My New Meizu
My wife bought me a MiniPlayer for Christmas, a portable media player made by Meizu, a Chinese manufacturer. I love the darn thing.My wife has owned two iPods, an original and a Nano. I hate the darn...
View ArticleMaxtor OneTouch, HFS+ to ext3
I bought a Maxtor OneTouch 300GB external USB/Firewire drive a couple of years ago, mostly to save my iMovie experiments on my wife's Mac, but also to serve as a general backup device for my other...
View ArticleCharter DNS sucks
For the most part, I've been happy with my Charter cable service, with two glaring exceptions:They won't provide the NFL NetworkTheir DNS servers are unreliable, often down, and slow when they're upI...
View ArticleLearning (to hear) an Instrument
I'm a pretty good guitar player. Been playing since I was maybe 12 or so, and I'm self-taught, which is why it took me so long to get any good. A great teacher can make you better faster.But there...
View ArticleMusical Moments
When I was in high school, a friend described me as "the type of person who listens to guitar solos". I didn't realize some (most?) people don't.I don't really hear lyrics when I listen to music. I'm...
View ArticleCharter DNS still sucks
I set up dnsmasq on the Debian box I had been running bind9 on. It was infinitely easier to configure than a "real" DNS server -- just edit /etc/hosts -- and it perfectly suited the host-naming...
View ArticleLinux Podcasts
Since I got my new Meizu, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts, especially those dedicated to Linux. There are a surprising number of them out there, and I've listened to quite a few, but I wanted...
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Hating Maven less than Ant
I've been writing Java code since 1996 and struggling with build tools at least as long. Ant is the most comprehensive and Maven is the most ambitious. I hate both of them, mostly because they each...
View ArticleFrom Gentoo+Postfix+Courier to Debian+Exim+Dovecot
Ok, let's say -- hypothetically, of course -- you chose Gentoo for your home email server a few years ago. You found one of Gentoo's great docs on setting up Postfix, Courier and SpamAssassin. You...
View ArticleTesting EJB3 (JPA) with Maven2
This tutorial describes how to test EJB3 beans as a part of a Maven2 build, i.e. without an EJB container but with an in-memory, transactional database. I make the following assumptions:JDK 1.5EJB 3.0,...
View Article1952 Vincent Black Lightning
The theme for this weekend: 1952 Vincent Black Lightning. That's because I heard Richard Thompson's song for the first time. It immediately appealed to me, what with its protagonist sharing my name and...
View ArticleMy Mother's Blog
I've been meaning to create a blog for my mother for some time now. I think she's a pretty good writer. I have to. She's my mother.So here is My Mother's Blog.
View ArticleRemote Monitoring with Ruby and sshfs
At work I've been doing some performance analysis as of late. Specifically, I've been combing JBoss server.log files recording the time it takes various transactions to complete. Admittedly, I'm...
View ArticleTease
Tanya Thompson, the third tallest tenured teaching typist, told Timmy Timmington to try to take the touch-typing test tomorrow.Ta-da!
View ArticleStupidest Guitar Chord: D# minor
I love the Beatles' song, "I'm Only Sleeping", especially the very first chord, played with a beautiful, exaggerated "up-stroke" for emphasis. Strictly speaking, listening to the recording, the chord...
View ArticleJava shell tips
In which jar file does the class, CLASSNAME, reside?for i in lib/*.jar; do jar tf $i | grep CLASSNAME >/dev/null && echo $i; doneTo recursively search through all jars in the current...
View ArticleNew Job, New Spin on Frank
Well, it's been a while since I've blogged about anything. Since then, I've signed on with WebSingularity. We're attempting to build a social networking site that doesn't suck. More on that later, but...
View ArticleA Few Poems
While doing some digital housekeeping recently, I ran across some poems I wrote back in the mid 90's when I worked with a very creative group of people at a now-defunct company. We were programmers,...
View ArticleTrying to Save the Crum & Forster
My grandfather, Lewis "Buck" Crook, was a prominent architect. He and his partner, Ernest "Ed" Ivey, comprised the firm of Ivey & Crook, responsible for almost 600 commissions over the course of 43...
View ArticleMaking Gardening Cool
As if we didn't have enough, here's yet another reason ya gotta love Bob!
View ArticleCreate
I'm big on creativity. You know, building stuff. Putting things where nothing was before. I think it's both the secret to happiness and the meaning of life. I think it's what humans are SUPPOSED TO DO....
View ArticlePoopTag = Social Defecation
(It's not as gross as it sounds!)Everybody poops. Every U.S. president. Every Jonas Brother. Every Olympic athlete. Even Michael Phelps. Actually, at 12,000 calories a day, he poops a LOT! And so while...
View ArticleA little lithp
After almost 20 years of fairly hardcore Emacs love, I finally wrote my first Lisp macro. And now I want to smear my good fortune all over you, dear reader, by recounting my experience in more...
View ArticleThanks, Sean!
Thanks to my friend, Sean, I noticed yesterday that my last blog entry was posted exactly one year ago today. Well, I'm nothing if not punctual, and I'm committed to blogging at least once a year,...
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