… ?:o

It was hard. And especially hard since i couldn’t eat, sleep and breathe the environment; so every opportunity i got to tackle the problem, i had to relearn the same commands. But i got used to it. I read _a lot_. And i managed to actually understand the conversations at one point. A major plus

In case you’re wondering what a *normal (or typical?) deployment might look like, take a peek here.

*Normal or typical probably doesn’t even exist, it’s just a phrase which suits my goals at the moment.

In any event, there’s some configuring going on. Examples are here, and here, and here. And there are more.

And despite the seeming “mission” related to deploying apps (and why a lot of folk just abandoned the platform altogether), i still believed it would get better. It just had to.

Hello, Phusion Passenger. Phenomenal! And suddenly, the roses are redder, the skies are bluer, the birds sing clearer and the apps deploy smoother. Waaaay smoother. Keep your eye on this one!

Oh. and here’s more about using Phusion Passenger in development.

Now there’s a lot of discussion online and i’m not going to repeat all that here about the various math libraries and the reasons why the implementations aren’t available. What i will link to however, is a friendly, but relatively in-depth review of implementing your own pow() function. Incidentally, this article also implements an “inline” function for determining ln(x) in the dissection on using the Taylor series algorithm.

Wikipedia also have a pretty decent discussion on the fundamentals of logarithms which lead to more insight on the implementations discussed above.

So if you plan on doing math on J2ME, plan ahead. You will need to Google for some math libraries, or be prepared to roll your own. I prefer the roll-your-own method unless you need _all_ the features of library X. Keep it trim. And i get to apply some years of text-book learning

Big plus is you can unit-test it and luckily the laws of math don’t change too often so once you’ve written it, porting to other platforms/frameworks/languages in future is straightforward. Where as the entire library you might have linked to is only available on that one platform/language.

As for rhe RoR-ish slant. It is well… erm… RoR-ish. But really, nothing beats RoR. CodeIgniter is not bad. Rails still kicks!

Incidentally, another good reason to make the effort to document (read blog) that learning, or even just link that learning into your own blog. You never know when you gonna need it again…

Setting up Trac and Subversion on Ubuntu

This is probably about the most comprehensive and easy to follow guide i’ve come across so far. It has all the basic necessities to serve as both a refresher and get you up and running quickly. There is one small “typo” but you should spot it quickly if you’ve done this before. It refers to the root web folder for the trac setup.

So if you ever end up having to plan something like this (not that you can always consciously time it so well) then i have a a tip for you…

Make sure you got a loving, enduring and patient wife backing you up and supporting you all the way. It makes it seem so easy. Thanks, Lolly! You simply rock! Your honorary degree is almost there

Seriously. Jack was due just after the first exam, Macro Economics. So we figured it’d be alright ‘cos we’d have two weeks before starting to prep for the next two to settle in. Then Jack decided… “Neh. Too warm and cosy in here, thanks. Think i’ll stay a little while longer.”

8 days later (over due), little Jack says: “Hello, world!” That was one week before my last two exams: Financial Modeling and my major: Applied Mathematics. Oops = MC^2?

Needless to say, we -and i do mean “we”- decided to forge on and today, on my last exam, as soon as the invigilator said: “Pens down. Your time is up.” a chorus of angels hauled out the trumpets and started singing “Hallelujah!”. Shew!

Until next year…

**DISCLAIMER: I’m NOT a financial advisor; am not pretending to be one; and certainly not qualified to be one. But i can kinda do the numbers, so this looking at it purely from a mathematical perspective.

When it’s not really the “best” advice is when you are servicing other debt, at higher interest rates. Then the numbers say: kill that debt first, and _then_ look at the mortgage. So if you’re servicing a credit card, overdraft or vehicle finance (which can typically be higher than prime) and your mortgage is sub-prime, service the higher first.

But more personally, i recently faced the opportunity of trading in my vehicle for a newer one (which would have been nice) and i was figuring out what to do with the trade-in amount and work out where it would best pay dividends. On an aside, i’m of the opinion that buying a vehicle is NOT a financially smart move at all- no matter how you try slice the numbers. You will always lose (and i’m not referring to collectors’ classics). So look after your car- treat it nice, drive nice, service it regularly so you can leave it in your will. After all, it’s __just__ a car, right

So down to the maths… Note: the numbers have been changed slightly to protect the prudent.
New car: R150k at 15.5% APR over 60 months.
Existing debt: R640k mortgage (±30 months into the schedule) at 14% APR over 20 years.
Trade in on car: R50k. What to do with the R50k? A) Plough it into the bond. B) Use 100% of it as a down payment on new car. A or B, what do you do? The “best” advice i received was plough into the bond and save thousands in interest on the bond! Uhuh. That’s half the truth.

As a down payment on the new car, I reduce the repayments from R3.6K to R2.4K, and end up saving, in effect, R44k in interest over the term. Not bad, not great.
In the bond, i reduce the interest _over the same term_ by R33K. Worse. But not a surprise. And that’s the important part here: the same term. 60 months. You see, over the remainder term of the mortgage, that advance payment will save you A LOT! But now you’re comparing a value of money of two different terms: 60 months versus N years on the mortgage, so don’t be too surprised if you draw bogus conclusions. Afterall, once you’ve finished paying off the car, you’re R3.6k deeper in the pocket which you can then plough into the mortgage anyway.

So, on face value, it’s more favourable, over the same term, to service the vehicle as quick as possible and then see to the lower interest obligations. But there are better options… which is the other half of the truth: discipline.

Add in some fiscal discipline into the mix, and suddenly your options are wild. For example…

Put down the down payment on the car, saving an extra R1.2k in repayments each month on the car, but then put the saving into the mortgage over the same term. Suddenly you start to save R64K in interest. Mmmm… Or…

And then there’s this. Which really was the best option (Thanks, A)…

Take your old car for a shmancy valet at about R200, pretend it’s new and “pay for it” anyway at R3.6k per month. Now you’re saving close to double your previous best!

The bottom line is; if you’re in the market for a car and can afford X, but you’re servicing other debt, service that debt first- forget about the car*. Unless it’s an absolutely necessity (and looking better than the Jones’ is not a necessity- i checked) you probably don’t need it.

*Forgetting about the car, probably anywhere in the world, is really hard to do though. In South Africa, households spend a disproportionate amount of their disposable income on vehicle financing, which says a lot about how we feel about our cars. Somehow, cars have so (too) much appeal. So much so that having 4 reliable wheels is just never enough. There’s always going to be something really “cool” about a car that makes you just wanna have it. And the price tag is just irritating. Can you say X-Trail… or Fortuner?

My goal was to install Ubuntu Server edition on a machine that is really, _just_ a server. No shmancy graphics card, no CD-ROM.. wait. No CD-ROM!? How do you install server software onto a *disconnected machine with no CD-ROM? USB.

Now previously, the ability has always been there, and you had to download this and do that and change this- since you were doing something out of the ordinary (at least that is, back then it was). So they simplified the whole process with Intrepid and made it ordinary.

Sooo.. on a desktop machine (an existing installation of Intrepid) select to create a USB disk; locate/select the server ISO (or CD if you’ve burned the ISO onto CD already); select the USB device you want to use and the rest is a progress bar.

Now you can boot with the USB device and install the server OS onto the machine of choice. It really does just work.

Health, education, safety, housing, food, energy… these issues are not so important it seems. While all the politicians dance, the “guy on the street”, the ones working 8-5, 6-6 or not at all, are the ones bearing the burdens and suffering the patience of a long-awaited non-delivery. We have to be content with watching our money being diverted from the promised land into more airflights, suits, lunches, breakfasts, t-shirts, stickers, petty (and not so petty) court cases…

Of course, the argument is that these breakfasts and continued (boring) media tantrums are important enough so that the rest of the real work can start happening properly, with the right people in charge. And there’s truth to that. But the obvious responding question: “then why is there more politicking than delivery?” is never really answered. Except to say, well, because it’s really important to get that sorted so that the right people can start to do the work properly.

The irony is, the right people for the job are the ones who get busy just doing it, regardless. But they would probably never dream of being distracted from getting on with their job and “run for office”. ‘Cos, well, that’s all it is: running for an office. Maybe if we gave our politicans cubicles instead, there would be less of them “running for cubicles” :p

(Names have been blanked for privacy reasons)

My pending changes tells me i got a whole bunch of changes to commit but comparing each one tells me they’re the same. Not exactly conducive to keeping up a good habit, i would say. I actually only had 4 files that really changed, in case you’re wondering. No amount of refreshing, getting latest version or checking out could give me just the files i want to review before committing. Sigh.

And most people still ask me why i insist on using open source tools to do the job (properly) :p

UPDATE:

I stumbled upon Derek’s posting on TFS and it does seem that things which should be simple (and were solved moons ago) are indeed quite difficult with TFS. The “plus” side though is ian has taken the time out to do something about it: cue LizardTF. Keeping an eye on that while i simply have to use TFS…

The latest bzr version for Windows, really has a best-of-both-worlds feel to it. Just go get it already