The problem is we can not see the driveway from inside the house, so the solution I chose was to mount a camera outside and then have a dedicated raspberry pi (and some open source software) show the drive\ way in the house. It turned out pretty good.

I tried using google's nest camera, but I found that it did not work well for this application. Namely, it did not like always streaming content.

The Camera is a SV3C 5MP Wifi camera. I ended up hard-wiring it via ethernet. It gets it's power over the ethernet cable. The camera cost about $65 off Amazon.

I used the raspberry pi that I got as part of a kit off Amazon. "Vilros Raspberry Pi 4 4GB Complete Kit with Clear Transparent Fan Cooled Case" The kit was $99. I vaguely recall the fan was too noisy.

I had to fiddle some with the software to get it to start up and run the web application in fullscreen automatically. I hope it never breaks because it will take some googling to refigure that out.

This is such a rare finished project, I figured I better document it.... some. I hope you enjoyed this ramble.

On October of 2017, I purchased a Canon printer off amazon for $250. It seemed like a great choice for escaping the Ink cartridge scam of pricy ink. It comes with refillable ink wells filled with 2 years worth of ink!

ALAS NOT SO FAST, the printer includes a non-replacable, non-serviceable ink pad (aka the ink absorber) - which lasts about 2 years - then the printer is ready for the landfill - according to Canon Support.

Very very disappointed!

• did not escape the costs of ink cartridge scams
• did loose money on printers / ink
• did contribute to the environmental disaster of a disposable society

Creating shoddy products like this, should be illegal. Class action lawsuit? Buyer beware.

switch(num){
       7:  System.out.println("seven");
          break; 
       3: System.out.println("three");
           break;
       default: 
        System.out.println("deffy");
}

(case 7 (println "seven")
          3 (println "three")
          (println "deffy") )
    

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

Pulled the trigger on my office @system76 order... i7-3820 - 32GB Ram - 240Gig SSD - $2500 Can't wait... I'm sure I will code faster.

Leopard Extreme ( leox3 ) 	Quantity: 1 	Price Per Item: $2,466.00 	$2,466.00
Base System Price 	$1,399.00
Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit 	
5 Free GB of Ubuntu One Online Storage and Sync 	
2nd Generation Intel Core i7-3820 3.60 GHz L2 10 MB - 4 Cores with Hyperthreading 	
32 GB - 8 x 4 GB - Corsair Vengeance Quad Channel DDR3 - 1600 MHz 	+$199.00
1 GB nVidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti 	+$135.00
240 GB Intel 520 Series SATA III 6 Gb/s Solid State Disk Drive 	+$499.00
CD-RW / DVD-RW Dual Layer LightScribe Drive 	+$39.00
3 Yr. Ltd. Warranty and 3 Yr. Technical Support 	+$195.00
Shipping & Handling 		$64.20
Order Total: 	$2,530.20
            

I had to look this up twice, so here is a note to self... To add a custom program or shell script to the unity launcher do this

gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ~/Desktop

I put together a quick Android application to display which stamps are rare in the McDonalds Monopoly game. I dont visit McD's often, but I wouldnt want to throw away a million dollars either.

Snapshot of Rare Monopoly Stamp application

      // Groovy web server using only the JDK in 8 lines please
import com.sun.net.httpserver.*;
HttpServer server = HttpServer.create(new InetSocketAddress(2222),0)
server.createContext('/', { HttpExchange exchange ->
    exchange.sendResponseHeaders(200,0);
    exchange.responseBody.write('hello from groovy land.'.bytes)
    exchange.responseBody.close();
}  as HttpHandler)
server.start();
    

Crystal misplaced her phone charger, but we still had one for the car.... I was thinking how nice it would be to have a 12 volt car adapter for the wall... Hello monoprice.com!!! , I love those guys...

I created and placed in the market Car Cast Pro . I also updated the web page with a little more information about Car Cast. Car Cast Pro is $2.99 (about the cost of a beer.)

iPad apps that I recommend

I'm very lucky to get a free phone from google as a part of the Developer Seeding program.

Alas I didnt get the one I wanted. Hopefully the Android Device Exchange can help everyone in this situation!

ipad is cool ... even if apple is not.

Scary and True ...

Does anyone else have this problem? ...

UPDATE: Nov 4th, I'm booked till April, 2009

I'm seeking new full-time or part-time consulting work in the Boston area using some combination of Groovy, Grails, Griffon, Android and/or Java. I enjoy building stuff.

I've had loads of fun this year with both Grails and Android. With heaps of Grails, I helped modernise a innovative problem solving web site, innocentive.com . I also launched an Android Podcast Player, Car Cast . Thanks!!

I hack lots of small stuff together using the Groovy and Grails Consoles (using Groovy 1.5.x and Grails 1.0.3 - I know, I know... old versions...) A handy way to make your script so that it can be interrupted is to simply insert "Thread.sleep(0)" in any loop your doing. When you send it an interrupt the Sleep will throw a runtime and stop your script.

      while(true){
    println 'getting wiki text'
    new URL('http://wiki').text
    Thread.sleep(0)
}
    

find x ...

Regrets...

I just like this image

I finally took the plunge and put Car Cast in the Android Market. Whoo Hoo, the new phone books are here!! Car Cast is a BETA podcast downloader and player. Optimized for use in a daily commute, it features big buttons, large text, remembers last played location. Give it a try!!

I'm thinking of buying a new system to replace jadn.com (and/or for use in my consulting business). The image has the specs. Any comments?

I've been working on my own podcast application, CarCast ,... and just announced so has GOOGLE, http://listen.googlelabs.com/ Queue big and scary music!!! Yikes. I think my own feeble attempt might just be crushed....

Actually though, they do some things well, but some things I think CarCast does better.... The road has room enough for more than 1 type of car... So I'm going to continue tinkering on CarCast.

"Todd Finch, Dell senior product marketing manager, said the number of Linux returns are approximately the same as those for Windows netbooks. He categorized the matter of returns as a 'non-issue.' 'They are making something of nothing,' he said of Microsoft's claims."

The Grails Console is a handy way to try and tinker with stuff. If you switch back to your editor/IDE and change a domain or controller class, the console restarts. This is good, but it drops all the tinkering that you were doing. That can mean a loosing quite a bit of work.

At a coworkers suggestion, I tried modifying the Grails Console to save the current text during a restart. This is what I did and it works. Edit $GRAILS_HOME/scripts/console.groovy and replace the existing monitorCallback with this one

      monitorCallback = {
            def text = console.inputArea.text
            println "Exiting console"
            console.exit()
            println "Console had ---\n$text\n---"
            createConsole()
            println " Restarting console"
            console.run()
            // wait for inputArea to be constructed
            Thread.sleep(500)
            console.inputArea.text = text
        }
    

Whew! Someone is working on the Android client for Pandora. I've really gotten used to Pandora, sorry imeem. Woot Woot Pandora.

A friend of mine says

We are a small company in Waltham, Massachusetts looking for a full-time Grails contractor for 3 months (Q3). Even a talented J2EE contractor could be of interest (with a passion for learning new technology), although a Grails developer would be our first priority.

Just like the first start up task is designing the tee shirt, I'm spending time tinkering with the logo for a program that is still pretty much a hacky prototope... ah well. Here's a New Icon for CarCast. CarCast is an mp3 player that's designed to be used in the car during a typical commute.

Some screen shots of my Android application, Car Cast ... it is still a work in progress... but it is fun!!

So this is how swine flu spreads ...

A buddy of mine, @cutshot , is looking for a part time (1-3 month) Groovy developer to help out with a project. Any groovy people in the Boston Area looking for some work?

Time Saving idea ...

Interesting article, Secrets of social site success

This is a nice mock poster.

Two interesting things I found today.

First Thing

I use IntelliJ a lot when working on Grails and Groovy projects. Since IntelliJ doesn't have Eclipe's quick overview feature (Control-o), I do a lot of searhing when using IntelliJ. Alas the incremental search in IntelliJ, marks stuff yellow... and it doesnt clear it when you change your search. After a few searches your file is too yellow too look at. To clear all the highlighting, just hit escape twice. (thanks Ed for finding this one.)

Second Thing

I wanted to display how long it took to process something, but I wanted it to be readable by humans.

ie. Loading data took 1h 3m 33s

Loading data took 28882 seconds

Although I still wish I had a nice solution that would just do days.

println daysAgo( new Date(0) )

30 years, 2 months and 12 days ago

      (copy/pasted from elsewhere)
Dear World:

We, the United States of America, your top quality supplier of ideals of
democracy, would like to apologize for our 2001-2008 interruption in
service. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service outage
has been located, and the software responsible was replaced November 4.
Early tests of the newly installed program indicate that we are now
operating correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional on January
20. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage. We look
forward to resuming full service and hope to improve in years to come.

We thank you for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
    

I bought a Google Phone from craigs list. I really like it. I'm using it with the pay as you go t-mobile plan (10 cents a minute for voice, no data plan.) I use a wifi connection at home and at work to use the applications with the network. It's really a great device, and a no brainer if you are a Java Developer with an interest in carrying around some power in your pocket.

A funny tee shirt from BustedTees.com , it is titled Don't Drink or Drive ... Some of their tee shirts are offensive, but lots of them are funny.

Buy American ...

Make commuting (or treadmill time) fun with a groovy podcast downloader

I've received quite a bit of feedback on my earlier release of my groovy podcast downloader script. I've folded in this feedback.

Take a spin at http://github.com/bherrmann7/podcast-get/tree/master/src/pget.groovy Enjoy!! Please send along feedback! bob@jadn.com

I use a small Groovy script to download podcasts into a single directory. It numbers the files uniquely and they can be simply copied to any mp3 player (for my long commute.) It uses an array of podcast urls as it's source. It keeps track of what is downloaded (so you dont get the same podcasts over and over.) You can stop the script and edit and re-run it (tweaker friendly). Rerunning is safe because it doesn't update the history until the end and it skips already downloaded files.

I wanted to try out git hub, so I posted it there. I'm interested in all feedback.

Download it at http://github.com/bherrmann7/podcast-get/tree/master/src/pget.groovy

Groovy's Grape looks wicked cool, but I didn't have much luck getting it going (posted on stackoverflow) . Anyone else have success?

Open Source Therapy by Nat Torkington . The talk covers, "Open Source finds itself at a midway point in its existence, with unresolved trauma and an uncertain future. Join noted open source psychologist Dr Nat as he works through these issues and, hopefully, helps open source achieve stability." I found it very funny. I'm sure it applies to the Rails and Grails community as well.

Grails scaffolding generates list.gsp pages with tables. The default style when mousing over items in the list highlights the row. This provides nice feedback to the user about which row they are "selecting", but if a user clicks, nothing happens. This little tweak makes the click do the reasonable thing (which is drill down on the item clicked on.) In list.gsp, change

<tr class="${(i % 2) == 0 ? 'odd' : 'even'}">

<tr class="${(i % 2) == 0 ? 'odd' : 'even'}" onclick='window.location = "show?id=${YourBean.id}"'/>

Get Job Done is a slick site for matching people and projects. Similar to grailscrowd.com , but "Get Job Done" is for all kinds of technology stacks. "Get Job Done" was written using Grails! Sweet...

Pandora rocks. Not sure I will ever play one of my CDs ever again. It is like a radio station that only plays music that you like. My profile at Bob's Pandora Profile

I was looking at te grails crowd website, grailscrowd.com and I discovered grailsjobs.com/ . I wonder if either will get enough interest to make finding consulting grails work easy? I know about, workingwithrails.com and I think it must do wonders for the Ruby guys.

I've started Twittering using Twirl...

Cute...

On Ubuntu I sometimes need to run the Turbo Tax Runtime (aka. Windows Vista), I recently installed the GPL Virtualbox from Sun Microsystems. It works great! and only took a few steps;

      $ sudo apt-get install virtualbox
$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.24-19-generic
$ sudo addgroup bob vboxusers
$ virtualbox
    

I found this pretty moving. The youtube link is, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

I listen to podcasts on the way to and from work. Right now my favorite podcast is the stackoverflow podcast with Joel On Software

They have a summer reading list. Looks interesting.

      1. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
   2. Don?t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
   3. The Non-Designer?s Design Book
   4. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering
   5. Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully
   6. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
   7. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
   8. How to Win Friends & Influence People
    

Got an interesting email today

      Please consider this position below, they are interviewing 10 people, and selecting 6.
 
The will HIRE OVER THE PHONE MONDAY 5/19!!!!!

Job details:

    * 6 contract positions
    * 2-6 month contracts
    * 3 internal projects that need to be developed rapidly 

    * Exclusive contract opportunities until Monday, 05/19
    * Up to 10 block interviews Monday, 05/19 

    * Prefers candidates to work locally, but will allow partial to 100% telecommuting
    * Will hire off of phone interviews
    * Must have documented experience using Groovy/Grails ?? please reference check all candidates
    * H1Bs with good comm skills are acceptable 

    * If we can??t find enough Groovy/Grails candidates, we will change the focus
      to Ruby on Rails.  We need to make this decision by Thursday morning. 

CJ Liles
Technical Recruiter - Technology Flex
Kforce Professional Staffing

2201 E. Camelback Road, Suite 405

Phoenix, AZ 85016

602-776-1179 (ph), 602-264-6969(fax)

We grow by referrals so please don't keep me a secret!

Cliles@Kforce.com

www.kforce.com

Great People = Great ResultsSM  

 

Join my network http://www.linkedin.com/in/cjliles
    

Going to buy a book? I always check AddAll before making a purchase. They seem to always find the best deal. I was at Barnes and Nobel looking at Groovy book. B&N wanted $40+ for the book, but I found it via AddAll for $23.03 with shipping. Ordered. The book was "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" by Venkat Subramaniam. Sweet!

I like Grails and Groovy. I do get to use it some in my current gig. Since I'm a consultant, I need to always think about my next gig... How do I find people and projects that are using Grails/Groovy? I know some people are working on a directory ( grailscrowd.com ) and I know other technologies have nice directories ( workingwithrails.com ), but I'm also impatient and like to noodle around, hence Grails Fishbowl .

But I recently discovered that linkedIn has a Grails User Group. I'm wondering why can't I just use that. Although I haven't figured out quite how to find the Grails User Group's list of people... but won't linkedIn do a much better job of this than me and my dinky hobby site?

Did anybody get their IntelliJ license after attending 2GX? I went online and did what I was supposed to do - but I haven't heard a peep from JetBrains or 2GX. I intend to start using it for the Grails work that I do. Anybody else had any luck?

Would it be good to have a site that registers people's Grails/Groovy skills? It would be a networking site for finding and locating people who have G/G skills for possible question answering and or finding/helping (full time/consulting) with groovy/grails work or small fun projects.

Does anyone think this would be a good thing? (comment, or send email bob@jadn.com) I presume it would be a non-for-profit free to join kind of thing. And the code and data for the site would be open. That would mean you could host your own Russian version if you wanted to - etc...

Today's the last day of the 2GX Conference. The conference was/is very good. The food has been amazing!! The conference has been like going to 8 Java user group meetings in a row... Two Ninety minute presentations on Thursday, four on Friday, and now the final two today... There is also a "coding jam" type thing to end the conference, which I'm looking forward to. Coming to this conference was a good idea.

I'm going to the Groovy/Grails Experience this week! I'm looking forward to it. I plan to learn a lot. I'm curious about approaches for handling legecy SQL systems. How the plugin system works. Some more detail on creating DSLs. I'm also interested in Eclipse and Maven integration. It will all be goodness.

I find this image amusing...

The second OLPC that I ordered was scheduled to arrive today. I tracked it being put on the truck . I was waiting for the driver to arrive, and then it happended. "Order canceled" showed up on the tracking site. A quick call to FedEx says that Brightstar canceled/recalled the order 2 days ago (1/30/2008). I think I'm going to just give up on this OLPC thing.

Well. I didn't hear anything from OLPC (I've contacted them numerous times, to no avail.), so on the last day allowed to make purchases (12/31) - I ordered another OLPC. I did file a claim with FedEx, they rejected it saying OLPC must make a claim. I expect the second order to arrive with no problems. I started the dispute process with my CC company for the first OLPC.

I figured I would fill out the FedEx claim form just for fun (for my missing OLPC pc - see below.) So I printed out the claims form PDF. When I called FedEx to get my "claim control number", they were surprised that would be filling out the claim. The FedEx claims lady said 9 out of 10 times the sender submits the claim. She said they usually deny the claim when it is submitted by the recipient. She said even if they do allow the claim, that they will send the refund to the sender unless the sender sends FedEx a letter stating that I should receive the refund. Super.

Well hopefully I will get the call from the OLPC Donor Services manager today or early tomorrow and they are going to take all this pain away.

Otherwise I guess I can call American Express and see what options they offer me....

I called OLPC's "Donor Services" this morning around 8:15 or so. I had advised them that I called already on Friday and that I was looking to hear something like "We will file a claim with FedEx, and your replacement laptop is being sent immediately." Alas, Daisy said that her supervisor will call me later today or early tomorrow. So I will keep my cell phone with me at all times :-)

Where's my OLPC?

The OLPC project got it's own youtube channel... sweet. http://youtube.com/user/OLPCFoundation

There is a OLPC meetup group forming with plans to meetup and discuss modding and hacking the OLPC XO laptop. The group is named MOD the XO Laptop

Woo hoo! I ordered an XO machine!! Sweet!

One annoying thing about using "ssh" is that it clears the screen when you disconnect. A lot of times I find I want to cut/paste something or just see something that I was just doing remotely. It finally dawned on me today that an easy way to avoid this problem is to just "disconnect" and not "logout". You can disconnect using the key sequence "~." and disconnecting doesn't clear the screen. Small potatoes for nearly everyone on the planet, but man - I find that nice.

Way back in 2003, Crystal and I went on our Honeymoon. We've been pretty busy so I only am posting the photos now...
For our Honeymoon , Crystal and I chose to go to Aruba. We were there for a week starting on Monday May 19, 2003.

Found some Old Old Photos! from way back in 2003

If you develop web applications in Java, watij.com is pretty darn cool. It allows you to write Java code which drive Internet Explorer's interface. This allows you to write Java unit tests that drive the web browser. The JSSH plugin for Firefox allows you to script Firefox as well.

This is a neat library, called IUI for creating web applications (javascript) that resemble the interface of the iphone. Nifty.

I bought 5 DVD Players. I backup DVDs using k9copy on Ubuntu. Mostly I backup titles that my kids watch in the car. The backups play fine in my kids Audiovox two screen DVD player, but the backups didn't play in my 4 year old living room player. So I went to walmart and bought a cheapy Magnavox DVD player, my DVDs still wouldnt play. Go get slightly different model. No dice. So then I buy three DVD players from Target and my disks play fine in the second one that I open. It is this one here. I return all the others. Sheesh....

Jadn.com is now running on Ubuntu , a very friendly version of Linux... We finally moved off Fedora 4, which was getting very old. After trying out Ubuntu on Crystals machine for a few months, I finally decided to try it on the server. Basically it has been a delight.

A new version 1.21 of jbum is out. I implemented my first Groovy feature (I had already added the Groovy console in to jbum for development testing - see the help menu.) The feature is "Order images by filename" which was 20 lines of Groovy. Very cool.

These are pretty funny if you do web technologies. The funniest part is usually the endings.... wait for it... (Press the little triangle on the lower left of each video to watch them in-page)

Nice little cartoon about usability.

click on the cartoon for a slightly larger version

This is a snapshot of my brother's Desktop. You can see that Peter is quite the artist.

Handy FireFox plugin.... Download Status Bar (useful if you download stuff and get tired of the Downloads window)

My sister got married!!! WHOO HOO!!! GO SCOTTY AND DEE. I posted some photos.... (also mentioned on the kids page )

There is an interesting article on eweek, Python Slithers into Systems , which talks about what ITA does (I work @ ita.)

A good mock interaction, The S stands for Simple , that helps explain why I shy away from web services (It is too complicated and it hurts my gentle head.)

Is this an Amiga Emulator? Your talking crazy talk!

I just started playing with Groovy . It's pretty cool. Bought the Groovy in Action book, and I'm still working my way through it.

Mackie is almost 1 year old!!! Some photos of Mackie test driving his first cupcake

My father sent me some shots of the snow around their house

For Christmas this year, I made Crystal a photobook from the pages on the kids web site. She loved it. I printed the book, Liam and Max Herrmann 2006 , at lulu.com

I used a program I wrote to generate the pdf. If you want to know more about how I did it, shoot me an email.

I went to a nejug.org talk on Javascript. Mostly review for me, but covered a few interesting points and had some fun quotes. I like this one the best,

...Waldemar Horwat...lead Javascript developer... [at] Netscape... considered Javascript to be just another syntax for Common Lisp

Some phone camera shots taken at my office and on the ride home

I took some shots with my new phone in December. Its a Motorola V325i which is verizon wireless most basic phone. I used the open source program bitpim to extract the photos (and thus avoid paying the carrier a toll).

Updated Jblog.sf.net ... Added ability to use a local file as the "blog image"... handy for posting little snippets, and for when posting images off the desktop... needs a little more tweaking to be really useful.

If you develop web applications, go install the new firebug beta....

Intersting quote,

The faithful do resist the bogus certainties of religion??when they come from any religion but their own. Every Christian knows what it is like to find the claims of Muslims to be deeply suspect. Everyone who is not a Mormon knows at a glance that Mormonism is an obscenely stupid system of beliefs. Everyone has rejected an infinite number of spurious claims about God. The atheist simply rejects one more.

Synergy ROCKS!! Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

If you develop web applications, Selenium IDE - a open source firefox plugin - rules. It lets you record and playback sessions with firefox. Excellent for testing a web application or performing some routine web browser task. Very cool!

My father continues to work on his Farm House located on his Christmas Tree Farm .

Should we be teaching religion in school? Should the Church of the Flying Spagetti Monster 's belief's be covered? Something to think about?

ITA Software ranked as #27 in Deloitte's New England Technology Fast 50. Sweet.

I made some progress on the basement this month. I took some photos of the Basement progress . NOTE: I made this photo page using a new version of jbum , if you have any problems viewing the page, let me know! Thanks!

I love this place. I sent a request for an extra battery for my laptop this morning. In about 10 minutes, I got a reply from the IT department that asked where I sat so they could bring it to me. When I went down their to pick it up, they apologized to me for not bringing it to me directly. ITA is oriented towards making developers comfortable and productive. Wow. Anyway, I have code to write...

ITA is in the news, ITA Software signs deal with Air Canada I work @ ITA. Nifty. [ More bizjournals.com ]

A friend of mine works at www.heliumknowledge.com . I think the site is an interesting start. Trying to solve the information discovery or findability problem, but from a different angle. (The Q and A angle.) I'm interested in what other people think about this site.

if you really want to see Microsoft scramble to patch a hole in its software, don't look to vulnerabilities that impact countless Internet Explorer users or give intruders control of thousands of Windows machines. Just crack Redmond's DRM. Read about Microsoft's Quickest Patch Ever

What would you do with 700 million dollars? How about create a Linux distribution? Interesting article Really Free Software

Playing with uploading video to video.google.com (since youtube's upload api doesnt seem to exist.) This is the same video that I uploaded to youtube.

Have the courage to take your own thoughts seriously, for they will shape you.
-- Albert Einstein

ummm... Cywgin good

Ok, Dvorak Is the last straw... I am finally going to try youtube.com. Here is small video of the Bean. When he was about 1 year old, I was giving him raspberry's and he responds. Ignore the sound of the cloths dryer in the background.

Happy 2nd Birthday Bean!!! I can't believe he's two years old already!

I fixed the RSS dates (after using http://feedvalidator.org/ to find out my rss feed had issues.)

I've just started trying out the FireFox 2.0 Beta 1 and I love it. How did I live without spell checking??? (It does the red squiggly line when you misspell)

Not too long ago I added rss feeds to jbum (the software that powers this blog), but I manged to botch it up a few days later.

Well, RSS should be working again. I've been noodling with a different client (since RSSOWL has problems on Linux - thats SWT for ya.) My rss client of choice is now liferea it is very good.

Note: the main rss feed is now http://jadn.com/~bob/all.rss

Google keeps and hosts videos of Google Tech Talks made at their campus. Cool...

My parents are involved in a Rotary Club back home, so I was suprised to hear that Muslim fundamentalists don't like Rotary Clubs. But once you read the story (or I listened to it as a podcast on my way into work), you can understand how the situation arose. The Rotarian Menace

This Linux logo rocks ... from a story about Apple Hates Grandmothers ... or basically about how proprietary sucks.

I added categories to JBlog (The software I wrote to generate this site.) Some testing is still in order, but it should also be generating rss feeds for each category. I want to stick my site into a planet site, and I really need categories for this.

JavaOne 2006 conference slides and audio are online - Woo Hoo!

Lots of geeky internet types are moving from Mac's to Linux (including one famous guy who has a mac tatoo, Cory Doctorow .) This guy, Mark, posted some advice about Linux programs that correspond to Mac ones. Even though I'm a die hard linux guy, I found his post, Essentials, 2006 edition , recommended a program or two that I need to check out...

Well the winds of chance of changed, and now I'm heading off to work for www.ITASoftware.com . They apparently do lots of stuff with Linux/Lisp/Java . So I should fit right in. I found an article, Carl de Marcken: Inside Orbitz , which seems to give some real details of how the business works there.

At lunch today, I was on my Microsoft is evil shtick, someone suggested I go Apple. I explained that, to me, Apple is just like a mini-Microsoft. But a blog post by Mark Pilgrim, When the bough breaks , does a much better job of explaining why I don't embrace Apple.

When people hear Free and/or Expensive - they usually think of money, but I usually relate them to freedom and time. I use Linux not because it costs nothing, but because it gives me freedom (to make any changes I want.) I don't avoid commercial software because it costs money, I avoid it because it doesn't do what I want and it costs me more to work around it's annoyances. (Google Toolbar spellcheck rules.)

I installed the Google Toolbar, because it was on http://blog.russnelson.com 's site. And I know Russ is both smart and very savvy. So I thought I'd try it out. I love the fact that it gives you spell checking in Web Forms!! Since I can barely spell, its hugely helpful!! Give it a spin yourself.

I've been using the RSSOwl program for a few months now. I really like it - it helps me stay on top of whats going on. I track these sites myrss.html and the same list in opml format .

An interesting advertisement http://www.bobscube.com/ and a good use of flash.

Another thing I hate is these online photo services who let you upload high res photos, then only let you share them in a online photo album as low res photos. Shutterfly bad!

I find Ben Stein interesting. He wrote a short article about getting ahead, How to Succeed in Hollywood -- and Anywhere Else . He is pushing his book, but an enjoyable article none the less.

I do the occasional JavaScript development. I was surprised this weekend when debugging some JavaScript to find that FireBug , already an excellent FireFox development tool, now includes a JavaScript debugger. Wow! Works great!

Well, I used Ruby on Rails - and some JavaScript including using the Prototype library to layer on a commenting system on to my blog. It's pretty simple (so be nice.) It's kinda of neat that the page itself is still static html, the comment system is layered on as an AJAX application.

Classmates.com and linkedin.com are interesting social network sites. But I hate when they try to hold you hostage. For example, I wanted to email someone in LinkedIn and I get this....

Contact SOME PERSON directly through InMail?? To send an InMail now, upgrade your account or purchase individual InMail credits.

Intersting article on rails, What's the secret sauce in Ruby on Rails?

Finally a public TCPMonitoring utility.... I can't even remember how many of those I'v written over the years.... why didnt I opensource any of mine? I think they were small hacks.... Yea, I know eclipse/wtp has one built in - but I like small little utilities that have source code - so I can go in an beat it when needed....

If you know what Linux is, then you should check out this awesome user testimonial . Game on.

A strange but interesting article It Doesn't Take an Einstein to Realize Why Microsoft Is Headed Down and Google Is Headed Up

The tiobe site, http://www.tiobe.com/tiobe_index , shows how popular different programming languages are. Although I mostly do Java (21.316%), I'm learning both Ruby (0.456%) and C# (3.271%).

My good friend Greg asked me about an RSS feed for my page, so I added one. It is the feed.rss link near the top of the page.

RSS is most often used with a news reader. Since I wanted to test out my new feed.rss, I tried to find a decent free RSS client. I tried google's reader and I thought it sucked. Then I found RSSOwl and it rules! It's built on the eclipse engine so I'm not too surprised.

I added a smattering of kids photos to the kids page

Finally, the JavaOne 2005 presentations are completely online (slides and audio .) I've only ever been to one JavaOne, but sometimes I would like to attend a presentation (via the web), finally I can. This rules!

I now work for Miva.com as a senior architect (cloud-dweller). They do search and advertising stuff. I added the search box on blog home page Ads on the side of this page to toy with search/advertising stuff.

What exactly does Miva do? Well, from Miva's investor relations (Miva is a public company) here is a description;

MIVA's new media platform facilitates performance marketing for partners (publishers), advertisers and consumers (end-users). Our primary focus is on providing our partners with a complete set of innovative solutions enabling the acquisition, retention and monetization of their online audiences. For our advertisers, we provide solutions to manage, optimize and measure return on investment from keyword-targeted and context-related performance marketing programs. We generate traffic and leads to our advertisers through our network of publisher partners. Our integrated e-commerce merchant solutions allow online stores to capitalize on leads by offering robust online storefront, shopping cart, shipping, and payment capabilities.

I designed the process for withdrawing money from an ATM. I created a class diagram , sequence diagram and an activity diagram . (I assumed the card holder only ever has 1 account.) Pretty cool.

I just got a Garman C320 for my wife (Happy Valentines day honey!) I've been in cars that have GPS systems before, but I was never the driver. And I was never familiar with the display. After having tinkered with my wife's for a few hours, and then used it in the car - I was blown away. It's just amazing to have all that additional information available. Its like having a symbolic debugger for your travel. After only using it twice, I feel naked when driving without one. The C320 was almost $400. Amazing.

I'm an advocate of open source software. My rational is simple. I want whats best for everybody and I think the best thing for everybody is open source. Closed source has advantages primarily for the proceducer of software (developers). Open source gives advantages to the users. Since there are usually many more users than developers, typically the common good is for the software's source to be freely available. Thus open source software is in the commmon good. Open source enables freedom. The freedom to change, modify, and redistribute. Even though most users (and most developers) never do drop down and make changes to open source software, we all benefit from the developers who do. In the same way all citizens have certain rights and even if they don't all exercize them, everyone benfits from everyone having those rights.

Two new entries on the Kids page , Max is arriving in the "Year of the Dog" and we cleared out the cameras of all of our fall shots.

My coworker says the real power in EJB3/Hibernate is in the associations. Just mapping an object to the database is good, but mapping an object graph is better. So I expanded Person to have a collection of Subscription. Like so,

              
                @Entity
              
              
                (
              
              
                access = AccessType.FIELD
              
              
                )
              
              
                
                  public class
                
              
              
                Person
              
              
                
                  implements
                
              
              
                Serializable
              
              
                {
              
              
                @Id
              
              
                String email;
              
              
                String name;
              
              
                @OneToMany
              
              (mappedBy = "email", cascade = CascadeType.ALL)
              
                List
                
                  subscriptions;
}

So then I had to create another class, Subscription....
                  
                    @Entity
                  
                  
                    (
                  
                  
                    access = AccessType.FIELD
                  
                  
                    )
                  
                  
                    
                      public class
                    
                  
                  
                    Subscription
                  
                  
                    {
                  
                  
                    @Id
                  
                  (generate = GeneratorType.AUTO)
      public Integer id;
      public String email;
      public String subject;
}
                
              
            

At work we are tied to WebSphere and thus jdk1.4. So for the past 2 years I haven't ventured out into the land of Java5 or EJB3. Well, I have a small project that I wanted to do here at home, so I decided to try out both Java5 and EJB3. After two hours of tinkering, I wrote a class named Person ;

              
                @Entity
              
              
                (
              
              
                access = AccessType.FIELD
              
              
                )
              
              
                
                  public class
                
              
              
                Person
              
              
                
                  implements
                
              
              
                Serializable
              
              
                {
              
              
              
                @Id
              
              
              
                String email;
              
              
              
                String name;
              
              }
            

I attended a NEGeeks dinner on Wednesday. It was cool to meet up with some other geeks and trade stories. I did learn one important thing. Never, if dared, agree to drink the contents of an upside down frisbee filled with beer. I turns out 5.5 cans of beer can be poured into such a vessel. Good to know!

The new fedora logo is cool. Its got the 'f' for fedora , and the infinity symbol for freedom forever. Swell.

We are expecting our second child in March. Do you guess boy or girl?

This site, http://reddit.com/ , is a cool geek site. It has user rated links to other interesting bits of geek news.

Seems like Sun is starting to get it. Back in 96, when I worked at Sun, I thought it was pretty simple. When Unix wins, Sun wins. So doing everything possible to promote Unix was good for Sun. Including open sourcing all products ( from Schwart's blog ) Seems they finally agree with me.. although did they leave out java?

Posted some photos of our trip to Disney on the kids page

Released 1.7 of jbum! Mostly this added the menu item "File/Order images by exif date". This takes your photos and arranges them by the date stored in the photo. This is really handy when you use more than one digital camera on a trip or multiple people use their cameras (say a birthday party) and you want to merge the results into one story.

The Bean turned one last weekend. One of my little projects was to do the artwork for a CD in the party favors. check it out

Updated the Bean's page with photos from our Family Vacation to Florida.

Some people visit their parents and enjoy the relaxing warmth of home. My fathers idea of warmth and comfort means asking me to help go out to the tree farm and burn some trees... In these photos, you can see that the warmth part was pretty covered!

If you know Javascript, then check out greasemonkey . It lets you modify webpages by injected javascript into every loaded page. It's crack

UPDATE 05/17, there's now a story on wired about greasemonkey

I wonder if I will be like this when the bean is older...

I updated the Bean's Page with some pictures of him and his pals

My home town, Rome New York, has an Amtrack Train station. My father snapped some photos at the dedication today... go pop!

I updated the bean's page with photos from Maine and St Patrick's day...

Let us realize that the privilege to work is a gift, that power to work is a blessing, that love of work is success. -David O. McKay

Well, after getting the top replaced... I had the new car for three days and then I got into a fender bender. Oops... It was just after a big snow storm and the roads were a little slippery.... Ah well, accidents happen.... I should soon have it all fixed up....

Woo Hoo, we get a new car... Here are some pics . Here is a pdf document showing exactly what I ordered. Happy Driving!

While visiting my parents, I took a trip up to my fathers Christmas tree farm to pick out a tree for Christmas. I took some pics.

A sometimes funny page, joy of tech had a funny anti microsoft image today... They have a new image every day....

Updated Liam's page with some shots of him at 5 and 6 weeks...

I updated my photo to web program, jbum.sf.net , fixed some more bugs, made it easier to use... enjoy!!

My father is getting city water... He sent me some photos of the water works . I like the heavy equipment... cool stuff..

An excellent essay... How Will Companies Ever Make Money Off Open-Source?

More farm house Rehab 5

I now have a son... see my son's page over here

I thought this is a funny comic

We get some Big Visitors in our neighborhood.

Some shots of the new desk for Crystal

My father sent out another update from Rome, New York...

Rehab 4 on the farm house

My father continues more work on his farm. I even helped with some of it.

• Rehab2 on the farm house
• Rehab3 on the farm house

Isn't retirement for rest?

I got a new gig at ph.com . I am helping move some Microsoft (C++/MTS/COM) stuff to Java.

My office is a desk in a hall way .... Crystal didn't believe me, this is my proof....

Here are some pictures from our four days in Florida for a much needed vacation... We stayed at the South Seas Resort on Captiva Island... A Fantastic Time!

My father is working a little project .... Nice to be retired.... although is this really "taking it easy" ?

Crystal and I did some yardwork (last weekend) and took a small hike in our back yard... Photos

If it doesn't have an open-source reference implementation, the term "standard" is an abuse of the language.
--Eric S. Raymond, from Q&A: Raymond Expounds on Open Letter to Sun, McNealy

I got a new camera. The nice thing about my new camera is it's small size. It is a Casio EX-M20U.

I cut up the card board boxes from babypea's crib and dressers into nice 2 foot by 3 foot strips. I bound them together with twine. Then I see the recycle guy come by and go, leaving my nicely bound and cut up behind... Sheesh... why do I bother... I felt like this cartoon.

If you program in Java, you must try it. Eclipse m8 is out. Eclipse rules.

Choosing a language for the Desktop.... Java, Mono, or C++? Naturally, I tend to favor java... but this Essay is an interesting overview.

Marc Andreessen, Netscape Co-Founder, 12 Reasons for Growth of Open Source

1. "The Internet is powered by open source."
   
2. "The Internet is the carrier for open source."
   
3. "The Internet is also the platform through which open source is developed."
   
4. "It's simply going to be more secure than proprietary software."
   
5. "Open source benefits from anti-American sentiments."
   
6. "Incentives around open source include the respect of one's peers."
   
7. "Open source means standing on the shoulders of giants."
   
8. "Servers have always been expensive and proprietary, but Linux runs on Intel."
   
9. "Embedded devices are making greater use of open source."
   
10. "There are an increasing number of companies developing software that aren't software companies."
    
11. "Companies are increasingly supporting Linux."
    
12. "It's free."

How much in our lives is real reflection, and how much is just spinning our wheels?

Quote: "A friend of mine once characterized the majority of computer scientists as people who would rather spend weeks of hard hacking than an afternoon in the library."

I wonder, am I more the *library* or more the *hack* type? I more likely to just take the afternoon off and search the web to see if someone has already done the 'hard hacking' :-)

We finally got our baby's web page started.... Woo Hoo!

My father recently took a walk through the snow in upstate new york to visit his Christmas Tree Farm he emailed along some photos of his recent walk. Updated the link My father put up a more detailed version.

"A witty saying proves nothing." --Voltaire

A quote from the Halloween 10 article, "The brave new SCOsource business model is now clear: sue your customers, shill for Microsoft, kite your stock, and pray you stay out of jail. "

Cute... (click on the image) "Something bad is about to happen...."

Good article about opensourcing Java . Much better than Eric's plea. I like this quote "A GPL-ed Java would be Microsoft's biggest nightmare."

An interesting interview ...

"Einstein once noted that an explanation should be as simple as possible, but no simpler. ... Explaining the world through a collection of objects is just too simple! The world is richer than what can be expressed with object-oriented syntax."

[Note: this has heavy programmer speak] Software today is all about complexity. Systems seem to grow until they are so complex that they collapse in on themselves. Something needs to be done to make things simpler... I think this Naked Objects is an interesting idea about how to use a framework that exposes all the details of your objects. I also like the idea of the user and developer having the same frame of reference. This stuff looks pretty neat. I think it will be important.

UPDATED - Pete finishes the floor!

My wife's office is getting a new floor . My brother Pete is doing the install. Go Pete!

Wow, I was mentioned in my buddy Bryan's weblog!!!

I thought it was funny that I mention his blog, he mentions mine, I mention that he mention mine. Funny because a lot of people reguard the entire blogging thing as pointless drivel... and I was kind of making fun of that. Too much subtlety.

My buddy Bryan finally got a blog . It's only got one entry so far, but way to go Bryan :) He mentions that he leased an Audi...

Interesting article, Why 802.11 is underhyped to quote, " With some 802.11 radio chips approaching $5 price points, Wi-Fi will likely be embedded in every electronic product under the sun. ... Make no mistake about it: 802.11, or one of its backwardly compatible descendants, will dominate the wireless communications sector over the next 10 years the same way the x86 architecture dominates computing and that Ethernet dominates networking. ".

This image from the Mars rover was just seconds before it started having problems.

I have been trying to learn and use UML for years... but it never seems to stick (other than the simpliest class and object interaction diagrams.) So, I like this quote...

"UML reminds me a lot of the old OSI seven-level network model: Everybody learned it, everybody referred to it, and everybody knew why it didn't apply to their particular situation." --Ed Nisley, Dr. Dobbs Journal, December, 2002, p. 74

Here is Our Weddding Announcement in the local Billerica newspaper.

Yea, this ran in the paper almost a year ago... Crystal has been sick (Flu?), so I have been catching up with my backlog of photos.

Well, this is our first Christmas in our house. Here are some shots of our first Christmas.

Here are some photos from our Griswald Family Vacation. The Gelinas Family somehow got the idea to go on a cruise for the week before Christmas. A good idea, warm sun and fun instead of shopping in the mall. The Gelinas's invited the Cameron Family. So we all went. It was good time, although the weather wasn't as sunny and warm as we would have have liked.

Sometimes I think I spend too much time on the computer... But then I look at see what other people do with thier free time ... and I think... maybe I am ok...

Well, jadn.com is finally back. I ended up returning 2 hard drives to Maxtor for replacemtent... lets see how long the replacement lasts....

A nice quote,
"Next time one of your non-tech friends asks for system advice, suggest a Mac. You'll be doing the entire world a favor." from this blog entry ... The blog entry is a comment on the register story I quoted 2 days ago.

I call my wife Sweet Pea . I had some fun using an image program to make an image of her as a sweet pea. I found it amusing.

I used the www.gimp.org to merge the images.

A interesting story about security, Joe Average User Is In Trouble Notable to me because I have started playing with Java's WebStart stuff. It is pretty cool.... I love this little quote (from the article)

"Do you update your anti-virus software regularly?" I'll ask them. Most look at me as though I'd just asked them if they refloozle their hossenblobbets with tinklewickets.

An interesting read, An Open Letter to Microsoft , suggests to Microsoft to play nice with Linux. Good idea.

My buddy Jerry's company got a write up. Interesting... Revivio Vies for Backup Bucks

I work for Sun Microsystems. They make Unix systems. Developers love Unix. But Sun seems to do so little to keep developers happy. I hate Microsoft, but Microsoft does such a good job of making developers happy . When will Sun rise to the occasion?

This article was pretty good... He focuses mostly on WiFi, but talks about the growth of technology in general.. I like this quote,

"Innovations happen when people have the opportunity to add value"

I recently got my father's web site, atree4u.com back up and running . It had been down since we got reset because of the hard drive crash. It looked to me like he updated his site since I last saw it... cool...

If you follow the Linux -vs- SCO, you might appreciate how funny I thought this was

"In an apparent oversight, SCO forget to issue a press release this morning asserting yet another ownership claim against parts of the Linux kernel. Worse, no one has filed a new lawsuit against SCO today or even offered to indemnify Linux users against this predatory company's actions."

Two weeks ago Crystal turned 30. We had a birthday part at a nice resturant in Boston. Here are some shots

I was suprised to hear today that the Apache Group is creating a new project in it's incubator. An open source EJB container... Yet another J2ee engine... wow. Seems kinda late to the game, but Apache's licensing terms might make this an attrative option for some companies.

We had a hard drive failure... Yikes!!! Luckily I had a backup, so everything got reset to early May. Ah well, maybe monthly backups would be a good idea.... humm...

I havent said anything thoughtful in a while.... how about " The unchallenged mind is fertile ground for the whims of any ideology "... I read a weblog by Dave Winer and he is always coming up with interesting insights.

I enjoyed reading the story C# is just Java?only a little worse , but I tend to like stories that strengthen my own beliefs.

On November 9th, 2002 Crystal and I got married. Here are the photos from the wedding ! Enjoy.

I read this article about Understanding the Psychology of Programming and it stuck with me. I think it was an interesting read. Enjoy. Kinda scary picture of the author...

My next geek toy has to be a Wrist PDA available this summer. It runs palm's OS which is an excellent PDA. The palm is great with storing appointments and ToDo lists. Plus it works well with linux - Sweet.

The Watertown NotYourAverageJoes has been my favorite restaurant of late. We tried the Arlington one, but weren't very happy. The "baked pasta" special in Arlington wasn't as good as the Watertown one. Disappointment. The Watertown version uses bow-tie pasta in a tomato and cream sauce that is very awesome. The Arlington version was a strange pasta with plain tomato sauce... boo...

Ah well, the new house in Tewksbury is far away from any Joes...

Only 10 days left before we move into Our new house , OH JOY!!!

A recent article in, "I, CRINGELY" entitled How to Avoid the Almost Certain End of Sun Microsystems was a interesting read. A bit scary for people who (like me) work at Sun... I have always felt Sun could do a lot better by making Solaris more like RedHat. RedHat bundles thousands of useful tools with their release, Solaris comes with almost nothing by comparison. It is a shame that Sun doesnt adopt a RedHat like approach to delivering functionality in/on Solaris.

If you are a linux user, then you should also find that switch to linux flash animation is hilarious. It mimic's the now famous "switch to mac" advertisements.

ZDnet has an interesting story on Blog's, " Blogs become key tools for developers "

Frank first mentioned the Shuttle PC after he read a review on Tom's Hardware . He was really excited about its small form factor and wide range of capabilities for a reasonable price. Some of his excitement rubbed off on me. And for Christmas I got one. (THANKS HONEY!!) The shuttle comes as just a case, power supply and mother board. I added;

I am visiting my buddie Bryan in NYC. I went to Linux expo on Friday for an hour or so, pretty boring. We went bar hopping last night, that was fun.

This here is an interesting story on a cloned kitten . I love the name of the company that did the clone, " Genetic Savings & Clone ." Kitty so cute.

A cute image :-)

Well, Linux World Expo is happening in NYC this week. So there should be lots of exciting Linux news!! Woo Hoo!!

I have a new contract with Sun Microsystems. I work on the Capacity Reporter part of Sun's networks storeage management software, ESM Suite. It is great to be back at Sun and cool to be learning about new technology.

Wow, this could be very cool... google doing a pricing engine.... froogle.com

Some people whine about how opensource will destroy the software industry. I have always felt this was incorrect but I couldnt eloquently explain my position... I like this quote from Russell Pavelick (who is quoting Doc Searls)

Imagine a housing market in which trees are scarce. In that market, much money is made by the few companies that control the expensive commodity called lumber.

But then imagine that someone discovers a nearby land with bountiful forests ready to supply vast quantities of inexpensive lumber. Suddenly, the once-lucrative lumber trade is no longer the virtual gold mine it once was. Instead, the home builder becomes the chief money maker in the new resource-plentiful housing market.

Has the discovery of cheap resources destroyed the housing market? Not at all. In fact, the new market is likely to flourish because more people will be able to afford new homes at significantly lower cost. Has the market been disrupted by the change? Yes, because those that build the total solution (the house) stand to make more money from higher volumes, while those that provide lumber will only make modest profits on building materials.

Open source does much the same thing to the software industry. It will no longer be possible to charge exorbitant prices for basic software resources. There still will be plenty of room for profit in services, solutions, and even highly specialized closed-source software. But the days of high prices for basic resources will come to a close.

Heard the film, Spiderman , is all that and a bag of chips. We rented the DVD, but we weren't blown away. Crystal liked it. I didn't enjoy that much, I felt let down.

Crystal and I are buying this house . We can't wait to move in!!! We close on Feburary 28.

My page is a weblog. I mimic'ed slashdot.org , my favorite site, in setting up the layout of my weblog....

Anyway, lots of people now have weblogs. The technorati site keeps track of which weblogs are the most popular. Pretty cool! You can check it out here, http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/top100.html Chock full of interesting reading.

Jerry and Gail had a BABY! I (per usual) snapped some shots

Crystal's Birthday was August 13th. To celebrate we all went to Crystal's favorite Lobster restaurant in Maine. And I shot some photos.

I just got a new toy! The Logitech Digital Camera, it works best in bright light (it has no flash.) Here are some sample shots

Some photos of the trip Crystal, Zuzu and I took to Rome right before the Fourth of July.

Took a trip to Rome, New York on Memorial Day weekend. Snapped some shots of my dad playing with his tractor and a tractor trailer that had overturned!

On Friday I took a canoe trip on the Charles River and snapped some pictures .

My sister's twins turned two years old and had a party. My father took the shots and built the page. Go Dad! They apparently rented a inflatable house for the kids to jump around in. Nifty!

As a big fan of AOL's instant messaging system, I found the article " My Two Cents on AOL's Blockings " very interesting. It explains when they have blocked clients and why.

Here is a picture of me during a camping trip with my father and his brother in May of 1970. I was four years old.

"[...] open source has the potential to bring the software industry back to the marketplace; following a decade in which one company determined what innovations would take place, when and at what price." ZDNET: Microsoft's spin on linux

First annoying Microsoft says something stupid

"Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer," Microsoft's operating systems chief Jim Allchin said, "I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business."
http://www.salon.com/tech/log/2001/02/15/unamerican/index.html

RedHat, a Linux vendor, Responds,

"I'd argue that a worldwide monopoly, enforced by business practices that a federal judge has found to be predatory and anti-competitive probably has more to do with killing innovation than anything the open source movement could ever do." Red Hat's CEO
from http://www.zdnet.com/sp/stories/news/0,4538,2689856,00.html

Richard Stallman rules! He says,

"The Free Software Movement was founded in 1984, but its inspiration comes from the ideals of 1776: freedom, community, and voluntary cooperation. This is what leads to free enterprise, to free speech, and to free software. "

Try out Voice of the Web . I have been helping to hack it for months now and it is ready!!

This Boston globe article ECONOMIC PRINCIPALS Gates vs. the poets kicks ass! Amazed that a print paper understands these issues.

IBM, it is now the policy of that company, announced by its president, [...] every new piece of software written at IBM must be issued under an open source license, unless the development managers can make a specific business case why that should not be.

About 400,000 people now use aggregation services that gather financial information, up eightfold this year, Marenzi says. With major banks and Web portals joining the fray, he predicts the total will double by year's end and reach 8 million by 2004.

[..] Microsoft defended its statements in court by saying its reference to defining the standard "is mere puffery upon which consumers cannot reasonably rely and, therefore, does not constitute false advertising." Whyte [the judge] then examined the legal basis of puffery, or "puffing," as it has been defined in earlier false-advertising cases. Whyte noted that "puffing" is an exaggerated, generalized or ambiguous claim and not "a statement of specific fact upon which a consumer would reasonably rely."

From this story

See his latest entry A few shots on the twins new birthday swings to see what I mean!

"Voracious Reader at Tender Age of 3 A tousle-haired Shakespeare fanatic who consumes as many as a dozen books on an extreme range of topics daily, Joy still browses in the local bookstore, even after becoming Amazon.com's second-largest individual customer."

I am overjoyed when I read a book a month. Sheesh...

My sister's twins are Christmas ready .

3 more baby pics right here

Ok, where do I find parties like that? I hope my next job is in a bigger box.

FYI!!! This is (NOT) an actual radio conversation between a United States Navy aircraft carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and Canadian authorities off the coast off Newfoundland in October, 1995. (The radio conversation was released by the Chief of Naval Operations on 10/10/95 as authorized by the Freedom of Information Act.)

Canadians: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: Recommend you divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.

Canadians: Negative. You will have to divert your course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.

Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.

Canadians: No, I say again, you divert YOUR course.

Americans: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS LINCOLN, THE SECOND LARGEST SHIP IN THE UNITED STATES ATLANTIC FLEET. WE ARE ACCOMPANIED BY THREE DESTROYERS, THREE CRUISERS, AND NUMEROUS SUPPORT VESSELS. I DEMAND THAT YOU CHANGE YOUR COURSE 15 DEGREES NORTH...I SAY AGAIN.....THAT'S ONE-FIVE DEGREES NORTH.... OR COUNTER-MEASURES WILL BE UNDERTAKEN TO ENSURE THE SAFETY OF THIS SHIP!!

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

Ok, that story is pure urband legend... Not too suprising, but someone did actually check;

I updated my Links to be the sites that I currently check daily... the old list was pretty beat.

      [ FYI, someone emailed me this, I didnt create it. -- lllike PLEASE ]

                                                Start with a cage containing five monkeys. In the cage, hang a banana
                                                on a string and put a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey
                                                will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the Banana.  As soon
                                                as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold
                                                water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same
                                                result --aaall the monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon,
                                                when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will
                                                try to prevent it.

                                                Now, Turn off the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and
                                                replace it with a new one.  The new monkey sees the banana and wants
                                                to climb the stairs.  To his horror, all of the other monkeys attack
                                                him.  After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to
                                                climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

                                                Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with
                                                a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The
                                                previous Newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm. Again,
                                                replace a third original monkey with a new one. The new one makes it
                                                to the stairs and is attacked as well.  Two of the four monkeys that
                                                beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs,
                                                or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

                                                After replacing the fourth and fifth original monkeys, all the monkeys
                                                which have been sprayed with cold water have been
                                                replaced. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs.
                                                 
                                                Why not?
                                                 
                                                Because that's the way it's always been around here. And that's how
                                                company policy begins....
    

MICROSOFT LINUX , say it isnt SO!

Another reason I was surprised to like this film is, I knew most of what was going to happen (ie. I saw the trailer). So I was surprised how much time I spent after the film mulling over all the things that were in play. The movie certainly provided some mental entertainment beyond just the smooth visuals and decent acting, it provided some paradoxes and situations that kept me thinking through stuff. Nifty.

Getting rid of Jerry's games put me into a spring cleaning mood. I finally got rid of all the boxes of books that I had lying around. The books are now sorted into four sections:

• Books to donate to the library (1 box)
• Reference Books (1 box)
• Books I enjoyed and want to keep (1 box)
• Books I should read (3 boxes)

So If I were now to set out and read a book a week (a blistering pace compared to my current rate of a book every month or so), I would be done in about 2 years. Woo Hoo!

• My hands need a rest (I have some RSI issues)
• As a consultant I can afford to take a few months off
• My brother Pete says, "I am rich powerful and lazy like the rich of the world"
• My brother Pete and house-mate Matt were looking for jobs and I envied their job free lives.
• Because I hate getting up on Monday's to go to work.
• I miss summer vacations.
• Because I can.

Here are some shots of my family and me at Christmas. Kooky!

I was expecting the Film to be a light hearted satire of the movie making business, but it was much darker film. It definitely did draw out the Hollywood scene, but the main character, played by Tim Robbins, was hard to identify with. For most of the film, he is "trapped" in a situation that he is unable to resolve. The situation slowly grows to nearly consume all his attention and then slowly wanes. For much of the film, he seems caught in a kind of low grade panic. The film does do this interesting thing of constantly reflecting upon itself (like the opening scene being one big shot.) Overall it was an enjoyable piece.

I didn't like part of the films ending, so I was pretty pleased to hear it discussed in the supplemental material. After hearing the producers thoughts I can at least appreciate why that part was done the way it was.

• run my wrists under cold water every 2 hours for 30 seconds (to reduce swelling)
• take Ibuprofen every day for 2 weeks (to reduce swelling)
• stretch every 30 minutes (raise palms in a stop sign motion and move hands forward slowly straightening my elbow, then repeat with fingers pointing downward) (to keep tendons from shortening?)
• finger stretch (hold palm flat and upright, use other hand to hold three fingers flat then curl remaining finger to palm. Repeat for each finger of both hands except thumbs.)
• She recommends using the "no hands mouse" to rest my tired tendons...

I was hoping that the DVD version would have some extra gaffes or an interview with Rowan, but no luck. It only had the trailers.

Saw the movie Boogie Nights staring Marky Mark (or Mark Wahlberg). It was a trip. Toto this isn't Kansas anymore. It was similar to pulp fiction in that the film told the stories of many characters.

The DVD was pretty cool. It contained about 11 scenes that were cut from the film. The DVD also had a sound track where the director, Mel Smith, talks about the film. It is cool to hear the thoughts and intentions of the director. It gives extra depth to the film and the craft of film making.

The doctor agreed to send me to occupational therapy. I will be seeing a Hand Therapist, Elaine LeCroix , hopefully soon. (UPDATE: Scheduled for Oct 14th)

Here is a Blast from the Past Check out this news paper article from when Jerry and I were little kids... sweet.

• Sun's Jini product page
• New York Times - New product from Sun Microsystems Allows Supercomputing at Home
• San Jose Mercury News - New Sun technology to extend PC power
• info world - Sun to let Jini spec out of the bottle
• News.com - Sun software to link peripherals

The attorney said, "well do you have any grounds?" The farmer said, "Yea, I got about 140 acres." The attorney said, " No, you don't understand, do you have a case?" The farmer said, "No, I don't have a Case, but I have a John Deere."

The attorney said, "No you don't understand, I mean do you have a grudge?" The farmer said, "Yea I got a grudge, that's where I park my John Deere." The attorney said, "No sir, I mean do you have a suit?"

The farmer said, "Yes sir, I got a suit. I wear th to church on Sundays." The exasperated attorney said, "Well sir, does your wife beat you up or anything?"

The farmer said, "No sir, we both get up about 4:30."

Finally, the attorney says, "Okay, let me put it this way. "WHY DO YOU WANT A DIVORCE?" And the farmer says, "Well, I can never have a meaningful conversation with her."

As you can no doubt see, I have finished the paperback book on the right. I thought it was a pretty amazing read. It was just so weird to read Ben Franklin's own words. He talks about setting up shop in Boston and traveling to and from London. It is remarkable how down to earth the living legend was. In all of his writing, he is amazingly humble... Perhaps I could learn from him. Nah, I don't need any improvement. :-)

I tried race walking today... Race walking is just like regular walking except you do it really fast... This causes a lot of hip swing and rapid arm movement, which in turn causes you to look and feel like a goof. But a race walk workout is as effective as a jogging/running workout with much less chance of injury. (Much lower impact) I might try changing 1/3 of my daily run to incorporate race walking...