Relax, Diego.

Using gcc when Xcode 4.3 is installed

2012-02-22T18:35:00.001+08:00

I was having problems compiling gems with native extensions in my Mac last week. After further investigation and some Googling, I found out that it was because Xcode 4.3 now uses the LLVM-based gcc and not all native gems support it. I then installed the Apple Command Line Tools from within Xcode hoping that would solve the problem. Unfortunately, it didn't.

After some more digging around, I came to realize that /usr/bin/gcc, which is what gets used by default, is actually symlinked to /usr/bin/llvm-gcc-4.2. I tried setting CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 whenever I installed gems, but somehow that gets lost along the way. Some suggested that I downgrade to Xcode 4.1 or even uninstall Xcode altogether. However, in my case, I use Xcode every now and then so that was not an option.

Thankfully, I came across an idea in StackOverflow (Unfortunately, I lost the URL for that) which suggested that I create symlinks to the classic gcc and make sure it's accessed first when I'm in the terminal. Here's how I did it:

First, I created a hidden folder in my home directory:

~ $ mkdir .bin

Next, I created symlinks in ~/.bin:

~ $ cd .bin
~/.bin $ ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 cc
~/.bin $ ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 gcc
~/.bin $ ln -s /usr/bin/c++-4.2 c++
~/.bin $ ln -s /usr/bin/g++-4.2 g++

Then, I edited ~/.bash_profile and appended the ff:

export PATH=~/.bin:$PATH

The above ensures that my symlinks are used and not /usr/bin/gcc. I then reloaded .bash_profile

~ $ source .bash_profile

After this, all native gems compiled successfully.

Trouble accessing Google from the Philippines?

2012-02-16T20:33:00.001+08:00

I'm using Globe Tattoo Home DSL and I've had to deal with this problem for a number of days and tried different solutions to no avail, until an officemate of mine suggested that it might be a DNS peering problem between Globe and Google. He then told me to set my primary and secondary DNS to 4.2.2.2 and 4.2.2.1 respectively and voila!

As another officemate once said about Internet connectivity issues: it's always a DNS problem.

Objective C

2011-12-29T19:03:00.002+08:00

Objective-C implements weak typing, blocks (aka anonymous functions or closures), key-value coding (aka accessing an object's methods and properties as if the object was a dictionary), monkeypatching, etc. It's a dynamic language with the power of C. It's Ruby and Python's uglier but more efficient sister. It has its own quirks that might put you off at the start, but the more I learn about it, the more I like it.

Jogging Without Gadgets

2011-12-22T10:00:00.003+08:00

When I go out for my regular 10~12k jog, I don't bring any mp3 player with me. In fact, I don't carry any gadgets at all: the only items on me are my sleeveless shirt, jogging shorts, and running shoes. It wasn't always this way. When I started out, I would fill my iPod to the brim with supposedly energizing music. But after a while, the music started to get old, so I'd find more music to replace the old ones. Repeat ad nauseum.

After a while, I got tired of wasting so much time finding songs. So I got rid of the music (along with those pesky earphone wires that always cling to some annoying spot near my neck). Having been jogging old school like this for some time now, I realized something: Running is more enjoyable! Here are a few theories that I present:

I can pay more attention to how I feel. Do I feel out of breath? Slow down a bit. Do I feel too relaxed? Speed it up a bit. Doing this multiple times during my run eventually helps me to hit a pace that is just right for my current level of fitness;

I can let my mind wander aimlessly. I have to say, this is the best part. Usually, my thoughts revolve around some parts of work, philosophy, coding, and everything else that interests me or has piqued my curiosity at one point in time. This is certainly a lot better than the same old tunes blasting away inside my ear;

I get to take in a lot more of my surroundings. I notice the greenery more, I hear different sights and sounds as the city around me wakes up, I hear dogs barking and chasing after me (which is fine since I also exercise my fast-twitch muscles in between my long runs so I'm able to outrun them easily!), and so much more. So even though I have limited options for my route, there's enough happening around these places to make it new each time;

Before, when I used to bring a gadget that tells me my distance, lap pace, and time to finish, I felt constantly out of breath, impatient, and frustrated. Now that I stopped bringing that with me, I stopped thinking about those irrelevant things, and I started running according to what feels right.

So when I take all of this into consideration, running without gadgets turns out to offer a lot more enjoyment and variety than anything else. That is how, I think, running should be.

Theory of Constraints: Drum-Buffer-Rope

2011-12-12T16:19:00.001+08:00

This is an old report I wrote back in 2005 as a result of simulating different ways to streamline the process in the machine fabrication shop I worked for back then.

Traditionally, the scheduling method used in a small manufacturing shop (let's call it MMS) has been more of guesswork wherein job orders are issued as they come. The main problem with this scenario is that as more job orders enter the shop floor, the larger the work-in-progress (WIP) inventory gets. As a result, idle times for job orders will severely fluctuate contributing to the variability of delivery times for job orders. The bottom line is that supervisors and sales representatives will not have enough data (and confidence) to come up with an accurate completion time estimate for every job order. Often times, they will resort to padding up the completion dates and/or compromising less critical jobs just to avoid late deliveries.

Job Shop Simulation
To demonstrate the phenomenon of fluctuating idle times contributing to the flow times of job orders, two sessions were held in MMS. In both sessions three scenarios were simulated. These simulations are based on the game developed by Dr. James R. Holt (Professor for the Engineering Management department of Washington State University) which was designed to closely resemble the work flow arrangement of job shops.

The arrangement of this simulation is such that four (4) of the participants will act as machine operators doing specialized jobs--that is Operator A cannot act as substitute for Operator B and so forth. One (1) of the participants acted as the scheduler releasing job orders to the shop floor. The remaining participant acted as the monitor responsible for computing each job order’s flow days and plotting the data appropriately in a graph.

Scenario #1
This scenario mimics the traditional method of releasing job orders into the job shop floor as they come. The scheduler was given thirty-six (36) pre-filled job orders and was instructed to shuffle them and pick only from the top of the stack during the simulation. Note that all job orders in the stack were designed to require only four (4) operations and should normally be completed within four simulation days. That is, each job order, if properly serviced, should have a flow time of only four (4) days. After the simulation, the data was plotted and was found to resemble the following:

The graph demonstrates that as more job orders are released into the shop floor, the more the workflow is congested contributing to the wild fluctuations of flow times. In the middle of the simulation, participants would have little confidence in answering the question “When will this latest job order be completed?”
After this scenario, the participants were then asked where the problem was. They all noticed that Operator B was the bottleneck. This is actually by design. Operator B represents the most constrained work center in a real-world shop floor environment. In the real world, the cause for this constraint may be anything from limited capability of the work center to high demand for its services. Operator B may be likened to the lathe department of MMS where nearly all of the job orders pass through.

Scenario #2
During the second scenario, the scheduler was given a fresh set of job orders which was exactly the same as the stack given in scenario #1. During this scenario, the participants were asked to work together in arranging the job orders such that they would not cause congestion in Operator B. As with the previous scenario, the scheduler was also instructed to pick from the top of the stack only. After the simulation, the data was plotted and was found to be no different than the graph from scenario 1.

Scenario #3
This scenario now incorporates the Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) method into the simulation. The participants were also oriented on the rationale behind DBR as well as given additional instructions to implement it during the game. The scheduler was then given a fresh set of job orders exactly the same as the stacks given in scenarios #1 and #2. The scheduler was then asked to arrange the sequence of cards exactly the same as scenario #1. The reason was to provide a direct comparison of results between DBR, and the method used in scenario #1. After the simulation, the graph plotted resembled the following:

The simulation clearly shows that DBR is a superior method to reduce job order idle time and narrow down the variability of completion times. Utilizing this method, MMS will be able to provide even better delivery-time reliability to its customers.

Elegant Solutions

2011-12-06T13:58:00.001+08:00

I like elegant solutions because they are easier to administer. In fact, I believe that a solution is truly elegant if you do not even need to actively administer it. One thing to note about elegance though is that it's hard to achieve if you're harried, if you're out of time, trying to deal with too many things at time, etc. So it's important to be aware of you current state of mind and be sure that you are focused. Otherwise, you'll never achieve that elegant solution you have in mind.

Explaining Cloud Computing

2011-12-03T11:46:00.001+08:00

Cloud computing is a hot topic these days and while nearly every IT professional knows what it is, the rest of the world is still unsure about it. In my current job, part of my responsibilities is to explain this concept in the simplest terms especially for non-technical people and I do this by saying that cloud computing simply changes how we acquire computers or software. The following two slides are usually part of my arsenal:

I start with the above slide by talking about how, in the past, it would take weeks or months to acquire computers or software and, at the end of that acquisition stage, you still had to deal with installation and configuration.

The first slide then dissolves into this next slide. Sometimes I add animation to the arrow by making it shorter and shorter until only the dot is left. As this happens I talk about how cloud computing removes all of that time and resource consuming process and makes the acquisition of computers or software nearly instantaneous.

Of course, I follow this up with other slides that give more depth to the topic, but I've observed that these introductory slides are the ones that puts everything into context for the audience and make them go 'aha!' or even 'wow.' Notice how sparse the slides are. And yet, from my experience, they are very effective. That's because the slides don't compete with me for attention. Rather, they emphasize the message I'm trying to deliver from the stage.

Rails, Sinatra, or Express (for Node)? Decisions, decisions.

2011-12-01T20:32:00.000+08:00

I've been evaluating these three frameworks yesterday and while I have to say that the speed of Express is really going to be critical in the long run, I think it's premature to use it at this point in time. What I need to do right now is get a prototype up and running quickly so as to keep myself motivated. Sinatra is really the same as Express (albeit a little slower and less of the asynchronous goodness) so I'll have to avoid using it at this time.

Since I'm already familiar with Rails, I'm going to use that as my prototype's springboard so that I can focus more on the client side where most of the action is going to happen. Later on, I'll just replace the backend with Express or Sinatra, whichever makes more sense.

No code samples for now. Gotta keep the suspense going! :-)

Things That Are Smaller Than Apple, Inc.

2011-11-24T17:28:00.000+08:00

This may not be a slideshow, but it certainly is a good example of how to present numbers. Notice how this infographic does away with fancy graphics and yet gets the point across. I’d recommend using this for any comparison data. Chart purists might have a beef with the fact that it uses areas instead of the more technically accurate bar charts, but I think that it’s really effective in getting the point across.

Original infographic here.

Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!

2011-11-22T05:25:00.000+08:00

Today I will pick a slide that I like and suggest improvements to it.

I like the whimsical chart even though it’s not technically accurate because it sends the message across very clearly. Just one thing I’d change there is to move the CMS names from the legend at the bottom to immediately to the right of each plot. There’s also more than enough whitespace in this slide that could’ve been used to make the chart easier to read.

Original slides are here.

Redmine Dashboard

2011-11-20T18:22:00.000+08:00

A little something I wrote while I was on a plane from Manila to LA a few months back. This is actually the earliest prototype of the mini-project I was talking about earlier. I used backbone.js and I really feel that it helped me speed up development. It took a little time to get my head wrapped around the collection concept but once I understood that, everything else made a lot of sense. Here's a screenshot of how it looks like once you get it working:

You can grab the code here. Please note that it's purely in conceptual stage right now and I really only wrote this to help me understand one part of the real project I had in mind.

Acromag

2011-11-19T05:23:00.000+08:00

If you have to show a diagram or a workflow, always make sure the audience knows where to start looking and where to look next. This slide was very confusing and even had a number of elements that didn’t help explain what was going on.

Original Slide

My Rendition

Some notes: Apart from the fact that I have no idea where the process starts and ends from looking at the slide above, I also have no idea about monitoring diesel engines. So I didn’t bother fully replicating the information in my rendition. Key takeaways here though are:

Direct your audience eyes so that they will get the flow immediately;
Don’t use real world images if text boxes will do;
For chrissakes, don’t put marketing blurbs on the slide if they don’t help explain the process flow!

Original slides are here.

A Buyer’s Guide to Storage Virtualization

2011-11-18T05:21:00.000+08:00

Bulletpoints can be useful sometimes, but great care must be taken when using them. You don’t want your slides to replace you, the speaker. Even worse is if you use your bullets as speaker notes. Use an index card for crying out loud!

Original Slide

My Rendition

Don’t hide behind bulletpoints. Make the audience focus on you and what you have to say. Practice your speech and clean it up so that you only have to say the most important things. Afterwards, share with them some takeaway notes that they can read on their own time.

Original slides are here.

FAQ generator

2011-11-17T17:30:00.000+08:00

Here's a quick and dirty ruby script I made to extract issues from a project in Redmine and output it to an HTML file. I originally wrote this to compile issues in a project named 'FAQs' where we internally discuss FAQs and their answers before publishing to the wild. Check it out at Github.

After looking at that code, you might ask why I used pandoc instead of plain old erb or some other Ruby-based templating gem. The reason is that I originally started out by outputting a PDF file but then requirements changed and I had to come up with something very quickly. Needless to say, my fingers are itching to clean up this code. Soon...

Radisys

2011-11-16T05:17:00.000+08:00

This slide was presenting too much information at once so I broke it down into 3 different slides to highlight 3 very important things for the audience.

Original Slide

My Rendition (Broken down to 3 slides)

Original slides are here.

HDS Cloud Strategy

2011-11-10T05:09:00.000+08:00

3D charts, really, are unecessary: it distorts the visual information making side by side comparison difficult. To make matters worse, the “3D-fication” of the bar chart changes one of the data points below such that its color doesn’t match what’s in the legend.

Original Slide

My Rendition

Original slides are here.

PureStorage

2011-11-04T11:01:00.000+08:00

This slide had a number of unnecessary elements making it feel cluttered. Since the point is to convince the audience that hard disks are inefficient at random I/O, then a simple chart showing why is more than enough. The rest is left up to the speaker.

Original Slide

My Rendition

Original slides are here.