Kikkoman

Good article on phone screening.

Which is very interesting. I’ve been nosing around the tutorials and bumped up against this concept but couldn’t name it.

What is interesting is that, this is the first languange that I might actually use that has a mix of functional and procedural execution. Functional languages seem to be the new hotness now for their ability to be distributed across multiple processors.

As a “working” programmer the only functional language I use regularly is SQL. :-/

Election night I got home early-ish to watch the returns. While a great night overall, it started out slow. That and I wanted to play Little Big Planet.

So I’ve made the first “productive” use of any of my TV’s Picture-in-Picture capabilities; news talking heads in a small picture and Little Big Planet on the big screen. The trick was that the TV could output the sound from the “smaller” picture.

Watching Obama win stirred a combination of pride, excitement, and historical significance. The nature and strength of the emotions stirred was similar to the feelings I got from the Pathfinder landing and exploring Mars.

It was between my sophomore and junior years and college, and I was back on Guam for the summer. I remember being glued the computer, downloading the “live” images of Mars from NASA’s website over our piddly 56k modem. Truly amazing.

Both of those events made me proud of mankind, excited about the future, and awed at the accomplishment.

Inspired by this article from Lifehacker, I set about suspending the cable modem, router, switch, and printer adapter from the underside of my desk.

This also provides much better wireless coverage / speed for the first floor of the house.

Works well. I created a single MobileMe account, and after cleaning up and organizing the my calendars and my wife’s calendars, I was able to get over the air push of Calendar updates to work.

Each person in the household has an iCal Calendar Group to themselves (and more importantly a unique color).

It is possible to just sync calendars, even though you can’t find a screenshot or mention of it on the official site.

http://lifehacker.com/389595/slim-down-your-wallet-with-your-phone

Explosives Camp!

… You are now part of the problem.

That’s a good line, I’m going to have to use it on someone.

Normal person : “Dude, the new Nine Inch Nails [album] rocks!”

Milo :  “Dude, 9 of 15 of the new Nine Inch Nails songs rock!”

After getting a Mac laptop back in 2002-ish I have moved family and friends over to macs, which is at least 9 macs over the years. 5 laptops, 3 minis, and 2 iMacs.

My old Athlon 64 system is getting a little long in the tooth, so I am going to pass it onto my sister and get another desktop. I’d like to get a Mac, but can’t due to the hole in the mac product line.

I am getting a Dell, not because I want a Dell or Vista or want to run Linux on it (which is my plan), but because won’t sell a reasonably priced “normal desktop” box. The only Mac you can get that you can open up, add a harddrive, upgrade the video card etc, is the crazy expensive Mac Pro.

I sold my mac stock recently, I’ll consider buying more when they come out with the iPhone “mini” which needs to be at a $300 pricepoint (at $600 its going to flop like the PS3), and or when they offer a midrange $1k box that is upgrade / tinker friendly.

Update :  The new computer is nice.   It is very quiet.   We have named it StormTrooper after its white and black paint job / finish.   That and Ubuntu 7.04 was able to correctly set video resolution on my monitor (odd widescreen 1600×1050) with no /etc/xorg.conf hacking.

And yes Apple did just announce record profits, I still think the iPhone will initially be a dud.

Neat.

Going to Guam for the races for two weeks soon. Work has settled down, its now getting house stuff straight so I can leave.

Got Kelly’s mac mini setup; cracked the case open and installed a 1 gig ram chip. Used, a bunch of laminated and plastic cards (library card, old ITunes gift card, etc) to get the lid off.

Finished God of War last week. Fanstastic game. I am hoping to catch 300 while in Guam, but it is probably no longer in theatres.

Pick a color, and it gives your others that “go well” with it.

Nice.

I have had occasion recently to focus on my deep and abiding dislike of SQL and (databases in general), and have determined that there is actually one thing SQL could do that would “make it all better”.

That would be: give me nice, easy, standard way of generating a pivot table / query where I don’t need to know all the columns I want back ahead of time.

Please, for the love of … whatever … make it so.    We all know the database can do it and do it reasonably efficiently, cause we’ve all spent days fiddling with frustratingly obtuse queries to trick it into doing it.

Hence you can imagine my surprise to find out that Access already has this all figured out.  Behold, Access’s TRANSFORM statement. Which pretty much does exactly what you want.

The kicker is that, it has been around and in use for a long time.

Can you imagine the billions of dollars wasted around the world writing stupid pivot table queries in SQL when companies have upgraded from Acess to a “real database”?  OMG.

Interesting things I have learned about java recently.

Recursive Generics
Initializing your member variables to null is bad.   Because if you then add in lazy initialization and contructor chaining, you could lazy init twice.
String.intern()  been there since at least 1.2.

Being detached with hope is opposite from being invested with expectations.  -Tseric

http://www.acc.umu.se/~zqad/cats/index.html

Heard this clip long ago, and via the power of YouTube have found it again. Its about the women’s movement, but the following part is apropos to software development.

‘WE WANT THIS! AND THAT! WE DEMAND A SHARE IN THAT, AND MOST OF THAT, SOME OF THIS, AND FUCKING ALL OF THAT! LESS OF THAT, AND MORE OF THIS, AND FUCKING PLENTY OF THIS! AND ANOTHER THING, WE WANT IT NOW! I WANT IT YESTERDAY, I WANT FUCKING MORE TOMORROW, AND THE DEMANDS WILL ALL BE CHANGED THEN SO FUCKING STAY AWAKE!’

Praise be to YouTube, 1:30 into the clip.

VPNed and RDCed in to my work computer, and I go to shut it down.   I just submitted a big changelist and my work computer has been on for at least a week.   Time to give it a break/reboot.   You know how touchy windows gets when it doesn’t get its beauty sleep.

Lo and behold, the shutdown menu when accessing the computer via RDC is replaced with “Disconnect”.   You can’t shut down the computer.

After poking around somemore trying to find a way to turn the computer off or reboot it.   I give up and do it the “hard” way.

Kill “lsass.exe”; the computer pops up a nifty dialog saying that “lsass.exe died unexpededly, rebooting in 60 seconds.”  It even gives you a countdown, which is great in a Bond villian sort of way.

OooO

Gmail has POP access which you can setup Mail.app to pull from.