While this blog will still have my occasional musings about life in dot-com and software development, there’s a lot of other stuff I’d like to talk about that really doesn’t fit under that label. Carpentry? Home improvement? Relationships? I need a place to put a lot of that stuff. Well, me and my wife will be (re-)launching a new blog documenting our life. So if you’re interested in us at a more personal level, feel free to check out the new blog.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Goodbye, Eclipse.
30
Oct
Dear Eclipse,
We’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we? I remember when we first met. It was way back in 2005, two jobs ago when I was working at interactive Point of View. I was still a young, naive kid, just out of college. At the time I was just getting my start writing serious PHP code, and you were a breath of fresh air compared to what I had been using before (Dreamweaver). You seduced me with your awesome power and functionality.
I used to love being able to have code on top and a browser window underneath. Ironically enough, one of my favorite features would eventually be something I couldn’t care the slightest about.
Later that year I would move on to Asteria, and I took you with me. This was the first time I had two monitors on my desk, and I kept Eclipse in one, and a browser in the other while programming. Again, your raw power made complex tasks easy. I discovered Subversion integration, which made Tortoise (I was still on Windows at the time) irrelevant to me. Your Subversion tools turned me into a huge fan.
When I moved jobs again, to dealnews, I again took you with me. Much to the chagrin of my coworkers, I preached the gospel of Eclipse. When I first started I was still in the Windows environment and my setup was much like it was at Asteria. Later that year when I switched to Mac, I again took you with me. You occupied a place of honor in my dock.
We upgraded together. Through Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, Galileo, Helios and Indigo. We upgraded through Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion together.
Sure, we had our occasional disagreements and outright fights. I remember one time when you would absolutely choke on the size of dealnews’ code tree. I would try other editors and IDEs. I tried jEdit, Coda and TextMate. But I always came back to you.
But all things change, and this time I think we’re finally through together.
The first sign you were no longer interested in me was the dropping of the official PHP build – the one I had been using for years. But you knew I was worried – you even said so on your website and pointed me to PDT – PHP Development Tools. This aphrodisiac, you told me, would make our relationship just like we were kids again.
But what you didn’t tell me was that PDT would make you crazy and unstable in the worst kind of way. Your behavior has become increasingly erratic whenever you take PDT. You developed bugs, including ones that I could no longer justify. Ones that were literally costing me time every day. You said PDT could auto-complete code and when it does it works great. But when it doesn’t, the display glitches up the file so badly that the only way to get back into a usable state is to close the file and reopen. Now imagine doing this four or five times for every file you’re editing, every time you try to auto-complete some HTML. Your ill tempered behavior is costing me time and money.
I tried to talk with you about it, but all you could say was NullPointerException.
So, I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s been a good six year run, but I think it’s time we ended our relationship together.
The truth is that I know about your other boyfriend, too. I know his name is Android, and I know you guys have been spending a lot of time together. And I’m okay with it. Really. All things change and we all have to adapt. The truth is I’ve been fooling around some with your cousin Netbeans, and I think we’re really hitting it off. In many ways, she reminds me of you. The difference is, Netbeans has herself together, is trying hard to improve herself and hasn’t forgotten who her friends are, instead of getting strung out on PDT and spending all her time hanging out in the backseat of Android’s Pinto.
So goodbye, Eclipse. What we had was wonderful while it lasted and I’ll always treasure our time together and the memories we made. I hope your new life works out. Maybe we’ll see each other from time to time, but I honestly I don’t think that would be fair to Netbeans. She’s my new IDE now.
-Rob Peck
Eclipse User, 2005-2011
Facebook Errors
19
May
My Facebook news feed hasn’t update since May 15th – a span of four days, in which I know many of my friends have posted or at the very least updated their status.
With 50-something friends, I know for sure some of my friends are updating – my feed just isn’t reflecting it. So, after Googling about (Facebook’s site, for the record, is extremely unclear about contacting the company and/or reporting bugs), I found this:
Great! A place to file a report. So I type in my report and submit …
D’oh. Apparently, I’m not the only one having this issue, either. C’mon guys, get it together! At least let us users know what’s going on.
Cybersquatting Annoyance
24
Feb
I’m getting ready to launch a new open source project, and, as everyone knows, you can’t do that without a cool sounding name. 
I’ve picked out about six cool sounding names, and I’ve been looking them up on GoDaddy to see if I could go ahead a register the domain name. And wouldn’t you know, all of them are already taken. Now, this wouldn’t irritate me so much if there was actual content on the sites. But every single one I looked up is squatted by link farms. I am literally 0-6 right now.
<Beeth> Girls are like internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.
<honx> well, you can stil get one from a strange country
- bash.org
Angry Rob is Angry
23
Jan
Tags: geeks, geekcom, hardware failure
… or, beware of deals that look too good to be true.
In my professional career, I have now found only two things that have a 100% failure rate. The first was a batch of Digium TDM-400P FXO/FXS card. Every single one we deployed from that batch at my previous employer failed. I hear they don’t have those problems anymore – using a different fab shop now, I guess. But I still don’t like that card for that specific reason.
The second 100% failure rate came just this evening. The culprit is this little POS: Dual Xeon 2.4GHz 2GB ECC 120GB 1U Rack Mount Server being sold by Geeks.com.
Look, it’s a 1U for $375. I’m not expecting the universe out of these things. With that in mind, let me document the last two days of my life. I ordered two of these little guys about a week ago, and they arrived on Tuesday. I intended to turn one into a general purpose test and development box, and one was going to go to Atlanta to replace the 1U Celeron in my friends’ data center.
So I get the machines home, unpack them and try to boot. The first one won’t POST. No beep, no video, just a bright orange surrender HD light. Research tells me that the motherboard is fried. The other one booted up fine. I figured I was just unlucky, so I RMA’d the first one today and was going to put the OS on this one.
Well, the OS install went fine but when it came time to reboot … presto. The exact same thing as the first. No video, no beep, orange HD light. Of two machines ordered, both of them failed within 48 hours and both in the exact same way. So now I’m out at least $60 in RMA shipping charges – and I have no servers – just because this company apparently has no Q.A.
So take my experience as an example of what not to do when ordering a server. A good deal can turn into a major headache incredibly fast. Me? I’m ordering Dells from now on.
