The Novel Coder

Blog Split - bakerama.com

2011-11-29T07:51:00.001-08:00

In order to keep this blog on point with my general reflections and more of a diary approach I have split off the posts I have about cooking / baking onto www.bakerama.com. I was surprised that this high level DNS name was available and it seems to fit.

I have been baking up a storm lately and posting only of my successes. My most recent entry is of a sourdough french loaf that came out pretty nicely. If you would like recipes for things that I cook or bake this will be the place to visit.

Downsizing part duex

2011-06-06T06:38:00.000-07:00

Over the last year or so as a family we have been considering a move into town. Currently we live about 20 miles south of Lincoln, Nebraska which is a relatively small town of about 250,000 people or so. Once you get 20 miles south you pretty much are in a very quiet area. From our back porch which faces south we have a view that stretches several miles in all directions and from that view we can see only about 6 homes. The point is while we are not particularly remote at least not how I picture being remote we are at a minimum very spread out.

I recall when we first moved into this home about nine years ago we were moving from Denver, where we were all very used to high density living, the first year was quite an adjustment. Most of the adjustments were very positive, such as; never being woken up by a neighbors dog, never wondering if I needed to call the police to stop a neighbor's teen child's party and not having to be overly vigilant with our small children playing outside. There are numerous other great things about living in the country including swimming in ponds, walking around our lake and just generally being closer to nature.

When you age our family 9 years; everyone in our family owns a car, more than half of them are attending college, and all but one of us work in Lincoln. As it turns out there is a reason that people congregate in cities... It is simply just more convenient. We have had a wonderful time in the country, but it is once again time to join society and move in.

So what does this have to do with downsizing? Everything! Currently we have a home that is 3400 square feet and we have mostly filled it. We have cars, beds, cleaning supplies, blankets, pillows, clothing, and the list goes on. As it turns out it is easier toss old cloths on the floor of a closet than to take them to good will or simply throw them away. This behavior isn't really specific to clothing either. It applies to just about everything a family owns.

In 8 days our house goes on the market and for the last 3 weeks we have done virtually nothing but clean, paint, pack items for goodwill, list items on craigslist and ebay and finally we had to rent a storage unit. I am not a great proponent of a storage unit but as it turns out I can't in good faith get rid of furniture that my children will need in a couple of years when they move out.

One major item we downsized was our ski boat. We all have enjoyed this boat immensely and I was a little sad to see it leave. The maintenance of such a large item is a giant pain in the butt, however. I have spent countless hours and untold dollars for the privilege of driving in circles on a small lake four to eight times a year.

If you are reading this please do yourself a favor, pick a closet, grab 20 items that you haven't touched in over a year. The chances are if you haven't touched them in a year then they don't fit or just aren't your style. There are a couple of great indicators that an item is no longer being used. One, look for dust on the shoulders of hanging items, thick layers of dust are a great indicator. The second is look for items with a sales tag on them, just because it looked nice in the store, if you haven't had the guts to wear it then you probably aren't going to.

Finally we need to consider the items we own. Several years ago a friend of mine shared a Tyler Durden quote with me "The items you own end up owning you." This is a crazy true statement, and I am happy to say that we own substantially fewer things. The crazier thing is that if you came to my house you might not even be able notice the massive purge that has occurred.

Health Tracker May Numbers

2011-06-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

So as it turns out I only really enjoy numbers for a short period of time.

Currently Health Tracker has 91 downloaded, 42 installed pro users and 14,034 downloaded 4,543 installed free users. This last month installations slowed down considerably. I have to admit to not really understanding the whims of the market.

A big change from last month is that admob.com ( my free banner ad provider ) now allows for adsense ads to be displayed. This has changed my displayed ad rate from < 50% to nearly 100%. Basically before adsense I only got an ad displayed 1/2 of the times I requested it. This makes a huge difference as if you don't show anything, then no one can click on it.

Pro sales dropped off at the beginning of the month and I believe it was due to a rather sharp criticism that was posted as a review. When you only have 3-4 reviews, a bad review apparently hurts a bit. Fortunately additional reviews were posted and some recovery occured.

Final numbers for the month of May were: $23.28 in pro sales ( down from about $30) and $31.08 in banner ad sales (up from $7.08) for a total of about $54. I won't actually realize revenue from the banner ads as I have to exceed $50 before they will transfer funds.

This was a good month for Health Tracker. I believe we are sitting at $56 in the red ( not counting developer time ). I am hoping to blot out this red ink within the next couple of months so I can hire my friend at goopymart.com to draw us some new artwork!

Health Tracker Stats for April

2011-05-02T11:41:00.000-07:00

I love numbers.

In early April I decided to convert the completely free version of Health Tracker to a Banner Ad supported model. Additionally, for those who don't want banner ads, I created a "pro" version that could be purchased for $1.00. This eliminates banner ads but otherwise the programs are the same.

Using AdMob to supply the ads I display a small ad at the bottom of Health Tracker. In the month of April we have presented about 20,000 ads to Health Tracker users. We don't get paid unless someone clicks on one of these ads which happens about 3% of the time. I understand this is a pretty decent rate. With AdMob there is no guaranteed rate per click. But I think I receive 2-8 pennies per click. All told for the month, I received $7.80 in banner ad revenue. This averages out to be about $0.27 / day.

Health Tracker Pro netted $29.70 for the month. Google takes 30% of every transaction so this represents greater than fifty purchases.

So the really big story for this month was the new artwork that I added from goopymart.com. I keep track of current installations and rarely report on total downloads. It appears that there are a lot of people who download an application just to remove it shortly thereafter. Health Tracker enjoys a 37% current install rate, that is for every 100 downloads 37 of these are still installed.

In April, thanks to goopymart.com, more Health Tracker's were installed than in the previous three months combined. As of the end of April we had 3,600 current installs, 2,000 of these having been added in April.

My original objective for monentizing Health Tracker was to cover my expenses. Currently those expenses are $6/mo for internet hosting and $100 invested so far in artwork. I am pleased to say that we are covering the monthly expenses with banner ads. Hopefully we will cover the artwork investment with pro sales. It will be fun to see where we go from here.

You better have thick skin

2011-04-21T06:55:00.000-07:00

One of the lessons I have been learning is how to develop a thicker skin. We all have had experiences when we have been unjustly accused of something and had no outlet in which to address it satisfactorily. In some cases this lack of redress is caused by personal motivation to "rise above" the situation. In other cases we simply don't have the power or tools in which to do anything.

Software development is an area where this phenonem is particularly acute. As a developer I spend countless thousands of hours attempting to build tools and programs that are both useful and easy to use. I have an incredible investment in the art of software and user interface development. It is, for all intents and purposes, my life's work. So imagine me having a bit emotion invested in this as well.

HAH... This is a classic trap. At this point you already see the problem in what I have described. Emotional investment! This is a fertile ground for growing a thick skin.

What does a thick skin look like? Well, how about when a user installs a FREE application on their phone and for whatever reason doesn't want it... What if their phone refuses to uninstall the application. So as a user looking to help me generate this thick skin you should:

1) Immediately go rate the application with a 1 star... App sux.. Won't uninistall..
2) Send me an email complaining about my predatory application
3) infer that I should do something about it

OK... I will bite my tongue hard enough to make blood flow. (this is perhaps one of the most effective ways of thickening your skin... not sure why the body's natural response to tongue biting is to make your skin thicker, but it is well known )

Then... reply with an email describing how to use their device to successfully remove an application. The steps aren't difficult but they do need to be followed. Offer to help further if she can describe the problem further.

I really don't believe I am getting better at having a thick skin. I appreciate you reading through my vent, I think I can let this go for now.

Did I mention that Nichole likes my app?

Defense against evil bots

2011-04-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

You might this post is more about creative writing than software, it is not. I have a forum created for the Health Tracker application where I have implemented Simple Machines Forum software. If you want to join in ( or really at this point, start up ) a healthly lifestyle conversation please join up and contribute... but I digress. Initially I setup my forums by simply installing the SMF software from godaddy.com which does my hosting. Within a week the evil web-crawling bots had found me. I really have no idea what their end-game is other than to wrek havoc on us poor forum admins. Within a couple of days I was receiving 40+ new accounts a day followed by at least that number of new completely random posts. The posts are so poorly worded and conceived that I can't imagine anyone reading them much less falling prey to a random link contained within. My best guess is that the evil bot's intentions are to simply cause me and people like me pain. Anarchists spreading disorder and causing disruption. Well, I have to say, intially this worked. I completely shut down forum registrations as I found it impossible to keep up with simply deleteing all of the new users and messages. I tried implementing captcha, you know the thingy where a picture has some letters that are slightly scrambled and if you type it in correctly then you can proceed. Well best I can tell SMF's implementation for captcha was relatively easy to get around as it didn't slow these guys down at all. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, right? Well now I have a forum that no one can join so instead I am receiving emails about feature requests.... ARGH! I don't mind emails but it is a terrible way to keep track of things for me. I have to take the email and transcribe it over to the forums so other's can check it out and possibly provide feedback.. I really need people to be able to register on the forums automatically. A bit of research later and I find that this is not an uncommon problem. Apparently evil bots really like honey. No really, they do. To be more accurate they like honey pots. To make sense of this you have to understand a little of how a bot works. The bot has no idea of the names of web pages or for that matter websites so the bots gather website names and then start attempting to locate pages on those sites. Most web designers follow some obvious patterns where our launch page is called something like; index.php, index.html, default.asp, default.aspx or a handful of other "default" names. The bot gets this page then starts combing through for links it can harvest and then spiders through your site looking for things it recognizes. This is where a honey pot comes into play. Basically a honey pot is a page that no one would ever normally view but you ( web designer ) innocently leave a small trail to. The evil bot then goes to grab the honey and leaves its gooey tracks all over the place. A little later on we collect this information and ask other honey pot owners if they have seen these particular tracks ( ip address ). If enough honey pots are tracked upon then the bot's ip address is recorded and shared with everyone else. The evil bot's ip address is added to a black list and as long as they stay naughty then we all know to ignore that ip address when it comes along and asks for service. If you want to know more about the honeypot that I am hooked up with, check out Project Honey Pot. Don't worry, as a non-machine user it would be virtually impossible for you to find your way to my honey pot. But if you happen to be an evil bot and you are reading this then please, make sure you check out my site...

Joy of creativity

2011-04-09T15:45:00.000-07:00

In life one of the great joys I experience is expressing my own creativity or experiencing the creativity of someone else. Health Tracker is starting to make a very slight amount of money. I imagine I could make as much as $25 this month. So to that end I have decided to spend some of this money on artwork for the application.

In my last post we got to see Will of goopymart.com's rendition of Bad Monkey after or during an exercise. This image is used as the launcher icon as well as the primary icon that gets viewed when a user is looking for Health Tracker in the android marketplace.

Well I also asked Will if he would be willing to build a marketing 512x512 of Bad Monkey working out. You can see what he came up with. What a genius!! I love it and I bet it will grab attention on the android marketplace. What a creative guy!

The Race is On!

2011-04-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

I feel like I am coming out of a long tunnel. This is often the feeling I have after a long race to meet a self-imposed deadline. The deadline I am refering to is a release of Health Tracker that has two different versions. Version 1 is a $1 pay for model where version 2 is supported with a banner ad. The idea is if you don't like the banner ads then simply drop some cash to the table and get the pro version.

I chose adMob which is a company that Google purchased a while back. The implementation is relatively simple if not occasionally frustrating for the developer ( it doesn't always serve up an ad which is great for the user but very confusing if you are testing out to see if the ads are working ).

Much of the work I have been doing has been in support of being able to build 2 completely different applications while maintaining a central core of code. In languages I am familiar with this is pretty darn easy, but since Java is not my native tongue it took a bit more work.

So what are the numbers you ask? At this point they are too insignificant to really tell. I believe the pro version has enough history to prove that it is good for about 2 sales a day. This turns out to be about $1.40. Annualize that ( or do anything you want to it ) and you really don't end up with a bunch of cash. In testing the banner ad version I was able to generate about $.20 by clicking on all the ads I ever saw. This was over a 2 day period and 120 banners displayed ( yes I did a fair bit of testing ).

The most interesting point is, however, I am starting to generate a little bit of revenue. Sure last month's revenue was $4.14 ( only had pro running for 5 days or so ). The nice thing is my expenses are similarly low. I am paying about $6 / month for internet hosting service. I might have $30 more in goDaddy expenses for keeping my novelcoder.com name around as well.

With new revenue I have taken on some new expenses. Like my daughter is to cash and clothing so am I with shiny things.

I asked Will over at goopymart to design a new icon for my Health Tracker. You can see here what he came up with. I love it!! It is the badmonkey after a nice workout! I think Will's work is zaney and fun. Please contact him by visting his site if you find you also need some art work.

We have additional plans for more art but I will have to be a little careful so that my expenses don't outrun my revenues at too great a pace.

So the apps have been released into the wild and I am hoping to step back from the craziness for a while.

If you have an android phone and you are looking for a diet and health tracking application check us out at: Health Tracker Pro and Health Tracker Free

Once I have information about banner vs. pay-for I will post some real numbers. I am not sure who I am pulling for at this point ;)

Fun Health Tracker statistics

2011-03-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

First off... I am about to release version 2.2, it will go live on Monday or Tuesday next week depending on if I find any new bugs this weekend. It will be interesting to see if the new permissions I require on the device will deter new users ( I need to access the internet as well as their active phone state so I can get a unique device id from them ).

Currently Health Tracker is installed on 1610 devices. First version was released Jan 11th.

On Feb 1st this was 701, Feb 12th this was 746, March 1st 1,120, March 12th 1,450 and today 1,610.

Generally... this works out to an average of 24 installs each day. January weighed in at 33 / day, February 15 / day and March is chugging along at 29 / day. What happened in February? I had a couple of buggy releases that I didn't catch right away. This is when I decided I should do more extensive testing before I release.

70% of these installs are on version 2.2 devices, 30% on 2.1 devices ( I require at least 2.1 ).

They are spread out pretty evenly across devices ( Evo, Motorola Droid , Samsung Galaxies, etc. )

Countries of origin are mostly english speaking countries ( 78% US, 8% UK, 4.2% Australia, 2% Canada )

So what can I learn from this? I believe I could improve my adoption by supporting Korean and Japanese. They grab 14.3% of the market and have a 0% Health Tracker adoption. Second... it is all about quality... bugs are bad. Anyone really good with Korean?

Android Barcode Scanning

2011-03-14T09:47:00.000-07:00

What a weekend of coding.

Health Tracker is a free application on the Android. My motivation for this tool is two part. First I need to keep track of my health objectives. Things like a food diary, weight and exercise are what I care about. The second objective is that I like to have a toy-project that drives me through the new fun code that is out there. It turns out making money isn't a primary objective as when I tried to monentize and my new customers dried up... I immediately dropped back to a free app.

A number of my friends and family have been pimping me around about Health Tracker not having a barcode scanner. Apparently all the cool kids are doing it. So I started digging in and found that this really all about an open source initiative by google called ZXing. These guys ( as is usual ) have done all of the heavy lifing for barcode scanning. Basically you can either copy their code into your own and not tell anyone ( oh the joys of open source ) or you simply reference their application from your own.

So here is the design I came up with:

1) I put a barcode icon on the Food Diary page.
2) If you click it and you don't have the FREE app, I send you to the google marketplace with a preloaded search pointing at ZXing's Barcode Scanner app.
3) If you already have the ZXing app on your machine, I will fire it up and wait for it to respond
4) Once ZXing is done it posts the UPC information back to my app..

SWEET! I had this running by Friday evening.

The bad news is getting UPC information pretty much just includes UPC Code and Scan Format ( so an 8-12 digit number and text like 'UPC_E' ).

I searched around and contacted some data vendors and yes they would be quite willing to supply me with UPC data related to nutritional information. I will just need to let them know how many people are going to access this data and then we can come up with a contract for $10,000 - $50,000 in fees that I pay them to get the data. that just isn't gonna work.

So what now?

1) I have 1,500 people using Health Tracker
2) I am a software developer
3) I have a hosted website with advanced database tools and programming languages

Yup, you guessed it, we are gonna make our own UPC database!

Initial Design looks something like this:

1) Lookup UPC Code on database
2) If it is there, allow user to scroll through the results
3) User assigns a particular period ( morning, lunch, afternoon, evening )
4) User enters a partial serving usage ( like 1/4 serving or 2 servings )
5) User can vote on the information presented ( like was it input correctly ? )
6) UPC Items have reputation associated with them, negative votes puts them at the bottom of the list, Positive votes bring them to the top
7) Users say Add and voila it is in their Food Diary for today
8) If User doesn't like the data or it is not there they can add their own version ( or update missing parts )

This weekend I got through items 1-7. I am not thrilled with my user interface at this point but it will get better as I go along.

Things that might not be obvious:

1) A single UPC might have several entries in my database.
2) A user cannot change what has already been entered by another user ( other than possibly to update missing information )
3) Each item will have a reputation which is a tally of the +1 for a positive vote and -1 for a negative vote.
4) Each user can only vote once on an item

Well... it is a fun experiment to say the least. I hope that I can have a completed version in the next couple of weeks. It will be interesting to see if people actually add UPC entries or if it just gets a collective yawn.

Going for gold

2011-03-06T06:13:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine likened the mobile application market to that of the gold rush. Instead of thinking about the gold rush of the 1850s my mind went to the recent TLC show Gold Rush - Alaska. I watched 6/10 of these shows and was struck with just how desperate these folks were to make something out of nothing. The one real dupe was the primary investor who plows untold tens of thousands of dollars into their folly. In that I wasn't able to force myself to watch this band of idiots to see if they could actually turn it around I can't tell you if they did anything beyond just spend a bunch of money.

Something that strikes me about the idea of gold-rush mentality is the expectation that you will get essentially something for nothing. A number of the people on the TLC show had jobs and substantial investments. Unrealistically they expected that within a couple of weeks they would start gathering gold and receiving a hefty payout. Well you didn't have to watch the show to figure out that this didn't happen. Like the original gold-rush they experienced just enough success to really get them commited.

The current statistics on the free version of Health Tracker are 3300 downloads with 1183 installed. I am adding about 25-30 new users each day, it seems that this is not slowing down. Yes this is where I have experienced enough success to get me commited.

I originally thought that I would worry about monetizing if I started approaching the 10,000 level. At the time I didn't understand the difference between downloaded and installed. At this point I am interested in seeing if "free" has any relationship to "$0.99".

I have conflicting emotions about changing from free to pay-for. It is pretty satisfying to have 30 new users download my app and to see the occasional positive feedback. I am worried that by moving to a pay-for model that people who need the application won't be abel to use it. Call this the angel on my shoulder. From my other shoulder I am reminded of the amount of effort I have poured into the application. I think about the actual value of a $0.99. This is the difference between getting water and getting a soda with your happy meal. It is 1/3 of a gallon of gas (about 8 miles of driving for most of us ).

Marketing people talk about barriers to entry. Generally the barrier to entry for free is pretty low. There is an expectation that something that is free has some way of making money that doesn't involve an immediate exchange of cash. A pay-for application has a few barriers; first the user has to be setup on google-marketplace. This isn't hard, but of the five users in my house only three of us are setup this way. Further there is the, I am already spending all this money to have my phone, I certainly don't want to spend another dollar. There are probably more barriers, but I really don't want to think about them too much more.

If everyone who has the free version of the app paid $0.99 I would have made enough to reimburse myself about $8 / hr. Please don't tell the folks that I work for that I am OK with $0.75 over minimum wage. The real test, however, is not my own effort or how I value a dollar.

I will be publishing one last version of the free app that points to the pay for app. At some point I will turn off that free application. Sometime this next week I will release the pay for application. I will let you know how that goes...

So my picks and shovels are loaded into my wheel barrow and I am officially joining the gold rush.

Writing and Publishing...

2011-03-01T10:45:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I released numbers on my Health Tracker application. The overall number of installs is 2700 with an active number of installs at 963 ( 35% if you are wondering ). I have started to receive some positive feedback through the marketplace and after a few original negative comments it is nice to receive some confirmation.

Mobile application markets are much different than traditional software development / publishing. If you wanted to write an application that sold for less than $100 you pretty much had to market it sufficiently to sell 10,000 units at a minimum. Your risk in the venture was measured in hundreds of thousands if not millions. More developers failed with this model than succeeded. I only have about a hundred dollars invested in Health Tracker (if you don't count my hours of effort). Point is, however, that I have built something that 1,000 people in the world consider to be valuable. The Android market (like the apple marketplace) has made this possible on an extremely small scale.

So what does this have to do with Writing and Publishing? Everything! Possibly a not very well know fact is that I am an unpublished writer. I have a rough draft completed of a fantasy duet ( 2 books ) and am in what can only be described as a constant editing cycle. I have three other stories in various stages of completion. It is simply what I do for entertainment.

Like my android application I don't actually expect that my writing will equal that of J.K Rowling or Tolkien. I do, however, expect that there will be a small group of readers who find my writing to be amusing and worth reading.

The ebook ( kindle, nook ) marketplace has taken what was just a fantasy of mine and brought it completely into reach. As far as I can tell it is completely free to publish a book for the Kindle on Amazon. The ball is squarely in my court all I need to do is complete my editing process, make some cover art, finalize on a name for the series,.. and oh yeah, I need to get the courage up to actually hit the submit button.

Look for future posts on the subject, I am hoping to publish the first book of my fantasy novel within the next year and then follow with my second a few months after that.

What a great world we live in.

Props to Robin Sullivan who writes a blog about the publishing world and got me all stirred up again.

If you are interested in a wonderful fantasy series you could check out her husband's ( Michael J Sullivan ) The Riyria Revelations series.

Pushing back... in a small way

2011-02-25T06:25:00.000-08:00

Having 3 kids 17 years and older makes for an extremely busy home. I love the activity and enthusiasm for life they all bring. One of the annoying aspects of this is we end up with junk mail for 5 people and the credit card companies are all over themselves to bring in some new blood.

I considered making this post a rant against the evils of debt and the parallels of this debt to slavery. Nah you probably have debt and already get this.

No... this post is all about striking out against these giant corporations.. I am doing it $.35 at a time. Yeah, that's me.. I am ripping them a new one, death by a thousand cuts! Uh.. yeah, you read that right 35 cents a whack. OK so that isn't gonna bring anyone down and at this point it is purely symbolic, but I have to say it feels good.

So what am I doing? Simple, every time ( 3-5 times a week) we receive an unsolicited application for a credit card, I simply shred the contents but keep the mail back envelope. I then seal this envelope (leaving it empty) and send it out in the next day's mail. By doing this I have doubled their cost of that bulk mailing.

I suppose that since they can afford to send it once, they can probably afford to receive it back and pay for it. But the real cost is considerably more than 35 cents for the return postage. Someone at the company has to open it and then roll their eyes and throw it away. Maybe I spent another few minutes of their time...

If everyone took this approach I bet we would get less of these mailers.

Android Speech Recognition

2011-02-14T07:56:00.001-08:00

When google gets it right they really get it right. I have been working on an android application called Health Tracker. So far the public response hasn't been overly excited but then the application is pretty much my own invention for tracking a daily food, exercise and weight diary. I am not trying to make a business of it nor am I attempting to grab onto the "gold rush" mentality of many mobile app developers. The tool is useful to me and so I think it is probably useful to others like me.

What does this have to do with google getting it right? Well the fine folks at google released their speech recognition engine and made it extraordinarily easy for average joe developers like myself to utilize it. Consider the daily food diary. Pretty much I want to write down ( electronically of course ) everything I eat in a day. I want to track Weight Watcher points or calories ( I vacillate on the units ). It sure would be handy if I could simply tell my phone what I have eaten and have it record that for me. As of version 1.6 ( not yet released ) this is exactly what my app does.

On google's side of the coding, they allow you with a minimum amount of code to popup their speech recognition engine and capture the user's input. Google then turns around, ships that stream off to their servers, they do a best-guess translation and ship it back as a string of words. The only thing that I am left to do is to parse through these words and react to them.

In the case the food diary I have a very small grammar that I accept. I don't recall the grammar notation from my CS classes but basically I recognize a phrase as having three main sections; [period] [item description] [points / calories]. A period has to be an exact match to my existing periods ( morning, lunch, afternoon, evening ). I don't take the item description next, rather I check the end of the phrase to see if it ends in one of my unit designators ( calories, points, carbs, carbohydrates, etc ). If the phrase ends with one of these, I backup to the 2nd to last word and grab it as the unit value ( morning toasted bagel 200 calories ) is interpreted as [morning] [toasted bagel] [200 calories].

I couldn't even possibly attempt to solve this problem without Google's speech API. It does get words wrong occasionally but I would have to say it listens at least as well as I do :) All in all I am pretty stoked about this fun new toy that I found this weekend.

Happy Coding !

Wireless HD from Laptop to TV

2011-02-07T06:57:00.000-08:00

I suppose a number of you are already aware of a very cool new mechanism. Intel has started integrating wireless and video cards. I am really not sure who actually developed the tech, but it is exactly what I have been waiting for. Let me try to answer some of the obvious questions in a Q/A format.

Q. What does it do?
A. Displays a computer's current screen on a TV wirelessly

Q. Any computer?
A. Nope, you need to have a video card / wireless card combo with Intel's cool new WiDi tech

Q. What other pieces are required?
A. On my laptop there are no extra pieces, but on the TV there is a small box that connects via HDMI to the TV

Q. Did you have to buy a special laptop?
A. Yes, I just got a new laptop and it had Intel Wireless Display (referred to as WiDi ) as one of the options

Q. Did you have to buy anything else?
A. Yes, I also purchased a Push2TV box from NetGear for an additional $99

Q. Was installation hard?
A. Not at all. The box can be wall mounted ( I put it behind the TV on the wall ) and it requires a 2-prong electric connection. Connecting to TV can be either component or HDMI.

Q. How is the quality?
A. Almost always perfect. Have had one case when the picture stalled for about 5 seconds.

Q. Can you do other things on your computer while streaming to the TV?
A. NOPE! This is the one and most significant downside.

If you are in the market for a new laptop or computer don't miss this opportunity. I know I am loving it.

More about Android Development

2011-01-26T09:16:00.001-08:00

Health Tracker (beta) continues to grow in the install base. It is not without a bit of grumbling from a few consumers. The latest complaint is that I don't have a database of caloric values to allow a user to simply choose from. Once again the user is right on with what they want, this would be a great addition. It is also the case that with my current budget of $0 this just isn't going to happen.

I have one user who has figured out my app for what it is a work in progress and something that I am simply willing to share and improve upon. I am pretty sure this app doesn't monetize at all. We have had just over 1,200 installs and a bit over 600 keepers which is a 52% stickiness factor ( 52% of the people who download it are willing to leave it on their device ). Currently I believe this app will continue to be installed and I will eventually end up with a stable number, it will be interesting to me to see what this number ends up being.

For me this is a success. I was scooping snow from my driveway and it occurred to me that if 600 people actually used it to help them become healthier then this is pretty cool.

In addition to developing new features for Health Tracker I am going to start on a new android application with Jake ( my son ) using openGL. More on that as we make some progress.

Health Tracker Downloads..

2011-01-14T07:27:00.001-08:00

It is more a testament to Android Market's marketing leverage than anything I have done but Health Tracker was downloaded 119 times in the first 12 hours of it's life. Of the 119 downloads 74 people kept the software for at least that reporting cycle. Not a single downloader registered on the website (novelcoder.com/HealthTracker). It will be fun to track the progress of my experiment. I guess I hope it turns into something, but that would probably require that I put alot more work into it. In the (highly paraphrased) words of Benjiman Franklin, most people miss opportunity because it generally shows up looking like work.

Adventures with Android

2011-01-13T12:39:00.001-08:00

For the last several months I have been working on an application for android phones. It has been a goal of mine to build a nice simple application and publish for the android OS. The application I settled on is one that I have built several times in different languages. The concept is simple, I want to be able to track a food diary, exercise log and weight loss journal all in one place. So I created the application Health Tracker.

If you want to get a copy of Health Tracker on your very own android device, just go to the Marketpace and search for "Health Tracker". It is funny, you would think my app being the only one named such would be the first on the list... Sadly this is not the case, I am showing up at 3rd or 4th on the list. I imagine this has to do with the fact that I am the only one ever to have downloaded it ( it is only 10 minute old on the marketplace ). The author name is Novel Coder so that shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

If you are worried about cost, don't be, the app is free and likely to stay that way unless it gets 10's of thousands of downloads at which point I will have to worry about making money. As of now I am not particularly worried about this making money. The app is very simple, it is free and I have already met my objectives for it.

If somehow you ended up here and were trying to get to the home page for HealthTracker please goto http://novelcoder.com/HealthTracker.

Hmm.. what next... I suppose I will see if anyone downloads it and asks for enhancements...

Back to Kansas

2010-09-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about living in south eastern Nebraska is that you have access to other states like Iowa and Kansas. Our last adventure took us to Milford Kansas where we found a beautiful 16,000 acre lake with an extremely small yacht club. The people were certainly nice enough but the club itself was extremely restricted. I believe the restricted has occured without even their intent. But the fact remains that they have fallen into a supply / demand trap where members are not motivate to grow the club as it would actually reduce the value of the one commodity that would expand their club ( slips for sailboats ). As it turns out members at Milford own their slips and only when they are done sailing at Milford would they consider selling them.

On Monday we visited Perry Lake. Perry is about 40 miles west of Kansas City and situated north of I-70 close to Wichita and Topeka. About 1/2 way there I received a call back from Craig, the owner of an ODay 26' sailboat he had listed. Craig is prof at KU and an extremely nice guy. He showed us around his boat as well as filled us in on the runnings of Perry Yacht Club. Craig, Janet and I visited for 30-40 minutes while sitting in the cabin of his O'Day. It was in the low 90s and it was warm in the cabin but out of the sun we were all very comfortable. I am not sure if this is the boat for us, but it gave us a very nice introduction to a 26' length boat. Personally I hope to run into Craig in the future as we seemed to share a number of interests and I would love to see how he is making out in his plans.

Janet and I were able to get a good feel for Perry Lake. Perry Lake is an 11,000 acre lake due east about 110 miles from Milford. From the perspective of a this nebraskan, these two lakes are on points of a triangle from my home. That is to say, where Milford is a 2:15 hour drive, Perry Lake is a slightly longer 2:40 hour drive. Honestly neither of these times is killer, but they are definitely both a factor when considering the future.

Perry and Milford are much different lakes and having only been there once each, I can only give my first impressions. Perry's yacht club boasts 160 slips to Milford's 40, slips are owned by the club and an annual due is required for renting a slip. To me this puts a lot of advantage into the club's hands, as the club is more able to afford maintenance and new items. Furthermore with 160 slips you can imagine turnover occurs more frequently.

At 11,000 acres Perry Lake, like Milford, is very suitable for day sailing trips. Along one line it runs about 9 miles. A fast sailboat might go 10 knots, but reasonably more like 4-6 knots for anything I might sail. Ultimately this means if we were to start at one end and race to the other it might take as much as 1.5 hours.

The lay of the lake is not quite as nice as Milford. Where Milford's primary surface is west to east giving a fantastic exposure to the most favorable south wind (blows from the south). Perry is situate at 90 degrees so that the longest run is actually north to south. This makes heading up into the wind or running from the wind the prevelant courses. If you were a merchant wanting to sail the lake for profit, this would be a big problem. As a recreational sailor this is not much of an issue, but it is worth keeping in mind.

Well, thats what I have to report for now.

Keep Dreaming!

Kansas Adventures

2010-09-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

For Janet and me exploring new territory is a great deal of fun. If you have been following my recent posts you know that I have a rekindled interest in sailing.

Yesterday we made a quick trip to Milford, KS where one of the largest lakes in Kansas is located. Sure, I know what you are thinking, Kansas!? Well as it turns out Kansas boasts some very nice sailing lakes.

So the trip for today was a short 2 1/4 hour trip down to Milford Lake which is a 16,000 acre lake that has a very nice lay allowing sailors to take good advantage of Kansas' prevailing south wind. At 16,000 acres it is roughly 12 times the size of the last lake we sailed ( Branched Oak ).

At the lake we ran into a very nice gentleman, Ralph, at the aptly named Southwind Yacht Club. We hadn't intended on talking to anyone but Ralph was sitting within the club's shelter and after a small introduction he was quite happy to tell us what he knew. What a great character! As it turns out he was the the treasurer of the Southwind up until about 3-4 years ago and had been a member of the club for something like 40 years ( since inception ).

Janet, Ralph and I chatted for probably 45 minutes while he filled us in on the details of the club, his old yacht ( a Benateau 28' ) and Milford Lake. We also found out that his bad luck had been our good luck. He was only sitting there because having sold his old yacht he had turned around and purchased a motor boat as his advanced age made sailing much less fun than it had previously been. His sparkling new motor boat's trailor had blown a tire and he was waiting for his son to show up to help him replace it.

All in all the day was a pretty nice adventure. We explored a new area and were able to continue to dream about our future that includes sailing.

For our next adventure we will be heading out to see the slightly smaller Perry Lake. It is about 30 minutes further away from us than Milford but has a much larger and more active yacht club. It also boasts the advantage of being about 40 miles outside of Kansas City.

Planning for next vacation season

2010-08-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

Plan early or stay home. That is basically how vacations work around here. Last year the five of us had an incredible time when we went to Branson, MO. From the wonderful little cabin we rented, to Silver Dollar City, to renting a pontoon boat and cruising around Table Rock Lake it was jamb packed and non-stop fun. It will be hard to top that.

On the trip we actually reached our limit of how many activities we really wanted to do. One of the activities we would like to repeat, however, was the time we spent on Table Rock Lake. As lakes go this lake is incredible. Clear with a greenish tint the water feels wonderful to swim in. We absolutely want to take our boat back there next year and spend less time running around and more time relaxing in the lake. I need to get this planned out asap!!

Janet and I will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary this year. We feel pretty fortunate to have found each other and still fit together like peas in a pod. To celebrate I want to kick off with a presage of our next 25 years together.

To that end we have decided that we will start pursuing our shared love of sailing. We have never been experts at sailing although we have very much enjoyed our experiences. So to dive back into this shared passion we are going to take a trip, just the two of us to the Pacific Northwest and charter a sailboat for a week. We haven't finalized the details yet, but I have found a wonderful small charter company http://www.sailnw.com.

Sail Northwest has three different options that are appealing to me:

1) The complete cruise. 6 days and 5 nights aboard their 50' Benateau sloop. Sail NW ultimately takes care of everything on this cruise.
2) A bareboat cruise where we hire a Sail NW captain to sail with us for the week, we provide and plan the entire trip
3) ASA (American Sailing Association) Training for a week. I don't have many details on this option but I have asked for more details. The goal would be that Janet and I end the week with a strong understanding of how to operate a cruising sailboat.

I am not sure which option we will take at this point, but I am leaning toward #1 or #3 at the moment. I am not prepared to plan a trip, although I suspect we could get a lot of help from the Captain.

So maybe August is a bit early for this kind of planning, but a boy needs to dream !!

Happy thoughts to all!

Sailing away

2010-08-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

My big dream in life is to sail away. Literally. Janet and I live in Nebraska so this isn't really that practical at the moment. Moreover, we have two kids (Matthew, Emma) in college and one (Jacob) still a Junior in high school. The dream really has to wait for a while. It just isn't practical yet.

Lately I have been talking about mid life crisis. One of the things that hits me is this never ending question; "Is this it?" I am asking a fairly exostential question of is this all there is to life? So when I finally, truthfully answer myself, the answer comes back; "Life is what you make it." If you know me very well you know that platitudes don't sit that well with me. Generally these types of statements are too general, too simplistic, or just down right annoying.

I have a lot of pride about how Janet and I have raised our kids and prepared them for life. The are each unique and wonderful. I am sure that when I die I will rest comfortably on this alone. The problem is between here and the grave I don't want to walk around patting myself on the back for my kid's accomplishments as my only source of entertainment. ( I didn't say I would stop, so don't even think you are getting off that easily ).

So back to the dream... How do we make it work?

1) The way I have it figured we have 3-4 years before we can even think about loosing a permanent land-based home.

2) Jacob needs to be at least in his 3rd year of college before we pull the rug out.

3) We will have to be able to accomodate Janet's new High School Math teaching career.

4) We don't want to miss out on grandkids so being able to see them is a pretty critical issue ( no we don't have any, but I have a kid in his 20s now, with the others only a couple years back, this is gonna happen at some point)

5) Oh, did I mention the economy sucks? Where will we get the money to do this?

6) Neither Janet or I are certified sailors. We need some training.

7) Where would we go?

As you can see The Dream actually involves more questions that solutions. Perfect! I love a good problem, I will try to blog out how I get through this.

Mid life crisis is in full bloom still. I feel a sense of urgency to get on the stick and strive toward the dream. I am a few years out so I can start the early preparations and for me that means DOWNSIZING.

Downsizing is a few steps forward and one step back. Apparently my materialistic nature just can't handle all of this selling stuff off. Previously the downsizing count was up to three. I am pleased to announce that we have made progress of net +1. I was able to offload an old walk behind tiller ( that no longer runs ) as well as an old computer ( complete with it's big old 15" monitor ). Hmm, that sounds like +2, so why just +1? Yeah you guessed it, I purchased something... I bought a brand new scale, the kind you might see at your Dr's office. I will talk about that in a future post.

Off to work I go, I hope you continue to dream big!

Mid life crisis, I embrace it!

2010-08-25T06:32:00.000-07:00

Everytime I have heard someone describe a mid life crisis it has been negative. I generally describes some otherwise rational person doing irratic things, like buying a $50k sportscar, an affair with a younger woman, fill in the blank.

To me these are examples of a poorly thought out mid life crisis. Tying yourself down to a really expensive ride to boost your self worth or having an affair with a younger woman might temporarily satisfy a worn-out ego, but it doesn't get to the root of where I think a mid life crisis comes from. They also have their own set of chains. No one wants to make payments on a BMW and relationships are for life.

For me a mid life crisis comes from looking down the road and imagining nothing changing and wondering if I can be ok with that. If the answer comes back "NO" then houston, we have a problem.

Analysing my life I have come to realize that I do alot of things that I find to be completely meaningless. I spend quite a bit of time on housework, yardwork, maintenance and repair. I always have leftover vacation time at the end of the year (with the excuse, I am just too busy to take it all ). We rarely take vacations because "that would just be too expensive, we have college to think about". UGH!

I would like to think of this phase of my life as the start of my "anti-materialism" phase. Or the "Let's have an Adventure!" phase. How do these two things relate? I can't be running off on adventure if I have a bunch of stuff to keep track of.

So on the anti-materialism phase. The score is currently Jim, 3 (good scoring system no losers).

1) 4HP Mercury Outboard
2) 2HP 6, 1/8" Jointer/Planer
3) Older Computer

The cash is nice, but we all know just how easily that gets spent. The crazy thing is that just two things and I can feel my load getting just a little lighter. I don't have to move them around anymore, I have more room, things look cleaner. It isn't much but it is a start.

I will keep you up on the score as I rack up points.

Sailing... next time we really need to talk about sailing. This is something I can get passionate about.

Courage to dream.

2010-08-23T13:37:00.001-07:00

I have always been a dreamer and sometimes I am able to actually go after these dreams. In a moment of lucidity I realized that dreaming is scarier that real life. Or perhaps expressing your dreams is scarier.

When we were a young family, mentally I made a promise to my family. We would be as stable as possible and focus on providing for their needs both physically and emotionally. 21 years later I can say I feel like we have done that in spades. I have worked for the same company for 20 of those years and Janet put her career on hold to stay home and nurture.

As of late our family of five has been experiencing some serious changes. This year 2/3 of the kids are in college. Talk about starting to feel the empty nest. In addition Janet just started teaching Math at a local Christian school so she is not hanging around the house either. It is the perfect storm for someone prone to the mid-life crisis. In addition to the kids leaving home, I also had gall bladder surgery. "Boing" I am now having a full blown mid-life crisis.

I have started to dream about the future. At 46 with a reasonable nest-egg built up, the future is endlessly bright. We have the opportunity to do just about anything we are creative enough to imagine.

So... the word of the day for me is Downsizing... Time to toss off the shackles of the crap that we own. What does that have to do with dreaming... Stay tuned... And if you feel like I have something you want... make me an offer, I might surprise you.

Robots in space

2010-04-29T06:28:00.001-07:00

No... seriously this year even.

One of my favorite blogs is Engadget. For whatever reason they seem to hit me right where I live or at least where I fantasize. So today the picture of

Really caught my attention. This picture goes with an article about how Japan will be putting a humanoid robot on the Moon by 2015.

Wow... crazy... not sure why that is practical but it sure is cool, I suddenly like all things Japanese if they can overlook practical for cool

So if that isn't cool enough, we (the US) are sending at least 1/2 of a humanoid robot up to the space station this year. Check out this article (also on engadget ). The robot is called Robonaut2. If you dig around a little you can find this video showing what they expect to do with this guy in september. Here is a pic I stole from the NY Times.

Robonaut2 is a venture between General Motors and Nasa. This particular robot seems to be extremely versatile and built of components that are interchangeable. Initially they are expecting to send only the top half ( torso, arms, head ) and place it on some sort of rolling platform. This will require astronauts to manually move the robot from place to place.

Later on they expect to send up some sort of legs or mobility base that can be controlled as part of the overall robot operation allowing the robot to move independantly around the space station.

Even later they have plans to interchange components to facilitate EVA ( outside of the space station ). I can envision little rocket packs and boosters in some sort of a cool backpack, but I suspect they will be more practical than that with their expensive toy.

OK so if you are still with me... you need to check out one final Robot thingy. Watch this small jumping robot video ... If you are really interested go to engadget.com and type into the search boston dynamics. The world has already changed...

Android For All

2010-04-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

My family and I have jumped off the cliff. Up until now I have been resisting getting any sort of data plan type phones. With Verison the price for 5 has been waaay too high, about $280 / month. You could almost rent an apartment for that!

Enter Sprint. They have a deal going where we are able to get in for about $100 less than Verison, unlimited roaming, data, pretty much everything.

Personally I wanted to get a Windows 7 Mobile phone. I am a Silverlight developer for my company and it would be dang easy to spin off small applications for my phone if I could simply write them in Silverlight.

Well neither Verison or Sprint have a Windows 7 Mobile phone just yet so that decision was made easy.

As it turns out I am somewhat of a google fan-boy. If it isn't Microsoft, then google will do just fine for me. When the Android platform was initially announce a couple of years ago I downloaded their development environment and made some basic apps just to prove that it could be done. The amount of work required was fairly substantial so i dropped it.

At Sprint the best phones we could identify are Android based phones. Everyone but me ended up getting an HTC Hero ( no not the new HD2 ). I opted for the Samsung Moment. All of the phones are android based.

Wow, what a cool setup. Android is plugged into all of the same applications that I use today; gmail, google-calendar, google-voice, and the list goes on. I really couldn't be more impressed with the functionality.

People warned me about Sprint connectivity... Well, I have noticed that Sprint will drop in a few places that Verison won't... Generally speaking, however, we just don't have a problem. It is certainly not an active conversation of how bad our service is.

Back to programming. One of the things I regularly have to do is attempt to get healthy and lose weight. What's this got to do with programming? Well.. I have embarked on writing an Android application that lets me keep track of diet related things ( food diary, activity log, weight loss, etc ).

This application will take forever to write and to be honest it is the journey that I enjoy not the destination. Sure I would love to have the ultimate tracking program on my Droid... but really I am more interested in building the program. Progress to date is mostly the bottom of the ice-berg. ( stuff you don't see) I setup a server that will handle my data and web-connectivity. It is in the basement running Windows XP Pro. I have also been successful at connecting this to a small droid application that I installed on my phone that will query a given day's food diary and render it on my phone. All in I have probably spent 40 hours building and setting up the application, it was a thrill when it finally displayed on the phone.

So there it is... random bits of my life related to Android

Finally a wireless home printer

2010-02-22T06:15:00.000-08:00

I recently purchased a Lexmark S405 directly from Lexmark. If you don't recall, Lexmark is a company that picked up IBM's laptop and home printer divisions. I don't know the corporate structure but I have always liked IBM's laptops. Oddly I also worked for IBM's printer division for about a year while finishing up a degree.

The total cost with shipping was $99. For me this is a good buy and I haven't really seen anything too close to this. My requirements are pretty straight forward:

1) Wireless
2) Doesn't require a specific computer to serve as the print server
3) Can act as a scanner

#1 & #2 turn out to set the bar fairly high but the Lexmark simply delivers.

When I received the box I installed the software on my computer, temporarily connected the printer to the same computer with a provided USB cable, and completed the installation.

The printer works very well. I have installed the requisite software on several computers in the house and it simply works.

Features that I find useful are:

1) Wireless connection
2) Crisp printing
3) Ability to scan documents "to" any computer with installed software
4) Ability "make a copy"
5) Ability to manually send/receive faxes
6) Ability to send/receive faxes from computer

If you are in the market you should consider this particular device.

Epic Fail -- No data for you

2010-02-18T10:21:00.000-08:00

So this should classify as a Rant... But just to make things a bit confusing I will lavish some praise first.

As a rule the people at Windstream seem to be very nice and easy to work with. I have talked to no less than five of them in the last 24 hours. Without exception they are genuinely nice and at least pretend to care about my issues. (end of praise section)

For those of you not in the know, Windstream is my land-line telephone provider. Living in the country as we do, Cell Phones are just not reliable enough to be used as a primary telecommunication device. To make things worse, they are the only game in town for internet service. Well, that is an sort of not true... But suffice it to say they are the only practical, > .5 meg provider available.

Windstream provides what they advertise as 1.5meg DSL service to our house. Not bad but the reality is that it is more like 0.7 meg service due to a very liberal amount of packet shaping on Windstream's part. What is packet shaping you say? The short answer is they only deliver about 60% of what they promise to because they make a concious decision to conveniently forget about 40% of the packets being sent to me.

There are people who get down right crazy when you mention packet shaping but practically speaking it is part of all of our lives. At least Windstream admits to doing it.

As it turns out it really isn't personal, Windstream would love to sell me a 6 meg service, I imagine with their liberal packet shaping this would potentially deliver a 3.5 meg service which for me would be a 500% increase.... YAYAH... sign me up.

Turns out I have a disease known as crappy hardware... Or as the tech referred to it today as "a mess". Apparently the installed hardware in their boxes (along the gravel road no less ) just isn't capable of delivering > 1.5 meg service. ( I politely corrected him by pointing out that they don't actually even deliver that )

Well in typical polite Nebraskan speak I was informed that "they would look into it..." but the look in his face said it all... be happy we can even keep you hooked up...

... sigh ...

The long slog through winter

2010-02-16T06:12:00.000-08:00

For whatever reason this winter feels like the longest one I have ever endured. I suspect it has something to do with snow being on the ground from late November until now. The 2009 Christmas drifts still occupy most of the visual landscape out my office window and even the normally cheerful birds seem a bit grumpy.

Working from home is both joy and hardship. From a raw productivity perspective it is incredible. I can drill into a problem as hard as I want and simply crunch and grind on it for as long as I can take it. As a younger man I recall being able to focus on a computer problem for 8-10 hours, taking minimal breaks for biological needs. In my mid forties this number is down to 3-4 hours before I need a mental break. I love focusing on a problem and so there is the joy.

What I hadn't expected is my need for human interaction and variety of scenery. Working at home in the winter really pushes these needs to the forefront. Outside activities are simply not available. You could argue that playing in the snow is a good time... but yeah, not for me. 20 degrees, 15 -20 mph winds are the norm for my neck of the woods. My normal walk around the lake is miserable and riding bike on the trail is simply just not possible with all the snow we have received.

For the first time in my life I have started scheduling "lunch" with buddies. No topic, no attempt at starting some new business venture, just get together and have lunch. The good news is my buddies are pretty open to this.

I wish I had some deep insight to share about this but the best I can figure is this is something to be endured. So I have hunkered down and been spending my "activity" time on the eliptical machine. I keep myself busy doing things like changing the oil in the vehicles and small building projects. All that said I have to admit to wondering why anyone lives here...

Advice for a young family

2010-02-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

Friends of mine are preparing to have their first baby. I received an email asking for some advice on what I wished I could redo, was shocked by, etc. This is a copy of what I came up with:

Wish I had done ( or not done ):

Bought a video camera early on. Had an easy way to save lots of video.
Not responded to or cared what strangers thought of our child rearing. When you are out in the world the stimulation to your baby is overwhelming, they will not act the same as they do at home. I wish I had been more understanding of that.
We tried spanking… honestly I wish we never had. It was a quick fix that worked… left me feeling bad, it was an easy way out.

Most shocking things:

How much sleep we lost in the first year. Adjusting to the kids sleep cycles was painful.
How much crap a backed up baby can store ( always have the next size up diaper on at night if you think they are )
How bad an idea holding a baby over you with your mouth open is… (this was not a lesson I learned quickly)
Cold air on previously diapered skin will cause a bladder to constrict… don’t stand in front of the pointy object when changing diapers.. (worse for boys than girls)

General Advice:

Don’t solicit general advice… you will get it
Purchase a lot of Desatin… you really can’t have too much or apply too much
Get a journal and write down as many things are you can… we love reading them and even at 20 years old the kids love the stories
Most of parenting is simply showing up. Spend as much time with them as you possibly can.

Favorite things:

Taking naps with an infant on my chest. Most peaceful event in my life.
Every developmental step ( rolling over, scooching, crawling, utterances, etc )
Our kids loved everyone but saved their best for us
Watching them sleep

Our three kids are 16 years old and older. This year we will have two in college. It is bitter sweet to see them grown up and starting to move out. We have loved every stage of their development and are proud to see who they have become. It makes me a bit wistful when considering my friends venture...

Holiday Cream Gravy

2009-12-30T19:20:00.000-08:00

The following is a recipe that I developed by swiping wonderful ideas from many accomplished cooks. The tipping point for me was when I watched an Alton Brown episode where he discussed a White Gravy called a Roux. Alton is an amazing chef and you would probably receive a lot of inspiration by visiting his site.

The recipe scales easily so I will give this to you in 1 cup ( 240 ml ) version.

Ingredients:

flour - 2 tablespoon

butter - 2 tablespoon

milk - 1 cup

bullion - 1 teaspoon ( any type works )

Mix milk and bullion in a small bowl and set aside.

Heat flour and butter in a sauce pan over a medium high heat until the mixture turns a nice golden brown ( a darker color will produce a slightly toasted flavor ). This should take about 5-6 minutes.

Once mixture is brown, reduce heat to medium low and add milk / bullion mixture. Whisk mixture over the medium low heat until the gravy reaches desired consistency. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Additions

For holidays I will often swap whole for skim milk. You can also add sour cream or just about any kind of cheese.

So there it is, Enjoy!

Silverlight - Service Contract from URL

2009-12-21T08:52:00.000-08:00

As a silverlight developer every once in a while I run into a problem where Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008) absolutely throws down and refused to generate my service contract for my WCF service. I receive a number of errors that are completely erroneous and generally useless.

As a bit of background. Generally speaking line of business (LOB) applications that run in a web environment need some sort of a server that will feed that LOB app data. The approach I have taken is to build a WCF (windows communication foundation) service that runs in my data center and connects to our LOB data. The WCF service provides a nice and secure Internet facing view of customer's data in a machine readable (XML) format.

Microsoft as part of the Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment) provides a convenient mechanism that generates an absolute ton of code by pointing at that WCF service. Among the output of this generation feature is a file Reference.cs. This is where the really clunky looking code is that provides an interface between silverlight and the web service resides.

For reasons not known but lamented on various other blogs is a bug within this generation program that causes it to fail to build this reference.cs file correctly. As a developer this is a bit of turn-about-is-fair-play because we get to live with the 'it doesn't work and we have to live with it' that we sometimes foist on our users. Unfortunately I just can't live with this tool failing. My project ground to a complete stop as a result.

Some solutions I found in other blogs suggested, restarting your machine ( yes a programmer favorite), deleting all non-essential files, deleting all files and grabbing code back from the repository, etc. After nearly an hour of banging my head into the keyboard I finally gave up with the 'quick and dirty' solutions and set out to solve this thing for real. After a bit of digging I found that some other developers had reached a similar point.

When VS2008 was VS2005 the IDE actually used an external program to generate this reference.cs. The program was called SVCUTIL.exe. This program is still around ( for backward compatibility ) but unfortunately it doesn't generate the right stuff for silverlight.

After a bit more digging I found that Microsoft includes a program that will indeed generate this same code. If you have hung in this far, you are probably screaming at me... just show me the freaking code already...

I created a batch file: (makeproxy.bat) that sits next to my solution file(.sln). Here are the contents of that batch file.

pushd

@echo %1

set path=C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Tools;%path%

slsvcutil /language:cs /out:%1\BusinessServiceProxy.cs

http://localhost:50771/MyService.svc

/edb

/namespace:*,MyNameSpace.BusinessService

/ser:Auto

/noconfig

/ct:System.Collections.ObjectModel.ObservableCollection`1

/r:"c:\Program Files\Microsoft Silverlight\3.0.40818.0\System.Windows.dll"

popd

exit(0)

I then added this batch file to my "pre-build" event command line of the build for my silverlight application in VS2008.

The parameters I used are:

/out - you tell it where you want a file of all of that code to go

/language:cs - I use c#

http://localhost:50771/MyService.svc

/edb - enable data binding ( this adds support for INotifyProperty to the objects created)

/namespace - renames all namespaces to whatever you specify

/ser:auto - does something with serialization

/noconfig - this won't generate a web.config or app.config (you might want this )

/ct - collection type, I wanted ObservableCollections (and it was the original default )

/r - include some extra .dlls, this is required to find the type specified in the /ct

Click on slsvcutil.exe to see a full reference of this tool.

I had to include BusinessProxy.cs in my silverlight application in order to utilize the generated code. It really is just that simple.

My hope in posting this is that just one other person might stumble across it before doing too much head-damage while fighting VS2008's generator.

Happy Coding!

Fall Breakfast Muffins

2009-11-10T06:20:00.000-08:00

Being creative is something that I strive toward. I enjoy trying new things and experimenting with wood, metal, paint, glass and certainly not least of all food.

To start with I love recipes. I love reading recipes of food that is well done. I am not real big on cooking from a recipe, however. Over the last year or so I have been making stabs at breakfast muffins. Muffins like so many other things have some basic truths. The most important truth about muffins is you can fix just about anything in a muffin with sugar. Keep that between you and me. Generally a home made muffin can be very healthy.

So here is what I made this morning:

- 1 Cup Whole Wheat Flour (we grind our own from wheat kernels)
- 1/3 Cup of Honey
- 1/4 Cup Oil
- 1.5 Tablespoons Baking Powder
- 1 Handful of sunflower seeds (I like the unsalted kind)
- 1/2 Handful of shaved almonds (again unsalted)
- 2 Eggs
- Splash of milk
- 1/4 cup of Pumpkin (from a can)
- 1/2 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice
- 2 Tablespoons white sugar

So first you notice that my measurements aren't overly tight. Get used to it. They don't need to be. The critical components are the flour, baking powder and eggs. Everything else is added to make it work out. The sugar added at the end is all about taste testing and needing to sweeten it up. Feel free to use more honey.

Mix with a big spoon and add milk until the mixture is the consistency of a good chocolate shake.

Fill regular sized muffin cups about 2/3 full and cook at 395 degrees for 15 minutes.

If you just don't think there is enough sweet goodness in them, crumble some brown sugar (and coconut if you are so inclined) on top before baking. ( I didn't do this, but mostly because it didn't occur to me until after they were in the oven.

Enjoy your high-fiber sweetness. If that doesn't work.. feel free to drop by, they are still warm.

NPR - FOX - Obama

2009-10-31T15:00:00.000-07:00

To me it is entertaining when the liberal news media (in this case National Public Radio ) attempts to paint the conservative news media as being biased or tainted (ala FOX News ). 'No Duh' comes to mind... but it is the pot calling the kettle black. Lets be real, FOX definitely leans right and NPR / CNN absolutely lean left.

What is humorous to me is that Obama recently tried to ban FOX news reporters from interviewing members of his administration. The message from the White House was that FOX is not a new organization like CNN is. Well, I suppose in many ways that is right, CNN has tons more money, viewers and most importantly is LIBERAL leaning...

I perceive myself as a moderate conservative, I watch both CNN and FOX. I am frustrated when FOX dips into the lower end of the gene pool quoting jerks like Rush Limbaugh. I am similarly frustrated when CNN holds up Roland Martin as a moderate voice. Let's at least stop pretending that either side holds some particular high moral ground.

So where did this get amusing? Well... NPR entered the fray a few days back with a poll which basically asked people to choose on of the following answers (paraphrased)

1) Is FOX not Fair and Balanced?
2) Does FOX just simply ask hard questions?
3) Are the White House and FOX playing this for attention?

The results of the poll are overwhelmingly #2... go see for yourself.

NPR having not gotten the answer they wanted, sluffs it off to a bunch of conservatives taking over their poll. Their mistake was in making it public. Had they restricted their poll to only liberals who enjoy the NPR forum I think they would have received the answer they were fishing for.

Bottom line... if you believe the media is unbiased you are nuts... if you believe Obama is a centrist you are similarly nuts.

RoboForm

2009-10-29T07:08:00.001-07:00

If you are like me you struggle to keep track of the myriad passwords and user accounts that you utilize on the internet. So it struck me the other day that there must be a tool that helps with this problem. So before looking I decided on the following criteria:

1) has to recognize when I am being prompted for a pwd and fill it in for me
2) integrate with my browser
3) help me generate randomized passwords
4) save this data somewhere that I can easily use it on other computers

I found a tool that does this and more. It is called RoboForm. In just the week that I have been using it, RoboForm has discovered 12 sites that I log into and captured their passwords (with my permission of course ).

Check it out, I am pleased that I did!

More Windows 7

2009-10-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note...

One of my favorite online personalities is Cali Lewis. She does a daily video podcast called Geek Brief TV. Aside from being flirty and cute (only gets you so far), Cali does a nice job of finding stuff that geeks like to hear about. In episode 642 Cali presents a really nice run through of many of the new features of Windows 7 (due out October 22nd). I have been using Windows 7 for a month or two and love it. One of the new features that I missed in my last run through is the shake feature... You can grab a window's title bar and shake it back and forth with your mouse. This minimizes all of the other windows that are behind that window. I didn't even know that was available. Thanks Cali!

Browser Wars

2009-09-14T06:38:00.000-07:00

It is hard to know who to believe when it comes to actual market share of a particular browser. If you were to poll 1,000 internet users just what % of them would be use what particular browser? It may seem like a mundane question for you, but as a content provider and web developer this ends up being a pretty important question.

Why? Simple, every browser does things a little bit differently. As a result web developers have to be careful to make sure important (or cool) functionality works with browsers that people are using.

Why don't they all work the same? Great question and the answer is they are starting to. Fortunately the standards bodies are being listened to for the most part. As a developer I want people to choose a browser that will make my application look as good as I designed it to look.

The current popular browsers are:

Internet Explorer: 65%
FireFox: 20%
Google Chrome: 4%

In 2006 this looked like:

Internet Explorer: 80%
FireFox: 13.5%
Netscape: 2%
et. al.

Personally, I am done with Internet Explorer... I have tried to love this browser and appreciate that they are working hard to improve it, but seriously... can you say bloat? For me IE is terribly slow although quite functional.

At the moment I am using Google Chrome. Chrome is very light weight and blazingly fast. Call me fickle but I tire of Chrome... Often it refuses to run things and provides minimal feedback on what is occuring. The UI is just what you would expect from Google, minimalistic.

What are the advantages of using Chrome? Primarily I use Chrome as a 'sanity check'. If my website looks nice in Chrome it almost always looks nice in FireFox, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and IE7. As for IE6... if you are still running IE6 or below you don't deserve a keyboard...

What's next? I think I will load up FireFox and run with that for a while... I have fled FF in the past for poor performance (that is to say it was very slow) but I have heard from more than one that this has been resolved.

More on this later

Windows 7

2009-09-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

As a Microsoft developer I was given access to MS's new Windows 7 operating system early. I installed a couple of weeks back and have been trying to determine how I feel about it. Here are some of my initial reactions:

1) User Account Control - turned off and forgotten...

2) User Interface

- Not a lot different than Vista, aero glass is still cool

- I like their 'themes' for the desktop, nice sounds and pictures

3) Big change to the task bar at the bottom... When you start a

program it creates an icon in the task bar. In XP this was a small icon plus some text. It is not just a regular sized icon. Where cool enters for me is that if you start multiple copies of that same program ( like Internet Explorer ) you don't get multiple icons in that task bar, there is still only one. So here is my current task bar:

From left to right is; 'Start Button', 'Internet Explorer', 'Wind

ows File Explorer', 'MS Outlook', 'Command Prompt', 'Visual Studio', 'Google Chrome',

'SQL Enterprise Manager', and 'Paint.Net'

If you notice the 'Windows File Explorer' you see that it doesn't have that highlight around it like the rest do. That is because I am not running that program. So why does it show up on the task bar? Well that is a feature that is cool. When you start a program and it shows up on the task bar you can 'pin' that program to the task bar. It will always be there even when it isn't running. This makes it easy to start that program without having to create a new shortcut or navigating your menus.

Take a look at the 7th icon from the left (chrome):

Notice that the icon is not only highlighted but it appears to have a second window behind it? Well that is because I am running multiple copies of that program.

If you are reading this and you haven't run Windows 7 you are probably wondering how you can switch between the two different Chrome windows. In Windows XP and Vista you have two different things in the task bar to click on; Chrome 1 and Chrome 2. In Windows 7 you get to move your mouse down and 'hover' over the icon. Once you do you get a really cool mini translucent rendering of both windows, allowing you to visually choose which one you want to switch to. Here is what I am running as I write this:

I am sure there is more that I am leaving out on the Task Bar but I think you get the general idea.

4) Windows Gadgets are now placable anywhere on the desktop and don't need to be placed near eachother. In Vista you had to create a gadget's bar and then place your gadgets into that bar. It took up too much real estate. This is a nice tweak. If you aren't familiar with gadgets, there are a bunch of them. Personally I use two at the moment; system performance and weather:

5)...? I have seen some other Windows 7 features but I would be hard pressed to enumerate them. I like the fact that it uses IIS 7 instead of IIS 5... but that is a programming thing and most people could care less..

I am curious what peoples plans will be. Windows XP is an old but very viable operating system. Microsoft, however, would love to make new money on people upgrading. It will be interesting to see if Windows 7 receives the same 'yawn' that Vista received.

For me it is a 'want to stay in the now' decision. I don't have to pay anything for it so why not... I can tell you I won't be upgrading computers at home. They fall into the... if it isn't broke, don't fix it...

Summer Haiku

2009-07-29T08:13:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine on facebook has challenged us to respond to her haiku posts with our own. She is attempting to do one a day for 30 days. Personally I don't think I can get one a day because I like to keep myself busy with many other things. Here are a few that I have come up with. Feel free to comment with things you don't like about it. I am pretty liberal in my use of the rules of Haiku.

Three varients of same idea:

inky blinky tool
the frames make me feel so old
glasses on my face

inky blinky tool
the lens make me feel disgrace
glasses on my face

inky blinky tool
the frames make me feel a fool
glasses on my face

My first three haiku

just a simple guy
counting syllables endured
finds me quite inured

haha too verbose
should you really hold your tongue
could make you morose

summer is for fun
but school break is nearly done
know you why so glum

Tomorrows Facebook Post

faded aspen tree

spring's growth you could not hold back

withered leaves now black

Moth and Rust..

2009-07-23T06:04:00.001-07:00

A question you should ask yourself before purchasing or accepting an item from someone is; do I have the time and inclination to maintain it?

I remember a quote from the movie Fight Club; "The things you own end up owning you"

So I am whining because I had to get out in the lawn and fix sprinklers. We have been in our current home for roughly six years. The lot was basically scraped clean before the home was built and being in a dry section of Nebraska, if you want a lawn here, you will install underground sprinklers.

I didn't do the work, rather I had a local installer do it for us. The guy did a decent job and for a couple of years there have been no problems. But over the last several years we have had a growing problem. Clay. Yeah, that probably took you off guard. How is clay a problem you ask? Well, grass isn't all that happy to grow in clay but over time it will do alright. You have to water it pretty heavily as the water mostly runs off. Keeping it fertilized also helps the grass retain some water.

So what is the problem with clay? The problem is that the clay, over time, expands. I suppose not all clay does this, but at least the clay at this house and my last suffers from this problem. What does this have to do with sprinklers you ask? Well, the sprinkler heads don't do a very good job of 'growing' with the clay. In some cases this was so remarkable that the sprinkler part of the sprinkler head barely got 1/2" above the roots of the grass. Just locating those heads is a major victory.

This summer we have raised 10 out of 40 of the heads in the lawn. It was a bit of triage, which ones are the worst... focus on them. We probably need to raise an additional 10 heads, but they aren't in as bad of shape as the original 10.

So... all in we have spent four to five hours fussing with our sprinkler heads to water the grass, which points out that I need to purchase and apply fertilizer. Did I mention that the sprinkler spray gets blown onto our rock driveway? Yeah, this causes the weeds to grow prolifically if I don't apply weed killer 3-4 times a year. It takes about 1.5 gallons of weed killer to accomplish the task each time...

My sister is a new home owner and how proud she is. She has a right to be too, completely on her own she has scraped and saved on a teacher's salary enough to get into a home that suits her very well.

Clover, chiggers, wasps, and five different varieties of grass is apparently 'the best' the family who owned it before her could manage. She is just starting her journey to being owned by her home.

So I am thinking... was it really that bad living in an apartment? The grass is always greener, but you know that guy works his ass off for it...

A visit from LE Modesitt Jr.

2009-07-08T08:29:00.001-07:00

I have recently been reading a series of books by L.E. Modesitt Jr. At some point I will read everything Mr. Modesitt writes as he coverse both fantasy as well as science fiction. The series I am currently reading is called "The Saga of Recluce" for which there are perhaps a dozen or more 400-600 page books.

One of Modesitt's common themes is the coming of age type of tale where a young man discovers his own metal by making his own way in a strange land. These tales often involve the discovery of a heretofore hidden capability with one of the the two primary forces of the natural world ( order or chaos) and in many cases the young man also shows considerable creative talent with something more mundane (like woodworking) which helps fund his adventures. His main characters have strong moral compasses which generally drag them into trouble. I am sure I haven't done justice to the series but hopefully you can see what I enjoy.

I took the time to send Mr. Modesitt an email with some simple encouragement. While I hadn't expected him to respond I thought it was a possibility ( after reading 2-3,000 words from someone you start to get some glimpses about what they value ). He not only responded but visited the NovelCoder blog and browsed it long enough to comment on the cabin project. I hope if I ever attain that sort of writing success I will treat incidental emails in the same way.

Hmm... writing... I seem to remember I was working on a sory....

New Artwork from JoshTheCartoonGuy

2009-07-01T06:20:00.000-07:00

Half Blood Prince - July 17th, 2009

I am fortunate to have a friend who is an artist. I comissioned a new Bad Monkey drawing in honor of the new Harry Potter film being released this July. "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" I believe is the title. It wouldn't be fair I didn't mention my outright disgust for Warner Bros. greed which was evidenced by their not releasing the film last Christmas when they had originally planned. Seriously do they not understand the concept of the value of future dollars being worth less than today dollars. That is to say money in my pocket today is worth than the promise of money in the future. I am not really that interested in WB's money, I simply want to see the movie. I will gladly give them roughly $100 over some period of time for that pleasure (including a couple of copies of the DVD). Try not alienating us WB!!

If you are interested in seeing more of Josh's work please visit his site at http://bobandjoecomic.blogspot.com!

(un) Supersize Me

2009-06-30T06:22:00.000-07:00

Many of you know me and my epic battle with food. I have often quipped about being allergic to food. I break out in fat!

I have learned that one of the most important things you can do when trying to reach a goal is to make it public. Let people know you are doing something. This makes it more difficult for you to walk away from that goal in a moment of weakness as it builds in some accountability.

For me accountability is what it is all about. If I think people are pulling for me I become more interested in staying focused. So in my life I will be either gaining weight and feeling guilty about it or I will be on some sort of plan to lose followed by a plan to maintain.

Over the last 20 years I have been in and out of Weight Watchers. The first time I joined was when my first son was born. I lost about 90 pounds and it was great. It took me over 10 years to gain back 60% of that initial loss and then another 8 years to gain the rest of it back. Like an astronaut who only wants to get back into space I feel that same desire to be back to a more comfortable weight.

So here we go. I have made a good run at it so far, over the last year I am down a little over 30 pounds. I want to go further than I did the time before and I believe I can. One really cool thing is that weight watchers has an online message board. I have joined an accountability group with a great group of people who are all in the same boat I am. 40+ years old and 100+ pounds to lose.

My New Bicycle

Along the way I purchased a bicycle. When we lived in Colorado I used to ride 2-3 times a week. Nothing too serious, 10-15 mile trips on bike paths. I loved it. Well that bike is long gone and we now live in the country in Nebraska. Fortunately, the good people of my county have installed a bike path that runs about 3 miles from my home and goes further than I would ever care to ride. My youngest son, Jacob, has become my riding buddy. We started on Sunday and have ridden every day. Although, today is a rest day for us. My hope is we can get out 2-3 times a week once the 'new' wears off. You can see a picture of my Marin - Kentfield.

The Odyssey
Well... next post will likely back to 'The Odyssey'. This weekend we are headed to the cabin and projects still abound. We will take good pictures so you can see what we are accomplishing. I absolutely hope to get hot water running in the shower... That is probably a bit optimistic, but hey, that's me.. Mr. Optimism...

The Odyssey - Small Distractions

2009-06-26T10:48:00.000-07:00

Project Abound

Well we had a plan and we are missing a shower. Unfortunately as I sat at the table my mind reeled with the infinite project list. Fortunately this is not much different than software development, or really most anything else in life. You need to perform triage and determine what takes the highest priority.

The cabin is roughly 30-26 (feet). The overall space is not gigantic but it is pretty comfortable if you are only there for a few days. At some point in the late 60s or early 70s my Dad erected 1/4 of the cabin. He accomplished it primarily by himself and the quality of the building was first rate. He used exterior grade plywood and straight 2x4s. That part of the cabin is destined to last forever. At some point in the late 70s or early 80s a contractor that Dad knew decided he wanted to bring up a 'gang' and enclose the remaining 3/4 of the site. Unfortunately this was done with a 'cabin' mentality. Complete the project fast and quality is not the top priority...

So back to the table and the overwhelming to-do list. While building out the larger portion of the cabin, someone made the decision that the entire roof could be supported by the outside walls and a 2x4 column. I know my Dad well enough to know that he argued this point but was overruled by 'Contractor Short-Cut'. I know he wishes he had stuck to his guns but how do you say no to people who are volunteering to help you build your cabin.

Suffice it to say the roof had slowly crept down about 2.5 inches from it's original starting point. This might not sound like a lot but my mind extends small problems and considers terms like 'Critical Fa

ilure'. In the case of a Critical Failure in this case, all would be lost. This was unacceptable to me.

A Really Big Post

A friend of mine, Brian, runs an outfit called BigRed Sawmill. He isn't a close friend but I enjoy talking to him and think the business he built by himself is pretty cool. I would love to own and operate a sawmill. It just seems like a cool idea. I gave Brian a call to see if he might have a solid post 16 foot tall that we could use to hold up a r

oof. Cedar was the answer. It won't rot, it has a nice smell, and if you spend some time with it, the wood can be very pretty. For about $100 he gave us a 18 foot log cut flat on one side (so it would fit next to the 1/4 cabin in the center of the larger cabin). The log still had its bark attached and it would be our problem to clean it up.

Cleaning up the log was basically a matter of breaking out the angle grinder and connecting a spinning wire brush to it. The 4" grinder doesn't mark the wood too badly but easily grabs the top layer of bark and a little of the sap wood and throws it off. Here you can see Jacob working the log. He really did a nice job on it!

Placing the Post

Having a clean log made the rest easy. I carefully measured and reclaimed the 2.5" we had lost. I took some temporary 2x4s and placed them on top of a 5 ton bottle jack that I have hanging around and lifed the roof back to where it should have been. It is a real advantage to have everything built on top of concrete. Especially concrete my Dad poured. I guarantee it is 2x the PSI required. I will fill you in on that a bit later.

Once the post was measured and cut, the roof raised it was really a matter of carrying it in and sliding it into place. My original objective was to the lag-bolt the log into the surrounding structure, but once I had it placed I realized just how silly that was. I don't know how heavy a cabin roof is, but I can absolutely guarantee that this log is not moving anywhere unless the whole thing tips over. The amount of downward force is incredible.

I circled the little bottle jack that is holding up the roof with a purple circle.

Amost There

Now that I don't have to worry about trees falling on the roof, and I don't have to worry about the roof falling into the building. The only critical item that I can come up with is the hauling of trash.

Dad was an incredible packrat. Much of what he kept was simply of no real value. That said a good 1/4 of it is incredibly useful. We spent most of the rest of last summer simply mowing, placing the pole, removing the shower, and reorganizing the various living spaces. The cool thing is we all knew we were positioned ideally for 2009 to start the process of construction.

The Odyssey - Project Bathroom

2009-06-25T06:41:00.000-07:00

Project Bathroom

The bathroom that my Dad put in was a fabulous upgrade from the outhouse we had. Unfortunately it was built with scratch and dent parts. The shower was a large geriatric model that had a large seat and hand rails in it. He had no reason to install this type of model other than he probably got it for nearly nothing. The installation of this shower was on top of a plywood box that raised it up nearly 14" off of the cement grade. By raising the shower he was able to achieve the correct amount of fall. In reality he gain way more drop than he needed. 1/4" drop per 1 foot of length is the maximum desired drop and 1/8" per 1 foot is the minimum. For a shower you can drop more than the 1/4" but where you might have solids (e.g. toilet) this additional drop is undesirable.

The shower originally was placed off the wall leaving a gap of about 30" where a toilet was placed. The use of the space was pretty efficient but you can imagine that it wasn't overly comfortable. Just above the toilet sat a window air conditioner at about the 6 foot mark. To keep a bit of separation between the toilet and the a/c unit we had a shelf built from 2x4 material. If you are closely following along and do a little math you fairly soon recognize a small problem with this. Well... maybe if you are a man taller than 5'9". Yes, if you are standing there in front of the toilet your forehead nicely contacts this shelf. For me it just above my eyebrows. If you do your business while all the time staring straight ahead you are great... but say you want to check your aim... a natural process that most of the time we don't think about... This motion is generally a relatively quick tilt of the head forward and in this bathroom it is followed by a nice 'thwack' to the forehead. Finally the little sink was made of plastic and was about the size of a salad plate. The hot-water hadn't been hooked up for quite some time to the sink so it wasn't even that useful for shaving.

The project started while I was sitting at the table with the family. We had just turned on the water for the first time that spring. I noticed that there was water seeping out from under the shower. Not a good sign. I turned off the water and poked around for a while... I couldn't find the leak without getting invasive... This is never a good sign.

"What would you guys think if we just went ahead and removed this shower?"

We had been talking about a remodel and now we were at a point of no return... Fix the existing structure or blaze forward...

I recall my sister being the first to respond with ascent. I quietly walked out to the shed and brought back a sledge hammer... 1 hour and 20 minutes later I was sweating a copper cap onto the final fitting which had originally supplied cold water to the shower. The hot water heater was now sitting on the porch.

The Plan

Princess Lotus Blossum (my wife) had been working on plans for the cabin and walked us through what she thought would transform the entire side of the cabin into a kitchen / bathroom suite that we would be proud of and enjoy.

This drawing is a fairly accurate rendering of what we desire to build. In purple you can see the original footprint of the original bathroom. It was nicely squished up into that corner. We are spreading it out considerably.

Next time I will provide pictures of some of the progress we have made. The biggest task to getting started was to break into the concrete to get the new shower and toilet drains. This turned out to be a substantial project.

Bell's Dell - The Odyssey

2009-06-22T07:39:00.000-07:00

My family owns a cabin smack dab in the middle of Iowa. It has been in the family for 45 years or so and I hope it will be around for hundreds of years.

My Dad took immeasurable pleasure toiling over the place and built it from scratch. As a handy-man carpenter / plumber I think he would receive a grade of about a B which I think is pretty good. Work that he did on his own is fabulous in many cases and in some cases a bit hurried. What he lacked in some cases was a bit of audacity. His vision of the cabin was a rustic building in the woods.

The vision my family has for this cabin is considerably different. It is not OK to have a shower that is 15" off the ground so it can drain properly. It s not OK to have studs/insulation showing. It is not OK to have a sink that is smaller than a salad plate.

After Dad passed away the first project was to clear the forest off of the back of the cabin. Trees had overgrown and limbs were resting on the roof. It was a hot and nasty couple of days but it had to be done. The second project was considerably simpler but was one that required cash and effort. Mowing... The cabin is on 16ish acres and has a meadow of about 3 acres. It really looks nice when mowed... Project #2 was completed by simply buying a quality riding lawn mower.

The third project came about while we were sitting around the table at the cabin in the spring. We turned on the water and all of a sudden a water started flowing from behind the shower. ugh... This project can be aptly named 'The Odyssey'. From this simple water leak we decided to completely redo the bath / kitchen area of the cabin. That weekend we removed the shower and repaired the plumbing that was leaking. The goal was now to completly replace every fixture and locate them correctly in the building so that for the next 40-50 years people could more easily enjoy this family treasure.

Look for future posts on this as I bring you up to date on where we are at!

Working things out

2009-06-18T18:10:00.000-07:00

Watching my size

A good portion of my adult of life has either been spent in denial of dieting or actively dieting. Most people who are naturally thin have a difficult time understanding why this is such a hard thing to deal with. Well meaning friends, on more than one occasion, have described to me just how to be successful at maintaining a lower weight. Seriously, speaking for all big people, we get it. Use more calories than you take in = weight loss. Moreover, not to be overly offensive, if you haven't been > 25 pounds over your 'ideal weight range' then your minor weight loss victories aren't really that comparable. Personally I have recorded a loss of 90 pounds once and 30-50 pound losses a half a dozen times. I am both a pro at loosing and gaining weight.

If you are detecting a bit of edge here, you are correctly reading this. Not a big edge, just a little bit. In our modern society the last reasonable and acceptable prejudice is that against heavy people. Ever see a seriously heavy woman CEO? Work your way back in the last large company you worked in. What is the highest level of management a heavy person occupied?

I was recently on an airplane flight. It was a short flight and the plane was one of those small commuter jets, 2x2 seating. For a big guy it is a bit of a squeeze but manageable. The flight was relatively empty and it was late at night (9:30 takeoff). A group of young men entered the plane, big guys, athletic builds, they had apparently been drinking. They sat behind me and talked boisterously for a while. Inwardly I rolled my eyes, this was shaping up to be 'one of those flights'.

I really am not a big fan of this particular group of young men. Not just this group of 4-5, but this extends to the general population of meat-headed young men who have been blessed with incredible bodies and athletic talent. For whatever reason this group lives in a 'life owes me something' mindset. Worse yet, life generally pays out to this group.

So back to the plane. A moderately large woman entered the plane, she was tall, 5'10 or so. She was also heavy, a solid 50-60lbs extra. She wasn't really very attractive and honestly I think she understood that. I imagine, just like me, she has probably received this message nearly every day of her life. Her day, however, was just about to really suck. Imagine just how this woman feels about the athletic young male. She discovered, to her no doubt horror, that she had the inside seat next to the broadest shouldered 'alpha-male' in the group.

I am certain I didn't want to be in her head as she had to push her way through this group of buddies and indicate to this boisterous young man that she had the seat next to his. It would be nice if I could report to you that she merely had to endure the humiliation of walking through this group.

Nope... that's just not what happened. When she was about 3-4 aisles away from the group, all of us who were nearby heard this assclown make that 'whooa' sound, you know the one where he changed the pitch, letting everyone know he was seeing something that was 'just not right'. The fact is, however, that everyone around knew exactly what he was pointing out. He tried to cover by getting louder and making more obtuse comments... yeah, about that... it seems to make sense when you have been drinking but it isn't that effective.

So back into this woman's head a bit. What can she be thinking? I will leave that to you. I bet she hasn't forgotten it. I know I certainly haven't. I would be willing to bet she will never tell another living soul about this experience. Apparently that was my job.

Storm Project Complete

2009-06-16T15:47:00.001-07:00

Storm Shelf

Well I had the best of intentions of posting some intermediate pictures of the bookshelf construction. Suffice it to say we have a shortage of cameras in our house.

The construction of this bookshelf is relatively simple and I have made this particular pattern 3-4 times. It is an original design although nothing too fantastic. The wood in walnut from our cabin. The rails of the shelves are held on using a stainless steel screw which I have sunk into the rails far enough to place 3/8" walnut plugs over the holes I drilled. All in all this shelf came out very clean and the redish stain nicely compliments the already rosey color of the walnut.

I think we had better put a rush on getting this to it's rightful owner Ralph. Princess Lotus Blossum has been threatening to obscound with it.

I am not sure what the next project will be. I have found that I am short on clamps for a couple of the projects I would like to undertake. I will put the word out and hope that Christmas ends up getting me into good shape.

Project Next

2009-06-13T16:42:00.000-07:00

Project Storm

Look, in the sky, is it a bird? is it a plane?... Ok... so more like look, on the table saw... what the heck is it?

Well if you remember the story about how I came into the good fortune with the walnut lumber you remember a good guy neighbor (Ralph Storm) out of the goodness in his heart grabbed the logs and got them milled for me. I didn't mention that he didn't ask for anything in return.

Later on in the year while the logs were neatly drying I was sitting on the porch of our cabin with Dad. He said, you know those bookshelfs you make? How about you make one of those for Ralph, wouldn't that be nice?

Well Dad, yeah, that would be nice and that's why this one is called Project Storm!

Stay tuned I will try to post a few more intermediate pictures. Don't hold your breath though, I get tied up in the projects and tend to forget to take pictures.

Recliner Table

2009-06-11T16:30:00.000-07:00

Recliner Table

Since you are reading this blog you probably know me. As such you know that I have a fabulous pile of walnut lumber sitting in my workshop. Before he died Dad saved a couple of large walnut logs that had fallen. We were standing in the meadow looking at the logs and talking about how we would get them over to the lumber yard to be milled when a good guy neighbor (ralph storm) drove down the lane and into the meadow. Ralph asked what we were doing and we told him. Well, I didn't know Ralph all that well but this guy is a man of action. He asked if it would be ok if he grabbed the logs and drove them over to the lumbermill, he had a couple of his own logs he would like to work on and so it would be a perfect time...

About a month later Dad called and said that Ralph had dropped his trailer off and it was loaded with the walnut lumber. Dad wanted to know if I could make my out to get it stacked for drying...

This is my first official project with the walnut of Bell's Dell. It is an original design and fits my needs perfectly. I like to have a drink while watching tv and often have a paperback or 2 that I am reading. The shelf below will nicely hold 10-15 books and I can store a few clickers or snacks in the handy little cubby.

Diet - Die with a 'T'

2009-06-01T06:22:00.000-07:00

OK so that was an old Garfield comic strip. So if you know me you know that I am either dieting, thinking about dieting or completely denying that dieting is necessary...

My latest trip around the bend has been to tryout the Adkin's diet. Somehow I must have been doing something very wrong because after an entire week I haven't lost a pound. Seriously not a single one! Adkin's officionatos would probably be able to discover and correct my error but save yourselves the effort. If I have to be a raving carnivore you can forget it. Wow, I have to say that the freedom to eat meat and other fatty stuff is pretty cool, but if you haven't done it you just are not getting the full picture of how much we all enjoy carbohydrates. Imagine any food you enjoy... It is made better by carbos. You are thinking steak, right? Fine.. next time you order steak try it four hours after you have eaten anything else, don't eat any rolls, potatoe, gravy, well, you get the picture. If you are successful then wait about 1 hour and see how satisfied you are... If you feel just great then you are most likely my brother-in-law, Max, who is the carbo-free king. Sorry Max, but you are on your own. I could no more stay carbo-free than and ice-cream cone in hell... hmm.. ice-cream... (ooh shiney)

Back to Woodworking

Of the many cycles of my life I have jumped back to woodworking. I was working on a door for the red-shed at our cabin. This shed is pretty run-down and as of right now it is sitting on blocks in the middle of a mud-puddle next to our cabin. For some reason I got it in my mind that I would make a door out of walnut that I harvested from our land in Iowa. I spent 3-4 hours planing the wood from 4/4 (4 quarters or an inch thick) down to 2.5 mm (roughly 3/4 inch). Suffice it to say the wood is beautiful and there is no possible way I will put this fabulous wood into a door that goes on a crappy old shed... I have a trip planned to get some rough cedar from which I will make this door.

My current project is to refinish a walnut shelf I made for Princess Lotus Blossum. Unfortunately the urathene that I have has some sort of particals in it and I will have to sand out some of that since I applied it without noticing... It is not an epic-fail but it is going to take me more time.

After this project I will either get started on the door again or I will start working on a side-table for my recliner. I have a new piece in mind and a ton of freshly planed walnut. I may even make another book-case but that would be getting ahead of myself. Before my dad died he asked me to make a book-case for a neighbor who lives near our cabin. That seems like a cool idea to me.

Progress at the Cabin

This year at the cabin we (the entire family on my Dad's side) are making a serious push to change up the kitchen/bath. Dad always looked at the cabin as a "quick-fix" sort of operation and we would like to upgrade it substantially. Last weekend the Gentle Giant (my 2nd son), Princess Lotus Blossum and I rented a jack-hammer and whacked out 20' of concrete inside the cabit to make way for new drains for a ground-level shower, sink and toilet. The concrete is out and new problems have been discovered. Probably the most serious being the drainage for the septic looks to be 6" red-clay (instead of plastic pvc). Ugh. I have no idea how to hook up with that. Fortunately I have a plumber that has agreed to help us out.

We located some beautiful doors at Lowes for the shower and bathroom. I am hoping to hang the powder room's door on a rustic black metal track so that it slides back and forth (instead of swinging). It will look gorgeous as well as solve a space problem that we have with another swinging door. The alternative is a pocket door, but I am not quite as down with that as it wouldn't provide quite the same visual impact.

Work is still a blast

My silverlight project is moving along fairly slowly. I am a total rookie at writing silverlight code and as a result I am moving ahead more slowly than I would like. Part of the slowdown is envisioning what I want the final product to look like. Part of it is discovering new technologies and trying to determine if they belong in the project (.net ria servies being the most recent). My boss has been very understanding which I appreciate a great deal. I will meet with him 2 weeks to show-off what I have so far. I think he will be plesantly surprised by what I have but the realization of what we need to get done will limit this. My hope is that we don't give up on this course of action (Silverlight+WCF) as I am more and more convinced it is the future of web development for Line of Business Application developers.

Speaking of.. I am starting to cut into my work schedule so I better get to it!

Work is fun again!

2009-05-13T18:57:00.000-07:00

OK so perhaps you have noticed that I haven't been writing for a while. There are a couple of reasons why this occurs and if you know me very well you recognize some of the many phases I go through.

One phase is the creative phase which can find it's outlet in a number of different ways

-) Stained Glass

-) Welding

-) Wood working

-) Writing

Another phase I go through is the "work on my person". This one is easy to recognize... Weight Watchers, fruit, weight lifting...

At least one of my phases is whether I consider the work I am doing to fun and exciting. This particular phase is quite often not within my control. I am a software developer and if I am currently attempting to "slay a dragon" (code for a cool project) then I am as happy as a clam!

Several weeks ago we decided to start on a new dragon. The really cool part of this new project is that we decided to do it using a whole bunch of new technology. Honestly I haven't had to do so much learning on a technology for a very long time. One facet of the technology is learning a programming environment called Silverlight. It is a really cool new sdk from Microsoft.

So why is Silverlight cool? Well think about your favorite website. ... got it? OK so think about how inane the user interface is... sure, it is probably cooler than websites from five years ago but even still it is "the suck!" compared to programs that you install directly on your computer. Seriously, compare MS Word and how rich the user interface is with google's online word processor.

Well Silverlight promises to deliver much of the rich interaction you get with a desktop application through a web-browser. Beyond that Silverlight is based off of Microsoft's extrodinary dotnet architecture.

OK so some of you are about to hop on the "why not java?" "why not flash"... Sorry you get to have that argument with yourselves.

Tomorrow I get to wake up and pound away at a new Silverlight application.

About Birthdays

2009-04-23T16:13:00.000-07:00

Forty Six is really not much different that 45, 44, etc. Basically I am past the point where I deny that I am getting older and have surpassed the 1/2 way point. Seriously 92? I doubt it. My birthday started off nicely with well wishers emails and hugs from the kids and Janet. It isn't required but I appreciate it all to be sure. My work does a nice thing by giving employees their birthday off. So I woke up, had some coffee and decided it would be a good morning to move some of the river rock out onto our flower beds. Previously we have had mulch on the flower beds and it has all blown off due to living at the top of a hill and in the state of Nebraska. I have moved nearly 12 tons of the stuff in the last week or two so while I was winded I felt pretty good aside from a brewing headache.

Phase II of birthday was to head to a small town south of us called Beatrice. Janet and I have been wanting to checkout the Ashley furniture store that is down there. Several of our neighbors have recommended that we visit and this seemed like a perfect time. I have requested an easy chair (recliner) as a birthday present. I am tired of falling asleep in a chair that I can't recline in. (yes a reliner is a good indication of age) It was getting past 1:00pm and the store was very large and had good prices. (kiss of death in my opinion) My headache was getting worse but the chairs were comfortable and I really just wanted to laydown and take a nap. We finally picked out a chair and headed to lunch.

Phase III was mexican food at Paula Azule (not sure of spelling) in Beatrice. The restraunt is a little run-down but the people are friendly and they serve Mountain Dew in 32 oz tumblers (whee haw!)... Time to take care of that headache and get some Huevos_rancheros. I started to notice that my jaw was hurting and it was pushing my headache a bit. Odd... seems like the Mtn Dew should have eliminated the headache but it didn't. Oh well... the food was good and it was nice to have a leasurily lunch with Janet.

Once we got home all I wanted to do was lay down. This is pretty unusual for me but we have been pushing it hard lately so I indulged and grabbed a book. Janet needed to go into town and grab Jacob so I napped for a while until they arrived home around 6:00pm.

Phase IV time for cake and presents. My jaw is starting to throb but it is no time to be a party pooper. Smile for the camera. If you are on facebook you saw some of the pics... it was a good time to get a candid, my defenses were definitely down. They surprised me with a couple of new grape plants and a bird bath! Throb Throb Throb... my jaw is just killing me now.

I finally went to bed with an icepack resting on my face. It doesn't do too much but it is better than the alternative ( doing nothing ).

I think the moral to the story is that my body wanted to let me know it is time to pay better attention to my health. At 46 things aren't gonna get easier they are gonna get more expensive.

At birthday + 1 day I was sitting at an endodontist watching her drill into a perfectly good crown and pull the stuffing outta the roots of what is left of my #2 molar. If you want an expensive root canal this is the way to go.

I love my dentist. Well, I suppose I strongly appreciate my dentist. Dr. Christine Campbell has to be one of the finest dentists to have ever lived. Her staff loves her and they all do a great job. Why is it that I absolutely dread going there. I do everything in my power to avoid cleanings (including cancelling and not resetting them back up). Why is this? They are essentially free (routine dental is covered) I think the whole office is just awesome... I just don't get it.

My dentist and the entodontist that did my root canal have very similar offices and have common characteristics. They are both woman run businesses. Their employees all seem to be very happy in their work (and seriously they are cleaning and repairing teeth, this has to have some down sides). From the moment I met them I instantly trusted them both. If you need good dental care and you are anywhere nearby let me get you setup.

Oh, yeah, so when I called the dentist's office at 7:30am the day after my birthday and asked for a return call. I received a return call at 8:01am. The person assigned to listening to messages figured out that I was in pain, put aside her coffee and got on it. She let me know that they had a 12:00noon emergency appt available (I am guessing in lieu of someone's lunch) and they would be happy to help me then. This would work just great for me I told them. Fifteen minutes later I got a call from the same woman who called me so promptly, she said that she had discussed my symptoms with Dr. Campbell and they really wanted to squeeze me in, how soon could I be there?

It doesn't end there...

Dr. Campbell gets done looking at my poor tooth and says, "yup, you need a root canal." She then informs me that it will take a specialist's (endoscope or something like that) that they don't have. "hold on I know someone who does let me get you an appt." Dr. Campbell who is running a full dentist's office with 5-6 chairs full of patients picks up the phone and calls her friend the endodontist. "Jeri has an 11:00am appt, would you be able to make that?"

OK... If you don't love my dentist now you never will. Suffice it to say I will make a better effort at getting in for my tooth cleanings.

Presents in the post

2009-04-17T08:11:00.000-07:00

Cheese from Holland

My sister loves me :) I received a box in the mail. How exciting :)

The package contains a nice chunk of
1) Parmigiano Reggiano

and 3 Cheese from Holland
2) Leyden
3) Beemster X. O. Extra Double Aged Gouda
4) Dorthea

I haven't opened any just yet but prepare for the reviews :)

Boxes of barn hardware !
I also received a couple of boxes from Hardware and Tools. Summer is a great time for us to work on the cabin that our family owns. This particular summer my projects include adding a sliding barn-styled door to a shed we have (we call this shed the Red Shed).

This weekend I am hoping to get some time to plane down some of the walnut that I have stacked in the garage so I can build this door. The door will be about five foot wide and six foot tall. I will try to put together some still shots of it's construction as I move from raw boards to finished door to hanging it on the red-shed. This will be a great project.

So that's it.. no fancy pictures... just toys for me.

The 328-7448 game

2009-04-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

Could it be world of warcraft? How about starcraft? Diablo?

Nopers...

The game is one of my own making. I think you will become interested in this game as well.

Have you recently received an unwanted solicitation phone call? One that is made by an auto dialing system and then handed out to people who are making minimum wage? Well, I tell you what I just did and I challenge you to somehow up the odds on this...

Credit card services calls my phone number 2-3 times a week. I am in their system and they are unrelenting. Instead of being annoyed today, however, I realized this is an opportunity for a game. The game is very simple. Here are the rules:

1) your goal is to keep a live person on the line for as long as possible

2) you are not allowed to give real information

3) you are not allowed to get upset, this is a game

The scoring system is pretty straight forward and like in golf you are allowed to record your own score.

1) Every second is worth 1,000 points...

2) If you can make the salesperson angry... you receive an additional 10,000 - 50,000 points

3) Creativity should be liberally rewarded... you can give yourself appropriate points

So here is how I scored today:

1) I kept Ronny on the phone for 6 minutes 10 seconds for a total of 370,000 points

2) I gave ronny my credit card's phone number as 1 800 328 7448... as an exercise to the reader you can figure out the conversion on your phone pad.. (I spelled something) this was worth 50,000 points

3) Finally, I got Ronny to call me back for an additional 90 seconds or 90,000 points

So the current high score for this work is 610,000 points... Can you beat that?

Silverlight is cool

2009-04-06T17:26:00.000-07:00

Silverlight. I just recently received the go-ahead to spend a couple of weeks experimenting with Microsoft's answer to browser delivered client-side computing. The basic idea is that the browser based everything interesting happens on the server approach to computing is too limiting. For you non-techs out there, much of the web content you view through your browser is served up from a server sitting in a data-center.

Set the way back machine to the late 1990s. The internet was young and developers were just happy to generate HTML that gave pretty pictures and general updates. We, as a group, gave up 'really cool user interface' for 'I didn't have to install it on my computer'. By in large this wasn't a bad trade. Do I need a super slick interface to view my bank account balance? Heck no... just give me the numbers and keep it safe.

What has me all excited is this thing called silverlight allows rank and file developers to once again build high quality user interfaces and serve the code up from our own servers. It really is the best of both worlds. More over, the code is fun to write.

HULU HULU Hulu. If it works for me... I guarantee it will work for you. I have mentioned in the past that rural Nebraska is a technology slum. That is to say, if you live where I do, you are happy to have a 1.5 megabit service that delivers 990 kbits. Yes, I imagine I heard gasps from a number of you. But that isn't the point of this section.

I am absolutely loving HULU. This is a service that delivers streaming video programs. My family has adopted a new TV program called 'The Legend of the Seeker'. Basically this is a very well done fantasy series. Each of the 17 episodes are 43 mintues and the commercial interruptions are minimal. Good looking young people running around in a fantasy setting, worried about saving the world... good stuff...

If you have fun programs you watch on the internet, let me know... if you want to talk about Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog... well go ahead... gush away... I know about it, it is cool nonetheless.

How long before I get to turn off my direct-tv connection??

Babe

2009-04-04T17:03:00.000-07:00

More pieces of metal from the scap pile. I saw babe sitting in the pile from the first time I looked.

Pretty much with a MIG welder you can stick just about any piece of metal to another. I have a couple more little guys looking out from the metal pile. I will see about helping them out as well.

New family member

2009-03-30T07:26:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago my Aunt sent a couple of boxes of scrap metal parts to me. For most of you this sounds like a completely whacky thing to do. But for me this straight to my heart. More odd metal pieces means more fun things I can do with my welder.

For whatever reason I don't get behind the painting of these things as much as I do the raw construction and that is probably something I should work on. Nonetheless here is my latest in the line I refer to as Metal Children.

He doesn't have a name just yet so feel free to offer your suggestions:

If you can't see it...

2009-03-28T18:31:00.000-07:00

It can hurt you...

This couldn't be further from the truth with case fans in my computer. For some reason I was cleaning out my computer (while it was running) and thought I had turned off the case fans. The rear fan is a 120mm fan that is apparently running at a fairly high rpm. Living in the country we have quite a bit of dust floating around and with the airflow of a high performance computer a substantial amount of dust gets sucked through it.

I have to say that I was surprised to learn that with just my finger I was able to snap off one of the fan blades of the rear fan. I poked my finger in around the edge of the fan (trying to scoup off some of the built up dust) and whack!! the fan stopped and one of the blades flew off clattering to the bottom of the case. The blade exacted revenge on my finger as it chunked out a piece.

So.. no moral to this story, just a funny occurance.

Goblin Lullaby

2009-03-26T18:34:00.000-07:00

Often when I workout or walk I like to listen to a story based podcast. That is to say a short story that someone has taken the time to record. Today I listened to Goblin Lullaby from a podcast called Pod Castle. The story was told from the perspective of an old goblin woman who was merely annoyed with the chivlalrous elfs, a prince, meat headed goblins who seemed to always get pounded by heros, etc.

If you have 35 minutes for a wonderfully cynnical story you won't be disappointed in this one.

Let them eat pork

2009-03-26T11:00:00.000-07:00

So what should I do when my website is piggy on memory? Well... I have chosen to let them eat pork. Big server in-coming! After a few days of digging into it I have found that I can get better at writing tighter .net code and this is a good idea (so I will). But in the end I can reduce my memory foot print by about 30% which is a great thing... but hardly the silver bullet I was looking for.

If I put my management hat on I do a bit of different analysis. I can buy 16 gig of ram for about $1000. How much developer time can you pay for with $1000? I can tell you it isn't the amount of time that it took to do my research... It isn't even close to the money we would spend retesting the code once I would update it. And it isn't even close to the reputation cost of just one new bug caused by the effort...

Seriously.. would you like some BBQ sauce with that?

Chrome for the win

2009-03-24T07:04:00.000-07:00

Google Chrome has become my favorite browser. There are several reasons for this but I believe the primary one is that it is fast. Compared to IE7 it just feels soo much faster. IE8 well... if they ever release it I think it might give chrome a run for its money but don't count on it. Microsoft has long err'd on the side of too much functionality over blazing speed. Oh, yeah, the second reason I like chrome is that I can type my search criteria into the address bar. If you are a long time IE user this doesn't make sense... but from google's perspective it makes perfect sense. A huge percentage of the search strings that google receives are actual web site addresses. Normal people (who have been assimilated) don't see a big difference between a website address and a search term. Heck I might be one of them.

I am traveling to Kansas today to meet with a customer. We are researching project next and this customer has a good handle on what this next project should look like. I am looking forward to what they have to say.

My website is a pig. Well technically my websites are piglings. ASP.NET will chew a huge amount of memory. Remember that Microsoft chooses functionality over blazing speed? Well it might sound counter-intuitive but I am only annoyed because we didn't size the server correctly to handle asp.net's piggishness. We have had to stop installing new sites until we get some more hardware configured. Overall we will need to be able to host about 12 gigabytes of RAM to bring up all of our sites if we want to shoot for worse case. Statistically worse-case is nearly impossible to reach but we are paranoid and that is fine by me.

One solution to get to 12 gig of RAM is to install a really big virtualized server with say 32 gig of ram and make a smaller virtual server with the 12 gig that our sites will need. The downside to that is that this will require a 64 bit operating system. My technical friends will immediately say... no problem.. you are using asp.net it doesn't care about 32 bit or 64 bit operating systems.. Well my friends you are right but you don't know everything you need to know about my problem. My sites tie to a legacy set of c++ code which have to be specifically compiled to run as either 32 bit or 64 bit. Alas we believe there is a solution for this that requires something called thunking.

A second solution would be to setup 3-4 smaller virtual servers (on that same big virtualized server) that are runing 32 bit operating systems. Max memory for a 32 bit server is 4 gig... the os takes 1/2 a gig leaving 3.5 gig on each server...

Heh, well... I guess at a small company I get a chance to learn about all of these things as we have no IT planning department an I am not forsightful enough to anticipate all of the problems we run into.

I am back to writing. Most of you know I am a terrible video game addict. Specifically I am attracted to mmorpg's (massively multiplayer online role playing games). My current game of choice is World Of Warcraft. I have played on and off for the last 4 years. The problem is when I am playing, I spend 2-3 hours a day during the week and 10-15 hours on the weekends. Those play numbers can go up or down depending on family commitments.

The problem with this is that when I am playing I completely ignore all other creative outlets. I love work with welding, stained glass, woodworking, remodeling our cabin, writing, painting, etc. All of this goes out the window.

Last night I talked to my online friends and let them know I wouldn't be coming back. I closed my account and uninstalled the software. I wish I had something more than an on or off switch for this sort of thing. Like I could limit myself to playing 3-4 hours a week. Doesn't work that way. I totally get caught up in the drive to make a better character and see the new things that Blizzard provides.

So Cold Turkey.... I'll let you know how that goes.

Regulation. So up to now you have probably thought that I am staunch conservative. I am not sure what all that means but it doesn't seem to me that I am but what would I know. Labels are something I am not that comfortable with.

Bernanke has suggested that we need stronger financial system's regulation. Sign me up. But try to be aware of the fricking pendulum. The reason we got rid of a bunch of the regulation that we had was because it was too punitive and didn't allow enough freedom for good ideas. So our answer was to rip most of it out. We need to carefully tread back down the path and make things make sense. If you make $3000 / month you probably can't afford $2000 / month house payments.

I have a lot of hope for Obama still. I find a number of things he is doing to be very positive. Ultimately I am afraid that if the pendulum swings too far back to the left we will simply jump back off the cliff in the other direction. Yes we have the power to make sweeping changes... but is it prudent? Let's work on elegant strategic changes... Moderation is the key...

My Cardinal Friends are Back

2009-03-19T08:01:00.000-07:00

Saturday is the first full day of spring and on queue my cardinal buddies have once again returned. We have a nice arrangement, I put out seed, they hang out in my trees and serenade me.

Working from my house makes me grateful for small things like this. For the last several months I have been feeling the effects of what seemed like a very cold winter. Now that spring is here I am excited to see all of the things that God has in store for me.

Here is the partial list:

1) buds on the aspen tree in front of my window

2) grass turning from that tan color to a full, rich green

3) a rare glimpse of a baltimore oriole

Things are getting dicey for my poor tutoring student 'Greg'. The teacher decided to grill Greg in class about some of the things he had in his projects. Fortunately Greg understands the work we have been doing together and was able to defend himself. The teacher appears to me to be lining up to really give Greg the business, however. Even though the programs that we have worked on together work flawlessly as well as produce the complete and correct output the teacher is marking them as incomplete.

Greg's mother has requested that I come in and meet with this teacher to discuss this. Sorry, no, that isn't going to happen. I have some experience with teacher's who want to make things hard on the undeserving kids. It was a fairly painful period of my life. At this point Greg will be lucky to exit the class with any sort of grade. Stay tuned, I will let you know how it turns out.

We added ten more websites to the server last night. That brings the total to 57. The server is behaving just fine and there is reasonable hope that the final number of 126 is attainable on this meager little box.

I started on something new although not terribly exciting. We have an interest in Workflow solutions. I recently spent a good deal of time researching MS Sharepoint. It is a very flexible system designed to help companies share information. Sharepoint has built in integration with WWF (windows workflow foundation). Basically workflow is a way of routing stuff around and waiting to make sure things get done. The typical example is an expense report... Sharepoint/Workflow would allow an employee to fill out an expense report and submit it. Workflow would take care of routing the expense report to the right people for approval and once that has been achieved it could send it to accounting to be paid.

Our customers have a similar process they would like to see implemented. Sharepoint / workflow would do a great job but it is a terrible answer for them. The problem is that sharepoint is extremely flexible. So why is this a problem? It is a bad business model for our customers to use something as flexible sharepoint. The would need to pay us consulting $$ to make all of the necessary customizations. Most of our customers don't have deep enough pockets to pay the kind of money that would make this possible.

Whatever we implement will need to be full packaged and customizations extremely controlled. So I am working on the WWF (windows workflow foundation) without the aid of Sharepoint. So for then next few days I will be tutorial boy again... walking through examples on how to use WWF.

Tapioca Pudding

2009-03-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

I may be the only person in history who has tried to do this but next time you have tapioca pudding attempt to squish one of the little tapioca balls with your finger. If you are like me you find this to be amazingly difficult. No matter what you do the little ball seems to escape from under you finger like a little Houdini.

Sometimes kids can be like this too. Have you ever questioned a teenager about something that happened that they could get yelled at for? Like tapioca they will give you just enough non-incriminating details to slide out from under your inquisitive finger. I had another tutoring session last night with 'Greg' and I witnessed an exchange between Greg and his mother. It was only funny because I could see that he was purposely not answering the question she was asking, she knew it and it found it frustrating. To her credit she didn't lose her cool but you could tell that the conversation was far from over.

I have been working with a guy in my company to gather statistics about the websites we are installing for our customers. Unlike Greg this guy isn't going to get in trouble for anything but the conversation was a tapioca conversation nonetheless. Everytime he would give me a number I would hear him mumble something about a different number. Well it turns out he just didn't want to do the work to find the actual numbers so he was making stuff up. I was trying to plug his information into a spreadsheet and he was inventing numbers... So I started getting a little annoyed.... That's when I felt my finger slip off the tapioca ball...

Moral to this story? Not really... well OK... be honest if for no other reason than it is a lot easier.

Life of a Programmer

2009-03-17T06:12:00.000-07:00

We had to stop installing websites on our production server for a couple of weeks while we await memory... ugh... It fits right in there with things I probably should have thought of earlier but didn't. The technology I am using for the websites is .net and it is a fair bit harder on memory than the previous technology we were using. To make things worse I lost a 'strong discussion' with our IT guy regarding the best approach for rolling websites into production early on and I knew that it would impact memory.

So the memory arrives and apparently the version of the operating system is a special 'web' version and instead of a max of 3 gigabytes it will only accept a max of 2 gigabytes. Are you freaking kidding me!?

Remember that discussion I lost with the IT guy? Well we got revisit that discussion and we finally agreed to try things a different way (it was hard to not remind him that this was my original approach). Memory problem solved... 2 gigabytes will be fine. Unfortunately several changes were made to accomodate the other approach, these changes have to be unwound. Oh for a crystal ball (or fewer stubborn people).

I have been tutoring a high school freshman in a visual basic (really old version) class that he is taking at a local high school. It started when i received a call from a work friend of mine who wondered if I could help with VB. I said 'no problem I would love to help'.

So the first night was pretty rough. Greg (not his real name) showed up and had a project due the next day. Suffice it to say he hadn't made much progress. He had about 3 hours of work that needed to be done and his mom wanted to pick him up in an hour. I suggested that he call his mom and put her on standby. Two and a half hours later we completed the project. Greg had learned alot and the program ran and did what it appeared the assignment required.

Greg failed the assignment... According to the teacher the math formula used was incorrect and so even while the program ran OK the assignment didn't work. Personally i am mystified I am pretty sure the formula was specified on the assignment and it was simply plugged in. More over the assignment was rather lengthy and the program worked flawlessly. Really? Failed?

Greg's mom called and asked 'how could this be?' It is a hard question to answer and a legitimate question. My only answer is, 'dunno, program worked great and the math seemed OK too.' My best guess is the teacher saw my fingerprints on the code and decided to punish Greg.

I am not sure what the moral of the story here is. Greg's mom wants to know if I will come in and talk to the Guidance Counselor and the CS teacher. I am pretty sure the answer to that will be NO.

So here's the funny thing about it. Greg and I have met three times. Each time he has shown up his work has been substantially better (much closer to a solution). This last time we only spent about 1/2 an hour together, he just needed a nudge over the top. It was quite a change from the first time he showed up.

Positive outcomes from a teacher /student relationship:

1) Greg learns the subject matter of his class
2) Greg is rewarded (via a good grade) for accomplishing #1
3) Greg's teacher receives the satisfaction of doing his job well
4) Greg discovers a desire to learn more

Negative outcomes from a teacher / student relationship

1) Greg is dispirited and left with a feeling of inadequacy
2) Greg develops poor work habits
3) Greg's teacher receives a gratitutious boost to his ego reinforcing that programming is hard to do and should therefore be hard to learn
4) Greg determines he is unable to learn more and gives up on the subject

I am satisifed that I have helped with the positive aspects and have fought against the negative. I would like nothing more than to take his teacher to task and let him know just what I think of him. I will resist this impulse.

Finally, one of the last pieces of the production websites I am working on is a piece that communicates with a third-party piece of software. The site I am replacing does this work just fine and for some reason my new site doesn't work. I have been pouring hours into trying to figure out what could possibly be wrong. I have traces showing their system connecting to mine, correct information is received and I generate a response. I have compared my response to the old system's response at a byte-by-byte level and all seems to be OK. I am confident there are no differences, but the systems will not communicate.

We put in a request with the third-party to help us resolve the issue. Imagine just how excited they are to help. Not at all. It is funny (ironic funny) this customer pays this third-party 4-5 times what they pay us yet we can barely get them to respond.

The programmer for the third-party is a broken record, he keeps sending me the error message his system is generating expecting I can do something with it. The message simply reads; The xxxx system is not responding (nnnnn.xxx.ssss) the xxxx refers to my system and the nnnn.xxx.ssss is a date / time. NO CRAP !!!!

Finally I got a guy to look at their traces and he shares the information with me. Apparently they have a poorly installed certificate. So I suggest to the guy that the the error that says 'Certificate is not propertly installed' might mean that they have a problem and his answer is that this can't be the case....

The moral of these three tales of grief.

Next time you see me ask how my stocks are performing... it is a much better topic than asking how my job is (that was also sarcasm)...

I'm on a roll -- politics aside

2009-03-06T10:24:00.000-08:00

Sucked in a second time eh? Fool me once, shame on you... Fool me twice....

Who the Heck elected Rush Limbaugh as head of the republican party!? As far as I can tell it is the liberal media. CNN has spent a great deal of time on Rush making a huge deal about his arguments with the GOP's head guy. I used to enjoy watch CNN and was very much looking forward to post election when they would go back to pretending to be neutral in their delivery of news.

To me this is the same story as when all Christians are lumped in with Jerry Falwell. Uhhh... who died and elected this guy to represent us!? Same freaking group.. the liberal media.

It is simply lazy journalists who don't want to have a real conversation. It is much easier to announce that Rush Limbaugh represents the republican party and that Jerry Falwell represents Christians than it is to talk to the much more reasonable and well spoken people who we look to.

To me liberals always like to present themselves as the "thinking man's party." This behaviour simply demeans them. Some of my favorite people are very liberal in their thinking. How about looking for things that unite us instead of divide!?

Politics aside..

2009-03-05T09:56:00.000-08:00

The title is a lie.. I imagine much of this has to do with my own political views (which even I am surprised by sometimes).

So far I am not overly impressed with our new president. To me it feels like he has started leaning much further to the left than he seemed to indicate during the last few months of his campaign. I didn't vote for him but shared in the joy of the milestone of electing an African-American man to the most prestigious position in the US.

My concerns oddly are not about the economy. I don't honestly believe a president can either cause or fix such things.

My issues with Mr. Obama are that many of my fears about a liberal president coupled with a liberal congress seem to be coming true. It appears to me that the size of our government is going to grow substantially over the next four years. I am not a proponent of "the government can do it better."

Until recently I held a relatively large stake (large for me) in a company that provides student loans to college students. This particular company is now worth about 1/10th of its high water mark mostly due to the desire on the part of the government (Obama) to governmentalize this program. Without a lot of details we have seen the government try this before and fail miserably, spending considerably more per loan than when they use banks and lending institutions to do it for them.

Why is this? In my opinion it is all about motivation. Banks and Lending institutions want to make as much money as they possibly can and will squeeze every possible penny out of the process. Does this make them evil as the liberals seem to portray? No, heck no. What motivation does a government run agency have to make the process more efficient? The simple answer is they have none.

If you feel like a company is going to make a lot of money as the result of being greedy your response should be simple. Invest in that company and stop bitching.

No doubt someone reading this is feeling a bit of "Obama got elected, you lose, get over it." I reject that. Obama is my president even though I didn't vote for him. I will hold him to a high standard and complain when it isn't being met.

Project installed... now the hard part

2009-03-04T13:53:00.000-08:00

For the last year or so I have had a singular focus which is to build a new website for the company I work for. It is interesting that while I am talking about building a single website I have instead built four different websites that will be installed about 120 times in both our datacenter as well as our customer's datacenters. The whole thing is a bit daunting when you get right down to it.

This week we went live in our data center with about 25 of these websites. While it is a lot of fun to have such a challenge it is also intimidating when the calls start rolling in. With this many sites / programs there are bound to be some problems and so you enter a phase of triage where you attempt to sort out the real problems from the 'I'm afraid of change' types.

well.. back to the salt mines

My Podcast List

2009-02-10T06:07:00.000-08:00

I have six podcasts that I follow regularly.

Buzz Out Loud - This is an ancient podcast that provides basic tech news. Unlike the "this week in tech" guys there isn't so much inside baseball. It is a daily feed and runs about 30 minutes. Much like a newspaper, if you miss a few, don't worry they will catch you up.

College Humor TV - Cutting edge humor that is sometimes a bit over the top. I believe they are PG-13 in nature. The format is short produced videos.

Discovery TV - You already know what Discovery TV is about. These are short produced videos covering a lot of topics.

Escape Pod - Science Fiction short stories read out loud. I love this feed and listen to the stories while I workout on the treadmill. The cool thing is that the stories are timeless and therefore if you have interest in the science fiction genre and like listening to stories this is one to keep track of for a long time.

GeekBrief.TV - Kali Lewis hosts a daily look at technology video short. Somewhat like Buzz Out Loud but much shorter and generally a single topic. It doesn't hurt that Kali Lewis is a cute geek.

NASA JPL - Short videos on things they are involved in. If you watch one thing today, go find their 5 Years and Still Roving episodes. (I think there are at least 2)

PodCastle - Like Escape Pod this is a short story audio only feed. Pod Castle is in the fantasy genre however.

Science Channel - Small videos like Discovery Channel. They have a lot of "How Do They Do It" episodes. Always fun to watch.

So there you have it. Feel free to comment with fun podcasts you enjoy listening to or watching. I can't get through all that I have marked but then that isn't the goal. I am all about having so much content that I get to choose some fresh material anytime I feel like it.

Enjoy!

The fog has finally lifted

2009-02-09T06:05:00.001-08:00

It is a bit ironic that I say that given how rainy and grey it is this morning. I have been fighting a cold for just about a week now. I believe I will survive. I am amazed at how "out of it" a person can feel.

I am in that awkward point of a project where I have ultimately put in all of the work necessary but haven't really latched on to the next big thing that needs doing. It is now time to pay attention to all of those little nagging things that I ignored while on the hunt of the really big fish.

One of those things is this nagging product model that I keep seeing out there. It is driving me nuts because I simply can't wrap my brain around it. Ultimately it is the use of MS Sharepoint, Windows Workflow, Outlook and some crazy product that I have ignored called Infopath.

The essence is that with very little actual software development you implement a web based business process (like submitting a trouble ticket to your helpdesk). Sharepoint hosts the website and provides a framework, workflow moves data around and informs people, Infopath helps design forms and other mysterious stuff.

So there you have it.. that is everything I know on the subject. I have an objective to spend 10% of my work life researching new things. While I was working on our big project I completely ignored this 10% (4 hours a week). This week it is time to pay the piper, I am hoping to spend at least 10-15 hours plugging away at this stuff. I purchased a book called SharePoint for Dummies. It is my first "for dummies" book. I really like the format!

My overall hope is that I can get the fog to lift for more than just this cold... Maybe this week I will experience why this is the coolest technology ever... I will let you all know what I find out. And for you non-techies out there look for the tag 'sharepoint' in my entries, you might want to ignore them.

Rinse and Repeat

2009-02-02T08:30:00.000-08:00

Last February I started working for a company I helped created roughly ten years ago. The company is small but relatively profitable. We build software for small banks and have found a good niche. I love the concept of win-win deals and that is what we got when I rejoined the company. I get a win because I get to do things I really enjoy with software; the company wins because they really need someone to do these things.

In February I started a project that we wanted to have completed and installed by Q1-2009. Well today we are headed off to beta. For those of you not in the software world; beta is that period of time where you have the software installed but if you take errors you blame it on being in beta, not your crappy testing. (ok that was synical) For a developer beta is basically the point where you turn over your software to the rest of the company's infrastructure. It is a huge milestone of 'I'm done'.

For me 'I'm Done' really means that I am ready for the next project. In all likelyhood we aren't that well organized so I will struggle for the next month to make sure I am doing things that are as relevant as possible. Most likely these things will be minor tweaks and changes to the current project while trying to define the next project.

So here we go again... Rinse and Repeat time. I hope it is as much fun as my last project.

Cranberry Muffins... Hot from the oven

2009-01-28T06:30:00.000-08:00

There is something about a piping hot bran muffin straight from the oven. I have been working on my recipe and feel like I have finally achieved the taste I was looking for. If you want to follow along at home, here is what you need to make sure you have:

1/2 cup flour,
1/2 cup wheat germ,
1/2 cup oats,
1/2 cup milk,
1 egg
1/2 cup dried cranberries
1/3 cup honey
1/4 cup (or less) unsalted sunflower seeds
1/4 cup canola oil
1 tsp baking powder

mix, put in muffin cups, cook at 425 for 15 minutes...

This is an instant classic. Sounds like a lot of ingredients but it really isn't and you just throw it all in a bowl and stir.

Let me know if you try it. Better yet come on by and I will make you some!

When all the Cheese is gone...

2009-01-24T10:24:00.000-08:00

So if you follow my blog you know that I received a variety of cheeses from my sister for Christmas. Before the house was even empty of guests we had blasted through 3/5 of the cheese samplers. We made hard boiled egg breakfast dish using the Spanish Mahon, I will attempt to get some more of that in the future. I added Manchego to a breakfast pizza that I made for the morning after Christmas and it was great. Finally I worked through the Idiazabal, adding it here and there to sandwiches and crackers. It reminded me of a hard swiss.

In addition to the three mentioned above the sampler pack came with a Murcia al Vino. Ugh! I am not much of a wine drinker so my palette is not sophisticated enough to deal with this taste in cheese. But that is the fun of a sampler. I really want to know about the different kinds of cheese and how they taste.

Finally the Fifth cheese was an Italian Parmagiano. This is your not so basic parmesan cheese that you can grind out of a cheese grater... Well I ground my last few strokes of that just last night... I am feeling a bit of a loss now that the fun is gone...

Now I am back to looking forward to my birthday... Maybe the cheese fairy will visit again!

Jury Duty

2009-01-23T10:17:00.001-08:00

I was summoned to Jury Duty in Lancaster County yesterday. Over all the experience was pretty easy. In Nebraska the courthouse in Lincoln is overall pretty small (say compared to Denver). The case we were to hear was the county vs. someone who was accused of selling a plant that could be used to get high from. The plant is Salvia-A. I was one of the lucky unchosen jurors. In our county they call 18, seat 12 and then whittle that group down to 6. I was not chosen for the initial 12 although I had to listen to all of the instructions while they decided if their inital pick of 12 would result in a viable group.

The youngster that questioned the jury for the county was was a 3rd year law student. Oh to be that young and confident again. He asked a number of seemingly banal questions to determine if any of the jurors would be ineligible to hear the trial. It was an interesting process to watch, but holy cow it was time consuming.

Homemade Root Beer

2009-01-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

Hmm. I take a certain amount of pride in my cooking skills. I enjoy making things that people enjoy eating and to a lesser degree drinking. I was all excited to use a homemade rootbeer kit to make a rootbeer. The recipe was drop dead simple, add rootbeer flavoring to sugar, water and yeast, pour into a 2 liter bottle, wait 2 weeks, voila.

I will save you the drama. Total junk. Completely not worth the time. Absolute junk...

Well just a bit of a disappointment, but what are you gonna do?

Maybe it is time to breakout the cheese making again.

January Doldrums

2009-01-16T06:01:00.000-08:00

For some reason January is the target date of most long term projects I work on. This makes for an interesting holiday season most of the time. This year has been no different. Like most years i took a number of days off around Christmas and as a result caused tension in my projects that are ultimately due about now.

Since I live in the country and the fricking sun disappears shortly after lunch (yes that's an exaggeration) you have to ask what else do I have to do? It's funny but the list is actually pretty long; video games, stuff at school, oh yeah did I mention my project, writing a book, working on an online game? This is not to mention the hobbies I have like; woodworking, stained glass, metal working and painting.

So why, you might ask, am I talking about the doldrums? Well for me it is totally appropriate. What are the doldrums? Well it's funny the question is really what IS the Doldrums. It is an area of the world near the equator where things are just perfect for stagnation. Winds don't blow in a meaningful way, etc. Sailing ships lost their main mode of motivation in this area if they were unlucky. I feel like that sailing ship, I have so much to do but once again January, its frigid temperatures and lack of sunshine has taken the wind out of my sails.

Time to break out the oars and trudge through it. There is a silver lining to this. My projects are due and I will finish them up in the cold and dark of January and February. When spring finally comes I will be ready to enjoy it.

Final analysis on DVD Ripping

2009-01-06T07:32:00.000-08:00

So I need to be able to put videos on my new Zune. Unfortunately all DVDs I have purchased and have a complete legal right to place my Zune for replay are copy protected. No lengthy discussion on DRM here. Simply put it just sucks.

In previous posts I listed the various software that I have tried out. I received comments and emails from some friends suggesting other software. I tried it as well. Thanks to Steve and Adam for their suggestions.

What I ended up with is 100% free. My favorite solution would have cost me $50 bucks. I am cheap, just ask my kids.

Favorite (but pricey) Solution:
AnyDVD by SlySoft and HandBrake. Basically AnyDVD installs a driver that gets in the way of requests to your DVD drive. If it 'sees' copy protection it breaks the protection and hides it from the requesting progrm. HandBrake is the tool that will create an MP4 or M4V movie file from the files it can find on a DVD Disc. Once AnyDVD is installed you don't really interact with it anymore, it just sits there and intercepts DVD requests, stripping the copy protection on the fly.

Chosen Solution (free by 2 steps)
DVDFab and HandBrake. So when you visit the DVDFab site you will only see 'pay-for' stuff on the screen. That was a mistake that I made. A friend of mine Adam pointed out that at the bottom of their website they have a link to 'free-stuff'. One of these items is a DVDFab that is free but basically does nothing more than copy files from a DVD to your HardDisc. The critical component of this, however, is that it removes copy protection while it does this copy. You can then use HandBrake to build your MP4 or M4V files from those files on your hard-drive. The obvious down side to this is that you have to endure the copy process before you can start encoding with HandBrake. Moreover you need about 2wice the disc space. For me I have time and disc space, just not alot of money.

Mac Users
T-Bone pointed out in some comments on a previous post that HandBrake will ignore copy protection on DVDs on the Mac. I did a little research on this. Somehow, the HandBrake guys slipped up and included some code that somehow got around the CSS protection on a Mac. Unfortunately the mistake was pointed out to them and they have since removed this errant code. So T-Bone, don't upgrade your version of HandBrake, even though your current version is 'broken' I think you will agree that it is a happy mistake.

Sorry -- no flame bait today..

Zune Fan Boy

2008-12-31T16:12:00.000-08:00

For Christmas I received a 16gig Zune. For those of you not in the know this is an iPod from Microsoft. I decided that I would prefer the tiny form factor of the smaller Zunes over the huge disc size and spacious screens of the larger hard drive type Zunes. People who buy iPods have similar choices.

My particular needs for a device are that I want several movies and all of my podcasts and some music. I don't expect to regularly watch movies on a portable device, just on airplanes. I do expect to listen to audio books and pod casts regularly. I also don't want to maintain a gigantic library and carry it around with me. I prefer to manage this on my computer. This is at least why I chose this form factor. I will let you know if I grow to regret that decision.

Something I don't even remotely regret is the switch to the Zune desktop software. I have used iTunes for years and it seems to suffer from neglect. Quite to the contrary, the Zune software is slick and shiny and so far works great.

So flame on little apple fan boys... your rule is coming to an end... just look at the Apple stock price if you have any question about this.

A Cheesy Gift

2008-12-29T11:26:00.001-08:00

One of the fun gifts I received his year was a variety pack of spanish cheeses. For me this is a fabulous gift as I love to try new flavors of things and experiment while cooking. The package contained:

Manchego, Mahon Reserva, Idiazabal and Murcia al Vino

Let me tell you what I did with the Mahon Reserva!

Mahon Reserva

Ahh, so much cheese, so little time. The timing of the gift couldn't have been better as I was planning a post-christmas-gift-opening breakfast that could easily incorporate a new cheese flavor.

This cheese has a very nice smokey flavor. I incorporated it into a requested dish from my daughter. Basically I took a fresh pizza type dough (made from scratch and not cooked) as a base, layered shaved Prosciutto ham, Idazabal Cheese, fresh basil leaves, a little garlic, and brie cheese. I then layed hard boiled eggs (no shell) across the layers in a line. I then wrapped the dough around the contents in what appeared to be a long tube. I finished by brushing beaten egg wash across the topside and sprinkling with toasted sesame seeds and baked for long enough to bake the loaf.

The smokey flavor of the Idazabal combined beautifully with the Prosciutto ham creating an instant hit.

There you have it... First slice cut for the provider of the cheese... Thanks Oracle!

Old Friends

2008-12-18T17:46:00.000-08:00

Over the last couple of months I have made contacts with some old friends. I am constantly surprised at how quickly time passes. Recently a good friend of mine, Candy who I met when I was in college in Kansas City, pinged me with a friends request on facebook. It has been twenty four years since we last talked. While in college we hung out pretty much every day and some on the weekends, then blip, 24 years shoot by, totally crazy.

I have been working on a flu bug and hope I get over it by the time the weekend comes. I am taking a few days off for Christmas and I just can't get along with the idea that I will be sick. Since I work from home I have not called in sick. Pretty much I have to be able to make it fifteen feet to my office and prop myself up in a chair. If I can type then I am good to go. I actually made good progress on the project I am working on. Working from home definitely has it's advantages, i am not sure if this is one or not. If I had to drive to work I wouldn't have driven in..

I think tomorrow is a snow day... still working from home... dur...

Fun writing exercise

2008-12-15T09:26:00.000-08:00

I have a new story line called Henry Bigston for lack of a better title. Ultimately the character is a wanna be bounty hunter / private detective / do anything for a buck type of character. I have been rubbing my sister's nose in the fact that I followed another writer's suggestion and completely mapped my plot from top to bottom. I have posted on this subject some already.

Yesterday, after spending some quality time with my primary writing project, Lesser Prince, I decided to spend an hour with this Henry Bigston project and convert the entire story's setting (only 1 chapter so far) from current to a point in the future. Going from fiction to sci-fi. I am a huge sci-fi fan and found it odd that none of my projects were of this genre.

It was a tremendously fun exercise and I found it intersting that most of the sci-fi stuff is pretty much just a prop / flavor. The story didn't change in any substantial way other than the first chapter ended up being a bit longer due to my need to explain a variety of techno innovations that a reader would probably not be aware of (the innovations occur in the future so don't feel bad).

I am now faced with a new issue; should I keep the story in Sci-Fi or regular fiction? I don't have the answer to this yet, I guess I will see how the mood strikes when I take the story back up.

Happy Writing!

Writing again

2008-12-14T07:33:00.000-08:00

Some of you have followed a bit of my fiction writing. Currently I am working on three story lines; Deep In Clowns, Henry Bigston and Lesser Prince. Each of these stories are in different stages. I hadn't realized just what a commitment creating a story would become. When I first started out I was able to finish chapter after chapter every other day or so. Nowadays I am lucky to finish a chapter in a week. This is mostly due to very poor planning at the outset. I was niave in my creation of plot and character.

Recently I have taken a scalpel to a number of what I have come to think of as "twin" characters. Those would be characters that are duplicated in another character. For some reason when I have an idea for a good character, I end up duplicating that character. With minor characters, I don't mind so much, but I have done this with some of my primary characters. Removing the duplicates from the story line has taken quite a bit of work, but I believe I have completed my exercise.

Having solved my "twinning" problem; I have turned my focus to my plot problems. Honestly the problem is that i hadn't planned out a plot. Some writers can get by with this, but I have found that I cannot. I desparately needed to outline my plot from top to bottom. So while I haven't been cranking out words, i have been making real progress on plot line. I currently have a top to bottom plot line for both Lesser Prince and Henry Bigston and once I get back to Deep in Clowns I will complete the plot line for that as well.

So there you have it! I haven't abandoned my writing but I have retooled considerably.

Happy Writing!

Moxie Update

2008-12-13T04:58:00.000-08:00

It seems to be a slow time of the year to make much progress. Neither Sky Captain or myself have been able to really punch much through into the endzone, but we have trickled a few things out of interest.

Sky Captain provided a new drag and drop interface; allowing the user to move stuff between party members. He also allows for stuff to be dropped on the ground as well as be picked up. Just as important he implemented the same interface so that we can grab stuff out of containers that are on the ground. This is important as when a party is wiped out, the server (my stuff) turns that part and all of its members into a container of their stuff. So be careful, if you die, all of your junk is in a container that will be destroyed in a couple of minutes. (I may have to consider allowing these corpses to last a bit longer).

For my part I have added support for the items discussed above and introduced the concept of vendors to the game. If you aren't interested in game design then you will probably loose interest in this post so you should consider averting your eyes.

When a game designer (for Moxie) adds a vendor to world, she can specify a list of items the vendor will keep in stock. The vendor will always have these items for sale. If someone sells a stocked item to the vendor, the vendor will simply destroy the item when he receives it. Of interest for the programmer types reading this; I don't actually keep a full up item on the vendor, it turns out I can simply keep track of what type of item it is, then manufacture that item when an actual purchased. It is a pretty light weight way of keeping track of things.

Next on the list are; monster generators, combat healers or healing totems, and some way to start saving the world as it runs. No that wasn't social commentary, literally I need to write the bytes that are in memory out to the disk so in the event of a catastrophic failure I can restore those precious bytes. While this list isn't particularly long, some of it will take quite a bit of doing.

Let me leave you with a quote from Ann Flanders (paraphrased); "opportunity is often missed as it tends to show up as work"...

AnyDvD and Handbrake

2008-12-12T04:21:00.000-08:00

I have had two good friends point me in the direction of HandBrake which is an opensource (freebie) project that takes copyright free DVD source and turns it into smaller versions of that DVD. While it doesn't have a specific Zune setting I suspect that won't really be a problem. It does have a bunch of Apple presets, perhaps the average apple user requires that (yes that was flame bait)

What I found interesting is that both of these friends have a considerably different take on how to get DRM free access to your DVD. One suggestion is DVDFab and the other AnyDVD. DVDFab has a free piece that you have to look for (hint: checkout the footer on their website) AnyDVD is offering upgrades for life if you purchase before the beginning of next year.

The burning question in my mind is how long will the DVD format live? Sure we have actually moved away from the original DVD format and on to an HD version. And, yes, you have to buy all new hardware. At least the disc's look the same. Roll forward 3 years and no one will be producing the old format. But that is just an editorial on the pace of change in technology...

The question is.... when will we escape the bonds of physical media? To rant a little... Why do I have to work so freaking hard to simply move a movie that I own onto my newest little viewing device? I believe the answer to when, is; not very soon. Here are the things that get in the way:

1) DRM (yes, it would be cute to have 3 items in the list that all say DRM)
2) data transfer speed of US internet (try moving 4 gig files around and get back to me)
3) did I mention DRM?

OK, I got a little off topic from AnyDVD and Handbrake. It is a pretty nice combination. AnyDVD is a piece of software that runs and intercepts requests to the DVD device on your computer. It ultimately defeats the copy protection so that other programs simply don't see that copy protection.

Handbrake can't deal with copy protection (DRM) but Handbrake can do the work of converting the DVD to an MP4 or something like an MP4 (which most portable devices can read). It also shrinks the size of the video by reducing the quality of the video.

When you are using any of these convertors, be prepared to wait. Given all of the software I have played with I have found this stuff takes between thirty minutes to an hour and a half.

I am not yet sure which software I will end up with but at this point I am relatively sure I won't be disappointed.

If you are wondering what DRM is; it stands for Digital Rights Management. It is a sticky problem. DRM is the reason you can't move your files from your iPod to anything else. It prevents people from simply making copies of DVDs or CDs and handing them to their friends. The objective of DRM is not so bad, make sure people pay for what they consume. Most of us over 25 years of age don't want our media for free, we recognize that if we pay for stuff, we will get cooler stuff.

The rub on DRM is that it prevents us from doing completely legitimate stuff. For example I purchased the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets DVD.

1) I would like to watch it on my TV; no problem, insert disc into dvd player.
2) watch it on my computer; same deal, works like a champ
3) buy a portable DVD player; same deal
4) buy a portable media device (iPod, Zune, etc); no worky...

To the freaks who invented the current DRM scheme they make money coming and going. If you want to play a DVD you have to not only purchase the DVD but you have to purchase a device that is licensed to play that DVD. A part of your purchase price for every player (including your computer) goes to this group in the form of a license fee.

This is why we need things like AnyDVD or CopyFab, etc. It is commonly referred to as "fair use". If I own something then whoever made it stops having much say in how I use it as long as I don't start making money off of it (or distribute it somehow).

Sorry for the long post, Princess Lotus Blossum reprogrammed our furnace and it fires up to "incinerate" at about 4:45 am.

Cool stuff

2008-12-06T10:46:00.001-08:00

Bad Monkey is anticipating receiving a new media device for Christmas. I have put in a recommendation for a Zune 16g. Yup you heard me Zune. I have suffered under the incredible poverty of coding talent at Apple for just too long and need to move on to a bit more sophisticated software development team. Last year at TechEd (a microsoft training event) I had a chance to sit down with one of the Zune software peeps and chat about their new Zune software. At the time I wasn't in the market for a new device but the conversation stuck with me. This software is light years ahead of iTunes in my opinion. iTunes constantly causes problems on my machine, forgetting settings, installing new versions, trying to place "freeware" on my machine. Really!? It would be nice if Apple considered me a valued customer instead of a "mark". Quality assurance is not really that hard, but enough ranting.

The Zune software does a very nice job of organizing my consumable media; videos, podcasts, music. One thing that I would really like no one has (iTunes or Zune) and that is a way to RIP my DVD's to a format I can put on my Zune (well my alleged Zune).

So a software search ensued. The first product I found was Cucusoft Zune Video Convertor. They have an iPod and Zune version and you can d/l a freebie version to see what they are producing. Turns out I was simply lucky in this choice as after I researched three other tools (FairUse, Dvd2svcd, Intertech DVD Convertor) I am convinced it is the right tool for me. The interface is simple to use and the options are readily available.

Software is a tricky thing to get right IMO. FairUse, Dvd2svcd, Intertech all fail for similar reasons, they all believe we give a crap about how the process works. As a software developer there are two hard lessons that I have learned:

1) just because it was hard to write, doesn't mean it s/b hard to use
2) an inferior product with a superior user experience will win every time.

I don't really think that CucuSoft is inferior, nor do I think that Zune is inferior. I do know that they are both easy for me to use and I get just what I am interested in.

iTunes, FairUse, and these others... well, stop trying to sell me something and just do what you say you will, oh yeah, and make it easier for me. It turns out the center of my day will never revolve around figuring out all of your cryptic crap.

Another cool thing that I pickedup is a product called FreeMind. This thing is awesome. If you have been following my blog you know that the my Muse (sparky) took off for a while leaving me to wonder if I was meant to be a writer. Well using this idea mapping tool I have to say that I have been able to lure Sparky back. I am happy to have had a visit from my muse and will treat her right this time. Over the last day or so I have been able to map out an entire story's plot line front to back. All I have to do now is put words to it. I am all cranked up and ready!

Happy Writing!

No Muse

2008-12-04T05:48:00.001-08:00

I have often wondered what the perceived experience of a writer is when they refer to their muse. I no longer wonder. A couple of months back I had a visit from my muse and didn't recognize that this was an unusual event, considering it to be a somewhat pedestrian event.

Well the muse is here no more. I have experienced several days maybe a couple of weeks of staring at my computer screen and generating nothing of consequence. I have written a few things but they have all been junk. Ultimately I believe this is an open letter to whoever employs these muses. Could I have mine back?

Sunset -- It just doesn't get worse

2008-12-02T11:14:00.000-08:00

For some reason I take the loss of evening daylight hours personally. I feel like the very earth is working against me. Today, however, marks the bottom, it doesn't get any worse than today. Some of the pureists would point out that today is not the solstice, and therefore the days continue to get shorter. This is a reasonable point but meaninless to me. I don't much care when that sun gets up, but dog gone it I care when it goes down. 4:55 in the afternoon is the limit. Yes the sun will continue to set at 4:55 for a few days, but it is the beginning of the end for darkness' tyranical reign.

Mondays aren't all bad

2008-12-01T19:43:00.001-08:00

Like most of you I don't usually like Mondays. But once in a while Monday hits me like Spring. This was the case today. I haven't put in a full day at work for five days and I really getting close on delivering a large project. By the time it is implemented I will have a full year invested. The project is a web site that I may have talked about a few times and for my company it is a pretty big deal.

Last week I discovered that Microsoft delivered a new Charting tool for asp.net ( the tool I use to build my website). The crazy thing is we were getting ready to go buy this tool from the company who developed it as I have been coding to this tool for the last six months or so. After I checked out Microsoft's new offering, it turns out that they made some sort of source code arrangement with the same dang company. This will save my company thousands of dollars in licensing fees (it is free from Microsoft).

SO... today I had a great deal of fun integrating Microsoft's new asp:chart tool. And even better so far everything is working...

I just love it when a plan comes together...

Humble Pie

2008-11-29T19:57:00.001-08:00

I joined a discussion group called My Writers Circle. One of the activities of this group is to review other writer's work and provide feedback. As most stories are likely to go unread or at least unpublished this is one of the few ways that I have found to receive honest criticism of a small portion of your work.

This afternoon I posted 450 words or so from the beginning of a story I am working on called Lesser Prince. So it was good and bad. Fortunately the people who chose to respond were kind in their pointedness. I have interest in writing and know that it will simply require hard work to hone my skills to the point where I produce something that is interesting to a wide audience.

The advice I received was terrific and I hope that I will be able to utilize it beyond the short passage I was brave enough to post. Of interest to me was that when I considered the advice, I was able to review what they had just read and see the weaknesses that were pointed out.

Hmm, what is the moral of this story? Easy.... If you are interested in writing, you should consider this website as a resource.

Moxie Screen Shot

2008-11-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

Here is a sample of the screens we are working on in Moxie.

You can see a castle and a few houses. The Red triangle is a "party" icon and the green hexagon is another party icon.

Thanks to Sky Captain for supplying the screenie for us to look at.

Silverlight tried to kill my computer

2008-11-26T07:21:00.000-08:00

Extreme geek alert, be wary:

As part of my explore fun new things I thought it would be a good idea to start playing with Silverlight. If you don't know what this is you won't appreciate most of this post so read on at your peril.

Most of the software development I do is in Microsoft tools and currently this is mostly asp.net work. Silverlight is the next cool thing to mess with if you aren't a "flash" type person, which I am currently not.

Microsoft makes development easy (if not cheap) for the average joe like me and has made their Silverlight development tools available, free for the downloading. So after I downloaded the development tools and attempted to create my first silverlight project I received:

Registry Access is Not Allowed

Holy Crap! What to do!?

Well fortunately there are tons of blogs out there with suggestions. The first blog I found was:
http://niravbhattsai.blogspot.com/2008/10/fix-requested-registry-access-is-not.html

Before you run off an execute this on your own machine... warning... it cratered my Vista installation's registry. I lost access to my network as well as Windows Audio Service couldn't startup.

This is where "cool" entered. I executed a Windows Restore System Settings and found that I had a backup of my system settings as of 9am that morning. I restored to that point and it worked. Well my machine started working again I should say. That has to be the first time I have ever successfully executed a Windows System Restore. The best I can tell this restore point is all about the system registry and it simply restores the registry to a point in time. Regardless the fact that this worked and I didn't need to reinstall my OS was very cool.

So hmm... nirav's post is a bit too radical for me, but before my registry croaked I did notice that I was able to create Silverlight projects in visual studio. So the fact is he was on to something.

After a bit more searching I found:

http://petesbloggerama.blogspot.com/2008/01/fix-requested-registry-access-is-not.html

He had a considerably less intense solution but and I noticed the comments on his post were generally favorable (having helped a number of people). I tried his formula (you can read it on his blog) with no success. The thing is, his post was basically the same solution as Nirav's except considerably smaller in it's scope. Nirav basically modified the permissions on just about every registry entry. I noticed that over 300,000 entries were modified not once but twice by his approach. Pete's approach modified less than 20. Maybe there is some middle ground.

So I went in search of a Registry Sniffer or something that would allow me to see what sort of errors are occuring when processes on Vista attempt to access the registry. That is when I found additional coolness, Process Monitor. This tool allows you to see pretty much every event Vista is executing and indeed you need to tone it down because the detail will drown you. In <>

So here is the fix I came up with:

1) Download and install this tool from microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e8ba3e56-d8fe-4a91-93cf-ed6985e3927b&displaylang=en

2) it probably put the tool in c:\program files\windows resource kits\tools\subinacl.exe
create a batch file: fix.bat that includes these lines:

subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.vbproj.9.0 /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.vbproj.9.0 /grant=users=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.vbproj.9.0 /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0 /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0 /grant=users=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.csproj.9.0 /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.9.0 /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.9.0 /grant=users=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudio.Solution.9.0 /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\._sln /grant=administrators=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\._sln /grant=users=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\._sln /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\._sln90 /grant=administrators=fsubinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\._sln90 /grant=users=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\._sln90 /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AgControl.AgControl /grant=system=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AgControl.AgControl /grant=users=f
subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AgControl.AgControl /grant=system=f

Run the batch file... Hopefully it just works for you like it did for me. If it didn't then breakout process monitor, you will find the errant key and be able to use this approach to solve it.

Happy Coding!

I resemble this quote

2008-11-25T07:55:00.000-08:00

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion. - Robertson Davies

Obama and the Economy

2008-11-25T07:07:00.000-08:00

CNN has an article that I found interesting about Obama's economic plan click on the quote to see the full text of the article.

"At the center of the plan are investments in the nation's roads, bridges, schools and alternative-energy infrastructure. Obama has said his plan will lead to the creation of 2.5 million jobs."

I didn't vote for Obama for a variety of reasons. This approach, however, brings me hope. I know that public works projects can be boondoggles like "the bridge to nowhere". I also know that investing in strategic infrastructure is an extremely sound practice for a business. When you couple that with creating jobs, well, that just makes good sense.

I am also a closet alternative-energy enthusiast. I want us to invest heavily in solar, hydrogen, wind, hydro and even natural-gas.

So while I a shrink from some of the liberal leanings of our new president I have to say that I am impressed, even enthused at his stated approach for economic recovery.

Do dreams provide insite?

2008-11-25T06:22:00.000-08:00

I really have no idea. Last night I had a dream where I was being berated by someone from the blogosphere regarding my blog. Apparently I had been tagging my posts with keywords that caused them to be high in google's page ranks. Everytime this woman searched for her favorite subject there I was banally talking about whatever the heck I talk about. She was infuriated.

Ack. What am I to take from that? No idea, and if you are reading this as the result of a random google search, well you have my appologies. No strike that, write a comment and beret me for my foolish and banal writing. Just stay outta my dreams, OK?

Last night was a bit miserable for me. As sundown creeps ever so earlier into afternoon instead of staying in evening like it should, I have a difficult time staying productive. My eyes get heavy and I just have a difficult time concentrating. Sky Captain and I had a spirited discussion about how to handle "fog of war" in Moxie and it left me feeling a bit un-motivated. I have never done too well dealing with strong disagreements which is where we ended up agreeing to leave it alone for a while.

I very much enjoy cooking and Thanksgiving is one of two days of the year where our family goes all out. Preparations are just starting up. Tomorrow will be a big grocery run for us and then cleaning will ensue. Not much writing or game design will be accomplished, but it is for a good cause.

Friday we are planning a D&D adventure. Yes that is dungeon's and dragons, roll playing, dice throwing, paper game. The intrepid band of adventurers have a kobold encampment to encounter. We will just have to see how that goes.

Back to work for the Bad Monkey...

A Major Visit

2008-11-23T15:12:00.001-08:00

Well technically a Major's visit.

Throughout my life I have bonded with just a handful of people outside of my family. You know what I am talking about, these are the people that I grew up with, shared secrets with and live my crazy life with.

The list isn't all that long to be honest and is pretty easy for me to recount; Sam, Joel, Tim, Jeff, Parker, Luke, Janet. If your name didn't show up on the list and you are reading this blog don't dispair, I probably should have mentioned you and spaced it... If you don't think I am capable of spacing it then you definitely don't belong on the list.

This weekend, Major Rothermel visited the Treehouse. You know, the place where Bad Monkies live. Major Rothermel is a career military guy who I met when he was a Sophomore in HS and I had just moved to town as a Junior in High School. Our time together was only about 2.5 years while we waited to graduate but these were formative years. Together we played Dungeons and Dragons. He was most often the dungeon master and I the unruly nemesis player although we would often trade places.

It is both easy and hard to get together with someone you have shared such a deep friendship with. We have both moved throughout our lives doing what is necessary to thrive in our own ways. It was fun to spend time with him and learn what he has been doing and what the perspective of a career military officer thinks about on a day to day basis.

The Major's visit kind of makes me wonder of all of the people we have left behind. Those would be the people we have shared a bond with but which circumstances have separated. I have to tell you that I believe you should go find these people and simply hang out.

General Craziness...

2008-11-17T15:43:00.000-08:00

So my son, Mini-Me, has decided to purchase World Of Warcraft's - Wrath of the Lich King. This has presented me with a problem very much like Edward Cullen has with regard to Bella in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. I can smell the installation CDs from here and I would very much to take just a nibble. If you don't get the reference, think of me as Garfield and World of Warcraft as my Lasagna.

To him I say pfffft...

This weekend was busy. Mini-Me had driver's ed that was poorly spaced out with his Saxaphone lessons causing First Mate Lotus Blossum and me to hang out in the car waiting for him in town for nearly 4.5 hours. Fortunately she was willing to drive so I brough my laptop along and started slinging code.

What is with all this crazyness where no-one will let you use their internet without paying for it? We parked outside of Barne's and Nobel... no joy... Star Buck's no joy... And no I didn't want any freaking books or coffee that particular day, I wanted to sling some code and I was wearing my slippers. This really pissed me off.

Finally about 1/2 hour before we were to head home we parked in front of the AAA office where Mini-Me's lessons were and some doofus had left his wi-fi unprotected... Schawing! Although by that time I was down to about 5 minutes of battery, oh well.

I made a serious run at Moxie this weekend. This is the game that Sky Captain and I are working on. I was able to add a fairly complete inventory system. You can have your party members pickup/drop and equip/unequip items. Pretty much thats how programs go... you get small features added at a fairly consistant rate and eventually you have something useful.

Unfortunately the Sky Captain has some particle detection to do... Considering it is what he gets paid for I think it is probably not such a bad thing. He was on a pretty serious roll with the User Interface and this whole work thing is interfering a bit.

Well I promised I would get the Sky Captains permission to post some art-work but alas I neglected to ask. I will do better next time so you can start to share some of the joy of the game with us.

Time to BBQ...

Finally, The Weekend!!

2008-11-15T07:49:00.001-08:00

Wow, crazy trip to Denver again. I haven't had access to the internet for more than 1.5 hrs in the last 48 hours. This makes a Bad Monkey very unhappy! Fortunately the trip was a good one for my company, just not so much for Monkey productivity.

Sky Captain and I are plowing some real progress on Moxie, our game. I recently added the concept of containers. Ultimately every element in the game has the potential of equipping a container. So a gun could have a container that only holds bullets, or a toon could carry a backpack to hold his weapons and other stuff.

The Captain is working on graphics at the moment. I haven't received his permission to post these images yet, but I will see what he thinks and get a scene up here. We made a decision to display our maps in an iso metric view. For those of you not familiar with what I am talking about, this would look more like StarCraft or Ultima Online as opposed to World Of Warcraft, Asheron's Call or most of the new immersive games.

Honestly one of the primary reasons we are not going for the full 3-d effect has a lot to do with available man-hours. An iso-view game can pretty much exist in a 2-d plane and the graphics are more like paintings than they are full blown 3-d models. A company like Blizzard employs hundreds of programmers and graphical artists. We pretty much just have me and Sky Captain.

Our goal is to get a fun game put together and work on attracting a couple of thousand players. Ultimately this is shooting pretty low but for the most part practical. My little server is probably only capable of supporting a hundred or less concurrent users.

In other news, I have some changes coming for Lesser Prince. I don't like the dynamic that Celia, Tig's mother has brought to my story line. I am going to pull her from the entire story. This will free up Tig to grow into man-hood by having to grow on his own. I am also not happy with how similar Tig and Samuel Lordly have become. You may need to reread chapter 1 to see how this turns out.

So finally I am considering that I might take the entire story off-line, publishing only to people that I am reasonably connected to. When I started I had no expectation about publishing this story. At this point, I don't want to preclude this from occuring by posting the entire story on the internet.

If you have been following Lesser Prince, please contact me and I will make arrangements for you to be able to receive story updates. (you can post a reply to this post)

Sky Captain Delivers!

2008-11-10T19:21:00.001-08:00

The Sky Captain worked hard this weekend and delivered a prototype GUI for our new game code-named Moxie. I have to say it is fantastic. I am getting pretty excited about our new game as much for the possibility of having something fun to do as well as making a contribution to an intellectual space that I enjoy (gaming).

So in response to his hard work, I changed the server in a way that crippled him, literally bringing the Sky Captain back to the ground for a few hours. It was not intentional sabatoge but I had some fairly intense changes to the underlying server architecture and it knocked him out for a bit.

We are currently struggling with the idea of trying to allow a single player to control an entire party of characters. Somewhat like you might see in Final Fantasy. But we want these parties to operate in a persistant world environment where changes are constantly occuring (even when the player is not online).

Sky Captain had a moment of panic when he discovered a new game that seemed to be occupying the same space. Ultimately we figured out that it really isn't. But even if it was this is not the point in my opinion. We want to build the game, to heck with everyone else. Build it and they will come. It is not such an unreasonable approach.

For my part I am changing the server again, my last thing was to change the way movement is calculated. I added the concept of speed to the members of a party, the slowest member ultimately setting the top speed of the party. I also factored in the thought of diagonal movement (1.4142 times slower than horizontal/vertical movement if done correctly).

My next trick is to factor in speed to the flexible weapons in the game. I want big axes to swing slowly and do a lot of dmg and little daggers to swing quickly doing considerably less dmg. Ultimately I want to put the power of designing these weapons into the hands of our content creators not hard baked into the game.

After that I will add an inventory system to the game. We need party members to have the ability to hold and equip items. Perhaps have a limited number of slots.

Sky Captain is off in the world of content design. I have seen some of his initial thoughts and I can't wait to see what he actually comes up with. We are shooting for a comic styled isometric view. It will be pretty simple look as our focus is on a sustainable game development environment.

I am promising to deliver a screen shot pretty soon!

Oh and I have another chapter or two available on Lesser Prince.

Finally if you haven't see this parody from 236 it is absolutely worth watching. Sky Captain sent it over and I nearly peed myself watching it.

Busy Day - Fun Stuff

2008-11-06T17:21:00.000-08:00

Too many cool things happen in one day... We DVRd the latest "Prototype This". It is another Discovery Channel, whacky geeks build something.... Oh the sheer joy of it all. This episode was building a six legged crawler that would carry one of the team. Episode "SIX-LEGGED ALL TERRAIN VEHICLE"

Looks like Discovery Channel has episodes online, for the love of all that is geeky go watch this show!!!!

So if that wasn't enough, my son, Prince Pajama Bottoms, sent me this incredible youtube video, "Tribute to John Williams". Seriously if you do one thing tonight, go watch this video. You will be amazed!!

Apparently today was to be a very productive day. I felt terrible this morning, I think I had a migrane headache. This is uncommon for me and it started around the time First Mate Lotus Blossum attacked Pinky's kennel (yes, the Brain was watching, unimpressed) with Pine Sol. I don't know if this was merely a coincidence or if it was related to my migrane somehow. I was coding for a while with my sunglasses on.

Sky Captain and I are working on Moxie and for some reason the Sky Elite have flown the Captain up to Vancouver for some super secret particle detecting. Fortunately, we are in the 21st century and game writing can't be held up by mere distances. I was able to progress the work on several key components; including allowing terrains to be loaded into the game using outside forces, as well as adding information to our terrains that will allow us to constrain party movement. I also made it so party movement will respect this new terrain information.

Next on the agenda is some sort of inventory system. At the moment members of a party can have exactally one thing... A weapon... Sure this is handy, but we have plans to make this a bit more robust.

Well I want to get some writing done on Lesser Prince tonight so I think I will skeedaddle. May the force be with you!

Gate Travel.. It was just a matter of time

2008-11-05T06:33:00.001-08:00

During the election coverage last night I had a good time, early returns showed McCain ahead 8 to 3 (electoral votes). I took the opportunity to poke on Sky Captain. Oddly he was unwilling to concede. Well since I ended up voting for Ralph Nader I wasn't overly concerned. OK so if you want to know why it is because Ron Paul wasn't on the ballot and your cars can never be too safe.

Back to Gate travel. This is in reference to the game (Moxie) that the Sky Captain and I are working on. He ran me through his new UI ideas for the game and it is shaping up nicely. One of the big concepts is "locales". Ultimately a "locale" is a local map you can't really move between locales and so you better hope you are on an intersting one. Well that was true up until now. As of last night I pushed code allowing parties to move between locales.

So I sent an email to Sky Captain letting him know that this was available. Here a part of the exchange:

Bad Monkey: Moxie Server now supports gates.
Sky Captain: Sweet. How do I use a gate?
Bad Monkey: they are touchy and just a bit unpredictable
Sky Captain: uh, what?
Bad Monkey: just be careful
Sky Captain: ...

Lol, I could write customer support scripts for DSL Support!

OK, onto something cool, First Mate Lotus Blossom forwarded a cool thing to me and it desperately needs some sharing:

Are you freaking kidding me? This is a solar powered mini spy plane. Really I have just a few questions. HOW do I get one? Can you use a net and snag it? Are they flying around, but just during the day? USB Port?

Anyone remember that crazy movie with Tom Sellek called Runaway? Well now who is laughing?

I am about 1/2 way through another chapter on Lesser Prince splitting my time between Moxie and Lesser Prince for now. Both are fun projects and keep me pretty busy. Maybe next time I will be able to share a screen shot of Moxie.