Lots going on this week – stress levels are high. We have a big demo today to show all the progress we’ve made in the last 2 iterations, and it could be a real big boost for us, or a real issue. Cross those fingers, and say those prayers.
Remember the last time you lost 9 minutes?
Man, there’s been a lot of stuff that I’ve been thinking “I need to blog that”. but of course I haven’t. So let’s do a bit of everything here.
Stuff that’s been happening:
I’ve been writing a new program for a friend of mine – it’s a Point of Sale program that runs cash registers. Really expandable, easy to use. The hard parts so far have been interfacing with a scanner (to read bar codes), and the register keyboard. Each key that gets pressed fires a unique keycode, so I had to track each key, get the modifiers and keycode and map them all into a big huge action map – for example, the grunt presses the ‘Visa/MC’ key – and the keystroke is ASCII 112, with ALT+SHIFT modifiers (that’s how the system interprets it, anyways. The old program is a 15 year old DOS program that requires a hardware dongle to run! Such Antiquity!
This weekend we went up to Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. Wow. It’s really cool, and the moving floor and 36 inch telescope are amazing. It’s even more amazing when you realize that the whole thing is over 100 years old!
Hockey last night marked only the second time that I’ve ever intentionally hit someone. We played a team called Phase Matrix, and last season they won their division and moved up into ours. This season we’ve played them 4 times and every time we play them, they start out well, then after we get a couple goals up on them they start to play dirty. Their captain is the king of the dirty players. Last time we played them he crosschecked one of our guys from behind into the boards, just crushed him right in the back. So last night I was forechecking in behind their net to get the puck and he was almost to it, so I motioned toward the puck with my stick, then threw my hip into him instead. As he was going down, he grabbed my sweater and started pushing and pulling me, and as he pulled me down I popped him a couple.. Not my finest moment, but a well deserved minor penalty, and I wasn’t going to let him keep getting away with crap.
Last friday I had a brilliant idea too.. I’m writing a Swing application, and I wrote a lot of framework to do UI stuff so that we didn’t have to do a lot of monotonous things.. so we define how screens look in XML, and the framework will do all the creation and layout behind the scenes. I also introduced the concept of a semantic action. Java’s swing framework provides you with stuff to catch mouse clicks and the like, but as a programmer and user, you don’t care that you clicked the mouse, you really care that you’re trying to perform some action, like saving your work or creating a new action, so I wrote an abstraction layer that translates system actions into semantic actions. Anyways, to get to my idea.. I’ve been struggling with getting Swing’s DND framework into our application and to play nicely. the Java Drag & Drop framework deals a lot with data transfer, serialization, the flavour and type of data, and the like. So I’ve been trying to get it to deal with our data structures, which are a generic type of data wrapper, but I realized that I don’t need to do it at all, I can just have a drop action fire a semantic action event, and that action should deal with populating data.
And last before I leave: a playlist for monday morning!
Oops I Did It Again – Britney Spears
Just A Little Bit – Gina G
Roadside Attraction – Spirit Of The West
Dizz Knee Land – Dada
Crazy Train – Ozzy Osbourne
Southside – Moby
Sober (Live) – Tool
Planes And Satellites(Live) – Sonia Dada
Barbie Girl (Techno Remix) – Aqua
Mutha Don’t want to go to School Today – Extreme
Synaesthesia (Remix) – Ministry Of Sound
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More IM fun.
(1:19:37 PM) Trogdor: LOVE the costume! Rawks!
(1:19:45 PM) EalasaidH: I am currently away from the computer.
(1:20:07 PM) EalasaidH:
(1:20:17 PM) EalasaidH: thanks!
(1:22:08 PM) EalasaidH: I’ll be wearing the Cardinal Fang outfit tonight.
(1:22:22 PM) EalasaidH: I even got some fake hair to try and make a proper beard/mustache with!
(1:22:30 PM) Trogdor: Ahaha awesome
(1:22:34 PM) Trogdor: What’s Twon going as
(1:23:03 PM) EalasaidH: I think he’s wearing his baseball uniform.
(1:23:06 PM) Trogdor: BooooO!
(1:23:09 PM) Trogdor: Unoriginal!
(1:23:27 PM) EalasaidH: what are you wearing?
(1:23:30 PM) EalasaidH: tonight, I mean
(1:24:30 PM) Trogdor: I’m not
(1:24:40 PM) EalasaidH: Boo! Lame!
(1:24:46 PM) Trogdor: /me hangs his head in shame
(1:25:02 PM) Trogdor: /me shuffles off to stand with the lame-o ppl
(1:25:07 PM) EalasaidH:
(1:25:46 PM) Trogdor: Maybe that’s my costume! I’ll be an AOL Lamer! OMGOMG WHT R U DONG? U R TEHSUCK!!!!!!!!1111one
(1:25:55 PM) EalasaidH: rofl
(1:26:38 PM) Trogdor: I’ll just yell at people all night and pronounce lamerspeak
(1:26:59 PM) Trogdor: “I PEE-OWN JOU!”
(1:27:53 PM) EalasaidH:
(1:27:54 PM) EalasaidH: awesome!
(1:28:12 PM) Trogdor: And I’ll visit a bunch of my friends and install virii on their computer.
(1:29:19 PM) EalasaidH: *snicker*
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Dreamin..
OK another dream last night. It’s weird, I can’t remember every dreaming before a couple years ago.. anyways..
I’m in a kind of spaced out montage, where I’m in my body, but also observing myself from a 3rd person perspective at the same time, and I’m moving a little off.. like time has been sped up for what I’m doing, but my 3rd person perspective isn’t sped up, so I’m watching myself zoom around and do different things, and then a jump, like a movie edit and I’m doing something else.. all in the course of a day.. and there’s an interesting thing.. with me in every scene is my friend Jon.
Then the last bit of the dream is me leaving work and trying to find the right subway train to take home, and I keep ending up on the platform or in the hallway for the ‘Yellow Line’ train, and I know that’s not the right one, but I don’t know how to get to the right one. Then I see, across one hallway, Jon again, reading a book on one of those moving sidewalk dealios. I see the sign above him, pointing in the direction he’s moving, and it reads ‘Green Line’. “Aha!” I think. The green line train is the one I need. So I run across and jump on the walkway. When I finally arrive at the platform, I walk down one little way and in the next one over I see a couple of people, whom I don’t know handcuffed to the railing along the wall, and (in the way that things can only make sense in a dream), I know that the traffic cops have taken to just cuffing offenders there and collecting them at the end of their shift. I also see Jon and his wife crouched next to one of the handcuffed people, ministering to her. Talking to her, offering her water. I didn’t go over to them, or call out, or make my presence known, I just kept on my little walkway towards the train and watched them get further away, with a distinct knowledge that it was I that was moving, and not them.
Then…. awake.
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South Saskatchewan
Conversation today at work, going something like this:
(Me not listening, watching seinfeld on my computer.. then catching the end of a statement
“…Like when Tom becomes president.”
(I stop, take my headphones off and start to speak.)
“When *I* become president, I’m going to make this whole place a canadian province… South Saskatchewan.. Or maybe I’ll break it up into a couple of provinces. All these states, this confusion is going to be gone. 5 Provinces… the NorthWest Territories, The SouthWest Territories, The NorthEast Territories, The SouthEast Territories… and the…. Umm.. Midwest Territories.”
“So would New Jersey be in the NorthEast Territories?”
“I could consider making all of NJ it’s own province, but it would be herefor known as ‘Stinktown’.”
“Why would Canada want all that land?”
“Well, we’d technically own it, but rent it out to people.. Like the SouthWest Territories would be on a long term lease to Mexico, so they wouldn’t have the border issues anymore.. and the NorthWest Territories could be loaned out to a long-term hippie contingent for a while. Canada has a lot of land it doesn’t need already.”
“Ahh, but what about Montreal?”
“They might have to be all relocated to Stinktown Province. Except maybe the Habs, although the ‘Seacaucus Canadiens’ is catchy.”
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