echo "Hello, Blogosphere!";

Note that this post was my first post in my blog @ developerWorks. I've moved all the entries over here, so the context is a bit wrong, but I figured I'd leave the post here, and just add this note - pmuellr - 2007/11/07

Who are you?

Patrick Mueller, check out my brief bio at my wiki @ developerWorks.

What are you doing here?

Well, I just took a new position in IBM that involves 'community' (as in programming communities) and so I thought I should set a good example of how to do that by creating a blog here.

In addition to doing something regarding 'community', my new assignment also involves PHP. While I won't quite claim to be a PHP n00b, I'm pretty green. I thought I could let you learn along with me, and hopefully some more knowledgeable folks will happen upon the blog and correct me as appropriate.

I've been blogging for a while; my old blog is here. Before blogging, newsgroups; before newsgroups, VM/CMS FORUMs. Whoops, just dated myself!

Anyway, besides the usual stuff I blog about (maybe I'll drop the movie reviews), expect to see PHP stuff.

By taking this assignment, I left another very cool one: Jazz. My hall-mate Bill Higgins talks about Jazz quite a bit, so go there to learn more. I'll probably do some blabbing about it myself, eventually.

Radio Paradise

Have I plugged Radio Paradise before? Maybe; if not it's time for another plug.

This is simply the best radio station I've ever listened to. It's not like there's much competion in the RTP, NC area. At Purdue, we used to get some pretty good stations out of both Indy and Chi-town, and DC/Baltimore had some decent stations when I was there.

But RP beats them all. Plays new stuff I can tolerate, and generally like. Old stuff I love. Non-intrusive, commercial-wise.

Time to donate again.

Click here to see what they've played recently.

We get DirecTV at home, and so also have some of the XM channels, but none of the ones I get compare. In a pinch (I'm upstairs, don't have a computer plugged into speakers), I'll listen to the XM traditional Jazz or Blues channels. The closest channels to RP play too much crap.

RP has actually turned me off of buying music. I'd much rather have the variety from them than to have to manually switch what I'm listening to. Yes, I am rather lazy.

I've done the emusic thing, a few years back, when they had unlimited downloads. I downloaded LOADs of stuff, mainly older jazz, but the first 1/2 of Elvis Costello's catalog more than made up for the $45 I paid for unlimited downloads for 3 months. Not really played with anything else, like last.fm, or as Mark suggested in his blog, OpSound; RP is just too easy.

If I could only get RP in my car, I'd be set.

Playing right now: SCOTS - Fried Chicken And Gasoline (link) . A "local" band.

MacBook Random Shutdown

You'll only 'get' the image above if you have a MacBook that suffers from Random Shutdown Symptom (aka RSS or RSD). You can read all it about it Apple's MacBook Discussion Board. I'm an early adopter of the RSD technology, first experiencing it over two months ago.

Luckily, Apple has provided elaborate information regarding this problem in Knowledge Base Article 304308. What a relief!

My machine has decided it's time to start Randomly Shutting Down again, after it's second extended repair job less than a month ago (which took 10 days). Funny story: when I picked the machine back up at my local Apple Store, the Genius brought it out and powered it up, and the display filled with colored vertical lines. He took a look at it, and said "oh no, we're going to have to send it back to get repaired again". I replied "Nope, I can fix that". And proceeded to fix it. (I'd been reading the MacBook discussion list a bit too much).

That was a mistake, of course, since having it sent back right then, for another repair, would have meant instead of going in now for a 3rd repair, I'd be going in for the 4th, and would have gotten a new machine instead (Apple won't repair a machine more than 3 times, supposedly).

So, now I have to decide what to do; here are some options:

1. I can stay up late some night so I can get a reservation at the Genius Bar at my local Apple store to drop the machine off for repair; but I absolutely have to be able to have the machine shutdown, in the store, in front of their eyes, before they will accept it.
2. I can wait 60 minutes or more on the phone on hold with AppleCare to get a problem report open or hopefully re-open my previous problem report. And they'll send me a box to send the machine back to them.

In any case, current wait time for MacBook "Random Shutdown" repairs is about 3 weeks, according to reports on the message board.

Yes, I've learned my lesson. Never by rev 1 of an Apple product.

I take it back

I've decided that I don't think I want closures / blocks in Java after all. Never mind.

movie review: The Illusionist

movie review: The Illusionist

Sep 14, 2006 by pmuellr product

The Illusionist

★★☆☆☆ Sandy and I were kinda looking forward to this; we both like Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti. And it started off pretty hopeful. But it was quite, quite predictable. Wait for the DVD.

If you like Giamatti, check out: The Amazing Screw-On Head.

0.3

This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.

Just when you thought it was over

I hardly expected to see a new Smalltalk come out of the woodwork, much less from Sun, but ... there ya go.

I remember hearing about Animorphic (sp?) back in the day, and I think even that Sun had bought them. Ten years ago, I guess. Wow.

Now just waiting for:

• Intel Mac binaries
• File-based, class-per-file sources
• to see what the startup time is like; I want to use this as a command-line shell programming language

on Amazon EC2

During a meeting today, Amazon's EC2 service popped into my head, and so I did a little extended thinking on it. I was going to research it some more, but since I didn't see the announcement of this soon enough, I don't have anything to play with anyway.

• Amazon already has a crap-load of 'users'; who doesn't have an 'amazon id'? Won't take long before they take advantage of this by allowing me as a service provider to authenticate folks via 'amazon id', allowing me to somehow charge the users of my service by cpu usage and/or bandwidth, and generally cool social networky things. Not many sites have a user base of this magnitude. Yahoo! comes to mind, perhaps google (via gmail). EBay?
• Micropayments, finally. Or at least close.
• Virtualization on servers. It'll be interesting to see how this scales.
• Real time vs space trade-offs. Most hosting companies I've seen charge you by the amount of bandwidth you use (as one of the limits on your service anyway). Here, Amazon is charging for both cpu and bandwidth. It's interesting to imagine situations, in this new fat client universe, of deciding whether I should pump excess info to my client and let them churn over it, or optimize the amount of data I send, but pay a bit more in CPU. If there's a huge cost difference, it's easy to decide which one. Maybe one provides a better end-user experience, but my users would be willing to pay for it. In the end, it will force people to deal with poorly optimized services, because they will literally paying for all the cpu they are throwing away.
• If this isn't software-as-a-service, I don't know what is.

I think the most interesting thing to me is the micropayments. And thinking about how to charge the users of my services via something like micropayments. Charging just enough so I can actually host my service without it costing me a dime, by charging just a little over what it costs me. Hell, charging a LOT over what it costs me, maybe.

But what if I don't want to be tied to Amazon, and use PayPal or Google Checkout (or whatever) instead? Tough problem, because Amazon's got all the infrastructure all ready to go for this. Including user authentication. Something like Flickr's Authentication API would be nice to have here.

the dangers of transparency

From: [nag generator at my hosting server]
Subject: Re: [Alerts] *** SECURITY information for [my hosting server] ***
Date: Fri, 8 Sep 2006 00:36:09 -0500
To: [me]

Attention: the use of sudo is restricted to staff.

Please do not use sudo in the future.

Thank you.

--  
[sig of nag generator at my hosting server]

On Sep 8, 2006, at 12:32 AM, [me] wrote:

> [my hosting server] : Sep  8 05:32:18 : [my userid] : user NOT in  
> sudoers ; TTY=ttyp0 ; PWD=[my home directory] ; USER=root ;  
> COMMAND=/usr/local/sbin/apachectl restart
>

The ssh session into my hosting server looks purty much like my local shell; I was of course trying to restart my, local, server, not my host's server.

No sandwich for me! (Thanks Josh)

Time to make my PS1 on my host a little more obvious, somehow ...

Of course, what's scary is that I use sudo (and sudo -s) a lot these days, it seems. Almost might as well be using Windows. Gotta do something about that as well ...

guitar signal chain

I'm a guitar noodler. See definition 3, and I'll emphasize the haphazard part. Although I started playing when I was 8, my big problem is I never played with a band (sorry Eric + Mark, biohaz doesn't really count). And I take frequent, multi-month breaks from guitar. But I'm back in one of my phases, and I've got a pretty good set up, so I thought I'd mention it.

I should first mention I was hoping to run everything through my MacBook, but when I tried that, the amount of set up I had to go through every time I wanted to play was just too much, plus, I don't really have room for everything in front of me, plus the chair I live out of doesn't lend itself to comfortable guitar playing.

So, I resigned myself to setting up on my wife's desktop. I bought a Line 6 TonePort UX1 about a year ago. This is a fun box, as it's basically like a traditional Line 6 Pod in it's functionality, only it's really just a USB-based D/A box; all the tone rendering is done on the computer it's connected to, but it doesn't use much CPU. The USB is nice, instead of having to rely on the line-in ports of my sound card; I'll take a USB connector over a 1/8" stereo connector any day. And the latency is basically nil. The UX1, when connected, adds another 'sound device' to windows, but only Ableton Live is listening to that device; luckily, Live actually let's you select audio devices to use instead of just using the system default, like every other program in the universe. I have some headphones always attached to the UX1 also, and the line outs of the UX1 go to an old receiver on that desk, so I can play through stereo speakers, if I'm willing to embarass myself in front of my family.

So, to play, I pull out my guitar, the guitar stand, and the cord. Then, I attach cord to guitar and then to the UX1, and either put on headphones or turn on the receiver. Then start trying to play. Probably less than a minute total. Nice.

version control for one

So I'm planning on getting off my arse and working on some small code projects I've been meaning to work on for a while. It's been so long, and so many machines ago that I've done this, that I don't have a legacy version control system that I must use, so I thought I'd look around a bit.

Actually, that's not quite correct. I was planning on using subversion. I started compiling it a few months ago, to get all the binaries lined up, and actually started using it. Well, reading the docs. Getting started, and reading the docs, means checking out the section of the Subversion book titled Choosing a Repository Layout. At least for a SVN n00b like me. Now, there's something to be said for the relatively clean nature of the SVN's tag and branch story. Quite nice, and logical, compared to CVS.

However, it kind of sucks to be in a position where you have to choose a repository layout like this out front. On one hand, I'd like to have some grand scheme in place for multiple projects, but on the other hand, structure like this usually evolves, or at least you need to have some practical experience, and I don't want to wait for either. I just want to start committing some code.

Not to mention, if I was planning on using Eclipse, I'd have to make the Subclipse vs. Subversive choice, and I have no idea which one would be a better fit for me.

Luckily for me, I won't be needing Eclipse. More on that later :-)

So, poking around at what else I might use, I ran into darcs again, and decided I'd try that for a while. Bonus, TextDrive supports it as well (on the server end).

Took me a few tries to get my initial project dir pushed to my server, and ... guess we'll see how it goes from here.