David Pollak's Blog

I really want to be liking Ubuntu, but the 8.10 release is once again a disaster. There's a nasty freeze bug on my ThinkPads (T61p and X300) when I use WiFi. The machines just randomly lock up. It took about 3 months before 8.04 was stable. I figured it was because the Ubuntu folks pushed a lot of stuff into the Long Term Support release. In terms of the crap that is 8.10, there's just no excuse. If 9.04 is as bad as 8.04 and 8.10, I'm going to find another distribution. Gack.

Wow!

It's been two years that I've been doing Scala development and I'm still totally grooving on the power of the language and the awesomeness of the Scala community.

Continue reading "Two years loving Scala" »

I am pleased to announce the Lift Workshop.  Lift Workshop is a one day Lift training seminar and community gathering.  It's a way for you to learn about the Lift web framework, build relationships with others in the Lift and Scala communities, and give feedback to the Lift team so that we can improve Lift.

Continue reading "The first Lift Workshop" »

Folks,

I will be doing two presentations at the Silicon Valley Code Camp tomorrow (Sunday November 9).

I will be doing a beginner presentation on Scala tips and tricks.  I'll post the presentation slides next week.

I will also be doing an intermediate presentation on Lift.  This presentation will be a live coding example where I'll build a real time chat app.

Developing the Next Generation of Web Applications on a Shoestring

The bar for web applications keeps rising with demands for increasing richness and scalability delivered on tighter time frames and budgets. Buy a Feature is a real-time, interactive, serious game that allows product managers to learn from their customers through play. Buy a Feature runs in most browsers without add-ins and was built in less than 1 man-year using the Lift web framework and Scala programming language. Buy a Feature is deployed on a standard J2EE app server and on a dual-Opteron machine supports 2,000 simultaneous players and serves 700 pages per second. Join the Buy a Feature team, Dan O'Leary and David Pollak, as they discuss the technology and agile process that made Buy a Feature a reality.

Where: Pillsbury Winthrop, 2475 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, 94304
When: Wednesday, November 12, 2008
6:30pm Registration, Pizza, networking, and small-talk
6:50pm Introduction and announcements
7:00pm - 8:30pm David Pollak, Lift, Dan O'Leary, CTO Enthiosys, Inc.

Folks, a few months ago, I had a bad experience upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 and recommended against upgrading.

I have had a bunch of good experiences installing (not upgrading) 8.04 and it seems that ThinkPad T61p support is pretty reasonable, so I am now recommending installation of 8.04. I still think that the upgrade process is a bit suboptimal and suggest that if you can, make backups of the data you want to preserve and do a clean install.

There are still problems with the NVidia drivers (this is not unique to 8.04 and in general, Ubuntu does a better job with "proprietary drivers" than any other Linux distribution I've found.) If you can avoid NVidia cards and buy a system with Intel graphics chips, you'll likely have a better Ubuntu experience. For the kind of work I do, I don't care about super-fast 3D, so the advantages that NVidia (or ATI) have over the Intel chips are near zero.

So, I need to go to New Jersey today. Rather than renting a car, I'm taking a train from Newark Airport to New Brunswick. I book a hotel on Hot Wire. I book a hotel for "New Brunswick." Not "New Brunswick and surrounding cities and towns." Not "Within 7 miles of New Brunswick." I book a hotel for "New Brunswick." Hot Wire shows me a bunch of options, including hotels in other cities and towns near New Brunswick. I choose the hotel in New Brunswick.

I book the hotel and pay. Then Hot Wire tells me the hotel is in a town 6.3 miles away from New Brunswick. I call their 800 number of explain that I booked a hotel for New Brunswick. "Chris" the customer service rep explains that there's a "map" that shows what "New Brunswick" means to Hot Wire (hint, it's not New Brunswick.)

You know what, I don't give a shit about a map. I give a shit about getting a hotel in the city that Hot Wire promised me a hotel in.

So, I'm disputing the charge. Will I prevail? Maybe... maybe not.

I'm also posting this warning: don't do business with Hot Wire. They are scammers. If they really meant for me to understand that the hotel in New Brunswick was not in New Brunswick, they would have listed the hotel as "New Brunswick or nearby city."

I'm a Netflix subscriber. Netflix is pretty cool. Too bad I'm bad at planning and knowing what my wife and I are going to be in the mood for. We often get movies from Netflix, don't watch them for months and just keep paying our Netflix fees.

Continue reading "OMG the Netflix Roku box" »

H00T!!

Luke and I have been working on getting Buy a Feature online since November. There've been lots of excellent milestones. We had a game with thousands of players. Luke and other folks at Enthiosys have used the online version as part of facilitated projects with a ton of success.

But now, it's time to put the game online and open the doors. A self-service version of Buy a Feature is online. Yeah... there's still some usability stuff and help screens and other productization stuff we need to do, but it's up. It's running. It works.

H00T!! Woo-frickin'-Hoo!

It's also wicked fun to do 'real' agile work. Buy a Feature has been based on an ever-shuffling backlog. Luke and I spend a little time every week or two prioritizing and scoping the backlog. When I have focus-time on BaF, I go to the backlog, pick up my next tasks and nail them. It's the way to work.

I've been a vocal supporter of Ubuntu since I first started using it a year+ ago. I really regret saying this, but don't upgrade to 8.04. It's the worst Ubuntu release I've experienced. Specifically:

• The sound drivers don't work with my Intel motherboard and the USB sound drivers only seem to work well with my Plantronics headset. No sound from speakers sucks.
• Ubuntu 8.04 causes my ThinkPad T61p to lock up every hour or so. I can't get any real work done in the ThinkPad with 8.04... I spent 2 hours copying data and downgrading to 7.10 which works just fine.
• The NVidia drivers on 8.04 suck just as bad as the 7.10 drivers, but there's less documentation. You'd think the Ubuntu folks would have a ThinkPad with NVidia graphics as a test machine.
• Firefox 3 beta 5 sucks. It uses 100% CPU with GMail after a few minutes. Firebug sucks in FF3. FF3 crashes all the time. I moved to using Epiphany as my primary browser on 8.04

I understand the issues that the Ubuntu folks had to deal with balancing a long term support version with the needs of a timed release. Unfortunately, it seems that 8.04 was the least well tested version of Ubuntu that I've used (since 6.10). I'd wait 3 or 4 months for the Ubuntu folks to work through the bugs and other issues in 8.04 before installing it. Stick with 7.10 for a while.

I got a mini-note 2133. It came with SUSE. I tried, repeatedly to do the most simple operations (using the software updater to update packages that had critical patches, install JDK 1.5, install Skype, etc.) and it just sucked. ZMD (the package manger) would crash, corrupt its database requiring a complete re-install to fix. It was simply aweful. I don't know what the folks at SUSE are thinking, but coming out with software that's more fragile than WIndows 3.1 and the registry is plain stupid.

So, I found some pointers for installing Ubuntu 8.04 on the mini-note. I installed Ubuntu and the Mini-Note turned into a great machine. I'm totally loving it. I've got everything except the wireless drivers working (but I'm using an EVDO modem and that works just fine... so I'm just using the EVDO modem at home as well.)

The performance of the Mini-Note 2133 (except for the video performance which is visibly slow) is pretty impressive. I've got 2GB of RAM in mine. A full build of lift takes 15 minutes on the Mini-Note and 7 minutes on my T61p (2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo.) Not too bad. I can do remote software development on this little beast. The touch-pad is a little hinky and I've bought a mini USB mouse with makes navigation a lot easier. The keyboard is totally usable.

So, to make the Mini-Note 2133 ready for prime time, install Ubuntu, don't call HP (they have weak support) and just use the beast to get your work done.

Continue reading "For all you know, it's just another Java library" »

Being the early adopter I am, I bought a new HP Mini-note 2133 running SUSE 10. It's not ready for prime time.

Why?... briefly:

• HP's support group doesn't know that the product exists so there's no menu item on the web site to get chat or email support and the phone tree for getting support takes two or three humans to "route you to the right group"
• The system restore disks are not included with the machine and it took 45 minutes of hold time and chatting with various support people to get the system restore disks sent to me (to HP's credit overnight FedEx). Why HP can't put the restore image on it web site (SUSE is nominally open source after all) is beyond me.
• SUSE Enterprise Desktop sucks. It's update mechanism is broken (if the ZMD process starts before there's a network connection, the ZMD database gets corrupted and as far as I can tell, the only way to get ZMD uncorrupted is to re-install SUSE... so you're totally screwed if you boot without a physical network connection). The pre-install expects a SUSE DVD and it took me 2 re-installs to figure out that I had to disable the DVD:/// source before running any updates or installations. None of the packages I care about are available by the normal install mechanism (Thunderbird, Skype [pre-loaded on the EEE PC], emacs [it's listed but won't install because of dependency errors], Subversion, Maven, etc.) Lest you think I'm a Linux noob... I've been installing Linux (and building drivers from source) since 1996. SUSE feels like Windows... lots of for-pay support options from Novell... no apparent active support communities... and lots of "do it using the GUI-based tools (YaST blows) or not at all.
• No USB EVDO support
• There are no available Via video or wireless drivers for Ubuntu 8.04 and 7.10 crashes during the install process.
• The wireless driver fail 70% of the time and when they don't fail, they take 5 times longer to hook up to my WEP-keyed network. This is compared to my EEE PC.

On the plus side... the keyboard is beautiful and the display is spectacular. The processor is slow and the disk is slow... but I could live with that in a portable mail reader kind of machine.

So... I'm going to assemble all my issues/questions and spend a day on the phone with HP support. I love the hardware... if HP could make the software run, I'd be a very, very happy camper. Until HP makes the right OS decision (come on guys, Ubuntu is the only real choice -- it's "Open"... SUSE is all the badness of Windows combined with all the badness of Linux), it's going to be hard to say anything other than "don't buy it."

PS -- the Via processor is slower than frozen dog poop and it runs very hot... I'm not sure why HP chose this process especially given that the rest of the chip-set isn't stellar and the power characteristics are weak... perhaps they saved $75/machine and put that into the display and keyboard (which... thinking about it... isn't the worst decision.)

The Scala and lift communities are growing (woo hoo!)

A fair number of folks, including me, will be blogging about Scala and lift at Scala Blogs.

I'll be giving a presentation on lift at 7:30 PM on November 7th at the Bay Area Functional Programmer's Group. The Carnegie Institution at Stanford is graciously hosting the event. I hope to see you there!