Holden's Blog

I just had a wonderful customer service experience with them, and I feel the need to share and let everyone know how awesome Topatoco is. Topatoco sent me what has to be one of the best packages I've received in a long time. After some initial problems with my first bear-monster hoodie, they mailed a replacement, which (thanks to USPS) got mixed up, but no worries, they re-sent it. With buttons! and stickers :) And most of all a hand written note.

Pigs Can Fly Site Monitor is now available in Spanish and French. The French translation is a bit more shifty than the Spanish one. If you find a translation error, drop me an e-mail , holden@pigscanfly.ca .

my web2.0collage Originally uploaded by dmcopernicus I've updated web2.0collage, it now uses stateless web servelets (thanks to a patch in plt scheme :)), which gives the load balancer a much easier time, sine session are no longer sticky. It is covered in a few other places, besides slashdot, now ( like gigaom/nyt ) and being the hobo that I am, I'm trying to see if I can get the story up on digg ftw :) If you run into any bugs with it (which is likely) or have suggestions I'd love to hear them :)

After reading about su.pr I was interested in giving it a spin (especially since I need to be concentrating on abstract algebra, I needed to take it for a spin right away). They posted beta invite code to the stumbleupon twitter feed . Of the features mentioned in su.pr's initial press release , all seem to be functional with the notable exception of "seo friendly" links (aka 301 redirects) so that search engines count the links as going to your site and shorten on your domain. I haven't had a chance to try out any of the other features, like suggested posting times, as it seems like they are tailored to each user so it requires a bit of data first. The settings panel seems a bit buggy (I haven't managed to get it to add more than one site that I'm "promoting"), but that seems like an easy fix. Overall I'm not entirely sure what all the buzz was about, it seems kind of cool but lacks sufficient compelling features to convince me that its not a ba...

So it looks like my host pulled the plug on my server on the morning of the 27nth. There appears to be some mix up with finding my account, which could be anything from a mix-up to "oops we wiped that server". Since its been awhile I've decided that the server probably isn't coming back online anytime soon, so I've got a VPS set up. Most of the stuff is backed up, sadly back in Waterloo. Fortunately I learnt from my more recent laptop failures and the most important bits (namely my delicious code) is in a variety of locations (three cheers for git :) ). On the plus side I've lost a lot of cruft of configuration that had built up over the years, but on the downside I've got a lot of configuration and sys admin work to do for the next couple of days.

Interviewing for full-time is quite different than what my Co-Op interviews have prepared me for. For one thing, companies are much more interested in having you come on site, which is pretty cool in that I've gotten to see a lot of different work environments, but also has the downside of keeping me busy flying all over. Fortunately, I've managed to get the remaining 2 west coast companies I'm interviewing with to co-ordinate so I don't have to make separate trips out :) I was a little worried with job hunting during this economic slump, but it seems like most technology companies are still hiring (albeit maybe not as many people as before). Having the Amazon offer has made the whole process much less stress-full in some ways, but in other ways its made my schedule a lot more packed since the deadline is the end of this month.

So I upgraded my main laptop to Ubuntu 8.10 (). The initial estimated upgrade was approximately 8 hours, so I headed into campus (where the main csclub & Canadian ubuntu mirror server is) and did my update in about 30 minutes instead. This rest of this month is incredibly busy with trying to finish up interviews before the Amazon deadline. After this weekend I'm hoping to have a working CLI port with login functionality for Device Scape on the OpenMoko.

In what came as a bit of a surprise my latest device scape build seems to be working pretty well. It successfully selected the correct network, and did the automatic login at a Starbucks in NYC. I've got another round of code cleanups to do, and there is only a CLI interface at present, but I'm hoping to have some ipkgs ready for testing soon. If you're interested in taking them for a spin, send me an e-mail ( holden@pigscanfly.ca ) and I can send you the freshest bits :)

Which means that I will be uploading my first attempt at creating a haskell package ( a small library to do lookups in DNSRBLs ). Funtimes :)

I recently decided to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.04 (HardyHeron), despite it being in beta, so that I could give the new ghc a spin. During my upgrade I ran across bug 174148 (“Element <standard_system_servicedirs> not allowed inside <busconfig> in configuration file"). The simple work around is to restart dbus ("sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart") and then continue with the upgrade. Other than that its been a smooth upgrade.

My daily check of the news sites has gotten a whole lot quicker to do thanks to aideRSS and I've managed to find some more interesting things. I'll talk more about aideRSS once I've had the time to poke at it enough. In my semi-daily perusal I ran across this lovely piece about the importance making urls bookmark friendly . For the most part, All The Code has been relatively free of any of the problems mentioned (we don't over use POST or encode session information into the URLs), but it got me thinking about one possible problem. When All The Code does an index re-build the file IDs for a given program can change, and the links to the code viewer is based on the file ID. Now, index re-builds don't happen all that often with the public version of All The Code, but with the upcoming "enterprise" version index re-builds happen on a more regular basis. With that in mind I quickly whipped up the code to make the links less brittle. If you have a application ...

All The Code has a new toll-free (within North America) phone # 1-866-500-1777 .

Being on slashdot, reddit and other news sites has its ups & downs. On the positive side, you get a lot of viewers, and for the most part people seemed fairly positive. I also got a lot of useful bug reports about such wonderful things as cross sight scripting vulnerability, places where things should have been escaped, and a few feature requests. Since All The Code has a fairly small database, since it only indexes .java files and does not look inside cvs/svn/git or even zip files for the time being, a lot of searches didn't return many results. The solution to this is to allow substring matching IE (you search for "btree" it finds "tree" and gives you tree). This has the wonderful effect of giving you lots of results, but depending on what you are searching for this stemming can lead to much sadness, giving not so good results at time. My present solution involves some magic determining when to use stemming and when not to use stemming. After being on slas...

So All The Code recently made it onto slashdot for the win. Theres a lot of stuff that I need to do and write about but life is way too busy.

So I was starting the post of as an explanation of yet another delay for AllTheCode. I decided I'd take a quick 30 minutes to take a look at the state of things. Those 30 minutes quickly turned into two hours, but now All The Code seems to work properly enough to be ready for release. The nameservers have been swapped over, and its just a matter of swapping some files on the 31st and launching the instance, and hoping nothing else breaks :). Sure, it still has a lot of "features" of the suspiciously like a bug variety, but its usable enough. Now back to the work I should have been doing :)

The University of Waterloo is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and they have chosen the slogan to be "the spirit of why not?". Right now I'm in my 3A academic term, and I'm trying to figure out what I should do with the Co-Op term between 3A and 3B. I've been going back and forth between applying only to awesome jobs, and not applying to any jobs and working on my own projects (like AllTheCode ). I figure, why not?

I've been playing around with a lot of new languages recently as part of getting All The Code ready, and I've tried numerous IDEs (camelia, radrails/eclipse, etc.) for different languages (ocaml , ruby , c, etc.) and they all seem to suffer from extreme bloat. #5 It uses more ram memory FireFox with 30 tabs #4 You can see a refresh rate as you type #3 It takes longer to load than the rest of your operating system #2 If someone replaced it with a web-based application you wouldn't notice the delays #1 The developers claim it does more than emacs. Whats the lesson of this story? There isn't one, except that writing blog posts while waiting for batch jobs to run is good way to pass the time.