I’ve just spent the past three or four hours setting up Apache, Subversion, all my browsers etc etc to use SSL connections and client certificates for authentication with my Debian stable server. I’m sure the mod_ssl devs already know what’s coming here and are either chuckling gleefully or ripping their hair out right now. Anyway, the joke for all those who are mod_ssl devs, is that you can’t get subversion to use client certificates with a Debian stable server because Debian stable has Apache 2.0.54, complete with everybody’s favorite mod_ssl bug. It’s fixed in Apache 2.2, but not in 2.0.

Just a reminder for those in Brisbane that the Redemption 101 Movie Premiere is on tonight, 6:30pm at the Schonell Theatre, Union Rd. University of Queensland, St Lucia. It’s a light hearted, quirky, full-length science fiction film made by a local studio. Party with the, er, stars, afterwards and best of all, have something to poke fun at me with.

And for those who aren’t in Brisbane and can’t make it, check out the trailer below and buy a DVD from the website.

Most issue tracking/customer relation/todo list things have a concept of resolving an issue for later or a remind me later option. The idea is that you don’t want to or can’t deal with the issue straight away, but you need to come back and review it or follow up later.

Unfortunately, it turns out that marking an issue for later tends to mean “make this disappear so I have no chance of remembering it” because the issue disappears from all the open issues lists forever. Many systems have an option to e-mail you regularly about issues that are marked as remind or later, but the e-mails are hit and miss – usually they remind you about the issue too early and you just get used to ignoring them.

There is an awful lot of money spent on user interface research, carefully tracking what users do with an application and trying to find ways to improve based on that. It’s a shame that so much of it is wasted because the captured data is misinterpreted.

The Office 2007 Ribbon is a classic example of this, it was clear that Microsoft had real world data to back up their decisions about the Ribbon, they’d spent millions on it. Yet somehow it just didn’t seem right to me. Turns out at least Damien agrees with me. It turns out that despite the fact that usage data shows that users work in different modes, designing an interface that reflects those modes isn’t ideal.

Rob posted about his second month at Ephox and it made me realize it’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to reflect on how things are going for me. Warning, lots of rambling ahead with no attempt at editing.

Towards the end of last year it had gotten too long between holidays and I was getting stressed out and generally sick of work in general. Fortunately, if you haven’t taken holidays for a long time you also have a lot to take, so I took all of January off to recuperate. Since then I’ve been working on my own for the most part with the rest of the team tied up with other projects. I must admit, I quite enjoy going off and coding stuff on my own, still doing TDD and all the other XP practices except of course pairing. It does however tend to let the odd thing slip through and we’ve seen a few issues crop up that we’ve had to fix. Fortunately, since we run the latest builds internally the problems were caught before clients saw them. I’m really not sure if a pair would have picked them up anyway, but it may have helped.

Nice article from the Chief Happiness Officer this morning on pimping your office. Most of the things listed are just over the top, but I really did like the look of Softwall. If Ephox winds up moving offices we should definitely think about using these – it’d let us have an open plan development environment with the flexibility to close off sections as needed.

Very cool.

We’ve been looking at ways to improve the experience for end users when applets first start up. It’s unfortunate that the worst experience with applets is always the first one since that’s when the JVM has to start up and the applet has to download. Once all that happens subsequent usage of applets tends to be lightning fast – particularly with the latest JVMs.

Sadly, that awful Java coffee cup graphic just doesn’t make users happy while they wait for the applet to download. Equally sadly, there’s no good option to get rid of it. You can specify an image of your own to load, but then it replaces the progress bar and it can’t be dynamically resized to fit the applet. Heck you can’t even center it. Worse yet, by the time the graphic downloads and displays the applet is just about ready so the user winds up seeing an empty box for a while then a brief flash of the image and then the applet’s ready.

I’ve been interested in Mindquarry for a while now, so when they finally released a version you could download I headed straight over and grabbed a copy. Sadly, the copy I grabbed, advertised as for OS X, is actually a generic package for which there are no installation instructions. The instructions that are provided for installing Mindquarry all talk about executing ./bin/mindquarry – which would be good if there were a ./bin in the generic package.

One technique that I’ve started to use a lot around the different systems here is to store everything in subversion. It’s a pretty commonly recommended technique and the nicest benefit is that if your changes don’t do what you wanted you can easily roll back to an earlier version.

I’ve found though, that my favorite benefit is that it makes it easy to set up automatic updates for systems. Generally I just add an ‘svn update’ as the first step in running the appropriate system. When that’s not suitable, a simple cron job does the job just as well. For our cruise control server we actually have a “config” project which builds every 30 minutes and all it does is update cruise control’s config files.

So I need to improve out caching support and I really don’t want to got through all the pain myself if I can avoid it. Does anyone know of an existing library that just handles client-side caching with the appropriate If-None-Match and If-Not-Modified headers etc. We already have libraries for doing the actually HTTP stuff, I really just need something that knows how to store things on disk and tell me what headers to use to make the request conditional. Oh and we’re an applet so small and without dynamic loading or configuration files would be ideal.

For those who are interested in science fiction, particularly the home-brew, long-tail kind, you probably want to check out the premiere of Redemption 101. It’s an added bonus if you are looking for an opportunity to poke fun at me – I feature as Klang the less than brilliant Aldaran pilot.

The premiere will be at the Schonell Theatre, St Lucia on March 24th. Drinks in the foyer start at 6:30 with the red carpet parade at 7pm. Tickets are $14 ($7 concession) and you can order them online from the Redemption 101 website (contact details for offline orders are there too). You can also preorder your copy of the DVD which will be released at the premiere. 

If you happen to be running a VMWare Server instance on a machine with multiple network cards, make sure that when you upgrade you reconfigure which network cards your VMs should use, otherwise you may find that despite the fact that the network interface in the VM is up you have no network access. It usually reports “No route to host” or “Destination Host Unreachable”. Sadly, VMWare doesn’t seem to be too bright about how it picks network interfaces and will sometimes pick one that isn’t connected to anything.