The rules of blogging

1. Don't nag about how long it's been since you last posted something.

;)

(seriously)

amazon's black hole at "'s Gravenvoeren BE"

There seems to be a black hole sucking up amazon shipments at "'s Gravenvoeren BE". I ordered a book on amazon.de last week and it still hasn't arrived. The shipment details:

Datum	Zeit	Ort	Nähere Informationen
24. November 2009	11:33	's Gravenvoeren BE	Zustellversuch
24. November 2009	11:31	's Gravenvoeren BE	Zustellversuch
24. November 2009	07:04	's Gravenvoeren BE	Zugestellt.
24. November 2009	06:34	's Gravenvoeren BE	Lieferung wird zugestellt
24. November 2009	05:04	's Gravenvoeren BE	Lieferung wird zugestellt
23. November 2009	15:56	Antwerpen BE	Lieferung ist beim Depot eingegangen.
20. November 2009	16:18	Bruxelles Brussel BE	Lieferung hat das Versandzentrum verlassen und ist unterwegs.

The shipment's destination is Gent, Belgium, which is nowhere near "'s Gravenvoeren". Also, note the bizarre inconsistency in the tracking: Zugestellt (delivered) occurs before Zustellversuch (delivery attempt).

Some more googling revealed that I am not the only one, and bizarrely, it also concerned packages with destination Gent, Belgium (although these are ordered on amazon.fr):

http://www.amazon.fr/review/R1EFSYKEUUDKWW

http://blog.volume12.net/9472.htm

UPDATE: The tracking at amazon is fundamentally broken. To track the parcel properly, you need to track it on the courier's website, which in my case was TaxiPost, the parcel service of the Belgian Post. There, it mentioned a failed delivery and the post office at which the parcel was kept. Normally, a note is left in the mailbox, but I guess they messed that up. So I went by this morning and picked it up.

Devoxx09 JDK7 update surprise: closures!

During the JDK7 update by Mark Reinhold, it was announced that closures are to be included in in JDK7 after all. Most people were happy but considered it very questionable to make this kind of decision so late in the process.

Personally I think it ties in with another important observation I made during this year's devoxx edition: Scala has become normal. A whole lot of people appear to have made the move. Scala gets attention in most of the presentations, and nobody considers it to be a novelty. If scala's adoption rate continues at the same pace, then I fear jdk7 + closures is once again going to be too little too late. The ship has sailed.

During the oracle keynote, I also paid attention to their wording regarding their promise of 'good stewardship' over the java platform, which I unfortunately have not memorized. It seemed to me that under oracle, the Java language is not going to be so much of a priority as the jvm.

I'll review when the keynote is published on parleys.com (the jdk7 update was not part of the keynote though, which it was last year. One might wonder why.)

3D Mandelbrot

sweet!

http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html

WINS Name Resolution for Linux

 - apt-get install winbind
 - edit /etc/nsswitch.conf:

passwd: compat winbind
group: compat winbind
shadow: compat

hosts: files wins dns mdns
networks: files

protocols: db files
services: db files
ethers: db files
rpc: db files

netgroup: nis

http://www.bensbits.com/2006/02/04/wins_name_resolution_for_linux

Running your own eclipse on Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic)

In you eclipse dir do

$ mv eclipse eclipse.bin
$ touch eclipse
$ chmod a+x eclipse

And put the following in the new eclipse file

#! /bin/sh
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/jni GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true $(dirname "$0")/eclipse.bin

The LD_LIBRARY_PATH is there to make the javahl svn connector work (along with sudo apt-get install libsvn-java)

The GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS is there to fix annoying behaviour that appeared in 9.10 where some window content in popups isn't refreshed and some buttons don't respond well to clicks (or not at all)

regina regina

he was perfect except for the fact that he was an engineer

Regina Spektor, Love Affair, 11:11

git and clojure similarity

Has anyone else noticed that clojure's immutable persistent datastructures and git's internal structure are essentially the same thing? (I was reading peepcode's 'Git Internals' pdf)

So people who understand git's internal structure should feel right at home programming with clojure's immutable datastructures and vice versa.

ubuntu: constructive criticism (3)

As I mentioned in an earlier post about the vpn setup: There is no support for location profiles. Connecting to a vpn is essentially switching locations, and switching locations might require things like proxies to be re-configured. (IBM/Lenovo's windows utilities do this very well: changing wifi, vpn, proxies, default printers, homepages and so on)

Major bummer.

ubuntu: constructive criticism (2)

Another one I was thinking of recently:

There is no user friendly method of browsing apps for ubuntu. There's synaptic, sure, but you should know what you are looking for. There is no friendly information. Too many packages.

I don't want 'packages'. Packages are installation units, and there's too many of'm that really don't make sense to me. I want an iTunes-like browsing interface, with a pretty layout, a large application icon in the upper left corner, a nice description on the right, and a bunch of screenshots below.

Disclaimer: I use apt-get anyway, but my friends don't. Yep, I'm the only linux user in my circle of friends. How sad.

ubuntu: constructive criticism

The wifi connect is still slower than windows', although 9.04 has improved.

I think I'll make a habit of criticising ubuntu under the title "ubuntu: constructive criticism". I read a blog post recently (forgot where) that was definately right: linux lovers are not sufficiently critical of linux.

So I will try to point out some negative user experiences as I bump into them.

Ubuntu 9.04 on a usb stick

Update: I should point out that in order to boot from the usb stick, you have to remember to trigger the bios boot menu (which on most laptops I have handled is done by pressing F12).

I am about halfway into my 2-week holidays. I left my laptop at home because it is big and bulky: it does not qualify as a 'portable' to me (so I essentially do not have one). I'm left with my wife's laptop, which I would prefer to mess with as little as possible.

Enter Ubuntu 9.04 on a usb stick (I'm using x86_64). Simply a clean install, no special procedures, no fancy tricks. 1 partition, no swap, and make sure that grub is on the usb stick's MBR (click the advanced button at the right time).

Now, I have not seen 9.04 boot from a regular hd yet, but I can tell you that from this usb stick it boots pretty damn fast. User log on takes about 2 to 3 seconds and everything is there and loaded. I'm so satisfied with it. I get the occasional freeze during normal use, but it is rare and hence not terribly intrusive. It is, after all, still a usb stick and not a proper SSD, so in that respect, the user experience is excellent.

So after several days, I had the unfortunate need to boot back into windows vista. It was painful. Excessively painful. Honestly, I ended up staring at the screen for so long, while it just endlessly kept on loading crap. The worst part was the realisation that I simply forgot how much it used to bug me before.

Anyway, ain't going there again anytime soon.

vpn fiddling

I managed to get my work vpn set up on ubuntu. It turned out to be not so hard, thanks to vpnc. I used the information from my company's windows vpn client config files as instructed here. Even better, I found and installed network-manager-vpnc, so i don't even need to touch the commandline anymore. Sweet!

The only real annoyance is now that I need the company proxy to surf the web, and as such, switching between vpn and no vpn really sucks since the proxy settings do not adapt automatically.

System Update discontinued by Lenovo

Lenovo discontinued its system update feature. Personally, I think this is a bad idea. They are clearly completing a move into the value segment. I'm not sure if I will be buying any thinkpads in the future, since, well, there is increasingly less that distinguishes them from the rest of the pack.

update

- Continued interest in clojure, less so for Scala. I may still pick up on Scala in the future as I still see the benefits of a well designed statically typed language, but it is not a priority for me right now. I've started experimenting in Clojure, and I like it. Reading "Programming Clojure".

- Continued interest in git. Reading "Pragmatic Version Control Using Git".

- I'm immensly enjoying reading pdfs on my ipod touch.

- Been browsing the "Pragmatic Programmer" catalogue. I'm considering buying the "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" pdf. It looks interesting. Hard to tell if it is well written, The git book is. The clojure book is still very beta, so I can't really judge it yet.

- Got a laptop from work. Big and a wee bit bulky. Nice screen resolution (1920x...). I basically use it as a compact desktop; it doesn't move. Running Ubuntu on it. Quite happy to use linux again. Somehow windows tends to kill a lot of my programming passion (cygwin takes away a lot of frustration, but still). Perhaps I should get a mac some day. Not sure. Not a priority.