Andy's Blog

I finally saw Episode III last night

Finally! I decided to wait until the stars aligned amongst my friends before seeing Episode III. It was well worth the 3(+) year wait. I'm not going to write a full review, but there is one thing that I want to get off of my chest after the jump...

(Beware of spoilers)

How much of a badass is Obi-Wan? In Episodes I & II, his only big achievement was killing Darth Maul. But in Episode III? Whoa-boy: became a kick-ass general, killed General Grievous, survived the clone army turning on him, and kicked the crap out of Anakin. After Episode II, I thought that Yoda was the most bad-ass Jedi of them all, but Obi-Wan really won me over in Episode III. And saving Anakin's light saber to gift to Luke some 20-odd years later? Man, was he ever thinking ahead!

-Andy.

Another post about work

I found out today that another person on my team is resigning.

There are a number of dimensions to being "satisfied at work". Basically, I see it as being either "the technology, "the mission", or "the team". If I were super-interested in what I was doing technically, then I could have a really great time of work, irrespective of whether-or-not the work mattered, or if I found working with my co-workers gratifying.

The reason why I have stayed at EDS this long has been mostly for "the team". The technology and mission components certainly exist, but I really like my co-workers: we're a tight-knit bunch, we stimulate each other intellectually, and balance each other out pretty well with our strengths and weaknesses. On the upside, this has made the work environment pretty great. On the downside, when people decide to leave, it because a bigger kick-in-the-pants than usual.

So, at this point, I'm pretty-much wondering when I'm going to have to pull the eject lever for myself. It's certainly shaping up to be an interesting summer, indeed.

-Andy.

My current relationship with EDS: "bipolar"

Thinking about it, the best way for me to summarize how I'm feeling about EDS right now is that I have bipolar personality disorder about it. At one point last week, I was entirely jazzed about working there -- I have some ideas about bringing blogging and Wiki to the table, that I think could really revolutionize how the company communicates internally. I have been doing some work, giving presentations, trying to sell my ideas, and I'm at the point where I need to start some pilot projects in order to get some proof in the pudding. All of that is totally great.

But then I have days like today, which just make me feel like "fuck it, I want to quit". One of the members of our (small) team announced that he is moving on, and will be joining a different company in a few weeks. It really hurts because this person is someone that I have a deep respect for on the technical computer side of things (which isn't to say that he isn't a stand-up guy in other ways -- he is, but I'm all about the CompSci kung fu). We're certainly not going to be able to replace him -- even if we could hire externally (but we cannot, so the point is moot).

It has been fun, essentially being a startup within a big-giant-honking organization, but I'm not sure how much longer it is going to last. What has made everything worth it so far has been the team -- I have a lot of respect and admiration for my co-workers. Not only are they technically brilliant, but they're also a fun group of cats to hang out with. So, it really sucks to see the team slowly breaking apart. But, as the saying goes, "all good things must come to an end".

-Andy.

(Bonus Blog Entry: Really-loud music that I listened too after getting home today: track 13 off of Ænima, "Ænema". That, at least, made me feel a little better.)

Apple World Travel Adapter

Yesterday, I wanted to know all of the countries supported by Apple's World Travel Adapter kit, without having to get off of my butt and go and find the manual. Well, Google let me down (even the images section), so in the interest of never having to get off of my butt again, I have scanned the relevant page of the manual, and am now posting it here for all:

-Andy.

Goodbye Sheila (for the summer)

Sheila managed to snag an internship and some funding for the summer, but the "rub" is that the job is in South Africa. She is leaving on Tuesday, so we had a "goodbye" dinner for her yesterday:

(L-R: Mike, Sheila, Mariko, Will, Koji, and me)

Food & friends were pretty-A-Ok, and it sounds like she is going to have a blast in South Africa.

-Andy.

Google is really cool

A couple of things about Google have been bouncing around in my head lately, and it all came together with something that I read on Slashdot today. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer made slashdot today, with is prediction that Google is a one-trick Pony, and as such will be dead in 5 years. Last week, I read an article by Robert X. Cringely, stating that the Google Web Accelerator is a portent of how Google will become a "platform". Thankfully, I don't think that either point of view is exactly correct.

While, it's probably true that if Google just sticks to search, Microsoft will be able to do to them what they did to Netscape, I don't think that is Google's game. I think that Google is looking to be a repository for accessing data. And the "platform" (if you can call it that), will be their API's, which allow 3rd party applications to interact with and add value to this data in their own ways.

Case in point: this Wired news article that I read the other day. It highlights several new applications that are making use of Google Maps in new and interesting ways. One of the applications that immediately grabbed me is something called HousingMaps, which combines apartment listings from craigslist with mapping information from Google. Go ahead and try it out -- it is super neat. But the reason why this application reached out and grabbed me is because this is something I could have really used the last time that I was looking for an apartment. With one click, I saw all of the current craigslist apartment listings as pushpins on Google's map. This is so awesome! And it is all made possible by the fact that Google's "platform" is eminently hackable and extendable by third parties.

Of course, the one thing that Microsoft touts over and over is that they provide a platform -- i.e. Windows -- which is a rich ecosystem for 3rd party developers to build their own applications, thus allowing the free market to serve customers in a way that no monolithic entity can. Well, guess what kids? Google can play that game too. And while I don't want to over-hype this (because hyping some company as a Microsoft-killer is a sure way to get them killed by Microsoft), I sure am keenly interested to see where this is going.

-Andy.

Blowing my brains out

Today was day one of a three day training course in ITIL, for me and my immediate co-workers.

Boring, boring, boring, boring-as-hell, boring!

Why so boring? Is it the quality of the training materials being used? No, they are okay (if uninspired). The instructor? While he probably won't win "instructor of the year", he is adequate, and hence not the problem. The real problem that I have is that I simply don't give a flying fig about change, incident, problem, and release management. And all of the associated processes, documentation, and rigid social structures that make all of it work.

And this isn't a shock -- I knew that I wasn't interested in this crap before taking this course. But I'm stuck with it, and I just have to slog through it.

What is interesting, however, is that after sitting in front of this material for eight full hours today, my mind was actually numb. When I got home from work, I had to blast "The Patient" on my stereo, and submit my body to a punish workout just to feel alive again.

Two more days of this is really going to hurt. Or turn me into a process-loving zombie. You know, whichever comes first.

-Andy.

Bay to Breakers

I ran "Bay to Breakers" today for the first time today, with Mike. Here's a shot that gives a sense of the crowd during the run:

The race is 7.5 miles long, starting near the bay and ending at the ocean. I surprised myself by jogging pretty-much the entire thing. The beginning of the race is so crowded that it is impossible to run, so I probably didn't get going until about 15 minutes after the race started. Still, Mike and I finished in 1 hour 33 minutes, which seems pretty good to me. I expected to be able to run like 3 miles and then poop out, but instead I was able to jog the entire race.

Dang, I'm so awesome.

I managed to take some pictures of the race, mostly before and after the running. Some highlights: Spear & tortilla, Mike finds a tortilla with a message, the starting line, sharks, dogs as babies, Mike (afterwards), and me (afterwards).

-Andy.

Self Portrait (in transit)

I took this picture last Sunday while Mike drove Kevin and I to dinner in Berkeley, CA. I was fooling around with the camera on the way, and this photo actually came out pretty decent (by my standards, anyway).

-Andy.

Finally!

My copy of Tiger finally arrived today (iWork came yesterday). My initial analysis: Tiger fixes iSync not working with my crappy Nokia 6600 cell phone, so that is worth the price of admission right there.

-Andy.

"Copy Protected CDs Suck"

Today's "new music Tuesday" was a particularly fruitful one. I went to Target on the way to work this morning, and picked up new CDs from Fall Out Boy, Nine Inch Nails, and Acceptance. I listened to the first two discs at work, but paused before I unwrapped the Acceptance disc. On the front spine, it has a funny logo and says "Content Protected". This triggered my "uh-oh" reaction, and I flipped to the back. Apparently, on Windows machines, this CD has crazy content restrictions (you can only get low quality WMA versions of the songs, which can only be transfered to certain portable players). But apparently, on the Macintosh, it behaves like a normal audio CD.

I don't know how to feel about this. A large part of me wants to return this CD to target and wash my hands of the whole thing. I don't want to send the message that by consuming this CD, that copy protection is okay. On the other hand, on the Mac it doesn't appear to be protected at all. And I buy copy-protected DVDs all of the time, and while it bugs me, I'm not out protesting in the streets.

I wrote to Sony/BMG and complained, but what I really want to do is complain to the band. I think that if bands knew that their fans were pissed off about how hard it is to transfer the songs from their legally-purchased CDs to their iPod, then something could be done about it. So, I went the to the official Acceptance website, but I didn't see an e-mail address on there anywhere. Humph!

I still haven't opened this CD, so I still have a chance to return it. I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

-Andy.

Taking out My Lack-Of-Tiger Pain on Ubuntu

Since I had blocked off a decent chunk of time over this last weekend for playing with Tiger (which didn't happen), I had to take my-lack-of-new-OSX-goodness out on something. And that something was my Ubuntu install that I did on my Athlon64 Shuttle box. Shortly after Hoary came out, I decided that I had had enough of Fedora Core 2, and wiped that Linux out with a fresh install of Ubuntu. The Ubuntu install was simply amazing (in the domain of OS installs, anyway). I would rank the install better than Windows (it actually asked me less questions, was faster, and had less reboots). The only pain is partitioning, but even that wasn't so bad -- I liked their fdisk-like utility -- it made it easy to preserve the '/home' from my FC2 install, while blowing away the rest.

So, I have been knocking around with Ubuntu for a few weeks, and am definitely liking what I am seeing. Ubuntu is one of the most polished Linux distributions that I have ever played with. It has shocked me at times, how well this OS has worked (which should tell you something about my low expectations concerning Linux).

So my project for this weekend was to finish installing and configuring MythTV on the new Ubuntu machine. I also wanted to export my data from the old MythTV box, so I wouldn't lose any state concerning which shows I want to record, and which episodes I have already seen. Fortunately, the procedure for doing the export was reasonably well-documented, so I was able to pull that off.

Not everything was clean and simple, however. Everything in the base Ubuntu distribution has had the spit & polish treatment given to it, from what I can tell. However, the core Ubuntu distribution is quite small, and doesn't cover the vast wealth of free software that is available. That is why Ubuntu is based off of Debian, which means that you can pull Debian packages "from the wild" into Ubuntu. What this means is that in order to get MythTV working properly, I have had to do some hacking, since MythTV isn't a part of Ubuntu.

The worst part was getting the remote control working. On Linux, IR remotes are handled by the LIRC project. This is a set of utilities and kernel drivers that sit outside of the main kernel. On most (sane) distributions, you can download a binary package that includes the utilities and libraries, as well as pre-compiled kernel modules that match the kernel of the distribution that you are running.

But is that how Debian works? Oh no, that's not how it works. Apparently, in Debian-land, you download the source code to the LIRC modules, as well as the source code to the kernel that you are running. Then, you use some special Debian utilities ('make-kpkg'), in order to build the LIRC kernel modules for the device that you want to support. This would all be fine, in a Gentoo-esque sort of way, if it actually worked. Unfortunately, it appears as if the 'make-kpkg' utility makes assumptions based upon the 2.4 kernel, which don't hold true for the 2.6 kernel that Ubuntu uses.

So, after fighting with this mess for awhile on Sunday night, last night I decided to simply screw Debian, fetch the LIRC source, and have at it the completely manual way. I'm pleased to report that the LIRC source was quite easy to deal with, and I now have my Hauppauge remote working on the new-and-improved MythTV box.

So, the moral of the story? Ubuntu is good, but I'm still not on board the Debian bandwagon.

-Andy.

Still No Tiger For Me (Yet)

When I got home from work today, I was once again greeted by a lack of MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger". I called Apple (that will make the third time now), and after about a half hour wait, I was able to speak to someone. Without me really having to make my case, she realized that there is indeed something messed up with my order. After some more waiting, she was able to bang up my order to my satisfaction. The new deal is that Apple is going to overnight me another copy of Tiger tomorrow. The assumption is that the first copy that they tried to send me is "lost". To compensate me for all of my "pain and suffering" (heh), they are also sending me a free copy of iWork. Not too bad, but I would have rather had Tiger 4 days ago. :(

-Andy.