Red Leopard

Sites I Visit

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 15:07:20 +0000

freshnews.orgI get my tech news through the freshnews aggregator. While not a complete picture of the world, it is enough for me. Those looking for a more extensive time waster, try originalsignal.com.
Certainly, using an aggregator implies that someone else is selecting the stories I read and therefore outside forces are impacting my worldview. But isn’t that always true? Are we not inherently enthralled by amusing stimulation? Those concerned about it might look here, here or here.

  <li>
    <a href="http://zenhabits.net/">zenhabits.net</a>Leo Babauta&#8217;s Zen Habits is exactly what&#8217;s needed when I notice the world seems a shade darker. Have you noticed that some people seem to always be angry? or negative? or depressed? or paranoid? I&#8217;m not talking here about something clinical, something requiring psychiatric intervention. No, what I&#8217;m talking about here is a person&#8217;s persistent mood. <p>
      My persistent mood some time ago was rather negative (and my use of the word &#8220;rather&#8221; is rather charitable.) My discovery–which was actually discovered thousands of years ago and since extensively written about, yet new to me–was that while moods are <em>deeply</em> ingrained, they are not <em>indelibly</em> engrained. You are not stuck with whatever persistent mood you have. In a nutshell, the way to replace (or displace) a persistent mood is through structures and practices that support the new desirable mood and breakup the old undesirable mood.
    </p>
    
    <p>
      One of <em>my</em> practices is the practice of awareness. Sometimes I succeed in maintaining awareness and other times I do not. The practice stands nonetheless. The Zen Habits articles are a part of that practice.</li> 
      
      <li>
        <a href="http://itp.angellearning.com/">itp.angellearning.com</a>I will finish my <a href="http://itp.edu/academics/globalma/">master&#8217;s in psychology</a> in June 2012. It is an online program (although students spend two weeks in on-campus seminars) hosted by Angel Learning. I frequently login to my account to publish my work and comment on my cohort&#8217;s (classmates&#8217;) work. <p>
          I was skeptical of online education. No longer. I see the benefit of brick-and-mortar schools, especially at the undergraduate level. However, that precludes many adults from continuing or finishing their degrees, either undergraduate or graduate. The online format is a viable alternative.
        </p>
        
        <p>
          My interest in online education began long before I returned to school. <a href="http://moodle.org/">Moodle</a> captured my imagination and became my entry point into the practical issues of course management systems. For those interested only in (non-degree) continuing education, traditional universities participating in <a href="http://www.ocwconsortium.org/">Open Courseware</a> publish actual courses online. <a href="http://www.khanacademy.org/">Khan Academy</a> is nothing short of inspiring.
        </p>
        
        <p>
          Unsurprisingly, <a href="http://www.ecampusnews.com/technologies/rules-could-prompt-colleges-to-pull-online-programs-from-some-states/">not everyone</a> is excited about online education. Why? When in doubt, <em>follow the money</em>.</li> 
          
          <li>
            <a href="http://safari.oreilly.com/">safari.oreilly.com</a>I am not an advocate of online subscription services; they too often underdeliver. Yet I am a subscriber to O&#8217;Reilly&#8217;s online Safari book service for quite a few years now. <p>
              I noticed one day that it made little sense to buy technical books–which I did on a monthly basis. I&#8217;d once a month wander the aisles of <a href="http://www.digitalguru.com/">Digital Guru</a>, reading chapter one of a dozen books before buying a <em>must-have</em>. At $40+ a book, I was spending five to six hundred dollars a year. The subscription service is cheaper and I don&#8217;t have shelves full of outdated books.
            </p>
            
            <p>
              O&#8217;Reilly has added a number of non-technical publishers–unexpected but very welcomed, especially Kogan Page, Jossey-Bass, Berrett-Koehler, and Butterworth-Heinemann. I now read several books a month; I&#8217;m now in the middle of four: (i) <a href="http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9781593273842">Art of R Programming</a>, the why of which is a long story. R scratches an itch. (ii) <a href="http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9780749456672">Excellence in Coaching</a>, is an edited work on coaching. (iii) <a href="http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9780470579619">The Mindful Coach</a>, outlines Doug Silsbee&#8217;s septet model. It&#8217;s an interesting approach to developing a wide range of personal communication styles. Finally, (iv) <a href="http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/-/9781118033388">The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching</a>, is another edited work on coaching.</li> 
              
              <li>
                <a href="http://www.yellowbridge.com/">www.yellowbridge.com</a>I&#8217;m still on this masochistic path to learn Mandarin. The Yellow Bridge dictionary is amazing and goes a long way in easing the pain. How good is my Chinese? Well, I haven&#8217;t given up. 一步一个脚印。
              </li>
              <li>
                [<b>update 2012-02-20</b>] <a href="http://pandodaily.com/">pandodaily.com</a>When I first heard that AOL bought TechCrunch, I felt my shoulders slump and the day darken. It was like that when Fox cancelled <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Guys_(2010_TV_series)">The Good Guys</a>. And <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefly_(TV_series)">Firefly</a>. TechCrunch wasn&#8217;t just news. It was entertainment. And polarizing. <p>
                  How many productive hours were lost in debate over Michael Arrington&#8217;s status as a reporter, the end of journalism, and the recklessness of TechCrunch. It was deliciously awful. The AOL buyout signalled the end. Assurances of editorial independence aside, TechCrunch lost their editorial independence. Who was surprised when Arrington got sacked? No one. AOLCrunch took a wild tiger and put it on a morphine drip. Sad.
                </p>
                
                <p>
                  A new day. Sarah Lacy has (finally) left to create her own fresh online tabloid, PandoDaily. A few of the old <a href="http://pandodaily.com/authors/">TC bandits</a> have joined the party yet it doesn&#8217;t seem to me an attempt to recreate TechCrunch—thankfully. Let the dead lie in peace.
                </p>
                
                <p>
                  I wish Sarah and her crew well.</li> </ul>

linkedin text too small

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 20:47:43 +0000

Linkedin’s latest site redesign reduced the font-size to eye-straining smallness. When I tried to enlarge the text (OmniWeb, Safari, MacBook Pro), I found text enlargement didn’t work.

What?

How did they disable text enlargement? And why would someone purposely make their website difficult to read?

I don’t have a desire to hunt down how linkedin disabled text enlargement. Even if I did find the cause, I’m sure people who could fix the problem already know yet choose to not fix the problem.

Quotes and Idioms

Fri, 06 May 2011 18:06:32 +0000

A few quotes and idioms I’ve collected.

顿悟之前砍柴挑水，顿悟之后砍柴挑水——吴力。

Dùnwù zhī qián kǎnchái tiāo shuǐ,
Dùnwù zhī hòu kǎnchái tiāo shuǐ.
–Wú Lì

Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water;
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
–Wu Li

Note: Enlightenment does not relieve one of the details of daily life.

摸着石头过河——邓小平。

Mōzhe shítou guòhé.
–Dèng Xiǎopíng

Cross the river by feeling the stones.
–Deng Xiaoping

Note: We may not see exactly how to get there but we will pragmatically find our way; we will learn as we go.

Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 18:12:21 +0000

[update 2011-05-06 I believe my tone in this posting is unjustly harsh and debated (with myself) whether to remove it or not. I’ve decided to let it remain and write a new, more appropriately toned post. Why the change in heart? I’m reading Sieler’s Coaching to the Human Soul (2005). My questions arising in Flaherty’s (2010) book are being answered in Sieler’s. I’ve also just finished reading Brock’s dissertation (2008) which addresses the history and lineage of coaching. Brock is said to publish Sourcebook of Coaching History later this year, now on my future reading list.]

Coaching: Evoking Excellence in Others
by James Flagherty

Beginning Rails 3

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 20:11:19 +0000

I read a paper some time ago–but for the life of me cannot remember where–presenting study findings on student recall and comprehension. The irony of not recalling the details of a paper on the subject of recall spurred me to examine my own recall in other areas. I may have forgotten the source but the gist of the paper… that I remember: The best way to improve comprehension and recall is to write an essay. I’ve long believed that writing develops a concept more fully (Galbraith, Torrance & Hallam, 2006) but the lost paper suggests that essay writing on a new subject internalizes the content.

A New World

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:54:43 +0000

January, 2011. A month of reflection and choices. My world will never be the same.

Speak a new language
so that the world
will be a new world.
—Rumi

What in Hell Happened to 2010?

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 00:05:45 +0000

2010 sucked.

Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot good happened in 2010. But as a vintage, it sucked. Big donkey balls.

At 2010’s wake, we make New Year’s resolutions in hopes that doing so will wash the taste out of our mouths. It’s what we do. Like paying taxes in April. Creatures of habit, that’s what we are. One of those habits is making resolutions at year’s end.

SOD: Sidebar Diversion

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 22:11:51 +0000

I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that the Avatar rendering cluster required 1 petabyte of storage. However, this slide show of the facilities used for filming the actors opened my eyes. [eye opening slide show]

The petabyte is required not just for the finished product. It’s needed to store all the sensor and camera data as well. Okay. I accept that Weta needed 1PB. How does one go about creating a petabyte storage facility? What are the tradeoffs? How much does it cost to build and then to maintain?

SOD: System Benchmarking Hardware

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:55:14 +0000

I’ve been working on and off on the next Seeds of Discontent article. This is a tidbit of an upcoming post but I wanted to push it out now since I need it published for a divergent sidebar article. It stands here bald and raw. That’s life.

This system uses most of the Rampage III resources. The two Radeon cards will completely consume the PCI Express lanes (2 x16). The 24GB DDR3 will fill the six DRAM slots.

Mid-Peninsula Aikido

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 23:52:52 +0000

These are my notes made while looking for an Aikido dojo in the San Francisco Bay’s mid-peninsula region. Specifically the communities in and around Palo Alto, CA. (image: wikimedia.org)

[Update 2011-12-20: I have chosen to train at Aikido Center and started attending Zazen and Aikido classes in October 2011.]

I won’t get into the ‘why’ I’m looking for an Aikido dojo in this posting. Most of what I would say can be gleaned from Stan Wrobel’s excellent book, Aikido for Self Discovery: Blueprint for an Enlightened Life. I’ve included a short book review.

Will it Blend?

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:52:02 +0000

In the previous article Seeds of Discontent, I jotted down a few benchmarks to compare OS X, Windows and Linux performance at a system level. In this article, I explore further a test built around graphics rendering engines. In particular, I was impressed by Sintel, an open source movie built with (among others) Blender.

I don’t know how long it takes to assemble the movie from source assets into a shipping product but I’ll venture it is quite a compute intensive process. I got the idea for this benchmark while reading on the sintel.org home page that the project is re-rendering the film for 4K and that it should be ready later this year (still a few months away). I didn’t know what 4K was so I looked it up. That lead me to compile a table of film formats and supported Frames per Second (FPS). I also appended three rows for HDTV of which only 720p and 1080p are real. 4320p is something bandied about as future but I couldn’t find material online that would lead me to believe it’s anything but a concept. I included it to define the upper envelope edge. (Note: different formats support different levels of FPS.)

Seeds of Discontent

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 03:10:48 +0000

I like reading Tom’s Hardware Guide. I liked it better in the site’s early days when it wasn’t so javacript and flash heavy and the articles were idomatically ‘German-English’. A lot happens in twelve or so years. Still, Tom’s is the best source of information on the web.

I read a CPU benchmark this morning which got me wondering if there were a possiblity to benchmark on any operating system but Windows. I concluded for the kind of benchmarks seen on Tom’s–not really.

filenames with spaces

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 08:48:22 +0000

I downloaded Unity last week. My first bit of installation geekery was to push the documentation to marmaduke, my CentOS server. I drop the documentation directory into a virtual host and let apache serve the index (since I solved my Apache Directory Indexing problem a bit back.)

However, I found that the pages had missing images. Looking at the HTML source, I found that some of the image URLs used ‘images’ (lower case i) while others used ‘Images’ (upper case I). To make matters worse, CSS and javascript files were also stored in the images directory.

android custom component

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 18:18:25 +0000

I recently created an android custom component. To get started, I simply wanted to use the android framework’s CheckedTextView as the starting point. This is because I had an existing project having walked through a tutorial video on safari.oreilly.com. In the tutorial, CheckedTextView was used to create a custom list item for a ListView. I wanted to change the list item to replace the checkbox with something else.

MCPO Rich Dowdy, 1934 – 2010

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:32:21 +0000

It is with heavy heart that I say farewell to Master Chief Petty Officer Rich Dowdy. He passed Thursday, September 2, 2010 at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Balboa.

I married into the family thirteen years ago. The first time I met Rich Dowdy, he gave me the hairy eyeball. Somehow I passed muster, even if I was an old Army soldier. In time, I was accepted into the family.

eight sides open

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:47:25 +0000

An expression piece from my ITP GLBM7600 Intro to Transpersonal Theory class. I thought of it again yesterday while in another class. BTW, ‘eight sides open’ refers to a state of panoramic awareness. Though eight sides open has been described in many cultures, I draw upon the tradition of Musashi. The dragonfly shows utter equanimity and absolute awareness.

MIT 9.00

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:08:33 +0000

I recently finished Paul Bloom’s intro psych course and thought I’d continue my survey with Jeremy Wolfe’s MIT 9.00: Introduction to Psychology. I’m only two lectures in and already I sense Dr. Wolfe’s class has heavier technical leanings. That’s not a bad thing. To read broadly expands awareness.

I tried comparing the syllabi from Yale and MIT. There is some overlap but there is far more unique content than not. At least that’s my impression comparing the two sets of reading assignments. I’ll know more when I finish the balance of the 23 lectures.

loyal and gentle friend

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 22:59:44 +0000

Truffles (1996 – 2010)
Loyal and Gentle Friend

“Look in my eyes, Lord, and my sins
will play out on them as on a screen.
Read them all.

Forgive what you can, and send
me on my path. I will walk on,
until you bid me rest.”
—Shepherd Book

Ten Apple Announcements That Would Not Disappoint

Fri, 28 May 2010 00:24:58 +0000

There are a lot of haters out there but I’m still rooting for Apple. I want Apple to succeed. I’m not going to WWDC 2010 (tapped out of conference budget).

I wish I were going.

Job’s “you won’t be disappointed” promise has my head spinning. I like surprises. I hope Apple doesn’t disappoint.

So, what would I like to see announced? Here’s my top ten list of wishful thinking.

OYC PSYC 110

Fri, 21 May 2010 15:54:43 +0000

I’ve stumbled upon a new means of relaxation at Open Yale Courses. It sounds strange that recordings of university lectures are relaxing but I find they are. Paul Bloom’s PSYC 110: Introduction to Psychology is far more interesting than television. I’m currently on lecture ten of twenty.

His has an enjoyable speaking style; the hour flies by. A sidebar at the end of Dr. Bloom’s lecture on Freud exemplifies his sense of humor.

Get Spiked

Mon, 17 May 2010 17:05:46 +0000

I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with broadcast and cable news outlets. News outlets have sadly taken distinctly partisan roles in society. I find their content specious at best and makes for very poor commentary. (One notable except is Deutsche Welle.)

I recently stumbled upon spiked, which itself has a bias but its bias pleasantly lacks the shrill insanity commonly found nowadays. It’s not news but rather commentary on newsworthy events and trends. Even those articles with which I disagree will often have a point two I hadn’t considered. I find this to be the real value.

bash uuid generator

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 04:20:50 +0000

Onliner bash scripts are handy but bash and common utilities don’t always work the same on the two systems I most use: Centos vs. OS X.

centos $ cat /etc/redhat-release 
CentOS release 5.4 (Final)

osx $ sw_vers | head -n2
ProductName:	Mac OS X
ProductVersion:	10.6.2

For example, I recently wrote a simple script to generate a set of UUID using the uuidgen utility. OS X and Centos versions of uuidgen take very different parameters.

tomcat error: clearThreadLocalMap

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:43:57 +0000

I’m trying to move from Tomcat 5.5.28 to Tomcat 6.0.26 for my Struts2-based webapp. I previously tried–unsuccessfully–to make the move to Tomcat 6.0.20 but had to roll back. There were problems with the underlying connection to mail that I didn’t have time to track down.

I use a standard stack.

$ cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS release 5.4 (Final)
$ /usr/sbin/httpd -v
Server version: Apache/2.2.3
Server built:   Nov 12 2009 18:43:41
$ java -version
java version “1.6.0_18”
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_18-b07)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.0-b13, mixed mode)

Where are you?

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

“Who are you? What is identity?

You like cheese, and sun on water. You know your age and what happens when your eyes grow tired.

Filtered through some predisposition, you are the product of everything that ever happened to you, but if you lost your memory, who could you be?” – The Monkey, episode 30

“Who could you be?” The question is on my mind.

Can you hear me now?

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:16:45 +0000

I ate too much last night. My wife had ‘girls night out’ which left me unsupervised as I made my dinner.

I powered through an entire package of Johnsonville Brats. Cause and effect… I was wide awake at 2AM, bloated as a poisoned pup. Uffda!

And, yes. It was worth it.

“What the hell”, says me? Good time to catch up on some random and completely unnecessary web browsing.

Apache Directory Indexing

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:47:59 +0000

Sometimes a problem persists long enough—is an irritant long enough—that I’ll burn an entire Sunday morning simply out of spite. Today’s irrational time-waste went to solving “Directory index forbidden by Options directive.”

[marmaduke ~] $ cat /var/log/httpd/error_log \
 | grep '\[error\]' \
 | head -1
[Sun Dec 06 09:25:05 2009] [error] [client 192.168.2.29]↩
Directory index forbidden by Options directive:↩
/var/www/documentation/public_html/

I have a development server that I use to offload work from my laptop.

Unicode Backlash

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 20:12:08 +0000

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a blog that made me laugh. The truth be told, I have a snarky side—my evil twin, if you will. I keep it in check. Mostly. Some of you who will understand. Some of you won’t. It’s a Gemini thing.

My twin is fun but good luck putting it back in its cage. And believe me, for every dollar of fun you get, you’ll pay ten dollars in social disaster. Best to keep the twin in check.

Speech Reference Materials

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 01:26:26 +0000

Below are several resources I used in writing a speech delivered this morning for Early Risers Toastmasters entitled, “Feedback Loops in Personal Practices.” For those who were unable to attend, the talk focused on somatic learning and the importance of personal practices. (I am interested in personal practices as access to metaprogramming.) Feedback loops are important to mitigate the risk adopting destructive practices or of improperly performing the practice. I concluded with a tie-in reference to Theo’s new project of video recording the clubs speeches (if the speaker requests it).

Blue Light

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:18:54 +0000

Rolling Stone reports that Mazzy Star‘s “Sandoval confirms her [sic] and her bandmate David Roback haven’t called it quits and they are still working on their anticipated fourth album. But she declines to give many specifics. ‘It’s true we’re still together,’ she says. ‘We’re almost finished [with the record]. But I have no idea what that means.’”

Mandarin Wednesday I

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:57:25 +0000

I finished Mandarin Tuesday III this past Spring. There’s a lot going on at work and I must admit, I didn’t put in the same level of effort as I showed in Mandarin I and II. I believe anyone who is learning a foreign langauge will concur, class is a bitch when you’ve not put in the requisite study time. Nevertheless, perseverance pays and I crawled my way to the end. I have “completed” the entirety of “Practical Chinese Reader Book 1” but I still babble like an idiot when confronted with native Chinese speakers. So, what to do? Sign up for the next course! Pain? Haha! I laugh. I have known pain in my time. The mild embarrassment and frustration of language school is nothing. NOTHING! Bring it.

bash date tricks

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 21:14:39 +0000

A quick usage note regarding the date util under bash. I sometimes want to convert between a unix timestamp and a formatted date string. I do it infrequently enough that I forget the syntax. This article is me writing down my notes.

In the following example, I want to get timestamps and date strings for both today and yesterday. Why yesterday’s date? Because I want to get yesterday’s data from google analytics’ data API. I’ve see numerous examples getting day, month and year then subtracting one from the day and propagating the underflow through the month and year. Blech! If I have today’s timestamp, I simply subtract a days worth of seconds from today and violà, yesterday!

Verdana Hates Pinyin

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:09:16 +0000

I stumbled across an article on lostlaowai.com

www.lostlaowai.com/survival-chinese

which lead me to poke around the site a bit. At the above URL, I noticed that some of the combining diacritical marks (tone marks) used in writing pinyin were not rendering properly. I had not seen this problem before. It didn’t make sense.

Things that don’t make sense bug me. And being something of a character geek, I couldn’t let it go. So I tried to reproduce the problem in a test example. I couldn’t. That’s when I discovered a quirky Mac OS X copy+paste issue. I sensed there was a problem but the truth was elusive. You can’t see that copy+paste changes the string characters unless you look at a binary dump of the file (which I did).

Blue Smoke IV

Fri, 29 May 2009 22:19:31 +0000

I’ve added this latest rendition of Blue Smoke to illustrate a point: The quantity and quality of non-video music is greater than that of video music. Okay. So it’s anecdotal. But this isn’t about science. It’s about sensation. In my world, the grooveshark player found every track but one: Helpless by Needle. But I’ll take Neil Young’s unplugged version. Not as good but does have a nice base coat of maudlin piano. And I prefer the Paul Weller’s Portishead remix of Wildwood.

Blue Smoke III

Wed, 13 May 2009 23:03:18 +0000

Yet another version of blue smoke using the embedr.com player. No one has the video of Needle‘s cover of Neil Young’s Helpless. Shame. Needle has, in my opinion, the quintessential rendition. Anyway, Helpless didn’t make it it.

Blue Smoke II

Wed, 13 May 2009 22:27:08 +0000

Another adaptation of blue smoke, this time using Yahoo Video as the source. Some of the videos were not found (Lenny, Helpless, Until the Morning).

Lenny and Fade Into You are the lynchpins of Blue Smoke and my substitutions make this something I call “an interpretive playlist”. However, I like the Paul Weller cover. Raw, courageous, authentic. Best of luck, Dylan.

Pensive II

Mon, 11 May 2009 18:25:02 +0000

An alternate view of the pensive playlist.

Pensive

Mon, 11 May 2009 15:15:00 +0000

I’ve been pensive of late and frankly the weather is just too damn nice for that. Still, there is something gained by wrapping up from time to time in a blanket of introspection. I’m sharing here my pensive playlist.

MacRoman encoding creeps into Maven

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 00:29:05 +0000

You’d think in this day and age that modern operating systems, especially OS X, would be set for UTF8 handling by default. Not so. My previous post, centos l10n problem, showed that CentOS defaults to set its locale LANG as POSIX rather than UTF8.

Mac takes the lunacy one step further. Or should I say one step backwards in time.

I use maven2 as my build manager. Normally, I ignore the stream of info at the beginning of a build, Either it succeeds (yeah) or it fails. Either way, I’ve been more interested in seeing the end result; You know, those last few lines rather than the first few lines.

Failed to create poller with specified size

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:35:04 +0000

It had always bugged me that I got this warning on my OS X, MacBook Pro development system. (Well, it’s really an INFO, not a WARN but it bugged me nonetheless.)

Apr 8, 2009 4:10:55 PM org.apache.coyote.ajp.AjpAprProtocol init INFO: Initializing Coyote AJP/1.3 on ajp-8009

&lt;!-- snip --&gt;

Apr 8, 2009 4:10:58 PM org.apache.tomcat.util.net.AprEndpoint allocatePoller INFO: Failed to create poller with specified size of 8192

&lt;!-- snip --&gt;

Apr 8, 2009 4:10:58 PM org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start INFO: Server startup in 2703 ms

UTF8 JDBC on Tomcat

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:06:08 +0000

I’ve had opportunity to once again visit the UTF8 chain of failure and thought I’d write about it. If for no other reason, it’s easier for me to find my notes when I shove them into a blog entry.

I previously wrote about UTF8 on Tomcat. I pointed out that I needed to add an attribute to the connector element so that the mod_jk connection would be UTF8-ified. I neglected to also point out that I needed to UTF8-ified the database connection.

use curl for api documentation

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:08:03 +0000

I’ve been working quite a bit with the rest plugin for Struts2. The really nice thing about this plugin is the way it cleans up Struts URLs. Makes them more rails-like. I chuckled when depressed programmer suggested that struts2 is “WebWork on drugs.” I hate struts2. I really do.

Anyway, I have stripped down an AccountController to show just the POST service. In reality, the create() method is wired to a middle tier service that authenticates username, password pairs then updates session attributes with member id and other bits of persistent session data I need.

Resume Example

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:35:34 +0000

I reread my Resume Advice post this morning. It occurred to me that the article was incomplete. I gave an example of resume bloat and a few rules for improving it but I didn’t give an example of a resume I liked.

I decided to write a resume following the rules and using my own background for the example.

Here’s a transcript of my writing flow.

RULE 3: The resume shall include a three or four sentence opening paragraph.

Software RAID 10

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:25:57 +0000

I’ve been putting off building the software RAID10 on marmaduke. Today, I put it off no longer.

The server marmaduke has six storage devices (2 IDE and 4 SATA)

$ ls -1 /dev/hd? /dev/hde /dev/hdf

$ ls -1 /dev/sd? /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd

The CDROM is attached as /dev/hde and a 300GB HDD as /dev/hdf on which I’ve installed CentOS 5.2. The four SATA drives will be used to build a RAID 10. I’ve read through a number of postings on how to build a software RAID. The cleanest, shortest and clearest of them is on tgharold.com.

RAID 01 vs. RAID 10

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 19:25:29 +0000

I just finished building a four-drive software RAID10 on marmaduke and wanted to jot down my thoughts on RAID failure. In particular, I read a number of postings on the difference between RAID 01 and RAID 10. None of them satisfactory described the differences and how those differences changed when adding more drives.

Marmaduke only has four drives in its array. Most of the web postings dealt with four drives but I also wanted to see the impact on six drives. Here is a hypothetical set of six drives.

bash progress monitor

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 05:55:28 +0000

I have a remote machine that is used to store and process XML files. Recently, I had need to duplicate a directory of XML files (e.g., cp -r a b). It’s not really germane to the subject here, but this particular server has a whack configuration and I gotta rant before I continue.

The office server (scrappy) has pretty good specs.

[scrappy ~]$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:      3980800 kB
[scrappy ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

Javascript DOM Listeners

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:52:34 +0000

I’ve wanted to build a simple gallery viewer for some time. “But there are thousands of already built viewers,” you may be thinking. Yes there are. But I wanted a simple viewer that was at once trés snappy and minimalist.

I dislike the gallery systems that open another window or create a floating panel which must be dismissed. I wanted a simple picture portal with simple thumbnails. I wanted something that didn’t require jacking javascript or event listeners directly into the html. It had to be easy to use with wordpress.

Peace on Earth

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 21:13:38 +0000

This Christmas is good. So much of the year was absolutely lousy. I’m glad it’s ending on the upbeat. There are more than a few painful memories in 2008.

A new Harley goes a long way towards easing a painful memory. And my in-laws Julie and Bob have come through with the goods: raffle tickets for a 2009 Harley Dyna Low Rider.

It’s going to be a bumpy ride!

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 06:48:20 +0000

When I first read that Rails and Merb were merging, I thought it a hoax. Too good to be true.

But true it is.

I’m excited but no doubt, “It’s going to be a bumpy ride!”

grep and UTF-8

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 01:44:24 +0000

I needed to look up the various strings Apple uses to name the iTunes Library. First I tried to get name from the iTunes resource bundle

echo "this won't work..." echo "so don't even try it"

cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj cat Localizable.strings | grep ‘PrimaryPlaylistName’

But I quickly learned that grep doesn’t work on the strings file. Why? Because Apple string files are not UTF-8. They are UTF-16. Usually. But in this case they are. I wanted to iterate over the set of resource strings and extract just the string I wanted.

Jalapeño Peppers

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 15:44:35 +0000

I was looking in my archives for a snickerdoodle recipe. Rummaging through those old sites was nostalgic and horrifying. The very first sites were hosted on Earthlink. I don’t even know the URL any more. The later sites have all been on Hurricane Electric.

I pushed the first Red Leopard website out on October 29, 2000 using Microsoft Publisher 98. Yikes! What a dog’s breakfast. Eventually, I migrated to Notepad and by 2002 had a site that I liked. A static site but I liked it. I was horrible at CSS but improved my skills in raw HTML.

Why I believe I can learn Chinese

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:54:47 +0000

Let me tell you. Learning Chinese is damned hard. The character set, the tones, the pinyin phonetic alphabet (which uses latin characters but the characters rarely correlate to English pronunciation), the grammar…

In comparison, learning German was a snap. And German is no snap. I can babble like an idiot in German but I’m understood. I’ve found Germans, Austrians and the Swiss quite accomodating of my linquistic struggles. Perhaps its because they already speak English and can decipher my grammatical gymnastics, translate my mangled vowels, forgive my nouns’ gender jumping. Perhaps English is a piece of common ground.

Sepia MacWorld

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 14:06:49 +0000

I’m reading the news of Apple pulling out of MacWorld with a touch of sadness. MacWorld Boston is long dead. It was only a matter of time before MacWorld San Francisco ended, too. It makes sense to me.

Consider the history of COMDEX. In it’s heyday, COMDEX rocked. There was excitement, drama, confusion. I attended my first COMDEX in 1991, my last in 2003. Fall COMDEX reigned supreme but I also have fond memories of Spring COMDEX in Atlanta. (Never made the Chicago show).

Mandarin Tuesdays II

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:03:55 +0000

My Tuesday dancecard is filling up. The first mandarin course has ended and I’m now registered in the next chapter of Mandarin.

Beginning Chinese II

“This course is the second of a three-quarter sequence of beginning Mandarin Chinese. It is designed for students with little knowledge of Chinese. With an emphasis on conversation, the course will focus on the acquisition of basic communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.”

centos l10n problem

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:46:03 +0000

Just about the time I believe the UTF-8 beast is in the cage, it escapes and runs amok.

This AM, I started to deploy an update to the webapp on EC2. Seems that some of the static strings in the app contained UTF-8 encoded non-ascii characters. The java compiler barfed. “The heck?”, I thought. I just compiled the app on my MacBook. I checked the usual suspects (tomcat’s server.xml, JAVA_OPTS) but everything looked fine. However, when I looked at the code, it was indeed mangled.

bash array crawler

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 02:18:06 +0000

I wanted to complement my bash directory crawler post with a bash array crawler example.

Sometimes, it’s easier to jack a list of identifying tokens into an array and process them rather than to build an end-to-end script with database access. For this contrived example, I grab a list of UUID from MySQL with a simple SQL statement.

mysql> SELECT id, uuid FROM icons;
+-----+--------------------------------------+
| id  | uuid                                 |
+-----+--------------------------------------+
|   1 | fe0b16ed-3369-4dda-8e60-faffb966375d |
|   3 | 82bfcbc2-84a2-4ca7-914b-13172b94feb6 |
|   6 | ab5e7265-3698-4205-b081-e6aec528fee2 |
|  11 | 4b6ca26b-c6ed-494f-aeb4-9bf369e2d465 |
|  19 | e7cc807b-7f15-46fa-b1c5-85d1f1050155 |
+-----+--------------------------------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Next, jack the tokens into an array and simply crawl over the tokens.

Holiday Angst

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:37:38 +0000

Once again, it’s the holidays; I’m not feeling very cheery.

UTF-8 on Tomcat

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 15:31:46 +0000

I use Apache httpd + mod_jk with tomcat and connect to port 8009. Be sure to tell the tomcat connection that you are using UTF-8.

# vi /usr/local/tomcat/conf/server.xml

<Connector
  port="8009"
  URIEncoding="UTF-8"
  enableLookups="false"
  redirectPort="8443"
  protocol="AJP/1.3" />

Add two parameters to the list of JAVA_OPTS (at least for tomcat)

-Djavax.servlet.request.encoding=UTF-8
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"

WordPress plugin problem

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 21:01:05 +0000

When I moved to wordpress, I purposely picked a theme with paged listings. Of course, I also started with the latest v. 2.7 release. (Actually 2.7 rc2, then an upgrade).

The paged navigation at the bottom of the content section did not work. I tried to install the wp-pagenavi plugin but wordpress complained that the anjing theme had already defined wp_pagenavi().

I’m new to wordpress (and don’t know PHP well) but I do know how to comment out code.

Character codes and encoding

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:43:48 +0000

Character codes and encoding

In the beginning, there was ASCII. (There were others, but we begin here with ASCII).

7-bit ASCII in an 8-bit package. Using only the first seven bits of a byte, standard ASCII could not deal with diacritical marks (accents and funny dots in the vulgar vernacular). Therefore, the German word for later, später, would sometimes be transliterated into spaeter. I suspect this started in the days before computers when typewriters had only so many keys. You had to make do.

EC2 and S3 Success Story

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:09:36 +0000

I’ve been building systems lately on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). At first, I was only interested in Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution (S3) after seeing the SmugMug slide show.

I hadn’t really considered using EC2 since we had more servers in colocation than I really needed. But I had a file storage problem. When you have a thousand files, you stick them in a directory. When you have a million files, you cannot simply stick them in a single directory. You distribute them across multiple directories. What a PITA.

Actionscript GZIP Alternative

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:08:57 +0000

I really wish Actionscript 3 had a native decompression utility for opening GZIP compressed files. I really do. After reading (and trying to implement the advice of) numerous postings, I gave up on GZIP.

In my investigation, I walked byte-by-byte through numerous binary dumps. Somewhere along the way I noticed a pattern. Forget about the head and foot bytes, the basic GZIP compressed data is simply not the same as the actionscript base deflate-algorithm compressed data.

The Jump to WordPress

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:18:10 +0000

I finally made the jump from moveable type to wordpress. The hardest step was porting the old posts. Whereas I created posts using UTF-8 encoded characters, moveable type did a dumb convert of the characters into Latin-1 when storing them MySQL. Since the path out of the database and to the page was a reverse process, when viewing pages the characters would reappear as UTF-8.

However, when exporting the data from moveable type, the round-trip was broken. The characters in MySQL were not really proper Latin-1 characters. None of the recommended processes I found through google worked for me. I’ve had to deal with this problem at work last year. The memory of that pain makes me flinch.

About

Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:50:19 +0000

This site (redleopard.com) is the online scratchpad for Tracy and Kelly. Much of what we put here reflects our individual thoughts at the time we published it.

We each say what we want to say and respect what the other says. We don’t always agree and yet it somehow always works out.

Kelly on linkedin.com

bash directory crawler

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 19:44:21 +0000

Currently, popular filesystems (ext3, hfs+) have a practical limit on the number of files and directories you can store in a single directory. Certainly, most of the unix command line tools will not work once you exceed some magic threshold. In my experience, 10,000 files and or directories is the practical limit.

So what do you do when you have 1,000,000 XML files to process? I had this very problem recently. Fortunately, the problem was simplified as each file belong to one of 27,000 categories.

Fuser Detects FTP Completion

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 19:28:57 +0000

At work, we have legacy systems with problems which no one had taken the time to fix. One such legacy problem involved an FTP server. Client applications would FTP files up to the server for processing. That part worked fine. What didn’t work was knowing when the FTP was complete so we could start processing the data.

Recently, I decided to fix this problem.

Many people have written on the subject. One of the approaches advised, “watching the file and when the file size stops changing, you can use it.” I didn’t like that one. For so many reasons. Another recommended using lsof. Hummmmmmm. I didn’t get a warm fuzzy feeling with that one either.

An Open Response

Sun, 26 Oct 2008 18:58:58 +0000

I attended the SDForum Engineering Leadership SIG talk What Defines an Early Stage A+ VP of Engineering? held on Thursday, October 16 at SAP. Matt Pérez, COO of nearsoft.com, spoke his mind on the subject in the context of his own experience. I see a lot of presentations. Matt’s style and presence puts him at the front of the class.

At the end of his talk, Matt opened the floor for audience questions. He also opened the floor for the audience to answer (or simply opine on) the question. One guy asked–I paraphrase here–the question, “I am a CEO; How do you VPs of Engineering want to be managed.”

A Week in the Slife

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 19:19:28 +0000

Monday’s morning scrum was dragging out. Scrum is supposed to be a short meeting so when it starts to drag, I’ll make a “now and later” request. What conversations can we complete “now” in a few minutes and what conversations are better served with their own “later” in their own planning meeting. I hadn’t scheduled Monday planning meetings. Sometimes meetings get in the way. Sometimes they are the way. Monday’s meetings were definitely overdue.

Resume Advice

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:31:14 +0000

I read a lot of resumes. It’s a depressing activity. One thing I’ve gotten from reading so many resumes is an empathy for hiring managers.

Don’t get me wrong. I remember those anxious, uncertain days of writing my own resume. Worrying whether I had just the right words that would keep my resume out of the circular file.

The truth of the matter is that most resumes are crap. Total and complete crap. When I scan through resumes, I make three piles.

A Slife of Life

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 03:54:29 +0000

I saw Rorschach‘s tweet about slife and thought I’d give it a try.

Wow. It is eye opening. You can read a mans whole life with slife. I installed it Thursday morning.

It didn’t surprise me. I more or less know how my days are filled. Here’s two and a half days…

07:30 arrive office, make coffee, review yesterday’s notes
08:00 read originalsignal.com
08:30 scrum meeting
09:00 write code, compile code, commit code
10:00 bathroom
10:05 write code, compile code, commit code
12:00 lunch
13:00 write code
15:30 bathroom
15:35 write code, compile code, commit code
17:00 answer email
17:30 end of day meeting
18:00 depart office

Sick as a Dog

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 05:18:41 +0000

You really don’t notice that you’re not sick when you’re not sick. But take ill, and that is all you notice. I’ve been pushing life a bit hard of late and life in turn bit me right on the ass.

I had felt run down for a couple of weeks but late last Thursday, I felt simply awful. By midnight, my head was a hair from exploding. I knew I was out of commission for the next few days.

Flexible Web Services

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 22:00:15 +0000

Things don’t change. You change your way of looking, that’s all.
— Carlos Castañeda

Early this spring, I made some big architectural changes in the company’s website. The two most far-reaching changes involved Amazon’s Web Services and Adobe’s Flex product. Sometimes you regret big changes. I only regret having not made the changes earlier.

I admit that I wasn’t always a flex fan. Indeed, I dismissed the flex out of hand in the early days mainly as a response to Macromedia’s steep pricing model. Ouch. Since then, Adobe had bought Macromedia and the pricing model changed several times. I never noticed. Such is the cost of writing something off.

Mandarin Tuesdays

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:18:50 +0000

It’s confirmed. My Tuesday evenings are booked till December.

I’m building a study group to meet once a week out of class. All students in either the Monday or Tuesday class are welcomed to join. (Which suggests we won’t meet on either Monday or Tuesday)

Introductory Chinese Language and Culture

“With an emphasis on conversation and an introduction to reading and writing Chinese characters, it focuses on the acquisition of basic communication skills for travel, business, and everyday use.”

Centennial Words

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:56:19 +0000

“Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”

William Saroyan
(1908 – 1981)

Google I/O May 28-29 2008

Sun, 25 May 2008 19:11:36 +0000

This is a busy week. Monday is a Memorial Day in the United States, ostensibly a holiday. These days, holiday is code for catching up on specification writing, of course.

But on Wednesday-Thursday I’m heading up to Google I/O. I’ll be in the social track. I didn’t see a single session in social track I want to skip. But one session stands apart as one I simply must see. ‘OpenSocial – Scaling and Analytics, Nuts & Bolts’ delivered by Nat Brown.

Run Log

Sun, 25 May 2008 17:27:37 +0000

Churchill Route
3 miles
34m 12s
11.24 pace

Buddha Belly Begone!

iMac on Loan

Sun, 25 May 2008 17:14:54 +0000

Last summer, I retired my old Titanium PowerBook G4 (800MHz) as the Company bought my a shiny new MacBook Pro (2.4GHz). Sweet!

A year later, the latch on my laptop stopped latching. I sent it in for repair. In the interim, I Carbon Copy Cloned my hard drive and am using that hardrive to boot a 20″ iMac on loan from the office. I love it.

One thing I do miss: I really do use my laptop as a lap top. I can lean back with feet up on the ottoman and work with laptop on my lap. Sometimes, I need a book under the laptop. It gets hot.

Blaudämmerung

Mon, 19 May 2008 01:23:44 +0000

I’ve started a new online radio station at laut.fm

It’s based in Germany. If you can speak or puzzle out a bit of German, you can navigate the site and find a station you like.

I created this based on my playlist Blue Smoke. However, before they will play a station, you must have more than one hour of total track time in the playlist.

360|Flex San Jose 2008

Sun, 18 May 2008 18:38:16 +0000

I’m going to 360|Flex San Jose (August 18 – 20, 2008). This is my first Flex conference. I had long maligned Flex as expensive and unnecessary. I have changed my religion!

I saw Peter Armstrong (ruross.com) at the Ruby conference in San Jose. Here’s a guy who built a flex+rails app during his presentation. It wasn’t a slicky talk. No oily powerpoint slide deck. Just raw. Working with the actual tools. Fat finger typo’s in the terminal. There’s an honesty in that.

Monday’s at 1PM

Sun, 18 May 2008 17:37:40 +0000

I take Mandarin classes at the Language Studies Institute. While studying Mandarin is fun, I wouldn’t say it’s easy.

I’ve opted for the conversational track. We aren’t learning the characters; we use pinyin (romanized tranliterations) and focus on speaking. I bought the CDs recently which correspond to my textbook and ripped them to iTunes. Once a week in class isn’t ideal; listening to the CDs really helps.

What’s on Your Bookshelf?

Sun, 18 May 2008 01:46:50 +0000

My bookcase at work reflects what’s currently on my mind. Here’s the state of my mind in May 2008.

Apache: The Definitive Guide — I don’t know that this book is a must have. I look something up now and then.

Web Site Measurement Hacks — A goldmine. While written as a hands-on book, its value for me has been deeper understanding in the what, why and how of metrics. Err, measurements.

Melancholia

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:27:47 +0000

When nostalgia just isn’t the right word.

I put this playlist together back in January. It’s not my favorite but somehow I find myself trotting it out again and again.

I feel that swapping out two or three tracks would complete the list. I can’t put my finger on which ones to drop or what would replace them.

Blue Smoke

Wed, 14 May 2008 23:34:56 +0000

On a hot summer night, sitting out on the front porch under a blue light reflecting against a humid haze hung low, you find yourself silent. Quiet reflection in a blanket of blue smoke.

Embedded Playlist Player

Wed, 14 May 2008 22:30:00 +0000

I’m trying out the Imeem playlist player. The version on the Imeem site is fancier than this but thank the stars the embedded version is plain. It fits red leopard’s minimalist sensibilities. Sweet!

It’s super simple to use. Find a playlist you like, cut and past the code snippet into your blog. Like that and it’s done!

So why Aaron Lewis? I like his solo acoustic work over his staind electric work. Not everyone shares my opinion but Imeem has beaucoup playlists. Go get your own!

Dammit, man! Get it together!

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:12:19 +0000

I’m re-reading Tom Peters’ Talent. It’s funnyânot the ‘ha-ha’ type but the ‘strange’ type of funnyâthat on a second reading, the material often takes on an entirely different cast. I believe it’s the time in between the readings, the between time, in which your daily experiences are interpreted within the context of ideas gleaned from the first reading.

In any event, Peters accomplishes at least one of his goals:

“I don’t expect you’ll agree with everthing that I say in this book. But I hope that when you disagree â¦ you will disagree angrily. That you will be so pissed off that you’ll â¦ Do Something.” [p.9]

Office Tour

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 15:18:25 +0000

At work, we ditched our cubicles and went straight up desks. It is amazing what breaking down the cell walls will do.

Anyway, here’s ten points of interest in this “Kelly’s Office Tour.”

Mazzy Star Promo

Mazzy Star was an American 1990s dream pop/alternative band. They formed in 1989, from the band Opal, a collaboration of guitarist David Roback and bassist Kendra Smith. Smithâs friend Hope Sandoval became vocalist when Smith left the band.

The Art of Peace 7

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:52:25 +0000

Eight forces sustain creation:

Movement and stillness,
Solidification and fluidity,
Extension and contraction,
Unification and division.

—Morihei Ueshiba

THE ART OF PEACE 6

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:08:10 +0000

The Art of Peace functions everywhere on earth, in realms ranging from the vastness of space down to the tiniest plants and animals.

The life force is all-pervasive and its strength boundless.

The Art of Peace allows us to perceive and tap into that tremendous reserve of universal energy.

—Morihei Ueshiba

who are you?

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:33:43 +0000

“Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you’ll give and tears you’ll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be”
—Pink Floyd, Breathe (second stanza)

One chooses or not. Nevertheless, one is; you are; I am. At the root of not knowing who one is a failureâor a refusalâto choose.

Our personalities, our identities, our ingrained patterns of behavior are all antithetical to choice. Personality, identity, ingrained behavior are the default that suffers no possible alternative, only itself. It (personality, identity, ingrained behavior) is a mechanism, the design function of which is survivalâprimarily /its/ survival.

on poetry

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:48:51 +0000

“so far as i am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individualityâ¦poetry is being, not doing. if you wish to follow, even at a distance, the poet’s calling (and here, as always, i speak from my own totally biased and entirely personal point of view) you’ve got to come out of the measurable doing universe into the immeasurable house of being…nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else. toms can be dicks and dicks can be harrys, but none of them can ever be you. there’s the artist’s responsibility; and the most awful responsibility on earth. if you can take it, take itâand be. if you can’t, cheer up and go about other people’s business; and do (or undo) till you drop.”

The Art of Peace 5

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:03:47 +0000

If you have not
Linked yourself
To true emptiness,
You will never understand
The Art of Peace.

âMorihei Ueshiba

ClustrMaps

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 01:12:26 +0000

I just added the cluster maps app. It uses ip address lookup to put a pin on the world map. I hadn’t done anything on the blog in a while and thought it might be a fun diversion. :^)

WOTD 2007-09-20

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:43:23 +0000

Word of the Day

Schadenfreude
n : delight in another person’s misfortune

We all know someone like this. Maybe we have experienced schadenfreude in our own lives. It happens when a person is deeply invested in the failure of another. It is small, sad and toxic.

You might try this: for the rest of the week, observe the people in your life. Do they show empathy or schadenfreude? To whom do you feel closer?

Twentyfive Skills

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:26:54 +0000

Over on O’Reilly, Rick Jelliffe took Popular Mechanic’s 25 Skills Every Man Should Know quiz.

I eagerly read through the quiz and I noticed two things. First, I eagerly read through the quiz. Second, I have smirkedâon occasionâat women’s magazines that have similar quizzes. It’s all relative to what you believe is important.

How did I do on the quiz? Let’s say simply that I felt rather smug. We all like to score well on tests, right?

The Art of Peace 4

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 02:59:23 +0000

The Art of Peace is medicine for a sick world.

There is evil and disorder in the world because people have forgotten that all things emanate from one source. Return to that source and leave behind all self-centered thoughts, petty desires, and anger.

Those who are possessed by nothing possess everything.

–Morihei Ueshiba

August Already

Fri, 03 Aug 2007 02:47:16 +0000

Tracy and I vacationed in Fargo in July. I hear you snickering out there, you snickerers. For the record, I like Fargo. Nice town.

We visited Tracy’s sister and her family. Those kids know how to show out-of-towners a great time. We all slipped out of North Dakota and into Minnesota for three days of R & R on Detriot Lake. Picture Perfect.

July was so perfect, in fact, that if it lasted any longer, I just might not have made it back to work.

links for my new iPhone

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 22:23:03 +0000

Yep. Geekboy got a new toy. Shiny new iPhone.

Problem is, I hate typing the url in on the keyboard. That’s what this entry is all about. A place to publish links using my laptop so I can simply click and go on the iPhone. Cheesy. But effective.

2007-07-06T14:23:00-0700
http://joehewitt.com/files/iphone/navigation.html

2007-07-06T22:51:00-0700
www.moviesapp.com

2007-07-08T16:20:00-0700
iphoneplayer

Another Try

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 07:00:05 +0000

Another try at cleaning the flickr css (ugh) and javascript (sucks).

What I did was to remove the javascript and index the thumbnails directly. I could put the links back in for each thumbnail but I’m thinking not. Rather, I would put a bit-o-javascript to have the thumbs control a larger portrait just to it’s right and a text box with the flickr description just below the thumbs+picture. There would still be a flickr badge linking to the original set.

Flickr Snickr

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:59:04 +0000

I’m looking at adding my snaps to flickr. Here’s a few from my trip to Hyderabad last year. It was a glorious day on the Deccan Plateau.

The flickr code is bloated and if I decide to keep it, it’ll need a css trim. Again, it seems a bit large for the sidebar but perhaps an alternate 2 column set will work.

www.flickr.com

  <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="10" border="0" id="flickr_badge_wrapper">
    <br />
  </table>
</td>

Breaking the Law

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 15:19:38 +0000

I now have a myspace account. Why? just because.

Note: Someone else has already secured redleopard as her myspace url. No hard feelings. I was late to the party. My url is the alternate spelling, www.myspace.com/hongbao.

I haven’t yet done much with my account (you noticed) so it begs the question a second time: why?

Well… redleopard.com is my little sanctuary, a place where I can blather on about whatever. But I like the tidiness of my little blog. Almost Prussian in it’s retentiveness.

The LastFM Quilt

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 22:56:20 +0000

I’m on the fence on whether or not to add the LastFM quilt to my blog. It’s a bit large. If I see it in the post for a week and still like it, maybe it goes in the REVERB sidebar. (and, of course, I’ll clean up their css.)

Ten Years Later

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 22:32:34 +0000

It’s been ten years since Tracy and I were married. Here’s a flashback to 1997.

The Art of Peace 3

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 17:32:39 +0000

All things, material and spiritual, originate from one source and are related as if they were one family. The past, present, and future are all contained in the life force. The universe emerged and developed from one source, and we evolved through the optimal process of unification and harmonization. –Morihei Ueshiba

The Art of Peace 2

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 23:50:45 +0000

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train. –Morihei Ueshiba

The Art of Peace 1

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 05:14:56 +0000

The Art of Peace begins with you. Work on yourself and your appointed task in the Art of Peace. Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here for no other purpose than to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment. Foster peace in your own life and then apply the Art to all that you encounter. –Morihei Ueshiba

Chill with Anji Bee

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:07:47 +0000

I spend a lot of time listening to music at work. It’s one of the perks working at a music discovery site. I mean, what kind of “music discovery” site would we be if there were a “no listening to music” rule? Duh. Anyway, I’ve found a new source of really sweet tunes: Anji Bee.

Real Soon Now

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:32:03 +0000

I submitted my suggestion to Jeep Customer Service and was directed to another office. From their quite sincere form letter (below), I’m certain that I will be taken seriously. We’ll be seeing a Wrangler with a V8 “real soon now.” Believe it. – 紅豹

Don’t Get me Started

Sun, 14 Jan 2007 17:37:03 +0000

I dropped into the San Jose Auto Show on Saturday. Truth be told, I’ve been dreaming about the four door Jeep since hearing the rumors.

I have a ’95 Jeep, a true war horse. Leaf springs. 258 straight six (aka 4.0 L). Carpeting removed. Rear seat removed. Cargo net. Rack. Tow hitch. Utility trailer (converted ’67 Dodge stepside box). blah blah blah. I bought it nearly new (as in, ~~not~~ new) and it’s been loyal these past 100,000 miles. And reliable.

I’m Sure

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:56:48 +0000

I travel. A lot. Not as much as I used to but it’s still a bit.

When I travel, I take a stack of unread books. The stack I bring is always one or two books more than I believe I’ll finish. For example, my last trip to Delhi lasted two weeks. The reading list for that tripâ¦

Second Try

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 01:06:25 +0000

I want to allow people to comment on the site. I found that after I shut off comments, I simply stopped writing.

Here’s a second try.

Talent

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 18:55:40 +0000

Peters, Tom. Talent: Develop it, Sell it, Be it. London: Dorling Kindersley Limited, 2005.

I picked Talent up in the Hong Kong airport last month. I thought I would read it on the flight to Delhi but found the format too annoying. The colored text on colored pages was simply too trying.

White Flag

Fri, 03 Dec 2004 07:27:51 +0000

I raised the white flag today. I thought I had turned comments off in moveable type (v 2.6x) and deleted all the old spam. But today — just 2.5 days after cleaning up the mess — there were another 556 spam turdlettes on the site.

I don’t have time for this.

I haven’t gotten the entire site back up but I did upgrade to MT 3. I’ll figure out the TypeKey thing and turn comments on again. Soon. But not real soon.

WTF?

Tue, 30 Nov 2004 05:34:19 +0000

People warned me. But did I listen? NOooooooo.

I’ve been away from blogging for a while. When I came back, some 10,000 spam messages stained my comments. I have no time to deal with it except to delete all existing comments and turn comments off.

Deleting comments the easy way required logging into mySQL.

mysql> DELETE FROM mt_comment;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Rorshach over at scary sharp is right. Upgrade to MT 3 and get TypeKey. Most ricky tick.

Fear of Commitment – Redeaux

Tue, 02 Mar 2004 18:10:10 +0000

This is a rework of a previous speech. I delivered this talk for today’s Early Risers Toastmasters club speech contest. I changed the middle by replacing the work context with a general life context.

My evaluator pointed out one area of needed improvement: I should relate the closing to my own life. I agree with her. Of course, I’ll have to trim something out of the middle or talk faster to stay within the time limit.

Marketing Matters

Fri, 27 Feb 2004 04:32:48 +0000

This is a must read. Title is ‘The Luxury of Ignorance: An Open-Source Horror Story’

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html

I tried to use CUPS from my Mac. Crikey! I don’t know HOW it happened but I can now print to my laser printer over ethernet. Of course, it has one of those [not supported on OS X] ethernet dongle thingies from NetGear.

But I can now print And it wasn’t CUPS either. I really don’t know if I’m printing through CUPS or over AppleTalk. Of course, I can’t print from ALL applications. Office-yes. PDF-yes(slow). Illustrator/Photoshop-no.

Fear of Commitment, Power of Commitment

Tue, 10 Feb 2004 22:34:01 +0000

A pig and a chicken are walking down the road when they come upon a church where a revival is going on.

{gesture towards audience} Any of you been to a revival? It’s been a while for me. Let me tell you, a revival is MOVING.

Pig and chicken were moved, overcome by the spirit.

Pig says, “I want to contribute something.”

“Me, too!”, says Chicken. “Me, too! Let’s contribute some ham and eggs”.

Favicon

Mon, 09 Feb 2004 22:12:42 +0000

I got a message from Dan last week asking about favicons. See, we both are on Mac OS X. It seems anything that comes from the Windows word requires an extra level of understanding when it’s in the Mac world.

After a bit of googling, I found the no non-sense answers I needed.

COMDEX is Dead

Thu, 20 Nov 2003 00:45:20 +0000

I said it last year, “This is my last COMDEX for COMDEX is dead” Yet, I went again. Just to see.

It’s true. Last year was the death of COMDEX. This year was the ‘viewing’. All that’s left is to toss dirt in the grave.

Book: Battle for the Mind

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 19:33:38 +0000

I read a fair amount. I wouldn’t say a lot only because I don’t really read that fast. Well, that’s not true. Fictional and biographical works I cruise through fairly quickly. It’s non-fiction that slows me to a crawl.

It was a decade ago that I realized the obvious. Just because you start reading a book doesn’t mean you have to finish it. I can still remember the book that broke the spell: The Vermont Papers

If I’m reading a book for my own enjoyment and edification, if I can’t relate the book to my life, if I’m getting nothing out of the book, it’s history. Ciao, baby. The Vermont Papers was my last “I’ll finish the book simply because I started it” experience. When I finished that book, I said, “What a waste of my time.”

Currently, I’m reading Battle for the Mind. This book I will finish and read again.

Drill Bit Chatter

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 18:04:14 +0000

As some of you know, my one and only purchase on eBay was the famous Fred G. Sanford Memorial Trailer or simply The Trailer. Tracy is still under-whelmed by its appearance but has conceded its occasional usefulness.

To bring everyone up to speed, the trailer is the back half of a ’67 Dodge Stepside half ton pickup. It really is quite the eyesore. Yet, as anyone who has been to the garden store knows, you really don’t want to toss three sacks full of chicken manure in your trunk. It’s on those occasions that the trailer justifies itself.

This year, the floor boards rotted out. The bed is made of wood, you see, and the old boards were breaking through in places. I said to myself, “This could be really cool. I can replace the old 1-by pine planks with sturdier 2-by douglas fir planks.”

I’ve been reading George Buehler’s book, again. While I may have neither the time nor the cash to build an Archimedes class cruiser right now, I figured the little trailer project could be just the fix I needed for my boat building jones.

When I pulled the old planks out, to my surprise and dismay, the entire box fell off the frame. Seems the box was secured to the wooden bed and the bed in turn bolted to the frame.

Oh, well. To the drawing board.

Spam-Spam-Spam-Spam

Sat, 08 Nov 2003 00:26:48 +0000

Anatomy of a spam message:

I got this one in my box. It didn’t display properly since I’m not using a Microsoft mail reader. But it did slip past the junk mail filter. Most filters work on a point system. If a message accrues enough spam points, it’s flagged as junk.

It’s a good new, bad news thing. Bad news, spam still gets through my filter. Good news, there’s still much furtile ground for intelligent spam filtering.

Let’s take a line-by-line HUMAN analysis and see how many spam points we get. (Answer: 80 points.)

Exercise and Nutrition

Sat, 27 Sep 2003 00:37:49 +0000

Tony sent out the theme for this coming Tuesday’s Toastmaster meeting.

“THEME – Exercise and Nutrition”

    “Seems like there are many ways we hear
     about improving our exercise and
     nutrition, from TV commercials for
     those perfect abs, to fantastic weight
     loss meal plans.”

“Even the Dr Phil show has a season long
weight loss challenge.”

“There must be a simpler way.”

    “Do you have a favorite nutrition plan
     that really works? Or perhaps you have
     an exercise routine that is effective?
     Or what is a good suggestion to get
     into that routine or zone?”

My role this time is as a speech evaluator. As such, I need to send in a brief comment that would be used to introduce me to the group.

As I have studied and corresponded extensively on this subject. I think I could summarize my thoughts inside of 5,000 words; That’s a bit long for an introduction. So,… here was my stab at a brevity.

No Surrender

Wed, 10 Sep 2003 23:30:48 +0000

Some of you know that I’ve taken up boxing this year. I recently commented privately about my workout routine. In that comment, I included a poem that distills part of my mental process while training.

It deals with the issue of quitting. I’ve been pushing the workouts pretty dang hard and in new directions. It doesn’t happen often but sometime the routine pushes me right to the line of collapse or barfing. It’s at those times one must be especially mindful of creeping thoughts. It’s easy to rationalize a break or early finish to the workout.

I’ve included the poem here with a concluding quotation from O-Sensei.

Death Penalty for Virus Pukes

Mon, 25 Aug 2003 02:43:36 +0000

The sobig virus has hit me. Well, not me directly. I’m on the Mac. But it has hit someone (I don’t know who) and I’m affected (even if not infected).

On On

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 17:32:59 +0000

Last night I took Truffles (our old english sheepdog) to run with the Agnew State Hash House Harriers. Big-T is getting a bit long in the tooth but he sure does love to hash!

Miles to Go

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 18:38:20 +0000

This morning at toastmasters, Tony delivered an excellent interpretive reading talk on Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I remember the last stanza from the 1977 movie Telefon starring Charles Bronson.

On the Road Again…

Sat, 19 Jul 2003 16:56:02 +0000

Another Toastmasters talk, this one my third. I thought the material was better, or at least more humorous, than the previous two. But my delivery sucked. In retrospect, I should have rehearsed another day.

I got laughs but there were three mechanical problems with my delivery

Flow stalled in a few places
I ran over my time limit — 8:36 for a 5:00 to 7:00 talk
The intro was a bit wooden

All in all, I was pleased with the material and may revisit the subject again.

More site tweaks

Fri, 11 Jul 2003 21:44:44 +0000

I haven’t made many visible tweaks to the redleopard site since June. This isn’t to say that things weren’t going on ‘behind the scenes’. Here’s what’s happened.

Not Gonna Upgrade

Sun, 29 Jun 2003 03:53:45 +0000

The cool thing about Open Source software is that folks world-wide are constantly working on it. That means continual updates. However, I’m not gonna update for a while. Here’s why.

The Gwailo Lives

Wed, 25 Jun 2003 01:23:34 +0000

I’ve done it. I’ve committed to the name Gwailo Joe for my business.

“I know you”

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 01:53:45 +0000

Broken fist
on bended knee.
Behind closed doors,
where no one can see
Who you really are.
But, I know…

“Just for today”

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 01:48:44 +0000

I could be lonely today.
Just for today…
I won’t.

Memory of You…

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 01:41:40 +0000

Surprise…
I was not looking;
There you were.

Panic Attack

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 01:00:48 +0000

An emotion on the
Edge of a nerve,
Opal fire washed clean
Of sin and envy.

No Longer Functioning

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 01:00:04 +0000

I am broken, a disheveled caricature
Of a fully functioning human.

I Am Done

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:59:25 +0000

I will leave it to you
To copy the words
Onto the pretty paper.

What was that?

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:58:41 +0000

The shadows lengthened
Throughout the day
Until there was a stillness
Within the dark.
A glimmer pierced the night.
What was that?

And, so it Comes

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:57:47 +0000

Bouncing off of walls
Very unsure
Destiny’s child
What the future hold.
Shifting tide
Under a full moon.
Kept in the dark
Goddess…Mother
Holds all the keys
What shall it be?

I was wrong

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:57:22 +0000

All this time
I thought success was here.
I was wrong.

Hardly Famous

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:56:42 +0000

If I could be famous
For just one day,
I’d write you a novel
Full of hope and love.
I’d keep you close to my heart
So you would be safe.

Safe

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:55:55 +0000

Bang the pipes
Loose of the crud and muck.

Rain

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:55:20 +0000

Rain floods my eyes.
Pain splinters my heart into dust.
The soft glow of the candle,
Illuminates my fear and self-doubt.
This is not working.
Throw it out!
Time to try something new.

Lost

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:54:53 +0000

Somehow, I fell
Off of the track.
I tried to walk
Down the middle
Of a precarious
Situation.

Depressed

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:54:18 +0000

The flower that grows
In the terra cotta pot
By the garage door
Had the audacity
To bloom today.

Sunday Morning Ritual

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:53:37 +0000

The rock fountain
Outside my sliding
Glass bedroom door
Creates a sense of peace
And tranquillity
In my weary stress
Filled mind.

Just One Last Point…

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:52:40 +0000

I realize it now,
that a few
days have passed
and my head
is no longer
affected by spirits
and illusions of
grandeur
and self-importance
that I may have
been too hard on you
the other day…

Copper Creek

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:48:58 +0000

Light of the half-moon casting shadows;
Stars as far as the eye can see.

Questionable Existence

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:48:18 +0000

Does the fantasy
That resides
Inside your head,
Keep you from having
To face the dread
Of an empty existence?

You Don’t Own Her

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:47:35 +0000

The child without an anchor
Flies free into the face
Of a brick wall.

Adrift…

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:46:50 +0000

We tore at the tether
because we wished to free.

Greek Mythology

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:46:23 +0000

Athena speaks in mixed
Messages and metaphors.

Sometimes

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:45:52 +0000

Sometimes,
our best thought
through plans go astray.

Damaged…

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:45:05 +0000

In the cold light of day
you keep me there
beside you in a
Glass by the bed.

The Poem

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:44:18 +0000

A state of mind
Where images and perceptions
Appear as shards of glass.

Quicksand

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:43:35 +0000

He kept us intrigued;
With wise words and false wisdom.

What Happened to – IT?

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:42:54 +0000

There is nothing new to be said;
Nothing cleaver to be read.
All creativity is rendered dead.
Nothing left – but this silly little verse,
Inside my head.
Please “Shut Up”!

A Positive Spin

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:40:46 +0000

A shimmer through the glass
in keeping with the lateness
-of the day.

Please Make ‘It’ Go Away

Mon, 23 Jun 2003 00:38:48 +0000

The familiar feeling descended
like the yellowed pages of
a very old, well read book.
He was comfortable, but not – happy.

I’m glad it’s over

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 23:25:58 +0000

That’s the title of the talk I gave last Tuesday. I joined the Palo Alto Early Risers Toastmasters about a month ago. This was my second speech. (I hand wrote the first one and am too lazy to type it up.)

CSS Changes [check]

Thu, 19 Jun 2003 23:18:06 +0000

I made the css change in less than a month. It consisted of two changes.

New Style Needed

Thu, 22 May 2003 05:04:46 +0000

I’m sick of the Red Leopard style sheet. Expect to see a new CSS.

Moveable Type Rules

Thu, 22 May 2003 05:01:26 +0000

I’ve spent the past several nights getting my sister site up and running. After cursing MT, I’ve come to love it. I’m hooked.

Episode II – Redeaux III

Wed, 14 May 2003 05:35:06 +0000

I watched episode II again this past weekend (to Tracy’s dismay) and will wrap up the Anakin quandary.

Episode II – Redeaux II

Fri, 09 May 2003 06:52:02 +0000

Anakin Skywalker

What do we do with Anakin? Well, Luke Skywalker was a doofus so why shouldn’t, too, be the old man. Doofus. That sums it up.

Episode II – Redeaux

Thu, 08 May 2003 06:08:42 +0000

Did the recent two Star Wars episodes evoke a “what the h***?” Yep. They were big budget but they left me cold. Here’s the first (of many) changes I would have made.

Beautiful Baltimore

Wed, 07 May 2003 22:58:25 +0000

It’s been almost a decade since I lived in Baltimore. Last week, Tracy and I visited my old stomping grounds. It’s said that you can never go back. I don’t know. It felt like home.

Online (sort of)

Tue, 29 Apr 2003 22:05:08 +0000

About the time I decided to convert the redleopard site to a blog, I switched back to the Mac. That’s when my problems began – but not for the reasons you may be thinking.