a salmon of doubt

Haven’t posted much for a while aside from my automated Twitter updates, which don’t really count, so here’s a nice new post.

First up, technology. Because I am apparently a consumer whore or something, I’ve acquired some new tech recently. As those few of you who follow my Twitter digest may have noticed, I’ve switched to AT&T and am now using an Apple iPhone. So far, I’m very happy with it and I like it a lot better than the LG enV I had when I was on Verizon. The iPhone’s interface is easily the best I’ve ever used on a cell phone, and it’s really nice having a GOOD mobile web experience… even if EDGE does kind of suck sometimes. I know some people hate AT&T and I hear that their call quality is less-than-stellar, but since I’m deaf anyway I don’t especially care about that. It does mobile web, e-mail, and SMS, and those are the majority of my uses for my phone anyway. My only real wish is that AT&T would introduce a data-only plan… I don’t really need all the minutes that my plan comes with, although it should be hilarious to see how many rollover minutes I have at the end of my contract.

Apart from the iPhone, I also picked up an Airport Extreme Base Station. I’d been planning on getting one anyway after getting my own place again in a few months, and it seems to have solved the wireless problems my MacBook was having after the 10.5.2 update. I haven’t tried the remote disk feature yet, but I have to note that wireless printing is ridiculously awesome. It may also just be placebo effect, but it seems like my connection is a little bit faster now, too. It isn’t the cheapest wireless access point/router on the market, but I have to say, it works really well and I’m pleased with it.

So that’s why I’m a consumer whore, I guess.

Apart from my wireless issues, iPhone, and consumer whoredom, I’ve taken the next step out on the dance floor and am currently taking a Lindy Hop class. It’s been a blast so far and I had a great time at the dance last night putting my new moves to work, although with The Madison Crawl playing, it was a bit tough to keep up with my footwork… they like to play it FAST. Lots of fun, though, and I’m looking forward to my next class session tomorrow night.

CompUSA is going out of business, and we have one near me.  I’ve been looking to upgrade my monitor on my desktop PC for a while, preferably on the cheap.  I’d stopped by the local CompUSA a few weeks ago to see if they had any good deals, but all of the interesting stuff was only about 5% off.

I decided to stop back in this evening and see if they had anything good.  They had one boxed LG 22" widescreen LCD still in stock, with pretty nice specs… and for a very reasonable price with the 15% discount, so I jumped on that.  For some reason, LG didn’t include a DVI cable, only VGA.  This is slightly inconvenient since the 8600GT in my desktop machine only has DVI out, and I don’t think I have any adapters handy at the moment.  I just pulled the DVI off my other LCD, and am letting my MacBook run that monitor dual-head for the moment.

Behold, in all its pixely goodness:

I don’t like how photos post-processed on my MacBook appear significantly darker.  I really need to pull Photoshop off my ailing PC laptop and get it installed on my desktop machine instead.

Or, “I came for the swag, I stayed for the sessions!”  Once again, there’s a TL;DR version at the bottom of the page.

I felt much better this morning, so I got around, checked out since I wasn’t staying tonight as well, then got to the banquet hall for breakfast and a keynote from Brian Goetz on concurrency in Java.  It was pretty interesting—even though I don’t work with Java and I haven’t gotten to that level yet in .NET, honestly—but it was good information and many of the concepts should be applicable in .NET as well.  It was a bit heavy for first thing in the morning though. 

Following that, it was time for a very interesting presentation from Bill Wagner, Real World C# 3.0.  It was really very interesting—a lot of info on things you can do with the new features in C# and also a bunch of ways you can shoot yourself in the foot.  That was actually the tagline of the talk: Our motto shouldn’t be “hey, it’s your foot.”  Bill is always a great speaker (I saw one of his presentations at the Ann Arbor .NET User Group in late 2006) and it was nice to see another one of his talks.  One of the things he brought in is also something he blogged about recently, in fact—using extension methods to extend IComparable to get more readable comparison code.

After Bill’s talk, it was time to hit the next room over for Neal Ford’s talk on Domain Specific Languages.  After his keynote on Thursday, I was really looking forward to this talk.  Going in, I knew that DSLs are one of the big developments of the last year or two, but I didn’t have a good handle on what they were or how you create them.  He did a terrific job of giving us an overview on them before throwing us into a whirlwind assault of slides and sample code.  ;)  I came out of it with a much better understanding of DSLs and also a few good ideas on how we could use them in our product at work… it’s something I definitely want to investigate in the next few months as time allows.

As it turned out, that was the last session I attended at the conference; after lunch I got to talking with a guy that my boss is trying to recruit.  He wanted to see a bit of what we work on and discuss the company a bit.  We ended up having a very nice hour-and-a-half or so conversation on technology, programming, and software development philosophy.  The second afternoon session was about a third over at that point and I was starting to feel not so great again, so I chilled out for a while and then went to the closing session, where I failed to win anything whatsoever in the raffle.  C’est la vie… although one of the XBox 360 Arcades would have been nice. 

I think I also figured out why I wasn’t feeling that great yesterday evening and again this afternoon—dehydration.  During a normal work day, I probably drink between 1.5 and 2 liters of water, and with the chaotic session schedule at CodeMash, I didn’t get to do that.  As soon as I hit the road after leaving the Kalahari resort, I stopped off at the first convenience store I found and picked up a bottle of water… I felt quite a lot better after drinking that and I’ve been continuing to guzzle down liquids since I got home a couple of hours ago.

All in all, it was a terrific conference and I’m already looking forward to going again next January.  I might even be willing to take vacation time and pay for it myself, if my boss doesn’t want to let me go next year… it’s that good.  :)  Now I get to spend some time this weekend and early next week in PowerPoint, putting together a nice presentation on what I learned so I can pass it on to the other developers at work.  I do enjoy talking about software development though, so in its own way, that should be kind of fun.

I’d also like to note that after seeing a bunch of tablet PCs in action and playing one with a bit… I’d love to get my hands on one.  Would I trade my MacBook in for a Vista tablet?  Hmmm… I might have to give that some serious thought. 

Too Long; Didn’t Read version: Day 2 was good.  Interesting keynote, awesome presentations on C# 3 and domain-specific languages.  Spent a good chunk of the afternoon talking to a really awesome developer that I’d like to see on our team.  Dehydrated.  No luck on the raffle.  Want a tablet PC.  Hella tired, but looking forward to next year.

First day of CodeMash is over and it’s been pretty busy. Here’s some summarization of my day and random thoughts on it. It’s long. TL;DR version at the bottom.

First up, we had Neal Ford’s keynote, Software “Engineering” and Polyglot Programming. My initial impression based on his slides was that he really likes pictures of bridges, because he shows a lot of them. That said, the main thrust of his argument is that languages suffer entropy (rot) just like software itself does, and that’s currently happening to Java and C# because of the feature bloat they’re acquiring.

As a result, he’s a big advocate of dynamic languages and he doesn’t agree that you can’t build enterprise software in a dynamic language—he maintains that you can, and the key is that you need as near to 100% test coverage as you can get. He also really dislikes the argument that you need static typing to make sure developers can’t get in trouble, and his response to that is that removing ineffectual warning signs will make everyone more careful.

I was discussing that with a friend on IM after the keynote, and his response was that that’s great if you’re Google and have infinite money and the ability to cherry-pick the AAA people—but for the rest of the world with crappy developers, that’s not realistic. I actually had the opportunity to speak to Neal later in the day and I put that question to him.

What he basically said (with my hearing problems, I may not have heard him correctly since it was a bit noisy in the room) was that ThoughtWorks deals with that all the time—they come in to a client company and the client’s developers don’t have that skillset, and what they do is work with the client to build that skillset in their own developer team as well. He also agreed with me when I said that argument is basically a cop-out that says “We don’t want to invest in making our people better, we just want code monkeys who can implement whatever spec they’re given.” I think it’s a BS argument, and it’s not like those skills in test-driven development sprang fully-formed out of nowhere. They had to learn them somehow.

After that keynote, I went to an introductory-level discussion of Silverlight. It was somewhat interesting, but disappointing… all he demonstrated was how to create a button and make it spin in a sickening fashion. I’m not really sold on Silverlight in general… it lets you do flashy stuff, but then again, I don’t like that crap in Flash, either. I really prefer sticking to HTML + CSS + Javascript; I don’t feel like those are lacking in capability and I don’t really want my web applications to try and pass themselves off as desktop apps anyway. I’m a curmudgeon about that.

Following the Silverlight discussion, I went to Jay Wren’s Introduction to Castle talk. I enjoyed it for the most part, although I had less than optimal seating owing to my need to get some power into my MacBook; the battery was getting pretty low, and I didn’t bother bringing a notepad to this conference. All my notetaking has been in TextMate on my Mac. My only complaint about the Castle talk was that it dwelled a bit more on the history and background of the project, and I would’ve preferred to see more time devoted to the actual code.

Lunch came and went and then it was time for Scott Hanselman’s keynote. He started with a brief introductory presentation talking about his life up to the present, and I must say… it was hilarious. Everything from reasons why you should sell out to Microsoft to a brief demonstration of LOLCODE. He had the crowd pretty much in stitches through that entire segment.

He then got into a discussion on changes in IIS7 and a demonstration of how it’s so modular, you can easily run PHP on it—while using .NET code to override various aspects of server behavior. To be honest, it was a bit too deep for me, but that’s not a knock against Scott’s presentation skills. My job just doesn’t have me diving that deep into IIS arcana.

I’d like to note, by the way, that Scott is a really cool, approachable guy, and a class act. I happened to bump into him later in the evening and told him how much I’d enjoyed his presentation. When he realized that I was having difficulty understanding him owing to being deaf, he moved effortlessly into sign language—it turns out that he’s a big advocate of baby sign language so he knows a lot of the basic signs, and it made our conversation a lot easier. We had a nice conversation about captioning video on the web. Scott, if you happen to read this, do me a favor and push Microsoft to add some kind of captioning or transcripts to their screencasts, would you? This trend toward screencasts in general on the web as a replacement for introductory tutorials has been a bit frustrating for me as they aren’t as accessible, and I would love to see some leadership from Microsoft on this issue.

Following Scott’s keynote, we had a break (I skipped the vendor sessions) and then I hit Keith Elder’s talk on Windows Workflow Foundation; we’re thinking of using it at my company and I wanted to get an overview of it. It was a pretty good talk overall; a bit hard for me to follow what he was saying, but the slides were all fantastically detailed, so major props for that. I have a much better handle on what it is now and it’s something that I definitely think could be useful.

None of the remaining sessions really grabbed my attention and I was dead tired (I’m actually worried that I might be coming down with something here—feeling a bit crappy this evening), so I skipped out on the last session block for the day. It was a very full, informative day and I’m looking forward to another drink from the firehose tomorrow.

I plan to post a summary of day 2 tomorrow or Saturday as well as some general thoughts and comments on what I’ve learned.

Too Long; Didn’t Read version: Neal Ford thinks Java and C# are bloated, likes dynamic languages. Silverlight presentation slightly underwhelmed. Castle is cool. Scott Hanselman is awesome. Windows Workflow Foundation is pretty powerful. I’m tired. More learning tomorrow.

I’m planning to be at CodeMash in Sandusky, Ohio on January 10-11, 2008. Anyone else planning on going? My employer is kindly sending me to this conference so (as a .NET developer) I’ll be hitting quite a lot of the .NET sessions so my coworkers can pick my brain afterward. It looks like there’s a lot of really interesting .NET talks going on, including a few from presenters I’ve seen in the past at user group meetings. It should be a fun two days of drinking from the firehose.

If anyone reading this is planning to go, shoot me an e-mail or comment.

In other news, I picked up my new hearing aid on Friday and so far, I’m very impressed. The noise filtering functions very well and does a terrific job of eliminating background noise. I was actually able to have conversations with people while out dancing on Friday night, so long as I left it on the “heavy filtering” program.

No, not really, but it turns out to have one really nice feature that I wasn’t aware of. If you import an image into OneNote, it will automatically OCR any text within it and make it searchable. It will even highlight the portion of the image where the search text appears.

As it turns out, this is an extremely useful feature for me. I’ve been wanting to take a bunch of my somewhat important paperwork—stuff that might be nice to have around for reference, but isn’t necessarily something I need to have hard copies of—and get it scanned in so I can destroy the hard copy. This is mainly because I’m sick of how much space that paper starts taking up.

I had been looking into doing this on my MacBook—DEVONthink Office Pro is very similar to OneNote—but my Canon Lide60 scanner doesn’t seem to want to play nice with Leopard. Canon does provide Vista drivers that work fine, however, so I’ve been using that. I know some people really like the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners for this particular application—and they would be easier since they’ve got an automatic document feeder—but I’ve heard some complaints about their reliability. They also don’t appear to be TWAIN or Windows Imaging compatible, which is a serious downside. Plus, I just can’t see spending $400+ on a scanner for that; once I’ve cleared the backlog, a simple flatbed scanner like the Lide 60 should be more than enough.

For the sake of security, I plan to store the OneNote database files in a TrueCrypt container, once I do a little research on how OneNote manages its databases. I also intend to back these files up regularly and probably put copies on CD/DVD (or a thumbdrive) into a safe-deposit box every couple of months.
In other news, after debating the idea for a couple years, I’m finally getting a new hearing aid. I’m currently using a Phonak SuperFront analog behind-the-ear model that was manufactured 15 years ago and has been rebuilt a couple of times. It’s apparently pretty unusual to keep using the same hearing aid for so long. It’s worked well for me, but it’s been through the wars and is definitely due for a replacement. One interesting note—it appears that Phonak still makes that model; when I Googled for a link to it, I found that page and it is the exact model that I have with an identical model number (PP-C-L-4). I’m a little surprised they’re still manufacturing them.

At any rate, I’ve decided it’s time to take advantage of some of the technological advancements of the past 15 years, so I’m getting a Siemens Cielo 2 SP digital model. It’s supposed to be able to filter background noise and wind noise, two features that I think will be absolutely worth it if they work well. I’m hoping it will provide a bit more clarity than my current one has, too. I’m planning on going swing dancing the evening I get it, so it should be subjected to a pretty immediate stress-test. I’m kind of excited to get this, and very curious as to how well it’ll work.

One thing that is kind of annoying is that they’re not cheap, and my insurance doesn’t cover them. I kind of wish that I could at least purchase them through the insurance company to take advantage of their bulk-purchasing power, but I guess we can’t have that since it might actually, you know, make sense. Oh well.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

As I mentioned in a recent entry, OS X 10.5 went on sale last night. I ran up to the Apple Store after work to get a copy (and my free t-shirt, naturally :)) and got it installed last night. So far, I’m pretty happy with it.

What’s good:

• Everything seems a little snappier. Firefox, in particular, appears to be running faster than it used to… and in my experience, Firefox was the slowest of the various Mac browsers.


• Time Machine is a great idea, and I plan to get an external USB drive set up for that purpose. I’ve never been particularly rigorous about scheduled backups and that’s something I should probably change before I get burned by it.


• Finder improvements. Apple gave the Finder some much-needed “teh snappy” in spades. It’s much, much improved and much more pleasant to use. I’ve had it installed for a bit over 12 hours and I’m already finding QuickLook to be a massively useful feature.


• Spotlight. Apple put in a lot of work on Spotlight and the results are rather nice; it’s much faster and quite pleasant to use. I haven’t yet felt a need to reinstall QuickSilver since all I used it for was application launching, and I can do that easily enough with Spotlight now.

What’s not-so-good:

• 3D Dock. This doesn’t really affect me so much since I keep my dock on the right hand of the screen, but imo, it’s kind of ugly and the running program indicator doesn’t show up clearly.


• Stacks. I’ve always kept a reference to my applications folder in the dock so I can get at it quickly. With 10.5, that becomes a stack and I don’t think it works quite as well, especially because you can’t easily get at sub-folders like you could in 10.4. I’m not sure why Apple made this change.

All in all, I think it’s a good upgrade. And since no review would be complete without a screenshot of the new shiny:

Another fun entry in which I ruminate on various random crap! Also, I just installed the Wordpress 2.3 upgrade and want to make sure posting works properly.

Apple has announced that Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) will be available for purchase on October 26th. I’ve been using my MacBook more lately, so I plan to join the early adapter crowd and pick it up. I doubt I’ll do the Apple store on Friday night, but I’ll probably head up to Lyndhurst on Saturday to pick it up. Hopefully they still have some t-shirts to hand out or something.

Speaking of OS X… one thing that sometimes annoys me a bit about it is that it’s very mouse-oriented sometimes. For example, if you minimize a window to the dock, there’s no way to bring it back up short of mousing to it… or is there? I did a bit of digging and discovered that if you enable Universal Access, you can hit CTRL-F3 to highlight the dock, then navigate it using the arrow keys. It’s quite handy… I found a nice list of OS X shortcut keys here. I mention this here primarily for my future reference.

Work continues to go well, although it’s been insanely busy lately as I’ve been working on a bunch of customization stuff for one of our clients. The deadlines are pretty tight, which is a nice motivator, but it’s also a little stressful at times. I’ve been burned out pretty much every evening this week, and am hoping I can escape after lunch tomorrow to enjoy a nice afternoon off, as one of my good friends will be in town for my roomie’s 30th birthday party. He’s officially a broken-down old man.

I must say though… I’m becoming somewhat dissatisfied with C# and ASP.Net. Now, I used to work in Visual Basic.NET at my old job, and compared to that, C# has been wonderful… but I can’t shake the feeling that for a lot of applications, it’s just too heavyweight. Also, the page lifecycle is massive frustrating, especially when you’re using numerous user controls to reuse functionality. The one plus in that area is that they’ve announced a new System.Web.Mvc namespace that will apparently be quite similar to Castle Monorail. Still and all, though, ASP.net development has more overhead than I’d really like sometimes, and the compile step can be really annoying sometimes when it decides to bog down. Playing around with Ruby on Rails has spoiled me a bit, what with not needing to recompile.

Anyway, I think that hits all the major points…

And now to follow up on my slightly vitriolic post from the other week. The short version of it is that bogo_lode was pretty much right on. More time has helped quite a lot and I’m liking the system a lot better than I did previously. It helps that I finally got set up with an MSDN account (thanks, work!) and have XP SP2 installed in a VMWare Fusion image—so I have access on this laptop to a few random pieces of software that aren’t available on the Mac, like Visual Studio.

I can also install Microsoft Money—and may do so—but in the mean time I’ve bitten the bullet and bought a copy of Quicken for Mac. It’s not as horrible as the previous versions I’ve used, though I don’t like how Intuit’s policies basically screw Mac users; as I understand it they charge banks an additional fee to support Quicken for Mac even though there is no technical reason for doing so.

I continue to hate the Quicktime client with a burning passion, but on bogo_lode’s advice I’ve switched to NicePlayer and am using that instead. I’ve not yet installed the Perian codecs pack, since I don’t run into a lot of unusual stuff that causes problems. I’m sure I’ll get around to it, however.

Coming back to VMWare Fusion for a moment—that’s a very nice piece of software. Windows is pretty snappy in it and once you install the VMWare tools add-on in the Windows guest, it’s pretty nice to use. It’s pretty graceful in handling changes between my 800×600 windowed mode and 1280×800 full-screen mode. I’m pretty happy to have it around since it means I can use my fast laptop with the readable screen to hit the company VPN and remote-desktop into my PC at work—always a very useful ability.

I haven’t had any time to get into Ruby on Rails, although I do have Locomotive installed once I have time to play with that. I’ll probably end up picking up a copy of TextMate, though, since that editor is like vi or emacs was reborn and made usable. There are a few other little applications here and there that I’d like to pick up, though I’m not in a rush on some of them. I’m also probably going to see about getting a 2×1GB RAM kit to stuff into this, particularly since it’s very affordable on Crucial.

I continue to really like the hardware. MagSafe has saved me from yanking the machine off the desk several times. The PC is fast and snappy and OS X hasn’t beachballed on me very many times. The screen is also really bright and readable, and the glossiness hasn’t given me any issues so far. The one complaint I do have, as far as the screen goes, is that it seems to pick up dirt and fingerprints pretty easily. I need to find a good solution for cleaning that… if anyone has any suggestions there, let me know.

Overall, it’s a mixed bag. I really like the hardware on this. It’s far faster than any other Mac I’ve used, and almost as snappy as my windows desktop is. It also has some nice little touches like MagSafe and two-finger scrolling/two-finger right click.

On the other hand, using OS X frequently again has reminded me of all the things I don’t like about it. I hate the mouse-centric interface, since I’m a heavy alt-key-to-application-menu user. None of the web browsers particularly impress me—I don’t like the way Safari handles tabs—nor do I like the KHTML engine that much, Camino committed the unforgivable sin of crashing while I was trying to submit my taxes to Taxcut Online, and Firefox just… doesn’t fit well. I use Firefox, though, since I can at least configure it to do what I want.

There’s also a glaring lack of a decent personal finance manager for the Mac. Quicken for Mac is a steaming pile of crap, and Intuit deliberately screws Mac users by charging a separate fee to banks to support Quicken/Mac specifically—despite the fact there’s no technical reason to do so. There’s also Moneydance, but I don’t like the transaction input interface, not to mention that it’s painful to get automatic downloads working.

There’s actually been a few times I’ve pulled my Lifebook back out and used that for a while instead, just for a respite from the things that annoyed me.

I’m currently investigating my options for running Windows on this. There’s Parallels, which is a pretty nice piece of software—but it still requires you to run OS X, and the thing is that I’m rapidly getting to the point where I don’t want to do that. That leaves Boot Camp, which seems to work fairly well, except that the touchpad drivers seem to be somewhat less than functional. Which is to say, they currently don’t support tap-clicking. As someone who compulsively tap-clicks, including setting up tap zones for right and middle clicks, this would quickly drive me insane; I hate using the actual buttons on laptop trackpads.

The moral of the story: slightly impulsive purchases (even though I’d been looking for a new laptop) are BAD, m’kay? That said, I’m going to try to be fair and stick to my original plan: try the MacBook for a month or two and see how I like it. If I still don’t like it after I’ve had it for another month or so, I can always throw it up on the Agora Classifieds on Ars Technica, then replace it with something else. We’ll see what happens, but I figure I can get most of my money back if I end up doing that. Either way, I don’t regret taking that HP back and getting this in its place. The HP was definitely not the right machine for me; it’s too soon yet to say whether or not this one is.

The one downside: I have a feeling that my experience on the Mac would probably improve if I dropped a little cash on various applets. The problem is that if I’m not certain I’m committed to the platform yet, I don’t really want to spend any additional money on it… funny how that Catch-22 works out.

I should note that none of this is really meant to flame OS X or to say that it’s a steaming pile of dog crap. It’s not, and obviously a lot of people really like it—I’m just not sure yet that it’s the right choice for me. And I will note that yes, I’m very demanding when it comes to my laptop. Given how much time I spend using it, I don’t think that’s at all unreasonable.

Edit: Oh, one thing I forgot to mention. QuickTime. Words cannot describe just how much I despise QuickTime. I don’t have anything against the codec itself, but I’m pretty sure that if you looked up “utter crap” in the dictionary, there’d be a screenshot of the QuickTime client next to it. VLC is a bit of an improvement, but I find Windows Media Player far less annoying overall.