You start a project

You initialize Maven

World is downloaded.

Dependencies Stink

What is the incantation?

Maybe God knows them.

Have some subprojects

Maven won’t find sibling code

Then chaos ensues.

New dependency

Not found in Maven repo

Now build is broken.

Do you understand?

Maven has many errors

Now you start guessing

All day on Maven

Now the project is worse off

And your hair is gone

I just got back from a trip and the GPS capabilities of our Android phones (wife: Moto Droid, me: HTC Incredible) were flawless.  The drive-by-drive directions were spot-on.  Need to find a gas station?  Literally hit the button and ask it.

I seriously couldn’t ask for a better phone.

My wife likes her keyboard on her droid, but she also likes how much lighter my phone is than hers.  I thought I would be annoyed by the Incredible’s keyboard but I have gotten used to it. Or, rather, it’s gotten used to me — I now have a number of words added in and now it is smarter about spelling decisions.

I really only have two gripes about my Incredible:  you can’t see the screen when you are in direct sunlight (this is a big deal while geocaching) and sometimes it can be real slow when I turn it sideways. That especially happens when I’m typing something in and decide that I want to two-hand type, so I turn it. The screen generally does not rotate with it.

But the value and the usefulness of the phone outweighs all of them.  I can’t think I would like an iPhone more than this.

I remember when this first aired (I think I was in junior high) and I still think it’s hilarious.  If the beginning seems slow to you, go forward to about the 6:23 mark — when Carol and Robin do the skit a second time.

I tried it and I liked it. But it didn’t have everything that I used. But, heck it’s on github — easy forking.  So I did. My changes are:

• Change the xiong-chiamiov-plus theme to use vcs_info instead of being git-specific.  Gave the new theme the original name of mikeh.
• Option to configure a terminal with strange settings (labor intensive on the first run, perfectly wonderful after that.)
• Will automatically rehash the path, so new commands will be found immediately
• Added realias to quickly make a new shell alias/function (EDITOR env variable required)
• Removed upgrade checker (I don’t expect you to trust me)
• Share history with your zsh’s on the same host

More changes coming as time permits.  Enjoy!

Let me tell you my pattern — I use FireFox in two places: Work and at Home.  Many times I wish I stumble onto a site I want to read at home.  Usually I just save it to Diigo. But sometimes I forget.  The biggest annoyance is passwords. Yes, I save a ton of website passwords in FireFox.  But it stinks when I save it on the home machine but want to get into my account at work, and I can’t remember what password I used there.

Weave solves all these problems.  And ones that I didn’t know I even had.

So now when am I work, I don’t worry about saving an address to Diigo just so I can read it at home. Instead, I do nothing special.  When I go home, I start FireFox, I wait about 15 seconds and I see that it starts to sync. After that, I have all my history from my last session.  Yes, you read that.  All my history from my work browsing session.  Oh, and if I setup a web account during the day at work and save the passwords, that is synced too.  Preferences?  Check, but in a smart way. Like my proxy server config from the office is not moved to home.  That’s a good thing.  Bookmarks? Check. Yes, I still use bookmarks and I probably use them more now because they are synced between my machines.

A neat feature is tabs.  Yes, tabs are saved across browsing sessions on different machines.  So if I want to quickly see what I was looking at last night at home, I can go to History-> Tabs from other computers while at work.

Many of you may be thinking. “How is this different than the nasty FoxyMarks/XMarks crap?”  Well, not only does Mozilla not publish or track it but they also encrypt all data with a passphrase of your choosing. So, yeah, they thought of that too.  If you are truly paranoid you can setup your own Weave server.

So I think it’s worth a go, especially if you are still using FireFox instead of Chrome (which I still am on the fence about, but that’s another discussion.)

I put up with this for a few months, mostly because I didn’t want to spend the cycles on figuring this out.  I did spend a few, and they were all pretty much worthless. I’m not sure why — the idea wasn’t hard, but it seemed to be.

A while back I decided to put some dedicated cycles to this.  I found this comment from the It’s All Text developer on his blog — it didn’t work , but it was a start.   I took his work and built my own version.  I was trying to do it with a one-script solution but seeing his I knew I needed two: one batch file and then one shell script.  After some experimenting,

The following batch script should be left alone.  It sets up the Cygwin environment, and then uses Cygwin’s “run” command to start a bash shell, when then runs our shell script.  The “%~f1″ is actually the most important component here.  It is a batch file command that says to give the full path of the first argument. Of course, that assumes that the first argument is a file but considering we are using this with It’s All Text, we are safe with that assumption.

@echo off
SET DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0.0
SET CYGWIN_ROOT=c:\cygwin
SET RUN=%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin\run -p /usr/X11R6/bin
SET PATH=.;%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin;%CYGWIN_ROOT%\usr\X11R6\bin;%PATH%
SET XAPPLRESDIR=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/app-defaults
SET XCMSDB=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/Xcms.txt
SET XKEYSYMDB=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB
SET XNLSPATH=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale

rem the %~f1 is the full path name of the argument given to the script.
%CYGWIN_ROOT%/bin/run.exe c:/cygwin/bin/bash.exe  /cygdrive/h/bin/text.sh %~f1

The following is our shell script, which we referenced as “text.sh” above. It’s much simpler — it converts the Windows path it was given to a Unix path and then calls our editor (“emacsclient” in my case, which will load up the file in the current Emacs instance).  You maybe thinking that I could have just was well as done this in the batch file above — and, you are right, I could have ran the editor but I had to also convert the file’s path first.  That is really why we need two scripts — using a shell script is the only way I could find that would let me use the cygpath command in a reliable way.  Note that I used “$*” at the path name — that will give all the arguments, which I need because there are spaces in the full path name (“$~f1″ above).

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/emacsclient "`cygpath "$*"`"

So not easy, but it’s possible. Of course, I made it a lot easier now for everyone else!

The answer is that the Joslyn Art Museum has a lot of kids stuff.  Quite a bit in fact. Actually, they have a whole website worth of stuff. And we had a ball.

We kinda walked around the special exhibits and saw some interesting things. But Leah wanted to make her own.   Leah sat at the Can Do Art display, where they have paper, crayons, colored pencils, etc.  Even a few games!  If you know Leah very well, you know that she loves that kind of stuff.  A grandfather was there with two grandkids and he started making paper airplanes. That meant we made some too.

After that, we went to the Cafe and had a little snack. Then Leah asked for something that I casually mentioned to her. I read it off the website but really didn’t know what it was.  So we went and got an Art Pack and got going.

We did the “Go West!” pack. The best way to describe it is a scavenger hunt or a geocache in the museum.  They gave us a backpack and it had a journal with directions, and a compass.  The journal told us where to start and then gave us directions of “Walk 6  paces North then turn East . . .” until we eventually got to a painting. We read about the painting, and then reached in the backpack and got an activity out there to do (make a journal, play a bingo game, etc.)  And we had a blast with it!  And, while we didn’t see a lot of different art on this activity, we actually learned a lot about the pieces that we saw — and isn’t that the point.

Leah is excited to do it again and I am as well. We need to take Gina next time.  And how did our foster son do?  I had to feed him during our stop at the Can do Art display, and then he slept until waaay after we left.

I think what he’s saying in a round-about way is that the dependency injection framework should not be a deep dependency in our code. I agree with it in theory, but it’s not necessarily great in practice.

Sort of like the log4j example in Clean Code, Uncle Bob thinks it is good to hide the fact that we are using a library into the inner bowels of the project.  In the log4j example, Uncle Bob  makes his own wrapper around the log4j calls and uses his wrapper instead of calling log4j in his code. His idea is that, if they decide to change logging mechanisms, they just have to change one class.   I think “why not just use commons-logging, since that is what is was designed for?”

Anyway, I think a Dependency Injection framework is much harder to abstract because your main method has to know about it just to get the container up and going.  This is what he is saying here:  “I can’t abstract this stuff out, so it dirties up my code.  I don’t like it!!”  I’m not sure like it  either but it’s a cost thing. If you decide to do dependency injection, then you have a hard dependency on that library. Sort of a contradiction in terms, certainly, but then you only have one hard dependency and the framework should take care of the rest.

Of course, Uncle Bob doesn’t seem to talk about cost — for him, it’s black and white.  For me, I figure you have to know what you are getting into before you start down this road.  This is a good example of “What if I decide to use a Dependency Injection Framework?  What are the costs?”.  His post is a good example of what those costs are.  In that light, it can been read like Ted Neward’s infamous The Vietnam of Computer Science. It’s OK to choose a framework for dependency injection, just know what you are getting into before you start and be ready to suffer some pain down the road.

Bash has a add-on version of this, called bash-completion, and I used that before moving over to zsh full-time. Bash-completion feels, well, added on and slow and not always working. Zsh’s completion, however, keeps surprising me on how much it does do. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

I typed "./manage.py TAB" and Zsh gave me all the arguments of a standard Django manage script.

The above screenshot came with no configuration — I didn’t have to tell zsh about Django because, well, someone already did. And I’m glad for it.

It’s not just for Django, either. See what happened when I did “./configure <TAB>” in PHP’s source tree:

The top part is what I got when I did "./configure TAB". The part below my prompt is what I got when I did "./configure –with-TAB"

So note that zsh helps me figure out the right options.  What I want to know the exact options for MySQL?

Results of ./configure –with-mTAB

Again, none of this stuff had to be configured — I just told zsh I wanted completion and it gave it to me. I didn’t have to tell it that this was a configure script — it knew that! Just like it knew about the Django script.

This is just a taste. I hope you bite into zsh for more goodness.

I’m that way with files on my computers as well.  I let files sit around long after I need them and then, surprise!,  I have a problem with hard drive space. I end up having to scramble to find files to delete, and end up finding ISO images and tarballs of forgotten installs that I could have delete months, sometimes years go.

After  my clean install of Snow Leopard, I vowed I would be better at cleaning up after myself.  I would delete files that I know longer needed, remove those MP3 files after I import them into iTunes,  and empty my Trash periodicially.  But, really, who am I fooling? I’m not going to do daily or weekly sweeps of my hard drive seeing these things.  That’s where Hazel stepped into my life and made things much easier.

Hazel cleans up after you.  Essentially, you tell it where to look, what to look for, and what do to.  Want to import MP3 files automatically into iTunes? It will do that. Want to delete files that were downloaded more than a week ago?  It will do that.  Delete the Trash every month?  Yep.  Oh, and if the Trash bin gets large, it will delete it automatically — but only if you tell it to.  What if you want to do something weird with the file?  Well, you can write an AppleScript or a shell script to handle that.  And you tell it all this in a nice, mostly-intutive  GUI.  (Click on the Screenshots link on the main Hazel page for an idea.)

And added bonus is that it can delete application files when you delete the application.  What’s that?  You thought OSX did that for you when you moved an app from the Application folder to the Trash?  Well, look in your user’s Library->Preferences or Library->Application Support folder. Yeah, you see a lot of folders there for applications you no longer have installed.  If you had Hazel installed, it would see that you have moved an Application to the Trash and it will ask you if you want to delete the user-level files as well.

I think Hazel is an application that every Mac owner should have.  So, really,  at least try it out. Now. Go.   It’s worth far more than it’s $21.95 price tag.