Seriously… within a few minutes I installed powder, which installs pow and provides some nice utilities, ran the command to add my pwd to pow, and I was ready to roll. Subdomains were being routed perfectly. No more need to add tons of subdomains to my hosts file just to test. This made my day.
Last night I finished putting together the parts for my new desktop build (just in time for QuakeCon). I’ve created a listing of the parts in it in case anybody is curious. :)
So, I discovered this gem when FAFSA “updated” their page. Sure, things look new and spiffy instead of looking like the late 90s… but they also regressed in a huge way: the incompatible browser test.
I’m rocking the latest versions of Chrome and Mac OS X, not IE6 on WinXP. This is just sad.
To top it off, they include instructions on how to update Chrome. *facepalm*
Click and see for yourself: https://fafsa.ed.gov/FAFSA/app/errors?page=incompatibleBrowser
looking at a computer mouse
Cr-48 Update
I’ve been using the Cr-48 (Chrome OS Pilot Notebook) for a few days now. I like the general design, which seems good for a pilot notebook but needs some improvements before it’s ready for production (VGA port is outdated, the trackpad is better than most but nowhere near Apple quality, etc).
However, I think the main thing is the OS. It’s perfectly simple if all you need is a browser. Web apps are doing a really good job of that. It seems like this type of notebook would be perfectly designed for somebody like my mom, who sometimes struggles with simple tasks on Mac OS X.
In other news, I quickly turned on the developer mode and figured out how to access the terminal on this box. I wish Vim was installed by default.
I Don’t Like Stack Exchange
I’ll admit, I’m late to the Stack Exchange thing. But I already hate it. On December 16th, 2010, Jeff Atwood announced the Programmers Stack Exchange site left beta.
So I read through most of Atwood’s comments… I’m still kind of stumped here.
At one point he warns another user: “Careful, because you’re also advocating Yahoo Answers, where anything and everything is on topic all the time.”
Perhaps I’m totally misunderstanding the point of Stack Exchange sites. I’ll admit this is possible, but I will not take blame. (Design for dumb users, etc.) I thought the point was that sysadmins go to Server Fault, power users go to Super User, developers go to Stack Overflow, etc. Now it seems like the URLs are getting more fine-grained, making it harder for a one-off user to be converted to a repeat customer.
Take a look at http://stackexchange.com/sites/
Stack Overflow: “Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers”
Programmers: “Q&A for expert programmers interested in professional discussions on software development”
I don’t see a noticeable difference there.
I’ll admit, though, that actually visiting and comparing stackoverflow.com and programmers.stackexchange.com will show a pretty clear difference. However, most people will not be opening up both at the same time. I wonder about the other possible use cases.
And then there’s the reputation aspect of it all. I can understand developers not having their reputation carried over to the sysadmin site… but to another site for developers? Everybody has to start over on Programmers. Great. This has a cost of annoyance to people and I hope it was included in the cost-benefit discussions on this.
Heck, even the description for Programmers given in the blog post (which included “programming puzzles” as a good subject for Programmers) is already out of date since at the bottom of the list of Stack Exchange sites I see one for Code Golf, described as “Q&A for code golfers and programming puzzle enthusiasts”. Geez.
I get the idea that this degree of userbase fragmentation is a bad thing. Stack Overflow has been far superior to Yahoo Answers due to the grouping of people (you don’t want somebody that’s barely describable as a “power user” to answer your development question), but I have a hard time enjoying this new system.
It’s typically $69 (what I paid just over a month ago for it… ugh…), but it’s $29 until Feb 15, 2011. If you like an IDE for Ruby over TextMate or VIM, I recommend checking it out.
New Job
I started my new job at Wieck Media today. I get a nice 15” MacBook Pro to work on as well as a big cinema display (I’ll figure out which one that is later).
It’s been a fantastic day so far. :)
This is one of the ways I separate good design from bad design…
Submitted by Richard Beer.
(In case anybody has any question, “click here” links are bad, mmmkay?)
I discovered something interesting about MySQL: it’s not trivially simple to rename ENUM values.
Say I have a table called people with an ENUM field called type. If people.type has 3 possible values (‘male’,’female’,’no_answer’) and I want to change it to be (‘male’,’female’,’undisclosed’), there are two possibilities of what I think should happen with the data:
- Values of ‘no_answer’ should not map directly to ‘undisclosed’ and therefore should become 0. Perhaps I’m getting rid of ‘no_answer’ but want to differentiate it from ‘undisclosed’.
- Values of ‘no_answer’ should become ‘undisclosed’. Perhaps I’m just renaming ‘no_answer’ to ‘undisclosed’.
It’s pretty easy to solve Possibility #1: just run an ALTER statement and change the column. Possibility #2, however, is a bit more problematic. If other bad data has been entered, then you can’t just simply assume that all empty-string values are from ‘no_answer’. From my understanding, MySQL stores an array that goes somewhat like this: { 0 => ”, 1 => ‘male’, 2 => ‘female’, 3 => ‘no_answer’ }. Thus, it would be nice if there was a way to just rename 3. Oh well.
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