So I’m living with Mac OS X ATM, at least until Kubuntu is fully compatible with my MacBook Air. It definitely has its niceness, but boy oh boy, is it also extremely difficult and inconsistent to work with. One thing that is really annoying is the complete disregard for how the rest of the world does keyboard shortcuts. Or even doing shortcuts in the first place. Never have I seen anyone use the mouse(pad) so much as when observing the average Mac OS X user. Working on this system out-of-the-box is such a drag, everything takes ages because standard keyboard functionality is missing (like Home, End, and Del keys), shortcuts are inconsistent – if even there, navigating a dialog without using your mouse pad is a no-go, Cmd+Tab disrespects spaces, is filled with minimized and tray apps, and creates new windows ad libitum.

Lots of good apps are out there to fix these usability issues, but I just learned how to add keyboard shortcuts for functionality for 3rd party applications, which is a built-in feature of Mac OS X, and really, really cool. I’m sharing it here.

Example: Aptana Studio 3 on Mac OS X supports PHP editing, but there’s no keyboard shortcut for looking up the definition for words in the language. You have to right-click, choose Commands, PHP, Documentation for Word. Not exactly great. This used to be Ctrl+F2 or something like that. But as it turns out, you can just add a shortcut yourself. Open up System Preferences > Keyboard, and choose the Keyboard Shortcuts pane. Chose Application Shortcuts in the left pane, and click the + button underneath the right pane. In the dialog choose the application you want to create a shortcut for, in this case “AptanaStudio3.app” (which you’ll probably have to find yourself – it wasn’t in the list when I did it). In the Menu Title field type in exactly (case-sensitive and all) the menu item you want to create a shortcut for, in this case “Documentation for Word”. Focus the Keyboard Shortcut field and press the keys you want to use for the shortcut. Click Add.

Works straight away!

I haven’t yet experienced what happens if there’s a name collision. I mean, like “New…” appearing in two different menus or something like that. So I don’t know how you would define the correct one you want in the Menu Title field. Time will tell. If you know how to do that, please leave a comment

I can’t claim to understand the reasoning behind getting rid of /var/log/messages in Natty. It’s the number one place to start looking when something goes wrong, and one of the first places people asking for community help are told to go look and report back in order to debug some situation. Either way, to right this wrong is definitely very easy, so just fire up a terminal and type:

you@your-puter:~$ sudo nano /etc/rsyslog.d/50-default.conf

In nano, find the commented out lines mentioning “/var/log/messages”, and uncomment them.
Tip: Search by pressing Ctrl+W, then type in messages and press enter.

You should be uncommenting four lines, and ending up with this:

*.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;
        auth,authpriv.none;
        cron,daemon.none;
        mail,news.none          -/var/log/messages

Save it and exit (Ctrl+O, Enter, Ctrl+X), then restart the syslog daemon:

you@your-puter:~$ sudo service rsyslog restart

That’s it. /var/log/messages is back

I’m currently moving about a whole bunch of smaller files in Windows 7 (about 400,000 files). I was getting frustrated with the abysmal rate at which Windows is able to move files around. Even moving just one folder into another one causes Explorer to start “discovering” the entire source dir, which is utterly pointless in the first place as there’s just one node to consider and to relink in the MFT. One wonders why it always does that. It didn’t do so before Vista.

Anyway – adding injury to insult, these files need to be imported in and processed by an application which is rather poorly written, making it run out of memory when it is fed much more than 4,000 files at a time. So, I have to move batches of about 4,000 files into separate folders before importing them, and to do this I have to use Explorer. The move operations, as mentioned, are incredibly slow, maxing out at 25 items per second, sometimes dropping to 5 items/sec, generally hovering at about 15 items/sec. I was wondering if the problem was the files lists in the source and target Explorer windows being continually refreshed as items were moved in and out of them, and so tried to navigate away from them, even closing the windows entire, without effect.

Then, by accident, I discovered that if I selected a batch of files from the bottom of the list in the source window, the move operation was massively faster, running at 350-500 items/sec! That’s a performance factor of ~ 14 to 100, in other performing, compared to the previous runs, at between 1,400% and 10,000% effectiveness. Go figure!

Not having access to the Windows source code, one can only guess at what kind of code disaster lies behind this behavior. But regardless, remembering this trick can prove very helpful when you don’t feel like spending an entire day looking a green bars very slowly moving east.

These issues, and the effect of this trick, seem to happen according to Windows’ current mood, though. Sometimes you get to drag-and-drop a folder with 200,000 files into another folder instantly, at other times it’ll spend 30 seconds examing a 100-file folder. Similarly, sometimes (about 1 in 4 so far) the forementioned trick has no effect, and you’re looking at green bars again. Your mileage may vary

Whoah…! Today is a great one for me as an individual, and for the Windows community as a whole.

It’s been an amazing couple of months! Windows 7, as it seems, will soon – or sometime, anyway – be surpassed by its successor, Windows 8. This has been disclosed officially by Microsoft, discussed all over the net, and various leaks of functionality and design have been discovered and forwarded to the interwebs, mostly about the Windows 8 Login Screen.

As anyone with half a brain knows, the most important part – feature-wise – of an operating system, and also the hardest to fake if you were to do that, is the login screen! Especially with regards to Windows, as on an average day, this is the place you’ll be spending most of your time.

Well. Santa’s got something in his stocking for you!!! Working closely together with a close friend of mine “behind the fence” so to speak (who shall remain unnamed), I’ve acquired a great deal of info on something very astounding. Even now, months before the release of Windows 8, and years before the release of the next iteration of the Redmond series, I am in the fortunate position to be able to reveal a couple of goodies to you. For one, the successor to Windows 8 will be named “Windows 9″!!!

Secondly, in what seems as a big-brotherly shoulderpat and comradery “get-well” gesture from Microsoft to the daredevils of Europe, the codename has an Icelandic ring to it, specifically “Eönghörn”.

And as if that isn’t enough to get your panties shaking, I’ve even managed to acquire a leaked and very very hush-hush screenshot of the login screen of Windows 9. This is even from Windows Server 9, and shows an entirely new strategy in interface design – helping the user by using in-screen annotations, explaining all those things that are usually really hard to fathom to the average Windows Server administrator.

These are great times, indeed, and if I were Canonical or Apple, I’d be shitting my pants! Wouldn’t you?

So, the Electronic Frontier Foundation wants me to buy the “Humble Bundle” – a pay-what-you-think-is-fair financed bundle of computer games. Not only that, but you get a choice of who to pay, too.

I went to the site and started reading – primary concern being, of course, “will it run on Linux?” I scrolled down and a pie chart caught my eye. The statistics for the previous Humble Bundle installment. An event that apparently resulted in the raising of $500,000 to EFF:

Now, while Windows as a platform is the largest contributor, per user paying it’s also the smallest one, as you can see by the average purchase price by platform to the left. Actually, on average, a Linux user has coughed up about three times the amount a Windows user has. And about twice as much as the average Mac user.

Now, why is that? Well, I’d like to think that we’re just better people, but that would be stretching it a bit Either way, with more than 132,000 purchases it’s damn hard to dismiss as statistical error. Given that any PC these days is hard to get without Windows pre-installed, it’s not like we have the extra money left to spend that we didn’t use on the OS. What do you think?

One thing that’s both cool and quite annoying at the same time about Aptana Studio 3 is the themes system.

Clearly, Aptana have been looking at editors like Textmate and fallen in love with the brightly colored and bold texts on a black background, and have tried to implement that in Aptana Studio 3.

The fact of the matter though, is that it just doesn’t work very well. To being with, Eclipse which Aptana Studio is based on, isn’t very text-on-black friendly – you can’t properly style the UI elements in Eclipse themselves, so you end up at best with a halfway-there result where non-text editor elements crave your attention being far too bright. Secondly, the theming isn’t properly carried through (yet?), so while there are themes that look fairly good with regards to editing Ruby, you’ll find that HTML, CSS, Javascript, and more are poorly themed, often leaving you with mostly uncolored markup.

While I do like Textmate’s dark style theme, I just don’t like the idea when it’s attempted to be implemented in Aptana (Eclipse). So I’ve switched to the “Aptana Studio 2.x” theme which is text-on-white and has more styling of non-ruby code, too. The problem then becomes that your terminal windows (for firing off console commands, gitting, raking and such) become text-on-white, too. And not just that, the text colors aren’t changed to accommodate the white backgrounds, either – so you get 100% on white, which is pretty much impossible to read. And adding insult to injury, there aren’t any apparent way to change the terminal and console colors using the theme editor.

Except, there is. You just have to add the tokens yourself. For fixing the terminal colors, so that you can have text-on-black terminals in a text-on-white theme, you just need to add some tokens to the list. You add a new token by clicking the small [+] button beneath the list of styling elements when in Preferences > Aptana > Themes:

As you can see, I’ve already added the tokens, they’re the ones starting with “ansi.”:

ansi.black
ansi.white
ansi.gray
ansi.magenta
ansi.cyan
ansi.yellow
ansi.blue
ansi.green
ansi.red

The full list of available tokens that can be added when missing – if you want to also add missing styles for other (markup) languages – can be found here, on the Current Theme Scopes page on the Appcelerator wiki. One thing that’s not mentioned on that page is that there’s a sort of hierarchy defined for the languages, where broadly defined tokens, such as constant.other.symbol (which isn’t even mentioned, btw.) is used where language-specific variants, such as constant.other.symbol.ruby, are missing. This makes it easier to create more generic cross-language directives using fewer keywords

Sitting here reading feeds. Two consecutive posts from TechCrunch:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/14/local-is-focal-street-fight-gives-the-local-industry-a-source-for-news-and-analysis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/14/ioxus-21-million-energystorage/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

One is about real value, real innovation where investments will generate real return, where the other is pop piggy-backing on services piggy-backing on trends with a monolithic trend beacon still not generating revenue. Yet the pig is snubbing out $6 billion?

Are we already knee-deep in the next IT bubble waiting to burst as a horrid aftershock to the economic crisis a few years back? There’s so much money being funneled into non-revenue generating business these days… These months… These years…

Just me?

DISCLAIMER: What you’re about to read may contain harsh language. It contains stories of feces-throwing gorillas and crying children. Opinions will be biased. Proceed at your own risk!

Education is usually a very quiet thing, a thing without big feelings, outbursts and whatnot. It’s about immersing oneself in new and unchartered territory. About curiosity, longing, and yes, sometimes even passion. More often than not, it’s a stressful thing, sure, but that’s usually attributed to the effort it takes to focus, concentrate and create abstractions in one’s mind, synthesize and understand things, their perspective and impact, on a larger scale.

Then again, sometimes it’s just plain boring. But, just once in awhile you get carried away in that great flow of passion when you actually feel your horizon widen, your perception deepen and your entire world becoming more detailed, more finely grained, and yet still more focused.

I’d never thought education would one day actually enrage me. Until today, that is.

I’m attending a six-week course in ASP.NET version 4, which will enable me to cough up some more dough for the “70-515″ exam earning me a title of “Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist” in “Web Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4″. As weeks go by, this title is starting to feel more and more like a misnomer, actually being more equivalent to a “Web Professional Turd Stacker”.

So why am I so angry? What’s wrong? Is my teacher an idiot? Possibly, but if so he’s doing a mighty good job of hiding it. Well, are your classmates idiots then? No, I don’t believe they are, no. Well, then, are Microsoft idiots? Well, for the love of all that’s good and true in this world, and for their sakes if they believe in any type of after-life purgatory, I hope that they are. Because if they’re not, they’re simply just evil. Although I believe that actually both may apply.

I’ve been developing web solutions for a while now. It’s a trade that can be very tricky in practice, as many actors are involved in defining the playgrounds, with differing ideas about how the web should be expressed and interpreted. Well, maybe not that differing – it’s been more like a lot of serious actors trying to come to an agreement while one monolithic retarded gorilla decided to defecate on all the initiatives of others and poison the interwebs with non-standard, buggy and poorly written junk applications that have plagued our profession for about a decade or so. Unless, of course you were Certified by that particular retarded feces throwing gorilla in which case you’d just be one more minion wrapping more turds in IP packets.

Even though the retarded gorilla was very rich indeed, as luck would have it, its massive ineptitude prevented it from actually inventing anything new, and over time, people started discovering cuddly chimpanzees, apes of a more intelligent and friendly nature, throwing tasty bananas instead of turds. Lovable and patient panda bears took on the daunting task of catching the flying feces mid-air, churning it through a magic waste management processing plant, and presenting it as beautiful flowers. The crap gorilla’s iron grip was loosening, storm clouds were dissolving and the tears on the cheeks of the Earth’s children were licked off by purring kittens.

Well, okay… I may get carried away a bit here, but it helps calm my rage talking about kittens, so that’s how the story went. Anyway, the evil retarded gorilla found he had to listen to these annoying little wise-ass chimpanzees and start doing things more like every other ape with a quarter of a brain was doing it, so he put on a diaper and started dealing in bananas, too! They weren’t as yellow and ripe as the chimpanzees’ bananas, and every once in a while you’d find a shard of broken glass or a little strychnine in your banana, but all in all it was a step up from having feces thrown at you all day.

So, basically that’s where we are today. The future will tell how wide rips HTML5 will put in the retarded gorilla’s diaper and consequently how much feces it’ll manage to pollute that with, but things in general are looking up.

So, starting this course a while back now, I was actually looking forward to seeing what the big gorilla was up to these days. My roads have mostly been tread with a backpack full of Ruby on Rails, RESTful interfaces, PHP, jQuery, AJAX, XML/XS(D|LT), SOAP, etc., so I’ve been exceedingly religious about doing things the “right” way, be it either using proven design patterns or utilizing the infrastructure that’s already there, the way it’s supposed to be used, rather than piling some “Not Invented Here” custom crap on top of the stack.

I’ve previously used Visual Studio for hacking a bit on the DC++ application, and in the mid-2000s used VS.NET to create a backup application in C# for Windows Mobile devices for the company Bullguard. The latter experience was really good – I found C# to be a pretty nicely constructed language, coming from C++ and Java it was pretty much self-explanatory, and Visual Studio itself was about the best IDE I had ever used. Never mind that the actual development for the mobile devices was a nightmare in marshaling Outlook DLLs and juggling low-level SIM stuff, what I came out with was a good feeling of VS, .NET and C#. Given the recent boost in adherence to standards by the gorilla, things were looking up!

Until the gorilla’s diaper started bursting on the first day. Lesson 1. Create a new project, what do you get? An html page with a form. Now, any web developer that’s not completely beyond salvation would utter out a little, “Eeck!”, jump in his (or her) chair, and immediately delete that atrocity until he actually needs it. Bad idea. If you do, you can pretty much forget about doing anything else with your project. The form is what was there at the dawn of time, for Windows applications. The form is what people know. The form is omnipotent. The form is good. Praise the fooooorrrmmm. Everything goes in the form. And by default, everything you do will POST feces around your site, unless you actively stop it.

Not just your own feces, mind you – remember the gorilla – the “viewstate” object will drag things around everywhere, requiring pretty much any interaction with the server to be a complete POST of your data, the frameworks’s data, and who know how many layers of monkeys’ data in order to keep up the facade that is ASP.NET.

Now, keeping state is of course of grave importance in any web application. And there are many ways to do it – Lord knows, it’s not always pretty, especially when hives of AJAX are thrown in the game, with page sections, modules and templates being refreshed and causing state changes on their very own. It’s not an easy task keeping state like this (especially across sessions), even with a defined domain and reduced business logic. Imagine trying to keep state invisibly in a framework like .NET not knowing the application and its domain. Yeah, that’s not gonna be easy, unless you’re completely indifferent to standards, performance, simplicity of code, or anything else that keeps developers and the internet in general sane.

So what do you do in this scenario when realizing you’re about to break patterns and standards in order to support a monolithic and opaque framework? You could either,

1. Pay attention to the fact that you’re creating developer tools, choose to respect the developers and empower them, and force them to learn how the internet works, which would result in faster, better, more standards-compliant web applications.
2. Assume that only idiots would develop for Gorilla Inc., wrap everything in familiar turds and leave it for the “idiots” to stack them so that on the surface, things still work (but don’t look underneath, oooooh, please don’t).

Apparently, option 2 was chosen, and once that rip was torn in the gorilla’s diaper, the stench amassed. Right after this sucker punch to the face, we were set to drag-and-drop first a “Label Control” to our page (which was rendered as a span, thank you very much), then a “Calendar Control”, which rendered as a table-in-table monstrosity with in-line css in every cell, defaulting to round-trip to the server onclick, and leaving any designer to throw away her CSS knowledge and get a copy of Visual Studio to start making hideous “design templates” in it. Hello, early 1990s.

This was on day one. Over the weeks, to keep me from going insane and “professionally aggressive”, I’ve started phasing out a bit I must admit. But today, I actually got really angry. We were doing jQuery and web services.

Okay, jQuery I know very well (it’s fantastic, absolutely beautiful, as is Javascript), and web services I’ve written, so the first thing that pops in to my mind is, “Well… jQuery doesn’t connect with web services, at least not without a plugin, so what do they really mean?” Fair enough, the lesson is about getting some JSON from ASP.NET using jQuery, so I’m just assuming we’re using the term loosely here, the same way we’re using the term AJAX for any kind of DHTML that fades or moves around or whatever, regardless of whether server interaction is taking place.

Things start to get strange when the example tells us to query the example “web service” using jQuery .ajax notation like this,

// [...]
  type : 'POST',
  url : 'Service.masx/HelloWorld',
  data : "{'a':230,'b':0}",
// [...]

Anyone who knows jQuery would wonder why that data object is quoted – that would just send an anonymous string containing the JSON payload as cleartext while its members should’ve made up the key/value pairs in the request. Obviously a typo, right? Obviously, this is not piercing a turd, is it? Clearly the gorilla is not defecating on our jQuery, too?

Well. Yes. Yes, he is. The gorilla is lose and on the crapper. And when you look at the response from the web service, returned in C# in the method like,

  return "Hello World.";

It becomes, as a JSON response,

{"d" : "Hello World."}

D? Is this Boyz n the Hood? “D, motherfucker, D!!!!!”? What’s with that ‘d’? Which, coincidentally, is presented to us course takers as “jQuery notation” WTF?! Dark rain clouds once again appeared, mothers leapt for safety while crying children were at the mercy of wolves on the prowl…

The dirty, rotten truth is that the feces-throwing retarded gorilla is stacking more turds on top of its pile of shit. Its mental capacity was just adequate enough to somehow put an erroneous equality mark between SOAP web services and an AJAJ request. Now how do we accomodate that? Well, we smear some more feces on our turd pile that is the web service stack, make it require being POSTed to, have it expect its parameters as a string containing JSON encoded data and then just crap out mangled JSON in return (if you’re lucky, because the equivalent jQuery code using .post() will actually result in XML output even if all your POST request headers are correct – XML that doesn’t represent the same objects as the mangled JSON, BTW).

Why on earth would a web service, no matter how mangled and raped, ever want its input as a string containing JSON? Why on earth would you not use the HTTP standard way of using key/value pairs that every friendly banana dealing chimpanzee has been using for decades? Why on earth would you wrap your response in an object assigning the return value to a single member, ‘d’?

Because you’re living on a pile of turds, and you just gotta keep stacking them, that’s why. If you took away that .d, the entire framework would be shedded.

I walked away with an adrenaline overload and gorilla feces all over me. My professional pride is stung. It’s not so much that someone would do these things, it’s that some big gorilla would have hundreds of thousands of minions do it with him. I’ve often wondered what makes some developers so weird, so utterly bitter, anti-social and dysfunctional. Well, having to work with this framework professionally would definitely do that to me.

This gorilla is not just retarded and feces-throwing, he’s also destroying all that’s good about development, taking away all the joy, taking away all the power of the people involved. I used to think that IntelliSense was the best auto-completion I’d ever seen. Now it’s just apparent that it’s not about quickly auto-completing code that you were about to write, it’s about navigating you through a dark, cold and confusing cave filled with HIV-ridden needles and bear traps.

This is why I’d rather be homeless than working as an ASP.NET developer. It’s not thinking, it’s not creating, it’s stacking turds like you were once stacking Lego blocks. Except, if my mother were ever to complement me on my stacking of ASP.NET turds, I’d want to go crying in the shower.

As Homer Simpson once said, “Kids – just avoid eye contact and very slowly walk away.”

2011-04-15: The gorilla keeps crapping: Groklaw: Microsoft Cloud Services Aren’t FISMA Certified

As Google Search gets smarter, it gets dumber, too. And extremely annoying. Yes, I meant “mobil”, not “mobile”, that’s Danish, so please stop rewriting it and forcing me to click and confirm that yes, I did mean “mobil”.

Are you, too, tired of having Google rewrite your queries? Well, if you take a closer look at the request querystring that’s generated when you correct Google’s “corrections”, you’ll notice a token, “nfpr” (or None of those Fucking Pathetic Rewrites, as that acronym must clearly mean) that’s set to 1, i.e. true.

So, using this, combined with the knowledge gained from fixing the broken search accelerator in Linux Mint, we can add this token to our defaults so that Google will revert to its previous, less intrusive, and less retarded behavior – the simple link “Did you mean blah blah blah?” placed just under our search input box.

$ sudo nano /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/en-US/google.xml

And add,

<Param name="nfpr" value="1"/>

to the list of parameters. Exactly where doesn’t matter, just anywhere. Ctrl+O to save. Restart Firefox.

Probably there’s a Windows and Mac OS equivalent file, but you’re gonna have to find it yourselves

Now if we could only have a token, like poracawmq=1, for “Please Only Results that Actually Contain All Words from My Query”, Google Search might just start to be genuinely useful again!