chrishowie.com

There have been many good changes in my life recently. It’s been almost three months since I graduated college, and nearly two since I got married. Well, now I have another for the list.

For two years I’ve been working at Ontario Systems as an intern. The first year and a half were a lot of fun. I was coding PHP and Flex/ActionScript on a team of two other developers (one also my manager). However, I’ve been unable to secure a full-time job offer since graduating and have been continuing work as an intern, which pays enough to cover the bills, but not much more. Additionally, the company’s partnership with Microsoft means that pretty much all of the Linux servers are in the cross-hairs, so to speak. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that my current role of PHP developer and interim Linux sysadmin is not exactly going to be permanent.

Last week I had the privilege of accepting a full-time job offer from Aprimo and will be starting work with them on July 27th. They are also a Microsoft shop, but I will be working on the development team and coding C#, which I’ve been hacking with for some years now. The company looks to be doing well, and the people I’ve met so far have been very friendly and welcoming. The developers I’ve talked to all seem very knowledgeable, and I’m looking forward to working with them.

I’m not sure which I’m excited about more: getting to work at Aprimo, or finally ending my job hunt. Both are pretty cool. I will miss my friends at Ontario Systems (we’ve had some pretty good times) but I am definitely looking forward to the future.

First some backstory…

I had a public and a private Subversion repository on my web server, and when I started a new project I’d import it into one of them. This is nice because I get versioning and history, plus I get implicit synchronization between my various development boxen.

It’s not unusual to have one monolithic Subversion repository for many different projects, mainly because setting up a Subversion repository can take a small bit of work, especially if you are serving it from HTTP. However, Git makes it so easy to create new repositories that there is no excuse not to create per-project repositories, not to mention that you should anyway since Git doesn’t support checking out a subdirectory of a repository. You simply can’t use a monolithic Git repository because you have to clone the whole big tree, even if you only plan on working on one subdirectory.

Since Git is so much more awesome, I plan on converting my Subversion repositories over. But what do I do with the multi-project ones? There’s no built-in mechanism for pulling out just one directory, with history, into a new repository. So I wrote one.

The usage is git-pluck src-repo dest-repo path/to/directory. The script copies the repository at src-repo to a new directory, dest-repo, and then does its magic. It rewrites all of the commits so that all of the files in path/to/directory are moved into the root of the repository, and everything else is deleted. Commits that do not introduce changes to that directory are removed from the history, potentially including the first commit to the repository. Finally, the reflogs and backups are removed and the repository is compacted, leaving you with a small, single-project repository.

This script was written and tested using Git 1.5.6.5. Feedback is welcome!

One of the better fails I’ve seen from MS Office:

When this is posted, my wedding ceremony will be underway. It’s been a long wait but it was so worth it.

Today I am marrying Deanne, the love of my life. We started dating about two and a half years ago. I can’t say it’s always been an easy road, but it’s been a good one and I wouldn’t trade her, nor my experiences, for anything.

I love you, De! I look forward to spending the rest of my life with you.

Expect radio silence until the 16th. (This, unfortunately, includes comment moderation. I will check comments first thing when I get back. Promise!)

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

“It is still in dispute whether wars between neighbors occur mainly because they fight over territory, because they generate disagreements in their day-to-day interaction, or because they are more easily available for fights—but Vasquez (1995) presents a strong case for the territorial explanation.”

I’m selling textbooks online, you see…

Well, the Comcast guy showed up today and dropped off the modem self-installation kit. About two or three hours later and it still wasn’t working quite right.

Here is my setup. The modem is plugged into eth0 on a Linux box, and eth1 runs to a switch. Traffic routed out eth0 is masqueraded (also known as NATed). If the modem and Linux box are turned on then everything works fine. But if I bring eth0 down and back up, then some odd behavior begins. All traffic that originates on the Linux box behaves normally — I can use elinks to browse the web and irssi to chat on IRC without any problems. But any traffic that is masqueraded, meaning that it comes from another computer on my network, does not behave normally. The connection establishes and works for a split second and then is silent.

I’d suspect a routing problem on the Linux box, but tcpdump there confirms everything is working as it should. However, ifconfig reports RX errors on eth0. This makes no sense — traffic originating from the LAN side of the router box triggers receive errors on eth0. Unless I reboot the router and the modem. I have not observed this behavior with any other ISP or uplink switch.

Anyone have any theories?

Well it’s hacking season again. With GNOME’s switch from Subversion to Git complete, which means Banshee now uses Git too, it gave me an excuse to finally learn it. This was not fun. But having toughed it out, I can definitely say that I love it.

Now that Banshee is using Git, Aaron is starting work on a branch off of the 1.4 series to incorporate my visualization patch. Wielding my new Git tool belt, I was off and hacking. Taking Gabriel’s branch allowing replacement of source widgets, I rebased that from master to stable-vis, fixed the merge conflicts, and started hacking away at Banshee.OpenVP. Unfortunately, not all the pieces I needed were there yet. So I added them and pushed them up to Gitorious. Neat.

Now Banshee.OpenVP looks like this:

I will be graduating in two weeks from Anderson University with a B.A. in Computer Science and Mathematics. I’m actively looking for employment in the Anderson/Muncie/Indianapolis, Indiana area. I’ve had several prospects for some months but nothing has come through yet. If you know of any opportunities, or are looking for a dedicated coder familiar with many languages (C, C#, PHP, just to name a few) and both Linux and Windows environments (Linux preferred), drop me a line. My résumé is available in two formats: PDF and HTML. Feel free to ask any questions about my experience or skills. Looking forward to hearing from you!

Update: I’ve disabled comments since I’d rather people email me about opportunities than leave a comment. My email address is on both versions of my résumé.

I’ve abandoned my idea of creating an AJAX interface for the time being. It is a cool idea but I think I can do much better by writing a proper application.

The Linux FICS interface scene is rather weak. eboard is about the best there is in terms of usability, and it has its share of problems. xboard is there for the minimalists who want their interface to provide a chess board only. When compared with the powerful and extensible interfaces available for Windows it’s rather a shame there’s nothing similar for Linux.

So I’ve decided to take the name I was going to use for my web interface and apply it to a new Linux interface. Building on Mono.Addins, I’ve already got an interface that can be extended in several key ways. Addins can, for example, provide new text highlighting classes or classes that can manipulate the console text buffer in interesting ways.

Using a tip from jonp in #mono, I have now come up with an extensible preferences system that does not suck, based on XLinq. Addins can simply subclass PreferenceContainer, slap on a few attributes, and they have an easy-to-use set of strongly typed preferences that get automatically serialized to XML. Right now only the basic primitive types and strings are supported, but this will be extended later to include things like arrays, lists, and XLinq objects. Thanks to Mono.Addins and some more support classes I wrote, addins can also provide Gtk# widgets that get embedded into the application preferences window. By writing very little code, addin authors can persist their settings and provide the user with a convenient way to change them.

I’m still lacking a chess board though. If anyone likes writing custom widgets and feels comfortable working on this project let me know. The sources will be made public in the coming weeks after I’ve had a chance to polish them and set consistent style guidelines.

I’ve been getting back into chess recently, and my favorite online community is the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS). There are a wealth of free and open interfaces available for download, but they all have one thing in common: you have to download them. At my workplace this is a no-no, but over my lunch break it would be nice to get in a few games. If I forget my laptop then I have no way to play.

Enter Gazebo. I started this project last Friday night, so it’s only been about two days. Still, what I have right now is rather impressive for that amount of time. At face value, the current version is not very representative of the time that’s gone into the project so far, and for a very good reason.

The HTTP protocol used by web servers was not engineered around the idea that you’d establish a long-lasting connection with the server. It’s better suited for quick request-response cycles. Because of this, the PHP web service has no good way to maintain a connection to FICS.

The solution I came up with for this problem is simple, yet very involved. A daemon script (yes, written in PHP…) listens on a UNIX socket for connections from the PHP web service script. If a new FICS session is requested, it creates a new session and returns some authentication parameters to the web service. On every request to the service, another connection to the daemon is made over the UNIX socket, the session attached to with the authentication parameters, and some action taken, like “write this to the network socket” or “tell me when you get new data from the network socket” or even “close the network socket and destroy the session.” The daemon essentially acts as a super-proxy that persists the network sockets and enables access to all of them from one UNIX socket.

Yes, it’s kinda ugly. But it also works incredibly well. There is still some tuning to be done, but behold the awesomeness of what is essentially in-browser, color-coded telnet: