Here is my PSN gamer id

Feel free to contact me on PSN.

Petition for "Bike There" on Google Maps

Below is a petition to be sent to Google requesting that they add a "Bike there" feature to Google maps. Please take a second to sign if you can. It may not make a difference, but it's worth a shot.

Thanks,

Brad

http://www.petitiononline.com/bikether/petition.html

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Amendment IV:

Search and Arrest Warrants

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The new FISA legislation pretty much deems this one to be of little use. It also helps our wonderful government justify its illegal wiretapping and provide protection for the companies that helped them out even though it was illegal. Way to go government, way to go. Forget the Constitution. Forget rules.

Obviously, this frustrates me. Oh, yeah, thanks, Obama for changing your mind and backpedalling on your clearly stated opinion. Even though I will still vote for you, my monetary support, as well as the time that I spent evangelizing your campaign are over. You are moving towards being, much like Kerry in 2004, the "lesser of two evils". I am seeing too many "firm policies" begin to soften (War in Iraq, Iran).

I sincerely hope that Obama begins to realize that he has the supporters that he does because of the person that he presents himself as, as well as the positions that he claims to take on various issues. If he begins to change his opinion to try to gain even more popularity, he will be seen as weak and indecisive. This will not lead to a victory in November, it will only divide his supporters and turn away possible undecided voters.

Anyway, that's my rant......there's plenty more, but I am out of time.

-B

What I'm reading

Currently:
Sun Tzu: Art of War
Margaret Weiss: Dragons of the Autumn Twilight
Orson Scott Card: Shadow of the Hedgemon
United States Constitution

Recently Completed (within the last month):
Christopher Moore: You Suck
Orson Scott Card: Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card: Ender's Shadow
Ron Paul: The Revolution: A Manifesto
Barack Obama: The Audacity of Hope

Pelican

Wow, two posts in one day. This is almost unheard of from me. Anyway, check out a band called Pelican. They are instrumental metal and kick ass. I have "City of Echoes", but I am fairly certain that all of their albums are worth a shot.

Overall, definitely one of the better albums I have heard lately.

ebooks...

So, in my day to day errand running the other day, I somehow got stuck in my head that I need an ebook reader. I have several reasons that I feel this would be a good purchase. In line with my recent "green" kick, I can say that I am killing less trees. The cost difference in the books also should allow me to realize a savings in under one year (this number is derived from the average of one book per week at a savings of anywhere from $5 USD to $15 USD for a new release). There is also the portability factor. I am usually in the process of reading at least two books at any one time. Overall, there are many arguments for picking up one of these handy devices. But, I can always talk myself out of a purchase... I may be living in the past, but I have a really hard time imagining my bookshelves empty. I can't even begin to think of sacrificing my trips to the bookstore. It's not just about buying the book. These trips are as much a social event as a shopping trip. I can discuss books with someone of similar interests, observe people interacting in very interesting ways, pick up a coffee, or just wander around thumbing through books until something grabs my attention. Also, how do you replace the sharing of books with your friends? The final argument against it is that I am beginning to feel like Batman lately. Is gadget-sprawl an actual term? If not, I want to coin it. I carry my cell and a Blackberry everywhere. Not too bad, right? But if I am going somewhere that I may want to take a book, I could reasonably assume that I may want to take my iPod, or even my Nintendo DS. That brings me up to five items (DS, iPod, Blackberry, cell, ebook reader) if I should decide to make this purchase. That is officially one gadget and one Batmobile short of Batman. I guess that I should wait.

Good Project Management Software?

I am trying to find some good (open source) project management software. I would prefer web-based, but everything that I have tried has been either complete shit or something that is mostly useless for my purposes, but great at creating Gannt charts. I may need to just go ahead and get a task list organizer or something similar. Any thoughts from anyone?

Beanstalk and Versions

If you are into code management or need a versioning system, I would highly recommend checking these products out. I just got through setting up a simple demo and they work great.

Beanstalk(think svn) manages you repository.
http://beanstalkapp.com/

Versions is a really nice new mac svn client.
http://www.versionsapp.com/

Basically, this is svn without as many headaches. Better for smaller projects.

Install Notes: Hardy Heron [VMWare Workstation]

Installing vmware workstation on Hardy Heron.
Ran into some problems.

Use this guide:
http://aldeby.org/blog/?p=113

If you get this error:
"Unable to change virtual machine power state: Failed to connect to peer process."

"sudo apt-get install ia32libs"

Everything seems to work fine.
Problem Solved.

Switch? No? HELP!

I was wondering if anyone who reads this is a "hardcore" (read very proficient) Perl programmer who has made a switch to Ruby. I currently average between 3-5k lines of Perl/week and consider myself to be proficient and effective at completing a multitude of tasks with it with very little pain. Most of these include accessing/manipulating/querying oracle tables, pdf files, csv's, html/css, etc. I would love to hear more from people who may have been in a similar situation that have switched (at least mostly [80%+ code in Ruby now]). I have been looking at making the move, but I really can't afford the downtime right now, but would like to look into beginning a migration shortly after the fiscal year begins (Jul 1). To give a little background, I have written several small scripts in Ruby, but these are mostly to get some data out of a few db tables, or to manipulate some text.

What I would like to hear is:
a) about the migration
b) efficiency increase/decrease
c) support for outputting .pdf, .xls (or open office equiv), etc.
d) problems that you encountered
e) other relative topics...

I would prefer not to hear:
a) someone evangelizing Ruby without hands-on experience using it (this seems to be the case in a lot of places lately.)

Hope to hear from you guys on this....
-Brad

Ruby In Steel

My favorite software? Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005. But I also really enjoy Ruby programming. Well, I can now put both together. Peanut Butter/ Jelly. Oreos/Milk. Visual Studio 2005/ Ruby in Rails. That's right...you can do Ruby progamming inside of Visual Studio now.
Here are some screenshots.
Here is the software's official site.

We are getting this today. I will try to let you guys know later this week how it is.

By the way, this is a fully integrated development suite for Ruby inside of Visual Studio and not an implementation of Ruby for the .Net framework.

if i had to choose one app....

Right now, if I had to choose one app to complete my Ubuntu experience, it would be......
iTunes!!!!

I know that I can virtualize (I already do that with Visual Studio 2005), but I want it to run natively on my install. Even though I love the functionality, my interest is more about the store. I am scared to use allofmp3.com (something about giving credit info out there creeps me out) and need a place to legally purchase music without the hassle of going across town to the mall area (mall, best buy, circuit city, etc). I also make most of music decisions late at night after these places are closed.

suggestions?

Here you go

I have been playing with two things that I do not get to use very often in C# lately. One is Mutexes. The other is C#'s yield functionality with IEnumerable functions. I will go into the second one with an example now, as I am sure that everyone is familiar and (ultimately) bored with Mutex and thread management. If not, check out Dekker's algorithm for a very famous example of Mutual exclusion problems. You may also like the Dining Philosopher's Problem if you like thread management and the like.

Anyway, my example relating to yield and IEnumerable functions is simple and explains, in my opinion, very effectively the use of this functionality. Here is the code for this example:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

public class List
{
public static IEnumerable Power(int number, int exponent)
{
int counter = 0;
int result = 1;
while (counter++ < exponent)
{
result = result * number;
yield return result;
}
}

static void Main()
{
foreach (int i in Power(2, 8))
{
Console.Write("{0} ", i);
}
}
}

notice that the function is called, returns a result and continues until conditions are met. Also notice how the function is called (inside of a foreach loop). Anyway, I really like this solution and think that it makes C# coding even cleaner. Let me know if you have any questions about this or about dining philosopher's. Later.

--brad

Still Here

Hey Everyone. I am still here. I have just been really busy lately. Sorry for not posting lately. I have gotten my primary system set up at work finally. I am currently running Ubuntu Feisty with VirtualBox. I have XP on one Virtual Machine so that I can run Visual Studio 2005(my only Windows necessity) and Office 2007 (if I actually need it for some reason).
If anyone is thinking about VMWare, I would highly recommend giving VirtualBox a shot. So far, I am loving it.

Other news...I have no new music for once. I am going back to some of my old cd's and just enjoying them for now.

Impeachment...stop bitching and start acting

My friend Dan has a post that gives the number for Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi's offices. You can give them a call and voice your support for the impeachment proceedings that are currently being discussed. Here is her contact info. In case you don't want to follow the link, the number is (202) 225 0100. I would suggest that you give them a call if this is something that you support. Make your opinion heard!

If you have a few extra seconds, I would also suggest that you read Dan's post on this issue.

Now this confuses the hell out of me.

In case you didn't know, I quit smoking around 4 months ago. When I smoked, I almost never exercised and I ate horribly. I would regularly just pick up fast food on my way home and ate tons of food that was horrible for me. When I quit, I starting eating slightly better, but lately, I have given up on fast food almost entirely, cut my soda(diet Coke) consumption by 50-75% (replaced by water), and have even been running three times per week and walking hiking 1-3 times per week. You would think that my weight would have stayed stable or even dropped. Nope. I have been feeling like I am gaining weight, and my suspicions were proven to be true when I weighed today. Even though I have been doing everything "right", I have put on 8 or nine pounds. Holy shit. I am also pretty sure that we aren't talking muscle weight here. I just feel like I am putting on weight. My new plan is to add cycling to my weekly regiment and see if that helps. That would put me at running 3 days, walking/hiking 1-2 days and cycling 1-2 days per week. I am currently training for a 5k, followed by a 10k and ultimately (hopefully) a 1/2 marathon. I might as well add a triathlon to that...who knows.

Rock's not dead...so stop bitching and whining

I am really tired of hearing people bitch about how "Rock is pretty much dead" or "Nothing good ever comes out anymore". If you could stop bitching long enough to listen to some new music, you will find more than you could ever ask for. Need examples? Okay, let's go with the last year or so.
Off the top of my head, we have: Mastodon, Converge, Mars Volta, Killswitch Engage, Coheed & Cambria, Tool, A7X, Slayer, Lamb of God and a whole lot more. All of that is fucking rock any way you look at it. So, stop bitching.

BTW, there should be a new Dr. Hourai this year, new Coheed in the next few months as well. Apparently, there is also a new Mars Volta scheduled for 2007, too.

database connections [perl v. ruby]

It's no secret that I am in love with Perl. I can honestly say that it is my favorite scripting language. To me, it is clean, powerful, efficient, concise, and everything that I want a scripting language to be. I can also say that my favoritism toward Perl is not because of a lack of experience with other scripting languages. I have used Python extensively and have used my fair share of Ruby, along with several others.
Lately, I have been giving a fair amount of attention to Ruby for a few reasons. First, we have a new programmer at work and since Ruby is one of the only languages that he knows, I am helping him when he gets stuck. The structure, syntax and semantics are clear enough that I am able to point out logic errors and traps in a language that I, admittedly, am not an expert in (though I have had three separate programming language concept classes). Second, there are some times that I can just knock out a quick script in a few lines without needing to worry about all of the error catching and process killing that I do (out of habit) in Perl. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the Perl syntax shown below, but there is something nice about the Ruby syntax, too. I guess that what I am getting at, in a very roundabout way, is that even if you commit yourself fully to a given language, realize that one language will never do everything that you would like as easily as you would like. In order to appreciate a language, you need to know when to use it and when to use something else.

For example, if I am writing a loooong script using several database connections to several types of databases (Oracle, DB2, mySQL) and I need to know everything that is going on at any given moment, I am more familiar and comfortable using some Perl like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use locale;
use DBI;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:Oracle:'.'DBNAME', 'acctName','passwd',
{AutoCommit => 1}) or die print "Unable to Connect\n";

my $selectstmt = "SELECT val1,val2...valn FROM ROOT.AE_X_EMPL_X WHERE (E_STAT = 'A')";

my $sth = $dbh->prepare($selectstmt)
or die print "Unable to prepare the Dept User Select Stmt.: " .
$dbh->errstr . "\n";
$sth->execute()
or $errMsg = $sth->errstr;

while(@data= $sth->fetchrow_array()){
do stuff;
}
$dbh->disconnect();

If I am writing a script that I am using to perform nested selects within a single database, then I a would probably be more likely to use Ruby. The reason is that I can usually tell pretty quickly if my data is coming out right in a situation like this. It isn't that I don't trust Ruby, I am just more comfortable with my Perl syntax. But, for the Ruby, notice how much shorter the syntax is for a similar situation:

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'oci8'

oracleConnection=OCI8.new('acctName','passwd','DBNAME')

db=oracleConnection.exec("select deptnum, dept_desc from tbw_depthead order by deptnum")

while var = db.fetch()
do stuff
end

oracleConnection.disconnect

See? Much, much simpler syntax overall.

But, I guess that the whole point of this is that you need to understand your tools to understand the best way to solve a problem. Imagine a carpenter using a sledgehammer to drive finishing nails into a baseboard. Doesn't seem like a good idea does it? How about using a screwdriver as a wrench? Exactly. Bad idea. I know that Perl's Regex support is pretty much the best that I have found, but I also know now (from experience) that cgi and css support is much easier/clearer in Ruby. Finally, I am going to leave this as an open ended post and try to get some feedback from you guys about your scripting preferences and what you like to use different scripting languages for. Lat me know....

Leopard delayed...

This makes me sad. Especcially since I am waiting on Leopard to launch before I get a new MacBook Pro....

Here is the quote from Apple.com:

we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard's features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October.

I was originally waiting on the next spec upgrade and Leopard. Now, I am fairly certain that they will up the specs on the MacBook Pro in/by June, but no Leopard until October.

SQLPlus & PL/SQL from a shell script.

Tim Archer has a very nice post that he was kind enough to point me to that describes how to run SQLPlus and PL/SQL commands from a shell script (and cron!!!). Check it out here. If you have a little time, he has some nice posts, so check it out.

Ten grammar mistakes that make you look stupid

I saw this at Reddit and wanted to share.

Transcript from the "God Debate"

I have just finished reading the transcript from the "God Debate" (Sam Harris v. Rick Warren). You can read it Here. This is a must read if you have read any of Harris' books. Leave a comment letting me know what you think.

Exam Tips

What do you do to help study for Certification Exams? With the massive amounts of data that I am currently processing in my head, I feel like I am forgetting a lot. My usual study methods don;t seem to be working right now. Post your suggestions and let me know if you have studied for(and hopefully passed) a major cert.

Right now, mine is my first test toward getting my MCAD.

Mount your network drive [linux]

I have had a couple of people ask me how to mount a network drive that will not reappear after a reboot. They wanted to transfer files and have the connection drop after the machine restarts. Well, here is how to do that.

sudo mkdir /mount/dirname
sudo mount /// /media/dirname/ -o username=myusername

Then you will be prompted for the password for your remote samba account "myusername".

I have mine set to mount on boot b/c it is my personal server among other reasons, and finding documentation for that is really easy, but for some reason, they were unable to find instruction for this.

Anyway, be sure to check out UbuntuGuide.org if you have any questions about setup on Ubuntu. It is by far the best and most comprehensive reference that I have found so far for Ubuntu.