Jan 2006
Kids and Skiing
January 29, 2006 @ 15:08Filed in: Personal
I
decided that it was time for my oldest daughter and
son (Jordyn and Connor) to learn how to ski a couple
of weeks ago, so committed to taking them about once
a week to a local ski slope (Blue
Mountain).
The first afternoon/night we went we where lucky
enough to get two personal trainers (one for each of
them), and I just hung out on the bunny slope (as
it's been a few years since I've skied myself, so
that wasn't such a bad idea anyway). Jordyn had
picked up the basics before the end of the first day
and was asking me when we where going on the 'big
mountain'. Since it's just myself and the two kids, I
can't commit to going on the lifts until BOTH of them
are ready. Connor amazed me as well. On the first day
he was skiing very well. He needs to work on his
turning and stopping, and by the end of the day his
poor legs where so tired that he was just constantly
falling down.
The second trip was definitely a different experience. The ski-school was evidentally too busy to accomodate us with two teachers, so instead we just headed directly out to the bunny slopes ourselves. Jordyn picked right up where she left off; and was constantly asking to go on the lift
Connor took about an hour before
he got his ski-legs back, and then when he did,
he did VERY WELL. He didn't fall once on the
small lift that brings skiers up the bunny
slope! That was awesome. By the end of the
night, his turns where looking good and his
stops where looking a little better. For some
reason he can not 'get' snowplowing. So instead
he either cuts to a stop or falls to a stop!
Oie!
We're planning the third outing for this coming Wednesday or Thursday. I have GOT to remember to bring my brand new video camera!! I forgot it TWICE already. Grrrr. Anyway, hopefully I'll have some footage for my next ski adventure blog!
The second trip was definitely a different experience. The ski-school was evidentally too busy to accomodate us with two teachers, so instead we just headed directly out to the bunny slopes ourselves. Jordyn picked right up where she left off; and was constantly asking to go on the lift
Connor took about an hour before
he got his ski-legs back, and then when he did,
he did VERY WELL. He didn't fall once on the
small lift that brings skiers up the bunny
slope! That was awesome. By the end of the
night, his turns where looking good and his
stops where looking a little better. For some
reason he can not 'get' snowplowing. So instead
he either cuts to a stop or falls to a stop!
Oie!
We're planning the third outing for this coming Wednesday or Thursday. I have GOT to remember to bring my brand new video camera!! I forgot it TWICE already. Grrrr. Anyway, hopefully I'll have some footage for my next ski adventure blog!
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Spent a day figuring out OO PHP...
January 28, 2006 @ 15:08Filed in: Software
Development
I'm
back for a rant. I just spent a day figuring out a
little bit about OO PHP. I must first comment that I
did this for selfish reasons (was too lazy to write
an entire java servlet or jsp inside a container or
.... you understand). It's admittedly nice that I can
pump out a little php and use it on an 'almost'
plain-jane apache installation. That being said, my
experience with OO PHP was not as grand as I'd had
hoped.
I needed a simple graph, something to pull data from a file and stick it into a png/jpeg/whatever line-graph for me. There are several PHP 'pay for' type products that do this, however it wasn't so important that I needed to 'pay for' it, so I of course found an opensource graphing tool. Graphpite, which, by the way, has been merged with Image_Graph now. However, because of the sourceforge front page (not saying anything about such a merge) I was hacking away at the Graphpite library for half a day before I started looking for 'bug reports' for it. This is the point at which I finally made the discovery and switched over to Image_Graph (which wasn't too bad of a migration, considering I had only 100 lines of code). The big noticable difference in the two libraries is the use of a 'factory' within Image_Graph in order to create objects. The factory accepts 'special codewords' in order to create the correct object, so that is a little time consuming looking through the code to determine which 'codeword' I needed to pass to generate the appropriate object. The other minor annoyance with Image_Graph was the immediate need to download two other packages. Image_Color and Image_Somethingelse (can't remember as of this writing what it was).
I'm the kind of guy who likes to take quick peeks of sample code and then bookmark a reference page (such as PHP.NET) and then GO! So it took me a little while to figure out the = and the =& in PHP, but it's pretty evident after playing for a day that one is a copy and one is a reference! I did find myself in loops (foreach, while, etc) where I was passing references into another method, however at the end of the loop the method's underlying object only had several of the same references? I had to change the loop to actually pass a reference to the underlying object (it was in an array, so something like &$someNamedArray[$someName]. Instead of passing a reference like &$someNamedArrayValue which was actually declared by: $someNamedArrayValue =& $someNamedArray[$someName]. Strange, huh?
The end result of a day: I think my PHP knowledge helps me understand the reasoning for PHP existance I think I could have done pretty
much the same thing in Perl, much quicker
(understandedly because I already know a little
Perl), but the OO and simplistic nature of PHP
was cool. I do have a PHP script to show for
myself! This script basically reads in a data
file and plots a graph, yay! I'll upload it to
this article when I get a chance (it's on
another machine right now).
If anyone can give me a little insight into my reference array issue above, please feel free to email/contact me.
I needed a simple graph, something to pull data from a file and stick it into a png/jpeg/whatever line-graph for me. There are several PHP 'pay for' type products that do this, however it wasn't so important that I needed to 'pay for' it, so I of course found an opensource graphing tool. Graphpite, which, by the way, has been merged with Image_Graph now. However, because of the sourceforge front page (not saying anything about such a merge) I was hacking away at the Graphpite library for half a day before I started looking for 'bug reports' for it. This is the point at which I finally made the discovery and switched over to Image_Graph (which wasn't too bad of a migration, considering I had only 100 lines of code). The big noticable difference in the two libraries is the use of a 'factory' within Image_Graph in order to create objects. The factory accepts 'special codewords' in order to create the correct object, so that is a little time consuming looking through the code to determine which 'codeword' I needed to pass to generate the appropriate object. The other minor annoyance with Image_Graph was the immediate need to download two other packages. Image_Color and Image_Somethingelse (can't remember as of this writing what it was).
I'm the kind of guy who likes to take quick peeks of sample code and then bookmark a reference page (such as PHP.NET) and then GO! So it took me a little while to figure out the = and the =& in PHP, but it's pretty evident after playing for a day that one is a copy and one is a reference! I did find myself in loops (foreach, while, etc) where I was passing references into another method, however at the end of the loop the method's underlying object only had several of the same references? I had to change the loop to actually pass a reference to the underlying object (it was in an array, so something like &$someNamedArray[$someName]. Instead of passing a reference like &$someNamedArrayValue which was actually declared by: $someNamedArrayValue =& $someNamedArray[$someName]. Strange, huh?
The end result of a day: I think my PHP knowledge helps me understand the reasoning for PHP existance
I think I could have done pretty
much the same thing in Perl, much quicker
(understandedly because I already know a little
Perl), but the OO and simplistic nature of PHP
was cool. I do have a PHP script to show for
myself! This script basically reads in a data
file and plots a graph, yay! I'll upload it to
this article when I get a chance (it's on
another machine right now).
If anyone can give me a little insight into my reference array issue above, please feel free to email/contact me.
Got the need....
January 24, 2006 @ 15:09Filed in: Personal
Well,
I've finally given in to the simplistic nature of a
'blog'. It's a great way to easily dump the brain
every once in a while, so I think I'll try it out and
see how it goes.
Little about me:
I'm a software engineer and have been writing code since my parents first purchased me a VIC-20 instead of an Atari, umpteen years ago. I had wanted an Atari game console ("all my friends have one!") and my mother and father decided it was in my best interest to learn how to "make" the games, not just play them.
So from the VIC-20, to the C-64, to the Amiga, to the IBM XT, to the IBM AT, to Novell, to Solaris, to Windows 3.1(.1), to Windows 95, to NT 3.5.1(and 4), to HP/UX, to Linux, to OSX.... It's been a fun ride so far! And I don't plan on quittin!
If you notice, you've caught me in the year 2006.... when the Apple Intel Mac (MacTel) became available to the public. I purchased a PowerBook last year (2005) as the lure of BSD with a gorgeous UI was just too much for me to stand. I instantly fell in love with the PowerBook and would have never looked at another OS again had it not been just too slow for me. Compiling large enterprise size projects would take four times as long on my PowerBook as it would on my Gentoo P4 box. I finally gave in and currently use my Gentoo boxes (laptop and desktop) for all the day to day 'work' that I do (coding/etc). And I use my PowerBook to play with new 'code' ideas. (I've recently been playing a bit with Xcode....)
However, 2006 is here. And I ordered a new MacBook Pro!!! It has a dual core processor, oh my!! I am completely stoked. My ship date is recorded on my order as February 15th. Actual delivery date is expected to be around February 23rd (man, where you think these things are coming from??!!). I expect once I have my new MacBook Pro and all the things I 'need' in Universal Binary I'll be dropping my two linux distro boxes on their heads, and can't WAIT!
In the future, I will be blogging articles in how the MacBook Pro will be working out for me in my 'developer space', so feel free to come and check out the, ahem, "progress".
Later,
J
Little about me:
I'm a software engineer and have been writing code since my parents first purchased me a VIC-20 instead of an Atari, umpteen years ago. I had wanted an Atari game console ("all my friends have one!") and my mother and father decided it was in my best interest to learn how to "make" the games, not just play them.
So from the VIC-20, to the C-64, to the Amiga, to the IBM XT, to the IBM AT, to Novell, to Solaris, to Windows 3.1(.1), to Windows 95, to NT 3.5.1(and 4), to HP/UX, to Linux, to OSX.... It's been a fun ride so far! And I don't plan on quittin!
If you notice, you've caught me in the year 2006.... when the Apple Intel Mac (MacTel) became available to the public. I purchased a PowerBook last year (2005) as the lure of BSD with a gorgeous UI was just too much for me to stand. I instantly fell in love with the PowerBook and would have never looked at another OS again had it not been just too slow for me. Compiling large enterprise size projects would take four times as long on my PowerBook as it would on my Gentoo P4 box. I finally gave in and currently use my Gentoo boxes (laptop and desktop) for all the day to day 'work' that I do (coding/etc). And I use my PowerBook to play with new 'code' ideas. (I've recently been playing a bit with Xcode....)
However, 2006 is here. And I ordered a new MacBook Pro!!! It has a dual core processor, oh my!! I am completely stoked. My ship date is recorded on my order as February 15th. Actual delivery date is expected to be around February 23rd (man, where you think these things are coming from??!!). I expect once I have my new MacBook Pro and all the things I 'need' in Universal Binary I'll be dropping my two linux distro boxes on their heads, and can't WAIT!
In the future, I will be blogging articles in how the MacBook Pro will be working out for me in my 'developer space', so feel free to come and check out the, ahem, "progress".
Later,
J