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Last weekend I attended my first Startup event. Seems unbelievable, but it’s almost a week ago since StartUp Weekend Tenerife. If you don’t know, StartUp Weekend events are a sort of challenge in which you part from the idea to the Startup project in just 2 days. This event, sorry for being so enthusiastic or sounding very stereotypical, has deeply changed me and for good.

On Friday I was a bit nervous and excited. I really neither did know what I was going to find there (I have no experience in such events), nor had any idea to propose. I just went to see and, maybe, help with my developer abilities and support the team I were to collaborate with, but I didn’t know where I had got into.

Despite that, the first thing I saw were many ex faculty mates and people I already knew. I met guys from Agile Canarias (a local Agile group). I also saw the organization members Juanjo (Altavista Ventures), Elena and Ángel (Coworking Nomad), Carlos y Samuel (FEULL) working really hard to make the event to reach such an excellent level (everything was awesome!). And also, during the reception, I bumped into a fantastic catering which advanced the amazing weekend coming…

Finally I enrolled a team developing a project called SpeakApps and we ended up on the 2nd place!

2nd place! hurray!

I learned a lot. My takeaways:

• There still is a big knowledge gap between geek and non-geek guys. “Computer guy” is no longer a profession because every user will end up being a “computer person” sooner or later. The computer-related professions have specialized and diversified.
• People is nice. Sometimes I’m a bit mistrustful and now becoming more opened and receptive to others.
• Everybody has strong and weak points. We all can help in some way, and we must also allow being helped.
• I was in a group trying to figure out a simple solution within 48h of, at first lance, a hard problem and we make it! I’m able to reach creative and fast solutions. I’m “lean” and didn’t know it. I can be an entrepreneur. This was the most revealing lesson.

When the event ended something had changed for me. I was transformed: I felt more energized and motivated than ever. And I still do.

I even had the (subtle) sensation that now I feel more self-confident, and that I was radiating it. In consequence, other people seemed to take me more seriously and to trust me either: so people interacts with you depending on what you project on them, and this is the result of your mental interior state.

The only bad thing: Startup Weekend is over. Now let’s wait for the next one.

Wow! Almost a whole (sabbatic?) year has passed since my last post! I really was neither in the mood, nor motivated for writing. But after having sorted out a little some other aspects of my life, I’m back, stronger than ever!

Among the things I’ve recently had to deal with, is the ODBC connections and Mac (yes, I own a Mac for some time now ). And I’ve finally found an easy way to create ODBC connections using unixODBC as I do in Linux. I’m surprised, because it works incredibly well:

First thing to do is installing unixODBC for Mac OS X. Personally, I think the simplest way to do it is using Homebrew, that fantastic open source package tool which makes Ruby to call my attention (disclaimer: I’m a zealot pythonista! ). It’s an example of a good work very well done (however, using Homebrew is not mandatory, there are other projects long ago: Fink and MacPorts).

Install unixODBC with Homebrew:
brew install unixodbc

Once installed, it’s time to compile the PostgreSQL ODBC driver (not available in Homebrew yet, unfortunately, so we’ll do it by hand):

1. Download the ODBC driver source code. Pick a recent one and uncompress it in a directory of your choice, then open a terminal and ‘cd’ into it.
2. Compile it following the typical command sequence:
   
   ./configure make make install

   1 2 3

   ./configure make make install

If everything went ok, you should have the PostgreSQL drivers installed as 2 library files located at /usr/local/lib/psqlodbcw.la and /usr/local/lib/psqlodbcw.so

And that’s all. Now we have to define an ODBC driver entry for PortgreSQL in the file /usr/local/etc/odbcinst.ini in a similar fashion to this one:

Add this entry to the odbcinst.ini file and we are done. Now we can define our DSNs and start using ODBC!

To do so, create if not exists the file .odbc.ini in your $HOME directory and add the desired DSN, like this one:

This define a User DSN named ib3db (with its user and password). Now to test it, just type:
isql -v ib3db
And it should work.

Remote connection

The previous DSN example was created for a local postgreSQL database. If we wanted to connect to a remote one, there are many configurations, but for me the easiest and safe one is to create an SSH tunnel:
ssh -C -N -L 60000:localhost:5432 user@remotehost.com
This will map our local port 60000 to the remote port 5432 at the remotehost.com machine (we’ll obviously need to update the Port = 5432 line in the previous example with Port = 60000). The command will keep running. To shutdown the tunnel, just kill the ssh command pressing CTRL-C.

You can also use extra flags, like -C (above) to compress the data transmitted to the tunnel (recommended for slow -e.g. modem- lines, but not for faster ones), and also use -N (do not execute anything remotely) so a remote ssh window is not opened, for example.

Wow! I’ve been away of my blog for almost 4 month. I said “It’s time to open those good wines before they get bad”, and I haven’t almost stopped since then!

This little post is not for talking about what I’m currently doing (I doubt there is someone interested in knowing it, but if there is any, please wait for a later post in which I will comment), but to give thanks.

Thanks to a friend who forwarded me this video, and thanks also to the people (a group in which I include myself!) I know they exist and which trust a new system, a better world is still possible. This is one of these people (audio is in Spanish, and no subtitles, sorry ):

Thank you anew. I received this little dose of coherence and common sense in January, but it was so inspiring I still haven’t stopped I’m not alone; you are not alone; we are not alone.

It’s been quite a long time since my last post. This year, 2011, has been quite odd (you can’t say it’s been a bad one, nor complain of it; it’s not politically correct).

I’m gradual and inexorably reaching one of those crossroad dilemmas and I seriously have to reconsider my life and where I am heading to. Yes, I also collect bad wines.

I needn’t pass through a terrible experience to know it. I’m simply not very (to say the less) satisfied with my life (and yes, I know many people are feeling the same, but this does not mitigates this feeling). I really feel like lost. My mind says something is broken here.

At my age, I feel that people surrounding me (including those supposedly closer to me) don’t respect me; I feel continuously questioned (and almost sabotaged) in every, including the pettier, aspect or decision I try to take on my own life. And it ends up being frustrating, exhausting and, at my age, hard (it’s almost like going back to my childhood). I wonder myself what is my mistake, because it’s clear that part (if not all) the problem lies on my side.

But that hasn’t been the hardest part: the toughest one is seeing how those few people who do accept, endorse, encourages and enlighten me, or just I felt some affinity are not among us (passed away) or have moved really far away.

This has been a somewhat sad end of year, with that feeling of any past time was better.
Anyway, I don’t give up. It’s time to open that bottle of wine, now that it’s still good:

I’ve been working on a 3D VideoGame prototype these last months, using Visual C++ (Visual Studio 2010). With such work, some vacancies and some job affairs I havn’t had enough time for publishing something interesting in the blog…

Visual Studio 2010 worked fine at the beginning, but one day, suddenly, breakpoints stopped working. A yellow exclamation mark symbol was shown over them and placing the mouse cursor over such symbols showed the message “Breakpoint won’t be hit”.

Searching on the internet for this problem I found out it was a common one in almost every version of Visual Studio, specially in 2008 and 2010. Most common causes for this error are:

• The project was compiled in Release mode, not in Debug one
• Debug symbols are not found (or wrong path)
• Incremental Debug linking option is not enabled
• Not having installed the latest service packs and patches (some of them address this problem)
• Corrupted installation: Reinstalling the application, restoring default configuration or even deleting Registry Keys and Local App configuration stored in the Windows User profile folders might fix this case

The fact was none of the above worked for me, but found out that if I started Visual Studio with a different user account everything worked like a charm. After opening two projects (each generated with a different user) and compared differences on the .vproj XML files I found these extra lines added to the “faulty” one:

Removing these lines from the .vproj file and recompiling made the breakpoints to work again! The case was these lines referenced User configurations that didn’t appear in my VS configuration panels or couldn’t change (some of them were grayed). These XML lines contain a conditional inclusion and the path is $(UserRootDir)\MicrosoftCpp.$(Platform). It happened that path was C:\Users\Boriel\AppData\Local\Microsoft\MSBuild\v4.0, which was not the Visual Studio configuration Folder. Deleting it fixed the issue (it’s regenerated the next time Visual Studio IDE is started).

To avoid even more troubles I not only removed that folder, but also the local configuration stored in my profile (C:\Users\Boriel\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0) and related registry keys (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VSCommon\10.0). Afterwards I restarted the IDE and a splashscreen warning told me the application was being prepared to be used for the first time. And the problem was gone.