System.Random.Next()

On leadership - Thanksgiving

2011-11-22T21:21:00.001-06:00

One of the things that came up in discussion during our last MOR training session was guilt. Guilt can be a motivator, but more often, in our jobs, it is a sign of focusing on the wrong side of the equation. So today, as we go into the holiday, I want to take an opportunity to look at the other side of the equation. Generally we feel guilty because we got something done, but we feel bad about the things we didn't accomplish.   Why not focus on the the things we did get done? Reflect for a moment, if you are feeling guilty about some things you did not accomplish at work, what did you get done?

Similarly, some of us, myself included, sometimes focus on our weaknesses, things we want to improve, those things that might keep us from success. Just as worthwhile is identifying what traits, those things already inherent within us, might help us to succeed.

All of us in the MOR leadership training program used a 360 evaluation to help us understand our strengths and weaknesses. Take some time as you are thinking about what you have to be thankful for this holiday season to consider those strengths.

One of the leaders on campus also introduced me to another way to discover my strengths. Using a different methodology, Strength Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath helps to guide you to actions based on your strengths. The book is an introduction and a key to an online assessment with an initial investment in time of about an hour. After that hour, you will have some additional things to add to your list of strengths. You will also have another source of actionable items you can add to your list of goals when you finish the set we are working on with our coaches and our mentors.

This time of year, I'm glad to know that one of my strengths is making sure thanksgiving dinner works because I'm a good cook and have my own way of making sure things come together on time. Speaking of which, the Spicy Orange Pecans just came out of the oven.

Recipe follows (if this recipe belongs to you and you want it removed or credited, please let me know):

4 cups raw pecan halves
2         tablespoons fresh orange juice
1         large egg white
           zest of two oranges
1/2      cup sugar
1 1/2   teaspoons kosher salt
1 1/2   teaspoons chili powder
1/2      teaspoon cayenne, or more to taste
           Pinch black pepper

Combine pecans, orange juice, and egg white and toss until well coated. Add remaining items and toss again.
Spread pecans on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper
Bake in a preheated 225 degree oven stirring every 15 minutes for about 1 hour until pecans appear dry.
Cool completely and enjoy or store in an airtight container for up to six months.

Time tracking results

2011-11-22T21:16:00.001-06:00

just as a place to start, here is the data I captured. Look forward to a write up that I will post because I will be giving a short presentation the second week of December.

Navigate to the last week of September 2011 and the first week of October.

Stating the obvious

2011-09-23T13:07:00.001-05:00

Brian said that we all want more time to do what is important, but we all have to be honest with ourselves and realize that none of us are going to get it. Time (in a day) is a finite resource.

Lori challenged us to track our time, consider how we use it, and plan for change.

My strategy, let's see how out works, is to fill my calendar up with notes about what I did all day. Then go back to review.

Let's see if I have the resolve to actually post the results.

How are you going to track your time and keep yourself accountable?

On Leadership -- Jargon

2011-09-22T08:18:00.002-05:00

I'm going through MOR IT Leadership training. The last two days were a great start to the program that will last through next year. The course itself is instructional, but I wanted to take one thing that came up after the course to pin-point for this post.

Ray asked about the word leaderful and wanted to know if anyone was bothered by the adjustment to the English language. I focused on the fact that other disciplines, such political science, have their own jargon. I had to listen harder to get the real point. Using the jargon, he explained, alienates the listeners. It sometimes takes me a while to process, but I put this together from a point Lori Green from MOR associates made a couple of times. Lori was talking about feedback. You don't want to be general in your feedback, you want to be specific in order to have the most impact.

So here I am, finally at my point:

I will not ever provide someone feedback and say, "you need to be more leaderful." I don't think that does anyone any amount of good. At best they will ask what "leaderful" means to me. At worst they will walk away from the conversation confused and worse off than they started. Rather, I might encourage someone to take a more active role in meetings, provide options, or even better yet, questions that the rest of the group may need to help them to arrive at a conclusion. I might ask them to take the initiative in resolving a particular issue. I might ask them to share their experiences with a team members in order to complete a task. Even more so, I might ask them during a specific meeting to provide their insight for our discussion. Or after a given meeting ask them why they didn't speak up. This feedback doesn't refer to any of the jargon and yet, directly impacts how "leaderful" someone is.

My team practices agile development. One place where it is important that everyone show leaderful behavior is during our planning meetings. Everyone who takes place in the meeting knows that I expect people to speak up and that I will call on people who don't.

I expect my team to grow, and not just because I'm hiring.

I am growing too.

CSS Is Great, But Floating Isn't Always The Answer

2011-04-18T11:20:00.001-05:00

You know it is time to stop with the floats when things break, right?

In CSS, floating objects are not like hovercrafts or hoverboards. They don't solve all of life's problems. Consider getting rid of them when your browser's print engine renders your page as mostly garbage or when things are missing from your printed or rendered output. Troubleshooting this type of problem can be tricky, but start by checking your XHTML compliance. I like the W3C validator service.

Once your page is valid and it still doesn't print right it is time to look for other things. If you happen to have the same problem I did and have a float that is mucking up the works, get rid of it. My case looked something like this:

parent div
child div
anchor
span with float right

That works fine in the rendering engine of the browsers I tested with, but the printing engine of IE8 fails miserably when presented with that markup. The answer, for me, was to get rid of the float, after all, that isn't really what I want, what I want is to right align the span. In order to still do that I add position absolute and right 0px. That isn't enough, though, I also added position relative to the child div. that gets me the same behavior without using a float. If you want to learn more about CSS positioning, there are some great google queries you can try, but one easy to understand page is learn CSS positioning in ten steps.

Mini Kites

2011-04-16T20:45:00.001-05:00

At K Mart we came across mini kites today. They are cheap (less than 2.00) and easy to transport since thy are so small. They come in macaw, butterfly and dragonfly varieties. I am looking forward to trying them out with C.

They are xkite(?) kites. I don't know if they will last long, but, since we are going on a long driving trip soon, it will be nice to have a bit of a distraction along the way.

I'll let you know how they do.

Of course, my favorite kites come from the into the wind catalog. I can look through the catalog for hours.

why the bluetooth device cannot be found

2010-12-04T19:58:00.000-06:00

Ok,
If you are here you have been trying to figure out why your computer (windows 7) won't recognize your blue tooth device. You have added a third party bluetooth adapter to your computer. When you plugged it into your usb port you were able to see the drivers load, but, whatever you do, you can't get the bluetooth device you want to add to be recognized by your pc. You can't even find the "Bluetooth devices" section of your control panel under devices. You have restarted your computer. You have re-installed the drivers. You have changed usb ports. It still won't work. And your are frustrated, like I am. You have looked at web site after website, and you have nothing. Maybe you have come across http://support.microsoft.com/kb/911894. Yippee! a registry hack! My favorite. (forgive my sarcastic moment). I don't want a registry hack. I want a solution for the rest of us. You know, those that are more comfortable after someone else has figured out the solution to the problem and packaged it up in easy to understand and complete steps.

Here are some steps to follow.

hit your windows key and type "services" without the quotes
find the entry that has "starts, stops, and configures windows services" as the description when you hover over it.
click on it
find "bluetooth support services"
it probably says "disabled" in the status column since your computer didn't come with bluetooth enabled otherwise you wouldn't be here
right click on it
select properties
select "Automatic" from the dropdown.
click apply
Since you probably want bluetooth right now, go ahead and click the "start" button
close all the windows you just opened.

Go about your business with bluetooth enabled.

Just as a recap. This is how you resolve the problem of adding a third party bluetooth radio / dongle to your windows 7 computer and not being able to add devices. It seems like it is a problem of not having the bluetooth service running on your computer. Sure your driver is in place, but there is no way to start the bluetooth service without going through these steps. Unless your driver is fancy, smanchy, and does everything you need to do. If you are like me and you got the bluetooth usb dongle that you can get from amazon by essentially just paying for shipping, you will likely need to do this.

Good luck getting your wiimote, phone, keyboard, or other bluetooth device paired with your machine. If you are at this post, you most likely had to dig deep to find a solution. I know I did.

--JJ

ok, I just had to reblog this. It was too awsome not to

2010-09-01T21:58:00.000-05:00

and not necessarily in a good way either.

Ayende Rahien had a great post on their blog, which I might just have to follow, regarding some code I couldn't believe anyone would write. Take a look, if you have the stomach for it.

It really happened, legacy programmer tales

(teaser: a method with 500 lines? no. 700 lines? no. 3000 lines? no. you'll just have to go to the blog to find out.)

Why I like vimperator

2010-09-01T21:43:00.000-05:00

I like the Firefox browser. I really do. There are a lot of things to like about it. Extensions is one of those things that Firefox does well. It does it well enough that other browsers have add ons that are like Firefox. Internet Explorer has add-ons. Ever use one in Internet Explorer? Opera has widgets. All kinds of them. I've even tried a few..... I thought the gesture support in Opera had some merits.... But I don't use them, or Opera much for that matter. Not that I don't have it installed. I have IE, Opera, Firefox, and Chrome all installed. I use them all for different things. But I also use vim or mvim for Mac OS X. I spend alot of time in vim or in a terminal window at the bash shell. And sometimes my mouse batteries are dead. Yeah, really. But that is OK. Don't feel bad for me. I use vimperator.

vimperator lets me push my mouse aside when I'm working in a browser and allows me to use my favorite keystrokes to control my browser. j to scroll down. k to scroll up. gt to move to the next tab, gT to move to the previous tab. Hit escape to switch to control mode. o to open a new tab, t to open a new tab, :bmarks to list bookmarks, and lots of other fun stuff. I use vim, so I use vimperator.

I know if I ask there will be plenty of people that say vim is inferior to emacs, or textmate, or .

So I won't ask. Instead I'll point you to firemacs and if you want to roll your own: keysnail.

On using an iPad at work

2010-08-09T21:01:00.001-05:00

The applications I use the most are Evernote, email, calendar and safari. I also use the citrix client to access file shares and, recently, set up ssh on the virtual desktop using putty portable.

Evernote helps me to organize and retrieve my notes from most of my devices. My phone, iPad, Mac, my personal pcs, etc, all have clients and allow me to bring up notes when and where I need them.

Dropbox, and good reader with it have helped me to access documents such as spreadsheets and word documents. It is a great companion to Evernote when I need items at meetings. It also allows me to synchronize across devices, carry less with me and still have access to what I need.

Email and calendar access are invaluable in meetings and at home. I often have to put off some of my administrative work until after hours because of the work load and I can take advantage of the iPad so I don't have to take a laptop home with me every day.

Safari allows me to interact with our project planning software, Mingle, while I am leading our standup meeting or discussing priorities with stakeholders.

The citric client to the UI Virtual desktop servers allows me to find documents I didn't know I was going to need when I left the office or to use remote desktop if I need it. With putty portable on the virtual desktop, I can even interact with our development environment if I need to.

There are a few other things that I use the iPad for, for example, I have a weather application on it and it doesn't hurt to know when the storms are coming through or how high the reservoir at the Coralville dam is, but the items I listed above are some of the best selling points for it.

What can I say?

2010-07-06T13:53:00.000-05:00

I had a great visit from my sister and her family.

The kids all got along, we had some good conversations. A bit of reminiscing, a lot of new connections. It was very nice to have some positive interactions with family...and not just the type of family you choose, but real family. It was again a reminder of how localized wormholes could make life better.

We joined a CSA

2010-05-20T21:22:00.000-05:00

And today we received our first delivery.

It is important that I provide some history before I continue. I worked on a farm as a kid. I spent a number of summers as a kid on a farm in Michigan and picked produce. All kinds of produce: apples, pears, plums, cherries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, apricots, and several varieties of the apples, pears, berries, and cherries. One other thing we picked was asparagus. I hated picking asparagus. Most everything else you can eat while you are picking. Asparagus snapped against my fingers as we picked it and made me sore. I hated going back home afterward and smelling it cook, or seeing it. Asparagus wasn't like the other produce we picked where once you picked a spot you were done. With asparagus, and granted, the berries, you had to keep going back. Picking the same fields over and over again. Snap, snap, snap...... I hate asparagus......

Which brings me back to the CSA. I have to admit at having problems with my first order. I'm new at it and didn't really have the process down yet. I ended up getting asparagus in my delivery without having asked for it. Not anyone's fault, and most people are likely to wonder why anyone would blame anyone for asparagus. See my message above re: snap, snap, snap....

The good news: I kept one spear of asparagus out of the fridge tonight and cooked it (steamed) right away. The little one and I ate it. I gave her two pieces and I ate the rest. I ate asparagus and I'm proud of it.

I only pouted a little bit. The little one was proud of eating it also. Getting asparagus today maybe wasn't all too bad.

Why I didn't turn a laptop lcd around

2010-04-24T19:37:00.000-05:00

I wanted to mount a laptop LCD around so I could have the screen on top while it was closed. I wanted to improve my kitchen computer setup by using a better laptop.

I have an old hp pavilion in the 5000 series. So off I went and found myself a maintenance manual. It listed exactly how to disassemble the display assembly.

It turns out that the video connector and the wireless antenna wires are way too short to turn the display assembly around and remount the display assembly easily.

I'll keep looking.

New PC, new post

2010-04-22T20:16:00.000-05:00

I bought myself a new PC this week. A lovely black beast so far.

I am running windows 7 with ubuntu virtualized as a seamless virtualbox second OS.

It seems to run pretty well except that alt+tab sticks inside the os I'm currently on. Expected behavior, but it might be fun to poke at it.

I spent some time setting up rails, vim, and bzr on the ubuntu machine. Playing with .vimrc settings and bzr aliases.

Read through some of the bazaar documentation and need to read some more.

Here are some of the bzr aliases I came up with during some of my searches:

bzr alias ci="commit --show-diff --strict"
bzr alias diff="cdiff"
bzr alias tip="log -r-1"
bzr alias top="log -l10 --line"

top and tip are simple, just show the top 10 commits one line per and tip shows the last commit with more detail.

ci makes sure that the diff is part of the commit and that I don't forget to commit files I added. I can just type bzr ci and it will prompt me for a message with the diff showing.... one last check before it goes into the repository.

cdiff just shows a colored diff.. easier to read.

I also installed bzr-gtk in order to get bzr viz working. It's nice enough.

Lets see how things go. First project: Euler in rails.

Wish me luck.

HTC Hero, Day 4

2010-02-05T08:19:00.000-06:00

I got a new phone on Sunday. My plan is with sprint and I've had good coverage, so I ended up with the HTC Hero, which is one of their best android phones. It may not be the nexus one, or even the motorola droid, but it is an android phone. Before anyone starts talking about google +NSA, let me get to the point of my post.

I like microSD cards. I think they are amazing little pieces of technology to hold so much data in such a small space. I wanted to know that I could put a higher capacity card in my phone if I wanted to. So I looked, and looked and finally found that in order to get to the microSD card slot, I would have to remove the back of the phone. In order to do that I would have to turn it off and push up on the back of the phone with my thumb.

So I turned off my phone, and started pushing....and started pushing.... I felt like I was the guy on the visa commercial trying to open the pickle jar. No I didn't bang it on the table, but I didn't get anywhere either. So I turned it back over.

I was faced with an android boot screen asking if I wanted to delete all my user data.

yes
no

scary as it sounds all I had to do was press the send button while avoiding pressing the action button. Simple.

Except there is no button on the face of the device labeled "send" and worse yet, no button labeled "action".

*2 to the rescue, right? I picked up my wife's phone and called sprint. I got a helpful representative on the phone who tentatively asked if I had backed up my data and then spent some time talking to other reps, her boss, etc, trying to figure out which button to push. Fairly certain that the talk / green phone button was the send button, but not able to determine which was the action button she suggested I turn off the phone by holding down the power / red phone button. I held it down, uncertain that it would not be the mysterious action button, only to find that it accomplished nothing. Another option was to remove the battery while the phone was on....which involves removing the back of the device. See above.

While I was on the phone I did some hit up google online and found that some folks, including the hacker community, considered that the trackball button was the action button. So I pressed the talk/ green phone button.

Building suspense.....

The talk button is the send button.

Apparently, turning on the phone while simultaneously holding down talk, action, and back, or some silly combination of things that might occur while attempting to remove the back of the HTC hero prompts to remove all user data.

I did eventually manage to remove the back of the phone will on the line with sprint, peeked at the card, put it back and closed the phone up again.

Technical curiosity satisfied, I wasn't able to remove the back again. I'm not going to try that hard until I need to.

I haven't really dissapeared

2010-02-03T17:26:00.000-06:00

I have a new daily calendar at my desk now and I want to share one of the quotes from it.

One moon shows in every pool; in every pool, the one moon.

What does it say about life? Why does it resonate for those that follow Zen?

To me it says that perspective, though individual, doesn't lie. In the statement's essence is that everyone experiences the same thing and, at the same time, everyone's experience is unique.

As we work our way toward valentines day, it also says to me that the shared experience ties us together. That knowing that we share experiences binds us to each other.

And for a friend:
If we don't tell stories, real, or imagined, we can't find the experiences we share. It might be misfortune, shared humor, tales of joy, or simply anecdotes of things we have done.

I looked at the moon: a rabbit.
You looked at the moon: a face.
We looked at the moon.

Mac + Rails

2009-12-02T21:27:00.000-06:00

Big news. I'm starting a new job on Monday.

After working for the last seven years as a .Net developer, I'm switching to Ruby on Rails development on a macbook pro.

I've been setting up my development environment.
Where do you think I'm ending up?

Eclipse?
Aptana (isn't that the same thing?)
TextMate
vim?

Eclipse has a great IDE and I've enjoyed using it for phython development with the Google App Engine platform. Which is great to work with.

Aptana has a great RadRails development system. I've only used it a bit as an eclipse plugin, but it works very well.

Textmate is a mac specific text editor with "bundles", essentially macro sets for editing in a variety of languages. I've never used it before, but it looks like it has some great rails development integration.

VIM is something that I've been working with for quite a while. It is essentially vi with a graphical interface. Doesn't that sound like an oxyoron? Really, it is a great thing to have and it can be used on windows systems, unix, amiga, ... you get the picture. Oh, and it is also available on the Mac. I know the most about this, since I've been using it for years. VIM can do syntax highlighting and has shell integration (to run shell commands). Just as TextMate has bundles, VIM has plugins. VIM's plugins include a rails plugin that does quite a bit for rails development including switching files based on context, kicking off generate and other scripts, kicking off the development server and kicking off files in a preview (in your browser). Add the Nerd_tree plugin and you get project navigation. On windows the rails plugin injects a submenu on the plugins menu to list all the tasks you can do, but VIM, like its predecessor vi, is keyboard centric so all of the commands can be done using keyboard shortcuts using the command mode of VIM.

So what am I going to do come Monday when I start my new job.... It just depends. If I find out that everyone is using textmate, I'll use textmate. I just need a good intro on how to work with it. I understand some of the developers in my new group use TextMate and some use vi.

I'm having fun trying things out. I'll let you know what I end up with.

--JJ

White house rocks the drupal

2009-10-26T12:26:00.001-05:00

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10382893-264.html
The news releases may not know what they are talking about but it is
still nice to hear it.

Fall

2009-10-22T17:18:00.001-05:00

Stabbing at the earth

without remorse blood-tipped leaves

sacrifice their lives

why it doesn't pay to be smart

2009-10-21T12:08:00.000-05:00

Developers are smart people. We can come up with some great ways of doing things. The problem comes in when people decide they are smart enough to be clever. The story I'm about to relate is not intended to implicate anyone. Instead, it is meant to be a warning.

I just had to trouble shoot the following error message:

I opened up the code associated with the application and followed the button that had been clicked to a stored procedure that was called before the error message appeared.

Sure enough, the stored procedure sets up three different error codes and passes them back to the calling code when appropriate. Don't get me wrong, error codes are great. But here is where it falls apart:

The error codes come back in an output parameter, not as the return code
The error codes are returned in a variable that would otherwise return a valid value and is of the same class of integer. I.E. the error code is a positive integer
The error codes are 62000, 64000, and 64025 -- nonsensical codes picked from nowhere as far as I can tell.
The error codes are trapped in the code that calls the stored procedure as being any returned value in the output parameter that is over 50000.
No specific error trapping occurs for the three valid error codes.
Error codes are dumped to the screen as is, no interpretation of the error code is provided for the users.
What if the id inserted into the database reaches over 50000 legitimately?
Would somebody please think of the children?

Hopefully, in reading this, you will have taken to heart the fact that these are not things that you should do. I know I won't make this mistake anytime soon.

From the interwebs:

smart: showing mental alertness and calculation and resourcefulness

clever: Mentally quick and original; bright.

I think the root of this problem is two-fold. First, someone took a legitimate concept, learned under different circumstances, and applied it incompletely where it did not belong. Second, the developer was clever and did something quick and original. But it wasn't necessarily smart, in that it didn't include a complete calculation of the consequences of the action.

OK, I'm just using words that might fit the definition, but I really think time would have been saved if this had been done differently.

Just to be clear. I'm not saying that the individual who wrote this was not an intelligent and resourceful person. The application has been around for a long time, so I know that it works and does everything it needs to otherwise it would have been tossed out long ago. A bit more fore-thought would have taken it even further.

jQuery: get closest previous sibling match

2009-10-12T13:42:00.002-05:00

Jquery provides a simple way to get the previous sibling of a DOM element. Starting from any jQuery object, you can simply use the prev() method as in:

$current = $('.startingPoint');
$previous = $current.prev();

So $previous gets the previous sibling.

But, sometimes you need the closest sibling that matches a selector. So here's a sample function to do just that:

jQuery.fn.closestPrev = function(selector) {
   var current = $(this);
   var abort = false;
   while (!abort) {
   if (current.prev().length == 0) {
   abort = true;
   current = $([]);
   }
   else {
   current = current.prev();
   if (current.is(selector)) {
   abort = true;
   }
   }
   }
   return current;
};

So now I can ask for the previous sibling that is a horse:

A Cat has wiskers

A horse has a tail.

A horse has a mane.

A cart has wheels.

A driver steers.

$('.cart'). closestPrev ('.horse').css('background-color','yellow');

would result in:

A Cat has wiskers

A horse has a tail.

A horse has a mane.

A cart has wheels.

A driver steers.

ACPI? What's that?

2009-10-08T13:34:00.000-05:00

ACPI broke my computer. If you really want to know what ACPI is, wikipedia has a great article.
If you want to hear my story of acpi disaster and how I managed to pull my computer from the brink of disaster with nothing but my bare hands, risking life and limb, then read on.

Do you recall my kitchen computer? You know, the toshiba 1135 s125 laptop that got a new life after battery optical drive problems as an under-the-counter computer? Well, I've been trying to put a new operating system on it (on the usb key that is the only persistent storage on the computer. Aside from RAM all the other storage devices have been removed), but I could not get Ubuntu ( I heart Ubuntu) to load on it properly. I tried a few other variants on it and finally settled on Mint as a possibility. It is really pretty.... I followed all the instructions on the pendrivelinux site to create a persistent install from my windows machine. I even used the 2GB casper file and updated the os from my desktop computer after rebooting. I modified the profile for the default user by adding

xrandr -o inverted

so it would boot right side up (since the monitor is hanging upside down).

I went to boot my kitchen computer (which is named "kitchen sync", get it?) and got pretty much nowhere. It just hung there doing nothing. I gave up and used the OS I had on it before... not my favorite, but it worked. But it was a love affair gone wrong. I wanted more.... So..

I did some research and figured out that I could change the boot options from grub before the boot process. I hit tab (like grub says I can) and edited the boot parms. I removed "quiet" and "splash" from the boot parms and added "verbose". Now when it booted up it seemed to do more but it stopped with a message that read:
"ACPI: EC: non-query interrupt received, switching to interrupt mode"
After some research I found that some people were seeing this as a boot pause, not an outright failure. But eventually found a couple of parms to try. I tried booting again with "noacpi" and "acpi=off" in the boot parameters. After a long pause for some dramatic tension.... It booted up.

So I went back to my windows machine, plugged in my mint 4GB microSD card in it's minimalistic enclosure, found the syslinux.cfg file to include the right parameters and modified the splash.jpg file to have a nice welcome message. Now my kitchen sync computer boots into a great os built on a wonderful foundation!

Maker weekend, part 2

2009-09-26T21:54:00.000-05:00

Very different for this one.

We got some apples at Wilson's Orchard a few weeks ago. Great apples. Tonight went out and picked up:

1 tube of chocolate chip cookie dough
1 tub of cheesecake filling
1 large papa murphy's pizza mushrooms on all of it, jalapeño on half.

See where this is going?

I cut up the apples, put them in a pan with some brown sugar and cinnamon, and let them cook down.
While that was going on I packed the cookie dough into a glass pie pan and then baked that. I didn't bake according to package directions because the oven was preheated for the pizza at the time. I baked the cookie dough in the pie pan until I thought it was good and ready. I cooled both of those while the pizza was baking. While the pizza was cooling on the counter before slicing, I pulled the cookie crust out of the fridge (it had cooled on the counter for a bit, not straight into the fridge people) and filled it with cheesecake filling. I took the apples out of the fridge (they had cooled in the freezer for a bit too) and topped the cheesecake with the apples. That went back into the fridge while we ate our pizza.

Desert was great!

(the pizza was a red herring.)

--JJ

It's a maker weekend! Part 1.

2009-09-26T21:44:00.000-05:00

I made two things this weekend. The first thing is a project for my computer. I have had a set of computer speakers attached to my computer for a while. They work well.... But remember the kitchen computer? Well that one has the original laptop speakers and I have to say, Pandora, or any other music played on it, sounds like someone stuck a couple of speakers at the end of one of the infamous inter-tubes, put foil paper over it and then jammed the whole thing down with a bunch of cotton balls.

I work on projects based on what comes up, or, in this case, what I get my hands on. I was walking to a meeting and in the hall I found a sony ZX-S1 boom box labelled "trash." Now, my first though was "speakers!". I always feel a bit guilty when I come across these things and someone has decided it is trash and I feel I will get some value out of it. I took it home and by that night I had it working again. The hard part is that it doesn't use a standard DC power input jack. I have a couple of universal power supplies with octopus ends. The only power supply I had that really worked without fiddling was my old newton message pad 120 power cord. (By the way, the newton still works.) So after some basic percussive maintenance, some cleaning of contacts, digging out junk from the button panel, and some hunting for power, I had a working radio / CD player with some nice speakers on it. But that isn't what being a maker is all about. And what does it have to do with the price of peaches in Spain? I mean, with computer speakers?

Well, the zx-s1 comes with a power jack and a headphone jack, but no input jack, and my goal was to be able to feed the radio the input from my computer so I could put the speakers I have to work in the kitchen. but, how do you do that? Here is where the inter-tubes came in handy. I found quite a few posts about hacking an aux port onto car stereos, but I didn't have a car stereo. So I did some more digging and finally came up with a gem on a Halloween forum. The basic idea: find the left and right channel from the tuner component and splice your input into those leads. I was lucky to find the zx-s1 has a nicely labelled tuner cable with L Chan, R Chan and ground clearly marked. I messed around with speaker wire and duct tape and snaked some wires out through the battery compartment. After some testing, I found I had a serviceable aux input.... But it looked like the radio had been run through with a katana by someone from the western hemisphere. In other words, messy.

I took a trip to radio shack where I bought some heat-shrink tubing, two switching stereo audio jacks, some 22 gauge solid wire in red, green, and black. I dug my soldering iron out of the utility cabinet in my garage, took the radio apart again and got to work. By the way, you need a seriously long phillips screwdriver for this, my normal screwdrivers just were too stubby. I did some practice soldering on a switch I took out of something else a long time ago. I don't think I had actually soldered anything before. Mostly I used the iron for removing salvage from old boards. I soldered some pretty long leads on one of the audio jacks. I had bought two just in case I fubarred one. I used a hair dryer on the heat-shrink tubing. (Fun stuff). Then I wired the jack to the original leads I had split for each channel. The packaging for the jack has a schematic that I followed for the wiring. Some guesswork was involved on my part because I can't read schematics worth a darn, but it worked.
Now, the extra wires made it impossible to run them back the same way they were before, but a few nibbles with some wire cutters were enough to make new channels for the new wires. I went back to the same side the other jacks were on for the new aux jack and drilled a hole. I popped the jack through the hole when I finally had it big enough... to find the jack was too short to mount through the plastic wall. Back out to the garage for the dremel tool and a rasp. I had to make the wall thinner in order to mount it. It works and it looks nice. No more wire spaghetti coming out of the bottom of the stereo. I can now turn on the boom box, which sits under my monitor stand, switch to radio, plug in my aux cord from my computer and listen to pandora or hulu without having the other set of speakers in place. Awesome sound. Or I can take out the aux cord and listen to the radio. I have a splitter on the back of the computer to plug in my wireless headphones so I can listen during nap time when I'm catching up on my shows. And guess where the other speakers are going?

Tattoo anyone or anything with jquery!

2009-09-17T19:59:00.010-05:00

~~This isn't quite ready for prime time yet, but I am leaving it up. You can play with it, but it won't be much fun.~~
Now you can tattoo anyone or anything online with the help of jquery and my blog!

There are stills some things to be done, but you can start playing with it. Find an image online you would like to play with. For example: the guy from Supernatural, kermit, a space shuttle, a celestial body, something from your facebook, myspace, or blog, or even your flickr collection. Tattoo it with one of the tattoos below and then label it. Follow the directions below in order to save your masterpiece into a comment below (If I like it I will post the comment). If you want to email it to your friends and have them come here to see it, that's fine too. I won't be able to see anything you try out because it is all done on your computer. This is not connected to a database, so I'm not storing anything.

Note: it doesn't look right the first time you click "set it", click it again. Sometimes the text in the label is too big and overflows the viewable portion of the page. Make it shorter or change the size of the text.

for now try pasting:

{"tattooCanvas": "http://megasizzle.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/slimey.jpg" , "tattooWords": { "text": "Hot Stuff!" , "size": "28px" , "color": "rgb(255, 0, 0)" , "top": "224px" , "left": "149px" , "width": "165px" , "height": "34px" } , "tattooOverlay": { "src": "http://lh6.ggpht.com/_mYmgp8oGCOY/SrK8o-VETJI/AAAAAAAABgo/yTb1zNMpQb8/s288/dragon-03_sm.png" , "top": "123px" , "left": "172px" , "width": "133px" , "height": "44px" } }

into the "set it" textarea and click "set it".

This is some text in the tattoo container.

If you really like your masterpiece, show the settings, copy and paste them into a comment Nothing indecent, please. I won't post it if I don't like it. This is my blog. Look for comments and try them out.

Jquery Test post

2009-09-17T13:19:00.006-05:00

Just for fun, I have added jquery to my blog. To test it, I have added some animation to the text below.

something should happen here:

It didn't work.

something should happen above.

If it is working, the text should change from "It didn't work." to "It worked!" and the color should change in an animation because I also loaded jqueryui.

How does this work?

in your template, add an html / javascript element close to the top of your page.
fill it with:

as the content.

Now, any element that has the class firstJQuery will have the text changed and be animated as soon as google finishes loading jquery.

More jquery fun later!

The age old question: aspx or ashx?

2009-09-16T16:29:00.001-05:00

Jquery and other client side technologies such as prototype, mootools,
and sciptaculous allow asp.net developers to decouple the user
interface from standard asp.net page postbacks. It is possible instead
to serialize objects on the page and use AJAX posts to send
information to the server.
It is easy then to go one of two routes. You can write a standard aspx
page to recieve the post request or you can write a handler ashx page.
An aspx page makes it easier to take advantage of any code on a master
page that might handle security or make use of session. The aspx page
requires that you clear the output, set the content type, and short circuit the page life cycle so the page does not render any extaneous
HTML or continue the page life cycle.
The ashx handler makes it easier to only render what you want, but it
is a bit more difficult to check session and there is no garbage
collection in the life cycle of a handler.
Still, between the two, a handler is the right option. The session
issue is easy to handle, if you implement the right interface it
fetches the session before calling process request. The handler life
cycle doesn't render anything you don't ask for. And, if you don't
leave any open connections lying around, you don't really have to
worry about the garbage collection issue.
I'll fill in some details and links soon. Updated with links!
--JJ

Bathroom talk Or Things I Don't like

2009-09-11T17:13:00.000-05:00

There are thing I don't like. It may be hard to believe, but it is
true.

Walking into the bathroom, phone at the ear, conversation in full
swing. Zipper down, belt undone, pants around the ankles, sitting in
the stall, talking over the neighbors' flush. Skip the hand washing,
only one hand available for lifting, zipping, buckling, opening the
door. Besides, the hand dryer is too loud.

I hate it when I walk into the bathroom to find one of Them in there.
Sometimes you can't tell until you are sitting in a stall or they come
in after you. What goes through their heads?

"this conversation is so important I have to have it at the same
time as I take care of some bodily functions. "

Maybe they figure they can be quiet, after all, they won't be
flushing, washing, or using the hand dryer. But what about the rest
of us? These are public restrooms we are talking about. What about
the people on the other end of the conversation? Who are these people
talking to? I have heard, to my dismay, short conversations and long
ones that seemed to convey to me the idea that one of us was really
wrong, but I don't drink enough to have inadvertantly stepped into a
telephone booth to relieve myself.

I know that it must be a personal flaw on my part, but I find it
really disturbing when one of these "potty-talk" individuals' paths
crosses with mine.

I'm sure that I'm not the only one who has these encounters. Or
rather, while I don't wish it on anyone, it is better for me to
believe I'm not the only one who runs into them.

I need a cell phone signal blocker. Who has one for me that fits in a
wallet?

Now I can see the small stuff

2009-08-27T21:25:00.004-05:00

Some people say that some other person can't see the forest for the trees.

I say I couldn't figure out what to do with two web cams. Really, who needs two on the same computer? I hardly use one, let alone two. I bought the second web cam, because my ge minicam pro (H098067) wasn't really doing what I wanted it to. I mean, the quality was not that great.

So, for over two years, the ge minicam pro sat in a box in my closet.

Hello, my name is JJ and I am a tech hoarder.

...

Later, online....

I bought a pocket microscope from American Science and Surplus a few months ago.

Let me say, I love them, so if they wanted me to sing a jingle for them, I would do it, but the recording would have to come with a warning "Please remove all items that are sensitive to sound from the room before playing this recording. This includes plants, animals, people, and dairy products. Effective on all types of pests."

Back in the original thought....

I like the microscope and have spent some time with my daughter and her friend looking at salt crystals, color in old books, paper, stuff, you name it.

elsewhere ....

I keep seeing digital / usb microscopes online and in magazines, even on store shelves, and I wonder about them.... I mean, I think about buying them... spending money....

the light goes on....

when you flip the switch on the side of the microscope and I finally realized, people are always talking about opening up web cams to make IR detectors with a bit of dark photographic film, why not do that? No, not make an IR detector, but use the same concept, i.e. taking a screwdriver to a webcam, to put two great things together? Well, ok, I did say the GE minicam pro was not great, didn't I?

I took a screw driver to the webcam and got it apart. One tricky bit is that the webcam has a bit of dark film over the electronics on the aperture side in order to protect them and there are screws under there. Don't pry too hard without removing them. And, because the camera is attached to the USB cable by soldering after part of the case is slipped over the cable, I left part of the case on the cable, I just slipped it to the other end. (Tin snips are definitely in order... some time.)

Now, some folks say that you should put hot glue on the electronics to protect them. I say, don't do this at home. If you do anything that I do, you do so at your own risk. Don't take the camera apart, don't use hot glue, don't use electrical tape to wrap stuff like I did.

Yes, I wrapped the circuit board for the camera in electrical tape. All but the microphone for the camera, which, for some strange reason, I left attached and uncovered.

The camera is free....

Well, it cost about $30 when I bought it a few years ago. Surprisingly, it still costs about the same. You can get cheaper ones. But now that it was free from its packaging, which included a weight, I could attach it to the pocket microscope.

Carefully applying the adhesive...

Is for other people. I just used more electrical tape and attached the focus ring of the camera to the ocular lens of the microscope. Sure, the ocular lens of the microscope is now stuck at the highest magnification setting because I had to extend it to its fullest in order to get the tape to fasten, but I can still adjust focus.

It is even more fun now to use the microscope because we can share what we see without having to have the original viewer hold the microscope in place and describe it. Now we can use webcam software on our computers to see the image together.

By the way, my driver cd for the webcam croaked and finding the driver for the ge minicam pro (h098067) was difficult, so, go to the jasco products site to find it. It is on the drivers page in the pc cams section. There are a bunch of them listed. I had to install the first listed one in order to get the camera going.

On Linux, use the cheese photo booth application to view the webcam stream.

Here is an image I captured of a bug wing we found on a hike that I took with my standard webcam (on 4 squares per inch graph paper).

From bugwing

And here are a few shots from the microscope on the same background.

From bugwing

internal membrane panels meet.

From bugwing

edge of the wing.

From bugwing

Part of the carapace section.

Not bad for a few minutes of work, I think.

--JJ

Michigan

2009-08-17T14:19:00.001-05:00

I have spent very little of my life in Michigan, and yet, it defines me in ways other places I have lived do not.

Water flows up-hill

berries of summers long ago

memories return

--JJ

"Oh, No! 3D!" or how I came to fear trees

2009-07-13T09:08:00.002-05:00

Ok, I'm really not scared of trees. But, by any account I should be. Take any horror movie. Add a drive on a road with trees on the side of the road. Add car accident. Someone wrestles for the wheel, the vehicle becomes possessed, aliens land in the road, something horrible lands on the roof of the car, whatever the cause of the accident, you can rest assured a tree will be involved. Or it might be committed. (You know like the chicken and the pig in non-vegetarian breakfasts). The tree might serve to pin someone against (involved) or it might drive a fallen / broken branch right through the windshield. In one notable recent movie you even get it in 3D coming right at you.

So, bottom line, enjoy your drive through the forest. Just make sure you trust your passengers, no aliens, or gahstly monsters are after you, and you've good care of your car. You know, so it doesn't turn against you.... Isn't it time for an oil change? Check the brakes lately?

Isn't the pattern of light through the leaves lovely?

I like making Pizza

2009-06-02T20:23:00.006-05:00

Pizza is fun to make. The reason is that it is so flexible. I make it with my daughter usually. I know that it is possible to make your own crust from scratch, but I start with a Betty Crocker Pizza Crust mix. The package instructions are simple, mix with water, allow to rest and bake. But even here, there is more you can do.
We added grated parmesan cheese, garlic, black pepper, basil, and a tablespoon of olive oil. How much of the rest of the ingredients? It depends on the mood.

We put it on a pizza pan.... I know, a pizza stone is recommended for good pizza. I don't have one, so I use a perforated pan. We poked holes in the crust with a fork. My daughter is especially good at that part. A bit of a pre-bake at 450 degrees and then we added the toppings. Today the toppings were fire roasted tomato sauce, sautéed button mushrooms, sautéed yellow and green bell pepper slices, mozzarella, and some grated romano and parmesan cheese. Baked and served.

MMMMMMMM yummy.

IPod Touch Win

2009-06-02T20:14:00.002-05:00

Today I did something that I hadn't really thought I could do. I ran Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint on my IPod Touch 2G. And I did it without jail-breaking. OK, I cheated, but Citrix made it easy. They have released Citrix Receiver for the IPhone and IPod Touch which makes it easy to run applications on a Citrix Server from your IPhone or IPod Touch. I tried it out with their demo server and it worked very nicely. I started a powerpoint presentation on and it worked very well.
Now, if I can only get the folks that run the Citrix Servers at work to open it up to IPhone / IPod Touch connections.

The kitchen computer - or What to do with the rocks in your junk closet Part 2

2009-06-01T20:13:00.001-05:00

A Toshiba Satellite 1135 - S125 served me as a decent laptop for 7 years. I bought it for myself when I was finishing up my degree. I have a tendency not to buy computers full price. But this one I did. After 7 years, it was a real lap-burner, even after cleaning out the heat sink. A few weeks ago, a neighbor gave up on a laptop that was only three years old, so I decided fix that one up for the living room. The drive had died, so I took my 7 year old pata drive out of my toshiba and installed it in that computer. Just as a side note, Ubuntu booted without a blink on the new computer without any reconfiguration after the transplant. That's a nice OS. So my toshiba was in the corner, driveless, without really anything to do.... And then my wife went away for a few days.

The toshiba was siting there, not doing anything..... I had time and a few different screw drivers. So I took it apart. Now, there isn't a manual on how to dissasemble this model of laptop, not even on the irisvista site. But there were some hints there. I didn't know about the keyboard panel that has to be pried up initially, but found a mention of that on another laptop. That was really helpful. I had some trouble with the hinge covers, once I had taken the first screw off them, I didn't realize I could just take those off too.

I took the entire base off, but I didn't take apart the LCD. I was left with the mother board with nothing but the CPU and heatsink / fan assembly on it and the LCD assembly. I hooked those things back together and it booted to the bios prompt before failing because there was no drive. That's when things started getting exciting. I downloaded and installed pendrivelinux on a flash drive I had around. I had a usb mouse and bought the cheapest usb keyboard I could find. I had a usb wifi adapter and a 4 port hub. Some basic supplies (double-stick foam tape, miscellaneous wood, screws, etc) later and below are the results.

we now have a basic kitchen computer running pendrivelinux (a mandriva variant), with 1GB of ram, 1.8GHz celeron processor that runs Opera, basic games, and utilities, with a 400MB persistent loop on a 1GB flash drive. It can connect to my network drives and has wireless internet access. The battery on the toshiba was toast, so it it wall-wart powered. The original hinges work well for hanging the LCD from the cabinet above it. And I saw a water-proof silicone keyboard on craigslist.

There are spices and knives behind the computer and to the left is the stove, where, yes I do cook. I do wonder about the high heat and humidty from cooking, but then again, it is 7 years old. We have been using it since to plan our menus, grocery list, look up recipes, leave notes for each other, to-do lists, etc. All of this takes place online so if it shuts down unexpectedly, it doesn't get lost.

About the only thing I don't like about it is that the power button is the tiny internal surface mount button on the powerboard which is hard to find. I might try to rig something else for that.

One last hint. I know the pictures are blury, but the LCD is mounted upside down. XRANDR is your friend.

in linux in the .bashrc for the default user I have added a line:

xrandr -o inverted

It flips the screen output as soon as X is loaded.

A Project -- or What to do with the rocks in your head Part 1

2009-06-01T12:51:00.002-05:00

Your favorite store is closing, or maybe it is just your current favorite because of all the great deals you can get now that it is closing. Are they selling everything? Even the shelves? Look for a listening kiosk. If they have one they are selling, it might be worth buying it.

I got one from a shop closing downtown for a couple of dollars because the headphones, the main attraction on the listening station, had been stolen previously. The one I got was a Sounds True listening station (You can find a picture of it on the sounds true sales site. It is similar to the stand alone item that does not have a rack of CDs attached to it).

I didn't know what I was going to do with it when I bought it, but as I looked at the back of it I saw a battery pack attached to a PCB that had a compact flash card attached to it. It also had a headphone jack and a volume control nob. You have seen these things in stores, kids love playing with them. Push a button on the front and you get music from the dancing marimbas or the xylophone players of the baltic south, sounds of the rainforest, or in this case music through a dogs ear??.

I powered it up with a power brick I had lying around (12 volts). That's all well and good, but I really didn't want to listen to people telling me how to get better self esteam. I tried to mount the compact flash card on my computer only to find that it reported as not formatted. So I dug around the internet after finding the "digital tech" label on the PCB I found the company's web site and found the software I needed. (they have an awful site where "click here" means it literally, and there are two links on the same line which go to different places, you have to get the right one to really get to the software....headache). My daughter now has a digital jukebox in her bedroom with 20 of her favorite songs on it. $2.00.

Being told that having the titles printed on regular paper on top of the buttons is awesome: priceless.

Everyone is Doing it

2009-04-30T11:34:00.004-05:00

It seems like everyone has something to say bout the swine flu. I thought I would add one more that I came across today.

I got an email with the subject line:

Swine Flu warning DONT DO THIS !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It has a handy image available for reference.

I have masked the identities in the picture.

There go my weekend plans :)

--JJ

Testing javascript with Jquery bookmarklet

2009-04-06T21:45:00.002-05:00

Karl Swedeburg put together a bookmarklet that can add jquery to any page loaded in your browser. See his article / post on the learningjquery.com site. For my purposes, I added a "console" to allow me to run arbritary javascript on demand from the bookmarklet against the page. My version of the bookmarklet is just a few more characters. It prompts for a javascript statement and then evals the javascript. It also alerts the elapsed time it takes to execute the statement in milliseconds. I found it useful to know how long it takes to execute statements in order to optomize scripts.
I hope it us useful to some of you.

JQuery Intellisense in Visual Studio 2008

2009-04-06T10:07:00.002-05:00

I know that I'm behind the times here, but I wanted to do a followup on ScottGu's post about intellisense in visual studio 2008 for JQuery. I don't have much to add except that it is very much worth while. A couple of things that I will point out. If you have service pack 1 for visual studio 2008 installed, it may not be right. In order to get the process to work for me I had to run the service pack one preparation tool. (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A494B0E0-EB07-4FF1-A21C-A4663E456D9D&displaylang=en) then run the service pack 1 install. Once that was complete, I could run the described hotfix for adding -vsdoc.js recognition. I had to run the preparation tool and then rerun the service pack 1 install because the hotfix kept telling me I didn't have the any packages that the hotfix applied to. I wish I had the exact message text so I could put it in this post.

Once it was installed, I could add references to my javascript file and get intellisense, but the jquery intellisense was broken. The -vsdoc.js file that I downloaded from jquery.com didn't work. I updated it to add a delcaration for some variables that had been commented out in the downloaded file and now it works just fine.

Doing all this also fixed an annoying scroll bar problem with javascript files.

Thanks to Scott.

--JJ

It's Obama's fault

2009-01-21T12:52:00.000-06:00

Yesterday was thee first day of the spring semester here on campus.
Spring being a misnomer since we might hit 32 degrees F today.

There are some people standing on one of the main paths downtown
holding " free hugs " signs. You know that has to be his fault. Like I
said, it isn't exacly warm out there, just like it wasn't warm in D.C.
yesterday. He walked around out there shaking hands, smiling, and,....
wait for it.... hugging people, like it wasn't cold at all.

I think it must be part of his big plan to unify and improve the
economy. Do happy people spend more or less? Based on a recent
lifehacker.com post, we have a tendency to eat more in tough economic
times.

Too bad so many people skipped the free hugs. We might have had a
viable sample size to do some analysis of otherwise.

--JJ

.net dynamically added controls redeaux: Ajax

2009-01-09T10:00:00.001-06:00

Yesterday I helped to solve a problem involving contols added to an
update panel during an asyncronous post back. The problem was that the
event associated with the controls were not firing. Before Ajax came
around we learned that controls added dynamically to a page need to be
re-added each time the page posts back. (http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/092904-1.aspx
). The same still applies when you are doing a partial post back with
Ajax.

But the question now is, how do you know if you need to add controls
that only need to exist in a particular context? In this case, we
only need the controls when the user caused them to be instantiated by
clicking a control that opened a modal pop-up containing them and then
interacted with them, causing the partial post back. If the user
interacted with any other part of the page we don't need to add the
dynamic controls.

We can tell that we are in an asyncronous post back by asking the
page's or the master page's scriptmanager. Use the IsInAsyncPostBack
property of the scriptmanager to determine if the page is in an async
post back. To determine if the post back was triggered by one of the
dynamic controls inspect the async source element Id property. If it
matches your control, add it back before the viewstate gets attached
and your event handler will fire.

In our case it was even easier. We could check to see what the element
was that caused the postback. The name of the control had everything we needed to handle the event.

Good luck

-- JJ

Jose Jimenez
Applications Developer
Healthcare Information Systems
University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics
Phone: 335-6521

The day the earth stood still.... or how to bake six loaves of bread for one wedding

2008-12-07T22:27:00.001-06:00

Two of our friends got married on Friday the 5th. It was a beautiful occasion. The dogs barked at the right spots, the ceremony was.... well, I almost cried at several points, it was so touching. It was wonderful to be a part of their wedding.

I was asked to bake some bread for the wedding. I haven't done much bread baking, but I do have one recipe that I've been using for special occasions. I won't repeat the recipe here, instead, I'll point to the place where I found it to begin with. This has become my basic bread recipe and is always there to help me make sure I don't forget something, like the final baking temperature. The Simple Dollar printed the basic recipe I use in November last year. My "special" recipe consists of adding about half a jar (about 1/4 cup) of basil or sun-dried tomato pesto to the wet ingredients before starting to add the flour. After that, work the dough following the instructions the same as before. I make two sets of the dough , one with basil, one of sun-dried tomato, for my fancy loaves and braid three strands, two of one color and one of the other, together for each loaf. This makes two loaves to keep it even.

In order to get six loaves made for the wedding, I had to freeze some dough before hand. Now, I'm fairly new to bread baking so I didn't really know how to get this done. A bit more web snooping lead me to let the dough rise the first time and then freeze it on a baking sheet to get it to keep. I did this for all six loaves and the day before the wedding I started two of them thawing at 6pm. It was midnight before they were thawed enough by sitting on top of my 170 degree oven to bake. (not in the oven, just a warm oven). If you are working in the middle of summer you may not need the oven on or as long. I started the other 4 loaves to thaw so I could bake them the next morning. Now I know how long it takes to thaw my bread dough from frozen. I used six foil pans I bought a the grocery store. If I hadn't done that I would have had a hard time getting them all ready for the wedding.

The best part of the bread is that everyone thought it was great! They noticed it even thought there was a beautiful wedding going on.

Great song, M and J. Congrats C and C.

--JJ

An anchor by any other name is still an anchor

2008-11-27T14:06:00.001-06:00

I worked through a problem recently with someone else's web page. The problem was that they had a series of named anchors on their page, but no links to them. They left the links off because the had badly named anchors and didn't want to go through the trouble of fixing pre-existing code to create the links and fix the anchors. Here is an example of the html:

<html>

<head>

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.1.2.6.min.js"></script>

<script ...>

</head>

<body>

<div class='navigation_box'></div>

<div class='month_header'><a name='Jul'>July 2007</a></div>

....

...

<div class='month_header'><a name='Jul'>July 2008</a></div>

...

</body>

</html>

When I saw jquery was referenced, I knew it was going to be easy to create the links and the anchors to for the page. Only, it wasn't.

The logic is fairly straight forward. Here are the steps:

find each of the divs with the class 'month_header'
change the name of each anchor inside those divs to be the same as the text inside the anchor, substituting an underscore (_) for any spaces
clone each of the divs
add an href that matches the name tag
remove the name tag
be nice and add a class to the div for styling
add the cloned divs to the div with class navigationbox that was already there

The problem that came up was in step two. Early in the process I realized that either jquery or Internet Explorer was eating the request to set the value of the name attribute of the anchors. I just could not change the name attribute. here is what I tried:

$('.month_header').find('a').each(function () { $(this).attr('name',$(this).text().replace(' ','_')) });

I did try to do this a couple of different ways, but each time the anchors did not change names. I tried removing the name attribute first by chaining in a

.removeAttr('name')

just before the

.attr('name',...)

It just refused to set the attribute. If I used 'Name' instead of 'name', it added a second attribute and didn't work for the purposes of linking to even if I removed the original name attribute.

I really don't know if it was jquery or IE, but it refused to work.

I had spent enough time with it already, so, here is the change in logic I came up with.

for number 2 above:

remove the name attribute
add a new attribute with the correct value named '__XX__Name__XX__' ( I picked that arbitrarily. It is something I don't think will otherwise be used)
change '__XX_Name_XX__' to 'name' within the html of the parent divs using basic string replace

That last step is really where the rename finally happens. After that, the logic goes on as necessary.

Here is the script:

$(document).ready(function(){

createAnchors('header_month','navigation_box','monthenabled');

});

//linkContainerClass = class of the element that contains the existing anchor

//navigationContainerClass = Class that the new links will be added to

//navigationClass = the class to add to the new links

function createAnchors(linkContainerClass, navigationContainerClass, navigationClass)

{

//find all instances of container class and change the name of them to the text (for uniqueness)

// then clone each container class, remove the original class, add the new class and add it to the

// navigation container.

$('.'+ linkContainerClass).find('a')

.each(function() { $(this).attr('__XX__Name__XX__',$(this).text().replace(' ','_')) })

.removeAttr('name')

.end()

.each(function() { $(this).html($(this).html().replace('__XX__Name__XX__','name')); })

.clone().find('a').addClass(navigationClass).removeClass(linkContainerClass)

.each(function (){ $(this).attr('href','#'+$(this).attr('name')).removeAttr('name'); })

.appendTo('.'+navigationContainerClass);

}

</script>

Some things to notice in the script:

After adding the new __XX__Name__XX__ attribute and removing the name attribute, I use end() to return to the linkContainerClass list and work with them rather than the list of 'a' elements that are found with find('a')
I noticed that if I tried to do this without the each() functions $(this) did not refer to the right thing.
.clone() makes copies of the elements and works with them, not the originals. if you have events tied to the items being cloned, use .clone(true) to copy the event handlers also
.appendTo() adds the selected items to the matched item.

Keep in mind a couple of things. I had a particular set of html to work with here where there already were anchors and divs to work with. This is not a fix all for when you have an issue with changing the name of an element in the DOM with jquery. Also, this requires jquery. I say that for those of you who don't know about jquery and are having trouble doing this with plain javascript. Jquery is a very nice tool for working with the DOM.

If someone knows how to do this better with jquery, let me know.

I hate my cat

2008-11-23T19:55:00.002-06:00

Well, OK, I don't hate my cat. He is just smarter than me. OK, he isn't smarter than me, he just likes giving me a hard time. One of the things we disagree on is counter surfing. He feels that, so long as we keep food on the counter, he should be allowed to discover it and share it with the other cat. So far they have gotten three loaves of wheat bread, one loaf of home made braided red / green pesto bread, one lemon danish, and some other stuff. I don't know all of it. I don't want to know. We have taken to putting everything away as soon as possible, but I bake. I have to leave bread on the counter to cool. Our old cat was a counter surfer too. I have trouble remembering, but I think foil on the counter was the solution. Cat's don't like the way it sounds or the way it feels. Honestly, I've put up with the problem for too long. I foiled the counter today. I don't like doing it because it makes the counter less usable. So I want to make the experience even more memorable for the cat if he does decide to try it again.

I took some inspiration from the video here (http://www.metacafe.com/watch/932358/how_to_construct_a_motion_detector_alarm_system/) There is an ad on the page. Open it in a background tag and wait a while for it to go by before switching to it.

I went to Radio Shack, bought a batter holder, and a buzzer. I went ahead and spent the extra 50 cents or so and got an enclosed battery holder with a switch on it. This is going in the kitchen after all, and I can use it for something else once the cat gets the message.

the buzzer is a 6VDC buzzer It is available at Radioshack (click the picture for the product page).

I had a Silk two pack box (it usually holds two 64 oz cartons of silk) available from our grocery shopping earlier and I have bought a 200 count package of straws some time ago of which I still have about 100 available.

I opened up the Silk box and cut off all of the extra tabs from the top and bottom. I put foil on the plain side of the carton and then put straws flat around the perimeter and along the center from top to bottom as stand offs. I connected one of the lengths of wire from the buzzer to the foil with tape. I connected the other wire to a wire from the battery holder in which I installed the required four AA batteries.
(click on the image to see the product page at radio shack.)

The other wire of the battery holder got attached to the foil I already had on the counter. Once the Silk box got flipped over onto the foil on the counter, any touch on the box causes the buzzer to go off. It isn't very loud, but it will do one of two things. It will either warn us that the cat is on the counter or, even better yet, tell the cat to go somewhere else for treats. Like the plant.

Arrrgggggg.....

--JJ

Ubuntu 8.10 no gui after upgrade from 8.04

2008-11-15T11:11:00.001-06:00

So I booted up after an update to 8.10 from 8.04 (intrepid ibex from hardy heron) on a virtual box.

I had already gone through the process on my laptop build with no problems so I was stoked to do the same on my virtual build.

All I got was a text based login prompt on tty1 with no graphical interface (gui, images, pictures, etc). ctrl+alt+F7 did me no good. I tried starting the gui using

sudo /etc/init.d/gdm start

but it did no good. But to show the power of the interwebs and of Linux developers, I went online to find the recipe to fix the problem.

I rebooted the machine, hit escape when I got to the grub prompt and booted into the recovery mode. (why are there so many listed?)

I picked the first one after the normal boot selection. Once I booted in to that mode, which took a while and alot of text scrolling by, I selected XFIX from the menu that had come up. Once that process completed (I didn't have to answer any confusing questions), I selected the option at the top that resumes a normal build. The boot process continued and I had a graphical login prompt. Just what I wanted. No problems after that.

--JJ

Iowa Code Camp

2008-11-08T21:22:00.001-06:00

I just got back from Iowa Code Camp. I had a longish drive so I left before the dinner. Some folks drove from Chicago to Des Moines in order to attend. That's over 5 hours. I didn't drive that far myself.

I left for ICC a bit late, so I didn't make it to the first session, but I made it there for Greg Wilson's talk on SQL 2008. As someone who has to hack out some complex t-sql every once in a while, I was glad to see some of the new features coming up. I also liked seeing some information about the syncronization stuff.

I then attended Todd Bleeker's Sharepoint 101 talk. I have to admit that I left that talk wanting a bit more. I got alot of good theory and insight into the why's of sharepoint webpart development, but the code demo was left for the last 10 minutes and was interrupted by more discussion, so I didn't really get a good demo out of the talk. I think I could learn alot more from Todd, but I'm not sure it can fit into 1 hour and 15 minute chunks.

After Todd's talk I attended the discussion on Microsoft's Unity framework presented by Jeff Brand, self proclaimed .Net Sex Symbol and All-Around Good guy. Jeff Brand is a good guy, that part I can vouch for. The Unity framework is a dependency injection container. I could imagine a few good uses for the techniques, but, of course, the starship + engine / weapons example is what stuck with me. I kept wanting to say, you need to use the impulse engine to get out of the dock first and then fire up the warp engines. Watch out, there is a Klingon ship on your long range radar.

The last session I attended was a less formal. Dru Sellers was discussing his Mass Traffic framework. It was a fun session with alot of individuals asking questions and trying to come up with answers.

Along with all of that I got a decent lunch, a large brownie, and a couple of drinks (non-alcoholic). At the end of the whole thing I got a great book, Ajax Security, a book bag, and a great prize from Infragistics. I just found out how much the Infragistics is worth.... Wow.... Talk about great sponsors.

I really appreciated the apportunity to attend an event like this, for free, with such a great group of presenters. They are going to be working on another Iowa Code Camp for next May in Iowa City. I'm already looking forward to it.

Mini Vacation report....or...What I did over my fall break

2008-10-29T11:06:00.000-05:00

I took a couple of days off this week and made the weekend longer. We went to the Putnam Museum where we saw some dead things (Have you heard of Isis Neferit?) and some scary things. They have a ghost hunting exhibit all set up. It was a fun trip.

I reupholstered the kitchen chairs. Someone had been eating on, or rather someone had been feeding, the chairs and they had gotten a bit out of hand. I think I should have brought the old upholstery in to the research labs at work. They would have been at them for quite a while, trying to identify the newly discovered life forms..... Ok, they weren't that bad, but they are quite a bit better now. I even made a cushion for the little one to use in order to keep the crumbs off the chairs. Same fabric, with ties, so it matches.

I worked on L's scarf also. I didn't code anything.... Wait. I did.

I wrote a script to tell age based on a birthdate. It is a shell script for my conky setup. I use it to tell how old the little one is down to the day.

--JJ

Flat Stanley works the Habitat

2008-10-24T18:37:00.003-05:00

This afternoon, my group from work went to help at a Habitat for Humanity build. It was close to the 2500 block of Aster in Iowa City.

View Larger Map

Flat Stanley went to the build with me. He wore rain gear. I hope to have the picture added to this blog later. We worked on caulking the rafters and installing a big double window. Flat Stanley is visiting from Virginia.

CSS Reset and then Some

2008-10-21T13:47:00.001-05:00

I got information about a CSS reset from one of my favorite campus designers recently and thought I would post info about it here. I found information about Eric Meyer's CSS reset online which give some good information about the why's and whyfores of css reset. You can find his latest discussion on the topic here: http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2008/01/15/resetting-again/.

But while I was searching for it, I found some mentions of css frameworks. Now, I have been working with javascript frameworks such as jquery for a while now, but this is the first I hear of css frameworks. That shows what kind of developer I am, doesn't it? I'm going to be taking a some of the frameworks and trying to think how I can use one of them to my advantage or come up with my own. Right now, I am looking at the 960 grid system. It gets me thinking about how to design my pages a bit differently if nothing else. i haven't really been very good at layout without grids. i've been looking into using CSS more. One bright spark that stood out was the yaml framework which even includes an online xhtml / css builder with a preview.

--JJ

Lion's mane takes over 5 hours, gets a smile

2008-10-21T07:55:00.001-05:00

I knit for over 5 hours this weekend. I picked up some eyelash yarn and some size 19 knitting needles, you know the big fat ones

I made a fairly long scarf out of two colors (one after the other, not mingled) in brown and orange. I then folded it over and attached it to the lion costume hood. I got a smile for my trouble. I think it will work out just fine.

I live in a college town....

2008-10-17T17:31:00.001-05:00

...which is pretty evident when you see a panhandler chatting up the college girls holding a sign that reads

My family was kidnapped by ninjas.
I need money for karate lessons.

It is one of the best writing schools in the country.

You know if he gets the money, it will be used for karate lessons, but most likely his family was not kidnapped by ninjas. He just wants to be able to kick the "rear-end" of the person who hurt his feelings reviewing his latest poem.

Do I own any banks yet?

2008-10-15T09:59:00.001-05:00

As a citizen of the United States of America, whose government has, or is in the process of, purchasing stock in a number of banks, do I own any banks yet? I'd really like to know, especially if I own any banks in my neighborhood. It would be fun to walk in the door, walk up to the front desk and say, "Don't you know who I am? I own this place. Where's my office?" I'm sure I'd get shown the door, and not one with my name on it. Oh, well, I guess it will be a while before my bank treats me like I belong. They are nice, but they always have better chairs than I do when I go in. It's not like I get to even look at the monitors, let alone play with their computers.

I read an article about Iceland and how all of their banks are in bad shape. Imports have slowed down, people are having trouble buying what they need. We are talking Iceland. It isn't like they grow everything they need. Is that the shape of things to come here?

I steadfastly refuse to believe it.... but sometimes....late at night...the news pops up into my TV or computer screen like a bad Halloween movie. That's why I like Hulu. No news, sure you get some commercials including pleading children trying to guilt you into saving the earth, but at least the banks don't creep in.

SQL Compare

2008-10-13T15:51:00.002-05:00

I really tried to do without. I, like many other developers using SQL server, have databases that live on multiple servers. I tried to compare one database on two servers by scripting the stored procedures, tables, roles, functions, etc in each database and using a text comparison tool. Of course, the objects didn’t get scripted in the same order in each, so I was cutting and pasting for about 15 (interrupted) minutes before I thought to myself, “Self, there has to be a better way.” Without going into details of that personal conversation, the accusations, the dirty looks which can’t be expressed easily in text, suffice it to say that, yes there is a better way. I’ve known about RedGate and their tools for a long time (hi, Chris). SQL compare is $more than I want to pay. They are wonderful tools and about as tempting as a Boston cream pie made by the right person (it’s late, and I’m hungry). But I’m cheap. I bought a palm m100 for $5 at a consignment store – cheap. So I went looking for something I could use without spending the money.

SQL effects has a community edition that is a free download. It allows you to specify your two servers, how you connect, the databases and objects to compare and shows the differences in objects. It can handle stored procedures, tables, functions, roles, users, and some other things. No more procedure by procedure compare, no more mucking about with moving text around so I can do a text based comparison.

Of course, I don’t know SQL Effects from Alice, so trust them on your own dime.

--JJ

Water levels dropping

2008-06-19T20:44:00.002-05:00

If it was a vessel containing liquid, the Coralville dam would be a soda bottle with a pack of mentos in it. At this point, the soda would be only a couple of inches above the opening, still, since you are holding it in your hands, you are definitely getting wet. The water level in the dam is still 3-4 inches above the spillway. That means it is flowing over the highest level of the dam. Like the soda over the lip of the bottle opening. Get it? So even though the water levels are dropping, they haven't dropped enough. The mentos are wearing out though. Or the CO2. I don't know anything about that.

My boss said something that made me sad today. She mentioned the possibility that Sluggers would close. Now that was scary. Now, we haven't done this in a while, but I think we once went to Sluggers 3 times in one week. We have cut back significantly, but still, it is one of our favorites. (Their gourmet grilled cheese really is. Some places say they have a good grilled cheese and they mean they add lots of butter and two slices of cheese. Sluggers adds three cheeses, fresh basil, tomatoes, and field greens. That's a good grilled cheese.)
I hope they made it through the flood....

OK, seriously, this whole thing has been rather depressing and it is easier to work through it and do my cameos for TV than to think about it and the total devastation that has ravaged communities all along the Midwest. Cities along the Mississippi are getting hit at all the twisty parts of rivers and streams.

Good luck to all of them.

And a map to go with the pictures.

2008-06-16T11:23:00.001-05:00

View Larger Map

And another

2008-06-16T10:54:00.001-05:00

on the Left you can see a Walgreens. Behind it is a bank. In that same direction is a rail road trestle that you can normally get a car under. The colorful building on the right is a Mexican restaurant and an Indian Restaurant (in red). The road is supposed to be between the two rows of trees in the center of the photo.

These are all at least 3 miles from our home.

Another flood shot

2008-06-16T10:48:00.001-05:00

A taco bell in Coralville.

The park

2008-06-16T10:46:00.001-05:00

The top of a carosel in a park we go to.

June Post: Flood

2008-06-13T10:21:00.002-05:00

I have only been out sandbagging for about 6 hours total. It takes a toll, but others have been at it for days. It is sad when the sand bag levies are over taken. 6+ foot walls built by hand hundreds if not thousands of feet long.

My family is fine. We are not really in danger ourselves. There is talk about utility interruption later on.

Here are some sites you can use to keep up to date:
http://www.icgov.org/default/?id=1874

http://www.press-citizen.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage

and a webcam on the iowa river in iowa city:
http://www.iihr.uiowa.edu/webcam/

We cross that bridge often to get over to the west side of the city.

Sweeperbot

2008-05-18T20:39:00.002-05:00

So, here it is. I made it. I borrowed a motor from a minipanda from wowwee that I got for under $5 at Radioshack. My daughter now has a panda to play with.

I added a weight that is a left over modular furniture retaining nut. It is cut with just the right weight distribution and opening to fit over the existing cog on the motor. A D cell battery, wire, and electrical tape. Add to brush.

I borrowed the design from evil mad scientist, only bigger.

Helping your robot see you

2008-05-08T22:40:00.001-05:00

Braintech: Intelligent Vision » Products » iSpot & BlueVision

So it seems our robot overlords are coming soon. And Braintech is planning on helping them be able to recognize the umbrella in your drink so they can pull it out and crush it with their massive robot feet. Microsoft robotic studio will probably be necessary along with the iSpot software. (yet another iProduct, will people never learn that it isn't the little i that sells things?)

Did you know about the MS Robotic Studio? Have you made anything with it?

--JJ

We's in UR City, EnWebbing your GubMint!

2008-05-08T22:32:00.001-05:00

Microsoft announced a product offering today that is really a grouping of existing products and templates. Using Sharepoint and other technologies they intend to make your local city government more accessible. CSP was originally announced in January, but is now available. It doesn't seem to be a do it yourself system. Rather you have to contract with a "partner" to get it up and running.

--JJ

2008-05-08T17:26:00.002-05:00

I knited this!

Really, I did. It is kind of a bottle cosie (is that even a word?). I learned how to knit 2 weeks ago and tried different things with knitting, purling, how many loops to pull in, counting stitches, seams, etc. I ended up with this, so.... Maybe I'll join Patty in the knitter's guild.

--JJ

It's tax time!

2008-02-07T08:22:00.000-06:00

Why is it that the only way we can do our taxes and not worry about the possiblity of doing something wrong is to hire people who spend their lives studying to do taxes?

Be honest, if you do your own taxes, or even sometimes if you hire someone to do it for you, you are afraid that something in your taxes will trigger an audit. You do everything by the book. You read the instructions. You buy a program to help. You pay a big sum of money to get someone else to do it, and you are still worried.

I have called the IRS 3 times this year so far to ask questions. I have spent over 2 hours on the phone with them. I'm sure that will trigger an audit, won't it? All I was trying to do is do it right. I think I have so far.

Why isn't it easier? Wasn't it nice of the President to form an advisory panel for tax reform in 2005? It provided a plan to simplify tax filing in November of that year. Oh, wait. It has been years since anything was done. Is it possible it was just a way to spend some tax money? How much money was spent putting this together? the results are here: http://www.taxreformpanel.gov/index.shtml

In the executive order establishing the panel, it doesn't say anything about actually changing anything, does it?

--JJ

And the winner is.....

2008-02-04T07:46:00.000-06:00

....Cece, for most runs completed in a single hour! Cece went sledding yesterday afternoon. It was still snowing, we were probably out for one of the last two of the 8 inches we recieved yesterday. We decided the best place for us to sled was the sidewalk. Nothing dangerous at the end of the ride.

....Obama, for the most super bowl ads of any campaign this year. He didn't pay $3 million for a national ad, but he did pay a large sum (he could aford it) for ads in most of the states in play tomorrow. No other campaign bought ad time during the super bowl..., huh .

....Oglioneucleotide, for being one of the most difficult words I work with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligonucleotide.

....Roman, for having the nearest birthday to today. Congratulations to him. Did you hear we had about 8 inches of snow? Want to make a snow cake, then plow into it in a sled or on a snow board? Happy birthday.

From the makers of "Put on a Shirt" comes the latest: "Put on some real shoes!"

2008-01-23T19:04:00.000-06:00

Around noon yesterday it was under 10 degrees before the windchill was factored in.

Now, I'm not one to balk at a little bit of cold. I've been known to cross the 100 feet or so between my building and the next without a coat on. What's a minute of cold if I can be lazy and not carry my coat once I'm in the building?

If I had a book of pet peeves, which I don't, one of them would be this:

When it is snowing, I shouldn't be able to see your bare heel in a backless shoe. I've seen some ridiculous footwear choices from sandals with socks in the rain to flip-flops in cold weather. But, when the windchill is such that 20 minutes outdoors will start to cause frostbite, I'm thinking better choices should be made.
What if they couldn't afford good winter shoes? I'm thinking walking indoors could have been a real option. Besides shoes like : http://www.shoes.com/productimages/shoes_isec1010281.jpg are not cheap.

So, put on a real pair of shoes if you are walking by my building. That way I don't have to look at your raw red heels as I am looking to make sure my footing is good on the slush. And I don't have to think of frostbitten feet for days afterwards.

Writer's Search Engine

2007-12-31T12:00:00.001-06:00

Just because I am trying to get it more visibility and Google seems to do searches on my blog, I thought I would mention that I put together a search engine that included a good number of sites devoted to writers. 108 sites currently. The search engine is a Google coop search engine that indexes the sites I have selected.

It is available at: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=003822876353905946077%3Axj_7vn_ne8c.

I have included some well known agent blogs such as misssnark and knightagency, some sites that help you protect yourself, such as copyright.gov and some lists of things to watch out for when looking for an agent. I have also included a good number of publishing resources including sites for young / novice writers and for established writers.

For example, using the search terms "tracking submissions" returns 4 pages of results including articles by Greg Knollenberg on writerswrite.com, Terry Hickman and others on anotherrealm.

Want to find out if a market is still accepting submissions? Doing a search for "Cthulhu Mythos" market news reveals that Leng! The Cthulhu Mythos Megazine was DoD as of 10/17/03, so if you were hoping to sell to them, you are much too late. But, if you were planning on changing it to something else, some poking around on the site might find you a market.

Good luck to you.

The gingkos lost their leaves

2007-11-09T17:40:00.000-06:00

On Wednesday the Ginkgoes lost their leaves. In the morning the rain of leaves started and by afternoon, all the leaves were gone. If you have never seen it, you should find a ginkgo next year to watch. I once witnessed a grounds keeper at the U standing under a tree waiting for the last leaf to fall before blowing the leaves into a pile. That isn't something you do with other types of trees, because, with other trees, just because a few leaves fall, that doesn't mean the others do. With ginkgoes that is exactly what it means. Below is a video from youtube of ginkgo leaves falling. I encourage you to find some more, or better yet, a real one.

I have Mono

2007-10-12T20:53:00.001-05:00

Really, I do. A couple of nights ago I wrote my first application using MONO (you can get it too by going to the MonoDevelop website. I have to say, I'm not terribly happy that I don't have as much help as I am used to in Visual Studio, but it works.

I created a very simple application (see the screen shot).

All it is is a calculator with a tape. It does the trick, although there are quite a few features missing, such as key-press listeners, that would make it useful. The really neat thing is that I wrote it on an Ubuntu desktop (I really like the liveCD and the installer). And it works. Don't get me wrong, If you saw me walking down the street you would say, "there goes the Microsoft evangelist" (that is on days you wouldn't say, "there goes the Google evangelist"), but I love that I was able to do it without using any Microsoft tools. No Windows, no Visual Studio, not even notepad.

Gtk is not among my strong points, so I know I have a long way to go, but I know now that I can do it. What's next? Maybe some more work with Eclipse and Google's web tool kit? Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

--JJ

I really do develop in .Net

2007-09-08T18:45:00.000-05:00

I said at the beginning of this exercise that I would post some .Net related items. Well, I have done some and here is a new one. I created an article on yet another way to create an httpHandler that allows a developer to ignore the implementation details required to display an image from a database. It isn't really a good idea to not know what is going on behind the scenes, but if you do know, it is handy not to have to rewrite code that has been written by so many people already.

Have fun with it. Have fun poking it with sticks. I don't guarantee it will work for you. I will guarantee it will work for me :).

The link is here: http://to.jose.jimenez.googlepages.com/dbimagedisplay

And the years go by

2007-08-13T07:24:00.000-05:00

Around two thirds of my life has gone by and there is something from that first third that I don't think I will ever let go of. Working on the farm in Fennville, Michigan really left a big mark on my life. I like to think it was a good thing.

I still talk about it like it made me who I am. Perhaps it did.

There was a lot of work to do in Fenville on the VanVorhees farm. In the last 10 years, I have visited the farm once. It was both wonderful and sad. I didn't have the courage to walk up to the VanVoorhees farm house and knock on the door. I wanted to remember Mary and Bob the way I knew them long ago.

I did run into John, their son, who has run his own farm since I was a kid. (Pleasant Hill Farm is close to the farm I worked on.) John is managing his farm and his parent's farm.

So here I am, years later, still talking about it. This morning I stood under an apple tree and tried to gauge, with my limited skills, when the apples would be ready. I wish I could say it was more than a guess. But my guess is in about three weeks. The week after the kids are back in school and knock most of them off by climbing around in the tree.

Good luck to the ones on the top of the tree's canopy. They might make it.

--JJ

Omaha and more

2007-08-10T15:12:00.000-05:00

For those of you keeping track, we went to Pella and Omaha recently. We saw the worlds largest windmill.... Ok, just a windmill, but a nice one. Really worth seeing if you want to see a dutch windmill, but are unable to fly overseas. They have great bakeries on the town square. Yummies galore.

We also went to the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. My favorite part was...

Petting the Iguana that had just been moving around in the pond by the front entrance.

I understand some of the penguins in the exibit may have been some that L and I saw on our honeymoon ten years ago.

define: Decaversary

2007-07-23T07:35:00.000-05:00

Not enough time.

10 years ago we started something not so new. It didn't quite start the way we pictured it would, but we forgot or put aside all the things that didn't go the way we wanted.
10 years ago we took a walk along a river, listened to music, and ignored so many things around us. I was for you and you were for me.

I am still for you. You are still for me.

A beginning.

Fireflies

2007-06-26T07:54:00.000-05:00

C and I drove home from the mall. I don't think she would have noticed, it was late, but I asked her to take a look out the window. There were thousands of fireflies along the fields on the side of the hiway. I say thousands, because hundreds just doesn't cover it. They winked on and off like.... nothing else.

lights in the fields flash
stars shine down with jealousy

Google Maps Saved My Life!

2007-05-21T22:24:00.000-05:00

Well, not really, but it came in really handly to have printed maps from the web site available and then later to have Google Maps on my cell. I didn't use a fold out map except once at the hotel. That was just to get ideas about where to go to dinner. Here are some photos from our vacation in San Antonio.

You get three guesses where some of these pictures were taken.
Enjoy.

If you want real honest to goodness family shots, you will have to send me a personal email. You know my address if you know me :).

Amana woolen mill.

2007-05-08T22:06:00.000-05:00

This past weekend L, C, and I went to Amana's Maifest with Y, and U from work. I decided to take some pictures at the woolen mill in order to hold on to some history. Amana is full of history and the woolen mill is just one example.
This first image shows a foot-powered spinning wheel. A bit later C and I sat and chatted with a woman who was actually spinning wool with this wheel, her bare foot making the wheel go round and round with practiced ease.

This system is a loom that I didn't manage to get a good picture of.

This is a system they were running at the time. The excitement came when a thread broke and had to be repaired in order to restart the machine.

This last image is just another shot of the same. I have a movie, but I have to format it for the web.

Buying a camera...

2007-05-03T07:25:00.000-05:00

can be so much fun. How many megapixels. Take the number of objects to be captured, multiply by the number of moles (based on density, temperature, etc.), devide by the number of feet between the camera and the object. Take that number, devide by the number of moles in the objects you desire to be in focus, multiply by the number of focus indicators you will actually have on the screen or the number of objects that will actually be in focus (if you have electronic precognition).

Ok. Have that?

Now...

Think of a number that is divisible by 10 that is between 50 and 100. Devide it by 10. There is the minimum number of megapixels you should consider buying, unless, of course, you are on the high side of that range, in which case you should consider that the maximum number of megapixels you should consider buying.

On a more serious note, here is a megapixel guide put together by best-buy. I don't know if you want to trust them, but it is what it is. I don't think they would be far off.

I think I'm going for something like a 5 or 6. Hey, price matters. I've been talking to people about it for a bit, and Canon seems to have gotten better since I got my last camera years ago. I liked the image resolution, until it went wonky, so.... I think I'm going with it.

Now the serious questions. Should I go with the thin style elph, the A series? I know I'm not getting an SLR style camera. I'm not ready for that much camera. Canon has their comparison site.

I think I'm ready to choose. Are you?

Cough, Cough,... Haakkk

2007-05-01T19:46:00.000-05:00

Oh, wait, no asbestos? Oh, well, guess I can't call in sick.

Good news: We harvested another morel in our back yard.

Bad news: I smashed two of them without noticing while raking up last fall's leaves.

One out of three ain't bad?

to abate, or not to abate, that is the question

2007-04-30T20:19:00.000-05:00

So I came in to work this am to find a nice hole in my ceiling. It was 7:20 am and the most fun I'd had all week. (It's Monday after all.)

Well, I saw my desk first. You can see the junk collected in the corner of the LCD. Nice big chunks on my franklin and keyboard. My water bottle was open, silly me, I'll boil it before I use it again.

Tune in tomorrow, when I find out if there was asbestos in the mix....

Beyond Web 2.0

2007-04-28T10:30:00.000-05:00

For the tech forum at the U, I put together a list of things coming down the pipe in terms of web technologies. The list is available as a Google doc here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=djmmmtg_22chc39z

--JJ

Silverlight (WPF/E) -- candle in the dark or just Flash in a pan?

2007-04-20T21:05:00.000-05:00

Next week I will be on a panel ant the U whose topic is listed as Web Development beyond 2.0.

To go along with that I've been looking a various up and coming technologies including what I knew as WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation). Microsoft recently announced they renamed the technology to Silverlight. It looks like it can do some interesting things but I wonder why it just seems to remind me of flash? I dig through the source of the sprawl game and see a lot of javascript, some use of the canvas element(?). There are callbacks going on to the server side. It looks like with WPF/E, now Silverlight, it is possible to create an object to host / present the XAML delivered from the server. The XAML is xml that represents the application. Just a few lines of xml deliver interactivity.

Microsoft makes the point that Silverlight works on a variety of browsers and doesn't tie the developer or the client to any given browser. I gave the February CTP a try. I installed it and restarted ID. Sure enough, it worked right away. I hesitated to say it was working in Firefox, but, after I closed my browser and restarted it, I was playing Spawn. They have a download listed for Safari as well. I played a bit with the XAML editor also. It looks like it will really be necessary to work within the Expression XAML editor or another tool to really make use of the full capabilities of Silverlight. Visual Studio "Orcas" has a "Cider" designer built in to edit XAML which gives a design / XAML combined view, but for graphics, it will probably be necessary to use the Expression design tool. That's where they will tie us to their product, but the developer / designer can be bound to a technology. We all want our applications to be available to anyone regardless of the browser or OS they use.

The more complex examples end up taking a significant amount of time to download, even though I have DSL broadband at a decent rate. That's where I start feeling the whole flash vibe again. I know we can create beautiful things with these tools, but, just they way we still have to think about people use dial-up, we can't use the newest tools too much. somehow we have to manage to provide our information and interaction to as many people as we can. Isn't that why we are on the web? I personally skip sites if they are too bogged down in flash. If Silverlight goes any slower than light, I wonder if I will skip those sites too.

Spring: the second coming

2007-04-17T07:36:00.000-05:00

Did I say it was spring earlier? I don't remember.

It's spring.... I think.... Maybe.... It's hard to tell. It was spring before, but then it turned back into winter without the intervening summer or fall. I think it's spring now.

seagulls fly overhead
ever seeking the next meal
an empty building

lets see if spring sticks this time. People get tired of sequels.

Spring?

2007-03-28T21:03:00.000-05:00

The April showers are early this year. Buds are forming on the trees in the yard, just in time for us to spend $$$$ to have them hacked back into submission. Do you know how much it costs to have trees trimmed, worse yet, removed?

We do it all for the grass.

Trees wake silently
Buds form at a branches tip
soon to fall in mud

Ha!

If you are related to me, let me know and I'll send you a link to PJ's scavenger hunt pictures.
Maybe we'll buy a camera this week and get our own done :).

Thanks, PJ.

Alive

2007-02-25T09:55:00.000-06:00

I finally got Life working down at the bottom of my blog! You should be excited, really you should. I was trying to figure out how to do this for a while. It isn't much, but I like to play with it. If you want to know more, just take a look at the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

the buttons: Random Grid might be the most useful, but you can change the individual cells to on or off by clicking on them to create your own starting pattern. Start and stop are for kicking off and stopping the processing pattern which evolves the patterns into the subsequent generations. Clear, clears the grid to start over.

Have fun.

Caution: Contents may be hot

2007-02-16T12:51:00.000-06:00

Today I picked up a pretzel and on the back of the package it had the warning
CAUTION: CONTENTS MAY BE HOT

They could have skipped the warning. It was a jalapeño pretzel, and even then, it wasn't.

I think warnings like this should read:

CAUTION: CONTENTS MAY BE HOT, OR COLD, OR SIMPLY ROOM TEMPERATURE. WE CANNOT GUARANTEE THAT THE TEMPERATURE WILL BE TO YOUR LIKING. IT ALL DEPENDS ON THE CONDITIONS THAT THE PACKAGE AND/OR CONTENTS WERE UNDER PRIOR TO THE ACTION OF SENSING THE TEMPERATURE. WHILE NOT RECOMMENDED BY US, THE CONTENTS OR PACKAGE MAY SOMEHOW HAVE RECENTLY BEEN IN THE CORONA OF THE SUN, OR WITHIN THE OBJECT-PREVIOUSLY-KNOWN-AS THE PLANET PLUTO'S ATMOSPHERE. THEREFORE, WE RECOMMEND YOU APPROACH OUR PRODUCT WITH TREPIDATION. *

* On the other hand, our product might meet your expectations and may, though unlikely, fulfill your wildest dreams. Good luck.

ASP.Net Resetting Form Fields

2007-02-01T14:22:00.000-06:00

A coworker and I were working on a form and found it to be quite cumbersome to do it field by field. here is some code we found that works to reset all the fields in a form. Add more types in the case statement to reset more items:


void resetField(object myObj)
    {
        RadioButtonList rl;
        string temp = myObj.GetType().ToString();
        switch (myObj.GetType().ToString())
        {
            case "System.Web.UI.WebControls.TextBox":
                ((TextBox)myObj).Text = "";
                break;
            case "System.Web.UI.WebControls.CheckBox":
                ((CheckBox)myObj).Checked = false;
                break;
            case "System.Web.UI.WebControls.RadioButtonList":
                rl = (RadioButtonList)myObj;
                if (rl.SelectedItem != null)
                    rl.SelectedItem.Selected = false;
                break;
            default:
                break;
        }
    }

    protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        foreach (Control wc in Page.Form.Controls)
        {
            resetField(wc);
        }
    }

ASP.net Server Application Unavailable

2007-02-01T14:20:00.000-06:00

If you have ever received an error message on a .Net application that simply stated "Server Application Unavailable" you might find this useful.

When you receive this error, make sure to check the event viewer on the server. This is found under administrative tools. Under the application event log, you will likely find an error that states: "It is not possible to run two different versions of ASP.NET in the same IIS process. Please use the IIS Administration tool to run the application in a separate process."

An application pool is a process that responds to web requests under IIS. An application pool does not have a setting for what type of ASP.Net applications will be run in it. Instead, it loads the appropriate libraries when an ASP.Net application is loaded in the process. Because the libraries for ASP.Net 1.1 and ASP.Net 2.0 are similar, but not the same, the application pool cannot respond to requests for both types of applications at the same time. This can cause sporadic behaviour if you are using the server at the same time as another developer and you have applications using different versions of the framework in the same application pool.

Make sure that on your server there is an application pool dedicated to ASP.Net 2.0 applications and one for ASP.Net 1.1 applications. When you add an ASP.Net application to the server, make sure you select the right application pool for it.

The new year

2007-01-17T10:31:00.000-06:00

Is it 2006 already? What? _chagrined_ Oh, I mean 2007. Good thing I don't write out the checks....

the new job is going well. but the cold has finally hit. It is -3 degrees this am at around 10:40. It snowed over the last couple of days and there is actually still some on the ground. C went out for a bit and later brought in some snow to play with in the kitchen.

L reports there was some plastic egg mold use in order to form snow ball-ish things.

C has a lot of yuck going on, but she seems to be in an ok mood. She's not at school today, so wish us all luck getting along.

Footprints in the snow
I walk against the flow
wishing to follow them

I saw C's footprints this morning in the snow on the driveway. They lead back toward the house as I was leaving.

Invisible, finally!

2006-12-27T10:51:00.000-06:00

search google news for Invisible Electronics for the latest in invisible gear.

http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=invisible+electronics

I'm looking forward to my invisible phone and invisible microwave. I could set up shop as a "fast food" shop with delivery service out of my office and no one would know.

--JJ

Holidays...

2006-12-24T10:46:00.000-06:00

Are on the way. They'd be so much more fun if we weren't all in some stage of flu-like symptoms. We are looking forward for C's reactions tomorrow. I should have had the camera fixed....

Things are going well at the new job. Lots of good people there.

We have to go out to finish shopping for meals over the next few days. I hope everyone reading this had / has a great holiday season. Everyone who doesn't read this: Shame on you! Have a great one too.

frost lingers, white clouds
kiss the ground as birds flitter
eating gifts from C

First Week

2006-12-15T10:49:00.000-06:00

Things are going well for my first week at my new job. The main thing I'm concerned with is the bus schedules. With three transit systems going past my office (two cities, one U) you would think I could get on a bus and get where I wanted. The difficult part is deciding which bus to take. In any given half hour, more than 10 busses may go by.

I hope I get it all worked out soon.

pfeffernusse

2006-11-29T19:53:00.000-06:00

Today I had some of a pfeffernusse cookie for the first time. It was yummy. I will get the recipie up later because I need to get the one I tasted. This recipie does not have anise in it, and I really like the anise flavor. A co-worker from AEGON handed me one. Yummy!

New Job

2006-11-22T20:01:00.000-06:00

Finally, I can say it. I am going to be starting my new job on December 8th December 11th.
It will be in I.C. No more driving 90 miles each day. That drive really was much too long. I know someone who does it every day and has for years. It's not for me.

I've been trying to answer some questions on asp.net's forums. There are some questions I just don't know how to approach. Should I give a full answer or just some basics?

I wonder how much interest there would be in a programming basics course in the community. I think next summer I might try to work that into my schedule.

What's going on?

2006-11-09T21:55:00.000-06:00

Too much.

Leaves are falling like raindrops the last few days. I have driven through floods of them in the streets. The patio is not done. Who knew it would take as much sand as a small beach? C is singing so nicely these days. I recorded something for PJ that I have to clean up for her. I have to get a better camera.

Too soon the road splits
Up ahead the unknown waits
hidden by the leaves

CC's Con weekend

2006-10-15T20:49:00.000-05:00

CC had a blast as a Con baby this weekend. She wore a tie-dyed hoodie Saturday and matching pigtails. The pig-tails were rigged to stand up straight. She got so much attention. There was a kid's costume workshop around 6pm and she was the only kid there. There were three grown women and myself all working on her costume. One woman even did her make-up (whiskers and nose). CC was so good for them. All of them were fawning over her, of course.
I was a permissive dad this weekend. She had cheesy poofs for the first time. She liked them.

I wonder what people thought when I was letting her fetch her coat by hanging upside down while I held her one handed? She had one thought that she voiced several times, "Again!"

Here's a link to more information about the Con. L actually was part of a panel this year. She looked great and did a great job :).

We ran into someone I knew from the U and he's running KingZombie.com where he has fun zombie stuff. I hadn't seen him since 2001 or so.

Cheddars

2006-10-01T13:47:00.000-05:00

We went to Davenport this weekend in search of something family friendly to do that didn't involve the local University's football game. (Crazy traffic, loudness, cursing, etc is what you get in town on game days.) We tried the Putnam museum. It didn't work out. Not enough for C. to do. too much... I was going to say adult stuff, but I wasn't really interested myself. I hear the IMAX theater isn't even built right... (hearsay).

On the other hand, we stopped for lunch at Cheddar's. That was actually pretty good food. Some other's that have reviewed it have not said much about it, but I liked it. Well... There was a bug on the table early on. There are alot of live plants in the building. It looked like a cricket to me. The manager came over, very nervous and took care of the appetizer and desert. The appetizer was a very nice stuffed portabello mushroom. The food was good, quick and hot. Was it worth a little bug? Ask L. She was the one sitting next to it.

Numbers

2006-09-26T20:35:00.000-05:00

I came across this interesting sequence last week while doodling :

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

10 29 38 47 56 65 74 83 29 01

01 92 83 74 65 56 47 38 92 10

11 121 121 121 121 121 121 121 121 11

11 * 11 is 121

The order of the lines is:
original line
reverse of original line
concatenate the top two lines
reverse the last line
add the last two lines

Anyone out there care to explain? Not like it is a big mystery, but I would like to hear some history of the sequence, some explanation of why it occurs, formulas surrounding it, etc. Are there any other sequences for which this holds true?

Fairfield, Iowa

2006-09-11T20:43:00.000-05:00

On the first of September, the family went down to Fairfield, Iowa with our friend J.
We went for their "first-Friday-of-the-month" gallery walk. It was a great way to spend an afternoon, even with the long drive. We stopped at a jewlery store, not for the jewlery, but because of the amazing artwork in the windows. Kris Kaufner, from Americus Gallery, does some amazing work. It is work I would buy if I had 5-10K handy. My favorite is from the Italian Landscapes selection and is called Tuscan Wheatfield.

United Way

2006-08-30T21:30:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow is a big day, with lots of deadlines. My code for the United Way should will kick into gear. It won't be linked on the site until Friday, but some users will get to see it early. six figures worth of donations will be processed through the code. I have to have all of my system documentation done for the Upgrade tomorrow. I think I can get it done.

Maybe this week will end out on a good note.

Update: I had a bug fix to deal with on Friday, but I got it done before the end of the day. Five figures already.

--JJ

The Dearly Departed

2006-08-27T20:58:00.000-05:00

I heard a noise outside just now that reminded me that I was as close as I had ever been to a bat this Wednesday. L and I got to the day care to pick up C that afternoon, opened up the door and saw a bat lying on the floor. No, it wasn't dead, but after our encounter with him, I'm surprised it wasn't. Not that I did anything horrible to it, but as I tried to coax it to leave, and finally captured it in a shoe box, I had opportunity to see it really close up. It looked worse for the time, over 18 hours I later found out, it had spent in the church the day care is in. I let it loose out in the courtyard near some vines that grow over the side of the wall there, hoping it would quickly find it's way to hiding. I don't know what bats are supposed to sound like, but it sounded a bit tired to me. That is probably just because it looked tired to me. I've never seen a bat hanging around on a floor before.

tired wings, slow chirps
brown and gray bundle lies flat
fading with the day

I hope it recovered. At least it has left the building.

Falling.... behind

2006-08-24T21:29:00.000-05:00

I didn't mention it, probably because it was hard to remember at the time, but one of the nights I left to work I saw an owl in our neighborhood. It was sitting in someone's yard quietly, of course, watching me drive towards it.

Dark yellow eyes watch me
talons grip the earth defiant
not a hint of fear

I did run again today. It went better and worse than expected. I ran a mile and a half and walked another mile. That's not bad for my first time out in almost 6 months. I say worse, because I only intended to go a mile and a half total. I forgot exactly how far it was to the high school from work, so I slogged along until I got to the school, all the time thinking, "it can't be that much further." Of course, 6 months ago, it would not have been all that far, I was consistently running past the high school all the way to the hi-way from work and back without walking any of the distance.
Three weeks. I think I can get back there if I keep at it.

Someone gave me a quarter on my birthday, out of the blue, just because I looked like I needed change. Nobody I know or am likely to come across again. Just a pleasant person.

There have been lots of incidental and coincidental uses of my birth date this year. What's that all about? Signs about re-zoning meetings, international politics, on and on....

enough...