jdavidboyd's Journal

ant

jdavidboyd — 2004-10-20T20:43:49+00:00

I wrote a small Java applet a while back, using Borland JBuilder 5.

Now, of course, I needed to update it, and jar it, and, of course, JBuilder is now at version 10, and 5 doesn't support the JDK 1.5.0, and I didn't want to spend $3000 to upgrade. (Go figure, huh?)

So, I used this little teeny ant build.xml file I put together a while ago, and was able to make my changes and compile under the new JDK, and no more money has to go to Borland.

Which, of course, just re-enforces that the command line is the only way to go...

Meta Moderation

jdavidboyd — 2004-07-13T20:30:50+00:00

Evidently, something has changed lately. I keep being teased with the Meta Moderation marker. I hurriedly run for the chance to meta-moderate some posts, but there is nothing there...

What happens when there is no more oil?

jdavidboyd — 2004-07-13T20:25:16+00:00

Has anyone thought about this very much? I was on a web site the other day, run by some oil affiliated think tank, that says that 2005 is going to be the peak production year for oil.

After 2005, the oil companies will never again produce oil in the quantities they currently are producing.

One would think that society at large would be worrying about this, and planning for the future. What will "poor people" do when they can't get cheap gas to get to work? Just recently there was a "state of emergency" in California because gas was over $3.00 a gallon. I think that price is going to be looked back on with fond memories.

Does anyone have any thoughts formulated, or plans for the future in regards to this? Should we plan on running for the mountains because "it's the end of the world as we know it?". I don't feel fine...

time subjectivity - or - the summer of death

jdavidboyd — 2004-06-07T19:51:37+00:00

Let's see.
My wife has been up north for the past two weeks, tending to her Mom, who is dying from some kind of internal cancer.

My cousin, (not very close, but not all that distant) is dying *soon* from a cancer that started in his mouth and has now found it's way into his brain stem.

A buddy of mine is losing his dad in the next few weeks to pancreatic cancer.

My company is losing one of our biggest clients at the end of the year, they have informed us, to go with one of our competitors.

Another one of our clients has been unreachable since last Thursday, all we can find out is that their office here in the states has been shut down by the police/FAA.

Now, it seems to me that with all this going on, the past two weeks should have gone by fairly quickly, but instead, they are dragging by.

Two more weeks until I have to fly to Rhode Island and drive home with Anita, and it seems as if the day will never get here.

Then, of course, she is going to go back up for the last several weeks of her Mom's life. That is NOT going to be a fun time for anyone.

quandary between emacs and xemacs

jdavidboyd — 2004-03-22T19:17:32+00:00

I'm getting myself confused. I like Xemacs much better than emacs, but after reading some of the editorials by RMS, I'm beginning to feel that I should use Emacs, even though I don't like it as well...

consolidation

jdavidboyd — 2004-03-03T20:11:28+00:00

I've been working hard at getting my SCO Unix machine at work, my Windows XP running Cygwin at work, and my Mandrake Linux box at home, to all use the same scripts, so I can keep everything in CVS
It is a little bit of a pain, as I have to set a few environment variables, but so far so good.
Now I have the same Xemacs environment, and almost all my bash scripts work the same.
I'm about 50% done...

Editors

jdavidboyd — 2004-03-01T16:10:32+00:00

What an obtrusive pain!
What I really want is a mind to machine interface that types what I think, not what I press on the keyboard.

Perl & Java

jdavidboyd — 2004-02-28T18:07:18+00:00

My wife needs a small utility program to keep track of the hours she works, and what she should be getting for her paycheck.
I've decided to write two versions: one in Perl, one in Java, and see how they compare. I think I'll also set them up to use Postgresql, and MySQL, and see how it feels working on both databases.
I can hardly wait. One thing I've already noticed, Java takes quite a bit of setup to do anything...

Xemacs and Cygwin

jdavidboyd — 2003-10-30T21:33:54+00:00

Hmm, somehow, unbeknownst to me, one of the last time or twos that I updated my cygwin seems to have broken the shell mode in XEmacs.

Man, is that a pain.
I can still use eshell, but I don't care for it at all...

litterbug

jdavidboyd — 2003-07-24T12:29:03+00:00

As I was driving to work today, I saw a car coming toward me, at the head of a line of 10-15 other cars.

The driver opened their sunroof, reached an arm up, and let go of their McDonald's bag of garbage. Flew over the car, onto the road, and was run over by all the following cars.

How could anyone possibly still litter this way? Were they a total moron, brain dead, or just not caring about society, the planet, etc.

I do not understand it, and probably never will...

White Noise

jdavidboyd — 2003-07-16T18:00:45+00:00

Man, lately it seems that everything that is going on in the world and country is being interpreted by my brain as white noise.

I've been pounding my way through the Perl CD Bookshelf, and Learning Perl/Tk, which is pretty much taking all my concentrative facilities (is that a real phrase?)

It sure does feel good to be stretching out (or perhaps, wrinkling up) the grey matter a bit.

Annoying

jdavidboyd — 2003-07-09T16:32:27+00:00

Man, is there anything on this planet that is more annoying than you telling your boss that the change he wants is going to take 'X' amount of time, and he responds "Oh, I don't see why that would be. It is only a little change."

Of course, he knows nothing about coding in C, or the data structures the program uses, or the flow of the code as it presently exists.

He does know that, when I make his change, and he is subsequently looking at the screen, a few elements will have shifted around. He says "Shouldn't be a big deal at all."

And, when you try to explain, he gets a glassy eyed look, and then gets upset because he seems to think that I am questioning his judgement

Like I said, most annoying.

Netbeans or Eclipse

jdavidboyd — 2003-06-29T23:20:03+00:00

I've a java project to do at work, just a teeny one, but for some reason, management wants me to use an open source IDE.
So, the obvious question becomes, Netbeans or Eclipse?
Don't know anything about either, and kind of like it that way.
If I had my 'druthers', I would just stick the XEmacs and be done with it.
I find it very annoying when non-tech people tell me how to do tech!

Lesson For All

jdavidboyd — 2003-06-29T17:28:37+00:00

This month's issue of Communications Of The ACM, in an article entitled Making A Game Of System Design, has a very pertinent message, wherein it states

Cleverly exploiting Narrative to shape the player's experience, game designers give players the perception they have free will, even though at any time their options are actually quite limited.

This is quite a great concept, and something to remember for the future as I code application software. Let the user think they are totally self-empowered!

Provacative Title

jdavidboyd — 2003-06-29T16:06:53+00:00

This month's issue of Communications of the ACM has an article that starts out as

The pleasures and wonders of gameplay, as well as
their deeper lessons, are being applied in fields beyond entertainment as
diverse as psychological therapy, experience-based education, and design prototyping.
Making A Game Of System Design

I can't wait to read the article....

Hard Drive Size

jdavidboyd — 2003-06-20T18:03:11+00:00

I was reading an article last night in the current ACM Queue , and the person being interviewed stated that in the next 5 years or so, hard drives will be in the 20 terabyte range.
I can't imagine ever needing that much space.

Chasin' my tail...

jdavidboyd — 2003-06-19T15:53:19+00:00

It often seems that I am chasing my own tail here at work.
The old adage seems to apply, that their is "never enough time to do it right, but always time to re-do it".
Also, my company seems to be extremely event-driven. By which I mean that whichever customer screams the loudest is the one that we drop everything for and go to town on their latest problem.
How do you make process changes stick in a place like this?
There are four of us programmers, two (myself and one more) that would like rules, processes, and some consistency. The two others just want to do enough to get by.
What a world...

Cholesterol

jdavidboyd — 2003-06-18T18:50:27+00:00

Just had a call from my doctor, my blood tests from last week came back A-OK!
PSA level was fine (my dad had prostate cancer, fully recovered now).
My cholesterol was 145, which they say is good, but I'm not certain just what cholesterol level really means, anyway.
All I know about it is what I see on the stupid TV commercials.

Time for a change?

jdavidboyd — 2003-06-18T13:25:58+00:00

Have you ever felt stagnant and stale at your job? After five years of working on C source, I'm getting to that point.
I try to use as much Perl and Java and shell scripts, on internal utilities, as possible, just to alleviate the sameness, but it doesn't quite take care of it anymore.

Going to be cold

jdavidboyd — 2003-05-02T15:39:46+00:00

My wife and I are heading to the border area between Connecticut and Rhode Island to visit our families.
It is going to be cold! Highest expected temp is 62 deg F. With lows around 42.
We are used to every day (almost) in the upper 80s, and the night cool off to around 70.
Have to make sure to take some heavy duty insulation along!

Hurray

jdavidboyd — 2003-05-01T20:31:42+00:00

Been trying for a while now to get xEmacs to upload a journal entry, with no luck at all.
Yelled for help, pudge said "Maybe it is an authentication problem"
Way, down deep in the back of my mind, "Hmm, didn't I change my use.perl password a little while ago? Did I update my script?"
I'm not telling anyone, I'd feel stupid

Life is too short

jdavidboyd — 2003-02-25T16:26:27+00:00

Life is indeed too short to waste it on inconsequentialities.

My dogs woke me up this morning, about 4 a.m., barking at a loud diesel noise coming from the street.

When I went to see what they were barking at, there was an ambulance across the street. It was followed, shortly thereafter, by a police car.

Unfortunately, my neighbor's wife had passed away, shortly before 4, while going to get a glass of water (her son assumes). Her son and his wife were visiting, and found Ellen on the floor, where the coroner said she had probably been for an hour or more, dead of a cerebral stroke.

This makes me really regret the small fight I had with my wife the night before last, as you never really can tell what might happen. I think I will try to be nicer to everyone from now on.

TkPod, graphical browser for perldocs

jdavidboyd — 2003-01-30T20:58:21+00:00

I just installed TkPod, and it is a great utility.
Now, I can see all the perldoc stuctured nicely, with
full text search of whatever I am looking for.

And, it looks as if the source code for it should be a great
way to learn to use Tk and Perl.

Perl script to emulate sendmail

jdavidboyd — 2003-01-29T17:28:46+00:00

I was certain that several weeks ago I had
(downloaded, read, received in email, etc) a shell script
that emulated sendmail with a perl script, using a module from CPAN.

I've scanned the web using every search string, and no luck.

Wonder if I'll ever find it.

It actually let you send text to it,
formatted as if it were being piped to sendmail,
then sent it out via a configured SMTP perl script.