http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/ the Design Experience Weblog OpenACS 5.0 Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:32:46 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/rss-support/images/openacs_logo_rss.gif http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/ 126 48 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=243191 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=243191 The last sign in this video is why I am now an independent contractor. You can still get "interesting" projects when you are independent, but you can be pickier about what you do, if you are lucky. Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:32:46 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=188460 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=188460 So I admit, my home network backup strategy has mostly consisted of randomly copying to files to a shared drive, or a DVD about once every year or two. I obviously needed some sort of a system. I have 3 main machines I wanted to backup, each on a different platform, Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP Pro, and Mac OS X. I could have connected a USB hard drive to one of the machines and shared but, but this seemed to be a little messy. I did not want any one machine to keep all the backups so this mean... Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:56:18 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=181619 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=181619 Image from Wordle Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:55:10 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=181490 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=181490 Google provides the answers again. I needed to look inside a debian package and I found the answer on Vijay Kumar's Blog. dpkg-deb -x debian-file target-directory Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:13:07 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=163293 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=163293 I just read about the new merge merge tracking features in subversion. This has the great potential to make development of new features much easier. That said, tools are great, but without clear procedures on how to use those features in the context of development for a certain project you can still have problems. That is, of course, all the developers in a project need to understand how to use the tools, and the rules for branching and merging code. That said, I still believe bette... Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:59:14 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=163284 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=163284 Over at the iBanjo blog Ben Collins-Sussman has written the most enlightening essay on programmer insecurity. It explained very much what I had been thinking in the back of my mind based on my experience with Open Source projects. There are many contributors who, for whatever reason, may attempt to contribute a huge chunk of code, fully formed, as if there was no history to the development. That is, instead of building up their code in the open and comitting their code often, they work alo... Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:42:51 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=163266 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=163266 Michael Feathers believes many believe a flawed theory of unit testing. This theory is that unit testing improves quality by catching errors. This seems to make sense but is does not explain the real value in unit testing. To write effective tests, you need to make sure each unit of code only does one thing, and it does it clearly without unexpected side effects. This gives you a chance to reflect on the intentions of the code. Very often, while trying to understand how to write a goode te... Sun, 15 Jun 2008 13:00:39 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=148262 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=148262 Basically a init.d script needs to be fixed. Uncomment lines 42-45 /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh then sudo /etc/init.d/mountdevsubfs.sh start Start up VMware and the USB device will be available. Wed, 28 May 2008 00:30:13 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=146891 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=146891 2-3-98 Conference: An Open Discussion on Technology in Education will address Open Source in Higher Education, and include a second day Moodle Moot. I'll be attending the conference June 19 & 20, 2008 as SUNY Delhi. SUNY Delhi is  using Moodle for their unversity LMS. I will be attending this conference, and look forward to the opportunity to learn and discuss our use of Open Source in education. One of our clients, Stephen Wilmarth, from the Center for 21st. Century Skill... Thu, 22 May 2008 18:49:20 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=129087 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=129087 Downloaded Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.1 beta multiplatform version. On Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) I had problems running it out of the box. After I fixed the permissions I got this error message. ./bin_unix/native_client ./bin_unix/native_client: error while loading shared libraries: libSDL_image-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory So I checked to see what it was linked againt. ldd bin_unix/native_client linux-gate.so.1 => (0xffffe000) ... Sun, 09 Mar 2008 17:34:50 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=122068 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=122068 This quote from Mary Lou Jepson, the CTO of OLPC, and designer of the amazing, low power, sunlight readable display inside it, shows why the OLPC will change the world, while Intel just wanted to sell CPUUs "Mary Lou Jepsen: Where to start: Classmate is more expensive, consumes 10 times the power, has 1/3 the wifi range, and can't be used outside. Also, the Classmate doesn't use neighboring laptops to extend the reach of the internet via hopping (mesh-networking) like the XO does. So not on... Mon, 14 Jan 2008 02:08:59 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=121948 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=121948 Your GTD system is not the problem advises your to rethink your system. Simplify, got back to basics. Think about what parts of your system make sense for what you are trying to accomplish. The author recommends switching to paper, which can really help to get you thinking about what you want to organize and how you want to prioritize your life. Personally I use a hybrid system that seems to work most of the time. I use paper to get everything straight in my head. Forget pricey designer... Sat, 12 Jan 2008 14:29:50 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=121738 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=121738 So far, wicd, is hands down, better and more reliable and useful, than network-manager-applet that comes with Ubuntu. I can never get network-manager-applet to work with my wireless and wicd just worked. Wicd is independent of your desktop, so it doesn't depend on gnome. Highly recommended. Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:07:42 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=121655 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=121655 I installed flyback http://code.google.com/p/flyback/ today, on recommendation of Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/342576/get-time+machine+like-snapshot-backup-with-flyback . It was pretty easy. I follwed the ubuntu instructions but could not install python-sqlite3 package. It does not seem to exist. A apt-cache seach sqlite found python-pysqlite2 which is actually bindings for SQLite 3. It's already installed on my system anyway. I ran flyback, configured to backup to a network share. c... Wed, 09 Jan 2008 18:40:09 GMT http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=121108 http://www.thedesignexperience.org/weblog/one-entry?entry%5fid=121108 Here is some code I borrowed to make emacs work nicely with scheme. First I installed some stuff apt-get install mzscheme apt-get install quack-el Then I added this to .emacs ;; Start up Scheme (add-to-list 'load-path "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/quack-el") (setq scheme-program "mzscheme") (global-set-key [(f5)] '(lambda () (interactive) (require 'quack) (run-scheme scheme-program))) The code fragment borrowed from http://jeffcjensen.net/scheme/_emacs Th... Wed, 02 Jan 2008 14:22:05 GMT