Sander’s Weblog

For some time, any time I downloaded a Microsoft Office document in Safari, the browser appended an extra filename extension to the saved download, which turned the Office Document into an Office Template. A Word Document gets a .dot suffix, a Powerpoint slide show gets .pot, and an Excel spreadsheet gets .xla, which turns it into an add-in library which is really not what that file is.  Devastating? No. Annoying? For sure yes. Life is too short to have to munge file name extensions all the time, and this is a Mac, right, so stuff should just work. 

Fortunately, a Google trip across some web forums leads to the cause of the problem, which in itself is an interesting illustration about how intricate even Personal Computers have become, and how easy it is to break something.   (more…)

ApacheCon EU 2008 has come to an end, and I think it’s been a really good show. Exactly what defines a conference as “good” is sometimes hard to capture: I think a lot is in the intangibles like who was there, what was done and what was discussed over the tables in the common room.

There were good talks too: I think dividing the conference up in tracks worked really well. It made it easy to find related sessions and follow them. A logical next step might be to work with the presenters to make sure that the contents of a particular track are cohesive, with minimal overlap. The planners may want to assign each track a volunteer “editor” from that particular field who gets to work with the individual presenters.

I spent a significant amount of time in the Systems Administration and Security tracks because that’s where I was presenting. On Friday, my talks done, I sat in on some sessions about projects and technologies with which I have never worked, and found them really inspiring. During Ate’s talk on enterprise portals I downloaded the installer of Jetspeed 2, and found myself with a fully functional portal on my laptop, ready for corporate branding and custom portlets. That’s cool stuff.

I guess that I’ll also be looking at interesting stuff like Serf and the Waka as they develop and (hopefully) are documented. Will I play a role in the development of Apache 3.0? Ma-a-a-a-a-a-y-be… in my copious spare time. Will there be an Apache 3.0? Only time and dev@httpd.apache.org will tell.

I feel tired, yet refreshed, with lots of interesting things to check out. And that is a good feeling to have after a conference.

We’re doing a PGP Keysigning again at ApacheCon Europe 2008, but the Apache Wiki is down today so I can’t update its PGPKeySigning page. Several folks have already sent me their key: thank you very much!

The Keysigning session will happen at the tail end of the Welcome Reception, and hopefully be done before the BOFs start. If you would like to participate, send your public key to sctemme at apache dot org before 3PM on Wednesday. I will compile the key list after I’m done with my talks.

It’s fully ensconced in my muscle memory: tar -xzf somepackage.tar.gz to untar a gzip-compressed tarball. But what if the tarball is compressed with Bzip2? You have to use tar -xjf or tar won’t understand the compression format.

Or, on MacOSX, just use tar -xf on either compression format and tar figures it out for itself. And that’s the way it should be: smart software that can find out on what file format it operates.

But my fingers still want to tar -xzf…

Now that you can get Green Eggs and Ham at IHOP, I’m completely overwhelmed by the carpet-bomb marketing campaign for the cartoon based on the Dr. Seuss book. I want to know when I can buy a Theed at my local Macy’s or Gap. I need one. So I can hide under it.

If you can see this, it’s been successfully posted through Journler.  I’d do a test post, but that’s too boring.  I’m in Seattle.  It’s raining.  Oh wait, I’ll have to do better than that if I want to be non-boring. 

A Dutch news show has commissioned an online voter’s guide for the 2008 US presidential elections… targeted at a Dutch audience. It’s online, in Dutch and English (for the expats).

Apparently, it’s a huge success. I get consistent results whether I use the English or Dutch version, although I don’t like statement 23 because it lumps together two distinct and contradictory views. Try it and see where you stand.

So we’re on vacation on Maui, hanging out in downtown Lahaina. The first night, we wanted something quick after arriving late… so we picked Cheeseburger In Paradise. This turned out to be the wrong choice. They have a great location, but their burgers are atrocious: processed meat product patties cooked well done that taste as if they could be made of anything except cow. Yuk. Their coconut shrimp appetizer is OK, but don’t go there for the burgers.

Tonight, Maui redeemed itself by guiding us to the Cool Cat Cafe. The burgers served in this unassuming fifties themed diner are actually tasty, made of real meat cooked a sincere attempt at medium rare (they managed medium; we didn’t complain), and a good chunk of change cheaper than at the aforementioned tourist trap.

Lahaina itself can be summed up this way: yes there are souvenir shops, jewelry stores and art galleries, interleaved with timeshare sales desks, but one block away the streets don’t have sidewalks. Yes there are resorts but the town’s grammar school is right on the beach and a town that can keep development in check to this extent makes a great place to visit.

I finally took time to read Will Shipley’s impassionate 2005 post about unit testing and why he doesn’t do it. He’s of course exaggerating for effect and the post is best taken in together with BBum’s excellent follow-up where he argues that unit testing made a huge amount of sense for his project, but may be less relevant for software that directly interacts with users.

Unit testing serves to define and enforce the interface that a piece of code presents to the outside world, which makes most sense (and makes a whole lot of sense) when the user of the code is itself a program. Hence: libraries, Frameworks (oh wait, they are also teh suck) and the like. Having a comprehensive set of unit tests gives the folks who have to work with your code confidence in its quality, and gives you liberty to change stuff under the hood as you see fit, with no fear (ok, less fear) of breaking the confidence the other folks have.

Unit tests don’t find bugs. They ensure that there is no unpredictable behavior (bugs) in the bits they test, but they are not as good at finding new bugs that you didn’t know were there. That’s still up to other techniques like exploratory testing that Will likes so much better. Perhaps Unit Testing is incorrectly named, and we should be talking about Unit Verification.

I have a new PC under my desk, and it seems that I now have my X setup the way I want it. The problem was with the dual head support: I wanted one desktop stretched across the two monitors, so I can drag windows across from one monitor to the other.

The default configuration merely mirrored one screen onto two monitors: a waste of desktop real estate. What I had before did put different X displays on the monitors: good but not great because I couldn’t drag across. On my old machine I could use the Xinerama extension to achieve the what I wanted, but turning that on made the driver for the new card (ATI’s proprietary fglrx) crash when the screensaver kicked in.
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