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