Obscured Info

Converting XPS to PDF on Ubuntu 9.10

Rich — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 01:58:24 +0000

I’m in the process of switching from Windows 7 to Ubuntu 9.10 at home. I had several web page receipts that I had printed to XPS on the Win7 box for my records. On Ubuntu Okular can read XPS, but I didn’t want to install all of the KDE libs to run it. I’d rather convert to the more universal PDF format, anyway. Searching around I found reference to the GhostPDL project and its gxps program.

After a little work I was able to build this on Ubuntu 9.10 32-bit:

Unpack the source
Install the libxt-dev package for the X11 headers.
In the root of the source, run make xps

Voice User Interface

Rich — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:09:45 +0000

At this point in my career I’ve built Character User Interfaces (CUI) and Graphical User Interfaces (GUI). In October of 2007 I started a new position working on a team that develops Voice User Interfaces (VUI). Yes, the automated phone applications we all love to hate. The interaction patterns are very different from CUIs and GUIs. Imagine having to present the user a list of ten items, and have them select one of them without using a visual list. It’s a lot slower and painstaking process.

The technology stack is also quite different. The carrier-grade platforms seem to be predominantly proprietary and lack the niceties of the ecosystems that surround .NET, Java, Ruby, etc. The tool I use currently provides some Smalltalk for scripting. Cool, but unfortunately Smalltalk devs aren’t in great supply. The code is going to run on one platform only, probably forever.

This is where voicexml enters the picture. It’s been around for about a decade, but adoption has finally hit my enterprise. As someone experienced in web development, I’m a lot more comfortable with voicexml. It’s like html…for a phone. It has pages of code in individual text files. All my source code editing and management toolchain is still in play. It’s a standard supported by multiple vendors.

Where I have difficulty is the vendor tool support. Voice vendors like to sell nice clicky draggy tools that resemble Visio flow charts more than programs. Think BizTalk Orchestration Designer and its XLANG drawings. I understand the appeal. Really, I’m not one to code everything by hand. When the source code is obsfucated or rendered in such a way as to make code management a real pain, I have a real problem with a tool. Units of code spread across multiple files makes team development easier. Text source makes merging easier. Take away both of those and you’ve made parallel development a real pain in the ass. I don’t want to be the I’d Rather Use Notepad Guy, but I’m really leaning that way. Not that I’d really use Notepad with the smart XML editors than can be found.

This could be a vendor issue, I’d I love to hear from other VUI developers on this issue. Can voicexml development be managed like web development?

Closures

Rich — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:48:55 +0000

Once you use them, it’s hard to go back. The Java Jakarta Collections didn’t have true closures, but they were close enough and very useful. Here’s a C# example using anonymous delegates:

rules.ForEach(delegate(PriceRule rule) { ruleCatalog[rule.Item] = rule; });

For loops are bronze age.

Stumbling through ASP.net

Rich — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:13:09 +0000

One of the humbling (and slightly frustrating) parts of switching technology stacks is learning how to do something you knew by heart in the old tech. Case in point: figuring out which item you selected in a GridView in ASP.net. I had a pattern down cold for this in Java web development. I eventually found the DataKeys property of GridView, but the online help did not describe how to use multiple keys. Thanks to the internet, I found a very helpful answer (and it’s not intuitive) here.

Debuggers: I’m all for them

Rich — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:21:42 +0000

There was yet another huge flamewar over whether or not debuggers are useful or the tools of lazy slobs. Count me in the former: I like using a debugger. Tests are great for shaking out issues with code and for maintaining confidence. However, when things get rough (and they will), it’s nice to look at exactly what’s going on inside the code.

My New PC Build

Rich — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 00:32:12 +0000

My AGP-based, first generation Athlon 64 was getting long in the tooth, and didn’t have a lot of upgrade room. With an eye towards doing more .NET development, and…uh…Bioshock’s impending release I built a new machine.

Athlon64×2 4000+ with stock heatsink/fan
ASUS M2N-SLI mainboard
2GB of RAM (Crucial, of course)
ATI x1950Pro video card
PC Power & Cooling 610 power supply

I reused a SATA drive and Antec case I had already. The power supply seems like overkill but that video card (crucial for productivity), eats a lot of amps. The build went easily, and even with considerably more horsepower this PC is quieter than the old model.

I’m also trying running as a limited user under XP on this machine. I’ll fast-switch to an admin account when I need to install something. Now to get Visual Studio and…uh Bioshock installed.

C# and Yield

Rich — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 01:09:38 +0000

I just discovered yield. Wow. After using some of the new tools languages like Ruby provided (blocks, process control), it’s been hard to go back to Java. Nice to C# is up to more than just adding syntactic sugar (cough, Java5, cough).

Diving Into .NET

Rich — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 01:06:26 +0000

I’ve been coding Java for a good seven years now, ever since I walked away frustrated from writing business applications in lower level COM+, ATL, and C++. Tonight I dug into a .NET training book for the first time, as I plan on getting certified mainly as a goal for learning. It’s really hard to look at C# as a Java programmer and not see the overwhelming similarities. System.Console.Writeln isn’t fooling anyone. That said, I’m already seeing some niceties. Tonight’s example:

bool? flag = null;

The ‘?’ allows you to indicate the variable is nullable. Java is going to make you think about ints and Integers, even in the Java 5+ world.

I Have the Unit Test Religion

Rich — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 02:53:20 +0000

…And I must testify. I’ve been making a conscious effort to make as much of the new logic I’m writing unit-testable, and it really makes the development process smoother. I can’t stress enough how important and comforting it is to be able to make changes to complicated logic and be able to immediately test for regressions. There are some pretty big pieces of logic in my current project just crying for unit tests. Now I just have to convince the customer it’s worth it.

Defragging OS X

Rich — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 04:51:08 +0000

When installing Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro, I received an error that files couldn’t be moved to create the Windows partition. Rather than take the Boot Camp Assistant’s advice and format the drive, I decided to enter the world of OS X Disk Defragmenting tools. I settled on iDefrag. The reviews were positive, and the bundled CD Maker app makes it a clear winner: you can build a bootable iDefrag CD that will be able to defrag your Mac’s boot drive.

After a successful defrag pass, I was able to partition my drive just fine.