While I was at the Toronto iPhone Tech Talks, I attended the OpenGL ES sessions by Allan Schaffer. Seeing the “Shock” demo was really inspiring, and caused me to want to try my hand at some simple OpenGL Shader demos.

The base XCode OpenGL ES Application template sets you up pretty nicely for some simple experimentation, the only things that gave me any trouble were:

1. remembering to set the identifier to ca.latte.whatever so that I could build, and

2. remembering that the OpenGL ES 2.0 path only ran on the device, so of course none of the changes I was making were showing up on the simulator¹, and finally

3. Figuring out that depth was position.w, and not position.z. (Did I mention that I’m a bit of a newbie at this?)

Anyways, after it was all up and running, I made the x and w co-ordinates vary on a different period than the y co-ordinate, and now the square moves around in 3 dimensions in a pleasing (to me) way.

Since this is intended for me to play around with shaders, I’m not going to bother updating the OpenGL ES 1.0 code path, but if you’ve got an iPhone 3GS, or a 3rd generation iTouch, feel free to grab the code at BitBucket, and play around. I'll be adding branches and tags and keeping it updated as I play with new stuff.

A while ago I had my first patch to Thunderbird committed.

Today I pushed my first patch, all by myself.

It’s kind of exciting, having checkin privileges. It means that I don’t have to wait for someone else to check in my changes once they’re accepted. But on the downside, it means that I’m the one who has to do the commit, and watch the Tinderbox, and if anything goes wrong, I’m even more on the hook than I previously was. (Well, that last part isn’t really true, but I feel way more nervous than when I could just add “checkin-needed” to the bug, and not worry about it anymore.) And basically there’s just a lot of new stuff for me to keep track of, and figure out. But since anything I do is going to show up in the official history, I need to figure it out before I do it, which always adds a little pressure, which in this case is probably a good thing.

I’m always looking for ways to speed up my Mozilla build, since it allows me to test my changes even quicker. I was really excited when I found out about make -s tier_app, since it sped up my compiles by a huge amount.

make
real    10m22.630s
user    4m28.072s
sys     1m27.807s

vs.

make -s tier_app
real    0m14.426s
user    0m6.502s
sys     0m3.957s

But yesterday, on IRC, I heard about libs_tier_app, which is ever faster, if you haven’t changed any IDL files (which I usually don’t).

make -s libs_tier_app
real    0m9.407s
user    0m5.440s
sys     0m3.065s

Okay, it’s not nearly as good as going from 10 and a half minutes to 15 seconds, but a 30% (or is it 50%) speedup is still nothing to sneer at.

I’ve been doing a lot of work recently, in preparation for the next (and last!) beta of Thunderbird 3, and I’m happy to announce that it was released yesterday!

The reviews from LifeHacker and Ars Technica have been positive, which is always gratifying to see on something you’ve spent a lot of time on.

For more information, check out the Thunderbird 3 for Users page, or the Release Notes for beta 4.

Recently, I made some changes to my work flow to get around some slight annoyances. Specifically, I switched from using mq to using pbranch. The features that pbranch gives me that mq didn’t basically boil down to two main things; sharing, and tracking.

With pbranch, it’s way easier for me to share my changes, both with other people, and with myself in a virtual machine. It is possible to share the patch with mq, by cloning the patch repo if I remembered to run qinit -C, but with pbranch all I have to do is clone the main repo, and my changes are right there, waiting for me.

For tracking, when I’m nearing the end of a patch, and it mostly works, I get really nervous if I can’t check in my changes. With mq, I set up an alias to let me commit the patch queue, so that I could go back, but it was really hard to tell what I had changed between any two commits, since it was showing me the diff of my diffs. And so I didn’t use it as much as I would like to. With pbranch, I just commit the code, like I want to, and it keeps track of what the patch should look like.

So, my day-to-day workflow now looks more like this:
If I’m working on a bug that I’ve already got a patch started for, I cd to the appropriate branch, type hg pgraph to see where I am, and hq update branchname to get to the pbranch I want to work on. Then I make my changes, and when I’m happy with the results of hg diff, I type hg commit to put the changes into the pbranch. After that, I use hg pdiff > ../branch-name-bugnum-description.diff to get a patch that I can upload to bugzilla. At this point, I usually load the patch into Vim, and search for some of the mistakes I’ve made in the past. (/^+.*[[:space:]]+$, and /dump caught a lot of my initial mistakes. Now I’ve moved on to things that are tougher to check for, like putting open-parens on a new line instead of on the previous line.) I usually go through a couple of cycles of hg commit/hg pdiff … before I’m happy with the patch. Once I am, I don’t have to type anything before I upload it, since it’s already committed.

A lot of the code I write for Thunderbird has to work on all the platforms it supports. Since I don’t own a Linux or Windows box, and don’t really want to waste the hard drive space on my MacBook Pro with a dual- or triple-boot setup, I’ve decided to install the other operating systems on virtual machines. (I’ve chosen VirtualBox, because it’s free, and I’m cheap. As an added bonus, it works quite well, too.)

If I was forced to use a centralized version control system, this would lead to a bunch of pain, since I wouldn’t want to check in a half-finished patch, but I would still really want to see what changes I made for one OS, to try and figure out what changes I need to make for the others. And I would want to be able to keep a record of what I did, step by step, so that I could undo stuff if it turned out to be a bad idea. (Hey, that sounds like a perfect task for a version control system! ;)

Since Mozilla uses Mercurial, I didn’t have to deal with any of that. I had my repository on the host machine, which I had cloned from the main repo, and I just cloned it into each of the virtual machines. Whenever I started a VM, I pulled the latest set of changes from the host machine; As I fixed stuff on that platform, I committed to the repository on the virtual machine; And before I shut down the VM, I pushed my changes back to the host machine. When I wanted to see which changes I made to get things working for the platform, it was easy, and propagating those changes to the other virtual machines was also easy.

When people talk about the advantages of distributed version control, a lot of the time they mention being able to still commit your changes when you’re on an airplane, and sharing in-progress changes with other people, but for people like me who do mainly self-contained stuff and don’t fly anywhere, supporting multi-platforms with virtual machines and still being able to track my changes might just be the killer feature.

I don’t know what happened there, but it doesn't look quite right to me. Well, it’s fixed now, so I guess no harm, no foul, right?

It’s true, after a lot of hard work, and a few hard decisions, the first version of Thunderbird that has code of mine in it has shipped. Dan Mosedale has some comments on what’s changed. If you like Thunderbird, please download it, give it a try, and let me know what you think!

On a more personal note, the thing I did on this release that I’m the most proud of was to add a button that lets you reply to a mailing list.

I’m proud of it because it feels like a neat-but-still-usable UI, and because it is one more step on the road to getting people to change their mailing lists to not munge the Reply-To header. (With this patch, you are given the option of replying to the list, or the author. Unless the list has set the Reply-To to point to the list, in which case you can only mail the list.)

A couple of the other areas I worked on for this release were updating the Activity Manager so that it didn’t hang when you clicked “Clear Now”, and so that it merged a bunch of move/copy/delete notifications into a single notification that told you how many messages had been processed; and fixing a some layout and logic bugs in the Autoconfig dialog (which you get to from “File » New » Mail Account (Quick Setup)…”). Yeah, the Autoconfig dialog is still kind of ugly, but it’s better now than it used to be, and I’m working on making it prettier for beta 4.

A few weeks ago I started a new full-time contract at Mozilla Messaging (a.k.a. the people who brought you Thunderbird). I meant to post this on the Wednesday after I started, but didn’t get around to it until now. So, here you go, my notes from just after I started a new job.

It has been a pretty crazy couple of days, both because I’m not that used to working for a full 8 hours on one thing, and because I’m at the point where there’s still so much to learn that I could spend all my time researching stuff, and never get anything done.

But even with all the stuff for me to learn, I feel like I’ve made a fair bit of progress. There were a few bugs assigned to me, based on a previous patch, as well as a couple of things left to do to get the feature working, so I jumped right in to those. After I had new patches up for review on all of those bugs, I talked with Bryan Clark about what bugs I should tackle next. He and David Ascher both suggested that the new automatic mail server config dialog could use a bit of love.

This morning, I did some investigation on group email addresses for one of the bugs I’m working on, and took a look at how the autoconfig dialog was put together so that I wouldn’t sound like I was completely lost in the meeting. (XUL, CSS, and Javascript. No surprises there. :) Then, after the Status Meeting, Bryan and I chatted a bit about what the various bugs were that he had assigned to me, and what sort of things I might look into to try and fix them. A few hours later, I had a fix for one of them, and applied a similar fix to another. (As an aside, you’ve got to love the 3 hour investigation which ends up being a 9-character change. At least while investigating the bug, I learned a lot about hboxes, vboxes, flexes, grids, and descriptions, which will hopefully come in handy in future bugs. :) Finally, I ended the day by reading a review of a patch I submitted on Monday morning, making some tweaks to my code, and resubmitting it.

The final thing that amazes me is that each day is taking up pretty much a full page of my log book, which is way more than usual. Most of the days last month got a line or two. Really full days would maybe get half a page. But yesterday and today were a solid page, chock full of information, each. I wonder how long this trend will continue. I hope it keeps on going like this for a long time.

I have a theory. (No, it’s not bunnies.) One of my favourite foods is soy beans. I love it both because they’re tasty, and because they’re so changeable. I mean, what other substance can be used to make a hard white solid (tofu), and a viscous black liquid (soy sauce)? Hey, waitaminnute. “Soy beans” are oil! It’s all just different names for petrochemicals!

I started working for Mozilla Messaging a while ago, and since David Wolever asked me how I used Mercurial and the MQ extension, I thought I would put up some notes on how I’m currently using them in my day-to-day work. Of course, the stuff I’m doing now is a little different than what I’ve done in any of my previous jobs, so I’m not sure how useful any of the following will be to anyone who isn’t contributing to an open source project.

First, let’s talk a little bit about how I have my Work directory set up. The first thing I did when I started working on the Thunderbird source code was to pull down a clean copy of the source into a directory named “src-base”. The purpose of that directory is to always contain a clean copy of the upstream source code so that when I want to update the various branches I have (five, at last count), I only need to download the changes from the Mozilla repo once, and I can then propagate them from src-base to the other branches. I got the idea to do that from the Bazaar-NG developers, and I think it has helped to keep my bandwidth usage down. It might cause a problem if I was sharing my branches, but since Thunderbird seems to revolve around submitting patches to bugzilla, it works out pretty well.

The next thing I did was to clone src-base into a directory named “add-reply-list-button” (because I was writing a patch to add a Reply-To-List button :), go into that directory, and type hg qinit -c to create an mq repository, and put the mq repository itself under version control. (I didn’t actually do that the first time, and was quite annoyed that I couldn’t revert changes I had made in my patch queue.) The other part of that is that I’ve aliased mq to hg -R $(hg root)/.hg/patches. This lets me type mq commit to commit the changes to the patch.

So, now we’re at my day-to-day work. If I’m working on a bug that I’ve already got a patch started for, I cd to the appropriate branch, type hg qseries to see where I am, and hq qpush or hg qpop to get to the patch I want to work on. Then I make my changes, and when I’m happy with the results of hg diff, I type hg qrefresh to put the changes into the patch. After that, I use hg qdiff > ../branch-name-bugnum-description.diff to get a patch that I can upload to bugzilla. At this point, I usually load the patch into Vim, and search for some of the mistakes I’ve made in the past. (/^+.*[[:space:]]+$, and /dump caught a lot of my initial mistakes. Now I’ve moved on to things that are tougher to check for, like putting open-parens on a new line instead of on the previous line.) I usually go through a couple of cycles of hg qrefresh/hg qdiff … before I’m happy with the patch. Once I am, I type mq commit -m "Updated patch to fix foo and bar." to save the state of the patch, and then I upload it.

It took a while, but my first patch to Thunderbird was committed today!

changeset:   2727:98a7de404c08
user:        Blake Winton <bwinton@latte.ca>
date:        Fri May 29 10:35:37 2009 +0100
summary:     Bug 45715 - ""Reply to List" [button/(context) menu item]"
             [r=mkmelin,sr=bienvenu,ui-review=clarkbw]

The patch started off by adding a “Reply to List” button to the message header pane as seen below, but after some discussion, the scope was expanded to change the “Reply” button to “Reply All” or “Reply to List”, depending on the message you’re currently viewing.

Of course, there’s still some things I’ve got to add, but those can go in a separate patch, which will be much smaller, and so much easier to get reviewed and committed. And once it is, we might be able to close a 9-year old bug, which would be pretty sweet.

I did something new today. A while ago, I had bought a 10-speed Bianchi for $30 at a garage sale, with the intention of converting it into a fixed-gear/single-speed bike to tootle around on. Well, today, I took it down to Bikechain, and talked to Steve, who sent me on a merry goose chase picking up various parts. Once I had gotten a new wheel, tire, and tube and biked back to Biekchain, Steve and I put it on the bike, checked the alignment of the cogs and chain, and then I had to head out to buy a new rear cog, and a lock wheel…

Sadly, my bike didn’t have a functional rear wheel anymore, so I had to walk down to Urbane Cyclist to buy the cog and lock. I ended up with a 52:19 ratio, which is harder to start on than the gear ratio I use to start, but isn’t too bad, and doesn’t go as fast as the gear ratio I use to go fast, but again isn’t too bad. Given those two things, I figure it’s pretty close to perfect for my style and level of riding. When I got the cog and lock ring back to Bikechain, we put them on the new rear wheel, hooked everything up, ran into the obligatory problems, fixed them, and finally I was good to go, so I did! The first trip I took was a fairly short one, from U of T over to the Dark Horse Cafe at Queen and Spadina.

The second trip was from Queen and Spadina back home, which was a little longer. I learned a few things from that trip, but let me start off with something I didn’t learn. I had test-ridden a fixed gear bike before, so I had already been almost bumped off by trying to coast, and this time around I was expecting it. So, now on to the things I did learn.

• Stopping is hard. It’s not that I can’t stop. I’ve got both brakes and pedals. The problem is stopping with one of the pedals in a decent position to start from when I want to start. The other problem is that I really want to coast when I come to the end of a stop, and that totally doesn’t work.

• I can carry it! (As you can see over on the right there.) My commuter bike is a good ride, and very solid, but damn is it ever heavy, especially after I loaded it up with accessories like a rear rack, and panniers, and water bottles. The fixie is simple, clean, and light enough to carry all over the place.

• The fixie is slower than my commuter bike. Not just slower for the obvious reason (because I don’t have a higher gear to switch to), but it’s also slower for me to start, because I don’t have a lower gear to switch to. It’s really kind of strange, since one of the things I seem to be really good at is starting really quickly from a dead stop. Well, that used to be one of the things I was really good at. On the fixie, not so much.

• Even though it’s slower I found that the fixie was a far smoother ride. Thinking about it a little more, perhaps because it’s slower. Since it takes me so much longer to stop and start, I found myself slowing down earlier to try and conserve as much momentum as I could.

• All in all, I think that the new bike is going to be really good for me. It’ll slow me down, and calm me down, which are two things that I think I could use. I can also feel how it’s changing the way I ride, making it more smooth, controlled, and thoughtful; keeping my legs moving to give me more exercise and stop them from seizing up; teaching me how to lift my butt off the seat to go over speed bumps while continuing to pedal.

It’s fun. A lot of fun. I’m glad I finally got the conversion done, and I’m really looking forward to riding it.

(With thanks to Bunnyhero, both for the title, and the inspiration to get blogging again.)

As you can probably guess, if you’ve read Bunnyhero’s blog post, I recently learned that the AlertView delegate method alertView:clickedButtonAtIndex: can be called multiple times for one AlertView, much to my surprise.

And here’s how I found that out. A couple of weeks ago, I ran across a bug in my still-in-development iPhone game. I was displaying an alert when the game ended, and when the user clicked “Okay” it would go to the next level. And it all seemed fine until one day, when instead of clicking the “Okay” button, I hit the home button to exit the game while the dialog was displayed, and the next time I entered the app, there were, like, 40 robots where I was expecting 8!

As a favour to a friend of mine who’s a prof, I let the bug sit until I could debug the code in front of a room full of undergrads, as a part of the software engineering class he teaches. (The whole experience turned out to not only be something that I wished I could have seen when I was an undergrad, but also something really fun to do from the the industry-type person side of things! Anyone who has a laptop, and some code with a small bug that they don’t mind showing to a bunch of students should really give it a try!). Debugging the problem led me not to the archiver/unarchiver as I was expecting, but instead to the observation that when I hit the home button, my delegate method was being called up to 5 times!

This is why I saw way too many robots, because I was advancing 4 more levels than I should have been. And so when I re-entered the game, it happily put me on level 5-ish, instead of level 2.

The fix was fairly simple, if slightly inelegant. I merely added in a flag to tell me when I was handling an alert, and would only advance the level when I thought I had popped the alert up. (Now that I write it, I wonder if I can set the alert’s delegate to nil when I’m done handling it instead. Thoughts, anyone?)

My life, such as it is, is pretty much an open book. I’m not a very complicated person, so I don’t know if I can find seven things that the average reader of this blog probably doesn’t know about me.

Still, that’s no reason not to try. So, here we go.

1. I’ve had two jobs that didn’t pay me. After the first, I swore that if an employer didn’t pay me again, I would quit, but this last time they laid me off before I found out that I wasn’t getting paid. The most recent company swears that they’re trying to get me my money, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

2. I hated country music from the first time I heard Billy Ray (father of Miley) Cyrus until Elizabeth Campbell sent me a CD full of the good stuff. So now the only kind of music I don’t like is “New Country”. And Schönberg. Der Mondfleck sucks.

3. I know enough Visual Basic to write a compiler for it, but you will never ever see it on any of my resumes. Ever! My policy is to only put on my resume things that I would enjoy working with on a day-to-day basis, and VB definitely isn’t one of those things.

4. I am almost every link but for one in the first 5 pages of Google results for “Blake Winton”. I guess that’s one of the benefits of being on the Internet for 17 years. (Well, kinda. Amy has been online as long as I have, but doesn’t show up until page 8 of the results for her name, mainly because of the Unicorns-riding-fairies artist who shares her name.)

5. There’s a quarter of a cow in our downstairs freezer. Well, quite a bit less now that Amy and I have eaten a bunch of it. We split half a cow with some friends, and it arrived pre-chopped up, so we’ve been having at least one beef dinner per week, and often two.

6. I download, watch, and enjoy, American Idol. Less so, now that we’re out of the “Simon says snarky things to really bad singers”, and into the “Simon says snarky things to Ryan”, but it’s still enjoyable. (Go Alexis Grace!)

7. My first hard drive wasn’t actually 5 Meg, as I like to claim. My father bought two hard drives, and took the 5 Meg one to the office, leaving the 10 Meg one at home. The story about having 11 Meg of RAM is true, though.

Okay, that’s my seven. There were a few more I could think of, but I’m glad David didn’t run across the 25-things-about-you version, since then I would have had no choice but to resort to things you probably don’t want to know about me.

In the tradition of disbelieving in bad luck, I will now tag no-one, thus breaking the chain. (Although, if any of you are feeling verbose, feel free to pick up the meme and post a list of your own.)

A while ago I (and the rest of the company I worked for) was laid off, so I was forcibly thrust into the world of consulting. It’s been quite a change, keeping track of my hours and sending out invoices for the work I do. And it’s that second point that I want to talk a little more about.

Perhaps I’m too picky, but there seemed to be a fatal flaw with all the online invoicing tools I tried. One didn’t allow enough clients for me on the free plan. (Yes, I am that cheap, especially when I’ve just been laid off.) Another would have allowed the client to dispute the invoice. I mean, really. This is the invoice. You don’t get to dispute it. Or at least, I don’t particularly want to make it easy for you. So I ended up using an online time tracker, and left the invoice creation step until later.

Well, later rolled around, and I really kinda wanted to get paid, so I downloaded a report of my hours as a csv file, and whipped up a quick Python script to parse it, and import it into a locally running copy of CouchDB.

The python script looked like this:

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import couchdb.client
import csv
import path

server = couchdb.client.Server('http://localhost:5984/')
if 'timelog' not in server:
    db = server.create('timelog')

db = server['timelog']
print db

def cleanup():
    # Clear out old rows.
    for row in db:
        if not row.startswith("_"):
            del db[row]

def input( docName ):
    print docName
    input = open( docName )
    reader = csv.DictReader( input )
    i = 1
    for row in reader:
        row['Import Doc Name'] = docName
        row['Import Doc Row'] = i
        if 'Client Name' not in row:
          row['Client Name'] = "Client1"
        key = "%s_%03d" % (docName.name, i)
        print "  ", key
        db[key] = row
        i += 1

cleanup()
base = path.path("/Users/bwinton/Documents/Client1")
for file in base.files("*.csv"):
    input( file )

Pretty easy, eh? After that, I had to create a couple of CouchDB views:

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// hoursPerDay
map=function(doc) {
  key = [
    doc['Employee name'],
    doc['Client Name'],
    doc['Date of work'], 
  ];
  emit( key, doc );
};
reduce=function (tag, values) {
  sum=0;
  temp = []
  for( var i=0; i<values.length; i++ ) {
    sum += parseFloat(values[i]['Time in hours']);
    temp[i] = {
      'Order':values[i]['Import Doc Row'],
      'Description':values[i]['Description'],
      'Time':values[i]['Time in hours'],
      'Type':values[i]['Activity Type'],
    }
  }
  temp = temp.sort(function(a,b) {
    a = parseFloat(a['Order'])
    b = parseFloat(b['Order'])
    return a - b
  })
  return [sum, temp];
};

// totalHours
// This view is just to save me re-calculating this value every time
// I call the page, because it should only change when we add a new
// document.
map=function(doc) {
  key = [
    doc['Employee name'],
    doc['Client Name'],
    doc['Date of work'], 
  ];
  emit( key, parseFloat(doc['Time in hours']) );
};
reduce=function(keys, values, rereduce) {
  function sum( values )
  {
    retval = 0;
    for (i=0; i<values.length; i++)
    {
      retval += values[i];
    }
    return retval;
  }
  return sum(values);
};

it was a quick snippet of HTML:

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<html>
  <head><title>Time Log</title>
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="style/blueprint.css" type="text/css">
    <script>
      // Set up some variables.
      months = [ "2009-02" ]
      users = {
        "Blake Winton":{
          invoiceDates : [ "March 1st, 2009."],
          address : ["16 Forman Avenue",
                     "Toronto, ON, M4S 2R2",
                     "bwinton@latte.ca"]
        }};
    </script>
    <script src="script/bwTimesheet.js"></script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <p class="prepend-1"><b>Blake Winton</b><br/>
    16 Forman Avenue<br/>
    Toronto, ON, M4S 2R2<br/>
    bwinton@latte.ca</p>
    <p class="prepend-1"><b>Invoice Number:</b>
      XX-<span id="invoiceNum">000</span><br/>
    <b>Date:</b> <span id="invoiceDate">March 5th, 1973.</span><br/></p>

    <div class="prepend-1 span-1"><b>To:</b></div>
    <div class="span-22 last">
    Client Name<br/>
    16 Client Address</div>
    <p class="span-24">&nbsp;</p>
    <p><span id="timesheet">Timesheet loading...</span>
      <span id="summary">Summary loading...</span>
    </p>
  </body>
</html>

and Javascript:

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// Get a default month, if one wasn’t passed in.
month = $.url.param('month')
if (typeof(month) == 'undefined')
{
  month = "0";
}
month = parseInt(month)
if ( month < 0 || month >= months.length )
{
  month = 0;
}
invoiceNumInt = month+1;
month = months[month];

// Get a default user, if one wasn’t passed in.
// Yeah, I’ve defaulted it to me.  ;)
user = $.url.param('user')
if (typeof(user) == 'undefined')
{
  user = "Blake Winton";
}
if (!(user in users))
{
  user = "Blake Winton";
}

// Figure out when to start and end the invoice.
invoiceDates = users[user].invoiceDates;
invoiceDateStr = invoiceDates[invoiceNumInt-1];
start = [user, client, month+"-01"];
end = [user, client, month+"-31"];

// Why, oh why, doesn’t Javascript have printf?
function zeroPad(num,count)
{
  var numZeropad = num + '';
  while(numZeropad.length < count)
  {
    numZeropad = "0" + numZeropad;
  }
  return numZeropad;
}

// Update the header, with the address, invoice number, and date.
function updateHeader() {
  var address = $("#address").empty();
  address.append( "<b>"+user+"</b><br/>" );
  for (var i=0; i<users[user].address.length; i++)
  {
    var line = users[user].address[i];
    address.append( line + "<br/>" );
  }

  var invoiceNum = $("#invoiceNum").empty();
  invoiceNum.append( zeroPad( invoiceNumInt, 3 ));

  var invoiceDate = $("#invoiceDate").empty();
  invoiceDate.append( invoiceDateStr );
  updateTimesheet();
}

// Update the timesheet, with hours and descriptions.
function updateTimesheet() {
  var timesheet = $("#timesheet").empty();
  var dbs = $.couch.db("timelog").view("invoice/hoursPerDay",{
    group: true,
    startkey: start,
    endkey: end,
    success: function(r) {
      table = "<div class='span-20 prepend-1 last'><table class='timelog'>";
      rowNum = 0;
      response = r['rows']
      for (var i = 0; i < response.length; i++) {
        var record = response[i];
        var date = record['key'][2];
        var total = record['value'][0];
        var entries = record['value'][1];
        table += "<tr class='row"+rowNum+"'><td>" +
        date + "</td><td>" +
        total + "h</td>";
        for (var j=0; j < entries.length; j++ )
        {
          if (j > 0)
          {
            table += "<tr class='row"+rowNum+"'><td/><td/>";
          }
          table += "<td>" + entries[j]['Time'] + "h - " +
            entries[j]['Description'] + "</td></tr>";
          rowNum += 1;
          rowNum %= 2;
        }
      }
      table += "</table></div>";
      timesheet.append( table );
      updateSummary();
    }
  })
};

// And finally, update the important stuff.
// The total hours, rate, and amount owed.
function updateSummary() {
  var dbs = $.couch.db("timelog").view("invoice/totalHours",{
    startkey: start,
    endkey: end,
    success: function(r) {
      summary = $("#summary").empty();
      content = "<p class='span-20 prepend-1 last'>";
      if ( r['rows'].length == 0 )
      {
        content += "No data available.";
      }
      else
      {
        value = r['rows'][0]['value'];
        content += "<b>Total hours:</b> " + value + "<br/>" +
          "<b>Rate:</b> $" + rate + currency +"/hour.<br/>" +
          "<b>Sub-total:</b> $" + (value*rate).toFixed(2) + "<br/>" +
          "<b>Tax (GST @ 5%):</b> $" + (value*5).toFixed(2) + "<br/>" +
          "<b>Total Payable:</b> $" + (value*(rate+5)).toFixed(2) + "<br/>"
          }
          content += "</p>";
          summary.append( content );
    }
  });
};

// When the document is ready, kick off the updates.
$(function() {
  updateHeader();
});

And we’re done. Not to sound too much like an infomercial, but with JQuery, Blueprint, CouchDB, and Python, it took me only 255 lines of code to get a decent-enough-quality invoice that I could save it as a PDF, send to the client, and get paid. In fact, the client liked it enough (or just wanted things to be standard enough) that they asked that the other consultant on the project use the same template, so I had to spend some time taking my original invoice script and editing it to support more than one user. Either way, I would call it a success.

A while ago, I downloaded Aquamacs, an emacs port for OSX, and tried to switch to it as my default editor. I mainly did it because I wanted an editor I could add functionality to, à la Steve Yegge. I used it for a while, and got fairly proficient at it. There were a lot of things about it I really liked, like the Markdown mode, and the ability to edit files on a remote host, and the way I could write small functions in elisp and use them to make me more productive.

But while it worked, and worked well, I didn’t really write all that much extra elisp, and whenever I did, I didn’t really enjoy it. So the other day, when I found myself reading a weblog about the lack of a good graphical text editor on OSX, I found myself agreeing with him. So when I read a later article on how the author had finally switched back to vim, I thought that I might give vim another chance.

Well, it turns out that vim is actually pretty close to a perfect text editor for me. It’s got Markdown support, remote file editing, and not only can I write functions for it, I can write them in Python! As an example, here’s Steve Yegge’s blog-check function in vim/python:

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function! BlogCheck()
  python << END
import re
import vim
pattern = re.compile( r"\s" )
count = 0
for line in vim.current.buffer:
  line = pattern.sub( "", line )
  count += len(line)
if count <= 5000:
  message = "Okay so far"
else:
  message = "Dude, too long"
print "%s:  %d chars, %d words" % (message, count, count/5)
END
endfunction

I found myself downtown today, with nothing really to do between 3:30 and 6:30. I suppose I could have headed over to U of T, but it seemed like sort of a long way to go just to connect to the internet and come all the way back again. So instead of making the trek, or wasting two tokens, I took advantage of the 2 hours of free WiFi that comes with my Starbucks card, and stayed near Yonge, drinking green tea with a little honey, and investigating a few bugs for work. After it runs out (in another 31 minutes), I think I'm going to pack up, and walk north to my next appointment, grabbing some dinner on the way. If I'm right, that should put me right where I need to be, right when I need to be there.

Ah, if only everything in my life could fall into place this easily. (The upgrade to Aquamacs 1.6 that I just did also worked out really well. Maybe today is just my day for doing stuff!)

I was chatting with a friend and former co-worker of mine today, and asked him why I was never a part of the group guiding where the company was going. (Okay, I actually asked why I was never a part of the management, but in retrospect that was the wrong question, for reasons detailed below. I should have asked the question I said above.) His answer basically boiled down to “You never wanted to be.” One of the things he mentioned was that when I traded salary for extra vacation days (something I was fairly proud of thinking of, since it makes me an easier sell to the CFO, and the two are pretty much equal, if you’re allowed to cash out unused vacation days), it indicated that my priorities lay more with my family than with the company, with the unspoken implication that that attitude isn’t one that will lead to a position of power within the company. That initial assumption led to a series of misunderstandings, and miscommunications, until I was effectively shut out of helping to guide the company.

I guess that’s fair enough, kinda, but it’s a shame that people think that having interests outside of the office means that I’m somehow less interested in the success of the company. Particularly since I didn’t take the vacation days, and was always intending on cashing them out. So, for my next job, I think I’m going to take that option off the table, since I didn’t use the vacation days anyways. (I had 27 days built up when I was laid off!)

I also asked him what I could do to get into management next time, but I’m not really sure that’s really where I want to be. I know a few people who have moved into management, and then found it hard to get a job when they were laid off. Along the same lines, I still believe I’m a far better architect and coder than manager, and so it’s sort of foolish for a company to hire me for my managerial skills when my coding skills are far superior. And I really really like programming. Really. With the spare time I had after I was laid off, I wrote code for an iPhone game. For fun I read up on programming languages I haven’t seen before, and solve Project Euler problems with them. But I don’t know if there’s a way to parlay my architecture and coding prowess into the ability to help guide a company, since that seems to be the exclusive province of people who manage other people. (Of course, my work on Basie last term also has me wondering if I’m actually a mediocre manager, or if I may be better at it than I always thought I was.)

I suppose there’s always one way to find out how good a manager/team lead I am, and I expect I’ll start moving that direction in my next job. I can always write code on evenings and weekends, right? Well, either way, it’s not something I’ll worry about until I get another job. And certainly not something I should be worrying about this late at night.