Zac Bowling’s Blog

This blog post is amazingly funny .

Everything in this blog post, at one point or another, I could so relate to. Everything up to the second to the last paragraph is right on for me. Its a must read.

Favorite quote: “That’s programming in a nutshell: long arms, good coffee, and a natural aversion to rat fur. ”

I love this app on my windows box. imeem. If you are into social networking software, this is one of the best. They do some absolutly amazing things with GDI+ with SWF on Win32.

They just released their new mac client. It runs on top of Mono and binds to cocoa using a new interface they designed called Dumbarton (released under LGPL). Good work guys!

Now, since you got Todd Berman from (but not limited to) MonoDevelop over there now, I expect a native GTK# interface soon too…

Ok. I got a new laptop. You might remember my rants about my laptop order from Dell. I waited over 2.5 months to get that laptop and they never shipped. So ordered an Alienware. A $5,000 dream machine.

Its been a month since I ordered and I just got it. Turned it on and used it to upload a couple pics, and then about 6 hours layer I decided to stretch its legs and try half life 2. Played great for 30 minutes, then *CLICK*, no video. Apperently the video card wasn’t screwed down tight or there was poorly soildered connection somewhere. All I know is that the mother board and video card are damanged ($2100 worth of parts). I called and no questions ask, they are taking the machine back and sending me a new one. Dell would of given me the third degeree.

While I still don’t have a good machine yet, but at least I don’t feel like I’m getting up the rear like I did with Dell.

In the mean time, I just ordered a new Soekris board. Going to get Mono on it. Might tinkering with getting mono running on iPod linux later thats to the new working port on the ARM processor. Hehehe

People who use talking points and dumb exit rebuttals should be shunned and slapped from this point on. If you hear one, slap the person who said it. We need to institute a requirement of some original thought and personal research if you wish to have a public opinion. I believe in freedom of speech, but not freedom to spew someone else’s crap just because they said it and you must repeat it. Its cachos. I don’t care what politcal group, goverment, agency, company, team, school, or whatever you are part of. No body should stoop to “talking points”!!

If you are appointed to speak for your group, you should know the material personally and be able to answer on your own. If you are asked for an opinion or to make a judgement call about something you directly don’t know, yield to someone else or just say your not sure. If you have to use prepared statements to speak on behalf of your group and try to debate on that foundation, you should not be speaking.

As another option, if you must, you may speak in the third person repeating someone else’s opinion since you really don’t have one of your own and that way we know its not your own personal opinion or statement (from you, the clueless representative to your group). You may defend the person who said it then based on your own personal experiences. That way we can stop this jumble of misinformation.

On another note, one thing that has been driving me nuts lately is the rebutting of the argument against Bush’s reaction to the most recent disaster in New Orleans saying we are blaming Bush for the weather. The argument is not about Bush could do anything to prevent the weather (which is still much more debatable that he could of helped that), but what is hardly debatable is his horrible appointments to FEMA, his timely response time to the disaster, and his countless bumbling through fixing the issue.

Carlos Mencia says it best: “DUHHH-DUH-DUUUUUHH”.

I guess thats just my personal pet peave or something but seems to make sense.

Got my travel plans in place and I’m starting to get excited. Going to be in LA for Tuesday and Wednesday for the Mono meeting in LA (just a short walk from the Microsoft PDC conference). If you are going to be at the Microsoft PDC conference, I urge you to come on over. Directions and information about the meeting here. It starts at 6 and goes until 9:30 so it should fit into the PDC schedule nicely.

Really amazing pictures but I do warn you to enter at your own risk.

http://www.digitalglobe.com/images/katrina/new_orleans_msi_aug31_2005_dg.jpg

http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/katrina/KATRINA0000.HTM

DELL SCREWED ME AND WITHOUT BUYING ANYTHING!

You may remember my last blog post about what was going on so far. [Dell making me mad!]. Well it got even worse. I ordered that machine on May 27th but had been delayed over and over every day up until the 18th of this month. In that period, 3 of my co-workers have ordered and received their laptops of nearly the same exact thing.

Here is the latest:

They figured it was being delayed because the hard drive, but they couldn’t change the order because the order was already in production. Then they said they could after they talked to a few managers. Then they emailed me back and said they couldn’t because only the orginial sales agent only could and she was extended leave. With everything that happened, that was just the iceing on the cake. They said they would have to cancel the order out and re-enter it in order to get the order in. I said that as long as I would get it in less then a week, otherwise I was totally fed up and wanted them to cancel it.

In the time I was waiting for my machine (over 2 months), my company had 2 discounts for this specific Dell totalling $1,500 off and I wanted the discounts. They said they couldn’t.

After re-entering the order, I checked the site and the order wouldn’t get here until mid November and not only that, the order was wrong! It was missing two parts. I emailed back and they said it was because those parts where on delay. I was ferious. I told them to cancel it. They did shortly afterword.

I thought that was it over and was so happy. The next day, on my way to work, I stopped by the gas station to fill up my tank. I stuck in my ATM card, and the machine refused the transaction. I tried again and it still didn’t work. I went inside and they tried it at the desk and still no go.

I went home and called the bank. I had (negative) -$1100 avaliable funds but they said I had all money in there (>$7,000). I asked her why all of a sudden I didn’t have anything avaliable. My last deposit was well over a month ago and it cleared. She said that Dell had recent had activity on the account. She did some more searching and found that Dell had put in a transaction for $3,950 (the price of the machine) 3 times and then reversed it sortly afterword but the funds where locked out because thats what happens just like a deposit and I would have to wait till it cleared again. For 3 1/2 days I was without any cash of any kind because those ding bats at DELL.

Its all a joke. They made me, someone who is extremely nice and easy to work, absolutley angry and ready to start a personal campain against them.

After losing my last laptop to an accident and the fact that I needed a new machine for so long, I went ahead and ordered a brand new laptop from Dell. Spent a ton on it because I figured I use it more than the average user (far more) and deserve to have the best out there. I spent nearly $4,300.

That was over nearly a month and a half ago. Since that time, my order has been delayed over 5 times. I’m not set to get my laptop for another week according the latest report. Dell was forced to contact me the last 4 times and get my consent because of FTC regulations. The first and seconded time were a little bit annoying but reasonable.. About the 3rd time I was getting very angry. I was willing to work with them on the parts so that they maybe it could ship sooner but I was told doing so would take it out of its place out in line.

The first issue was that the hard drive had just back-ordered. I asked the lady twice if that’s all it was and she assured me that was the only issue. The second time it was still the hard drive. I accepted and still waited. The 3rd time they called me and told me the motherboard and video card were back-ordered. I was begining to become angry. You see, the first time I was assured that Dell holds the parts for a machine until they get everything. I was angry and she said she would investigate and get back with me. No one ever got back with me.

The 4th time, they told me they had the motherboard but the video card was still out. I told that lady about the last lady and she transferred me to a customer support person that was so monotone and condescending that it made me more angry but I was desperate need of my machine that I demanded that they upgrade my shipping so that when it was readyI would get it sooner, so they did.

Friday, I get a call from a clueless rep. asking if I would allow for it be delayed again. I was furious. I asked him what it was this time. It happened to be the hard drive again. I was screaming mad. He said it didn’t show that it had been delayed on his records for the hard drive before. I demanded to speak with his manager. They transferred me and they told me they would investigate and personally find out what was going on but because of the long weekend that they would get back with me on Tuesday.

I can’t stand this anymore. I should of received my laptop on 06/07/05. The latest I have heard is that it will ship on 07/08/05 and I should get it on 07/11/05 (because of the weekend). If it wasn’t for the time it would take to build the system and the discounts I got from Dell for my partnerships and employee discounts and the fact that I love the machines (not so much the ordering process anymore) that if it was anyone else I would have canceled a long time ago.

I got the job at Match.com. I’m officialy working for Telligent Systems now, the company I mentioned in my earlier blogs but I’m will spend my time contracted out to Match.com International. I’m so excited. I’m going to be helping the Match.com International team bring everything up to date with the main Match.com site. From the looks of it I’m going the starting on tomorrow morning. That means I’ve got today to get a ton of stuff done and ready. Its just to much fun.

GAPI demystified…
For those wondering how to wrap your favorite gobject library just like the professionals do in Gtk#, GtkSpell#, Gecko#, GtkSourceView#, Gst#, and Gsf#, you have to check out what I’ve got so far on Mono’s wiki.
http://www.mono-project.com/GAPI

‘Match.com International’ Interview
I’ve got an interview today over at Match.com doing intergration/migration of their existing Windows/.NET systems with their existing Linux+Python+Sendmail backend email systems. Wish me luck!

HotOrNot.com
Found my old HotOrNot.com profile this morning thinking of my interview at Match.com today. Enjoy.

This is from any email I sent explaining my side on the best operating system to program on. I though it was interesting enough as it hashes up a bunch of feelings I know friends of mine have. Might sound a little bit more evangelistic (if thats the right word for it) that I orginally intented but I think its still a good read. Enjoy.

“Honestly, I really don’t have a side. I have what I want on ether system now days to program efficently and I can make anything do anything I want on ether system so it really doesn’t effect me as much as it does the with the advocates of the operating systems might make out.

The main foundation of the reason I work on top of GTK+, glib, and Mono is that I believe in it because its platform independent, and I’m not on the side of the OS vendor but the side of the programmers who I don’t want to see taking part in the OS deciding battle as most are forced to that use technologies only provided by a single OS. I really don’t care about my customers not using open source operating systems (although I do like the security it provides to me as I can patch holes myself on my own systems), but I love the fact that the library I use for porting from system to system is open source (but not open source as in GPL because that is really to restrictive but open source as in public domain, X11, BSD, and LGPL) because it means that another company I can’t control can’t get its hands in where my software I’m writing can go or can’t go or what it can or can’t do.

It gives me the ability to let my customers choose the OS they want and if they don’t want to use Windows or FreeBSD or Solaris later they can switch without loosing my software which is better for me and my customers. It also gives me the ability to package as closed source for anything I want but retain that freedom as well. Also one of the greatest advantages is that if it doesn’t do what I want it to do in the library or its broken in some way, I can change it or reuse its code somewhere else that I come up with, unlike Java or many other libraries in the same catagory. Who can’t see the benefit in that? “

Man, I haven’t been posting as much as I used to.

I posted GtkSpell# into the Mono repository. Check it out at http://svn.myrealbox.com/viewcvs/trunk/gtkspell-sharp/ Seems to have some activity already too. One line of code and you can add it to any TextView. Multilingual support as well and something that Tomboy has been doing themselves. This should build on Win32 as well and you can get the gtkspell dlls from the default Gaim installer and the aspell dictionaries from http://aspell.net/win32/ if you don’t feel like building yourself. If you haven’t seen it yet: http://www.polystimulus.com/Screenshot-GtkSpellSharp.png

I went to meet with the guys at Telligent. They work on the popular CommunityServer software which is really neat stuff. CommunityServer is awesome, pardon the licence as its not normally what we consider open source in the Linux community, but it is still very flexible. I recently had it working on Mono myself (sorry, no link anymore as it was more of an proof of concept at the time). It is used currently on channel9.msdn.com, www.asp.net, weblogs.asp.net, XBox forums, the MSDN blogs, and so many other places. I would say these guys are the most elite developers in the ASP.NET community I’ve seen. Very nice and very relaxed development environment as well. These guys were the most enthusiastic developers in a single company that I’ve ever seen and only comparable to the energy and drive that I see in people related to different open source projects. Maybe because it is a business made up of nearly the best developers in this field. They work hard and play hard as well as evident by the notorious XBox room. I was very impressed with their setup and I hope I get to work with them very soon.

I’m working on a lot of little things I hope to release soon, but mostly its been pretty busy lately.

Also, my prayers go out to Paco and his family. I’m happy to see him again after what must of been the hardest week of his life loosing his son to the war in Iraq. Take care Paco.

Wrote this up based on this idea I have had for a little while now. Its mostly just a thought and needs some work. Been tinkering with some code but nothing to big. Check it out and let me know what you think.
Mono Package and Deployment Framework

I released a new GRE for gtkembedmoz and I also put up a new page for the gtkembedmoz and Gecko# stuff for WIN32 here. I also made some custom Mono wallpapers when I got tired of coding today. (All my SVGs, GIMP files and transperent PNGs here.)

• Mono Mystical v2 (1024 x 768)
• Mono Mystical v2 (1280 x 1024)
• Mono Mystical - Monkey Power (1024 x 768)
• Mono Winter (1024 x 768)

Enjoy!

This is a republishing of a previous blog entry I did 4 months ago with some updates. Enjoy.

I’ve thrown a list of simple things you can install and do to help you understand the common products and systems in Linux better and use the tools that Linux users use everyday. It help any Windows user better understand Linux. It can also make it easy just to work with other Linux people at your office. Who knows. Here is what you need to do:

STEP 1:

Download and install the following apps (*optional):

1. Paco’s (Fransico Martinez) WIN32 installer for Mono
   http://www.mono-project.com/downloads/index.html - Free
2. Cygwin is a full package of tools, applications, and compliable libraries that all work under windows using a unix emulation layer.
   http://www.cygwin.com/ - Free
3. Apache and PHP for your web server.
   http://httpd.apache.org/ - Free
   http://www.php.net/ - Free
4. ActivePerl, ActiveTcl, ( and maybe ActivePython)
   http://www.activestate.com/Products/Language_Distributions/ - Free
5. *MinGW (maybe MSYS) for compiling those linux based apps. (You can use -mno-cygwin but I prefer MinGW straight up. Seems to play more friendly that way)
   http://www.mingw.org/ - Free
6. *Windows Services for UNIX from Microsoft is nice for the command line utilities and setting up a Windows based NFS server (but is hard to find at a good price)
   http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/ - $$$
7. *Mozilla Firefox and the Mozilla suite are the best web browsers (not really needed but it can help with your window’s struggles)
   http://www.mozilla.org/ - Free
8. *Subversion and TortoiseSVN
   http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ - Free
9. *CVSNT for a great NT based CVS
   http://www.cvsnt.org/ - Free
10. *VNC for remote desktop.
    http://www.realvnc.com/ - Free
11. *Putty for SSH. (Cygwin SSH is nice but Putty has better graphics support but don’t try to tie putty to subverison.)
    http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ - Free
12. *NMAP is great for scanning open ports (some virus scanners think this is a virus though)
    http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ - Free
13. *UCD-SNMP (or if you want to play with NET-SNMP, but its not as stable on windows) for SNMP
    http://www.net-snmp.org - Free
14. *Ethereal for packet sniffing
    http://www.ethereal.org/ - Free
15. *Gaim for instant messaging (Works with AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC, ICQ, Jabber, Novell Groupwise, Napster and more)
    http://gaim.sf.net/ - Free

STEP 2:

After you install Cygwin, make sure you add the X:\cygwin\bin (and X:\cygwin\usr\autotools\stable\bin if you installed the autotools package) to the end of path variable (Windows Control Panel -> System Settings -> Environment Variables -> Path). ActivePerl will do this for you for your perl libs. If you plan to use MinGW go ahead and add X:\mingw\bin to your path before the cygwin bin folder.

STEP 3:

Enjoy!

Paco (Fancisico Martinez) and I got together last night and had a late night hacking session talking and working on the WIN32 port of Gecko# and the gtkembedmoz.dll backend. First time I got to see it from someone elses perspective (from the front line, if you will) on a cleanly working machine. Ordered a pizza and got some Dr. Pepper and we were off.

Turned out we did some good work in the end. We locked down the issues and came to some very great solutions to get it working and distrubuted.

This morning I confirmed my theory that a lot of the intial errors had to do with the offical GRE being built with MSVC 6.0 and I was building with MSVC 7.1. Something about the dlls not passing UTF8 strings from my DLL to the offical Gecko Runtime Enviroment (GRE) DLLs. The GRE I included on polystimulus.com is completely built with MSVC 7.1 and it works. The NVU team which releases an independent GRE as part of their version of the Mozilla editor in a standalone application which they built using MSVC 7.0, and my DLL works with their GRE flawlessly.

I also need to get the WIN32 port ready for the changes in 1.8 that will be released soon. I can confirm its working (with errors that may be releated to mismatch versions like I said above) on the 1.7.x branch though. What I’m guessing we will do is to do is use my GRE for now which will have its own Mono/.NET shared path and give it its own installer. I’m still going to work for binary compatablity with the offical Mozilla releases at the sametime but it won’t be my main focus. If and when the patch makes its way in the mozilla tree and if and when it gets included with the offical GRE from Mozilla, then this will be the best solution to prevent breakage when a user upgrades Mozilla. The biggest issue in maintaining a binary compatable version is that some of the interfaces used in gtkembemoz are not frozen in Mozilla so any change made in the main tree has to be changed in my DLL which is a big game of catch up, so trying to release a binary compatable version that works with any version of the GRE is a little futual right now. This isn’t any issue on Linux, because the gtkmozembed lib is included by default with every version of Mozilla. Best solution is to include my GRE for gtkembedmoz.

When I get it fully compatable without the little bugs and such (in the offical GRE only) there is a way to lock a GRE version when its in the shared GRE path, so it doesn’t uninstall our version of the GRE durning an upgrade of Mozilla. We can do this if we register we are using it and we still need it in the registry. We can also do a test in the installer for compatable GREs installed. If one is found we can register with the latest compatable version installed that we find. If none are found then install (ether via net download or local dir) a compatable version of the GRE. The XPInstall and GRE docs have it all documented how you can do that, but I have yet to find an application that has ever used it. Wasted space (roughly 4.5mb compressed, 10-30mb decompressed) is not a big deal when it comes down to just making it work without errors ether now or in the future by the user doing something unexpected and breaking the application.

I also finally got my copy of Paco’s WIN32 developer disc. I wish I had this when I started. It would of saved me about 2 weeks of changing and hacking my enviroment over and over trying to build on WIN32, all the parts of Mono (as massive as it is with way more then 3,000,000 lines of code). My enviroment is nearly perfect now without the disc now, but this disc is recreatable and distrubutable. Its a must for anyone wanting to build from source on Windows.

In the end it, I had a good time and left feeling like we got one more big step closer. Yeppie!

It has been a long time since I posted a real blog entry in a while on what I’ve been doing so here goes…

• GtkEmbedMoz + Gecko# for WIN32 -

  The patch is making its way into the Mozilla tree that makes this work and it might make it into the official upcoming Mozilla Suite 1.8 release (cross your fingers). Right now you can find the beta versions of the dlls required to make it work, a custom GRE (even though I have tested it with the official Mozilla 1.7.3 and 1.7.5 build, the official versions have a few bugs like disappearing scroll bars and control focus issues on web forms) and my patches to build yourself. The Gecko# dll is up there as well and I’m committing my fixes into the SVN later on to Gecko# so we should have this in the next WIN32 installer

• Monodoc using Gecko# and working on WIN32 -

  Miguel and Paco talked about it a little before. It’s nothing really to write home about except it brings it to Windows. I have the patch for using Gecko# instead of GtkHTML (which doesn’t work on WIN32) here if you want to play and a screenshot can be seen here.

• Tomboy on WIN32 -

  I got bored and decided to have some fun, so I ported Tomboy to WIN32. It was pretty easy. It only took me about 30 minutes. I think it really shows that rapid application cross platform development is really something that Mono can offer.
  

• SNMP.NET -

  I have a fully working lightweight SNMP library for .NET that I wrote using references from a few networking books I have. I included two little sample apps as well that can query a devices id and uptime and the other one can query for that machines MAC address. Provided of course you query an SNMP device that you have its community name for. Most routers and any *nix flavor box running an SNMP server. I don’t have any M.I.B. support so you have to use the UID directly to make this work. M.I.B. translation is a bit more work then I pulled off in the 250 lines of code in this. It uses pure sockets provided by System.Net so it works on Win32, Linux and Mac OSX I know for sure. Get it here: http://polystimulus.com/snmp.zip. (Side-note: I do have a fully library that does have full M.I.B. support written by this guy in England but its very complex and very resource intensive but it provides the ability to host SNMP, but it doesn’t currently work in Mono yet.)

• PHP&GTK - PHP & Mono & GTK#/SWF -

  I’ve been toying with this idea a bit and had some great success with it. It’s the one idea that when I mention it, people seem to always say, “I don’t know whether to be sick or socked and amazed.” I know a lot of people have tried and used PHP-GTK. You basically run PHP as a runtime on the client side and use it make GUI apps with GTK as the interface. Applications like Nova (a gnutella client for WIN32) do this and pull it off really quite well. The biggest issues though is that PHP+GTK is very slow on development and stuck in gtk 1.x right now and it doesn’t have a lot of interest as it started as more of a proof of concept. Part of the issue is that if you use it to wrap your existing code, you couldn’t render HTML in anyway so everything has to be rewritten with GTK.

  Well I have a much cooler solution. Thanks to the classes in PHP that allow you to load and access .NET/Mono assemblies in PHP, it is possible to take PHP, run it as a runtime, and call SWF/MWF or GTK# for your interface. Then thanks to Gecko# and GtkHTML you can render basic things like your tables and css styles inside your app without rewriting. Nothing working well enough to post about it.

Well that just about sums it all up. I’m also looking for a job if anyone is hiring in the Dallas area.