The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I'm trying (again) to port Firefox 3 to MidnightBSD.  it's a real pain in the butt.  I wish they had a porting guide.  That would involve them caring about the operating systems beyond the big three though.  I'd like to have native firefox and thunderbird (latest versions) working.  At the moment, we've got unbranded firefox 2 (www/browser) and seamonkey working (although not all features) There's also the linux versions of those.  Firefox 3 for linux won't run due to dependancies on newer linux libraries.  Even with the newer linuxolator in current, it just isn't happening.  

This type of stuff is a real time waster.  

All of the sudden, I'm getting a lot of emails from users asking for various changes to the site.  Normally I'd be happy about getting feedback, but I just don't have the time to work on the site.  There's a certain tone to some of the emails I don't like.  I work on the site for free after all.  

 I just watched a very different movie.  It's called Cashback.  

The movie starts with a guy who dumped his girlfriend because she's relying on him to make her happy.  After they break up, he becomes depressed.  After several weeks of sleepless nights, he takes a job at a supermarket.  He's able to freeze time and move about.  The characters he works with make the movie.  One guy thinks he's a martial arts master and dresses accordingly.  Another character used to be a soccer player, but got injured and now manages the store.  His best friend was a pervert.

What is wrong with CNN?  Lately, they've been reporting on twitter and youtube.  I don't care what some guy said on youtube.  I can watch the video myself.  At first, I thought it was just Iran that they were twiting about.  Now, I find an article about a tweet regarding an emergency landing with Gov. Swartzeneger's plan today.  That's just silly.  I also think they should attribute the damn articles to the authors at least.  In this case, they did mention the source of the user on twitter, but usually they don't. 

i was finally able to connect to the ITMS to download some content.  Part of the problem people had was apple added a new terms of service.  If you hadn't agreed to it, it would take you to that page first.  That often times out and causes problems on the backend.  I missed a TV show last night that I enjoy.

According to an MSN article, starbucks is grinding coffee throughout the day.  What I find amazing is that they weren't doing this already.  If they want their core customers back, they have to stop making wimpy coffee.  Most of the posts on that article are about watering down the coffee as either decalf or some mild blend.  They need to offer a bold or extra bold blend for real coffee drinkers too.  People who want wimpy coffee can go to MacDo or get coffee at a donut shop.

Yet again, Apple releases a highly anticipated update and cannot handle the server load.  Users of iTunes may remember the problems during Christmas with ITMS timing out.  This time iPhone updaters are killing the connection to ITMS.  I was able to get the os update for my phone earlier and it's ok, but not as amazing as I expected.  Now I'm unable to purchase any content from iTunes.  The apple forums are full of crazed users wondering why their computers aren't working and it's all a server farm at apple that's the problem.  One person suggested apple updated to a new server farm and yet still can't handle the load.   

 Doh.  I just found out I didn't backup my firefox bookmarks when i formatted my computer.  Apparently copying the ENTIRE profile directory was not enough.  Firefox 3's approach is very annoying and I'm not going through it again.  I'll just switch to IE or safari which can sync to .mac/mobileme

Ever get this?   Cannot convert value '0000-00-00 00:00:00' from column  to TIMESTAMP. 

The problem is that the MySQL jdbc driver doesn't map it to null.  There are flags to the connection that are supposed to do this for you, but I've had no luck getting them to work.  I have two timestamp fields on the User table for this site.  I wrote a MySQL to java data mapper years ago, but now that I'm converting to Cayenne, I can't use that anymore.  Time to fix the database :)

One "solution".  

I've been using JSON with Dojo Data Grids lately in PHP.  Now, I want to use something similar on this site.  I decided on the json-simple library.  It's actually quite easy to use.

Encoding examples:

http://code.google.com/p/json-simple/wiki/EncodingExamples 

<%@ page contentType="text/json;charset=UTF-8" language="java"%>

<%@ page import="com.justjournal.model.User" %>

<%@ page import="org.apache.cayenne.DataObjectUtils" %>

<%@ page import="org.apache.cayenne.access.DataContext" %>

<%@ page import="org.apache.cayenne.query.SelectQuery" %>

<%@ page import="org.json.simple.JSONObject" %>

<%@ page import="java.util.*" %>

<%@ page import="org.json.simple.JSONArray" %>

<%

    out.clearBuffer();

    SelectQuery query = new SelectQuery(User.class);

    query.addOrdering(User.USERNAME_PROPERTY, true);

    DataContext context = DataContext.getThreadDataContext();

    List users = context.performQuery(query);

    JSONObject obj = new JSONObject();

    JSONArray list1 = new JSONArray();

    Iterator it = users.iterator();

    while (it.hasNext()) {

        Map map = new HashMap();

        User u = (User) it.next();

        if (u.getUsername().length() > 2 && !new com.justjournal.User(u.getUsername()).isPrivateJournal())

        {

            map.put("id", DataObjectUtils.intPKForObject(u));

            map.put("username", u.getUsername());

            map.put("name", u.getName());

            map.put("since", u.getSince());

            list1.add(map);

        }

    }

    obj.put("items", list1);

    obj.put("label","id");

    obj.put("identifier", "id");

    obj.writeJSONString(out);

 I've been working on converting just journal over to Apache Cayenne today.  I figured it would give me an opportunity to get better with it.  Cayenne has a nice modeling program, but their documentation is often lacking.

For example, suppose you're getting an error from your servlet container (Tomcat in my case) about a filter not loading.  With Cayenne, the "correct" way to use it is to load a filter mapped to /* that catches all the sessions and maps a DataContext to them.  You might find after pulling your hair out that there is a syntax error in your DomainNode.driver.xml file.  Even with logging cranked up in log4j, it will not tell you what's wrong with the filter.  However, if you initialize like a traditional app in a jsp page, you can see the error.  Invalid passwords are an example of what can cause this.

Wondering why visual stuidio keeps crashing on me. Every time i drag a control in vs2008 after a few saves, it seems to crash. Wonder if it's a vista sp2 bug.

I installed Windows Vista SP2 Today. It's not too bad so far. It went much smoother than the service pack 1 installation. I have issues with vista, but part of me likes it. It's a love hate thing I guess. I often find myself more relaxed using MidnightBSD or Mac OS. Since I got git and some of the cygwin tools installed, vista is much more tolerable. I just love having a unix like shell with unix style commands. Sometimes I wonder if I could just deal with windows if they'd add them as part of the OS.... nah.

I also installed the direct x sdk today. THe C# support is not as nice as I expected. I'm starting to understand why some people write C++ code still for games. If you want to do any clever transformations, it sucks. (directx 9 at least)

You might wonder why i installed the directx sdk. I want to write a very simple game. Caryn's going to work on the logic/backend and I'm going to write the graphical "engine" to render it.

git config --global user.name "John Doe" 

No Doubt will begin touring again.  I find that surprising.  The real question is will they sound like stefani's solo work.  

There's a new vaccine for the swine flu headed toward the CDC for review.  That's good news.  

I've been having trouble sleeping again.  Tonight, I got the I4B stack removed from MidnightBSD.  GCC 4.2.1 is working now in CURRENT.

I purchased an AMD Phenom last week. It's a quad core first generation chip with 2.3Ghz cores (9600). The chip works great with Vista and I think it will rock in MidnightBSD once I get some of the stuff on the AMD 7700 chipset fixed. The best part though is the power consumption. The only thing different is the cpu and motherbard, yet i'm seeing much better power use over a core 2 duo 6000 series (2.13ghz). THe new box uses 125-150watts most of the time.

I finally beat Half-life 2 tonight.

I'm still setting up my computer after all the crap. I finally got it running stable. I suspect it was gettnig too hot. I finally got the motherboard drivers installed and it's running much faster. At this point, i need to load SP1, IE8 and a few more programs.

I seem to be on a role.  

I gave up on Windows Vista ten months after launch.  It "died" because I added more ram.  The file system was corrupted and it just freaked out.  I suspect it was a memory mapping bug with the video card.  It was x64 vista and 4GB of RAM.

Yesterday, I got a new motherboard and processor.  It's an AMD Phenom 9600 and Asus M4A78 Plus. Everything else stayed the same.  I decided that with a major CPU and motherboard shift, I should reinstall Windows.  Why not try 32 bit vista this time?  

After spending 2 hours deactivating amazon unbox, iTunes, adobe acrobat, various games, and other stuff I finally got to put the motherboard and cpu in.  This process took me about an hour.  My case was dirty and I hadn't used an AMD chip in years.  The heatsink setup is much better than the Intel design for core2 and pentium d chips.  

I tested BSD first as I didn't have to reinstall the OS like WIndows.  However, the USB controller and Ethernet are not supported correctly.  I'm already bummed.  Now to install Vista.  

Windows Vista's installer is quite nice and easy to use.  I had to use it twice because I know vista won't let you go from legacy sata to AHCI mode later.  Once the bios was fixed, I got Vista loaded.  

I found that I had to install over 100 updates to vista and that didn't include SP1!!!!!  In fact, it didn't suggest I use SP1 first to save time.  Only 70 installed correctly.  Upon reboot it "tried" again and the update mechanism just froze.  I decided to stop updating and it claimed it stopped.  Next, I attempted to install the chipset driver from ATI.  It seemed to hang near the end, but otherwise looked complete.  I proceeded to install some other software like steam and amazon unbox.  It went fine.   Then after I had setup a good part of the system, I decided to reboot.  BSOD

Try again : BSOD

Try in safe mode: BSOD

Use the repair feature of vista disk which claims not to whack your personal files.  It then told me that it had to use a restore point, but my files would be ok except for a few "programs" i recently installed.  It deleted everything!  It was almost a factory install at that point.  It seems the restore point was at the beginning of the install!  

What have we learned?

1. The dialogs are wrong in the installer.  You can and apparently do lose data with Vista.  Tell the user.

2. The backup software isn't like time machine and i can't get my amazon unboxed videos back.  Mr. Monk and the man who shot santa is gone!  

3. Vista can't shut down.  it takes like an hour and never does anything.  I think this is motherboard related but since i can't install the drivers....

4. Everything is hidden.  I hate that.  

5. The only thing that works worse is KDE 4.  Since it was designed to look like vista, i think they did an exceptional job getting the suck down.

Now, I'm sure you might find the above to be misleading.  Perhaps I did something out of order or "wrong".  If so, Windows let me do it.  That in itself is a bug.  If I can't use it, how on earth could a typical non computer literate person make this thing "go". 

Amazon unbox service runs on Windows.  Some users of Windows experience problems that require an OS reinstall or even a revert to a previous checkpoint.  The product activation can be lost in these cases.  This means you lose videos that you purchased.  Amazon makes you rebuy videos because Windows has bugs.

At least with iTunes, you can reset it every year (computer count).  Worst case you have to wait a year to get your content back.  It's not gone forever.  

Ways they could improve the service:

1. allow you to deactivate a computer from the web, see a list and make sure it's dead jim.

2. Don't do it in the uninstaller!  What if it goes wrong?  

3. Allow people to reset their activations once in a while.  Just require a net connection periodically to "verify" even.  I don't care as long as I don't lose my damn videos.

4. Ideally provide support for other operating systems.  I know this is a long shot.

5. Give me ANY reason to like it over iTunes.