December 2008 Archives

Happy New Year's!  I'm off to San Francisco for a few nights to ring in 2009 with my girlfriend.  No plans in the city as of yet; gonna wing it tonight.

Some (small) accomplishments of 2008 ...

Started a blog.  Bailed on HP-UX; changed jobs at HP.  Started a new Open Source project.  Canceled HBO.  Watched this guy become president of the United States.  Got crazy with JQuery and PHP.  Wrote some awesome regular expressions.  Got a coffeemaker for Christmas.  Watched Sirius XM Satellite Radio self-implode.  Created a profile on LinkedIn; still refusing to use Facebook.  Built a web-site for my buddies wedding using Gagawa PHP.  2008, The End.

I've never really been a huge fan of coffee, but I found myself drinking more and more of it over the last few years.  It's slowly grown on me.  Until recently, I never had a coffeemaker in the house.  At work, I drink the hard stuff, that cheap freeze dried crap.  However, for Christmas, my girlfriend got me an awesome Krups KM 7000 Grind-and-Brew Coffeemaker.  Now I can make my own coffee at home, using legit quality beans.  I'm no Martha Stewart, but I love this coffee maker.  Granted, I've only had it for 5 days, but it's clearly a five-out-of-five star machine.

Pros:  Makes an awesome cup of coffee; consider using a permanent filter like the Swissgold #4 Cone-Shaped Filter as a replacement for those cheap paper filters.  The machine is definitely well-built; very solid.  Nothing needs to be assembled; works right out of the box.  The brew-cycle is very quiet (the grinder is slightly louder).  Has a nice high-tech look and feel to it (especially the LCD display).  Requires little cleaning and no regular maintenance.  The machine can be programmed to remind you when to replace the Krups Duo Water Filter that sits in the base of the water reservoir.

Cons:  The machine is slightly bigger than you might think; unpacked, sitting on my counter it's approximately 16-inches tall (barely fits under my cabinetry).  The clock on the LCD display runs in 24-hour time only; instead of 2:30PM, you'll see 14:30 and so on.  During a grind-cycle, when transferring the coffee grounds into the brew-hopper, the machine makes a slight mess on the counter; some of the grounds won't make it into the brew-hopper before brewing.

Review:  5 out of 5 stars.  Highly recommended.

I've got an HP issued 8510w Notebook as my primary work PC (BTW, it's phenomenal; I would highly recommend this notebook to anyone).  Much to the chagrin of my IT department, I configured this system to be a dual-boot laptop, supporting Fedora 7 Linux and Vista Enterprise.  Recently, I acquired yet another flat-panel monitor for my home office and setup a dual-display configuration using the laptop's built-in DFP and my new LCD flat-panel.  The HP 8510w uses the NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M (G84GL) graphic chip set which is fully supported by the latest Nvidia drivers.

In Windows Vista, configuring dual-displays was trivial; the Nvidia driver detected the extra monitor and let me configure it using the Nvidia Control Panel utility.  In Fedora 7 Linux, it was slightly more challenging to get the desired TwinView dual-display configuration to work.  First, I installed the correct Livna-Nvidia graphic drivers by following the instructions here.  Using the Nvidia drivers packaged with Fedora is a mistake.  Use the Livna packaged Nvidia drivers, you'll be much happier in the long run.

It's the day after Christmas and not a whole lot is going on at the moment.  My girlfriend is at work, HP is closed for two-weeks, and I'm stuck at home bored out of my mind.  So, I decided to write some code.  I finished up an initial implementation of Gagawa in PHP.  The PHP libraries can be found in the Gagawa Google Code SVN repository.  If you are not familiar with Gagawa, my Gagawa Project page should help explain things a bit.  In a nutshell, the Gagawa library lets you build well-formed HTML and do other awesome things in PHP/Java like this:

$a = new A();

// Note you can daisy chain attribute setters.
$a->setHref( "http://kolich.com" )
  ->setTarget("_blank")
  ->setCSSClass("linkclass")
  ->setId("myid")
  ->setAttribute("other","value");

echo $a->write();

Calling write() on this A (a link/anchor tag) produces a well formed link, an <a> tag, with all of the correct attributes set.  This frees the developer from having to hand write HTML in a web-application.  Even more importantly, Gagawa virtually eliminates missed closing tags and other mundane HTML typos that often haunt web-developers.  See the Gagawa PHP Example for more sample code.

Download the complete pre-packaged Gagawa PHP library here.  To include the library in your PHP application, use require_once("gagawa-1.0.php").

Shameless Self-Promotion

In high school, I was heavily involved with a low-power Class D FM radio station, 87.9 FM KSFH.  During my time with the station, I was a DJ, Programming Director, and eventually became co-General Manager.  Running the station was absolutely phenomenal; probably one of the best memories of my high school career.  Recently though, I was browsing the web looking for some details on the station.  I came across an old San Francisco Chronicle newspaper article that was written about KSFH, and how myself and several buddies of mine resurrected the station from pending doom.  You can find a PDF version of the article here.  It can also be found on SFGate.com here.  While you're at it, check out the live KSFH studio cam.

And yes, that's me in the picture.  I'm sitting in the station studio on one of the computers; downloading MP3's on Napster!  Obviously, this was before the RIAA ruined Napster and other free file sharing services.

The source code for the Gagawa Project is now available on Google Code!  You can checkout the source code via SVN, or you can download a pre-built JAR from the Gagawa Downloads page.  For the latest code via SVN, non project members may check out a read-only working copy anonymously over HTTP:

svn checkout http://gagawa.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ gagawa-read-only

To build Gagawa from source, you'll need a Java SE Development Kit (JDK) and Apache Ant.  If you're using Eclipse, and want to checkout the source directly into a new Eclipse project, you'll need Subclipse.  Enjoy, you crazy kids.

Economic slowdown got you down?  Can't afford a Christmas tree?  Well, how about a sweet USB powered Christmas tree for your cube or home office?  I got one a few years ago, and let me tell you, nothing says Christmas at the office like a luminescent piece of glowing plastic on your desk.

And yes, that's a donkey pinata sitting on an HP ProCurve 2724 Gigabit Switch in the background.

OK, this may seem easy but I figured I would document this just in case it bugs anyone else like it bugged me.  It appears that the best way to recursively delete files and directories on Windows XP and Vista is using the "rd /s" command.  On previous versions of Windows, e.g., Windows 2000 and Windows 98, you could run the deltree command.  The deltree command was obsoleted on Vista and XP.  So, if you're ever in a command prompt and want to delete a directory, and all directories and files inside of it, think "rd /s".

C:\Mark>mkdir dog

C:\Mark>rd /s dog
dog, Are you sure (Y/N)? Y

Yea.

My team at work recently encountered an interesting problem that required us to configure an Apache XML-RPC client to use a web-proxy when communicating with a server.  In most corporate environments, the internal network sits behind a firewall and filtering web-proxy.  If your XML-RPC client needs to communicate with a server outside of the firewall, the only way out is through a web-proxy that supports XML-RPC.  After talking with several colleagues, I found that this seemingly simple need isn't very well documented.  So this post is an attempt to somewhat officially document how to use a web-proxy with Apache's XML-RPC Java implementation.  Surprisingly, it's actually quite simple once you've put the pieces together correctly.

If you're not familiar with XML-RPC, you can read up on it here.

Continue reading for the HOWTO.

Mounting a Samba share on Linux is fairly straightforward.  You'll need access to "/sbin/mount.cifs", and a spare mount-point.  For the sake of this demo, I'm going to mount a share on 192.168.1.100 to /mnt.

Continue reading for the HOWTO, and a gotch-ya to be aware of when dealing with symbolic links ...

At first, The Day The Earth Stood Still seemed like it would make a great entertaining thriller for the whole family.  However, don't be fooled, this movie is hardly worth the $10.50 I paid to see it.  In fact, it was actually yet another one of Hollywood's attempts to shove "the Global Warming issue" down our throats (think The Happening).  If you're expecting an action packed thriller full of apocalyptic gore, think again; it's rated PG-13.

Here's a summary:

Keanu Reeves is a human looking alien named Klaatu who comes to the Earth peacefully in an attempt to warn us "that we must change our ways or we face sure death."  Klaatu lands in a big glowing sphere right in the middle of New York's Central Park (how convenient).  Some big, not very realistic, robot looking thing comes out of the sphere.  The US military, New York's finest, and DHS surrounds the sphere and robot.  As Klaatu exits the sphere, he starts walking towards a human in an attempt to make an obviously peaceful first-contact.  The human sticks out her hand to peacefully greet Klaatu.  As Klaatu reaches out to greet the woman, someone from the big bad US military shoots Klaatu in the chest and he falls to the ground.  There's a commotion; Klaatu is rushed to some military installation where he actually undergoes surgery!  After Klaatu's surgery, the big bad US military attempts to determine his reason for coming to the Earth through interrogation.  Not surprisingly, Klaatu escapes.

An hour or so goes by; I lost interest at this point.  All the while, the US military is trying to figure out what the big robot in Central Park is all about (I was trying to figure that out myself).  The US military fails several times trying to blow up the robot.  Klaatu is still running around loose in human society.  The military moves the robot to a containment center in Virgina.  At this point, the robot starts its "destroy-the-human-race" sequence by releasing trillions of little metallic like bugs that eat glass, metal, and human flesh.  This swam of bugs starts making its way to New York City.  After hangin' with us for a while, Klaatu realizes that humans aren't so bad after all so he races back to the sphere spaceship in Central Park.  Once in Central Park, among a massive swarm of those ridiculous metallic bugs, he touches the sphere to stop the destruction sequence.  The Earth is saved, the human race faces a life-changing realization on Global Warming, the end.

With respect to movies, I'm usually hard to please.  But walking out of the theater last night, I couldn't help but overhear all of the whining complaints from just about every moviegoer.  Glad to know I'm not alone!

This is a follow-up post to the HTML Generator Approved for Open Source Release Under the MIT License.  This morning, a colleague and I launched the Gagawa Project live on Google Code!  Gagawa (formerly the HTML Generator) is a set of Java classes that allow developers to easily and dynamically build well-formed HTML in web or non-web Java applications.  The source code isn't available yet; we haven't had the time to prepare it and check it in to the Gagawa SVN repository.  However, that should happen in the next week or so.

For those who are curious about the name, Gagawa is Tagalog for "generating/doing something".  In this case, generating HTML, of course!

I recently gave up on Winamp and Windows Media Player.  Both have a bloated memory footprint, took too long to start, and don't naively support the audio formats I most often listen to.  So, I moved exclusively to Foobar2000 as my new media player of choice, and haven't looked back.  From their site: "foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats."  Of course, when I'm on Linux I'll use XMMS and Mplayer for all of my media playback.  But when I have to boot into Windows, Soma fm via Foobar2000 never sounded so good.  However, don't be discouraged by the name; I know, it's not the best.  Even so, consider giving it a try, or at least take a look at a some screenshots.

It wouldn't be December without a United States Postal Service mishap.  I recently ordered a relatively expensive item from Amazon.com; it's a Christmas gift.  I do most of my shopping online since I absolutely despise malls and shopping centers around the holidays.  I'll only go to a mall in December if it's 2PM on a Wednesday (the middle of a workday so it's empty), or if I'm dragged there kicking and screaming.

Anyway, I finally got around to some online Christmas shopping and ordered an item from Amazon.  Of course, because I qualified for Amazon's Free Super Saver Shipping I selected that as my shipping method.  In retrospect, that was probably a bad idea.  Usually, when I order something from Amazon, and chose their Free Super Saver Shipping, my item is shipped via UPS.  About 12-hours after I placed the order with Amazon, I got a shipping confirmation email confirming that my order has been shipped.  I was happy, until I saw .... continue reading for "...the rest of the story."