Having Ubuntu 9.10 WIFI Problems?

Apparently the new version of Ubuntu broke compatibility with a lot of wifi adaptors, including some relatively new USB adaptors. If you have upgraded to 9.10 but are having problems seeing and/or connecting to your wireless network you may want to try the following:

1. Open the update manager
2. Click the settings button
3. Click the updates tab
4. Check the “Unsupported updates (karmic-backports)” checkbox
5. Open a terminal and type (and reboot):

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-karmic

NHibernate 2.1.1 GA Released!

Fabio Maulo has announced the release of NHibernate 2.1.1 GA via Twitter.

Get the bits and/or code here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhibernate/

Reactions to the Legacy Programmer Boss

There have been a couple blog responses to my “Legacy Programmer Boss” post. The first was by Krishna Kumar and the second was by Mike Marshall. Both bloggers really ran with the idea and came up with some very thoughtful and constructive posts. I’m very happy that neither of them reacted to the term as if I meant it in a pejorative way. Although I was a bit miffed at Joel, I didn’t mean it to be a pejorative. A person’s focus and expertise shift as they advance in their career. That being the case, it’s up to each and everyone of us to use our brain when assimilating advice from our peers and superiors. We are all responsible for thinking critically about any advice we take, no matter who it is from.

Grow Your Shop’s Maturity by Managing up via New Blood.

I work with a great team of people. Both of my managers used to sling code which is a godsend if you ever had to report under a person who hasn’t. I don’t have to convince them about the vagularities or the particulars surround about my craft etc… They inherently pad my estimates, or instinctually know what I mean when I say “this will be a hack that needs to be fixed in the next maintenance cycle” However, since they don’t code anymore, they can be skeptical (rightly so) of anything that happens in the industry post when they had their feet in the fire and may veto ideas that were out of reach when they were fighting the flames.

When I joined the organization about 6 years ago, I took a look at the build process, I said: 1) All builds need to be done from the same machine (not individual developer machines) and 2) the builds and possibly the deployments need to be automated.

When I joined and espoused these ideas we had severe build / deployment pain due to the manual process, but from management’s perspective, automated builds and deployments seemed too bleeding edge or too costly to implement.

Time went on; the pain continued for years. I repeated my opinion several times a year.

Eventually the economy tanked. We were in the position to hire new blood (both consultants and full-timers). I was fortunate enough to be either a part of the interview panel or have input on the “desired skills” of the want ads. Each time we interviewed new full-timers or consultants I specifically looked for people who had skills we required AND skills we didn’t have as an organization but I thought we needed.

Over time, more and more people said: “we should automate the build!” Many voices are louder than one voice.

We are now trying to automate the build.

Thank you new blood.

In Response to: “Where is C# in the Programming Language Lifecycle?”

K. Scott Allen raises an interesting question when he asks “Where is C# in the Programming Language Lifecycle?”

The nearly 8 year production life of C# has been very interesting. As a former Java 1 / Java 2 developer I can honestly say that C# started out looking a lot like Java. However, it has evolved into its own over the years. Point in case: I recently wrote a framework that heavily leveraged the things introduced in .NET 2 and beyond (generics, lambdas, linq to objects, nullables, anonymous types, etc). Looking at the code, it barely resembles the C# we all wrote in the past and what the majority of C# coders are still writing. In fact it is rather illegible if you only know C# 1.x and semi-legible if you know C# 2.0. It seems that C# managed to become something else without bothering anyone who didn’t care to notice.

Although C# has successfully managed to be a shape-shifter in the ever evolving world of language trends, I think K. Scott Allen is onto something when he questions whether or not C# will continue to thrive in the multi-threaded / multi-CPU world. I have a hunch that C# may remain a first class language if the single threaded / parallel language interop pans out in an easy fashion. I think C# (and VB) will remain to be the best way to model a domain and perform OOP in the Microsoft world, but perhaps other languages will advance to be the main application control / host languages. If the interop story goes South, people will choose something else.

All that being said - how much change can a language go through before it falls under the weight of shims that allowed it to grow outside of its initial design? Eventually the need to implement a hot feature to keep the language popular could undermine the language. I do have to admit however, that the C# team seems to have managed to truly extend the language rather than shim it or fake it to get new features in. The way generics were introduced really allowed the 3.0 / 3.5 features to be added in a way that isn’t dissonant with the original base language. Anders and co. basically put in the the genetic possibility of growing another limb of indeterminate descent without disrupting the body.

So what is my answer to the original question? C# has definitely hit maturity. Based off of the trends I am seeing in online code samples and forum questions, I think C# as it was in .net 1.0/1.1 timeframe is on the verge of decay as 3.5# semantics are probably just past the adoption/acceptance stage.

The State of Spolsky or: How I Learned to Ignore the Legacy Programmer Boss.

If you don’t know who Joel Spolsky is, you can probably pass on this blog entry. I have a ton of respect for Joel. I’ve learned a lot from his posts over the years, and I still consider him to be a guru in the business of software. I’m sure I'll continue to learn from him yet.

In recent weeks, Joel has made some controversial posts regarding what many people think are the hallmarks of modern programming (design patterns, TDD, IoC, etc…). In this blog post, Joel espouses the ethic of the “Duct Tape Programmer”. In this stackoverflow.com answer he has this to say about IoC:

IoC containers take a simple, elegant, and useful concept, and make it something you have to study for two days with a 200-page manual.

I personally am perplexed at how the IoC community took a beautiful, elegant article by Martin Fowler and turned it into a bunch of complex frameworks typically with 200-300 page manuals.

I try not to be judgemental (HAHA!), but I think that people who use IoC containers are (A) very smart and (B) lacking in empathy for people who aren't as smart as they are. Everything makes perfect sense to them, so they have trouble understanding that many ordinary programmers will find the concepts confusing. It's the curse of knowledge. The people who understand IoC containers have trouble believing that there are people who don't understand it.

The most valuable benefit of using an IoC container is that you can have a configuration switch in one place which lets you change between, say, test mode and production mode. For example, suppose you have two versions of your database access classes... one version which logged aggressively and did a lot of validation, which you used during development, and another version without logging or validation that was screamingly fast for production. It is nice to be able to switch between them in one place. On the other hand, this is a fairly trivial problem easily handled in a simpler way without the complexity of IoC containers.

I believe that if you use IoC containers, your code becomes, frankly, a lot harder to read. The number of places you have to look at to figure out what the code is trying to do goes up by at least one. And somewhere in heaven an angel cries out.

I see two things happening here:

1. Joel continues his (very worthwhile IMHO) crusade against the “Architecture Astronaut” who is so far into the clouds that they aren’t writing code anymore but think they should tell people how to code, and the “shiny new toy” developers who have a solution looking for a problem. I’ve had very painful experiences with both of these archetypes.
2. Joel inadvertently enters “Legacy Programmer Boss” territory as he discounts mainstream changes in programming that have happened since he stopped coding as his primary job.

The Legacy Programmer Boss is the manager who had a successful programming career in the past but sees many modern concepts as language baubles, academics, and anti-patterns because they are out of the loop. The fact that they once had a high degree of expertise gives them confidence in making mis-judgements.

There was a point in time where “design patterns” where purely academic. However now-a-days many design patterns have become as ubiquitous as the FOR loop (that was the idea behind defining these patterns). IoC is not difficult to understand by any developer who can understand the factory pattern. Frankly, the average developer can go to 0 – 60 with IoC by watching a 22 minute video from David Hayden. If a developer cannot understand the factory pattern, then they are doomed to be a duct tape programmer. I’ve worked with many duct tape programmers, and over time their code requires more duct tape.

Joel is justified in his efforts to decry the Architecture Astronaut, but his Duct Tape Programmer is just as bad. After years of experience in the field, I think Uncle Bob’s Clean Coder / Software Craftsman is the happy medium.

If you write software for a living, you should keep up with the current practices and use them as you see fit. If you see your opinion in the minority, you are either a genius, an early adoptor, or wrong.

This blog will be a’changin’

Until now, this blog has been primarily focused on retro-gaming / retro-computing. I plan on expanding it in the very near future to include .NET development, slice of life, and some music / media related content.

Things in the works:

• Rework the theme to be wide enough for code. (DONE 10/3)
• Reorganize tags (DONE 10/3)
• Add RSS feeds based on tags so people can ignore the topics they don’t care about. (DONE 10/3)
• Possibly move to a hosted Wordpress install on my Webhost4life site. I really haven’t made up my mind about this yet.

Vectrex

I finally got my hands on a Vectrex via ebay complete with 12 games, manuals, and overlays. My neighbor had one of these when I was a kid, and I've seriously been lusting after it ever since. I spent many hours playing Scramble and Star Trek on one of these in my youth.

The Vectrex has to be one of the most unique early 80s game systems. It's a vector graphics based console that came with its own CRT monitor. It had one built-in game (Minestorm) and a cartridge slot for purchased games. The screen displayed black and white vector graphics but used transparent overlays that were placed on the screen to add color and other graphical elements. In my opinion, it remains the best way to recreate vector graphics arcade games at home. Emulation is great, but nothing can beat seeing these graphics on a CRT.

Here is the system I acquired:





My camera's autofocus had a hell of a time dealing with the CRT's refresh rate. It tended to snap some trippy pictures. Here is the cleanest picture I could snap of Minestorm in action:





Here is one of the trippier interpretations my camera made of Minestorm:




If you are a fan of vector graphics, but are unfamiliar with the vectrex, you owe yourself a peek at the following video from Classic Game Room:




Here is a great retrospective video of several classic Vectrex games. This video is done via an emulator and I'll think you'll see that quite a bit of sparkle is missing. It's still cool nonetheless.





Finally, just to prove that the Vectrex was the shizzle back in the day:

Autoduel

For those who aren't familiar with this game, Autoduel is a classic computer strategy/RPG conversion of the Car Wars table top game. I've been hunting for an affordable good condition copy of Autoduel for quite some time now. One with a decent BIN price showed up on ebay late last week. I couldn't resist. I used to have this as a kid and I wanted to get a physical copy back into my collection. The awesome box art and cool map that comes with the game make this worth having.

Coincidentally, this week's episode of Matt Chat is on none other than Autoduel!

The Mouse's Reprieve

When I arrived home from work this evening, I was greeted by an odd clickety clack sound. A quick glance around the kitchen revealed this:


Apparently a mouse had got itself caught in a trap I had set out, but only by its arm. The mouse then ran around the side of the refrigerator (pooping several times apparently) and squeezed inside the refrigerator's vent cover. I initially tried to pull the mouse out of the slot it crawled into, but it emitted a pitiful squeak. I ended up taking the cover off and letting it go outside. It took off ok, so I'm sure I'll be seeing it in my kitchen again soon. Next time it may not be so lucky.

Hello C64 From Ebay. Will You Be My PAL?

I finally managed to get my hands on a PAL C64. It came with a light gun, tension adjustable joystick, Datasette, and several games on tape. I have a NTSC/PAL S-Video to VGA converter box, but unfortunately the results were pretty horrible. I'm going to have to get myself a PAL capable monitor ASAP.

Breadbox64 - The Commodore 64 Twitter Client

As unbelievable as it may sound, there is now a Twitter client for the C64. It is called Breadbox64 and it was written by Johan Van den Brande. It is built on top of the Contiki network stack and requires a RR-Net compatible Ethernet card.

I have sent my first tweet from my C64 and it was good.

If you don't believe me, see for yourself. Here is a video from the author of the software:

Did You Know That New Games Are Still Being Released For The Commodore 64?

It may surprise you to read this, but the venerable Commodore 64 is still getting new commercial game releases in this day and age. Although 99.99999% of the software industry left the C64 behind in the early 90s, there are a few independent developers and publishers here and there that still put out releases. One such label is Psytronik Software. Psytronic specializes in creative conversions and re-releases of classic 8 bit hits, and the development of new titles. Their most recent project, "Knight'n'Grail" has been getting a lot of positive buzz in the C64 community, and all indications point to the possibility of an instant classic. Check out this pre-release video:



More information about Knight'n'Grail can be found here:
http://psytronik.blogspot.com/2009/04/quest-for-holy-grail.html
http://www.binaryzone.org/retrostore/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=473

I've Got Pac-Man Fever

If you grew up in the Atari age you'll undoubtedly remember the top-ten hit Pac-Man Fever. Pac-Man Fever was a single (1981) and album (1982) by recording artists Buckner & Garcia.



My fiancee happened to have a copy of the 1982 album which I've become rather reattached to since I recently got a Technics SL-1200MK2 Turntable. If you like Weird Al, you may find this album to be liquid crack. Unfortunately her copy has all signs of being owned by a child back in the day, so I set out on a hunt to get an archivable copy. Of course, the first thing I did was look to see if it made it to CD. I found it had been released on CD as a rerecording. Sadly the rerecording just doesn't do it for those nostalgic memories as the voices have aged and the original sound effects were not able to be re-licensed. Luckily I was able to import a "sealed" copy via gemm.com. It arrived from a record shop in Italy still in its wrap, but the seal was not 100% unbroken. Therefore, it had some mold/mildew on it that creeped in over the years, but otherwise it was untouched. I've managed to clean it up and I hope to digitally archive it ASAP.

Track listing

1. "Pac-Man Fever" (Pac-Man)
2. "Froggy's Lament" (Frogger)
3. "Ode to a Centipede" (Centipede)
4. "Do the Donkey Kong" (Donkey Kong)
5. "Hyperspace" (Asteroids)
6. "The Defender" (Defender)
7. "Mouse Trap" (Mouse Trap)
8. "Goin' Berzerk" (Berzerk)

Yes, I'm a Cultist.

According to Infoworld.com, I'm a member of one of the biggest tech cults of all time:
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/true-believers-biggest-cults-in-tech-433?page=0,4