PROGRAMMING : Launchbar - SlickRun

Ok the closest thing I have found to Launchbar is SlickRun, and it is pretty slick. You start typing a key word and it completes it for you when you hit enter, running that particular command. You can get it to run programs (with command line parameters and working directories) or just open a website.
I have set it up to start terminal sessions to particular machines, open a browser to my internet email page, start mail and so on.
Oh, and to invoke it you just hit Windows-Q (Which wouldn't work so well on Mac...)

LIFE : So far this week

Went and got my bike back from Rotorua on the weekend, which was a fantastic ride. The mechanic told me that basically my fuse had blown, he'd replaced it, and hadn't had any problem with it since then.
Went out that evening with Jenn to her school friend's going away dinner. That was OK, seemed like pretty cool people. Jenn asked me to not come to her 'farewell get together', which was fair enough; she wanted to concentrate on catching up with her multitudes of friends without having me (someone she's known for 2 months) distracting things. One of those situations where you understand someone's motives, but the understanding doesn't mean you _like_ it. So I just moped around the house in a mood instead :)
Monday I rode to work, only to have my bike die again (thank god it didn't do this on the way back from Rotorua!) at Hill Road. So I had to have a big lunch break to haul the bike into a truck that we borrowed, drive to Takapuna (40kms away) and drive back - thanks Kev for man handling the bike with me!!
So I had to catch the train home, but couldn't be bothered so got Aaron to drop me off, which meant I didn't get home until 9!!
The car is still in the mechanic, the bike hasn't been looked at, and so trains are my only transport now.
Ooooh I have now had a number of enquiries about the buggy, and they all know IO am asking 7k for it so things are looking pretty good on that front.
Finally: I have my car full licence test tomorrow at 1:45. I am not looking forward to it. I can do most things ok except a) parking and b) merging (I am a little to abrupt...)
Wish me luck.

IMPRO : Commedia Dell'Arte

Had the second of two workshops on CDA last night, again really enjoyed it. The only thing about doing good workshops on stuff like that is it makes me realise the difference between where I see myself as a performer and sort of performer I would respect and pay money to see - and believe me there is a long way to go!
I suppose all endeavours in life are about seeking improvement - and once you don't find yourself improving you stop and move onto something else. Still, sitting in the workshop last night I understood, logically, that what is sought after in this kind of acting (all acting?) is to expose yourself, your inner feelings, to the nth degree. To lose yourself in the character and become open to the audience. And I logically understood this _as_I_was_performing_... and no you can't be open and so on while your brain is thinking "I should be open" :-)

PROGRAMMING : Paradigm shift

There is an excellent article over at o'reillys about a 'paradigm shift' brought about by open source software.
It talks about things like the highly propreitery way that Amazon uses OS software, but doesn't have to 'give anything back' because it's not selling the software.
It also talks about how the big sites are leveraging their users to make their sites more useful. This is very 'emergent behaviour' stuff, and for me is typified by the way Slashdot works (though they weren't mentioned in the article, I guess they don't make money?)
I think I'll have to read it again to appreciate the paradigm shift, at the moment I am at that stage where I can see what he's talking about, but don't actually appreciate it.

LIFE : Adventure Motorcycling

Murray asked me to go ride round India with him last year and, while he's piked, I am very excited about this proposition. I will do an adventure motorcycle ride, probably across South America (especially after seeing 'Motorcycle Diaries' on the 9th of July).
So I bought myself a book, Adventure Motorcycling Handbook, which is bloody good and is getting me more and more excited about the idea. A list of other books can be found here.
So who's going to come with me?

LIFE : I got my motorcycle licence!

Had a complete arsehole of a tester dude, but I got it anyway. Anything I said the guy bit my head off... and he obviously didn't want to do the test, cos it only took 30 minutes instead of the required 50, and I only had to stop twice to relay the 'hazards' in the area.
I even stalled the bike (it's not my bike, had to borrow Cintia's (Thanks Cintia!!) which I haven't ridden until this morning)

And so, just for fun hello kitty meets call of cthulhu

IMPRO : Comedia Delate

Well, I never could spell...
On Tuesday we did the first of two workshops on CD with Lisa, a friend of Greg's who is a clown (Jean le Coq and so on - that must be a real suasage factory, I know so many people who've been ;).
She took us through a little history, and then some clown stuff like the 7 energy levels, and then we did some stuff with a Balinese full mask. Then we did some masks which were just face scrunches but we had to keep them that way for the whole scene - the 'cheat's' mask :) Finally we did some Pantaluni (and Pantaluna) stuff.
It was really interesting. Strange how one feels liberated when the mask goes on - you become posessed by the mask, or maybe just freed from your anxieties because the audience can't see 'you'.
I am really looking forward to next week

PHILOSOPHY : Eat the rat!

Jenn pointed me to feed the rat. I have to have a bit more of a read, and maybe get a copy of the book, but I am interested in their approach.
The only reservations I have about this stuff is that you can only do it if you happen to be a (relatively) wealth westerner. I don't see a slum kid from Brazil being able to endorse the philosophy. I'll have to read more.
I have a real problem with perceiving 'elitism' with things like cars (it would be patently ridiculous for all 6 billion people to have a car, but I should certainly be allowed to), computers (which are insanely polluting to make, but no one really thinks about that - why not create programs the whole world can use on their crappy recycled 486's?) and so on.
But, being the average human hypocrite, this doesn't mean i actually change my actions in the world (do I?)

LIFE : Not so bad today :)

Car took some starting, but then purred all the (cold) way to the Vinyl fixing place. The fixed vinyl looks great, really good job. Drove into Crichley's the mechanic, going 95 most of the way because the Vinyl didn't feel like it was going to fly off!
Put up the for sale signs, and already had one inquiry! Still, for 7k it's going to have to be someone who _really_ wants it

LIFE : AAAaaaargh

For F*ck's sake, what is it with me and vehicles?
I took my vinyl cover off my dune buggy on Monday so I could take it to get mended at the vinyl cover mending place. This was fine because I have a nice plastic cover that I use to cover the car and keep it from getting to wet or whatever.
Unless of course it is the squalliest day since I've been in NZ with gusts over 100km/h. In that case the plastic cover half blows off, and the rain goes straight into the cabin of the car.
Great. Thank you mr weather for choosing the one day that I don't have the top on my car to blow the cover off.

COMPUTERS : LaunchBar

Where is an equivilent of LaunchBar for Windows?
This is a cool program you bring up with the equivilent of Windows-Space keys, and then type some stuff, and then it'll do something for you. For example, you might type 'word', then it will prompt you to find out what you mean by that (open M$ word?) and once you say yes that's what you want to do, whenever you type 'word' again it will open word for you.
No searching through hierarchical menus or whatever. In fact even tog likes it!

In addition I've been thinking about "Yet another command line interpreter". The thing I dislike about command lines is their obsession with text :) I'd really like to be able to specify objects and types. That way the command _knows_ it's getting an int. It _knows_ which parameter is which without reinventing the wheel every time. And you can do cool things like have a file selector thing that works like the ant selector with inclusions and exclusions, and can be used as an iterator inside the command.
Instead of just a text string.
Does it sound like I've been around Java to much :)

(boy I'm prolific today :)

PROGRAMMING : Books

Jeez those guys at O'Reilly's know what they're doing. check out Hardcore Java. That kind of book tickles all my buttons, in a nerdy, java kind of way. Seems to be a collection of all those little articles I've read over the years about optimization and 'the right way to do things' and formed into one coherent mould.
Greg here at work has informed me that I should wait until i get to the UK before buying it as books are much cheaper there, so it may be some time before my book review :) (BTW, I find it really dissapointing how emoticons looks so crap in proportional fonts)
Another is better, faster, lighter java which looks like something I wouldn't mind having a glance at. HAving written a few light weight frameworks myself, I'd be interested, but I don't know what new this book would have to offer philosophy wise.
Java Extreme Programming Cookbook looks like a good reference for ant, junit, httpunit, cactus, tomcat and XDoclet. I don't have any written stuff on these, and for some reason I do _like_ to have written stuff.
It just goes on and on really :)
Finally there are the Martin Fowler books I have yet to purchase, especially "Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture" and "Refactoring to Patterns" (I have his refactoring and analysis books.)
Damn, I really love books. As I've mentioned before I probably lap them up a little too easily - Brendon always bitches and moans. I think there is probably a happy median.

PROGRAMMING : Desktop Java

Here's a wiki about developing decent java desktop apps. Is this even possible? jIDEA is supposed to be excellent, and Eclipse is OK (a bit slow).
I think the best thing for desktop would be for the JITs to be able to cache their 'compiled' class files in, for example, 'bin' files so that load times etc are considerably improved. But that's just me :)
Talking of desktops, the boys at Ars Technica have an indepth look at KDE

LIFE : Turkish Star Wars

not sure if the video or the review is more absurd. actually i do know - it's the video - Turkish Star Wars

LIFE : Of Rotorua and dead bikes

Wonderful weekend started with an enourmously wet Friday. I drove home, the motorcycle being even worse than the car in wet weather, but still felt unsafe as the torrential ran made anything more than a few meters away impossible to see.
I approached my turn off the motorway as the water ran down my legs from the gap between my bonnet and windscreen. I travelled up Church street and drove through a 5 meter long river of water across the street... the water sprayed up a good 4 meters into the air off my tires - it looked cool!! Then I hit another one. A slightly deeper one. In fact, I would surmise that it was about as deep as my car is low, because as passed through the water two great fountains of water sprayed up through the 'drain' holes in my buggy and completely soaked the interior of the car; me, my bag, the dashboard and the alarm.
The alarm goes off, as it always does when it gets wet. Thank god I got Kev to fix a switch so I can just turn the fucker off. Not very safe, but better than ripping the wire out!
Finally I get home, and reverse the car up the drive way. Into the fence. It being bloody dark I couldn't see a damn thing, so I now have a nice scratch in the back left fender. Damn.
Saturday I had my pre-test driving lesson - the guy seemed to think I did OK, but I have to say that I wasn't quite so impressed with my performance. That finished at 12, so I was too late to make it to Capoeira, so I wrecked myself in 40 minutes doing it in the living room. I then decided that I would ride to Rotorua to meet up with Jenn and the guys. I really wanted to see Ling's place on Lake Terawara, and I wanted to do a big bike ride (on my little bike - 125cc :) because I haven't done that before.
I left at 3, and was in Hamilton at 4:50, and finally made it to R. at 6:30. The last hour was all pretty much in pitch black night, which was a little scary, but not too bad. The only crappy thing was that travelling at 90 on 100km/h roads means you hold up the traffic - so you are constantly having to slow down even more to let them past.
Caught up with Jenn at 7 - she'd had an awesome final paddle before leaving NZ, finished off with a dip in a hot spring - and we rode to "Hamish's" place (I don't know Hamish at all) to watch the rugby. I mainly talked with Ol in the second half as it was incredibly boring as England go trounced.
4 hours later and we all headed off to Ling's place. Fortunately it was dry, so not too hazardous going around all those curving roads.
At Lings we all had a sit and chat and drink before going to bed. Ling had a mountain bike competition at 9 the next morning so he didn't want to go to bed too late.
During the night it started to piss down, which woke me up as I contemplated riding home in the rain. For 3.5 hours. Yeah.
Finally we got up, had yummy porridge with raisins, and headed off. I was going to stay with Oli and Cintia for lunch, but because of the weather thought I should probably get going - might get worse.
Jumped on the bike, rode off. About 400 meters on it bike fired a few times, which was a little worrying, and then i came to a give way sign. I put the clutch in to change down a gear, and let it out to find the engine had stopped. I thought it was just because the poor thing was cold, so I tried to start it again but got no response; the electrics were completely gone - no lights on the 'dashboard', no turning over of the engine, nothing.
Jenn and James (who is cool) caught up. James suggested roll starting the bike, so I did that and it started to turn the engine, but no sound of ignition, and there was no reaction to using the throttle - yep, the electrics were completely gone. (As Kev pointed out yesterday, it's probably just a fuse, but I wasn't really thinking straight).
So i left my bike there in a big huff figuring that there wasn't a lot of use paying lots of money to some guy to come out on a Sunday when it would probably take a few days for him to fix it anyway (my bike always seems to take a few days to get fixed - getting parts in etc). I found out this morning that I have of course locked the bike, so the mechanic couldn't actually pick it up last night... I have couriered it to them.
Got a lift back with the generous Jenn and James, but I don't think I was good company considering my mood. I did lighten up by the end though, and kept Jenn entertained while James slept.
Home finally by 2, then I lazed about until 6 when I went off to Maestro. it was a surprisingly good show considering we only had 6 or so people to play to, but I was really lacking in energy and, while I made it to the second round, wasn't really holding up my end.
Monday morning I walked to the Vinyl fixing place with the vinyl from my buggy, and then to the train station. SMSd Aaron to tell him where I was on the off chance he was close - which he was, so he came to pick me up. This was a little more complex than it sounds as we got the train stations mixed up and my phone refused to make any audible noise when he rang - so I had to keep ringing him back when I noticed that he'd left me a message!
Enough drivel. Hope you had as eventful a weekend, though not necessarily as damaging to your pocket :(

LIFE : Mr T Rocks

Greg has just pointed me to a sight with some pretty awesome video reviews, including a self help video by Mr T and a video to teach you dirty dancing.

Oh dear.

LIFE : MMO, like cocaine but without the benefits

I've been intrigued by the whole MMO movement, but can't really be bothered commiting myself to wasting the hours it takes to play. My mate Justin plays EverCrack, and thinks it's great.
Well I just read about a particular MMO that sounds like it might be worth having a look at - A tale in the desert. Based in ancient egypt it has not fighting, and places a real emphasis on socialising. For example, you have to trade person to person, and the tests you sit to increase your skills are voted upon by the community rather than simply being determined by the server.

PROGRAMMING : More on documentation

Burce Eckel writes

"The reason Extreme/Agile methods are so important is that they revolve around the idea of human communication: between the customer and the team, between the members of the team, and between current members of the team and future members of the team"

and if Buce says it, well...

Sometimes I wonder if I'm not a little too easily influenced. Brendon here at work throws his hands up in disgust at nearly every book/article he reads about analysis/design/programming, where as I seem to wholey embrace anything that comes across my desk. I am sure there is a happy median, I just have to remind myself to question the proposals I have just read.

And BTW, the Struts article linked below is pretty unimpressive. I guess I'll have to save up and get a real book :) It does look quite similar to what I've come up with, which is always reassuring.

PROGRAMMING : long trail to some IBM struts tips

After reading my morning dose of Why the luck stiff? (when is he going to finish his Poignant Guide to Ruby), I headed over to Erik's Linkblog to check out the daily links there. That was were I found a link to the Java Buzzwords site. I am hoping that this will alleviate some of my complaints about the current lack of fads that I mentioned in an earlier post.
Anyhoo, the Java buzzwords site has a link to an IBM resource detailing best practices in Struts development. I have been meaning to catch up with this framework - I believe it is very similar to my "Three Day Web Framework" (TDWF) and since it is an industry accepted framework, rather than a framework written by me in 3 days, I think it would be more useful to my Resume. (maybe I should find somewhere I can use Struts so I can do some ROD - Resume oriented development)

PROGRAMMING : documentation and UML

I'm currently trying to make some useful documentation for work as I am leaving in 3 weeks (from today!!). As I sit here typing away, and drawing up diagrams, I am trying to find the balance between putting in so much detail that it immediately becomes out of date, or so little detail that it proves to be useless to the person reading it.
I am a strong believer that programming is all about communication. At the obvious level it is about communicating your intent to the computer, but it is also about communicating your intent to fellow programmers through your code (and comments therein), through your documentation and, most effectively, through your verbal 'knowledge transfer.'
Of those three forms of communication, documentation is the least useful - it is the quickest to go out of date, and the least accurate. Consequently, in my documentation I attempt to convey the most information in the smallest space possible. If i feel it's starting to get away from me then I try to take a step back and leave out some of the detail. In this way it might stay up to date for longer, it will hopefully supplement the code so people can more easily get on with the job of understanding the ifs and thens, and people might actually bother to look at it as they know it's only going to take a minute of their life, rather than waste an hour.

I would be interested to see how a team worked if they were required to created detailed and up to date documentation all the time. I would be interested to see how _I_ would deal with it - I think I might go insane!
The one time I did have to do this was at my first job. We had a large spec, some 160 pages long, that was to be used as the contract for the project we were doing. Consequently it _had_ to be accurate and detailed. It took us 18 months to produce just that document, and still wasn't finalized 6 months later after we'd started coding.

Actually, I suppose that this was one of the issues that the Rational stuff was supposed to deal with - keeping documentation up to date. I'm not sure that it really worked, but I guess the class diagrams etc could be kept up to date from the source, though I'm not sure that that would supply all that much more information than looking at the code...

LIFE : Opinions are like Murray

They piss everyone off :)

Hi Muz!!!

PROGRAMMING : UML Diagrams

I'll admit I'm not really a fan of the whole Rational Rose thing, but having a common vocabulary is useful. Martin Fowler has just pointed out UMLGraph, a text based definition of UML Diagrams. Makes it easy to CVS, and you don't have to worry so much about layout, since you can't do any :)
I might give it a go because I am currently supposed to be documenting the system before I leave.

PROGRAMMING : Java Additional Default Environment

Is this any good?
It has stuff for automagically pooling objects for a particular thread, cool maths stuff, a 'Monetary' package and some faster implementations of Map and String (using lots of memory to increase speed)

KingToast

Well that's all I want to say really :)

COOL : Music navigation

http://www.musicplasma.com/
Is a site provided by amazon(?) that lets you visually look for bands that are related - drawing a graph that displays how 'influenced' one band is by another.
Check it out rather than try to understand my crappy explaination

LIFE : Cool weekend, or not

It was really good to catch up with my Uni/turning 30 friends on the weekend. And all done in the magnificent Bay of Islands.
Apart from the obligitary drinking and chatting about all things work and life, we also went on a cruise of the islands and a 1.5 hour walk. James, Leon and Brad went fishing instead of walking, and so we had a bunch of fish to eat for dinner on Saturday night. My favorite was the Golden Snapper, which is the best tasting fish I have ever had (apparently it's not actuall a snapper...)
Then on the Sunday we went to the Treaty house which was more interesting than I thought - we were staying about 1km away so thought we probably should. Then drove back to auckland, which took a while because I can only go 90 in my car.
Then everyone else went up the Skytower except me (I've been up, and wanted to check out the Kathmandu sale, which had nothing), and an hour later we returned to the cars to find that their car had been broken into.
Bugger.
Fortunately the only expensive thing that got taken was Cathie's wallet with a lot of money, all her cards, and her car licence. So we contacted the hire people (the window had been smashed) and the police (who told us to drive up to the station, which ended up being as far away from our new park as the old one).
After a while we eventually got all the paper work pushed, so I got them to come back to my place so they could use the vaccum to clean up the mess. Having done so they all left for their hotel in Hamilton, feeling much the worse for wear.

A very dissapointing end to what was otherwise a fantastic weekend. I am really looking forward to getting back to brisvegas to catch up with all my friends.

LIFE : double booking

Oops.
I organised a party for this Friday (well actually Alessandra jokingly suggested it, and I said "why not?") at Greg and my place. Everyone's invited; the 'Brazilians', Greg's friends, my friends, the clowns and so on.

I just got an email from my turning thirty friends that they are heading over today, and expect me to be up in Paihia tomorrow night. Given my licence terms (not allowed to drive after 10) I have to leave at 6pm tomorrow night - which doesn't leave a lot of room for me attending my own party!!

I of course thought that my turning thirty friends were coming next week.

LIFE : I just quit

Just quit my job at Simworks. The guys (Aaron and Greg) were really understanding, hardly a curled lip. They mentioned that they too have quit to go overseas.
So I now have 4 weeks of work, then a week to get my stuff together (And to go see the Buena Vista Social club guys), then 2 weeks in Oz for my 30th birthday, then off to the UK 2 August. Woo Hoo!!

What happens after I leave for the UK? who knows. I want to go visit Karin and Iain in Sweden, Yalin in Turkey, my home stay in India, Chi Yang in Japan, and meet up with Alessandra in Brazil. When I can manage this, and how I can afford it I don't know, but somehow it'll happen.

In my time here I have to sell my car and bike :( ship all my stuff back to Oz, get my car and bike licences and generally enjoy myself.

LIFE : Romantic things to do

OK. So you can go to the Movies/theatre. You can go to dinner.
What other things are there?
After racking our brains we in the office have come up with

• Ice Skating
  
• Bowling
  
• Planet arium
  
• Wine tasting
  

Pretty poultry(sp?) selection...

LIFE : Tuesday

Had a big weekend, without much to do :(
Friday night I went out with the Brazilians, which was really good, not too much misunderstanding between Dunya and myself. We then had another get together on Saturday for dinner, I ended up staying at Chongs (Had a good Capoeira during the day too)
Sunday I lazed a lot, eventually going along to Impro in the evening, which went really well. Kev and Brendon and Carla came along, so I was releived when it was a good show and I didn't suck :)
Yesterday I cleaned my car and then went climbing with Ken, and then went climnbing again with the Brazilians!!!!! I am making lots of really good friends over here. I think moving away from Oz (and Papakura) has finally paid off in the 'opening myself to new people experiences'.

JAVA : j2ee and j2se performance advice

Precise Java

LIFE : Some fun links

this guy is totally crazy, in a put on way - Why the lucky stiff?
Lucky also pointed to the following site, which I think is awesome. Basically the guy has put up his paintings, and invited everyone to rank them two at a time. Quite addictive.

LIFE : Test Results

Went to the doctor last week and had some blood tests, which all came through OK. My cholesterol is excellent, my kidneys are good, my liver is ok, I'm not diabetic and my testosterone is smack bang in the middle of the healthy range.
Good to know I'm OK :)

IMPRO : last night

Last night we did some 'advanced games' at Impro.
Slow Motion Commentry.
 Well this was more of a warm up.
Horizontal Split
  Stage is split in two, when an actor leaves stage left, another actor enters stage right continuing the first actors reality. It's as though the stage had been moved left by a half, with the 'missing' section reapearing on the other side.
  This was kind of OK, but only 1 of the 3 tries worked to any great degree - it's hard to get the energy levels up, to 'ride the absurdity curve.'
Touch to Talk
  This was the first one of these scenes I've done that I actually thought worked well. I was a Secretary to AJ's Boss, and I took the high status role while the Boss was trying to fire me.
  It does strike me that this is a _training_ game (some would argue that all games are training games...), as it's not really very entertaining to watch. It does, however, provide excellent experience, and adds to the vocabulary, for the actor.
I thought we did more than that, but I can't remember.
One little bitch - the covert decided to charge my $25 a class because I can only make it to 6 of the 10 workshops, even though I'm paying all in advance. If I'd paid for the whole term it would have only cost me $180. Thanks guys.

LIFE : Inane Tuesday

:)
Had a great weekend, went down to Tauranga for Kev's, ahem, 30th. Jenn and I stayed in a very nice 5 star hotel. Then on Sunday we went for a bit of a walk, but otherwise just sort of hung around; met Jo and Dave two of Jenn's crazy climbing/triathloning/paddling/mountain biking friends. They were pretty cool, we chatted for quite a while.
Then back home for some yummy Enchiladas, and watching the extended version of LOTR:Two Towers. The extended version is pretty good (TTers is my favourite of the three films), really fills out David Wenham's character. Jenn is a bit of a fan of David, and a big fan of Orlando :)
Defensive Driving was good last night - a lot shorter so I could get home to make dinner.
This week it's the usual, though I am going to book my driving test for 1 July. woo hoo!! Jenn is down to Christchurch this (long) weekend, so I am going to have to entertain myself :( might try and catch up with Mike and go climbing, but the weather will probably be sheeite.
It's my Blister's birthday this Saturday (5th) so I will give her a call, she will be back from her tour which I am sure is a pretty good birthday present itself...

LIFE : Howard Surges in Polls

What the?
I'll admit I am a little out of touch with Aussie news, but I certainly haven't seen anything that would indicate that little johnny should suddenly be popular again. Maybe it's because he supported the gagging of the Aussie soldier in front of the inquest into prisoner abuses in Iraq. Yeah, I'd support him for that.