First, about git.  There are infinitely better resources to look to on what git is and why it exists.  With that said, I’ll just quicky say that git rocks for OSS development.  When I was flying back from DC, I giggled like a Miley Cyrus fan when I did my first disconnected commit.  My mind is still trapped in centralized repository thinking, but this has always been my greatest complaint against them: offline commits.  Now it’s so trivially easy I can’t go back.  The other wonderful thing is that a checkout of the repository is the whole repo.  That means I can view the full history locally without hitting the server.  It also means that commits back to the parent repository (or a remote push in git-speak) are really quick.  Also, branching is really really cheap.

Now for the ugly: git is horrible in Windows.  I mean, god-awful.  “But Andy, why would you use Windows? OMG M$ 5uxorz!!!!11111elevendyone”  Because we have Windows laptops at work, and I need to be able to commit to the project while at work.  Git has a ways to go here to be as simple as SVN to install, and it would be cool to see some IDE integration, although it’s certainly not a requirement.

When I say it’s bad, the main reason is that there isn’t, at this point, a truely native build.  I’m using msysGit and PuTTY.  Throw into the mix our corporate proxy at work, and the pain goes up exponentially.  However, it’s not a lost cause.  Using instructions gathered from a ton of places, I have it up and running.  Finally.

1. Get git!
   1. Follow the steps from github to get the binaries and generate your key
2. Get PuTTY
   1. Go ahead and get the Windows installer version from here.
3. Configure PuTTY
   1. First, we need to take the private key from step 1 and make it available to PuTTY
      1. Open PuTTYgen
      2. Click on Load
      3. Change the “Files of Type” dropdown to “All Files”
      4. Choose your private key file you created in step 1
      5. Enter your passphrase
      6. Go to File>Save Private Key and put it somewhere safe
   2. Next, we need to set up PuTTY to connect to github (or where ever)
      1. Create a new session called “github.com” with the host name set to “github.com”
      2. Set Connection>Proxy to whatever your corporate proxy settings should be
      3. Ensure that Connection>SSH>Auth has the “Attempt Authentication using Pageant” checked
      4. Go back to Session and save the session
      5. Click Open and make sure you get a login prompt.  If you do, close out.  If not, check your proxy settings.
   3. Now we need to give Pageant our key
      1. Open Pageant
      2. Click “Add Key”, navigate to your new PuTTY private key, and click OK.
      3. Enter your passphrase
4. Perform a clone
   1. Using either Git Bash or Git GUI, clone a public repository from github.com (eXPlainPMT is a great place to start!)
   2. If you get errors about an invalid host or invalid passphrase, Pageant can’t find the session we created in step 3.2

Most of these directions are modified from what I found at CodeSlower and github guides.

We don’t have any intention of moving or changing our work situations, which unfortunately severely limits what programs we can take part in.

At work, we got to skip out have an offsite meeting Friday with a vendor at Tour 18.  Very nice course, even though I had some healthy challenges getting a small white ball to travel not only in the right direction but with the right distance.

Cathy came down to join us Saturday, and she’ll be here for just about 2 weeks.  It’s always fun having her around.  We went out that evening, and had Ethan and Donald over to our place Sunday night for games and adult beverages.  Angela, of course, documented the whole affair.

New MacBook and the old PowerBook

I also was a lucky boy and got a new laptop to replace my aging and very broken 12″ Powerbook.  Apple has a back to school special going on so we decided on a new white MacBook.  Nothing fancy, but it’s such a nice change over the Powerbook.  Just the fact that the battery works (and works well) is a huge improvement, let alone the zippiness.  And just in case anyone is wondering, yes, of course this is a “family” laptop.  Why, Angela even has her own account on it (although she has yet to touch it).

Today was a successful exercise in relaxation.  Not so much for those folks in LA with Gustav bearing down.  Looks like we might see some rain later in the week, but nothing like what New Orleans saw.  My Dad pointed me to Storm Pulse, a very functional storm tracking page with a clean UI.

This week promises to be hectic as we’re doing some transition activities in the team as well as coming up on some major deadlines for deciding the direction of one of the projects I’m on.  Angela gets to go back to a “normal” 8-hour day week AND she gets Friday off.  Hope she manages to survive!

Camouflage fail., originally uploaded by andytrommer.

Poor mr. Stickey hiding in plain sight.

On Thursday night, Erin dropped by on her trek to KC.  This led to some good Isis/Jabber time and also let Erin and I catch up over some tasty BBQ.  She also introduced me to a fun new game called Alhambra.  Good times, although I must say that I enjoy Settlers better.

On Friday, Angela treated me to baseball, beer, brats, and blowing things up, all in the same event!  We went to a Fort Worth Cats minor league game.  Their logo, no kidding, is FTW, and boy did they, 9-3.  We even made friends with a completely wasted old man with a net loss of teeth.  It’s always fun to carry on conversations with people who might as well have a mouthful of marbles.  I like it because I can invent in my head whatever I want them to say and the conversation carries on just about the same.

I was really surprised on Saturday.  Angela took me out to get a massage which nearly put me to sleep the rest of the afternoon.  Thankfully I came to, because after that we went to Truluck for an amazing dinner.  I had the sesame tuna this time and Angela tried the mahi-mahi.  Both were fantastic.  We finished the night watching Wall*E.  I found it very cute and incredibly human, which is funny considering it’s a movie about two robots on Earth with only a couple lines of dialog between them.

Today, my actual birthday, I largely spent in bed being lazy.  This evening, after some grocery shopping (and cake-buying!!) we met up with Griff and Courtney to watch Wanted at Movie Tavern.  I really enjoyed the film, and it was a great end to the weekend.  

Sadly we all head back to work tomorrow.  Thankfully, Angela and I will be meeting up with my folks in two weeks to spend a short 3 day vacation on the coast.  Time to start looking forward to that.

Two weeks back, we went up to KC for Cathy’s graduation, Mom Chao’s birthday, and to catch up with the gang.  Angela, of course, documented the whole occasion in a timely manner, so I’ll spare you the play-by-play.  However, I had a great time with Katie, CC, Scott, and Shernuk.  I love how, no matter the time that has passed, we can fall right back into old times.

Scott, Andy and I watched Iron Man and I was happily surprised at how fun it was.

Last weekend, Brandon came in town to (hopefully) get some much needed relaxation in.  We ate out at BLT Steak Friday night.  It was decent, but the flavors were a bit too raw for me.  With that said, they had amazing gruyere popovers.

Saturday was shopping and a BBQ where we got a chance to meet Eric’s fun girlfriend, Brittany, as well as meet up with David and Anni.  I made ridiculously large burgers.  I believe some even referred to them as “hockey pucks”.  Either way, no complaints, and no food poisoning.  Angela made her mom’s potato salad (tasty!) and a fruit salad.

Sunday, we met back up with David and Anni for lunch at Central Market (note to self, we frequent CM way too much for lunches, but it’s so good!).  We then split up, guys and girls, with Anni and Angela off to shop for clothes while Brandon, David, and I went to Modia for my home theatre gear.

After getting lucky on some prices, I was able to get the exact set I wanted.  I ended up with the Rotel RSX-1057 paired with 2 B&W 685’s.  They sound amazing, especially considering that I only had the built-in speakers in my TV to compare to!  It still pains me that I spent that much on speaker cable, though.

This week will wrap up my 4 weeks of 4-day-weeks, and I’m certainly going to miss it.  Angela and I don’t have any time off planned until July, and work is looking to be very hectic over the next month, so I’ll be sure to use my new speakers for some relaxing music.

This weekend, Angela and I are planning on seeing the Sunday Concert in the Garden, and I suppose I should finally mow the yard.

Pickle cicles. Not kidding., originally uploaded by andytrommer.

Found there in central market and it made me shudder.

Last month we took a short but exciting trip to LA to see friends and family.  Angela’s relatives recently moved there and it was really great to see them.  We hadn’t really had time to see them since our trip to Taiwan in 2004.

Since then I have been busy at work, and so has Angela.  Jabber is as goofy as ever.

I picked up work on a new project in my free time, eXPlainPMT.  We use the tool internally at work, and it’s giving me a good codebase to play with Rails again.  In fact, I just put up a demo environment for people to explore on.

After getting frustrated with not having proper inputs in my car for my iPod, I finally replaced my stock deck with a new Pioneer.  It sounds good and has a dedicated USB input that actually handles my 13000+ song library on my iPod very well.  It does, however, rely too much on the remote for navigation, so I’m not looking forward to the inevitable day that I lose it.

In the garage, we finally cleaned out our old crap left over from the move in 2006 and I put some shelving up.  I think we gained a good 2′ of extra garage space on each side.

Inside the house, I got around to painting the kitchen nook.  It looks much nicer now, and since the paint has set in it no longer looks like the old Kraft Mac and Cheese nuclear waste orange.  I quite enjoy it.

I’m rambling, I know, but it’s been so long.  Last weekend we had everyone over for the KU-UNC game, and it was a great win for the Jayhawks.  On Monday I met up with Ethan, Donald, and Jeromy to watch the championship.  Amazing game, and I’m still in shock over Mario’s last second 3.

Alright, it’s time to actually get some work done.

View from office, originally uploaded by andytrommer.

The snow is blowing in!

I haven’t seen the first ep of Lost for this season yet since Angela has been working nights. That means I can’t even sign into Google Reader until then, since most of the feeds I read probably mentioned all sorts of details that I’d rather hear organically.

In the mean time, I found this great short, Still Life. It’s about 8 minutes long, but it’s very worthwhile. Enjoy!

My dad worked for IBM, so all throughout my childhood we had access to a computer and a fancy typewriter. As much as I could, I typed everything.

Fast forward to high school. In-class essays quickly ensured lots of face-time with the teacher as I would be asked to read large portions of my writing. Teachers weren’t amused.

This little bit of background was hopefully a nice segue into what has become an odd circle of note taking.

K-11th grade: Ahh yes, the spiral notebook. These were always impossibly unreadable - including by me

12th grade: My Handspring Visor! I had to really convince my parents that I could spend my money on this at the time. I scratched down notes, made TODO lists, even set due dates for my assignments in the calendar. In the end, all I really did is play Infrared chess and Pong with Kent Thompson.

12th grade - Freshman: The IBM Crosspad was, I believe, meant for fancy pants businessmen and lawyers. Leave it to me to ask for it for Christmas. Handwriting? Really? But it gets better! This device captures the pages and will do magic writing-to-text conversion. The downside, of course, is that it failed on every conversion with my handwriting, even with the laborious 100 page training guide. I made pretty graphs and emailed physics notes to Brandon once. Not too useful. I took this with me to KU and attempted to use it freshman year during the rare moment that I was awake. I ended up setting the alarm off in the libraries more often than actually using it.

College - Freshman and Sophomore years: And I wonder why I wasn’t big with the ladies freshman year! I grabbed my Visor and added the Stowaway keyboard (full size, take that, laptops!) and actually took really good, outline-format notes. This was very handy, required 2 AA batteries, lasted for months, and was 100% reliable. Why change it up, right?

Junior Year: During the summer between sophomore and junior year, I picked up a Toshiba laptop. At the time it was awesome. I ended up using MS Word to do my note taking in class. This worked out fine as all I was doing is taking down outline format notes with the occasional figure that could be recreated on the fly using wonderful Word Art. I also had a few professors that had Powerpoint lectures, so I could save myself the trouble of printing crappy PPTs and use their outlines. This laptop died a horrible death (I hate you, Toshiba, your laptops to this day have the same crappy, heat-damaging designs), which leads to…

Senior Year: I had my internship summer of 2004 and stashed away enough cash to get myself a 12″ Powerbook. I was the only guy with a Mac in any of my CIS courses and was chided daily by several professors, but I didn’t care. I used OmniOutliner to take my notes. It was really intuitive, which is saying something since it is replacing functionality that I had done before in notebooks, PDAs, and the ubiquitous MS Word. It had custom flags you could put on items, categories, fast searching, and a pretty UI.

Today: I eventually entered the working world and migrated my way to a decent job. The fun years of OS X were replaced by the same horrible Windows XP that I left behind in 2002, on an updated but equally troublesome business-grade Toshiba laptop. I had to adapt. That’s when I started using OneNote. I really like it and still use it today. It has it’s quirks and usability issues, but it’s stable enough to document out just about everything. I also put most of my sharable notes back into our team Wiki. Unfortunately, even in a company that is predominantly IT, there is a stigma against laptops in some meetings. I also find myself watching Explorer lock up through good portions of my day, so I need a backup datasource.

Enter my Moleskin. I have the smallish gridpaper one. It has a band to keep it closed, quality paper, a bookmark, and a pocket in the back. I still can’t read my handwriting consistently, but I have an intricate system of checkboxes and symbols to at least have a gist of what I was talking about. I can also scan these notes directly into Onenote for consolidation.

So, I still can’t write, but I’ve gone full circle in my note taking habits.

What does this really mean? Why haven’t we got to the paperless world we have been promised? Even today pulling out a notebook is more reliable and faster than grabbing a laptop. With the new laptops having more instant-on functionality with more impressive battery life, we’re getting closer. The big device that I’m looking for is an ultraportable with a tablet’s screen. 5+ hours of battery and a full-size keyboard would be even better. I guess I can hope that the Air will get an upgrade to make the screen have pen-recognition, right?

Security Question by Ramon Rozas III.

He strode forward, weaving amongst the students. His target was walking along with two other young men, blue LL Bean book bag over his shoulder. The man hurried to catch up and fell in beside the student with the blue bag. “Hello there!” he said, tapping the youth on the shoulder.

Angela posted all of the photos in the Christmas 2007 album. They are towards the bottom.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

Happy Holidays!

In fact, here is our house in Street View:
(easter egg, if you swing around to the other side of the street you can see my neighbor out for a walk with her daughter)

View Larger Map

This was excellent.

However, hypem reformats the ID3 info to be “artist name - track name” in the name field. This is annoying. So annoying, in fact, that it drove me to write my first applscript. Good god applescript is easy.

This simply renames the track info for whatever tracks you have selected in iTunes. It puts the “artist name” portion into the Artist field if it’s blank, and then updates the “track name” portion to be formatted correctly.

UpdateTrackNames iTunes applescript

Some facts about the recent rally:

• From the BBC to AP, most media outlets count the rally at around 1000 protesters
• Out of all those protesting, only a small group were calling for executions
• The Sudanese government, while defunct for supporting the charges in the first place, have sentenced Gibbons to 15 days in jail
• The UK government is appealing and chances are that by the end of the weekend this will just be another embarrassing moment in modern Sudan politics

However, in the media led this story with outrageous headlines:

• CNN: Sudan protesters: Execute teacher
  • Execute isn’t even in the copy
• AP: Thousands in Sudan Call for British Teddy Bear Teacher’s Execution
  • again, the small handful reported in other outlets is exaggerated to now be the entire protest group calling for executions

As usual, NY Times had the most rational report, noting the small amount of protests were largely those ordered to be there by the government and that across the city the mosques weren’t calling for any violence whatsoever.
Just another wonderful sign that anything can be bumped to the top of the major networks, regardless of factuality.

Emma Pollock opened and she was amazing. Her singing powered through and it was a great start to the already delayed evening.
New Pornographers were all together, which I hear is a rarity considering the number of miscellaneous solo careers within the band. They put on an awesome show, and I loved the superband quality to the performance as various members came in to solo than rotated back to support.

Spoon finally made it on and the energy they brought was incredible. I was also happy to hear them play “The Ghost of You Lingers” as most people seemed to dismiss this track on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, but I love it. Hearing it live was both eerie and powerful.

www.flickr.com

Last time I checked it was in fact Halloween. What really sucks is that the pumpkins I worked so hard on are sitting, unlit, on our front porch. Angela says she left some candy outside - last year we had a total of 5 trick-or-treaters so I doubt there will be a mad rush this year.

I got home late last night as well and only had time to say ‘Hi’ to the puppy before Angela came home off her evening shift. Monday, however, I got home and watched this week’s ep of Top Gear. Brilliant ep, and I died laughing when Jeromy said ‘I bet you’d get a lot of badge’ during his Lambo ‘b for v’ section. Watch it and you’ll see what I mean.

Okay, I’m at 100%, time to doubleclick like a madman!!!!!!

It really was a week of things breaking. After my 360 bit the dust, my router’s LAN ports all died. WLAN was fine, but anything wired was dead. After many calls back and forth to Fios Support (who never can figure out how to look my account up since I don’t have local phone service) they finally decided that I wasn’t a moron and drop-shipped me a new router. Woohoo.

Microsoft was also helpful after running through the entire script of questions, and Wednesday night my empty RTM box showed up, awaiting my lousy 360. Thursday I dropped it off at the UPS store in Southlake, which just so happens to be next to a GameStop. I had some money left on the gift card from Griff and decided to pick up Brain Age 2 for Angela. Right. Angela.

The guy at the counter isn’t the most knowledgeable man, but he loves to talk about games. Especially on my lunch break. I casually asked if he had any Wiis in, since I knew he had a decent supply of used consoles that get picked up within an hour of being dropped off. HE DID! And, what was better, he had a brand new Wii waiting for me. After careful deliberation while pulling my card out of my wallet, I purchased a Wii for Angela and I.

I love the Wii. I love the Wii like I loved playing NES for the first time at Greg Sorrell’s house. I love the controller, I love Wii Sports. I love the fact that Angela plays it. I don’t know how much staying power it has, but I’m excited for what the future brings in game releases.

I have a brand new copy of Bioshock sitting sadly in its shrinkwrap, waiting for my 3rd 360 to wander home. Hopefully it finds its way soon.

Unrelated to gaming, the new Spoon video, Don’t You Evah, is awesome.

On the exit door, originally uploaded by andytrommer.

As we were leaving we saw this.