Blogs are bad?

There is an interesting story on slashdot about how blogs are so much worse than libraries. Well, wouldn't any non-professional thing not "stack up" to something that people with professional training do? This blog isn't ever meant to be anything more than a brain dump and let people who know me what's going on in my life. If you read anything here and think that I am full of shit, well then you're probably right. But like anything, this is just a personal view to be taken with a grain (chunk?) of salt.

I have to link to one funny comment about the story. Most of the time people tear each other apart on slashdot, but people still do leave insightful messages.

Load testing

One of the things that I am working on is load testing. My hope for it is that we can figure out what the breaking point of our app is. I don't care if it's in or out of spec that it breaks, as long as I can figure out at what point it melts down. Mind you, it'll be wonderful it is melts down way out of spec (melts down with 1000 users, we say we support 100 kind of thing).

I guess it comes from my time testing software. I just enjoy breaking it, even if it's my own. ;-)

The Wailin' Jennys with special guest ZoÎ Lewis

Laura and I went to a folk festival last night with some friends that invited us along. Ya, you did read that right. It was good. I really enjoyed the opening act of ZoÎ Lewis. She was super high energy and lots of fun. I ended up buying her album Small is Tremendous which is pretty good, if a little short at 11 songs.

The featured act was The Wailin' Jennys. They were very good, sounded great and well polished, but I found them too "folksy". Not really my style of music. Ah well. But what a great sound. My favourite part of their act was the last song where they shut off the mikes, got off stage and just sang together. That was awesome. I'll look around and see if I can find a copy / words for the song. I think that I did on this page under the "Good-Bye, Good Luck, God Bless You" section (but the music file they linked to sounds nothing like what I heard last night). I'll keep looking. ;-)

Power consumption

After a surprisingly high power bill for the last 2 months, I am looking into where all the power went. One thing that I have done differently the last month was leave my linux box on all the time. Since the bill came in today I want to figure out how much a desktop computer costs to keep running all the time.

I found a site with some power consumption numbers that I decided to use. I looked at other sites and they had similar numbers.

So I did some calculations. I wanted to figure out how much cost per month, so I figured how many hours are in 30 days (720). The cost on the bill is 0.047 $ / kWh. I multiplied those to get the cost per kW in a month to get 33.84 $ / kW*month.

Then I get these numbers:

style="text-align: left; width: 100%;">







style="vertical-align: top; text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">low


style="vertical-align: top; text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">avg


style="vertical-align: top; text-align: center; font-weight: bold;">high

	colspan="3">Power consumption in kW
desktop	0.03	0.07	0.15
CRT monitor	0.07	0.09	0.12
total	0.1	0.16	0.27
cost per month	3.384	5.4144	9.1368

This doesn't explain the large bill... so I'm going to run an experiment and not have the box on all the time and see what the bill is. I really want to isolate what device is using all the power...

Another shuffle

Is it just me or does the government spend a lot of time just shuffling around jobs?

Home Buyers' Plan

The Home Buyers' Plan helps you out if you are buying a home for the first time. You can take money out of your RRSP (tax shelter) and then repay it over the next 15 years. Interesting. Just one thing, when did I get so old that I'm interested in things like tax shelters, RRSP's, and buying a home? *sigh*

Better way to get properties

If you are using properties in a java app, you might want to check out this article about loading properties "smartly". Struts does it, but I didn't clue in that it was build in to Java to do easily.

Pass phrases?

After finally finishing an article about how you should ditch passwords for passphrases (from a /. story of course) I have a couple of questions. The first of which being: If people don't type too much, how are they going to enter in a 42 character phrase (getting case and specal chars correct) if all they are seeing is stars?? **** And then what happens on the 5th incorrect login? You get locked out? Nice.

Damn, I choose NTFS

When I got my external drive I formatted it as NTFS. Little did I know that NTFS doesn't play very well with linux. There are tools that will help you to read from the drive, but they tell you not to write to the drive. Damn. I guess it's not as portable as I thought.

I guess I can either move everything off the drive and re-format it or I just do any reading / writing through a windows box. It'll probably be better to use it as a backup drive anyways. Ah well. Now I guess the next steps would be to get a new (big) drive for my linux box. I also want to get a new (non-super-crappy) monitor, but those things can wait. We'll see.

Stupid easy dinner: Lentils And Spinach

Tonight I made something that was very yummy and (best of all) stupid easy to make. With the things I have in the kitchen, I googled for a recipe and got Lentils And Spinach. Tasty! Of course I didn't stick to the recipe too closely, so I added a whole bunch of curry and chilly powder as well as other spices. I served it on a bed of rice and Laura suggested some cottage cheese which really added to it. I should have taken a picture of it for a food photo diary but it wasn't really the prettiest dish. Mmmm...

Low flow

They have posted a notice up in my apartment that next month they are going to replace all of the toilets, shower heads etc. in the building to "low flow" efficient models. First off, that really surprised me but it must be cost efficient to do that in the long run. Second, I am not looking forward to having to flush at least twice all the time. That's my experience at work.

After doing a quick search, it looks like old toilets used about 3.5 G vs the new ones that use 1.6 G (or less). At work they are 1 G (4 point something L) per flush. If on average you have to flush twice, then they are still saving water. *sigh*

I just wish that there were able to design and build toilets that flushed right the first time. I keep on imagining the engineering team and how they all this fake poop at their disposal and adding it to their "test toilets" in pipping bags like you ice a cake with. I wonder if they have a computer simulations too? Maybe this is like the early automotive industry and soon we will have better toilets like the ones in japan. Who knows. One thing that I do know is that this isn't a new issue and people who really care like Dave Barry have been "lifting the lid" on this issue for a while now.

I'll post again when the new fixtures have been installed and after some "field testing" to see if they suck, or more importantly flush.

Funny

A quote from a slashdot story that I just had to share:
"The UK is known for many things, great food, a wonderful climate and beautiful women." Well, clearly...

NL or NF (or NFL? hahaha...)

One thing that I have come across today is the fact the the ISO code for Newfoundland and Labrador has changed from NF to the more politically correct NL. Why iso codes have to be politically correct is dumb to me, but must be important to someone else. This problem has bitten me today and I'm still stinging... *sigh* Who knew ISO codes changed much?

Adventures with class loaders

One problem that we have been discussing around work I wanted to share with everyone else at of a point of interest.

Lets make an example: you are a group that is hosting lots of J2EE applications. Some you have control over the source, some you don't. A lot of these apps will use common jars like log4j.

There are two things that you can do now:
1) put all the jars in a common location on the server
2) have each app including the required jars they need

Both setups have advantages and disadvantages. If you go with #1 then you have a common place for jars but you run into headaches when App A needs log4j version 1 and App B needs log4j version 2. This also means that you have to make sure that the server setups are exactly the same or apps will blow up if you move them from one server to another. The applications are no longer as atomic. And every time you want to change a shared jar, you have to do a full regression on all the apps that use it. And then you may not find the bugs at all until a weird case comes to the surface.

So you go with option #2 and have each app include what they need. Things are good, the sky is blue, the birds are singing, the applications depend less on the server setup and don't conflict. Now, of course there is a hitch: static classes.

Both App A and App B use log4j. App A uses an old version that has a org.apache.log4j.Constants class that has 2 static members in it. App B uses a version with 3 static members in it. You test both apps on developer workstations and everything is great. You load them to the server where they are both in the same JVM and everything is melts down.

With the class loader it checks if a static class is already loaded. If it is, then it doesn't bother to load them again. This means you are stuck with whatever version gets loaded first. Both versions may be incompatible with each other. The applications are no longer so atomic.

What's the solution to this? I don't really know what you could do other than putting the apps into different JVM's, but I'm still thinking about it. ;-)

Note: I don't know if there is a log4j constants class like that... I was just making one up.

One of those weeks

This has been one of those weeks that it feels like I am trying to push water up a hill... *sigh* At least it's the end of the week. Sometimes it helps to read something funny.

Stuts 1.3 and EJB 3.0

If anyone is doing struts stuff out there, here's an interesting read about 1.3 and the "Chain of Command" and another thread about the new EJB 3.0 spec.

Family Doctors

The following is part of an email that was sent to me:

There are currently 1.2 million people in Ontario without a family doctor.
Patients are waiting forever for appointments to see specialist and for
diagnostic test. Canada's diagnostic equipment is so old, that some is
similar to that used in 3rd world countries.

The Ontario Medical Association is trying to bring attention to this matter.
We have set up a website www.supportourdocs.ca

On this website you will find information about the current problems and
also have the ability to send a letter to your local MPP, the Minister of
Health and Mr. McGuinty. You do not even need to write the letter. If you
click on the area and fill out your name, address, postal code and email
address and hit submit, a pre-written letter will pop up and you can send
it. If you do not know your MPP, you can find it out on the site as well.

It is easy. It is simple and it will help. We need to make the politicians
accountable.

Please help by doing this and by forwarding this email or one in your own
words if you prefer, to all appropriate persons in your address book.

Ontario's doctors are trying hard to look after you with limited resources
but it is getting harder all the time. We need your help.

Map Quest is dead

One of my stand-by's for the longest time had been MapQuest but it looks like it's time has come with Google Maps. Such a slick interface, no long refreshes... sweet. I just wonder how it handles on dial up...

Just more evidence of Google doing better than anyone else out there in whatever they try. I guess there is a reason why they only hire the smartest people.

Valentine's Day Poetry

For all the computer nerds, I think that I have found a fitting t-shirt gift for your SO. Ahh, the stupidity...

Update: For those that need some background info

What would your title be?

One of the things that you can have control of when working in a small team is your own title. Now, since I am on the bottom of the heap and no one reports to me I can't take any title that I have too seriously. So after getting a new member to our team and giving her the title of Project Alchemist, it was decided that we should all have fun titles. It was suggested that I can be Development Grand Poobah which I really like.

What title would you choose for yourself?

Super Bowl Commercials

For those who only care about the super bowl for the commercials, they are on the net like all good things. ;-)

The Long Tail

This is something that a co-worker pointed out to me: The Long Tail. It's about online sellers (no, not me) and how the market is changing. I'm not going to explain it more, I'll let you read it. ;-)

Auschwitz Orchestra

A few days ago now Laura and I watched a special on cbc (?) called HOLOCAUST - A Music Memorial Film from Auschwitz. It was touching, well put together and just an amazing special. One of the things that I never knew before was how they had a Auschwitz Orchestra made of inmates. People who were made to play for other's amusement; to make an appearance that things were "okay" at the camp... every time I learn something more about Auschwitz I feel ill and am scared by how cruel and evil people can be to each other. It's frightening.

And what is one of the only ways to make sure that it doesn't happen again? To remember that it has happened. To watch for the signs that it is happening or could happen again if we continue down the path we are on. I guess the only way to keep track of the potential evil inside us is to keep it in front of us where we can see it and not to push is away "out of sight, out of mind".

Funny

If you are somewhere you have sound and probably not at work 'cause you'll be laughing, check out when Richard Simmons showed up to Who's Line Is It Anyways. Too funny... (click on the "watch movie button"). Very funny...

On a totally unrelated note, the word of the day is boondoggle.