(Oct 4)
I've had problems with my latest MacBook Pro freezing, and a number of friends have politely suggested it's my fault. :) (You gotta love my friends!)
However, I saw an article this morning that makes me feel better. Apparently it's a fairly wide spread video driver issue. I feel better because a video driver can be fixed.
New iMacs plagued by interface freezing issues
To be clear, the article is about the new iMacs, but I'm running the latest MacBook Pro. I've got the 4 gig capable version, so it's fairly recent.
Sometimes when I do a hard power down after a freeze, I can't restart. It just hangs during the boot screen. Booting in verbose mode (Apple + v) usually shows it hanging on the bluetooth bits, so I know it's not doing some sort of disk diagnostic. I've given it as long as 30 minutes to finish, and it never does.
Here's what I do to get everything happy again.
1) boot into single user mode (Apple + S during boot)
2) Follow the steps on the screen to repair disk, mount it, and continue booting
into single user mode. This takes a while. around 10 minutes for me.
3) type 'reboot'
Done. The nice GUI should now pop up.
Hopefully this'll save someone some time.
Category: Misc
(Aug 28)
I've got a new phone, courtesy of Cisco... and I find it hard to complain about something that's 'free to me', but this phone is sad.
First, it's got music playback capability. Very cool. It can play MP3s or WMA. But it's got no headphone jack. If you want to listen to your music, you have to buy a bluetooth headset or use the speakerphone speaker. Seriously. This is sad.
Second, it won't sync with my Mac. The Bluetooth will pair (and apparently you can use it as an internet connection see here), but no basic file copy. This is dumb.
So I poke around the net a bit and found the The Missing Sync.
So I get a cool new phone that can take pictures, video, play music, send and receive email... and I have to buy software to copy off my pictures. Oh well... at least it can be done.
Category: Misc
(Aug 15)
I spoke at the Ruby Hoedown last weekend and had a blast. I didn't get to attend much of the conference due to my travel. However, that talk was the last time my shiny new MacBook Pro would boot!
It had been locking up with an increasing frequency... it locked up when I took it to the front of the room to start speaking. What timing! It took nearly 10 minutes to reboot.... during that time, I got to entertain the audience with just my wit. (Pity the audience.)
Fortunately I had also brought along some candy. I like to throw candy into an audience at random from time to time. It keeps everyone alert and laughing. And on this occasion, it was perfect.
My Choice of Candy
Jared and His Nerds
Every shot of me 'talking' is actually me throwing candy at people. :) Here's one. And here's another.
I've got to admit that a lot of the Ruby Hoedown Flickr shots are people taking pictures of each other... taking pictures of each other... with iPhones. There's some kind of Freudian statement in there... ;)
Back to the MacBook Pro. Cisco had provided me with a brand new, sealed in the box MacBook Pro. The first had a broken FireWire port. This one (my second) had a disk that seems to freeze when the machine gets hot. So I'm on my third! (When you open three MBPs in a week, the packaging loses a bit of it's magic.)
So far the third box seems to be working great. I left it on all night and it's still humming along. Third time's the charm? :)
All this and I have a cold too... I've got several half written blog entries cued up, but I've got to get caught up on other fronts first. Staging your machine three times in two weeks tends to take up all the spare time in my evenings.
Category: Misc
(Jul 31)
If you've never caught a BarCamp before, I'd encourage to try to make it to your local edition. Or start one if you don't have one already locally.
Last year it was a great event on several fronts. I learned a bit about several topics and met a lot of great people. The professional networking alone was worth attending, but it was also a lot of fun.
This year's RDU BarCamp is coming up shortly (August 7th), but I won't be able to make this one. But check it out if you have the time. I think you'll find it's well worth the trip.
BarCamp RDU.
Category: Misc
(Jul 25)
ThoughtWorks employee Muness Alrubaie filled in for Neil Ford at OSCON, giving a talk on Testing in the Web Tier.
He's mentioned the standbys like Selenium and Firebug, but he also covered Crosscheck. I'll just quote from their website.
Crosscheck is an open source testing framework for verifying your in-browser javascript. It helps you ensure that your code will run in many different browsers such as Internet Explorer and Firefox, but without needing installations of those browsers. The only thing you need is a Java Virtual Machine.
Apparently it's much faster than trying to run in every browser and catches a lot of the big problems right away.
It's looks like a tool worth trying.
Category: Misc
(Jul 23)
I got mail from Fred Medlin today about a Tangler group he started to help extend the NFJS experience.
Come drop in and contribute as well as learn. Make the most of your NFJS experience.
No Fluff Just Stuff Tangler page
In Fred's words:
I've been digging tangler lately and I wondered if others would, too. So, I created a NFJS group because I had a great time, but there didn't seem to be another forum for continuing the experience. I enjoyed the show and especially the meal and break time conversations and was hoping there would be enough people interested in the same. So check it out!
Category: Misc
(Jul 23)
I've been absolutely swamped lately, so thought I'd write a quick post with some updates.
This weekend the No Fluff Just Stuff tour came to town. The Research Triangle Software Symposium was really great. Someone told me "I finally get why you rave about the show so much. Every topic has been great and every speaker is polished and very well spoken. It's awesome!"
Tomorrow morning I'm heading to Portland for OSCON. It's the first time I've attended this conference and it's starting to look like it's going to be a very busy week.
Then Friday I'll head south to another No Fluff tour date in Phoenix. The Desert Southwest Software Symposium. As usual, I'll be on the Agile track.
I attended the first meeting of a local Erlang user's group, erlounge RDU. Nineteen members and counting! I can see that Erlang is going to require a bit of neural rewiring before I can do much with it, but there are some interesting bits in there.
Kevin Smith is the erlounge RDU organizer. You'll find some great tips on his blog, Hypothetical Labs
Work has been very interesting lately on several fronts. I hope to have an announcement shortly about a major shift in my focus and direction.
Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects is up for a reprint. I think this is the fourth printing. I'm planning on updating my bio and some of the tooling appendixes. There's also a Korean translation in the works. That'll be a version in English, German, Japanese, as well as the India subcontinent version.
And the battery in my Mac Book Pro has largely gone south in the last month. I think it may have been the 10.4.10 update, but now the battery seems to run out of juice when the meter says I've got an hour left. And I've gone from over 3 hours of reported battery runtime to only 2 hours... of course, when the last hour can't be used because the laptop goes dead, I'm really only getting one hour. :( This is the first time I've had any battery issues with this laptop, but it looks like a trip to the Apple store is in order.
Oh, and the latest Potter book was great. :)
Category: Misc
(Jun 28)
Act fast and get your discount to see Andy Hunt and myself in the first Ship It! LIVE: DC Edition.
The early bird discount expires June 29th. Act now. Operators are standing by.
Ship It! LIVE: DC Edition
FYI, this is only scheduled Ship It! LIVE on the east coast.
Category: Misc
(Jun 7)
If you read this blog regularly or heard me speak, you've probably had to endure an enthusiastic rant about virtualization. I think it's a great thing that can make your life much easier. Now that X86 Virtualization is commonly available, we can run a guest operating system just as fast as if it were the only operating system running on the hardware. Nice.
The existing players have a new competitor though... and I think VirtualBox will shake things up a bit.
Here's the state of the product line up as I see it.
Xen is awesome, powerful, open source, cool... and Linux only. And you've got to be a Linux guru to install and run it. Recently it's made huge leaps forward in ease of use, but I only mention it here so I don't get dozens of emails telling me I missed ~the~ major player. It's what your IT department will use, but most end users won't.
Parallels is awesome, and largely responsible for the virtualization arms race on the OS X platform (even though Parallels runs on Windows and Linux too). They got to the Mac first and forced VMWare to play catch up. It's great for the end users when companies have these races though. Both companies have done great work. I've prepaid for the next version of Parallels because of the reputed 3D support. They have screen shots of ID Software games running. (drool).
Parallels has been the best (bar none) for the end user to get up and running. The GUI is trivial to use and the run time performance is awesome. I give my Subversion and Cruise Control talks inside Windows XP using Parallels all the time.
VMWare has been around for years. They have a big vested interest in selling their enterprise products though. So even though they give away the VMWare Player product that can run a virtual machine, creating a new machine seems to require a paid product. That means you can't grab a copy of Windows XP or Kubuntu and make your virtual machine instance. You have to download one someone else made for you. But you'll notice that I said "seems to require". I've been told you can do it yourself for free ~if~ you can figure out some VMWare voodoo. I can't, so VMWare loses out with me. If I can't easily create a new virtual machine, I'll move on.
And now the new kid on the block, VirtualBox. First, it's open source and free. Second, it's cross platform. They've got versions for Windows, Linux, and OS X. Third, it's easy to use.
I pulled down the OS X version, had a nice clean GUI installation, then pulled down a copy of Xubuntu and it just worked.
It doesn't feel quite as fast as my Parallels instance on the same hardware, but I haven't done any real benchmarking. For the money, you can't beat it. If you're just wanting an instance for testing or a LAN server instance, this is the way to go.
I should also mention that VirtualBox has a nice image snapshotting tool that lets you back up a given image before you make major changes.
Category: Misc
(Jun 5)
I've heard it said that if you're not using Firebug, you're not a real web developer... you're just pretending.
Since I'm only pretending to do web development myself, I'm not qualified to say, but Firebug is an awesome tool. If you're creating web apps of any kind, you should check out this free tool.
I'm not even going to try to do it justice by attempting to describe it to you. I'd fail miserably... the tool does too much for a blog posting. From it's HTML inspectors to CSS, Dom viewer, wire debugger, etc, it's an invaluable resource.
My favorite way to use it is with two monitors. The first monitor runs my browser window. The second runs Firebug (Tools/Firebug/Open Firebug in a New Window). You can also run it at the bottom of your browser screen, but I find it much less useful there. I simply can't see enough of Firebug when it's jammed in at the bottom. It's better than no Firebug at all, but once you've tried it dual monitor, you may have trouble returning to a single screen. You've been warned. :)
It's one potential drawback (depending on your shop)... it only runs in Firefox, but since FF is free and cross platform, Firebug should still be a valuable tool for the IE only developers.
Here are the links:
Firebug Homepage
FireFox add ons page
The first link is easier if you want to look at features. The second is easier if you just want to download and install.
Category: Misc
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