Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at April 29th, 2004

With many apologies to Primus (whose song lyrics I just butchered), I suspect that Chuck E. Cheese may be closer to Hell than the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles).

Abby and Becca’s cousin Brandon had a birthday. Brandon’s mother decided to do something special for Brandon and invited the boys of his Kindergarten class plus Abby and Becca.

Abby and Becca spent the first half hour there clinging to my leg. Meanwhile, roughly a zillion (at least) large televisions showed Chuck E. Cheese singing rap versions of Beatles songs and dancing.

The videos also featured a grab bag of children’s characters ranging from muppets (I think) to Veggie Tales to what may have been the new Blues Clues guy.

I am leaving out the toys/attractions. These included a lot of things that moved if you put in a token (horses, cars, and a carousel), video games, various games in which you whack things with mallets, and a massive collection of tunnels with a slide that reminded me of nothing more than a habitrail.

In the 1970’s, habitrails were a collection of tunnels connected to hamster cages.

To get a feel for being there, imagine the most active children from your childhood, put them in one room, and imagine that room is full of pizza, toys and cake. Imagine that they are all running to different toys at the same time, sometimes arguing over who gets the toy. The voice of a singing rodent pervades the room.

You may also imagine that your child spilled pop all over the kid sitting next to her.

At this point you may be wondering if there’s a private room for frazzled parents. Maybe it has soft music, possibly a fountain, low light and it most definitely has sound-proofed walls.

There is no such room. On the bright side, they do sell beer.

Posted by Jim at April 26th, 2004

We went to a Thai restaurant with my parents on Friday. Abby and Rebecca actually ate some chicken and a bit of rice there. Not a lot, mind you, but some.

They were much more enthusiastic about it on Sunday night in the form of leftovers. Abby at one point held out some sticky rice on a fork at Rebecca saying “Look, I feed Becca Thai food.”

Any enthusiasm they may have had did not last till today though.

When I asked Abby if she wanted Thai food (I’ve been meaning to make Phuket Chicken), she made a face. A little later she walked up to me and said, “I want food, Daddy. Not Thai food. I want food.”

Posted by Jim at April 23rd, 2004

Much to my amusement, I’ve finally found a decent cd burning program for Windows XP that doesn’t cause you to fork out any money. It is called burnatonce.

Most other decent cd-burning programs are shareware that ceases to work after 30 days. The ones (for XP anyway) that aren’t shareware don’t seem to work well at all. I once tried one called “Deep Burner” that (despite my best efforts) simply would not burn an iso. I have 3 additions to my coaster collection that demonstrate its many problems.

The cd burning abilities of XP itself do not include burning images, just data.

That all being said, here’s the amusing thing about burnatonce–it’s just a gui for gpl’ed cd burning tools.

The gui itself isn’t gpl’ed, mind you, but I don’t really care. Just being able to use a decent burning tool that won’t nag me endlessly makes me very happy.

And thanks to burnatonce, I’ll be installing FreeBSD on my (soon to be former) Linux box in the next couple days. With any luck I’ll be running Open Office in English soon…

Posted by Jim at April 21st, 2004

With our regularly scheduled season of endless campaigning upon us, I’ve been thinking a lot about politics.

Our political system currently centers around two groups not mentioned in the Constitution–Republicans and Democrats. While other democracies seem to have many more political parties (including communists, socialists, and the Greens), only two parties really matter in the United States. Sure, we have communists, socialists and even some rather odd parties (for example: the Transcendental Meditation party…), but it’s not as if any third party has much of a political presence.

By contrast, third (and fouth, fifth, and sixth…) parties actually matter outside of the United States.

A two party system wasn’t inevitable or even necessarily wanted by all of the United States’ founders. George Washington opposed political parties in general. He seemed to want people in government to represent the interests of the people that elected them without organizing into groups.

Personally, I vary between thinking that a two party system is a good thing (for political stability, for example) or a bad thing (legislation can become a tool in the process of increasing a party’s power rather than doing good for the country).

I hope people reading this blog wil pardon me while I think aloud about it every so often over the next few days (or months…).

Posted by Jim at April 20th, 2004

The semester’s over for me as of yesterday. If anyone’s still reading this blog, they’ve doubtless noticed that the number of updates last week could be counted on one finger.

The reason for that goes as follows: A distinct need to finish a project that constitutes 60% of my grade.

Granted, the project wasn’t all programming. It also included a number of papers describing what the project was, what the architecture was, and what we were going to do about issues such as security and so on.

I finished the project half an hour before it was due. It was a group project and my partner had put most of the infrastructure in place and I was to finish the gui. I did this–mostly.

I had written the code necessary to make the gui work when I suddenly realized that it still wasn’t working.

The project was a file sharing program, but when I pressed the button that allowed me to download a file, I just got errors. The first was a casting error (when you program in Java, you find yourself casting a lot). The next one was more insidious.

The program only allowed you to download files that had been created by Java’s ObjectOutputStream–not mp3’s, text, or anything you might actually want.

So, rather than doing touch up work on the gui, I ended up spending most of Monday trying to figure out what was wrong i.e. what would give you an “invalid stream header” error.

Eventually I ended up turning the contents of files into one gigantic array of bytes, attaching them to a serialized packet and sending that across the net.

Thus, despite the fact that the gui still sucks, the project at least works. Bearing in mind that this wasn’t a class in gui design and it was a class in distributed programming, I imagine that I did something more important for the project.

That being said, the gui still has very big and very ugly buttons that you must see to believe.

Posted by Jim at April 12th, 2004

My workplace got broken into last week.

The guy apparently dumped out the contents of one of our boxes and put stuff into the box, grabbing small things that he could carry away. I’m going to guess that it was a hurried and not particularly well planned robbery because of what he took and how it was taken.

Stolen items: a radio, a couple pda’s, a postage scale that was the same shape as a laptop, and somewhere around $50 in cash (mostly change).

Moved: The television. It was taken off its stand and then apparently discarded because of its weight.

Damage: GRACE’s business manager’s file cabinet. It had been locked. Clearly the adding machine identified it as our office’s financial center.

Mysteriously Untouched: Many things. There were a number of small items (some of them within the broken file cabinet) that would have caused us great financial pain if stolen. Apparently the thief did not take the time to be thorough–not that I have any complaints with that.

An example of the craziness of this break-in: Our business manager had 37 cents in a small envelope tacked to his memo board. The envelope was ripped open, the money taken. By contrast, one person’s unlocked drawer contained a surprising amount of cash. This was untouched.

It is likely that the thief was hiding in the building while people were here. Only the front door is open and it only stays open till 5pm. The janitor reported noticing that the speakers of a radio were there, but the main box of the radio was missing. By the time we came in the next morning, the speakers were also gone.

One of my co-workers was actually working late that night. It’s a given that she was alone with this guy and had no idea.

So far there is no word about whether the police caught the person. I’m guessing they haven’t, but I’m told they did get some good fingerprints off the television.

My personal theory is that it’s probably someone the office helped (or turned away). Normal people would not think of a couple cash-strapped non-profits as great places to rob. By contrast, someone a church had sent to GRACE or ACCESS for financial assistance might well view us as a place full of cash. ACCESS has been robbed before by a person in exactly that situation.

Posted by Jim at April 10th, 2004

I got a little confused when I initially saw the headline of the following article US Forces Attacked in Baghdad, Offer Falluja Truce, somehow managing to replace the word “Truce” with “Juice” in my head.

I imagine I must be thirsty. I can’t imagine what Falluja Juice would actually be like.

Posted by Jim at April 10th, 2004

I’ve really enjoyed the various movies in which Christopher Guest and others do a mock documentary. Examples: A Mighty Wind, Waiting for Guffman, and Best in Show. Before any of these came This is Spinal Tap which included many of the same people as the above mentioned films doing more or less the same sort of thing. The same sort of thing being almost entirely improvised, character-based humor.

I was looking through Amazon recently and ran across a review for “This is Spinal Tap” that simply floored me. Either the writer is rather unaware and thinks that Spinal Tap was actually a real band or he’s getting into the act himself and pretending that they’re real. If the latter, I don’t find his review funny enough to justify him going to the bother. If the former…

Wow.

Read it for yourself (you’ll have to scroll down a bit). The idea that he really doesn’t know that it’s a fake documentary is strengthened when you notice his comments on other movies. For example, he gives On the Waterfront two stars because it’s not colorized. In his view, all black and white movies should be colorized. Mac and Me by contrast, gets five stars.

Posted by Jim at April 8th, 2004

Over the last two weeks, I’ve made four meals that involved Thai food. I’ve been curious about it and Kristen bought me a Thai cookbook in February, but I hadn’t really thought much about it till recently.

Some observations:

1. Thai food seems to make a lot of use of lemon, lime, ginger and coconut. Almost all the food I’ve made so far contained at least 3 of those.

2. Green curry paste burns. Early this week, I made a beef curry. It required 4 tablespoons of green curry paste. Though it was great stuff (both Kristen and I liked it), it was closer to inedible than it ought to have been. I checked the cookbook later to see if I might have put it too much. I didn’t. I’m currently thinking that people in Thailand like their food much like people in India do–burning hot. The Thai use more fish sauce though.

3. As for nam pla (fish sauce), I am currently meditating on various brands. I most recently bought fish sauce from the local grocery store. It looks very much like ethnic food packaged for US use. It’s kind of reddish in color, but slightly transparent.

The last time I bought fish sauce was at Saigon Market, a local Vietnamese grocery. That sauce was obviously shipped straight from Vietnam. It was silver and black in color–similar in color to the rotting fish that lie on the beach of my hometown most summers.

I can’t help but wonder which is more authentic, but bearing in mind that the flavor seems the same, it’s a bit of a moot point.

4. Here’s something I’ve never had to do before: brown dry rice in frying pan, grind it up in a coffee grinder and mix the resulting powder into ground beef. It turned out just fine, but I’d never have come up with that myself.

I may write more about Thai food when I’ve had time to cook more of it. We’ll see. I’ve also got a mostly unread Japanese cookbook I’m tempted to actually use.

Posted by Jim at April 6th, 2004

I’ve just hit something that irritates me greatly.

When I installed Mandrake Linux on my pc, I found that Open Office mysteriously didn’t work. Tonight, for the first time, I tried to solve this problem. I uninstalled and then reinstalled Open Office. Now Open Office works. Unfortunately, it has one problem. It is not in English. It is instead in Catalan, a dialect of Spanish.

I’d do something about it, but when I try to remove the Catalan module, it informs me that I’ll have to uninstall Open Office as a whole. I’ve been searching for the English module, but I can’t find it.

I’ve tried to go into the help files, but they have not been installed. The configuration menus, however, are of no help. They are all in Catalan.

I’m getting tempted to uninstall Open Office and then download and install Open Office directly from the project website. This irritates me on aesthetic grounds, however. Mandrake has a package system and I’d prefer to use it, if possible.

If I’ve got to screw around with the details of this supposedly “easy” distribution too much more, I will probably switch to Freebsd. With that, I’ll at least be assuming the need for configuration and having to put up with some crap won’t annoy me quite so much.