Four Island

TLDR: Going forward, I will be hosting most of my code on code.fourisland.com instead of Github.

At some point in the last decade, Github took over the world of open source development.

I can't really remember when it happened. Before then, I would maintain my source repositories on my own server. I used CVS at first, before switching to Subversion, then Git, and then Mercurial. I stuck with Mercurial through most of high school, if I recall correctly, although now that I've become an avid Git user (perhaps something forced onto me in college?), I'm not sure what it was that I liked about Mercurial over Git. The point is that throughout that time, I just had source repos on my server, and I'd clone them on whatever computer I was doing development on. It was fine.

One of the earliest times I can remember using Github was to host the code for Rawr eBooks. It was adapted from a class assignment in my second year of college, so that timeline seems to fit the narrative that school got me into using Git. It was around that time that I also moved away from maintaining my own infrastructure as much. I was no longer using my personal website, Four Island (yes, the one you're on right now! it's complicated). I also was not working on the kind of projects I had worked on in high school anymore.

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Hi! Guess what came out a few days ago! The long-awaited iOS 4.2.1 jailbreak! Horray! At least, that's what I was thinking, having been stuck on iOS 4.1 for months. I eagerly downloaded Greenpois0n RC5 and tried to jailbreak. This was my horrific experience:

1. First, I downloaded Greenpois0n RC5. Not as simple as you would think because so many other people were trying the same exact thing. I finally managed to get it off a mirror, though.
2. Second, I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 4.2.1. It took quite a while and when it finished, it popped up with Error 1013 (or something like that) and demanded that I restore my iPhone to factory settings. I would rather not.
3. Going out on a limb, I tried using RecBoot to kick my iPhone out of recovery mode and, what do you know, it worked! I later discovered that Error 1013 was a result of having Cydia's TSS server in my /etc/hosts file and that practically everybody knew to use RecBoot at that point. :P
4. Now for the exciting part: untethered jailbreak. I ran Greenpois0n and... nothing happened. Greenpois0n said "Complete :)", but when my phone finished restarting, I could tell that clearly, nothing had happened. Wow. After a few more attempts with nothing happening, I gave up.
5. Still needing a jailbreak, though, I downloaded redsn0w and an ISPW file.
6. Then, I gained a tethered jailbreak using redsn0w. I was excited to see that, even though I had to reinstall all of my Cydia apps, all of my settings were still there.
7. Upset that I was tethered and slightly regretting upgrading at all, I tried to get an untethered jailbreak again and re-ran Greenpois0n. This time, instead of just failing like usual, it got my iPhone stuck in the Apple Logo Boot Cycle Of Death. You know, when the phone starts booting and then restarts over and over again?
8. Guess what the only solution to that is? Restore your iPhone. Great. Just great. I avoided having to do it before and now I'm ending up doing it anyway.
9. I waited like a half an hour for it to finish and you know what happens next? Error 1013. (Or something like that). So, I blanked my iPhone and it was still stuck in the boot cycle. I did some research and discovered the cause of the error was the entry in the hosts file, so I removed the entry and restored again.
10. Okay, better; it worked that time. Good thing I had a backup of my device from before I jailbroke, otherwise I would've been very annoyed at that point. Restoring from the backup also took a bit of time
11. Then, I had to sync all of my media. Goodness, that took a long time.
12. Finally, I was back to the point I was at during step 4, but this time, there was a new version of Greenpois0n to try: Greenpois0n RC5 v2. So, I tried to jailbreak and this time, instead of silently failing, it said "Failed :(". Wow, that's so much better.
13. I decided to get serious and took a peek at the logs. They were filled with libusb errors and such, so I did some research and downloaded the newest version of libusb from MacPorts.
14. Did that do anything? Nope. Very annoyed at this point, I opened my Twitter client and saw that some people suggested running the actual binary (instead of the bundle) from the Terminal as an administrator.
15. sudo Greenpois0n.app/Contents/MacOS/Greenpois0n
16. ohmygoditworked. :D Finally, after a whole ton my time was wasted, I got my untethered jailbreak back. Except, I didn't have Cydia yet. And the Loader.app wasn't working.
17. Not a problem, though, because I had previously read that the strain put on Greenpois0n's servers had stopped Loader.app from working and that you could instead install Cydia using redsn0w without breaking your untethered jailbreak, so I loaded up redsn0w again and installed Cydia.
18. Horray! Now, I just had to reinstall all of my apps (thankfully, the configuration was all still there, probably thanks to my backup) and I could finally listen to music on my iPhone again! You know, because I'm a last.fm nut and I can't listen to any music if it won't get scrobbled. :P

Upgrading to 4.2.1 certainly was an ordeal, but was it worth it? Well, so far as I can currently tell, not really. Well, sort of. I set up Find My iPhone and am very happy with it, though I think it's a bit unlikely that I'll lose my iPhone. You never know, though, right? Besides that, well, though I am very excited to have AirPrint, I'm not sure when I'll ever use it. Ditto to AirPlay, seeing as we don't actually have any AirPlay speakers and I would rather have an iTunes instance controlling AirPlay speakers. Also, I hate the new Voice Memos icon. Whatever; I guess it just best to always have the latest software.

Have you had any horrific jailbreaking experiences? Do you want to jailbreak and now can because of Greenpois0n RC5? Do you want a burrito? Leave a comment and I'll consider taping it to my fridge!

This is a problem. It's seriously a factor in why I don't post so very frequently. My website just really looks terrible. I want my website to look smooth, simple and easy to read. Instead, it looks like this:

Not only does it look bad, but its internals suck too. Why is three-year old PHP code from a time when I thought MVC and <!DOCTYPE> tags were bad running my website?

Four Island 3.

It's a comin'.

There's been a lot of speculation recently about the addition of four-fingered gestures to the iPad in iOS 4.3. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, soon you will. Apple recently released iOS 4.3 Beta 1 and one of the new features is the ability to go to the home screen with a four-fingered pinch, open the multitasking tray with a four-fingered swipe up and switch apps with a four-fingered swipe to the left or the right. Now, this is all pretty cool and I support it 100%, but what I don't support is the mass-rumor that this is eventually going to lead to the removal of the home button.

No. Just... no.

Why exactly would that be horrible? Well, for one thing, the learning curve. Anyone who doesn't know about four-fingered pinch to exit is immediately stuck in an app forever and ever and ever, twirling down an infinite horror whirlpool to death do they part.... You get the point. The home button has always been an easily-recognizable, instantly-usable method of exiting out of an app and everyone knows it.

Second, the home button's dual-function of waking up the device when it's locked. Sure, the lock button also does that, but it's always seemed counterintuitive to me to press the lock button when I want to unlock the device, and besides, the home button is so much easier to press in those instances. Without the home button, someone looking at an iPhone for the first time at an Apple Store may pick it up, toss it lightly from hand to hand and maybe ask someone, "Hey, is this the new iBrick?"

Perhaps I just don't like change. Yeah, that's probably it. But still, the home button needs to stay. Because.

I know, I know, it may not be the best of titles as one of OS X's most criticized elements is how bad it is at window management, but hear me out. Okay, so Snow Leopard has been the latest version of Mac OS X for quite a while now and it's the OS X I fell in love with and the OS X I currently use. I really do enjoy Snow Leopard. Then, about a month ago, I sat around on October 20th, waiting to hear what Apple was going to announce because we all knew it would be a new version of Mac OS X. Yes, we were right. But, no, I was not satisfied at all with the news of Mac OS X Lion, and here I am, finally about to explain it. :P

Macs have always been criticized (quite frequently by me) as being too different, but since discovering that I love Macs, I've realized that it's not supposed to be the same as anything. And why should it? There's no reason that Mac OS X should be the same as Windows or Linux, and there's no reason it should have the same paradigms. One huge paradigm difference I've noticed between Windows and OS X is window management.

In Windows, it's not only easy to do, but it's practically expected of you that you will pretty much have your windows maximized at all times, unless you're doing something that requires you to see two windows at once. Windows is a huge fan of the MDI (Multiple Document Interface) paradigm which allows you to have one window maximized, but able to see and interact with a lot of information.

By contrast, OS X's window management paradigm is centered around SDI (Single Document Interface) windows, and a lot of them. In OS X, it's not fashionable to have a window filling your screen--you can do many things at once and the windows are all there! In fact, one of the biggest annoyances that people switching to the Mac find is that they expect the three stoplights in the top left of every window to act similarly to the window control buttons in the top right of every window in Windows, probably because they look similar. And yes, for the most part, they do act similarly, but the green stoplight does not do the same thing as the maximize button--it simply resizes the window to best fit its contents.

Now, as I'm sure you'll notice, the SDI paradigm doesn't really work out too well on my laptop with its tiny 1280x800 screen. While I totally agree with the Mac's SDI paradigm, I believe it only really works well on desktop computers because they have much larger screens. On computers like my laptop, the screen is so small that I normally have to keep certain apps' windows maximized all the time like Mail, Safari and NetNewsWire. But on desktop computers and laptops that are hooked up to larger screens (which I totally plan to do some day! :D ), SDI works fine and is so awesome.

One of OS X Lion's most touted features is the addition of full-screen modes to a whole ton of apps. This worries me. I mean, yes, I can certainly see it being handy on a laptop, but when I get my LED Cinema Display and hook my laptop up to that so I have a bigger screen, what then? I don't want full screen apps with such a large screen--I want my SDI paradigm back! The iPad is the iPad, but the Mac is the Mac--they're two completely separate things and I really don't think OS X needs to take anything from iOS.

Yes. Change is always bad. :P

No, but really, this really bothers me. I have strange dreams of having a large-screen Mac and writing a post on Four Island with MarsEdit while reading an email and surfing the web at the same time as chatting with friends and doing a little programming in TextMate. No, seriously, I'm not weird. :P

This isn't the only problem I have with OS X Lion, but it's a pretty big one. One of the other problems I have is the iOS-ization of some built-in apps, such as Mail and iCal:

Doesn't that look... just... bad? Snow Leopard stole my heart with its colorful, sleek interface and iOS just does not work like that. iOS belongs on the iPhone / iPod touch / iPad / Apple TV / WHATEVER, and Mac OS X belongs on the Mac. Let's keep it that way, shall we?

I'd like to make one last note regarding the criticism of Mac window management, specifically with regards to resizing windows. Sure, you can only resize Mac windows from one corner, and yes, that is fairly annoying, but it's not too bad. On the other hand, Windows programs, when not maximized, have a hideous border around them that allows you to resize in any direction. No. Just.... no. There is no real middle point, though, because GNOME on Linux allows resizing from any direction without a hideous border and it's just impossible to resize a window without either clicking through to the background or clicking in the window. Yay for Macs.

Finally, I'd like to say: Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Birthday To TimTam! :P

Okay, folks, as I mentioned last week, Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat came out. I decided to use it for a week before writing a post about it (9.10's was a bit hasty). And, you know what? It's just getting worse. Kind of makes me happy that I like Macs now because Ubuntu is kind of starting to anger me.

Okay, first of all, the upgrade itself. The upgrade was fantastically easy. I'm telling you, the upgrades are getting easier, but the OS is getting worse. But last time, easy meant "torrent the alternative CD from Windows and install half of the packages from there". This time, easy meant "click Upgrade." Really, I went to Update Manager and I clicked Upgrade. And it worked. Wow.

Anyway, I then had Ubuntu 10.10 and was find that I liked quite a lot of things about it. First of all, as I mentioned earlier, the Ubuntu Font. It's just freaking awesome. It's used pretty much everywhere now and combined with rounder controls and a pastel-ish color scheme, Ubuntu looks prettier than ever. Not prettier than Mac OSX, though, but still, pretty nice.

The second thing I noticed was that the flashing problem had diminished. In Ubuntu 10.04, whenever I closed the lid of my laptop, when I opened it again, EVERYTHING WOULD START FLASHING. For a while. It was UNBEARABLE. Well, in 10.10, the problem is mostly gone. It now only flashes once or twice. Not as annoying.

However, the good things seemed to stop there and the whole experience started to get very, very annoying:

• I found that, with certain wireless access points, my computer absolutely refused to co-operate. It would (sometimes) let me connect and occasionally allow me to load a page or two, but it would be infinitely slow and it would just stop serving me pages. I eventually found out that blacklisting a bunch of alternate drivers for my wireless card fixed the problem, but still. Very annoying.
• Slow. SLOW SLOW SLOW. What has happened? For one thing, the mouse occasionally just gets "stuck". And by occasionally, I mean increasingly frequently. And sometimes, the mouse moves as if it had a mind of its own: the other day, the mouse was actually avoiding Drifty's name as I tried to initiate a chat with her (I eventually used the keyboard). Also, when I use the terminal, text appears very slowly.
• When you start to drag an image, and then let go because you've changed your mind, it gets stuck there until you restart X. Actually, it's not just images, random stuff in general can get stuck on your screen. An autocomplete popup is now stuck on my screen. I am very, very angry.
• Okay, for some reason, GNOME just went insane. Both the dock and the panel at the top vanished and a Nautilus window filled the screen. I found out that the display was semi-frozen--moving the mouse around changed the cursor and made popups appear and I could click on menus, but I had no clue what was giong on. I had to kill X. With all of this X killing that's going on, I'm losing a ton of work. This is really frustrating.
• After another week of testing Ubuntu 10.10, I've found that a whole ton of things can get frozen on the screen accidentally. You can usually remove them by repeating whatever trigger caused them to appear in the first place. However, it's still very annoying and argh, Ubuntu 10.10 is just so slow. Today, the mouse suddenly froze for a very long time (about 5 minutes) while the wireless disconnected (though I was in a high-signal area) and refused to reconnect until I restarted the computer.

All in all, Ubuntu 10.10 really annoys me. Really can't wait until I get a Mac. :P

Yeah, I'm just going to borrow a few minutes of your time to rant about something that annoys me for a reason I cannot fathom. There's a myth going around that ketchup is a brand name (like how adhesive bandages are almost always called "Band-Aids") and that the substance as actually called "catsup." You know what I say here?

FALSE!

After about a minute of looking around Wikipedia, I found the answer. But before that, just think for a minute. What is ketchup? Really, what is it? Those in Australia know this better than we do in America because it's not often called "ketchup" there. What's it normally called in Australia?

Tomato sauce.

Yeah, if you've somehow forgotten, ketchup is tomato sauce. No, it's not the same tomato sauce you put on your spaghetti, but seriously, it's a sauce made out of tomatoes. It's not like sausages, where you don't know what it's made of; ketchup is tomato sauce. Really.

As for catsup, I think I'll let the Wikipedia article speak for itself:

Ketchup (also spelled catsup, catchup, ketsup) is a condiment that in modern times is usually made from tomatoes.

Wikipedia

Catsup is simply an alternate (and obsolete) spelling of ketchup. They're the same exact thing, and neither one is a brand name. So there.

I guess now you know how silly I get when someone is wrong, somewhere. Oh well. :P

Okay, this post may be a bit shocking to some people who know me and my feelings towards Apple products, specifically Macs, in the past, but I kind of feel it needs to be said.

I like Macs now.

I'll give you all a few minutes to find a defibrillator and restart your heart.

Done yet? Okay, good. Now, please, someone, tell me what my argument against Macs was. Anyone at all. Nothing? Huh? That's right, I can't remember a single, valid argument I had against Macs. I would just go "THEY'RE EVIL" and "THEY CAN'T DO ANYTHING" and then run away in a cloud of smoke. I was even reading back on Four Island and found an old post where I interviewed "an idiot" as to why he liked iPhones, saying only idiots liked them and, volia, I now have an iPhone. Interesting. :P

I think I must've had a scarring experience with a Mac in my childhood or something because I seem to make fights between Apple and I where they aren't necessary. I mean, come on, I don't even KNOW why I started saying that iPads were bad. Sure, I dislike how a lot of people are saying that they could be used as a replacement for a computer because that's definitely not what they should be used for, but I do, actually, like the iPad. It was a cool concept and it definitely would be like "holding the Internet in your hands".

Macs look really nice, they're fun to use and they're really, really fast. I actually know that, and I haven't been hypnotized by the Apple website, because my cousin has a MacBook Pro and I keep telling him that it's evil instead of telling him that I like it for some reason. Oh, and the magnetic power cord is just SO much fun. :P

Now, while this may be a bit out-of-the-blue, it really has been a while in the coming. While I love the freedom of Linux and the speed increase it has over Windows Vista, I really, really like professional looking and highly integrated operating systems and sadly, Linux doesn't really fit either of those. Linux has a thrown-together look going on and it has so many random programs that offer this functionality but it doesn't go well on this computer and it looks ugly over here and blah blah blah. So many programs to choose from that aren't so greatly integrated with this and that and it's so frustrating.

So, basically, I'm saying that I'm no longer hating on Apple products just for the sake of hating on Apple products. That doesn't mean I can't still hate on Apple, though. :P If it weren't for them locking down iOS, we wouldn't have to jailbreak and it would be so much easier to run awesome apps on your iPhone! :P Anyway, I've been meaning to post this since Sunday and this whole procrastination thing is really annoying me, so here goes.

EDIT: Okay, I know this post is kind of stupid, but I have some better reasons in a comment to a more recent post.

Yesterday, I had the horrific experience of being forced to attend a baseball game. The situation was comparable to being injected with cyanide, only slightly worse. Yes, I don't like sports.

I really don't know why this was necessary. Unlike me, most of my family are sports fans and my immediate family are fans of one baseball team while the rest of the family are fans of another team and oh god, please just stop bickering about that. I. Don't. Care. Next, we arrive at the "OMG STATIUM" which is apparently super cool or whatever and everyone I'm with is like "OH MY GOD! YOU HAVEN'T BEEN HERE SINCE THE RENOVATIONS! YOU'RE GONNA LOVE IT!" Well, with more grammatical mistakes.

The stadium? What could possibly be so exciting about a stadium? Well? Nothing, in my opinion. It was a place.... where people "watched" "people play sports" and got fat from hotdogs. Nothing interesting happened there AT ALL.

When the game finally started, I learned something about baseball. THEY'RE NOT PLAYING HALF THE TIME. There was a very loud speaker behind me (and probably other places in the stadium) and it would just randomly start playing sound bytes like "LET'S GO NAME OF TEAM" and "annoying clapping noise" and, on at least four occasions, "JUST GONNA STAND THERE AND WATCH ME BURRRN; BUT THAT'S ALRIGHT BECAUSE I LIKE THE WAY IT HURTS". Oh god, just kill me. They would be like walk and then the speaker would be like "OMG BUY POTATS--THE OFFICIAL POTATO CHIPS OF US" and then walk and then the speaker would be like "AHM RIDIN' SOLO" and I would throw a hockey player at it and then walk and then the speaker would be like "IM NICK CANON! YAY TEAM!" and then hit ball with bat and the whole, horrible process would just repeat AGAIN AND AGAIN AND OH MY- shot

I think I was about half-dead by the time that we left (because our "team" was losing by like 5 points, lol) and I had only managed to get through half of "Life, The Universe And Everything" before my brain totally shut down. But you know what? I think it was worth it. What, attending the game? Heck, no. It was worth surviving through it; because, now, I HAVE AN IPHONE 4! :D It arrived this morning and, gosh, I don't care about what people say, I LOVE IT. :D I will write about it in another post because I am tired right now and this post is about bad stuff and is rather rant-y and insane. Because baseball is horrible. Yes.

Let me show you a quote from our IRC conversation two days ago. We had gotten onto the topic of .NET technologies and other Microsoft products after I told Smiley that I had started to look into learning a bit of ASP.Not (I mean ASP.NET--I just like to make fun of them :P ) just a few hours earlier and Tamasys was, as usual, berating me for my usual lack of excitement over Microsoft products (I say usual because I quite like C#--on Mono, that is :P ). When I asked what "Silverlight" was:

(12:39:57 AM) Smiley: suddenly ninjas, thousands of them
(12:39:57 AM) Tamasys: O_o
(12:40:05 AM) Tamasys: how do you not know what Silverlight is?
(12:40:08 AM) Tamasys: **attacks**
(12:40:18 AM) Hatkirby: Hmm, let's see, I'M A LINUX FANGIRL YO
(12:40:20 AM) Tamasys: silly Linux person..

Yeah, and there's a reason for that.

So, yesterday, I was working with ASP.Not a little bit more. I was following a tutorial from the Microsoft website and it would occur quite frequently that something wouldn't work and I would have to jump through some massive flaming hoops to get it to work with Mono. After slaving over DbLinq, switching to PostgreSQL, switching back to MySQL and adding foreign keys just to find that I couldn't have something called "navigation properties", I was like "yo" and decided to try writing an ASP.Not website using the official, Microsoft IDE.

Yeah, no. At first, I tried installing it in my virtual machine, but then I realized that that was really, really stupid and it was just so stupid that it was stupid. Then, I tried restarting into my Windows Vista partition and installing it there. I clicked on some Microsoft Web Platform thing which was linked to from the tutorial and decided to install it. When the wizard came up, I noticed that "Visual Web Designer Express" was missing from the list somehow, but I shrugged it off and pressed install.

Then this happened. Twice.

I AM GOING TO HIRE SOMEONE TO KILL YOUR FAMILY, WEB PLATFORM INSTALL! This download manager was surely the spawn of the devil. The first time I tried installing stuff, it hung at the first item (IIS), it's stupid indeterminate progress bar giving me no indication whatsoever that something real was actually happening. I eventually had to cancel the wizard after about 10 minutes of nothing happening, which, after 5 minutes of "cancelling", told me that I was an idiot and everything was going fine until I rolled along. I stabbed it with a knife and tried again.

The second time I tried installing stuff, it told me that I had already installed IIS and some other stuff which I surely had not as nothing new had appeared in the Start Menu and the program once again hung at the first item. However, this time, it wouldn't cancel and it started dancing around the screen like an epileptic tapeworm on ice and the Task Manager didn't help anything at all by joining the dance party and winning three awards. I had to use the command prompt to kill Task Manager, which somehow, instead, made it stop dancing, and then used it to kill the installer. God.

After that, I started getting errors such as "Your operating system is not supported." Wtf, I was running Windows Vista. Granted, it's one of the worst operating systems of all time, but surely it was supported by Web Platform Install. I mean, I just ran it twice. I clicked the link and read that only Vista Service Pack 2 was supported. I checked my computer and sure enough, I only had Service Pack 1. So, I, being the optimistic trashcan that I am, decided to install it.

No. Just.... no. First, Windows took 20 minutes installing auxiliary updates (after which I had to restart, of COURSE) before actually allowing me to start the upgrade process, which it warned would take around an hour. Okay; I took out my summer reading book and worked away at that while Vista downloaded and then installed the upgrade. I checked the screen after every page so that when the computer inevitably restarted, I could tell GRUB to boot into Windows again.

About an hour later, after I had finished about a chapter and a half of my book, I looked up and saw something horrible, something truly hideous on my screen.

WHAT THE AMANDA PALMER'S MIDDLE NAME?!?!?!?! So it decides that after an hour of installing pointless garbage on my computer and reaching 100% on all three stages of the upgrade that NOW it would fail? If there was something seriously wrong, it surely could have been checked during the installation, or even before it. Anyway, I was now too furious to continue reading my book and I sat in my chair, waiting for perhaps 20 minutes while Windows uninstalled the service pack. God.

When the computer restarted again, after it had done some more uninstalling, it finally let me back into Windows. But really, what was the point? Nothing happened--I was still on service pack one. On a whim, I decided to run Web Platform Install again. Despite having even less available items to install this time, it actually (sort of) worked. I left it running in the background and 10 minutes later, it told me that it had installed one item and wanted to restart. "Oh god, please shoot me," was probably what I was thinking at that point.

So, find, I restarted the computer. Except, when the computer turned back on, it said "Uninstalling Service Pack". WTF? You already did that! Plus, it can't be anything serious--I was just using Windows! OH MY GOD I THINK I MIGHT EXPLODE. I was really quite angry at this point--and suddenly, I had a vision of what might happen if I had to use Windows all the time. I drew a little comic of what it might look like:

Image of me copyright Drifty. Image of Laptop probably copyright Acer. Image of window copyright I don't know and I don't care. :P

Later on, when my computer had finished it's reboot and finished installing everything, I found that not only was I right about Visual Web Developer not being installed, but that it was also the reason I was getting the error message before! The only reason I was able to successfully install the other stuff was because I used a different link to download Web Platform Installer, one that didn't include Web Developer and now that I did want it, I would have to upgrade to the latest Service Pack.

It was at this point that I decided to stop being so lazy and just write the one extra query needed to replace the need for navigation properties.

I'm a Linux fangirl, foo. :P