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Tuesday, December 25. 2007
quick entry from my new iPod touch.
The keyboard functionality is pretty decent.
I will blog more about it from the laptop, later.
Tuesday, December 25. 2007
I really need to get to bed, but before I did I wanted to post a quick link to this article. I caught it on Digg, via my Google Personalized Homepage.
Is Circuit City in Danger?
Movie Night was fun.
Drank some good beer, ate some good appetizers, brought way too much popcorn, oh well more for later.
Well, off to bed.
Laterz
Monday, December 24. 2007
First let me thank John for the gift of TiVo this holiday season.
I have really been enjoying the fact that TiVo has already recorded some of my favorite shows without me having to instruct it.
However, I have only recently managed to get both TiVo and the DISH Network satellite box to work together properly.
I just recently finished telling TiVo what channels we actually get from DISH. It had way more channels in the list than we actually subscribe to.
And the problem is that when TiVo would try to record on a channel we don't actually get, the satellite box doesn't let you just change the channel, you have to press the 'SELECT', 'UP' or 'DOWN' button. Well, TiVo doesn't realize any of that. So it would just keep recording what is effectively an error message telling you to "Press SELECT, UP or DOWN."
Great huh?
Now, telling TiVo what channels you actually receive would probably be the smartest thing to do first.
I did that last.
In part because, I found that there were a couple of other problems that I had to do first.
1. I found that TiVo had recorded several times what effectively is a screen saver from the satellite box. There is a setting on the set-top box that turns on a screen saver after about 4 hours of inactivity.
---- I disabled this and no more screen saver.
2. Well, no more screen saver because of the inactivity setting. TiVo still was recording a screen saver. However, I discovered that this one was happening because at 3 A.M. every morning, the set-top box was downloading a new program guide and in the process turning itself off. Which resulted in the the screen saver returning.
---- I disabled the guide download. Which became irrelevant because now we use the TiVo guide.
Now, another part of this whole taming TiVo exercise has been to tame the Logitech Harmony 550 remote that I bought a while back.
I had managed to get it working to the point that it eliminated the need for the TV, DVD, and Sound System remotes. But, still I had not programmed the 'Activities' quite right. The idea that you can select the 'Play Xbox' activity and it automatically changes the channel on the tv, turns on the xbox and the sets the surround sound system to the right channel is pretty sweet.
Well, with the idea of taming TiVo on my mind, I setup TiVo as a device in the Harmony software and I got all of the activities setup properly.
Now, I have had a chance to teach TiVo to record my stuff. Gina needs to spend some time with TiVo and get it recording the shows that she likes.
Ultimately, I have a feeling that we will end up with 2 units, same as Jeremy.
Anyway, TiVo is turning out to be a really great gift.
Thanks again John.
Laterz
P.S. I will try to get Gina to bake some pumpkin pies this week.
Sunday, December 23. 2007
A little while I back I wrote up an entry about Circuit City, after my experience shopping there shortly after Thanksgiving.
Well, it would appear that there were some reasons as to why I did not find the staff to be very knowledgeable.
They apparently fired all of their senior staff, in a cost cutting measure.
Score one for management.
But wait, it gets better.
Apparently, they wanted to make sure that they keep their executive vice presidents, so $1M bonuses to ensure 'employee retention' were given out.
Unbelievable!
The article also states that the $1M represents 35 years worth of salary for the senior staff that they fired ($14/hr).
With Circuit City making such intelligent business decisions, I am not very curious about my question I threw out in my last post about them...
"Ever wondered how they stay in business?"
Of course, there is also the fact that CompUSA is going out of business.
With CompUSA out of the way, not that I really like Circuit City, they might seriously have a chance to gain back the 75% of their stock price that they have lost since last year.
Or in six months time, they might be closing that brand new store up on 1431.
Who knows. Who knows.
But the $1M bonus is complete and utter bullshit.
Laterz
Sunday, December 23. 2007
I have been sleeping a ton the last couple of days. I hope it is just me recovering from fatigue of sort almost burning the candle at both ends the last couple of weeks and not a cold.
I have been wrapping Gina's gifts over the last two days, I am still not done yet. Partially because there are quite a few, but also because I keep falling asleep on the couch with the Emma and Buddy.
I would have been picking Gina up from the airport at midnight tonight.
However, because of the weather in the Mid-West, she was rescheduled to fly out tomorrow morning. I hope she doesn't get delayed again, otherwise she might miss out on the holiday festivities that are planned. (We will be watching x-mas movies with the Arntz's tomorrow night.)
She is due in at 10:20 AM tomorrow morning, I will make sure to set an alarm, even though I have not needed to the last few days. Even with as sleepy as I have been, I have been waking up between 7:00 - 7:30 AM.
Crazy huh?
Anyway, if I could have rented an elf, then I could have slept the last couple of days away completely, while the elf was wrapping the presents and maybe feeding the dogs.
Yesterday Jeremy and I went on a beer quest. It started over at World Market. However, the selection of beer there was not all that great. A couple of decent imports, but overall nothing very spectacular.
Upon my suggestion we headed over to Central Market. Their wine and beer section is quite amazing. They had all sorts of beer, too many to choose from really.
I forget everything we picked up, but I do remember that Jeremy picked up a 'sixer' of some beer with a crazy looking dog on it. And I grabbed a bottle of Chimay (burgandy label) and a bottle of Young's Christmas Ale. I think we picked up a sixer of Abita's Christmas Ale.
Gina request a particular Pinot Noir, something by the name of 'Rus'. She wasn't sure of the name exactly, either way Central Market didn't have anything like that. I picked up a couple of bottle of good looking Pinot Noir while I was over at Target.
I also picked up some popping corn, white and black kernel. The popping corn, beer, and wine are all for tomorrow's movie night.
Well, I need to get back to wrapping gifts. (unless I pass out again.)
Laterz
Friday, December 21. 2007
Been at the office way too late the last couple of days.
The dogs have been eating kind of late this week.
However, last night it was even later than I had originally planned.
I ran out of beef to boil for Emma, yup boil.
I need to ask Gina exactly why it is that I boil the meat. I understand that the recipe Gina is following has the beef boiled, but I guess I don't fully understand the difference between boiling it and just cooking it in the pan. It would have appox the same amount of fat.
Anyway, I had to run over to Randall's to get Emma some beef. I bought one of the smaller packs of ground beef and portioned it out, should last the next week or so.
I wrapped up the gifts for my staff while the beef and the rice were cooking. (Everyone seemed to like them, they opened them today.)
By the time everything was all said and done it was about 1:30 in the morning.
The last couple of days I don't even remember the alarm clock going off in the morning. I only remember waking up around 6 or 6:30 in the morning and dragging myself out of bed.
John should be over here in about 15 minutes.
I think I am going to try to get a round of halo in before he arrives.
More to come.
Laterz
Wednesday, December 19. 2007
md5('this') => 9e925e9341b490bfd3b4c4ca3b0c1ef2
md5('that') =>21582c6c30be1217322cdb9aebaf4a59
So, way back in March of this year, man that feels like three years ago, I created a simple web service that creates MD5, SHA1, and CRC32 hashes/encryptions.
I did it for work.
There was a developer using this web scripting language that I have never heard of called H2O. This has to be about the most useless language I have ever come across. Notably, because it did not have the ability to natively generate an MD5 hash.
Well, Jaduka's APIs use a check value that is computed by generating a MD5 hash from a privateKey (aka secret) and one of the parameters in the method.
i.e. huge FSCKING problem for H2O programmers.
So, after learning a little bit more about what the language could do, I determined that it did have the ability to pull in data from an HTTP-Query-string request, aka REST web service.
I did only a little bit of looking around before I registered www.hashserver.com and created my MD5 hashing web service.
For the longest time there was no real traffic on the site to speak of, except for my own usage of it. I routinely use it to generate hashes when I am working with the API manually (ie http-query-string) for operations that generating a full script seems a bit overkill.
Anyway, I posted a comment on a blog not too long ago that was talking about encryption (MD5s vs Salt). Given the topic, I posted the www.hashserver.com at the end of my comment.
While, I still need to pull all of the data for this from the very simple table I am store some stats in (dateTimeStamp, ipAddress, type of hash (ie MD5, SHA1, CRC32)). I am pretty sure the increase in hash creations spiked after I made that post.
Given that the number of records in the table went from a couple of thousand, to about 260,000+ thousand, I figured I should add a counter to the front page. I just finished that part up. Nothing too fancy, just a simple counter.
I do want to add a Google Map to the main page as well to show the IP addresses that have been using my HashServer. There are just under 400 unique IP Addresses creating hashes.
However, when I ran some queries to see how diversified the hash generation is, I saw that the bulk of the hash generation came from only a handful of IP Addresses. This caused me to investigate who owned the IP Addresses, the heavy user ones are owned by Yahoo!.
I confirmed my suspicion that someone had embedded a call to my HashServer into some Yahoo! Pipes apps that you can build, thanks to some easy searching on Google.
I am really not too sure what the three apps are doing with the hashes that are generated, I will take later some time to investigate later.
In the meantime, it gives me a sense of pride that something I whipped together in about an hour and haven't touched since 3/9/2007 has now handled over 260K requests and is actually useful to some folks.
I mean honestly, I sort of did it all as a joke, the "Question" and "Answer" on the HashServer homepage should be proof enough of that.
Tonight in doing some link searching for this blog post I did find md5oogle, a md5 hash service website. However, not technically a webservice from an API perspective. And it is doing it for a completely different purpose. Oh yeah, I don't store the content being hashed in the database, I mean with just the 260K requests the table is already about to break the 12MB level. If I was storing the hash output and the content that went into making, there is no telling how big that table would be by now.
Oh well,
I need to get back to finishing up a few things so I can head home.
PS: My darling wife, before you freak out. I was home at 5:20pm today and let the dogs out. Love ya!
Tuesday, December 18. 2007
Just letting everyone out there know that I am still alive, just busy.
Been getting to bed at a reasonable time, for the most part. However, the last couple of nights I have been up a bit later than I would like and that has resulted in me being the LATE one.
Not this morning, I beat Jeremy into the office.
I was exhausted this weekend and spent a good chunk of it napping. Gina had a cold a few days ago, I think I might have caught that bug too. I tend to get wiped out when I have a cold. But a weekend of rest seemed to help immensely.
Well, I have a packed day of conference calls and meetings.
So I best get back to finishing up this paperwork before others start pouring into the office.
Laterz
Monday, December 10. 2007
Not that we were in any formal contest or anything. But for some reason I always figured that I would be the first one of the two of us to open our own business.
Below is the text that accompanied this digi-pic I received today.
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Hello one, Hello all!
The bike shop I'm opening with 5 awesome bike mechanics (pictured from left to right, back row: Clintron, TimTim, middle: Sauce, front: Ian, rdb, Aaron) is opening this week! I know for some of you this is the first you've heard of it, surprise! We've been working hard to get the shop together and if you're in the area, would love to see you at the opening party on December 14, and at our shop opening day on December 15 (details below). For all my friends out of town, this is what I'm up to!
Opening this Saturday, December15th. A Better Cycle specializes in used bicycle sales and repair, retail of new and used parts and locally made biking accessories.
Our opening party is December 14th at the Hawthorne Theater (SE Hawthorne St at 39th) from 7:30 p.m. until close.
A Better Cycle, L.L.C. is located at 2324 SE Division Ste B. Our hours are Monday through Saturday 8 a.m. - 8 p.m. and Sundays from 10 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Love,
Rachel db
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Back to the grind.
Laterz
(ben db)
Sunday, December 9. 2007
The X-mas party in Longview was pretty fun.
Gina and I drove home this morning. We stopped in Tyler and ate @ Rudy's BBQ. I am pretty sure the brisket and the turkey were from yesterday. However, the ribs were fresh and delicious. The cream corn tasted like it was a little stale and they apparently prepared the potato salad differently.
I finished listening to "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" audio book. It was very informative. I was aware of much of what Steven did in between being at Apple and then returning to Apple. However, I was not aware of the time frames. I was under the impression that he had founded NeXT Computers shortly before returning to Apple, rather than right after being ousted from Apple.
I also only became aware of Jobs' ownership of Pixar during the recent acquisition by Disney. Apparently, he had owned it for quite some time.
Anyway, I need to do a bit of laundry and put away clean clothes.
Laterz
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