Steve Jobs - what a jerk!

I read Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography a couple months ago, and really enjoyed the read. One thing that surprised me - although I guess it's well known - was what an asshole Jobs was. He was just a really mean and selfish guy a lot of the time.

Of course Jobs was an amazing success on many levels, so everyone forgives him for being a jerk, and many argue that his acrimony contributed to his triumphs. On the other hand, many people also espouse the "No Asshole Rule" of management - which also makes sense, but it's ironic that a typical supported of the no asshole rule is an asshole.

Anyway - I think it's healthy to have at least one asshole; otherwise you wind up full of shit.

iptables NAT port forward 443 (https) to 8443

I recently wanted to setup port forwarding on an Ubuntu Linux server (AWS EC2) to redirect https traffic (port 443) to a Tomcat server listening for SSL connections on port 8443. I really did not want to learn anything about UFW or iptables - I just wanted to setup the forwarding and get on with my day, so I proceeded to Google away and read man pages and finally figured out the following commands after learning more than I wanted to learn - which was a complete waste, because I'll forget it all anyway:

sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8443

sudo iptables -t nat -A OUTPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -o lo -j REDIRECT --to-port 8443

The first command adds (-A) a rule to iptable's PREROUTING table to redirect incoming packets bound for port 443 over to port 8443. The second rule adds a similar rule to the OUTPUT table that redirects packets outgoing to port 443 on the loopback interface (-o lo).

Of course there's another trick - those rules disappear on reboot unless we save them somewhere. If you're running UFW, then add the rules to /etc/ufw/before.rules. Otherwise one solution is to install the iptables-persistent extension (on Ubunutu: sudo apt-get install iptables-persistent), and save the rules to /etc/iptables/rules.v4.

I hate this sysadmin garbage ...

Simple Session Scope with Guice

I've been a big fan of the Guice dependency injection library for a while, but I missed support for session-scoped injection until I figured out a way to achieve the same effect using child injectors. I was inspired by the PicoContainer project that I stumbled upon several months ago. I haven't actually used PicoContainer, but it appears to actually be better thought out than Guice - implementing arbitrary dependency injection scopes and lifecycle management via hierarchies of IOC containers.

I had PicoContainer's hierarchy approach bouncing around in my head when I stumbled up Guice's createChildInjector method - which supports a similar approach to managing object scopes.

Long story short - I introduced the notion of a "SessionModule" that defines session-scoped bindings to littleware's module system in my development repository clone. Littleware's module system also uses OSGi in an unorthodox way to manage the application life cycle. I wish I would have known about PicoContainer earlier - it appears to implement a nice approach for a combined IOC and application life cycle container. At some point I need to take a look at Spring too - to steal ideas if nothing else!

Youtube to the rescue!

I have this old yellow Kitchenaid blender that has been sitting in the cabinet collecting dust for the past year or so after the rubber coupler that mates the motor base with the pitcher's blade impeller melted when I left hot soup in the pitcher for too long. It was so frustrating to have this appliance with working motor useless from a melted piece of rubber - what a piece of garbage! I tried some ridiculous jerry rigs, tried to remove the part, googled "busted blender", and eventually just stuck the thing in a cabinet disgusted.

Anyway, happy ending, yesterday I was thinking again about the damn blender after watching America's Test Kitchen make some awesome gazpacho - trying to figure out how I could puree without a food processor or blender, when I decided to google "kitchenaid blender coupler" - something like that, and discovered a community of pissed off blender owners and their relief at discovering how to repair the busted rubber coupling! This YouTube video shows how to remove the part, and Amazon sells a replacement.

I'm waiting for my new coupler to arrive in the mail. I can't wait to give the repaired blender a try. It's like I'm getting a new blender for Christmas! I'll probably wind up blending my hand off or something like that now ... blood smoothie!

Escaping Java classpath wildcard on Windows command line!

I had a ridiculous battle with a set of .bat scripts that I wrote to launch java command line applications on Windows. I'm working on a suite of related little tools that I bundle into a zip file with a bunch of .jar files under a /lib/ folder, and launch scripts under a /bin/ folder that each look something like this:

@echo off

if not defined JAVACMD set JAVACMD=java.exe
if defined JAVA_HOME set JAVACMD="%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe"

%JAVACMD% "-Djava.util.logging.config.file=%~dps0..\config\logging.properties" -cp "%~dps0..\lib\*" run.my.App %*

So I'm trying to use the nifty java classpath * wildcard introduced with java 6, but I had a terrible time with windows insisting on expanding /lib/* in the shell regardless of how I tried to quote or escape the thing! I was driving myself crazy, when I finally got the genious idea to just add a semicolon, so /lib/*; doesn't look like a path to Windows Powershell or CMD (I guess), and the following works:

@echo off

if not defined JAVACMD set JAVACMD=java.exe
if defined JAVA_HOME set JAVACMD="%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java.exe"

%JAVACMD% "-Djava.util.logging.config.file=%~dps0..\config\logging.properties" -cp "%~dps0..\lib\*;" run.my.App %*

What an amazingly stupid waste of time!

Java RMI over SSL and a single port

I was lucky with my latest freelance contract that the clients were happy to build on littleware to implement some of their back-end services, and they let me bill a little time to implement a few features - like securing the RMI-based procedure-calls over SSL. Fortunately java includes an RmiSSLSocketFactory, but there are a few integration tricks.

I outlined in a previous post how to configure RMI to export all its objects over a single firewall-friendly port. That was easy to do once I knew the trick. Unfortunately SSL has a few moving parts - some of which I disabled as I really just want the data going over the wire encrypted, and am less concerned over end-point certificate verification.

Anyway, in the end it's not too complicated - it's just a matter of knowing the tricks - which are annoying to track down. Most of the code is in littleware's LittleRemoteObject class that specializes java's UnicastRemoteObject. The server builds a RmiSSLServerSocketFactory using an SSLContext that loads a certificate from a keystore on the classpath. The client builds and RmiSSLClientSocketFactory with a no-op TrustStore that bypasses verification of the server's certificate.

One final trick - the server boots up its own RmiRegistry with its custom RmiSSLServerSocketFactory, and the client connects via LocateRegistry.getRegistry - which accepts the client's socket factory - (littleware's RemoteRetryHelper implements the client's connection). Littleware's client actually exposes its own API that integrates a cache and authentication building on top of the service API that the server exposes via RMI (I'm working on a REST implementation).

Anyway - a boring post about a technology nobody uses. Sweet!

Mishaps and Disasters

The last month and a half has been a parade of mishaps and disasters. The morning of July 27 I was looking forward to my flight out to California where I would join my old friends for a camping trip in the eastern Sierras. Our three dogs and I were walking through the front yard as we returned from our morning walk when we all realized we were being attacked by freakin' yellow jackets. I usually get along fine with stinging insects, but yellow jackets are freakin' mean if they decide you're too close to their nest, and we had a freakin' nest in some gopher holes in the front yard. Yellow jackets can sting repeatedly, and they do sting repeatedly - it's not like "sometimes they sting repeatedly, but usually just once" - I mean they just latch onto you, and repeatedly sting - freakin' mean! The dogs freaked out, but we managed to run to the back yard, and I spent the next hour dressed up for a Chicago winter in Alabama July trying to drown and burry that freakin' nest.

Anyway, we survived, and I was glad when I was finally sitting uncomfortably in coach flying to LAX. My friend Hiro organized a 4 day (3 night) backpacking trip. I packed light - just a few changes of cloths and enough food to keep me hiking through the freakin' arid eastern Sierras in late July. Hiro set me up with a tent and sleeping bag, and I rented a pack. We drove up 9000 ft outside of Bishop, and started hiking. I was such an idiot. Everybody got altitude sickness the first day - freakin' headaches and exhaustion, but that comes with the territory, and we made it over a high ridge the first day, and were on our way the second day on a much less taxing hike. By mid afternoon we were getting rained on pretty steadily, but I thought, "no problem, nice summer rain", but there's no such thing as a nice summer rain above 10000 feet. The rain didn't stop, then it turned to hale, and it got cold! Freakin' cold, and I was not the only one not prepared for rain or cold. Finally my friend, Mike, decided to hell with it, and put up his tent - by then it was a freakin' down pour of freezing rain that had been getting worse for hours. I was shaking like a leaf. Fortunately, my other friend, Steve, got his tent up, and let me crawl in. We both dove into our sleeping bags, and I felt much better for a while, but soon I was freezing again, and Steve noticed, "you don't have a matte under your bag ?". Frick - I just had the bag Hiro gave me. Freakin' Steve saved my life letting me sit on his matte. We sat with our faces jammed into the tent wall for about an hour when the rain finally stopped. Steve let me crash in his tent that night, and Hiro lent me an extra matte, so all was well, but we were all pretty annoyed when it started raining the next night, and I was especially upset, because my tent leaked. I was freakin' miserable in this mini tent with puddles all around me, but my friends, Stewart and Chika, took pitty on me, and I squeezed in with them. Everyone on that trip must hate me now.

So fun trip, and I made it home, and all was cool for a week or two, when Joanne's poor Aunt died, and we drove to Atlanta for the funeral - leaving our dogs at the kennel. We have three dogs that I love and spend a ton of time with, but they don't get along all the time, especially Ponzi and Moose, and especially when squeezed in close quarters - like our Volkswagon hatch-back driving to the kennel. We have a crazy system where Ponzi sits in the front passenger seat, and we have this fence thing separating the front seats from the back, and Joanne, Moose, and Shugs sit in the back. Anyway, that worked pretty well, and we made it to the kennel ok, and the dogs were all excited and nervous. I put Ponzi on the leash, and circled around back to let Moose and Shug out, and there's some confusion, and the next thing Ponzi and Moose were trying to bite each other's head off - literally. There's a lot of luck involved in separating two fighting dogs without coming away bleading yourself, but somehow I managed it. I noticed Ponzi holding his head to the side, but didn't see any obvious injury, so we left the boys at the kennel, and went to Atlanta for some family drama. Next afternoon we headed back, and found Ponzi with a very red eye - Moose must have got a tooth into Ponzi's eye. Freakin' mess. Fortunately Joanne got through to the Auburn Vet School, and Dr. Newcomer was good enough to let us squeeze in an appointment just after closing time. Ponzi's eye was ok - the surrounding tissue was injured, and Newcomer set us up with some eye ointment to help him heal. Soon after that I noticed we had a new nest of hornets in another gopher hole in the front yard. What the frick ?

Finally, Ponzi healed up, and I took the dogs to the park to run around - we did that twice a week. Kiesel park is a really cool park in Auburn. It used to belong to some farmer named Kiesel who raised cattle. I guess he donated the land to the city, and it's a great park with a cow fence all the way around, a little pavilion for concerts, a few miles of walking path along the parks edge, and several little woods separating parts of the path. Unfortunately, Shug has a love for going where he's not supposed to go, and a gift for finding gaps in the fence, and sure enough - soon after we arrived he ran across a stream, and under the fence, and into the woods across the street. I followed, and so did Ponzi. I nearly caught up with him when Shug decided to walk out into the road - in front of a GMC Jimmy. The next hour was a mess. Shug survived the accident - dragging himself to the side of the road. I tied him up there, so I could get the car, dragging Ponzi along and yelling for Moose, but when I drove back I couldn't find Shug - he had hidden in some bushes. Fortunately Moose showed up, and found Shug for me. I lifted my poor broken and bloody dog into the back of the Jeep. Moose and Ponzi amazingly didn't fight, and we headed to the vet school. I think it was only about 7am, but the vet school has an emergency service, and they took Shug in. I was a freakin' mess. Long story short, the vets were able to save Shug. He had a fractured right femur and another fracture on the left side of his pelvis, but the orthopedics crew was able to do some magic with a bunch of steel rods, pins, screws, wires, and plates. Shug is three weeks along his way to recovery now - so far so good. I enjoy keeping him company - writing code at the table next to his crate; hiding from whatever else is coming my way.

Oil Buffet

The other day I listened to a short discussion on the PBS News Hour podcast about the proposed oil pipeline from the Alberta tar sands mines to feed our oil hunger here in the U.S.A. The news hour likes to have little mini debates where they have a spokesperson from each side sit down and talk about an issue. The whole tar sands thing and global warming in general boils down to whether we should risk our environment for the economy, or risk the economy for the environment. Of course if the environment goes to hell, then the economy is screwed anyway; and the tar sands wouldn't be viable if the cost of a gallon of gas wasn't already heading north of $4, but whatever.

Anyway - one thing the pro-pipeline guy said (and many others too about this and similar issues) that frustrates me is that the Alberta tar sands will be developed whether the United States consumes the oil or not - the oil will just go to other markets, so we might as well take the oil, because there's no stopping China and India or wherever. I mean per capita we consume over 5 times the amount of energy as China, and 10 times the energy of India (thanks, Wikipedia!). Sure there are a lot more Chinese and Indians, but since we led the way to our energy-fat lifestyle; we ought to also lead the way to a more sustainable future. The cost of energy will go up, and we'll have to change the way we do things, but we'll be better off in the end.

The picture I have in my mind is of big old fat America at the energy buffet - freakin 500 pound energy fatty half blind from diabetes, blood pressure through the roof, butter for blood, zooming around the buffet in one of those fat-people scooters, because America can't walk more than a few steps without getting winded. So fatty America has already eaten 5 times the amount of food as any of the skinny Chinese at the buffet, and ten times more food than any of the Indians; but America is getting pissed off, because the buffet is starting to run out of food, and even though any one Chinese or Indian has eaten a lot less food than America, when you add up all the food that all the Chinese and Indians have eaten - that almost competes with the amount of food America has eaten, and America needs that food! Freakin' China and India! Now America notices Canada just set a giant chocolate cake on the buffet table. Is America going to freakin' go on a diet and start exercising and let China and India and Europe have the freakin' cake ? No way, baby!

Writing the Congressman

I got a little fired up about the debt ceiling nonsense, and decided to e-mail my Congressman, Mike Rogers. I always feel so empowered after writing a politician - which is ridiculous, because it has never made a difference.

Hello Congressman!

I'm writing today to complain about your part in the House majority's role in taking the United States to the brink of default. I cannot take your "Cut, Cap, and Balance" bill seriously. It is exactly in times of economic recession that we need the federal government to run a deficit - lowering taxes, bolstering the social safety net, and absorbing the lost revenue from a diminished tax base. Our short term debt increase is a result of the economic downturn and stimulus spending; it is not a result of "out of control" spending. Our long term debt mostly results from the projected increase in medicare spending. I know you understand this, so I find your press announcements disingenuous.

The debt ceiling should be raised as a matter of course, and not used as a gun to the nation's head to push through the minority agenda. Please do your part to ease the debt-ceiling grid lock. It would be great while your at it if you could help restore funding to the FAA, and contribute to the plans to save the postal service from bankruptcy.

Thanks for your service.

Cheers,
Reuben Pasquini

Giving GWT a try

When I decided to implement a webapp browser for littleware's node database I began a debate with myself whether to implement the project in javascript or to give GWT a try. I have a little experience with javascript - I've enjoyed working with YUI on several projects, but javascript really sucks - no strict type checking, no module system, weirdo prototype object system ...

On the other hand - I feel like if I'm going to build a browser-based application, then I should develop with web technologies - javascript, HTML, CSS, ... It's great that GWT let's me develop in java, but it's a weird technology - not javascript, not really java - it's its own thing, but GWT is open source, has a community, is used and sponsored by Google (this blogger editor uses GWT), so might as well give it a try.

Anyway, I downloaded GWT and Eclipse, and was quickly running the demo application that the GWT Eclipse plugin creates in a new project. The demo is great for demonstrating GWT's remote service infrastructure and asyncrhonous support, but the simple UI assembly does not take advantage of GWT's new declarative UIBinder infrastructure. I want to use that UIBinder mojo, so I decided a good first task would be to refactor the demo to use UIBinder. I had a few false starts and a few different parts, but one part of the code replaces this html segment:

...
    <table align="center">
      <tr>
        <td colspan="2" style="font-weight:bold;">Please enter your name:</td>        
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td id="nameFieldContainer"></td>
        <td id="sendButtonContainer"></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td colspan="2" style="color:red;" id="errorLabelContainer"></td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    ...

, and this java code:

	public void onModuleLoad() {
		final Button sendButton = new Button("Send");
		final TextBox nameField = new TextBox();
		nameField.setText("GWT User");
		final Label errorLabel = new Label();

		// We can add style names to widgets
		sendButton.addStyleName("sendButton");

		// Add the nameField and sendButton to the RootPanel
		// Use RootPanel.get() to get the entire body element
		RootPanel.get("nameFieldContainer").add(nameField);
		RootPanel.get("sendButtonContainer").add(sendButton);
		RootPanel.get("errorLabelContainer").add(errorLabel);
                ...
         }

with this UIBinder XML:

...
	<g:HTMLPanel>
		
    <table align="center">
      <tr>
        <td colspan="2" style="font-weight:bold;">Please enter your name:</td>        
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td> <g:TextBox ui:field="nameField" /></td>
        <td> <g:Button ui:field="sendButton" /></td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td colspan="2" style="color:red;"> <g:Label ui:field="errorLabel" /></td>
      </tr>
    </table>
		
	</g:HTMLPanel>
   ...

that pairs with this code:

public class DemoPanelView extends Composite {
	private static DemoPanelViewUiBinder uiBinder = GWT
			.create(DemoPanelViewUiBinder.class);

	interface DemoPanelViewUiBinder extends UiBinder<Widget, DemoPanelView> {
	}

	@UiField
	public Label errorLabel;
	@UiField
	public Button sendButton;	
	@UiField
	public TextBox  nameField;
...

Anyway I'm having fun with GWT, so I'll try to implement the database browser in GWT until I run into something that stops me ...

Powershell Tabexpansion

There must be a better way to do this, but one of the funny things I do is setup variables in Powershell for paths that I frequently navigate to. So my profile.ps1 file has lines like this:

$GLOBAL:g1 = "C:\whatever\some\path"
$GLOBAL:l1 = "C:\whatever\some\other\path"

, and I issue a lot of commands like cd $g1
ls $l1
cp $l1/bla $g1
... that kind of thing.

One thing that drives me crazy is that I often want to do something with a sub-directory or file under a path referenced by one of my jump variables, but Powershell tabexpansion won't expand the variable for me ... until now! I finally decided to look into how to customize Powershell's tab expansion, and sure enough there's a TabExpansion function that I can override. This bLog post has the details.
Anyway, I defined my own TabExpansion function in profile.ps1 with a patch that just adds one line to the default function. The default has this regex-switch case that expands variable names:

            foreach ($_v in Get-ChildItem ($_varName + '*') | sort Name)
            { 
                $_nameFound = $_v.name
                $(if ($_nameFound.IndexOfAny($_varsRequiringQuotes) -eq -1) {'{0}{1}{2}'}
                else {'{0}{{{1}{2}}}'}) -f $_prefix, $_provider, $_nameFound
            }

, and my patch just adds a line to the end of the loop that also returns the value of the expanded variable:

            foreach ($_v in Get-ChildItem ($_varName + '*') | sort Name)
            { 
                $_nameFound = $_v.name
                $(if ($_nameFound.IndexOfAny($_varsRequiringQuotes) -eq -1) {'{0}{1}{2}'}
                else {'{0}{{{1}{2}}}'}) -f $_prefix, $_provider, $_nameFound
                $_v.value
            }

Now when I enter 'ls $g', then for each tab Powershell scrolls through a series of possible expansions: $g1, value of $g1, $gr, value of $gr, then back to $g1. If I want to list some sub-directory of $g1, then when the value of $g1 shows up, I just enter a '/' and start tabbing again to find the sub-directory. Hopefully that makes sense. Let me know if there's a better approach!

Quick Powershell Background Function

My blogging energy is way low these days, but I'm forcing myself to throw together a quick post - whipping myself like that crazy albino masochist monk assassin in the DaVinci Code.

First, here's a handy function to change the background color of a powershell terminal. Just throw it into profile.ps1, and you're all set to colorMe 'DarkGreen' or whatever. I found the code at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee156814.aspx.

function colorMe( $color ) {
    (Get-Host).UI.RawUI.BackgroundColor = $color
}

Next, I'm working on a project now that involves a little SVG, and I was surprised to discover that my NetBeans IDE didn't recognize the file type. It turns out that NetBeans' SVG support is in its Mobility extension, so I'm all set now after installing that.

littleware a little chill

I just updated littleware's ivy repository with new versions of the core littleware artifacts. I completely reworked the way the asset system manages client-server interaction, and also reworked the asset type-tree and IOC injection. I think it's a big improvement, but I'm too lazy to get into it tonight. The core littleware.asset APIs pass regressions, but the supplement tools under littleware.apps (data buckets, image managers, task tracking) need patches to work with the updated core APIs, so I didn't release new versions of those artifacts yet.

I'm busy now with some consulting work (whoot!), so littleware is going to have to simmer on the back burner for a while. I still laid out some goals for littleware's next milestone. Rather than complete the port of the supplemental modules to the new core api's, I plan to work on a couple services for services.frickjack.com that do not require the asset system.

The first service is a simple Google-calendar based appointment manager. A client supplies a calendar with events marking out when he or she is available for appointments, then other users from the general public may visit the frickjack service to view the calendar, and schedule an appointment - which just appears as another event in the calendar. This service will take advantage of the openId authentication service already deployed. I think this service would be useful for the owners of those "For Sale By Owner" homes to let potential buyers schedule home visits online.

I also want to deploy a simple barcode-image service where a client may submit a numeric barcode to a ReST-like URL, and receive in reply a .png barcode image. I've had this service in mind from when I worked at Auburn University's library, and a coworker in circulation mentioned how annoying it was to search for the record in the ILS associated some e-mail or web-based request. He suggested that it would be nice if the e-mail or web page had an embedded barcode-image that he could just scan with the hand-held barcode scanner that integrates with the ILS system.

We'll see how it goes.

Keep up with the bLog!

My list of blogging topics is piling up, but I've been putting off my latest post trying to finish several littleware changes, then a small contract.

Anyway, time to take a break from code, and complain about platforms. It's great that there are so many great tools and frameworks out there to take advantage off - application servers ( glassfish, tomcat, jetty, jboss, geronimo, ... ), distributed SCM (Mercurial, Git ), IDEs (Netbeans, Eclipse), java web component libraries (JSF, MyFaces, RichFaces, PrimeFaces, struts, ...), build tools (ANT, IVY, Maven, Scala SBT, Gradle), databases (MySQL, Postgres, Cassandra, ...) ORM ( Eclipselink hibernate, ...), javascript (YUI, JQuery, GWT, Flash, ...), languages (PHP, java, scala, python, ruby, ...), platforms (Spring, JavaEE, Guice, AWS) ... !

It's nice except when it's not nice. It always takes me a while to learn how to use a tool well - the right and wrong way to do things, the corner cases to avoid. So I like to use ant with ivy, glassfish, netbeans, mercurial, YUI, ...; and I'm not going to spend time learning jboss, maven, eclipse, and git unless they have something major to offer me. Of course - other people feel the same way. I can't argue with a project proposal where the client wants to use tomcat, struts, git, maven, and eclipse; because that's what the client is familiar and productive in, and there's no reason for that client to switch to glassfish, jsf, mercurial, ivy, and netbeans. It's a little annoying to spend time learning a new tool that does the same thing as a tool I know how to use, but in a slightly different way - even though I always learn something in the process.

End of rant!

Rejected by Google!

I was lucky enough to interview with Google in Santa Monica last week, but got the "thanks, but no thanks" call today. Ugh! On the one hand they would be scraping the bottom of the barrel to make me an offer, and on the other hand a company that can't talk itself into making me an offer has bigger problems than I can help with. Still sucks though.

Happy Earth Day!

Earth Day was last Friday, April 22, so I thought I'd throw up some pictures of our backyard herb garden for the occasion. One of the benefits of living in Alabama is that you can get a nice house on a quarter acre in town for a lot less than the cost of a one bedroom condo in L.A. The only drawback is that also comes with a few crabby neighbors that complain if you don't mow the grass, and call the cops if your dog gets out of the fence and runs through their yards. Most people are cool though, plus Alabama doesn't believe in property taxes, so it's easy to be a squatter. We'd rather have stupid kids than property taxes here. We do tax groceries, because the poor should pay for government. The grocery tax hasn't made a dent in the obesity problem anyway.

If you live out of town, then you can afford a bunch of land, so the neighbors aren't a problem, and you can have farm animals! Farm animals aren't allowed in town, but I love the idea of having chickens. A lot of people have horses out here - crazy, right ? All the cool little girls in Alabama have a horse and take riding lessons.

Anyway, back to our back yard - the dogs love it (2 of the dogs love it, the other dog loves to sleep on the bed), and there's room for a little herb garden and a compost pile (which fertilizes the garden). My garden is kind of a mess. I don't really know what I'm doing, so I was especially pleased when some seeds I threw in the ground early March actually grew. Alabama is warm enough to have two or three growing seasons if you're ambitious enough to take advantage of it - cool crops in early spring, hot crops through the summer, then cool crops again in the fall. My garden doesn't have the best location - there are a lot of trees around our back yard, and the house shades the back yard in the afternoon, so the garden really only gets three or four hours of good sunlight each day.

Last fall I scattered some cilantro and swiss chard seeds in the garden. The swiss chard was great last year and sprang to life this spring too, but the cilantro didn't do much until this spring when it popped up and went crazy. They're both great in pesto and in beans with rice.

Cilantro From Garden

Swiss chard From Garden

I also scattered some broccoli, carrot, and leek seeds in March. The broccoli is growing like crazy, and I think the carrots are doing ok (it's either carrots or weeds - I'll find out when I dig them up next month). I think it's actually summer squash (probably from seeds left from last year's garden) growing where I planted the leeks, so I don't know what's up with that.

Broccoli From Garden

Summer squash From Garden

I stopped by Home Depot the other day too, and bought some tomato and pepper plants - 16 plants for about $7! Jalapeno peppers did great in the garden last year, but Joanne hates jalapenos, so the neighbor and I were constantly eating them. This year I got some banana peppers - which should be more mild for Joanne, and cayenne too - we'll see how those do. I had a few bell pepper plants last year, but they didn't do well. I also tried egg plant last year, but some beetle munched most of it - I was too lazy to try to figure out how to defeat the beetle.

Pepper plant From Garden

Of course owning a house is not very Earth Day green. When we first moved to Auburn we lived in a big apartment complex. The complex consisted of several buildings along a loop road on wooded land by a big pond - pretty nice. Our building had eight two-bedroom apartments that the complex management kept in good shape. The house we live in now probably has about the same carbon footprint as the whole building we used to live in. At least we recycle and compost and try not to run the air conditioner or heat or set the thermostat as high or low as we can stand it (Joanne hates me for that). Plus I bought (actually it was a gift from mom) this funky little mechanical lawn mower with the blades that spin when you push it. I love that little mower even though I only use it once a month or so, because I actually like the look of the yard with the wild flowers and weeds and uneven growth, but sometimes neighbors complain about that. The soil is mixed with clay around here, and there's a lot of shade, so the grass doesn't get high in our yard anyway. The neighbors with the manicured, irrigated, chemical treated lawns bless us with the noise and pollution from their two-stroke mowers and leaf blowers every week, and we don't complain (except on the bLog!).

HBO is going crazy advertising for Lady Gaga's Monster Ball Tour that they somehow get to broadcast from Madison Square Garden. I'm almost tired of seeing her breasts and ass ... almost. I wonder if Gaga cloths would be comfortable for programming?

nice AWS!

I spent time over the last several days setting up a free amazon web services account, and manged to deploy a simple openId helper service that I've been working on the last couple weeks. I couldn't be happier with AWS. I have a glassfish app server running custom java webapp online for free rather than paying between $50 and $100 a month to some hosting provider. If people actually start using my apps, then I'll just scale up my AWS instance, and start paying Amazon for the resources I use. That's just what I need.

The AWS web console is very to use; I was able to get up running with an Amazon Linux AMI backed by an EBS disk by just following the instructions in the "getting started" guide. I'm new to AWS, but I've already picked up a few tricks.

• "Terminating" an EC2 instance not only shuts down the server - it also deletes the instance and its data - even an EBS backed instance. Just stop (don't terminate) an EBS AMI if you want to be able to start it back up again.
• This bLog has a nice overview of how to register the AWS security keys with the Putty ssh client for Windows.
• The public DNS name on a load balancer persists, but the public DNS name on an EC2 instance is reset after reboot. A good way to publish a service is to deploy it behind a load balancer, then map a DNS C-record to the load-balancer's public DNS name. You can do the same thing with an "elastic IP", but I don't think the AWS free service tier includes elastic IPs.

I'm also really happy with my experience with openId. The littleId code includes a simple openId consumer I wrote with the very nice openid4java library, and supporting javascript, PHP, and scala/java client libraries. The littleId openId consumer can run in the same java webapp that requires authentication, or the webapp can access littleId as a simple web service. In fact, a webapp can just use http://services.frickjack.com as its littleId service provider.

The littleId client API includes support for javascript, java, scala, and a little PHP, and should be easy to port to other languages. The javascript code manages openId popup-authentication windows in the browser. The java client code includes JAAS integration, and a simple LoginServlet and request-filter that easily integrate into a java .war webapp, and the PHP code is currently just a single-method class with which a PHP client can verify the credentials delivered by littleId's openId consumer. There's a littleId demo online that might help show what I'm talking about.

I'm not sure how much that all makes sense, but I'm all set to write webapps that authenticate with Google and Yahoo openId credentials, plus there's a small chance other developers might find the littleId service useful. It would be great to get a little traffic to http://services.frickjack.com, and setup the site with adwords or whatever to make a few bucks!

I hope to make the littleId service more useful to a developer compared to just coding an openId consumer directly by integrating support for live.com and Facebook connect authentication. I also plan to setup a workflow for authentication by non-web GUI clients. We'll see how long it takes me to get around to that!

Finally, is it just me, or is iTunes unstable on Windows 7 ?

More communication ...

One of the many things I constantly struggle with is how to better communicate the current state of the littleware dev machine. What is littleware? How can I use it? What are the current development goals? Fortunately Google code is there to host the littleware project site, source code repositories, download bundles, wiki, and issue tracker; but over the last few weeks I've added a few small improvements to my communication effort.

First, I added a "news" section to the frickjack.com home page just to report the latest goings on. I'll get in the habit of throwing the news up on twitter too @catdogboy; although twitterfeed has turned my twitter account into a garbage stream of code commit messages and issue tracker updates.

I also moved littleware's SCRUM documentation over to frickjack.com (it's a Google site). I made that move mainly to integrate littleware's Google calendar , but it cost me some head banging to get the issue tracker gadget working there. The whole SCRUM and calendar thing is pretty aspirational anyway considering I'm the only one that works on the project, but it helps me keep track of which direction I'm moving in.

Finally, I've made littleware's jenkins server available online. Actually, the server is only available when I'm running my laptop at home - beta.frickjack.com maps to my home! Jenkins (formerly known as Hudson) is a great continuous integration server. It was easy to configure jenkins to automatically build and test littleware commits thanks to littleware's IVY build system. It's important to secure jenkins before publishing a server for public access, but that's not hard to do.

I've spent a lot of time the last week on system administration deploying an AWS AMI and tweaking jenkins, and project management updating docs and moving things around on the web sites. I hate wasting time on non-coding stuff like that! This kind of work always reminds me that a software project needs a good combination sysadmin, project-admin, configuration, release, and documentation manager. It's not just all about the coders!

Google code Mercurial SCM / issue-tracker integration

I just patched a littleware bug, and I wondered whether Google code had some SCM integration with its issue tracker, so that I could update the bug's issue with the patch's commit message. The answer is yes ! One limitation is that the SCM message only propagates to the issue-tracker after being pushed to the main Mercurial repository - pushing to a clone won't do it. That's probably the best way to implement the feature anyway.

I posted a new littleware download bundle online today too. The new code includes openId support, and separates out the base littleware ivy module from a new littleAsset module that also includes the old littleApps module. That probably sounds meaningless, but basically I pushed the code around, so that an application can more easily link against the littleware.base packages without also dragging in the littleware.asset stuff that a lot of apps don't need.

Anyway, I'll try to put together a "release notes" bLog post soon with more details on the openId stuff. I intend to get back into the discipline of updating the bLog at least once a week - there's always something to talk about. For example, I actually have a little openid-helper web service that I want to get up online with Amazon web services. I'm not sure whether the openId helper is really all that useful, but AWS is giving away 12 months of free use, so I might as well give it a try - see what the fuss is about.

cops and gangstas

We watched the penultimate episode of The Wire season 3 last night (on Netflix DVD). Omar and Brother Mazon doin' what they do. I love it!