scottyallen.com

I had a very enlightening conversation with one of my professors, though it was hardly the good sort of enlightenment.

It turns out one of the classes I’m taking this semester, Software Engineering Methods and Tools, is going to largely be a waste of time, and we won’t be learning much I don’t already know. It turns out the first half of the course will be largely an introduction to linux and development in a linux environment (make, cvs, find, grep, standard libraries, etc). And the second half of the course, which gets into testing, performance evalution and debugging, won’t be getting into enough depth to be of use to me.

This is all added to the fact that the funding was cut so severely that they had to drop half (or possibly more) of the lab sessions. So there will only be 6 two hour labs the whole semester. For a course that’s supposed to be largely hands on.

I had hoped to learn extreme programming (pair programming), test driven development, how to develop test harnesses for hard to test systems, and project time and cost estimation. None of which will be covered.

But that isn’t the most annoying part. The most annoying part is that there appears to be no one I could have talked to ahead of time who might have steered me away from this fate. The computer science advisor is useless. The professor for this class said that I’m a rare exception - most students don’t really care what they’re learning, and just want to be told what they need to know to pass the course.

Screw that. I’m here, spending all this time, so I can actually learn something. And not just anything. What I want to learn. But apparently that’s too much to ask.

Yesterday, on my way to lunch with a friend, in the process of flying down Baseline Dr. on my bike, I made the spetacularly stupid move of trying to adjust my lock, which resulted in me and the bike being transferred from a vertical rolling position to a horizontal sliding position. I was goig fast, and slid quite a ways. Thankfully, no one ran me over. That would have sucked. I pulled my bike to the side of the road, talked to two concerned people that stopped to see if I was ok, and then promptly passed out in someone’s front yard. Doh!

I got taken to the hospital by two very nice complete strangers, and got to meet a crazy conservative with an infected beesting (who had four different wounds from failed attempts to give him an IV, which I find more than slightly ironic), and got to have lots of fun with sadistic xray techs who made me do lots of painful things.

Moral of the story is that I chipped the corner off my shoulder, which sucks, but, as far as these things go, is pretty mild compared to what could have been. So, l now have a nice industry velcro contraption to bind my arm to my body (you gotta love industrial velcro), and silly things like putting on shirts and flushing the toilet take on all new meaning. And I anticipate getting to discover all sort of new intracacies about the boulder bus system. w00t!

When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed.

– Marilyn Manson

A fitting quote for our time.

Update: I’ve been corrected. This quote was originally from a fortune cookie, and was only popularized by Manson.

I just received a package containing two of the most expensive dvds I’ve ever held. One of my clients’ servers had a hard drive crash, and these dvds are the results of sending the drive to Ontrack for data recovery. I’ve been less than impressed with Ontrack, having refered them to my client, as I assumed they had the best reputation for data recovery. They’ve been exteremely slow, overshooting their estimate by 3-4 times, and extremely expensive, to the tune of well into 4 figures.

So, sitting here with the dvds in my hands, I figured we were past all the hassles with Ontrack, and that all that was left to do would be to copy the data off the cd and reconstruct it. We got a list ahead of time of what files they were able to recover, so I know theres a fair amount of mysql table rebuilding to be done.

No such luck. I mount the first cd on my linux workstation, and the first file I see is autorun.inf. Not cool. I looked through it a bit more, and found a text file called “CDRestore Instructions.txt”, which starts off:

1.      To restore data from the Ontrack discs, the system must have:
·       An installed Windows operating system (Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, or XP)
·       Software applications installed
·       Sufficient space to store the data from the disc(s)

Doh! And the cd even has printed on it “OS - Linux”. Brilliant. So, in order to recover these files, I’d have to mount the dvd on a windows machine, restore the files, then copy them back over to a linux machine. Moreover, the instructions seem to imply that it’s not possible to tell the restore utility where to put the files, effectively spewing them all over the place. Just what I need, a windows box with a /etc directory.

Fortunately, the command “file” came to my rescue and I found that the files were stored as cpio archives, which appears to be an archaic brother of tar. So I’m in the process of restoring to my linux workstation now.

Tonight I found the inspiration to come up with something of a design for this new blog, as well as reorganize my travel blog into more of a permanent archive format.

In reorganizing the travel blog, I ended up having to use a nasty php hack in order to be able to have everything listed in forward chronological order. It would appear that there isn’t yet a may in moveable type to set order on a MTArchiveList section (though you can on a MTEntries section). I ended up finding this entry over at the girlie matters (go figure), which ended up being both comprehensive and helpful. I ended up using the php solution, with a bit of modification to get the layout I wanted.

During the whole redesign/reorganization process, I found my latest firebird plugin, mozex, to be a huge help. It’s a relatively simple plugin that allows you to configure external apps to handle things such as viewing the page source, editing the content of textareas, and handling mailto links. I originally installed it to handle mailto links, since I didn’t see another easy way to get firebird to send mailto links to evolution (though it seems like there should be an easier way), but have been relishing it’s view page source and edit textarea features a lot more, as it allows me to use vim, my editor of choice (obsession?) that much more.

I was finally convinced to start blogging again, by Chris. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, and as he put it, a good New Years resolution. I think it partly ties back into the procrastination I feel with closing out my trip (scanning slides, writing friends I met travelling, polishing up my travel blog). But it’s good to finally break out of it. I realized tonight that the web design part of it was holding me back, so I’ve decided to skip doing a design for now, and just throw it up bare.

In other news, I’ve been playing around with wikis a lot lately. I’m running php wiki for keep notes to myself, todo lists, and most importantly, client server documentation. I don’t think it’s possible to truely appreciate the power of a wiki until you start actually trying to do work with it. And you really, really understand the power when you go back to trying to write things in html. It’s so incredibly fast, and requires so little thought about the mechanics of formatting and other annoying details.

One of the nice things using a wiki has caused/allowed me to do is to start keeping better notes about technical tips and hacks, as I figure them out. More and more I’m finding that I’m hitting the same problem multiple times, and I always remember that I was able to fix it thorugh some obscure hack, but don’t exactly remember many of the details. My wiki has already saved my butt several times on that front. Part of the experience has been learning when I need to write something down, and what I should put down about it. I’m hoping this is a practice I can keep up with, as well as I’m hoping to eventually make my notes open, so others might benefit as well.