Speaking of user interfaces, I have found Apple’s secret sauce. They always give more then 100% when working on a product or program. The proof is in the attached screenshot.

/Irony.

I was trying to open all the history links from mobile.de, browsed Saturday. As a side note neither Mac OSX nor Firefox crashed after that, and I managed to visit those pages again (and close them again, one by one).

I’ve noticed that starting with a couple of days ago, the iMac doesn’t want to go to sleep anymore. If I go to Apple menu then Sleep, it tries to go to sleep, but after the hard disk stops spinning, it wakes up again.

After carefully inspecting the Console logs I’ve come up with the following messages:

Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: hibernate_write_image done(0)
Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: sleep
Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: Wake reason = 
Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: System Wake
Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: Previous Sleep Cause: 5

What’s particularly strange is the empty “Wake reason = ” message after sleep. Usually, there you can see different messages like “Wake reason = OHC1”, when you wake the Mac by pressing a key on the USB keyboard.

After removing some innocent Extensions (Remote Buddy and CoolBook2—this one ended up here when I’ve migrated the data from the laptop), I’ve found out the root cause.

In my case, it was the wireless network’s fault. I already have a regular network cable between the Time Capsule and the iMac, but I also have a wireless network for the mobile devices. For some reason, I’ve activated the wireless network on the iMac. This caused the computer to wake up from sleep immediately, but no “Wake reason” was given.

In case your computer doesn’t want to go to sleep too, try this.

New, smaller, computer requires new desk, which requires new cables setup. Different from the previous setup, I had to cut about 40cm of the board off, ditched the Western Digital MyBook external hard drive (which failed one month after the two years warranty expired). Also I took the opportunity to get rid of the second outlet set.

About 3 weeks ago I had to switch from Mac OS X (Leopard) to Windows (7 beta build 7100) at the company I work for. One of the reasons of the change was starting of a new project, that will be developed on Microsoft stack (C#, ASP.NET MVC and Microsoft SQL Server 2008). The project will have to be deployed on some Windows Servers, so no point in using C# Mono or PHP.

The first week, was spent getting used to the new platform and all the tools available on it. Installing pasteboard history (ClipX), an Orthodox File Manager (Nomad.NET), a proper editor (GVim for Windows) was something you had to do if you wanted to have a proper work environment.

The second week, I started to take a closer look at the IDE itself, as I already received the sources I was going to work from now on. For a change, it is nice to have code completion for about every namespace, class, method or function, but is annoying not to have word completion (for strange words you have to write inside string declarations like SQL keywords).

Beside the different change in layout, one of the other things that I noticed was the lack of attention to details in user interface and the general lack of polish. For example, in the above image you can see the subtle blue break point (enabled or disabled) in XCode versus the red break point from Visual Studio. I’d rather have 10 more pixels to fit one or two characters then to have 10% unused space in a window. Also see the subtle indicator for folding area, shades of gray in XCode and square with +/- sign in Visual Studio.

A much more visible differences in Visual Studio are the items from the menu item and the layout of the sub-windows that change when you go from Edit mode into Run/Debug mode and back. It is distracting to see shapes changing in background when you should concentrate on the front window. Better to keep everything fix and in place, and let you focus on the things you’re doing.

These are the touches that makes most of Mac OS X software much more enjoyable then most of the Windows software.

During my business trip to Munich I haven’t had much time to wonder around and visit bike shops (although I bumped into a big one near Theresienwiese U-Bahn station), that’s why I’ve ordered this nice bicycle teapot shaped bell from Amazon.de. I think that it’s nice form goes much better with my city bicycle then a regular one. I’m sure that the nice and shiny look will wear out pretty soon.

As many office workers, I got infected with the ‘productivity bug’.

I found myself using two types of software daily (or at least weekly) on Mac (that I didn’t use while I was using Linux).

The first type is task management, represented by OmniFocus, which helps me not to forget different task/errands.

For what I use OmniFocus?

• List of monthly rates I have to pay (car loan, assurance fees)
• List of important things (utilities) or less important (having a haircut) I have to pay from time to time
• List of things I’d like to buy in the new future (inline skates, shoes)
• List of things to do (home errands)

For what I don’t use it?

• Managing projects, although some projects are written down there, but I don’t work on them much.
• Grocery store lists. For that I use a small post it on the fridge, where I write what I should not forget to buy on the next trip to grocery store.

Also not to forget dates/meetings/events I use iCal, the build in calendaring software. I prefer this to OmniFocus because it syncs with my iPods and with my mobile phone. OmniFocus can sync some of it’s entries to iCal too. I’ve tried this feature once, but I think I put all my to-dos in one calendar and that it become littered with entries from OmniFocus. On a screencast I’ve seen that you should sync only one of your contexts (e.g. errands) with one of the calendars, not all the contexts with one calendar (as I did).

Famous Moleskines notebooks come to Timisoara, and other small Romanian cities, where you can find Carturesti bookstores. Until now, you couldn’t find this brand of notebooks in Romania, and Amazon didn’t ship anything besides books to non-Amazon countries.

I got the small one on my trip to Belgrade, in April 2008, and the medium one on my trip to San Francisco, in September 2008.

I didn’t use them much, though. Only the medium one has some notes, from a couple of conference presentations.

Going from Santa Clara to San Francisco, by public transport, gives you a lot of time to think, since you have to change 2 light trains (VTA, BART) and one regional train (Caltrain) you’ll need roughly 2 and half hours from one place to another. On the way to airport, I had some time to note a few things about my experience there and about ZendCon 2008.

Coming from a smallish country (population of 22 millions) and an even smallish city (population of 400 000) I was impressed by the big distances Americans in these area have to travel daily. If you’re not leaving 5 or 10 km closer to your office, and in a big city, your daily possibilities are limited and is not practical to use the public transport for everything, because you’ll have to spend lots of time commuting (for example this more then 2 hours trip by public transport could have be done in 40–50 minutes by car, there are 70km, after all). We (me and my Ciao colleagues) have lost this time when we had to go from Santa Clara to San Francisco, so didn’t manage to see much. We’ve seen some classic tourist stuff, Golden Gate, the Cable Train, Fisherman’s Wharf, and Mission Street, a Spanish neighborhood we’ve landed in by mistake. Still, it was surreal to see all the things you see in the movies, the exterior fire stairs, the American Police cars, the Transamerica Pyramid building and other landmarks from San Francisco.

These tourist stuff happened on Saturday and Sunday, the first two days I spent here. For the rest of the week, I’ve attended ZendConf in Santa Clara.

More about the conference, in another post.

Just a couple of days before Greenfield Online announced that they will be bough by a private invest firm (hint: google for SRVY and follow the news), Ciao Romania had the new office opening party “Ciao – Open for business”. The party that celebrated the move in the best office spaces a company can buy in this town (City Business Center Timisoara) was celebrated at the Aquarium Restaurant from building’s 6th floor. Along with mere mortals from Timisoara office, were present representatives from Munich office, members of local students organizations and company’s collaborators.

Pictures from this, small for other but important for the company, event can be seen in the Ciao Open for Business album.

While working to add MetaWeblog support to my blog (not that I’m writing lots of stuff here and I need a ‘desktop blogging tool’ to increase my productivity) I found some very helpful links how to add this to a Django based blog. Greg Abbas wrote two tutorials on how to integrate XMLRPC into Django and Metaweblog and Django. Everything fine and dandy until I tried to integrate the XMLRPC part into my system. I’ve started with the ‘arithmetic’ example, but I got the following error message:

xmlrpclib.ProtocolError: <ProtocolError for localhost:8000/blog/metaweblog/: 500 INTERNAL SERVER ERROR>

It was strange for me to see that my previous play with XML RPC (used in another part of the system) didn’t work either. It worked on the production server, but not on my development machine. One of the major differences between these servers was that I was using python 2.5 on my dev server and python 2.4 on the live server. After I’ve google it around a bit, I found that there were some differences between the 2.4 and 2.5 implementation of xmlrpclib. If you check the release note for python 2.5 there is a small mention:

- Patches #893642, #1039083: add allow_none, encoding 
arguments to constructors of SimpleXMLRPCServer and 
CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler.

And incidentally, SimpleXMLRPCServer is used by both XMLRPC implementations.

The fix is pretty easy: add the missing parameters (allow_none – Bool and encoding – String) when you instantiate SimpleXMLRPCServer or any class based on that.

After fixing this, I still had to adapt my models to the Metaweblog API. Thanks to ecto‘s trial version, it wasn’t a very hard job. I prefer to write my posts in Textile so now I have to see how I can make ecto or other blogging tool to let me to that.