I quit Microsoft. I followed my interests and now have a day job that excites me and on the side I am getting paid to teach about computer science.  I get to work from home most days and I know I’m making an impact.

I started playing guitar and remembered how to sing. I do this pretty frequently around the city with friends and once in a while sit in with a local band.

I still use Linux. Not exclusively (much of my training content has to be Windows based). I have also picked up Erlang and Python.

I started brewing beer.

I lost 70 pounds (and still going).

I start trail running and joined up with a Hash House Harrier kennel.

I’m much happier now. I’m living my life. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and certainly not my employer, that I wasn’t before. One of the nicest things anyone ever said to me was “It’s great to have you back”

It’s great to be back.

Now turn off your computer and go find a trail to run. I’ll see you there.

Popped it into our CyberHome $30 DVD player from Wal*Mart and it worked right off the bat.

Just mentioning this because it took me a while to sort through the options for going from dvd-slideshow (png images) to a VOB file to an ISO image (via DeVeDe).

With the basics down I’ve started with Rails.  My son has a website idea that I’m helping him implement.  He gives the requirements and I knock out the code.

Some sites I’ve found helpful so far include:

http://www.rubyinside.com/19-rails-tricks-most-rails-coders-dont-know-131.html

http://www.blainekendall.com/uploads/RubyOnRails-Cheatsheet-BlaineKendall.pdf

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/UsingMigrations

http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods.html

These are the ones I bookmarked, anyway.

1.  I am more familiar with Ruby.  I read Code Generation in Action a few years ago but never really gave it much thought.  The seed has been planted though.
2. The local B&N and Borders had more Ruby and Rails books in stock.  Perhaps this says that all the Python titles have sold out and the Ruby titles aren’t moving.
3. I followed some RailsConf blogs and they gave me a good vibe.

No arguments about syntax or framework advantages (Python won out here since fewer hosts provide support for Rails apps).

Both are fine languages and provided everything I’ll need to do anything I want.

To fit the slideshow into a specific time window I adjusted the display rate to 8 seconds per shot (from the default of 5) and left the default 1 second transition time alone.

Compiling the script into a vob file took about 40 minutes for roughly 160 photos.  I’m impressed that the tool was able to scale each photo reasonably well – they were a real mix of sizes to start with.

Once the vob was created testing it with mplayer was a breeze.  All I need to do now is add some audio, put in a few captions and burn it to DVD.

I already have something in mind that would be immediately beneficial for me but which will take a decent amount of time to implement (if I were 20 again it would probably only take 2-3 weeks since I wouldn’t need to sleep).

This will be a web application (what isn’t these days?) and the goal, other than the application, is to learn more about a new language (ruby or python), an existing platform (e.g. rails) and AJAX (which I already understand but haven’t personally worked with beyond some exercises from books and magazines).

What I’m trying to figure out now is should I start with Ruby or Python? I’ve been reading quite a bit on the benefits of each language and so far they are basicaly a wash (except that I’m reading a lot about scale problems with Ruby on Rails – but it’s not like I’m trying to become the next Twitter).

Also I’m not clear what the platform would be if I went with Python. With Ruby it would be Rails – but with Python … ????

I already have a small start with Ruby and Rails (I’ve read a few books) – but I’ve not yet written a single meaningful line of either.

Any suggestions or pointers to articles/blogs/books worth reading?

btw – Before I’m accused of being too lazy to research this on my own … I know there are hundreds of sites and posts on this exact topic. I’ve been reading them for several days. I’m close to making a decision but want to toss it out there in case I’ve missed something that only experience would reveal.

I’m tracking the process as I do it.  Perhaps some folks will have suggestions.

I did a little research and discovered dvd-slideshow. Unless I hear a better suggestion I intend to use this to create the slideshow.   Apt-get had no trouble installing dvd-slideshow which is one reason I’m confident this will work.  The first snag is that all of the pictures are in bmp format which is not on the list of supported formats.

I’ve made a copy of all the images (since I don’t want to mess with the originals – this took her many hours) and now need to convert them from bmp to png.  I looked around for a while on Google searching for variants of “mass image file conversion”.  Eventually I started honing in on The GIMP (already installed) but it’s manual did not include any info on mass conversion.

Finally I opened upgThumb Image Viewer and low-and-behold it already handles mass conversion and it supports bmp to png.

I’m going to spend a little time researching the dvd-slideshow script format to figure out if I want to write a shell or ruby script to create the input script or if I want to use one of the existing solutions.  My inner-geek already knows the answer.

I knew I had the integrated Intel 915 graphics which isn’t exactly high-end but it should be enough for basic OpenGL support. I started searching and discovered a few things …

1. glxinfo would fail on my machine. When I would run it the following would be displayed:
   • X Error of failed request: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)
2. System -> Hardware Information did detect that the Intel 915/910 graphics controller
3. dmesg also detected the card

So I started hitting Google and discovered a utility called 915resolution on the Absolute Beginner’s Guide – http://absolutebeginner.wordpress.com/2006/08/20/absolute-beginner-guide-915resolution/. Following those directions I was able to get into a different resolution.

Still desktop effects would not work though. I needed to tackle the glxinfo problem.

After some more Google time I came across this page on ArchWiki: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Intel_915_Chipset. This page explained how to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to support the 915/910 driver (the key is the i810 driver).

While I was in there I noticed that the monitor settings were odd. The monitor ID was a string of gibberish and the refresh rates were all off. I have an HP M70 monitor (which is odd because I’ve never owned and HP computer and I can’t, for the life of me, remember how I came to own this) so I once again went to Google and discovered this page: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=381593

Once I made the suggested adjustments and restarted X (ctrl+alt+backspace) I was able to enable desktop effects and enjoy the fun.

I’m going to try running Beryl now.

../.././libgcc/../libdecnumber/decContext.h:52:50: error: gstdint.h: No such file or directory

I was pretty sure I had followed the directions correctly. I had installed the pre-reqs described here. I had enlisted in the source as described here. Then I switched into the gcc directory and ran ./configure – everything looked good so I ran make.

This is where things went downhill. Build errors galore.

It turns out that while I did skim the Configuration instructions I missed the part about not building from the src directory but rather from a sibling directory (or rather – not from the source dir). So I created a sibling directory, re-ran configure and then make. This time it got much further – but it still ended up hitting compile errors (a missing target in a makefile).

Even doing a clean build and re-running configure again could not resurrect the build.

I ended up having to start over with an `rm -f -r *` and getting the source over.

This time I ran configure from the sibling directory right from the start and everything was much happier.

Who would have thought that when the gcc maintainers went through the trouble of documenting the proper way to run configure that they would really mean that you were supposed to do it that way.

I posted this because when I hit the original problem I found several sites where people were asking why they were hitting that error and did not find a site where the cause was explained. Hopefully this will get enough Google Juice to save someone else the trouble.

$ g++ -g -pg main.cpp

Then I simply needed to run the output executable (./a.out) which produced a file named gmon.out in the current directory.

Executing gprof is now enough to get some basic profiling information – e.g.:


% cumulative self self total
time seconds seconds calls s/call s/call name
100.52 9.73 9.73 5 1.95 1.95 run()
0.00 9.73 0.00 1 0.00 0.00 init()


The app ran for almost 10 seconds, made 5 calls to run which ran, on average, about 2 seconds per call.

Pretty simple high-level profiling.

The sample app was nothing more than a busy-wait (I wanted to busy wait otherwise all of the samples ended up in the call to sleep).

It’s code is:


#include
#include
#include

void init() {
srand(time(0));
}

void run() {
int limit = rand();

for(int i = 0; i

Some interesting command line options include:

-i	Prints out some basic summary info (record counts)
-p	Print basic call graph info
-z	Display unused functions
-p	Print basic call graph info
-A	Print annotated source code

I intend to look more into gcov in the next few days to see what it has to offer.

While I'm on the topic of programming tools - what's available in the way of static analysis (i.e. lint) tools?

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