November 24th, 2009
Or, it means that I’ve successfully migrated this blog and website away from tyranny. I now have shell access along with a whole bunch of other cool things. What does this mean for you? Probably not much. You probably won’t notice much of a difference. I’ll continue to deliver you the same boredom you’ve come to expect. See you in a few days.
On this day…
- 2008: Leaves of Wonder — So it would appear that those few Wolverine fans that frequent this blog from time to time were too embarrassed [...]
Tags: Blog Status
Posted in Blog Status | 1 Comment »
November 15th, 2009
In a Burger King bathroom just off exit 2 of the Ohio Turnpike, this event transpired while I was drying my hands:
A guy comes out of the poop stall with a big plastic pop cup from the joint. He skips washing his hands and proceeds to rinse the cup out at the sink and then fills it up with water. He puts the lid back on. He then picks up the straw from “between the wall and the faucet” where he had placed it. He begins sticking it into the cup when he realizes he’s got it the wrong way for some reason. He takes it out, turns it end over end and sticks it back in. He leaves.
I don’t know if the guy was planning on drinking it or had some other use for it, but the thought of drinking from a straw that was sitting on a Burger King sink is enough to make me gag.
On this day…
- 2008: Stupid blog — For some reason, this stupid blog is not honoring my paragraph breaks on the last couple of posts. I apologize [...]
- 2008: All good things must end — A few weeks ago, we took the field for our final game of the fall soccer season. On the line [...]
Tags: Deep Ramblings
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November 12th, 2009
I’m in the process of moving floydwing.com to a different hosting service. I’ll give a heads up a few days before the DNS stuff happens. In the meantime, if there’s anything you want saved on the forum, please copy it off. I don’t know whether I’ll go to the trouble of salvaging the existing content and even if I’ll have a forum at the new site, at least first on.
Keep an eye on the blog for future updates.
On this day…
Tags: Blog Status
Posted in Blog Status | 2 Comments »
November 4th, 2009
I’ve been enjoying the online email gaming at GamesByEmail. It started with playing a Risk clone (Gambit). I’m a bit worn out on the whole RIsk front and have cut my regular game back to a 5 player free for all.
We’re now into Axis & Allies (WW2 on the site) and have been enjoying that. It’s much easier playing this at the email pace rather than setting up the pieces and playing it live. I’ve probably already played more games of it online than I ever played live. The last live one being at an early Pit BBQ. I wish you could add some more variety to it, as I’m starting to find my moves being somewhat scripted by the nationality I’m playing. Not much room for creativity here if you don’t want your allies yelling at you. They really need a Civ type game that would take a while to play.
We’ve just moved into History of the World (Empires on the site). It’s a through the ages type game where you use your civilization each epoch to score as many points as possible. It’s a bit different, but gives us a longer struggle. Not much in the Civ vein. The civilization you play dies out after each of your turns.
I’d love to play their Diplomacy clone, but I don’t see how well that would work in an online arena. The live game has a 5 minute period before each turn where the players attempt to sway each other to support their attacks. I don’t think emails and posts would really achieve the same thing.
A coworker and I started a game of chess on the site. I used to really get into chess when I was young, though most of the games I played were on a handheld electronic game. I’m going to get creamed because I don’t have the slightest clue about strategy in chess.
On this day…
No other posts on this day.
Tags: games
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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: Dungeons & Dragons, Tech Stuff
Posted in Gaming, Tech Stuff | No Comments »
October 28th, 2009
Oh no, if Civilization comes to Facebook, I’m in trouble. Time to start recruiting my minions now.
By the way, yesterday’s post wasn’t some spam viral infection. It was a promo for J. C. Hutchins book release of 7th Son. Head on over to that site and check it out. It’s a pretty awesome trilogy.
On this day…
No other posts on this day.
Tags: book review, Facebook
Posted in Entertainment | No Comments »
October 27th, 2009
I really hate that s>>> [ WARNING ::: DATABASE ERROR ::: CONTENT OVERRIDE ::: SOURCE: EXTERNAL ] <<<
Kilroy 2.0 is here.
> source terminal location: UNKNOWN
> source terminal identity: UNAVAILABLE
> source login information: ENCRYPTED
> message begins
the post you are now reading is designed to dull your senses to THE TRUTH. do not live the life of the worker bee, the cog, the well-oiled piston in the MACHINE OF DECEIT!
there is a grand CONSPIRACY afoot. you have been taught to believe that you are UNIQUE, one of a kind. THIS IS NOT TRUE. long ago, a cabal of scientists created technologies to ensure that ANYONE’S MIND AND BODY can be duplicated.
human cloning isn’t NEAR. it’s already HERE. discover the truth at http://JCHutchins.net
you are being DECEIVED. break free from the cogs, flee the hive, become A PROPHET OF THE TRUTH!
kilroy2. was here … kilroy2.0 is everywhere
>>> [ CONTENT OVERRIDE CEASES ::: DATABASE STATUS: RECOVERING ] <<<no longer should bug me!
On this day…
- 2007: Dragonlance the Movie — Looking forward to this, I will definitely need to see it. I can’t remember how old I was when [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 26th, 2009
I just got done watching the Liverpool/Manchester United game from Sunday that I recorded. It was one of the best that I’ve seen. Fernando Torres is an amazing player. He showed such power to hold off Rio Ferdinand on the opening goal. I’d still take Drogba, just wish he wouldn’t go down so easily. He takes himself out of some scoring chances at times in seeking a foul.
On this day…
- 2006: Multi topical — It should be a busy weekend. I’ve got a list made out of work that I need to do. [...]
Tags: soccer
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October 17th, 2009
I signed up for FaceBook on my birthday last month. It was more of a surprise for the wifal unit (who’s reference name I will officially be changing to “The Hottie”. (Seems a little less offensive, not that she ever cared. :) )
My fear of it becoming another time sync has not held up. While it is something you can waste hours in, looking at friends pictures and such, I’ve found it’s at a very low priority in my internet browsing. I avoid the games and all that crap. We were virally infected a few weeks back but I spent a few days righting the ship and saving the computer, only to have the hard drive die a few days later. Such is luck.
FaceBook is a marvel of social network programming. I purposefully avoid adding any information to my profile at the beginning that I though could link others to me. No high school, hometown, etc. But I kid you not, within an hour I started getting friend requests from high school classmates. My guess is it takes into account who your friends with, your age, and any range of other variables and displays you to those others as a possible match.
I had wanted to avoid the whole friending for the sake of friending sake. Just because I stood beside someone in the urinal once, seems like no reason I should let them have a view of my life. But I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t really care anymore. If these people want to boost their numbers, so be it. So I’m very close to just accepting the group that I’ve been ignoring since that first week. I’m hardly paying attention the way it is. Though this will probably eventually lead to everyone that I ever passed in hall.
I have made it more of an effort though, hiding the button that people can “friend” me with. They’ll have to actually make an effort and send me a nice note. So if you’re not already on FB, sign up and look me up. You know you’ll go to the front of my queue.
On this day…
- 2007: Appliance Rant — This is a rant I’ve been wanting to write for a while. It’s lost a little of it’s sting [...]
- 2005: Spam sucks! — I don’t know how much time I’ve wasted tonight on deleting and trying to shut down the spam comments. [...]
Tags: Facebook
Posted in Deep Ramblings | No Comments »
October 14th, 2009
Over the summer at work, one of my projects was creating an application to print a new Bill of Lading that showed an itemized record of each package. This involved pulling data from a legacy system and using BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool) from the Eclipse Foundation. I’m not a huge fan of BIRT, mainly for the fact that I’m not a fan of report writing. But I got the short straw and had to learn it for our main project. So using it on this project made sense.
I decided to use JPA (Java Persistence API) for my data access. It would give me an opportunity to learn something new, get a different perspective from Hibernate, and since the other members on my team had used it I had ready tech support.
The project was a success, though making the “Holy Grail” of Bill of Ladings seems a little like overkill it was a good learning experience and was my first project that I was a major part of to make into production. We’ve had some peculiarities caused by the legacy system that we’ve had to accommodate for.
I did have one major mistake that I rectified this week after a swift kick to the head from a team member. I’d been letting Spring inject an EntityManager into each one of my DAOs (Data Access Objects). I’d found a great series of articles on using JPA and setting up a generic framework for your DAOs. But I’d neglected to realize that the articles must not have been written for the web world and threading. EntityManager’s aren’t thread safe. While this wasn’t seeming to cause us a problem, it was a good idea to rectify it.
EntityManagerFactory’s are thread safe, so it was a pretty easy change to switch over to injecting the correct entity factory and then creating an EntityManager as needed for every method that required one and then closing it. Hopefully, this will circumvent one issue that was caused by our legacy database driver. Fingers crossed.
I really like JPA. I used EclipseLink as the JPA provider. Annotations rule for all this ORM (object relational mapping) stuff. So much nicer than the load of Hibernate XML files. I believe Shindo told me this years ago, and I’m glad I finally had an opportunity to use it. On our main project, we’ll be stuck in Hibernate XML hell forever, most likely. I know Hibernate has it’s own annotations for this, as well as coming JPA support, but I really like the seemingly lightweight feel that EclipseLink gives me.
On this day…
Tags: JPA, Programming
Posted in Programming, Work | No Comments »