Archive for the ‘Tech Stuff’ Category

« Older Entries

The beast that made me forget my MacBook

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

Maybe I’ve talked about my current work laptop before, maybe not.  I don’t think so.

I posted how much I was going miss my MacBook Pro way back then.  Well, the laptop I’ve had for the past months has made me forget about my MacBook Pro.  A day or two before Thanksgiving vacation, my Dell arrived.  I immediately stripped off the Win7 it came pre-installed with, put Ubuntu64 on it with Win7 running withing a Virtual Box.  Things have worked amazingly since then.  I went from 10 minute database bootstraps on my old WinXP machine to 50 seconds bootstraps on my Ubuntu machine.  The thing rocks!  I love being able to go to the command line when I want to.

So why did it enable me to forget about my MacBook Pro.  Well, it probably would’ve cost less to buy me a Mac.  8 gigabytes and a solid state hard drive have a way of causing deficiencies to disappear.  I loved the thing over these past months.  It will be another sad day come next Wednesday when I hand it over.  :(

On this day…

  • 2008: The Part Time Developer 3: Hibernation Mode — I got probably a good 3-5 hours in this weekend concentrating on working through another Hibernate tutorial, experimenting with the [...]
  • 2005: Friday! — Not much going on today. Did some extreme grilling tonight for a pretty big meal by our standards. [...]

Tags: ,
Posted in Tech Stuff | No Comments »

Web bound

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

I handed in my notice at work today.  I’m headed to a digital media company doing web related work.  It’s another exciting and scary situation I’m putting myself in.  Looking forward to the challenge.  Hopefully I’m up for it. (hansoninc.com)

I’m finishing up my first week of 2010 with Hopslam in the fridge.  It’s been a wonderful week.

CodeMash was awesome.  I’ve gotten a few new directions to explore in my side projects.  I got a little taste of Ruby, which I need to continue.  Plus I won a Scala book, and have started reading that.  Not to mention that I talked to another person who said I need to learn Groovy and Grails.  Looks like my year is going to be busy.

I don’t know if you noticed the new page I put up related to my Android apps.  I created a Google Android app that displayed the CodeMash schedule.  I really enjoyed creating the app and am trying to come up with a new idea for phone app development.

On this day…

Tags: , ,
Posted in Beer, Tech Stuff, Work | No Comments »

CodeMash 2010

Monday, January 11th, 2010

Only one more day of work before I head to CodeMash.  I can’t wait.  It was painful not being able to go last year.  The problem always is trying to fit in all the great sessions that I want to go to.  Plus, I plan to keep an eye on the Open Spaces topics for Android topics or other things that catch my eye.  So session wise, it’s going to be tough.

This year they are even having a game room and a coding jam room.  Add in that the evenings are usually filled with something (opening night panel, cocktail party) and I doubt I’ll make it to the water park area again.  Just too much to do.  This is such a great conference for the price.  I hope I can continue to go every year.

On this day…

  • 2009: Mini review: Santa’s Butt Winter Porter — Santa’s Butt has a rear view of Santa looking over a list and holding a mug of brew while sitting [...]
  • 2009: 2009 Goals: Professional — These are my goals of the professional variety.

    Continue to work hard and enjoy my job.
    This hasn’t been a problem so [...]

  • 2007: Spam, VASSAL, Exercise — Sorry, no The Mighty Endeavor after action report yet. Hopefully this weekend I can put some time into that [...]
  • 2005: Wellies — Tonight was a very entertaining evening for me. For once I wasn’t the target of my children’s laughter.
    My wife [...]

Tags:
Posted in Programming, Tech Stuff | 2 Comments »

Surface

Friday, October 30th, 2009

When is this going to be widespread enough that I can buy one for $100.  Too bad I can’t write things for it in pure Java.  Google needs to start designing one of these babies.  Microsoft has been at it for what seems like 5 years and we’re still no closer to having it as your average home appliance.

On this day…

  • 2007: Body Doubles — They say everyone has a twin. I’m starting to believe it, though I’ve not found mine yet.
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/1789772531/
    By the way, [...]

Tags: ,
Posted in Gaming, Tech Stuff | No Comments »

Josephus’ Circle of Doom or “links of the day”

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

No energy to really say anything intelligent, so I might as well pass along some links that caught my eye.

An interesting take on the recent announcement of Google’s Chrome OS.  Kind of long, but I must say it sounds reasonable.

A very surprising math technique for multiplication.  Good thing it wasn’t the peasants we were in the Cold War against.  Is there some kind of mathematical proof backing this?

An intriquing programming problem that wouldn’t seem to be too elusive but does tickle my curiosity to start up the old IDE.  I bet Josephus was always the last picked during recess.

On this day…

  • 2008: The Shirt — I forgot to mention.  Saturday, after having already made one trip and frustratingly realizing the need for more trips, I [...]

Tags: , ,
Posted in Entertainment, Programming, Tech Stuff | No Comments »

Why can’t Windows figure out how to manipulate files better?

Friday, July 24th, 2009

Funny and so true.  It usually takes two minutes for the stupid delete dialog to be done on my work laptop.

On this day…

  • 2008: It begins — The final (at least that’s the dream I’m having) move has begun.  Actually it began on Monday when I started [...]
  • 2006: The Big News! — The big news is…….I GOT A NEW JOB!!!!!!!!!

Tags: ,
Posted in Tech Stuff | No Comments »

What the Grand Am said to Ubuntu while coaching Pit…

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

After a brief respite, car trouble is back in the picture again.  We’re scrambling to figure out how much we can handle in another payment.  Tomorrow we’re checking out a buy 2 get 1 free deal at Kia.  I’m skeptical that you really get a “deal”, somehow they get ya coming or going, I’m just not sure how.  We’ll see.  Anybody ever hear anything about this deal, or Kia in general?

I haven’t been watching the “On this day” of past blog posts but when starting to write this I noticed that a year ago I was working feverishly on fixing a playoff bug in Pit that had delayed the start of the playoffs.  Ah, what a run it was.  I remember the day I fixed the bug, spending a hidden hour away in the little cafe of the student union.  I miss those hidden hours in the cafe, don’t miss the job.

I’ve been running Ubuntu for around 3 weeks or so.  I’m loving it.  I hope to post something about it and how I went about it, just haven’t had time to sit and write those long posts that you love.  I found some nice resources on the web that helped me install a variety of things.  Though “apt-get” makes things pretty easy as long as you know what you want to install.  I don’t have the skills currently to use apt to find the things I want.  I installed Subversion, Trac, and MySQL.  Eclipse was just a simple unzipping of the downloaded file.  Such a contrast to installing Visual Studio on Windows.

One thing I missed from when I had my Mac was being able to play songs from my iTunes library from my desktop on my Mac.  I could’ve had this ability on my laptop had I ever installed iTunes on it.  So I started looking at how I could recreate that on Linux.  I went through an elaborate install and patching of Wine with git.  Then installed iTunes.  It appears to run for the most part, but it won’t discover the library contained on my desktop.  I ran this ourTunes program and it saw the library but gave some sort of error.  So I’m guessing maybe Apple did something in iTunes 8 that causes issues for such things.  Why can’t they release a linux version?  I haven’t been able to find some other program that is supposed to be able to discover the library.  What’s it through, bonjour or something?

The time has come for signing up for Spring soccer coaching.  While I think I should probably avoid the stress that comes with the job, it looks like I’m going to sign up again.  The guy I coached with last Fall are going to try to link up again.  This will definitely be it for me.  If the eldest plays next season, she’ll be in the next age bracket.  I think she needs somebody who knows what they’re talking about to coach her if she continues with it.

On this day…

  • 2008: Pit Playoff Bug — So I spent the last two lunchtimes trying to figure out what was wrong in Pit playoff code that worked [...]

Tags: , ,
Posted in Family, Sports, Tech Stuff, pit | 1 Comment »

The future is near, tomorrow

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

You have got to check this out from TED conference.  Some pretty cool ideas here.  It’s pretty futuristic, I don’t know who besides us geeks would walk around with painted nails and that lanyard.  I don’t think I would, but I’m sure it will get smaller in time.  Perhaps the next generation of programming will use this for input.

My fear would be what it would display as I’m going to the bathroom.

On this day…

  • 2005: Another game — One of my latest acquisitions on the board game front is called Circus Maximus. It’s a chariot racing game [...]

Tags:
Posted in Tech Stuff | No Comments »

My New Desktop

Thursday, February 26th, 2009
My new desktop

My new desktop

That’s right!  I’m now running linux on my laptop.

Surprise!  I finally got around to trying to put a picture in the old blog.  I’ve got to say, it hasn’t been as simple as I think it should be.  Trying to use the defaults I kept getting an error.  After changing the default upload directory I was finally able to upload the image.  But inserting the image didn’t seem to take into account the changed upload directory and I have to manually update the path everywhere.  Quite a pain!  Who knows what kind of additional pain this will cause when I upgrade.

On this day…

No other posts on this day.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Tech Stuff | No Comments »

Blog overload

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

I’m watching the Wings and reflecting on my past week.  It’s been busy but I’ve always had some time each evening to get on the laptop.  I always end up reading blog posts in Reader.  I always have this (beautiful goal from Hossa to Hudler just happened.  WOW!) plan to do a little programming and learning, but it never happens.  I’ve decided that I subscribe to far too many blogs.  They distract me from doing anything else.  I’ve seemed to have a drive this week to get my unread count low, but what I really should do is just start unsubscribing.  I don’t know from what though.  I subscribe to a range of different programming blogs, from Java to .Net to Groovy to pure architectural discussion blogs.  And I’m adding more all the time.

Most of the blogs are technical in nature, but I have boardgaming, hockey, and others that I’ve accumulated along the way.  I’ve starred so many posts that I want to come back to someday (learning Groovy for instance).  I’m paralyzed.

I think part of the problem is I don’t know how to go about learning Groovy.  I haven’t purchased a book yet and haven’t found something online that seems like it would be fun to follow.  The other problem is my age old problem.  I haven’t been inspired with a project idea that really excites me and holds my attention, even to just get something going in Java.  When time does present itself, I usually put myself in some other activity that keeps me from putting my attention to it.

Does anybody have any techniques they use for avoiding this form of procrastination and to focus and commit?

On this day…

  • 2009: Weekend flowed from crap to great — Last weekend started off quite crappy, but got significantly better.
    Friday was a double whammy.  It was finally discovered what the [...]

Tags: , ,
Posted in Programming, Tech Stuff | 2 Comments »

« Older Entries