A month ago, I made some changes to my diet after my doc ominously dropped the D word. Basically, I've started doing an Atkins-like program... still trying to keep carbs to 20g or less per day, but I haven't been following it as strictly as I could have. End results is that I've lost around 18.2 pounds in a month's time.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
MT table Mark II
Okay. So my last swipe at this wasn't technically a table, but give me a break. I got busy and couldn't find spare time for... 18 months. /o\
Any rate, I've been on a kick lately and I'm moving away from doing stuff on my computers and moving more towards the analog method of designing stuff: grabbing a damned pencil and a sheet of paper and just sketching it out. I don't know why, but when I write/draw something I seem to retain it for a much longer time than if I type it up. Part of this has led to a desire to get a good old drafting table. But why buy a solid pre-built one when you can build a shaky, hideous one from scratch and save $20?
So I set about designing a drafting table, and about halfway through it occurred to me that I could also fashion it so that I could remove the plywood table top and slide in a sheet of plexiglass later on to easily convert it to a multitouch table later on.
Since it's been 18 months... here's a link to previous multitouch posts (read from bottom up for chronological order).
And here is a link to the Mark II.
It's not as perfectly aligned as I would like it, but I don't think it's half bad for my first woodworking project EVAR and it's sturdy enough I can lean on it. More thoughts after the jump.
If anyone is interested in plans (although it's not that complicated) or has questions about the construction.. hollah.
Any rate, I've been on a kick lately and I'm moving away from doing stuff on my computers and moving more towards the analog method of designing stuff: grabbing a damned pencil and a sheet of paper and just sketching it out. I don't know why, but when I write/draw something I seem to retain it for a much longer time than if I type it up. Part of this has led to a desire to get a good old drafting table. But why buy a solid pre-built one when you can build a shaky, hideous one from scratch and save $20?
So I set about designing a drafting table, and about halfway through it occurred to me that I could also fashion it so that I could remove the plywood table top and slide in a sheet of plexiglass later on to easily convert it to a multitouch table later on.
Since it's been 18 months... here's a link to previous multitouch posts (read from bottom up for chronological order).
And here is a link to the Mark II.
It's not as perfectly aligned as I would like it, but I don't think it's half bad for my first woodworking project EVAR and it's sturdy enough I can lean on it. More thoughts after the jump.
If anyone is interested in plans (although it's not that complicated) or has questions about the construction.. hollah.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
the 2 minute offense
I was once watching a game with a friend who was new to (American) football who overheard the commentator use the phrase "2 minute offense" and wondered what it was. Being more interested in the game, I brushed it off with the quick explanation: it's an offensive play scheme designed to move the ball down the field as fast as possible so you can score before the end of the quarter.
My friend waited for the play to run and then asked, "So why wouldn't you do that for the other 13 minutes in the quarter? Isn't the point of the game to score the most points?"
On the surface, it's a good question, but when the theory is reduced to application we find that it's a bad idea because it's resting on some very, critically, super star-level bad assumptions that you made when trying to think about the problem in the abstract.
The truth is that the 2 minute offense can be a wise gamble, but it's a poor standard operating procedure for the same reasons that "crunch time" is a bad thing for software development.
My friend waited for the play to run and then asked, "So why wouldn't you do that for the other 13 minutes in the quarter? Isn't the point of the game to score the most points?"
On the surface, it's a good question, but when the theory is reduced to application we find that it's a bad idea because it's resting on some very, critically, super star-level bad assumptions that you made when trying to think about the problem in the abstract.
The truth is that the 2 minute offense can be a wise gamble, but it's a poor standard operating procedure for the same reasons that "crunch time" is a bad thing for software development.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
back to the gym
I lead a pretty sedentary life, and thanks to OpenVPN and being able to work from home, it's gotten even more sedentary since at least work has stairs you have to go up. While I knew I needed to do something, it wasn't until I got winded heading up the apartment stairs with some laundry on Sunday that I realized it was go time. On Monday, I swung by Anytime Fitness took a quick tour, and signed up for the month-to-month plan... end results is that it's around $43/month, but I have 24 hour access to the gym via nifty key fob you swipe at the door. After a month or so, databases get sync'd up and the fob will work for any AF gym in the US. Pretty slick.
This isn't the first time I've tried to get back into a gym, but it's the first one where I'm not trying to think up a reason to procrastinate going until it's too late. I've also made a few changes to my approach for getting back into the swing of things that I think are helping.
This isn't the first time I've tried to get back into a gym, but it's the first one where I'm not trying to think up a reason to procrastinate going until it's too late. I've also made a few changes to my approach for getting back into the swing of things that I think are helping.
Friday, September 24, 2010
hi clear, bye clear
A few months ago, I had to cancel my home internet service with Time Warner. It turns out, TWC was executing a telemarketing campaign with some severely broken equipment. This meant random calls to my cellphone that never left a message and in the off chance I did manage to answer I was promptly hung up on. TWC left no way to get in touch with anybody who might be responsible for the calls, and letters I wrote asking them to stop went unanswered, so after two weeks I finally told them to cancel service.
To replace home connectivity, I went out and snagged a 4G wireless modem from Clear. The prospect of 6MB that I could take on the road with me for less than TWC was charging me sounded like a good deal, and for the past 3 months it's been everything I'd hoped for. Less downtime, and waaaaay less harrassing phone calls.
However, earlier this month (last Friday in fact), Clear instituted some mechanism that attempts to rate limit users who pass an unspecified bandwidth usage threshold. If you trip their bandwidth-hog alarm, your connection drops from 6Mb to 0.25Mb download speeds, and this makes doing pretty much anything relatively impossible... the speed is basically bumped below the throughput of a dialup modem from 1999. It is impossible to watch Netflix movies uninterrupted, and it's introduced some real problems when I try to play games or use VoIP services.
The intent is pretty obvious. Rather than scale up their bandwidth to accomodate a large influx of customers, they have chosen to ration out access. They were clearly assuming people would only be using the service to check email or maybe listen to a few mp3's... fools burning 30 hours a week on movies and video games will quite easily wreck that business model. The problem is that rather than cap me at the speed I've paid for, they serve up more than I paid for (12Mb) until I hit this limit, and then slap on a draconian limit to punish me for the amount of traffic I've pushed. From my point of view, I have very little to show for it since most of the bandwidth is from dynamic services (ie, Netflix and WoW) rather than from downloading files.
It's basically akin to flipping on the TV to discover that the cable company is only going to let you watch public access channels and CSPAN because you've spent entirely too much time watching HBO this month.
This is a total deal breaker for me. I don't really care about throughput so long as it's greater than 1Mb. I'd be happy taking a price break and using the slower service to having my provider suddenly and without any warning yank my leash for violating rules I don't understand and have no way of monitoring. Unfortunately for Clear, the faster (and cheaper) solution is to just cancel the account and install DSL service rather than give them "a month" to iron out the bugs in their rate limiting ubersystem.
To replace home connectivity, I went out and snagged a 4G wireless modem from Clear. The prospect of 6MB that I could take on the road with me for less than TWC was charging me sounded like a good deal, and for the past 3 months it's been everything I'd hoped for. Less downtime, and waaaaay less harrassing phone calls.
However, earlier this month (last Friday in fact), Clear instituted some mechanism that attempts to rate limit users who pass an unspecified bandwidth usage threshold. If you trip their bandwidth-hog alarm, your connection drops from 6Mb to 0.25Mb download speeds, and this makes doing pretty much anything relatively impossible... the speed is basically bumped below the throughput of a dialup modem from 1999. It is impossible to watch Netflix movies uninterrupted, and it's introduced some real problems when I try to play games or use VoIP services.
The intent is pretty obvious. Rather than scale up their bandwidth to accomodate a large influx of customers, they have chosen to ration out access. They were clearly assuming people would only be using the service to check email or maybe listen to a few mp3's... fools burning 30 hours a week on movies and video games will quite easily wreck that business model. The problem is that rather than cap me at the speed I've paid for, they serve up more than I paid for (12Mb) until I hit this limit, and then slap on a draconian limit to punish me for the amount of traffic I've pushed. From my point of view, I have very little to show for it since most of the bandwidth is from dynamic services (ie, Netflix and WoW) rather than from downloading files.
It's basically akin to flipping on the TV to discover that the cable company is only going to let you watch public access channels and CSPAN because you've spent entirely too much time watching HBO this month.
This is a total deal breaker for me. I don't really care about throughput so long as it's greater than 1Mb. I'd be happy taking a price break and using the slower service to having my provider suddenly and without any warning yank my leash for violating rules I don't understand and have no way of monitoring. Unfortunately for Clear, the faster (and cheaper) solution is to just cancel the account and install DSL service rather than give them "a month" to iron out the bugs in their rate limiting ubersystem.
Sunday, July 4, 2010
uml deadend or why your proprietary file format is a really, fantasically bad idea
So, I'm working on a project. Pretty big SQL setup, lots and lots of complexities. Good news is that the whole thing is described well with a "UML" document. There is also a tool in place to generate SQL-like stuff for MS SQLServer, but it takes advantage of some of MS SQL's quirks in the code it generates.
What I'd like to do is take the UML document as input, and have it spit out a bunch of ORM files for me in another language and just let the ORM's framework worry about the messy SQL details for whichever database ends up being used. Not only would this be (slightly) less tedious than manually building up the objects by hand, it would have the benefit of making the UML document a single point where the database could be managed in the abstract and I could get on with doing the stuff that's more computer sciencey and less data enterishy.
But. I can't. Because the UML file was created with a very feature rich UML editor that lets you draw really nice and really well annotated diagrams, but locks it all up inside of a very non-UMLish file format. And for the icing on the cake, the company that made the editor closed up shop in May and has decided to not only stop taking orders for their software but providing the free evaluation download as well.
From my point of view, this makes the file just as programmatically useful as a jpeg picture of a diagram of the database layout. The tedious grunt work of examining the diagram and manually hacking it all together is unavoidable, which means that now we've introduced the chance of documentation skewing away from the implementation. Inadvertent forks from last minute bugfixes or poorly communicated design changes are now on the table.
All because a software developer thought his method for storing UML data was better than just using simple UML, and that his clever method would assure him of job security.
Wrong on both counts, mang.
And now we're both hosed.
Just stick with the standards, people. Please?
What I'd like to do is take the UML document as input, and have it spit out a bunch of ORM files for me in another language and just let the ORM's framework worry about the messy SQL details for whichever database ends up being used. Not only would this be (slightly) less tedious than manually building up the objects by hand, it would have the benefit of making the UML document a single point where the database could be managed in the abstract and I could get on with doing the stuff that's more computer sciencey and less data enterishy.
But. I can't. Because the UML file was created with a very feature rich UML editor that lets you draw really nice and really well annotated diagrams, but locks it all up inside of a very non-UMLish file format. And for the icing on the cake, the company that made the editor closed up shop in May and has decided to not only stop taking orders for their software but providing the free evaluation download as well.
From my point of view, this makes the file just as programmatically useful as a jpeg picture of a diagram of the database layout. The tedious grunt work of examining the diagram and manually hacking it all together is unavoidable, which means that now we've introduced the chance of documentation skewing away from the implementation. Inadvertent forks from last minute bugfixes or poorly communicated design changes are now on the table.
All because a software developer thought his method for storing UML data was better than just using simple UML, and that his clever method would assure him of job security.
Wrong on both counts, mang.
And now we're both hosed.
Just stick with the standards, people. Please?
Friday, May 28, 2010
screw you, firefox tab complete!
For some reason that is completely unfathomable to me, the URL that's shown as hilighted in firefox's URL window can get out of sync with options that show up in the drop down menu of possible alternatives, yet firefox gives preference to the drop down menu when you hit the TAB key to complete.
Case in point: I want to go to gmail. I start typing in "http://www.g" and the drop down shows up. The first thing its got highlighted is "http://www.google.com/", which makes sense. I next hit "m" (so what I got in the URL window is "http://www.gm")... the text in the URL window goes ahead and auto-completes out to "http://www.gmail.com", BUT the drop down highlight remains on "http:"//www.google.com/").
So when I hit ENTER, I'm being queried for a search string instead of looking at my inbox.
I sigh and once again curse my blazing fast touch typing skills and lightning quick ENTER key pressing reflex. So I go fumble around for the mouse, point the stupid pointer over the URL, double click to highlight the entire URL, hit BACKSPACE, and... we go back to where I said "Case in point:" up above.
Repeat 3-4 times until I finally am able to remember to force myself to stop and wait for the drop down to catch up and get to my email so I can read the latest chain letter my old high buds have forwarded to me.
KAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHNNNN! \o|
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