Gigu’s blog

So I’m reading this book at the moment “Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. It’s good read for all the people that design/create things/software that would be used by others. I realized that I’m paying more attention to how things are design. If they are user friendly etc.

Client that I work for at the moment has one disable toilet with shower. I use this toilet to change and shower when I arrive on my bike to work. There is couple of things in this toilet that made me generally think about the design and find analogy in software, AND more exactly in Web Interfaces. I have stumble upon those issues all the time, on BIG GUN web sites (like banking interfaces) and on small private web sites.

(more…)

It is this time again when I have to switch platform I work at. This time I jumped into .NET world. It is not an unfamiliar ground, I was doing some work with .NET before and I like it (not all of it though).

One of the interesting things we came across this week was a config file for web   application, so called Web.config. So we desired to switch some settings based on environment where application was deployed. Simplest thing we could think of was referring in a config section to external file with settings. Something like this:

…

<web.model configSource=”file.with.config” />

…

Deployment with NAnt was just deploying proper file to server and all was automated.

(more…)

New Ubuntu release should be with us in a matter of days. I’m looking forward

Greg

Some time ago I overheard a conversation about performance of Ruby applications on Windows or more precisely it’s lack. I don’t usually believe this kind of conversation until I see something with my own eyes. I saw it today.

I am a Linux enthusiast. I use Linux on my desktop and usually deploy applications on Linux servers. I know that Linux is fast and reliable. I don’t need proof for that. But I thought that Ruby will perform somehow similar on both platforms. Wrong.

I wrote a little application that is pooling a lot of XML content (RSS feeds) from web sites, parses it and extracts a data. It also updates MySQL database with new content.

Running application on Windows took me 24 minutes (something about 2000 web sites). Dual core machine with empty MySQL database and without any intense processes in a background (excluding Windows itself hehe .

Then I run it on Linux with same configuration, same network connection, empty database and no intense processes in a background. It took 7 minutes. I know that maybe server that the sites were requested from could respond slower but COME ON. How much slower it could be.

I never trusted Windows when it came to a production environment. Now I don’t trust it even more. Where is the 17 minutes that Linux didn’t need it? Is it MySQL performance on Linux or I/O operations or maybe networking?

I’m looking forward for Ubuntu Hardy to install it as I did some damage to my old installation and I am to lazy to fix it. Developing on Linux was always much faster and more flexible for me. Plus I do get my favourite tool, powerful command line

Greg

We currently live in a decade where everything is I. iPhone iPlayer, iSomething. My teen years were 90tees. I could probably say a lot of good and bad things has happen that time but I just won’t to mention the one thing that smith my character The birth and existence of Grunge music.

Why I’m writing about that. During the weekend I was looking at some old mp3 CD that I have in my CD collection. Looking at the band and album titles old memories of the good old times came back to me.

Bands like Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Silverchair, Bush, Hey (I do strong believe and still am that they were the one and only Polish grunge band at that time). These bands are the example of my favourites. I could listen to their music for hours.

I do believe nothing as good as Grunge has happened after. Even G Bands went some odd direction with their music. All the crap that you hear in TV or a Radio these days sounds the same or like a remake of old songs.

I will shove all the G juice (nothing Google like) into my mp3 player and listen to it, reminding myself good old times, times of rebel, and most important of good music.

Pearl Jam “Leash” will forever stay my personal anthem.

What’s your anthem? What is the song moves you to your very bone?

Grzegorz da Greg

Ps. There is a Grunge radio station http://www.grungefm.com if you are interested in it.

I’ve done a horrible thing yesterday. It ended up with coming back to Windowz again. But let’s start from beginning

When I was writing the post I looked at some news in Linux community and came across KDE 4. It’s got an eye candy look. I have a weak spot for my desktops. I decided I got to have it and give it a test drive.

Quick Google and search on forums showed me that I can get it with latest development release of Kubuntu. So, all I need to do is two steps. Install Kubuntu desktop on my Ubuntu (sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop) and then upgrade to latest version (sudo update-manager -d). BIG MISTAKE. I mean all updates and upgrades went fine.

It took about 30 to 45 minutes to finish (in a mean time I could play and talk with my 4 months old daughter about my desktop change decision, she is pretty good listener, but it’s hard to get any sort of opinion from her in when it’s about IT subjects. I’ll give her one more month for that :).

So, after 45 minutes computer prompted me for restart. When I did so and it arrived at boot menu screen what a surprise. SEVEN different options for booting Ubuntu, with three different kernels. Oh well, I choose default, the one that was preselected. What a surprise when it took about 5 minutes to boot (normally about 30 seconds). When it finally manage it only screen resolution I could get in either Gnome or KDE was 800X600. RIDICOULOUS.

Poking around for 30 minutes with Oliwia (my daughter) hanging on the other side of my arm with face expression telling me “See old man, BIG MISTAKE” I realised it was a BIG MISTAKE.

Back to Windowz days for some time. I don’t have the patient to fix this sort of problems anymore. Will wait for stable release of Ubuntu Hardy Heron and then put a clean install.

On the other hand I found a nice piece of software for getting an access to ext2/ext3 partitions under XP. It is called Linux Reader.

Summary

Don’t do system upgrade on Beta and Development version of software.

I hope uncle Greg teaches you kids a lesson. It’s better to learn at someone else’s mistakes.

Gregster

Everyone know how hard it is to come back from holidays. I’m in the office but my head is all over the place. I’m starting a .NET project next week. It’s good to change a seat after few months of Java chair. I do like to do that. I’m trying to become more of a universal developer then a one platform expert. It might look like I will not be an expert in anything, just know something in all areas. The point is to adjust to new circumstances and learn fast to do the job right. I guess it’s being agile

I was at QCon two weeks ago in London. Only one day but I heard a lot. Most interesting were discussions that we had at ThoughtWorks exhibition stand. Martin Fowler and Kent Back spent some time talking about social skills in software development. Was good enough to listen to those guys plus we got the chance to ask them some questions

I came across gOS last week. Downloaded live CD and I gave it a go. I think I used to much to Gnome or KDE to learn another Desktop environment. gOS is using Enlightenment version DR17. It is a little bit different then Desktops I used to. The whole idea behind gOS is to somehow integrate and make it easy to use Google applications straight from your desktop launchers. I have to say that gOS desktop looks very pretty. Other then that I’m not impressed. Missing button for terminal window is just a crime that can’t be forgiven. When booted from Live CD I can’t mount my hard drive too for some reason. Officially it is still beta release. I will wait for proper release to give it a go.

As you can see, holidays still in my head. Thoughts everywhere. Slowly getting there.

Cheerios, Gregsteros

Today first time in my life I decided to write small Ruby script instead of using COPY, PASTE. Does it mean that I’m a geek now?

I needed to get some data from a web site. Because data was nicely formatted in table I could just mark it, copy and then paste in spreadsheet tool. What I did instead was a little script that loaded the page, parsed table rows, extracted the data and saved it to a csv file. There is a nice library for HTML parsing called Hpricot. If anyone is doing some HTML, XHTML parsig in Ruby I do strongly recommend. Very simple parsing based on document tree.

Short example, to get all link elements from this blog I would do something like that:

document = open(’http://blog.gigoo.org’) { |opened_uri| Hpricot(opened_uri) }

link_elements = document.search(”a”)

Voila

So, why addicted

I think I became addicted. Got the Ruby bug on me now. I like it more and more. Still trying to keep away from Rails just play with language and it’s features. I love big number of useful tools and libraries and the fact that community is working hard to make great stuff for it.

What I don’t like is the fact that everything is design and created with Rails on mind. I hope that Ruby is not going to be “the Rails language” and that people are going to remember that it’s not only about WEB (well, almost all the time is).

Cheerios and other cereals, Gregster

I got standard Ubuntu Gutsy installation on my laptop. Some time ago I tried Ubuntu Studio and I always remembered its look. It was probably one of the best looks of Linux desktop I ever seen. It turns out that guys from Studio made they distributions look pre-packaged and you can use apt to install it. It is just one simple command

sudo apt-get install ubuntustudio-look

And results are:

Fancy a little bit of Studio for yourself?

Cheers, Gregii

I got dual boot at my laptop. Most of the time I use Ubuntu (Gutsy Gibbon at the moment). I do occasionally switch to Windows XP to use my digital camera software that is only available for Microsoft’s system. Few weeks ago problems with sound started. When I tried to use Firefox with a Flash it completely nuked the sound in Ubuntu. Not just for a moment but until next restart.

I know at least two people with same problem. Laptop I got is Dell Latitude D620. Have I fixed a problem? Sure I did, Google helped as usual

I got a deb package from Paul Betts, looks like he is fixing stuff If you can’t find it there here is a copy. All you have to do is download it and install. All that is required is a Firefox restart.

I thought I will share this knowledge as solution is fast and simple

Cheers, Gregster