Category: Tech

I’ve been setting up a test installation for a ColdFusion application I’m supporting and dreading having to set up ColdFusion on Ubuntu. I had been planning to install ColdFusion 7 because the earlier 6.1 no longer worked after I upgraded Apache to version 2.2.3. I found instructions for installing ColdFusion 7 on Ubuntu, but in the comments on that blog someone had said that ColdFusion 8 installed on Ubuntu 7 without the need for any special steps.

So I downloaded the ColdFusion 8 Developer’s Edition for Linux and ran the installer. No trouble at all, and so far it appears to be working. Ubuntu is not an officially supported Linux for ColdFusion, but I suppose it has become popular enough that maybe someone decided to at least allow it to install on Ubuntu. In any case, thanks Adobe!

I just read that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 will be out Q1 2008 and weighs in at a hefty 1GB! OMFG, how in the world has it come to this? How do you grow an OS to such size? There’s no good reason that this should be the case and IMHO, Microsoft needs a serious palace revolution to get things back on track. In the past, faster computers have been able to outrun OS bloat so that now, the initially piggy Windows XP is a pretty good performer on today’s hardware. But I wonder if those days are coming to an end. Chips may get faster, but PCs have a lot more competition for their functionality now than in the past which could slow down PC sales to consumers. And, as usual, businesses are slow to adopt new OSs and probably won’t be picking up Vista until they buy new hardware, Vista’s specs have pretty much assured this. A 1GB service pack definitely is not going to help matters.

It’s been a few weeks since my last foray into the virtual world Second Life. I’ll probably logon this weekend having heard that the Second Life Community Conference is taking place right here in Chicago. Even if I wanted to go physically, I couldn’t because the event has been sold out for a while now! And part of me wonders if crossing the streams of one’s real life and second life, to borrow a Ghostbusters analogy, is a good thing. Insert the usual geek/nerd jokes here.

I only learned of the SLCC yesterday while reading an article on CNet concerning the conference and what they labeled as a “backlash” against Second Life due to some long standing technical issues and the failure of SL to live up to the wet dreams of a number of corporations hoping to make some real money in the virtual world.

After reading this, I remembered a lot of skepticism about whether or not anyone would be able to make money on the web and how companies like Amazon.com were destined to failure. Obviously, a lot, if not most, of the early web ventures failed, some spectacularly. But in the end, a number of companies were successful and now Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and others are household names and for many, it’s hard to imagine doing business without the web. Second Life may not go on to the success that Amazon ultimately had, but it’s really too early to tell. I think that virtual spaces like SL probably are the next big thing, but it will take some time to develop the new business paradigms that are valid in that space. If Linden Lab can hang on long enough and don’t make too many mistakes, they, like Amazon, may be around to reap the rewards of pioneering a new medium.

While very popular, MySQL is a database with a number of sometimes annoying quirks. On Windows, MySQL stores table names in lower case and does case insensitive comparisons by default. On Linux, it stores table names in their original cases and comparisons are case sensitive. This has obvious implications if one is trying to develop a database on Windows and then restore it to a Linux based production server, and is just the problem that I ran into. I know that I can reset those defaults to make this easier, but that really wasn’t an option on the production server, which hosts other databases that would have been effected by a change like this. So I decided that the best bet, being pressed for time, was to simply convert the lowercase table names in the mysqldump generated SQL dump, to the uppercase versions needed for the app running on the server. Having over 150 tables, in a 12MB dump file made changing these by hand extremely undesirable.

Regular expressions and Python to the rescue! Searching the web for a script that would find all text enclosed in back ticks and uppercase it, proved fruitless. And which my favorite editor for this, notepad++, can find and replace using regular expressions, it did not have any function I could invoke to perform the uppercasing automatically. So I present the following code I wrote to do the job. It’s very simple, only the very last part of how to grab the matched text that I wanted to uppercase, took any time. Please feel free to use this any way you like! I think it can serve as a good base for any similar search and replace operations. I used A.M. Kuchling’s Regular Expression HOWTO to learn how to use regex in python.

# uppercase_table_names.py
#
# utility script to find and uppercase all
# table names and references in mysql sql
# script. this actually uppercases anything
# in back ticks which is fine for my purposes
#
# feel free to use this script anyway you like
# -- blueZhift 2007-08-19
# http://bluezhift.proliphus.com

# see http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/
# for more about using regular expressions in python
import re

def make_uppercase (match):
    input_string = str(match.group())
    return input_string.upper()

print "Beginning Program\n"

output_file=open("outputfile.sql", "w")
output_file.write("-- Uppercased Output\n")

# complile regular expression to look for
search_pattern = re.compile(r"`(.[^`]*)`", re.VERBOSE)

input_file = open("inputfile.sql")
for line in input_file.readlines():
    # find and replace
    edited_line = search_pattern.sub(make_uppercase,line)
    output_file.write(edited_line)
    print edited_line


input_file.close
output_file.close
print "Program Completed\n"

Click here to download source code plus input file example. (uppercase_table_names.zip)

I just got a link to ifixit’s iPhone Disassembly from my brother in-law who is also into tech gadgets like me. It looks like quite an interesting device inside too. I know, most probably wouldn’t dare think of immediately taking apart your shiny new $600 device! But this sort of tech strip tease has become quite common whenever a popular new device hits the market. I’m also quite sure that in a week or two, someone will have figured out how to run 3rd party apps on the iPhone despite the lack of an official SDK from Apple. I can’t wait!

The iPhone launches today and as I’ve said previously, I won’t be getting one. I’m planning to wait for a cheaper and better one later. But long before that happens, there may well be an army of iPhone clones to choose from. One in particular that has just caught my attention is the Neo1973 running OpenMoko. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of phones with touch screen interfaces that do x, y, and z before the year ends, but the OpenMoko platform is about more than that. It’s another one of those radical long haired hippy open source projects that rants about freedom and open (hackable) standards! LOL God I love this stuff!^_^

While the Neo1973 is certainly not on the same level as the iPhone, it does offer some glimpse of what a clone will look like. I like a stylish phone, but more to the point, I really don’t like the look of a QWERTY keyboard on the face of a phone like the Blackberry or similar smartphones. I could get used to it yes, but I don’t like it. A good clone must have a touchscreen interface, but beyond that things will get murky. Why? Because programming a good interface is not trivial. So I’m sure that a lot of them will suck at first. But there is hope, because once the interface is freed from dependence on the hardware, upgrading it is just a matter of better software. And beyond that, personalization of the interface is a reachable goal. I only hope that the threat of lawsuits won’t block this progress.

I guess I enjoy hype about as much as the next person. So even though they are plenty of reasons not to buy an iPhone, go ahead, buy one anyway! No really, buy one! Heck, buy two! Why? Oh, I don’t get a commission or anything like that. But I am very selfishly motivated nonetheless. I figure that there are plenty of people out there who have the money for what is likely to be the next high status gadget. The rest of us will have to wait for the cost to come down, and for any bugs to be worked out. The more iPhones Apple sells, the sooner that price will drop due to the usual economies of scale. And more beta test…er first time adopters mean the bugs will be worked out that much faster! So unless the iPhone blows it in a Newtonesque fashion, I hope to be seeing a much cheaper and better iPhone by this time next year. So please people, buy those iPhones tomorrow, for the childr…er me!

The iPhone is coming out on Friday and while I’d love to have one, it’s just too expensive right now and I can live without all of the whiz bang features it has, for now. People have compared it to Sony’s PSP, yeah, crazy people!^_^ I don’t really think it’s a sensible comparison, but there is one thing the iPhone can do that I sooo wish the PSP could. And that is play YouTube videos. While the PSP finally did get some level of Flash support, that support is for Flash version 6, YouTube requires Flash version 7 or better. I really wish Sony’s software writers would at least try to keep up. The PSP is still pretty nice hardware just begging to be fully exploited. If they cannot keep up, then please Sony, open the platform up for the 3rd party homebrew/independents to make some apps! My TiVo can’t play YouTube videos either, but at least TiVo is trying to keep up with the features war by adding new services that take advantage of what’s available on the net. Not perfect, but they’re trying. Perhaps the unlocking of the PSP CPU is a sign of good things to come…

AT&T has just announced the cost of service plans for the Apple iPhone, and according to one analysis, it isn’t too bad at all. Basically, the cheapest plan includes 450 minutes of voice and unlimited data for about $60/month. Considering that my current carrier, Verizon charges $40/month just for data on smartphones add about $40 more for the cheapest voice plan to go with it, I agree that service for the iPhone is nicely priced. I should also note, that Verizon’s data plans comes with a lot of restrictions too. Now this doesn’t mean I’m running out to buy an iPhone any time soon, it’s way too expensive for me right now. But my hope is that it will spark some friendly competition and help bring down the costs of data plans from all major carriers. In the end, I hope to see voice and data become part of the same service glob rather than seen as separate things and priced that way. Convergence man! That’s what I’m talkin bout!

Here’s the awesome geek tech story of the day, imho at least. John Lam writes in his blog that Google developer Steve Yegge has ported Rails to JavaScript line by line in 6 months! Ruby on Rails has become my favorite coding framework, and while I’m no huge fan of JavaScript (caps or no), having Rails available for the language will make javascript projects far more palatable to me! In particular, this should be helpful for those of us who write our Google Gadgets in javascript. Thank you Steve!

The Verizon CEO says he’s not worried about the iPhone. I think he should be because while he’s correct that Verizon has phones that will offer more in services and functionality than the iPhone, which isn’t even 3G yet, a features checklist will not win the battle for cell phone customers. In Asia, it is already quite clear that your cell phone is as much about fashion as functionality, perhaps more so. From what I’ve heard, people in places like Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea change phones and service providers as often as some people change their socks! And there seem to be signs that the cell phone is becoming a fashion accessory in the US as well. With this in mind, I think Verizon should be worried that the hot sexy new iPhone will win out over something less sexy with more functions. Afterall, there are plenty of digital music players with more features than any iPod, but I don’t see anyone deserting the iPod, which remains the number one digital music player despite its higher cost relative to other players with similar features.

As a techie, I used to believe that the best tech would always win. But personal observation has shown me otherwise. Sexy/hip/cool devices with good marketing will beat better technology almost every time. The only wildcard I see in the iPhone equation is just how much of a brake on sales the high price will be. Unless there are major quality issues the iPhone should do very well. If I were Verizon, I’d be trying to get some sexy new phones to market as soon as possible.

I’m sorry, I like Apple and everything, but the Safari for Windows Beta is a piece of crap! I cannot believe they released this bug infested alpha level application. To call this beta is an insult to beta level software! Since the initial release of the “beta” a few days ago, a new updated version has been released. I had hoped this fixed the textless menus problem and lockups that I and others had experienced initially. Well, no such luck! I tried submitting a bug report via the bug button, but that only served to totally lock up the program. I won’t be touching this thing again for a very long time! Someone should have told Steve Jobs that Safari for Windows was no where near ready for even a beta release. Oh, maybe someone did and they are now looking for a new job. Sigh…

Apple released the first beta of the Safari web browser for Windows today. Naturally, loving new tech toys, and having heard good things about Safari, I downloaded and installed the beta. Well, I have no regrets, but sadly I’ve not been able to get anywhere except for Apple homepage.

On my Windows XP SP2 box, Safari starts up looking like iTunes big brother in general appearance. But unfortunately for me, all of the menu text is missing. Not only that, I could not enter text in the address box either. After a few minutes of bumping about in the dark, so to speak, Safari locks up and I have to shut it down. So no Safari love here.

I know betas are test versions, so I’m not surprised by bugs, but I would have expected something more esoteric than the menus not showing up. That seems like something too basic to miss, especially since iTunes works well on my machine. I’m sure the problem will be fixed soon enough.