I firmly believe that Vagrant is the quickest way from nothing to a running and preconfigured development environment on any machine and especially Macs. For me, the ‘works on my machine’ problem is the biggest reason I run Vagrant. Day-to-day though, Vagrant is probably the easiest to use UI for Virtualbox. If my work actually had money to give me for the VMWare plugin, I believe it would be a better UI for VMWare Fusion as well.

The Basics

This is enough to get started with Vagrant and to reap the rewards.

1. Virtualbox
2. Vagrant

That’s great and all, but these are the basics. At the very least, you’ll be able to bring up some boxes that don’t require special plugins up.

Frills

You don’t need these but I do! I usually build my Vagrant boxes with Opscode Chef, a configuration management system. For reference, a Chef cookbook is a series of statements about how a machine should be setup.

Most of these frills are plugins. To build the boxes I make, you’ll usually have to install or use these.

1. Berkshelf is a dependency resolution manager for Chef. I use Berkshelf as a gem along with the corresponding vagrant plugin. With this, when I run berks cookbook <name>, I can make a Virtual Machine that can be created and destroyed quickly from scratch for whatever purpose. I could do vagrant init but berks cookbook has it beat by creating a directory structure that’s pretty much a Chef cookbook. Even if I don’t intend to redistribute said cookbook, the VM made is perfectly fine for tryout purposes.
2. I like using the Opscode Bento boxes. They are minimal and they have already been uploaded to S3 on Opscode’s dime. In a Vagrantfile, you can set the box URL for a Vagrant basebox to be downloaded. These boxes are great.
3. You can’t use the Opscode Bento boxes without the Vagrant Omnibus plugin. Those boxes do not include Chef so you must install Chef at runtime.
4. Just so you don’t get warnings about the Virtualbox additions being out of date, there’s a Vagrant plugin to automatically update the guest additions if needed. This one is really optional and it’s use just surpresses that warning you get if you bring up a vagrant box with old guest additions.

The Future

In the future, I’ll like to be able to test my boxes to make sure they stay working as the things they pull from the internet change. For this, there’s Test Kitchen.

Unfortunately, it’s still really cutting edge. However, there are guard plugins and this Youtube Video and blog post. That video is very much a must see for anybody who appreciates TDD.

Full integration testing on your own laptop is very attractive to me. I keep mine plugged in and I find it disturbing that the rest of the cores on this MacBook Pro just lie cool.

And also, maybe if I get some cash, I might drop some money on the VMWare plugin and VMWare Fusion. If I want to simulate multiple servers at a time and heavier loads, it would make that much faster.

I paid Swish $25 and $8 shipping for this two months ago. I think I had my share donated to the Khan Academy.

It’s the “Windows Quickstart Kit for Mac Developers”. It includes:

• A full Windows 8 Pro license
• A Parallels Desktop license
• A USB Stick with an ISO on it with a real Microsoft Certificate of Authenticity. Genuine Windows!

I’m not sure why Microsoft saw fit to spend two months packaging a “quickstart”. Why Microsoft did not see fit to provide this quickstart through digital distribution is beyond me. They could have emailed a link to some keys and ISOs and maybe even let a distributor like Digital River do this. Instead, they saw fit to contract this work out to a physical media distribution company. It seems with these charity-ware deals that the best way to donate money is to allocate a large chunk to some physical distributor.

I’m so stoked to try and develop for Windows Phone. I’m going to virtualize Windows 8 and develop a native app for a platform on which I have no way to run natively. I’m also going to jump over some chairs in celebration.

Nuh uh, virtualization is cheating and is really anti-dogfood. If I have to boot up a RAM hungry OS to RUN the app, it’s a failure. If I have to develop the app inside a virtualized OS, that would be even more of a failure since I would have to bear with the performance and non-nativeness penalty. There’s no way a good app can come out with so many barriers like that. Google realized that its Eclipse toolkit was a problem and switched to IntelliJ IDEA to reduce their barriers and gain an awesome IDE in the meantime. I highly doubt Microsoft will provide a free cross-platform and light SDK. The technical barriers are just too high. It’s totally not like their Xbox where game developers are used to putting up with shit like that. Mobile developers are in general more finicky and prefer native tools. I’m not sure if this is still the case now but the Android team saw fit at one point to maintain the Android compilation toolchain for the entire OS on OS X. You can compile a Linux system on OS X!

With that said, this cool cardboard box is all that remains. It would be well designed if it never existed. It’s way too late for that though.

It’s made up of two big pieces. After ripping off the plastic wrapper, there’s a windows logo cutout sleeve thing to keep the box with a flap closed. It’s a pretty retail package for something that is only sold online.

When you open the box, you have a welcome card with some very basic instructions on the back on the left and some coupon card things on the right.

Beneath the welcome card is a USB drive. It has a Microsoft certificate of authenticity on it, so you know its real and has real Microsoft binary bits. There’s also a tracking ID on it too. The Microsoft logo is embedded in plastic on the back and not some cheap printer job. It’s certainly done with style to make the USB drive seem to be actually worth something.

On the USB Drive is just an ISO. There are no other files The drive itself isn’t bootable. It is formatted with NTFS though. At the very least, it’s readable on all platforms. It also enumerates as a device of the name Windows 8 Pro in system profiler. Quite a Matroska doll. I guess having an ISO is easier than mounting a USB drive in a virtual machine in terms of instructional material.

The cards on the right had keys on them. They’re business card sized and feel like them too.

On the back were some keys. Why they felt the need to kill all these trees and grow soy beans to produce the ink for printing on said dead tree material to wrap around these numbers is beyond me.

It took two months for these two alphanumeric strings to get here. The lack of timeliness on delivering these two codes and an ISO does not look well for Microsoft’s Windows efforts at all. It would take 30 minutes to illegally obtain these materials. 30 minutes is far less than two months. Oh, I almost forgot, they don’t even include Parallels in the package. You will have to go download that from Parallel’s site. What a “quickstart” indeed.

I just compiled a version of keycastr and put it here since I could not find a precompiled version that’s relatively new.

http://files.mindflakes.com/blog/KeyCastr.zip

Keycastr is used for presentational demos. It’s free and the source is here in this github repo. You will need a modern version of Xcode to compile it.

https://github.com/nelsonjchen/keycastr

The version that is compiled is by creemama. I only blindingly updated the settings with Xcode recommendations. This “works for me” on OS X 10.8.3.

A few days ago, I decided to pull the trigger and install Windows on my Retina MacBook Pro at a LAN Party. It’s a perfectly fine machine with a decent graphics card and CPU. I started Boot Camp Assistant and followed through with the instructions to install from the USB drive using the ISO of Windows 7 I had on my Desktop. If you follow Apple’s steps to the letter, your installation of Windows will never proceed.

If you do follow the steps, you will most certainly get an error of “Setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition. " when you select the BootCamp partition that you had just formatted in the Windows installer on your Mac. This can occur on PCs too but basically the issue is that the USB drive is initialized as another valid bootable disk. If you were to Google this, you will find solutions online that involve yanking out the USB drive and reinserting it before pressing “Install Now” on the Windows 7 installation screen. This “Install Now” screen is a big centered button that prompts your to install now and the arrow is set inside a blue circle that’s like a gem.

This is where Apple’s helpfulness can get in your way. By default, Boot Camp Assistant copies the Boot Camp support files to your USB drive. It also adds an Autounattend.xml file to the root of your drive to automatically install Boot Camp support drivers and utilities in Windows. With Autounattend.xml present, you will not have the opportunity to yank out and reinsert the USB drive before continuing. Instead, the setup just proceeds as if that button was pressed. While this is a good file for disc installations, it causes a massive problem for USB installation which is most likely to be the case for all new Macs from now on since they do not include disc drives by default. If you try to ask Apple to ‘fix’ this, they will just blame Microsoft which admittedly isn’t blame free either.

To solve this problem, move or delete Autounattend.xml on the root of the USB drive and proceed with the normal steps afterwards . After Windows is done installing and since Autounattend.xml was nullified, you will have to run the Boot Camp support installer from the BootCamp folder on the USB drive.

It’s a shame Apple’s instructions just do not work. The fix required would probably mean removing Autounattend.xml functionality for USB Drive installations. In the meantime, this worked for me.

Here’s a comment I wrote on /r/UCSantaBarbara a month ago. Learning Git is a very valuable tool for any aspiring or lazy programmer.

http://www.reddit.com/r/UCSantaBarbara/comments/1b93tr/ucsb_cs_faq/

At my current place of somewhat employment, the candidates for our internship offering job did not know how to use Git. I hope my post will have changed something.

I’m ashamed to say I’ve neglected this domain and site for 9 years. In that time I’ve gone through high school and university in that time. In each period, I’ve attempted putting up blogs, forums, another blog, and other similar nonsense. I did not follow through with whatever resolutions I may have made to keep the site maintained or write down the latest results from my last screwing around with my projects. Basically, for the past 9 years, I don’t really have much to show for it other than being able to rattle off some helpful anecdote from experiences I have never written down here and there.

Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and Science is writing it down.

– Adam Savage, Video

I thought I was conducting Science for the past few years; in reality, I’ve only been really screwing around.

Most of my experiments in the past few years have also ended in spectacular failures. I never wrote about my failures even during the times I had a blog available. This is where my fails turned into an epic fail. I recently watched a TED talk on this and learned that this phenomenon is called research bias. I should not have withheld what I had learned from failing. My memory of my failures only fade away until someone mentioned it and I rattle off some anecdote. This obviously won’t scale and does not do much to help me demonstrate any skills when I can’t even get my foot in the door.

I’m going to change that with the launch of my new site. I’ll be honest here, this is very much a career move. However, it is also a personal one for reasons I’ve outlined above. I can’t let those many hours of screwing around go to waste! Prospective employers and/or clients love to hire people who do Science, not screwing around. And I think this site will fix that.

My new site is designed is designed so much as to be a portfolio and as a blog. My portfolio is small as I have little to show and my blog has a meager amount of posts. As a foundation though, the site is solid and is totally ready to showcase more of my skills.

Because of Hope

I started the project to fix up my personal site in September 2012.

At that time I had heard about this static site generator called nanoc. I had taken down previous versions of this site since I could not be bothered to maintain the PHP beast that is called Wordpress. Also, there was little hope of me hacking on Wordpress to change its default style to something that better demonstrates my skills. Stock Wordpress themes just do not exhibit confidence in web development. Also, learning PHP is just something I’me not too interested in doing. The horror stories of PHP may be FUD, but I’ve experienced and witnessed them myself in a past lifetime. nanoc answers both of these problems. I can hack Ruby and static HTML pages on a server do not have moving parts. nanoc is written in Ruby and generates static HTML pages for uploading onto a server. Compared to a beast like Wordpress, it is also very transparent. The nanoc guys can better explain their kind of product (static site generators) here. I did have a problem in that I had absolutely no experience with nanoc.

In September 2012, I answered a request for help from an organization named Because of Hope at the beginning of my last quarter at UCSB. Because of Hope is an organization that helps children and women in Uganda through sustainable methods. Here’s the email that was sent to the UCSB Computer Science jobs list:

My name is Natalie Lemonnier and I graduated from UCSB in 2011. Since graduating, two of my friends and I have started a nonprofit here in Goleta called Because of Hope (BOH) that is working to empower women in Uganda. I am emailing you because our nonprofit is getting ready to launch a new Student Sponsorship campaign, which will require making some changes to our website, and I was wondering if you knew of anyone (student, faculty or otherwise) who might be interested in helping us make these changes. I am not sure if websites are your area of focus, but I just wanted to contact you and see if you could point us in the direction of someone who might be able to help.

Originally, our friend built our site from scratch. However, he is no long working with us and none of us have any web background to make the necessary changes. I believe that some of the fine-tuning will be relatively easy, while other issues may be more time intensive.

However, because we don’t have web background, we are not really sure of the exact time needed to complete the desired changes. If you or anyone else you know would be interested in volunteering to help us, or would like to learn more about our situation, we would greatly appreciate it.

Because we have only been operational for a year, no one in our organization currently gets paid, so unfortunately it’s not in the budget to pay someone to help us with our website. But we are hoping to find someone who would be understanding of our situation and wiling to help us further our mission! I know UCSB is getting ready to start up, so please feel free to pass on this information to students you think would be willing and able to get involved. Please let us know if anyone comes to mind! Thank you for your time, and please feel free to contact me via phone if that would be at all more convenient for you! (818) 620-8847. Happy Fall Quarter :)

(If you would like to learn more about our organization or view our site, please feel free at http://www.becauseofhope.org.)

Best of Wishes,

Natalie Lemonnier

So, I needed some experience doing a nanoc site, something nice to put on my résumé, and something to satisfy and fulfill the “help poor children in Uganda” request in the Vim text editor. Because of Hope needed someone to maintain their site. With my résumé as sparse as it is, I called up Natalie and offered to help.

I met up with them and took a look at the setup. They had a $20/month VPS to serve one HTML file. The rest of the “pages” were actually linked tumblr posts. I told them upfront I wanted to test out some tools on their problem before I ran with it on my own personal site. In the meantime, I would maintain their current handcrafted site and check out any technical details such as the domain name, Google Apps, or the VPS itself.

I had nanoc chosen out, but what about the rest? I checked out the then-current website’s code and it had some custom 980px grid system. I couldn’t be bothered to try and understand it. I did try to understand it enough to add a donations page that they immediately needed for their upcoming fundraiser.

On the bright side, all the mockups that Nikki Day of BOH did were in Photoshop. They were far more ambitious than what the current site’s current implementation. The custom 980px grid system was not up the the task. In retrospect, it would have been thrown out anyway. I shudder at what beast I would have had to slay if the original plans had gone through.

I chose to use Zurb Foundation. Zurb Foundation is a front-end framework that is far more flexible than many other frameworks out there. This was the the kind of Framework that could handle Nikki’s designs. I would also get free functionality such as drop-down menus, pretty buttons, photo carousel, and first-class support for SCSS, an extension of CSS. Zurb Foundation’s use of SCSS was very instrumental in adapting the design of Zurb Foundation for Nikki’s designs. Compared to its competitor Twitter Bootstrap, there is far more control over elements on the page, especially the buttons. Also, I got a mobile site for free! BOH didn’t even ask for it but it came with it!

Ever since from that time, I’ve been working on BOH’s nanoc site. I learned how to better compose layouts, the Rules DSL of nanoc, and the whole nanoc ecosystem. I was also working with it to integrate Zurb Foundation into the project.

Remember that $20/month VPS? It has since been replaced with Amazon S3. I also tossed in Cloudflare in front. BOH can take on a DDOS attack of the most epic proportions. Why would anyone attack a non-profit is beyond me but the overkill just tickles my funny bone. And the cost is free to near pennies! This is something only a static site can do. As a vote of confidence in S3, NPR used S3 for transferring data in its election app. I’m not saying that BOH will become as big as the presedential election, but it can definitely handle that much traffic if need be and certianly more than a $20/month VPS. Honestly, I’m just glad I don’t have to manage a Linux server to achieve this goal. It’s really upload and forget.

Also, in doing nanoc, I now realize how much of a pain in the ass it is to update the original site. There was so much copy-paste! How do people do all these busy work?

I learned a lot from doing the BOH site and I am continuing to work on it in my spare time. It’s source code is versioned in a Git repository so I can experiment on it all I want. It’s also open source in a GitHub repository. If anybody wants to peruse it and reuse parts of it, they are more than welcome to do so. I plan to keep it in sync with anything that is a nanoc best-practice and update it with new pages.

Mindflakes

Okay, so I’ve helped a non-profit get their site stuff in shape and beyond.

What about my personal site?

Ever since I’ve started the BOH site project, I’ve probably made 3 false starts in creating mindflakes.com. I wager I wasn’t confident enough in my nanoc knowledge in the previous starts. I had given up or I did not have enough time to really sit down and really start work on my site. Also, I was working part time at a local company in the area at this time. I came back home so exhausted from looking through piles of Ruby and Python that I really did not want to put my finger to the keyboard.

Maybe the fourth time was the charm? I didn’t start the mindflakes project this time. What I did instead was start an example/bootstrap project for a blog that used Zurb Foundation and nanoc. I put some of the best-practices I knew into there and learned some more best practices from various sources around the web. I’m especially proud that the project is completely tied to Zurb Foundation as its Javascript is sourced from its gem. There were plenty of Bootstrap examples out there but I believe that Zurb Foundation better fits with the nanoc philosophy in letting power come out in the right places when needed.

By distilling the framework from the content of my site, I was able to work away from any pressure in having a nice site to present. Just having a good framework to build upon is much more gratifying.

Not only that, I now have a free reusable framework that I may be able to reuse for client projects that don’t involve my site. I don’t have to extract magic or best practice out of my site. I can just rebase anything off of the framework with the way I like it. I plan to contribute anything I think is relevant while building my own site back to the framework.

This is my first long blog post since ever. I wrote this to test out this blog. As of this post, Mindflakes.com is still very much out-of-the-box even though I just built the box. I will customize it and make it look pretty enough to really showcase my work over the next few sessions. I’m going to have to decide what to do about images and what to do with the flexibility that Zurb Foundation offers me.

As for what to write, I think I have that settled.