Blizzo :: The Morgan Blog

Today we deployed the latest version of our product OpenLogic Exchange (OLEX) and it includes a brand new look and feel.  The design was truly done by concensus with our entire engineering department, and it came out better than anything I think I could have done in isolation.

I used a varierty of techniques I had not had the opportunity to play with before, like CSS sprites for repeating backgrounds, a CSS Reset stylesheet to get a better baseline for CSS behavior, and a more aggressive attempt at modularized widgets to simplify page construction.

Overall I am pleased with the results, but there are a few things that were difficult to overcome.  We have a large pool of users still using IE6, so I had to use a patch to get alpha transparency support for PNGs.  We are using a less traditional font for the site, which renders very differently in Linux, so I had to do a Linux specific stylesheet to make the site usable, and it still has a few issues.  Future releases will tighten things up a bit, but it feels like a big step forward for now.

After several hours of mashing the refresh button in Firefox, I was finally able to get to the G1 preorder form and place mine.  On October 22nd, I will be the proud owner of a G1, the first Android powered smart phone.  The phone has a touchscreen interface similar to the iPhone, but it also has a full qwerty keyboard that slides out. Not only that, but it is running Android, which is a very open development platform, which means all sorts of cool things will be developed for it.

Here are some links if you want to learn more:

• A nice photo gallery of the phone
  
• The official site for the phone, with ads, video press conference information, etc

I saw this new Microsoft commercial the other day, and I have to say I think it’s brilliant for the following reasons:

• It shines light on the fact that Apple is casting an unfair stereotype of PC users
• It gives existing Microsoft costumers a group of people they can feel proud identifying with
• It makes Apple look like elitist snobs (which, to be fair, they are)

Disclosure:

I am operating system agnostic.  I use Linux at work, PC at home, have worked extensively with Mac’s.  I consider them all fairly similar platforms for software development, with PCs lagging behind a little because of the lack of a real shell environment, but it still doesn’t slow me down all that much. I have an iPod, it was free.  I don’t like it all that much more than the MP3 player it replaced, but it’s fine.

Conclusion:

Anyway, good job Microsoft (I don’t say that often).  Also, Vista is a steaming pile of crap, and when I got my new PC with it preinstalled, all of my applications crashed so often I had to go revert to XP and download tons of hard to find drivers to get it all to work.  Maybe they should hire the person who came up with that commercial to sort out their product development.

Some of you may be aware that my cat, Oliver, went missing a while back.  It has been two months now, and so I have decided it is time to say goodbye.  Oliver was the first pet that was truely my own.  We adopted he and his sister, Twist, from my sister in law about nine years ago.

Oliver and I didn’t always see eye to eye on everything and had quite a few fights.  Eventually, we discovered that by letting him be an indoor/outdoor cat he was immeasurably happier.  We knew the risks of that decision, his sister Twist was hit by a car when she was just a couple of years old.  Oliver is also extremely friendly, so we worried about him getting “adopted” by another family.  Oliver also had little fear, picking fights with large dogs (Olive was 19 lbs), so we worried about him starting a fight that he couldn’t finish.  I guess I won’t ever really know what happened to him, and it is possible, however unlikely, that he will show up one day, rolling around on the sidewalk to greet me.

Here are some of the things about Oliver that I will never forget.

• He would stalk light switches, jumping up to turn them on or off, then always seemed surprised at the result and ran away.
• At night he would crawl onto my chest and lay down, then inch his way forwards to try and bite the hairs of my goatee and pull them.  It always made me nervous.
• Everyday when I came home from work he would be waiting for me by the front door, rolling around and purring.
• When he was younger he would play fetch with me, with those faux fabric mice.  I would throw them across the house and he would bring them back to me, over and over.
• For the majority of my life with Oliver, I never saw bugs in the house, ever.
• Oliver loved ice cream, and would get extremely aggressive going after my bowls.  Sometimes I let him lick them clean when I was done.

And lastly, here is a gallery of pictures of Oliver

Goodbye Oliver, I will miss you.

Amy and I took the kids down to the 16th Street Mall last night to take in the sights and the chaos as people descend on our fair city for the Democratic national Convention.  For those of you that can’t be here, this is for you.

Oh, and I’m going to Mile High to see Obama speak tomorrow, are you?!?

UPDATE: Don’t follow this guide, look down in the comments and do what John suggested.  This totally screwed me up, as none of the changes I did before I created the branch came through in the merge.

I started working on a new feature for my product today, and realized after several hours that committing my code would be a bad idea.  The new feature is big enought that I should have started working on it in a branch, but I didn’t think of that early enough.  I thought there would be a simple way to “commit changes to a new branch”, but I wasn’t able to find any obvious way to do that.  Here are the steps I took to get this accomplished.

From trunk checkout with uncommitted files:

• Copy current trunk to a new branch
  svn copy . /path/to/new/branch
• Switch current working directory from trunk to new branch
  svn switch /path/to/new/branch
  This merged my current changes with the trunk
• Mark new files to be commited|
  svn add /path/to/new/file
  For each file that needs to be added
• Commit your new files
  svn commit
• Switch current working directory back to trunk
  svn switch /path/to/trunk
• Checkout your new branch to work in
  cd ..
  svn co /path/to/new/branch

That’s all there is to it.  If you know an easier way to do this, let me know.  I wonder if I had done the “svn add” commands before the switch if that step would have been unnecessary.

On our recent trip to South Dakota, there were quite a few exciting moments. Bears brushed up against our car in Bear Country USA, the police came to visit us because someone thought they saw a “domestic disturbance” in our car and a hike to split rock resulted in our being covered with ticks. Despite all the excitement, there is one story that stands apart from the rest. This is that story. This, is Snappy’s story.

On our way out the door for one of three-or-so-a-day hike’s, the neighbor down he road from out cabin waved us over. When we got close, we found a very large turtle on the front lawn. It was big, green, cranky, and clearly out of place. There is a small pond behind this cabin, and sometimes when there is heavy rain one or two of these suckers will get washed downstream and end up there. It was a common snapping turtle, and they are very aggressive. The kids actually listened to me for once and observed it from a healthy distance.

Read the rest of this entry »

This morning we awoke to find a little blood on the kitchen floor. It was coming from our now 11 week old puppy, Diablo. We took her to the vet and they kept her a while for some tests. When they finally called, some x-rays showed what looked like rocks in her stomach.

Uh oh.

On our trip to South Dakota we caught her chewing on rocks quite a few times and were, or so we thought, diligent about taking them away from her. The gave her some medicine that would force her to vomit in hopes that it would get them out, otherwise she would be going under the knife. It turns out the medicine was successful and got the rocks out. Oh, did I just say rocks? They found the following had been in her stomach:

• A couple pieces of shale and some other unidentified yellow rock
• A hairball
• A yellow bead
• Wood chips
• A small piece of paper with the following writing: 24″ x 21″

Apparently my dog can no longer be left unsupervised with anything smaller than her head.

All silliness aside, this is quite dangerous. Unfortunately one small rock made into her intestinal track, but the vet feels comfortable that it will pass through with little trouble. Until then, I get to inspect dog poop!

My cousin Josh works in the marketing department for Vitamin Water. When he was in town a few weeks ago I mentioned how much I loved his product, which I really do.

Read the rest of this entry »

OK, thats probably not true. It may come as a shock to many of you that the glamorous life of a software engineer/father doesn’t leave a lot of time for exercise. I wouldn’t call myself “fat”, but the Morgan from 8 years ago would have mocked me and called me lazy. On Friday my fellow platypus in arms told me about hundredpushups.com. The idea is simple, do a simple test to see how many push-ups you can do, then do push ups three times a week for six weeks and by the end you should be able to do 100.

100 push ups? Dare I dream? Yes, why not. I did the test tonight and, being very careful not to cheat at all, I did 21 solid and respectable push ups. That puts me right in the middle of rank 3 (15-29 push ups). I will follow the plan, which is easy as it requires little time and no equipment, and let you all know how I do. If I can do it, I will make a donation to the hundred push ups program creator so he can get an old school Volkswagen bus.