Cheers Twitter, now your name is Mastodon

I am amazed that Blogspot as a platform still exists in this age of streaming live events, videos of all sorts, medium and substack looking to monetize any decent text written by journalists or other authors.

This blog remains my digital trace of writing tech stuff and other rants, before my Twitter adoption. I was really forced to write in 140 chars, then I was happy to benefit from 280 chars, but it formed me in my rants, really.

And I thought I would not resume writing on it, as I'm not a native English writer, obviously, and my many mistakes only allows me to transmit ideas, not correctness. 

But now that APIs are gone as well from Twitter (X, whatever) ... I see the widget on the right hand side faltered, and that's why I replaced it with my Mastodon handle.

If you want to check out my rants, Mastodon is the place. 

I no longer have time to write blog posts, nor do I have the drive. Quick rants yes, specifically on topics that pick my brain. But one never knows, for the moment Blogspot still functions, whatever Google's plans are with it ... 

mkcert - crafter's local cert

If you're a seasoned developer, you must know that local SSL .. err, TLS, configs on your local development environment is some sort of art. 

That happens because of the highly technical details of low level tooling like openssl, keytool and other PKI related details that makes the https protocol work. 

Today I discovered that life of a developer got a little bit easier, due to the work of Filippo, here's his article: https://blog.filippo.io/mkcert-valid-https-certificates-for-localhost/

mkcert repo https://github.com/FiloSottile 

An excellent tool that most probably will (if not already) be part of the full-stack developer's toolbox.

we need to plan for more highways. Extend, already !

I was travelling this week, starting from Bucharest to Satu-Mare, then back. As we're in a pandemic and I don't trust border crossing, this year (and most likely the next one, 2021) we'll have loco holidays. Break from work, go visit some of our relatives.

No, we'll not spend money on the seaside, nor at the mountains, and to be honest some of the hosts where we had experiences past many years, I hope they go broke this time, and start fresh to have more consideration for their tourists, and not trying to rip-off at every corner (but that's another topic)

To better understand, past 3 or 4 years, from Bucharest, we mostly escaped to the South during holidays (either Bulgaria, or Greece) ... and so I was rather disconnected from any kind of progress with the highways in my country. I know everyone complains, we also had protests and all that, but myself I was not a driver to the north, to experience the ordeal on myown.

This week, I did. For the most part, it was an OKish experience. Driving through Europe on several occasions, I was rather surprised that I had so many km on the highway in my country. But then, we stopped. Aiud - Sebes, 45 km, a segment that is the current nightmare for anyone that choose this route. Unless you plan to reach there in the middle of the night, or on week-ends, you'll be holding for at minimum 1 hr. Not acceptable.

Which is to say, at the next elections, I will vote with the party that will convince me to these points:

1. when this crappy segment Aiud - Sebes is ready (we're rather delayed, so many wasted resources ...)

2. when the two highways over the mountains are ready: Pitesti - Sibiu, Comarnic - Brasov

3. are plans already being considered to extend these highways, already constructed, or the unfinished ones ?

The last point above is for any long-term planning for any party in this country. I have a clear feeling that what we have now is already not enough, from the infrastructure requirements. And I'm a software engineer, not a transportation one, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. 

my 2020 focus area(s)

Past years with my blogging breakup, I went through some transformations. One is age (uh, he passed 40 ! ... he must be expensive ! ... no he's not).  The second is that I realized that I'll be continuously learning for the rest of my career, and that's a given. The third is that my daughter will be 18 this year, so it's time for daddy to get back to writing some potentially cool stuff. Or not, that remains to be seen.

With a new assignment starting at the beginning of the year (pre-pandemic ... :facepalm:), I am returning to the role of Integration Architect - the formal name  is some leadership role part of a leadership team :)

I am not ashamed to admit:  I don't know everything there is to know. But right now I am focusing on some Microsoft technologies. Yes, that Microsoft :) ... well, time will tell if they're trustworthy of the FOSS community attention (don't think it will ever be love, there's no such thing in open-source). They grabbed github, they appear to have changed their mindset. 

So here's my focus areas for this year: ADO, ADF, Spark, Scala, Python, HDFS, ADLS2. By focus I mean learning, we're ok here, right ? Some I knew, most I did not. And yes, I will attempt to be certified by Microsoft, once that I can get to their learning testing centers (because pandemic restrictions, we're all WFH, and I assume all their testing centers are pretty closed). 

Ha, fun times ahead.

Google Blogger ... still on. good.

I'm seeing ppl ditching medium and embracing git like static generators for their blogs. 

While I do appreciate markdown, I do know my way around terminals and am using it all the time, there's the hosting issue that requires extra money, and effort to set up.

You might have seen that past years my thoughts are mostly under twitter, @raducadariu, and I have stopped blogging that much (no facebook, thanks, nor other crappy social media)

But I also see that blogspot is still active and sound, and in fact I can write this post from my older tablet. 

And so, hopefully I will continue to share my thoughts, at least those longer than a tweet.

macos - my list of apps for day.to.day work

Over the years I learned to share things. Switching my OS to the fruity company, back in 2015 (so by now running macos 4 years, daily), I was looking at what tools and utilities could make myself productive (read: to stay in focus and not get annoyed by stuff caused by the operating system)

Probably this is a habit I got from the previous 6 years of running Ubuntu on a daily basis, where OSS taught me to look to fix things, or search for solutions (or utilities).

Below, you have my list of apps (free or not !) that I find useful to my daily activities (beside other regular business related ones, that's another story). I'm also adding some comments and I won't link sites, you'll have to search for their names on Google v2.0 in order to check them out.

If you don't know what the comment is saying ... not my problem :) Some of these are payable, but not excessive (I'm cheap), so in an alphabetical order, here they are:

1password - you do use a password manager, right ? I also had LastPass, but for the moment I think this is the best. As alternative (free), you might look at Bitwarden.
Alfred - better spotlight.
AppCleaner - for app remainings after uninstalls.
Apple Music - something has to sing when focusing on stuff.
BetterSnapTool - window resizing on macos made easier.
Boom2 (or Boom 3D) - sound enhancer, nice to boost an already good sound on mac.
CudaText - nice editor.
DaisyDisk - cruncher for what takes that space.
draw.io - diagrams, sharable with teams via SCM (read git, these days).
Eclipse - coding, but for me it's mostly looking, these days...
Github Desktop - go figure ..., terminal just as good, but hey ...
iTerm - life in terminal is fun, sometimes.
LightShot Screenshot - consider Retina oversized screenshots, and default Cmd-Shift-Ctrl-4 not enough when you want to send it to other humans using PCs.
MacPorts - alternative to Brew ... :)
RDM - nifty utility to change resolution on my screen, depends if I have my glasses on ... or not :)
Quiver - note taker. And SimpleNote, and Google Keep.
SimpleMind - mind mapper.
TinkerTool - tweaking more macos settings.
VSCode - another coding IDE.

If this list will change, I will update this post, but the reason I publish it is my feeling that now I have a system on which I no longer have annoyances (well, after 5 years of mocking apps and crunching the net).

new (for me) Eclipse oomph installer

It's been a long time since my last post, but I'm fine, if you stumbled upon some of my pages, just by looking at the Twitter feed on the right hand side.

This post is just to let you know that recently I got re-activated with mocking around with plain Eclipse for a project I'm driving for a customer, using ... he he, open-source ... we (all) won afterall, huh ? :)

My surprise to re-discover something I saw back in 2015, oomph project, which made it now as the default installer for eclipse(s) on a local machine (https://wiki.eclipse.org/Eclipse_Installer), when you point your browser towards https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Give it a try, it did fine on my station (a fruity company macbook pro) with several plugins, git, sonarlint and the likes ... no fuss, just enlightment

More to come, hopefully soon, as I look for more info.

Latest Rational Team Concert - 6.0.2 now, keep agile delivery going :). Playgrounds

Recently I've (re)started to get things going with RTC, to the level of getting up-to-date with the latest developments and tweaks one can do in RTC.

As I'm not good at writing long posts to sell you how good RTC is (and free for up to 10 devs) , I'll limit myself to the purpose of this post: to raise awarness of where to play with it (no costs, DIY the quickest)

Currently I have two options (if more, let me know in comments please):

1. free sandbox avail for 6 months ! (yah, not 30 days)

On https://jazz.net/products/sandbox/?tag=clm
Here you need to login / create an account with some mail address. Use a free one, I do.

The thingies you do here have chances to get deleted later (than sooner), but I use this sanbox to do most of my studies before I apply changes to the actual project areas I use internally or for customers.

As the RTC concepts are the same as they were when RTC 1.0 started (I was playing that too :), this is mostly sparring me time of install/setup/configure. Ha, talk cloud advantage.

In the sanbox you can also access Quality Management and Requirements Management apps, which are part of the same platform, but yes, do different things :)

You can also invite others ! to your Project Area, so grab your team mates, have them play. Fair warning: stick them up for a while until they start grasping the concepts ! You'll be rewarded afterwards. And you'll thank me.

2. second option is called bluemix.net. And I stop here, as Ralph's entry is much more detailed.

my POV on "smart" watches

Remember these, around 80' ? https://www.google.com/search?q=casio+electronic+watches+1980&newwindow=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X

At some point, as a boy, I actually remember having one of these. My Casio was outstanding: plastic, but it had buttons, that crystal screen, wasted time to learn each function, date, time, alarm. A real joy :)

The thing which triggered the idea for this entry is reading an article about someone complaining on the utility of Apple Watch, combined with different quirks in usage. You can read the article here.

Nowadays, I work all day long on a laptop. If I raise the eye, I can tell the hour. If I do anything, I can pop-up the thingie we call smartphone. Heck, even my daughter had one watch (simple one), she begged for it for three months. Now it's thrown away. Simple reaction of a 10 to 13 years old.... she does not need it, she has ... her devices displaying time. She's connected, she sees time .... all the time.

But, what I can't do nowadays, is to wear something on my wrist. Something which gets in the way of me typing on the keyboard.

So here's my point of view, where I also kind of envision some requirements for these things to make them more appealing for my taste:

- Smart watches are useless. The only use case for a watch is to tell the hour. Nothing else. Since we see the hour pretty much everywhere, synced with atomic clocks [think NTP].... ok, the world moved on.  More or less, a watch is a fashion accessory [or military/spy tool, that's a different story].
- Struggling to do things on watches is silly. App updates, texts, calls, bridging with phone .... humans don't need that. Usability for a watch is: raise hand, spot hour, day, day of week. Not even the alerting function, not assuming any interaction, since this would be a distraction.
- This fancy trend for "smart" watches from different vendors will vane in two to three years.

Instead, when we talk about health bands/monitoring which accidentally displays time .... this is something else, and serves a different use case in itself: you start with some other function, like check pulse, or check vital signs, or anything else. NOT displaying time. With me so far, right ?

So here would be my requirements:

- A watch I would wear is one I could not feel. It should be so light ..... Think a latex band displaying the date/hour. Or skin implant of some leds - suddenly thinking of In Time, without the creepy story :) ..... Or maybe glued somehow only on my top left hand, so the bottom side of my hand would be free to rub on the laptop as I work/type.
- I should not care looking for the watch around bed / house / office, because I would forgot I have it on me.

On a final note, know that if you wear one of these and meet me, you'll not get a good first impression. If it's a smart watch, for me you're looking dumb. Move on.

SSL3 - workings for legacy crapware

I got it, and if you're involved with technology, you got it by now. SSL3 is bad, we get to be intercepted, poodle, whadawhada.

However, geeks, developers, admins, coders, whatever we are and work for and in our larger or smaller enterprises, need to check web apps over https://my-host-or-ip/my-other-url and be in after authentication. For one reason or another, to check functionality or simply curious or "whatever you need". Routers, devices, even old .wars/.ears deployed on older web containers, again, WHATEVER.

This intro is somehow a rant because I just wasted about one hr of my time trying to get into a whatever old app. And could NOT, because in the virtual where trying (smaller disk size) I only had Firefox latest version (45.0.1 at this time) which I want to update and keep it updated.

But then, what to do with my legacy crapware ?

Turns out there's a simpler solution. Grab an old Firefox. version 31.8.0esr downloaded from

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/

As an archive in Downloads, uncompress, run from there, be done with that.

Why did I spend one hr to find this ? because yes, I wasted time with about:config

security.tls.version.min;0
security.tls.version.fallback-limit;0

in latest Firefox 45.x and most likely above.

For browser developers: keep your old versions available, as years pass by us and technical debt accumulates, you'll be sparring yourself some curses from people like me just wanting to use a freaking browser to get into a web app..... no matter how insecure....

re-activated on my blog

Just having a new thing to publish and noticed I managed the performance to have only one article posted on my blog for 2015. That's being caused by multiple factors:

a) I consider 2015 to be a crap year, mostly because of issues happening to people close to me.

b) I became involved in a project where I'm mostly learning (new tech skills) and teaching others what I know about Eclipse / RTC / linux ... and everything else.

c) On social front I'm mostly active on Twitter, sharing / re-sharing snippets that interests me. For longer posts (like this one), I think I considered G+ and medium.com as alternatives to this blog. That is no longer true: G+ no longer interests me, and medium.com reached a point of growth where they're looking to start monetize.

So, longer posts than 140 chars will keep flowing on this blog, for as long as blogger.com will be available with ads free, clean theme where I can write stuff that represents me.

Application development and deployment target.

Here's an exercise starting while laying on the beach totally disconnected. Yes WiFi does not work, data in roaming too expensive.

Funcky idea popped up:

I want to find examples of apps which cover the following basic set of deployment targets:

1. mobile: Android / iOS, both mobile/tablets. Won't look for web/hybrid/native variants, just for functionality to work unde mobile umbrella, be it smartphone/tablets.
2. web. Browsers, plain and simple (FF and Chrome, cross compatibility etc, frameworks these days make it easier)
3. desktop. Here I see coverage of Linux, Mac and Windows.

edit: One could argue that web and desktop are pretty much the same. The contra-argument I'm making is the sync apps for clouds, for instance Box and Gdrive. These do not run in browsers, but on desktop. So keeping the two separate, with maybe countless of other examples. Browsers are not always desktop similar.

The three targets would then translate into the following list of sub-targets:

1. Android - smartphone
2. Android - tablet
3. iOS - smartphone
4. iOS - tablet
5. web (let's assume Firefox and Chrome as one, who cares ;) 
6. Linux - Ubuntu / Fedora ... here I'm missing technology to suggest one that works across distributions...except Java ... ha
7. Mac OS X Yosemite ... again newbie, not sure what to pick
8. Windows .... 10 ? not quite, let's just say 7 / 8.

And so I'm challenging my readers to give me examples of applications running on the 8 targets above.

What on earth is doing a startup coming with a brand new idea for a wonderful application (either commercial or open-source) if they cannot accomodate this list. You'd answer: they do what they can. Ok, good enough, however, myself as a consumer, I already use all those targets, in one way or another. And I'm starting to feel the need when looking to a new app and ask: ok, this app fails which bullet ? Then ... do I need it ?

And guess what, while writing this, it suddenly popped to me one example. Just one, for now: IBM Notes. Yes, good old Notes, is answering to the three "domains" above, here:

- mobile. Android/iOS, checked.
- web. checked, both Traveler / Verse.
- desktop. Mac checked, Linux checked, Windows checked.

Well, opened to more suggestions, hit me please.

eclipse luna 4.4 - things I've done for Ubuntu 12.04 64bit

As I've reinstalled on 64bit, starting over with Eclipse, this time 4.4 Luna, here's a handler article with things I did so far, so I won't forget them:

1. .desktop file

gedit /usr/share/applications/eclipse-luna.desktop with the following content:

[Desktop Entry]

Encoding=UTF-8

Name=Eclipse

Type=Application

Comment=Eclipse Luna 4.4 64bit IDE

Exec=env UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 SWT_GTK3=0 //eclipse -vm //java 

Icon=//icon.xpm

Categories=Application;Development;Java;IDE

Name[en]=Eclipse

Terminal=false

NoDisplay=false

2. eclipse.ini - supplementary than default provided

-Xms128m

-Xmx2048m

-Xss2m

-Xverify:none

-Duser.name=Radu Cadariu

3. ugly and non-readable tooltips

source: http://www.devsniper.com/black-tooltip-in-eclipse-on-ubuntu-12-04/

which is saying this:

sudo apt-get install gnome-color-chooser

Specific tab, you can setup background/foreground colors for tooltips. I am (also) using for foreground black(#000000), background blue(#C2DFFD)

4. ugly big tabs for Luna UI. 

source: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1465712

gedit ~/.gtkrc-2.0

style "gtkcompact" {

GtkButton::default_border={0,0,0,0}

GtkButton::default_outside_border={0,0,0,0}

GtkButtonBox::child_min_width=0

GtkButtonBox::child_min_heigth=0

GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_x=0

GtkButtonBox::child_internal_pad_y=0

GtkMenu::vertical-padding=1

GtkMenuBar::internal_padding=0

GtkMenuItem::horizontal_padding=4

GtkToolbar::internal-padding=0

GtkToolbar::space-size=0

GtkOptionMenu::indicator_size=0

GtkOptionMenu::indicator_spacing=0

GtkPaned::handle_size=4

GtkRange::trough_border=0

GtkRange::stepper_spacing=0

GtkScale::value_spacing=0

GtkScrolledWindow::scrollbar_spacing=0

GtkTreeView::vertical-separator=0

GtkTreeView::horizontal-separator=0

GtkTreeView::fixed-height-mode=TRUE

GtkWidget::focus_padding=0

}

class "GtkWidget" style "gtkcompact"

The 3 and 4 affects the GTK on the system, so I'll take them with a grain of salt related to changes in the overall Ubuntu UI.

Now that I have my handler, if I find more things to change, I'll get back to this entry.

quick note for my dual displays - xrandr command worth booking

so I have a laptop and another monitor, whose position was to the left, and then I positioned it to my laptop's right.

The problem was the mouse translation from laptop to the monitor, annoyance !

So I changed settings, and I got an error when trying to apply the new position.

Solution is given here:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/174195/gdbus-error-when-trying-to-enable-second-screen

Which led me to issue locally:

> xrandr --current

and then the proper command for my case:

> xrandr --output LVDS1 --auto --left-of HDMI1

and bingo, things are back to normal.

More info for fun: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Xorg_RandR_1.2

my knowledge centers - was, portal, connections, worklight

I thought these URLs looked cool, so I'm publishing here.

WAS KC:
http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSAW57/mapfiles/product_welcome_wasnd.html

Portal KC:
http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSHRKX/welcome

Connections KC:
http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSYGQH/welcome

Worklight KC:
http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSNJXP/welcome.html

Time to review some of my bookmarks ...

Start menu thought

Ever since Windows got rid of it's Start button, the world was starting to get confused. Or so I've read. 

But then, a friend of mine asked me to solve something on her Win 8 laptop, knowing that I'm a guru... ha.

And so, I couldn't but to realize that the world was right. It was confusing!

And now I'm reading that Microsoft is returning it's.... let's call it launcher?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/15/win8_start_menu_leaked_screenshot/

Linux desktop world has launchers with these minimum requirements:
- launch button.
- move it wherever on your side screen, horizontally or vertically.
- resize it, allow for larger icons etc.
- show the running apps, but also allow me to move them freely on the launcher.
- add the systray, clock time whatever else.

When looking at the mobile world (yes, for now Android), we also have launchers. Bit different than desktop, but I see two common points:
- Start somewhere on the screen!
- Allow user to change things, allow flexibility.

So, Linux Desktop moved on, mobile world moved on, maybe it's time for Windows to move on?

4 years on Ubuntu ... thoughts crossing my mind

I was checking stats on my blog when I spotted that on 6/8/10 I wrote my first impressions after I've switched to Ubuntu

4 years later, here are some thoughts:

~ I've performed one upgrade, from 10.04 to 12.04 LTS (I don't remember the details ... ha)

~ as much as all my apps (including some internal ones) are working fine on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the same is not true for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. At this moment, I'm NOT ready to move upwards.

~ I've NEVER looked back not only to Win XP, but not even to Win 7. In fact, one friend of mine asked me to help with a Win 8 notebook, I was looking strange for 3 minutes, then I gave up. Win 7 is still manageable, Win 8 is alien. To Excel credit, there is still a need for it, which is where virtualization comes to rescue. For everything else, there's OpenOffice.

~ I'm also looking strange to Ubuntu future: Desktop / Tablets / Mobile. meh ...

~ Both Microsoft and Ubuntu should reconsider: there's no such thing as one size fits all. Give us the base OS, come up with visualization / features / usability on top, for each device. I know it's tough, but that should be the strategy. So far, on my account, both failed. But again, I might be biased, haven't bought a Win 8 mobile device, they look alien :) As for Ubuntu mobile, Mark, would you please give us back the desktop ?

Above list leads me to the current status quo: I'm stuck :) I cannot move upwards for Ubuntu 14.04, I cannot switch to Fedora (another meh ...), I won't go back to Windows. 7, of course :)

Adding another item to make things worse: the wonderful Cinnamon desktop (which I currently use under Ubuntu 12.04) lost it's apt repo, which means no more updates for me.

I'll probably reconsider Ubuntu 14.04 when I'll get my hand on another TP, so that I will not break everything .... careful with that axe Eugene ...

Edit: time to celebrate my 200th post to the blog ! let's get a beer ...

interesting healthcare.gov story

This is an article which I first spotted on Twitter, via Stephan  who retweeted this article: http://newrelic.com/healthcare-team

I'm refraining from making too much comments, I'm drafting several points coupled with my own experiences working in governmental engagements.

• when stakeholders say everything is ok, it usually is not.
• when stakeholders saw things crumbling down, they wanted to get things back on track within one week (sigh....). It took 5 months. With the team working 24/7 or something, having synergies in place and pumping adrenaline within the team. 
• having a cache added to drop response time from 8 to 2 seconds looks familiar. This point alone really shows lack of architectural decisions in the first place.

I'm missing some other technical details for adding more comments, but nevertheless that was a nice read. The only conclusion you can take is that in any project, it's not the technology that matters, but people making it work. 

Oh and yes, the industry should add another role in projects: troubleshooter. 

added twitter timeline to this blog

I added a Twitter widget to this blog, from my timeline. I find myself ranting on Twitter faster.

Also, interesting enough for me, this is the first post on the blog written from the mobile app Blogger (by Google), which I discovered a while back. So possibly my blog entries will get shorter.  Or not...

so long InfoCenters, welcome KnowledgeCenter

I was stoked 5 minutes ago when I spotted in an article that the well known IBM Infocenters will probably fade away. How come such big news for IBM techies did NOT get noticed ? Almost everyone I know in IBM's world complained about the Infocenter, not necessary it's looks, but mostly it's content (and I might add Chrome browser compatibility)

No matter what IBM's product you were faced to learn/master, you'd have to know what Infocenter means. It's almost a brand, they should keep it :)

The good news is that the new Knowledge Center seems faster: http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter

About the content quality and breadth ... we'll have to see, I maintain my confidence in the power of community contributing to DevWorks and Portal wikis