Laptops make the best routers

It has finally been decided to use my laptop as the router for our home network 'cause it gets the fastest connection (49.2). The USR that my dad has in the big computer maxs out around 36 / 39 so I didn't want to go back to that, and the new external AOpen modem (which would have solved SO many problems) maxs out somewhere around 26. That is just too slow for me. Not cool, not cool at all. Why we didn't do this a long time ago? I don't know.

Listening to: Dave Matthews Band - Cool Fiddle Piece

Running down a dream

Yesterday was the first time that I have gone running since September. I expected it to hurt a lot and for me to be totally exhausted. I wasn't yesterday, it was great. I was tired, but not gasping. And I wasn't sore at all. The key word here is wasn't. Today my legs hurt... it's slightly painful to sit down. *sigh* Ah well, I didn't really think that I would get off scott free after all that break and then doing a run. I don't think that it will take me too long to get back to where I was, but I am a long way from it now. My pace yesterday was horrible, but oh well.

I have borrowed Peter's palm to try it out of a bit... I keep on forgetting to be places and things that I have agreed to, so hopefully this will help a bit. We'll see.

After me bitching about the new slow modem, my dad is investigating it and has been fighting it most of the morning. It's been connecting at a blazing speed of less than 24000. *sigh* I think that two cans and some string would be faster. He'll get it working faster though, but until then I'll be doing an downloading at my brother's place or work.

Listening to: Janet Jackson - Come On Get Up

Busy little Jim

I can't believe how busy I have been of late. It's nuts, but oh so much fun. I am going into work, working away at stuff all day as fast as I can churn out answers, and getting home, wolfing dinner and hanging out and then hitting the sack. It's great. I love being busy, but not crazy busy. The day just flies by and I feel pumped up. I think that it's the team though that's helping a lot. Everyone is so much fun, energetic and young. I think that it helps when everyone is that way. I've worked on teams where a few people can be negative and that takes the whole thing down. This is great.

One thing that keeps on coming up for jobs is communication. People who don't communicate with others can slow everything down. That's not cool to say the least. *sigh* (Sorry for the rant.) And it doesn't just depend on how you communicate, but how well you would fit in with others on the team. I have come to realize that this is the true use of interviews. Adding a person that "fits in" with either make or break a team dynamic. You probably won't believe me till you see it both ways, and it is rare to see it "working".

On a totally different note, I think that I am going to go running tomorrow. Yay!! ;-)

Listening to: The Cranberries - Ridiculous Thoughts

BNL == Best Show EVER

Laura and I saw BNL last night, and it was the best concert that I have even been to, hands down. They were very entertaining. So funny. And here's something that I forgot, some of the bnl guys have blogs. Cool. ;-)

Okay, that's great, and I will write more about it later, but I just got home. I think that the total amount of time that I have spent here since 0730 is 15 minutes. Off to bed I go! *zoom!*

[update] I think that it will be really cool to have a copy of the actual concert that I went to. I think that I am going to buy it. Ah, the memories. (weird... I must be sleep-blogging 'cause I said I was off to bed...)

Listening to: Fatboy Slim - Tomb Raider 10 - Illuminati

Funny stuff

Laura's friend Kim sent this to me and I thought that it was pretty funny. I just had to pass it on...

The Parking Ticket

I went to the store the other day, and I was in there only for about 5 minutes.
When I came out there was a damn cop writing a parking ticket!
So I went up to him and said, "Come on, Buddy, how about giving a guy a break?"
He ignored me and continued writing the ticket.
So I called him a pencil-dicked Nazi. He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn tires!!
So I called him a piece of horse shit.
He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first one. Then he started writing a third ticket!!
This went on for about 20 minutes...the more I abused him, the more tickets he wrote.
I didn't give a shit. My car was parked around the corner.
I try to have a little fun each day.
It's important at my age.

Listening to: Collective Soul - Breath

Inline frames

Most people when ever they are talking about web dev work and the word "frames" comes up, most people make a face and shudder. It's never really a pleasant thing to use frames in web pages. Something that I learned about on Friday was something called iframes. It's an frame that you can place and give constraints much the same as an image. It's really quite cool. Webmonkey has a funny tutorial if you want a quick run down.

Here's the context: we want someone to be able to search for documents, and if they are what they want to keep, to add them to a "shopping cart". Well, I know if I was doing that, I would want to preview those pages first. We were talking about doing different ways of doing that, and the solutions were were coming up with were either opening a new window, using (regular) frames, or getting the user to hit the back button. All of these have different problems and none are really an "ideal" solution. Using iframes allow us to control where the user sees the document, and they they never really "leave" the application.

My next concern was if it was IE specific (it isn't), and how it would handle other docs like pdf, doc, html pages with frames, etc. And it came though with shinning colours (for IE 5.5 and mozilla 1.5). I just thought that I would share this in case other people hadn't heard of this either. Something useful for doing web dev work.

Listening to: Wide Mouth Mason - My Old Self

Sometimes it's smarter not to be helpful

One of the things that I wished that I didn't do at work was trying to be helpful. It's had mixed reactions. Mostly because I wasn't smart about it. I told someone about a program that will convert files to pdf. It's on sourceforge. They then asked if we were allowed to install this on our computers. This is where it gets bad and I realized my mistake, but it was too late. I said probably not, that it would not likely be on any "pre-approved" list, and I don't know the process to for this. The person that I told about this took this to mean that I didn't understand the process to install sw on our computers.

So, long story short, pretty soon the emails were bouncing around to our lan guys, other managers, and eventually IT Security. Ya, that's not cool at all. I don't want to attract people who manage IT security for 10k users, but it was too late. Thankfully with my help of my mangager and another one, we were able to bring it out as a miss-communication, which it really was. I screwed up, and I know it. I'll not make suggestions like that again. If I have something helpful, I'll just let my boss know.

Almost everyone agreed that I messed up. Except for one. The lead lan guy in our area came around and told me to forget it, and if I have any more helpful suggestions, to make them. I felt really good after he did that. I don't want to work in a place where I feel like I should not make suggestions, that they will get trashed. Suggestions should and will be made in the future. I just have to do it through the proper channels though. Lesson learned (hopefully). ;-)

Listening to: Buddy Holly - Maybe Baby

External modem

My dad has installed an external modem that is running off our switch (via serial cable) to connect us to the internet. This is good since we won't have to switch back and forth all the time from having the "big" computer being connected and my laptop. It sort of gets confusing when trying to have 3 (or 4) computers being able to connect to the internet through two possible gateways, and being able to switch back and forth all the time. The only thing that I don't like about this connection is that it seems always slow. Ah well. It's not like I am doing any big downloading anyways.

I'll now be able to use Apache on my linux box to actually serve web pages, but with it maxing out a 3 kb/s, there really isn't much point till I move out and get a high speed connection. My dad is trying to get me to help pay for a satellite connection, but I don't think that it will be worth the cost. We'll see though. Maybe it'll be cheaper than I think, but I doubt it.

Listening to: Gordon Lightfoot - Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald

Family Tree stuff

One of the things that my mom has been working on and off for as long as I can remember is family tree stuff. She had stuff on our old Commador 64 (and I think still does if we could find the disks) and is on another kick of it right now. She picked it up again for her mom's 80th birthday this last weekend. Up to now people have been pretty limited to getting their family tree stuff since most of it is stored over seas (for us in England) and isn't a trivial thing to access. Not so with things like google and other services which (for a fee) will send you copies of BMD (Birth Marriage Death) documents.

Now my folks just got a new scanner / printer so they can make very good copies (and of course digital copies) of photos that are pretty old. A a couple of greats (3?) in there, and you'll get an idea of how old they are.

Imagine for anyone looking for family stuff and being able to get info that they never knew existed. With the web being able to link people together, all the information that people have will be able to be overlapped and a general idea can come about. Who knows, I might be related to you right now. There are a lot of different names that I am finding out about like Page, Friend, Clark(e), Owen, Phillips...

Currently my mom has things in a program called Parents, but I know that my cousin is looking for a program called Family Tree Maker 11 Deluxe. Any one have this so I can try out a demo? I had promised that I would ask around about it...

I remember in one Star Trek episode (ya, I know, I'm a nerd) they looked up someone's family tree in seconds. They knew it all back 20 generations in a second with pictures of them all. Can you image? People saving pictures and handwriting of yours to pass on to their kids. I guess history can have more meaning when you have a personal tie to it.

One thing that my mom always recommends doing while you have the chance is to sit down with your older relatives and get as much info as you can. A short afternoon would probably save you months if not years of research. I think that people want to be remembered, even if the only thing that remains is some BMD info, a picture and a scrap of handwriting.

Listening to: Rage Against The Machine - The Ghost Of Tom Joad

QotD

Testing can show the presense of bugs, but not their absence. -- Dijkstra

stolen from slashdot

Contracts have some benifits

One thing that that my uncle pointed out to me last weekend is that there are some really good things about being on contract. None of these had occured to me before, and I am really glad that he pointed them out. I guess that's what happens when your life long best friend is an accountant. ;-)

The benifits include being able to write off part of the milage that I "drive" to and from work (about 100 km / day), maybe being able to write off part of other car expensives like repairs, my cell phone bill, and maybe a few other things. I'll just have to keep careful track of these things in case I have to produce recepts at any point. That definally made me a bit happier. I guess if I am going to get any toys like a palm pilot I should do so before my contract runs out. Ah well, that's in the future anyways. Now all I have to figure out is how to show that a kayak is needed by me to do my job... hummm... And before people start commenting, this post isn't spell checked. ;-P

Listening to: Great Big Sea - Mary Mac

Everyone should be relieved

I think that everyone will be happy... I finally got a plugin so that I can start spell checking my posts. Hopefully this will make it that I can post and respond to people faster, and spelt a little better as well. I also installed a Canadian Dictionary to hope that my posts don't become too american-alized. This is all thanks to a comment the Ryan made long ago. The only draw back is that people who read this are less likely to spit out coke all over their computer... ah well.

Listening to: Goldfinger - Disorder

Money Trees

As I was watching the news the other day, they were disucssing the cities budget shortfall and how they are going to make the books balence. They asked the public and the public 1) don't want services to be cut and 2) don't want the city to raise taxes. So, city council is going to do everything they can to avoid raising taxes by cutting many, many services. I think that they are doing this just so that next election they will be able to say "well, we didn't raise taxes". Ya, but you cut everything else. And I totally understand where they are coming from.

I have been waiting for the swing back vote from the public saying "no! Don't cut everything, just raise taxes a little". I think that they have been too, but it doesn't seem like it's going to come. I guess people will deal with not having as many services as before.

The thing that gets me is how the public wants to have their cake and eat it too. They want the good things, but not the bad. "Yes, we want the cheap power from a nuclear power station / dam / something big and ugly or dangerous, just don't build it near me". Yes, they want the cities budget balenced, but they don't want anything to change. Ummm, there is a reason why it got to be not balanced in the first place.

I think the issue that ticked me off was that the people who live in the city say to cut rural services, while the people in the country say to cut city services. People all seem to just look at things how it is best for them and hardly ever consider the big picture. It often amazes me that we have been able to not wipe this planet of life so far. But you never know, there's always tomorrow.

Listening to: Moby - Flower

Throws Throwable

Looking at badly written code usually pisses me off. That's simple, and true for most people who probably have to read it. There's this one class that I am going through so that I can try and figure out how they used JavaMail and every method they have looks like this:

public void methodName() throws Throwable

Ahhhggg!!! And they just catch Throwable at different points. I have no idea what exceptions they are using and it's very hard to figure out how things are supposed to go. Exceptions and errors are definally something that I will have to work at. I think that when I was working on audioman I used exceptions all the time after checking pramaters etc. I don't think that was a smart idea for methods in a class. From what I was reading in Effective Java, you should use asserts on non-public methods. That's smart, but I just don't know how to test that sort of thing. I always thought of asserts to test the state of an object, but they also have things like IllegalStateException (since 1.1). I don't know when asserts came in, but I think that they are newer than Junit. In a way, it's starting to be a bit of a mess, but I can see why they are going to have a hard time in getting rid of things like that. We'll see how well they are going to be at making the language nice and lean. ;-)

Listening to: Foo Fighters - Low

Still fighting samba

One of these days I will win against samba. I blame it on WinXP, but who knows. I have been using the Samba HOW TO, but I get stuck on some of the trouble shooting stuff. I was a little hopeful about using it, but it's more or less the same as other documentation I looked at already. *sigh* Ah well. I don't want to spend too much time working away at it, not after spending all day at work anyways.

With another samba page that I had found before, I kept on hitting refresh just to see the quotes... ah well.

Listening to: Alan Silvestri - Pachelbel 'Canon'

Amber Alert and Code Adam

A couple of weeks ago Laura and I were on our way downtown to do some skating on the canal when we saw some of those temporary road signs lit up saying "Amber Alert. Turn to local radio stations". We had no idea what an Amber Alert was. We actually joked that it was that something like "we are out of amber beer. Panic!". The truth isn't quite so funny.

It seems that this has started in the states, but has spread to Canada as well. I guess that no one thinks missing children is funny, and nor should they. I know that at Home Depot (and Wal-Mart) they use Code Adam which is along the same lines. When the associates hear that, they drop what they are doing, and their only job is to find the missing child. They won't help customers, the customers will have to wait. This would not be as effective if the person who grabbed the kid is able to get away, so what they do is seal off the store too. They don't allow anyone to leave with children unless you have ID and can prove that you are the guardian or until the Code Adam has been called off.

I think that everyone will try and help out if there are missing kids. An Amber Alert is just a HUGE version of Code Adam: it's applied across the province if not greater. Many hands make light work, and I guess the same goes for eyes too. If you take a kid, no matter what city you go to, people will be looking for this child and they'll find you. I think that these are great plans, but I am saddened for their need, but that is the nature of the world we live in.

Listening to: Bare Naked Ladies - Wrap your arms around me

I'm smarter than you ring

One of the things that has bothering me for a bit is that some people refer to the iron ring as the I'm smarter than you ring. I guess that engineers are known for arrogance, and they have identified this visable symbol with that fact. Which I think is a shame. Other people have told me that they don't respect the people who wear it just because of that fact. I keep on seeing my friends who have their rings, and most of them don't wear it for one reason or another. I'm starting to feel self conscience about it, which I really shouldn't. It's meant to remind the wearer of their responsibility, not act as a symbol to seperate people from one group into another.

If people do identify it as a negitive symbol, even though it was never meant that way, it will become that. It will start to divide people into groups (us and them). Maybe this is partly the fault of the engineers who wear it and act in a disrespectful way to others, maybe it is a result of other people feeling inferiour for some reason (not as much education?).

This rant has been in my head for a while, but what triggered me to write about it was an article that Karen wrote about and the dialog that followed. I feel symbols are great. I like them when they have a positive connotation. I feel that they are detrimental when they are used to divide groups. As I am sure that I have ranted on before, that's my biggest complaint about religion. Not that it is used to unite people and "bring them into the light" of whatever religion (which is great), but more that it is used to divide people. Is this division worth the good parts? That is a call that each person has to decide. I would say that most people that I know would say yes, but no one that I know has ever been repressed, alienated, or persecuted because of their religion. Those people who have might have a different answer, but maybe not. It all depends on their level of faith.

Personally, I think that acceptance, understanding, empathy and tolerance are things that people should focus on. Maybe if that happened more things would fall into place. But I am sure that everyone is already doing this. It's got to be someone else's fault. It always is. That's how people are able to sleep at night.

Listening to: Theory Of A Deadman - Last Song

Blogging is the new "killer app"

Since it became really easy to be hosted, and have sw that produces a somewhat dynamic content (but not really in the true sense) that is easy for people to update often, I think that blogging has become the newest best thing about the web. It's great to be able to see into the lives of people that you know, and sometimes ones you don't. It seems really free and easy: people are not confined by what their boss tells them to put on the net, they don't have to tell everyone their real name, etc. Overall, really cool.

Today while looking at Ryan's blog I followed a link that Andrew posted, and found another blog by a guy who I guess is Jon Eaves. It just gets me that it is SO easy to find these blogs, for people I don't know, and probably won't know. But I can see as much into their lives as they let people. So cool. Maybe I am just amused by the game Jon made. I love magnet poetry...

Listening to: Johnny Favourite - Media Darling

Ice sculptures

Laura and I went downtown yesterday to try and get into the Tieuter (sp?) concert at a small club there. It was sold out, so we ended up going over and looking at the ice scuptures. Very cool (hahaha...) and pretty. They handed out awards for them yesterday, so they were still quite "fresh" and people had not been tools and wrecked them yet. It was the perfect time to see them, I just wish that I had dressed warmer. Ah well. I totally recomend seeing them soon. And take your camera (I forgot) and be like every other person there taking pictures. I'd post some images if I had remembered. Ah well. And don't forget to go to my favourite part of Winterlude: the beaver tail shack. Mmmm... so nice and tasty in the cold.

Listening to: Holly Cole - I Can See Clearly Now

I feel...

"I feel pretty, Oh, so pretty, I feel pretty, and witty and gaaaaay!!!!!"

Yes, I have that song in my head after watching Anger Management. Good times, good times.

Listening to: Foo Fighters - Everlong

How contracts work

I did not know this, so I thought that I would pass this info along. I signed a contract that says my employeer will not have to pay me for 30 days. Well, the thing that I didn't realize is that it is 30 days after they receive your invoice. And they only accept an invoice after 30 days too... (I have to double check this last one, but I think that it is correct). So in effect, you don't see money till after over 2 months of working.

In my business classes, they always talked about one of the problems small businesses have is cash flow problems. They might have enough money to pay things, on paper, but it's not in the bank when they need it. I always thought "ya, that's pretty dumb problem. How could they not see that coming? Dummies." What problem do I have now? Ya, you guessed right. And I should have seen it coming. What a dummy.

Listening to: Moxy Fruvous - Dancing Queen

Reboot in unix

After working on and off with unix for years, this is the first time I have ever had to restart a computer. I had no idea how... (init 6). I thought that in itself was pretty funny... on of the first things that everybody learns when using windows is how to restart it, and the first solution to any problem is to shutdown, wait for the ram to clear, and restart.

For figuring out what the problem is, I am looking at some eclipse bugs. I think that the problem is that WSAD 5.0 (which I am using) is built on Eclipse 2.0, which I don't think is very good (but miles beyond 1.0). I had a co-worker try it out with E2.1, and got a totally different error messages, one that was actually descriptive. I think that the problem was that the box only had SSH 2 running on it, while WSAD 5 only has support for SSH 1. *sigh* It's nuts, I am having all my trouble because versions are not playing well together. I don't even want to think of the headaches involved in making things that don't work together now play nice like.

Listening to: the annoying people in the next cube who won't shut up and go and leave me in peace or talk quietly. I think that I need my own cone of silence.

Fighting the good fight

I was able to get CVS working at work today. Sort of. I got it working with Tortoise, but not yet with Site Developer 5 (WSAD). Before, I narrowed it down to the cvs binary was not on the path when the tool logged in, so it could not find anything to actually run, so it just returns with an end of file (EOF) or IO Exception in WSAD. It took me so bugger long to find that. I don't even know where the path is set for when you try and do a cvs call (command line) from one machine to another. I ended up just making a soft link from where it was on the path, to where the binary file actually installed to. That problem took me much longer than it should have. The IT guy was too busy to help, and I also was playing around with other stuff like making a user (hard if you do it wrong the first time and are trying to figure out how to fix it with the command line). There are other issues that I think that I have to resolve with for using WSAD. I already downgraded the version of CVS because of a problem when they changed what text is passed to the client. I think that tomorrow I am going to dig through the Eclipse code to see how they are (used to?) contacting the server. I still might have a path problem, I am not sure. I don't know if the cvs client that comes with eclipse gets any path info, or looks in a specific directory. We'll see what happens...

Listening to: Underworld - Cowgirl

Hope

As I am fighting to get cvs up and working here at work, I was thinking about part of my book that I was reading this morning (from page 87):

Hope, in a technical sense, is more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right. Snyder defines it with more specifically as "believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be."

This really made me sit back and think for a little bit. Hope (as defined here) is not a blind faith that everything will be good, it's having the faith that you can make everything good. It's not an external fate or anything like that, but a belief that you are on the correct path, and it's a path that will allow you to get to your destination. Or, at least if you are not on the "correct path", you will find a way to switch. Humm... I like books that make me sit back and ponder.

Listening to: P.O.D. - Without Jah, Nothin'

Tweaking the ol site...

I just added something that has been up and running on my site for a while. A rss feed for comments so that if you are using something like SharpReader you can read all the lastest stuff. I use this mostly for when people add comments to stories that are not in the last post or two. This is very good if the top seems to be a hot one. I also added some links to the main page (scroll down a bit and on the left...). Just some blogs that I check out. I am trying to cut back the amount of time I spend not interacting with real people, but it's hard.

On a different topic, email is pissing me off. I know that everyone has a friend or dozen that sends them dumb chain letters all the time with things like "if you send this to 8 people and than hit ctrl-8 something really cool will happen! I didn't believe it but it's true!!!" Grrr... I keep on fighting the urge to mark it as spam with my filter, but I can't really do that 'cause it's my friend. Well, I can't do it yet. As it is I am getting 15-20 spam a day, so what's one more? Well, that's exactly what it is: one more. But I think that this will just go back to Peter's idea about requiring a licence to use the internet.

Listening to: Lifehouse - Hanging by a Moment

Do I look stressed?

While at work, I keep on getting told that I look really stressed. I think that other people (non-work) think so too. Do I seem that way? I feel busy, but I don't think that I am super stressed... maybe I am just used to school where for like 4.5 years I was stressed most of the time, and I just don't know how to let go. Maybe it is the coffee I drink. Maybe I am stressed, I don't know. But I had better learn to deal with it soon or I'll cause myself trouble. I guess that's what this blog is for, to de-stress, to relax and get the things out of my head.

I'm reading Emotional Intelligence and I'm right at the part discussion how people get mad, what keeps them mad, and how some people deal with it. It's actually quite interesting, but I think that it is very oprah book club-ish. Ah well. Older books are usually good (somewhat) because they have been good enough to stay around for a while.

Listening to: Linkin Park - With You

Good TV means good writing

I don't watch tv too much now-a-days. Mostly because I don't get control of the controler, but that is a different story. But there are a couple of shows that have kept my interest. One is The West Wing, and another is a snappy new show that is set in Toronto called This Is Wonderland about a young lawyer named Alice (get the pun?) and what's happening. It's sometimes serious, sometimes sad, funny a lot, but mostly just entertaining. And the thing that I like about it is that they keep people watching just with their story, not with fancy sets, not with women wearing tight clothes (not that I don't appreciate that), not with annoying laugh tracks, ... well, you get the point. Good times, good times. ;-)

Listening to: Nena - 99 Luft Balloons

Car repairs, since I first saw it

I am just going to recap what I have fixed or had fixed on my car since the first time I saw it. Considering it's a 2000, it has quite a lot.

1. Clutch replaced. I didn't burn this out, and the dealer replaced it. Cost: 0 $
2. New winter tires. I needed them, and it was time. In the spring I will get new all seasons and some nice rims considering mine look like ass, and I have been missing a hub cap for like 6 months
3. Oxygen sensor. They had to replace some wire and the sensor. The end result is that my idiot engine warning light is off, it is harder to stall, but it gets worse gas milage. Who knew that something good for the env means worse gas milage? (or is it kilometerage?)
4. Front struts and springs. This was really needed. It would not have been safe to continue without getting this fixed right away.

Of course there are other regular things when owning a car including gas, oil changes, new wipers, wiper fluid, blinker fluid, etc. I am not upset about these costs, it's just "normal" costs when owning a car. But I'm cheap, so I don't like paying at any time. Ah well, that's life.

Listening to: Gob - Ex-Shuffle

Cars are money pits

Today I took my car into the dealer 'cause the steering had started to make thumping noises, then grinding noises, and then started to act a bit funny (other than the noises). It turns out that it is the strut(s) and they have to replace it 'cause the ball bearings are all sezed up. The good thing is that I am going to get my car back today. The bad thing is that I am considerably poorer. Things never break down at a "convient time", because there isn't one for things to break down. Ah well.

Even if I had the tools, I am not sure if I would want to do that stuff. I hate working on my car. I guess that's why I went into engineering instead of becoming a mechanic. *sigh* Ah well.

Listening to: Bif Naked - If I

[Update] They just called and one of the front springs is broken too. So they will replace both. *sigh*