February 2007 Archives

I went into Abbotsford to pay some bills at lunch and saw basically hard rain or soft hail, just a few sprinkles here and there and though "well isn't that quaint". After I got home I went heads down into work (today I was working from home). Then when I poked my head out of my hole I went "holy @#$^@!#!!! There's $%#$^# snow out there!!" or words to that affect.

Whoda thunk it?

Interesting way of determining how good a programmer is on Imran's blog, called the FizzBuzz. I took it to make sure I wasn't a crappy comp-sci grad who couldn't program and discovered happily I could. Took just under four minutes to complete, though part of the extra time was I forgot how the '%' operator in Perl worked (returns 0 not 1).

(A) Solution after the read more....

Man windows, or maybe just my computer, can be weird at times. When I get in the office I have to....

• Turn the power on to both monitors.... not out of sleep but a full power on (I think $coworker might be at fault for turning them off though)
  
• Hit ctrl-alt-del to get my windows login prompt
  
• Log in
  
• Wait for windows to draw all the windows slooooooowly (in the non-tonka-toy look I might add)
  
• Watch my screensaver (Electric Sheep) come on.
  
• Move my mouse, watch login screen come on again
  
• Hit ctrl-alt-del to get my windows login prompt
  
• Log in
  
• Watch windows draw all my windows again (though much faster this time)
  

Surprisingly, last week ended very nicely. A couple of big projects at work were finally put to bed, and I even got all my timesheets up to date before leaving. Also this weekend I got the bulk of work done on a website Content Management System (CMS) that I've been (re)writing for a contract job. The idea there was to make something fairly generic that could be written once and then plugged into multiple systems with minimal work yet still be modified easily if something custom was needed. In my course of working with the design company I've done this same sort of project about 4-5 times, each having their own twist. When I'd done work before it was done specifically for the case of that one client, so adapting it to another site that was always a case of either the pain in the ass of retrofitting the code or rewriting it from scratch. Even though I know (or at least, found out) that you should never rewrite code from scratch, I ended up doing it simply because the various projects were just too different to nicely plug one system into another. Also the one system I did write that was fairly generic was done so long ago it was just painful to work with (and so painful in fact I put it right in the code to not retrofit anything more onto it.

Anyway, this time it'll be different (knock on wood). Writing this once, doing it right and (in theory anyway) having a fair amount of time to kick the tires and make sure the system is solid and making sure it's generic enough to plug into a system easily. In theory now the design guys whom I contract to can just say "and we can make your site editable by you for an extra $X", where $X it the cost of me going in and installing the system to a webhost. The issue before was to handle this they'd have to send me the details, I'd quote on it, we'd go back and forth on features, etc. This all took time and effort on everyones part, and they weren't able to give the client an immediate answer for such a "simple" addition. Now it'll be a generic widget.

Anyway, it's been going well, I have the framework of all the page editing and user management done, allowing what I think is a fairly generic system I'm fairly proud of. Hopefully there won't be too many "oh, but we thought you mean you wanted this" moments this time :)

So yea, all in all a good weekend, nice to end Sunday night feeling fairly accomplished for the last few days. Hopefully this week will be just as good.

Side note... I'm still looking for a free or cheap (under $300) laptop that doesn't totally suck for use on the train, if anyone has a line on anything or anyone (maybe someone upgrading?) please let me know.

I played with Ubuntu Linux a few days ago and reported that it went on slick and easy and was nice and stable, and I was considering replacing my desktop system with it. Well, in a fit of boredom this weekend I decided to do just that. Because I'm sane, and have had "oops" moments before I decided to do it on a totally separate hard drive so if something did go wrong I could revert back and still get work done. I didn't have any standard hard drives sitting around, so I decided to install the three 18G super-fast SCSI drives I still had from the old UFies.org system. I later found I also had a couple of 40G IDE drives, but leaving those 15,000 RPM drives and adapter just sitting in my closet seemed like such a crime.

The Lightroom Blog was the first one I saw to break where to download the trial version of Adobe Lightroom that is available.

I played around with this a bit and I'm really excited about it. Some of the new controls are really cool, and the program seems to have come together very nicely. Now the question is how fast or slow is it with large libraries of images. The image to the right is a sample of me playing with an image from my vacation with the black and white mixer, and some selective curves to various bits of the image. It's supposed to be very high contrast if you were wondering.

Finally got around to seeing Snakes on a Plane tonight. What can I say about this movie that probably hasn't already been said, other than "Sporks?" Oh wait....

Anyway, it's a fun movie, with everything predictable you can throw at it.... from the airline stewardess that's a day from retirement to the couple heading to the bathroom to join the mile high club, Samuel L. Jackson's "motherf*ckin' snakes on this motherf*ckin' plane" remark, and the complete lack for some bits of the plot.

I think that for really bad movies the plots have to have one of two things. Either a completely predicable plot that never deviates from something that you have seen a hundred times already, or something that was obviously written under the influence from something out of this world (like mushrooms, which we all know are evil and most likely not created here on earth...). This movie is mostly from column A, with a sprinkling from column B. The whole "snakes on a plane" thing I hadn't seen before, but the overall plot of the movie has been done countless times already.

Snake vision, sporks, and the demise of "Mary Kate" are among the "definitely influenced by mushrooms" moments, some going on for far too long.

Still, if you have a 94 minutes to waste and (optionally) a group of rowdy friends, alcohol, or other illicit substances, you'll have a blast. I had only a small glass of Baileys (on ice) so I only had a marginally good time. Glad I finally saw it though.

An instruction guide to the weather cat, a simpler version of the weather rock:

• A dry cat licking your nose first thing in the morning means fair weather.
  
• A soaking wet cat licking your nose first thing in the morning means it's pouring outside.
  

This taken from my personal experience this morning with a very wet Rex this morning.

Decided to throw Feisty Fawn, codename for the latest Ubuntu onto the second hard drive on my main windows box today, just to shake things up.

System specs are as follows:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU (2.40Ghz)
  
• 2G DDR2
  
• nVidia GT7950
  
• 2x 320G SATA Hard Drive
  

The system is my windows Photoshop / Gaming box, with dual hard drives, one of which has never been used. So I disconnected the one that was plugged into the Windows drive and rebooted...

Booted up fine, but there were a couple of moments of "WTF?" when nothing happened, or my monitor went into powersaving mode. I had to hit CTRL-ALT-F1 and then ALT-F7 to get back into the graphical environment. Or think I did anyway, not sure if I was just impatient.

Since it's a clean box, I just hit the 'install' icon and let 'er go. Simple install, language, keyboard, my name and the name of the computer, then the partitioner (all of which I used defaults) and then off it went. Full install took about 20 minutes, all of which time it's still in the Live CD environment, so I played games while waiting. When it was done I hit the 'Reboot' button and was thrown into the new environment.

I have to say, bootup was pretty sexy, at least compared to what I'm used to with mainly servers, and fast. Either this computer is lightyears better than my other Linux box, or Ubuntu has really got some super-optimizations in their bootup system. I went from GRUB to GDM login screen in only a few seconds. Had the same issue as I had with the Live CD as far as having to go to the console and then back to ALT-F7 to get to the graphical environment. Odd.

Honestly, the only real reason I was doing this was to play with the cool eye candy stuff. I followed the Beryl Install which has their "three click" method (which worked perfectly) and was up with super-sexy desktop eye candy in about 5 minutes. Sweet! Much more stable than under my Gentoo setup as well.

The new additions to the Movie Player to allow it to download codecs on demand is cool too. Basically it's just a frontend into the package manager to allow the system to search for what's needed and then tell the system package manager to install it. Very slick. Only sucky part is that if you have another package manager going at the same time it bails out (understandably) and then you have to close the movie player and start again. Not a big deal though, and it works perfectly.

The one thing I was a bit disappointed with was the lack of widescreen support. My monitor does 1650x1080 native resolution, and it took a bit of fiddling to get it to work. Not much, but it was more than the rest of the system.

And that was about it. I had accomplished what I wanted (so far) and plugged in my windows hard drive to continue on with a day of coding and gaming. Now my next step is to see if I want to replace my current gentoo desktop with Ubuntu, and what I need to do to do this (as in special setup, backing up the systems, etc).

So I don't forget, looks like this Virtual Photographer plugin for photoshop could be quite interesting. Found out about it from a LucisArt video tutorial.

So I'm finally getting this online after two weeks of being home. This is the (hopefully) short story of the ten days involved in a seven day cruise to three ports of call in Mexico (my first time there) with my wife-to-be Firefly and her two parents. Thursday night I got home from work and did a marathon packing session, getting out the door around 8 or 8:30. Follow that with a quick (3 hour) drive down to Seattle and then a night in a freezing hotel before a morning shuttle to SeaTac, followed by sitting and waiting for a flight to LA. More, including lots of pics if you read more....

This entry isn't complete I don't think, and there are still more pictures coming, but it's stagnated way too long as a draft. Check out the photo set for updates later on.

Anyone else out there watching Heroes? Man, it's finally starting to get good. Not that it hasn't been good, but there's been a lot of build up and what feels like getting you ready for big and exciting things to happen, but not a huge amount of payoff so far. This last episode (caution, minor spoilers) finally got a bit deeper into it, giving you some more insight into different characters relationships, but more importantly, we finally got to see more of George Takei as Hiro's father. He did a great job, it'll be interesting to see if he comes back more.

A couple of neat things that I just loved (and see if you other geeks caught these) was first of all the "Sulu" reference in the preview for next weeks show (someone insulting Hiro calls him "Sulu").

Secondly (and it was really subtle, which I just loved) was the license plate of Hiros father (George Takei's character) which was..... wait for it.... "NCC 1701".

If you don't get the reference, please delete 10 geek points immediately!

Other interesting reading for Heroes geeks:

• Hiro's blog - fake of course, still interesting for little tidbits of backstory.
  
• Greg Beeman's blog - From the director
  
• The Heroes online novel - A pretty decent graphic novel (read: comic book) with some extra back-story and hints of the future of where some characters are going.
  
• Heroes-spoilers blog - Title says it all...
  

My real fear for the TV show is that they'll drag it out too long. Right now they are at episode 14 of (I presume) a 24 episode season. If they are smart they'll finish it with two or three fantastic finale episodes and put it to bed. Converse to this, Prison Break is a great show but I can see them dragging the story out for season after season, never giving any "finish" to the storyline and just giving some new hook at the end of each season to suck you into the next. They did this successfully at the end of season 1, and if they do this at the end of this season I'll probably bail. That much teasing is just no good. 24 gets around this by having each season be a "day", and at the end of the season the threat is averted and (most) everyone is happy and all is good. Then the next season is the next big huge threat for the day, which seems to work (for me at least). But sticking with a show for a full season and not getting a resolution just pisses me off :)