pretendamazing

Note to self: 50F + wind + biking = numbness.

Next time, I should be smart enough to leave /all/ of the food intended for work at work rather than some so I have more room in my bag the next morning.

I left work today yesterday, got to the bike trail, and grabbed my iPod. (It’s dangerous having noise cancelling earbuds and blasting music at 5pm, so I generally just have it paused until I hit the trail.)

Unpause. Nothing. Unpause. Nothing. Did the battery die? Will I have to ride all the way home without it? I reset it a couple times and all was well. Yay!

Tip of the day: If

1. you’re thirsty before you leave work
2. you have a 9 mile bike ride ahead of you
3. it’s 91° F outside

…drink some water before you leave. At least I have my smoothie now.

On that note, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m racist.

• fresh banana
• frozen pineapple
• frozen mango
• frozen peach
• orange juice

Sorry Carl, but Lenny clearly wins this one. D’oh!

If it’s any consolation, I did put in two chunks of rhubarb to make it a little less sweet.

np: Bonzo Goes To Bitburg from the album “Mania” by Ramones

Oops, I finished this post about 24 hours ago and forgot to hit Publish. Go me!

Hi Campbell.

I left work at 4:30, got home about 5:45ish. Showered, made a smoothie, made a quick banana run, then came back and went to bed. I was in my bed at 7:30 and asleep by 8:00.

I had left both my screen door and bedroom window open as well as two fans going in my room, so I woke up freezing at 1:45. I fixed that, went back to bed, fell asleep instantly, and woke up around 5:50.

3:33 am. I’ll get to bed soon. Up at 5:45. Sweet.

It’s almost 00:45. After roughly 5 hours Friday night/Saturday morning, 6 hours Saturday, 2:15 Saturday night, and now 16 hours Sunday/Monday, I might almost have my laptop in a working state.

Ubuntu decided a while back that it should install Gforge. Gforge then wanted Mailman. The Gforge install broke my Apache config, and I wanted Apache working again so I tried to uninstall those.

Mailman broke itself.

Toward the end of the week, I was learning how to do a couple of things that I need to do for my project, but I haven’t been doing them within the codebase for the project; I don’t want to (a) complicate things by putting them inside an MVC framework or (b) end up writing bad code then simply using it because it’s already there.

What with writing a webapp and needing a place for this code, I kind of need a web server and a scripting language. Apache and PHP in this case. After getting Gforge to uninstall, I still had a really broken Apache config. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Apache; apt-get thought that Apache had been removed. As it turns out, only parts had. What I ended up with was an Apache that was more broken than before. I couldn’t fix it without manually manipulating the package database or manually installing an additional copy of Apache (which then couldn’t be easily upgraded).

Friday night, I drove to work to fetch the laptop. I came home and worked for 5 hours on it, backing things up and then installing OpenSolaris. I eventually gave up on that. I burned a FreeBSD 7.0 LiveCD and installed that. A prereq for Apache 2, but it kept trying to install it over and over since Apache 2 was set to be installed. That hosed the pkgdb, so I reinstalled FreeBSD on the box and set out to use pkg_add and ports to install everything. Some package wasn’t found so I tried to build it from ports, but I had a newer ports tree than the server had package tree. gio stuff failed, and all sorts of applications that I need wouldn’t install.

So I’ll try Ubuntu again. I installed the nVidia X driver and it broke everything (wow, I’m in the wrong field), but I think that might be because I used a 64-bit install. My assumption is that the good driver is 32-bit only. Either way, I took the install CD that I brought home (”I shouldn’t need it, but just in case…”) and installed that version. I have things copying right now from my backup and have a lot of my software reinstalled.

I still need to install and configure Eclipse, which took a while the first time. Fortunately, I wrote up step-by-step instructions last time, so I should be able to do that part fairly quickly. I hope so. I have to drive to the other end of town to take the computer and other stuff back, come back home, get whatever amount of sleep I can, get up at 5:45, and bike to work. After about 10 hours of work, I bike back home…AND GO RIGHT TO BED! Probably not. :\

Oh, yeah. Ubuntu Desktop doesn’t come with Apache, PHP, and MySQL. I have to install those before I can quit, too.

np: Earth To Bella (Part I) from the album “Light Grenades” by Incubus

I sure do.

I should really take a picture of my setup before I take a laptop that’s running X11 home next time. Maybe then I’ll notice that something’s actually wrong rather than just wondering why it feels weird.

I took my laptop home from work last night. Wanting to use my personal laptop (which I’m more familiar with the keyboard and keyboard shortcuts on) to do research and use the work one for actual coding, I set the two side-by-side. (This turned out to be a great annoyance as I only have one laptop stand so the two machines were at different angles and switching between them threw me every time.) I didn’t have sufficient space to plug my external into either system.

The laptop booted up fine and, after about 30 minutes of fiddling with it thanks to xfce deciding that xfce4-panel didn’t need to be started upon logging in and not being able to find the wireless config that it uses, I got the system working.

Open Eclipse…and everything’s HUGE. Sadly, I didn’t realize that I was running at 1280×1024 instead of the 1650xsomething that the built-in LCD runs at when at work. Simply going with the physical placement of the laptop and the external LCD on my desk when I got here, my primary monitor is the external. When that’s not present, its configuration moves over to the built-in and I lose the high resolution.

My laptop runs at a resolution smaller than that, but it’s running at a native resolution, not something that it’s stretched in to. Important things like window decorations and fonts go all out of whack when you make a computer run in a resolution it isn’t made for, and it suddenly becomes difficult to code.

Before anyone assumes it, I’m not making myself look good or reaching for praise. I’m ranting about society.

It’s pretty pathetic that doing the Right Thing™ results in an obscene (a lot, not indecent) amount of praise, these days.

Trigg’s birthday was last Tuesday. She rented a party bus for Saturday and we all went out. I got home around 4am and started walking toward the elevator. There lay a wallet.

It was a bit tattered and looked empty, but I picked it up just in case. It wasn’t. I started looking for a phone number, but couldn’t find one. I recognized the guy from his picture; he lives in the same building and same floor as I.

When I got into my apartment, I kept digging through it. Colorado driver’s license, no help in figuring out which apartment he’s in. Credit card and debit card, not much help. I could maybe call the companies and read them the information and ask for his apartment number or phone number, but I don’t know how well that would work–it may get them cancelled and new ones issued, which wouldn’t be fun for him. $50 cash, that certainly won’t help. A few business cards? None for him.

Finally, a break in the case! Two credit cards in a name not his. They had what I assumed was his father’s name and a company name. Corporate credit cards, he must work for the family business.

Delaying a shower and sitting in cigarette stink (hurry up and pass a smoking ban, South Dakota), I enlisted my trusty pal Google. Bingo!

I found a page with his name and picture as well as the picture of the guy who I assumed (and, based on the age of the guy in the picture, have proven) was his dad, again with a matching name. I looked around for an email and sent an email to the address saying I had it and when he could get it (and that I’d take it to the office if I didn’t hear from him during a specific hour later that day).

I didn’t hear from him. I eventually took it down and left it with the landlord, who recognized him instantly and mentioned which apartment he’s in.

I got to work today and shortly thereafter got an email. (Stuff for a project is under my personal email, which is a good thing, and various work-related emails still get addressed to that address instead of my work email. I just keep both open throughout the day.)

I have contacted %firstName.

THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR YOUR KINDNESS AND THOUGHTFULLNESS.

His dad was quite appreciative. About 15 minutes later, I got another email.

I am so thankful that you held onto it thanks a lot, I tried stopping by I live in %apt I have an appt to go to at 10 but ill be home rest of the day after that. Thank you again very appreciated

I emailed him back to let him know that I had long since dropped it off in the office and got another reply.

Thanks so much ross

These two didn’t surprise me too much. I know our society, so I kind of expected such responses. What threw me was that his mom emailed me about half an hour later.

Dear Ross,

I am %firstName’s mom. My husband (%business) got the email about finding %firstNames wallet. You are so very kind to return it and go the extra mile to look up an address on Google. I know %firstName will be ecstatic to get it back!!!! Finally got hold of him this morning to tell him so he will be over there very soon if he hasnt all ready. It really made his day since he was pretty down in the dumps about losing it.

You are so right about being “too many dishonest people” out there. There sure are so it really makes our day to hear about an honest, decent person like yourself. %firstName is lucky you were the one to find it. So again, thanks Ross. You are greatly appreciated!!!!

%lastName’s

His entire family (okay, so I don’t actually know how large his immediate family is, but a large percentage of it if nothing else) emailed me thanking me for returning it. Corporate credit cards, I think (no personal experience, really!), are easier to fraudulently use than personal ones so those two could have been a huge headache, and the debit card could have been a pain, but the personal credit card and driver’s license were likely not too bad would they have been stolen. I saw no SSN on the driver’s license. The $50 would be gone for good, but given the annoyance that the others could be, $50 is a “small” price to pay.

I took nothing. I remember the driver’s license was in Colorado, but that’s it. I’m good with numbers, so I made sure to not look at any card numbers to accidentally memorize part/all of any of them.

What’s pathetic is that people who would take nothing and would go out of their way to get it returned, while quite likely the majority, seem to be the minority as far as people who find (or at least pick up) lost items. There’s no reason that people should be that appreciative that I did the Right Thing™; it should be commonplace.

np: Hoover Street from the album “Life Won’t Wait” by Rancid

I want next month. Or at least the last week in this one.

Last week, my bike was broken. I walked to/from work, about 50 miles in total. While my legs were sore because I didn’t stretch at all the first day, it wasn’t too bad. Oh, except for ALL THE BLISTERS. They’re (mostly) healed now, though, and I have my bike back. Yay!

This week, I have work. Lots and lots of work. Without going into the boring details, my project for the summer is split up into a handful of milestones. The first one was simple, the second is where coding begins.

There wasn’t really much thought into how the milestones relate to each other when they were set. As it turns out, milestone 2 requires most of the functionality of milestone 3. During a meeting, this was pointed out and the milestones were going to be reworked. They weren’t.

The second milestone is due Wednesday. I’ve barely started on the second half of it. I think I could get it completed just during work, but I’m not sure, so I’m working extra. I worked a “short” 9 hour day today, biked home, showered and did some cleaning and such, then got my laptop set up to work here. I’ve been working since 18:30.

I’ll probably stay up until around midnight, sleep a few hours, get up and go to work. Lather, rinse, repeat. With luck, all of the extra time spent these next few days means I’ll hopefully have a bunch of time to finish milestone 3 since the two pieces of that that I have left require a lot of extra learning.

On a non-work-related note, I get to see Lisa this weekend.

np: River’s Dance from the album “Firefly” by Greg Edmonson [I think I actually prefer the Serenity soundtrack. It has the whole orchestral thing going on too, but it has a lot of acoustic guitar too.]

Update: (2008-06-16 20:46)

    /**
     * Match a partial string in a column.
     *
     * Like will look for the pattern in the column given. Like accepts
     * the wildcards '_' matching a single character and '%' matching
     * any number of characters.
     *
     * @param string $expression the name of the expression to match on
     * @param string $pattern the pattern to match with.
     */
    public function like( $expression, $pattern )

Thank you, ezcDatabase! I’ve been trying to figure out how I could best implement a search feature. MySQL has a MATCH clause, but I don’t know if that’s SQL standard. Even if it is, which standard? SQL92? Some other? Which DBMS support it? We don’t necessarily want to tie our software to MySQL, even if it’s going to be run exclusively by us for the time being. It looks like ezcQueryExpression::like() might do what I need.

np: Red Hot Moon from the album “Indestructible” by Rancid