Yesterday was Adelaide’s third birthday. The theme of her party was “Pirates”. We had the party at Happy Joe’s on the NE side of Cedar Rapids. Nancy purchased some pirate party supplies from Oriental Trading Company. Included were 12 pirate themed candles. You can see them in the upper left of the picture. There were pirate flags, treasure chests, and skull and cross bone candles. I made 48 cupcakes, so on the other 36, I piped black tinted frosting to make the flag and white frosting to make the skull and cross bones. (Lower right of picture) The cake mix was from a box, but I made the frosting from the Joy of Cooking: 75th Anniversary Edition – 2006
Addy’s Pirate Cupcakes
March 1st, 2009Just read: Watchmen
February 21st, 2009I just finished reading Watchmen. This has been a story that I have wanted to read for some time, but with the impending release of the movie on March 6, 2009, I decided that I should read the book before seeing the movie. I am glad that I did. This was such a good graphic novel. It is very ‘dense’. I don’t know how better to describe it. There is some much story packed into the book. If you think that it is just a “comic book”, with the standard panel layout, you would be wrong. In addition to very detailed panels, there are graphical ‘excerpts’ of newspapers and books. These are included at the end of each chapter. They are not just novelty, but they add to the story. There is even a comic within the comic that ties in to the story. This all adds to the story by providing a depth of layers. I now understand why this book is so celebrated: it is so good.
I highly recommend it.
littles3 version 2.3.0 released
February 14th, 2009Version 2.3.0 of “littles3” has been released. This release includes enhanced serialization of business objects to support non-serializable commons logging logger implementations
Issues included in this release:
Code reviews in Google Code
December 3rd, 2008So I just released a new version of “littles3“, a project hosted at Google Code. I tried out the “Issue” feature; pretty neat. But what I really found cool was the “code review” features in the source code management. For instance, the source file that was changed in my latest release was to FileS3ObjectDao. I was able to have a diff from r21 (the old version) and r37 (the new version). It even let me comment right within the diff, in either the old or new version.
littles3 version 2.2.0 released
December 2nd, 2008Version 2.2.0 of “littles3” has been released. This release improves performance of listing keys within a bucket. For instance, 1000 keys with version 2.10 took 3.36 minutes. With version 2.2.0, this same list of 1000 keys took 1.75 seconds.
Issues included in this release:
littleS3 basic usage
November 28th, 2008I have updated the littleS3 “Getting Started” wiki page, adding a “Basic Usage” section. This section includes:
Some littleS3 documentation!
November 26th, 2008So, I promised some documentation “soon” for littleS3. That was 2 months ago. Well, I have finally made good. I have just published a “Getting Started” wiki page to the project site. So far, this document provides some background on the project components, how to deploy it to an application server, and what the configuration files “configure” (along with sample configuration files in the project download section).
I would still like to add some samples of how to use the system to create buckets, add objects, etc. This is very similar to the usage described in the Amazon S3 Developer Guide for the REST API, but there is a bit of a trick since you are using your own application server. In addition to the host name, you may need to include a context path (a servlet notion) to the REST URIs.
Google can sort
November 22nd, 2008Google recently announced that they were able to sort 1 terabyte (TB) in 68 seconds using 1,000 computers. The previous record holder was 209 seconds on 910 computers. I was impressed by this because I recently read about MapReduce and have been studying some of Google’s papers about the Google File System. Google used both MapReduce and the Google File System to attain this sorting record. But, being Google, they thought that since they did 1 TB so successfully, why not try sorting 1 petabyte (PB). (A petabyte is a thousand terabytes.) Google was able to sort 1 PB in six hours and two minutes and used 4,000 computers.
Why does Google care about sorting? One reason may be that their primary revenue source is based on advertising. And they have vast access to massive amounts of data submitted by their end users in the form of search queries. The more efficient Google is at crunching this information, the better they can target their advertising to users, resulting in more revenue. And Google can use their data for other purposes too, like predicting flu outbreaks.
I have been very impressed by what I have been reading about MapReduce and the Google File system. These sorting results help prove how efficient their infrastructure is. I particulary like how they use commodity computers to achieve these results. I know that using multiple nodes can get tricky very quickly. But their techniques seem to be designed from the ground up to use multiple nodes. And with this mindset, they can more adequately manage and utilize their collective computing resources.
lightningtimer.net
November 13th, 2008I found Simon Willison’s lightningtimer.net Javascript timer to be totally awesome. The app is written in Javascript, all on one page. It lets you specify a time, and then a big-font timer counts down. The timer takes up the whole page. It can give you a warning, the background turns pink, when the timer is almost up. When the timer reaches zero, the background turns red and 0:00 blinks. Take a look at the page source for documentation on how to use lightningtimer.net. He says that he needed something for a Lightning Talk and this is the result.
Looking at the code (like I said, the Javascript is all in the page source, so just “view source” in your browser), it is a really cool example of Javascript. I was amazed how simple and elegant Simon’s code was. As someone who definitely is a poor Javascript hack, it is nice to see some good Javascript. And, I can use it as a tea timer too!
Greasemonkey for Pearson Access
November 12th, 2008During the day, I professionally work on a web application called Pearson Access. Today we determined that we needed a user administration process for one of our Pearson Access customers that would require them to always select a certain user role when creating a new user. The system doesn’t auto-check the role, the user will need to be trained to check it.
But, being a geek, that got me thinking. What if Greasemonkey could be used with a Greasemonkey script in Firefox to automatically check a role when creating a new user account. So, I wrote such a script: autoselectrole.user.js.