Today I ordered a couple of items I look forward to getting in the mail. The first is a Gymboss which is a interval timer with vibration and sound. I plan to use it for doing tabatas. Thanks for the tip Thomas!
The second item is a pair of mini bands from Iron Woody Fitness. I plan to use these on the bench press, push ups, x band walks and probably a myriad of other exercises and mobility work as I get acquainted with it.
Just hoping both items will arrive before Christmas…
The problem is with the svn client, at least version 1.5.1 and 1.5.2.
The workaround is simply:
svn up -r head
Symptom: When producing pdfs with latex (miktex distro) it uses bitmap fonts, resulting in text that it is not possible to either select or search.
Solution: install the cm-super fonts with the miktex package manager (large package), or use the \usepackage{lmodern} command to use the lmodern fonts that are included with miktex.
This post at miktex support forum outlines the symptoms, cause and solution.
When things suck.. just remember you’re probably better of anyways.
Lesson to be learnt: whine less.
My mother recently bought a shiny new dell with Windows Vista on it. I recently got my fingers on it, and it’s pretty darn alright. But I had one problem:
starting uTorrent was causing the system to slow down and also drop http traffic…
After consulting a friend we found out he had the same problem some months ago. The solution was simple: uninstall mcafee.
So I uninstalled mcafee, and now my linux iso download is blazing. :-)
Btw, you REALLY SHOULD install some other AV after uninstalling mcafee. I’ve been pleased with Avast which is free. Also I’ve heard good words about AVG, Avira and Nod32 (this is one of the best, but payware).
I discovered a German artist called Zoë Keating the other day while watching a photo series(the ‘audio slide’) on New York Times that was about China and the consequences of the rapid industrialization. Make sure to turn on the sound.
So far I’ve only listened to the music on her myspace page and downloaded a live album from eMusic. There’s also some videos up on youtube.
Oh, and it’s cello.
Good hip-hop without all the killing, bling and “hoes”. From the Wikipedia article:
Talib Kweli (born Talib Kweli Greene in Brooklyn, New York City on October 3, 1975) is an American MC from Brooklyn, New York. He is one of the best-known rappers in alternative hip hop, and is frequently critically acclaimed, despite not having seen significant commercial success. His name in Arabic means “student”, his last name in Swahili means “true”.
So far I’ve listened to his new album Ear Drum and a mix cd called Right About Now. Both good in their own respects. Although I’ve heard that his older material is better, so there is more to explore.
I’m a regular reader of Stronglifts.com which is a blog about strength training. It features themes as technique (helped me improve my deadlifts) and nutrition (proponent of the anabolic diet – which I’m not on.. as of yet.).
Not to much, but some.
Yesterday I talked about how the project was executed in both the design and implementation phase. Today I’m ranting a bit more in detail about how we coded the thing in PHP (v5).
When coding started, we agreed on (or rather, I pushed the view) that we should use the DAO pattern for our database access needs. To work easily with the database, and also to have the possibility of prepared statement we used Creole, a PHP database API that’s very similar to Java’s.
Soon, we had our DAOs. Though, all was not good. Eager to get going we started coding using our new functionality and didn’t bother coding up the corresponding service layer for them. This was alright to begin with since the application only had some basic CRUD functionality. The problems (or future problems if you want..) became obvious when we started adding functionality that cut across the model objects. Code cutting across the DAO layer was made. And this in turn led to duplicated code.
At that point, I guesstimate that our application was ~70% done. So, to go back and change everything into using a Service Layer wasn’t an option with the deadline closing up and the code was delivered with those nice dependencies within the layer.
Looking back, I see that the Active Record pattern probably could have been a good choice.
This was probably the hardest part to get done right. And there’s no real consistency in the approach here.
Some places the code for handling form data and get requests were in the same file, and the page posted to itself. I guess this is fine for smaller scripts, but some of ours were starting to get big quick, and doesn’t look very maintainable.. In other places there was sort of a controller. They took POST data and redirected with a header(“Location: foo”) call. This is a much more maintainable approach, and very MVC.
I think the issue would have been better solved using perhaps the Front Controller pattern or a good MVC implementation. Both coupled with a template language such as Smarty.
Creole was a good experience. We lacked a good approach from the data layer and up. Using a framework like CakePHP or symfoni would probably been the best thing to do.
I think I have learnt a thing or two now.
This spring I have been doing some work on a web application, part of a deliverable in one of my courses (INF5270).
We were a team of four writers/programmers/designers/whatever needed. The deadline was about an hour ago, and we delivered our system 3 hours before that for once. So, for personal reflection I thought I’d sum up my experiences. Especially in the light of having read through a better part of Getting Real by 37signals.
The theme of the course is, as stated in its title, Design of Interactive Web Sites. The curriculum is somewhat broad, but the main focus is on Information Architecture and Sociability. Our task was to build a social web site (and also write up some reports about it and reflect on the theory of the course).
We decided on a theme early on; books. We were going to build a social web site about books, or literature if you want it dandy. We started investigating other sites within the theme, and found some. Looked into them, and what they did and reflected about what we would want to put in.
At this step, we only had some thoughts, and also a report that we had to deliver about our findings and how they related to the theory taught. The next step was, as Getting Real suggests, making the screens in HTML. Only, we skipped the part with sketches and drawings and drew directly on a document with ideas. I think this is probably one of the first (major) faults we made in the project.
Words in a document are fine, but do they really convey what we want? Everybody has different ideas, and that really shone trough nearing the deadline. We were not on the same note and the end result was different than, I think, everyone envisioned. If we had sketched the site early on and put it somewhere on the web it would have been much easier to see what we agreed and disagreed on and reach agreements.
So, we had the screens out there in HTML (part of another delivery), we disagreed, agreed and none of them really got updated. The same screens were the basis when we started on the 4th delivery that included the first bit of implementation. The screens where as much worth as the dead document, nothing. So we started coding, all in our own directions, which resulted in confusion and a delivery that consisted of different ideas, not ONE idea.
And, that was pretty much the story for our 5th and last delivery that was finished up some hours ago. We ended up delivering a system that deviated some, or much, from both our personal and common vision.
I think the following would have made the project execution better:
* Interface sketches EARLY on, perhaps just after deciding on our theme for the site, and then meeting up for more iterations and doing an early assessment of feasibility for the different parts of the site. Together with a vision document, and some documentation of elements in the sketch this would serve as the framework for the whole System.
* A live document where we documented our choices, so that they could be found in easily when needed (some code at night, others early in the morning).
* Some more meetings . Although Getting Real really disapproves of them I think they would work in our case (small team) to easily and quickly solve confusion on certain aspects in a quicker way than e-mail and/or IM.
* A centralized, online, meeting place. Campfire could probably have been suitable for this.
Hm, that’s what was on top of my head for now.
There was a pillow fight in Toronto last week, and the picture of this pillow fighter caught my eye. Maybe I will give up my disdain for people with dreads someday too? For some reason I’ve always felt a bit of contempt for people who doesn’t wash their hair on a regular basis, although some of the women can look really good with it. A shame.
As a person somewhat interested in possibly doing something by myself work-wise some day, I ran into the Personal MBA Manifesto site that more or less gives a list of books and magazines to read and study by oneself to attain knowledge similar to an MBA.
The manifesto states that you wont attain all the knowledge needed by the books alone, you need to be out there working with your own start up or something similar. I’m kind of a skeptical, but I enjoy reading —so I’ll definitely pick up some of the books for summer or something like that (already posess Getting Things Done by Allen for a year or so. How is that for Getting Things Done?;) —I’ll get right to it after exams.)
Last week was also the birthday of the typeface Helvetica. I found Magasinets article(norwegian) a enjoyable read. BBC also has good coverage.
What I’m currently up to
I guess I’m not blogging much. I’ll try my best to fix that.
These days I’m occupied as a java developer at a company called Cicero Consulting. The company is a combination of several services, but they are all related to banking and finances. Luckily in a way that shouldn’t hurt us to much during the economic downturn.
The company is like a small family, and we’re currently about 20 people working there. We have 8 developers that does consultancy and product development. I started out with product development in on our core product called Cicero Financial Planner. It is product delivered in various forms to major actors in the Norwegian banking sector and enables them to do effective client counseling.
Fast forward to november and I was sent out as a junior consultant to a (for me) large project related to the financial field. Being a consultant is in many pretty different from working in the office. Both good and bad. I’ll probably write a post on this later as I get more time to compare. But the biggest change is perhaps working in a focused team again.
In the product developer setting we were 2-3 developers working on different parts of the product. This meant that you felt somewhat alone with what you were working on. In one way this was bad. It raised the threshold of starting a conversation about the aspect you were working on. I guess this is perhaps a bad personality trait that I have. I’ll work on it. On the other hand it also gave a lot responsibility and freedom to influence decisions during the development process. A huge bonus.
In the team and project context (in my specific case at least) the roles are somewhat reversed. There’s plenty of opportunity to discuss the different topics of the ongoing development process within the team, but smaller opportunities to be a part of decisions. This is both good and bad. It allows you to offload this work to others (or, it newer reach you), but it is frustrating when (in my eyes) bad decisions have are made. The decisions can also take quite a lot of time to clarify with the customer. Which is pretty frustrating when they’re minuscule in my eyes.
So, what do I favor? I can’t decide. Working for yourself, being your own boss and being allowed to make decisions contra the interaction and focus in a team. I think both have their merits. Either way, change is good and conditioning.
I guess that sums up my current status as to work.