welcome to my blog! blog, blog, blog. there was a time when i thought that word sounded ridiculous and lame. years later, still do, but now everyone uses it. oh well.
this is basically my non-professional site. just go to www.danemmons.com if you want to see my ministry site. i made this blog so i'd have a place to put silly stuff or express myself in a more unprofessional way. or bore my readers to sleep with geek talk about linux and programming. or whatever. |
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another case of tripping over the 'obvious' while coding
1.24.2011
So I'm working on learning Android app development, which is pretty enjoyable overall. finally got a WebView to load local files, after finding lots of advice online that didn't work, simply by putting the files in the package's /assets folder, and accessing them as an url at "file:///android_asset/myfile.html". that wasn't the obvious - in fact it was anything but obvious, even when googled. the obvious was the reason my test file, which used javascript to pull random strings out of an array, would not work properly in android or chrome, while it worked in firefox. I eventually found that it was treating one of my arrays as a string, causing name.length to report incorrectly, and name[n] to evaluate to a single character. yep, the array was called 'name' - and that was the problem! apparently 'name' is a reserved word in webkit. well, now i know.
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How to reopen a closed Spring Roo project
12.28.2010
This is the sort of thing they expect you to understand without having to mention it in tutorials, but since I had to google it and failed to find any mention, this is how to reopen a Roo project if you've closed Roo: at a command line, cd to the project's directory (the one with pom.xml in it) and type roo. yes, that's all. I can't believe I spent about an hour trying to figure this out! I guess my wife is right, I really have no common sense - but what's obvious to one person might not be to another.
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Battle of the British Dinosaur Park Administrators
11.26.2010
So, my son is a dinosaur fanatic. "Daddy! Saur!" is what I hear each time I get near my computer - Roldan wants to watch Prehistoric Park. This is the show of choice because the CGI dinosaurs aren't that bad, and there's no violence or gore - no humans get eaten at all. Just a good mix of fantasy and education. You simply can't resist comparing it to Jurassic Park, though. So here's a breakdown of the performance of the two parks' administrators.
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John Hammond |
Nigel Marvin |
| Nationality: |
British |
British |
| Previous occupation: |
Venture capitalist, flea circus operator |
Zoologist and 'wildlife adventurer' |
| Park name: |
Jurassic Park |
Prehistoric Park |
| Dinosaur Acquisition Method: |
Genetics - blood acquired from mosquitos in amber, DNA sequenced and gaps filled with DNA from other animals, notably frogs - therefore no guarantee of genetic authenticity |
Time Portals - specimens rescued from extinction events, genetically pure and born and raised in the wild in their own time. |
| Dinosaur species acquired: |
Tyrannosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Dilophosaurus, Velociraptor, Gallimimus, Triceratops, Hadrosaurs, and Compsognathus are prominent in the first movie, with Spinosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Pachycephalosaurus are seen in sequels, and Carnotaurus is present only in the second book |
Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, Ornithomimus, Microraptor, Titanosaurs, and a stowaway Troodon are acquired for the park through the time portal, as well as various non-dinosaurian creatures. |
| Breeding program: |
Dinosaurs bred to be all female to prevent 'unauthorized breeding', but ultimately this fails when some animals with frog DNA begin to switch into males (although parthenogenesis would have made more sense) |
Breeding program is a long-term goal, with initial success among the Ornithomimus, and large enough populations of Microraptor and some form of Titanosaur |
| Fence Construction: |
Concrete and electrified steel, often with moats. All fences fail due to power outage during a storm |
Primarily wood. Occasional failures due to clumsy Titanosaurs, and one incident with a Tyrannosaur |
| Fatalities: |
5 in the first movie, more in the second and third - and in the book, many more, including John Hammond himself. Several serious injuries |
0 fatalities, and the extent of injuries is one cameraman scratched by a small Mei Lung |
| Collateral damage outside the park: |
Tyrannosaur escapes and trashes San Diego |
No incidents, even with the consequences of time travel - not even a minor effect is seen of their many forays into prehistory |
| Administrator involvement: |
Even during crisis, Hammond stays in a bunker and hides while a paleontologist rescues his grandchildren. |
leads by example, always doing the difficult or dangerous tasks himself, even using himself as live bait in order to lure extinct creatures through the portal and into the park |
| Known outcome: |
Failure, due to convergence of several factors, including natural disaster and industrial espionage which led to the escape of most animals and destruction of control mechanisms. Isla Nublar is fire-bombed by the Costa Rican government to destroy the dinosaurs, but a second island is later discovered and left as a preserve. InGen Corporation goes bankrupt. |
Success, with no serious incidents and a wide variety of animals saved from extinction at the end of the season. |
While I have read Jurassic Park 8 times, The Lost World at least twice, and the films are some of my favorites as well, John Hammond gets pwned in the comparison. This of course is mostly because Jurassic Park was written to be a warning of what the consequences could be when modern technology is used irresponsibly, and Prehistoric Park is a BBC extension of Walking With Dinosaurs meant to be educational and fun. But you know which park you would want to work at, I bet!
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Web Hosting Drama
11.12.2010
I'm sure no one has been concerned about the lack of blog posts, but I'd like to think someone noticed my main site stagnating for more than a month. This is because of a problem with my web hosting provider. To make a long story short, I've dumped them. You can only leave a trouble ticket unanswered for a small number of weeks before it becomes unacceptable, haha. They lost a customer of 7 years. My new web host is IX Web Hosting, on the recommendation of a friend, and they have already impressed me with their quick and knowledgeable service. This is also saving me about half of my yearly expense maintaining my site. So right now I'm just finishing up the transfer and adjustment of my site code to run properly on the new machine, and then I'll finally be back to updating www.danemmons.com. What a relief. Now, to hunt down the remaining bugs in my RSS feed generator...
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Valve's vote
6.17.2010
While searching for something else I stumbled upon this article today and found it pretty entertaining. It's a few months old and to sum it up, it's a reaction to the then-news of Valve's announcement that its Steam Client and its flagship games (Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, etc.) would be ported to the Mac. The article basically made a case that it is time for Valve to make a Linux version of Steam. The comments were the best part, as almost all of them were detractors giving their opinions on why big game companies will never take Linux seriously and it will never have any good games. This was entertaining because I already know Valve's opinion - the day they released the promised Mac version, they officially announced a Linux version was on its way! Maybe this is finally the Year Of The Linux Desktop?
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in my blog
6.11.2010
In my blog I feel safe
No one cares about my ways
In my blog where I belong
No one sees me type this song
In... my... blo-o-oggg!
This got stuck in my head today and I really couldn't figure out why. Weezer never gets old, but my blog does. I mean, I sometimes forget I even have one. Hopefully, writing it out will make it go away, in an "eat the pie, white man from town!" kind of way. great. that movie better not get stuck in my head now. i feel sorry for anyone who recognizes the quote.
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which is strange since i don't 5p33k like one
1.27.2010
I was just thinking that although I don't seem to look like any celebrities at all, people do compare my voice pretty consistently with that of Matthew Broderick. I'm told it's a compliment, but I never was sure. But then I thought about Broderick's early career - the kid uber-hacker in War Games, and Ferris Bueller, who happens to be able to hack his school's computer as well. I'm no cyber criminal, but as a sysadmin I do have an interest in security. I also identify well with the original hacker subculture; the Unix programmers like Eric S. Raymond who were around before the word became associated with crime and vandalism and instead denoted skill and a love of code. I don't know, I guess you could do worse than sounding like Matthew Broderick - sure beats looking like Richard M. Stallman, 'cause beards are itchy.
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