Robot Minds of Robot Slaves

The new boss at work asked if we wanted Macs. I said “yes.” So here I am working through some of the kinks one encounters when switching platforms.

The first major issue I’ve encountered is with using the No Machine remote desktop client. First off, DO NOT install XQuartz to run NX on Snow Leopard. I did this, and it was a hell of a time uninstalling it. The result of using XQuartz was that all the keys seemed to be mapped wrong. I could see the remote Ubuntu desktop, but after opening a new text file and typing into it, I saw backspace was now a comma, and the other keys on the keyboard were also screwy. Replacing XQuartz with the official X11 package from Apple fixed this problem.

I was psyched! Then I encountered another, major issue. Thanks to the blog post over here about “D key alone shows desktop”, I figured out how to fix the problem. Go into System->Preferences->Keyboard shortcuts, and scroll all the way down. You will find a shortcut to show the desktop mapped to “D”. Change this to Alt+D or Ctrl+D and voila! You may now cd.

The social/sharing options for Google are many and there is lots of confusion about which to use: +1 Button, Google+, Wave? Who knows?

Wait and see. That seems our only option at present. The +1 Button looks like the early winner in terms of ubiquity.

I’m using a couple of new jQuery plugins. One very nice, one not as nice. The bad news first. jQuery Validator is inflexible. It is not up-to-date. It is not playing nice with the Asp.net stuff I am working on. I cannot find a way to reset the validation state. I tried rules(‘remove’,rules), I tried the ignore property. I stopped short at trying resetForm(), which seems to just clear all the fields in a form.

On the other hand, jQuery Template is working quite nicely. It seems very flexible. The standard way of using it, is to declare a script block, and give it an id, then use $('#tmplName').tmpl(data). You can also use $.template('tmplName', markup) to create a template dynamically, and then apply the template using the method above. It’s really neat.

I ran into an issue with the slider widget. It didn’t work on iPad, and I suspect it would not work on touch-interface devices in general. I was able to easily fix this issue by pulling in the code for this widget from the in-development jQueryUI branch on github.com.

Google bookmarks is what I am moving to. But the ownership changes with del.icio.us make me nervous. It mostly boils down to that. I worry that the service will disappear altogether. And since I put down my cold, hard cash for a Samsung Galaxy S, I am now fully inside the Google not-exactly-walled-garden (chickenwire-fence?).

I don’t know a LOT about how this will work out, it is an experiment. The factors involved are: Google Bookmarks, Chrome Browser, and Android phone. I am pleased by the nice integration among the various Google products. The way Google Voice integrates with both Android and Chrome is incredible. I would like to see this with my bookmarks, but so far my experience has been that these three products are not well integrated, if at all.

But at least I know that if it’s from Google, it is not going to be going away. Not 100%, and not without ample warning. If that does ever happen, then maybe I will go right back to del.icio.us. Or roll my own. But for now I am done with del.icio.us. And I was a rabid user with over 5000 bookmarks on del.icio.us.

working on a phonegap app, testing out on android. i am just starting to learn about html 5, so i went with the code i got from html5boilerplate.com.

The site went down in a catastrophic fashion yesterday. I am rebuilding it now. The site is hosted on GoDaddy, has been for a little over two years. They’ve been pretty good. This is an exception. But they did advise me to create a new database, which will likely end up on a different instance. This will effectively upgrade the database for our site. I shoulda done this right away when rebuilding the site. I think I need to do this for the dev site. Like now.

I’m back into the habit of using Git, and there are a couple of tips I have, mostly for my own reference, but maybe some of you out there will like these too.

Use git config. Use it for at least these two things. Point git to the remote repository using git config remote.origin.url . Second, designate a default merge tool by issuing the following git config merge.tool .

git config -l will show you what you’ve set, and you can use auto-complete to look through some of the other available settings.

The worst ever. Danica Patrick wasn’t too great to look at, but this new one is some kind of female bodybuilder. Ripped. Grosses me out so much.

Running an Ubuntu server on Amazon EC2. The server runs a standard LAMP setup, with MySQL. I’m building some deploy scripts that interact with the database. I want to be able to remotely access MySQL and this is what I did.

I edited the my.cnf file to exclude the bind-address line. At first I updated it to use my server’s IP address but MySQL would not restart. But when I commented out the line removing it from the configuration, this worked. Go figure…

The other thing that you’ll need to do is to fire up mysql and add in a couple of new users with a wildcard for the host. Run a command that looks like this:

mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

That should do it.

I found the tip originally over here.