iPod

I have decided to go ahead and buy the iPod from apple. I was thinking of waiting until the Visa goes down a little more, but with Tina and me going on a long bike ride next weekend, I want it now. :)

I was thinking of getting a different mp3 player that also plays ogg files, as they sound better. But the iPod seems to be better than any other player out there. And they have a normal battery pack so I don't have to worry about recharging all the time.

Back pain

My lower back has been a little tight lately, but I figured it was just a temporary thing. So last night my back woke me up at 2 am to tell me it was in pain. It was tense and had started creeping into my sides and stomach. I went to the kitchen to try and stretch but it hurt so much I ended up throwing up. I've never had that before.

I guess it's time to hit the yoga place for a few weeks to get straightened out.

Bushie

Bush wants to make sure that marriage is only legal for us heterosexuals, and not them homosexuals. He talks about sinners and such in his rant. What happened to seperation of Church and State?

And to make sure we're all safe from terrorists in the sky, the government is cutting air marshals because of budget problems. Don't we have this huge department making sure we're safe? Why cut money for things that make people feel safe?

end of ranting....

Windows resolution

I was installing software on another computer today and was getting tired of the 800x600 resolution. So I updated the resolution to 1280x720 and hit ok without testing the resolution.

Turns out that the monitor didn't support the frequency I was using and gave me a black screen stating such. Since I don't have the keystrokes memorized to change the resolution back, I had to turn off the box and march it to my computer and attatch it to my monitor. After resetting everything on my bigger screen I got back to what I was doing.

So don't just hit ok, use the test button instead.

Crank Brothers Pedals

I just looked at the crank brothers website to check out their stuff. I use the normal egg beaters. I like them, but sometimes my feet fall asleep because they're not used to such a small contact. And lo and behold crank brothers comes out with two pedals (in 'aug) that will fix that problem. They have a larger footpad that will spread the pressure over a larger area and relieve any pains.

Check 'em out:

I personally like the candy, looks pretty spiffy. I think I'll have to get a pair for my road bike so when I do the next big trip my feet are comfortable.

C++/Unix

While working on my gSoap Web Service program, I came across a weirditie (If Bush can make up words, so can I) of C++/Unix programming. If you set a signal handler and then catch the signal, you need to reset the handler to catch further signals.

In my case, if a client application is communication with my server (via SOAP) and the client application exits, the server will receive a broken pipe signal. This signal is sent when a program tries to write to a socket or pipe when no one is reading. So I had set my handler:

signal(SIGPIPE, my_handler);
....
void my_handler(int x) 
{
   cout << "howdy: " << x << endl;
}

And I would get the howdy: 13 notice after the client exited. And when the client would restart and exit again, the server would go down.

I think it's silly that you have to tell the system that you want to catch the same signal again. Now my handler looks like this:

void my_handler(int x)
{
  signal(SIGPIPE, my_handler); 
  return;
}

Da Vinci Days

Last weekend, Tina and I went over to Corvallis for davinci days. There were cool exhibits and some great elephant ears - fried dough for you East coasters.

The coolest part was the Kinetic Sculpture races - which were human powered sculptures that had to race through mud, sand, water and land. A few jugglers were at hand (hahah) and they were pretty funny.

I got to ride one of those bikes that have an off center rear wheel where you have to bounce up and down on the bike to get it going. I didn't get it going. But it was fun anyway.

Couldn't imagine lacing up the spokes in this wheel:

Wet Paint

Mail and spam

I was checking out servlets.com to see what new stuff was coming up. He put up a link about Mailinator. It's main use is for websites that ask for an email address for registration, and you usually have to check that email once or so to get the registration info. It's similar to spamgourmet.com but easier to use and has a nicer website.

So instead of setting up an account with hotmail, myway.com or yahoo.com, you make up a name like fancypants@mailinator.com and use that. Then you go to mailinator.com and check your email. And you don't have to worry about that email address getting hit by tons of spam.

Their FAQ is pretty good.

Weird webpages here...

I've been told (and then saw) that my /photos webpages were rendered in non Opera broswers with a blank section before the photos appeared. I traced it to two issues:

• I had two <body> tags in the html page.
• The Internal Frames were being rendered with the frame larger than I had specified. This was because Moveable Type specified the html header as:
  
  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
       instead of
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

Not sure why this was, but changing the above seemed to fix everything.

Teeth

I just got my teeth cleaned today at Tina's work and while I was there I got a xray of my jaw. It looks pretty neat. So here it is.

Legos

Trey just mailed me a website that lists all known Lego sets. I put together a list of the legos I used to own. Some might have been Trey's, but who knows....

Internet Book List

For about a year now I've been wanting to create an online book list of the books I own. I was going to create a WML version of it so I could see what books I had by using my phone when I was at book stores.

But I've been lazy and slow and have only just begun creating it. And I find this site [iblist] online. They have over 10,000 titles and are probably going to be the book equivilant of imdb . It's a nifty interface and has everything that I was/am going to do.

Mine will end up having quite a few less books than 10,000, but hopefully will still be nifty.

Icon

I just made a favicon for my website (My icon is of Mt. Hood). A favicon is the little icon your browser puts up for each webpage. It's the one good thing from Micro$oft has done. :)

Not all websites have them and not all browsers support it. Internet Explorer seems to ignore icons from websites and put it's own icon instead. Opera and Mozilla support the icon.

I'm using the Irfanview utility to create icons. It's pretty slick and is easy to use.

STP pictures

I finally got around to posting some pictures from the STP. So go have a look see

Java Beans

In Java there is a component model called Java Bean that is used all over the place. They are used in GUIs and in template languages (webmacro and Jakarta Velocity). I'm using the bean model for web applications and web services.

The major features I use are the get and set methods that access properties of an object. For instance, take a Circle object that has the following properties:

• Color
• Radius

To make the class a Java Bean, you'd need to have something similar to this:

class Color
{
   String m_color;
   int m_radius;
   public Color() {}
   String getColor() { return m_color; }
   void setColor(String color) { m_color = color; }
   int getRadius() { return m_radius; }
   void setRadius(int radius) { m_radius = radius; }
}

This can get tedious very quickly especially when you have a large number of properties you want to set & get. And if you're doing commenting, it's a real hassle.

So I wrote this quick and dirty Java program that takes a file with the list of variables and their types and names. It then creates a commented class that has all the appropriate get/set methods.

STP

This weekend Tina and I rode from Seattle to Portland, 206 some odd miles. We lucked out with the weather, it was warm and sunny on Saturday and we didn't hit too much wind/rain yesterday (compared to how it could have been.)

The prettiest part of the ride was the first 15 or so miles where we rode along Lake Washington in the morning. We ended up riding in the middle of the all riders and had tons of people all around us the entire time. I got a little frustrated with everyone who didn't stay to the right or move over when you tried to pass after saying "on the left", which forces you to go further out in the lane.

We rode around 18 mph for quite a long time, until we hit the Puyallup hill. After that we rode a bit slower. We (I) only got one flat tire, at the end of the first day in Chehalis, and no one got hurt. And no one laughed at any of my jokes along the ride. As we were waiting to go over the Longview bridge was telling everyone with ears on about how in the earlier years they had to ride over the bridge without an escort. I was tired of hearing how he knows everything and is really experienced, so I piped in - "When I was younger we rode to the river and swam across." I don't think he appreciated it too much.

Overall it was a good ride, though there weren't any good rice krispie treats like in '98 (when we rode across bridges that were slicked with oil and a cross wind.)

Terminator 3

Trey and I saw T3 last night. I have to say that I'm disapointed. It just didn't have that bad-ass feeling that T2 or Aliens had. The first Terminator was even scary - at least for me in middle school it was.

One of the main problems with movies these days, IMO, is that they're relying on computer graphics way too much. There were some scenes where they used CG for Arnold and it looked cheesy, which detracted from the feel of the film. They did dumb stuff just to do it - like the Terminatrix having a flame thrower for no good reason.

It's too bad they didn't continue the dark feeling from the previous two movies. At least they didn't have the little brat from T2.

junkIt

I updated my work page (not really saying anything too new.) I put up a copy of my junkIt delete utility. I've found it useful to use at work on our HP-UX machines or on my Dell box running cygwin.

Radio Interview

I just got interviewed by KPAM radio about the STP ride this weekend. My buddy Frank works over there and thought they should put up a piece about the ride. He has gotten me two other interviews, one for my cross country ride and another about being eaten by a hippo.

New Camera

I just walked back from Camera World where I bought myself a new camera - Canon PowerShot s230. It's pretty damn small and has the features I want, like taking movies at 640x480. Hopefully I'll get some good shots during mountain biking.

I'm trying out a program called Zempt for posting blog entries. Thanks to Radwin from Brown. Pretty slick.

4th of July

This Saturday Tina and I rode our bikes from Albany to Corvallis (snagging some blueberrys at the farmer's market along with a grilled calzone.) From there we rode north up to Buena Vista and Independence. In Indepence we ate at a corner soda shop that had tasty burgers and marionberry milkshakes. They were very good - I even drank the rest of Tina's strawberry shake. Being super full made it a little difficult to go up the remaining hills, but it was all good.

We took the Buena Vista ferry across a little river (bikers go free) and rode up the other side. It was neat to ride around this area, it reminded me of Illinois, especially the ferry to Kentucky across the Ohio river.

Little door

July 03, 2003

July 02, 2003