1. Open edmx model file
2. Go to model browser view
3. Expand the Function Imports node
4. Double click relevant stored procedure
5. Change return type select to Entities and pick desired model

Wow, I've really let this blogging idea slide. I should have been writing more about my coding adventures in the last years. I don't really know where to pickup. I blame it on having 3 kids keeping me busy. As soon as I get home they're begging me to wrestle or play with them. I try to oblige most of the time. But I'm not complaining, I love my kids.

Life is more important than blogging, right?

I have started working with Oracle and I was recently tasked with importing a data pump export to a different schema. Once all the required roles were created and the correct REMAP_SCHEMA option was sorted out* I was left with one interesting problem. Everything remapped properly except triggers. The trigger name was remapped correctly but the target table still referenced the old schema.

I'm surprised that something this obvious would go unfixed.

**note Multiple schema remaps are done as follows:

Here's a tip for copying a database in SQL Server 2008 (maybe other versions) via the Copy Database wizard.

When I initially tried the wizard it failed with Message: Access to the path 'E:\Data\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA\NEWDATABASENAME.mdf' is denied.

In this case the NETWORK SERVICE was not able to create the new MDF file. I had to do add this user with FULL CONTROL to the MSSQL\DATA directory and the wizard ran with no complications.

1. Navigate to data folder
2. Right click -> Properties
3. Click the Security tab
4. Click the Edit button to change permissions
5. Click the Add button to add a new group or user
6. Search for "NETWORK SERVICE" and click Add
7. Click the Full Control checkbox for the newly added user

In case you're trying to find the wizard, right click the database, pick tasks, then Copy Database.

I want to switch accounts on my Galaxy Note 10.1, so my wife can use it on a trip she's taking, but I want to re-install the same apps. Since it's not rooted at the moment, I have to reset to factory defaults to switch Google accounts which would erase everything I have installed

In order to restore my installed apps and data after resetting, I'm using ADB (Android Debug Bridge) to backup my device. The backup command looks like this: adb backup -apk -shared -all -f galaxynote.ab For this particular device, if I didn't enter a password it would create an empty backup file.

Once this is done, I can reset the tablet and then run: adb restore galaxynote.ab And my apps are back but using a different Google account.

My plan is to eventually flash the Note 10.1 with Android 4.2 so we can have multi-users but that will have to wait for another day.

I am working with a small debian linux server and was trying to set eth0 to a static IP address but it was getting reset after boot. I turns out, there's a daemon called ifplugd that automatically configures specified interfaces in which eth0 was specified.

To resolve this, remove all references to the interface from /etc/default/ifplugd

Tomorrow Abby and I are making the drive to Manitoba. Julene and Joel are staying back since Julene isn't up for travelling right now. Abby is really good at entertaining herself, plus, she can watch movies while driving - not me. She's excited to eat at a McDonalds, I'll have to find one for lunch and/or supper.

It has been a long time since I've done all the driving myself. But since we'll only be driving during the day it should be ok.

Lately, I have been experimenting with different storage engines. MongoDB is interesting, especially to the developer in me, the ability to get JSON objects in one simple call is attractive. Most recently, with a little help from Tom I have setup Oracle 11g Express, simply to get a feel for how it operates.

First off, the nomenclature is different than what I'm used to, so I have to get my head around that. Authentication is different too. Gone are the user:host users of MySQL. Good riddance! In Oracle, users are users. Interestingly, when creating a user, they automatically get their own "schema," akin to a MySQL database,

I explored Oracle's Application Express, but being more of a command line guy, I ditched that and started poking around with SQL*Plus. After figuring out how to view tables (SELECT * FROM CAT instead of SHOW TABLES) etc, it felt much like learning a new programming language. The main concepts are similar to other RDBMS's and it ends up being more about learning the semantics than new concepts. Sure, some things are different, but if you know SQL, you can get around in Oracle - at least from a data perspective.

With little difficulty, I was able to install Oracle 11g Express, create a user, grant privileges, create tables, and insert data. I then installed php-oci8 and pulled out the data.

To become a true Oracle DBA, however, and learning how Oracle is working behind the scenes, creating clusters and other administrative tasks - that will take time and perhaps a few courses.

I've been out of the Android development game for some time now. A little over a year, if I check the commit log on my projects. A friend's recent foray into this world encouraged me to look at refreshing my apps.

I have an app called WebsiteMonitor. The idea is that it polls a list of URLs and alerts you when any of them return a response code other than 200 (ok). This was inspired by my former job where I needed to make sure webservices were up and running at all times.

It had some serious limitations. First off, it was developed for Android 1.5. Second, it was using a widget to periodically poll, where the minimum refresh time is 1 hour, and doesn't alert you when your phone is sleeping. My current rating isn't the greatest, but what can you expect if I can't spend a lot of time on it, and it's pretty stale.

Well now the Android development landscape has changed significantly. The community appears to be way more active that it was a year ago with many more helpful tutorials and advice than there were when I first started. In pretty short order I was able to add quite a few features:

• configurations
• custom ringtone
• enable notifications (persistent if you want)
• a polling service so it runs while your phone is idle
• less false negatives. This remains to be verified, but I think it's better

I haven't published it yet since I'm waiting for it to cook a while on my phone and a friend's. If it does ok over the next few days the plan is to put it up for download shortly. In the meantime, you can help test it or download the old version.

We've been having connection issues with our MySQL servers at work. Today I see a lot of connections that have been open for 1000+ seconds. Here's a quick way to find them:

mysqladmin processlist | grep [databasename] | awk '{if($12>1000) print $2, $6, $12}'

Then you can take that list and kill the mysql process ids

mysqladmin kill [id1],[id2],[id3]....

If you ever find yourself in a 2004ish Jeep Grand Cherokee and the interior lights won't turn off and the driver's side controls stop working, you have a broken power wire between the door and the rest of the vehicle.

Pull back the ribbed rubber that covers the wires. It helps to take the plastic connector out of the door, but chances are you'll break some brittle plastic tabs like I did. Still went back together though.

The power wire is red with a white stripe. It should be obviously broken. Fix that (soldering preferably, although the wire is pretty thick and it's a tight spot to solder in) and you should be good to go.

It's such a great advantage to have your vehicle maintenance documented.

1. It's very helpful when it comes to selling.
2. Prevents over-extending periods between maintenance (forgetting the last time you did an oil change).

My problem is that either I don't have my notebook on hand when I do the maintenance, or I forget, and by the time I get around to it, I can't remember what the odometer was at.

This has inspired my latest pet project, lper100km.com, which allows you to not only keep track of maintenance, but track your fuel economy across multiple vehicles on a mobile device. It's currently designed specifically for mobile so it doesn't look great on a full browser. The site is pretty basic right now, but functional. Features are added as I have time to implement them.

Current features:

1. Record fill ups and calculate fuel economy.
2. Record maintenance
3. Upload pictures of vehicles.

In no particular order, features under consideration are:

1. Ability to use imperial values set as a user preference.
2. Attach images to maintenance records.
3. Multiple maintenance types per record. ie Oil and air filter in one entry.
4. Plotting fuel economy, with markers for maintenance on the same graph.
5. Print view of vehicle records.
6. Full browser site.
7. Better domain name?

Feel free to try it out and make suggestions.

Winter has finally arrived. That makes it seem like I have been waiting for it to come. I think I was. Sometimes I miss having a proper, cold winter. When snow stays on the ground until April. I want to be able to dig snow forts in drifts with my kids. Lately I've been playing a lot with the kids. Building Thomas the Train track routes and bridges. I get disappointed when the track gets messed up, it can take a lot of time to maximize the use of the table top.

We are just back from a 2 week Christmas holiday. During the holiday, Julene and I left the kids with our parents and took a holiday-in-a-holiday 4 day trip to Arizona to have some time to ourselves. We took a Grand Canyon tour which was amazing, and also did a desert tour where we were able to drive our own tom car (an Israeli made off-road vehicle).

Now we're back and getting back into the swing of things. It took a while but we seem to be getting back into the swing of things.

I recently had an issue where one of my MySQL slaves repeatedly error'd on replication due to key collisions. The replication type was row based, which is much more strict that statement. In fact, if it had been statement based, a lot of these errors wouldn't have presented themselves and the slave would have continued on happily becoming more and more inconsistent.,

Because of the huge dataset and the speed of recovery required, I did not want to rebuild the entire database. I wanted to restore only the couple tables that were causing issues.

What I wanted to do was

1. stop replication on a good slave and the problem slave at the same point
2. dump the table (from the good slave, obviously)
3. drop and import the dumped tables on the problem slave
4. restart replication

Fortunately this is achievable with by stopping the slave to be fixed and then a minute or so later the source database, capturing the binlog and position and then issuing the following on the target database:

START SLAVE UNTIL MASTER_LOG_FILE='binlog.000001', MASTER_LOG_POS=123456;
SELECT MASTER_POS_WAIT('binlog.000001', 123456);

On occasion, you will need to make sure that your MySQL binlogs of your master server stick around for a little while longer than normal. In my case, I'm doing a special slave build that will take some time and room for error and I wanted to make sure my binlogs stayed on the master a little longer than normal. This is a trivial task and can be done without a MySQL restart. All that needs to be done is to log into MySQL and execute: SET GLOBAL expire_logs_days=5;

Cloning a MySQL slave is typically very straight forward.

1. Execute stop slave on the donor slave and capture the slave status information
2. Stop mysql on the donor
3. Copy the database files from the donor to the new slave
4. Start MySQL on the new slave
5. Execute the change master statement to start the new slave's replication process
6. Start mysql on the donor and allow replication to catch up

Simple right? It is, if you don't run into the scenario I managed to hit. Show slave status gives you a lot of information like this:

                  Master_Host: 10.10.10.10
                  Master_User: repl_user
                  Master_Port: 3306
                Connect_Retry: 60
              Master_Log_File: binlog.002644
          Read_Master_Log_Pos: 1015419943
               Relay_Log_File: relay-log.000257
                Relay_Log_Pos: 68175060
        Relay_Master_Log_File: binlog.002643
             Slave_IO_Running: Yes
            Slave_SQL_Running: Yes
              Replicate_Do_DB: 
          Replicate_Ignore_DB: 
           Replicate_Do_Table: 
       Replicate_Ignore_Table: 
      Replicate_Wild_Do_Table: 
  Replicate_Wild_Ignore_Table: 
                   Last_Errno: 0
                   Last_Error: 
                 Skip_Counter: 0
          Exec_Master_Log_Pos: 887594041
              Relay_Log_Space: 2448352803

This information is then matched into a change master statement. The most important values here are MASTER_LOG_FILE and MASTER_LOG_POS which tell the slave thread where to start replicating from. This will be the point where the donor slave was stopped before the copy. Now, you'd think that the master log file would correspond with the Master_Log_File value from show slave status. It doesn't. You want to use Relay_Master_Log_File. Most often, these log files are the same - if replication isn't lagging. But even in instances where the slave is not behind there is a small chance you'll catch it as the IO thread is getting the next binlog file. Now if you use the log file you think is correct, you'll be setting your replication to start too far ahead. Now, you may get lucky like me and the position won't exist in the binlog you set, and you'll get a replication IO error in my case, 1236 "Exceeded max_allowed_packet", instructing you to set the max_allowed_packet larger on the master which is misleading in this case.

The CHANGE MASTER statement for the above slave status should be

CHANGE MASTER TO
MASTER_LOG_FILE='binlog.002643'
MASTER_LOG_POS=887594041

Hopefully this will keep you from bludgeoning your forehead on your desk as I nearly did.

Finally got Dan's motorcycle back together with new sprockets and chain. The front one definitely was due for replacement.

Note the bent teeth.

I've been meaning for a while to try and make a photography lightbox and finally got around to it. I found some white plastic in the basement I used for building the box, simply duct-taping them together.

Here are a couple shots. I need to get a couple more lights to brighten it up a bit. I'm also thinking of building a flash diffuser.

Our family Montana camping trip was a success! We traveled to Swan Lake, Montana and spent a week camping with Julene's family. Activities included:

• tubing on the lake
• cooking over an open fire
• smores
• dealing with bug bites
• waterslides
• hiking
• shopping

I really enjoyed cooking over the fire. We made pancakes, bacon, potatoes, steak, pies (with pie irons) popcorn and of course, smores.

Just before we left, we bought a 1980 Bonair tent trailer which proved to be water tight, spacious (compared to a tent) and had a working fridge. It definitely helped with the kids' sleep and allowed us to store a few essentials like milk.

Joel and Abby did really well on the trip there and back which totaled about 8 hours of driving. Unfortunately, our Jeep and trailer was a couple feet too long for the Going to the Sun Road but at least that meant the alternate route was mostly empty and easy driving.

We now have 2 weeks at home before we try the ultimate drive to Manitoba. That drive will be partially split up. We'll hit Bow Island first, and then do the remaining 12 hours the next day, starting later in the morning so the kids can have afternoon naps and sleep part of the night while driving.

Go to my Picasaweb gallery to see more camping pictures.

To view and/or count the open files belonging to a process

List:

Count:

Here's the final product.

Now on to the next project - sod.

The deck is complete! Well, almost. Initially we had thought we wouldn't do any railings since it's below 24", but Julene thinks that railings are needed. And the stairs. But let's not let the detract from the major project of the weekend. The cement pyles were done last Saturday and the rest was done yesterday. The hardest part was getting everything framed up square and level. The beam took a bit of work - I had to chisel away the top of the one pyle since the beam was going to be resting right on it. Once everything was framed up, the rest was easy.

We find ourselves in April with fresh snow on the ground. This past weekend, we received ~20cm of snow. This allowed Abby and I to go outside and make the snowman she had wanted to make all winter but for some reason we hadn't been able to up till now. I must say that it turned out pretty good. The neighbor girl helped out too, procuring gummies for eyes and goldfish snacks for buttons. We'll see how long he lasts against the sun.

In other news, we are hoping to start developing our basement shortly. I just picked up all the required permits this morning so that we can proceed legally and keep everything above board. Some say it's not worth it, but it will be when it comes time to sell.

We have enough friends and family that can help with each of the trades, at the least to provide guidance. We already owe most of them favors, so this will put us doubly in their debt. Hopefully, I have some skills that I can provide for repayment.

I've been copying a lot of Ubuntu VMs around lately andam always annoyed to find that after copying, the new VM network setup is broken. After searching on and off for quite a while I discovered a solution. In /etc/udev/rules.d/ you will see a file named xx-persistent-net.rules This file keeps track of what network devices get what name -in most cases, eth0. If you delete this file on the newly created machine, it will reset your network devices and rebuild this file.

I've been tossing around ideas for another Android app for a while. Since I've recently started working as a MySQL DBA at iStockphoto, I decided it would be cool to make a MySQL monitoring app. Now, we already have MySQL Enterprise Monitor, so I thought maybe there would be an API to use, but all of my Google searches have turned up naught.

The ideal would be to do a GET on a simple URL which provides a JSON object which my App would consume and do stuff with. I'll keep digging and see if I can come up with anything. If any MySQL people come across this post, feel free to give input.

Quick Linux tip. If you want to access Microsoft's fancy new web mail interface in Linux/Chrome you need to spoof Chrome's user-agent. Since it works in Firefox, I used that user-agent for spoofing. I setup a script with this line

google-chrome --user-agent="Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101206 Ubuntu/10.10 (maverick) Firefox/3.6.13" https://webmail.domain.com

Next, I made a launcher from my desktop to call this script. Note that all your Chrome windows and tabs will be using this user-agent.

Suppose you have a hung Linux application with a pile of processes. Here's a quick way to kill them all without having to issue a kill for each separately:

# kill -9 `ps ax | grep AppName | cut -d ' ' -f1`

Use with extreme caution! I take no responsibility for ensuing results. Please run the piece within the backticks separately before implementing the kill to verify that you're getting the right list of process IDs.

My Android app is really coming along. I finally got my widget working together with the app. One more small detail of making it more configurable and I might even put it on the Market!

We're back to pseudo-normal. Our holidays in Manitoba were great and flew by. We participated in an obligatory auto-cross. My dad always tries to arrange one for when we come out. The legendary "24" gave up the ghost after several years of racing when most cars last a day.

Two days after returning to Calgary, Julene left for the long weekend for Toronto to spend time with a friend. I stayed home and single-parented. Unfortunately, due to weather, we spent most of the time cooped up inside going stir-crazy.

Now, we are back to what has been normal for the summer. Sharing a house while we wait for ours to be completed. We are told that we are getting a letter in the mail with a date for our final walk-through. We wait with baited breath. Once we receive that, we start finalizing the mortgage and house insurance as well as making arrangements with utility, cable and Internet providers.

I can't decide if the time has gone quickly or slowly. It can feel like either at times.

We are leaving tonight for Manitoba to spend a week with my family. This means no Internet and no cell-phone service for the most part. Especially with my Telus work phone which only has coverage in Winnipeg. Another much needed break. This will be a short breather until when I come back and have to remotely oversee a software roll out for a major client.

Taking kids on the flight should be interesting as always. We're not so concerned about Abby who is very good at entertaining herself, but Joel is one, and one year-olds are hard to entertain in a confined space. Julene is picking up some new toys which will hopefully capture his attention. Snacks will also be packed and distributed as slowly as possible - one Cheerio at a time.

I'm going to try and drop by the house one more time on my way home, to capture any recent progress to show the folks. It is progressing rather quickly and will hopefully sustain this momentum. It will be exciting to see the difference when we get back.

See you in September.

We went to visit our house again yesterday. Some progress was made with the siding, but what we were really interested in was whether or not the ceilings had been textured. This is the point where we are supposed to get a soft date for our final walk through. Low and behold, the ceilings had texture! Now we are trying to patiently wait for the walk through date as well as trying to not get our hopes up regarding how soon that date might be.

How long does it take to paint, install cabinets, fixtures and flooring?

Wow, things are crazy. At work, at home.

Good news on our house! It's really coming along. Take a look at the pictures. We just had the pre-drywall walk through to make sure the doors, windows, outlets etc. were all correct before insulating and closing the walls. There was only one minor closet issue that the supervisor said was no big deal. He expected that drywall should be done next week. At that point, we get a soft date for our final walk through a week prior to possession. So that means that very soon we should know approximately when we'll be moving in! I am really looking forward to getting a garage again.

Work is insanely busy. I'll leave it at that. I'm doing my best to keep my lips above the water.

Julene and the kids are back and forth to Bow Island a lot to give our gracious hosts some breaks. Joel is proving to be a handful just like his sister was at this age. How do you teach contentment to a 1 year old boy? Ideas?

Google has recently announced AppInventor which is a web based visual IDE for Android. I've already submitted a request for an account. I've been a bit slow in figuring out the visual design aspects of Android so I am looking forward to using this as a tool to design my layouts. My one question is: will it have a way to edit raw code?

Read more about it here.

Can't decided what I like better - the acoustic guitar or her voice

Wow, this is handy. Had I known about this early it could have saved me a lot of time

mogrify -resize 800X600 *.jpg

Comes with ImageMagick in Linux.

An update to my Ubuntu 10.04 experience. I did a fresh install and things have gone a bit smoother. A couple hiccups remained though.

• Wireless no longer worked out of the box on my Dell Latitude E6400. I had to install 3rd party drivers.
• NVidia 3rd party drivers were worse. This seemed to be the cause of the freezing mentioned in my last post. Using the 3rd party NVidia drivers caused my laptop to freeze during boot and shutdown if on battery power.

Upgrading my laptop from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 was relatively painless. I did get a scare when the graphics failed with a white streaky screen. For some reason there was an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file that shouldn't have been there. After switching to console and removing the conf file, the graphics were fine. Flash had to be fixed by removing the flash plugin and re-installing via command line with

sudo apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree

That's all I had to do after the upgrade. At least for now.

edit

So it turns out that I am having major issues with Lucid Lynx. Well, one issue, it freezes constantly. Especially during boot and shutdown requiring hard kills. I will spend some time trying to repair it, but it's looking like I'll be downgrading.

Came across a handy trick to increase the size of a VM's hard-disk in VMware.

Navigate to the VM's directory and use this command (Linux):

# vmware-vdiskmanager -x 20GB vmfile.vmdk

Now go back to your VM in Workstation and you should see that your hard-disk is now the new specified size.

I'm finally getting somewhere on my Android app. It helps that I'm getting my head wrapped around the platform. The main problem I was having as of late, was that my custom list adapter was messing with the onListItemClick listener. So I opted to go back to the simple list provided by Android and it's working much better.

Here's a small overview of my app in case you don't know what I'm talking about. One of my roles at work is keeping tabs on several servers. I get automatic notifications via email if there are issues, but I wanted to be able to initiate a check. So far it simply makes sure the domain is reachable and then gets the HTTP response code of a specific URL.

Future planned features are

• Monitor multiple services (FTP, SSH, etc)
• Load server list from a remote source (CSV) or build locally
• Monitor via consuming web services to allow 3rd party custom monitoring tools

Development isn't very rapid as we're in the middle of getting a house built and selling our home. Plus having 2 kids slows things down as well. But the project seems to be keeping my interest. I recently read that the first Android car is rolling off the assembly line. How cool would that be to work on? The possibilities that would arise from hooking into the car's control modules are endless.

I've added more pictures finally. I only seem to do this when prompted by friends overseas.

Wow. Time is flying. It's December and there's snow on the ground. Julene and I are trying to come up with gift ideas for our kids. Preferrably gifts that take up little of the precious room that there is in our house. We have realized lately that there is no room left in our house. Something is going to have to give soon. In the new year, we hope to investigate buying or building. Building means a pile of decisions like location, wall color, flooring etc. Buying an existing house means finding something that meets our list of must-haves. Either way it's going to be interesting.

In other news, Joel is cutting teeth. This means some grumpy days and sleepless nights. He has 2 out so far and working on more. Abby is still growing up and continually surprising us with her vocabulary and ability to form sentences. She's even learning how to reason and manipulate.

Work is still incredibly busy - having more work with less people. But it's good. I'm glad to be employed and I'm glad I'm not bored.

Merry Christmas to all!

I've lately become a fan of awk. One of the recent tasks I needed to do was to take a couple columns from 1000+ line spreadsheets and insert them into database tables. What I did, was save the spreadsheet to csv format and then wrote a one line awk script to extract the desired columns and build an insert statement.

Here it is:

awk -F"," '$9!=""{ print "insert into table_name (col1, col2, col3, col4) values ("$7","$9",'\''text1'\'','\''text2'\'');"}' spreadsheet.csv > insert_statements.sql

The beginning statement $9!="" tells awk to only take rows where the ninth column is not empty.

My new role at work requires the 24 hour monitoring of mission-critical Red Hat servers. I am looking for a Linux based smart phone that would provide at the least an SSH utility that would allow me to access these servers without having to carry a notebook and staying close to Internet access.

Any ideas?

We are back from our 10 day stint in Manitoba. It was really refreshing to be completely disconnected - no cell coverage or Internet access. We did things like race beater cars on a dirt track in the pasture, watch drag and mud bog races and drive tractors. Completely different than what has become my normal life. Part of me didn't want to come back to the city.

But here I am.

Check the gallery for pictures from the race. I hope to add more from the week soon.

Here's a tip I learned today while maintaining an old Feisty Fawn Ubuntu server. If you run apt-get install [anything] you will get a bunch of 404 "file not found" errors. This is because the repository is no longer being maintained. To avoid having to upgrade to get your repositories working again, you can make a small change to your sources.list file.

Edit /etc/apt/source.list and replace all "archive.releases.ubuntu.com" with "old-releases.ubuntu.com"

Run sudo apt-get update and you should be ready to roll!

A great tutorial/howto on Youtube on differential gears. Go to 1:50 to skip the intro.

I have had to reset a MySQL root password a few times recently so I should probably write it down.

First, stop the currently running MySQL database daemon

sudo /etc/init.d/mysql stop

Next, start MySQL in safe mode without grant tables, which store the passwords

sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables

Now login to MySQL as root with no password. You may need a new terminal since MySQL is probably still running from the above command and you don't want to kill that yet.

mysql -u root

Update the root password

update user set Password=PASSWORD('mypwd') where user='root';
flush privileges;

Logout, kill mysqld_safe with ctrl-c and restart MySQL.

/etc/init.d/mysql start

That should be it.

This weekend Julene and I together with Dan and Christina took our bikes out to Cochrane for ice-cream and a pint. It was a gorgeous day for riding. This was Julene's first time on a bike since Abby was born and she did great though being nervous. We stopped at Big Hill Springs Provinical Park to take some pictures of us on the bikes. I negleted to dress for the pictures so forgive the green T-shirt. Christina and Dan had a lot of fun directing and snapping pictures.

Hopefully we can get another ride like this in before the end of the season.

To get mod_rewrite working in Ubuntu after installing apache2, execute the following command:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

Tomorrow we leave for the Shuswaps. Yet another welcome break. The past couple of weeks at work have been rather tumultuous. My workload and responsibilities have increased substantially and I need to sit down with the Powers that Be and figure stuff out. I think that it would be best to do this after my week away and things have somewhat settled.

Other than that, life is pretty good. Joel and Abby are still growing up too fast. Abby was a flowergirl and I was the best man in Dan and Christina's wedding which went really well. I'll get some pictures up eventually.

Come back in a week or two and look for a post holiday update.

I'm leaving in the next couple of minutes and packing up for a weekend in BC with Dan and the rest of his groomsmen. The plan is to find a place to camp. That's it so far. We'll plan it as we go.

I am in dire need of a break, so this is trip is at just the right time. On Monday I will be submitting the final NEMSIS files for certification that I have been working on for the past couple of months.

I will see you all later.

Dan came over to help with my Triumph diagnosis this weekend and I think we figured it out that it might be the regulator. Some more testing may be done, or I'll just order a replacement. They're only about $50 USD so that's not as crazy expensive as I thought it might be

I decided that I'll put the bike back together and ride it until I get it fixed. I can't just let it sit there. As long as I charge the battery in between short rides it should be ok.

I am a bit disappointed in the Triumph. It turns out that it isn't charging and it's fouling plugs very quickly. Tonight I hope to finally have time to take a look at the charging issue. I didn't want to have to do any work on the bike - just ride. At least not have to do anything in order for it to be road worthy. I guess that is always a risk when buying used, especially 36 years used.

Wish me luck.

I found the replacement for the the Suzuki Tempter I sold earlier this Spring. A 1973 Triumph Tiger 750. It is something else. It's an inline 2 cylinder, single carburetor engine. Recently rebuilt (~100 miles ago) with electronic ignition replacing the original points. Kick start only. And it sounds great! It has 7100 original miles - which is less than I have put on the Tempter in a single season.

There are a few things I would like to do on it. One is install some inconspicuous signal lights. Second, track down and fix some of the oil leaks. There are at least 2. And next season I might get new tires front and back.

I hope to get some pictures up soon.

Saw this Porsche while out for supper with Julene in Kensington. I can't imagine how awesome it would be drive.

Dan just reprimanded me for not having written a blog post after passing a couple significant milestones as of late.

First - we met the deadline mentioned in the last post with 2 hours to spare. The feedback was very positive with only 3 corrections needed out of 478 fields. These corrections have already been made. We are now ready for the real test.

Second - The Tempter sold. I am now casually looking for a new ride. I haven't quite settled on a particular style, year or make - I'm going to let the bike come to me. In the mean time I'm riding Julene's GS500 which is proving to be blast. Maybe I'll ride out the rest of the season on it.

Third and most importantly, Julene and I just celebrated our 5th anniversary. I must say that the past five years have been a great adventure that I would not trade for anything. We managed to get away from Abby and Joel for a couple hours and enjoyed a meal at La Viena - a hidden gem.

There you have it. You've been updated.

...and there is. We realized Monday that the Friday deadline included a lot more than we had thought. Good thing I reviewed the requirements document when I did or there would have been no hope. I have put in 2 consecutive 12 hours days and the next 2 might be more of the same.

Needless to say, I'm tired. I don't even know why I am writing a blog entry. Maybe I just need to unwind and debrief. When I work past 8pm, I have to forcibly relax in order to fall asleep at a reasonable time.

The family is doing well. Joel is incredibly mellow and sleeps great! Abby is adjusting well to having a sibling and doesn't show much jealousy. What great kids we have been blessed with! Julene is doing well too. Except that she's missing getting out, which is understandable.

Oh, and my motorcycle is for sale. I have decided I want to try something else. I will be a little sad when it goes though. So far I've had 1 call which ended up being a no-show. Hopefully I get more interest.

There. That covers it.

I joined Twitter.

Having stayed off of Facebook - I know, how is that even possible - and MySpace and all the other social sites so far, I decided that being in the industry I should give at least one a try.

It has been just over a month and after getting over my initial qualms, I have to say that I think I like it. At first, I felt egotistical posting 140 character snippets about what I was doing right now. Like anyone really cares. But then it was pointed out by @thefrontlawn that blogs could be considered just as narcissistic.

What I appreciate most is the developer community. For example, I made one small post about working on a Filemaker plug-in and almost instantly had followers asking for details or offering assistance. It's this sort of online camaraderie that could actually increase my productivity.

Have you ever spent hours and hours on a problem and just can't figure it out? And then after leaving it for a period of time the solution just strikes out of nowhere?

That just happened to me. I have a friend's motorcycle in the garage and was going to sell it except that I could only get it to run on two out of four cylinders. I took the carbs apart more than once. Inspected every little hose and passage. Checked for spark. Checked for fuel. I did everything I could think of and nothing worked. It really didn't make sense at all.

Then today, a year later, after raking the lawn, a thought popped into my head. "What if the two spark plug wires are reversed?" Sure enough, I switched the wires and all four cylinders fired up instantly.

I'm excited to have finally solved it but I also feel a little foolish.

Situation:

• I need to develop in Visual Studio. (Don't ask why)
• I am running Linux. (Ubuntu 8.04)
• Visual Studio is difficult if impossible to install in Wine.

Solution: install Visual Studio on a Windows XP virtual machine.

1. Install VirtualBox
   sudo apt-get install virtualbox
sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose-modules-[kernel name] - Be sure to get the right kernel module. I picked the wrong one and broke my Nvidia driver.
2. Install Windows XP in virtual box
   - Set your drive size larger than 4G as Visual Studio takes 2.7G for the default install
3. Install VisualStudio
   - Copy the install files to your harddrive first (if installing from dvd). Otherwise you will be prompted to insert a disc which you can't. They will all need to be in the same directory. ie Copy disk2/ contents to disk1/ but don't overwrite any files.

There you have it. Windows inside of Linux upon which is installed Visual Studio. I may try the Wine approach again sometime, but for now this will do.

I just moved my experimental work with Picasa web albums live. Hit the gallery link in the top navigation.

Incorporating with Picasa makes the task of resizing and uploading images trivial when using F-Spot in Linux. I used to dread the resizing sessions. Now I can just multi-select images and hit export.

Awesome.

The old galleries (Gallery2) are still available. Links are at the bottom of the new gallery page.

I have been using Linux and SSH for years now and I'm surprised I have not yet needed to create an SSH tunnel. The need for the tunnel was to connect to a remote PostGRES database that didn't allow remote connections.

What I did was create a tunnel from my local port 5432 to the remote server's port 5432 over SSH. The command looked like this:

ssh -L 5432:192.168.15.75:5432 root@192.168.15.75 -p 2222 -N

Where 192.168.15.75 is the remote machine. 5432 is the PostGRES port and 2222 is the SSH port.
It worked first try!

I've been digging through some of my old photos and came across this beauty. That was an amazing trip!

This has me itching to ride again.

The days are sneaking by us and here we are with but six weeks left until the arrival of our next child. This realization spurred the preparation of Abby's new room yesterday evening. The idea is to get Abby accustomed to if not, moved into her new room before the arrival of her new sibling. This way it isn't so traumatic having a strange baby stealing her crib and her room and her mom.

Abby's new room was formerly the office. The contents of the office have either been thrown out or moved downstairs. It was surprising to see how much had accumulated since we moved into the house. We gave a lot of clothes and some other unused items to thrift stores during The Great Purge. I think there will be another mini purge of items I can't find room for downstairs.

I feel better now that the bed is actually set up in the room. Now Julene can get started on moving things in. And I can assemble the Ikea dresser.

February 13th, 2009 16:31:30 MST will be 1234567890 Unix time.

If anyone cares...

Edit: If we were real geeks, we would have a Unix themed party about this time. Perfect time to go for beers on a Friday.

Has this ever happened to anyone else? It has to have had.

You go out and buy a cool pair of shoes. 1 year later, the laces start becoming frayed and eventually break. No problem, you go to a shoe store to get some replacement laces, except that once you get there you realize that they only carry white, black and one shade of brown. After visiting a couple more stores you find that they all seem to stock the same 3 colors. So now your cool shoes are rendered uncool with unmatched laces or you buy new shoes.

Anybody know of where to find a big variety of shoelaces?

One of our parenting discoveries is that Abby loves the Wii. So much so, that she will pull out the controllers and ask us to play. Her favorite thing to do is to sit beside us holding her own controller while we race shouting "Go Daddy go!"

It's to the point where if she's grumpy or whining a simple question of "Do you want to play Wii?" results in Abby responding "Wiiii?!" and running to the couch. Whatever was bothering her is forgotten.

In the coming years though, she will be wanting to play herself, resulting in less game time for Dad.

I wish politicians would act like responsible grown ups for once. I feel like I am watching yet another bad reality show and an another alliance is being formed to kick someone off the show. I don't expect the opposition to like the ruling party or to agree with them, but come on, joining forces with the NDP and requiring and seeking support from a separatist party? How can anyone think that this is healthy? Add to that the worldwide economic crisis and you have an unstable government during an unstable time. What does unstable*unstable = ?

I would like to see a point form list of what the Conservatives have done against the Canadian population, not against the other parties that require these drastic measures to remove them from power. Dion's reasons for a coalition from last night's speech:

• they believe they can achieve more
• there will be less conflict
• they disagree with the Conservative's economy stimulus plans
• Harper is at fault for the confusion in parliament and wants to "get to work now"

I realize I'm speaking as a Conservative Western and my sentiments are not echoed everywhere, but I can say with confidence that most Canadians would like to see the quibbling cease and some level-headed governing begin.

We do not need drama for the sake of drama.

I have begun to work on .NET/C# projects at work and am attempting to retain my Linux desktop. My development IDE is Mono Develop which works great (except with sharepoint.dll). The next step was integrating with Visual Source Safe 2005 which is what we use for our .NET project repository. Maybe one day we can switch to SVN. Until then I can use Wine.

These are the steps I took to get Visual Source Safe 2005 running in Wine 1.1.9:

1. Get the lastest wine (1.1.9)
2. Change wine to run in windows2000 mode
   $ winecfg
   This was recommended on several forums, I didn't try in XP mode.
3. Install .NET 1.1 in Wine. Download from Microsoft and install
4. Install .NET 2.0 in Wine.Download from Microsoft and install. For some reason, when I installed .NET 2.0 it seemed to hang on "initializing installation" but it appeared as an installed requirement in the VSS2005 install.
5. Install missing MFC42.dll. I got it from www.dlldump.com. Without this, Visual Source Safe thinks a trial version is already installed.
6. Install Visual Source Safe 2005

[Optional steps to mount a samba share for network databases.]

1. Mount your Source Safe Database directory. My mount command looked like this:
   $ sudo mount -t cifs -o credentials=/home/steven/.smbmount-cred //services/p-drive /mnt/services/
2. Create symbolic link from within the wine file system to your omount point. Or you could mount directly to the wine drive folder.
   $ ln -s /mnt/service/ /home/steven/.wine/drive-c/services
3. Run Visual Studio and add your source database.

And that's it! At least it was for me. As I am sure you are aware, installations usually vary from one Linux install to the next.

Good Luck!

I upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 8.10. I have high hopes for this version as it has benchmarked well and with the improvements to CPU usage. My biggest problem with 8.04 was how often my fan turned on (it wouldn't be such a big deal if it wasn't so loud) and how my hard-drive would spin constantly. So far the fan has turned on as much or less than it does with XP and the hard-drive spin issue seem so to be resolved as well.

I have one beef so far: VPN support in the network manager is broken out-of-the-box. It took most of today to get it figured out. Settings wouldn't stick when editing my VPN connection, saving my password resulted in a random error and a needed refuse-EAP setting was unavailable. This was all eventually resolved with much searching and reading. It is frustrating to have something that worked so well in a previous version completely changed and broken in the next.

That said, I am happy to have a Linux installation on my laptop that's not so CPU intensive. As I write this entry, top shows CPU usage under 10% whereas in 8.04 it was usually up around 15%.

More thoughts on Intrepid Ibex to come later.

Those of you who know me may know that I am slightly opposed to Microsoft products. This stems mostly from my anti-institutionalism and fondness for the open source community. Really, it all started with price. So you could say that my Mennonite heritage is what has produced my technological stance.

With that said, for the next several weeks, probably months, I will be donning a Microsoft hat for a project I have been assigned at work. I will be setting up a Sharepoint Intranet for one of our clients. This is as Microsoft as you can get. I will be working with all things Microsoft: MS Office, MS Projects, Active Directory etc.

I am approaching this with an open mind. I am actually interested in seeing how this turns out and learning a bit more about the world of Microsoft. It's definitely something that would look good on the resume. As I have said to a few people: "If it comes to the worst, at least I'll have a reason to not like Microsoft."

Pies are great! Today we had meat and pumpkin pie with Dan and Christina. To steal Dan's phrase: "I like pie!"

I write this post mainly for my own benefit so I can have somewhere to go back and reference when I need to do this again one year from now after I have forgotten what it was I did.

At work we use Modx a lot for CMS projects. One cool but annoying feature is the "QuickEdit" bar that allows you to make page edits from the page instead of from the manager. The problem is that the quick edit bar uses a Javascript library that often breaks other Javascript on your site - but only if you're currently logged into the manager. Which means, you often won't be able to test while you're logged in and making changes, that you need to test.

Here is the hack to remove the bar.
Edit

assets/modules/quick_edit/output.class.inc.php

In the function, mergeLinks change $allowed=true; to $allowed=false;

You know the media has next to nothing on you (Harper) when the press is running stories about how much public affection you show your kids.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/CanadaVotes/News/2008/09/30/6929886-cp.html

I finished my DIY laptop cooling device. I added telescoping rods to keep everything together and provide an adjustable platform.

What do you think?

I have always been a fan of DIY projects, but never so good at carrying them out to fruition. Well, here is one that I have indeed managed to see through to at least the proof of concept.

I have always complained about my HP Pavilion's noisy CPU fan. So in an effort to keep my laptop cooler with less interference from the CPU fan I build my own laptop cooler. The use of hoses was inspired by another DIY laptop stand I had seen on the net. Add 2 Princess Auto 5v fans, a USB cable and minimal solder and you get this:

I intend to tidy up the wires a bit and maybe attach the 2 hoses with telescoping rods for maximum adjustability and in an effort to keep everything together. The fans are not the quietest either, so there is the option of switching to 12v fans and since they will be underpowered they would spin slower. But at least it seems to work somewhat.

There was some excitement in Bow Island last night. There were a lot of people standing around watching this house fire. We got there a bit late so my pictures aren't as impressive as some people got earlier. The whole front of the house had been one big wall of flame.

You can see an old VW Bug in the garage. It's always sad to see an old car destroyed.

Dan, this one is for you.

You know that outline on href's you see when you click the link? I used to get rid of that with an "onclick=blur()". Well, I just found a way easier method.

a { outline: none; }

And I call myself a web developer. How did I not know this?

Finally. I have succeeded after much reading and trial and error to create my own custom firewall and more importantly QoS script. I have revisited QoS several times since I lost my Shorewall config to a hard-drive crash at work. I endeavored this time to build a QoS script from the ground up with no 3rd party software. This proved a little more difficult and time consuming than anticipated.

The very high level break down of how it works is this, IPTables is used to assign port, destination or source based traffic arbitrary marks. These marked packets are then read by traffic control (tc) and put into designated Hierachical Token Buckets (HTB) which have assigned rates and priorities. That's the gist of it.

It all sounds quite boring and simple but I assure you it wasn't that simple and boring is a subjective label. It's exciting for me because it is the final piece to the SNAP (one of my pet projects) puzzle.

If anyone is interested in these scripts, let me know and I'll make them available.

Sound problems has been one issue that has been in Linux for quite sometime. Usually what happens is that sound stops working after watching flash in a web browser.

To find the offending process type this:

This command will output a list of processes which currently have the sound device open. If you kill those processes you should get your sound back without needing to reboot.

We have seen some intense weather this summer. On the way to Bow Island this Friday we saw these ominous clouds.

I've had this weird problem for a while where my one USB drive would only mount as a read only filesystem. After lots of Internet searching across multiple days and weeks, I found one post where this one person just switched USB ports on his PC and it worked.

I tried it. Guess what it works.

Weird.

Tomorrow I'm 30 and I've gotten over it. People seem to make a big deal of this number. Pointing out that I'm no longer in my twenties as if the twenties are the prime of life. But I think the 30s will prove to be good years.

I'll let you young'uns know what it's like.

After several years of using a variety of Linux flavour desktops, I have to say that Ubuntu 8.04 is by far the easiest Linux to use to date.

One thing though - the Java version it installed by default on my AMD64 machine was terrible. Java routinely used 100% of my CPU. After installing Java 6 from Sun via Synaptic (Add/Remove), things are much, much better.

Thought other Ubuntu users may find this information useful.

Now with 50% more shininess!

Lately, I have been experimenting with Scriptaculous and Prototype JavaScript libraries. I used to be wary of using third party libraries for either backend or frontend applications. But now, because of some recent requirements for a website I looked to some libraries to implement these features quickly. I found that over the past year or so, Scriptaculous libraries had matured greatly.

So if you look to the title of my website, you'll notice it's changed from v5.0 to 5.1b to indicate the implementation of these libraries throughout this site.

Take a look at the experimental section to see what I'm currently toying with.

This is the Porsche 9ff GT9. It's top speed is rated at 252mph! Too bad it's 2mph shy of the Veyron. You'd think they could have squeezed 3 more to put it over the top. Guess not.

Everything went to pot yesterday. At least on my computer. I had noticed a few odd things recently like my TV capture card stopped working. Yesterday everything stopped working. The clue was that during boot every executable returned a "Unable to execute binary file" error.

Thankfully I could recover most of my files with Fedora Rescue. So as of this afternoon I am running Ubuntu 8.04. The first setup attempt messed up. So I tried again and the install failed completely. I tested the install disk and it failed. Burned another, tested it failed too. Tried installing off the second burn anyway and it worked.

Dual monitors was a snap to setup once it installed NVidia's driver for me. All I had to do was add the TwinView option in the xorg.conf. VPN is working - quite a bit nicer than the old pptp-config I used to use.

I'm still in the process of getting Eclipse to where I want it and I'm sure there are other things that I will find I need in the next couple of days.

Wow it has been a long time since I have written anything here. Maybe because I've been so busy shoveling snow. Calgary has been living up to it's crazy weather reputation lately. We actually drove to Bow Island and back during the weekend. On the way back, the highways were probably 80% ice covered. Our vehicles in the ditch count between Brooks and Calgary was 14. 4 of which were semis.

When we got home, I found that my 2 LCD monitors had been delivered Friday after we had gone, and left on our steps in plain view of the entire neighborhood. Good job Canada Post. I'm surprised they didn't disappear.

I set them up Monday and they're awesome! Working from home is going to be fun now! No more fuzziness or wavy effects. Not to mention the desk real estate that opens up.

Now to see if I actually have any time to do any work this summer. I think we've over extended ourselves a bit with our evening activities.

We are back. Abby was great with her babysitters, but she does seem very happy to be home. There was no issue with her coming back to us. Her grandparents had an especially good time with her. A big thanks to Janelle who had her most of the time.

Abby has been incredibly hyper tonight. For the past hour she has been screeching and playing with a (child proof) pill bottle. I often wonder what's going on in her head.

I have finished putting up pictures from our trip. I may put up one or two more if I find I missed some good ones. I have enabled commenting, so comment away on the pictures if you'd like.

Until next time.

"We're leeaaaving on a jet plane...."

Our flight leaves late this afternoon at 5:30pm. Crazy! I'm quite looking forward to having a couple weeks off with Julene.

Maybe, if you're lucky, I'll post some updates and/or pictures while we're traveling.

We are booked to go to England! This was kind of last minute. We had initially planned to buy tickets before Christmas, but due to certain circumstances we decided to wait. Then just recently, we were able to find babysitters for Abby so we could go. Thankfully, there were still tickets available that weren't super expensive, although, more than they had been in December.

Now we need to figure out where to go and what to do. We would like to venture to at least one other country while we're out. Other than that, all I've got is to visit some castles. I've always wanted to see a castle. And beer sampling! Julene would like to see a show of some sort in London.

Does anybody have any more ideas?

An older and wiser colleague once told me that during his downtime he would "read a book or technical article relating to my profession." I am experiencing downtime right now so I am doing some experimental programming with Google APIs but am finding it exceedingly difficult to be motivated.

What do you do in your downtime and how do you motivate yourself (if you're doing something productive)?

Click the icon in the top right to leave a comment

-- added
The same question was just posted on slashdot, creating a lot more discussion than would be generated here.

I don't subscribe to New Year's resolutions because they carry the assumption that they will be broken within a month. But one thing that I have wanted to do lately is read the entire Bible. And through a strange coincidence, Google Reader had a "Read the Bible in a Year" RSS subscription suggestion for me.

The feed breaks up the reading into 1 OT, 1 NT, and 1 Psalms/Proverbs section per day. If you're interested, the URL for the feed is
http://www.ibs.org/bibles/dailyreading/rss/niv.xml

Happy New Year!

The holidays are nearing their end. I am ok with that. It will be nice to get back to routine. But I am very much looking forward to our visit to Manitoba this coming weekend. My family hasn't seen us (read: Abby) for 7 or so months. We send pictures but it's not the same. It's always nice to spend some days hanging out on the farm. The atmosphere is so different than Calgary. It is tempting (for me at least) sometimes to trade our house on our tiny lot for a nice big acreage out there - with money to spare. I'll have to start up my own contracting company and work remotely. Some day...

This past weekend I got to single parent Abby while Julene went to help her parents paint their new house. Abby was really good to me, but I am thankful to have a helpmate. Raising a child is not a job for one person - my hat off to those that do.

Thanks again to Jeff for his relentless QAing. He found an ampersand issue with my RSS feed. I will have to be careful when adding links in posts to format them correctly.

I stumbled across this music video the other day. I love the acoustic guitar in it. I wonder if I can find this guy in local music stores?

Wisely: Through Any Window

For those of you interested in attending a Choral Christmas concert, I will be singing in Brentview Baptist's choir concert on Sunday December 16 at 6:30pm. The concert will be held at the newly completed church building on Charleswood and Crowchild.

View Larger Map

I hope to see you there.

I added some new background images (the picture at the top). To view a random different image click the green recycle icon in the top right corner of the page. Or, pick from the list that shows on mouse-over of the icon. My current favorite is the door_handle.

I also added some more pictures of Abby.

Good news! I was able to fix the Corolla's problem without any new parts. It turned out that the problem was that one of the control arm mount points was loose. After a bit of working the bolt back and forth I was able to get it good and tight. The Corolla drives great now with no suspension noises!

woohoo!

I have been on my own for the past week. Julene and Abby are at my inlaws. It feels weird being on my own. I like coming home to a wife and child and it feels weird to open the door and be greeted by silence.

On the vehicle front:
The Corolla is needing some maintenance. I replaced the rotors this week because they were warped. Tonight is the passenger side ball joint. This is a new procedure for me. I haven't replaced a ball joint before. From the looks of it though, it appears to be relatively straight forward. Christopher volunteered to come down and lend a hand if I need it - which will be nice. Sometimes all you need is one more hand or set of eyes.

I am once again very thankful for having my own garage to do these repairs on my own. I can imagine the labour cost would be somewhere around $250.

The !PHP project has passed the pilot stage. We are now waiting for confirmation that the quote we gave them will fit in their 2008 budget. I have been working on it during "down time" at work and I'm enjoying it. I have completed a device discovery web utility which is something the open source solution didn't have. The next step is to finish the monitoring daemon.

That said, it's time to get to work.

I had enough time budgeted so I could start writing a C++ monitoring daemon. I need another couple weeks to get where I'd like to be. If the project stalls, or they go with the open source, I plan to finish it on my own - it would look good on my resume.

In other news, a friend of mine has been chosen for jury duty. As much as I know there is a need for juries made up of members of the public, I'm glad I haven't had to be involved in any trials (as of yet). It does peak my curiosity a bit though. I'll have to bug him about once he's done.

Abby is still a super happy baby. She gets into these hyper moods sometimes and can be quite hilarious. I'm quietly hoping that the hyperactivity slows and doesn't increase as she gets older. She can sit mostly on her own now, we just have to tip her back up occasionally. Her favorite thing to do seems to be to sit on the (or Mark and Esther's couch) and play with a toy while "talking" as loud as possible - drowning out or at least distracting from any nearby conversations.

I was browsing ebay for old Porsches and came across what will now be my dream car.
A 1969 Porsche 911.

The prices don't seem to be way out of reach and I have always wanted a Porsche. Plus, I'd rather have a classic than something new anyway. So it meets all my desires. That said, I probably am nowhere near being a place to justify such a purchase. But it's nice to dream - albeit a bit frustrating.

You may have noticed a new look for the site. I was inspired by some design site (that I can’t recall) and decided to mostly mimic what they had, at least for the basic division of the header, menu and content. If you go to the gallery, you will notice that it is still in the old style. This is because Gallery2 is not the easiest to skin - but I plan to get around to it soon.

Oh, and Jeff, you now have a perma link for your RSS feed.

Cheers.

I recently started building a daemon in C for a possible SNMP polling app but that was one of the potential projects that faded away. So what I’m looking for are ideas in for which I could use this daemon shell. Or any mini-project ideas that I could implement in some other language.

I’m looking forward to your suggestions

On Wednesday night, I accompanied a couple friends to a Martin Sexton concert. Opening for him was Martyn Joseph, a political singer/songwriter. Both were really good, each in their own way.

Sexton has this way of singing that makes him sound like a muted trumpet. It's kinda cool if you don't mind not understanding what he's saying - but if you already know the words then there's no problem. He's a great performer and I'd recommend checking him out if he comes around your area.

I am finally parting with one of our three cars. I sold the Toronado on Ebay last weekend. It went for a decent price - enough that I nearly came out even after three years of owning and driving it. Which is more than you can ask for from any car.

Other than that, life is getting into the busyness of the Fall/Winter season. It seems that my evenings are mostly taken up during the week. This tends to get frustrating. Maybe this year I will resolve to be less committed. Although that sounds like a negative idea, it would probably help keep me more sane and less stressed.

If anyone is looking for some dark British humor, check out The Extras by Ricky Gervais, also picked up by HBO.

I finally got around to putting in the fuel tank pressure sensor in the Cavalier. Time will now tell whether this is the fix for the OBDII code.

Other than that, life is pretty well moving on steady. Abby is still a very happy baby. It is a lot of fun to watch her discover the world.

I should upload more pictures of her...

"When Jesus said 'Love Thy Enemy', He probably meant 'Don't kill them'"

This could be applied to any 'Christian' nation at war.

Here's an interesting vehicle I came across yesterday. Note the amount of mirrors.

Programming as the Magic of Legend ( http://jroller.com/page/obie )

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be. ... The computer resembles the magic of legend in this respect, too. If one character, one pause, of the incantation is not strictly in proper form, the magic doesn't work. Human beings are not accustomed to being perfect, and few areas of human activity demand it. Adjusting to the requirement for perfection is, I think, the most difficult part of learning to program."

I came into work thinking, today would be a good day to do the package updating that I have been prompted to do for a while. So I let the update wizard do it's thing and at the end rebooted as needed.

While Fedora (6) was booting I noticed that eth0 failed to get an IP. No worries, we have dhcp hiccups at work alot. Finishing booting. Tried to get an IP manually - no go. Called over the IT guy. His laptop worked fine. My onboard Broadcom gig NIC isn't even lighting up.

Figuring that the driver broker during the update I threw in PCI NIC. Still nothing. No internet connection means no online searching for solutions. So I thought, why don't I try upgrading to Fedora 7. Having never done a smooth upgrade from one Fedora version to the next before I had my doubts. 1 hour later... my doubts are confirmed.

Next I tried a clean install of Fedora 7. 1 hour later - still no network.

Finally admitting defeat, I dug up the Fedora Core 6 install DVD and went back to un-updated Fedora Core 6 and now everything is working. Except Eclipse - the most important utility at work.

What have we learned kids?
Be wary of automatic updates. Proceed with extreme caution and have a contingency plan.

After all of that, I still prefer Linux to Windows.

I used to think that this would be a hard age to turn, but the more I think about it the more I am ok with it. Why not simply embrace the inevitable? It's a path I'm going to have to walk one way or another? However, if I claim to be in some sort of early-mid-life crisis maybe I could get away with getting the V-max I've always wanted.

I have been trying to figure out the cause of my fatigue. Maybe lack of sleep? (usually 7 hours) Maybe poor eating habits - but I normally eat pretty well. Maybe a brain-draining, eternal project at work? But most likely the main cause is that it's between 2 and 3 pm on a Friday.

It's on Friday's like these that I look forward to doing nothing on the weekend. Except that in the summer it seems that all of our weekends through August get booked up by the end of May. I'll try and get some down time to relax Saturday and Sunday regardless.

1095 days. That is how long Julene and I have been married today. 3 years. Wow. It seems so long ago and yet so new at the same time.

With the arrival of Abby our social lives have been forever altered. However, Janelle has graciously offered to babysit Abby for tonight, so Julene and I can go out for dinner. This will be Abby's first babysitting experience and will likely determine how eager Janelle will be to offer her sitting services in the future.

Here's to a nice quiet evening for everyone!

Go Flames Go!

The prospect of being a parent is very humbling. To think that we will be responsible for a new Life. We pray for wisdom in bringing up this child.

Despite having our income status rubbed in our faces, it was a good time checking out what's new in the auto industry.

Mark pointed me towards one such artifact - a Microsoft promotional video for Windows386. As he so aptly put it:

"I'm building a time machine and switching to linux or BSD before this video ever gets made."
- Mark Slevinsky

Here it is in all it's glory.

Sounds like a Monday to me.

Armchair for the mind.
"What I dream of is an art of equilibrium, purity and tranquility, devoid of disquieting or preoccupying subject matter... a sedative, a calmative for the intellect - something analogous to a good armchair that relieves one from physical fatigue."
Henri Matisse - 1908

Julene and I have started discussing names for our future child. It seems that we cannot hit any middle ground. We both like names that other people have taken first but can't seem to find any names that we both like and hasn't already been taken by family or close friends. Any suggestions? Put them in the comments. Julene hasn't taken to my suggestions of Demetrius or Maximus so I have to bring more to the table.

Also, look out for a more complete example of my PHP OOP AJAX framework.

Recently we had our 18 week ultrasound. You can see the pictures here. The baby can be seen sucking her(?) thumb in one of them.

Merry Christmas!

Cause that's what happened to me. They way over-tightened (150+ft/lbs) some wheel nuts (and under tightened others) and when the body shop tried to take off the wheel to get the fender off, two wheel studs broke on one wheel - which costs me $150 because it was an item not on the estimate from the bodyshop.

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Being the last day of a yet another really busy week coupled with an early morning car-pool into work, I have to drink my motivation from a cup(s) this morning.

Model: HP Pavillion DV1315CL

Pentium M 1.73 Ghz

1 Gig Ram

80 Gig Hdd

Dual Layer DVD +/- burner

14" widescreen

Tonight I am taking the problem power supply out of the Toronado and bringing it to my electronic engineer friend's place to see if we can find and rectify the issue. Here's to hoping. If we can't get it, we will be replacing the guts of it with some modern parts. It would be nice to have this done for winter as it directly affects the heating of the interior of my car.

http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=102 This will be my first full week of work in a while. I wonder how it will pan out. I'm guessing that I'll be beat by the end. I'm trying to work at least a few extra hours so I can make up for my unpaid holidays. My mind tends to shut off around 7.5 hours of work so that could prove to be difficult.
Soon I will be down with extra-curricular sports. I have decided to take a break from soccer for the first time in years. Having the extra time at home to do some extra web development will prove to be very valuable.
Until whenever... http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=101 Our holidays are basically over. At least for me. Julene has a few more days off but I am back at work for a while now. I wonder how long it will take me to get back into this routine of work. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=99 I think we have all our pre-trip issues ironed out. Now, if only I could do something about the weather. It's looking pretty gloomy today for our start. And the forecast on the island isn't rain-free either. Oh well, we will start our trip regardless and just dress warm and in full rain gear. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=97 Two days before we leave on our motorcycle trip I run into a significant issue - the oil pan threads for the oil drain plug on my Tempter stripped. I remember that years ago (when Derick still owned it) we put in an oversized bolt because of weak threads. Well, those weak threads are now gone. So I am going to try and find an oversized, tapping bolt to replace it. Obviously this is a pretty important fix as you don't want to be losing all your oil in the middle of the mountains. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=96 I read Luke 6:27-36 today and was struck by a question. Often we hear contemporary Christians (myself included) say: "We shouldn't let people ( take advantage of || walk over ) us just because we're Christians." As disconcerting as it may be, I am no longer sure I can agree with this statement. This passage pretty well explicitly says that if someone takes something from us, to not demand it back. Does this remind anybody else of the Ned Flanders - Homer relationship?
Talk about a difficult command to follow. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=95 I just realized that all the links on my site don't work in IE due to IE being horrible. I'll try and get that fixed. http://www.stevenreimer.com/comment.php?id=94 Hey Faithful viewers.
So I was using my new framework for a friend's website and promptly and unwittingly started breaking the rules those which the framework was intended to help enforce. Particularily, the combination of business and display logic. But don't be alarmed, I have gone back and fixed my misuse of the framework.
In other news: In an attempt to possibly getting the Toronado running again without buying and AC compressor, I posted the question: "Can I run an altenator belt bypassing the AC?" on an Oldsmobile forum. Eveyone that responded seemed to think so. This weekend I will measure the length of the belt I would need without AC and see if it can run without any additional idlers or anything.
Here's to hoping.
Although I may have a lead on a truck, and in that case I would rather not keep the Toronado. I guess I could get something for it if it was running to help offset the truck purchase. If it's still available and we figure out how to get a hold of the guy.

Oh, and feel free to use the feedback to make personal attacks on other feedbackers.