Blogging Ottinger (tim)

Funny, if unhappy laws of project management. And yes, I earned the right laugh at them.

Your parents spend money to buy you pop because you like pop. They could give you healthier and/or cheaper things to drink. When you take one or two sips and leave the rest, it makes Mom and Dad want to give you water (which is better for you) in tiny juice glasses instead of wasting money on pop.

Young adults: your friends feel the same way about beer.

Microsoft this week announced (via lawsuit of course) that the Tom-Tom personal navigation device beloved by many is actually a Linux-based system. Yes, that’s right, thousands and thousands more people will come to realize that Linux is already a part of their lives that they enjoy and rely upon.

Thanks, M$. I didn’t realize that they were on our side. I just figured they weren’t running WinMob, since the darned thing works and doesn’t need a reboot just as you start to rely on it.

If you’ve not seen one, here is an obnoxious pitchman hawking the Tom Tom One XL. You can also read up on iPhone integration. It’s some nice stuff. My next navigator is certain to be a TomTom if at all possible. This inexpensive device is a great little bit of technology.

Clara teaches us how to eat like they did the last time the economy went seriously, horribly, long-term wrong. Poor people lived then, and maybe we can live now if we make the most of meager means and hunker down with some depression-era comfort food.

This came courtesy of my favorite hard-time news (sometimes bordering on irritainment) site, The Consumerist.

I finally signed up my joint project with Jeff Langr for google analytics. It’s really been very interesting. The service is free, and only requires that you place a little bit of text into your template (or specific page content you want tracked). You can have several accounts, and I track both the In A Flash website and my church’s activity. I’ll only be talking about AgileInAFlash.com here.

At this point in time, I can see that most of the (growing!) traffic is from RSS or bookmarked direct site references (34%) or references from other sites like twitter & Agile Voices (64%).

Today we only get 1-3% of our traffic from web search engines. That suggests that we’re at a kind of “friends and family” stage, with coworkers and colleagues visiting and some new people coming to sniff out the site. Google says we’re growing a steady base of repeat visitors.

Eventually I’d like to see it reach a point where searches on my name or Jeff’s name, and searches for “index card” or “reference card” will show the site in the top page or two. Google analytics tells me that we’re not really moving that direction just yet, but it is good to know what’s happening.

It’s cool to see the slope of our traffic uptake. I know what to expect, and am encouraged. It keeps my expectations in line, though, because we’re not getting the kind of traffic there that a more established agile site would. It keeps me humble and hopeful.

I put in a glitch the other day, so that one of the card images in the articles did not link to the larger printable, more readable, card image. I got a pretty quick response from an anonymous reader. Actually two responses, because Jeff noticed pretty quickly too. I had it fixed in minutes.

Thanks to my friends and colleagues who are keeping an eye on the site. You make my day.

And thanks to Agile Iowa for the good company at the Firkin Fox last evening. I had a good time.

Windows lacks a package manager. If you want to work in windows, you have to find and install all your software yourself. Each program has a different installer, and there is no batch mode. Search, find, download, double-click, run, click boxes, click-click-click, accept licenses, click, and finally you have the first program of 18 you actually need. Lather, rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat.

Sometime tomorrow you’ll be doing some actual work if you still have the energy for it.

Holy cow, this sucks.

Debian/Ubuntu Linux have a really good package manager. For just about any software, you ask for the program you want and it pulls down the most recent versions it knows about and installs all the bits your software depends upon. You can install with any number of gui or command-line clients. It’s really trivial by comparison. And quick. Did I mention that it’s very fast? With the command line, I can write a script or a line of text and you have software ready to go.

And in Debian/Ubuntu, the software all is updated through the same mechanism. Not through one mechanism per source. It is so effortless for the user/consumer.

I don’t know how people think that windows is easy and linux is hard. I think the opposite.

My hotel is not very good. Not a really, really bad one. I was in a truly bad hotel in San Francisco, where we feared for our safety and hygiene. All you can do there is leave. My hotel has no breakfast, no free wireless internet, etc. The amenities are that there is a room. It has a bed and a shower. There is a lamp, and a coffee-pot. The TV technically works, and might look okay if you’re used to navigating drunk in a snowstorm. No fridge, no internet, no microwave, no TV to speak of.

I could leave, but I like that my hotel is direct-billed to the company. I will ask for a different setup next time, but I’m happy to not be paying out of my own pocket for this whole trip. I can live with a not-so-good hotel for a week because I know a secret: I only have to sleep here.

Today’s theme is that everything is amazing. Today I had supper in a cafe inside the public library. They have wireless internet, lots of outlets, and a quiet place to work. On my way, I passed bookstores that have free wireless internet and food. I passed a Panera restaurant (maybe two) and even fast food places where wifi was free. I could have spent the evening at any of them, but had my heart set on the library. I probably would have had a better culinary experience at the others, but that wasn’t a damper on the experience.

I have a key card. I can stay at work, where there are refrigerators and pop machines and microwave ovens. Oh, we have great internet access there. And comfy chairs and big monitors. Oooo. I would just have to bring some food in. Maybe tomorrow should be a big burrito day so I can make two meals of it.

If I am tired of geekitude, there are guitar stories and hobby shops all around. I could have a good time and not spend a dime. That’s a lot better than fuming and fussing in a not-so-good hotel room.

I got some stuff done. I had a meal. I am not thirsty or hungry and I had all I needed. Tomorrow I’ll try panera or even the Taco John maybe. I might swill down a little coffee at Borders or B&N.

I have been borrowing an Ibanez DE-7 (Tone-Lok) delay from Phil at church, and that’s a pretty reasonable pedal too. I have always liked it, but it’s also a simpler standard digital delay. I haven’t been totally happy with it, but I’m a borrower. I started looking around to see what pedal I would like to have and at what price-point. I decided that I really like both analog and tape-style delay. I would really like to have tap tempo. True bypass would be a big bonus.

There are a lot of great pedals with all the features I want and more, but many of them are well over $300.00. If I were out making my living by playing, that might make a lot of sense. For a church guitarist, though, it seems a little over the top. I only play on Sunday mornings, and I am not part of the accompaniment for the congregation’s singing, not a solo act at a coliseum. It doesn’t make much sense for me to overplay my role, or overspend on gear.

I think I found the right answer. Pop over to Pro Guitar Shop and check out the video of the Hardwire DL8 Delay pedal If your mouth doesn’t water, then you’re maybe not into delay quite like I am. When the money comes round, I may have to look into getting one of these. With true bypass, great clarity, such lush sounds, nice looping, tap-tempo… this is really a Cadillac delay pedal at Camry prices.

I could certainly be happy with this pedal, though I would rather have some kind of remote midi pedal to choose between modes. I don’t want to be squatting at the floor to change effects between songs any more than I have to. Not that I wouldn’t be happy to do that if I could have the DL8. Nice stuff.

Kudos to Digitech on their Hardwire series.

To all my Nazarene friends: No, not really. It’s a gag.

To my technically naive friends: No, not really. It’s a gag.

Following my disappointment with miro yesterday, I went to The Miro Site and found that I am just way behind in versions. I clicked the download link, and found that they had this thing packages for multiple versions of multiple operating systems — a class act. I upgraded my apt-sources and almost immediately the ubuntu upgrade manager told me I was behind. Gotta like that little utility. After a quick upgrade, I fired up Miro 2.0 and have never been happier with an upgrade.

The HD feeds are nice, especially now that I’ve got nearly 3x the disk on this laptop. All the old feeds are still active and I’m able to upgrade them. Everything “just works”.

Miro guys: wonderful work, great idea, excellent app, good web site.

I have nothing bad to say about Miro 2.0. As far as I know right now, it’s flawless.

I use Miro. I like Miro. It has great channels, has reasonable control over how many you pull down, how often, how long you retain them, etc. There is much to recommend it. I subscribe to probably more video feeds that I ought to, including web search “channels” to pull down vintage aircraft videos and guitar lessons. I pull down more old crummy movies than I watch. I should get more software videos, less old movies. There are great software videos. Duh.

Anyway, there is supposed to be a feature to click on a feed and drag it to a channel folder. That doesn’t work. Not even a little. Well, at least not on Linux if it works anywhere else. I don’t know what’s wrong and haven’t pulled down the code (but I don’t know how to code drag-n-drop anyway… it would be fun to learn). It works miserably poorly. If you click the folder, the big window that opens up says you can drag things to it, but you cannot. It is just busted.

Alternatively, you’re supposed to be able to select with ctrl-click and then right-click to move movies to a folder. If I right click, I’m given the option to move them to a new folder (which it will create for me) but not to move them to an existing folder. That’s a pain.

And when you subscribe to a new feed, you don’t get an option to create it in a folder. There is no right-click meno on the folder that will allow you to create the feed there, either. It’s kind of a pain.

If you have a folder, you cannot change the folder’s contents. The best you can do is select all the contents of the folder and the new feeds you would like in the folder, move them to a new folder (which you would name similarly), and then go delete the old folder. That’s not very intuitive.

Everything else Miro does, I love. I am saddened that this part doesn’t look better. Maybe I should pull down the source code and see if I can fix it. It seems like it ought to be pretty simple in concept. I know there are bsddb data files behind it all, which are not hard to work with. I wonder what makes drag-n-drop work so poorly here, and why we don’t get to create the new feeds in existing folders. If I learn anything more I’ll post it as a followup.

In the meantime, Miro is worth your time.

The breadwinner announcement at Harmony Central is out.

How bad is it? This is how we stack up against a few other recessions:

And here’s a broader historical context:

So let’s get this straight, to use pylons competently I need a working knowledge of:

• setuptools
• virtualenv
• paster
• sqlalchemy
• mako
• javascript
• python eggs
• beaker
• routes

and if I want to work on docs, I need to know these things plus

• sphinx

I’m happy to learn all of these things, but I really thought I was in for less than I am. This kind of reminds me of Java, where everything you know is a further development of five things you don’t know.

Techies: DO NOT FALL BEHIND.

This is why documentation and learning by yourself is never as good as having actual programmers pair with you. I’m working form the pylons reference documentation, which has a number of tutorials in it. They would be nice, but they’re just so wrong.

I suspect that most of section 3.2 is wrong and/or broken

Note the explanatory text here. It describes the three import lines. Of which we have the second only. And it’s not used. We don’t have an import in this code for ’sa’, but we use sa.Column and not Column. So the second import is essentially useless. The only exception is where it uses Table. I replaced it with sa.Table and it worked fine. The import was a waste.

But where does sa come from? Well, if you have the right version of pylons then it imports sqlalchemy as sa at the top of the file. If you are not using the right version, it does not and your code won’t work at all until you import sqlalchemy as sa.

Next paragraph begins by describing code that does not exist in the sample. The last half of the paragraph is right.

Does this mean the pylons people are dumb? No. It means that the documentation hasn’t kept up even with itself. Over time it becomes self-inconsistent because it can. It takes vigilance to keep a documented truth in one release from turning into a lie in the next. That’s why you need noobs like me to come along and find out that the docs are all messed up.

Once a document is wrong you doubt the rest of it. It asks me to add code that is similar to code added by paster, but slightly different. Do I do that? Or is the documentation wrong again? If it doesn’t work, what do I do as a novice? If it does work, then does that mean the the code paster added is wrong and the tutorial is right? Do I need to undo paster work each time? Hmmmm.

Documents are an ongoing expense. They have to be constantly validated and verified. This is why agile shops tend to use pairing and prefer documents that self-verify (tests). Pylons is nice stuff, but you need to learn it from somewhere.

Pylons guys: please fix these. This is from the quickwiki tutorial. I love python and am eager to go further with pylons, but the tutorial is hard on the newb.

Come to Agile In A Flash where my collaborator Jeff Langr and I will provide you the shortest, fastest, most ready-to-hand agile references to be found anywhere.