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Time Flies - 20 years in mobile
It dawned on me yesterday that I've passed 2 milestones in my career. The first is that I've now been writing mobile applications for 20 years. Yes, there was mobile way before the iPhone and Android! I started writing mobile applications my senior year in college when Apple sent me a Newton MessagePad in exchange for licenses of my NotifyMail program. I sometimes think about all the changes in this industry and it just makes my head hurt! Development 20 years ago was generally not treated as a hobby due to cost; today, anyone can write an app with no skill (not sure if that is good or bad).
The second milestone is that I've been working from home for 15 years. I worked in an office setting for less than 4 years before I started this. It is a choice that I don't regret and can't imagine working in an office again. Even though I work for a large company, I have tons of flexibility and am far more productive than if I was in an office everyday.
Who knows what the next 15-20 years in my career will bring, but I look forward to them.
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Giving up on Xcode Server
Several weeks ago, I started having problems with my media center where recorded shows started stuttering in playback. There were a huge number of variables that could have caused it as lots of things changed, like an update to EyeTV, update to my HDHomeRun, Xcode update, OS X Server update, etc. While I'm still trying to identify the cause, I think I've narrowed down the problem to Xcode and Xcode Server.
Why am I blaming Xcode? Well, I went into OS X Server and looked to disable it. It wasn't turned on and didn't have Xcode selected. Since I hadn't turned it off and had selected a version of Xcode, I knew something went crazy. I selected Xcode again, restarted the Xcode Server and then turned it off. I noticed that even after I did this, there were still log entries related to Xcode Server. Huh? If I disabled it, why was it still doing stuff? I found a blog entry which identified a way to completely reset Xcode Server.
Before I had completely disabled Xcode Server, I had noticed periodic log entries about the server doing stuff which wasn't a complete surprise as it had to check source code and do other things. However, the status showed a huge number of little spikes in CPU usage. After I disabled Xcode Server, the spikes stopped. When it wasn't doing builds, it really shouldn't have done much to warrant the CPU spikes.
I can't say that I'm going to miss fighting Xcode server; I installed Jenkins and got it configured how I wanted my jobs configured. Jenkins, itself, was easy to setup and do the builds; the tricky part was getting my release notes to TestFlight and to get the archives named the way I wanted. Even though Jenkins is written in Java, I'm not seeing spikes in CPU usage; in fact, when idle, I'm seeing a decrease in CPU usage.
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The victims of airbnb and short term rentals
I've heard people say that airbnb and the like are disrupting the hotel industry by letting anyone rent out his or her residence. This may seem like a great idea until you're the person living next door to one of these rentals. Instead of having a neighbor that you know by name, you have random people staying for 1 night, 3 nights, a week. This can bring more crime, noise, and reduce property values. San Francisco just passed an ordinance regulating short term rentals putting a cap on the number of days a place can be rented a year. This number is capped at 90 days, but that is still far too many, in my opinion.
My neighbor decided earlier this year to kick out the family that had been renting his house for a few years and turn it into a vacation rental. He claims that he is a "family man", but the only motivation for doing this is greed. He "fixed up" the house by putting in a hot tub, redoing his deck and planting grass. His vacation rental doesn't fit into our neighborhood as all the houses in the immediate area are single family houses that are either owner occupied or long term rentals (I'll ignore the mini-dorm across the street owned by another greedy person). So now we're going to get random people staying at the house and have to deal with potential noise and the feeling that we may not be safe because we have no idea who is supposed to be next door.
The city of San Diego is too chicken to pass regulations on short term rentals because that would affect beach rentals and other rental properties that bring the city money via the transient occupancy tax (provided people collect and report it). Zoning laws are supposed to separate different uses for properties, i.e. commercial and residential. A short term rental is definitely commercial as a residence is where someone lives. Shouldn't short term rentals fall under commercial zoning regulations?
People could have similar arguments against bed and breakfasts, but they are more regulated (one we stayed in said that they could only serve breakfast and not any other meal) and have a host/manager on site.
The rise of short term rentals anywhere someone wants may be good for the property owners, but in my opinion, is not wanted by many residents of neighborhoods.
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Fun with Xcode Server - Round 2
Earlier this year, I wrote about Xcode Server as well as some issues I had with it. My Xcode Server has been running well for months spitting out builds for testing as well as ones that goto the AppStore.
Unfortunately, Apple changed Xcode Server as part of Xcode 6/Server 3.2.1 (the Xcode Server part of OS X Server primarily is found in Xcode itself as far as I can tell; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). There were a number of things I had to do in order to get my server building again due to a change in the location of the provisioning profiles and where the key/certificate pair are stored for the profile. These steps are long and not guaranteed to work, but give them a try if you're feeling lucky.
- Switch to root user
sudo su - - Switch to the Xcode Server keychain directory
cd /Library/Developer/XcodeServer/Keychains - Copy the Portal keychain to your Desktop
cp Portal.keychain /Users//Desktop/ - Make a backup copy of the keychain.
cp Portal.keychain Portal.keychain.bu - Change the owner of the keychain to your user.
chown/Users/ /Desktop/Portal.keychain - Record the password of the Portal keychain
cat /Library/Developer/XcodeServer/SharedSecrets/PortalKeychainSharedSecret - Leave this terminal window open.
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Open Keychain Access as your user.
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Add the keychain you just copied to Keychain Access - /Users/
/Desktop/Portal.keychain -
Open a new terminal window
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Unlock the Portal keychain
security unlock-keychain -p \/Users/ /Desktop/Portal.keychain - Copy the key and certificate used for the provisioning profile to the Portal Keychain in Keychain Access.
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Lock the Portal Keychain
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Go back to the Terminal window where you are the root user. You'll still be in the Keychains directory for Xcode Server.
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Copy the Portal Keychain back to the directory.
cp /Users//Desktop/Portal.keychain . - Change the owner of the keychain
chown _xcsbuildd Portal.keychain - Switch to the Provisioning Profiles directory
cd /Library/Developer/XcodeServer/ProvisioningProfiles - Copy your provisioning profile.
cp /Users//Desktop/MyProfile.mobileprovision - Edit your bot in Xcode and reset git credentials. I always let the bot create a new SSH key pair and add that to either GitHub or Bitbucket depending on the project.
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Cross your fingers and build.
It appears to me that Xcode Server has gotten worse where more functionality has moved to Xcode and less is in the web interface. This means I can't change the git branch I use for building and I can't edit my bots using the web interface. I think that there is a lot of potential with Xcode Server, but there is a long way to go in terms of usability. The server must be able to do more than run tests and must be able to let the small development shop do builds that can't be distributed via TestFlight and uploaded to the app store.
Automation is key in any development project as the manual process is for the birds. Many developers don't need the power of Jenkins, but could easily use Xcode Server if it worked a little better. Doing builds locally and then uploading for testers is cumbersome and a process that should be avoided. I'd be more than happy to talk to the Xcode Server folks about build practices. At work, I have our Jenkins based build system crank out 13 builds at a time and upload to TestFlight with minimal effort; we just push code to a build branch in git and out pops the builds. We can do several builds a day if need be without blinking an eye. For my personal projects, I was doing a build nightly for someone I was working with and without the automation, he wouldn't have been able to see the progress as quickly as I would have spent 5-10 minutes a day doing builds which really adds up.
- Switch to root user