Grog's Blog

Pandora Moves to HTML5

2011-07-27T11:24:00.011-04:00

I love new things just as much as the next person. So I have to admit that I was intrigued when I saw the little banner above pop up above the normal Pandora music player in my browser.I clicked on the link to change to the new Pandora layout and was immediately greated with a splash screen, styled similarly to the Pandora mobile apps. I was immediatly struck by the better use of space that the

Cabbage Destroyed

2011-06-03T18:36:00.002-04:00

All of the cabbage that I planted was destroyed by some kind of caterpillar. I didn't notice anything at first except for a few plants that had been gnawed around the edges. Then when I started inspecting the interior of the plants to see if heads were forming, I noticed all kinds of little green caterpillars chewing away at the tiny, forming heads of cabbage.It kills me because they seemed to

Type Safe Criteria API for Hibernate

2011-05-08T22:10:00.005-04:00

I've started a library for a type-safe criteria API for Hibernate called SafeCriteria.I've always been bothered by the fact that the Criteria API always requires one to use text strings for the property names. Strings aren't checked by the compiler, so they can hide errors in your code until runtime, which is way too late.In short, SafeCriteria allows you to query via "showing" the API what

Thinning the Vegetables

2011-04-11T17:30:00.001-04:00

Today, I had to thin out the cabbage as all the sprouts would never have enough room in the bed to grow. This process was quite difficult for me because I had to kill some perfectly healthy sprouts. It was for the benefit of the remaining cabbages, but it was still hard for me to choose. The bed looks a lot more sparse now. I hope the remaining plants get bigger soon.On the plus side, the

Dell Streak Wouldn't Connect to Cell Network

2011-04-02T14:22:00.002-04:00

I had a bit of a scare this morning with my phone. I have a Dell Streak running Android 2.2 and for some reason this morning when I powered it up, it wouldn't connect to the cellular network. I had grey bars with an X next to them in the status bar, and I couldn't make calls, or get on the internet except for wifi.Going into Settings -> Wireless & networks , I noticed that "Airplane mode" was

Garden at 9 days

2011-03-28T14:49:00.005-04:00

In an attempt to keep myself focused on my garden this year, I'm going to try and keep a log of what I'm doing and the results I'm seeing. Hopefully this will also help guilt me into making sure that I keep checking up on the garden and taking care of it.Well, we decided to move our raised beds up to a location that gets better sunlight as our vegetables last year just didn't get enough. All in

SQL Server "no count", and Hibernate StaleStateException

2010-12-17T00:26:00.004-05:00

Recently an application my company wrote had suddenly stopped working. We were getting an exception from Hibernate in some maintenance tasks we were doing on server startup. The exception string was: org.hibernate.StaleStateException: Unexpected row count: 0; expected: 1I wondered how this could even be possible since no one was in the DB at the time the server was starting up. The person who

Using Snapshot Isolation with SQL Server and Hibernate

2010-10-19T11:01:00.005-04:00

In the course of working on some deadlock issues, I found that MS SQL Server exhibits some unexpected (to me, at least) locking behaviors that can affect performance and cause deadlocks. In the end, I found that SQL Server provides an isolation level called Snapshot isolation which removes the need for locks on rows and removes lock contention. To use this isolation level, you need to execute

Virus Authors, I hate you

2010-05-31T01:01:00.005-04:00

I was browsing the internet to a see if there was an option to run Civilization V without a DVD, since I hate having to put one in to my laptop if I want to play.I search Google, see a likely site, and go to it. I get to the site and I see some things that look like text links, but nothing is active. So, I start to go back to Google, and I get an error message from Adobe Reader saying it

Search from Start Menu Stops Returning Items

2009-12-02T10:06:00.002-05:00

I've always hated how the start menu in Windows gets so bloated with icons. Since migrating to Windows 7, I've really gotten into using the start menu search box to quickly find the app I want to run by simply typing a few of the characters of the name of the app. It is much easier than trying to set up paths and do everything from the command line. I recently found that the start menu search

Write More Declaritive JUnit Assertions with Hamcrest

2009-06-24T11:05:00.003-04:00

The Hamcrest framework is a generic "matching" framework that JUnit added direct support for with version 4.4. Hamcrest allows developers to write more declarative assertions by using both built in matchers, as well as a clean way to define your own matchers.The online documentation on Hamcrest is mostly limited to some API docs, test cases, and a brief online tutorial. However the API is

Don't Package on Every Single Compile, Flex Compiler!!

2009-05-21T13:31:00.008-04:00

One of the problems I have with Adobe's Flex technology is that Flex compile times are very slow. Yes, I know, Gumbo is going to make compiles somewhat faster. I also know about the Flex Compiler Shell, and other projects to distribute compilation. Yes, I've also tried incremental compilation. All of these things really miss the true problem with the Flex compiler. And it is really at the

Pandora Desktop Hotkeys Enhanced

2009-03-18T13:00:00.004-04:00

I noted an issue with my original Pandora Desktop Hotkey script in that the embedded Flash control in the Pandora Desktop app sometimes has a different "control" name. This change in name would _sometimes_ make the script unable to send keys to the control. Here's an updated script that tries to work around this issue by simply sending keys to either of the possible names for that embedded

Completely Unscientific Test of Chrome 2.0 Beta with Bubblemark

2009-03-18T11:55:00.007-04:00

So, I had to rush out and get the Google Chrome 2.0 Beta and try it out.I was already running Chrome 1.0, but the install for Chrome 2.0 installed with no hitch, asked me to restart the browser, and then I see that all my settings/bookmarks migrated forward with no problems. After playing around with some the new features I had to find out how Chrome's DHTML Rendering performance stood up to

Official Pandora Desktop and Hotkey Support?

2009-02-02T12:16:00.006-05:00

EDIT: There is a slight problem occasionally with this script not being able to send keys to the Pandora Desktop Air app. I've got an updated version of the script that you can use instead of this one.Pandora is a different sort of online music service that uses the work of the Music Genome Project to automatically selects music similar to an artist or particular song, and then streams it over

Custom Foil Hats

2009-01-03T15:54:00.004-05:00

My oldest son wants to announce the launch of online sales of his newest product, Foil Hats. These hats are certified to protect your thoughts from prying government spooks, and brainwave stealing aliens. These hats are custom made to your measurements (up to US hat size 8), for just $3.99 (US). Simply comment on this blog entry, and we can coordinate payment/shipment over more secure channels.

Rollback DB Changes in Unit Tests with Spring

2009-01-02T12:15:00.004-05:00

Observation 1: Applications are written human beings, which tend to make mistakes. It's a good idea to have some tools in place to help catch those mistakes early by validating assumptions against reality. One such tool is unit testing. Observation 2: Almost every application out there needs access to some kind of persistent data storage. In a lot of application code, that storage mechanism

Cell Lazurus

2008-12-29T21:55:00.002-05:00

I pulled all the pieces back together after 24 hours of drying time, and my patience was rewarded with a working cell phone. You might notice that the phone didn't make it out all together unscathed, as there are some strange bright spots on the screen now. They aren't really noticeable except with a solid color background, so I consider myself somewhat lucky.All the buttons are working, no

Cell Phone, Deconstructed

2008-12-28T21:14:00.005-05:00

Honestly, I was just trying to be helpful. I figured, "Hey! I know how I can help! Laundry needs to be done, so I'll start with the blue jeans..."Of course, my wife doesn't own a waterproof cell phone, and I don't remember to check pockets, so my efforts to "help" ended up with a freshly washed cell phone smelling faintly like a clean breeze and water under the plastic cover for the

Workaround for Issue with @Any Mapping in Hibernate Tools Plugin

2008-09-16T11:58:00.003-04:00

There is a slight problem with 3.2.3.GA release of Hibernate Tools when specifically dealing with the @Any (or the element if you are using xml to configure hibernate) type of relationship. The problem manifests itself with an exception that contains the message "org.hibernate.MappingException: property mapping has wrong number of columns" when you try to open the session factory in

Great Eclipse Keyboard Shortcuts

2008-09-08T17:09:00.003-04:00

I remembered, at some point prior to Eclipse 3.3, I was able to simply hit F11(Debug) or Ctrl-F11(Run) to launch the last launch that you performed in Eclipse. This was great for making small, incremental changes and then just smacking F11 to re-run the failing unit test you are trying to get working again.Eclipse 3.3 changed this behavior and I was just living without it until I found a series

Yet Another Google Chrome Post

2008-09-02T21:51:00.004-04:00

Doubtless, there are already lots of blog entries about Google's entry into the browser wars with Google Chrome. There are probably a large number of these entries that are focused on performance already out there, and countless more tests will be done using much more scientifically methods than I've used here. Am I breaking new ground? Probably not. I'm merely lending my small voice to the

Fear, Magic, and Maven

2008-07-03T22:23:00.006-04:00

For the longest time, I was an Ant bigot.Before Ant, builds in Java were either all manual calls to javac, perhaps shell scripts if you were lucky, or done via some IDE magic for you. Ant, like the venerable GNU make and other tools before it, helped provide an automated, repeatable way to build and assemble complex projects. Write a little XML file with the steps for your process, and then a

Fedora, Ant, and Optional Tasks

2008-04-22T14:28:00.006-04:00

I've tried to be good.I've tried a number of times to use the version of ant that Fedora packages up into an RPM from the JPackage repos rather than caving to the temptation to install it myself manually. I also like to use optional tasks like ReplaceRegExp in my scripts to do all sorts of cool things. Of course, I see most of the installation instructions that refer to ant via RPM mention that

Rechargeable Battery Woes

2008-01-28T10:18:00.001-05:00

The optical mouse on our main desktop computer had recently been giving us trouble, so I set out to replace it. Previously, we had two desktop computers, but we consolidated them into one that my wife and I both use and my son uses for playing educational games. I had a wireless, optical that was just sitting around, so I decided to use that.Originally, I had some rechargable NiMH batteries to

Domain Renewals

2007-12-27T12:26:00.000-05:00

I have my own domain name for email and other purposes that I've owned for a while. Recently, I was in the process on transferring my domain name to a much less expensive registrar and I found out that domain transfers are less simple than they used to be. First, my registrar (and many others, I assume) has a mechanism to lock the domain from transfer. I knew about this beforehand, and so I

Spammer? Me??

2007-12-21T21:07:00.000-05:00

This past week, somehow Google's spam detection bots for Blogger thought I was running a spam blog. It's happened to a few other people I know, and, luckily, Google seems to be pretty responsive to unblocking improperly flagged blogs.I can understand the paranoid settings for the bots since Google appears to be getting a lot of flak for all the spam content on Blogger. But, sheesh, I didn't

More Fedora 8 Info

2007-12-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

I have a Lenovo T60 with ATI Radeon Mobility x1400, and Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG wireless card. I was previously running Fedora 6, and decided that since patches were going to stop soon for that version, I should probably upgrade. :)Here's what worked out of the ISO:Suspend to Ram/Disk AudioWireless Wired Ethernet Video Worked with the Vesa driver, but most folks will

1 year old Headbanger

2007-12-06T23:56:00.001-05:00

Therese and I noticed that Gabe was doing some strange, headbanging motions which we realized was his way of mimicing someone sneezing. I grabbed some video of it and set it to some appropriate music.

Fedora 8

2007-11-11T01:45:00.000-05:00

This is my first post after migrating my laptop from Fedora 6 to Fedora 8. The upgrade process have been fairly painless. I took the i386 Live CD, and tried it out on my Lenovo T60, and was able to get almost everything working right out of the box. I backed up my old home directory, repartitioned (not required, but I wanted to change a few things), and installed. Then I created my user,

Multimedia message

2007-10-24T15:06:00.001-04:00

This is us leaving Omaha. We had a good meeting in the morning, but the afternoon meeting left a little to be desired.

Leaving Denver

2007-10-23T21:15:00.001-04:00

We were in a push to leave our last meeting in Denver and I didn't get to grab the picture I really wanted. Denver has some beautifully, harsh landscapes that seem to call out to even the most cloistered homebody to be out in them.We were sweating a bit when we hit some traffic and packed parking at the airport. There weren't any lines for check in or security so we actually made it without too

JavaFX in an Applet Part 2

2007-10-23T17:26:00.000-04:00

After fighting for a while with JavaFX, I've come to the conclusion that it isn't quite ready for me quite yet. Why? I've grown lazy.The IDE tooling around JavaFX is still very early right now. Heck, even the documentation is still a little lacking around the reference side of things. For instance, that F3Applet class. I couldn't find any documentation on that thing anywhere. Plus, I ended

Long Trips are Harsh

2007-10-22T15:30:00.000-04:00

Just about to leave on one of the longest trips I've taken in a while. Looking forward to getting this over with. I've got a multi legged trip to Denver, Omaha, and Dallas. I'll be out most of the week and I'm really dreading being away from Therese and the boys. Therese is sick with some kind of cough, and Ian threw up this past weekend. I hate leaving.

Script to Auto-Enable External Display + FGLRX + Linux

2007-09-20T15:22:00.000-04:00

I noticed a cool feature of MacOS that automatically enables an external monitor whenever it is connected, and expands the desktop to it. I figured that this had to be possible to do with Linux as well.I'm running Fedora Core 6 on my work laptop, and I built the following brain-dead script from some stuff I found online. This script is very specific to the FGLRX driver and requires the

JavaFX in an Applet

2007-09-18T12:55:00.000-04:00

I saw an example showing how to get JavaFX running in an applet, but I had trouble getting it to work well on Firefox with Java 1.5.0_09 on Linux. After digging around in the javafxrt.jar a bit, I found an F3Applet class that might be helpful. I'm trying that out now.

Operating Systems Keep Getting More Complex

2007-07-14T22:02:00.000-04:00

My father-in-law's brother just got a new laptop computer from a major manufacturer. Said laptop came installed with the new Windows Vista Home Basic edition. The sales person that sold them the laptop also recommended Windows Live OneCare to make sure that the computer's health, security and all that stuff that non-technical folks don't do would be taken care of. This was the first time I've

First MoBlog Attempt

2007-03-16T13:00:00.001-04:00

This is my first attempt at blogging from my phone. I had to come back and edit it a bit. It seems that only the last block of text in the message is accepted.The first picture is of my oldest son in our van, and the second one is of my youngest at the park.

Red Hat Developer Studio

2007-03-08T10:30:00.000-05:00

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I'm an employee of Red Hat.JBoss did a demo of the new combination of Exadel, Red Hat Developer Studio, and JBoss IDE at EclipseCon. The demo ran through creating a Seam based application from nothing more than a database. It used Seam-Gen, a code/descriptor generation tool included with Seam and integrated into the new development platform

My wife (and Magnetix) are awesome!

2007-01-29T19:25:00.000-05:00

So I was replacing the passenger side low beam on my 2000 Honda Accord, when I dropped one of the screws that hold the bulb into the socket. The screw fell into cavity where the air intake for the engine sits. Of course, it falls and rolls to place where I can't reach it, and I begin to cuss myself for not having one of those great magnetic screw grabbers.Just about that time, my wife asks me

Using JBoss Seam with JBoss Portal

2006-12-13T16:15:00.000-05:00

I'm going to document my progress on getting JBoss Portal 2.6 working with JBoss Seam to develop simple portlets. Right now, I've gotten JBoss Portal 2.6.DR1 running in JBoss AS 4.0.5.GA with an EJB 3 configuration installed.All I had to do so far was run the JBoss AS installer (I did it via webstart), and select an EJB 3 configuration. Then I downloaded the JBoss Portal 2.6.DR1 binaries (not

Back from JavaOne

2006-05-19T11:54:00.000-04:00

Luckily, my current employer has enabled me to go to JavaOne this year. I was only able to attend Tuesday and Wednesday, but I did see some interesting stuff. I attended the EJB 3 Interceptors session by Bill Burke, from JBoss Inc (my current employer), and I was intregued with what I saw. This seems like a powerful mechanism for extending the capabilities of EJBs.I also attended an JUnit 4

Convert and Paste 0.2 Released

2006-04-18T23:15:00.000-04:00

I fixed a little bug with the preferences panel for Convert and Paste, and posted an update for the plug in. This is the first fully functional release of the plug in, and you can get it from Firefox's extension site at http://groggluebutt.blogspot.com/ or from the SourceForge project page for it at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=165483. You can go to my site to let me

Convert and Paste 0.1 Released

2006-04-16T02:04:00.000-04:00

I posted the results of my first add-on for Firefox called Convert and Paste. XUL is the framework that Firefox uses to implement all of the browser UI, and it is actually a quite interesting system for UI creation and extension. I defined an overlay that put a new menu item, and some bindings to keys for my add-on, as well as some a properties page to control the add-on.Convert and Paste

Closing!

2005-12-30T11:15:00.000-05:00

We closed on the house! After going to the bank to empty our savings account of the proceeds of the sale of our first house, we carried our down payment check into the lawyer's offices. Therese and I were a little scared, but we were very much ready to get out of the two bedroom crapartment. We walked into the lawyer's office at about 9:00 AM.Before filling out the paperwork, the laywer

First Walkthrough in our New Home

2005-12-23T17:14:00.000-05:00

Here's a photo of the new house as of our last walkthrough.Just want to plug Sharp Residental as a pretty darn good builder. We spent a couple hours going over everything with a fine tooth comb, and my wife and I noted less problems than the Sharp representative that walked through with us! If you are looking for a quality builder, Sharp Residential does a great job.Only 7 days until our closing,

Crazy Sales Phrases

2005-11-14T12:10:00.000-05:00

Since I'm in a role now where I regularly get on calls with the sales team to talk tech to customers and prospects, I get to hear to some interesting "sales phases". I think these phrases are borne of an environment where the sales person is trying to keep the upper hand in a conversation by always having a response to some situation. I'll attempt to keep a log of these phrases here. I do have to

Apartments Suck

2005-08-22T13:37:00.000-04:00

This weekend our refrigerator stopped performing it's normal job, and now it is mostly just taking up space. We've already lost two quarts of milk, and our ice is starting to melt in the freezer. It's getting pretty smelly in there too, what with our 95 degree weather.Also, our pool was closed off due to someone deciding to *ahem* excrete feces into it. So my son is driving Therese crazy because

Gas Prices

2005-08-15T11:26:00.000-04:00

My wife just called and told me that she just saw someone put over $30(USD) into her Toyota Camry. Gas prices are at $2.47(USD) at our local warehouse retailer's "low-cost" fuel center.

Bombings in London

2005-07-07T09:47:00.000-04:00

So we woke up this morning with a bit of a shock. It felt almost exactly like 9/11 all over again when we heard NPR reporting that terrorists had bombed London's tubes and busses. My first reaction was one of slight stupor, "How could they do this to innocent people?"After a little while, I started to get angry. I wanted to just bomb/nuke the heck out of any terrorist out there. The problem is

Moving, we hope...

2005-07-05T13:02:00.000-04:00

We got a finalized offer on our house in a record 5 days, and now the job of actually moving begins. We are moving to a great new neighborhood in Cherokee County with lots of walking trails, pools, forest and fields, etc. Therese has been working her arse off putting most of this move together, and I've only just started to be able to help out. We worked on the garage this weekend, and we cleared

ATX Panel Cut

2005-04-30T22:00:00.000-04:00

After my troubles with cutting the aluminium, I went out and got a got a little set of Dremel cuttoff wheels. I went through about 5 of them, but I was finally able to cut out the hole for the back panel of the motherboard:I'll need to repaint the back panel to help clean it up, but it looks ok right now. I've tried setting an adapter card into the board, and I've found that the board is

Issues with cutting

2005-04-28T15:02:00.000-04:00

I had a little trouble cutting the slots for the tabs that are on the bottom of adapter cards today. I burnt up a Dremel cutting bit, and broke a drill bit trying to get through the bottom of the enclosure. I remember reading something about "cutting oil", so I might need to get some of that when I get a new Dremel bit for cutting. I'll do some more looking around to see what others are

Minor modifications, and holes tapped

2005-04-27T16:12:00.000-04:00

Today, I made a little more progress on the HTPC. I had to cut some bulges out of the bottom of the enclosure to clear the ATX motherboard I am using in this project. Here's a shot of that:I tapped a few holes to put in the motherboard stand-offs to have something to mount the motherboard to. I had to do a little more hacking to get the motherboard mounted properly since the bottom of the

HTPC

2005-04-26T15:56:00.000-04:00

Boy, it seems like everyone is doing one of these Home Theater Personal Computer projects now. I've been thinking about it for a while, and only recently have the accumulated spare parts from other projects reached a point where I might actually attempt this. I'm going to try and keep a log of my progress on this project.We used to have an old Panasonic DVD-CV50 that was attached to our

My Life v4.0

2005-04-18T14:11:00.000-04:00

Today begins the first day of the rest of my life, as it is said. My final day of contracting with my previous company was last Friday, and I'm now officially unemployed. Not being at work during the week always feels a bit like playing hooky to me. There's plenty to do, so it isn't like I'm slacking off, but I can't help feeling like I'm doing something wrong by not being at "work".I finished up

T-6 Hours to leaving LeasePlan

2005-04-08T10:54:00.000-04:00

I'm finding it harder and harder to focus on work. I really need to finish up some things for the Spec Enhancement project, but all I can think about right now is the people I'm going to miss working with at LeasePlan. In fact as I was writing this, Donald Higgs, one of our switchboard operators, stopped by with a really touching card for me. I'm really going to miss the people here, and I hope

T-1 Day to Leaving LeasePlan

2005-04-07T14:53:00.000-04:00

I'm leaving the company I've worked at for almost 11 years. I've got lots of mixed feelings about leaving, but I'm sure it is the right thing for myself and my family. I've worn a lot of hats and learned quite a lot, but I think it is time for a change.I'm going to work for JBoss, Inc. in Atlanta, GA. It is a bit more of a commute for me, but I think the work will be very rewarding. Also, the

Ivan has passed

2004-09-17T07:37:00.000-04:00

Got up early this morning to inspect the damage from Hurricane Ivan, which passed over us last night. Everything was pretty much in order, except that the pine bark mulch in one of our front flower beds decided that rafting was much more exciting than drowning. We lost power a couple times before going to bed, but never for very long. Phone service stayed active, but cable service dropped out on

Quality Improvement to Internal J2EE Application

2004-09-16T13:15:00.000-04:00

I'm investigating improving our application testing process. We currently have Mercury TestDirector, LoadRunner, and WinRunner, but our testing people aren't really using them right now. I'm working on formalizing their process a bit with these tools, and trying to get an additional tool (Mercury Monitoring and Diagnostics for J2EE) to help continuously monitor our applications. Our current

2004-08-30T14:54:00.000-04:00

Just got back from my first visit to my a colleague of mine's restaurant called "What the Pho" The restaurant is actually run/owned by his brother, Lan Nguyen, but Son was there serving today. He took our whole department out to lunch and served us as well! They have extremely good noodle soup and appetizers, and everything is very new and clean. They do dine in and take out, and their hours are

2004-05-14T09:57:00.000-04:00

I've always thought it would be very cool to see how much freely available data on the internet could be mined by an automated, free-roving, intelligent agent. I've tried a few times to get started designing something like that, but I always try and design too large of a system the first time through. That process just causes me to get bored, and makes me want to move on to something else. I

2004-05-14T09:35:00.000-04:00

In the search for improving data quality at our company, I found a government site that maintains a list of all the known populated areas in the US, and their proper names. The site is part of the USGS (US Geological Survey) agency, and it is called the Geographic Names Information System. We can use this data to help us give the properly cased names for cities, and counties. We currently

2004-05-10T23:51:00.000-04:00

Found this fairly comprehensive listing of Home Theater PC related items.

2004-04-01T10:40:00.000-05:00

I made some configuration changes to the WebSphere server that is hosting our eBusiness application. I changed the WebContainer thread count to something more reasonable (Min 7) than what it was (Min 300), and I also set the initial java heap size to be 250 MB instead of the 32 it was at, since the server is hanging around the 100 MB to 300 MB range. We'll see if those changes have any effect.

2004-04-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

I got some more good news from our DataStage team about the changes I made to the ODBC driver. Someone who had a job that was running at about 75 rows per second before my change now is running at 200 rows per second. It seems that simply enabling connection pooling for the ODBC driver gave us about a 25% increase in speed. You gotta love that.

2004-03-31T19:16:00.000-05:00

Part of the build quality problem I mentioned yesterday had to do with the fact that changes are getting promoted to our test and production environments that aren't supposed to be. Our source control system is based in ClearCase, and we are using UCM. We have our projects set up where there is a stream that cooresponds loosely to the code that is in productions, and then we have developer

2004-03-30T17:03:00.000-05:00

Another hectic day today. I had to fight with ClearCase this morning for a few people. One of my co-worker's laptops had the wrong domain in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Atria\ClearCase\CurrentVersion\ClearCaseGroupName entry in the registry and the Atria Location Broker was using the wrong login as well. I don't know why this happens, but these settings seem to keep getting reset to point

2004-03-29T13:55:00.000-05:00

Alright. I've got to get better at posting to this thang! There's so much that has happened that I don't think I could list it all. I'm just going to start in and explain things as I post them here. Right now I'm under a lot of stress at work (who isn't, right?). Many of my workgroup and myself included often have to work more than 40 hour weeks just to stay on top of our day-to-day issues.

2003-11-03T11:15:00.000-05:00

Well, my email address apparently changed last week without my knowledge. Thanks to the "helpful" technical staff, my address was supposed to allow a transition period, but it didn't. Oh well...I guess that it means I'll be losing some spam for a little while. :)

2003-10-13T13:21:00.000-04:00

Pathe, a creator of many British newsreels, has opened up their library of images, and video to the internet.

2003-08-28T11:26:00.000-04:00

Had an idea for an intellegent news agent that would use RSS to get headlines every hour or so, and read the contents of each news item. Each item would be parsed out into a interpreter similar to Mind.Forth that would build up a knowledge base that could be queried with english questions. Also, this program would actually be able to come up with ideas of it's own based on it's own musings.

2003-08-28T10:54:00.000-04:00

Had an idea for a testing service based on a peer-to-peer topology. You could do things like distributed load tests, remote pings, remote traceroutes, and check http request response times. You would have to load up a servant to use the service, so that every user of the service becomes a potential testing platform. Security would only allow guests to submit tests that ran from at most 5

2002-12-03T18:06:00.000-05:00

I demo-ed a little proof of concept project based on JBoss running locally on a low-end machine with session EJBs. I was fairly happy with the results, as was the person I was demo-ing to. This person originally wanted to go with .NET, but .NET isn't even really a product yet. I try not to hate Micrsoft just because they are Microsoft, but I really believe that J2EE is the way to go for our

2002-12-03T09:34:00.000-05:00

I worked on getting the checkbook back in order until about 4:00 AM this morning. I had to re-enter all of the stuff Therese had entered on her Palm into mine. I guess it could have been worse. Ok, I've still got to walk the dog, and get to work. I'm already pretty late.

2002-12-03T00:39:00.000-05:00

Well, after upgrading to Acrobat 5.1 because it kept barfing when trying to load some DocBox plug in, I looked through the documentation for PMT to no avail. Then I checked out the readme, and, sure enough, there was a little blurb under the version 7.4 errata for PMT that states: Share and Transfer to DB menu commands are now supported. These commands permit you to share accounts between two

2002-12-03T00:15:00.000-05:00

I just finished up moving Therese's computer from the downstairs to the upstairs so that she can have a place to use her computer while I'm working on finishing the downstairs. I moved my computer into the room next to the office downstairs, so I'm now trying to catch up on email and bills from last week. The checkbook I use (PMT) on my Workpad c3 is giving me fits when I try to sync it up with

2002-12-02T16:57:00.000-05:00

Just thought of a way to make our build process faster. We could use ClearCase's clearaudit utility with Ant. If we run Ant in clearaudit then all of the files that Ant creates during a build would be remembered. We could have the Ant script check out the derived objects that ClearCase knows about via lsdo, and then have the script use winkin to get the correct versions of the .class files

2002-12-02T15:49:00.000-05:00

Read about this very nice laptop this weekend. It's the Area-51 system from AlienWare.

2002-12-02T10:43:00.000-05:00

Found a cool link for small form factor PC mother boards. People have been putting these boards in crazy stuff.

2002-11-27T12:22:00.000-05:00

This is my first blog entry. I've finally decided to actually put some content up here. My previous site was blocked by Adelphia, and I just didn't want to have to mess with trying to work around thier little blocking technique (plus, I don't think I actually could have :) ). Any who, I'm looking for something to better manage this blog, but for now...this is a start.