Tacky

Nothing says tacky like a 8 foot inflatable santa on sale. Boo-ya!

Night before night before Christmas

'Twas the night before the night before Christmas, and all through the apartment all the gifts were wrapped, with not-so-few exceptions. Ah well. I'll get them done soon enough. I'll post more about that later, or maybe not. I have not made up my mind about that. I DO want to take a picture of our Christmas tree after I get everything finally done. I don't feel too bad though. My mom told me that on their first Christmas they were wrapping gifts at 10 am Christmas morning. There is still tomorrow, so it's all good. ;-P

Media in 2014

When all the mirrors come back up, you should check out this interesting presentation that I read on slashdot. What will happen if there are no professional media and it's all just a popular contest? Something to make you go Humm...

WSAD using Java 1.4

It's all about figuring out the correct words. If you want to make a java app that runs in Java 1.4 in Websphere, you have to use WSAD 5.1.1 at least and have to change some configuration settings. But finding that configuration change is hard. You have to know that you have to change the "Server Targeting support" among other things. *sigh*

Non-power users will use the GUI

One thing that I was thinking about as I was setting up samba again is that it's nice to have a GUI when you are not familiar with something. And that's why I think until there is more support for linux users actually using just the GUI, it will never beat Windows.

The "typical" windows user doesn't even know how to set up their network card, so why would they switch to linux? I don't even remember when the last time I saw a Windows tutorial that said "Okay, now open a DOS prompt and...". But you're hard pressed to find a linux tutorial where at some point they don't open up a terminal and su to root.

So, along those lines I'll shortly do a writeup for how to setup samba from the lessons that I have learned. I think that it's really easy now, but I didn't before. It's pretty easy when you use the GUI too...

The only trouble with this is that there really isn't a "standard" linux version. The tutorials that are out there work because if you do them below the GUI it's going to be the same. Not true with so many distro's, install options, and desktops like KDE or Gnome. So, at best I think that my writeup will help 25% of the people that read it, but it may push the others in the right direction. And until there is more help out there for non-command line junkies, we're all going to be using Windows for a while yet.

Crazy

I mailed this to just about everyone already, but I thought that I would post it here anyways. Check out some intersting Canada / US relations by Fox News and CNN.

FC3: 6, Jim: 0

I've been trying to install the latest version of Fedora Core 3 the last couple of days to no avail. It's not that there is something wrong with me (well, no more than normal). It's that I can't seem to burn the media without errors. I did the checksum on the iso files so I "know" those are okay. When I actually try and burn any disks they fail the media test. *sigh*

I tried burning disks at slower speeds, on a different computer using a different cd burning sw, doing the verification on a different computer. No success yet. The only common thing so far is that I have been using CD's from the same spindle. Maybe they are all (?!?) bad, I don't know. So right now I am trying one of Laura's blank CD's. I'm burning it at 4x so it's taking a while for one disk...

I'll probably borrow the CD's from a co-worker of mine, but I'd like to be able to figure out why I am not able to burn these disks without troubles. Not happy about it.

Update: It seemed that it was a problem with the CD's. The BAD CD's are: Mitsumi. Bad, bad, bad... The CD's that did work are: TDK, which if you google them come up with the first hit as CD Media World - TDK Inferior Quality CD-R's. Too funny...

Check the default install

If you are making an installer for an application, check the default install on all of the OS's that you support. I was trying to install an app and it asked to put the files in my home directory which on Windows 2k is something like "C:\Documents and Settings\jim". Then from there I run the install file which opens a window and gives me choices. I click on the main choice and nothing happens. I wait for a bit. Nothing happens. I try again and still nothing.

Then I moved the file into a subdirectory of root and it worked. My guess is that because there was a space in the path the installer crapped out, but that is where the app asked to be put!!! So, at the very least assume that your users (at least some) will just click next next next... on the installer. Check that path. When that works, expand to give them more choices.

Frustrated

Ever find your exact question online and it not have any answer to it? *double sigh*

Adventures of Action Item

Sometimes the lingo and process can get in the way of getting the job done. Check out this comic to get an idea of what I mean. Sometimes I get annoyed with people saying "We'll take that offline" and other similar phrases, but they get the meaning across quickly (I think). *sigh*

About time

It took a long freaking time, but I finally have samba working. Cross your fingers that it will still be working tomorrow... I had a hard time with it, but I think that when I figured out that there was a firewall blocking my packets was the breaking turning point. I'm not sure that was the only fix, but it sure helped a lot. Other things like the work group name is case sensitive.

I'm using XP Home and there are tons of sites that say that you can't use Win XP Home, you must use Pro. That's only for if you are trying to use "domains" and have the samba box in another domain.

Another point of note, if you want to change the firewall settings in RH, use /sbin/iptables and the other associated commands. Don't try and modify the file by hand as some examples show you.

I feel very productive since I got home tonight. I'm not feeling too great but I got vnc and samba working. Next I'm going to move stuff over to the linux more and play with it as a file server. I may also make it a dev box and load it up with some RAM and just use my laptop as a terminal. We'll see. I wonder how well my laptop would run if I put RH on it...

It's finding the right tutorial

It's all about finding the right tutorial. Until I found this tutorial, I was having a lot of trouble setting up VNC at home. It wasn't until I got to the step where they talk about opening the firewall that I clued in. Of course RH would be running a firewall by default... *sigh*

Fat vs. Thin or somewhere in between?

One of the things that frustrates me often is having to try and make fat client-like functionality in a thin client. And I know I am not the only one. Instead of focusing on the business layer and other more "interesting" areas I end up spending my time making sure that a list can be sorted in a browser correctly.

But there are advantages of thin clients, including "no roll out", certain security measures build into the platform (which I pull my hair out about) and familiarity of the UI (more or less). Now I don't think that the fat client area is dead, but I don't think that web apps are going away any time soon either. I wonder if soon it will get to be more of somewhere in between. Somewhere I have not thought of before.

Since there are languages like XUL that allow the UI to be "easily" created. Will the future hold more of a hybrid where you pass some markup to the client to represent the UI and the data separate. The client will take care of doing things like displaying lists and various different widgets. I'm not talking about a fat client where the data is passed through some web service or SOAP. When you connect, if you have an outdated "UI" or don't have it already, you request that. Then you also request the data and it displays it in the UI you have on the client. This wouldn't really be too different than programming in JSP or ASP etc. where you load a collection into a tag and it iterates through it except that it is done on the client and not the server.

For applications that you would way to have more access than a web browser (freedom to print, save to the hard drive, etc.) you could have a part of the application with a permission list. Each app gets registered and uses only the parts that a user explicitly allows it to. I would think that this would be better than having users install "random" exe's on their computer.

If you have the computing part on a server, all the UI will be doing is dumb things like sorting lists, getting user input, dialog boxes, alerts, firing events etc. Any updates to the UI would get pulled in when they are on the server. It's sort of funny with desktops being so powerful yet this idea is just to use them as dumb terminals, but that's what happens with all these web apps anyways...

This "universal client" probably has tons problems that I have not thought of, but I have not seen other people talking about it. Have you? What other problems could you guys think of for this solution?

Digital Camera

I finally did it. I've been talking about it for a while, but today I went out and got a digital camera. It's a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P73 4.1MP camera and I'm happy with it so far, but it's only been like 2 hours. ;-P

I was reading reviews about it on Imaging Resource which I found to be really helpful. They really seemed to have done a lot of research into the cameras and tested them well. I didn't get a top of the line camera and from the review I feel I know what some of the shortcomings are.

One thing that "sold" me on it was how fast it takes pictures. You press the button, *snap* you have a picture. No waiting around for 2 seconds. A two second wait is forever if you are trying to take pictures of young children like my nieces and nephews.

Next step: figuring out how to make / buy cheaply a digital picture frame. ;-)

Funny blog

A well written funny blog. It looks new. Let's see if Gateman keeps up with it. ;-)

Biggest piss off

One of the things that really ticks me off is when you have a site that has a lot of broken links. One site that I hit a broken link like every 2 minutes is ibm.com. Not even links to external sites, but places to things within their site. Grrrr.... You'd think that they would have some fancy IBM tool that would go through a site and find all the broken links. I'm sure that they sell one, but I can't find it on their site. The link's broken. ;-P

Word of the Day

The word of today is POJO:

POJO (pronounced poe-joe)
noun from the latin root plainus objectus
Example usage: All my classes are POJO's, so nothing fancy here...

Simple tricks

One thing that I liked about coding with other people is the small but important tricks that people show you while you are pair-programming (or at least working closely together). One that Karen showed me a while ago is in what order you do a .equals() in Java.

Most people why they want to compare a variable against a constant would do something like this (forgive the formatting):
if (myLocalVar.equals(STATIC_CONSTANT)) {...}
Now this is all well and good except what happens if myLocalVar is null? Your code that wasn't protected throws a NullPointerException over something that you should have guarded against.

You could something like:
if (myLocalVar != null && myLocalVar.equals(STATIC_CONSTANT)) {...}
but that gets messy and more likely someone would forget to put that guard (or screw up the != for ==, ...)

Here is the simple trick. If you have a constant, you know that will never be null (assuming you didn't set it up to be null), so write the code like this:
if (STATIC_CONSTANT.equals(myLocalVar)) {...}
This protects you against myLocalVar being null and works (because equals is symmetric)

I like tricks and thought that I would share. ;-)

Gmail spam

I didn't post my gmail account to anything on the web (I think), but I have started to get spam already. My guess would be is that they are dictionary attacks, but even so it would suck if google wasn't filtering it so well. I doubt that spam will continue to be a good way to mass market a product, but it's got to work on some level now for people to making money doing it.

I just wonder how soon it will before google offers companies gmail for corp mail servers sort of like how they the google appliance and you rent the hardware and software. I wonder what they will call the mail box if they call their search engine an "appliance". Will the mail server be the "google toaster"? Maybe they are saving that for their google cluster which would "pop" out hard disks that crashed... god, that would be funny...

Teaching driving for the first time

Lately I have been teaching Laura to drive my standard transmission car. This is the first time that I have really helped someone learn how to drive and it's really an interesting experience. It's one of those things that you never know what it's like to be on the "other side" until you actually have to do it. I understand more now why when my dad or brothers were teaching me how to drive them sometimes had to really think about how to explain it. When you drive a lot and for enough time, it all seems to natural that it's hard to think about the steps / checklist that you use to perform the task.

Luckily for me I didn't learn to drive like 30 years ago. It was only like 8 so I am still able to recall a lot of the tricks that helped me out. Discovering how other people learn is interesting. I guess one of the hardest parts about teaching is putting yourself in other peoples shoes. ;-)

Snowing!

It's finally snowing! It's really wet snow and I don't have my winter boots yet, but ah well. I guess this might be a good reason to change my tires at my folks place this weekend. I'll probably take off my roof racks too since I don't think that I'll be doing any more kayaking this year... ah well.

Hey, that looks familiar...

A question on slashdot that looks very familiar for some reason... ;-P

I think that some places are trying to focus on contractors for technical work because of the ease of being able to "release" them from work. Does that mean people should get upset because people could drop you? I think that it shifts the onus on the tech worker to make sure that they have relevant skills. You can't wait for your boss to send you on training if you only know HTML and now they want a J2EE app built. You have to keep your ears to the ground and make sure you diversify your skill set somewhat. When you stop learning expect to find yourself locked into one type of job with perhaps a shrinking market.

Logging NullPointerException and throwing a NullPointerException...

One of the things that I have been doing now that I have not done before is using a logging utility to keep track of what is happening. We've been using Jakarta Commons Logging which is just a thin wrapper that doesn't bind you to any logging impl (like log4j).

From the examples that I had seen, I liked how it looked when you were logging exceptions, in that you could pass a message and the exception (javadoc). It would look like this: log.error(e.getMessage(), e);

The weird thing is that the error message takes "Object" for a message, and not String. Okay, I guess that's more flexible, but that's not the point. The problem with this is that getMessage can return null and the logging impl was not checking if the objects that I was passing in were null. So, I had code somewhere that I wrote that created a NullPointerException. I passed this in with the message as the first pram, and then the logging itself was generating another NullPointerException! Now, I would would have thought that it's one of those places (in logging) were you would want to protect the app as much as possible. I guess that it's always a call, do you want to "fail silently" or "fail fast, fail hard". I just wish someone had chosen the former.

Internet hunting

Just when you think that we are going to kill ourselves so we look good to voters, you see why this may not be such a loss. *sigh* What's with people's need to kill things in newer and "better" ways?

Coverage <i>while</i> I write code

I was going to rant tonight about code coverage. It's a good thing in that it helps you strengthen your test suite and points out places where you have missed. Now the focus of my rant was going to be that it sucks to have to do all this in an Ant file instead of your IDE like Eclipse. You can run tests, sync with your repository, just about anything in Eclipse, but you can't run a coverage report. Now, this really pisses me off. I don't want to find out how good my coverage is tomorrow after the nightly build. I want it now. I want to be able to see in my java editor what lines of code have not been hit while I am developing the code and making tests.

I thought that this was a big break through because I have not seen this anywhere else. I was looking at EMMA today, and I had not seen it at all. Now, I have looked at other "free" coverage tools before, but I have not seen anything that would do what I wanted. This is a big itch to scratch, so I knew that I was not the only one who wished for something like this. So I looked and I found that jcoverage has a eclipse plugin that seems to do everything that I want. But there's a catch (as always): it's not free. Well, it's free for 30 days...

The other problem is that it's for Eclipse 3, and I am using WSAD 5.1 at work which is based on Eclipse 2.1. If I remember correctly, the plugin arch. has changed from 2.1 to 3 the plugins are not compatible. *sigh*

It'll be good when this sort of thing is more common. Does anyone else have any suggestions for something like this?

How good is Wikipedia

A story on slashdot linked to a very interesting read on how good a community based encyclopedia is when everyone can edit it. Now, granted the author is biased, he still has some really interesting points. I really liked 4th last paragraph where he talks about no matter how good an article is, since it's edited by the public, it can always be "edited into mediocrity".

I guess that it shows that edits are only truly improvements when the person doing the editing has at least the same level of knowledge of what they are editing for (correct facts, spelling, ...) as the author. I guess it's like taking a really good piece of sw and having it maintained by co-ops who do not understand why it was built a certain way and actually make something worse the more they work on it. Good read...

Christmas is coming!

Kibbee isn't the only one getting ready for Christmas. Yesterday Laura and I went out and got a tree, ornaments, and some LED tree lights. LED lights are more expensive, but they last longer and they take way less power. But I mostly got them because I thought that it would be cool. ;-P

So now we've just to figure out where to put the tree and start putting things up. I've got to get all my Christmas stuff from my folks place. We have a tradition where my parents (and grandparents on my mom's side) gave each one of use a new ornament every year, so that when we do move out, we've got lots of things to go on the tree.

My next thing to get now is a camera so I can take pictures of everything... I've been talking about it before, but now is probably the time to actually do something about it. That and I found a Best Buy and Crappy Tire really close to our place, so now I'll be going there instead of the "long" trek to South Keys.

Yay! Christmas is coming!!! :-D

"The torch, be yours to hold it high..."

A few things that are worth a read, especially today: John McCrae, The making of the poem, and Remembrance Day.

Poppy pins

One thing that I don't get about the poppies that they have for remembrance day is how they are attached with straight pins. Why straight pins??? Most people usually end up loosing them, scratching / pricking themself, being fearful of the poppy. Is this to remind us that we are wearing a poppy and what it stood for? Is it just a really crappy design that no one has changed for 80+ years because it's cheaper to use the old design?

Why not use some kind of safety pin? Something where it would not fall out; something that people would not be bleeding all over our clothes?

Now, I am probably coming off as an ungrateful jerk for not just shutting up and thinking about the great sacrifice the poppy represents. It's just that I took off my poppy the other day because I kept on stabbing / scratching myself. I'd much rather be able to wear it to show that I remember. :-(

So, the questions are: why is the design the way it is; what would be a better design for the poppy to be able to make them cheaply while still being able to attach to all kinds of clothes (thick, thin, ...); how are we going to get this changed; and who should we contact to to get this changed? Anyone know?

Pentagon Strike

For all those conspiracy buffs out there, I am sure that they have already seen the presentation about the 9/11 pentagon strike. If not, there it is. Time to put on your tinfoil hats. ;-P

Looking for <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">love</span> a tech book

I'm going to buy a new tech book soon, and I wanted to know if anyone has any recommendations at all. Actually, for any type of book... I love to read a good book. ;-)

I was thinking about reading Code Complete by Steve Mcconnell. It's supposed to be one of those "timeless" books, but I'm not sure that I want to spend 50+$ on a book that may be out of date wrt a more agile dev env. I don't really want to read anything specific for any language if I can help it.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Grinding to a halt

My computer at work was always running slower than my co-workers, but we couldn't believe that the difference was due to his CPU being just 200 MHz faster than mine. And during the last week or so it was getting much, much worse. I kept on blaming it on WSAD and it having a memory leak.

The other day I threw up my arms and decided to do something about it. I did a couple of things, the first being a defrag of my drive. I had no idea how bad it was. People kept on telling me that you don't have to defrag a NTFS drive, but I have a feeling that that there were wrong or I misunderstood. The second thing that I did was run some anti spyware programs on my box. They found things and I cleared those off.

So, now my computer seems to take less memory, and my test suite runs much faster. I guess that the spyware was tracking all the http requests to my own box and trying to log them... Both those solutions helped my box run faster which means a happier Jim and that's all that matters. ;-)

Peep and the Big Wide World

Even though I have never seen the show, I can't get the theme song from Peep and The Big Wide World out of my head after listening to it a couple of times... Laura's seen it a couple of times and really liked it. Oh, before you get your hopes up too much, it's a show for pre-schoolers.

And for some reason, you can't find the any episodes on the net... who knew that pre-schoolers were not illegally sharing shows. Ah well. ;-P

Greener on the other side

One thing that has been hit over my head the last couple of weeks is that people never seem to be truly happy with what they have now. People seem to have a tendency to want what they do not have and be envious of others that do have it.

People with straight hair want curly hair, people with curly hair want to have straight hair; people who settled down and have kids wished they had travelled around, people that travelled wish they had settled down and have kids; Person A wants to be more like Person B, Person B wants to be more like Person A... the list goes on and on.

This reminds me of my discussions of Buddhism with Karen when she was taking a religion course. Now it wouldn't be a good thing for people not to have desire or want because there would not be any motivation, but it always gets me just how unhappy people can be with the situation that they are in. It's hard to look at yourself sometimes and just think "wow, I'm damn lucky and life is great".

Ah, I think that's enough random thoughts of now... time for some pumpkin pie... Mmmmm....

I can't believe it

Even though it looked like it was going to happen, I still can't believe it. I just hope that things go well and he doesn't declare war on us. *sigh*

Just a note, when I read this at first it was after an hour on /. and there was about 1200 comments... check out what the number is now. At the time of this post there is 1752... more than I have ever seen before.

Motorcycle Diaries

The other night Laura and I saw Motorcycle Diaries at World Exchange. I thought that it's a really great film. I had no idea about any of the background story, only knowing that it took place in 1952 and was true / based on a true story. I think that it's great for every thing in the story to be new and exciting without expecting parts to come up. It's a forign film, so there are subtitles... but it's fine.

It's very different than the thriller movie The Forgotten which was an excellent movie, except for the trailers about it. Don't get me wrong, but the trailers are wonderfully put together except for the fact that they spoil the movie. Don't watch the trailers!!! The things that should have had a HUGE impact I was just waiting for the moment that things were going to happen. The one that I just watched on the "official site" gave away every cool part... cut things together not how they happened. I really feel sorry for the director and everyone who worked hard on that because the best parts are given away. That must be frustrating.

So, I won't spoil Motorcycle Diaries for you by telling you more than I have already, other than to go see it. ;-) Don't read on if you have not seen it...

One of the characters in the movie was Ernesto Guevara. I had no idea who he was. I really felt bad by the level of my ignorance of the world's history. But that's one good thing about having watched the movie, now I want to learn more. ;-)

Funny when I don't like watching the news though...

Vote for the American election

Laura pointed out to me a place where the rest of the world can vote for the american election (globalvote2004.org). I think that this sort of goes along with the discussions on Ryan's blog. While it may seem really good that there might be a public place for people to "vote", I think that this might be a bad place to do it. Why? It's easy to "ballet stuff" with an online poll. But that's only if American's as a whole care what the world thinks.

That probably is a dangerous point by itself too. What if everyone in the world said that they felt that Bush was the best person to be elected? Would they vote for Kerry just as a big FU to the world? Or vise versa?

They are the only country that we share a border with, and I am still confused by how Americans act and think. And I don't know why there is such a significant difference... is it just the information that they are provided in the news?

I feel today I have brought up more questions than answers.

myFamily++

Tonight at 5:20 my eldest brother and his wife had their 3rd child, a healthy boy of 7 lb 9 oz. I'm not sure what the name is. What I heard was Alexander. I'll be updating that one. And just think, 14 years ago I didn't have any family here. Now we're... uhh... like 17 or 18 in Ottawa. Nice.

On a totally unrelated note, I went to GTEC where I picked up some great swag. Bell was giving things out like beaners / flashlight / compass and headset for your cell phone (which I need). I really like the cell phone headset and it seems to work well. Other than the free stuff from the show had some really cool stuff there, but it's purpose is for government departments to share the tech stuff that they are working on and for private companies to show the government people what they have to offer. Pretty cool all around.

A sweet pair of breasts

I was really happy with what Laura and I had for dinner tonight and I just thought that I would share 'cause I think that it was pretty easy to make, even when we both aren't feeling well.

1. Raw carrots: there nothing easier than eating veggies straight out of the bag.
2. Sweet potato: I boiled it till I should stick a fork in it part way. Then I peeled it (pretty easy, the skin sort of fell off), sliced it into ~1 cm thick pieces, put in in a small glass container, sprinkled it with some brown sugar and a splash of OJ. Then I covered it with some foil, placed in the oven at 400F and forgot about it. It was probably in there for 30-45 minutes.
3. Chicken breasts: I thawed some chicken in the microwave and then sprinkled with some garlic powder, salt, and a little bit of pepper. Now here is the cool thing: I took a pear, chopped it up, splashed some OJ on it (so it didn't turn brown and nasty), sprinkled some "all spice" and cinnamon, and then added some fresh chopped ginger.
4. Cooking: I cooked the the chicken in a pan on medium heat, and after I turned it once I dumped in the pear on top (and I added too much water). I just cooked that down till it reduced and then served.

It was very good and I don't think that it took too much effort at all. The only thing that I didn't like was doing the sweet potato. I used a pot and a dish to cook it in. I like it better when I use at most once dish per item. It's better to do the whole thing in one pot though... can you tell that I used to be a dish washer long ago?

Sooo coool!!!

It's finally here! I can search my computer using google (desktop). Kick ass! Now I won't have to be bothered by the really crappy search in WinXP. Oh happy day!

I thought that it was secure

Well, just when you think that they have come up with a good solution, it seems that it's not the perfect one after all. It looks like WEP which is used for wireless networks around homes, offices, etc. isn't secure. It's even stated that in the wikipedia article... *sigh*

What does this mean now? Does this mean that whenever I want to do anything like online banking I should be wired and disable my Wi-Fi connection? I'm not totally clear if your network is broken if that means that people can read your ssh / https traffic. I would guess not, but I'm confused about that. Does anyone know?

Hotmail's up

It looks like hotmail has now been increased to 250 MB for the free accounts. Aleks had his upped earlier, but when I had checked it mine wasn't. What is this, like 3 months late? Ah well. Either way it's still less than what I get from gmail, and without the kick-ass google UI experience.

Shhhh! We're hunting rabbits!

It's late. It's dark. I can't for the life of me get to sleep. The whole place is quiet except for the occasional sound of someone getting on / off the elevator on my floor. The only reason why I know is 'cause it makes a wirrl-pause-wirrl sound.

On another note, I think that I figured out what the construction by hurdman and Riverside is. It seems to be watermain installation. I wonder if they are going to be putting in a bike path there like someone said, or if that it just rumour.

On a slightly related note, does everyone know about the OC Transpo Travel Planner. It seems to work very well. It's something that would be really kick ass if they would let you download it and put it in your PDA or something. That's something that every city could use. Imagine just taking that app and selling it to a bunch of different cities? Let people download it and use it? That would be so good. That's one of the arguments about "giving away" software: if it's not part of your core business, why restrict assess to it? Their whole business is to get more people on the bus. If they would let anyone with a palm / whatever be able to make a simple query on their palm and it display some times / routes, I think that would encourage more people to use the bus. Baby steps I guess....

Picket lines

On my way in to work today I was wondering why the buses were super slow. I thought it was just a little different than normal. Nope, it's because there's a strike on. Some people I know were tied up in the picket lines for 5, 10, or 15 minutes. Aleks was there for 30. I sort of pushed past them on a side entrance when they were looking the other way and when they stepped in my way I just walked around them. I was snuffly and in no mood to get stuck outside talking to people bitching about getting more pay.

When they tell you about "having to stick together for solidarity", it just feels hollow when you receive none of the same benefits that they do. I am sure that I would feel differently if I was an employee, but I'm not, so I don't.

Jimbo Jones, back on the air

I've been laying low this last week... mostly because I've been fighting a battle with a cold. I think that at this point I have won, but it's not a decisive victory.

Now that I actually have an internet connection that's worth using, and a laptop that allows me to sit where I want, today I went out and got a wireless router. So, now I can sit in my bed and blog. Ah, the joys of it all. The only thing that I'm not so hot about is the card for my laptop sticking out the side... ah well. There's nothing that I can do about that though.

Today's been a day of experiments. A first test of Jim's Chilly (no fatalities so far), drilling in the wall (I think that I'll get the apartment people to finish... they asked us not to do it by ourselves anyways...), and cutting of my hair in our kitchen. It's nice and short, and the cost of the tools were just over what a "regular" hair cut would run me. Yay Walmart! And I think that it provided Laura with enough amusement cutting off my hair. But I'm still as strong as I was before, unlike some. ;-P

Don't let your picture ID expire

Today I had a bit of a frustrating day. This morning I ran the run for a cure (It was supposed to be 5 km, but was more like 4... and SO many people it was insane). That was cool. Laura and I had taken a bus there, so we hopped on a bus on the way home.

Well, at the end of last month my student picture ID expired, so I got a new adult pass. I was going to get a new adult picture ID, but it wasn't really high on my priority list. So, I got on the bus to go home from the run, and the driver stopped me. He took my pass, invalidated my 63 $ monthly pass (telling me that I would get a new one when I got a new picture), and gave me a day pass. He wanted me to pay on the spot (!?!), but I didn't have any money. Hell, I still had my race number pined to my shirt. Grrrr...

So, I went home, got cleaned up, (took a nap), and went back to Rideau where the only place that was doing picture ID's today was open. The line was loooong. It took me 45-50 minutes to get my new picture. Not that I am annoyed. Oh no. Not that it was a big pain in the ass. Oh no. Oh wait, I am and it was. :-|

Still, even with all that, it was my own fault. But I'm still pissed off.

Lessoned learned

One thing that I have really figured out lately is asking people for data in the proper format. If you are going to do anything automated with the data, it's going to be a bad thing if you give them flexability. Restrict the input options as much as possible and you will save yourself time.

Here's an example: if you wanted a people to give you their address and you sent them an excel spreadsheet with columns that you would like them to fill out. Your plan was to use this data and put it in a database. The biggest problem with this scenario is giving them an excel spreadsheet with that has no restrictions. It would be much better to whip up a quick VB form on an Access database and have them enter in things in the form. You'd spend maybe a couple of hours making that form / db, but you would save yourself days later on.

The leason here is to make sure you make things are restrictive for user input as required, even if it will be "processed" by a person. People will be as different as you allow them to be, not through spite, but just that's how people are.

Bye bye MSN (again)

After installing WinXP SP2 before, I didn't notice that it also installed MSN again on me. So, I had to disable it again. Sneaky.

Word of the day: iatrogenic

The word of the day is iatrogenic which means "they are sick because the doctor fucked up". Nice.

It's good to learn different lingo. Sort of like when people are having computer problems and it's a ID-10-T error or PEBKAC. ;-)

Ankle is feeling better

My ankle has been bothering me for a bit and it wasn't getting any better. Rest wasn't helping, so I tried exercise today. Not my fastest run by any stretch of the imagination, but good. And my ankle feels okay.

One reason I want to get back to running soon is that I have entered in the CIBC run for a cure which is on Sunday Oct. 3rd. It'll be good to do another event, and a bunch of people that I know are doing it (Laura and Liz). Yay! Running event! The funny thing (to me) is this event's route is more or less my favourite lunch route. Nice. ;-)

"Hackers"

One of the things that I feel I differ to others is how I perceive the word "hacker" when referring to people who write code. My mental image of a hacker is someone who sits in a room alone, pounding away at a dirty keyboard eating food from the vending machine while saving the day for the whole company / project. This person is someone who if left the project, it would fail. They can solve any problem in a matter of minutes and have an ego the size of a baseball stadium. They follow no process that is apparent to anyone "outside" and lack communication skills. Not a "team player".

Now other people hold hackers in high esteem. They are the demigods of the software world. Everyone should be more like them. If you can't think in cryptic code and obscure, complicated methods, you're just a lowly code monkey only ever to update the software that they wrote.

Well, like Ryan said, I'd rather be a great Software Engineer. I guess it's like in baseball I'd rather have a team of people who always go out and hit singles, than having a so-so team with one star player who hits home runs. I think that it's a better investment to teach people how to hit singles all the time rather than to point to the person hitting home runs and say "be like them!".

Maybe I'm just too new the the software world, I don't know. But the software world is pretty new itself. We'll see how it plays out, but I hope that the focus is about everyone being well trained and capable of producing stable, consistent sw that solves the customer's problem. Sure, the industry still have it's stars, but if you don't need to have a star to deliver a well made product, I'll be happy. We'll have the tools to be able to manage and monitor the work (not the people!) to ensure that we are doing what we should.

Listening to: Massive Attack - Risingson

HTML labels in struts multibox

I'm blogging about this in the hope that this will help other people and save them the time that I have wasted tracking this down.

Like I have blogged about before, using labels in html forms is a good thing. It makes the form easier to use, and over all is much nicer. I think that this is especially true for checkboxes and radio buttons.

Now, we are using struts for our app, and as recomended we are using a multibox to manage a group of related check boxes. Now the trouble is that I could not figure out how to add a html label. The spec says that you don't have to use the "for" attribute, but I found that it didn't seem to work this way in IE (works in Firefox of course). And the example that everyone points to didn't use labels.

Now, using the example, for it to work I had to add in a cast and use some java code (not tags!) to get it to work. Here is the modified example:

<logic:iterate id="item" property="items">
<label for="selectedItems.<bean:write name="item" property="label"/>">
<html:multibox property="selectedItems"
styleId='<%="selectedItems." + ((org.apache.struts.util.LabelValueBean)item).getLabel()%>'>
<bean:write name="item" property="value"/>
</html:multibox>
<bean:write name="item" property="label"/>
</label>
</logic:iterate>

The changes are the styleId and the label tags. Not the best experience, but I hope that this will save someone else the time that it has cost me.
Update: I changed the id to point to the label and not the value. The label is more likely to be unique on the page. My bad.
Update 2: I made the changes that I mentioned in the post to ensure that the label is unique in the form. ;-)

I think that I have found a reason to upgrade

One thing that I found myself to be a sucker for over the years: star wars games. I have recently gotten my hands on Star Wars Battlefront and it looks great. There's just one tiny problem: I can't play it on my laptop. There is no way that my box even comes close to having the requirements for this game, and this is a game where you would want to have no lag in any way. So now I find myself with a reason to actually upgrade my computer after so many years. Strange.

I have my linux box sitting next to me right now, so I think that I'll check that out. I think that it's only at 800 MHz though, so I might have to do a few things before I have a "gaming box". Like 1) get a graphics card that can handle the game 2) Make sure I have enough RAM and hd space for it 3) make it a dual boot so that I can still have a linux box to play around with? and 4) I would probably need a better monitor, but that's farther down the road.

The whole reason why I made a linux box was so that I could play around with having a nice stable computer that I could use as a file server. Well, it is stable, but that's mostly because I never turn it on. And a file server? Well, I could never figure out how to get samba working so I just got an external USB drive for my laptop with a 120 G drive. I would like to be able to work from home, and it would be a good idea to have something that would allow me to do this....

One suggestion that was made to me today was to just a couple of removable drives and just swap out to the OS that I want to run. This sounds good, but 1) I would have to get another drive (not a problem) and 2) I would have to get a couple of the swappable drives bays. So many decisions... I think that I'll mull this over eating supper.

Anyone have the hardware to be able to run Star Wars Battlefront? Is it any good?

Listening to: A. Boublil and C. Schˆnberg - I Dreamed A Dream

Twisted Ankle

Somehow this past weekend while going up to the cottage and closing up the boats, dock, etc. I slightly twisted my ankle. Now it's not bad enough to cause me to go out and get crutches, but it's annoying in that I walk with a bit of a limp. *sigh* I couldn't go for a run this morning. I think that I'll just have to be careful. Ah well. Damn.

Listening to: my computer fan

Virtual CD drive

I was trying something that I had the cd image for the other day, but I didn't really want to go to the trouble of burning the CD's just so I could do that. Then I found daemon tools that lets you create a virtual cd rom drive. I had no problems with it, everything went smoothly. It's free for personal use, but if you had a business (internet cafe) you could use it to have a bunch of virtual cd roms on your server and just change what image is in that drive. I found it's faster to change what iso / cab file is in there compared to changing a physical cd rom. Cool. ;-) And I guess this would work for you if you had a dvd image, but no dvd burner.... ;-)

Going digital

Well, I think that I am finally in the market for a digital camera. Right now I am thinking about something with 4-5 M px, 3x optical zoom, lots of memory, and small-ish. ;-) Another requirement that I have (because my dad's sucks at this) is speed. There is nothing worse than seeing the perfect picture, clicking the button, and having it take 2 seconds to take the shot while you missed that perfect moment.

So, I'm going to shop around for a while. Anyone has anything good / bad to say about any camera or other advice?

Listening to: Great Big Sea - My Apology

Birthday jokes

They got me good here at work today. Very good. Well thought out and executed plans. I'll update this entry later when I get the pictures.

Update: right now I don't plan to post the photos... they were taken with a cell phone and don't really do it justice at all. So disappointing, but what can you do?

QotD - Sept 21, 2004

Stolen from slashdot:
The real trouble with reality is that there's no background music.
;-)

Listening to: Pearl Jam - Garden

6:30 am

Today I went for my earliest run ever. We started at 6:30 am. I didn't even know that other people were out at that time... crazy. I think that I'll take a nap now...

Listening to: Massive Attack - Group Four

Like a box of chocolates

Sometimes life is like a box of chocolates: tasty, sweet, and wonderful. Other times you end up getting the bad ones that leave a nasty taste in your mouth. Today my friends is one of those days. *sigh* Ah well. Time to roll with the punches and just make the best of the options that I have.

Update: What I was upset about was all a joke. My boss got me good. Revenge will be sweet though. :-P

Listening to: Faithless - Tarantula

Applying what I learned

One of the best things that I feel I took away after working on our 4th year project at school was software process. I think that was the whole point, so I feel good about my experience. Not only have I been using test driven development for a while now, but I'm starting to use other "tricks" that have been picked up. Like keeping 2 test suites, one that is always green, one where developers can put tests that they want to pass, but don't have time to work on a special case of a feature right now. This really comes from discussions and posts with Ryan (here, here, and here).

I just think that I am able to apply so much from one "class" to what I am doing in the real world. I think that I have had too many classes where I don't think that I will ever use anything that was taught to me in there. I think that I just like practical things. ;-)

Listening to: Barenaked Ladies - Falling For The First Time

Coffeeeee!!

Why is there never enough coffee? *sigh*

Sometimes it's the big things that make the difference

Well, it's been almost a month since we've moved out, and we are getting our bed exchanged tonight. I just can't sleep on a firm bed. Needless so say, I'm really looking forward to getting a softer bed and hopefully being able to sleep.

It's really interesting how large an affect having / not having a good night's sleep can have on your whole day. Maybe now I won't need my morning coffee. Probably not though.

Listening to: Barenaked Ladies - Maybe Katie

New Firefox

Just after I installed Firefox, they have come out with a new version. I like the new one. I don't think that I even need the google toolbar for firefox since there is a google search area in the browser, and it has highlighting with the new find. Sweeeet!

Tests allow you to be experimental

One thing that I love about unit tests is the fact that they allow you to be a bit experimental. There are parts of code that I understand why they were written in a certain way (I could have written them!) but I don't like it. They just have a bad, icky feeling about them. So I think of a new way to write the code, comment out the old code, play around, and as long as my new, cleaner, simpler solution passes all the tests, it gets checked in.

There is such a freedom that you feel when you have tests that you can't get without. I often wonder how other people (and me) programmed without having a test suite. How did we make changes? I still can't believe how simple unit tests are, and just how powerful they are. Crazy.

Listening to: Chicane - Saltwater Original

Update: Ryan had some excellent comments about this. I totally agree with the "if it an't broke, don't fix it" approach. In the case that I talked about above, it was because of a requirement change that I allowed myself to change the code, not because I felt like it. That's one thing that I find about XP: nothing is new or super "cutting edge", it seems to take a lot of best practises and common sense. But like a lot of other things, it becomes more than the sum of its parts. I can see that as being one of the road blocks for adopting XP, but that's another blog post altogether.

Funny evolution

Anyone else think it's a little funny that at first OS's came free with your computer hardware; then as costs of hardware dropped (i.e. fell like a stone), they started to charge for the OS and other sw; now "free" sw is gaining ground again but instead of just making money off the sw, it's all subscription packages? I just think that it's interesting...

[end of random thought]

Blog spam

Well, with increased visibility comes increased spam. Today I was hit with my first big attack of blog spam. It was definally over 300, but I would guess that it was closer to 500 spam. Really nasty stuff too. People are sick. I'm just really disgusted right now. Time for a run.

Giving our lives away, or just more open?

Some interesting comments from Matthew Langham. That's one thing that I have not thought of before. The 'net as a medium allowing us not only to communicate faster and more open, but it is also distributing the information, our information, out of our control. This goes back to comments from Ryan about when you publish your blog (and everything else), you loose control over it. There are copies out there floating around that you would have no idea that they exist, let alone the ability to remove them, edit them, or choose who will see them.

I can see this as being a huge change to our society and I bet we won't even have noticed it till it's all done. In a couple of generations, I bet it will be a strange thought that you will not be able to find what used to be considered very personal info / data in a public forum. Imagine that your grandkids will be able to check out when you were blogging about that hot chick or getting really drunk last night.

All the data will still be personal to someone, but not most people. I think that the effect of this will be just that society will get more relaxed (which I think is a good thing). Maybe it will also mean that people will behave more consistently in different groups because members of each group will be able to see how the person behaves in the other group, but I doubt it. That's too much of a change.

I guess that in a way this is what we have been taught to do since we were children: share with others.

Listening to: Groove Armada - I See You Baby

WinXP SP2

My computer downloaded WinXP SP2, but I'm a little leery of installing it. Has anyone else done it, and if so, has anyone had any troubles with it? God, I should make backups...

Made the switch

After being frustrated with mozilla 7.2 not having a spell checker (for forms) anymore, I finally made the move to firefox. Then I installed spellbound and the Noia 2.0 theme. It's only been about 5 minutes, but I think that I like it. It actually does seem faster, but maybe it's all in my head. Either way, I can spell check things again. (and my browser seems mac-like, which is a strange feeling).

Listening to: Barenaked Ladies - Sell, Sell, Sell - Kazoo

Program lanuage inventor or serial killer?

Just for fun, see if you can identify people who are computer language inventors, and who are serial killers. Thanks to Laura for the link. My score was 5, Andrew's was 5, and Aleks's was 8. ;-P

Can I offer you coffee? Tea? GMail?

I think that gmail accounts are starting to flood "nerd" circles. There were services that are no longer running where you would be able to offer gmail invites. The last time that I saw it running, there was just 20+ just sitting there... Nerds only have so many friends you know. Well, maybe just so many that are gmail worthy. A lot of people are like "what? Another email account? No thanks.". What they don't understand is how nice the interface is.

A co-worker of mine keeps on giving them away, but then they keep on bumping him back up to 6. One day it will go out of bata, but there will not really be a flood of new accounts 'cause everyone will already have them. I think that their strategy is really smart, but I guess that's why they employ mostly PhD's...

Listening to: Massive Attack - Hymn Of The Big Wheel

Look Ma! I'm on Google!

Well, I think for the first time ever I can be found on google. Other searches bring up this page too. Weird. Does this now mean that I should be insightful, witty, and spel thigns rigth? Naaa... ;-P

Listening to: Death in Vegas - Girls

First day of school!!

To everyone starting school again, whether it is grade 2, grade 19, or somewhere in between, I wish you all the best. ;-)

Blogging Might Get You Fired???

Knowing that it can happen, and after reading Ryan's "Blogging Might Get You Fired" post, I feel a bit more nervous posting. Why? I don't think that I am saying anything that could reflect poorly on my employer or would reveal secrets. But I don't think that the other bloggers that got fired felt that way also. We keep on looking at those examples and saying "they never got warned at all, just fired". I guess the bloggers that do get warned never post "Hey look at me! This could get me fired! Let's see how far I can go. Weeee!!!"

It's a big deal now I guess... what's the fun in being able to blog if you can't talk about what's happening with your life? Not giving details is cool, but in general. *sigh*

The one that got me was the story where someone got fired for talking about moving from JSP's to PHP. Now, I would never have thought that was a secret in any way. Wouldn't you be able to tell from looking at the webpage? Yikes. To protect myself, do I have to pretend that I don't even go to work? Or should I use a level of secrecy like if I was working for csis or something?

The thing that I don't understand about that last example about revealing moving from one tech to another, does that mean you can't put on your resume what you have been doing?

I'm a bit confused. I'm not sure if I will mention work anymore. But I want to, damnit. Maybe I'll just become a secret agent man and have a nice clear line of what I can / cannot say.

Listening to: Underworld - Cowgirl

Laundry 1, Jim 0

Not that I haven't soaked my running clothes before, but I still need practise. I took my white shirt and black shorts (which I have soaked before together) and decided to add in my red towel and some other black clothes. *sigh* Wrong. I ended up with a pink shirt and socks. I (with direction from Laura) was able to get the shirt white again (with some black spots) but the socks are pretty pink. Ah well. Lesson learned (hopefully). :-P

Getting worked up over nothing

A couple of times over the last couple of months I've thought that events would unfold a certain way (badly) and in the time coming up to these events have prepared for the worse. Then the even happens, and it goes fine, without problems.

Now, this by itself is good news. The bad part is the wasted emotion and anxiety before the event. But in a way it is good, in that it teaches me (and hopefully I'll learn) how to better predict the likely outcome for an event. Really, it's just studying human nature / behaviour more.

Funny

Q: What did you cut yourself on?
A: Yogurt.

- an actual conversation that I had this morning.

Always carry ID

Always carry ID when you are exercising. Try and exercise with someone else if you can.

My running buddy was out running on Friday (she was off on vacation). She smelt "something" and I guess it wasn't a good smell so she was trying to run and get away from it. What she didn't know at the time was that she was having a seizure. She doesn't even remember the last km of her run.

They found her in a ditch by a culvert where some chicken wire stopped her from falling into the water and probably saved her life. She has taught me everything that I know about running and I owe her more much more for being such a good friend. She has always told me to take ID with me, old ID or whatever because if anything happens to you, your family can at least be informed where you are.

I just came back from the hospital where she found out that she has a tumour that looks like spaghetti in her brain. They'll be doing a biopsy soon to determine exactly what it is.

She's very fit and healthy, strong, and stubborn as hell. If anyone can beat this, she can. She's very much in my thoughts right now.

The reason why I am blogging this is that I want everyone who goes out for a bike ride, run, walk, roller blade, whatever, to know how important it is for them to carry ID. Not because they will need it in hospital, but because it can save their family the worry of not knowing where they are in case they are not able to tell anyone who they are.

It's just 5 more km Betty. You can do it.

Alternated to WSAD

Last summer when I was here at work in a different department, they were moving towards getting everyone a copy of WSAD. Now they have decided to use MyEclipse. I was told that it "does everything that WSAD does", and at 30 $ / seat compared to like 4500 $ / seat, I can understand why they made the change.

WSAD that I have is pretty new, and it is built on Eclipse 2.1. From MyEclipse's website, they support Eclipse 3.0. Pretty cool if you want to be on the cutting edge. I just thought that I'd pass along the interesting news. ;-)

Listening to: Massive Attack - Exchange

Cool!

A co-worker just showed me something cool... go to touchgraph.com and then to GoogleBrowser and type in your fav. website (or your own!) and see what's connected to it. Not only does it show what's connected to it, it flows and tries to make it so that you can see all the links... pretty neat. But I think that it depends on your google rank. I think that I'll play around with that later. ;-)

Router update

After some more investigation on why Laura could connect with the router and why I couldn't, I've found some very weird behaviour. Both computers are set up for DHCP. When using 2 of the ports, the computers get the network info from rogers and work fine. But only 1 computer can access the net at a time. I can't even see the router when this happens. The other 2 ports get their info from the router which doesn't seem to get any info from rogers, so it can't see past the local area network. I'm not sure if that's the final picture, but it's close.

Ryan suggested in my last post to upgrade the firmware which I might do soon. I just want to get my old D-Link back from my dad so that I can us it because I have never had any trouble with it. We'll see what happens. Now at least I can check my sympatico email account... :-|

Still can't connect at home

I'm still having troubles connecting to the net at home. Laura's computer seems to get it's IP etc. directly from Rogers and isn't using the router, while my computer is, but the router doesn't seem to be getting the info from Rogers...

I'll try a bunch more "resets" and see if that fixes anything, and / or just throw out the router and get mine back from my dad because I know that it works. It's just pretty frustrating right now.... I still have to change wires / try the port that works and see if it is a hardware problem. *sigh*

Listening to: Underworld - Tongue

Funny

You can usually find something funny on slashdot. Today's comment takes the cake though.

Listening to: Stan Rogers - The Wreck of the Athens Queen

Been busy

As always, I have been busy that last while. It's been just over a week since we've been in the new place, and we still have a bunch of unpacking to do. I think that we are getting things into the right place, but there is a lot of little things that we need to get done. The whole process has been more work than I thought it would be, but it's great.

Still some issues like me loosing my DNS (I suspect) server names. Just little things that I'll fix over time. ;-)

Do you have your exit buddy?

The fire alarm went off today at 2:50 am. So, I got to see what people in the building actually leave when there is a fire alarm (about 30 I'd guess). And I guess it's good to figure out where the emergance exits are before it's -30 outside. So, I'm slightly sleepy today. Ah well.

And yes, I did find my exit buddy. ;-)

Listening to: Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism

13 minute commute

I finally made the big move, and everything went well. Nothing got too beat up, the different families got along fine (it was their first meeting), and it went quickly. Now there is just more setup / unpacking to do. Tonight we get the highspeed net connection, and I think that my folks will be coming over to help run some wire.

And do you know how long it took me to get in with a slow-ass bus driver? 13 minutes from door to door. In traffic. Nice. :-D

Listening to: Starsailor - Love Is Here

Grapefruit juice

Just when you thought that juice is good for you, Health Canada is advising Canadians not to take certain drugs with grapefruit juice. Did other people know about this?

Thanks to Heather for the link. ;-)

Listening to: Beastie Boys - No Sleep till Brooklyn

Testing our db

In our db structure at work we have tables that have some "tracer info" like

1. who created the row
2. when did they create it
3. who last modified it
4. when did they last modify it

Now, I want to be able to check it see that, at the very least all rows that have tracer columns have non-null values in them. We have some sql scripts that put an absolute minimum amount of data for the app to work, and then we run the suite.

What I want is to have something that checks if any of those columns are not being filled out. I want this test to run after the scripts run, and then again after the suite runs. But I think that if tables are added / taken away this will be something that will not be maintained, so I want something reflexive. If you didn't notice, I like things that don't have to be constantly maintained to work.

Back in my early days of Java dev work, Peter and I worked on an app that got the meta data from a sybase db using a sybase specific call. Now, that call was specific and ugly, and I really don't want to do something like that. Now, to our credit, that part of the app was already done when Pete and I started to work on it. Tonight I found something that looks promising: DatabaseMetaData.getColumns. This allows you to pass it patterns and it then returns a result set that you can go through and pick out the info that you want. From this I think that I'll be able to pull out all the columns that have the names that I want and be able to build and run queries that check if those values have been filled out.

I'll update on how it goes. ;-) Now on to packing....

5 days to go

Well after taking yesterday off 'cause I was sick, it's nice to be back. I actually do like my job. Now I'm just really looking forward to Sunday when I move out. I just have to pack a lot more... I hope that there will be no snaggles, but I can't forsee those. Hopefully I'll be able to give an update on Monday... it's so close I can barely wait...

Listening to: Aphex Twin - Avril 14th

WSAD / Eclipse task list

One thing that is ticking me off right now is the task list in Eclipse / WSAD. Here is how I have the problem: I deleted files from our project which adds a task that says *.java has been deleted locally; did a sync and removed them from the repository; later before I shutdown WSAD it crashed and did not "save the workspace" properly. Well, now I can't seem to get rid of those messages.

I found they are stored in WORK_SPACE_PATH\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.resources\.projects\PROJECT_NAME\.markers file. But the file doesn't seem to be a plain text doc so I don't really feel comfortable editing it. Does anyone have a solution to this? I tired removing the .markers file but I couldn't seem to get it to refresh. I don't know how to remove this from the GUI in WSAD... Anyone have any ideas?

Listening to: Barenaked Ladies - What A Good Boy

Forcast

Ever want to know if it will be good star gazing tonight or tomorrow? For Ottawa you can check out the clear sky clock. Really cool.

Listening to: Blues Brothers - John Lee Hooker - Boom Boom Boom

NES

One thing that Andrew made me think of (since he has just moved this last weekend) is that I will now have a tv and a place to hook up my NES. What a classic system! I spent so many hours playing games like Bionic Commando, Dr. Mario, and of course the other Mario games. I think that I'll check around Walmart or somewhere for Mario 3 (which I don't think that I have). btw, there is a master list of games for the nes (pdf). So cool!

I had problems with my system many years ago... Andrew told me that you can clean it by getting "electronic contact clearer" from Canadian Tire, and 1500 grit sand paper. You spray on the cleaner (and wait, I'm not sure) and then use something like a ruler to rub the contacts with the sand paper in the same direction as the contacts. I'll try this out, but I have to get it back from my brother first. :-D

Listening to: Barenaked Ladies - Good Boy

Blown away

After seeing the post on slashdot about a new version of mozilla I downloaded it. Now none of my plugins work (including spell check). I guess they changed the plugin arch. *sigh* We'll see how it goes. On a good note though it seems to be running faster.

Starting to understand

I am starting to understand the power of struts. We wanted to implement very similar functionally and were talking how to do it. Were we going to make our class (that solved 1/2 of the problem) a abstract super class? Going to add a pram to the method call to distinguish between the two? None of those solutions I really liked.

Then it hit me this morning. Since we just want to change the flow of the app, we just had to create another action in the struts-config.xml file. 2 lines of xml and we had implemented a feature. Nice.

It's very different to control the flow of an app in a config file compared to in code. Just a light bulb moment that I wanted to share.

Listening to: Puddle Of Mudd - Nobody Told Me

Back in town

We just got back from the cottage last night... it was a really good weather for a big family get-together. Not so hot that tempers broke, not too cold to force everyone inside into too small a space for that many people / kids. Overall a great time out.

Now I'm looking forward to the next event. Of course I have a count down (just below the calender). Tick, tick, tick... it's getting close!! ;-)

Listening to: Ennio Morricone - Cheyenne

Really good road maps

If you are ever looking for cheap free maps of Ontario, check out the Ministry of Transportation's maps section. Very nice. ;-)

Listening to: Underworld - Trim

New "Cans"

I blogged before about getting new head phones. I liked them, they felt great, but they had a really loud hiss that just ticked me off 'cause I had to keep the volume so loud to hide it. So then I went out and got even more expensive sony headphones. They hissed less, but they were uncomfortable. So I took those back too.

But the important thing is that I figured out why they hiss! I did this by comparing those sony headphones to ones that my co-worker just got. His were cheaper. His didn't really hiss at all. The secret is to look at the sensitivity. The higher the sensitivity, the more hiss I got. Having a higher sensitivity is a good thing, but not in this case.

So I went back to Futureshop again (third time is the charm!) and got cheaper headphones that are comfortable (but not as much as the first pair) with a lower sensitivity. Now they don't hiss. ;-) AND they block out what people are saying around me. Overall, it worked out well.

Listening to: Red Hot Chili Peppers - throw away your television

POJO

After a conversation with a co-worker, we were talking about "plain old objects". So, that meant we were talking about POO. I guess the "correct" acronym is POJO. But I like ours better. ;-)

Listening to: Last of Mohicans - Track 1 (?)

Use the link Luke!

Today is a link day. One of the funnest things I have seen in a while was covered on slashdot. Check it out. It's about 3.5 Mb though, so you might want to do it with a fast connection, and maybe not at work. ;-)

Interesting word

Just scroll down to the part on this page where you see /moo/. I didn't know for a yes / no question you had a third option. Interesting.

Listening to: Nerf Herder - Lamer Than Lame

Censorship

Something that Ryan has commented on many times is how you have to be careful about what you blog about. People have been fired over stuff they have put in there blog before, and I do not want to add myself to that list. I am careful not to talk about non-technical problems at work for a bunch of reasons, the primary one being that it is not professional.

Now having said that it doesn't mean that I not walked a fine line in the past. And what I have written doesn't really mean much to people outside of work, but when you are in the inside it becomes quite clear what / who you are talking about. Should I have my frustrations a public record? No. But it still leaves the problem where I have emotion / frustration inside. And I think that I tend to vent to people when I see them in person (I almost said meatspace). Now this adds another problem: that my friends / family think that I just bitch all the time.

There are always different solutions to getting rid of frustration, but I am finding that I am really enjoying running. I was never a big one for exercise in the past, but I feel great about myself now. I really wish that I had made the time to do it more while I was in school. Ah well.

Listening to: Yann Tiersen - La RedÈcouverte

Resting the leg

Well, I've succeeded is messing up my leg. Last week on Monday and Tuesday we were doing speed training (took about 1 min / km off). We took it up too fast too soon. I've been trying to take it easy, but I think that it's still been too much so I am going to take a week off of running. :-( Which sucks. But if it is what is required to get me back to 100%, that's what I will do.

Listening to: Swollen Members - Ventilate feat. DJ Babu

Looking forward to being out

I was going to blog about another issue, but I think that I'll just talk about 'net connection. As I mentioned before, Laura and I are going to get EduNET which is the same as rogers "regular" high speed connection with a 3 Mb/s download. Why I am really looking forward to this you might ask? Well, it comes from the fact of being connected at 26.4 kbps right now. And that's the best that I can do out of four times of trying to connect. The other speed that I got was 9.6 kbps. Either way you look at it, I'm not going to connect to a torrent today... or any time soon. I'm just happy that my mail downloads right now.

The only reason why I think that this page loaded up okay is 'cause I have the whole thing cached. And just imagine, this used to be a good speed to be connected at... *sigh*

Things lining up

It's been busy, but Laura and I have most of the stuff ready for the apartment now. (She's done about 99% of the work... :-| ) It looks like everything is going smoothly *knock on wood*. This is great... it's just about all I can think about now. There are other things that I *should* be thinking about (like an upcoming family weekend), but it's hard when there is something else that I am so excited about. Ah well.

Listening to: Enio Moricone - The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Where Tim is to me?

The other night Laura and I were trying to figure out where closest Tim Hortons will be to our new place. This of course is very important information. ;-)

We used Canada 411 to find it. Now this isn't worth a blog entry yet. What the cool thing is when I mapped it was that when you mouse over a place in the map, it gives you the address. I think that this is better than map quest when you have to type in the addess, it reloads, and puts the arrow where it is... I thought that canada 411 maps were much cooler and easier to use. ;-)

Movie tonight

If anyone wants to go, Laura and I are going to see a movie tonight. All are welcome to join. ;-)

Listening to: Prodigy - Minefield

Net access

Laura and I are trying to figure out the best way to get high speed 'net access for the apartment. Today Laura found EduNET. Has anyone used them? Any good? Did I read the pricing right where you pay the whole year up front?

Looks good though 'cause it's cheap... but I am wary of things that look too good. There is usually a catch.

Listening to: Butthole Surfers - Pepper

SQL Truncate Table

Something that my coworker pointed out to me (and I dismissed it as something that we couldn't use... oups) today is the sql truncate command. Right now at the start of our test suite it destroys all the tables, and then builds them all up again, followed by filling them in with the "minimum" data that we need in there for the app to work.

One problem is that we are only doing this at the start of the whole test suite. I changed a test class to select all the objects in the table (that corresponds to that object) and remove them all. Well this quickly ran into RI problems where the objects spanned many tables and it was just a pain.

What I think that we should do for the tests now is have a clean method that clears all the tables with data from the tests on each setup method. Now, the problem that I can see with this is that at after you have run the tests, all the tables have been cleared out so you can't see what is actually in the tables. Maybe if we just have a switch on if it will clear out the tables or not. But the problem that I see with that solution is that the tests would probably break if you didn't clear them out between each test.

It would be good if I could isolate the db from the rest of the app like Andrew talks about, but the data persistence is so important to our app that I feel cutting it out too much would be too much of a risk. Right now I am willing to have slightly slower tests because they actually contact a db in the hope that we'll find integration problems earlier. No surprises. (that's actually a team motto. ;-) )

Listening to: The Tragically Hip - Grace Too

Who knows your SIN?

When signing up for our new place, part of the application asked us for our SIN number. Laura's dad made a big deal of them not needing it, and he was right. There is no need for places to ask for and keep your SIN. It's an easy way for people with "customer" data to link it across db's and figure out way more about you then you would have thought possible.

Tonight Laura and I were trying to get a phone line from bell and it was asking all kinds of info that I can't see them needing like student numbers (school and grad date), SIN number, driver's licence, ... Stuff that we really weren't comfortable giving to them, especially without the use of https.

What personal info do you give out? Do you have a comfort level, or could you just care less? I didn't really used to care, but now I'm working on web apps I wonder just why they need this, and how secure it really is.

Pain in the butt

I have never gotten a "real" apartment before and getting this one has gone smoothly. Almost. To be able to figure out if you are able to pay for the place, they wanted a pay stub. No problem there. But since I am a contractor, the cheque had my name on it, the stub just had the invoice number. So they had no proof that it was actually for me since I had no uncashed cheques hanging around.

Okay, so then I got a letter from my contracting company that says who I am, how much I make per day, and the length of my contact. Then the lady (not the nice one) at the rental place tells me they don't know how many days I work. Well, it depends on if I work over time, take time off, get sick, ... Grrrr... but when I was talking to the nice woman she told me to just fax back the sheet and write on it how many days (on average) I work per week. For some reason, that was good enough for them. Whew. I'm glad to get that behind me now. One less thing to worry about. At least this place didn't require a criminal check like another one we looked at. ;-P

Listening to: Faithless - Evergreen

Fare thee well!

Well the orange goatee has been shaved off. This in spite of the fact that whenever anyone saw it, they would say 1) how good it looks 2) that I should keep it 3) it makes me look "older".

Now, I don't know if getting rid of it makes me look ugly and "too young". I am not sure why it was a good thing that I look older. Maybe now people are going to give me a ball and tell me to go play in the park. Who knows. But it's gone.

Listening to: Prince - 1999

I, Robot review

This last weekend Laura and I saw the I, Robot movie. Now, I can't say that I thought that it was bad, but I can't really say that I thought that it was great either. It is exactly what I expected of a movie that 1) is about robots that kill 2) has Will Smith as the lead 3) uses the book's title to draw people in, rather that using the book's story or developing at story of it's own.

I'd say that it's more of a renter, but what I think will draw a lot of people to the theatre (including me!) is that you should really see a movie like this on the big screen.

Listening to: Corey Hart - Sunglasses At Night

Apartment pics

I just posted a page with some pics of our new place on it. Not too many of the other pics would be too good to post. They are mostly shots of halls, empty rooms, and the kitchen. All crooked of course.

In the first pic (it was 3 I put together), you can see the tennis courts, and in the middle at the bottom there is a path that goes by the play ground (if you can make that out). And lots and lots of trees. It'll be great in the fall and winter. I really love that view. :-D

Apocalyptica

Today I have been listening to Inquisition Symphony by Apocalyptica. It's pretty cool... It's a Metallica cover band, but they use cellos. Definally a change, and I would recommend it to people who tend to like harder music. It's pretty good for listening to while working. Check it out. ;-)

Listening to: Apocalyptica - Fade To Black

Finally got new wheels

Well, I finally did it. I took off my winter tires. Just in time for summer too. :-P I got 15 inch steel rims. Now I just have to get some hub caps 'cause my other ones are for 14 inch wheels. I guess that's another stop at Wally Mart or Crappy Tire.

Oh, in case anyone is interested where our place is, you can check out OC's map. It's between Hurdman (at the "T") and the next one south-west-ish. A bit closer than Carp. ;-P

Listening to: Apocalyptica - From Out of Nowhere

New 'phones

I just got some new head phones. It's been like 10 years, so I figured that it was time. The thing that I find funny is that the cord is like 10 feet long... I can go like 2 cubes away and still be listening to music. Too funny...

btw, I'm getting more and more annoyed at the people at futureshop. Every time I am in there, the sales people are trying to sell me the most expensive things ('cause they make commission). They aren't too good at it either. And the damn warranty plan! Aggghh! Before showing me products they want to sell me the warranty for anything. I have to tell them to stop and wait till I figure out if I want to buy anything... Maybe I'm just not dealing with the sharpest knives in the box when I go there. *shrug*

Listening to: Red Hot Chili Peppers - By The Way

/. poll

I found an interesting comment on the latest slashdot poll. The poll is about "girlfriends" and what the best qualities are. You can guess what some of the comments on /. are then... Anyways, the short summary of the comment is it is easier to have a common enemy than similar friends. Interesting thought. (Please don't read deeply into this anyone, I just thought that it was interesting 'cause it's like the flip side of "regular" wisdom)

Communicating <b>not</b> through my blog

I am finding it harder and harder to keep track of all my friends, what's happening with them, and tell them what is happening with me. I find that I am relying on reading their blogs rather than phoning, emailing, IM'ing, seeing them in person, ... Sometimes it's so hard to schedule time with people, meet at a place, and then try and talk while some loud music is playing in the background.

Blogs are easy, fast, and I can get caught up pretty fast as long as they blog. That's the catch. Otherwise it gets to be a one way street... people know lots of what's happening with me, but I don't have such a good idea the other way. I think that I'll just have to make a better effort the other way.

Listening to: Ennio Morricone - The Professional

Run ONE test

One thing that I would love to have would be the ability to click on one JUnit test and just run that one. Then when I got that working, run all the tests in that "TestCase" class. When that works, run the suites.

Now, with the frustration above, I thought "maybe they already have this and I am just not using it". Well, that's the case here. In WSAD / Eclipse, go to your JUnit dialog, look at the "Hierarchy" tab / view / whatever, and then right click on it and do "Rerun". Ta-da! So you can run a "TestSuite", a "TestCase" and a method within a test case class. Three levels of granularity.

I wish that I have been using that long ago... damn. The tools are there, but learning them takes time etc. Mostly it takes itch to scratch for the change in behaviour to happen.

Listening to: Roxy Music - More Than This

Generate schema

Something that I didn't know "back in the day", but MS Visio can "reverse engineer" your db structure. You just have to set up a ODBC datasource, point to it (using the correct driver of course) and it will generate a schema for you. Mind you, it might not be the prettiest looking one, but it's a up to date schema without having an expensive tool to do it for you. I love tools that generate documentation...

Listening to: Pearl Jam - Given to Fly

Our place, in the middle of the building. Our place...

Well, the lease has been signed and we get the keys Aug 14th. I'm so excited it's not even funny... since it's just such a short time away, we have a lot to do in that time, but I think that it's all good. ;-) Now we just have to figure out things like layout, internet, phone, furniture, ... Busy, but fun.

Today is also my sister's b-day... she's a lucky 7. Every time I seem to be away from the house, she looses a tooth... that's like 4 in the last month. Maybe we should have gotten her a blender for a present 'cause at this rate she won't have any teeth left!

Listening to: Disturbed - Rise

Mozilla not secure?

I was trying to fill out some forms at ciisd online and wasn't able to log in. I got a page that said "the link you are going to is broken" from the splash page. I was like wtf? So I sent in a "your thing is broken" email. I got a reply from the help desk. Apparently they don't support 'cause Mozilla "isn't secure", but they support Netscape 7. uhh? The lady told me that I couldn't use Mozilla or follow their link from Hotmail because that isn't secure. I don't follow, I tried to explain why I didn't understand, but she just didn't get it. *sigh* I hate tech support... mostly when I have to use it.

Update: that's pretty funny with things like this happening

Listening to: Prodigy - Mindfields