On Monday we returned from my 10-year college reunion and I must say that it was as much fun as I hoped it would be. Seeing old friends and meeting new family additions was a thoroughly refreshing experience – as entertaining as Boston might be, I need to be reminded from time to time that life goes on outside of 495.
I didn’t shoot as much video as I thought I would but this clip of Andrew and Matthew riding their trikes near the Dome is the weekend’s “money shot.” Here it is in Windows Media (1.0MB) and QuickTime (1.2MB) formats for your viewing pleasure.
Now Showing: All-Singing, All-Bowling Andrew
A couple of cute clips from this weekend…Andrew has started singing. He’s pretty good with the ABCs song and a couple other standards, as you’ll see here (WMV, 6.3MB) or here (QuickTime, 8.1MB). On Sunday afternoon we went bowling (candlepin, of course) with some friends. This turned out to be far less disasterous than you might imagine, since the alley has bumpers they put up over the gutters for the pipsqueaks. Andrew enjoyed himself immensely, though his desire to throw the ball “himself” meant that we ended up with a few that lost steam about halfway down the alley. Here’s a clip of one of his more successful, mommy-assisted tosses: (WMV, 1.8MB) (QuickTime, 2.3 MB)
Pictures from Dad’s retirement
I’ve finally had a chance to put up the pictures from Dad’s retirement back in February, they’re available here. Clicking on one of the thumbnail images will take you to a full-size version.
If anybody has suggestions for captioning, please email me or post a comment.
Feed me, I’m yours
I finally downloaded an RSS aggregator today; I was just spending too much time cruising tech websites trying to keep up with news. I must say that I’ve really been missing out. The one I picked, JNN, probably isn’t best-of-breed but it’s charming in a slightly broken way. Having all of the articles from a bunch of websites available in a single view is really a time-saver.
Now that I’m aggregating XML feeds, I find myself back in standards hell – evidently there are no fewer than three formats for content feeds – RSS, RDF and Atom. If you count all the various 0.9x iterations of RSS, there are even more. I’m not sure how many of these JNN supports at the moment, but it evidently doesn’t like pdabuzz.com’s RSS 2.0 feed.
As Tannenbaum wrote in his classic Computer Networks book (which I have yet to read):
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. And if you really don’t like all the standards you just have to wait another year until the one arises you are looking for.
That was true back in 1988 when Tannenbaum wrote it, and it’s true today. I haven’t had a chance to sort out the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of feed yet, so I can’t comment on which I think is better. I don’t think any of them are going to go away anytime soon, so I probably don’t need to hurry with that evaluation.
Article in Java Developer’s Journal
My article titled “Harness the Power of Javadoc” has been published in the May 2004 issue (Volume 9, #5) of Java Developer’s Journal. The direct link should work, but in case it doesn’t you may need to drill in through the archives, since it’s not exactly front-page material.
Commute: Milton to Fort Point
This week, for the first time in nearly three years, I rode my bike to work. Back in May of 2001 when our offices were in the North End of Boston, I met a co-worker at his house in Dorchester and did the ride. The weather was miserable – steady rain and wind – and I was overweight and out of shape (no excuse, considering all the free time I remember having before becoming a dad). The distance was close to 15 miles one way, which is not a trivial ride. Fast forward to last Monday: my opportunities to commute by bike have shrunk to one day a week, when I don’t have to shuttle Andrew to day care. Our offices are now a couple miles closer to the house and my body is in much better condition. The weather, however, wasn’t so different. No good reason not to give it another shot.
As a matter of fact, it is my first day on the new feet
Last night I went for my first run with the orthotics. I probably went a little bit further than I should have – 4.5 miles or thereabouts – but I was feeling good. The knee felt loads better, and in fact felt totally normal until about the 25th minute. I was running an out-and-back course that is mostly downhill on the outbound leg. After I turned for home and started uphill, I felt a few twinges in my knee. Still, it felt a whole lot closer to normal than it did last week before I went to see the orthopedist. The knee was a little stiff when I woke up this morning but as I sit here, it’s feeling pretty good.
By the time I got home, though, my dogs were barking. I had developed some serious hotspots on both arches, just behind the balls of my feet. Neither one raised a blister (yet) but I definitely have some footwear issues to sort out.
Know your tools: database performance tuning
An older book review on Ted Neward’s blog reminded me to hold forth on the subject of database tuning. Any application that has a relational database at its heart requires performance tuning. The development team needs to either hire or cultivate the skills required to extract the most out of the database, skills that go far beyond the basic select/insert/update/delete statement that most OO programmers know. This skillset is just as important as the analysis and “regular” programming skills that are obvious requirements for the team. For some reason we software folk tend to minimize the importance of database knowledge, at our obvious peril.
But this time, it’s not from begging
After suffering about three months of increasing post-run pain in my left knee, I finally made it to the orthopedist this week. He diagnosed me with an inflamed medial plica – annoying, but less serious than some other potential problems that exhibit similar symptoms, such as patellofemoral syndrome.
Andrew catchup
The site has been down for a while, but we’re back up and I have a couple of Andrew video clips ready. The first is from the St. Michael’s Easter Egg Hunt WMV (3 MB) QT (4 MB). The second is from this weekend’s trip to Drumlin Farm – Andrew checks out the pigpen WMV (3.5 MB) QT (3 MB).
Andrew is very much enjoying the warmer weather; he loves to run around in the back yard. Sometimes it’s a struggle to get him into pants before we leave the house, but we’re working on him.