Infinite State

The answer was so simple, but until I stumbled on this wonderful little AppleScript I was constantly frustrated by the difficulty of just copying the full path to whatever you were looking at in Finder. Now I’m happy.

Inspired by some recent comments I made at the New York CTO club, my colleague Dan Woods just published an article at Forbes.com in which he interviewed me about what I see as some of the most significant advantages of the Groovy language in enterprise software development environments.

I will just add that over the past year I have  found Groovy to be a lot of fun and surprisingly satisfying to work in. Over the years, I’ve worked in so many languages that at this point I just want something that allows me to clearly express the ideas I’m working with, and support the evolution of those ideas over time. For me, a lot of the pleasure in programming is still the process of coming to understand what it is that you are modeling. One of the things that I like best about Groovy, is that you can evolve your code alongside your understanding. So you can begin with a three line script that just does something very basic, and useful. You can then iterate those same lines into a more structured class, statically typed variables, interfaces and packages for managing name spaces and complexity, access modifiers for encapsulation, and build and deploy your code as a jar file or a war file just like any other Java component. And that component runs on the mature, high-performance Java virtual machine that we really know how to tune, monitor and scale.

Now if I could only get voice-recognition support for programming, I could use some of this recovery time to get some coding done…

1. Uninstall the old copy
2. Install the 64-bit version from the MySQL site

Install the two packages (a separate one for the StartupItem) and copy the prefs pane to /Library/PreferencePanes/.

Update

The MySQL prefs panel had an annoying dialog about having to reopen, etc. So I found this rebuilt version from the good folks at Swoon that works just fine.

Love this: save your script anywhere you want as an Application (I’ve started using a Scripts folder under my home directory). Drag the icon up into the Finder toolbar area and it’s available everywhere. I got this from a wonderful script for launching iTerm and changing to the current directory in it here. So you can be looking at a Finder window and with one click have an open iTerm tab pointing to it. Nice.

This is one of those posts you do in the hope that it will save someone else from the pain you’ve gone through. If you don’t know what Checkpoint VPN-1 is, or SecureClient, don’t bother reading this.

But if you’ve got a Mac, and you need to get through to (and past) a Checkpoint VPN gateway, then here’s what finally worked for me, in brief:

1. Download the most recent client (which is ancient anyway) from Checkpoint.
2. If you already tried to install it, completely uninstall it.
3. If you’re running Snow Leopard, then patch the installer and follow the other instructions on this page.
4. If you use a hardware token (e.g. RSA SecurID) you’ve been having weird problems connecting to the gateway, consider trying a new hardware token (happened to me).
5. Finally, make sure that your account is enabled by the admin, since a few failures seems to trigger a disabling of the account automatically.

At that point, my life began getting much better. Back at home, I have a Linksys WRT160N router, which seemed to have all the good VPN protcols already enabled for passthrough. But no luck connecting with SecureClient. So I found this very helpful tip, and followed the advice to force UDP encapsulation. And now I finally have working VPN from the office and from home.

Whew.

Through achingly slow steps over the past …who knows… I have finally gotten myself to the point of writing some new code in an area I’ve wanted to explore for awhile. I want to create richer UIs for interacting with information, like the old days in a way that’s been lost to me since I took up living in HTML and architecting on the server side, mostly.

I want to draw shapes again. Interact with them and the data they model.

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I left my old HP Laptop for a shiny new Mac early this year, and have barely used it since. I have fond feelings for the old slab, ugly and utilitarian as it was, for all the work it did for me. But I wasn’t prepared for the nasty smell of something burning coming from deep inside it when I finally plugged it back in yesterday. If you’ve worked around computers, you know that is a truly bad smell because it conveys the sense of painful loss and mortality that digital living is so good at obscuring.

But this story has a happy ending, honestly. And through a miraculous combination of technologies I now have that dear old laptop running perfectly right here inside my new Mac, whenever I need it. It’s hardware can never fail again, and it will never get old and die.

Here’s what I did:

• I’ve been using Acronis TrueImage to maintain a full backup of that laptop’s drive image for a few years
• It turns out that VMWare Converter can now take Acronis images directly, and the Converter is free
• I couldn’t seem to install the Converter inside a VMWare Fusion vm on my Mac, so I recommissioned an old Linux box as a temporary XP box (installed XP, didn’t activate it)
• The images took up a few hundred gigs of space on my NAS and it’s a slow connection, so…
• I took the USB drive that backs up the NAS and plugged it right into the new XP box, installed the ext2 IFS for Windows, and there they were, ready to go
• About an hour later, I had my old laptop in a new vm, like magic.

What’s really amazing about this is that even though the laptop’s hard drive presumably was fine, I never even used it to resurrect the machine. This is the way it’s supposed to work but never seems to when you need it. The end of loss. Eternal life for your old devices.

Of course the irony is that you never really go back to use them…

I finally put together my wonderfully hungry Fujitsu Scansnap S1500M with a great little AppleScript droplet to drive Acrobat Pro to do the OCR on batches of documents. So I can finally do this:

After a lot of painful diagnosing I found that my Netgear Router has a setting for “NAT Filtering” that defaults to Secure…and when set to Open it resolves a frustrating problem with the Checkpoint SecureClient VPN software which was causing “Cannot connect to gateway” problems. I found lots of threads online but nothing clear (and Checkpoint’s software and error messages leave a lot to be desired). So if anyone’s struggling with their connections from this thing, try fiddling with your NAT filtering on your router. I’m still unclear from Netgear’s perspective of how “Open” increases my vulnerability though, so I’m hesitant to use it.

Currently using VPN-1 SecureClient NG R56 HFA1 Build 031.

Good luck.

I’ve had Apple computers off an on since 1980. I remember a IIci that I dragged across country and back. But it’s really been a Windows world for me for most of the past 15 years, I’d say.

Not anymore.

A sweet little Aluminum Macbook and the 10.5 release of the OS (Leopard) has won me over. I resisted, I was obstinate (can’t stand following the crowd, even when they’re still the minority crowd) but now each day it gets better and better. Spotlight, Quicksilver, Mail, Growl, Adium, GrowlMail, Fusion, GarageBand, Mail Act-On, even Safari…good stuff. And with an XP Pro VM running in Fusion, I feel I’m still able to run whatever I need to. Except, strangely, I don’t need to (except for some Visio and Project files).

It’s simply a better computer, better operating system, better quality of software. I wish I had switched over sooner.

That’s the story. Going back to having a good time with my computer now.