February « 2009 « Keep [C]*(od|do)ing

February 23 rd

Be the Only Tech Guy Who Wears Suit?

Filed under: fetish, off-topic, peopleware — Liwen @ 10:29 pm

When talking about tech guys, geeks, nerds’ dress code, what images would pop up in your head?
Microsoft vs Apple
You think because the pictures are too old? How about these?
Microsoft Bad Dress in Conference
The above two were taken in 2008. Look at the red tie, ewwww!

I remember complaining to my fellow programmer friends that the worst thing about being a programmer is that you are not supposed to dress smart, if you turned up at work in suit and heels, people would think you are going somewhere else for a job interview.

Lots of programmers take dressing smart as a hard concept to grasp and think that’s totally irrelevant to what they do, which is very sad in my opinion. Are t-shirts and jeans tech guys’ iconic wardrobe possessions, or tech guys just don’t need wardrobes because they only throw their clothes on the floor?

We were asked to dress smart at work today. I went to office in a small-collar-thin-lapel suit with skinny tie combination, which has being popular for the last two years and recently it even caught more attention because of the popular TV series ‘Mad Men’. I was comfortable with my tastes on clothes, and fortunately people liked it. The problem is: as a programmer, I seemed somehow ‘over-dressed’. The popular acknowledgment turned to be that tech guys’ smartness of clothing should be lower than other people at least one level under the same dress code, why is that? Is it a stereotype or most tech guys are just being lazy?

After work, I did a search with keywords “trendy nerd” on Google, there are only 346 results. Which made me wondering is there anything wrong with tech guys’ dress sense or it’s just me that likes ties? Would that even unqualify me being a good programmer?

Personally I like work clothes very much, it’s not I am having a suit fetish. In my mind, this is not about how you want other people to see you, it’s more about how you see yourself, how you feel about yourself – it’s more of an attitude.

Geek clothes can not be trendy or stylish, but there is also a difference between casual and slobby.

If you really don’t like suit, at least you can think different. XD

February 15 th

Configure svn+ssh on Windows

Filed under: Tools, software — Tags: ssh, subversion — Liwen @ 8:52 pm

As a proud command line junkie, I never went anywhere without my Emacs ssettings, which made my hands look like old branches from dead tree in some desert, but that’s fine for me, it’s been a decade since I ceased my hand moulding career.

Ok It’s a lie but seriously, I am not a big fan of mice and GUI, they usually slow me down and distract me from concentrating. Besides, some really bad designed HCI, such as Windows Vista UAC, can easily push my buttons in all circumstances. People from Microsoft said

“Disabling UAC risks your computer for allowing some worms to execute commands secretly without a prompt confirmation from end user.”

and I up voted this as the correct answer:

“Enabling UAC risks me throwing my computer out the window from frustration with a poorly designed and horribly executed security model.”

Forgive me being loquacious, the point here is I don’t want to use TortoiseSVN – I 100% agree with you that it’s a fantastic software, I do! I just need to get svn+ssh work with my Emacs shell mode.

Let’s get started.

1. Download Putty, if you are like me always afraid of installing untrusted software from the Internet because you believe that they are mostly badly written piece of crap that they would mess your already rubbished Windows OS completely then you can be greatly relieved here, I promise.

2. Start Puttygen.exe and generate a pair of keys, save the private key WITHOUT passcode,

3. Copy the public key, yes COPY not SAVE, paste/append it to $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys, create the file if it doesn’t exist.

4. After modified the authorized_keys file, remember to:

chmod 700 authorized_keys chmod 600 .ssh

This is important as you may get connection errors if the file is group writable.

5. Next, test the connection with putty.exe or plink.exe, (side note:TortoiseSVN has a plink.exe windows implementation which would not pop up messages.)
plink.exe -i theprivatekey.ppk username@hostname

6. Modify your subversion configuration file. It’s in
c:\Users\yourname\AppData\Roaming\Subversion in Windows Vista
add the following line to your [tunnels] section:
ssh=x:/path/plink.exe -i x:/path/privatekey.ppk

Now you should be able to access your svn+ssh repository without typing password, in Microsoft Windows! Vista!

Some extra info for folks who love GUI – for TortoiseSVN users, you need to generate the OpenSSH private key from server, then load it with puttygen.exe and get the public key – it’s due to the fact that there are differences between private key implementations in putty and OpenSSH, otherwise you will get the lovely “server refused our key” message!

February 14 th

Install Subversion 1.5.5 on Bluehost 64bit Box

Filed under: Tools, software — Tags: bluehost, ssh, subversion — Liwen @ 11:55 pm

The first thing I do before start typing code at home is to put it under version control system; the first thing I tried to do when had a SSH enabled reliable hosting, of course, was to set up Subversion server on it.

There are already several tutorials in the Internet, why I am writing this again? Well, I just wanted to prove that I too, can write blog! Among all those tutorials, none of them worked for me, I guess either I was trying to install the newest version of SVN or the BlueHost hosting environment has changed, or they just hate me. So I am constructing this and hope to contribute something I learned along the frustrating process of setting up SVN on 64bit shared hosting so you don’t need to smash your keyboard.

Once you enabled SSH on BlueHost control panel with a photo ID, it’s time to set up Subversion.

1. Open a terminal, type in:
ssh username@yourdomain.com
and hit enter, then input your hosting password.

2. It’s better to create a separate folder for all the operations, in case our home directories got messed up by any mistakes.

mkdir src cd src

3. Download Subversion and dependencies:

wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.5.5.tar.gz wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.5.5.tar.gz tar -xzvf subversion-1.5.5.tar.gz tar -xzvf subversion-deps-1.5.5.tar.gz cd subversion-1.5.5

4. Install apr and apr-util, notice the var LDFLAGS , it’s 64 bit, it’s m-A-g-I-c.

cd apr ./configure --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME LDFLAGS="-L/lib64" make && make install

cd ../apr-util ./configure --enable-shared --prefix=$HOME --with-apr=$HOME --without-berkeley-db LDFLAGS="-L/lib64" make && make install

5. Install neon, I had been stuck here for an hour because of the 64 bit mode problem, remember to explicitly enable compilation of shared libraries and prefix the files into home directory.

cd ../neon EXTRA_CFLAGS="-L/lib64 -fPIC" CFLAGS="-L/lib64 -fPIC" ./configure --prefix=$HOME --enable-shared LDFLAGS="-L/lib64" --with-libs=$HOME make && make install

6. Install Subversion, pass --without-apxs and --without-apache to prevent svn installing Apach modules, also you need to explicitly specify the dependencies.

cd ../ ./configure --prefix=$HOME --without-berkeley-db --with-apr=$HOME --with-apr-util=$HOME --with-neon=$HOME -without-apxs --without-apache make && make install

7. Modify .bash_profile and .bashrc file

nano -w .bash_profile (pico is always my favourite.)
add $HOME/system/bin to PATH variable, it should look like this:
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin:$HOME/system/bin
Also add this line to your .bashrc file, after the ‘fi‘
PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

8. Logout the current session and log on again, let’s try:
mkdir ~/repos cd repos svnadmin create topsecrets007plus

now you can access your repository like this:
svn+ssh://username@host/home/username/repos/topsecrets007plus/
just replace username with your 8-character user name given by BlueHost.

February 14 th

Hello world

Filed under: off-topic — Liwen @ 11:20 pm

Life is like a circle.

Over the past 6 years, two of my 5 blogs had been in the first page of Google, one of them even stayed on PageRank 5. Sadly, I had to leave them behind due to different reasons, mostly because life change experiences made me believe that I need to grow up and start something more natural. I asked myself many times why I kept trying hard to please other people instead of just keeping a log, for myself.

After deletion, creation, deletion and creation… I finally understood that what I have deleted are not just posts, they are my time, my efforts and my thoughts. Blog is not like shining gadgets, you can throw them away and buy new ones with more features. It is your garden, you just need to cultivate it with patience, to accept failures and then grow up, with usual mind and heart.

The name ‘Keep [C]*(od|do)ing”, is to remind me to be persistent.