Bobbis.net

So, last weekend (the weekend before last), I was up in Grundy Center for a family thing. My cousin approaches me and asks if I could come down to fix a computer, I agree and we part ways. So, now I am scheduled to go down to my cousin's to work on her computer. I give her a call to find out the details so I know what to expect and what stuff to bring as she is only on dial-up. So, anyway, I find that the computer she wants me to work on is an Ascentia 810n. I figure it was some crazy off-brand, but ask her when it was manufactured. The response, 1994. Ohhh. You want wireless on this thing you say?

I do some Googleing and find an old BYTE article that describes this machine. I find that it's a laptop, 486DX2 (pre Pentium) with 20 MB RAM and 510 MB hard drive. My thought is that you can barely get Windows 95 on that sucker.

Luckully, she has other computer work to do. She needs a new Palm Pilot configured. She mentioned Zire, so I know it is at least still supported by the manufacturer. As for the notebook, I don't think I can do much for it other than sell it for $1.00 in a garage sale or take it to the recycling plant.

I guess, at current market rate, dinner for me and the girlfriend is about par for the work I'm going to be doing.

So 10.4.2 came out, and now I have to restart my laptop with an uptime of 33 days 6 hours 30 minutes. (June 9th I believe?).

So, a lot has been happening since the last time I posted. So, here I go.

4th of July happened. We actually saw Meridith and she hung out with us for pretty much the whole time, which was cool of her. None of us in Ames really get to see her much. We had a grill out at my place and went to the municipal band concert at Moore Park. After the concert we went to Nerdig's place near Des Moines to watch fireworks from the roof of their house, which was really cool.

I'm now dabbling a little bit in making dashboard widgets. I found this nifty little utility called Widgetarium, which is a beta IDE for dashboard widgets. Hopefully by the end of the summer I will make a useful little widget. I plan on creating a widget at work that will integrate with our help ticket system and show the us what tickets we need to work on.

Last night, Gaila went with me and my 'rents to Grundy Center for a family get-together on the occasion that my cousin Jody and family were in town from Connecticut. Spent the day munching and talking. She seemed to approve of my family.

There is a sale going on at IT Sales for Dell computers. I have configued the following system and may be purchasing it sometime this week or month.

• Dell OptiPlex GX280 SMT
• P4 3.4 Ghz with Hyperthreading
• Gigabit Ethernet
• XP Pro SP2
• 1GB DDR2 (2 DIMMs)
• Dell 17" UltraSharp 1704FOV (DVI)
• 80GB SATA 7200RPM 8MB Cache
• 48x32 CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
• 3 Year Warranty (On-Site Service)
• Total Price $1,061.62

So, today is the 11th, which means my class starts today. It actually starts right about now, so I should be going. I have class every day from 10 to noon until August 5th. This summer is so short. I hope POM will be as easy as TrLOG was.

Laters.

Well, Chris' last day was today and I have been officially put on the CMS project. This is going to be fun since I really haven't looked around at his code yet for this system. Hopefully it's straight forward and well documented. Also, as a result, I am now in charge of the servers at work. The sad thing now is that I will no longer be taking care of our Macs anymore :(. Though in my position I may be able to make a better case for Tom to get xServes instead of Dells for new server purchases.

Also, it's time to get the inventory people to grab our old equipment so we won't have it for the move. We were told we should be moving sometime this July (note they haven't worked on power or network requirements yet). So there is a lot of equipment to organize and catalog. Also, Tom gave the okay to start deploying Tiger clients to use the AD since I setup a building procedure.

Anyway, so much technical stuff lately. The problem is, there really hasn't been very much else going on. Other than work, I have been hanging out a lot with Gaila, but time with her just seems to go so quickly. I'm looking forward to hanging out with friends on the 4th.

The following is a quick and dirty AppleScript I created to deal with activating a different Kerberos realm after login using a different or multiple kerberos realms. For example, you authenticate your users on an AD that is not connected with a realm the user uses for email (Eudora). Set this script to run at login, and it will mount a file server using the computer login ticket, prompt the user for the second realm username and password then change the active user to the other realm so they can check their email. With this script that I made, I now feel confident that I can move our Mac users onto the domain. Hopefully this will be helpful for others who are trying to do the same thing.

set serverString to "smb://your.server.tld/"
set shareString to "sharename"
set userString to "$USER"
set realmString to "REALM.TLD"

tell application "Finder"
	open location serverString & shareString
	set founded to false
	repeat while founded is false
		set thename to the name of every Finder window
		if thename contains shareString then
			set founded to true
			close window shareString
		end if
		delay 1
	end repeat
end tell
tell application "Kerberos"
	launch
	set w to first window
	set visible of w to 0
	get tickets
	quit
end tell
do shell script "kswitch -p " & userString & "@" & realmString

So, we have been busy at work with the whole CMS thing, I have been busy with the help ticket thing, thinking about bug/feature request system, and I know Colin continuously works on ATX. Over these projects I have been thinking more and more about effective project management. The following are some things that may make sense, but really isn't done too often. A lot of this can also be applied to non-computer related projects as well.

1. When doing a project for someone (or even setting a goal for a personal project), give an estimate 1.5 to 2 times the amount of time you think it will actually take to get done. When developing there is always going to be something that snags you or causes development to slow down or stop for a while. Thus, if you overestimate your time required, you will find that you made it in just about the right time. Also, if you do happen to be super awesome and get your project done before your given estimate, you or your client will be happy that you finished early.

2. Before starting on a project have a set of goals for the project and don't add anymore goals until the first set of goals have been attained. Agree on a set feature list. Know exactly what a project is going to do and how it is going to do it. Once you have a list of features, have the client sign a contract that says they can not request any more features until the current contract is fulfilled. This is something that is biting us in the butt right now with the CMS. Every day there is a new list of features the client wants and every day adds more time required to finish the system. When the project started, we thought it would be a simple one month project, now it's probably going to take twice as long. And these estimates were thinking about point number 1.

3. Before making a version available, test, test, test and test it again. Try really hard to break things. Delete preferences, insert random quotes in web fields, put letters in a place numbers should go. Check the tab order of fields. What happens to your data when it unexpectedly quits? What if you don't complete the wizard? Don't do this by yourself. Even though you may think you are being objective, you can't be. You're human. Give it to a friend or someone and make them do the same thing. They can give you insight into what doesn't work right, or may think of things you haven't thought of. Fix the problems you find and repeat this process. I know it sucks. Just do it and you will have a reliable application.

These 3 things have been bugging me a lot lately and I thought it would be cool to talk about it here so that other people may take in this advice. I know I probably haven't followed this advice to a T when I have been doing stuff, but the more you adhere to these lessons, the better things will be.

Well, this week also went by really fast. I did the AD authentication for the help ticket system and added a few more features. The more features I think of, the more I want a simple system of keeping track of feature requests and track bugs with (even those that I want, I sometimes forget about). I know Colin has this problem as well. So, this has prompted me to create a feature and bug tracking system sometime this summer. Other things that I need to add on to my summer goals is to build another computer for my MIS work. So, Lets review my summer goals.

• Get apartment
• Learn cocoa - didn't happen before WWDC, still a goal
• Do something with web site - Decided to make a CMS for all the pages so I can add/delete/modifiy simple things quickly
• NEW Create Bug and Feature request system
• NEW Build a Windows PC (or buy a *gasp* Dell)

So, now that I reviewed my summer goals, I'll continue with what has been going on this week. Thursday was the municipal band concert. I was under the impression that Colin was going to be there, but he didn't show up or answer his phone.

Friday was an eventful day at work. The file server decided to stop communicating well with the AD, thus causing permissions errors and people not being able to login. We spent the whole day trying to figure out what had happened when we decided, the fastest and easiest way to get the file services back up was to go ahead and blast away the install and use Windows Server instead of trying to make Linux work. Since the boss was at a funeral (can't spell funeral without FUN!) he doesn't really know what what the solution to the problem was. It will be an interesting Monday moring as Tom figures out what we did (more so, what Chris did) and we finally get a cooling system installed in the new office space (over a year in counting since we were supposed to move there!). After leaving work after dinner, Gaila and I hung out until it was time to crash.

Saturday, I got around to getting my oil changed in my car, and cleaning my car. I mean really cleaning it. Getting rid of the the trash that has accumulated over the past year or so in the back seat of my car. It got dusted and everything too. I have no clue what Sunday has in store for me, but I know I will be sleeping in really good (unless I get a call for working on the server some more).

Also, on a last note. On the student sunday day of WWDC, I attended a presentation done by Wil Shipley founder of the Omni Group (makers of OmniWeb, and other Omni* tools) and Delicious Monster (makers of the insanely great Delicious Library). His inspiring Keynote slides have become available to the genearl public at http://wilshipley.com/blog/2005/06/student-talk-from-wwdc-2005.html. Colin managed to pick this up and throw it in his blog before I could even tell him, so yeah, it's really good advice for aspiring Mac developers :). Though, I have to say, the presentation was much better than just the slides.

Anyway, enough rambling.

So, this week is going by fast again. Monday, I hear no word about the status of my car, I call them up around 5:00 and it sounds like they lost my car! Tuesday morning I get a call from them telling me what the problem was and that it would be ready by 10:00 AM. Yeah! The bad thing is that the total cost of the repair (bad starter) with towing was $340.00. I should be getting $50 back from the insurance company for the tow coverage. My car works great now, so I'm happy, and the extra $120 from consulting work made things a little bit better. Taking out the refund from insurance and the subsidy of my extra work the bill comes to a more manageable $170.

So, what else has been happening? I'm pretty much done with the new help ticket/inventory/user management system. All I need is some searching functionality and authentication against the AD for the admins. Tuesday I didn't even get to work on any little project at work, it was all user support, all day. It was just one of those busy days. By the end of that day, my upper back was aching, but a nice massage by Gaila that night made things so much better :-) Thanks hon.

The other night (I actually can't remember since all these days have been running into each other) I shot out an online notepad for me and colin to use for figuring out what stuff we will be bringing for the apartment. I'm quite surprised at myself for getting this done in about 30 minutes and it includes password protection. I think I have been breathing PHP for a little bit too long lately.

Today, I organized servers, and figured out what to do with some spare servers we have. Perhaps next week I will be making a file server. Tomorrow will be a municipal band concert at 7:00 by the campanile. Perhaps I'll see some of you there.

I still haven't gotten around to doing anything with Cocoa lately, so I guess I will stop writing in my blog and get to work on that.

Laters

So, I leave work on Friday to go pick up Gaila to do stuff this weekend. I get there and we do a few things there, hang out, then we try to leave, my car doesn't start. We found that it is not the battery and we put some coolant in since it was empty, still not work. Saturday I called in for a tow and they should be looking at it today. Lucky now Gaila has a car now, so she has been driving me around. I guess if my car had to die, it picked a good time to do it.

Anyway, the weekend was pretty good. On Saturday Gaila and I walked around Ida Hayden lake. During our walk (in the middle of the afternoon on a hot day) we spotted a deer. We then, went to see Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Sunday, I made french toast and egg for breakfast (father's day). In the afternoon I had an appointment to help someone with their computer and made a good $80, thursday I made $40 installing and setting up the computer, so that brings me $120 this weekend, which I will probably be throwing into my car getting repaired.

Anyway, that was my update. Back to work.

Edit: Maths

So, it's almost friday already. This week went by really really fast. Work has been pretty busy all week. I have been working on a help ticket / user, equipment, and support office administration system to replace the old one that is getting kind of out of date and less feature-full. Also, I have been staying on top of what's going on with the new CMS system Chris is writing for the entire college. This has to be done before the 30th when he leaves for his new job. Things that are still on my plate for the summer is AD integration for the macs, and a new revision of the scholarship system that will be fitting into the new CMS.

A review of my summer goals shows that I completed the number one thing, getting an apartment. Number two thing, learning cocoa, has started the week before WWDC; but I just need to continue in the book. Number three, updating my website, is something I really haven't been thinking about much. Though now that I think about it, I know one easy thing that I want to do now. I want to get rid of my guestbook. The reason being, the last post to it was over a year ago, it was my first PHP project, and I get about 10 spam messages a day attempting to post to it that get sent to me via e-mail for to approval. The guestbook will go away sometime tomorrow.

Anyway, I'm tired. Good night.