schwuk.com

• Point (although kudos for his choice of TV shows)
• Point
• Counterpoint

I’m with the 37signals guys on this¹.

¹ And no, I’m not just sore no-one has tagged me with this meme before anyone suggests that.

Just posted this to the Mono mailing list:

I came across this quote from Miguel:

"One of the reasons that we developed Mono was because we wanted to
have better tools to develop software" â?? Miguel de Icaza

...and I was wondering: does Mono really provide a better environment
for developers?

I don't want to get into a debate about language or framework
features, but instead focus on the experience. To me there's a lot of
potential being missed - the emphasis still seems to be on using
'standard' build/config tools (make, autotools etc.) - which
complicate cross-platform development - and reliance on the
distributions for packaging and satisfying dependencies.

Are enough "better tools" being provided, or is there more that can be done?

A specific example that may help you see where I'm coming from is
rubygems. Once you've got ruby (and rubygems) you can get any other
(published) library or module. The same holds true with PEAR for PHP
and CPAN for Perl. Is there an equivalent for Mono? Should/could there
be?

It's been awhile since I focussed on Mono, so I'm hoping I'll be
inundated with responses pointing me in the right direction.

Now to see what sort of responses I get…

A while ago my career took a new direction. Before this I was a pretty dedicated code-monkey, deeply embroiled in the world of .NET and it’s associated technologies and culture. When Mono came along, I thought “great, I can finally contribute to Open Source using my C# & .NET skills” and for a while I spent a lot of time working in and with Mono. I also spent a fair amount of time defending both Mono itself and my choice to use it.

It’s been a while since I changed jobs now, and I’m really getting back into the whole “geeking for pleasure” bit. Along the way I came up with an idea for an application that would help out on of my fellow LUGgers and my first thought was to write it in Mono. Then I remembered that Jono had written something similar using Python & PyGTK (something I’ve tinkered with before) so I had a look at his code, played with it for a bit, discarded pretty much all of it and started again. Normally I would most likely have re-implemented in Mono, yet this time – because I’ve not done any serious coding in C# for approximately six months now – I decided to stay with Python and found it:

1. A refreshing change from Mono – everything I needed already installed in Ubuntu 5.10 or was just an apt-get away. No compiling from source to get the current version
2. A nice little language and environment to work in/with

I’ve never been that big a fan of Python, but I’ve got to admit that combined with Glade it really is powerful for quickly creating apps that have little or no dependencies (if you’re using a good distro). Sure if you’re a die-hard IDE person you’re going to struggle as it requires you to know more about the language and libraries you’re working with, but I fail to see how that is “A Bad Thing™”.

Choice

Now this post isn’t just a retraction of my previous comments about Python – it relates to all langauges and frameworks. My on-and-off affair with Ruby on Rails is now back on again, and I find that – again due to taking a step back from .NET’isms – the things I disliked before aren’t really that bad. I’ve even bought the book so that I can better understand it.

So having taken a step back from commercial development practices has allowed me to re-evaluate the Free alternatives, and I’ve found them far from lacking. I’m not going to do a complete U-turn and take Aq’s attitude of “why waste time creating a new language/framework” as I think the achievement of Mono is not an insignificant thing. However now that I no longer rely so heavily on the technologies that drove the creation of Mono, I do understand his viewpoint though.

Today I went with Mrs Schwuk to see Brokeback Mountain and in my opinion (which is, after all, what this site is for!) it deserves all the praise that is being lavished on it. It’s so much more than just a “gay cowboy” film (which I admit to referring to it as) – although it was worth noting that not everyone was aware of basic premise of the film as one couple walked out of the cinema once the ‘action’ began!

The only downside I can think of is that at times things can be quite slow, but it’s worth staying with (which is not much of a chore at all really). This may well have be down to the fact that I’ve only seen action/blockbuster type movies at the cinema recently so it was a significant change of pace for me.

Having put up with Mrs Schwuk’s infatuation with Heath Ledger for quite some time now means I am familiar with his other work, and he definitely deserves the oscar for this outing. Jake Gyllenhaal was very good as well, but it really was Heath’s film.

…and yes I know that the title of this post is a cheap gag, but I liked it.

Not one to hang around, I decided to give Gregarius a whirl instead of just talking about it. You can find it at http://lakelandedge.co.uk/rss/.

Install was pretty simple as expected, but there were a few gotchas specific to my (and possibly others) configuration as I’m running LightTPD with FastCGI, so I’ll cover them here:

• It thinks it’s running in the root of your site no matter where it is installed. This is caused by PHP_SELF being empty, for which a solution can be found here
• It use Apache’s mod_rewrite by default (an understandable, but unfortunate assumption on the developers part)

To save solving these yourself, here are some tailored instructions…

Tailored Install Instructions

1. Follow the standard install instructions (which recursively links to this post!), but don’t go anywhere near your browser yet!
2. Modify your php.ini, so that cgi.fix_pathinfo is 1
3. Now you can browse to you installation
4. Before proceeding any further, go to the http://example.com/rss/admin/index.php?domain=config (changing the domain & path to suit obviously) and toggle rss.output.usemodrewrite to off
5. Start using it!

At some point, I may figure out the conversion of the rewrite rules to suit lighttpd, but at the moment I’m not to bothered as I prefer the un-rewritten URLs.

robots.txt

I prefered not to have my installation indexed (whilst googling for tips, I encountered lots of links pointing to feeds within Gregarius installations – very annoying), so I modified my robots.txt accordingly.

Authentication

I went with htdigest protection, but I sure you can figure out how to use basic.

1. Create a disgest file – I used htdigest from my previous Apache installation
2. Add the following lines to your lighttpd.conf (in the relevant domain section if you’re hosting multiple sites:

   
   auth.backend = “htdigest”
   auth.backend.htdigest.userfile = ”/path/to/digest_file”
   auth.require = ( ”/rss/admin/” =>
                    (
                      “method”  => “digest”,
                      “realm”   => “Gregarius”,
                      “require” => “valid-user”
                    )
                  )
   
   

3. Reload lighttpd and check everything is as expected.

(via Little Gamers)

Games and juvenile humour – what more could you want?

Grandma’s Boy (Trailer)

…or maybe not…

From Joystiq’s not-really-a-review:

Overall rating within the entire universe of films: 4.0 / 10
Rating within the subset of movies significantly about video games: 9.5 / 10

Still potentially worth seeing as the movie…

“succeeded in one arena that almost every movie involving video games fails at miserably: it captured much of gaming culture pretty well to varying degrees of accuracy.”

…but it’s probably now going to be a rental (or wait until Sky picks it up and shows it forty-eight trillion times in a week) rather than a cinema trip for me.

(Yes, this and the previous post herald one of my typical flurry of posts. Deal with it.)

Like Aq., I too am frustrated with the recent outages of the Bloglines service. I’ve grown to rely on it, and when it is unavailable it is like a piece of me is missing (similar to, but obviously not as serious as, when my internet connection fails. <shudder />). I know these problems are uncontrollable, but I find them incredibly frustrating nonetheless.

So like Aq., I am now looking into the possibility of hosting my own (or possibly working with him, but duplication of effort is the foundation Open Source, Free Software and Linux are built on, and I do so hate to break tradition </sarcasm>). Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think I can do a better job than Bloglines, nor do I expect there to be less errors. In fact I expect there to be more, but they will be my errors that I* can (try to) fix. I’ve written in this vein before.

Having the right to make one’s own choices and of having the ability to act on them* is one of the definitions of empowerment, and this is some thing only Open Source and Free Software give us.

Around this time last year, I published a post entitled “New Year Resolve” in which I outlined some of the things I wanted to achieve in the (then) coming year. I also said I would see how I did next year (er, now) so with the preamble over lets get on with it!

Immediate

Things I intended to complete quickly:

• Re-implement my home gateway – Done. I switched to IPCop as mentioned and have gone on to recommend it to and even carry out implementions for others.
• Switch to Debian – Done, and I won’t look back.
• Fix my Linode – Half-done. I switched it to Debian as threatened, which resolved all the problems at the time, but since then my Spam filtering solution has all but collapsed making me reach the point where I have considered letting GMail handle it all for me – until I found RoundCube that is.

Ongoing

Things I intended to complete at some point:

• Technical Writing – Sort of. I didn’t get anything written on the scale that I wanted, however I did get to contribute to a book.
• Replace my website – Sort of. I started work on a Mono-based site (which I may finish at some point). However I succumbed to the glamour of Ruby On Rails and switched to Typo instead.
• Produce two pieces of software – No, for reasons I will explain later.
• Become certifiable – No, for reasons I will also explain later.

And there’s more…

I also came up with a few non-technical goals as well:

• Become more productive & organised – I’d like to think I’ve achieved this, but it will always be an ongoing thing.
• Be consistant – No, but not all of it was my fault, which I will explain, er, now.

Annus Horribilis

This year my (non-immediate) family has suffered through a horrible set of events that thankfully will have a much better outcome than we imagined. However this caused me to re-evaluate priorities which culminated in a career direction change. I said at the time:

Hopefully this will also give me chance to step back from focusing on the tech that I required for my job (e.g. .NET) and focus on the stuff that actually interests me â?? something Iâ??ve felt a lack of recently.

…and this has happily been the case. Of course this has been slightly marred by my new-found passion for gaming (especially on Xbox Live), but I’m still finding time to do the geeky things I enjoy.

2006, the year of…

I’m not going to come up with any (predictions|resolutions|tasks) for 2006, as I will have a busy enough year already. Last year saw a few lifestyle changes that the effects of should be quite noticeable this year.