Should be a good trip!!

June 30th here we come!

I wake up
Beside you, in mom’s car
I try to get you out,
You’re strapped to the backseat
I am too.

The car is rolling down to water.
Why are we
Strapped to our seats,
Trapped,
What did we do?
I cleaned my room just as she asked me to.

Filling up, dirty water,
My chin’s up, going under.
You’re still asleep, baby brother.
I’ll wake you up when this is over.

The car is rolling down to water.
Why are we
Strapped to our seats,
Trapped,
What did we do?
I brushed my teeth just as she asked me to.

This is it, baby brother,
One more breath togther
We’re almost underwater
Where is mom?
I miss her.

The car has rolled into the water.
Why are we dying in this way,
What did we do?
I was nice to him,
Her boyfriend, this is stupid
When people come to search the lake
We’ll be found in our pajamas
They will see
A big mistake is all that this must be

Her reaction was fairly positive, but she did ask “where do you find this crazy stuff?” In reply I chuckled and said “the Internet, silly.” Overall a good experience, even if it did keep us up too late.

Anyway, if you’ve never heard of Dr Horible, I recommend checking it out: http://www.drhorrible.com.

http://planck.cf.ac.uk/node/166

The formation of new stars as viewed by the Planck satellite. Pretty cool photos.

Well, let’s see what’s happened in oh… the last six months:

• I had surgery in November to fix some problems with my bottom (I am not getting into details )
• HighJump Software layed off > 50% of its staff in the delivery division on my birthday (not me though).
• My boss told me he was quitting the very same day (which is also HIS birthday).
• Christmas came and went… I got lots of new video games (and a new awesome toy!)
  • Dragon Age : Origins (Spectacular!!!)
  • Uncharted 2 ( Another spectacular game )
  • Assassins Creed 2 ( Good, but easier than the original IMHO)
  • Heavy Rain (Very Good)
    • This actually came a few weeks ago, but I’m too lazy to create another game section.
  • Dinovo Mini + PS3 Adaptor for Harmony Remote
    • Sooooo awesome… everything works with my remote, and I have a full wireless KB for the ps3 now.
• January was a flurry of job interviews as I looked to flee a sinking ship (aka HighJump Waterloo )
• February I landed a new job at Moxy Media, starting March 1st
• February was also a flurry of school work as I completed my degree on the 25th & 26th with my final two exams.
• March I started the new job. What a change from working on windows mobile devices to doing work for an advertising agency!
• I also got my grades for school… Passed with flying colours. Just waiting on the degree in the mail now.
• My little brother, Aaron, announced to the family he’s getting married in July… Of this year! Insanity is soon to commence.
• Since school is finished, I’ve started writing software on my own time again. I’m starting to feel the love once more!
• I remade the whole http://zenwerx.com website with a new wordpress look in mid-April.

I think that’s about it… It’s been fairly busy. Lots of stuff going on, and lot’s more to come.

I remember finding a caterpillar on a milkweed plant when I was a child. Being curious I captured the young monarch butterfly larvae with a piece of the plant and placed it in a jar with some holes poked in the top. Over the next few weeks I continued to feed the small caterpillar by finding new milkweed and adding it to the jar. Eventually it hung itself upside down from one of the leaves and created a cocoon. Being quite proud of this “accomplishment” I took the jar in to school to show all my friends.

Now, at some point along the way something bad happened to this poor butterfly I was trying to raise. I can not remember if my mother would not allow the jar in the house, or if I just forgot it outside on the picnic table one night. No matter what the reasoning was, it happened to rain that night and the poor jar was flooded when I found it the next morning. I emptied the water from the jar and dried out the cocoon, but it was too late. I never did get to see the butterfly emerge…

It seems odd, and yet exciting at the same time, how something as simple as a small seed floating on the wind can bring back memories like this. Thank you, milkweed, for helping me remember.

So what I have done is modified my script to be able to seek through the digits, and show you a picture starting from anywhere in the first 100 million digits. It did not take a lot of extra work, and I think the result is quite pleasing. I am actually considering doing the same for ln, phi, and some other interesting constants.

Yes, this is truly nerdy stuff.

For my 26th birthday Jackie had decided to throw me a surprise party. Unfortunately for her, I managed to figure out what was going on beforehand. My thought was to do a reverse-surprise and propose to her when I walked in the door. Let me tell you that Jackie is quite the snooper, or at least that is what her family always tells me. She has an uncanny ability to be able to shake a wrapped gift and tell you exactly what it is! So with this in mind I was quite nervous about having the ring in the apartment at the time. Especially since Christmas was nearing and presents were beginning to accumulate.

I was not really sure what day the party was, so I carried the ring around in my pocket for about a week. My hand was in there almost constantly making sure I had not lost it. Finally I figured everything out when my friends Don and Matthew got me out of the house, quite conveniently, during a weekend when Jackie was around. I was taken out to Bayshore Hobbies in Hamilton where Don was nice enough to buy me a 100 sided die for my birthday. The whole time we were out I was so nervous I thought I was going to puke!!

When we finally got back home my plan, as stated above, was to drop to one knee as soon as the words surprise were exclaimed in unison. What I had not anticipated was silly string!!!! I was bathed head to toe in the blasted stuff as soon as I opened the door, and lost my concentration entirely. I had to think quickly and regroup. I look back and say to myself “You should have just done it right there anyway,” but that’s hindsight. Instead I started drinking, it was my birthday party!

About an hour later I managed to pull my courage together and told everyone I had an announcement to make. I pulled Jackie into our dining room/living area and dropped to one kneee with everyone watching. The rest is history, although she still claims she never would have said yes if she were more sober at the time!

The year was 2002; I was in college at the time. I was beginning my second co-op work term during the winter semester. I also had a girlfriend, of almost a year – the longest ever at the time.  (SIDE NOTE:, this is the same GF whom I lied to about smoking.  Not my best years, I must admit.)  Sadly it was not to last as someone else,  ‘something‘ else rather, came into my life shortly after. As you can guess from above, this was a MMO game.

I had beta tested a few years before for a game called Asheron’s Call being created by one Turbine Software. At the time I was not very interested. The beta came and went and I paid no heed to it. I was more into first person shooters and real time strategies at the time. I also had a real Dungeons and Dragons group to get my true geek on with, why bother online?

Flash back to the co-op work term. I was working for the same company I did the first term for, but the load was pretty light this time. I was working from my apartment and corresponding through email and telephone. To make a long story short, I was bored:  I had nothing to do and I had no desire to find anything else to do.

My playstation and my old video games were getting a little tiresome.  I decided to try one of those new MMO games I was hearing about on the Internet. My first attempt was at EverQuest, but it just did not seem right to me. I packed it up and traded it in (yes, you could still do this at the time).  I remembered playing the beta for AC, and looked it up. I could not find it in stores but managed to have a copy shipped to me. It was the begginning of the end for my social life.

I am sure that many people who will actually read this post know what these games are like, but I will explain it anyway. The game was like being on drugs. I was glued to the screen for 18 + hours a day. Yes, 18 hours of every day I was spending on this game. Always trying to make my character better, trying to compete against everyone else. I had to be the best! If that meant I needed a widget or a do-dad which could only be found by killing a super-rare monster a hundred times, I would do it. I could not stop myself.

I soon stopped calling my girlfriend. I could not talk to her and play at the same time. When she called me I would ignore the calls whenever possible and make up excuses later. When we did talk I tried to keep it short, any time that I was not spending on the game was time other people had to get ahead of me! When I went to see her, all I could think about was the game. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up! Not of the woman whom I had told I loved…

Yes, this is exactly how I behaved back then. And as you can guess I was to lose her soon afterwards. There were other reasons, of course — and I will not enumerate them all here — but this is the one I look back upon and feel ashamed of. I let a video game control my life, and I lost something special because of it.

After she left me I went a little crazy.  I was stuck between a rock and a hard place – give up the game, or give up the girl. I told myself I really loved her, but I did not give up the game : I wanted both.  In the end I said some nasty things, none of which I can recall. I do, however, remember the reaction which they got me.  I was an immature 22 year old, but I say that with 8 years of retrospective. I would never have admitted it at the time.

All of that said and done, I quit the game forever 6 months later. I got a real job, since my money had run out. I could not devote the time I needed to it any more. When I quit, I had absolutely nothing to show for it except a still broken heart.

With that said, I am finished my story for today. And if you ask me to play an MMO, you will know the reason why I turn you down without even a second though.

I have my first summer off in roughly five years. As many who know me are privileged to hear, almost constantly, I have been taking university courses part time. It has been a constant move from one set of courses to another, but the end is definitely in sight. I cannot wait to be done, but I also ponder the thought of “what will I do?” after I am finished. This question does make me think, but then again I will most likely do what I am doing now during the summer : fill my time with hobbies. I am just not sure if that will be satisfying enough. Two months of fishing, video games, and other things is great, but what comes next? That will be a question for 2010 though… September marks the beginning of the end, my last two courses.

Some history is in order for the rest of this post. I completed college in August of 2003, but was never satisfied with the education I received from Conestoga. I always felt that I was being taught the basics over and over again, only with a different language every semester.  By basics I mean syntax of language, and not the FUNDAMENTALS that I believe that any decent software developer should know. Nobody taught us about data structures – Hash Tables, B-Trees, Lists. We never learned about how an operating system really worked. We were taught about Windows – How to operate it. We were taught VB, Cobol, and C – How to program in them.

Taking university courses in Computer Science has really opened my eyes. I have seen the guts of an OS and how it works with hardware. I know how my databases work behind the scenes, and can make better informed decisions on their design. I know how my computer network is designed and really understand how it works. I have dabbled with the semantic web and can make my documents part of it. I will be learning about Artificial Intelligence and Distributed computing next.

I also brushed up on my mathematics, something which was severely lacking in Conestoga. We learned “Business Math” and “Statistics”, but this is not nearly enough. I have the power of Calculus and Discrete Mathematics under my belt. I even tortured myself with a class on ODEs (Ordinary Differential Equations). This is the sort of learning that I longed for when I was in my early twenties!

Unfortunately, looking back a decade or more, my late teens made the trip to university impossible. I had a choice between friends, school, or a compromise between the two. During my first three years of high school I chose school and participated with friends to a lesser degree. After grade eleven, I tried to get into the social scene much more and my studies fell to the wayside. I even went for a sixth year of high school to attempt to bring up some grades and join the university crows a year later, but to no avail.

In one way, I do not have much to show for the bad choice I made above.  The friends I keep company with to this day are those whom I spent time with before I made the choice to let school slack. In other ways, I do not think I could have done anything differently. I have a beautiful wife, whom I would never have met if I changed the way I lived my life, and a life I would not give up for anything. It is hard to imagine how my life would have turned out if I had changed even a single thing in the past.

It is funny, I did not know how this post was going to turn out when I started it. I am quite satisfied with the results, even though there is much more racing. The mind is a beautiful thing, and I must exercise mine more to keep it in shape.

I’ve written various tools over the years to help me out with tasks that take a long time, or are very boring/repetitive. I have uploaded one of these to my website. It is a small PHP script that I wrote in order to rip album art from ID3 tags (embedded in the MP3) and store the file as a BMP (windows bitmap) that rockbox will be able to read and display. I’m not sure it will be useful to everyone, but it’s there for the world.

The download is located here if you are interested.

And here’s the description from the ‘product’ page on my website:

“When I installed the Rockbox firmware on my iPod I was left with a dilemma. I had spent hours (days even!) downloading album art for my MP3 collection and tagging every file with it. Unfortunately Rockbox only supports album art as a BMP file, and not embedded art. I didn’t want to spend more days pulling art out so I could see it, and what would happen if I changed what I had on there?
Enter this little script that I hacked together one night. It will read ID3 tags for your MP3 collection, and dump BMP files into the album folders on your iPod. Woo!”

And there it is! If you want to check out more stuff, there’s a bunch located on the products portion of the main site (although products is misleading… I don’t actually sell anything but my time).

That’s life I guess… No pain, no gain!

That’s it for now I guess. Will try to update again soon!

Southern Ontario Voting

Well, I’m amazed that almost all of Ontario, Southern Ontario in particular, has voted in the Conservative party. For as long as I can remember paying attention to politics Ontario has been a Liberal party stronghold. Something has changed this time, and whether for good or bad…. we’ll see down the road.

If you look at the picture on the right, you’ll see that it is dominated by conservative voted ridings. Up north we get into some NDP (orange), and Liberal (red) ridings, but the blue is overwhelming. If you go to the interactive map ( clicking on the image should get you there ) you can zoom in and see that Toronto is still a Liberal stronghold, but that seems like all of it.

I’m always a political swing vote. I refuse to give my vote to one party from now until eternity. I will give my vote to the party whom I believe will best suit us for the next four years. I’m not really sure if Stephen Harper is our man this time around, but he was a better choice than Stephane Dion… And sadly Jack Layton won’t hold a majority in my life time. I’ve stated my opinion elsewhere that I believe Jack Layton is a good leader. On the other hand, I am not certain that the NDP are a good solution for the country at the moment.

Lastly… there’s the “Green” party. While I’m all for helping the environment, I’m not dazzled by that being their strongest issue. I would rather have a party that was strong on all fronts, and didn’t base their platform on ONE significant issue. It’s sort of like the “Bloc” being a party just for Quebec. But, that’s just my personal opinion (And, we’ll conveniently ignore the fact that the current economy was the one ‘big issue’ for most this election.)

I guess we’ll see how things turn out in the months ahead, won’t we?

First and foremost, there is FireBug. I am so glad that Mozilla threw this in with Firefox version 2. I would have had no idea about it, at least not until someone else sang it’s praises, otherwise. This is the single most used tool that makes my job that much easier! Javascript debugging, Ajax callbacks, examining HTML, benchmarking network bottlenecks…. the list goes on! My only gripe thus far is that in Firefox version 3 there are certain HTML elements, such as buttons, which I can’t right click on and use the ‘Inspect Element’ tool. On the whole, it’s wonderful!

Next come the Firebug plugins… FirePHP is the first. This allows me to send debugging information in a HTTP header, and then view the result in the FireBug console. While I could just dump exceptions and errors straight to the screen this little gem allows me to show the same screen the user would experience in such a situation, but at the same time see detailed debugging information! It is great for use on my local development system, as well as our testing server!

After FirePHP, there is FireCookie! While, this extension isn’t as used as the above two it is still a wonderful addition to my toolset. With it I am able to see any changes to cookies in the FireBug console. Very useful while testing Ajax scripts which may or may not make changes.

Lastly… this isn’t a development tool, but interesting nonetheless. FireGPG is a tool which will encrypt/decrypt GPG blocks right in your browser window! Not highly useful, but it works and you can run into the odd encrypted block out there. It’s not a key store though, so you have to have GPG already installed and point FireGPG to it.

Hope someone finds these useful as well!

I took the time today to sftp into my home box, and download a copy of Head Like a Hole to verify. Guess what, the copy on my PC is actually right! This leads me to believe this is either a) a problem with rhythmbox or b) a problem with the iPod. I’m guessing it’s most likely the former… but it will require some digging to figure out what exactly is going on here.

*sigh*

Wordpress is definitely nice, but probably waaaaay more full of features than I really need. Oh well, it looks and feels very nice. I’ve added another last.fm plugin for wordpress, and this one actually downloads album images rather than just song names!

I also tried to upgrade my gallery from gallerypy to gallery2. I’ve tried this upgrade in the past, and it didn’t go so well. I should have stuck with my gut feelings, but I was interested to see how a wp->g2 plugin would work. While it worked reasonably well, I still can’t get past gallery2’s stupidness. I really hate that I can’t just point it at a folder of pictures, which are already on my site here, and have it parse them. I don’t have the time or willpower to sort thousands of pictures into albums… when the folder heirarchy I already have does that just perfectly as it is!

Anyway, I just hacked the template for gallerpy so it would look like the blog. It’s exactly the same thing I did with bblog a couple years ago! C’est la vie… take the easy route I guess!

There were 3 booths selling tickets for the show, ending up in a lineup of an hour and half!!! Yes, I waited for 90 minutes in order to pay $25 to get in. I think this is utterly ridiculous. You would think that since they’ve been doing this for a while now that there would be some extra ticket booths open in order to quell the rush. Hell, make an automated ticket booth or something that I can stick my credit card into!

Secondly, the vendor displays were again a little poor. I used to remember a wide variety of different things for sale in these expos, but I didn’t see that. If you weren’t looking for comic books, action figures, or DVDs there was nothing really there for you. We tried to check out the gaming section to see if there was any interesting board games on display, but were underwhelmed. We ended up sitting down and playing ‘Settlers of Catan’ for an hour and a half. A game that several of us own and didn’t have to pay $25 each for the privilege of playing.

Maybe I used to be more into the stuff that was there… or maybe I’m just losing touch with my geekdom. Personally, I was happier when we went back to Matt’s place and played D&D for the rest of the night. I just wish we hadn’t wasted half the day doing other stuff when we could have been doing that!

First off – the Video. Apparently ATI hasn’t release a version of their driver which will work with the new Xorg (version 7.4) that is shipping with Intrepid. This isn’t Ubuntu’s fault, so I won’t dwell on it. I will mention that ATI did just release a new driver about five days ago which we were hoping for support, but it didn’t come.

So to alleviate the issue, I switched to the open source Radeon driver. Not a real problem, since I’ve had to do this several times before. The driver works nicely, and I can get one monitor up in its native resolution (1680×1050). The problems start when I try to get the dual-head (two monitors) configuration going. The MergedFB method which used to work doesn’t. The Xinerama route does work, but my VGA monitor is EXTRA bright. It’s so bright that I can’t read anything that’s on a white background. Unfortunately that means this solution doesn’t work either. The ‘official’ way of doing this now is supposed to be with a tool called XRandR, but I’m not having much luck here either. Sometimes I can get the dual-head to work, but it will consistently revert back to a mirrored configuration showing the same desktop on both monitors. That makes this slightly unusable in my opinion.

Secondly there’s the sound issue. I’m not certain exactly what the issue was, but previously I had a USB headset connected to the computer for gaming and applications like Skype. Usually it defaults to the secondary output and I can select it in the preferences if I would like to use it. The issue seems to be that Ubuntu wants to use it as the primary all of the time! And, to top it all off I can’t get any sound out of the sound card (SB Audigy2) any more now that I have the headset unplugged.

So, as I type this I’m burning a copy of Hardy Heron (8.04) in order to reinstall. Not a big deal though, it’s one of those things that lets me get rid of all the extra crap I installed and don’t need anymore! This is actually made quite easy as well since my “/home” partition is on a nice RAID and everything else is on an 80GB partition of another HD.

Looks like it’s done… so time to format and start again!