Tuesday, September 07, 2004

life goes by pretty fast... rojan is turning three and gabriel is almost a month old now... gabriel, is now my coding companion... he wakes up at around 2am, just in time to remind me i need to get a break away from the keyboard and cuddle him for a while... rojan is now getting really interested on books and would argue if your telling the story the wrong way... hehehe...

seriously need a good computer chair for the home office setup... good back support is a must... should allow me to lean back safely to support both gabriel and me... and to withstand being pushed around the room by an almost 3 year old kid..


last song syndrome: shake yer head by the eraserheads... brings back fond memories of those years when am young and naive... *sigh*... its nice to be born upside down...

Tuesday, August 31, 2004

novell's free linux technical resource kit came today... 3 dvd's full of novell+suse+ximian technology... hope i can find free time to try this out...
the weather is gloomy... i feel gloomy... my spirit dampened... the price of working in IT... everything is a blur... everything is volatile... nothing is contstant... i worry not for myself, come to think i never worry for myself nowadays... its always for my loved ones, my children specially...

rain, rain... go away... come again another day...
seriously reading effective java now... man, this book rocks! geez even my iterator drill is lame... as the book points out using while for iterators is a no-no, for loops is better and more efficient... at least my being stubborn of insisting separating those layers is paying off... i can do a lot of fine tuning and unit testing of the business logic without giving the front end dev a lot of headache...

its raining cats and dogs outside... time to drink some coffee...

Monday, August 30, 2004

also been hacking this hal+dbus based applet to use static ip addresses for a while. the current gnome cvs version doesnt allow for static ip's and Ad-Hoc wlan mode...



of course, since am a gnome coding newbie, the end result was the network applet having hard coded values... but it *somehow* works...

Sunday, August 29, 2004

as a result of my frustration with firefox sage plugin and gnome straw (gentoo build doesnt compile cleanly) for rss feeds, i downloaded the planet aggregator python app to have a local version of mig's pinoytechscene... a few minutes of configuring planet and pixel pushing with gimp resulted to this (click on the link get a bigger picture):



i'll try to find the wackiest pictures of those people in the list and create hackergocthi versions of their heads soon ;)...

lately, this two little angels has been my finely tuned excuse for not blogging and not sending emails to my friends and relatives. the eldest seems to have adjusted to the fact the she is now a sister and the lil' boy is insanely increasing his cuteness factor each day ;)

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

distcc: a fast, free distributed C/C compiler... i should have configured this first before attempting to build openoffice-ximian... i had these working nicely on the fbsd servers... i wonder if it would be possible to use those distcc with gentoo... hmmn...
substring evilness... i wanted to produce serial numbers of uniform length for the index (5 characters)... this is my lame solution...

the inner loop:


int serialIndex = 100000 + index;
String serial = serialPrefix + String.valueOf(serialIndex).substring(1);


this produces padded serial numbesr e.g. 00001, 03450. certainly not optimal... but will do for now ;)

this obviously limits the number of entities to 99999... converting to hex would increase the limit a bit, but the printer guys argued its too much of a hassle to check the correct sequences since its still done manually... ok, so be it...

Monday, August 23, 2004

>> eRadioPortal.com : Welcome to the Digital Age <<.... the nu 107.5 stream rocks... kudos to the totem developers for making it possible to do this in unix... btw, realplayer 10 for linux is also out and totally loving it...
FreeBSD/i386 5.3-BETA1... hopefully 5.3 stable will come out soon... a lot has been done on the acpi front (hopefully this fixes the X issues i encountered)... acpi_asus has been added to the kernel...

am currently happy with gentoo for the degatto... but i still miss freebsd's way of configuring the kernel via a single text file and how trivial it is to test new kernels as opposed to linux make menuconfig or its make config... also freebsd's new ULE scheduler will certainly be able to provide a more repsonsive desktop/server environment... if this is indeed what will be tagged as teh stable branch, i'll set aside time to test this out...
XStream, looks slicker than xom... i wonder how this compares to betwixt... i've been looking for a POJO<->XML converter for sometime now...

Sunday, August 22, 2004

woke up early, in the mood to do work... had a great weekend with the family as well as completely happy with the outcome of last saturdays meeting...

meanwhile...

dude, i cant afford your fee for now (even if i do eventually paypal wont let me)... but i direly need your viPlugin. please reconsider releasing an eclipse 3 compatible version for free... all i want is basic navigation and cut-copy-paste-delete functionality... throw in a few search and replace functions if your feeling kind ;)... *hikbi* i swear by my aching hands that i'll put a thank you note on all the files i create using your plugin...

Thursday, August 19, 2004

Application Performance Management Review... got to read this later..
2Checkout.com - credit card processing / merchant account alternative... hopefully this fits into one of my client's requirements...
a week of downtime due to paternity leave and am left with a mountain of work to do...

on the bright side, the spring migration was going along well... i longer have to wait everytime i deploy and shout syet! and gedemet! while i wait for the container to do its cmp/cmr work... now only the xsl stlysheets gets compiled every time i deploy...

this morning i managed to play decently weezer's undone sweater song intro... but my excitement was short lived when the e string broke... sigh... super tired...

Monday, August 16, 2004

whilst waiting for my wife outside the labor room (it took her almost 15hrs before she was taken to the delivery room)... i was quite surprised that most of the doctors was toting a pda (mostly palm, i only spotted one using a pocket pc). obviously makes a lot of sense since this guys often roam around several clinics and hospitals. i hadn't had the chance to ask what medical apps for the pda do these doctors use... i wonder if that many publishers of medical books make their product available on sites like ereader or in general has a soft copy option available.... that could be an interesting research... on my end i usually use plucker to turn online articles suitable for offline pda viewing, avantgo for news and rss feeds and adobe pdf viewer for most of those downloadable docs, manuals etc...

am interested as well what mobile apps can be made for these doctors considering that java is also available for palm's and pocket pc's... will do a little research on this when i have time and play with the palm jvm i downloaded a few weeks ago...

luckily, i was able to bring the tj37 with me and was able to go halfway thru the "hacker crackdown" courtesy of manybooks.net... learned a lot about the history of US secret service, the legion of doom and operation "sundevil"... it also tells a lot about the history of telcos and a ton of other facts related to cyberspace that i had not known.... next book on the list is "free culture" to spice up those boring mrt commute time...

aside from reading, i was very very happy to use the pda to capture those "kodak moments"... el cheapo 3mp cant take decent pictures with low light conditions and using the flash would take a minute befor one can shoot his next picture... whereas the tj37 decent pictures even with only flourescent as the light source, and is fast enough that you can take several pictures with a whim without any noticeable lags in between...

oh boy! that boy!! IS MY BOY!!!

definitely blogworthy, born august 12, 2004, 11:29pm at 6.8lbs, Gabriel Janro rest assured that daddy will always care, will change your underwear, will take you to the fair, and i'll always try to be there... :)