I order up the aforementioned burger and some fries and she starts rambling about all the different fries she has, I just reply I’ll take the most normal fries you have. So I take my seat and expect that in a few moments I will be served some combination of beef, pork product and cheese.I notice a guy with dreads in the corner, over at the table next to us there are a couple of Indian woman munching on some burgers. That’s funny I think to myself Indians don’t eat beef, eh they probably serve tofu burgers too. This is where the trouble begins. I look to my right and see a blackboard talking about their various “meat” products and see “Native Bacon” and underneath that it describes how it is made out of some sort of tofu. Oh god. I look at a pamphlet on the table and see “100% vegan restaurant ” at the very top. Back at the blackboard I see my expected beef is actually “Seitan”. Panic begins to set in my friend begins laughing so hard he is crying. I have just spent 13.90  at a vegan restaurant. OK I have to deal with this situation, I’m sure this burger can’t be that bad who would become a vegan if all the food tasted awful?

My “Bacon Cheeseburger” with no bacon,cheese or burger arrives. I peer inside of the buns cursorily to inspect what I have gotten myself into. The “bacon” looked pretty real actually, well it had the right color at least. The closest thing I know of that resembled the “cheese” was easy-cheeze and finally the “beef” looks like a slab of calamari… “It can’t kill me right? right??” I ask my friend, he shrugs. I just go for it and take out a huge bite. I will remember that bite for a long time, it was the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten.It did not taste like cheese, it did not taste like bacon and it sure as hell did not taste like burger. God have mercy on your soul if you stumble into this place. This review ends here it pains me too much to say more.

Not sure why it is doing this but here is what fixed it

-You can’t have more than one workspace open

-The dock can’t be on the side where you are moving your mouse over from your server

-After doing both of these restart the synergy program on both the server and the client.

So I come in on Monday after a nice weekend and my previously perfect synergy setup has got a problem. I do a quick Google search to try to solve it and the top results are from stack exchange sites. Nobody has a real work around besides try an older version so I set off to fix it myself and a little later I figure out a workaround.

Now I think gee that sure was annoying, but I know, I will share this useful information on the top Google results(superuser.com questions) so Joe Shmoe doesn’t have to waste some of his time. There was two questions that were similar to mine that could use an answer and I check out a post on the bulletin section which has some vague wording on making duplicate answers. I’m thinking it would be useful to put the answer on two of the posts and if I’m in the wrong a mod will come by and just delete one of them or edit them and post a link in or something actually useful. I have no rep I can’t just add a comment so I have to put a full answer but hey this question was pretty much unsolved who doesn’t like some knowledge?

Apparently some kid with OCD damn well doesn’t like the sharing of knowledge because he deleted not one of my posts but BOTH of them. He didn’t give a reason, the only thing in the rules I could see that would apply to this is that these questions were a little on the old side. BUT THEY HAD NO REAL ANSWER AND STACK EXCHANGE DOMINATES THE TOP GOOGLE RESULTS. This is just completely irresponsible. If you have a site this visible on search engines and deny searchers knowledge because of some archaic rule there is something very wrong with you. This probably explains all the times I’ve gone searching for some bizarre problem and stack overflow floods the results with unanswered or half assed answers.

I sent the moderator an email and am waiting to hear back, I’m sure his response will be entertaining from my past experiences with these kind of people.

To unnamed moderator: I’m sorry for messing up your perfect little power tripping playground by actually giving something useful.

To Joe Shmoe: Sorry but you will have to wait until my blog rises in the search results through some sort of voodoo magic before you find your answer.

“Undefined symbols for architecture i386:

“_SecItemCopyMatching”, referenced from:

-[GTMOAuth2Keychain passwordForService:account:error:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_SecItemDelete”, referenced from:

-[GTMOAuth2Keychain removePasswordForService:account:error:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_SecItemAdd”, referenced from:

-[GTMOAuth2Keychain setPassword:forService:accessibility:account:error:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecAttrAccessible”, referenced from:

-[GTMOAuth2Keychain setPassword:forService:accessibility:account:error:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecAttrAccessibleAfterFirstUnlockThisDeviceOnly”, referenced from:

+[GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch saveParamsToKeychainForName:accessibility:authentication:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecAttrAccount”, referenced from:

+[GTMOAuth2Keychain keychainQueryForService:account:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecAttrGeneric”, referenced from:

+[GTMOAuth2Keychain keychainQueryForService:account:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecAttrService”, referenced from:

+[GTMOAuth2Keychain keychainQueryForService:account:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecClass”, referenced from:

+[GTMOAuth2Keychain keychainQueryForService:account:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecClassGenericPassword”, referenced from:

+[GTMOAuth2Keychain keychainQueryForService:account:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecMatchLimit”, referenced from:

-[GTMOAuth2Keychain passwordForService:account:error:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecMatchLimitOne”, referenced from:

-[GTMOAuth2Keychain passwordForService:account:error:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecReturnData”, referenced from:

-[GTMOAuth2Keychain passwordForService:account:error:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

“_kSecValueData”, referenced from:

-[GTMOAuth2Keychain setPassword:forService:accessibility:account:error:] in libGTLTouchStaticLib.a(GTMOAuth2ViewControllerTouch.o)

ld: symbol(s) not found for architecture i386

clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)”

(Im hoping shoving the whole thing in here will help people find this on google when they make the same stupid mistake I did)

So I thought the gtl library wasn’t building correctly for the iPad simulator and spent a little while changing build options for that. Nope turns out I skipped a step in the setup guide and I just needed to reference SystemConfiguration.framework and Security.framework in my app. It doesn’t really make sense to me that you have to have these referenced in the gtl project and your application project but the Mac users seemed flabbergasted when I wanted a maximize button that actually maximized the damn window so I guess I just don’t understand this Mac world.

Recently I was asked to write a little about why I decided to work here at Windward full time come summer.

1) They’re a software company

I am graduating this spring so I have been mulling over where to work. I had already got an offer from Windward but I needed to look around at the competition. I had heard and seen big name companies like Raytheon and such drooling over computer science majors, someone I know was walking by a booth of a large non software company at a career fair when a guy spotted the Computer Science major on his nametag “You can program? We want to talk to you!”. Working at a big company that makes some impressive weapons sounded great but then I got to thinking that software developers are not the company. It’s their “hard” engineers and political and management games that make them. I don’t just want to program I want to create something.

2) Ideas are demanded and the work is challenging

We are encouraged to share all of our ideas related to our products or not. But we are not just encouraged, I have been in meetings where product ideas were straight up demanded from me and the penalty for not doing so was to be locked in the storage room and forced to write blogs until being devoured by a plague of nameless blog commenters (that last part is a slight exaggeration). The point is I’m involved in our products and not just a tool forced to program.

The other part of this is that I am constantly challenged; I get moved from different pieces of code, languages and technologies all the time. My workload is a hodgepodge of things that need to get done. This is the place to work if you want to be pushed to your limits. Then on top of that we are allowed to do specific things that we want to do on Friday afternoons, I remade one of our websites, made a chrome extension and some other stuff I cannot recall at the moment.

3) No hurt feelings over challenging questions

When I interviewed with them I was told to ask a challenging question of them, I asked my future boss why did the video game you create, enemy nations, fail? No hurt feelings over my boss’s baby and it even got me the job!

4) Intelligent talking canines to bounce ideas off of

5) Ramblings

While talking to a few other local software only companies I picked up some rather strange tones. They made it seem like if I wanted to work for them I had to stalk their company for weeks and come to several of their boring presentations followed by scoffing at my .net and friends development background while I am pretending to be constantly intrigued about their strict agile culture and their out doorsey perks. Company hikes all day every day? Yes programmers are known for their love of the outside. I think I’d rather go for Windward’s internal coding competitions.(Ok Windward does go outside sometimes, this is Boulder).

I have never made a browser extension before, but it was pretty simple to do. The chrome API doesn’t have some magic history functions that could accomplish this so I had to store all tab ids and urls. My explanation of how this works will probably be butchered but hopefully someone will find this helpful still.

The first part is the manifest.json file. This stores the basic information of the extension. The “background_page” line tells the extension where are scripts are going to be run from which is background.html. “browser_action” tells the extension that we want a clickable icon and permissions requests from certain permissions from the browser when installed so that we can manipulate protected things.

The second part,background.html, is the actual code of the extension. It is written in javascript and listens for actions in chrome. One note, a lot of the chrome api calls are asynchronous so you must go through coding your application assuming that code will finish running whenever it wants to. There is no way to have synchronized and asynchronous code to work together as javascript provides no blocking and it is single threaded so you can’t sit around in a while loop waiting for an asynchronous function to finish.

Here’s the first part, whenever our selection changes to a new tab we want to store it in sel.

This listens for whenever a new tab is create in chrome. When a new tab is created we want to grab our last selection from the sel variable. Then we create an object and store the new tabs id and our last selections url and put it in a global array called tabs.

Here’s the actual function that is called when the extensions button is clicked. It finds what tab we are currently on then searches through our global array filled with the tab information. When it finds an object with a matching tabid it creates a new tab with matching url.

And that is all there is too it.