Fedora 17 vs Ubuntu 12.04

Binary Voting

Moving The Needle

These days the expression “move the needle” is popular where I work. I did not know it was an expression of Steve Jobs.

“The company starts valuing the great salesmen, because they’re the ones who can move the needle on revenues, not the product engineers and designers. So the salespeople end up running the company… Then the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off. It happened at Apple when John Sculley came in, which was my fault, and it happened when Ballmer took over at Microsoft. Apple was lucky and it rebounded, but I don’t think anything will change at Microsoft as long as Ballmer is running it.”

This is from the biography, just saw that in an interesting article about Microsoft problems:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer?mbid=social_retweet

I would not take those words literally: I have seen a company with the inverse problem: developping technical stuff for the sake of it, without a connection to what the market (or the users) are really after.

In the case of Apple, the engineers and designers actually know quite well what the market is after, maybe more so than the salespeople. But it is unfortunately not the case in every company. Still the case of people turning off because it is too hard to convince the hierarchy is probably quite common.

When solar panels don't work

I thought I would add another word about keyboard trends. A coworker has bought the Logitech K750, the one with solar panels to recharge the battery. This keyboard has excellent reviews on many websites, or even on Amazon. I somehow always found the idea a bit strange, it looked like the old solar panel calculators that used to be trendy when I was in primary school.Well after maybe 6 months of use, he needs to change the battery! It sounds like the solar panels were just a marketing plot after all.

Excel Bulk Entry of Jira using Apache HttpClient & POI

List<NameValuePair> formparams = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
formparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("os_username", "mouse@thecat"));
formparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("os_password", "DEADDEAD"));
UrlEncodedFormEntity entity = new UrlEncodedFormEntity(formparams, "UTF-8");
HttpPost httppost = new HttpPost("https://jira.calypso.com/rest/gadget/1.0/login");
httppost.setEntity(entity);
DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();
CookieStore cookieStore = new BasicCookieStore();
httpclient.setCookieStore(cookieStore);
ResponseHandler<byte[]> handler = new ResponseHandler[]>() {
	public byte[] handleResponse(HttpResponse response)
			throws ClientProtocolException, IOException {
		System.out.println("<-" + response.getStatusLine());
		HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
		if (entity != null) {
			return EntityUtils.toByteArray(entity);
		} else {
			return null;
		}
	}
};
System.out.println("->" + httppost.getURI());
byte[] response = httpclient.execute(httppost, handler); 

formparams = new ArrayList<NameValuePair>();
formparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("inline", "true"));
formparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("decorator", "dialog"));
formparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("startDate", startDate));
formparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("timeLogged", timeLogged));
formparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("id", id));
formparams.add(new BasicNameValuePair("adjustEstimate", "auto"));
entity = new UrlEncodedFormEntity(formparams, "UTF-8");
httppost = new HttpPost("https://jira.calypso.com/secure/CreateWorklog.jspa");
httppost.addHeader("Referer", "https://jira.calypso.com/browse/"+ jiraCAL);
httppost.setEntity(entity);
System.out.println("->" + httppost.getURI());
response = httpclient.execute(httppost, handler);

InputStream inp = new FileInputStream(file);
HSSFWorkbook wb = new HSSFWorkbook(new POIFSFileSystem(inp));
List list = new ArrayList();
HSSFSheet sheet = wb.getSheetAt(0);
boolean isEmpty = false;
int i = 0;
while (!isEmpty) {
	HSSFRow row = sheet.getRow(i);
	if (row == null) { isEmpty=true; break;}
	
	HSSFCell dateCell = row.getCell(0);
	HSSFCell calCell = row.getCell(1);
	HSSFCell idCell = row.getCell(2);
	HSSFCell percentCell = row.getCell(3);
	if (dateCell == null) {
		isEmpty = true;
	} else if (dateCell.getCellType() == HSSFCell.CELL_TYPE_NUMERIC && calCell != null){
		TimeLine timeLine = new TimeLine();
		timeLine.date = HSSFDateUtil.getJavaDate(dateCell.getNumericCellValue());
		if (timeLine.date.after(startDate)
				&& timeLine.date.before(endDate)) {
			timeLine.jiraCAL = calCell.getStringCellValue();
			if (timeLine.jiraCAL != null && timeLine.jiraCAL.length() > 0) {
				timeLine.id = Integer.toString((int)idCell.getNumericCellValue());
				timeLine.percent =  Integer.toString((int)percentCell.getNumericCellValue());
				list.add(timeLine);
			}
		}
	}
	i++;
}

Keyboard Porn

I have been browsing the web, looking for a nice computer keyboard. Programming is a big part of my job, a comfortable keyboard is therefore important to my daily life.

I looked and looked, read the forums. The hip keyboards seem to be the mechanical ones. It tempted me to get a WASD keyboard even though I never liked the feel and sound of my uncle’s IBM model M keyboard. WASD offers the combination of red cherry switches and o rings which should be significantly better for me.

I manage to do around 70 wpm (words per minute) on the Microsoft Wired Keyboard 600, as well as on some very basic 4€ keyboard (old style slightly noisy chinese rubber dome Atlantis Land K2101), but on the Logitech K800, I only do 55 wpm. So there it is for the 80€ keyboard compared to the 4€ one. Those numbers are not very precise, I only tried a silly simple wpm website. I am still a bit curious about those MS comfort curve keyboards, they don’t have great reviews but it might be a small improvement over the basic Wired Keyboard 600.

Adaptive Quadrature for Pricing European Option with Heston

Gnome Shell more stable than Unity on Ubuntu 12.04

sudo gedit /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/weather@gnome-shell-extensions.gnome.org/metadata.json

John Carmack on Parallelism

This is the interesting bit

“Modify some of your utility object code to return new copies instead of self-mutating, and try throwing const in front of practically every non-iterator variable you use”.

http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programming-in-c/

Google Galaxy Nexus Sound Quality Is Great

Many people are not enthusiastic of this phone sound if you read silly forums. They are wrong! the sound coming out of this thin phone is amazing, at least with high quality headphones. I find the akg q601 incredible with it: much much better than with the old ipod nano or the cowon i7.

In general most complaints i have read about the phone were wrong. The battery is ok, the size is great.