Tech H8rs

When talking about anything technology or engineering-related, especially when multiple companies are involved, standards are an absolute requirement to ensure that software and hardware play nicely together. These standards are often filled with technical jargon and field-specific terminology, and rightfully so, as they need to be very specific in what information they're standardizing. A blueprint that does not indicate its scale may yield a product far off from what it is supposed to be. Software, computers and consumer devices are no different, however there is an extra element thrown into the scenario, the consumers. This is especially true with the explosive growth of the internet and other high-tech devices floating around in every purse and pocket.

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One huge drawback with Bugzilla, and many other bug tracking software, is that they lack an SVN connector. This would be a snippet of script that would make a new comment under a bug, or close/resolve the bug automatically, upon a developer including a small bit of code in the commit message. This is usually something such as 'Bug#123 or Fixed Bug #123, etc...

This led me to some frustration when Bugzilla did not have one released. They have a workaround where you can redirect an email address to a perl script, which will then kick off the comment, but then you have to take the trouble of installing/configuring mailman, setup the correct aliases, etc... All-in-all, it was far too much work to get a simple autocomment script working.

So, after doing some quick crash-course learning perl and looking at existing methods of the Bugzilla system, I have developed my own script to use as an svn connector. I have the script available at dev.powelltechs.com (my dev server), available for download. A readme is available here.

The instructions for getting this setup is relatively simple if you have any unix experience, (and chances are, if you have your own SVN repo, you're at least *nix competent). Just edit a few parameters in the script, then link/copy it as your /svn/repo/hooks/post-commit file. It should start working with your bugzilla install and svn repo right-away, no need for patching or configuring Bugzilla or svn.

Enjoy!

Microsoft has recently announced updates to what will be restricted in their upcoming update to Windows Vista "new" version of Windows 7, specifically their starter edition.

They have removed the 3-application limit, which is good news for whatever unfortunate soul happens to have to suffer through the OS on a machine. However, they still have some rather unusual limitations in place.

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Companies are extremely cautious to embrace new technology, even if the technology is not so new. One such very common issue of this is the development of commercial applications for Linux.

Eclipse has long been an expandable development platform for multiple operating systems. As such, it's the perfect platform to develop a cross-platform commercial IDE on. Zend ported their IDE over to it using mainly PDT and other various OSS tools, and Adobe is utilizing it for their Flex language (the logic in flash player). Despite this, they do not fully support Linux as a full/stable release.

If you want to vote for the Linux version of flex builder to be produced in full, please take a second to head over to http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053 and vote for it.

I experienced a problem recently where one of my applications which relies on imagemagick's identify script failed on certain files. When executing identify filename_blah.eps on Ubuntu Jaunty, it would segfault and crash with a rather length trace stack, starting with libc6.

======= Backtrace: =========
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__fortify_fail+0x48)[0xb7af9da8]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__fortify_fail+0x0)[0xb7af9d60]
/usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.4.5/modules-Q16/coders/ps.so[0xb7f24fe4]
/usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.4.5/modules-Q16/coders/ps.so[0xb7f2154a]
/usr/lib/libMagickCore.so.1(ReadImage+0xce9)[0xb7d52209]
/usr/lib/libMagickCore.so.1(BlobToImage+0x157)[0xb7d21c57]
/usr/lib/ImageMagick-6.4.5/modules-Q16/coders/ept.so[0xb7f1a6b5]
/usr/lib/libMagickCore.so.1(ReadImage+0x1cb)[0xb7d516eb]
/usr/lib/libMagickCore.so.1(ReadImages+0x1b2)[0xb7d52a32]
/usr/lib/libMagickWand.so.1(IdentifyImageCommand+0x4cc)[0xb7c654cc]
identify[0x8048c42]
/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe5)[0xb7a12775]
identify[0x8048a71]

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The term 'Standard' can be very open to interpretation at times. This is especially true when it comes to software and computer systems. Take M$ for example, their version of 2008 Office featured an "Open Standard" implementation of a format that surprisingly, no other company implemented or even accepted; they just happened to have "open" in the format name, so it was a standard therefore.

However, this rather brief article is about HTML and its standards; not particularly that OS and browser variations will yield different results with the same code, but this h8 is about something that every browser does similar, AND is part of the standard. The standard I've recently disliked is that of form elements and the usage of the 'readonly' tag. As per W3C's specification:

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This trend toward centralized, virtualized, data centers is a bad idea. I'm not against Cloud Computing per se, but the incarnation championed by Google and Amazon et cetera really bothers me. For those who are new to this terminology, Cloud Computing is essentially like taking a bunch of machines and aggregating the power available via those machines into a resource pool. Then you can dole out resources to users as you see fit based any factors you care to use, i.e. subscriptions, user levels and what have you. Sounds great. Looks good on paper. But suppose someone at your cloud provider notices your data is offensive. Maybe you support the second amendment. Maybe you want to audit the federal reserve. Maybe the person at your cloud provider disagrees with you. They can flatline your access, or anybody else's access, to your data any time they want. "That can't happen. Google is an American company, with American values." I hear you, but look what they did in China. And our values are changing as well. People are ready to give up civil liberties for "security". Corporations will not protect us or our data from the prying eyes of big brother. Just like its a bad idea for states to let the federal government control too much, it is in our best interest to maintain as much control of our data as possible.

Hunting is a primitive necessary feature and survival technique for the human race. We have evolved complex brains that are capable of comprehension and learning to aid in our survival and proliferation of an entire planet. One useful bit of information that we as a whole have learned is when killing game for food or sport, it is rarely advantageous to impale yourself with the weapon instead of the game. This often leads to bad consequences and the losing of said game you were trying to acquire. This may be the occurrences of Microsoft as of recent with their operating system strategies.

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Web developers can understand subtle differences between browsers, but some are just so far out in left field that no one quite knows what the original developers of the engine were thinking when they wrote it. Such as the case many times with the infamous M$ Internet Explorer, aka Internet Exploder, aka Infected Explorer.

Recently, a coworker and I stumbled onto a bit of an issue with this regarding IE's memory usage and javascript. We were using the javascript library called jQuery in an online application, and so we need to keep it updated. After a recent update, we were getting a strange bug; of course only in IE.

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As fitting for any new site, an epic introduction is generally used; however, due to my inferior word-smith skills, (my assets lie in other areas), writings of such quality are rarely rendered. In such, I shall provide merely a simple introduction for myself and the idea in which inspired this site, for whomever may stumble onto this site, however you may find it...

[quote]"I don't hate you because of you, however my hate is an indirect derivative from the fact that..."[/quote]

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