Autism Speaks has Failed
Tue Dec 22 11:45:00 CST 2009
I was recently asked if I would enjoy a donation to Autism Speaks in my or my child's name. Thank you very much for the kind thought, but Please No. The money can be better spent with different organizations looking at environmental causes. If you enjoy throwing up in your mouth, read some of [this](http://www.disabilityscoop.com/2009/09/10/autism-speaks-pay/4893/) and [this tax return](http://www.autismspeaks.org/docs/Autism_Speaks_Form_990_2008.pdf). More...CDC ADDM: Autism at 1 in 100, avg increase 57% max 95% 2006 over 2002
Sun Dec 20 17:04:00 CST 2009
The [CDC study summary and press release](http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5810a1.htm) is getting a bit of [news coverage](http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,580574,00.html) along with some backlash, some of which sounds like wishful thinking. Then there were things I never thought I would hear Dr. Insel say in an interview with David Kirby, like mentioning entertaining the idea of a virus. About time. More...Site Changes and roughly scheduled down-time.
Thu Dec 10 09:16:00 CST 2009
Within this month (December 2009) I shall change the site and it will be up and down and feeds will change. If you want me to push a notification to you when it is stable, please let me know. More...Engerix B implicated in ADEM, demyelination and Multiple sclerosis.
Sat Nov 21 15:28:00 CST 2009
Conclusions: Hepatitis B vaccination does not generally increase the risk of CNS inflammatory demyelination in childhood. However, the Engerix B vaccine appears to increase this risk, particularly for confirmed multiple sclerosis, in the longer term. Our results require confirmation in future studies. Please see [Neurology](http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/72/10/873). More...Proposed link between vaccine glycine to autism
Thu Nov 19 10:21:00 CST 2009
Dianne e-mailed me a blurb about [this PR story](http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/scientific-link-to-autism-identified-70354482.html) about a possible link between autism and [glycine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycine) in vaccines. Their idea is [allegedly] described more fully on [The Center's website](http://www.thecenternj.com/lifesciences.html). This kind of surprises me as I did not think that [glycine](http://7thspace.com/headlines/325897/different_forms_of_glycine__and_gabaa_receptor_mediated_inhibitory_synaptic_transmission_in_mouse_superficial_and_deep_dorsal_horn_neurons.html) was a particularly novel molecule like [BPA](http://delicious.com/skelter.net/bpa), but is worthy of investigation. I do not know anything about *The Center* but I applaud them going out on a limb. It feels bleak and abandoned out here. I have no doubt [The New Inquisition](amazon:1561840025) will send a van by their center for a complimentary ride to re-education camp. More...tomcat6 logs on ubuntu
Wed Nov 11 13:29:00 CST 2009
This [thread](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1272270) points to a problem with the security policy for the tomcat logging jar in the default install of tomcat6 on ubuntu. I don't think that opening it all up is the way to go, but I bet that is what everybody does. More...I'm technically old
Sun Nov 08 20:04:00 CST 2009
*Big Sigh* Today our temp worker asks me, "So, what was assembler language like?" I plucked my teeth off the desk, slapped them in my mouth, grabbed my cane, and said, "Come with me, sonny, and I'll show ya some assembler!" I then had gcc spit out the generated assembler for a simple "Hello, World!" (I haven't written in assembler since, oh, < 1995 and that was on an IBM3090 mainframe). I let the Java whipper-snapper cogitate on the arcane code, hoping he is not interested in writing anything in this. Software development is trending to higher more pleasant languages. Then he asks, "What's a mainframe?" He asked, "was that like a super-computer." Uh not really. "So, most desktops today would blow it away." "Most of today's graphics cards would blow it away" I replied. More...AAP to research autism-related GI issues.
Mon Nov 02 10:56:00 CST 2009
More medical professional organizations are pursuing research into autism-related GI issues:I stand by my assertion that differentiation of the garbage-pail diagnosis of 'autism' into characteristic populations is key to successful research. More...Gastrointestinal Conditions in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
October 30th, 2009Autism Speaks, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition (NASPGHAN) will host one of the largest gatherings of researchers, clinicians and pediatric specialists to better understand the gastrointestinal (GI) problems in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The meeting will be held Sunday November 15, 2009, from 8:00 am - 3:30 pm, at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, National Harbor Md.
The goals of this meeting are to raise awareness among specialists about GI disorders in autism; to educate clinicians and researchers on the latest scientific information on the pathophysiology, evaluation, and treatment of ASD-GI disorders; and to identify critical areas for research for ASD-GI disorders. Nationally and internationally known speakers will address issues such as intestinal permeability, inflammatory processes, motility, nutrition, and the epidemiology, clinical phenotypes and management of GI issues in ASD.
Recent studies indicate that ASDs affect up to one in 91 individuals in the U.S. and an estimated one percent of people worldwide. Studies suggest that GI concerns are common among individuals with ASD. For many individuals, GI symptoms are of significant concern and may contribute to challenging behaviors such as posturing, self injury and outbursts resulting from GI discomfort.
This symposium was spearheaded by the leadership of Autism Speaks' Autism Treatment Network (ATN), a network of medical centers dedicated to improving the health and healthcare of individuals with autism. Co-chairs for the meeting are George Fuchs, M.D., Chair of the ATN Gastroenterology Committee and Daniel Coury, M.D., ATN Medical Director.
WHAT: GASTROINTESTINAL CONDITIONS IN CHILDREN WITH AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS
WHO: GI researchers, clinicians, autism specialists, and pediatricians from across the US in one of the largest gatherings devoted to a better understanding of GI problems in children with autism spectrum disorders
WHERE: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, 201 Waterfront Street, National Harbor, Md. 20745
WHEN: SUNDAY, November 15, 2009 8:00am - 3:30pm
Source: Autism Speaks
Enjoy your zombies
Mon Nov 02 10:43:00 CST 2009
Did you enjoy your annual zombie movies? I know I did. Woody's portrayal of a character who lost a child to the zombie virus actually touched on something very dear to me. Zombie movies are only fun when you can suspend disbelief and enjoy the absurdity. Get ready: those zombies are coming, and they are your kids. More...Mint bought by Intuit
Tue Sep 15 20:11:00 CDT 2009
We tried Mint out to see if it would help with coordinating finances between my wife and I. I didn't work. That's the niche that these programs fail to help: an economically productive household is a small enterprise and the accounting software needs to be multi-user capable. Mint was not, and eventually, we terminated our account. Mint was a cool idea. Was, because now a company that rivals Microsoft for suppressing innovation is buying Mint. Yes...Intuit is buying Mint. Tragic. No way does this serve customers. More...Software gigs in Bryan & College Station
Mon Aug 31 09:08:00 CDT 2009
My former co-worker is looking for software development ninjas in the Bryan & College Station area. E-mail me if you are interested. More...Drought
Sun Aug 16 22:08:00 CDT 2009
[The Drought Monitor](http://drought.unl.edu/DM/DM_state.htm?TX,S) gives some numbers to our crunchy dead lawn. More...Giving up on RDI
Sun Aug 16 21:08:00 CDT 2009
Been trying to find affordable resources for [RDI](http://www.rdiconnect.com) to no avail. $900 / 2 1 hr sessions is not feasible and wreaks of a grab at the wallet of distraught parents. The whole thing starts to stink at the rates of $150 for a dvd and $75 for the book. More...Neonatal exposure to parathion, an organophosphate, alters lipid metabolism in adult
Sun Aug 02 09:35:00 CDT 2009
Dr. Suehs pointed me to this article: Citation: T.L. Lassiter, et al., Neonatal exposure to parathion alters lipid metabolism in adulthood: Interactions with dietary fat intake and implications for neurodevelopmental de•Â?cits, BrainRes. Bull. (2009), doi:10.1016/j.brainresbull.2009.07.002 Exposed baby rat pups to parathion and later in life measured TNF-alpha and TBARS. Later the metabolic and neurological effects partially responded to a high-fat diet. More...Emergency Kits
Tue Jul 21 19:40:00 CDT 2009
Hard to afford emergency kits, but after the story my wife was watching on her computer of the kid burning in the flipped SUV, and eventually rescued, I'm going to push the emergency kits (1 each vehicle and one jump kit for house evac) higher on the list. John and Becca have influenced the contents: 2-4 MRE's and bottled water. Fire Extinguisher, gloves, MRE, water, gerber kit, flashlight, and separate batteries. More...Prevnar vaccine recall
Fri Jul 17 21:27:00 CDT 2009
Just one lot of Prevnar. Got mixed up with...uh...something not intended to be shipped in that lot. Reported on [FDA site](http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/Recalls/ucm172378.htm) and talked about in [WSJ](http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090716-718758.html?mod=dist_smartbrief). Recall: Prevnar Pneumococcal 7-valent Conjugate Vaccine, Wyeth DATE RECALL INITIATED: July 10, 2009 PRODUCT / LOT NUMBER / EXPIRATION DATE: Prevnar pneumococcal 7-valent Conjugate Vaccine (Diptheria CRM197Protein) 0.5 mL single dose pre-filled syring (10 per package) NDC: 0005-1970-50 (10‰Ûªs)/0005-1970-49 (Singles) Lot Number: D50002 Expiration Date: February 28, 2011 MANUFACTURER: Wyeth Philadelphia, PA More...Where have all of Ren's friends' blogs gone
Thu Jul 16 19:16:00 CDT 2009
I'm answering [Ren's post](http://www.rendarkin.com/chris/2009/07/16/what-happened-to-personal-webpages/) about friends no longer blogging. More...Yahoo upgrades killing pidgin
Fri Jun 19 12:22:00 CDT 2009
It looks like Yahoo may be upgrading a subset of their servers and breaking older versions of yahoo IM and pidgin along with it. Several, but not all, pidgin on linux clients at work are unable to connect. We were able to get around this by specifying the ip address of a particular server instead of relying on DNS and geting one from the mix. I suspect that is a temporary fix and will also break as the upgrades progress. Mostly speculation on my part. More...Mom attacked by Virginia Beach School Administrators at IEP meeting
Sat Jun 13 19:14:00 CDT 2009
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: (Virginia Beach VA, June 12, 2009) (SEND OUT TO ALL NEWS AGENCIES PLEASE) Local Mom attacked by Virginia Beach School Administrators at IEP meeting on Thursday. Allison Jordan, Special Ed Coordinator for the public school system, and Kimberly Dailey, 7th grade Principal at Larkspur Middle School, both physically attacked a Mom in an attempt to take an audio tape from her. The tape, which contained evidence of highly questionable tactics used by the administrators to squash LRE recommendations from the child's Psychologist, is so incriminating that the administrators were willing to use brute force to try to keep it from being released. More...minor traction on vaccine safety
Sat Jun 06 20:29:00 CDT 2009
NVAC Vaccine Safety Working Group released a [draft](http://www.hhs.gov/nvpo/nvac/documents/NVACVaccineSafetyWGReport041409.pdf) in short, there is enough to warrant concern and study. No promises, though. In other news, the general pattern that interested neurologists and doctors are converging on seems to be one of brain inflamation. Some theories are virus related, some are auto-immune, some are adjuvant stimulated, or combinations of the above three. Proceeding at a glacial place. Most docs don't want to get involved, though. In some ways, they are crippled by the sad state of the art, and the cliff of Wakefield awaits those to step out of line. Most docs just hope the autistic kid and their parents will go away and be someone else's problem. How a neurologist becomes a neurologist with no idea of what the immune system can do to a brain, or with no interest in it...uh. ok. More...Spraying Java 1.4 off the driveway
Wed Jun 03 09:36:00 CDT 2009
Gentoo is beginning to drop requirements for JDK 1.4! Whoop! More...Autism Moms
Fri May 29 18:17:00 CDT 2009
From [The Autism File](http://www.autismfile.com) magazine: Several moms look familiar, either from the ARD workshop or the meetups. More...Sam Debold
Tue May 26 20:46:00 CDT 2009
More...Worst of Singleton and DI
Fri May 15 15:30:00 CDT 2009
I have this on-going rant with Ren. I am fully converted to use of Inversion of Control or Dependency Injection to replace any and all uses of singletons. It makes the classes much easier to test, and there are other benefits described in gory detail elsewhere on the web. I have yet to find a justification for any remaining singletons. Today, I ran into the following in our code:/etc/exports invalid parameter
Sun May 03 13:43:00 CDT 2009
if you attempt to export a path that is a sub-path of a different export, you get a cryptic message. For instance:What would it take
Wed Apr 22 19:32:00 CDT 2009
a poster to the Age of Autism blog postedJust to play devil's advocate here... What, if anything, could get you folks to consider the possibility that vaccines don't cause autism?I'll tell you what it would take... More...
Due Dilligence for Vaccine Safety
Thu Apr 09 12:26:00 CDT 2009
It's a third rail and after the witch hunt and burning of Andrew Wakefield, no one will touch it, even if it has nothing to do with autism. Regardless of any problems with autism, there is much we need to do to secure our vaccines. More...fix key bindings in zsh
Tue Apr 07 16:09:00 CDT 2009
nvidia gl drivers breaking celestia
Sun Mar 22 14:06:00 CDT 2009
Google talk: Practical Common Lisp
Sun Mar 15 08:53:00 CDT 2009
Practical Common Lisp 1:12:04 - May 10, 2006 - (170 Ratings) - Rate: Watch this video on video.google.com Google TechTalks May 10, 2006 Peter Seibel ABSTRACT In the late 1920's linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf hypothesized that the thoughts we can think are largely determined by the language we speak. In his essay "Beating the Averages" Paul Graham echoed this notion and invented a hypothetical language, Blub, to explain why it is so hard for programmers to appreciate programming language features that aren't present in their own favorite language. Does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis hold for computer languages? Can you be a great software architect if you only speak Blub? Doesn't Turing equivalence imply that language choice is just another implementation detail? Yes, no, and no says Peter Seibel, language lawyer (admitted, at various times, to the Perl, Java, and Common Lisp bars) and author of the award-winning book _Practical Common Lisp_. In his talk, Peter will discuss how our choices of programming language influences and shapes our pattern languages and the architectures we can, or are likely to, invent. He will also discuss whether it's sufficient to merely broaden your horizons by learning different programming languages or whether you must actually use them. åÇ Google Tech Talk on Youtube More...Pre still-born with Sprint
Fri Mar 06 20:03:00 CST 2009
I hate Sprint. This is part of the attraction of the iPhone: shooting my effigy of Sprint. (We are under a burn ban due to the drought. You understand.) I had hope for Palm. Possibilities of returning to the basics and making software that does one thing well, adapted for the cloud. But Sprint? Oh, that was a mistake. Tragic. More...Dell displays beating Apple
Fri Mar 06 20:01:00 CST 2009
I'm disappointed. Apple, once the home of the artist and maker of computers and monitors for display prima donas, is making mediocre displays. Dell seems to be handily whoopin' them and undercutting their prices. You can get one with a camera and usb ports, even. *sigh* Get with it, Apple. More...xstream-1.3 breaking on Gentoo
Thu Mar 05 15:45:00 CST 2009
xstream-1.3 came down portage today and blew up with compiler errors. It looks like it was getting compiled with something that did not understand annotations. I changed my package.keywords file to specifically allow =dev-java/xstream-1.2-r3 ~x86 This seems to have fixed it. I am considering Ubuntu for the next workstation build. I just don't need to everything compiled and tuned for the hardware for my workstations. More...Plan9 / Inferno
Mon Feb 16 18:57:00 CST 2009
I've had this craving for some light-weight alternative platform. Tonight I had a few nibbles of Inferno, the latest interpretation of Plan 9, which is what Dennis Richie and others went on to work with after UNIX. In short, all resources are accessed through a common file-like api. This makes everything available via scripts. On top of that, inferno runs on something like a VM so the programs are portable to all inferno installs. Individual Inferno machines are easily connected to facilitate distributed solutions. I was trying to run Inferno hosted on a Linux workstation (Gentoo). I downloaded the component tar balls, but the emu binary just hung upon invocation, which hung the installer, as the installer runs on inferno. I finally did get emu running by checking out a subversion working copy, rebuilding Inferno on my workstation and running it that way. The next thing I ran into was many complaints about missing fonts. Charon, the browser, can't display all its buttons. I didn't know this for sure until I fired up the Windows version of Inferno, which does seem to work ok. I still haven't solved it. I did note, however, that someone has put together an overlay which will provide an Inferno ebuild for gentoo. Now, I'm watching a [Google tech talk](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=810232012617965344). My baby girl seems to like this one. After that, I'll go catch up on what is happening in [NetKernel](http://www.netkernel.org) land. More...Google broken?
Sat Jan 31 06:57:00 CST 2009
Every search result is a site that can harm my computer. The server that serves the explanation screen is overloaded and not responding. LOL how would you like to be on call for that ;) *follow up:* Here is Google's [response](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/this-site-may-harm-your-computer-on.html). The meat of the technical issue:We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes.More...
get that old java 1 stuff out of my path on gentoo
Mon Jan 26 11:20:00 CST 2009
Not sure what old java packages are still reliant on old Sun Java 1.4.2 some how, having the system jvm set to Java 6 isn't good enough to find jps, jhat, etc.Ubuntu Tomcat Hudson permissions
Wed Jan 21 08:48:00 CST 2009
you could disable tomcat permissions in /etc/default/tomcat6, but it's dangerous. Problem:extra-fancy-fun-ball commit considered harmful
Fri Jan 16 14:38:00 CST 2009
> **stevesuehs**: feel free to email your bash history file containing the commands in which you did the merge that repro your svn issue. > > **CowOrker**:svn status | sed 's|\\|\/|g' | grep '^[MAD]' | grep -v swf | grep -v examplealpha | grep -v di97 | grep -v log4j | sed 's/\+/ /' | awk '{print $2}' | xargs svn commit -m 'merge --depth=infinity -r32960:33020 http://svn/repos/trunk/di.main'
>
> **stevesuehs**: that's insane and I can't support it.
>
> **stevesuehs**: commit should be one commit from the top of the repository
Yes, I *can* read it. I can also ride horseback, nap flint, and start a fire with yucca sticks and a shoe string. For some reason, I almost always drive a Prius and commit merges with a very simple svn commit command. Maybe because it hurts less.
More...
seasonal fortune
Tue Dec 30 08:56:00 CST 2008
I had no idea that fortune had seasonal or time-based fortunes. Or is it conincidence. hmm. flash backs to an earlier more
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In Ellen's house it is warm and toasty while fuzzies play in the snow outside.
More...
emerge --unmerge vmware-workstation
Tue Dec 16 14:25:00 CST 2008
portage has failed to provide a working vmware-workstation release for me for months now. Uncle. More...Today's fun with Grails
Mon Dec 15 13:54:00 CST 2008
Go, Josh, Go!
Thu Dec 04 09:42:00 CST 2008
Josh is still working on the javafx web site. Looks like they are having a rough time deploying.JavaFX presentation at AJUG
Wed Dec 03 14:30:00 CST 2008
Last night I made it to the AJUG in time to catch some pizza and listen to Josh Marinacci talk about JavaFX. JavaFX looks very cool for developing rich applications deliverable over the web (or locally). It makes applets not suck, and UI development looks surreally easy. My notes from last night: * Sdk will be available on http://JavaFX.com * Linux support not ready yet! Trajedy!!! "we are comitted to supporting it!" * New site will be cut over on Thursday. (I think Josh is doing it before he gets on a plane?) * Inkscape plugins by campus? ambassador? in Brazil Very frustrated it won't be available on Linux right away. For Mac will require 10.5+. requires Firefox 3 and IE 7. I think but am not sure that Safari will work. More...More spam viruses targeting Windows
Wed Oct 29 08:14:00 CDT 2008
As Microsoft slowly improves its software, the viruses still target human fallibility. My father just spent a few weeks without a fully-functioning workstation because of virus-infested Microsoft software. This morning I got a virus sent from the comcast.net ISP, titled "Your Statement number: 330709." In it, we see a short message like thisOne-click deploy/configure for J2EE stack
Mon Oct 27 20:24:00 CDT 2008
Today was supposed to be get-home-early-and-stirfry-pork-broccoli. I'm working on a new deploy mechanism. We have 20-25 servers that we need to be able to one-click-install-and-configure the front two-thirds of a J2EE software stack, including IIS->Resin running on Windows, JBoss on Linux. My predecessor has a mouse-trap-game of ant scripts involving telnet to do it. "As long as nothing goes wrong, it works every time." More...apache commons exec
Mon Oct 27 13:24:00 CDT 2008
Not finding an available commons-exec module in the maven repos, but found one by criticalsection.org. Thanks guys!Wicket quick start
Mon Oct 27 09:02:00 CDT 2008
Evaluating [wicket](http://wicket.apache.org/quickstart.html) via a maven quickstart. More...jConsole and jmx
Fri Oct 17 09:20:00 CDT 2008
I now have a real-time peek into heap and non-heap memory usage on a production server. PermGen dooms us. More...Learning Idioms
Thu Oct 16 15:49:00 CDT 2008
There's learning idioms and there's learning idioms. Learning idioms, as in gaining knowledge of idioms, in a natural language as well as programming language. I don't know that it is a specific skill, but it is definitely a general quality that is very useful in becoming productive in a new language. I have to think the two are related. Made me think if idioms of learning. Will have to contemplate this. Generalized learning idioms might be useful in AI, but then might be useful in the real world, too, especially if you like to over-think things. More...NFJS wrapup
Thu Oct 16 15:46:00 CDT 2008
wrap up some straggler blog notes about nfsf. git: Version control very popular among the presentorgencia? (presentatti?) seemed uncomfortably unstructured, but will have to look into it. Brian Geotz's are always great, and the Java Memory Model talk was worth the time. This will become more important as we look at things like terracotta. Architecture and Scaling by Ken Sipe inspired me to set up the scaling lab at work and get some real numbers out of our application. Leading Agile Projects by David Hussman. I think what I need next in my career is some bone-head manager training. My people leading and direction skills are not geared to what I am having to deal with at work right now. Ted Neward was using the Komodo editor in a pinch during his magic show act. In the roundtable/grilling/QA, one of the presenters mentioned Bill Gates going on a reading weekend. I thought this was a full week. I was right, and it even has a name:[Think Week](http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/30/news/newsmakers/gates_howiwork_fortune/index.htm). I need to google a bunch of things, including * [VisualVM](https://visualvm.dev.java.net/) for a much more humane and luxurious interface to your vm. * [BTrace](https://btrace.dev.java.net/) dynamic trace tool for Java * the [Hawthorne effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect) * Ceremony vs. Essence blog posts by Stu Hollaway * youtube Mythbusters: CPU/GPU, * [Kingdom of Nouns](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html) * which lead to [Kay's remark](http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/017019.html) * and the [Nice language](http://nice.sourceforge.net/) * InfoQ podcsts I'll update this post with links as I go. Did you know you can just randomly put curly braces in a Java class, outside of a method. Uhh. Kind of a party trick. I'm not sure if it's gross or not. More...APC UPS's fail
Tue Oct 14 14:00:00 CDT 2008
I have now had two APC UPS's fail on me. Not battery failure, I mean the electronics die. Very frustrating. I'll try Tripplite and will avoid APC UPS's. I don't need this. I have a life and I have things to do. More...Playing with TerraCotta 2.7.0
Tue Oct 14 09:41:00 CDT 2008
I am playing with [Terracotta](http://www.terracotta.org/) clustering, the way it should be: on different machines. ## Obstacle 1 - Binding to non-localhost address 1. edit top level tc-config.xml <server> entry to bind to the public address 2. Add a server line to the ClusteredHelloWorld/tc-config.xml to specify the server at that address ## Obstacle 2 - Remote terracotta admin console access Solution: 1. Double check that the RMI stubs handed out are pointing to the resolvable hostname and not localhost or myhostname.local. See [this helpful blog on hostname resolution on linux](http://tech.mangot.com/roller/dave/entry/worlds_collide_rmi_vs_linux) 2. Enable authentication. admin console reports a timeout, but you are able to telnet to the port just fine, ruling out firewall issues. Server's jmx is apparently handing out stubs, but still no joy. Turn on authentication and make sure the properties are set up, and admin console will prompt you for a username and password. See [terracotta's jmx guide](http://www.terracotta.org/confluence/display/docs1/JMX+Guide#JMXGuide-authentication). Would be nice if admin console helped diagnose this. ## Conclusion - promising Got the HelloClusteredWorld example going on two different machines hitting the same cluster. It's a brain-dead hammering of a clustered object so I can see some performance grief, but it seems to be working find. This looks very promising. I am going to have to try some non-trivial prototypes. Next stop: learn about ehcache. More...Dr. Bart Childs right again: Network Attached Memory
Tue Oct 14 09:18:00 CDT 2008
My last year (1995) at Texas A&M University computer science, I had the pleasure of taking a seminar guided by Dr. Childs. One of the things he mentioned was coming was network memory. Your program will be able to address memory locations that refer to memory not on your machine, but over the network on a different machine. Today, 2008, I am playing with Terracotta at work. It is intriguing. While the fallacies of network computing still apply, this is an interesting approach to clustering an object graph. It is a wonderful time to be a developer. It is still profitable. The technology makes leaps on an almost overwhelming pace which increase my productivity. My children will probably never know CORBA, DCOM/COM+/OLE. More...SIGSEGV (0xb) at pc=0x0625665c Eclipse
Thu Oct 09 11:00:00 CDT 2008
Today, out of the blue, after months of working just fine, I started getting the dreadedn800 FAIL!
Mon Oct 06 21:39:00 CDT 2008
upgraded OS. Now Rebooting all the time! Boo! 4.2008.32-5 Bad! More...Hacking the JDK
Tue Sep 30 13:55:00 CDT 2008
Notes from Ted Neward's *Hacking the JDK* NFJS/NESS 2008 Ballsy presentation. format: Audience picked from lists and Ted did it. * Binary hacking * modifying the JVM settings at runtime * changing the JDK security policy at runtime * call private mthods, get/set private fields * load code remotely from an http server and other place * ignore CLASSPATH and -Djava.class.path * slipping your own clases ahead of thE jdk'S * Modifying byte code during load * embedding the JDK in your own (native) code - Source hacking * modifying the Java launcher (java.exe) * modifying the java class library * modifying the java compiler * modifying the JVM see slides More...Viva la Javolution
Tue Sep 30 12:20:00 CDT 2008
NFJS NESS Notes from Brian Sletton's talk *Viva la Javolution* This was primarily about Javalution, a kit and api useful for producing java code with predictable performance, important for embedded systems. Not useful for my current use, however a spun-off project, JScience, contains a UOM api which may prove useful. I had talked with Scott Davis about his talk about YSlow and reviewed the slides. It looked like I could pick up on the aspects of the tool, and make use of it and the techniques it mentions on my own. More...Branding build version into manifest and retrieving with Package.getSpecificationVersion
Thu Sep 25 16:14:00 CDT 2008
You would expect this to be straight forward but it isn't quite all there. Even then, there is a slew of bugs in the Sun Java bug parade that are worth looking at. 1. the Implementation-XXX and Speicification-XXX must be in a section for the package 2. the section name is slash separated and *MUST* have a trailing slash. 3. some of the docs and specs reference Package-XXX but we don't see this "manifesting" itself (*nyuck nyuck nyuck*). More...RESTful and Resource-oriented computing (ROC) links from Jeremy Deane
Wed Sep 24 15:44:00 CDT 2008
Steve, We spoke at the NFJS symposium this past weekend and you had expressed interest in ROC. Here are some links to ROC and NetKernel: * [RESTful Web Services By Leonard Richardson](http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529260/) * [RESTful Web Services vs. WS-* Web Services By Olaf Zimmermann](http://www.jopera.org/files/www2008-restws-pautasso-zimmermann-leymann.pdf) * [REST Anti-Patterns by Stefan Tilkov](http://www.infoq.com/articles/rest-anti-patterns) * [Restlet Overview by Sean Landis](http://www.ujug.org/stuff/Restlet.pdf) * [Introduction to Resource-Oriented Computing](http://www.1060research.com/resources/docs/IntroductionToResourceOrientedComputing-1.pdf) * [NetKernel - Resource Oriented Middleware](http://www.1060.org/) * [A RESTful ESB implemented using NetKernel by Jeremy Deane (shameless plug)](http://www.infoq.com/articles/netkernel-casestudy) I am sure you had a great time this past weekend but I bet you are glad to be back in Texas holding your newborn ;) Jeremy DeaneTechnical Architect
Collaborative Consulting
Thank you, Jeremy!More...
Nutch 0.9 quoted with " must be escaped
Wed Sep 24 09:35:00 CDT 2008
The search mechanism in our wiki at work stinks, so I've been playing with [nutch](http://lucene.apache.org/nutch/). I dropped it's war into tomcat and set up the nutch-site.xml as described in the wiki, but ran into this:Memory fragmentation on Windows XP?
Fri Sep 19 13:34:00 CDT 2008
We have a java program (java 5 VM) that we are starting up with -Xmx1500m. Occasionally, if the machine has been running for several days, java will fail to start with a message along the lines of "cannot start VM, unable to allocate heap". This is on a Windows XP machine. If I reboot the machine, the process starts without problems. If I look at free memory using sysinterals process explorer, in both cases I see sufficient available physical memory to satisfy the request, so I suspect that the problem is that the Windows memory space has become fragmented. Do you have any suggestions for ways that I can 1) confirm that suspicion and/or 2) solve the problem without rebooting the machine on some regular basis? Have you heard other reports of this? More...notes on Agile Mgmt & Mgnging agility - Davis Hussman
Thu Sep 18 19:33:00 CDT 2008
Also see slides, NFJS NESS 2008 More...Notes: Agile Architecture by David Hussman
Thu Sep 18 18:59:00 CDT 2008
Also see slides from NoFluff/JustStuff Boston NESS 2008. More...Obama: "I am not for selective vaccination"
Tue Sep 09 08:23:00 CDT 2008
[http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/09/obama-i-am-not.html](http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/09/obama-i-am-not.html) wow. Never thought I would be a one-issue voter, but this nailed it. I now have no choice but to vote for McCain and Palin. I hope they are enough of a change that they can un-do the damage to the Justice system done by Bush. http://www.ageofautism.com/2008/09/hey-obama-what.html More...Chrome vs. MonkeyGTD
Sun Sep 07 20:51:00 CDT 2008
I was real happy that Chrome's V8 Javascript engine sped up MonkeyGTD. But, I ran into a problem: the security does not let it save to disk. The memory usage is interesting:Sleepin' A.boy, Zeppelin, Googlin' and JBoss
Tue Sep 02 16:42:00 CDT 2008
I'm on vacation...welllll...I'm home helping take care of the new baby and sick boy this week. I'm googlin' and reading my O'Reilly JBoss at Work as well as an EJB 3.0 book borrowed from a co-worker. I had iTunes playing A.boy's "Sleep" play-list with the visualizer on, and that kept him in bed until the Pavlovian response put him to sleep. He woke for a bit when I waived a juice bottle in front of him, viciously attached to it, so at least his fluid intake is not zero. I couldn't take any more "sleepytime" so now I've got disk IV from the Zeppelin box set playing. Read about Google's Chrome and it sounds pretty neat. More back story here. I'm hoping Firefox and Chrome boost each other. Microsoft's (spit!) Internet Exploder (hock-spit!) version 8 supposedly also breaks browser tabs into processes for better resiliency. With the exception of the consulting laptop, none of my computers run software from the oppressive monopoly. I'm really looking forward to Chrome and hope it will integrate well with Ubiquity, Twitter, Delicious and of course Google apps. Chrome is definitely snappy. More...Ubiquity script for LJ
Mon Sep 01 08:59:00 CDT 2008
From the tutorial, I've pieced together a script for Ubiquity that starts an lj entry with the selected text. I'm sure it could be improved upon easily. More...Must...resist....research...
Fri Aug 29 10:00:00 CDT 2008
I need another project like a hole in the head. Scott Davis had mentioned NetKernel in his RESTful talk. Then, I ran across the "shared libraries vs. statically linked libraries" debate with mentioned plan9. I've run across plan9 before. NetKernel is a framework which seems to treat the key internals of your application as network resources, each identifiable with a URI. Where it can really start to pay off is in the caching. It is intriguing and I think about it whenever Clark mention he is working on XYZ on the map server. plan9 is a research platform out of AT&T labs, the birth place of UNIX and many of the concepts in Linux. plan9 has some strange but intriguing approaches to solving computing problems. I'm in a lull on the Performance and Reliability project. If I can find my next course of action while our instrumentation efforts cook up some data, I can get back on track. Must not get sucked into any more strange research projects. More...I'm a dad, again!
Tue Aug 19 22:06:00 CDT 2008
Morgann was born at 3:28 on August 19 at our house outside of Henly and Dripping Springs. She weighs 8lb 9oz and is 20.75" long.Technologically Satisfying Week So Far
Wed Aug 13 13:31:00 CDT 2008
This week I wrote a command line utility that uses JMX over RMI to hit a custom mbean that reports the version info branded into the manifest of some jars and ears we deploy to our app servers. I'm now using maven to build and release it, which was somewhat painful when I got myself stuck into a corner. It's packaged up with one-jar, and I've also made a short executable script in a tools/bin directory that calls java -jar ourjar.one-jar.jar. Right now I am reading about the merge tracking capabilities of subversion 1.5. I hope that will save some headaches. Next task will be to change our build system to build jars, ears and a war, brand them with build and version info, and check them into subversion. Yeah, don't ask how we *have been* doing it. ## Maven deploying grief I think, where I went wrong, is that I prepared the release before I had run site and site was failing because the connection url in the pom was not quite right. We'll see if that was it. The release:prepare step went ok, but release:perform failed, complaining that distributionManagement was missing repo tags. I had to take the naughty step of fixing the pom.xml on the subversion tag for the release, and not in the trunk. Ooops. Then things got sane again. Off to the dentist. Tough call which is worse: maven, ant, or dental cleaning. More...Nokia n800 OS2008 Diablo
Sun Aug 10 17:26:00 CDT 2008
I flashed the tablet to the latest OS2008, Diablo, and I'm beginning to think I should go back to the previous version for a bit, until MaemoPad+ is ready for it. Had a devil of a time getting repos set up for it. More...Long Live the Monte Cristo!
Thu Jul 31 20:50:00 CDT 2008
I heard on the radio that Bennigan's Grill and Tavern chain has entered bankruptcy and is closing many of its restaurants. I don't know if the Austin restaurants are closing. Bennigan's was where I was granted my honorary womanhood. My old friends from the Shire of the Shadowlands used to gather there after a day at TRF. I fondly remember Cedric and Hawk playing outside. The margarita was not special. What was special, was The Monte Cristo. >A delicious combination of ham and turkey, plus Swiss and American cheeses on wheat bread. Lightly battered and fried until golden. Dusted with powdered sugar and served with red raspberry preserves for dipping. I like the Monte Cristo, far too much, and have limited myself to no more than 1 per year, as it supposedly ranks up there with Chicken-fried Bacon Sausage Alfredo Fettucine1 in the Heart Attack on a Plate list. I recognized a couple of years ago that I could not count on Bennigan's to provide Monte Cristo's after the nuclear holocaust, so I practiced making my own, from scratch, including home made bread, but with store bought cheeses, ham and turkey. It was necessary to pin the sandwich together with toothpics while frying. I didn't have raspberry jelly, but homemade Mustang grape jelly worked very well. Hmmm. Was pretty good. So good, it inspired a short story that I'll post at some point. I missed getting a Monte Cristo and a chocolate shake at Bennigan's for my birthday this year, and I kinda feel bad about it. Silly, I know. I hope the Austin outfits make it. Saw the doc about my shoulder yesterday, and the nurse congrat'd me losing 20 lbs since my appointment for a fever (prob sinus infection) in June. I think their scale was off. How much could a Monte Cristo weigh, anyway? :) -s 1 I made that up, but now it sounds gooooood. More...Scientists figuring out the Antikythera Mechanism
Wed Jul 30 20:49:00 CDT 2008
After a closer examination of a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology known as the Antikythera Mechanism, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games. Story is [here](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/science/31computer.html?_r=1&oref=slogin). At some point, some museum store will be selling the recreations. Would be cool for the tower. Can go right next to the cryptext. More...Cuil not cool
Mon Jul 28 10:11:00 CDT 2008
Tried the alleged Google competitor search engine [Cuil](http://www.cuil.com) and was entirely disappointed. Please try again. More...Bill Gates on sabotaging ACPI for Linux
Mon Jul 28 06:09:00 CDT 2008
>> From: Bill Gates > Sent: Sunday, January 24, 1999 8:41 AM > To: Jeff Weslerinen, Ben Fathi > CC: Carl Stork (Exchange); Nathan Myhrvold; > Eric Rudder > Subject: ACPI Extensions >> > One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn't try and make the "ACPI" extensions somehow Windows specific. > >It seems unfortuante if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. > >Maybe there is no way to avoid this problem but it does bother me. > >Maybe we could define the APIs so that hey work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. > >Or maybe we could patent something related to this. [Here is the e-mail from the Iowa case](http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf) also see [this thread in ubuntuforums](http://ubuntu-virginia.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869249) In which more-manly-than-skelter Ryan finds the sabot in the BIOS, provides a fix and negotiates with Foxconn after suggesting Foxconn deliberately sabotaged their BIOS to destroy Linux ACPI. > I saw you targeting Linux with an intentionally broken ACPI table, you also have one for NT and ME, a separate one for newer NT variants like 2000, XP, Vista, and 2003/2008 Server, I'm sure that if you actually wrote to Intel ACPI specs instead of whatever quirks you can get away with for 8 versions of Windows and then go to the trouble of giving a botched table to Linux (How much *is* Microsoft paying you?) it would end up working a lot better, but I have this idea you don't want it to. More...
Family Bowl fundraiser
Tue Jul 22 12:21:00 CDT 2008
Hi all, Dream of Hopes Ranch is a camp for children and adults with special needs. DOHR is having a Candlelight Family Bowl fundraiser this Sunday, July 27th, from 1:00 to 4:00 at Westgate Lanes, 2701 William Cannon at Westgate. The price is $16.00 for adults and $12.00 for children, which includes lunch at 1:00 pm. All proceeds from the fundraiser will go towards building a work center at the Dream of Hopes Ranch in Buda. Dianne Doggett More...274-PPR
Tue Jul 22 09:06:00 CDT 2008
Discourteous driver: 274-PPR More...Big Sky Farm Campus Launch Party Art Show & Auction
Tue Jul 22 08:54:00 CDT 2008
Art Show & Auction featuring Richard Wawro and other Autistic Savant Artists Music s •ÛÊWine s Gourmet Appetizers Friday August 8, 5-9 pm Tickets at Entrance $20 Big Sky Farm Campus Launch Party Trail Ride s Kids Craft Tepee s Entertainment s Games s Food Saturday August 9, 11 am-5 pm Tickets at Entrance $20 Directions : WWW.BIGSKYFARM.4T.COM More...Connye Sue Suehs - January 7, 1946 - July 11, 2008
Fri Jul 11 23:29:00 CDT 2008
Connye Sue Davis Suehs of Castroville died July 11, 2008 in Hondo, Texas at the age of 62. Connye Sue was born January 7, 1946 in Sweetwater, Texas. She and Charles B. Suehs of Castroville, Texas were married on June 11, 1967. Connye was active in the community and was involved in the following organizations: Castroville Historic Review Board, Charter Member of Castro Colonies Historic Association, Alsatian Dancers of Texas, Castroville City Council, the Quilters Guild, Gourmet Dinner Club, and the Conservation Society of Castroville. Connye was quite an artist. Her Alsatian designs were originals. She helped design the booth used by the Castroville Chamber of Commerce at the first Folklife Festival and helped design the Alsatian Christmas decorations the were at Houston Square in Castroville. She is survived by her husband of 41 years, Charles B. Suehs, her son, Charles Steven Suehs and daughter-in-law Kelley Metzger, grandson Charles Anthony Metzger Suehs all of Dripping Springs, TX, daughter, Carey Meredith Suehs and son-in-law Thierry Boudemaghe, granddaughters Gabrielle Virginia Boudemaghe, and Emmanuelle Therese Boudemaghe all of Moussac, France; three brothers, Calvin R. Davis II of San Antonio, Joel Craig Davis and sister-in-law Carmella Davis of San Diego, CA, John Patton Davis and sister-in-law Mary Davis of Copperas Cove, TX; step mother, Ruth Davis of Fredericksburg, TX and numerous nieces and nephews. Visitation will be Wednesday, July 16, 2008 from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Tondre-Guinn Funeral Home, Castroville. Rosary will be recited Wednesday, July 16, 2008 at 7:00 p.m. at Tondre-Guinn Funeral Home. Funeral Service will be Thursday, July 17, 2008 at 10:30 a.m. at Tondre-Guinn Funeral Home. Memorials may be given in her memory to the American Cancer Society or Friends of the Castroville Regional Park. www.tondre-guinn.com
More...
Week of obscure bugs
Thu Jun 19 10:14:00 CDT 2008
The forkmode='once' test speed-up caused a bug to come to the surface only on Windows machines. On Linux (and other unix-like) file systems, you can delete a file while a process has it open, as deleting a file really translates to unlinking an inode. The data on disk is kept in nodes with reference counts which will be returned to the pool when all referencing inodes and handles are released. This was once a way to hide a data file on disk, create and open it, delete it, and use it. Windows file system does not behave the same way and attempting to delete a file that is open will result in an error at most and a failure to delete at minimum. This came into play because the hxtt dbf driver does not release the file right away when you close the sql connection. There is a property delayClose with a default value of 3 seconds. Our test was closing the database connection and turning around to delete the file. Works fine on Linux. Windows, this causes an error. So, we can sleep for a few seconds in the test (ugh!) or we can set delayClose to 0. Will be interesting to see if that results in a performance problem. Then was the case of the test passing everywhere but only failing on one developer's machine. Turns out we have a test sensitive to time zone and his machine's time zone was set to North Dakota/New Salem. We have no idea how that got set. Still looking at the details on the date creation in the code under test. I need to get some things done and could use some time back on the project instead of on 'strange bug safari.' More...Appreciation at work
Tue Jun 17 16:16:00 CDT 2008
My team surprised me today with chocolate cake and ice cream! yummy! Why? I reduced the build time, primarily for tests. We had fallen into the old trap of forking junit per test. The junit task in ant defaults to forkmode='perTest' which starts a new jvm for each test. Changing this across our modules to be forkmode='once' brought the test (unit + integration) time from 14 minutes 44 seconds down to 4 minutes 47 seconds. More...code_swarm
Tue Jun 17 13:14:00 CDT 2008
[Michael Ogawa](http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/) has produced an "organic visualization" of commits to Eclipse, Apache, Postgresql and Python called [code_swarm](http://vis.cs.ucdavis.edu/~ogawa/codeswarm/). Really cool. He's working on cleaning up the code and open-sourcing it.
This should be fun running on our own code.
code_swarm - Eclipse (short ver.) from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo. More from the vidi department found [here](http://vidi.cs.ucdavis.edu/research) and another video [here](http://vidi.cs.ucdavis.edu/research/videos/stargate). More...
Bunch of Clowns
Tue Jun 17 09:00:00 CDT 2008
Cue the circus music. More...remember to blog the happy things
Mon Jun 16 12:05:00 CDT 2008
I need to remember the bright spots, few as they are in my current dark times. This morning, I dreamed he was crying from far away. I jumped out of bed and into the living room. He was already working on juice and breakfast. I went back to bed, rolled and stretched, showered the poison ivy some more, got dressed and stepped back into the livingroom. He was in his room and jumped up to the gate, signed enthusiastically "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!". He makes the sign with his index finger instead of the 5-hand with thumb at the temple. This has the effect of a pun, shouting "Think! Think!" or "you're not all here, are you!" I'm thinkin' as hard as I can, son! I am! I am! More...Quietly, Slowly
Sun Jun 15 21:22:00 CDT 2008
Alzheimer's for Children More...Putnam/Putnumm's Law
Mon Jun 09 11:08:00 CDT 2008
heard this in a stand-up summary of a talk. Mark R said it boiled down to # of bugs in a software project proportional to the number of developers. For instance, if a software project had 5 developers and n number of bugs, than the same software project with 10 developers would have 2n bugs. I can see how that could be approximately true. More...Next batch of signs
Mon Jun 09 10:42:00 CDT 2008
I was asked to get a list of signs I want for Anthony and I. More...Could not find Chloe's Place
Mon Jun 09 10:31:00 CDT 2008
When I mentioned my son to our friend Shawna, she mentioned *Chloe's Place* in Austin, but I have not been able to find it. I found *Hibabi's Hutch*, though and we actually drove by it last night! More...OutOfMemoryError:PermGen
Wed Jun 04 11:24:00 CDT 2008
Our tests started getting slow, taking a long time to execute, and then they started failing with OutOfMemoryError's. That this started happening with our adoption of Hibernate was not a coincidence. This is not to say that Hibernate is at fault. The PermGen ClassLoader problem with the Sun JVM is now known enough. In short, the Sun JVM loads Classloader's and Classes directly into the PermGen or permanent generation. This collection of objects is for objects which, in theory, would never need unloading and therefore they are not checked during the sweep. I think the idea is that the gc sweep will go faster if the gc does not bother checking objects that will not ever be eligible. JRockit does not do this, so the PermGen problem will not manifest itself there, though, in the long term, memory leaks around class loaders will eventually show up. More...Soy cheese not casein free
Thu May 29 19:33:00 CDT 2008
If you are buying soy cheese to avoid casein, even one that says "VEGAN" on it, check the ingredients. Seriously. (and I've been spelling it quesin all this time, duh) More...Stink-Eye is Free
Sun May 11 20:56:00 CDT 2008
Shanon was headed up to Scarborough Fair in Waxahache to help with the Last Chance Forever raptor show and kindly met me in Kyle with Stink-Eye. Special treat for me... More...StinkEye is Still Alive
Tue Apr 29 12:42:00 CDT 2008
I called LastChanceForEver and Rex reports: Guarded condition, eating on his own, not out of the woods yet. http://www.lastchanceforever.org/ More...Rasputin Stink-Eye the Owl
Wed Apr 23 16:47:00 CDT 2008
I was grumpily wrestling hoses in the dark with a flash light to water the dog and the beans in the front yard which are getting nibbled by something. I turned on the hose to the trough having noted it was low, about 2" deep, did a quick flashlight pass to check for trapped possums, squirrels, etc, when whatever was in there rotated its head 180 degrees and looked back at me. "What?! Awwwwwwwwww" (how cute and tragic) followed by "dammit!" More...Monkey GTD
Sun Apr 20 09:38:00 CDT 2008
I've been using MonkeyGTD for, oh, maybe almost a year. Last night I made a copy so I could split work from personal stuff, even though MonkeyGTD has realms for doing just that. The performance problem is just too much, even on my better machine. More...SMS phishing targeting Bank Franklin
Mon Apr 14 18:56:00 CDT 2008
got an SMS message phishing for details for a bank I don't have an account for. The criminals are using the phone number 818-476-5000 More...Pizza Crust Dough
Sun Apr 13 08:37:00 CDT 2008
* 1 2/3 c. water * 2T. oil * 2T. sugar * 1t. salt * 2T. dry milk * 4 1/2 c. bread flour * 2 t. yeast 425 degrees F More...Whole Wheat Bread, adapted
Thu Apr 10 20:01:00 CDT 2008
* 3/4 c. buttermilk * 1/4 c. water * 1L egg * 2T oil * 2c. bread flour * 1c. wheat flour * 2T. dark brown sugar, optionally + 2t * 2t. gluten * 1 1/2 t. salt * 2 1/2t breach machine yeast More...Today's Deep Dive
Thu Mar 27 11:21:00 CDT 2008
We were trying to use HXTT's driver to copy some data out of Microsoft Access. We were getting a MethodNotFoundException when getting tables from the DatabaseMetaData. Did they implement this? SteveD pointed out Squirrel uses this driver just fine. Dug into squirrel source code to find out how it is using HXTT Access drivers. There is special code for TDS/Merlia drivers, but not for HXTT Access. I don't think we have sent in a support request yet. Googled, found a support request from HXTT from someone with a similar problem (MethodNotFoundException) and mention that they were using two HXTT drivers at the same time. HXTT response was to suggest they download new copies of both drivers but copies released on the same day. This reinforces suspicion that the problem lies in the obfuscation of the Java byte code by HXTT. I removed the DBF 3.0 drivers from the eclipse project build class path and the Access drivers now magically work. Time for lunch. More...Notes from Austin Java Users Group Meeting, 25 March 2008
Wed Mar 26 06:59:00 CDT 2008
## Conversations * Etan mentioned terracotta, martials objects across clustered jvm * Ran into a former Landmark intern now JBoss officianado giving the presentation tonight: Prabhat Jha, worked with SteveD, Matt, Caroline, Dan, Wes. ## OSGI in Short - Kevin Graham * Live updates, on-the-fly unloading of jar/bundle/classes and upgrading. * Not the solution for distributed environments ## JBoss Portal - Prabhat Jha * content aggregation * perspectives customized for users or roles * Apache JackRabbit * CMS * Workflow * jboss.org * Internally, they use Hudson for continuous integration. More...SprintPCS service rep fixes agreement date
Wed Mar 12 09:17:00 CDT 2008
Just got off the phone with a helpful, polite service rep who took the time to call me back after I left voice mail on the phone number provided by The Consumerist. I explained that * our account was terminated early in late December 2007 or early January 2008 without initiation or provocation from either me or my wife. * phone stopped working on 3 Jan 2008 * called service on 4 January 2008, asked WTH? they said they fixed it. * I asked, and that rep assured me that this was not triggering a new agreement. * we logged in through Sprint/Nextel's website last night 11 March 2008 and noticed that * New agreement expiration of January 2010. We did *NOT* consent to that, and were assured by that rep that this would not happen * no data plan for my phone The rep * said she put the agreement date back to March 2008 * wife phone is not on an agreement * the data plan is there, not sure what the issue was This is, by far, the best experience with Sprint I've had in two years. It appears that the VP in charge of stopping the sinking is gaining traction in his efforts. More...More collections
Wed Mar 12 08:11:00 CDT 2008
The best code is the code you do not have to test, write and maintain yourself. * [Apache Commons Collections](http://commons.apache.org/collections/) * [Google Collections](http://code.google.com/p/google-collections/) (Thank you, again, to Alan Berezin.) I am not *worried* over "trusting other people's code." The benefits far out weigh the minor danger which is easily mitigated through automated testing. More...Thoughts on the net on the Guice factory issues
Wed Mar 12 08:04:00 CDT 2008
My CTO sent me this. We are/were having issues cleaning up our code and considering moving some code to a DI using Guice. We have some objects constructed with both some injectable collaborators and some instanciation-time parameters. * [assisted injection with Guice](missing) * [curried methods with Guice](http://slesinsky.org/brian/code/guice_with_curry.html) * [call-back parameters using Guice](http://slesinsky.org/brian/code/guice_callbacks_should_take_parameters.html?seemore=y) More...Sprint crosses the line
Tue Mar 11 19:55:00 CDT 2008
SprintPCS has commit the following actions * Terminated our account without provocation or notice. * Failed to provide service per the agreement that was in place. * Signed us up for a different account, without our consent or our notice. * Removed our dataplan which prevented us from sending out sonogram pics of our daughter. That is it. We're done. The search for the new carrier begins and the war over the alleged and illegally applied early termination fee begins. What ever you do, avoid Sprint. More...Random notes of things to research
Mon Mar 10 12:46:00 CDT 2008
* groovy support in maven, for maven, by maven * worldwind - NASA * possible project - fox-hunt web-app using whirlwind * JavaFX * ProcessBuilder/Process Start * bytonic.de * JDK6.dev.java.net/6u * Exselsior Jet-compiler * Drools * google diffs in object graphs * java-based services on Windows machines More...Austin Java User's Group Meeting notes, 26 Feb 2008
Mon Mar 10 12:26:00 CDT 2008
Preamble, what's new in the Java World More...List equals == operator bug in Groovy
Mon Mar 10 11:50:00 CDT 2008
[Eric Anderson](http://testinfected.net) and I found this at work when an assertion in a test failed unexpectedly. We had extended ArrayList and overridden its equals(Object) method, but the assert a == b
did not call our equals() method (nor did it pass) while
assert a.equals(b) behaved as expected.
It turns out there is a bug in the Groovy interpretor version 1.5.4 that calls the ArrayList.equals() method directly instead of the overridden equals method. This may apply to every implementor of the List interface; we are not sure yet.
The thread on the groovy users list is [here](http://www.nabble.com/Overriding-equals%28%29-on-a-subclass-does-not-work-as-expected-tt15904445.html).
Beware the overloading of equals() if you implement List.
More...
Noooo! They killed her!!
Wed Mar 05 21:02:00 CST 2008
Jericho Spoilers after the cut...I warned you. More...Grandpa's Favorite Tune
Sun Feb 24 19:01:00 CST 2008
"No. No. You sit right there. The munchkins will take me up." "Dad, why doesn't Sam take...." "Because I enjoy spending time with my grand children!" he grumped. (Chuckled) "Are you going to fart the entire way this time?" Grandpa glared. "I knew I should have asked Sam to fix me a liver and onions omlette this mornin." He wheeled his chair out the door and down the ramp to the path. ---- More...Sprint termination
Tue Feb 05 09:39:00 CST 2008
Sprint is hell-bent on getting rid of my wife and I as customers. Our account has not survived the transition to the year 2008. (I expected glitches at 2000, 2012 and 2038). Something has initiated a termination, and customer service can't seem to figure it out. Around Jan 2 and Jan 3, I tried making calls to my wife, and to the feed store, only to get a recording about how my carrier had not set up my phone or if I was a Sprint customer, I should call Sprint PCS customer service. It happened again on the way home and since I needed to talk to my wife, I called customer service (*2) and asked them what was up. I got some questions about a refurbished phone. > "Uh, no, this is the phone you sold me." > > "Oh, we're very sorry about the inconvenience I have reactivated your phone." > > "Oh, Really? Why was it turned off?" > > "I duh know. Looks like a refurbished phone." February rolls around and the bill comes in. Wife IM's me: > *You canceled Sprint wtf?* You guessed right if you guessed "early termination fee." My wife spent hours on the phone with the service rep who **still** was not able to provide an explanation. He did manage to get most of the charges reversed but was still wrestling with prorated charges when he and my wife ended the call. Still no explanation on what triggered the termination. I am a software developer, and I want to hear about the bug, the solution, and the goin' forward. It is bad enough that Apple and AT&T are spanking the industry with the iPhone, that Gizmo, Skype and Vonage are dipping in to all phone business. Treating customers like this just doesn't make business sense. Spontaneous termination drives paying customers away. I am lazy and I don't *want* to make the leap to a new carrier. It means putting a $300-$400 repeater on our home mast. Sprint and its customer service are forcing us farther down the plank. At the end of that plank is a luxury yacht. When ever she gets a chance, she waves her StarTac hand-me-down phone at me and says, "Andi's died. This could die at any moment." One of these days, she's going to hurl it into the stone hearth. If that happens, I will not be angry. I'll hold her hand because I'll know she understands. More...The Workbench Book
Wed Jan 30 20:23:00 CST 2008
The other three developers on my team are also woodworkers. I explained it was time for me to start thinking about building the work bench, which lead Don to lend me a [very cool book about work benches](amazon:0918804760). Fascinating, and will take me a while to get through. The book had a chapter on Schnitzelbanken. My grandmother tells stories about singing the Schnitzelbank song. Here is [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnitzelbank). Here is [the restaurant, and the poster](http://www.schnitzelbank.com/poster.htm) Now I've got the [Animaniacs version of the song](amazon:B00000336P) stuck in my head. -s More...AJUG Jan 2008 - Austin Java Users Group meeting notes
Wed Jan 30 07:54:00 CST 2008
It was "open mic" night so I initially was not enthusiastic, until word came out that Eitan Suez was going to be talking about what he has been doing lately with JMatter. Presenters were 1. Robert Reeves presenting Phurnace's 'Deliver' configuration tool for web app servers. 2. Eitan Suez presenting latest on JMatter 3. Ernist Hill who gave a quick overview of SCALA More...Helios causing cracks in the Microsoft matrix
Tue Jan 22 12:49:00 CST 2008
Helios recently dropped by BestBuy and [freed some copper-tops](http://blog.lobby4linux.com/index.php?/archives/423-Yanking-the-Window-Shade.html) one of which really did not want to be flushed out of his pod. The disturbing thing was the guy was saying > Microsoft would not *allow* this as if Microsoft were a governing body or law enforcement agency. Funny. Disturbing. But still funny. Distributed arrogance carried by the marketing model has to be some sort of achievement. More...Time Off
Sun Dec 30 14:08:00 CST 2007
I noticed one of my co-workers IM stated: > Idle for 9 days 2 hours. Was good to take some time off. It's too bad our company forces us to burn vacation instead of letting us take it in meaningfully large blocks of time. More...SCO is delisted from NASDAQ
Thu Dec 27 12:04:00 CST 2007
SCO got the boot today. This really should have happened sooner. Yahoo informs me: > 'SCOX' is no longer valid. It has changed to SCOXQ.PK. indicating that SCO is now traded on the "pink sheets" with other "penny stocks" though I think this will not last long either. By Friday, Dec 28th (last trading day of 2007?) the stock had fallen to $0.065. Next year, I hope my stocking includes some criminal charges and convictions for naughty nasty people. More...DTrace at AustinJUG Christmas Party
Mon Dec 17 13:07:00 CST 2007
Austin Java User's Group gave an impressive demonstration of DTrace on Solaris. DTrace allows you to gather performance data on system calls, application servers, etc. without requiring re-building or even stopping and restarting the services or the kernel. I would have killed for this last year in the previous job. While DTrace itself is open source (free'nuf?) the instrumenting support module/provider for the kernel is not there for Linux...yet. That, and the flavor of *open* has led to SystemTap which is a similar approach to run-time instrumenting and performance diagnosis. There is a wiki page on profiling with SystemTap on the Nokia n800....*>blink<* I wonder what golden age of which technology will impress my two-year-old when he grows old enough. More...Presenting Data and Information, a Course by Edward Tufte
Mon Dec 17 12:21:00 CST 2007
Date: Dec 11, 2007 Included four books and course leaflet: * The Visual Display of Quantitative Information * Visual Explanations * Envisioning Information * Beautiful Evidence Attendees were asked to read the following before the course began: * *The Visual Display of Quantitative Information*, Introduction and chapter 1. * *Envisioning Information* Introduction and chapter 2. * *Beautiful Evidence*, Introduction and pages 12-45. I am frustrated with my notes. The course seemed to span different sections of the books and I am having to reconstruct an outline after the fact, as I did not have a take-home outline provided (which is ironic given one of my favorite take-home points is to provide something for the audience to take home). While some themes come out, they were not explicitly stated. Hmmm. More...OS2008 beta
Sun Dec 16 14:19:00 CST 2007
I'm trying out the OS2008 beta on my n800. Very nice so far. Enjoying the cleaner layout. Some menu icons (mail) are too dark. Best of all is that TiddlyWiki works (mostly) in the new browser. Looks like this one is mozilla based. Could that mean memory leaks? We shall see. So far, so good. I hope to try video out with Tim soon. Would be nice if skype supported video too. More to come... Update: basecamp works! More...jsMath
Fri Dec 14 09:39:00 CST 2007
[jsMath](http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/welcome.html) is a combination of javascript, fonts, and images that make working with math in the very broken HTML of today almost bearable (or beerable). Examples are [here](http://www.math.union.edu/~dpvc/jsMath/examples/Struik.html) More...Paul Offit's Stunning Failure
Fri Dec 14 09:26:30 CST 2007
Too busy guarding his millions of vaccine-earned dollars, Mr. Offit missed what could have been his finest hour: the discovery of an infectious agent responsible for stealing our childrens minds. Now it looks like someone else has found it. Thank goodness. You blew it, Offit. Hundreds of thousands of children suffered because of you. More...Sage
Fri Dec 14 09:21:00 CST 2007
A slashdot article alerted me to [Sage](http://sage.scipy.org/sage/), a mathematics program that has both a command-line and a web frontend for working with general, advanced, pure and applied mathematics. It appears to compete in the same space as Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB. I have fond memories of using the student version of [MathCad](http://images.google.com/images?q=mathcad&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi). More...Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
Mon Nov 05 14:45:00 CST 2007
We are skull-mates with an autistic ninja that will not talk to us. He is occasionally belligerent or racist. If you can refine and train him, you can do some amazing things, but watch out! Gotta know when to blink and when to take a moment. Good observations; application will be interesting. More...Regatta: Sailing for Leukemia Cure
Sun Oct 21 15:34:00 CDT 2007
Got this note from John Bertlette, sail maker in the Lake Travis area. This would be fun to participate in. Link http://www.active.com/donate/leukemiacupctx/rcJBartle John and Claudia write: ----- Claudia and John Bartlett's Race For a Cure Providing Help and Hope to Thousands of People Battling Cancer It's that time again and we are excited again to be racing to raise money to fund blood cancer research and to provide Leukemia and Lymphoma education and patient services. First, we want to say "Thank You!" to all of you that helped us last year as our boat raised almost $3,500.00. Your donations do make a difference. This year, we are racing again on October 20 and 21 in this year's Leukemia Cup Regatta on Lake Travis, and we could sure use your support. We're participating in the Regatta in honor of more than 712,000 Americans who are battling blood cancers. These people are the real heroes and we need your support to help accelerate cures and provide hope and support for patients and their families. More...Eclipse: paste_it_here
Fri Oct 05 19:29:00 CDT 2007
Boss found this feature in eclipse that will prove useful: I had 20 lines of javascript in a .js file and I wanted to cutpaste it into a string literal in java. String s = "PASTE_IT_HERE"; I figured this out: window -> preferences -> java -> editor -> typing Check: "Escape String when pasting into string literal" Poof, it works. It does incorrectly escape some javascript ( it converts var foo='bar' into var foo=\'bar\' ) so you have to touch up the results. Still, kinda nice. I wish it had been the default editor behavior More...Establishing Your Reward
Sun Sep 30 16:30:00 CDT 2007
Sections: 1. Momentum 2. Productivity 3. Cost 4. Ramp-up 5. Risk 6. Looking Ahead 7. Executive Summary ### Executive Summary * Guage ruby's growth: downloads, visionaries and emerging books * Cornerstone of ruby experience is productivity both short term and long term * Java's risk factors are perceived to be low because of dominant market share. (Me: is perceived the key word here?) * Project risk increases with time and complexity and Java fares poorly with both. * Java is an infrastructure language that's ill suited for many applications More...From Java to Ruby
Sun Sep 30 16:19:00 CDT 2007
*From Java to Ruby:What Every Manager Should Know* * by Bruce Tate * ISBN: 0-9766940-9-3 I'm reading this for the managerial perspective after reading *Beyond Java*. I'll tag my reading notes with FromJavaToRuby. More...Chapter 24: We feel overwhelmed. It isn't going to get any better
Sun Sep 30 16:06:00 CDT 2007
Yeah, its difficult but hopefully you can connect it to why programming is fun, if you think it is fun. Greenfield is no better because it replicates the problems without removing the old instances of the problems. Greenfield is not greener. Nothing can replace a good work environment with respectful people who know how to have fun. Don't let the code base get you down. Pick up some small projects to stir things up a bit. If morale is low on your team because of code quality, try getting the ugliest most obnoxious classes under test. This will build oases of good code. More...Ch23: How Do I Know That I'm Not Breaking Anything?
Sun Sep 30 15:53:00 CDT 2007
## How Do I Know That I'm Not Breaking Anything? Code is resilient and only breaks when we mess with it (or change underlying environment). Humans are primary introducers of bugs in code and code absorbs bugs from humans easily. This chapter discusses a few things to reduce risk when we edit. Some are mechanical but some are psychological. More...Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael C. Feathers
Tue Sep 25 20:43:00 CDT 2007
I am not keeping up with this in the book group at work. To really make use of it, I should go back, review the chapters. I'll try to type up my notes here. Spent some time looking for some static analysis java tools that will do some forward affect diagrams. ISBN 0-13-117705-2 More...iScream in iTerror when you macDropMe
Wed Sep 05 14:11:00 CDT 2007
Modern MacBooks have an accelerometer that hopefully allow the machine to detect that it is being dropped, so it can retract and park the heads before it hits the floor...hopefully. A co-worker showed off a screen saver that draws a collection of balls that roll to different sides of the screen depending on what angle the MacBook is held at. Given that they have all this, the MacBooks should be able to scream in terror when they are being dropped, and then whimper, cry or deliver an insult once they hit the floor. More...Agile Fortune
Wed Sep 05 13:57:00 CDT 2007
Snippets of the Agile Manifesto into a fortune file. More...Web Design Ideas
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