Monday September 14, 2009

The Meat Vegetables Jen said I had to blog this.

Last night I had a repeating dream; I'd wake up and when I fell back asleep the dream would restart. I don't remember details except: the people were vegetables. They germinated and grew in the ground. When they reached maturity they left the ground and moved about in a society. This society realized that in their midst were "vegetables made of meat". Yeah, makes no sense now, but some of the beings that grew in the ground and looked vaguely like asparagus were actually meat. These Meat Vegetables were hunted by the others, to be exterminated. But they couldn't know which of those growing in the ground were Meat or Vegetable.
( Sep 14 2009, 05:24:14 PM ) Entertainment Permalink
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Tuesday September 08, 2009

Exploding Pop

Entry number 2 in my exploding foods series! A week ago my 14 yr old son and I bottled some home-made root beer and cola. We used the standard recipe found in the flavoring package you can purchase from your local home-brewer store. It warned against using glass bottles, as they may not be able to handle the pressure generated by the yeast used to create carbonation; so we used two-liter bottles as recommended.

At approximately 3:45am this morning, one of those plastic two-liter bottles exploded in our kitchen (I believe it was cola). A sprinkle of cola covered everything in the kitchen, including the doorless pantry I built a couple years ago, so that several boxes of food were damp. The cupboards were sprayed, the cabinets were sprayed, the stove was sprayed. Soda pop ran down the cupboards and pooled in pots on the stove and on the countertop. A large puddle formed on the floor under the table where the bottle had sat. The french-press that had sat next to the bottle was flung against the fridge and shattered. A hole was created in the wall next to the table, we're not sure which object created that.

Jen and I spent a half hour wiping every surface and toweling the floor, I moved the fridge to get whatever had run under there. After she went to bed I got out the mop and cleaned the floor again before returning to bed at 4:30. The floor wasn't sticky when we got up at 5:45am. I imagine we'll need to give all the cabinets another wipe down tonight, and I'll give the floor another mopping, just to ensure we don't attract ants or other creatures.

( Sep 08 2009, 08:56:24 AM ) Personal Permalink
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Monday August 03, 2009

Building in Surveillance

It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state. No matter what the eavesdroppers and censors say, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.[Bruce Schneier on Security]

I'm not dead yet.
( Aug 03 2009, 11:50:57 AM ) Technology Permalink [Link]
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Saturday July 18, 2009

Echoing Rafe

Why I don't own a Kindle
By Rafe
The Kindle seems neat and all, but I'm not going to pay for books that I don't actually own.

( Jul 18 2009, 10:05:30 AM ) Technology Permalink
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Tuesday May 19, 2009

Exploding Soup

Did you know ham can explode? I didn't. I heated a 1/2 can of Campbells Chunky Split Pea w/Ham for 1 minute. I then stuck in my spoon, expecting to stir the soup and heat some more. Instead, the bit of ham I touched exploded in my face (leaning into the microwave in order to stir). A big chunk hit my lower lip and burned a spot, but it isn't visibly damaged. Just glad it didn't hit an eye!

I cleaned up the interior of the microwave, heated another 15 seconds (originally planned for 45) without incident. Phew!
( May 19 2009, 12:42:59 PM ) News Permalink
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Wednesday April 08, 2009

Satellite Sheiks

Satellite Sheik n. A televangelist for Islam. These media-savvy religious leaders broadcast moderate Muslim beliefs on satellite TV and social networks, appealing to Arabs alienated by traditional imams.[Jargon Watch]

Isn't that the opposite of Christian televangelists?
( Apr 08 2009, 03:38:02 PM ) Politics Permalink
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The Daily Chuck

It's silly, but I look forward to the Daily Chuck, but not so much as before Chuck got a sister.
( Apr 08 2009, 02:32:36 PM ) Entertainment Permalink
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Groovy Markup Builder

Rather than post this to the Groovy User's mailing list and look like a fool, I thought I'd restrict my foolishes to a smaller audience.

My employer generates a lot of XML, some of which contains an element that looks something like this:
<updatetime day='2' mon='8' date='11' yr='2008' hr='4' hr24='4' tz='GMT' mer='am' min='1' sec='0'>04:01 AM GMT Monday, Aug 11</updatetime>

The perl for this was straightforward (blat out the xml as a string), but when I rewrote it in Java it got complicated, using a SimpleDateFormat to generate a string that I parsed to constituent bits and built a DOM Element. The parsing to bits is irrelevant here, what was "nice" was that in Java for each attribute I just called (in a loop):
updateTimeEl.setAttribute(nameVal[0], nameVal[1]);

Now, for a bit of R&D, I'm rewriting it in Groovy (along with the rest of the class) using the MarkupBuilder and I built a map of attributes. I wanted to do
builder.updatetime( attributes.each{key, value -> key:value}, sdf.format(updateTime) )
but that failed (groovy insists that key/value must be members of my class) and I resorted to:

builder.updatetime(
	// first the attributes
	day:attributes['day'],
	mon:attributes['mon'],
	date:attributes['date'],
	yr:attributes['yr'],
	hr:attributes['hr'],
	hr24:attributes['hr24'],
	tz:attributes['tz'],
	mer:attributes['mer'],
	min:attributes['min'],
	sec:attributes['sec'],
	// now the text value
	sdf.format(updateTime)
)

This works, but is certainly less elegant than I like.
( Apr 08 2009, 02:15:44 PM ) Groovy n Grails Permalink Comments [4]
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