Robs Blob

Static Typing

2011-10-14T15:36:00.001-07:00

I ran across this post today, and it summed up nicely why I like Static languages, and why, even if you have to type some more in cases like Java, it's well worth it.

Yet Scala has type inference - so its typically as concise as Ruby/Groovy but that everything has static types. This is a good thing; it makes code comprehension, navigation & documentation much simpler. Any token/method/symbol you can click on to navigate to the actual implementation code & documentation. No wacky monkey patching involved, or doubting of who added a method, when and how - which is great for large projects with lots of folks working on the same code over long periods of time. Scala seems to hit the perfect sweet spot between the consise feel of a dynamic language, while actually being completely statically typed. So I never have to remember the magic methods that are available - or run a script in a shell then inspect the object to see what it really looks like - the IDE/compiler just knows while you edit.

James Strachan -
http://macstrac.blogspot.com/2009/04/scala-as-long-term-replacement-for.html

Lifehacker filtering disagreeing posts?

2011-10-13T06:56:00.001-07:00

So let's start out, is the following Spam? Is it hard to note?

OK, your economics are slightly off. You're saying don't count time for biking, but count it for driving, that's BS. If you aren't going to start your own company or do something productive in those times, then you're not saving it.

I think you're right to make people make sure they know the reasons they are commuting. I choose to live 5 minutes from family and commute 45 minutes, it's super important to us. My wife does things with our family during the week that makes it useful, things that wouldn't be possible if we were close to work. So it may be worth 50 grand or a bit more to live close to work, but it's not 400 Grand unless you have a second job. The one point you absolutely make that I agree is all that driving does add up. A huge reason I got a Jetta TDI over a Cadillac was the cost of Gas, and I drove a Toyota Corolla for 5 years before that, before I decided I wanted something quieter (It really sounded like a tin can).

One more point, I worked 5 miles from h
ome twice, I still needed 15 minutes to get to work because of stop lights, parking and such. So I'm not losing the full 45 minutes like you said, and if I biked there's other benefits, but again I wouldn't be saving time.

You ride your bike to save money because you enjoy it, you need to balance the cost of your commute with what you replace it with. But you need to know the REAL number, not some imaginary my time is worth X to sit in front of the TV because I'm too worn out from the job after 5:40 PM. I can, however, listen to an interesting talk for 45 minutes while cruising down my two lane highway through the country, and be a little less fried when I get home for dinner.

That's what I posted into a lifehacker.com article. Maybe I'm being hasty, but I don't think so. It's marked as spam, and it'll probably stay like that. It makes you wonder though, are disagreeable posts allowed on LifeHacker? It didn't seem like it was from the comments. Maybe it's the length, but getrichslowly.org encourages it. I don't troll getrichslowly.org comments that much, but I do read them and people make great alternative points, or add to the case. The point of comments is to encourage discussion, if you're going to one side them, then just remove them. But being scared of alternative opinions ticks me off, especially from Liberals who cry we should be more open, that's not what they really mean I guess.

Bears, Bears, Bears

2010-08-29T17:51:00.001-07:00

I decided to type up my thoughts on the state of the bears, so I figured I may as well post it here.

I've been telling the few bear fans around here for awhile Lovie is part of the problems. How many guys have you seen Lovie favor while he has someone better on the bench.

Both Orton and Greise weren't good enough for Lovie. I mean, Grossman was better than either one? I think not. I bet they weren't on his good side, and he mostly gave Orton a chance finally. Don't get me wrong, neither one was a Breese, Manning, Brady, or Warner, but they were far from bottom of the pack. Getting Cutler wasn't too bad, it was his choice of having Turner coach him last year that drove me nuts. When they work Devin with a trick play, somehow the timing feels better, like they caught the D off guard, instead of pulling something out to get things going. It'll come, but because of Martz, I'm driving up to Cleveland mainly because of how excited him being signed got me.

And Babich, another Lovie favorite who's still "coaching" the line backers. I don't know if it's the scheme, but I know the execution is not there.
Oh yeah, that Rivera guy who had the best defense in the NFL for a year and hovering around there for a few, he wasn't good enough for Lovie either. I keep watching San Diego's D, it's not stellar but I bet it'll be better than Chicago as long as Lovie thinks he's got the magic. And I have total faith Lovie will screw it up if they do find someone to run and get the Defense working.

For safety, Major may end up being good, but Steltz should be out there, I see other guys screw up much more than him, and notice him making plays when he's out there.

The only good thing I've seen the Angelo / Lovie duo do is get Martz and Tice in. I really wonder if Tice told them they needed better players on the line to get the job done and he was laughed at or what. I just hope they fix the three ding-a-lings at the top (Phillips, Angelo and Lovie), that Martz and Tice are kept. I think between the backs, receivers, and Cutler they'll have something. I really don't think Cutler is dumb enough to give Martz lip, or that Martz will take it, the guy did have one of the most explosive offensives in League history, even if he does have some pass happy flaws.

A true number one receiver wouldn't hurt, but it's not a must with the other 7 guys they have around them. So they need someone who can get 3 of what they need instead of spending the farm on another magic bean seed toy guy who fails to be the next Fitzgerald. D.A., Knox, and Hester can make catches when they need to. The ball that was 2 inches to far from Hester will come, and was a lot better than the dying quails in between 3 safeties they let Grossman toss out there. The blown routes and such will smooth out towards the end of the season, which I hope won't be too late to catch the playoffs. And a few of the passes just needed some better timing, like the ball low and behind that Knox missed, they'll come, and again I have faith Martz will bust them to be in the right spot, and Cutler for where he throws the ball more than anything.

Great Idea for controlling welfare

2010-07-02T15:09:00.000-07:00

I ran across this today and think it's great. If you can't pass a drug test, then maybe we do need to focus your rehabilitation a bit more.

I can hear people screaming about this kind of like the people screaming because you need to carry your Driver's Liscense if you live in AZ. I mean no one complains about needing one to board a plane.

Like most folks in this country, I have a job. I work, they pay me.

I pay my taxes & the government distributes my taxes as it sees fit.

In order to get that paycheck, in my case, I am required to pass a random urine test (with which I have no problem).

What I do have a problem with is the distribution of my taxes to people who don't have to pass a urine test.

So, here is my question: Shouldn't one have to pass a urine test to get a welfare check because I have to pass one to earn it for them?

Please understand, I have no problem with helping people get back on their feet. I do, on the other hand, have a problem with helping someone sitting on their BUTT----doing drugs while I work.

Can you imagine how much money each state would save if people had to pass a urine test to get a public assistance check?

I guess we could call the program "URINE OR YOU'RE OUT"!

Pass this along if you agree or simply delete if you don't. Hope you all will pass it along, though. Something has to change in this country - AND SOON!
P.S. Just a thought, all politicians should have to pass a urine test too!

Google needs to get on the 64 bit wagon.

2009-08-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

So I was working at home on a little project, and based on the requirements, I was thinking of building a GWT app using Google Gears. First, GWT doesn't support 64 Bit linux hosted mode. That's because of the SWT, and their migration path is to use OOPHM. So I downloaded the latest code from the trunk, and compiled it. Then for the plugin, I couldn't use the one in trunk, but the one listed on their website worked fine. After doing that, I added a GWT SDK to point to my build, mucked with the classpath, and I finally got everything starting up.

So on to gears, I went to install the plugin, and an error about it not supporting 64 bit. AGGGGHHHHH. That's it, I'm done. I know 64 bit may not be the main market, but c'mon, it can't really be that hard to support, can it? I mean it's not like you're trying to fit 32 bit into 16 bit.

So I can compile gears myself, for the next thing, or just forget about it and do something else. It's pretty annoying to have to jump through so many hoops. But maybe, with Windows 7 64 bit and such, they'll come around.

Sigh, just frustrating when it should be a simple deal.

[Follow-up: I found a patch in issue http://code.google.com/p/gears/issues/detail?id=335 at http://gears.googlecode.com/issues/attachment?aid=9071268416480001677&name=gears-gcc433.diff that I merged manually based on compile errors against rev 3396 of URL http://gears.googlecode.com/svn/trunk . The XPI compiled and passed all of the unit tests. So we'll now see how the GWT API libraries work with it.]

RC Terrorist?

2009-05-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

This is hilarious, and I'll probably bump up for this post. Because I blogged on 'RC Airplanes' and the governments over scrutinization of the American people, someone blogged for 'RC Airplane Terrorist' and well, this blog was number 3 or 4. I just thought that was great.

Upgrading to Jaunty

2009-05-01T17:34:00.000-07:00

So the newest version of Ubuntu is out and I upgraded. Everything went smooth as silk. The only thing I had to do was to confirm to keep a couple /etc files I had tweaked for some server apps I have installed. No problem. So the next morning, I fire up the new Amarok 2.2 and to my dismay the ipod support stinks compares to 1.4. I search for a bit, try a few things, and no dice. I tried a couple of other apps, and nothing like I had with amarok 1.4 was available. So I went to the debian main site, and grabbed what I wanted.

1. First, I would go into synaptic and uninstall your amarok stuff. I didn't have to uninstall much.

2. Run the following wgets


wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/t/taglib/libtagc0_1.5-6_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libm/libmtp/libmtp8_0.3.7-3_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/libk/libkarma/libkarma0_0.0.6-4_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/amarok/amarok-common_1.4.10-3_all.deb
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/amarok/amarok-engine-xine_1.4.10-3+b1_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/a/amarok/amarok_1.4.10-3+b1_amd64.deb
wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/y/yauap/yauap_0.2.2-2_amd64.deb

3. When those finish you can install them.


sudo dpkg -i yauap_0.2.2-2_amd64.deb amarok_1.4.10-3+b1_amd64.deb amarok-engine-xine_1.4.10-3+b1_amd64.deb amarok-common_1.4.10-3_all.deb libkarma0_0.0.6-4_amd64.deb libmtp8_0.3.7-3_amd64.deb libtagc0_1.5-6_amd64.deb

4. The last thing is to let Synaptic know to keep it. Ubuntu will want to upgrade the packages by default. So go into Synaptic, and click the 'Reload' icon in the top left. Then when that finishes, if you search for amarok, two of the packages should have little stars on them. For each package, click it, select the 'Package' menu and click 'Lock Version'. The package will turn a dark red, and you'll not be bothered to upgrade them.

A few of the libraries did upgrade for me. But as of the writing of this, all was working fine, I updated my podcasts, and my transfer tray was waiting for my iPod, WOOT WOOT.

Thoughts about our government

2009-03-04T18:44:00.003-08:00

Some family forwarded this on to me. Some food for thought.

Catching Wild Pigs
A chemistry professor in a large college had some exchange students in the class. One day while the class was in the lab the Professor noticed one young man (exchange student) who kept rubbing his back, and stretching as if his back hurt.

The professor asked the young man what was the matter. The student told him he had a bullet lodged in his back. He had been shot while fighting communists in his native country who were trying to overthrow his country's government and install a new communist government.

In the midst of his story he looked at the professor and asked a strange question. He asked, 'Do you know how to catch wild pigs?'

The professor thought it was a joke and asked for the punch line.

The young man said this was no joke. 'You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.

They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are caught. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.

The young man then told the professor that is exactly what he sees happening to America.. The government keeps pushing us toward socialism and keeps spreading the free corn out in the form of programs such as supplemental income, tax credit for unearned income, tobacco subsidies, dairy subsidies, payments not to plant crops (CRP), welfare, medicine, drugs, etc. While we continually lose our freedoms -- just a little at a time.

One should always remember: There is no such thing as a free lunch! Also, a politician will never provide a service for you cheaper than you can do it yourself.

Also, if you see that all of this wonderful government 'help' is a problem confronting the future of democracy in America , you might want to send this on to your friends. If you think the free ride is essential to your way of life then you will probably delete this email, but God help you when the gate slams shut! Keep your eyes on the newly elected politicians, as well as old ones, who are about to slam the gate on America. The hinges are being oiled now so they don't squeak.

Quote: "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have."
Thomas Jefferson

Freedom of Choice Act Removes our choices

2009-01-20T19:02:00.000-08:00

They Call it "Choice". They say you shouldn't interfere with someone's choice. Well many states have chosen many things about Abortion. Some states have flat out said no. Some, including "Liberal" states like California have limited it. Well FOCA said you chose wrongly. Some of us have chosen to follow Religions which call it wrong. While no one should be forced to go against their conscience, FOCA gives a woman the right to sue if someone else follows theirs.

There's alot more than abortion that my taxes should NOT be paying for. But regardless of how you feel on the issue, I hope you agree that you shouldn't force the 50,75% or more of Americans who personally feel it's wrong. I hope you agree that since people can live in any state they want, the states that don't want legal infanticide should be free to have the Federal Government honor their choice. Since you may not want my church Federally funded, I hope you'll honor the request of ours that you don't fund this.

FOCA goes beyond just allowing choices to continue, it retroactively removes any choices made that go against it, by anyone.

1. Please, write your senator and tell him/her that you want them to oppose FOCA and honor your States rights. You must now how hard it is for anything decent to happen in government, the common man has a better chance at the state and local levels than at the Federal, ask them to protect that.

http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml

2. Contact everyone you can, and ask them to do the same. If one in 20 writes a letter, it was worth it.

3. Call them if you can, and say the same.

In "the land of the free" you can't do much more without being tracked as a terrorist. But you can hope that maybe this would help. When people vote on issues and alter their state constitutions, and that's threatened to be swept aside becaue the Feds don't like it, I don't know how you can feel free in the "Home of the Brave".

Robert Leon Zaleski

Ibext Dualhead Goodness

2008-11-19T19:57:00.000-08:00

So I upgraded my work laptop to Ibex this last weekend. It was just something I wanted to do even though I didn't use it much. I then had a reason to boot into it at work where my 22" ViewSonic has me loving the dual head goodness. With Hardy, it wouldn't load at the right res, and it would look all faded. I was super suprised when GDM loaded up right out of the box with mirrored displays in what appeared to be the right res. I logged in, went in to the Screen Res preferences and undid the mirror setting, and voila I had both LCD's running natively. I've been in Ubuntu allot the last two days, and all looks good. The last thing to do is to get the newest driver running with all the accell as some of the rendering is a bit choppy. I'm also tempted to redo this setup to 64bit since it's currently 32bit. I don't know if I can really give that a go yet, but I'm pretty stoked that Ibex got that working. Looks like it's worth it if you want dual head.

Editors and IDEs

2008-08-20T08:10:00.000-07:00

I've been switching between gvim with cscope, eclipse, and NetBeans allot lately. The jvi plugin for NetBeans is good, but things can get a bit slow when I work with it for 4 hours on our 1000 file multi-maven projects.

I tried Eclipse for a bit, mainly drawn by it's fairly quick ctrl-shift-r which lets you start typing file names and jump to them. I find myself jumping around a bit. I also used gvim with cscope to do the same thing which worked out pretty good. I just do :csf name and it completes. It's not case insensitive which would be nice, but it works. The nice thing about vim, is you need a really large files for it to be slow, and cscope's pretty good. I think if I added javascript and HTML improvements to cscope it would be great, it's results filtering/ordering could also be improved. but it's pretty solid.

The one thing I missed with it was syntax checking, and a bit of code completion. Code completion under eclipse still seemed a bit slow, so I really don't think NetBeans or Eclipse is quick enough. I'm tempted to find IntelliJ just to see if it's quick enough to make code completion useful. If I can type the whole word in the time it takes it to pop up, then it's generally not worth it. The jump to declaration which is usually ']' in vim makes up for the times you don't know what you want. 'ctrl-t' takes you back to where you used. That works in both the NetBeans jvi plugin and cscope.

The NetBeans 6.5 Beta is pretty slick. It's JavaScript completion is heading in the right direction though it's a bit slower than I'd like on my laptop. I'm using it without jvi this time and I've been doing Eclipse with it's stock setup. I can't do the emacs keys as I have to hit too many random alt/control combos which blows my mind. Vim is nice because it lets you avoid that with modes, which I find easy. The other thing with vim is a line edit is easily repeatable with the '.' press in normal mode. I find myself doing allot of those and vim is great for it. So I don't know. Maybe I'll plop jvi back in and just try to profile it up.

Well, that's about it. Nothing really fits perfectly yet. So I'm becoming an IDE slut like Dick Wall, but oh well. Maybe some work on eclim will get me the best of everything. Then again, maybe not.

No Linux, What?!?

2008-03-23T07:20:00.000-07:00

I've been a pretty die hard proponent of Linux for a while. Some other things have caught my attention, but Gentoo and it's customizable package management has kept me on it for 4 years now. I mean, what other distro is famous for telling people to not file bugs on a package the DAY it is released. And I love that, because when I ran SuSe or Redhat, I was always months behind the community, not up there with it.

Well, I recently had my original motherboard from while I was in school die. This meant that while I had newer power supplies and monitors and IDE drives galore, and two graphics cards that were good enough, I still didn't have any working machines. My wife was going to let me buy some beast of a machine with a New graphics card and such, but at the moment, I don't think I'd really use it. So I settled on a pair of decent AMD x2 64 bit combos with ram and motherboard to get both machines back up and in action using the old AGP cards. (I think there were only like 4 or 5 sets that are still AGP, they are almost Obsolete it seems). Then I went ahead and burned a AMD 64 Gentoo boot CD, and that weekend I had all the normal stuff I like up and running. But within a few days we noticed it was pretty laggy, I spent about 3 days trying to get the ATI drivers to work with any of the linux 2.6.23 to 2.6.25 kernels with no luck. So I went ahead and got the Xorg radeon drivers going and glx gears was giving me 800 FPS, 130 FPS maximized at full screen. So that was certainly good enough for the graphics side, but I still had all this lag. I started looking around, and found that there's some IO issues in the kernel for the last year starting about 2.6.17 that's been going on. This guy would have his MySQL freeze up for 30 seconds or so while doing a copy of a large backup file. Now this got me thinking, and other AMD 64 peeps had problems. Now, it's not too terribly helpful to the kernel guys to say things slow down when you do a copy, but the fact it's change allot over the year is scary. That and the API changes which are causing the fglrx driver not to compile, got me ticked off. It seems to be considerably worse under 64, but I know the system seemed off to me even when I was running 32 bit, so maybe it was me noticing scheduling issues as much as it was the board.

So I went ahead and tried FreeBSD which I've been wanting to do for awhile. I recently saw that Firefox is using some of the BSD low level C libraries due to their speed, and I've heard the developers are supposed to be a bit more sane about their work. So I did a FreeBSD 7.0 install, and it booted with X and no problems. It took me awhile to learn how groovy the whereis command is, and get the hang of ports, but I can get what I need on the system fairly easily. It's also pretty up to date, with GnuCash being the same version as what's stable on Gentoo. Ports isn't anything compared to Gentoo's package system, maybe snappier since it's make based, which means the grunt work is all in C, but still not nearly as feature rich or comprehensive in the commands. But I'm sure I've got a number of tricks to learn.

Still, it's been pretty darn cool, and I've certainly got 90% of the stuff working great. The other thing, is that to have everything, like flash 9 and JAVA in Firefox working, I think I'd have to run a 32 bit linux system, which I may just do for browsing. Then again, I could probably xen or CD boot a fairly small system for that. Either way, the default browser set up I have is working well and not nearly as hokey when it comes to running multiple things.

Conclusion of the Sword of Truth Series

2007-11-08T17:15:00.000-08:00

I've been loving the Terry Goodkind works since I started them. Next to Tolkien, I think they are great. Like Tolkien there is allot of thought about moral good and evil behind them. Here's a quote from his site at

http://www.prophets-inc.com/communicate/q_and_a.html

The theme of CHAINFIRE, for example, is belief in one’s self. The plot is one man’s struggle to prove what he believes to be true when everyone else thinks he is wrong. The theme of NAKED EMPIRE is the existence of evil. The plot is the struggle to get men to recognize evil for what it is, fight for their own lives, and to deserve victory.
The theme of FAITH OF THE FALLEN is the role of free will in man’s existence — the abstract concept of the importance of freedom to man’s existence. The plot is the battle for individual liberty in a altruistic-driven collectivist society. The concretes of Richard’s struggle make the abstract concept understandable and clear.

- Terry Goodkind

The fact that these books are chocked full of a compelling story line and great story makes them great. I guess the author is also working on the film as well which I trust will be fantastic since his imprint will be involved. Anyways, start at the beginning, but the conclusing is coming this week!!

Google just can't help being the best

2007-10-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

So NewsGator started being a bit slow for me. Maybe it's just me, I dunno. It would loose clicks occasionally and just seemed laggy. The new version of YAHOO's mail seems that way to me as well. A friend and me tried the YAHOO logger out on a site and it just seems bloated and slow. I like what they are doing, but Firefox has the fastest javascript engine around, and if it's slow to me, then it's probably just too slow.

So anyways, I tweaked the Google reader preferences to let me control what I read via clicks. I started playing with starring some overly fat feeds that I won't read everything with, and made another feed for what I want to read all of. It's a pretty decent setup.

My shared page is at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/15106931895910626066 with all of my stuff. I added one of my friends shared feeds to mine, and if anyone else has a shared RSS feeds just send me the link to it at rzaleski81.nospam@yahoo.remove.com (I really hope you can figure out that .nospam and .remove should be deleted from that.)

My First Dvd

2007-08-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

A couple of friends of mine got married recently. A friend of theirs had given them a powerpoint and they wanted it to be on DVD so the hall could play it on the large screen. I went ahead and offered to do the transition. Let me tell you it was a bit more work than I expected, mainly because I was trying to get it going with a regular CD/burner and the open source tools all let me down.

I mainly tried qdvdauthor and DVD Flick to try and get it going. While they are both nice and I made and burned ISO's, neither worked. Now to be fair, I was using regular CD's, and I think my player may be at fault. I also used dvd-slideshow to make the pictures into a video. The main problem with dvd-slideshow was that the AC3 didn't work. It could probably be a gentoo issue that I should look at, but for now I'm a bit sick of it.

So on the day of the wedding, I broke down and bought a DVD-R drives, some recordable DVDs, and the package came with the Nero 7 tool suite. It's a memorex drive for $45. Memorex is a decent brand, it was the cheapest, and it came with software, all big pluses. In like 20 minutes I had it going, so I'm happy with it. The drive is a bit noisy, but any CD drive that really spins up usually is. Overall though, I'm a bit happy. I made some assumptions and mistakes with the audio, but it worked out. I think I'll definitely have to look into doing DVD Christmas cards this year, it will be a hoot I think.

Politicians and Religion

2007-08-03T04:00:00.000-07:00

I have been midly watching the Presidential canidates to see who's out there. I think if we want anything to change, grassroot movements need to start supporting canidates early to have a fighting chance of them winning the primaries and being a real contender. While I was googling I came across a page by Wesley Clark and I was struck how he just doesn't get Religion. Here's a quote from http://www.beliefnet.com/story/137/story_13791_1.html

"I'm spiritual. I'm religious. I'm a strong Christian and I'm a Catholic but I go to a Presbyterian Church. Occasionally I go to the Catholic church too. I take communion. I haven't transferred my membership or anything. My wife I consider ourselves---she considers herself a Catholic."

Okay, now If you ARE a Catholic, then you have made a free choice to submit yourself to your bishops who say you MUST go to Mass EVERY WEEK. Nothing says you have to be a Catholic (I personally think everyone should be, but that's another issue), but if you are, I mean really are, then you need to be one. I know plenty of families who are of two different Christian faiths and they go to BOTH to support each other and would never miss their own service. Now, the fact that she's Catholic too makes you wonder why he would ever skip the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Any Real Catholic should know something happens there that only happens in Catholic and Orthodox churches.

The next beef I have is on this line. "I take communion." First, most Catholics inherently say they receive. You don't take Jesus, He is God, He is in control. So there's another interior theological concept missing. I think most simple Mexican mothers I know (And there's lots of devout ones, simple faith at it's finest), who would say that just because that's how you always hear it in Catholic Circles. But the second is that he uses it as proof he's "Catholic OK" or something. Anyone can go up in line and receive, question is does he know if he should or not.

Anyways, that's my rant and I need to go. I'll have to post more on other Canidates and my view on this soon.

jVi and Netbeans

2007-07-15T02:58:00.000-07:00

I found jvi.sourceforge.net the other day and I'm pretty smitten with it. It gives you a good implementation of viMproved in Java and integrates it with the IDE. I've been using NetBeans because that's the one the author is currently using and I just always think Eclipse is too slow. Netbeans too can hang at times which annoys me, but overall the jVi editor is fairly quick. NetBeans also has good Maven2 support through MevenIde. Our newest project at work is using Maven2 for it's builds, which I have mixed feelings on. It certainly forces you into a "right way" mentality which I wish some of our other projects had.

I'm getting pretty comfortable with NetBeans after the last 2 weeks or so, and I like it alot. Anyone who's worked with me know's I'm a miceless freak, and NetBeans does pretty good at letting me be 90% miceless. Here's a sample of how I work.

Ctrl-1 (Pop's up the project navigator) Arrow keys, pgUp, pgDown, and I believe Enter will open a file. You can also type a file name and it will find the first item listed in the tree and display it. Fairly slick, not quite as nice as ":new" sometimes, but it's also got it's advantages when bouncing between multiple packages. Tab-Completion would certainly be nice.

Ctrl-4 (Takes you to the output, I've thought about rebinding but this is the default and so I'm using it for now.)
You can hit shift-escape to fullsize the window which I do as I keep it small at 4 lines or so. Then you get a full build result view you can look at and just hit shift-escape again to get back to your normal tiled view.

I should note that all of the right tiles are just buttons that are sideways and pop up their window when you mouse over. The output window is about 4 lines at the bottom. I found this to be best as I really need the "Project" and most other windows to be big to be helpful, but they clutter the screen too much for my likes. The Ctrl-1 integration makes it nice, when I want something I hit the key and there it is, when I'm done it dissapears. Although, this layout is good, I still think I should be given like 30 pixels every direction back. But oh well.

I bound "Ctrl-E" to the editor, so that get's me back into jVi. I generally think Netbeans should keep you in the editor more, but that may bug me in other ways, so I could be wrong. Ctrl-Tab swaps between open windows. It can be slow loading up the Ctrl-Tab window list for some reason, which is probably my biggest annoyance. It may just be a more memory desired issue, or windows swap, both of which I probably could help it out with.

F11 Builds and Shift-F11 cleans before building. I used a cygterm window to do this for the first week or two. I'd just alt-tab and then hit up to get the command and return. It's nicer to have build errors hyperlinked to the code in NetBeans. I suppose I could have just got the maven / javac integration working from within vIm.

The biggest reason I've been keeping NetBeans is it's database browser and it's interface for running SQL. It's missing a couple of features like SQL history, but it's about as quick as the isql command line utility. So the DB commands make me like it allot. I kept coming back to it when I was doing database work for a bit of coding I was doing via vi on the AIX command line. Now I'm soo hooked on NetBeans, I'm trying to get everything done in it.

One issue I have had is getting our TomCat project to run in it. Just running the "mvn tomcat:run" crashes for me (some concurrent map mod or something, so it's probably running inside NetBeans with some JVM issue). I also haven't figured out the built in tomcat shipped with the NetBeans server, but maybe someday soon I'll sit down and finish figuring it out.

Overall, NetBeans buys me a few niceties like accurate code completion and perfect cscope ( "Ctrl-] from jVi" ) like functionality. It's a bit slow to startup, probably because it's building some large data structures, but it happily sits at 200 MB most of the time. I probably should bump it's max mem allowance up to 512 and see how that does (then again it may never need it.), but half of the slowness on startup seems to be the laptop hard drive. I still think a lightweight IDE written in C and built around vIm would be the best, but you've gotta take what you can get. The clewn project, is certainly a great first piece of that with the slickest GDB integration I've ever used.

Freedom includes your money?

2007-07-15T02:20:00.000-07:00

I know there are two versions of the word Freedom in America. There's the Catholic version where your freedom really is your right to be able to do what is right. True Freedom is being freed of sins and the ways of death that the world seems to think disappeared. I had HBO which I had kept mainly for their NFL show which Laura and I thought was quite good. But when Bill Maher blasted Christianity back in March and HBO never said anything in response to his degradation of Christianity, we decided to drop it. But that's just a side point to this post. Mr. Maher certainly confuses Sex and it's relation to True Freedom and the American version.

The American version of freedom usually tries to focus on your ability to choose to do whatever you want. It certainly is related to the Catholic view and comes out of your gift of free will from God, but stop and think how free you really are. I was listening to a show by Fr. Benedict Groeschel and he was talking about how the drug addict has really lost his freedom. Think about it, if you physically feel like you have to have a fix, and your body physically is making it nearly impossible for you to go without it, then you're no longer free in that area of your life. Similar things happen to us in every day life though. I wonder how many people think about them, or even believe those actions are wrong anymore. Many people seem to do things, myself included, before they have a chance to decide what they want to do, or right after they decided they were not going to continue an action. As Paul said, "For the flesh has desires against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; these are opposed to each other, so that you may not do what you want." Gal 5:12 Still, that doesn't change the fact that we may pray for help and put our best effort into doing better.

But one place of free will which doesn't seem to be talked about, at least not much as wrong, is Taxes. I truly believe that we pay too much of our money for things which we should not. And this last 4th of July I had decided to write a post on it. More than likely people don't discuss this as we have little we can do to improve the situation, but it is one small thing to keep in mind as you go about your voting. Certainly other Moral issues like Abortion come into a much more critical play, but the right to keep the means you've worked hard for is certainly a valid one. And even if Taxes aren't directly mentioned, hand in hand with that are Government services which require money (well Government services all seem to require money) and so we should support only the ones we think we should pay taxes for. Not that some other organization can't do them.

Certainly though, by the Catholic definition of Freedom you should give something to your country. I think what politicians either knowingly through greed or coincidently through a desire to not say 'No', overly burden Americans, and that is wrong. Certainly, God is entitled to at least 10 % given back. And our government should have something for the many roads and such it provides, but Freedom by both definitions is based on our ability to exercise our free will to shape this world for God's glory. And certainly, giving 35% +/- 20% is not affording that freedom.

More Podcasts and Apple blew up

2007-06-14T02:53:00.000-07:00

So yesterday I was downloading my podcasts like usual and I got out to the car and started to load my morning listening, and boom there was NOTHING on my ipod. I even used the Apple eject button at the bottom right, to no avail. Oh well. I had to try about 10 times to get it to load up and sync, very annoying. What I think finally did it was ejecting the drive from itunes and then reconnecting it without doing anything else to itunes. But anyways, maybe I'll go back to Amarok for my Linux syncing.

Amarok mainly did what I wanted, my only slight issue was that it messes up song timings somehow, which is probably a libgtkpod problem. I thought some of my podcasts were having issues from a Amarok POV, but I now lay blame to the podcast publishers.

I've been listening to the mysportsradio.com stuff. Mainly just NFL and the Bears cast, although I may pick up the Pittsburgh cast for my wife. Good stuff. The other thing I got is that Franciscan started a "Spirit and Life" podcast from their conferences. Go to www.franciscanconferences.com to find it. So that's most of it. I went to the Charismatic conference this last weekend. Great stuff. Patty Mainsfield (I believe that's the correct spelling) and Sr. Briege McKenna were amazing speakers. Overall it's been a good pick me up, get back to your spiritual life for me.

Upcoming is that an open source project got me really jazzed and once I get a few patches done this week I'll blog on it.

What was lost is found

2007-06-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

So I lost my plane the other day. Either I made some mistakes or I ejected the battery, I'm not precisely sure, but I do know it went down straight while rolling and I was certainly trying to pull out. It wasn't the typical your upside down, pull up and pull into the trees. So I am leaning towards the fact that I ejected the battery which would be mostly me playing fast and loose because I kind of knew it was a bit ejection prone on crash at least. Oh well. I just wish I could find the battery so I knew it had discharged correctly and won't cause problems.

The plane itself got stuck in a tree. That's the only real problem with running it by my house is that the forrest trees around here have no branches to climb until you are 50 feet up or so. That meant that I had to wait for almost 48 hours for a good wind to blow it out. I'll just have to be a bit more careful though. Unfortunately It looks like I'm out 50 bucks at the moment though. Luckily it looks like there are more lower cost li-po's which may soften the cost.

Back in the Air

2007-05-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

So I finally got my plane back into a flyable state. I reworked the front taking about half an inch off and then digging out a spot for the balsa to mount the motor on. I got her back in the air over at the nearby baseball diamonds which was some fun. The only problem is that the battery wore out sooner than I had wanted and I had to land quickly. No damage but the prop broke. Oh well, I have spares, but not another APC 9x6 which is what I use for the top end. I Put a 10x4.5 on today and took it to the back yard. This time when it got low I made a big turn, got a little close to a tree I think, and glided her in. A much nicer landing. So I decided now I'm going to do some navy blue and orange highlights with the Bears 'C' on it. Should look spiffy and I'll have to post the paint job when I finish. But the plane will still look a bit beat up, oh well. I mainly want the color to help tell direction and such, so I'm not too worried about that.

The last thing I kind of wanted to do to straighten her up is to get the tail elevator wing a bit straighter. I'll probably wait a few weeks though as that will be a bit of work, and I'm already doing enough around the house with a garden and doorbell and other some more electrical wiring. Fun fun.

Oh, yeah, the Soyo Dragon Motherboard I got from Microcenter about 2 years ago died. I think it was more due to the PSU failure, or maybe the MB went first and that killed the PSU. Anyways, we knew it was going as the onboard NIC was broke, but it's been really iff'y to boot lately. So we finally got a TV and I'll have to figure out what to do about the comp sometime soon. Maybe I'll finally grab some screaming machine. I think I just need MB, proc, ram and PCI card as the rest of what I got should work. Maybe a PSU too. The only exception would be if I go raid on it, but It'd have to have onboard raid V for it to be really nice, or I'd have to get back in to the habit of doing backups. Reminds me, I should move the other HD over and back up this comp.

Some more tech sweetness

2007-05-02T05:02:00.000-07:00

So the other day I got into Delicious bookmarks. I use Firefox almost exclusively, as it blows IE out of the water. I'm tabbed browsing addicted and the last time I tried Opera it was kinda flaky for me on Linux. The only problem is, I have like 5 sets of bookmarks between work, home (1 on Linux and on Windows) and then again on the other comp. I used to sync the two linux preferences, but to do that to the work machine would be too cumbersome. So I used delicious. Anyways, my bookmarks are now online at

http://del.icio.us/rlzaleski

Now some people have talked about not wanting that to be private. Well I don't think I bookmark anything I don't care if people see on the internet. The more you talk about the technology behind cordless and cell phones. Between land lines and the internet, the more you just get the feeling at some point someone is going to be talking about you. The only real deal is to be ready to handle Identity theft and know your always out in public unless you shut the windows and don't use technology for a bit. So they are there, I tag something quite regularly.

The newest item on there I found yesterday which is on automatically ripping high quality AACs that I browsed to while waiting on a compile. I'm getting some clipping on some of my hip-hop, so I'm going to re-rip that and possibly all of my music in the near future to fix it. But for now I have a mod-podge of stuff. So I have it for at home even though I was at work when I found it. A great way to save state between work and home, kind of like newsgator, but more multipurpose.

That brings me to my default iPod sync software. I swapped over to iTunes from Amarok. Amarok is a pretty sweet player. I like it a lot. But a few things about it just make it a bit unusable to me. I can't really sync up my music well and sending 7 of 30 bible reading podcasts was a bit too much for it I guess. I really should wip out some Programming Kung Fu on it, but I seem to waste all my evening free time on WoW, or with the kids and doing house work. Oh well, WoW is my entertainment lately, and software has been work. I generally enjoy work, but I just haven't been pumped on it like before. I don't think I'd rather force myself to do anything else for 40 hours a week though.

BTW, my main is at lvl 48 on WoW. Not too shabby. I've been chasing one of my friends for weeks, and he's 3 lvls up on me still. If you play on Cenarion Circle, horde side, then pst Jekahn and say you read my blog.

Podcasts

2007-04-03T05:55:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to do a podcast update once I've settled into a rut of podcasts, which I have. It's a good amount of Catholic stuff I listen to with some other interesting feeds. The ordering is by generally how I listen to it during a week.

Mass Readings from the USCCB
http://feeds.feedburner.com/usccb/zHqS
If you went to mass every day you'd go through the whole bible in a year. This is what I start my commute with.

Catholic Under the Hood
http://feeds.feedburner.com/CatholicunderTheHood
This one is by a TOR from Franciscan University of Steubenville. He's a history teacher there and does a good mix of his take on current events, more historical stuff, and some spiritual topics. He tapes on Sunday so it's always ready Monday morning.

Op Systems and Programming - Berkley Webcourse
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/rss/course-archive.php?seriesid=1906978416
This was the most interesting to me of the Berkley Webcourses. So it's kinda a filler. Usually by Monday Afternoon I finished Fr. Seraphims broadcast and this one fills in. For the rest of the week to this one will fill in. Eventually I'll try to find some more interesting items, but this one's been a good refresher and has touched on some historical or theoretical aspects of Operating System design I haven't found out about before.

Sunday Night Live from EWTN
http://www.ewtn.com/rss/snl.xml
Fr. Benedict Groschel, CFR does a show on EWTN every Sunday night. I never watch it live, but I'll listen to his show. Good stuff, mostly Catholic Spirituality and events in the Church but he's a Psychiatrist as well and will touch on some other talks. This one is typicaly available on Tuesday so I'll listen to it after Tuesday's readings.

BSD Talk
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bsdtalk
I'm actually surprised I listen to this one. It's generally an interview with someone in the BSD community, generally a developer or someone who supports BSD in his company. Also they'll highlight different BSD conferences. It's pretty cool, and the developer talks are really what keep me listening to it.

Threshold of Hope from EWTN
http://www.ewtn.com/rss/th.xml
This one airs on Monday night so I get to it Wednesday or Thursday. It covers Encyclicals by John Paul II and at the time of this posting is going through one on Reconciliation. Good stuff. Fr. Mitch Pacwa does this one. He also now does one of the other EWTN shows which makes me tempted to pick his up. We'll have to see what's out there the next time I need more content.

Ask A NInja
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AskANinja
This is just comedy. All about Ninjas which is all about killing. It's pretty good to listen to and mix things up. There's another Comedy feed I need to try, but I really like things that aren't raunchy. Because it's Ninja and thus a bit more fictional violent, but SUPER violent, I generally like this one.

Software Engineering Radio
http://www.se-radio.net/rss
This one is maybe my favorite. Some good interviews from people involved with developing software engineering technologies. Lots of series on things like Xtreme Programming, Service Oriented Architecture, and much much more. So I like this one. I've listened to everything since the start of the year and I go back and dig out 3-4 archived items on a topic too. Good stuff.

So that's what I listen to right now. I smatter my drives with 2-3 Rosaries a week too. It makes the commute bearable. I'm still thinking about finding ways to reduce it, but definitely the iPod has been worth it much like the DVR. A shout out goes to Todd Wiseman for mentioning it which put the idea in my head.

Time

2007-03-30T08:36:00.000-07:00

I've thought about like 5 things to post in the last week, and I just haven't taken the time to do it. I'm stealing a little break at work to type this instead of taking a cigarette break like others. Anyways, about the only time I've been taking lately is with the kids, to play Warcraft, and work. Oh and for the dentist, I have wisdom teeth and at least one filling coming up in the next month, hopefully it will go well.

There's other things I should do. I'm at level 34 in WoW, and trying to catch my friends lvl 43 Pally. I probably should just cut the losses there and try to catch him later though as I've got some Spring items that need doing before some friends come for Easter and my youngest's Baptism. He was born on February 20th, btw, Mardi Gras.

Well, I've got my podcasts down, so I'll post those soon and maybe I'll start posting more interesting stuff in general.

Back into Warcraft

2007-03-15T20:52:00.000-07:00

So my wife and I missed the date to cancel the renewal, and I had decided I wanted to play WoW with a friend of mine who started playing on another server. I've been grinding like mad the last week trying to catch up to 40. I'm a 1/3 of the way there, but I think I'm getting more focused on it. If I can keep my focus, then in a week I think I can catch him and roll with his elf pally. So that's been my fun time waste keeping me from doing anything else.

Headlights

2007-02-13T09:01:00.000-08:00

I've noticed over the last 2-3 months that people drive around with their brights on an increasing amount of time. It's hard to tell for sure as when someone comes over a hill their lights are brighter (as you are technically down from their car's point of view) but you see for sure other times. I also thought that perhaps some times it was me being in a car while someone else was in a truck or SUV, but that doesn't seem to be the case either. If you watch the oncoming traffic, occassionally, maybe 1 in 5, there will be cars with much brighter lights than the rest. These are the culprits. And I'm not talking about the bluish tint halogen folks. So maybe we should pass this around and such, but it really is inconsiderate even if accidental most of the time. Not to mention that it could cause a hazard to others.

Clippings

2007-01-26T18:09:00.000-08:00

I've been doing better about scanning my reading list lately and thought I would point out my clipping RSS feed. It's pretty cool, contains any article I think is worth it for someone with my interests to read. I could probably sort them into something like tech, poker and other, but I haven't yet. But maybe I will try that soon. Anyways, here it is.

http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/ClippingsRSS.aspx?uid=374239

It's probably worth it, today I point to an article on the Unreal 3 engine which makes me want a new computer, and a few other things. If you like anything in it, or have your own clippings let me have it.

Upgrading Gentoo

2007-01-25T15:24:00.000-08:00

Well, I upgraded gentoo recently and noticed dbus had been masked. I unmerged it as usual, and went to work the next day without thinking much about it. My wife called at 9 saying stuff didn't load and after going home I realized a "revdep-rebuild -i" was in order to fix it. Not too bad, but be prepared when you emerge world.

Also, the new harddrive is really making my computer load faster. At least it seems to me to be doing so. I've been enjoying that allot. I'm thinking about trying FreeBSD 6.2 on some machines and comparing it to my Gentoo setup to see if there's any difference there. I'll post numbers if I do. "emerge --sync" goes wicked fast now which seems to be the main plus. I don't know if the other drive is going bad or just old / slow.

Also, for the copy, I used
rsync --delete --verbose --archive --one-file-system --exclude=/lost+found/ / src /dest to copy the file systems onto the new drive before doing the grub / lilo update.

Well I guess that's it, I'll post some podcasts soon as I've got a few good ones.

Moving on and Other Stuff

2007-01-19T10:04:00.000-08:00

So I've thought about blogging about quitting my job for awhile, but I wanted to wait til I put my 2 weeks in just in case. So now I'm moving on. One thing I've been fairly amazed and troubled at is the way small business owners expect people to work themselves to death for the most part. I'm talking more than just getting the job done when it's needed, but more like "You should work 45 hours a week". Now, the first thing, is that even if I love my job enough to do it, the fact that it's expected makes me say, "You should pay me for 45 hours a week worth of work then." But the next thing is, it seems like allot of great companies have figured out that this doesn't work. Eventually you get tired, and if you're good, the company looses your service. Managers like this also seem to micro manage or have odd rules to some point which many big companies seem more willing to drop.

The view the good manager has seems to be something I heard J.C. Penny realized when he started that company. That is that you have to find the right people and let them do what they do. Makes me wonder if I was able to just run the Software Group the way I thought would be most productive what could have been. But it's not my interest anymore, I'll be out the start of February.

So, beyond that, more iPod ripping. I've got 60 Gigs in one of my computers and I had to bite the bullet and buy my second +100 MB drive. Most of it is going into wav files I recorded from tape. I 'm quite happy with the one tape I remasterd, and will have to do the other two soon. Right now I'm trying to get some video going, which should also happen soon.

For pod casts, the one great one I'm enjoying is se-radio.net . Now that I'll be driving an hour a day, I'll get to focus on these while I commute, which will definitely be good for me.

Audacity and Amarok

2007-01-13T21:41:00.000-08:00

So before the NFL playoffs this afternoon I spent some time streamlining my media management and moving over to using Amarok. I think I finally got things going correct, but Amarok's a bit clunky when it comes to the iPod. What I love about it is it's podcast management, that seems to be well done. Right now adding a new song seems to go like so.

Start with GRIP, rip to music/encode to get it ready. I had grip go straight to music/mp3 where I have my music but they seemed to fight. I made it use "--preset extreme" to lame which is half the size of insane but sounds good to me.

After that, load the files in Amarok, do whatever edits to the id3 tags I want in the /encode dir, and then "move to collection" which drops it into music/mp3. It's id3 tag editing is a bit better than gtkpod's was if you ask me, but both are pretty close. The main thing I like about Amaroks is that if I select 3 tracks, it defaults to multi-edit mode, and it disables a few things like Track Name from being changed in edit mode. Then you can go to single edit mode and do all the track names and other track specific stuff. Very slick.

Now this is where things get a bit hairy. I wish Amarok could just tell me what is different between the collection and the iPod and either automatically sync things up, or prompt me to handle everything. Also, if I change the rating on the iPod I don't think it grabs that correctly, or even lets me browse that on the iPod. I've been using the rating to flag items that need work with a 1-star rating. Then I figured I could work on it and get it back. That brings up another problem, to change the file I'm working on, (i.e. to change it's genre), I need to edit it, then copy it to my collection, overwriting my old item, and then it seems everything goes well. There may be more things that gtkpod handles correctly and Amarok doesn't, but that's life I guess. Oh well, maybe I'll help out with Amarok development for iPod related stuff or just use gtkpod for that stuff.

One more feature is grabbing the CD cover art, I really dig how it grabs it and sends it all to the iPod. Not shabby at all.

Now, I'm also taking this time to "digitally re-master" some tapes I have, copy them to a CD in case I want it, and then encode them. Audacity is a fairly good .wav editor, and I'm digging it. The "Noise Removal" tool's been pretty good, and it's "Bass Boost" and "Equalizer" plug ins have been good. So I'm happy with the one tape I have done and I've got two more I'm going to do in the next week.

So that's what I'm wasting my time with for the moment. Hopefully I'll ahve it done soon and play with videos on my iPod. Then I can get back to working on the house.

RSS Feeds

2007-01-12T03:39:00.000-08:00

I've been reading blogs for awhile now, so I thought I'd post some. With the iPod and my impending commute again, I'm also planning on getting into some podcasts, but I'll wait until I've listened to some to say which ones I think are worth it. For what it's worth, I'm still using NewsGator as it's been good to me, but maybe I'll have to switch, we'll see.

So for Gentoo related stuff, two guys have stood out.
FlameEyes Weblog at http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/xml/atom/feed.xml and
Taviso's at http://my.opera.com/taviso/xml/atom/blog/
Also Stu's but he's no longer a Gentoo Dev, at http://blog.stuartherbert.com/xmlsrv/rdf.php?blog=1

There is finally http:.//planet.gentoo.org and http://planet.gentoo.org/universe which I used to read, but I just scan that now and skip half of it. The guys I read, I keep them separate and double mark their stuff in planet/universe separately.

Next on the list are two corporate sites I like. First is the official Google Blog, it's about 50% good, but worth a read. I love it blog reading because the 50% I don't like, I just click read when I see it and go on with life, very nice. It's at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Next, the Flash for Linux site is at http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/atom.xml . I was getting up to snuf to do some Flash development for a guy, but that fell through. Oh well.

I have to mention the http://www.ars-technica.com blogs as well. They are what I started reading, and though they've fallen in favor from what I must read, they are still good.

http://new.linuxjournal.com/ is the linux journals RSS feed, that one is pretty good as well. But again, my reading on these has been iffy.

Lastly, I'm trying to find some good poker blogs, but I haven't quite found some yet. I've also started playing with ESPN's poker club, which has been alright. I'll have to play some more. I even passed up a chance for a game because I was getting sick of taking some loose college kids money. We'll see, if I get decent I think I'll do a few 100 dollar satellites and see how it goes.

First a DVR now an iPod

2007-01-10T17:14:00.000-08:00

So I finally got one. It's been pretty good though, I'm digging it. I keep hosing the database and having to reload it, but with back ups it's not too bad. I just wiped it today because I wanted to play with the video features. iTunes is not my friend anymore, but the iPod is back to where it was a week ago, which I guess will do. All in all, I do like having the mp3 players for whenever I'm doing stuff that I want music for.

Yeah so, someday I'll get busy, but for now I'm still farting around. Maybe I'll get things to shaken up soon, but we'll see. I'm so Blah as of late, but I'll fight through it I guess.

House Work and other stuff

2006-12-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

So most of my time lately seems to be spent working on the house. I was taking a shower today and found my stuff planning for things that need to be done. Since Christmas is almost here I put the lights up today and we'll turn them on tomorrow night, YEAH!!! But while I was at it, I had to clean my gutters, which I think my fingers are still frostbitten. Then I noticed one downspout extension was clogged, cleared that, and modified it a bit. Then, of course I needed to prune a couple low branches off the front yard tree so that I don't get hit by it anymore when on the mower next year. Plus, I gotta finish sealing up some windows. Lots of fun, fun fun. I do enjoy doing the house work allot, but I also miss the week long binges of nothing but Warcraft after work. Oh well, guess I'm finally growing up.

I'm also strongly considering buying a DVR instead of paying the monthly 10 to Comcast. I'll have to wait a bit, but I think I'm definitely going to continue using it, so maybe just an old Tivo will work nicely. We'll see.

Manly Editors, well really just Editor!!!!

2006-12-04T18:47:00.000-08:00

First off, the planes still broken, but I've been fixing up my house. I guess it's gonna stay broken for awhile.

NOTE: blogger lost my <Ctrl + U> style key bindings. It's a bit annoying, but where they seem they should be I did type the key combos, but Blogger couldn't recover them for me.

Now, for the subject at hand. I played around with Eclipse using emacs key bindings and it was okay. The emacs key strokes were useful for the most part, but I still missed vim. Things like having to highlight a line including the newline and then press to cut a line versus simply hitting was a little odd. I guess when I think about it, most of the time I would just it but whatever. The only key stroke I didn't like was to page up, and to page down. That's when I got annoyed, to go up, to go down is just easier as my pinky just lives on the ctrl key. Other things I found xemacs could do but Eclipse didn't support right, and that just sucked. So I went back to vim.

People go off about all the great things an IDE can do. Most of the things they say I either do in Vim or my system works around. For instance looking up APIs from within eclipse. I keep Firefox going on another workspace and it works great. If I need to, highlight and middle click it into vim, but when I see what I need I am done with Firefox and I want to get back to coding. So this lets me have my 5 vim windows back and nothing else. Typically I seem to have one 82-80 (or maybe 65-70 tall) window for coding, another window which I either code something else or browse code I need, and a wide window to run code in. It seems other windows come and go in this as I need to copy files or whatever, but it works. I can also :new in vi to get a new window. I'd point out though, that my hands never leave the keyboard during any of this, so I never loose a stroke. That's where the real power comes. to get to firefox. A few quick key strokes to get what I want or do the samething in Qt Assistant. to get back, and such. :make, :cn, fix an error, :cn, do it again and so on. I get going good like this.

Now, people bring up all of the features an IDE has. First thing is that with Eclipse, it's soooo slow that any benefits of the tools, is usually lost. Most of

Little things

2006-11-18T05:58:00.000-08:00

First, a word of caution, beware your .asoundrc if alsa doesn't work. It should be obvious but it took me awhile to realize I had modified it and it was messing things up, so I removed it and alsa worked.

Next, a lot of people have been talking about moving over to this app or another. One example is people moving off of Firefox. Well, in the last week or two I tried Opera and Konqueror, the two leading contenders on Linux, and well both crashed on me so often I'd rather have Firefox's slowness. And believe me, next to crashing, slowness is the next worst thing in my mind. I swapped around terminals a bit too because gnome-terminal can be a bit slow too, but we'll see. I'm thinking about stripping out the "Gnome" part of gnome-terminal to see how much that would speed it up. If I did that then I'd probably move on to do the same thing to gdm. I may be wrong, but I think that would speed up both apps allot. Then again, I'd need to divest some time from doing other stuff to actually work on that (mainly watching TV, playing computer games, and working on the house).

One Gnome app I ran across recently that I really liked is gnomebaker for burning CDs. I decided to grab a GUI instead of looking up all the mkiso and cdrecord commands (yet again). Once I had myself in the cdrom group it worked great. (One thing is that it seems to puke and hang if you're not in the group, I should bug that as it should recover after telling you it bombed.)

This brings up how minimalist I am as far as the tools I use. I love clewn for debugging (clewn.sourceforge.net). It's the absolute best. A simple integration with Vi and the most stable interface to gdb I've used. I have managed to make Eclipse puke and others, but this one was allot better than pure command line debugging while giving up nothing on stability. I also use fluxbox for simmilar reasons. And yes, keyboard short cuts are your best friends.

Anyways, that's enough ranting on what's a good app.

ANSI Terminal Goodness and Sports

2006-11-04T06:31:00.000-08:00

So this week I got around to one of those things I thought would be cool to do, but never had a good reason to get into. I started playing around with using ANSI Terminal escape codes in my bash script to stop scrolling so much text but update information. For what I needed, just 3 escape codes work, and it's good, I haven't used this in plain PERL prints but it should work from just about anything.

So to start, before I print anything on the line I print "[s" to save the cursor location. In vi (The only text editor of course.) I type [s to get it. The just actually puts the escape keycode into the text. While blogging this I looked it up and tested \e does the same thing. So in bash echo -en can be used for the commands. The other two I use to start every line after the first one is '\e[1K' followed by '\e8' . The first command clears the line from the cursor to the begginning, what you just typed, and the second moves the cursor to where it was when you did the '\e[s' . So to sum it up, here's a bash script to start you off



echo ; echo; echo -en '\e[s This is my first chunk.' ; sleep 2 ; echo -en '\e[1K\e8 This is my second chunk' ; sleep  2 ; echo -en '\e[1K\e8 This is the last chunk' ; sleep 2 ; echo ; echo

So that was my fun with ansi terminal stuff this week, it will dress up all the PERL scripts I whip up at a moment's notice to do some thing. So, for sport now.

Well, I watch football. It's the only SPORT I watch (That and Poker which is really a game anyways.). Now one of my friends is all about baseball and I can't stand it. I mean it's so boring. Maybe the hand-eye coordination to hit a ball from a MLB pitcher is the hardest thing to do, but I agree with a family member who said "that doesn't make them great atheletes". Now I could watch Hockey, Soccer, or Basketball, and if I do then I'm done with the NFL. Even the NFL just takes too much time out of my day. I like the sport of football though. Even if there is more variance in the players from week to week. I mean who really know Minnessota would be completely dominated by the Patriots. But I loved watching Brady pick apart the defense (Man, I'm not a PAts fan but I'm finally at a place where I can say Tom Brady's a great Qb. And I think Peyton will be the next Marino who everyone says is great but didn't have the mustard to finish things and carry a team to the championship. If he does it will ONLY be because he didn't have to get through a Defense who could get to him. So Indianapolis lives and dies by it's offensive line.)

Anyways, if the penalty / officials got to something reasonable, and I blam it SOLELY on the NFL heads who make the rules changes, so that pass interference and some other rules make sense, then I'd never watch anything else. But as it is, maybe I'll pick hockey back up as my sport.

DVR experience

2006-10-20T04:40:00.000-07:00

So we finally had to ditch Vonage. We had some problems getting a number local to Steubenville, Ohio. Oh well. We decided to go with Comcast Triple play since we were already committed to the 50 a month for broadband and were missing some cable upgrades. They give you a free month trial on a DVR and we started playing with it. It's fairly nice. I think it may prompt me to set up a nice little setup to handle it on Linux. Then again, maybe I'll just pay to rent one as a card to do the encoding nicely will probably be $100+ alone. So we'll see how it goes. Right now the computer is doing nothing which is making me want to get a LCD projector or a decent TV. I think the 6-8 hundred on a LCD projector is probably our best bet. To get that working I'll have to finish setting up our family room. If I finish the wiring for it and it's adjoining bedroom then it'll just be a matter of doing something to mount it, perhaps on a shelf. That and some custom furniture to hold the speakers and we should be good. I'll have to post pics if I do what I'm thinking. Laura mentioned the surround sound when I talked about moving the setup, does she miss it? We watch less and less movies or anything anymore, so maybe it's not really worth it. But then again, I watched the final table of pot limit WSOP poker this morning, so maybe it is. I guess this month will be a good test of it. One nice thing about the DVR is that it can play a show live and record a second show at the same time, or even record 2 at once. That is a big plus. If I just upgraded the current machine and went for a third it may be reasonable to make a MythTV box. I still can't play Quake 4 on my current machine, but with WoW taking up my time, I doubt I'll want to anytime soon (YES, I did buy Quake 4 at 50 just to say thanks to Id Software). So maybe the DVR will be the way to stay until it's REALLY time to upgrade.

RSS Feeds

2006-10-08T06:18:00.000-07:00

I know I just posted 10 minutes ago, but I wanted to start a separate post on it. I settled on NewGator for now and it is working out well. I think the only thing I didn't like was depending on what I do it seems sometimes I can't re-mark a feed as unread if I left it in or something. I'm not sure how I did it, but it was a bit upsetting.

Something I really am getting into that NewsGator and Google both support is sharing clippings. I swapped clippings with one guy at work and I'm working on getting another guy to get in on it. I'm digging it so much I'm thinking I should spam some other friends to share feeds and try to get them into it. It's really fun when I see something I'd like to share to hit the clippings button and know Dave from work will read it. Also kool is looking at what Dave puts into his clippings folder. It's just pretty cool.

The only thing I wish would happen is that other sites would support RSS. I mean it's a great tool to push what content you have. If everyone used it I would certainly be subscribed to more stuff. As it is, I'm reading allot more of the sites that do.

What's wrong with media and other updates.

2006-10-08T05:49:00.000-07:00

Well, In case you didn't hear, Southpark has covered the World of Warcraft world. Laura and I would ordinarily not go anywhere near Southpark, but for this one I think we would sit and watch it. Now note, I will NOT pay 30 bucks to see, maybe 2-5 bucks to download it and watch would be fine. And while I don't even know when it came on or get the correct channels, I think a number of the millions of players would pay some to see it. As it is, the only way I know to watch it is some pirated copy in France which I won't touch. So there it is, at 2-5 bucks times a couple million the creators of South Park would be doing allright off of one show plus they would possibly win some followers. Instead they get nothing because media is behind the times.

Plus there should not only be the ability to buy a single episode for that much, but what about an entire season online with a single episode released every week. There could even be a community forum set online and a feedback forums so creators could really dig into how people react to their content. But it won't happen unless some new form of media does it to fight with the big dogs. Hey there's an idea.....

Other than that, Samsung let me down. Their old printer system used to interact with CUPS fairly seemlessly, now they seem to have some other setup they use. I ended up installing the Slix drivers the last time I went to set it up as the old CD drivers I had don't seem to be compatible with the newest version of CUPS in Gentoo and the newer drivers I didn't like. So this week sometime I'll have to package an ebuild of it which I couldn't find anywhere.

More updates

2006-10-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

So I found newsgator.com while reading an article which seems to be a good enough RSS reader. Of course, the day after I decided I like NewsSator Google redid their reader which I like allot now. Oh well. I may go with Google's because I can export and import an OPML with all my feeds, and the idea of not being able to do that in NewsGator just annoys me. It's too much like something microsoft would do. But both are adequate for me now, and at the moment I don't want to move my feeds one more time. When I get my reading list stable in a week or two, I'll have to link to that opml too, so anyone can see my typical reading list. I should also throw some news in too as I don't get any current events in the world any other way.

Other than that, nothing much else going on. Just doing house updates and playing warcraft.

Oh, that reminds me, the latest version of Wine finally works on Gentoo for me with a fully upgraded gcc 4.1.1 system. It's pretty good, hangs when it loads data it seems. Must be some differences in the threading in MS Win DX and the Wine implementation. I've never had it lock in an instance that I can remember so it's good enough although the sound lags a bit. Landing from a FP is usually the worst I have to deal with, and waiting a min there is acceptable. I think it could also be Alsa related, but I haven't proven that. Changing a SoundSystem config option in WTF/Config.wtf from 1 to 0 didn't help which I thought it might if it was a sound issue. Great job to the guys at winehq. There's a good chance I'll never run Vista which is more than okay with me.

Maybe some day, I'll get around to doing something to help OSS and report on that. It could be soon.

Robert

Football, RSS, and other stuff

2006-09-27T03:49:00.000-07:00

So I'm still watching football, surprise, surprise. But with most anything, I know I'll drop it quickly if I really become convinced it's too screwed up. The thing that keeps me watching most is that my wife and 2 year old daughter are into it. So Sunday just becomes a family day on the couch, something I can live with since it's the most time I sit in front of a TV.

I've also been enjoying fantasy football allot. This is my first year, and even though it's been a big learning year, it's been fun. Laura did great in the draft and even though most of her team is Pittsburgh based, she has allot of other hot players like Westbrook. Now if she'd only stop whining because she got 100 points instead of the 120 or so she could have gotten.

Other than that, I've been trying to find a RSS reader that really suits my needs. I tried bloglines because someone said it lets them read their bloglines on different OSes and from different places. I like that idea because I constantly read blogs at work during lunch and at home. Unfortunately, with bloglines it's not good for when you have 120 posts you want to get through 20 at a time. It marks them all as read, or all unread, but you can't easily unmark the ones you read. So I'll have to switch. Maybe I'll try Google's reader again, and if not I'll probably try to find a web based reader I can install. Worst case I'll write one in PHP or maybe I'll brush up on my OO Perl.

Other than that things are good. I should probably be more productive with my off-work time. Fantasy football has been eating allot of my time because I haven't liked who I have. Some picks I made like Tatum Bell are panning out nicely. Some other positions like tight ends I'm trading every week to try to get someone who can get me some points. At least Housh is back in at WR since Santana Moss seems to be suffering with other targets on his team.. Part of the problem was that our league went from 4-12 teams the day we started which I didn't expect, so the number of players I set up in the auto draft wasn't right. Oh well. At least I got the bears defense ;-) and they look like they may have what it takes to go all the way. This week should be a real good test, I'm looking forward to it. Now if the league would just let football be what it should be instead of a flag fest.

Football just might be done for me.

2006-09-10T20:17:00.000-07:00

Generally I've liked football allot. It's got a good mix of different personalities that have to work together. I've been doing some fantasy stuff this week too which has mixed it up. But I just can't stand unjust messed up calls, and there are too much. A baseball fan who I'm good friends with says that's just a part of every sport, but if it really is, then I just don't need to waste my time watching it. Anyways this is what I sent to the NFL today.

I was really close to getting your NFL package and a Hughes Satellite setup, but there's just too much BS calling in this game. I just saw the bad offensive pass interference call on the Giants receiver in the last 5 minutes. C'mon, this is right where we left off with the playoffs last year and good defensive coverage getting called and other BS junk. And Pittsburgh's game on Thursday had some BS as well. (A bad pass interference call to make up for a missed one?) Whatever, this game COULD be the best, but there's just too much crap. Trying to hype up the offense and hype out the fans? Oh well, I guess if you can't figure a way to fix it, then I don't need to buy any gear, support any of your advertising or buy any tickets to go to a game.

CYA NFL, it was almost fun.

Robert

My first real OSS contribution

2006-08-12T20:55:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty stoked about this. There is a project at clewn.sourceforge.net which allows your favorite text editor, vim of course, integrate with gdb. I've been using gdb allot by hand, because eclipse is slow and everything else doesn't cut it. So I decided this weekend I'd whip up an ebuild to do this. After all, if I have it installed, I may as well get Gentoo to manage it for me. So this morning I merrily went about ebuild creation until 11 or so I had something going and I put it on bugs.gentoo.org like a good little user. Now, I noticed it got moved to maintainer-wanted or maintainer-needed which bugged me that it would sit out there forever and not get into portage. So I dropped into IRC and asked and got pointed into the http://www.gentoo-sunrise.org project which aims at making a section of portage maintained by people like me and reviewed by developers. So the ebuild got a good scrubbing by a dev and someone else, maybe another dev, and it's now sitting in the sunrise overlay as well. Anyways, if Clewn makes it into portage great, but on Monday I can do a quick ebuild, gloat to the other gentoo guy at work, and maybe go on to do a bit more ebuild improvements in the future. Fun, fun.

Oh, and my father in-law crashed his plane too ;(. And neither of us have fixed our planes, but I may get to mine soon. Then again, if history proves itself, it may still take awhile.

Opps I did it again

2005-11-04T22:21:00.000-08:00

So last week I took my plane out a few times. Well, I was flying and the transmitter battery was getting low, so I laid into the throttle. Well, I did a nose dive with full power, and about half way down I hear this RIIIIPPPP and see something flutter around. A couple turns to get a look and sure enough the OTHER aileron came out. Now the first aileron came out, and I cut it in half where each flap was and heavily gorilla-glued it with a piece of foam over half the slit. So I guess I'll have to do that to the other side. When all is said and done I have a bit of work I want to do to it, so I'll have to do that.
In other news, I droppge Google news reader to go back to RSS Owl. There was just too much craziness with the Google Reader. But I'm really digging using RSS feed in general.

Robert

What is a Linux Distro?

2005-10-13T20:39:00.000-07:00

So, I was talking to someone the other day and they asked me why I used Gentoo. They actually mentioned why I didn't use a more "mature" Linux distro. Well what is a Linux Distro as opposed to just Linux. Linux, and all of the tools written specifically for it like KDE, GNOME, XMMS, and the rest is after all just Linux. You can do LFS and build everything up from scratch. But then you have to manage everything from scratch. So in light of that, a good Linux Distro helps by managing what's on your machine. Now Redhat and SuSE do a fairly good job of that. They also try to keep it stable, which if you're running a server or other application where uptime and controlled change is needed, that's good. But at home, is that what you want?

When I started looking past those two RPM based and professionally managed distros, I was annoyed when Gnome 2.4 came out above Gnome 2.6 and I had no easy way of installing it. Mainly, my DISTRO didn't help me upgrade and manage it, and then be able to go back. I could grab the sources, install the -dev packages needed for compiling against stuff, configure, make, and make install. But then when I wanted to change something, or un tangle what used what, where was I left. Well, I was in a mess. So that would be the second thing a distro should do for you, bring what Linux content you want, to you.

But, there's one thing that Gentoo does that not allot of other distros let you do easily. That is manage how those packages are installed and what they used. I used to hate it when I'd install something on RedHat and allot of stuff like cups when I didn't want the printing support would be pulled in. I mean, c'mon, I know I can compile it myself without that, why are you throwing it in there. Well, Gentoo let's me do that as well. Now there might be a better distro out there than Gentoo, but that's letting me do all I want allot more than me.

The end point is just that a Distro brings Linux to you the best and most managable way possible. Once you have what you need all bundled up, you're golden, unless of course your needs change. I think the only thing I'd do to make Gentoo better is to make it's tools quicker. Maybe keep a bit more history incase one needs to go back a version. But you can quickpkg anything that is installed, and upgrade and go back. Beyond that, I decide what parts of Linux I want, when and how.

Why my wife rocks

2005-08-29T18:40:00.000-07:00

So tonight, on Monday night, I came home, grabbed a beer, and turned on Monday Night Football while my wife got dinner ready. She really is awesome, and I thought I'd just share that. She really likes football, we watched ALL of the playoff games and the super bowl last year except for two that we listened to on the radio while driving through Kansas. Well, it's been great to be able to share something with my wife like this. I can only hope my kids pick up a love for watching the NFL with me.

Why young Catholics love the new Pope

2005-08-23T05:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I saw a tv interview with a reporter just after World Youth Day in Germany. First how amazing is it that the first one of Pope Benedict's Papacy was in his home country. Anyways, the reporter commented that Pope Benedict was shy and more scholarly than JP II and almost dodged the question of how the youth feel about him. Well, It's another one of those times where people just don't understand so I thought I'd chime in on how myself and like 100-300 other young Catholics in the USA feel about him.

We love pope Benedict and many of us loved him as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. Why? Well, he's a pillar of truth for Christ. He doesn't water it down, which is something the reporter did say. He might not be JP2 who we loved as well, but he gives us hope. I've told a few friends I think the Church is going to improve from here. The main reason for that is all of the young seminarians I know and active Catholics want all of Christs truth, even the uncomfortable one's that the "Cafeteria Catholics" would choose to ignore. We don't want to be lukewarm or to only see part of His kingdom, we want it all with the sacrifices required to obtain it. So, I think allot of places will be turning around in the next 5-20 years, though some places may stay in their present state for awhile because they are still holding onto a fist full of truth and a fist full of garbage. But He will do what He wills in time.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Same OS, processor and chipset, two very different worlds

2005-08-07T05:31:00.000-07:00

So we have two computers in our living room. The wife and I can both surf the net, or she can watch a movie or TV while I'm doing whatever I do on a computer. I got Sid Meiers pirates for the windows side of the world, and the poor little 5GB partition couldn't load it and have both. I should verify that it is in fact 5 GB, but I mean, egads, windows 98 is only like a few hundred megs, 5 GB for one game, some stuff like Norton and Lavasoft, and windows, we should be able to do a game. Anyways, I had a 40 GB drive in the TV machine, and the wife and I talked it over and decided to swap them. Now I new that we had some extra stuff on the TV machine, like tvtime, xine, some extra drivers and the like, so I set it up. What I didn't realize was the difference between the two. It seems I'm always doing something. like I didn't have usb-printers setup in the Linux kernel. The other one needed the alsa driver for the cheapy 5.1 surround sound card. I'm in the midst of installing java in this one because it never got on the old TV drive. Ack, and I know there's been more. At least Gentoo makes upgrading quite painless, I just do a 'emerge sync' then an 'emerge search java' or a couple emerge searches to find what I want, then a 'emerge whatever' and it's installed with all the proper dependencies. I can also edit /etc/make.conf to make it pick and choose the dependencies correctly so long as whoever added the package to the database set it up correctly. Allot better than the RPM world of SuSE and RedHat I was in before this. Best thing of all is that it's all my wife needs for everything, and it even has Tux Racer for the kiddies ;-)

Arrgh, it's a great day to be a Pirate

2005-08-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

Well, the wife and I went to an IMAC aerobatic competition about 2 weeks ago now. I meant to write on it, but I never actually sat down to do the typing. It was pretty cool, I saw a rolling circle, well actually quite a few rolling half circles. I saw some other good stuff. I finally got the motor screwed in with some small brass circles. The blasa actually split on one side, I knew I should have drilled some pilots. Oh well, it's fastened good. I've been looking at the elevator and it's tilted so the right side is lower than the left. I should probably dig some of the gorilla glue out and re-glue it level. Then she'll fly a bit better. I'm thinking about getting a Raven off Hobby-lobby sometime to replace this one. I should probably put wheels on the Formosa and give landing a good try first though.

Beyond that, I got into a Sid Meier's Pirates stint the last few weeks. I played "Tradewinds 2" which isn't much of a game, but it got me wanting to play. I'd read some good reviews on Pirates! and saw it at Wal-mart. The wife indulged me, I wasn't sure I should waste the money, and the last two weeks have been dueling, sinking frigates, wooking daughters, sacking cities, and digging up lost treasure and lost cities. Pretty fun, the game could have an end movie, but I didn't technically do everything that could be done. I'll have to run through it once more to see if I can fit everything into one career, but that'll wait a month or three.

So, maybe I'll actually do a little open source work in the near future. There's a few tweaks to GnuCash I'd kind of like to make. We've been iorning out how we use it for home finances and it's been going okay. Well, I guess that's about it.

Just the usual

2005-07-10T08:51:00.000-07:00

I think I've finally found my stride playing poker online. I still have room to improve, but I've been doing decent. Now if I can stay consistent I'll be doing great. The plane's been sitting around still. I did fix the hinge when my dad came out and took her up for a flight. I was trying to land it as close as possible and the nose took it a bit. The motor screws mounted into the balsa came out and tore the balsa a bit. It's a quick fix, but my motivation to do it will have to come about. I'll probably slow up on the poker pretty soon. Just 10 days to finish up this run, then I'll probably concentrate on looking at my play before I put more money down. ESPN has another run for a WPT seat I believe. I may play on there some more, and keep playing the $1 plu $0 frerolls. Other than that, nm going on.

Pushing versus pulling personal content

2005-06-29T18:54:00.000-07:00

So I was thinking about this right now as I was wondering about how an old friend of mine is doing. If he had a blog he updated regularly I could just check his blog out to see how he's doing. He takes pictures, and used to e-mail links to them out, but I haven't heard anything. The problem is, if you push content like links to his pictures, you feel like you're bothering people even if you will take them off the list if they don't post them. On the other hand, if you just post somewhere then people can check it as they want. The only problem is that if people don't comment, you feel like they don't care and stop posting.

Well, maybe what I should do is maintain a bookmark page to check daily. Put the list I do on it, but I'm sure there's already some web tool to do that. Well, we'll see how it goes, for now I should track down those two sites.

A switch in blogger Focus

2005-06-29T18:42:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't fixed the aileron in my plane in a long time. I've been playing allot of poker lately, so it's taken a back seat, but not forgotten. I really should do it tommorrow or the day after so it's good to go when my dad gets in to town. Anyways, as for this blog, I think I might put some random techie/geekie things in here. Things like ptrace and Gentoo equery escapades. I guess as I think about it, it's really not that hard, but maybe it would be worth reading for someone. Well, I'll just note things as they come up.

A quck Google search brough up documentation on the equery tool and other good portage tools. I've been trying to purge allot of garbage off my systems, but we'll see how it goes. My only complaint has been not being able to query packages I didn't install yet. I'd like to see what would depend on mythtv since I unememrge mythtv but didn't do all of it's dependencies. Well nothings perfect, only moving towards perfection, but for today I'll play with it.

The Need for Speed

2005-06-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

So, the day my wife was going back I decided to change the prop from the 9x4.3 to the 9x7 I had in the house. I went ahead and did the change and topped off the lipo. Then I measured the draw at 16 static which is within burst for the battery and motor but over the normal draw. Good to go then.

I went ahead and took off at half throttle and putted around a bit. Then I climbed up and got ready for a dive. Now, the field I fly in has some prairie dogs and it's good fun to fly down at them, watch them run for their holes, and fly off. One of them doesn't get nearly so scared anymore, but that was what I was diving at. So I enter the dive, crank the throttle up to full, and when I pull up, something was not right about my plane. So I fly it above my head to get a closer look. Wouldn't you know, one of the ailerons pulled out of it's hinges and the plane is flying on just the other aileron.

Well, I hastily land and walk out to recover. Ran into a snake, meaning I saw it get out of my way before I stepped on it. I got the plane back, just the tabs pulled out, so no biggie. Now, if wasn't for my other hobbies I'd still be playing, but sooner or later I'll be back in the air.

Huston, we have brushless

2005-05-21T07:18:00.000-07:00

Well,
The Hacker A-20 is installed on my Formosa and has survived two flights without incident. It was waiting for me when I got home, and within 48 hours was in the air. I had to fix up the nose after the tree incident, so I glued two vertical balsa strips of 1/4" square or whatever GWS uses to mount the motor on.
It took awhile to figure out how the prop stuff works. The can of the motor spins, so one mount just puts 4 screws into the can. On the other side, the prop adapter just winches on tight when you slide it on and attach a prop. I mounted the motor so the but of the can sticks out because it seemed best to keep the motor cool and I didn't want to mess with digging out all that foam. It seems to be working great, though some better mounting screws would have helped.
I'm not going to go crazy on painting this plane either I've decided. I might still do some one color stuff for identification purposes, but not as fancy as I thought at first. I'll wait until I go balsa to have a really slick plane.
Anyways, she doesn't go vertical, I think I'd need a gear box for that. A 10 x 3.8 SF will get her very close though but I think the draw is too much for the motor and battery. I didn't measure it but after awhile the can and battery were hotter than I want. I put a 9 x 4.3 on it, and it draws 14 amps static. More than I wanted but within specs of both. I fly half throttle most of the time, and I can fly at 1/4 or less now, plus that's static draw, so I should be fine. I haven't figured out maximum flight times, but I will soon. I just wish I could get her to knife allot better.
Well, that's enough for now.

Some more flights

2005-05-05T01:52:00.000-07:00

Well, I took the plane out a few weekends ago, and was having some fun. It was a little too windy, but not really that bad. I was bringing the plane in for a landing, and the wind pushed me a bit in a turn. It was really annoying. I got caught in a tree, it fell out, and the gearbox housing shattered on impact. Doh! I finally ordered a brushless tonight, a hacker 20-20L which should be about right and allot lighter than the GWS was. I can't wait to try her then.

A Failed maiden and two successful flights

2005-04-23T08:38:00.000-07:00

Well, things were a bit slow flying wise as I finished building the plane. I ended up using industrial strength velcro from Wally world, 6 bucks for 5 feet, and I will use it on all of my planes I am sure. Last Saturday I had the Formosa finished and maidened her. The rates on the ailerons were way too high. She was really twitchy and when I was trying to recover I rolled 3 times before hitting fairly hard. I glued her back together, reinforced the mount for the bottom wing which ripped out, and got the velcro worked out. I still need to sand the canopy a bit more to hold better, but she's holding find now. I'm using the 400 motor from the E-Starter, which is probably moving the CG forward, but she's flying fine, if not perfect.
Yesterdy I took her out with the aileron rates down at 60% or so. She was still a bit twitchy, but she flew fine. I can do manuel maneuvers, fly and even climb inverted, and do outside loops with ease. It's been allot of fun, and I can't wait until I get a brushless in June to really see what she can do. I'll definitely enjoy flying this plane. I'm also getting spray paint soon to make her look really slick as well. I guess that's it, some pictures should come soon. What I really ought to do is to get the e-starter working so I can put that in and take it to Ohio so my father in-law can try her out soon.

E-Starter Mothballed

2005-03-31T06:44:00.000-08:00

Well, it's finally official. The beat up E-Starter I own is being mothballed. The front mount is just too weak to hold the motor, and it did not want to ROG and was unstable once it was airborne. Too much downward thrust. I went ahead and used the setup to break in the motor. The Voltage really drops steep once it hits 10.0 V, so beware of this if you use Lipos. I actually noticed that the voltage rises too once it is taken off the load. That was a bit odd. I'll probably use the set up to run it once more today to condition the battery, but I'll be gutting the plane soon. Most of the sticky stuff on the pads GWS gave me for the servos are loosening up, so I'll put some balsa I bought in to hold the servos later. More than likely in 2 months or so I'll completely cut up the front and redo it and then go ahead and fix everything else about the plane up nice. Maybe I'll get some foam filler or glue some foam into the chunks that are messed up to make her look pretty too. I'll probably paint it then as well.

For now I started the Formosa last night. I got the ailerons cut off, all the way out to the edges though. I noticed a while back that if you just drag the utility knife over the foam continuously instead of applying downward force, you get pretty smooth cuts. Then I went ahead and glued in the control tubes to the fuse, and started cutting slits in the wing for the hinges after sanding the corners down. The carbon spar is also in the wing. I'm using Gorilla glue on everything to build her, and trying to be as sparing as possible, while enough to make her solid. I don't have any way to weigh her, but I'll compare her to the e-starter to see how she turns out.

I played some Warcraft III with the wife last night, otherwise I would have done more. Hopefully tomorrow morning or Saturday I'll get some more work done on her. I'm thinking I'll run the 400 motor in her to start, and then move on to the 350 which I will break in with the rechargable phone battery I'm trying to make. So, the next post should be some plane building tips for the Formosa I've learned off RCGroups.com and my own observations. I've also decided to use velcro to secure the battery and receiver so they are movable as well. I'll try and post some pics.

A victim of my own impatience, again

2005-03-29T10:11:00.000-08:00

Opps, I did it again. So I got home, and there was a box from Las Vegas with a new 3S 1320 mah from Thunder Power in it. Thanks for standing by your products Thunder Power. Anyways, I had company coming over, so I knew I couldn't use it last night, so I put it on for a slow charge to be ready for this morning. I propped down the e-starter to something flyable but also so I would know I'd draw 6.5 Amps static to do a few flights and break in the battery.

This morning, I couldn't sleep, so I went ahead and got all the electronics set back up, and checked the CG for correctness. I then snuck outside before I needed to leave for Church, and tossed her up. She dove straight into the ground even though I hastily pulled the stick up, and certainly didn't stall. I looked her over trying to figure out what went wrong and I realized I didn't put the push rod into the control horn. Stupid, stupid stupid. The cost was the nose being even more beat up, and another GWS prop being broken. bahh. I replaced the prop and plugged in the TX, but I had to go before I could try her. I may go ahead with a flight this afternoon, but it's kind of up in the air and dependent on the wind.

In the end, it all boils down to me learning to exercise some patience. I mean a 30 second ground check would have earned me another 12-30 minutes of flying plus saving me 15-30 minutes spend doing repairs. Aggghhh. God will teach me patience yet, I'm sure of it.

Some Building time

2005-03-28T07:39:00.000-08:00

Well, since the Lipo is still with Thunder Power, I finally sat down and did some building on my plane. I started with the stick mount up front, as I flipped the plane over a few times and it was lossening up. Afterwards, I finally fixed the strut mount so we can remove the nasty wing flex I've been seeing. Next I read a few posts which made we drool over ROG, so I put the front gear back on, maybe they will hold this time. I figure I can unscrew the gear if I want to belly land, but we'll see. I scoped out a good ROG location a few minutes walk. Usually I walk outside, across the parking lot, and just toss her and land in the grass. Lastly, I tightened up some of the aileron and elevator hinges that were loosening up. This may be what I needed to get her to loop outside.
On another note, I got a pack of 50-60 4/5 AA cells to make some NiCd packs. I hope they can handle the draw, we'll see. I tried sodering a 3-cell pack for my cordless, the other reason I got the pack of NiCds but the standard tip didn't work. I went all over for a T or hammer tip to use, but I couldn't find one, and my 30 W iron wasn't working. I finally found them on www.cheapbatterypacks.com, but I'm gonna check a local hobby-lobby and a RC store or two first, to see if I can get it today and save a few bucks.
Finally, Happy Easter. My wife let me get the Formosa I've been drooling over to celebrate the holiday. She's gonna get something too, just as soon as we find what she wants. It's up in the air between a few things for her. I'll take my time building this one, may even paint her before the maiden. That reminds me I still owe a picture of my E-Starter. Either way, I should have enough fun with the e-starter to pace myself. If I enjoy ROG enough, I'll probably keep flying the e-starter since I'm going to go gearless on the Formosa for the better performance. I also want to bum a TX off a friend and work on teaching my wife and let a friend try the e-starter out. The brushless motor for the Formosa should be coming for my Birthday in June. Well, that's about it, with a little luck the next post will be on flying.

Problems while flying

2005-03-21T06:23:00.000-08:00

Well, I had a good discussion about flying with my father in-law the other day. He's the one who got me hooked on the idea flying his 3-ch around, and I think I've got him hooked on getting a 4-channel. He's probably got all he needs for it, just buy an e-starter and he'll have a complete bird. I may even buy one for him if he doesn't have one by them.
On another note, the same day we talked my battery I found that my battery had died. I checked the voltage and it was under 9v, checked the cells and two were at 3.8v volts and another at 0.4v I'm guessing the charger thought it was 2 cells, charged it to 8.4v, and the other dead one backed off a bit after charging. Bah. I called Thunder Power and they said to send it in with a note describing what happened and all that. I'll let you know what happens later this week or next when I get it back. I've also been reading on doing my own batteries as a 3S lipo would be $35 max as opposed to 50 and would hold more amps. We'll see about that though, for right now I just want mine back.

Some Flying

2005-03-14T09:45:00.000-08:00

Well, last Wednesday I got the itch to fly and took her up despite the wind. She did fine, more forward motion despite the wind, very nice. I also got some calmness over the weekend and flew some more. I was finishing a novel otherwise Sunday would have been good for flying. Take heart though, this week looks like it will be great for some flying the next few days. I may be able to get a Formosa sometime soon too, which would be allot of fun. There's a few things I'd like to do, but haven't been able to with the e-starter. I'm also leaning towards getting a Formosa and then leaving the E-Starter as it is. I really need to figure out why I can't do an outside loop or really climb with the e-starter. Spins seem to be un-doable as well, she just turns. I thought I got it once before, but I'm not so sure now. Those could be my lesser ability though. A KE is hard to hold as well. So, I think I'm just outgrowing her, but maybe my wife will start flying her.

GWS 400 Motor Re-propped

2005-03-09T06:35:00.000-08:00

So I grabbed a 9x7 yesterday and put her on. I gave the wife the transmitter, put the amp gauge on the motor, and let her run it at half and full. She was pulling just over 10.0 amps at half and about 14.1 at full on the fully charged TP 1320. At static that's a little over the 13.8, but I run at half power most of the time and I should be able to start at 3/4 without sweating it.
I've also been thinking about adjusting the CG on the plane. I may retry the gear now that I'm getting better. I've got the rear wheel well anchored, but the front gear pulled out too much. I just used the GWS though, some Gorilla Glue would probably hold. I could then spend a day trying touch and goes, but I'd have to figure out where. Hand launching works great because I'm in a grass field. There's a smooth patch from some prairie dogs where I ROGed the maiden, and I could try landing there, or in the parking lot. I'm just a bit worried about cars if I do the parking lot. Although, I think she's tail heavy, so I could just pull out the tail gear, but it's way in there. That or add the gears to the front. Hmm, will have to think on that. I've been trying to do outside loops, might be possible with the new prop, or may need a CG adjustment. I'm going to try for more elevator clearance too.
Now if the wind would just cooperate and let me fly ;-).

Getting more out of a stock E-Starter

2005-03-07T06:03:00.000-08:00

So I've been flying for a bit now. I'm still having a hard time knife-edging and doing spins, which may be as much a plane limitation as the pilots. I'm pretty good with inverted flight, and my rolls are doing better.
This last week I picked up a Craftsman Voltage and Amp meter to do some testing. I'm pulling 7.4 AMPS on a GWS 9050 at 5000 ft here in Denver, and 8.4 Amps with an APC 9.0x4.7. I think I'll try out a 9.0x6.0 or so and see how she pulls then. I don't fly most of the time at full throttle, so I plan on pinning the amps at the 9.3 which should be the max for the GWS 400 motor.
One minor catastrophe happened during all of this. I forgot to screw the motor on after doing some testing. So it's fairly nice out, not perfect, but certainly flyable, and the wife and our little girl come out with us. I rev up the motor to hand launch and off it comes and takes a chunk off the wing and breaks a strut. I glued the wing chunk back in, fixed a crack in the fuse, and started repairing the strut, though I'm flying without it.
I flew her once since then, and she's still flying good. I cranked up the throws on all the control surfaces, and checked them for clearance. The aileron deflection made a big difference. Loops can come about a lot quickly, though she's still squirrelly on her side. The elevator throw also makes inverted flight more sustainable, and I can even climb a bit, though not really. It's too bad this week should be blustery, though I will fly if I get a chance.
One last change I'm debating, is to cut the wings off where the dihedral starts, and to glue them back on flat. Allot of people say they like this allot, and even with a thinned fuse on the e-starter. I should get a Formosa in June, but probably nothing else before or after, so maybe I'll do this mod the end of march to perk up my flying fun.

Windy Conditions.

2005-02-28T07:08:00.000-08:00

So, I had fixed my plane after the tree incident, charged a battery in the morning, and set out to do some flying in the field next to our complex. It was breezy, but not too bad. I went ahead and started to fly, and the wind kicked up about 1/4 of the way through the battery. So I started flying into the wind, and the plane was flying like a kite with no string. I did a little inverted flying, a few flips, the rolls were fairly difficult with the wind, but all in all it was allot of fun. Also, the wind kept me from getting too crazy and crashing her. I did the same thing a few days later, so some super heavy winds may keep me down, but those 5-10, maybe 15 mph ones won't kill a really bad urge now. The landings were cool too, bring her down with 1/4 prop or so, and she just comes down still or barely moving, then plops a few inches into the grass. I know flying in the wind depends on the plane, but my beat up e-starter seems to do fine with it.

Watch out for the....

2005-02-21T06:36:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this post is a bit slow. I was flying on Wednesday Morning after my repairs from the weekend before. Just about no wind, and the sun was shining off the tape holding the antennae in place. It was a nice flight, and I was having fun. Well, as the battery started to get sluggish, I was bringing her down and I decided at the last minute to fly some more. She didn't climb as much as usual, but as I was turning her to go the other way, CRACK! It was an awful sound as she hit a tree. I had to climb up and bring her down. The wing had broken, partly in the same place as before, and some divits were chewed into the wings. The screw that holds the wing in place pulled up with the foam. I was missing a piece so I've been using rubber bands on the wings instead of the screw lately, no biggie. Got her all fixed by the weekend though.

Some real flying

2005-02-17T20:00:00.000-08:00

So this evening the wind calmed down and I got to fly some. I did a few laps and brought her in for a landing. She ended up going into the ditch in the landing, not too hard, but it did take the landing gear off. I then went ahead and hand launched the plane, and flew it some more. I even did a loop almost from level, pretty nice. Enough umpf to get her over the tree when I was a bit too low. Then I brought her in nice and easy for a belly landing in the grass.
I put her up again, and the wind started picking up again. She started getting away from me, and as I was bringing her back, having flashbacks of before, she dove down. I pulled up and she settled in hard, but not nose first. The GWS prop was even fine. A strut mount I just put in had come out, a side of the fuselage had broken, and the aileron I handn't fixed broke. I just read about the control levers tearing through the foam. I didn't see the pieces I was missing, so either they ended up breaking mid air, or they broke when I hit the bush in the ditch. I really should have checked better, but she flew well on one aileron if I missed something.
Anyways, I took a scrap of foam and made a new aileron, glued it on, fixed the fuse, and put the mount back in. It's all drying and should be ready to go tommorrow if everything goes well. The wind is predicted to be 2mph too, best all week.

Preparing for the next flight

2005-02-15T05:31:00.000-08:00

So, Friday I began working on getting my plane back together. The propeller shaft was sheared in two, so I dissected it all and got the shaft online. I went to www.gws-online.com and ordered 2 shafts because I hear they'll bend allot if you keep nosing in, and a 6 pack of GWS propellers for 12 bucks. I also glued the wing back together and got the fuse back into one solid piece since it was split along the center and the sides had taken some damage.
When I checked my e-mail on Monday, I couldn't believe I had 3 e-mails stating my order had been processed and shipped out last Friday. I ordered early, but not that early, nice. So yesterday, my wife came back with an envelope that had all the parts I'd ordered, Wohooo! After a romantic dinner and some time with the wife, I started gluing things on. I got the aileron linkage for the broken wing, the motor mount, and the motor itself all put together. I also started re-gluing the strut mounts. So the plane is almost ready.
Wednesday morning there is supposed to be some dead calm, but it should be cold. If it works out, I think I'll go ahead and try flying her again before work, if not I think I can wait up to 3 weeks for calm. Hopefully things will go better this time.

First Real Maiden

2005-02-09T10:22:00.000-08:00

So I tried flying my plane yesterday. Probably 2-5 mph winds, breezy but it didn't seem too bad. Still, I'm a beginner and the planes not trimmed yet, but I tried it. Charging the batter took about 20-25 minutes. Once it was charged, I put the battery in and checked the controls. The elevator was sticking and no motor when I tried taxing on my way back inside. hmmm. Well, I took it inside, removed the wing, and checked the elevator for binding. I figured out that I had gotten the speed control into programming mode or something similar so I reconnected the battery and it was back. Next I played with the Transmitter I'd played with before, and I found I had reduced the ability to move the elevator, ahh. Crank that back up and it was back in flying shape.
So I go out to the field next to my house, I try taxing real quick, works ok. I set the plane out and throttle her up and off she goes. She verred right in takeoff so I corrected and had her going straight again with the rudder. Then when I was trying to bring her back around, I was having trouble. My skills, a breeze, and some more were probably to blame. She spiraled down and hit pretty hard, I didn't see the impact through a tree. I ran most of the distance, and checked her out. I also went ahead and tested the controls, they all semed to function except the motor. I managed to bust the prop shaft, but the propeller survived ;-). My solder on the connector to the speed control had broken, probably in the impact.
The damages don't seem to be too bad though. Fuselage needs re gluing, the motor remounted, prop shaft replaced, and the left wing glued back together. Well, she'll fly, maybe this weekend. I went home happy actually. A little embarrased, but happy. I built her, she got up, and I've been reading alot about the crashes to fly yourself in RCgroups. I checked the transmitter once more, and realized my controls were pretty screwed up. Like 50% alieron one way, 100% the other. I didn't realize they were dual controlled, so I fixed them before I could forget about it. Aileron is really low, like 45%, everything else 100 I believe. I'll fly 3ch once or twice, hopefully ;-). Well I'll keep you up to date.

My First Plane

2005-02-07T05:48:00.000-08:00

I've been stuck on RC Airplanes since about November or so. My father in-law has a 3 ch glider and I've been drooling over getting an aerobatic plane for some time. Well, Friday I finally got my first plane and all the needed gear. It's a GWS E-Starter which is a high wing 4 ch plane. I spent all weekend obbsessively building it, and it's finall done. I'm going to grab a few more things and hopefully fly it this afternoon. mmmmm, airborne. hehe. Anyways, my intent is to gut this one in 6-12 months when I'm good enough and get a GWS Formosa which is supposed to be a fairly good aerobatic plane. Then I can have some more fun.
On a side note, to note my impatience, I had to try to maide this thing yesterday. My father in-laws plane is allot lighter and he hand starts it all the time. Well, I tried on mine and it crashed. Boo, hoo. hehe, no biggie, just had to re-glue the front landing gear, and I finished everything else that needed doing.
The only semi-major problem I've had is that the battery is supposed to mount from the bottom, but my battery is bigger than the plastic piece that was to hold it in. I've improvised a holder, but I don't know if it will last, so I'm going to need to try something else to keep it in. Maybe a balsa door, perhaps foam padded, with a latch? Something like that at least.