March 18th, 2009
You can now use OpenID to authenticate at this blog! w00t!
I have just installed the Wordpress plugin OpenID (version 3.2.1). Installation was very simple: just upload the “openid” directory to the “plugin” directory and then active the plugin. The plugin allows you to assign multiple OpenIDs to your account to log in to your blog account.
Tags: authentication, openid, wordpress
Posted in Software, Technology | 1 Comment »
March 18th, 2009
Today I am working from home because Sydney is sick. I therefore connect via the VPN to my work computer. I use Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection to connect to my work computer. But periodically I have problems typing into the remote computer: whenever I type a ‘u’ character, the Microsoft Utility Manager pops up.
After doing a bit of searching on Google, I came upon this post “Windows key “stuck” in Remote Desktop…“. This seemed to accurately describe my problem. But, the first comment in the post was able to work around my particular problem:
The best workaround that always works for me is:
1. Close the RD window
2. Open new RD but make sure the “Apply Windows key Combinations” is set to “On the remote computer”
3. Now press the Ctrl+Alt+End and lock the computer
4. Log in again and it should work.
amirhp
/’L'\mir
I put this here so that I can remember it for the next time. (Yeah, I pretty much expect that this condition will happen again.)
Tags: microsoft, remote, tip
Posted in Software | No Comments »
March 1st, 2009
Yesterday was Adelaide’s third birthday. We had a party for her and this morning I was looking through the pictures. Kids are pretty amazing and grow up so fast. Here she is, three years ago, one day old, on March 1, 2006.

She is in the Mercy NICU in Cedar Rapids, IA. (Side note: This is the hospital where Nancy works.) (Side, side note: yesterday, 2/28/09, Mercy imploded one of their building that was damaged in the flood of 2008. It was a big deal for Cedar Rapids: the first known demolishion by implosion.) She was born at 32 weeks, 8 weeks early. She stayed just 2 weeks in the NICU and then was strong enough to come home.
Here she is, three years later, at her third birthday party yesterday.

She wanted a pirate themed party. (She can see just fine with both eyes. But pirates need an eye patch, of course. And they have a scowl and say, “Argh!”) You wouldn’t be able to tell that she was a preemie.
Tags: birthday, preemie
Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »
February 21st, 2009
I 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.
Tags: graphic, novel, review, watchmen
Posted in Comics, Personal | 2 Comments »
February 14th, 2009
Version 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:
Tags: Java, programming, release, Software
Posted in littles3 | 3 Comments »
December 3rd, 2008
So 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.
Tags: development, Google, hosting, Software
Posted in Software | No Comments »
December 2nd, 2008
Version 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:
Tags: Java, programming, release, Software
Posted in littles3 | 1 Comment »
November 28th, 2008
I have updated the littleS3 “Getting Started” wiki page, adding a “Basic Usage” section. This section includes:
Tags: documentation, Java, programming, Software
Posted in littles3 | No Comments »
November 26th, 2008
So, 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.
Tags: documentation, Java, programming, Software
Posted in littles3 | No Comments »