Random Ramblings
We got a cat!
Very cute, but older than I wanted. But he knows how to use the litter box so that’s definately cool.
We still need to pick a name. He’s a boy. And we want something internet/computer/gaming related. I like telnet, ascii (but sounds too much like “ass key”), servlet, tag (has too many non-computer related meanings).
We are probably going to get another kitten as well.
There’s always bugs.
I thought I’d download bugzilla to track bugs in stuff I work on, but damned if I can’t get it working! Something screwy with the Apache configuration. Hopefully when I get some time to look at it I’ll be able to fix it (but I’m more experienced with IIS than apache).
Though Bugzilla did come highly recommended, I’m wondering what other solutions might exist. Anyone?
At work we use WSAD, IBM’s version of Eclipse.
Its a very cool, free IDE (Integrated Development Environment) we use for coding Java with.
I plan on using Eclipse at home on my personal projects. It also has a Perl plug-in so I can use it to update MovableType. (Probably has support for other languages, but those are the ones I use the most).
While the tool is very cool, myself and a few other co-workers end up spending a LOT of extra time trying to fix errors in it instead of doing things we should be doing.
Today I updated all my code on my hard drive and now I can’t run any tests. I fixed the first problem, which made no sense, but the NullPointException I’m getting now is a mystery. Fixing the problem is not a high priority because the cause is likely in a temporary class we created because we are not integrated with the security team (so we made a stub).
One thing we always struggle with is: How to code and test. Before people would code in a text editor and send it to a test server (that was shared by everyone on the team). This was horrible because your changes could cause other people to have problems. Finding your error messages mixed in with everyone else’s messages was a pain! However, there was only 1 server to support.
After this we got Visual Age from IBM. Its was pretty cool as you could run JSPs and Java code, but itself didn’t support JSPs nor did it support EJBs so it was VERY limiting. After we got used to it, we changed to WSAD.
With WSAD, we all have our own development environment, but we all have to support it. Can’t win, can we?
Erica successfully imported her comments into her MovableType blog.
She informed me that HaloScan was going to charge $10 for her to export her comments. Glad I could help.
Zack had a suggestion: He (and Erica) were confused by the way the email addresses looked in the database. HaloScan has them “encoded” on purpose to try to avoid spammers. I wrote code to undo that, but did not execute it because my wife (and I) thought it was a good idea to keep them encoded. However, after Zack’s email, I thought it would be cool to add a radio button the import comments page allowing you to keep them the way they are, or to unencode them. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to make that change.
Well, I’m happy to report that at least one user has been able to use the Import Comments feature I added to Movable Type (no thanks to my sorry excuse for documentation/instructions and blindness to emails).
Zack was able to import his comments, blogged about my “plug-in” and sent me a nice email.
Here are some web sites I visit regularly to check out good deals on stuff to buy.
Warning…these links might cause you to buy stuff you don’t need, just because its “on sale”. Not to mention the majority of the “deals” rely on rebates which can take 6-8 weeks to arrive and can be denied for almost no reason (and I’m usually too lazy to contact them why).
There are some things that I don’t buy anymore unless they are free, like CD-Rs, mouse, keyboard, etc.
Yeah! They are making a new NBA Jam (2004) game.
This was one of my favorite games/series: NBA Jam, NBA Jam TE, NBA Hangtime. Then they changed the looks with NBA Showtimeand I wasn’t all that impressed.
The new game looks pretty nice though, and should be lots of fun!
NBA Street and NBA Street Vol 2 are great games, but slightly more “real” than NBA Jam. While Street lets you break the rules of the game, Jam lets you break the laws of physics!
OUCH!
I love the sun, I love to be tan, but this hurts! My back is pretty bad (luckily I could sleep fairly well last night) and the tops of my feet are REALLY red.
Muskegon was very beautiful, as you can see from the pictures:
The water was a little too cold though. Luciana managed to go in, but I didn’t because my feet were almost numb, the water was so cold.
The weather wasn’t super hot, 80F/26C and the wind was constantly blowing, enough to keep you pretty cool.
The Man Show is a cable show that depicts all of men’s stereotypes.
Sometimes its funny, usually valgar (to women), and probably rather immature (but if it makes you laugh it can’t be all bad).
I was pointed to this flash page that shows TheManShow.com Periodic Table
Got a little boring after awhile, but the stuff on the left was pretty funny.
That’s right, a Bulletin Board System. I have been going to ISCA BBS for around 7-8 years. I have logged in nearly 10,000 times. It has make topics you can read about and members from all over the world that you can “eXpress message” with.
As it is purely text based it is low bandwidth (which is rare in these days), but it obviously doesn’t have the graphic appeal or “coolness” of IMs.
You can telnet there and login as a Guest to look around: telnet://bbs.isca.uiowa.edu:23
You can get a client to enhance the experience at http://www.bbsclient.net/. (I hope to make my own client sometime soon, whenever I get some more free time).