Losing Weight With Technology

About 8 months ago I started running because I noticed that Nike+ was built into my iPhone 3GS.  I had run in the past, but never very seriously.  I started to lose a bit of weight, but it wasn’t coming off like I felt it should.  I’ve always been heavy, except for the couple of times in my life when I went on a crash diet.  Once I lost nearly 100 lbs, way back when I was 16 by eating every other day.  Recently I think I have found something that works so A few days ago I felt motivated to indulge in telling my story on my blog since perhaps someone would find it helpful.  Since my weight kept going up, and I kept exercising harder and harder, I thought that something must be wrong with me.  At one point I was riding my bike to work, totaling over 200 miles a week and I didn’t lose an ounce.

Over the years, the lifestyle of a software engineer and a literature nerd took its toll on me and I gained back all of the weight that I had lost when I was 16, and then some.  I signed up for one of Nike’s virtual running plans and started to run more and more.  I was really enjoying analyzing the data that was coming out of my nike plus, that combined with the weather data from slowgeek.  But I wasn’t really losing any weight.  I just sort of settled into the fact that maybe I was just one of those people who were meant to be fat.

My wife wanted me to go to the doctor and ask for statins, which I did, because she was worried about my blood pressure and cholesterol, which I hadn’t checked in forever.  My doctor agreed with me that something wasn’t right about the fact that I wasn’t losing weight, even though I was working out like a demon, that my blood pressure was so high, and that I was having allergy and miscellaneous immune issues.  She didn’t want to give me any drugs, she is an awesome doctor, so she sent me over to get a lab done.

The cool thing about my doctor is that, much like a software engineer tracking a problem, she was able to string together a bunch of seemingly random data, anecdotal and otherwise, mix it with empirical data from the labs and quickly come to a working theory of what was going on.  I had a chronic vitamin D deficiency.  I know it sounds like a joke, and I thought it was pretty silly when she prescribed me high-dose vitamins, but my laughter in ridicule quickly turned into joyous laughter once the weight started dropping off.  My cholesterol was fine, so that was the only thing.  My doctor told me that a) everyone has a vitamin D deficiency, and b) since I was African American it was worse for me, especially living in the Bay Area.  She said that vitamin D plays a role in, get this, metabolizing sugar.  That without it your body has a hard time using the energy from sugar.  Well most of everything we eat is sugar ( high-fructose corn syrup ), so this would explain why I couldn’t lose weight.

That wasn’t all either, I had been moody for quite some time, but the Vitamin D mellowed my moods and helped me to concentrate.  About the same time I had been reading a book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  I was becoming more conscious of what I was eating.  I figured that since the iPhone was so awesome at capturing data with the Nike+ and that I always have it with me, if I could find something that would track my nutrients and calories on the iPhone I’d be able to see what was going on with my diet.

When I first started using LoseIt! (ITMS Link) I was shocked that almost all of my calories, between 4,000 and 6,000 a day were coming from carbohydrates.  I was running at something like 90% carbs 2% fat and the rest was protein.  Prior to using the program I was under the assumption that all I had to do was keep my fat down.  With my Vitamin D deficiency preventing me from actually burning the massive carbohydrate load I was putting in, my body was just storing everything.  Once I finally got the Vitamin D levels evened out with supplements, I started cutting down the calories.

Almost immediately I noticed that I started choosing the lower calorie foods with high protein such as eating a chicken breast, with no bread or rice, and a salad, instead of a salad and a horde of pretzels.  The pretzels had an insane amount of calories, so did bread, and rice, so I stopped eating so much of those almost immediately.  I started eating way more fat, and when I say way more, I mean that between 12% and 20% of my calories were from fat.  I still eat way more fat than people say is good for you, all the while losing weight at between 1 and 3 lbs a week, with little to no ravenous hunger that doesn’t occur at mealtimes.  Of course I avoid trans-fats and saturated fats, but I am not afraid to eat a steak or dark chicken meat.  Once you get into training for endurance sports your needs will change, but at the beginning it is really good advice to follow Chris Carmichael’s : Eat Right to Train Right foundation percentages.

All this data was making me giddy, I could actually see what was happening to my body as I changed the mixture and quantity of what I was eating.  As I fixed my diet, the constant hunger went away.  LoseIt had me at around 2800 calories when I was at about 260 lbs, but now it has me at about 2060 at 200.

LoseIt works on a very simple assumption, that 3500 calories a week equals 1 lbs, so short 3500 calories a week, you should lose 1 lbs per week.  With all the data I can now see, based on what I am eating, what is happening to me during races, long rides, etc… I have a much better understanding of why I am cramping up on rides, or during swims, or why I bonk, or can’t crank up the output on some days.  I am learning which foods burn best for what.

Everyone thinks that the government has BMI and the diet guidelines all wrong, and to be fair, it is a bit off, but not as much as people think.  People want to believe that they are just the way they are, and that they don’t need to, or can’t change.  Many people think that they can be healthy while being seriously overweight, or that they are somehow special and the laws of thermodynamics don’t apply to them.  Everyone is so focused on eating more “good calories”, etc… That is all bullshit.  A calorie is a calorie.  If you don’t burn it you will gain weight.  Unless you are a triathlete, marathoner, etc… 3500 calories = 1 lbs period.  First you have to fix any chemical or other issues in your way, but aside from physical biochemical issues, it is possible for everyone to be at a healthy weight, and it isn’t hard as long as you can be anal about tracking calories.

I would have lost 1 lbs per week had I not been running, picked up swimming, and started cycling more.  Instead I was losing around 3 to 3 and 1/2 lbs per week.  While doing all of this I was building my CycleMetrics application for the iPhone.  Testing it was a monster, I had to do intervals to test the power output on the bike even when I wasn’t riding simply for fun.  All the while aggregating my exercise data on Google Docs, and using LoseIt to count calories.  Some people may think it is rude when I pull out my phone at dinner and start tallying up the damage before I eat it, but it helps me with portion control, and screw them if they don’t like it.

At the moment I have lost 60 lbs.  I still have a bit to go to hit my ultimate goal, which is to hit the top end of the normal BMI range for my height and shoulder width, but now that I have a framework with which to control my weight and keep myself at peak physical and mental performance I am not concerned that I will hit them.

I would like to editorialize a bit and rant about the food industry.  It is absolutely insane that I need this much technology to figure out what is in the foods that I am eating.  I shouldn’t have to track every calorie this way, corn shouldn’t be in everything in the quantities that it is.  The government shouldn’t tax fossil fuels, they should tax high-fructose corn syrup.  Also, eating out is inordinately hard.  I needed The Daily Plate ( Livestrong ) (ITMS Link) Application just to figure out how to approximate what I was eating and what the calories are in stuff at restaurants.  They should really consider putting this on their menus voluntarily, and if they won’t the government should make them do it.  Only because if they don’t everyone’s health care bills will rise.

With all of the money that we are looking at spending to improve health-care, I can’t believe that we don’t do something about the sugar / corn intake of people.  Unless you look at what you are eating, the amount of calories that you can consume is really absurd.  The bag of pretzels next to your desk that you munch on while coding and listening to glitch music is about 1400 calories, you’d be better off with two butterfinger bars.  Better than that would be to eat a balanced lunch with fat, carbohydrates, and protein.

If I was reading this, and I was still where I was, I’d be saying to myself, yeah its all well and good that you found religion, but you are working out, eating right, and got quality medical care.  It worked for you, but how can I know that it will work for me?  Its a good question.  I don’t know that it will work for everyone.  However, what I do know is that for each of the people that I have given this app to who have seriously tracked what they ate, their results are the same as mine.  Think about it this way, development without a framework is hard, it is tough to know where to start, and even harder to know when you have built enough.

LoseIt is like a framework, it makes the hard decisions about how much and what to eat.  It lets you think about that fancy Lisp project that you want to build, instead of feeling guilty about eating too much, or wondering whether to eat this or that.  Really it doesn’t matter much what you eat, if your goal is to lose or maintain a healthy weight.  I still eat McDonalds, although I get a happy meal, I eat dominoes and drink copious amounts of beer.  The difference is that either I work out to get rid of the excess calories or I stop eating and drinking when I hit my limit.  That is not to say that you won’t have any health problems eating this stuff, it is just to say that your weight won’t be one of them if you stay within your calorie boundary.

As far as the exercise goes, there are so many different types of sports out there, even people who say they hate sports admit to not trying them all, who knows, you could have a desire to be a curling champion, or to do pole vault, etc…  There is something for everyone.

If you capture the data, imagine the awesome analysis software you can write to find trends.  Right now I am cross referencing my diet with the weather, and speed with altitude to see at which humidity and carb levels I perform best at with altitude.  It isn’t so much that I care, it is mostly about the fun with analyzing the data.  I never thought I would have so much access to the inner life of my body.  Anyway, I this is about wrapped up.  If you are having trouble losing weight look into Vitamin D, and if you haven’t already, grab LoseIt (free) and a copy of Omnivore’s dilemma, it will change your life for the better.

Why the Volume Approach to Sales in the Apple App Store Won’t Work

For a few months I have been thinking about the app store. Specifically I have been thinking through all of the drama and screaming that is occurring on the internet over the rejection of a few apps, the difficulty of finding anything quality in the app store, and the impact to actual users. The conclusion that I have come to is one that is different from the conclusion to which I had figured I’d arrive before thinking deeply about it.

Basically the App Store is great for Apple, but bad for developers. OK, you may think, well that is obvious and it is, but I don’t think that it is quite as simple as that. Firstly, I think Apple has brought their brilliance for marketing physical machines, accessories, and their integrated software and applied it to third party applications. Secondly, they have created an ecosystem where sales volume is king and the primary means of competition is over price, not quality. Regarding the second point, I am certain that they did not intend to do this however, it is in fact where things are today.

To understand why volume alone in software sales does not make one rich or profitable, you have to look at the contrast between physical goods sales, and service sales in an environment similar to the app store.

Imagine that you have an area like the Akihabara district in Tokyo, Japan, where you can buy anything technology based, motherboards, cameras, MP3 players, etc… Everyone who wants to sell this stuff crams into the Akihabara district even though there are already thousands of people there selling the same exact thing. So why would you do this one might think? It is because even though you have to drop your price to compete with the others, the number of people who will come to the Akihabara looking for some electronic thing is very high, if you were to locate elsewhere, you could increase the price, but you would have fewer people coming to your store. This is less than optimal for someone selling a physical good, to understand this, you have to look at how profitability works when selling a real thing.

If I can buy 5 widgets at $2, my cost is $10, if I sell the widgets at $4, my revenue is $40, my net profit is $30, not too bad. Now lets say I move into the Akihabara, I will need 1000 widgets to accommodate all of the foot traffic, and the people who want my widgets. Because I can sell 1000 widgets, the supplier is willing to sell them to me for $0.25 each. Now I have to cut my price because I have thousands of others selling the same type of widget, so lets say I cut the price to $2.50, my cost is now $25.00, but my revenue is now $2,500, that leaves my net profit at $2,475. I am making way more money now that I am in the Akihabara, even though I am losing some business to my competitors and my per item cost is lower, my profitability is actually better.

Now, lets say we do the same thing for a service based industry like plumbing. I have a plumbing business out in the suburbs and I charge $175 / hour to fix plumbing, maybe I get 100 hours of work every month since I am out in the suburbs and I am the only one. I am making $17,500 per month, I’m doing pretty well. Now I move into the plumber’s alley in town with 50 other plumbers, well, in order to get jobs, since it is so easy for customers to shop around, I have to cut my rate to $65 / hour, and since I am around there with 50 other plumbers, there is a bit more foot traffic, but I am just one guy so when I am out on a job, I can’t collect any more work. Now I am doing 150 hours of work each month, but at $65.00, I’m only making $9,750 per month. The answer would be to hire another guy, let’s say I do that, now I can do 300 hours of work each month, but I have to pay this clown, plus the drain on my time to train him to do it my way, after his pay, I am making $45.00 / month, $13,500, not bad, but still not as good as working less and making more in the suburbs.

Software is not exactly the same, but it is similar enough that the calculus works out nearly the same. I have just seen this happen with my CycleMetrics application, which applies to a broad vertical, versus my Mides application, which applies to a very narrow vertical, and came out when there were very few items in the app store.

With software, there is a significant up-front cost of your, or if you have to hire a team, your team’s time.  But for most people in the App Store, it is just you, lets say you want to build a really high quality application, it takes you about 18 months to get it all done alongside your day job.  You have put about 2,000 hours into it.  Typically your time is worth about $125 / hour, or at least that is the neighborhood in which an agency would price you out at as an iPhone dev in the bay area.  So you have put $200,000 into this iPhone application, or if you were to do a 12 month consulting job instead ( because it would be full-time ), that is what you would have made in salary plus benefits, or salary if you are a typical contractor.

By the time you put out your app, there are 300 other applications that do the same thing, 90% of them are crapware fake web apps with a Cocoa wrapper.  But in the App Store, the users can’t really tell the difference since the reviews have been gamed endlessly.  You don’t do any of that stuff, you play by the rules.  All of the other apps are priced at $0.99.  The target you have set to recoup your initial capital investment of $200,000 is two years.  You expect to sell about 100 a month average over 2 years, because your app is super awesome and you get a good pre-release review.  You realize that you would have to sell your app at $84 each to make that up in 2 years.  So you give up and hope for the best, you hope that Apple features you, or you hit the top 50 list.  You price your app at $19.99.  Apple rejects you a few times, so you have to put in another 100 hours into getting through the review process, now you are 2100 hours into it.  You figure you will eat that as a sunk cost now, chalk it up as a learning experience.

You sell 15 initially because people think it is so awesome that name-the-apple-podcast reviewed it.  Soon you start to notice a few bugs being reported in the comments that the Apple review has missed, and so have you.  But it will take a while to get the fix to market, and so you start this process over and over again.  This time it only takes 10 hours, but you have invested 2110 hours into the project, and have a 2 star rating in the App Store.  Now your sales are so low that you have to drop the price to keep moving units.  If you try raising your prices later, you will just not sell.

Even if all of the past time is sunk, you have future time in support and maintenance costs, even if you don’t add features.  It is the plumber model, you can never be as profitable as if you are a single guy working in an area in which there is nothing else like what you offer.

Most developers don’t count their initially invested time as money, so most developers don’t see this, but time is the only truly non-renewable resource.  They hear about the guy that sold 80,000 copies of x game in a month and raked in a million dollars.  Of course there will be a few like this, its like winning the lottery.  Apple picks a few and they do well for a time, after that however, they get pushed back into the pit with everyone else.

So, is there any way to fix it?  Apple has no incentive to fix it, they, and the app consumers are the beneficiaries of the huge delta in hours invested in the iPhone apps in the app store, and the lack of profit that the devs are getting.  I don’t think we should complain about it though.  It is awesomely powerful to be able to reach millions of people through the app store with a tap and a search.

There are three ways for devs to acheive profitability, one is for everyone in a section to raise their prices.  The overall sales volume would drop, but the profitability would increase, and everyone would make more money, not as much as if they were by themselves in the section, but more than they can make with the brute force of the quasi-free market forces in the app store.

The second way is to use the app store and your application to sell services outside of the app store, like Omni or pandora.  In Omni’s case, they use OmniFocus to drive sales of their mac desktop application where they have a vertical they own, selling productivity products for Mac OS X.  In Pandora’s case, they are using their application to drive affiliate link revenue as well as potentially some aggregate data mining products.  Either way, the bulk of their revenue is going to come from their other business efforts, the App Store is just an adjunct to this.

The third and probably most difficult way would be to come up with a product that is so unique in its technical application that it creates a natural barrier to entry, or to create a product for a vertical that is profitable, but is so small or difficult to understand that most competitors wouldn’t bother.  Examples of this would be like some sort of law research assistant with artificial intelligence that you could charge $199 for, or a notional application that would speak to industrial robots for which you could charge $30,000, but then you become acutely aware of the 30% that Apple charges.  At that price point, it might make more sense to develop it for Android and offer it directly from your site, but you get the idea.

The gist of all of this is that Apple has created a wonderful retail location in the image of their physical item store, one in which they have a monopoly on impressions and can leverage economies of scale.  Since economies of scale have no clear practical application to software development, the App Store should be seen as a massive lead generator for some other monetization strategy.  Getting angry at Apple for being Apple is pointless, take what they have given you and use it.

The last thought that I will leave you with is that Objective-C development is fun, and researching the background of Objective-C / Cocoa from smalltalk is also fascinating.  I am not for one minute suggesting that you shouldn’t develop applications for the iTunes App Store.  On the contrary, I think you should, but you should develop the applications because you enjoy the process, not because you hope to recoup your investment in a number of years.  You will likely not be able to recoup but a fraction of what you have invested.  That is not to say that you won’t get an awesome job with someone who has figured out how to make money in the store because of that initial time investment.  That is what I would be using the developer program for, to enrich and expand my programming abilities, not to try to get rich quick.

products

Here are a few products and projects that I am working on…

CycleMetrics

iPhone 3GS: The Image Speaks for Itself

Its on!

If Only All Web Sites Had Browser Stats Like This

At this point, I just wish that Internet Explorer would just go away completely, but at least I know that the readers of this blog don’t use it.  What I’d really like to see are the Safari and Opera numbers on top as well, but I guess I can dream, speaking of dreams, what if all sites browser stats were like this:

resume

IRVIN OWENS, JR.
ALAMEDA, CA.
(925) 899-5797
IRVIN@OWENSPERFORMANCE.COM
HTTP://WWW.OWENSPERFORMANCE.COM

TECHNICAL SKILLS

Cold Fusion MX 6.1, MySQL, Swift 3D, XML, ASP, JavaScript, IIS, Creative Suite, Apache Server, CSS, Microsoft Visio, Microsoft Access, FileMakerPro, Java, JSP, JSTL, Tomcat, NetBeans, Eclipse, Xcode, PHP, XHTML, Fusebox 3, Fusedocs 2, Web Standards, AJAX, XHR, DHTML, C#, ASP.net 2.0, Visual Studio 2005, Cocoa, Objective-C, iPhone SDK.

EXPERIENCE

• 2007 – Present: Epocrates, Inc.
  Manager, Web Applications User Interface  
  • Lead the Epocrates web UI team to develop cutting edge SOA based interface to support multiple web based devices.Responsibilities include mentorship of other team members, defining standards and techniques, design and creation of cutting edge AJAX based web interfaces. Used JSTL, JavaScript, DHTML, design patterns, understanding of OO based design, knowledge of browser incompatibilities and knowledge of standards based web development to build dynamic next generation applications as a member of a very accomplished development team.Invited to Apple to work on the iPhone SDK pre-release. Built Epocrates demo for March 6th SDK event. Built Epocrates iPhone Web Application. Represented Epocrates on stage with Glenn Keighley. Designed native Pill Picker, helped to design and build Epocrates Essentials for iPhone. Redesigned domain model, and am currently implementing new service based domain server using Java.
• 2006 – 2007: Epocrates, Inc.
  Senior Web Developer  
  • Responsibilities include mentorship of other team members,
    defining standards and techniques,
    design and creation of cutting edge AJAX based web interfaces.
    Used JSTL, Java, JavaScript, DHTML, design patterns,
    understanding of OO based design,
    knowledge of browser incompatibilities and knowledge of standards based web
    development to build dynamic next generation applications as a member of a very accomplished
    development team.
• 2006 – 2006: FoundValue, Inc.
  Senior Software Engineer  
  • Design and create cutting edge, standards compliant user interfaces utilizing
    modern programming techniques including patterns, AJAX, and deep knowledge of
    browser incompatibilities. Utilized expertise in CSS, XHTML, C#, Web Services,
    and JavaScript extensively. Other technologies and software packages used
    include Visual Studio 2005, Eclipse, SQL Server 2005, and IIS.
• 2005 – 2006: Weathernews Americas, Inc.
  Web Applications Developer  
  • Develop and deliver enterprise applications to large corporate clients
    using ColdFusion MX 7, SQL Server, and Sybase. Worked with Design Patterns,
    and object oriented software design methodologies to design and implement
    robust maintainable software to enable access to weather data. Used Flash MX,
    AJAX, and Web Services to deliver dynamic map data to clients via a
    third party GIS solution. Used Asynchronous CFML gateway to deliver
    high performance multithreaded processes for ColdFusion 7.
    Worked with Japanese parent company to deliver advanced solutions
    to international client base. This has included
    several trips to Japan to work intensively with parent based engineering
    teams.
• 2005 – 2005: City and County of San Francisco
  PROGRAMMER ANALYST  
  • Assist in the design and development of applications to support CalWIN
    transition using ColdFusion MX and Microsoft SQL Server. Convert and
    debug applications while moving them from ColdFusion 5 to ColdFusion
    MX.
• 2004 – 2005: Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA.
  INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGNER 2 
  • Converted web based courses to online equivalent Used Flash MX with Actionscript, Cleaner, Adobe Suite, Macromedia Suite MX to design and build multimedia rich courses for art students.

    Worked with ColdFusion MX to build contact management utility to log interactions with instructors.

    Project managed content managers, contracted instructors, and occasionally other instructonal designers to develop courses.

    Used WBT Systems’ TopClass LMS (Learning Management System.) Worked with Camtasia Studio to deliver narrated computer aided demonstrations to students.

    Served as subject matter expert and Instructional Web Designer on courses.

    Developed Java applications to streamline workflow.

• 2003 to Present: Owens Performance, Alameda, CA.
  OWNER/CREATIVE DIRECTOR 
  • built Mides, http://www.midestouch.com a full featured PHP IDE for the iPhone and iPod touch. Currently selling in the Apple App Store.
  • Formed information systems consulting company developing web applications for small companies. Created www.vietsperformance.com using Cold Fusion MX 6.1, DHTML, Fireworks MX, Dreamweaver MX, and CSS.Created user editable back end making all content dynamic, Interfaced site with the Viets Performance financial system. Built GlobalPSD corporate order processing system, website, and intranet using ColdFusion MX 6.1. Deployed Xserve G5 to support the GlobalPSD web application, email, and FTP services. Installed and configured ColdFusion MX 7, PHP, and JRun 4. Ongoing support of co-located server. Winner 2nd Place Yahoo! Y!Q Contextual Search Challenge. Recently built Facebook application called JoostConnect to update users’ profiles with what they are watching in Joost, as well as allow them to be alerted of notifications while in Joost.
• 1999 to 2002: Northstar Integrated Distributors, Hayward, CA.
  REGIONAL DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS 
  • IS / E-Commerce manager, worked with development teams to create online presence with dynamic web store. Used Flash, ColdFusion, Generator, Dreamweaver, and MySQL to manage corporate site.

    Implemented intranet using MySQL, Access, HTML, and Perl to provide access to legacy data systems with a user friendly interface.

    Built infrastructure for planned growth, implemented Oracle Small Business Suite to provide automated financial reporting.

    Web based infrastructure implemented resulted in activations rising to 10,000 per month from only 1,600 activations per month.

    Northstar Team Player of the Year Award in 2002, and Multi-Tasker of the Year Award in 2001.

EDUCATION

• June 2004: California State University, Hayward, Hayward, CA
  Bachelor of English
• 1997 to 1998: Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA
  English Coursework, Minor in Business
• 1994 to 1996: Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
  Electronic and Computer Engineering Coursework

AWARDS
2000 Northstar Top Producer Award
2001 Northstar Multitasker of the Year Award
2002 Northstar Team Player of the Year Award
2005 Winner 2nd Place Yahoo! Y!Q Challenge

INTERESTS

Macs, Basketball, Football, Programming Languages, Literature, Anthropology, Gadgets, Gaming, Blogging, Writing Fiction, Fantasy, Driving, Camping, Web Development, Desktop Application Development, Currently working on mastering Objective-C using the Cocoa frameworks for OS X using Interface Builder and Xcode.

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Formats: 

Text Version | PDF Version | Word Version

 

 

Why I Will Never Specialize

Why I Will Never Specialize

I realized a few weeks ago that I had left behind the concept of being an expert in any particular language. Not that being an expert is all bad, however the pace of change in software development makes it impractical.

For a while now my interviewing ( candidates ) has changed to reflect that belief. I frequently get into constructive arguments with my hiring managers about the types of resumes they are sending to me to screen. The problem isn’t that they aren’t qualified, the problem that I see is that they are insanely qualified. Meaning that they have for example 20 years of Java or something with no hint of other languages, or techniques. I mean how many awesome programmers have you met that had never deployed their own PHP server, or their own tomcat server. How many programmers have had no experience with shell scripting.

Actually a red flag for me is someone who has never even looked at what Microsoft has to offer. I don’t use Microsoft technologies, but I have worked for companies where I did, and I stay as informed as possible about their various languages and APIs. The reason is because I am interested in programming, not in making a bunch of money ( even though that would be nice ) or finding a cush job to lounge in. I really want to understand what is happening inside of the compiler, etc…

I mean recently I started on a foray into what I thought was the V8 JavaScript engine, which is *MEGA COOL* by the way, but I found myself looking at the assembly language commands and thinking, hmmm… I want to understand that. So I started digging in, and now I think that assembly language is cool. Boy, I’m a long way from ColdFusion.

I don’t have anything against people who specialize in one language. That is the way people hire, the reqs always are asking for 10 years experience in Java or some truck like that. I would prefer the req say, and they do when I have control of them, 10 years of programming experience, which means you could be 18 or 75, its all the same to me. The best resumes are the ones where the person has just about every language, with one at around 8 to 10 years of experience, but lots of side projects in everything from lisp to sed and awk. It is probably hurting my chances of getting ahead in my career, but that doesn’t matter, that I won’t just stick to one thing, but I really want to understand this, I want to know how it all works, and I want to have a part in making it better.

It probably means that I am a freak.

Installing ColdFusion MX 7, and the Apache Connector on Leopard Server (10.5.5)

Installing ColdFusion MX 7, and the Apache Connector on Leopard Server (10.5.5)

This weekend, I spent an unpleasant 24 hours or so working on upgrading a client’s server to Leopard 10.5.5. The actual Leopard upgrade went pretty well on the G5 XServe. The secret to that was having a crossover cable, and knowing the specific RackMac system identifier to be able to get the IP address to SSH into. The problems started with ColdFusion.

Now I am going to rant. My client has an Enterprise license, so we aren’t running on some hacked up installation, we are running a major OS that has been on the market for about a year, it has been in the hands of developers for more than a year. That there isn’t a proper connector bundled with the installation is criminal. If I wanted to go hacking around inside of source code, building crap, I could run open source. Why did we pay so much money for this? I will not write any more private applications with ColdFusion. If a corporation wants me to build ColdFusion applications, I may, but only after I try to convince them to go with something that is more likely to be supported on UNIX / Mac OS X.

I mean, how long has Apache 2 64-bit been out there, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to Adobe. I can’t trust that they will support major platforms going into the future. This is because of one or both of two things. The first possibility is that Adobe doesn’t want to put money into ColdFusion because it is dead or dying, the second is that Adobe wants to force people to upgrade to ColdFusion 8 by any means necessary. What Adobe has done is to make me look bad in front of my clients for choosing a technology that was not supported. I have already begun to write my applications in RoR, now I am definitely going to write my applications in RoR. I am done. I could have made so much more money writing code instead of screwing around with compiler flags.

The problem is that I would expect to run into trouble installing or running my software when using OSS. That comes with the territory, but when you buy software and it claims to support the platform, one would reasonably assume that the platform would be fully and actively supported. Anyway, rant over.

Now I will show how I fixed the problem:

First:

If you have a standalone installation (the only one that works), you will need to start it by switching to your ColdFusion directory, if you followed the defaults, it will be /Applications/ColdFusionMX7/runtime/bin. You will need to issue the JRun command from here ./jrun -start coldfusion. This will work, if you try to start it any other way, you will get the THIS_PROCESS_HAS_FORKED errors.

If you have installed it in multi-server, you are screwed, I have not found any decent way to get this to work.

Second:

You should be able to get to the administrator on http://127.0.0.1:8500/CFIDE/Administrator/index.cfm. Then you will need to set up the connector, this was crazy. The solution I am about to post I found on Scott Pinkston’s blog. The post is called ColdFusion 8 Leopard with apache an answer for the rest of us. It is generally for CF 8, but it will work on ColdFusion MX 7.

Here are the steps from his blog:

The order of the files to be compiled is *IMPORTANT* I was working on a Dual-G5 2.3 GHz so my command was /usr/sbin/apxs -c -Wc,-arch -Wc,ppc64 -Wl,-arch -Wl,ppc64 -n jrun22 mod_jrun22.c jrun_maptable_impl.c jrun_property.c jrun_session.c platform.c jrun_mutex.c jrun_proxy.c jrun_utils.c.

You will get some warnings, you can ignore them. If you get an error saying something about functions that start with an underscore in your apache error logs, when you try to start it, you have the file names in the wrong order. If you see an error that says it found the module, and it is mach-o, but it is the wrong architecture, you are probably using -WI (I as in imitate) instead of Wl (l as in Larry).

Step 3:

Make sure to add the add handler to your httpd.conf. in the ifmodule for mod_jrun22.so. Mine did not install this by default, so my ColdFusion templates were coming up with the code showing up as plain text. Here is the default handler: AddHandler jrun-handler .jsp .jws .cfm .cfml .cfc .cfr .cfswf.

I hope this prevents anyone from going through the ridiculous configuration nightmare that I went through this weekend. I apologize for the rant, but I have some other cool projects that I would rather work on than spending forever hacking around with my application server.

What Does a Sun Bankruptcy do to Enterprise?

What Does a Sun Bankruptcy do to Enterprise?

For more than a few weeks now, I have been pondering some broad implications of companies that we all rely upon failing. Probably the grand-daddy of these is Sun Microsystems.

Normally I wouldn’t be concerned about tech companies going away. It is part of the normal advancement of the art, but in Sun’s case, it does concern me. While I don’t share many developers’ blind love of Java, or Solaris, or any product really. I do feel that Sun has given a tremendous amount to the software engineering community and would be sorely missed if they were to go belly up. At the time of my writing this, Sun’s stock is at $3.41 per share, and their market capitalization is 2.52 Billion, less than Sun has on hand in cash.

I don’t necessarily think that Sun is in financial trouble, but it does seem that there are a bunch of products that they release that are mostly not for pay. Not to mention that their financial performance may / should, be giving some corporate IT departments pause as to their dependence on their technologies. Many companies rely on support from Sun, and if that were to transition to the community, the level of response may not be sufficient. The question I would ask is, “Will a Sun Bankruptcy Drive Corporations Back to Microsoft?”

Unfortunately, I can’t see any other alternative at the moment. There are millions of lines of code out there written against the Sun JVM, and while the JVM is now mostly open source, and so is Solaris, the companies that count on those lines of code typically are not interested in maintaining that code as well. Without Sun, you could have JVM forking, Solaris forking, etc… where a particular application written against Java or Solaris may not run in a given company. Corporations would have none of these problems if they used the .net stack for application development.

Now, I am not advocating that all corporations out there should drop their Sun implementations and run to Microsoft, but what I am saying is that they should prepare themselves for a little instability. I tend to use Ruby and the Rails framework for most everything anymore, but I have come to be somewhat skeptical of the gems that I am using. I am also aware that there is currently no support beyond community support for most of these items, and the developers working on them could get bored and go away. So for functionality that is more than a nice-to-have, I tend to write it myself.

Hopefully this will go away when we start to see professional gem houses, but in the near term, I would hope that companies would begin to diversify their stack a bit so as to mitigate the cost, such as re-engineering their non-core systems to be less dependent on core software from a particular vendor. The last thing you would want would be to find a showstopper bug in something you were about to release that was based on a technology from a shaky vendor, that holds up your business process.

Most good IT shops already support a variety of technologies so as to not be locked in to any one particular implementation from any given vendor, but enterprise developers should not continue to believe that Sun or Java will be around forever in its current enterprise-blessed, no-brainer form. I think serious unbiased evaluation of technologies to be included in future products should gradually become the norm. If Microsoft wins, so-be it, there is some good stuff in .net, but I would hope that Ruby and PHP would benefit from this situation.

Setting Up VirtualBox Headless on Ubuntu 8.10

Setting Up VirtualBox Headless on Ubuntu 8.10

Over the weekend I have been setting up a RoR rig with MySQL replication. The problem I have is that I only have one machine that I can use of all of this. My solution is VirtualBox Headless.

The first step is naturally to install Ubuntu Server 8.10. There is no UI. The next step changed what should have been a 5 minute task into a 3 hour task. Pay close attention… If you use apt-get install virtualbox, you will get virtualbox 2.0.4 OSE version. The open source version does not have the built-in RDP server. So when you try to issue the command sudo VBoxManage modifyvm “vmName” -vrdpport 4389 or whatever, you will get an error back. My solution was to download the non OSE version from Sun’s VirtualBox site. After that, just issue the normal Debian dpkg command to install VirtualBox 2.0.4 non-OSE. There is an issue with the kernel driver not being updated with the kernel that may cause problems later, but I didn’t do anything with that.

After you get it installed, follow the instructions here : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox for getting VRDP up and running. You have to create a new PAM authentication file.

After that things work as advertised. Remember, if you want to run headless over VRDP, you *must* install the non-OSE version directly from Sun’s VirtualBox site. Follow the instructions there if you want for the kernel driver to automatically update and recompile if the kernel changes.