Andrew Huey | pointlessly blogging since 2001
I found out today that someone has been using my AmEx card number. They’ve used it for airline tickets, FedEx shipping, and opening up a couple of accounts for online dating sites, I think. AmEx identified the suspicious activity and called me, which is nice. I’ll have a new card in a week or so.
I think this was limited to just the AmEx card, and isn’t a full-blown case of identity theft. At least I hope so!
Some random notes, since I haven’t been doing much blogging lately:
I replaced the hard drive in my MacBook with a new 500 GB drive a couple of weeks ago. It’s working pretty well. At first, I thought the fan on the MacBook was coming on too often, but that doesn’t seem to be a big problem now. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy everything from the old drive to the new one, then just switched drives. No problems. I did de-authorize iTunes before switching drives, just in case. I really don’t know if switching to the new drive would have caused me to have to re-authorize iTunes, but I thought it might. I got the drive, and an external enclosure from Newegg.
I upgraded the OS on my BlackBerry Storm to 4.7.0.148 on Sunday, when Verizon released it. I couldn’t do the OTA upgrade, since I didn’t have enough free space for that, so I did it through Desktop Manager. It worked OK, but I had to manually restore my apps after the upgrade. DM backed up the apps, but couldn’t restore them for some reason. It wasn’t a big deal to do the restore myself. All my application settings, though, apparently got lost in the upgrade. I had to re-enter user names and passwords into a few apps, and re-enter authorization codes into a couple of apps. I also found that QuickLaunch 1.x didn’t work right with the new OS, so I paid CrackBerry $2 to upgrade to 2.x. It works fine now, and the new features were certainly worth the $2, so I’m glad I upgraded.
I’ve been fighting a cold since Mother’s Day. The first week, it was pretty much a standard cold. In the second week, I developed a really bad cough, but all the other symptoms pretty much went away. I went to the doctor, and she basically told me that it was a post-nasal drip problem, and just gave me some samples of Zyrtec and Nasonex. I’m not sure if either of those did me any good. When I ran out, I switched back to Claritin (actually, a generic equivalent). I’m not sure if *that’s* doing me any good either, but I think it is, at least a bit. The cough, and the throat tickle, come and go. I’ve learned to keep my windows closed at home, with the air conditioning on, and (sometimes) my air cleaner too. I definitely sleep better that way. I’ve also signed up for allergy alert e-mails from the Claritin site, and from pollen.com. I’d like to see if I can really correlate my problems with any specific allergy levels, or particular allergens. I remember having this same problem last year, right around the same time, so I’m guessing it’s a seasonal thing that I might be able to manage, if I can figure out exactly what’s screwing me up, and learn to stay away from it.
Meanwhile, I’m spending a lot of time alone in my apartment, catching up on my reading! I’ve read all the Hugo-nominated novels that were in the Hugo packet. I’ve now started into the novellas. Honestly, I thought all the novels were great, and I’m not sure which one deserves the Hugo. Conversely, none of the novellas has stood out as really great so far. I’ve only finished two though.
It looks like there’s finally going to be a new official OS update released for the Storm this weekend. I haven’t had many problems with the Storm, so I haven’t bothered trying to install any of the leaked updates.
I haven’t been blogging much lately, since I’ve been fighting a cold for the last couple of weeks. I’m feeling a bit better now, but I had a lot of trouble with allergies today. I think I’m going to stay in my apartment over the weekend with the windows closed and the A/C on.
I finished the Advanced .Net Programming class a couple of weeks ago that I was taking at NYU. While the class was going on, I limited my reading mostly to stuff that related to the class. I read bits and pieces of three books; I posted about those back in February.
I took a break from reading any programming-related books for the last couple of weeks, but now I’m looking to get back into something. I picked up Rocky Lhotka’s Expert C# Business Objects again tonight. I’ve had that book since 2007, I think, and I just haven’t been able to get all the way through it. The copy I have is now several versions behind. (Here’s a link to the current version.) I had read through the first six chapters previously. Tonight, I just sat down and leafed through the remainder of the book. I’ve decided that there’s nothing else in there I really need to read in depth right now, so I’m just going to drop it, and maybe pick up the new version at some point and start over with that.
Meanwhile, I also recently bought C# 2008 for Programmers by Paul and Harvey Deitel. I picked this up largely because I’d found some good stuff in an older version of the book that’s available on the Safari subscription I have through ACM. This is a general C# book, written for people who already have programming experience. It covers a lot of the newer stuff in C# and .Net that I haven’t really had time to pick up, since I first learned this stuff back in the days of .Net 1.1 — LINQ, generics, WPF, and so on. I’m thinking I should probably put this book on top on my reading list, since there’s a lot of stuff in there that could actually be useful to me at work.
I finally got around to installing Jira today. The Windows install was pretty simple. I did a default install, then went in and changed the database to MySQL. That worked fine. I then tried getting the CVS integration working, but I haven’t got that figured out yet. It just hangs when I try to set up a CVS module.
Either way, now I’ll have to spend some time setting up projects, and seeing if I can get myself used to tracking projects in Jira. Of course, I’ll also have to see if I can get the two other developers in the department interested in using it.
I just bought a supporting membership to Anticipation, the upcoming Worldcon. I’m not actually going to the con; I just bought in so I could get the Hugo packet, a zip file full of stuff that’s been nominated for Hugos this year. And, of course, if I manage to read through enough stuff before the voting deadline, I’ll actually be able to vote on the Hugos, which is kind of cool.
I haven’t read any of the stuff (novels, short stories, or anything in between) that’s been nominated this year, though all of the nominated novels have been on my mental “someday/maybe” reading list. I just started reading the PDF of The Graveyard Book, and I’m enjoying that about as much as I’d expected to, given that it’s written by Neil Gaiman. The other stuff in the packet is in a hodgepodge of different formats — PDF, HTML, and RTF mostly. The HTML and RTF files are pretty easy to load onto the Kindle; PDF files are sometimes fine, and sometimes not so good. I’m not even sure when the Hugo voting happens. Obviously, it’s got to be before the con, which is in August. So, I’ve got myself a bunch of stuff to read on the Kindle this summer!
I picked up Jira and Confluence this week, during Atlassian’s “Stimulus Package” sale — $5 each! A while back, I’d looked at Jira, and several other bug-tracking/project-tracking applications, but I never got around to evaluating any of them. I’ve had a vague sort of a plan to implement Trac eventually, after first converting from CVS to Subversion (which was also a vague kind of plan with no particular timeline on it). I don’t think I could have ever talked my boss into paying $1200 for Jira, which is their cheapest commercial license. The $5 version only covers 5 users, but that’s fine, since I only have two programmers working for me right now anyway.
It looks like Jira can work with either CVS or Subversion. I’m still planning on converting to SVN before I install Jira though. Of course, since we’re a (mostly) Microsoft shop, I should probably look into TFS, but I think that might a bit too expensive for me.
It’s a bit of a balancing act, in a small shop, trying to figure out how much time and money to spend on infrastructure (for lack of a better word) — project tracking, version control, formal testing, and so on. I can’t spend too much time on it, but if I don’t do it at all, things start to fall apart…
I’m working on a project right now that involves CVS and ViewVC. I decided to set up a test environment on my MacBook for this. It was pretty easy. CVS is apparently part of the standard Mac OS dev tools install, so it was already on the machine. I set up a test repository under my home directory and put a few files in there. There’s an article on the Apple site about CVS that could get you started if you’re not familiar with CVS.
Getting ViewVC up and running took a bit more effort, but wasn’t really difficult. If you just unpack it in a folder off your home directory, you can easily run it in standalone mode. My repository is under ~/sandbox, so “bin/standalone.py -r ~/sandbox” gets it running at localhost:7467/viewvc. (Python needs to be set up on your machine, but that too is part of the standard dev tools install.)
Installing ViewVC so it’s running under Apache takes a little more effort, but it’s not too hard. I used the standard “./viewvc-install” to do a standard install to /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7. From there, I just edited the viewvc.conf file to set my CVS root. Then, I had to set up a couple of things in Apache. The Apache config on my Mac was in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. I set up a script alias like this:
ScriptAlias /viewvc /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7/bin/cgi/viewvc.cgi
I also set up a “Directory” section to point to “/usr/local/viewvc-1.0.7/bin/cgi/”. I think that’s all I had to do. After that, I could access the ViewVC site at localhost/viewvc.
I didn’t try to set up the ViewVC stuff that requires MySQL, but that probably wouldn’t be too hard.
I’ve been slowing working on moving over from XP to Vista on my main home desktop machine since August 2008. I finally decided to finish up on that today.
I had been running in a dual-boot config since August, with XP on my old drive, and Vista on a new drive. My goal for today was to switch to a plain old single-boot config, with the Vista drive as drive 0 and the XP drive reformatted, so I can use it for backups, as drive 1. The problem, of course, is that the old XP drive was technically the boot drive. You’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to switch things around so that I could boot from the Vista drive, but it’s actually a bit of a pain. I followed the instructions here, which sounded like they covered my situation perfectly, but that didn’t work, and I wound up having to boot the machine with my Vista install DVD and run a repair. It took awhile to get all the way through this, but I seem to have a working Vista install now, booting off the Vista drive. And I’m reformatting the old XP drive right now.
This all took longer than it should have. Microsoft really didn’t need to make the Vista boot process so darn arcane. But hey, I’m now 100% Vista, just in time for Windows 7 to come out…
I’m all up to date in Quicken now, and back to entering my Merrill statements by hand. This thread on QuickenCommunity.com has a few messages from people having similar problems to the ones I had. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who can’t get Merrill to work with Quicken.