Goodbye Scott

I just heard that one of my U of O classmates and a friend died last night (2 nights ago?). I'm so sad right now.

It's funny how something like that hits you like a tidal wave and all other issues are instantly swept away. I don't know what I was thinking or doing 30 minutes ago. It doesn't really matter either.

Guilt, sadness, loss...

Goodbye Scott.

Planning ahead

Yesterday we got an unexpected call. Laura's 3rd grade teacher called us up and wanted to talk to Laura. Someone that she had not spoken to in ~ 20 years. The teacher had seen our wedding announcement that Laura's folks had put into the paper in June. The lady looked up in the phone book Laura's last name and ended up calling Laura's grandmother who told the lady all about what Laura's been doing lately. Including our home phone number. Which the lady called when we were napping (Laura worked over night and I'm training for the Nappy Olympics).

Why did this all happen? The lady's doc is retiring in 5 years and she's looking for a replacement. Wow. What other profession are people looking 5 years ahead?

This brings up a different issue, a social engineering issue and something that most of us (including myself) are guilty of: giving out someone else's phone number. If unknown Person A (PA) calls looking for your Buddy (B), it's much better to take down PA's contact info and pass that along to B rather than just giving PA the contact info for B. Being a middle man in this case is a good thing.

Photography classes

I was just going to blog about wanting to learn how to take better pictures. Somehow this sounded familiar so I checked: yes, I had blogged about this before, a year ago almost to the day. *sigh* No real progress to report unfortunately.

Every time I try and use the manual settings for the camera I usually end up taking a super over exposed picture so that all you see is white. If I play around with the more basic settings (like macro) I usually end up leaving those "on" so when someone else uses the camera all they get is blurry shots. I feel that I should look for a clue stick and beat myself over the head with it.

If all else fails I'll read the instructions for the camera. :-P

Sense of community

I remember years ago hearing about a study that showed being active in your religion was good for your health. It didn't matter what religion, just that you had one that you were somewhat active in. They attributed this to having a community that you belonged to for support and a sense of self.

I'd describe myself as an agnostic. So what group do I join in order to create a sense of community? "The group going to the bar" doesn't count. I'd almost start going to a church if it wouldn't be the overwhelming feeling of hypocrisy.

Subversion locally with eclipse

It took me a little digging around to get subversion running locally on my mac. No, I'm not a total tool trying to have a versioning system installed locally, I'm doing it so I can work on a bamboo plug-in.

Make sure I am up to date with subversion:
fink update svn

Tell subversion where the repo is:
svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/repo

Add your local subversion to eclipse as a repo:
file://localhost/path/to/repo

Pretty easy really... just had to find all the steps.

Rain? Crap.

I just checked out the weather for this week... Saturday has a high of 6 C and 80% chance of rain. Just after 37 cm of snow... craptastic!

Dripping taps

Our house has drippy taps. It pisses me off to no end. I wanted to look into the cost of a drippy tab. So let's do some math. Correct me if I'm wrong! Coffee hasn't kicked in yet...

From yahoo answers we get the estimation of 20 drops = ~1 ml (0.05 mL). Let's assume that there is a drop per second and there are 31 556 926 seconds per year. That works out to 1 577 846.3 ml / year. So that works to ~ 1 578 L / year, or 1.6 cubic meters. That's a lot of water in drips.

Now looking at the city of Ottawa page for water and sewer charges the price works out to 2.1266 $ / cubic metre (86.8¢ per cubic metre + (0.868 * 145%)).

So over the course of 1 year, each tap will cost us about 3.41 $. Wow. That's a lot less that I thought that it would.

MT is open source now... to late?

A few years ago when Ryan was installing MoveableType (which this blog runs on), it was one of the leading pieces of blog software. Then they came out with version 3 that wasn't as free. There were restrictions on the number of blogs you could install among others.

That pretty much guaranteed that another piece of software would become the "leader". Now they've moved to totally free again and are trying the only open source business model that I've seen work: paid support. Will they become the leader again? Who knows, but now they have an uphill battle.

Competition is good though. Time will show how this works out for them.

Horror stories

One thing that I find funny is how people love to tell horror stories about work. Everyone has a couple of good ones, always about someone else and how they did some dumb thing. 90% of the time it just seems to be because the person didn't know any better. 5% of the time it's because the "customer / user was soooo dumb!" for wanting / needing something. 4% of the time it's because the manager / management was dumb or motivated for the "wrong" reasons.

Then and again you come across a story where it just boggles the mind with how things came about. Those are the truly frightening ones.


In case you didn't guess it, I made up those %'s. People can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forfty percent of all people know that.

Ironic... like swiss cheese

Ah, there isn't anything quite as ironic as tool creators not using the tools they create. I noticed this recently with one of the tools that I used so I filed a bug for them to actually use it. Then I checked out other maven reporting plugins: most of them don't report on themselves. The funnest is the clover plugin generating coverage data using cobertura.

You always hear stories like this like with microsoft running unix in an anti-unix campaign. I just don't get why people don't think of eating their own dog food. I know that I've been guilty of this in the past as well. Is it just one of those cases of being too close to the trees to see the forest?

Finally beat the cat!

Via boingboing, I finally beat the cat. :-) Sad that it took me more than a couple of tries...

The White Knight

I read a short story in high school that I can't get it out of my head, but neither can I find the original story. If you know who it's by or what it's called, please leave a comment. It goes like this:

There was a young, brave knight who wanted to go out and bring truth, justice and happiness to all. He wanted to put a stop to all that would prevent this, namely the black knights. One day he was done all his training, all his gear was in sparkly, shinning white, working order and he set out. It was not long before he saw in the distance a blank knight cresting a hill. The black knight raised his weapon in challenge. The white knight bravely raised his as well and charged the black knight and won. That was the first of many victories.

After many years and many victories the white knight became tired. In the many battles that he had fought for truth, justice and freedom his armor had become dented, tarnished and scored. It had become the colour of soot from the flames of the dragons he had slain. He decided at long last to return home.

As he neared home he crested one of the last hills. In the distance he sees a white knight, with new shinny amour. He feels glad to see a friendly face after so long so he raises his weapon in greeting. The young white knight also raises his weapon. Then the young white knight charges.

Update: Austin Repath left a comment explaining that it was a story by Eric Nicol and even provided a link.

Update Again: Since I'd like a record of this story and don't trust that the other link will stay up indefinally, below is the story copied from the page. 

The White Knight

by Eric Nicol

Once upon a time there was a knight who lived in a little castle on the edge of the forest of life. One day he looked in the mirror and saw that he was a White Knight.  "Lo," he cried, "I am a White Knight and therefore represent good.  I am the champion of virtue and honour and justice and I must ride into the forest and slay the Black Knight who is evil."
    So the White Knight mounted his snow white steed and rode off into forest to find the Black Knight and slay him in single combat.  Many miles he rode the first day, without so much as a glimpse of the Black Knight.  The second day he rode even further, still without sighting the ebony armour of mischief.  Day after day he rode, deeper and deeper into the forest of Life, searching thicket and gulley and even the tree tops.  The Black Knight was nowhere to be found.
    Yet the White Knight found many signs of the Black Knights presence.  Again and again he passed villages where the Black Knight had struck – a baker's shop robbed, a horse stolen, an innkeepers' daughter ravished.  But always he just missed catching the doer of these deeds.
    At last the White Knight had spent all of his gold in the cause of his search.  He was tired and hungry.  Feeling his strength ebbing he was forced to steal some buns from a bakeshop. His horse went lame, so he had to replace silently and at night with another man's horse. And when he stumbled faint and exhausted into an inn, the innkeeper's daughter gave him her bed and because he was the White Knight in shining armour she gave him her love. But when he was strong enough to leave the inn, she cried bitterly because she could not understand that he had to go and find the Black Knight and slay him.
    Through many months, under hot sun and over frosty paths, the White Knight pressed on in his search, yet all the knights he met in the forest were, like himself, fairly white, depending on how long they, too, had been searching. There were knight of varying shades of whiteness depending on how long they, too had been hunting the Black Knight.
    Some were sparkling white. These had just started hunting that same day and they irritated the White Knight by innocently asking the way to the nearest Black Knight. Others were tattle-tale grey. And others were so grubby, horse and rider that the mirror in their castle would never have recognized them.
    Yet the White Knight was shocked the day a knight of gleaming whiteness confronted him suddenly in the forest and with a wild whoop thundered towards him with leveled lance.  The White Knight barely had time to draw his own sword and ducking under the deadly steel plunge his blade into the attacker's breast.
    The White Knight dismounted and kneeled beside his mortally wounded assailant, whose visor had fallen back to reveal blond curls and a youthful face. He heard the words , whispered in anguish, "Is evil then triumphant?"  And holding the dead knight in his arms he saw that beside the bright armour of the youth his own besmirched by the long quest, looked black in the darkness of the forest.
    His heart heavy with horror and grief, the White Knight who was white no more, buried the boy, then slowly stripped off his own soiled armour, turned his grimy horse free to the forest and stood naked and alone in the quiet dusk.
    Before him lay a path which he slowly took that led him back to his castle and closed the door behind him.  He went to the mirror and saw that it no more gave back the image of the White Knight, but only that of a middle aged naked man, a man who had stolen and ravished and killed in pursuit of evil.
    Thereafter when he walked abroad from his castle he wore a coat of simple colours, a cheerful motley and never looked for more than he could see.  And his hair grew slowly white as did his find full beard, and the people all around called him the good white knight.
From a high school anthology called And Who Are You?, edited by Austin Repath.