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If you are the delicate type, I'll warn you ahead of time; don't venture below. Animal kingdom does not have shots like this, that's for sure.
With that warning out of the way, I offer you Crab and Pipeline. Somehow, it reminds me of the phrase: "livin' in a world of hurt". (thanks Kurt!)
Sometimes I guess I need a kick in the rear end to get things onto the weblog. This week, it wasn't really my fault. I was all set to put up the previous story about Jon and the family at Magic Mountain on Sunday when the vomiting began.
First it was Jonathan. Every twenty to sixty minutes, for hours. We tried Pepto a couple times but that wasn't staying down any longer than anything else. We (mostly Sarah) finally got him calmed down enough to get to sleep and first thing in the morning, Stephen joined in while Jon moved back into full rejection mode. By Monday evening when I got home from work, Adam was part of the crowd. We had a pack of sick kids, so I worked from home on Tuesday where we had a few interesting incidents before Sarah came home to rescue us all.
By Wednesday (yesterday) morning, things had more or less settled down, but Adam and Jonathan were sore and wrung out from stomach gymnastics, so they stayed home again. Adam ended up having his seventeenth birthday while feeling pretty blah. He was happy non the less when we talked just before he went to bed; he'd gotten his present two weeks earlier (we are insane, we bought him a car; then again we are also tired of being a chauffeur service, and he wants to work part time).
So anyway, a friend sent me something funny today that I wanted to post. To do that, I had to clear the stop bit, and get all this stuff out of queue so that I could move on.
I believe that I've mentioned before that my family in crazy about roller coasters, especially Stephen.
On Sunday, they outdid themselves. I knew that Steve was a member of American Coasters Network (ACN), but now I've learned that we have added a family membership in American Coaster Enthusiasts (ACE) as well. Sarah took the two younger boys to Magic Mountain and they joined up with a bunch of fellow ACE members.
Apparently, some of the kids were filming Point of View (POV) movies during the rides. Somehow, someone talked Jonathan into doing a POV filming of Goliath Jr. (he's still just six so he can get on) which he did. From what I've heard (we still don't have the movie), it's a little shaky, and sometimes dark as the camera points down, but it works. Later in the day, Jonathan was in the first car on Ninja with an ACE member who was filming a Point of View (POV) movie there and had a blast.
Jon came home very proud of his work to support their efforts...
This Reuters story appears to verify earlier (and often fuzzy) reports that the "SQL Slammer" worm (given its operation, it seems more like a viral agent than a worm) hit Korea hard.
As to the why? I'll hazard a guess.
High broadband penetration means that there are a lot of Windows based systems sitting on the net with little or no protection. The same kinds of systems often used for other types of DDoS attacks because its easy to get control of a process there.
Microsoft has officially divorced itself from responsibility, stating that everyone should have applied SQL Server Service Pack 2 six months ago. What's not completely clear yet is whether this would have been effective. Service Pack 3, released eight days ago seems to work, but we'll have to wait and see if the claims from Redmond are valid. This particular incident could have political ramifications for Microsoft.
I don't remember where these came from, but here they are:
Motivational Quotes of the DayTodays SlashNOT is humorous (Microsoft completes purchase of Klez) when considering last nights problem with MS SQL DDoS attacks.
SlashNOT
I just realized that we're going to have to listen to John Madden for three plus hours if we want to watch the Super Bowl. I listened to one Monday Night Football telecast this year and it was depressing. After a little while I switched to the radio feed from Green Bay. Sarah can't decide whether she wants to go to Magic Mountain tomorrow or stay home and watch the show (and under the circumstances, I'm dithering a bit too, but I know I'll watch). I have no idea what the kids want to do.
The game has a decent chance of being good, although I'd venture that more than half the people who see some part of the game could care less who wins.
The Super Bowl has become an American mid winter party. In between nearly six hours of talking heads and commercials, they'll actually show almost sixty minutes of American football (where feet are only infrequently used). If you count all the slow motion replays, there will be almost 70 minutes of football. The day after, the actual game will be forgotten by most, but discussion will rage about the best new commercials and stories will float around about all the crazy things that happened at the parties.
Some day, the football hype will fade and we'll have to come up with a new way to celebrate American Corporation Day.
Me? I just want to watch the damned football game.
I ought to rename this the weekend blog, or maybe the once in everyblue moon blog. Oh, it's been busy.
This week I had jury duty, which was interesting. I was called to sitthrough the jury selection process for one trial, but was never broughtinto the inquisition phase. There went one day.
I finished reading "The Summons" (which was appropriate) andhave started back through the whole John Ryan series starting with"The Hunt For Red October".
We had a new engineer in from Atlanta, and spent a lot of time withhim, just getting him up to speed on things.
We're having a department meeting in a couple of weeks to talk aboutwhat we're all doing and where we are on it. So I've been working onfleshing out a lot of ideas and putting together presentations onseveral different things.
I spent most of yesterday reading and working on documentation and thenchasing down a rats nest of related bugs. I'll have to go back and workon that some more later today.
Oh yeah, I learned how to put a custom icon on a page in a browser.Browsers are looking for 'favicon.ico' (I'd been wondering about customicons and noticed all the icon requests in the server logs).
Thanks to Rogers Cadenhead I now know that I was playing Ship, Captain and Crew this past Friday evening (on a tie, we threw more money in the pot and started again with the last winner rolling first). It's also known as Ship, Captain, Mate and Crew. Here is another set of rules (although it's called Destroyer).
Finally, I'm really glad we weren't playing this variation!
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The sound quality on the Casio PS-20 Celviano is very good and when using the piano settings, sounds very much like the real thing. I especially like the "Grand Piano 1" setting, it's seems to get left there most of the time. The piano also has MIDI in/out ports. For years I had a MIDI box and at least one Mac which could use it, but no keyboard nor interest in buying one. Now that we have a MIDI keyboard, we've retired all the ADB based systems. It seems like its time to go looking at the USB and/or Firewire MIDI products out there and see what might work.
The most surprising recent piano related event occurred last night when Jon sat down in the family room for about half an hour and wrote some music. This morning, he was upstairs playing something unfamiliar and Sarah said it was the music he's written last night. I'm still somewhat amazed, and just had him play it for me again. After dinner Adam was telling me that Jon is the one who showed him how to use his left hand properly.
At least one of us will really learn how to play the piano, perhaps more.
Weather Underground sounds subversive but seems to be the commercial spinoff of a university project.
Here are links for Thousand Oaks and Pasadena.
The bad part is that their TO data kinda sucks. The data comes from Camarillo which is only about ten to twelve miles away, but it's also 900 (or more) feet lower in altitude (sitting on the Ventura coastal plain), which makes a big difference. Our wind patterns are different and we've usually got some sort of a temperature gradient (sometimes its hotter, sometimes not).
I looked around to see if they are looking to add amateur stations (that would be interesting), but it doesn't see to be the case.
What a weird evening.
I decided to go out and have a couple drinks after finishing things up for today. As I was going out the door, Sarah and the boys were coming back from Lazerstar in Camarillo (and dinner). They completely startled me as I was heading into the garage (after turning out all the lights in the house, I open the garage door and one of my kids friends is standing right there in front of me).
So anyway, out I went to our local Elks Lodge to have a couple drinks and mingle with people who don't spend all day thinking about computers (it's nice sometimes to talk to people who aren't geeks -- it helps keep the balance).
I ended up in a very interesting conversation with my friend David Pearson (he got me into the Elks). He was explaining how his company Frank Stubbs Company, was expanding itself and making itself more flexible. David is a natural speaker; full of passion and can go on at length about things they've done over the years to get better, mistakes they've made, etcetera.
Over time, they've had to get and maintain all kinds of certifications. They have experience working as an OEM, and with doing custom SKUs and a thousand other things that sail right over my head. He was also explaining how they've changed things so the floor supervisors can collectively make better decisions; it seems like they get a lot more information about orders ahead of time (by removing all the middle management) and by keeping them in the loop on inventory. Here, David has something really interesting to say; raw numbers don't work automatically. By creating simple charts that show some combination of orders, popularity, parts inventory and a couple of other things the floor leads are now able to make good decisions early on about manufacturing schedules, while maintaining a high degree of flexibility. They're now seeing far less problems with jobs being suddenly interrupted to deal with an un-anticipated emergency which makes everyone happier.
They are also constantly looking for new markets that map to the manufacturing experience they already have. What they've been doing over the last few months is to find new opportunities, and make small test runs at it. If it doesn't work out, that's fine and they move on to something else.
After listening for a bit and asking a lot of questions, I told him about Agile Software Development and said that he seemed to have hit upon one way for small(ish) companies to do in manufacturing what many of us are trying to make happen in software. I called it Agile Manufacturing, and I think that's an apt term. From a quick check, many others agree with me.
I also talked to him for a bit about search engines and weblogs, I'll have to see if I can push him in that direction. I'd love to read about it...
As that conversation wound down, Annie (David's wife) asked me to throw a dollar on the table. I knew we were getting ready to gamble on something and normally, I don't gamble, but it's just a buck. I went to a casino once (I spent my $5 at a casino on the island of Curaco, that was it). I've driven through Vegas before but had no reason to stop. I've played poker at a few parties, and come out about even (my wife likes it more than I do). I think I avoid gambling because I am cheap and hate to lose. I will participate in bowling sidepots, although I have not been doing so this year (I'm still not quite right, although I'm getting closer after taking nine months off because of an elbow problem). Anyway, we played some sort of dice game. You start by rolling five dice, you need a 6-5-4 to have an eligible score, the other two die counts as your score. You need the 6, then the 5 and then the 4. You get three rolls (pulling out numbers you've already hit). I managed to win the first round or I might have ducked out (already lost a dollar, time to go).
After about an hour, everyone was leaving and I walked away with $24. I don't think I've won anything like that since back in the years I used to play pool for money. Weird evening indeed!
I've thought about this a wee bit and I don't like it. For many of the reasons that the codepoet hates it, and more.
I'm just a user for the most part when it comes HTML. If you are looking at my web stuff for examples of how to do it; I'm the poster boy for the new anti-pattern. Look in the dictionary under wrong and you'll find my picture.
Why is this? Partly because I'm lazy and partly because my tools suck and well, goto 1.
All I want to do when I put up a weblog entry is to write some stuff, twiddle it a little to deal with any code or other 'do not touch' type data and post it. I spend too much time every day fighting with all the little in's and out's of Internet related arcanum, I don't want to have to do it here. Writing for the web should be easy (and it's not).
To make this happen, I need tools that make few compromises (or which allow me to dynamically make them if perhaps I should), and a display engine that makes no compromises (if possible). If the system engine is as correct as possible, then the Safari folks will need some sort of fork, otherwise, the HTML display engine will be fragmented. The power of IE in the Windows world is based not only on the installed base of IE, but all the other pieces which base themselves on the system libraries. As an engineer, I recognize that inevitably we'll need to deal with problems in WebCore (KHTML) and Safari. Do we want to do so now, when everything is so new and unsettled, or would it be best to wait until we have the majority of the problems settled? And I know, everyone wants their site to work in Safari three months ago, but is that reasonable? I'd prefer patience if possible.
Posted by dely at 05:16 PM
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It seems like a there are a lot of Mac people out there doing weblogs. Far more than seems reasonable given the market realities (somewhere south of 5% of the installed base). What the hell is going on?
I was trying to lay low about MacWorld, just sort of ignore its existence, which I've been doing for the last couple of years given that I'm not really doing Mac development any more (when I'm working on any of my projects, they're going to run on Solaris, I just happen to have most of it running on my Mac's). Tuesday, I couldn't avoid it. Everywhere I went, there was another link to an article about the announcements and further analysis, or just another article. I gave up.
In part, this seems driven by a bunch of geeks who are intrigued by Apple, even if they aren't yet Mac users. Further, the technical press (which did just about everything it could to ignore Apple in 1996; or worse, write them off) just can't get enough.
Take all that into account and it's still not enough, not nearly. There is something else happening here and I just can't see what it is. Somehow, the voice of the web seems to have learned to appreciate Apple. Note that I didn't say that they used or loved Apple hardware, I just said that they seem to have learned how to appreciate its special place in the world. And that is a tremendous win for Apple.
I've been fussing around with this for the last couple of weeks. I installed MT (again), removed it (again), grabbed the latest version and installed it (once more) and have been tinkering. I have a mostly working export script for Radio, but I'm not in a giant hurry. My plan is kinda wacky, but I want to run everything I can at home and leave a few important things to others. Mostly, I need to sort out my Apache, Tomcat, JBoss situation and figure out what runs publically, and what doesn't.
On Monday, the The FuzzyBlog! had an article which pointed to two stories (first and second) that describe one persons conversion process.
I'm going to get this done sometime in the next few months.
... or something.
I'm putting this up for one particular friend. He and I had a number of 'what if' conversation after 9-11. The 10 Most Startling Speculations and "Conspiracy Theories" About September 11 and America's New War.
I knew about Checkstyle, but PMD is new to me. The Struts Development Team has recently added these tasks to itsbuild.xmlfile if you're interested in an example. Erik Hatcher has the Checkstyle task in his JavaDevWithAnt project, and I'm using hisbuild.xmlfile as a model, but I've never used the Task. I've also had the Checkstyle Plug-In for Eclipse installed at one point, but it gave me so many errors - I disabled it. It'd be nice to use these from the beginning on a project.[Raible Designs]
I'd heard of CheckStyle, but never tried it before. I played around with PMD last night. I never really got past CPD, the Copy and Paste detector. It churned on a portion of our code for about four hours and finally popped up an interesting report that we talked about at work today. It had found lots of duplication in our DTD and DB Beans, but it had also flagged some code in our command handling that was really interesting. We have some code that doing the same darned thing in about 10 places while pulling apart common XML constructs. We've identified it now and will factor that out ASAP. That made the wait quite worthwhile.
These items seem worth the time to add to the bag of tricks while I'm in a period where I don't have anything due three hours from a week ago.
InfoWorld is reporting that Macromedia is introducing JRun 4 for MacOS X.
I've got my own screwy way of installing ncurses under MacOS X, but this article has me rethinking things. The hard part about being ahead of the game is undoing all that has already been done. The nice part about starting over using Fink is that it should just work out of the box and I won't have to do all the work everytime.
The bad part of this is that the server I needed to make the modification on first had never had Fink installed... so this is going to take a while.
Scott Ambler has written several very good articles on database refactoring from an agile development perspective: The Process of Database Refactoring, Catalog of Database Refactorings and A UML Profile for Data Modeling. There are several more; see the section titled 'Agile Database Techniques' on the main page of agiledata.org.
Evolutionary Database Design by Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadalage covers things from a slightly different perspective, while keeping to the agile methodology.
Scott also wrote this Java coding standards document, which I found somewhat amazing, as I agree with it nearly completely. I believe that this is the first article outside of Stroustrup's "The Design and Evolution of C++" where I've seen someone recommend putting constants on the left side of evaluation (comparison) operations. Perhaps I haven't been paying very close attention.
For example:
if ( someVar == 0 ) {}
if ( someOtherVar = 0 ) {}
versus
if ( 0 == someVar ) {}
if ( 0 = someOtherVar ) {}
The second comparison (with someOtherVar) is obviously a bug, but won't be caught by normal means. The easy way to catch it is to have the constant on the left side where it can not be modified. I catch about six bugs per year with this and have been doing it since about 1995. You do the math.
An interesting take on a Relationship Manager pattern. Having done something like this a couple times I'd have to say that it leads to crufty APIs over a period of time. As the relationships grow and become more complicated, the number of interactions grows and the RM becomes a festering rats nest all by itself.
If you do something like this, you need to refactor every time you make major architectural changes.
You probably need to be somewhat older to remember this time, but I still do. This is back when IBM kept running those crazy ads with Charlie Chaplin all the darned time to push the 'new little machine'. I guess it worked, 19 years later and I still can't get the ads out of my head.
My father in law, who retired from IBM many years ago, finally retired his PCjr about 6 years ago. I was rather stunned that it ran for as long as it did.
A friend sent this to me tonight:
The last four ex-U.S. Presidents are caught in a tornado, and off they whirled to OZ. They finally make it to the Emerald City and come before the Great Wizard.
"WHAT BRINGS YOU BEFORE THE GREAT WIZARD OF OZ?"
Jimmy Carter steps forward timidly:" I've come for some courage."
"NO PROBLEM!" says the Wizard. "WHO IS NEXT?"
Ronald Reagan steps forward, "Well... I... I think I need a brain." "DONE" says the Wizard.
"WHO COMES NEXT BEFORE THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ?" Up steps George Bush sadly, "I'm told by the American people that I need a heart." "I'VE HEARD IT'S TRUE!" says the Wizard. "CONSIDER IT DONE."
There is a great silence in the hall. Bill Clinton is just standing there, looking around, but doesn't say a word. Irritated, the Wizard finally asks, "WHAT DO YOU WANT?"
"Is Dorothy here?"
If you haven't been paying much attention to JMX (Java Management Extensions), it might be worth your time to do so. It's such a simple API that a lot of people ignore it. Bill de hÓra recently pointed to the first of a series on JMX by Sing Li on the developerWorks site.
The three part series is called "From black boxes to enterprises".
Part 3 delves into a complete solution and is quite a bit beyond what we have in place today, but we're pretty happy with what we've implemented thus far.Our biggest win has been the ease of exposing configuration settings via JSPs (rather than having people go directly to the somewhat complicated MBean pages) and in debugging. I hope to have more about how we're using JMX for debugging soon.
I did note that Tomcat 4.1 has it's own JMX engine in place, which could make moving moving from JBoss with Tomcat 4.0.x somewhat dicey. I wasn't planning on that bump in the road.
Yesterday, while watching the History channel, they had a 15 minute segment on the Stationary Low Power Reactor No. 1 (SL-1) disaster in 1961. I haven't thought about the SL-1 in several years and it was great to find so much information available online.
The U.S. Army operated a small reactor out in the Idaho desert (at the National Reactor Testing Station) that was intended to be used for powering remote radar stations to be used in the early warning system. For various reasons, there was an accident that claimed the lives of all three technicians, required the complete disassembly of the plant and in many good ways, significantly influenced the way that military nuclear facilities were operated.
This recounting of the story has a lot of good links, including one to Proving the Principle, a terrific history of INEEL (Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory); chapter 15 covers the SL-1 accident. The July '96 issue of "Atomic Energy Insights" is completely dedicated to the story of the SL-1. This Freedom of Information Act page has a number of official documents regarding the accident. Here is a very good picture of the plant (along with some information about the rumors that were floated, I'd heard some of them before) and radiationworks has some good pictures of the clean up effort, including two pictures of the control rod in the ceiling.
The state of Idaho has some interesting documents, including a final cleanup disposition (which includes the SL-1). It seems that not everyone is happy with the final resting spot for the SL-1 debris. The clean up is part of a settlement agreement between the state of Idaho, the U.S. Navy and the US DOE on a lot of other clean up issues that need to be addressed (including the SL-1).
Even the Naval Reactors Facility (also known as Nuclear Power Training Unit - NPTU -Idaho) needs some clean up (higher Cesium 137 contamination levels than expected). I guess that they no longer send Navy Nuclear personel there for training, the A1W, S1W and S5G plants have been shutdown. The Expended Core Facility is the only plant operational now. As you see from this map, NRF had it's own little area out there in the middle of nowhere.The S5G prototype was amazing. The complete back end of a submarine in a giant tank so that they could do operational testing of the natural circulation system as the boat was rolled from one side to the other.
None of this is stopping INEEL from doing new research and development on Generation IV reactors as the DOE puts it. This document contains an overview of the fourth generation work and links to http://www.nuclear.gov/ (I'd never been there before).
The Federation of American Scientists site has a bunch of information on military nuclear power plants (none on Aircraft Carriers plants though, I guess that information has not been declassified).
MovableType has it's own way of post processing data. This sort of sucks. It thinks it knows more about how I work than I do. I don't think I like that.
Here we go with another testing post from Kung-Log.
It's an interesting application, but I wish I knew how to turn off the damned transparency. Don't want it at all.
So, what happens if I don't use a return at the end of the article, as I am so accustomed to doing?
OK, here is a message from Kung-Log.
I honestly have no idea what the hell I am doing!
I guess we need to see about buying some more champaign glasses in the next couple of years. We've been married for nineteen years and have two glasses, the one's from our wedding ceremony. Every year we pull them out and dust 'em off for New Years. When I was doing that last night I realized that in the not too far distant future the kids are going to want to drink some champaign with us.
I'm still working on my plan for this year. I need to make a number of personal and professional changes, so I'll need a little bit more planning than Mark, but his is a great list.