Archive for Computers
April 23, 2007 at 3:27 am · Filed under Computers, Mundane
Leaving Vancouver. So tired, so full, so…I can’t feel the difference. I am going through the motions of my relationship with flying to Japan. This is the third time now. Only three times but it already feels regular. Sitting on a stool at a bar in the gate area cafeteria. A couple is sitting at the other end and when the guy taps the metal foot rest bar the vibrations travel to my end and remind me that other people are around me.
I’ve been wishing for things to find some stability. Wishing to remind myself of responsibility and what I need to do to…keep living? And live happy? But wishing for what I don’t have but want…I can’t do that. Ok I’d be lying if I said I never ever ever did that but really…I have so much. Vancouver reminds me of that. The flowers and the trees and the greenness remind me. The large houses and bright colours remind me. The encounters with people asking for money remind me. The choice…the choice I can slip into feeling like I need more and feeling unhappy for what I have but now, at this point I am reminded that I am lucky to have the choice.
A monitor hanging over the cafeteria area is showing a hockey game. Brought to us with Microsoft technology. It looks like an application on the computer showing the game is not responding. I wonder how long it has been like that and when someone will notice it and who that is and if they will worry about fixing it or if it is just routine. These moments of error and unresponsiveness are strange because had that blue/white/and grey box not been there, I would not have known that the hockey video was running on Windows. I would have glanced at that monitor and thought “a tv showing hockey”. But now I know which operating system and I wonder what other processes are currently running, what applications are installed, and what information is stored be it something important or something like web browsing history to find help on that problem causing an unresponsive program. The possibilities, the story behind the “thing” showing this hockey game has expanded. It is another world like the world I have on waffles here but full of foreign things and with its own purpose and history YET…it is built with familiar structure and interface.
When in my daily life am I an unresponsive program?
Across from me is a duty free hops with perfume and purses and watches and it’s funny how those products are valuable and the brands are up there but being in the duty free shop…they seem so cheap to me. Not cheap money-wise and hey! let’s go buy some but…tacky cheap. Why? When did I establish this idea? I’m always in airports alone so it is not from anyone else.
Well…it is time for me to wander somewhere else.
February 28, 2007 at 2:33 pm · Filed under Computers
I have been working away at a problem related to japanese strings in a database, character encoding, and java servlets for the past week. Not continuously but the problem has resulted in an unacceptable amount of my time being consumed and even some emotional bruising (from the java sun forum). Basically, I was getting a utf-8 encoded string from the database and I wanted my servlet to return an html or xml page, also encoded in utf-8, containing the string. I probed my program at every step to determine when the data I was getting from the database (a byte array of utf-8 character values) was turning into “???????……”. Could not figure it out until just now. Even though I had this set:
res.setContentType(”text/html; charset=utf-8″);
res.setCharacterEncoding(”utf-8″);
I also needed to specify utf-8 encoding when I made my printwriter (how the html or xml page strings are sent out):
PrintWriter pw = new PrintWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(res.getOutputStream(), “UTF-8″));
yeah…that last little bit there…, “UTF-8″ was all I needed.
I am sooooo happy that I finally figured out what I was missing but…really…all of this time. It is things like this that make me think about my life on the time/production/satisfaction scales. If I were indexed I would draw some nice little diagram resulting from these reflections but…time to move onto other things (like double checking that things I think work now are *actually* working).
February 22, 2007 at 2:27 pm · Filed under Computers, I'm a Nerd, Work
Today - I used a hex editor for the first time.
K so I’ve had to deal with hex before but this is like…I used a hex editor.
If you spend a lot of time on computers or programming this might be a fairly insignificant event for you but for me - there is some strangeness to it.
Luckily it is helping me find answers. I am battling with character encodings in Java. I have to convert text (possibly Japanese) encoded in iso-2022-jp to utf-8 and it is only half working. Some characters (mostly hiragana but a few kanji) are showing up as ???. I’ve been able to figure out that in my program, characters are been properly converted from iso-2022-jp to their Unicode values. So it is a problem when going from Unicode to utf-8.
I’m sure this was really interesting for you all…
Oh! Last night after work I missed a train by a few seconds and in my frustration I bought this strange hot sweet red bean beverage from the station vending machine. I can’t remember the name but I will try to post a picture tomorrow. It was nice at the time but on reflection I don’t know if it is necessarily good to consume habitually.
February 6, 2007 at 10:37 am · Filed under Computers, Things Found Online
In case you didn’t catch this one: Mario Brothers 3 theme for Firefox. It is rocking my day. My favorite part - pipes as scrollbars. I can’t stop scrolling. Then to stop loading a page - the statue dude…genius! Now are there sounds for this too? Ooo and I just remembered that I don’t have all my toolbar items up. Added a koopa and fuzzy beetle (is that what they are called…can’t remember).
If you try it, make sure you orientate yourself with the back button (unless you are one of those key command people)…Mario running to the left. I did a google image search on spatula at work thinking it would be relatively harmless and it was mostly harmless but I didn’t want to stay there for long. Lost a few seconds trying to find the back button.
October 11, 2006 at 2:06 pm · Filed under Computers
I was going through the motions of updating software and when EULA time came I hit the Agree button but for some reason I imagined an “Agree to Disagree” button. This gave me a laugh followed by disappointment because the button was not actually there. I went on to think of some humorous situation in an application that could use an “Agree to Disagree” button but came up with nothing.
If you can make me an “Agree to Disagree” scenario - some small program I can have on my computer and then click on Agree to Disagree to my heart’s content, I will love you.
May 30, 2006 at 6:03 pm · Filed under Computers
End of the day…I am very happy about many things MacBook but have a few worries. Well…two. The first is the heat problem. In search for comments on my other issue, I have found sooo many comments on the new MacBooks overheating. Something to do with thermal paste. Though maybe not to do with thermal paste. I had the notebook running for a few hours and yes, it was getting quite hot. Though I wonder if it was hotter than my Powerbook. Hmm, something of possible concern.
The second worry is that the cd drive is accepting some discs but not all. It spins a little, hardly at all, and then spits the disc out. A blank cd was alright, so was the Mac OS X Office cd…but not my virus software cd or the Windows XP installation cd…otherwise, this post would have been about how I achieved dual booting. I am a little sad now because of this. Wondering if we should send it back or if I should try another XP cd or just screw Windows and use it as it is with a sometimes working cd drive. I guess I should send it back…oh I am horrible at returns.
May 30, 2006 at 1:15 pm · Filed under Computers
I am not obsessed but this is so cool so I have to share. The power cable - MacBook attachment/port uses a magnet to keep the power cable firmly plugged in.
May 30, 2006 at 11:46 am · Filed under Computers
About the MacBook…so this is the 4th brand spanking new Apple product box that I have opened up and I now know about the Apple smell. It`s funny because it reminds me of last summer in Vancouver. I wish I could buy NewMacSmell room freshener.
February 6, 2006 at 10:41 pm · Filed under Computers
Sweet! So how do I set this up?
Actually…one thing with Google Talk that I find weird is its automatic insertion of people in your contact list that you communicate with some amount. Now the funny thing is, all the people that have been added to my Google Talk list are people who I would in fact enjoy having on my contact list.
So I’m wondering…does Google know who I like and don’t like?
The unfortunate thing about Google doing the adding is that it takes away from the joyful experience of seeing that somebody has added you to their contact list.
I don’t have much else to say. Things are going and coming. Today I tried to get into my apartment building with my FOB. It didn’t work. I also killed two spiders this morning. One was a little too juicy for me.
I am looking forward to a visit from my mom and sister in two weeks, as well as Kim’s visit in March. It’s all keeping me in good check with apartment cleanliness. Someday I’ll feel that it is clean enough for the public eye (yeah I’m a little neurotic about it) and I’ll have you all over for drinks…someday.
Google.
Two hundred years from now people or alien’s will study our history and determine the driving forces behind our advancements (or deteriorations) and they will find this word: Google.
Imagine calling your kid that.
January 2, 2006 at 6:20 pm · Filed under Computers
Last night in Regina…meeting Jemma and her ‘rents at Atlantis Coffee in downtown coffee…off to O’Hanlons later. There is free wifi here (I think) and that is cool. There’s not enough wifi in Regina yet. Had to share.
September 6, 2005 at 11:53 pm · Filed under Computers, Reflection
Is it a full moon tonight? I’m too preoccupied with my own little thoughts to look outside. I already tried to fall asleep once tonight but no luck. Heard some guy out in the alley, drunk, hiccup-ing and hacking. Perfect touch to my existing “nervous twitch”. Every time my hair brushes my neck or forehead I think it’s a spider. This causes me to thrash around under my blankets, sit up, turn on the light, and give all my pillows the once over.
But really. I was taking the bus home from the lab tonight and I saw a police drunk tank pulled over near a star bucks. They were talking to a distinctive looking fellow sitting on the curb whom I recognize from around campus and the neighborhood. He’s asked me for money several times and often I give him money. He makes me laugh, he says “god bless you”. The first time I was approached by him I was taken by surprised so I must have given him quite the blank look. He laughed at me and said, “hey, I know I’ve got quite the mug but you are not going to get a kiss from me”.
The last time I had seen this guy (before tonight), was as I was walking out the liquor store. It was hard not to feel some frustration that the money he said was for medication was going to booze. Sure, I was walking out of there with a good bottle of wine. But I’ve turned down drinks many a time in favour of paying for my rent, or for food or tuition. Still, I don’t know his story. Maybe that is all he has.
It’s hard. It’s mixed. It’s scary.
You want to be a good person, be generous, be helpful. On the other hand you have to question where your help is going.
Then I think - man, am I ever lucky to have all I do.
On a technical note, the Pancakes transplant did not go as smoothly as planned. The actual delivery was ok, but there were several setbacks during the operation, some of which seemed fatal during their moment. Though I think it was a success. I will be in tomorrow for a followup.
September 6, 2005 at 6:51 am · Filed under Computers
The long weekend is over and I am starting this month new and fresh. Sarah left this morning at 4:45am. I had woken up before her at 4am and have not been able to get back to sleep since, but I’m sure I’ll be able to sleep in a nap before heading off to the lab.
Today is the day that I take my PC to school as the machine there just ain’t cutting it for me. That and I don’t like have school PC + home PC + Mac laptop. I feel spread out and scattered. I’m reducing, reformatting and restructuring today. This requires burning cds full of data, files, bits. I hate doing this. I feel like I will lose everything.
I will have to give my PC a name when it gets to the lab, an identity among all the other computers there. I’m choosing “Pancakes”. Breakfast is my favorite meal so all my devices get named after early morning dishes.
Mmm…we went to Whistler on Sunday, hoping to get some good hiking in but it was rainy and cold. It did brighten up later in the day so we managed to get an hour long “nature walk” in. I’ll have to go back though. I want to go on a ZipTrek tour :)
July 29, 2005 at 11:04 pm · Filed under Computers, Mundane, Work
maybe even more
spent the time trying to figure out why a simple piece of java was not compiling. It could not revolve the most rudimentry classes of the JDBC. I just found my problem…just now…laying in my bed because I couldn’t fall asleep before solving it. After all the playing around with classpaths and exploring the directory structure of the Java SDK on a Mac I realized that instead of “import java.sql.*;” I had written “import javax.sql.*;”.
grrr.
June 13, 2005 at 8:51 am · Filed under Computers, Words
I didn’t think the new Dashboard for Mac OSX Tiger was THAT cool. It seemed okay. But I started liking it a little and now that I have found out that you can download extra widgets it’s just the greatest thing in the world. Like the Wikipedia widget?? Sweet!!
I just downloaded the magnetic poetry widget. It’s pretty awesome although I was disappointed that when I added it to my dashboard, it didn’t toss 200-300 words onto my screen. You have to add words one at a time - the results being unpredictable. I decided to not allow myself to delete the words they give. I selected a number and then made my first dashboard poem:
steam-engine zigzag
crash station
advise eyes
yours suit sounds
June 3, 2005 at 4:36 pm · Filed under Computers, Reflection
Was this too impulsive? Once in a while I make decisions that feel as though they are a little impulsive - but they usually turn out to be good ones. I’m hoping the same here as I type my first blog entry from this PowerBook. I’ve made the shift from PC to Mac and feel like a tag along but isn’t that what all Mac users want? People to join the tribe?
It feels quite nice. The keys, the font I am looking at, the movement in and out of applications. Much to learn though. I am in quite the foreign land.
I can’t wait to get a sleeve. Something sleek and compact, letting me throw my notebook into the backpack and take it for a bikeride. I can’t wait to test the batteries, hoping that they will last longer than the previous Waffles 1.5 hours.
Am I sad that Waffles I is gone? No not really. This is the new Waffles - just reincarnated.
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