I ended up with a sort of special bonus afternoon today as Cat is off in town, and Zach is over his friends house. The basic idea was to make up for a very interrupted week of work and try to get some long-neglected work out of the way.
Mostly, it worked quite well. I got caught up on a couple things that had been nagging, and that’s good. But what really got me grooving was working on… well, a project that a couple folks know about, but I’m not -quite- ready to release to the public. I’ve been referring to it simply as the “Secret Squirrel” app, or just ‘The Squirrel’ for short.
What’s been good about this has been the basicness of the design and implementation. I’ve been spending SO much time delving into the deep complexities of EJB3, JBoss, Hibernate, and more recently Terracotta, I don’t get much of a chance to just sit down and whack out simple code.
Today had 2-3 hours of basic grunt ‘hamburger’ coding, to borrow a phrase from MASH. No fancy libraries, environments, or oddities. Well, okay, one new library that handles OpenGL rendering, but everything else was basic data application coding and design.
It felt good! It sort of underlined where I’ve gotten with Java programming over the last 2 years or so, and now basic coding is second nature. Eclipse has become my environment of comfort, whether it’s running on Windows or Linux (in fact I’m leaning toward moving back to Linux full time soon – with both machines up and running cleanly on my desk, I find myself doing more on the Linux box than on Windows… but I digress…) , and the Java OOP approach to program development Just Plain Makes Sense. It’s nice.
Tomorrow it’ll be back to EJB3 and Terracotta land, and all the mysteries therein, but for now, I can look at what I did today and do a “That felt good!” happy dance.
And the code even worked.
Category: Life. Don’t talk to me about life.
A successful geocache find!
Zach and I took some time this afternoon to haul the bikes out and go on a geocache hunt. I had been trying to do more of this last fall, but various problems with my receiver got in the way, and we weren’t able to find anything.
I’m really frustrated with how poorly my Mobile Crossing Waypoint 200 works (or, in many cases, doesn’t work at all). It’s been back for repair 3 times now, and even in it’s best mode, it ‘only sorta works’. The Windows Pocket PC is woefully underpowered for the task at hand, and frankly, the software sucks. Navigating around it is too similar to working on a desktop machine, and I guess Microsoft -still- hasn’t gotten the hint that a handheld device is NOT just a smaller screen for Windows. The interface is completely different, and 14 different ‘start’ mechanisms just add to the confusion.
At any rate, with the weakness of the platform, combined with the poor software from Mobile Crossing, I never quite got any navigation system working to my comfort.
For this trip, though, I downloaded GeoNiche, a Palm application that worked fine on my Treo. It had it’s own interface problems, to be sure, but it did happily connect with the Bluetooth GPS ‘brick’ from the Mobile Crossing device, and I was able to carry both in my pocket. Once I got my target defined (a Cochituate Lake View cache), we were able to do the normal “Walk around and get closer with hints, and yay, we found it!” path that most geocachers are used to.
This was the first ‘new’ cache Zach and I had found together, and it was pretty exciting on all fronts. It was challenging because my assumptions of the first location were wrong, and we ended up on the wrong side of the lake. “The arrow keeps poinging .2 miles that way. But… that’s the other side of the lake! Alright, back on the bike!”
A nice hike up into the woods, and GeoNiche got us within about 10′ of the final location. A little rummaging around, and lo, we found a wonderful old ammo box under some wood, with lots of little toys and notebooks and the like.
This particular cache had not been visited for over 2 months, but everything was nice and dry inside. We signed the book, didn’t take anything because we hadn’t brought anything, and tucked it back in it’s hiding place.
A really nice day out. We’re going to do more this summer, now that I -think- I’ve ironed the bugs out of the process.
On being without an office, and shades of things to come?
Today was a great example of the ups and downs of being without an office. I’m sure most folks realize that, being a fulltime consultant has it’s positives and negatives.
I’ve been on the job with this client for over 2 years now, and things don’t look like they’re going to slow down any time soon. My job description can best be summed up as “Platform Architect” – designing this company’s next generation architecture. The work involves a lot of research, tinkering, exploring, and learning – the deliverables are rarely better defined than “Come up with a way we can do X”
On the one hand, I get a very open and free schedule, with no hard deliverable deadlines, no “What? You’re leaving at 4:55?”, and all the long lunches I could want. On the other hand, I don’t get the typical office interactiveness most folks take for granted. My ‘office’ at home is an L shaped desk with all my computers on it, which is all of 3′ from my bed. A ‘break’ is walking from there to the kitchen to make coffee. It can get a little lonely.
Fortunately I have lots of folks I chat with on IRC and interesting stuff to research, but sometimes I just Gotta Get Out.
My current favorite watering hole is Panera Bread in Framingham, MA. It’s all of 3 miles from the house, conveniently on the way to Zach’s school, and they provide free wireless. That, combined with a $1.50 cup of coffee that can be infinitely refilled and a set of comfy chairs by a fireplace, makes for my Office Away from Home for the times I just need to get out.
This evening had me settled into said Comfy Chairs[tm] working on long and vexing problem trying to… (if you’re averse to long strings of corporate buzzwords, technology references, and other geeky-hoi-palloi, you might want to skip to the next paragraph)… trying to get JBoss AS, running under EasyEclipse to fire up in a standard configuration, allowing for a Terracotta server to act as a DSO cluster server for instrumented classes as distributed in an EJB3 based SOA. The twitch was getting JVM versions to match so the boot-class wrapper for the JVM would allow for the Terracotta cluster to come up, and be accessible remotely from the JBoss hosted app.
Got that? Okay – the nutshell of this was – I got it working. With not a little help from the Terracotta folks on IRC. The baselien concept for this stuff is fascinating, but implementation, when much of this is still in ‘beta’ form, can be maddeningly difficult to get working. In the end, it’s all running, and now I have enough structure in place to actually learn the system.
What made this interesting was about halfway through this intense mishmash of XML configuration files, crashing applications, and “wait, what version of what is where?”, I heard a familiar voice in the background… after a few minutes I looked around, and chanced to run into Dwight, who was picking up some edibles for his family. It’s unusual for me to see someone I recognize during my ‘work day’ (even though it was in fact about 6pm), but I found myself sort of pleased at the interaction.
What does this have to do with my future? A lot, since sometime in the next 3 months, Mosaic will be breaking ground. This means that soon my home office will include our common house, where I’ll happily be able to sit in front of a fireplace on a comfy couch, and pretty much everyone I see wandering by will be someone I know very well.
How wonderful.
Kids Programming?
There’s been a lot of chatter around the net lately about trying to find programming and introduction to computers-type software for kids to learn on. I mean, we all know where we started, right? TRS-80 and a READY prompt, or the wonderful ] prompt. 5 1/4″ floppies, simple programs, and tinkering through the weekends were how we learned.
But how do you get a young one into these environments nowadays?
There’s been various attempts at a ‘kids’ software environment, things like Logo and the like. The problem is nowadays finding implementations that are either free or useful. The only real Logo environment I’ve been happy with is 
KTurtle, a Logo implemention for the KDE desktop. On the one hand, I’m terribly amused that by far the best Logo setup I’ve seen REQUIRES Linux to run, and at the moment, Zach doesn’t have a Linux desktop to work with. This sorely tempts me to set it up for him, I have to admit.
But Logo has limitations as a fully useful programming environment. In the modern age of “games a click away”, kids really want to start writing adventures and excitement right off the bat. We all remember spending weeks debugging “PICK A NUMBER FROM 1 TO 10” programs. How do you code Tetris in a few weeks when you’re still learning your multiplication tables?
A long time ago I read an article on SmallTalk in BYTE magazine (yes, a REALLY long time ago, like 1980). It was a discussion about object oriented languages and environments, and described the model of “Everything is an object”. At the time, it was somewhat of an intellectual oddity, though many folks really got into it.
Apparently there is an outstanding opensource project to build a comfortable Smalltalk based environment that can be geared toward kids. It’s called Squeak, and I first learned about it associated with the One Laptop Per Child project, which incorporates some of the Squeak environment. Once I got past some of the initial environment oddities, I found that Squeak provides a platform independent runtime environment, where object-oriented programs can be run compeltely independent of the OS they’re running under. This means apps written on a Mac will work fine on a PC or a Linux box.
Squeak really isn’t something ready to take on the Windows desktop or an environment to write accounting packages in. However, in educational circles, distributions in Squeak have really gotten quite a following. The Squeakland site is designed for educators who are looking for Squeak based information.
I’ll be writing more about Squeak as I get more and more comfortable with it, but unless someone else tells me about another educational / intro to programming environment that’s available for kids, that does NOT require a commercial license, Squeak is where I’m going to put my energy.
Books on Treo? Sure, why not.
During some random chattering online, I pointed a few folks at David Weber‘s works. I’ve really enjoyed the Honor Harrington series. Talk about pure unadulterated space opera. Big capital ships, multiple system alliances at war, fleet operations, and military politics all rolled together into a coherent and rich universe. Fantastic.
I have gotten in the habit of picking up each book as I go on my regular road trips. I usually finish one per visit, and there’s something like 14 books, so things are moving along nicely. I had also heard that Weber had published all the books onto CD, which sounded like a mighty inexpensive way of getting the material, but I didn’t relish having to haul my laptop around to read a story over a slice of pizza.
The other night I came across the Baen Free Library, a series of books that are available, for free, from the publisher. I highly recommend folks take a look at this page, where Eric Flint has an excellent commentary on copyright and why the current “brass knuckles” approach to enforcement is the wrong way to go.
At any rate, navigating around, I happily found the next book in the series I was looking for, and went “Hmm, I guess this should be put onto my Treo. I’ve been meaning to give this a shot…”
Off to Mobipocket to pick up an e-book reader. A quick sync later, and lo, I have the new book, and a reader, on my Treo.
How well does it work?
Surprisingly well. I admit I was a little leery of trying to read what has always been a paperback-sized book on a screen only 3″x3″ in size. Mobipocket does a good job of making it as painless as possible. I found myself settling into a comfortable reading pattern once I had made some small preference settings (go full screen, when scrolling to the next page don’t overlap lines – show the entire next page, etc etc). I think my one nudge is that a screen only holds about 1/4 of a page of text, so to read a single page, I have to ‘tap’ somewhere on the treo to tell it to go to the next page. Fine if I’m holding it in my hand, but when I’m eating lunch, it’s tedious to have to reach out and tap the screen or hit a button every 15 seconds or so. If there were a way to make it, oh, I don’t know, change pages when I tap my foot or something, that would be something. I guess I’ll have to wait on that toe-interface.
Commentaries on E-Books
So, it comes back to E-books. There’s been chatter for years about the idea that electronic book readers would replace paper books. Folks could just download the books they want into their reader, and they’d never need a paper version. Why hasn’t it really caught on? There is an electronic book market, but it’s tiny compared to the volume of paperbacks in the wild.
For me, it’s a combination of DRM and pure practicality. If I spend $6 on a paperback, I have it, I own it, it’s there. I can read it anytime I want, I can toss it on the shelf, come back to it in 10 years, and read it again. I can loan it to a friend, I can make notes in it, I can let my son read it. If I spill a drink on it, it gets wet. Then I dry it off, and read it again. If I run over it with the car, I can still read it, though it might be a bit mooshed.
If I spend $6 on an e-book, I have… a file. That file is most likely encrypted, and cannot be moved or copied around freely. I have to store it somewhere, perhaps on my Treo. I will not have this Treo in 10 years, so what do I do with the book? Store it on a CD? Okay now I have to make copies of it to a CD, and store that CD on a shelf. In 10 years, will anyone actually own CD readers that can read the filesystem on it? How about in 20 years? 30?
Or, if I download the book, put it on my Treo, and oops! I’ve mistakenly deleted it. Or the file got corrupted. Poof, it’s gone. The publishers will happily say “No problem! Just re-download the file” – assuming you can prove you own it, and the publisher is still in business, and you have the license key. Try that in 5 years. Or 15.
No, I don’t see E-books replacing paperbacks. The DRM issue is first and foremost a dead end roadblock, because there’s no working around these problems. The physical issues of ‘keeping track of media’ is something people can work on, and come up with their own solutions, but unless the media is free, there’s really no point in investing in a book collection where someone else holds the keys.
I’m not dead yet!
A brief life update for ya’ll.
First, I’ve been down sick for the last 2+ days. It started late Friday night after a lovely evening in town at Knitcetera. I was feeling a little sluggish on the way home, and by Saturday morning I knew I had Some Nasty Thing. I’ve been running a fever, doing the ‘really painful sinuses’ thing, and coughing off and on all weekend.
Due to the magic of Nyquil, I actually got about 6 hours of sleep last night, so I’m feeling almost human this morning, but that nice sheen of sweat is still with me. Gotta love it.
Further geekiness shall ensue when I can actually focus on something for more than 5 minutes. Lots of nifty projects going on, as well as updates on past ongoing doodles.
Stay tuned, campers!
Internet Radio Station Activism Alert!
I normally don’t post political activism stuff, but this one is too important to ignore.
The finest internet radio station on the net, Radio Paradise, is under threat of being legislated out of existence, due to the big record companies’ influence on the US copyright office.
As stated on RP’s home page:
For some time, we’ve suffered with a system where we pay a large chunk (10%-12%) of our income to the Big 5 record companies – while FM stations and radio conglomerates like Clear Channel pay nothing. Now they want even more. In our case, an amount equal to 125% of our income. Our only hope is to create as much public awareness and outrage about this staggeringly unfair situation as possible. Neither the record industry nor Congress are ready to listen to us at this point. But members of the media may well be, and we need to get their attention.
Please click through to Radio Paradise to see what you can do to prevent fantastic stations like RP from being pushed off the public networks. For a more detailed analysis of the rulings from the copyright office, see Kurt Hanson‘s analysis.
Come to our Intro meeting!
If you’ve ever even THOUGHT about living in Cohousing, now’s the time to come to our introductory meeting tomorrow (Sunday) at 1pm in Marlborough.
Mosaic Commons has received it’s building permit, and will be starting construction this fall. Even if you’re not ready to commit to Mosaic or not even sure about cohousing in general, come to our meeting and get the FULL PICTURE of what it’s all about.
As the saying goes… “All knowledge is worth having”. Learn about cohousing!
Thomas Dolby’s story…
I like reading Thomas Dolby’s blog. He’s a decent writer, and just tells things as they are. It’s a great window into the day to day goings on in the music industry.
A recent post however had me all teary reading it. Thomas describes a moment in 1985 working with Stevie Wonder. I heartily recommend anyone who relishes those ‘moments’ when playing, to give it a read. It certainly made my morning.
FoxNews Spamming Continues
As if we needed more evidence of the sleeziness of FoxNews, here’s a pretty concrete example.
About a year ago, I posted about foxnews spamming. I’ve continued to receive these posts fairly regularly, but decided to look a little deeper.
Today I got this posting – this is in the format I receive in email when someone posts to any of my blogs:
IP Address: 206.15.101.44
Name: qwdqws
Email Address: qwsdq@aaa.com
Comments:
dwsqw
<A HREF=”http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,251660,00.html”>Iraq to
Close Borders With Syria, Iran for 72 Hours in Security Crackdown</A>
Looks pretty similar. Hey, that IP address looks similar as well. I wonder….
dbs@yawl:~$ whois 206.15.101.0
OrgName: News Corporation
OrgID: NEWSC
Address: 1211 Avenue of the Americas
Address: 7th Floor
City: New York
StateProv: NY
PostalCode: 10036
Country: US
NetRange: 206.15.96.0 – 206.15.127.255
CIDR: 206.15.96.0/19
NetName: NAI-NET-BLOCK
NetHandle: NET-206-15-96-0-1
Parent: NET-206-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Assignment
NameServer: NS1-142.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-15.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-163.AKAM.NET
NameServer: NS1-218.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USC2.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USE2.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USW3.AKAM.NET
NameServer: USW5.AKAM.NET
Comment:
RegDate: 1997-01-24
Updated: 2006-01-19
OrgTechHandle: JJR10-ARIN
OrgTechName: Ripkey, Jason J
OrgTechPhone: +1-212-852-7000
OrgTechEmail: jripkey@newscorp.com
# ARIN WHOIS database, last updated 2007-02-12 19:10
# Enter ? for additional hints on searching ARIN’s WHOIS database.
Yes folks, not only is FoxNews blogspamming the world trying to get their google rankings up, but they’re doing it FROM THEIR OWN OFFICES. Remember these are the “Fair and Balanced” folks. Yet more evidence of the hypocrisy of that statement.
Fortunately, their whois record provides a direct phone number and a contact at Fox News.
The Best News Possible
A brief life post.
This evening we’ve received confirmation that our cohousing project, Mosaic Commons, has cleared the final regulatory hurdle between us and our building permit. As of 7pm tonight, we officially have a permit to continue with construction and development of our property in Berlin, MA.
This has been a year long complex process, involving the town, lawyers, committees, and constant legal wrangling. There were setbackes, and stresses, not without a few moments of despair. We are incredibly relieved to be done with it, and looking forward to seeing our homes and our vision for our community becoming a reality over the next 18 months.
Curious how we’re doing? Keep an eye on our blog for updates and details into what we’re doing.
DVD Sorting and cataloging
What’s a cool thing to do with your son on a nice lazy Saturday morning? Why, it’s time to finally sort all the DVDs and bring the inventory listings up to date! Yay!
Doesn’t sound like much fun? Actually, it was a blast 🙂 Zach and I went through all the DVDs, sorted them, and got them back up on the shelving in the proper order. Then we went through my incredibly outdated inventory list, and found what discs were missing (about 15), and what ones were not in the inventory (about 80).
I updated my flat HTML file with all my movies on it, noting in italics the ones that are missing (anyone have these?), but also took a look around the net for a possible inventorying tool.
I played around with DVD Aficionado a little, and I sort of like their “bulk import” function. I was able to paste in my listing, and it matched it up with ‘best guesses’ for what movies I was talking about. It got it right about 80 percent of the time, letting me go back and re-choose ones that didn’t match.
Unfortunately, the database is missing a ton of entries. Of my 210 or so movies, 15 weren’t in the database -at all- (no entry for ‘Animal House’? Cmon!). I know the DB can be updated, but I just wanted to do a quick crack at it.
So here’s my listing on dvdaficionado. It breaks down what I entered by category and links to IMDB and all that. I may try and keep it up to date, but really, my videos.html file is the definitive source.
Next project will be inventorying the laserdiscs. Oh my.
Arisia is nearing its membership cap. Register!
A reminder to all my sundry friends – Arisia is this weekend. Due to the hotel change, there is a membership cap in force, and we’re getting close to it. If you don’t pre-register, there’s a very good chance you will not be able to buy a membership on site!
So in the name of all that’s good, register!
This has been a public service ranty announcement.
For those who have been asking, yes, I’ll be working registration, but this year I’m not actually heading it up. So I will have time away from the reg desk to socialize, play, and generally have a good time. Might be a first for me! Mad props to Jasra and Sarah for all their intense work.
I’ll also be helping Blk with her dealer room, where she’ll be doing custom hairbraiding, as well as showing off some of my chainmail. Stop by the room on Dealers Row.
In which our hero succumbs…
Oh fine. I finally broke down and did it. I realized that I had a couple places where I was posting sort of “wishy” lists. Movies I was looking for, other toys. But, ya know, there’s a perfectly good site for managing wishlists for DVDs and books.
So, without further delay, I give you… my Amazon.com wishlist. Clicky on the graphic to view in all it’s geekiness. Do with it what you will.
All hail the FSM!
When I aquired clipper as my primary work machine, i needed to do something to really make it my own. I’d always wanted to do some sort of 
custom artwork on the cover of my laptops, usually to proclaim I’M NOT RUNNING WINDOWS. Well, that won’t work for this particular machine (it is, in fact, running windows), so I needed something else. The answer came to me in while getting a nice evolve plaque for the van. Why not something similar for the laptop?
So on went an FSM plaque, and I went on with my wanderings around coffee shops, customer sites, and the like. The problem? No one got it. I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster sect is just too obscure, too geek-centric for anyone outside the true elite of geekdom to get it.
Well, that is, until today.
Today I walked into Panera Bread and set up in my usual way. The place is pretty busy, it being around lunchtime, and I ended up taking one of the tall round tables. As I hauled out the laptop and parked my backpack in a chair, a passer-by went “Oo, the flying spaghetti monster! Cool!” I turned, expecting to find someone of the geek ilk, but it was in fact the middle aged nondescript woman and her friend who had just gotten up from said table. “Wow!”, said I “most people don’t recognize it.” “Oh sure, one of my kids just did a report on it.” “Well great!” and they wandered off.
I somewhat feel vindicated. Maybe the word is getting out.