January 2008

Just wanted to let everyone know that my laptop is currently not functioning. I am 95% certain it is a hard drive failure, but I am going to check and find out. The only thing that is keeping me from being certain is that I can’t seem to get it to boot from a DVD either. It will boot into the Apple Hardware Test, which tells me everything is fine, but it completely skips the test for my hard drive. The Hardware Profiler says that I have a hard drive, so it is recognizing it on the system, but when booting or scanning it seems to not be able to find it.

I’ll be looking into it over the next couple days, and hopefully will resolve it.

I should start by wishing everyone who recognizes it a happy new year. I’m not going to put up any predictions this time around because they are depressing to look at in a few years time when they still haven’t been accomplished.

I spent my New Year’s Day on an airplane. After an icy and snowy drive to the airport in Halifax courtesy of my parents, I managed to catch my ridiculously early flight to Toronto without too much issue. I knew ahead of time that my connection to Bermuda was delayed… by three hours. A small delay would have been good because I was a tad late coming in from Halifax, but the real drama started when I finally did get on the plane in Toronto.
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Still dead. However, I have learned the following:

• Resetting the PRAM and the NVRAM did not help.
• I wasn’t able to boot from the CD or Hard drive even explicitly from Open Firmware.
• I cannot boot from a Macbook Pro in Target Disk mode, although I can see the drive in my options.
• The aforementioned MBP could not boot from my hard drive although it too could see it in the boot options.
• Mounting my target disk mode Powerbook to the MBP would allow it to mount. I could access it from the shell (Terminal) and was able to list the root folder.
• Navigating into the /System/Library/CoreServices/ folder, I verified that BootX was there.
• All folders under /Users/ were missing. That sucks.

So, after all that, I still don’t know what the problem is. I’ve stumped those I work with, and I can’t seem to find a similar problem on the Internet. I’m not sure a call to Apple Support is going to help, and since I’m out of warranty, it is likely to be costly. I’d like to extract my drive and try it in an enclosure, but 2.5 inch Firewire enclosures are not easy to come by in Bermuda.

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

When I was on my way into the office today, I noted how nice and warm it was, especially after our bout of chilly weather this past week. Of course, as I’ve mentioned on countless occasions, anything here is warmer than at home in Canada this time of year. So to share a bit of the wintry goodness with everyone, I wanted to showcase a before and after photo of the seven-foot snowman that my brother built in December. As most people who have built a snowman can tell you, they don’t last forever, many not lasting more than a day or two before the forces of nature or neighbourhood kids bring it to a snowy grave.

However, a mound of snow the size of that snowman does have some staying power. But a day of rain will have a toll, and the after photo shows a redressing of the tiny bit of snow that was left after a mild and wet Christmas Eve. Not much left of Frosty there.
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I really don’t want to jinx it, but I’m going to start anyway. At this very moment, my laptop is (re)installing Leopard. Granted I lost the original hard drive in the process, but I’m just so happy to see her back up and kicking that I really don’t care. I just needed to buy a new hard drive, the one I found was 120 GB, 20 GB more than before. And thanks to Time Machine, I have everything backed up. One might say that a bootable version of my hard drive would be nice to simply restore, but I think that the clean install of Leopard will be beneficial in that it should be a bit faster, and this way I can bring over only those files I really need, allowing for a bit of house cleaning.

And after two years, things were getting a bit dusty in the corners. Unlike my Windows days, when I would re-format the drive after each term just to maintain stability, the Mac chugs on without complaint. Thinking back to my first Powerbook, which is still kicking, but ailing in several ways, there are probably files on there that haven’t been touched in close to five years.

But like my apartments and residences of yesteryear, I tend to accumulate a pile of junk which is never disposed of on my hard drive.

• Applications which I tested and rejected.
• A stockpile of short video clips which can be safely archived.
• 40+ GB of photos which I have backed up to multiple DVDs.
• Many, many other files, like old school files, etc.

Anyway, off to tend to my installation.

When I was studying in Greece, one of my classes was called Computational Intelligence, and in it we studied neural networks, genetic algorithms and fuzzy logic. It was actually a very interesting class, and we had projects in each of the aforementioned areas. For the genetic algos part we were told we could implement the genetic algorithm in whatever language we wanted. I chose Ruby, always being a tad unorthodox. It was my first serious attempt to use Ruby, although I had been dabbling for some time. It was quite pleasant to write, and while Ruby isn’t really appropriate for the serious number crunching of genetic algos it was a nice exercise.

However, I was just setting up my development environment on my laptop (more on the laptop in a separate post forthcoming) and decided to see what my Ruby setup was like. Leopard comes with 1.8.6 which is pretty good. It doesn’t have the mysql bundle installed, so I tried to get it via gem. It downloaded, but didn’t build. I’m not familiar with the gem system, perhaps there is a way to provide configuration switches through it, but I went into the download directory and was able to massage it into working. Not really Ruby’s fault I guess, but that is beside the point, I was able to get it installed.

I popped into irb, which is the interactive ruby shell, and tried to see if it “took”.

>> require 'mysql' 
=> true

OK, that is a good start. That means the extension was loaded successfully. Lets check how easy it is to access.

>> db = Mysql.connect('localhost', 'username', 'password', 'movies', 3306, '/var/mysql/mysql.sock')
=> #<Mysql:0x577448>
>> res = db.query("SELECT movie_id, title FROM movies WHERE available='Y'")
=> #Mysql::Result:0x56cad4>

Two commands and I had a result set filled with my available movies. Could it really be this easy? How about printing it out?

>> res.each() {|x| puts "[#{x[0]}] #{x[1]} " }
[2] Mallrats 
[3] Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels 
[7] Daredevil 
...

And BAM! Just like that. I guess the adage that Ruby is a programmers best friend is pretty close to the mark.

Some people may not call it a “disaster”, but in today’s digital world the loss of digital data, is in most people’s minds, a disaster. Loss of a carefully crafted music library is one thing, but what about family photos that can never be re-created, or the years of work invested in a dissertation? Obviously there is a need to safe guard this data.

The following is an account of my experience with my 15” Powerbook G4 failing 31 December, 2007. I awoke that morning not suspecting anything was wrong, looking forward to ushering in the new year, although not looking forward to ending my vacation. However, when I tapped my trackball to wake up the screen, I was greeted with… nothing. No response. Rebooting brought my computer back on, but things were not right. In addition to constant waiting for file system operations, some of my desktop scripts were yielding unusual results. Then finally it hung completely again and I was force to do a hard power-down. All subsequent attempts at booting resulted in the prohibitory sign (grey circle with a slash through it) appearing. It wouldn’t boot at all. My computer was dead.
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I suspect that you will be seeing a number of headlines like this around in the next couple of days. It is big news in both the open source and enterprise communities.

Sun Microsystems, the creator and distributor of the venerable Java language and application environment, has disclosed it will be acquiring the open source database vendor for one billion dollars sometime at the end of their fiscal third quarter of 2008. MySQL AB, of Sweden, is the creator of the world’s most popular open source database system, MySQL. MySQL has headquarters in the US and Sweden, and their database system is used by some of the largest players on the Internet including Google, Facebook, youtube.com, and Booking.com. Anyone who has ever done any work related to the web has heard of MySQL, and most have likely used it in some capacity.

While MySQL has offered an enterprise package for a number of years, it is suspected that Sun’s current enterprise-quality offerings will help position the database for a more prominent role in that market. Currently it competes with giants like Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server. Unfortunately it suffers from a bizarre affliction among enterprise users that open source and freely available software is bad. “Apparently” software must cost a fortune in order for it to be “good”. Ironic, since it is the closed, proprietary software which is most likely to be poorly written, probably the reason that the support contracts are so expensive.

As you may recall, I mentioned installing MySQL myself on my laptop in my most recent post. I have been using it for six years and this site, and all of my other websites, are driven by data stored in a MySQL database. It will be interesting to see what happens next as Sun strengthens its open source lineup. I suspect that we will see MySQL integrated into some of their application server products like GlassFish, and perhaps a tighter integration with Java. I think the SoHo web development community need not worry about the MySQL Community Edition disappearing anytime soon. Sun has been providing us with more and more open source, freely available solutions lately, even opening up Solaris and their UltraSparc architecture. I see this as a positive step in promoting good solid products available without significant cost which will continue to power the Internet.

This is the first time that I am reviewing an audiobook on here, so I wanted to point that out at the beginning so people are aware. An audiobook, even when unabridged, provides a different experience to a normal paper-based book. Not only does the content of the book matter, but the person reading also contributes to the experience. A bad narrator can ruin an otherwise excellent book, and conversely a good storyteller can breathe life into an otherwise stagnant story. In this case the narrator, Paul Michael, did a phenomenal job reading. He clearly distinguished the different characters when speaking, his female voices convincing and some of his accents were spot on. Reading a Ludlum book always involves a very international cast of characters, and Michael didn’t disappoint in the delivery.
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Some of my family members knew, but I figured that since I am leaving tomorrow, it was probably about time that I brought people up to speed on my trip to London. I am traveling with work to spend a week in our London office. I feel it will be quite beneficial since there are a number of people in IT at this office that I’ve dealt with but never met. Not to mention that my direct project supervisor works out of this office.

On the non-work side it will also give me a chance to meet up with a few different friends that I have not seen in a while. And I might be able to get a spa treatment or two done while I’m there. I will report in with anything interesting that happens. Unfortunately I think I’m going to be too early to get a chance to see one of the MacBook Air’s in the Apple Store on Regent Street. I know that they aren’t shipping yet, but there is a possibility that they have a demo model there. I’ll definitely be stopping in to check.

“The Chase” is a story of cunning and detection taking place in 1906’s western United States. We follow Isaac Bell, a renowned detective for the Van Dorn Detective Agency, as he relentlessly pursues the slippery and ingenious Butcher Bandit. Told from the perspective of both the protagonist and the antagonist, the story unfolds as the two are thoughtfully merged into one fast paced chase.

This is quite a departure for Clive Cussler as he breaks off from his usual familiar set of characters and themes and ventures into another realm altogether. It is his first period piece, taking place 100 years in the past. Normally Cussler opens his books with one or two episodes from history which will somehow come to affect the main story line in the present, but in this case he starts off in the 1950s and then jumps back in time to the early 20th century. Originally this deviation confused me, I didn’t realize how different this was going to be from Cussler’s other works. I knew it did not feature any of his usual characters, but it almost seems as though someone else wrote this book. You could have given me this book coverless, and I likely would not have guessed Clive wrote it. Not at first, because there are some hints throughout that point to a similar literary styling, but nothing that would make me say, “Yes, this is definitely a Clive Cussler novel”.

The deviation not withstanding, I enjoyed the book. I read it fairly quickly, but that was more of a function of my spending the day traveling on planes as opposed to not being able to put it down. The story was engaging, yet light, which is how I view most, if not all, of Cussler’s works. In it’s own right, the book was solid, and it will be interesting to see whether we get any other spurious novels like this one in the future. I’m not aware of how the sales are tracking, but I for one was a bit surprised to see a book that didn’t belong to an existing series.

As I find with a number of books, the ending was a tad rushed. It is very obvious that the beginning of the book which takes place in the future from the point of view of the main timeline, what happens at the end of the main story. It is still quite interesting as your mind attempts to fill in the gap from the two periods of time. However, even the jump back to the future at the end of the primary timeline didn’t really manage to resolve the story in a way that I was completely happy with. There were still a couple of unanswered questions. Despite that I’m still pleased enough to say seven out of ten.

Yesterday I spent the day in Reading, which was a bit nostalgic for me. I met up with three people, two of whom were great friends from my Masters. People I used to spend a lot of time with but now I rarely see. We aren’t the best at staying in touch, but I think that only makes any infrequent visits more enjoyable. There is more to catch up on. We spent the day moving from pub to pub in Reading, recounting the many good times and adventures we shared. It was just what I needed at this point when I am still trying to find my place in my “new” life.