assignments to get started on, and so I've slowly but surely plodded on with some pet project coding.

The main thing I've been working on is porting our old RCP-based budget app to Swing. I wrote this back in '07 when we were trying to get to grips with our finances in a new country where we had no sense of how much stuff cost, and I did it as an Eclipse RCP app because back in '07 I though that would be a fun thing to learn. By 2008 I'd decided that of all the things could devote my time to, writing RCP apps was not one of them. Development on the app stagnated.

I toyed with the idea of rewriting the budget app in another language, but since most of the Java logic was GUI-agnostic, I decided late last year to settle on whipping up a Swing gui to bolt onto the existing logic, and make do with that. Glad I did - for very little investment in time I've gotten a lot of functionality working in Swing. Swing and I might just - just - be making friends.

The other thing I've slowly started tinkering on is an app which will, if I get it done, scratch about a dozen personal itches. Back in the early 00's I wrote a Notes app which kept track of backed up files (I want file X backed up at time Y, what backup DVD is it on?). In the mid-00's I started thinking and then working on a thing I called 'metalib' - a way to organise metadata about technical documents (and anything else, really). (memory lane, here and here). I got sidetracked very quickly at the time and got no further.

With recent hard drive purchases and data shuffling (come to think of it, the past 4 and a half years in the UK have been an unholy mess of shuffling files from one backup drive to another), I had similar headaches (where are these files? what's changed? is this backup directory substantially different to that directory?)

I got to thinking about all of this stuff again. At the heart of all of these headaches is needing a way to store data about files on a drive (or removable media) and have easy ways to do intelligent things with that information. I'd be nuts to pretend that I've got time to develop anything monstrous... but I reckon something to accumulate data is a useful start.