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Excuses

'old school' by atomicjeep @ flickr


So, the last time I bothered updating this thing was in July of 2009.  Over half a year ago.  Now, that’s not too unusual, but this place probably deserves more than that.  So, I could ramble on about how I’m going to refocus my efforts, make it a goal to write more, rehash the same empty promises as always, but let’s face it — I probably won’t write.  And even if I did, it’s not like anyone ever reads this.  So, instead – I’m going to make some excuses.

Ok, really just one excuse.

I’m bloody busy.  I recently (yesterday) discovered exactly how busy I am.  See, there’s only 168 hours in a week.  No more, no less, unless you live in an area that believes in “daylight savings time” in which case you may have one week with 169 hours, and one week with 167, but let’s not go there.  For our purposes, a week is fixed at 168 hours.

I work, Monday through Friday, from roughly 5:00 to 2:00.  That’s 45 hours per week.  I also drive around 2 hours per day, getting to and from work.  That’s another 10 hours.

I am also currently enrolled at UW River Falls, ostensibly studying physics (though I’ve had no physics-related courses, yet), part time.  Six credits.  At UWRF, every credit is considered equivalent to 50 minutes of class time per week, and three hours of homework.  So, six credits is three hours in class, 18 hours of homework.  This semester I’m also “testing out” of ENGL-100 – college composition – which is an additional three credits.  Granted, there is no class-time associated with “testing out” — but it does involve homework, so I’m going to count it as another nine hours of time.  Which is a lie.  But I’m sticking to it.

It also takes ~90 minutes, round-trip, from my house, to the “campus” parking lot (we “commuters” have our own parking lot which is about 15 – 20 minutes from campus, on foot), to the actual campus, back to my car, and back home.  Three days a week.

So, what am I talking about here?  55 hrs/wk work and commuting, 4.5 hrs/wk commuting to school, 32 hrs/wk school and homework.  91.5 hrs/wk of those precious 168 hours, gone.  That leaves 76.5 hours/wk for things like sleeping, eating, raising three kids and taking care of a house.

As you can see, writing random nonsense for a blog no one reads isn’t very practical.  And I probably will continue not doing it.  Because I’m a very busy man.  At least, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

Getting Cozy with Android

Having been using a T-Mobile G1 “with google” for quite some time now, but it wasn’t until recently that I managed to actually make myself feel at home with the device.

The original wrap of Android that comes installed on the “with google” branded phones is pretty spartan, and only integrates Google’s apps.  This is understandable, of course, but I use flickr for photosharing and like to have access to facebook and twitter, too, and if they can be integrated directly into some of the other apps on the phone (the camera, for instance) it’d make my life simpler.  I like simpler.

Of course I’ve rooted my phone.  And I’ve played with the leaked HTC Hero ROM.  And it does everything I want, only it does it very, very slowly…so over several iterations of testing optimized Hero ROMs and flashing back to Cyanogen’s optimized Google image, I finally started narrowing down what it takes to achieve a happy medium.

I start with the latest-greatest (which isn’t always the absolute latest) build of JACHero (currently 2.63).  I install Open Home (I picked up the paid version – you should too) with the HTC Hero theme, the Glasklart icon pack, and Lock2 (haven’t paid yet, but it’s looking like I will).  I obliterate every last HTC widget from /system/app and follow that up with a good cleaning of /data/data, I set a security gesture, and remove the HTC lock screen.  I tell Lock2 not to disable the system lock screen, thus retaining my security gesture.  Clean off Quickoffice (seriously, will I ever use that? On a phone? Doubtful), make sure there’s no entries in /data/dalvik-cache for anything in /system/app or /data/app that has a compiled odex available.

Sync.

Reboot.

It’s all the bits of HTC Hero I want (minus the twitter widget, which makes me sad) — camera, People, Albums…and none of the lag and slow that I don’t.  Granted loading and switching out of some of the more memory-intensive HTC apps can still be a bit laggy, but that’s to be expected.  And it’s nothing like it was under Rosie / TouchFLO.

Now, the reason for using Lock2 is because once you remove the custom HTC lock screen app, whatever was open on your phone is clearly visible behind the system lockscreen.  If you set your phone down while reading email to attend to some other business, that email will be visible to anyone who wakes up the phone — displayed clearly right beneath the pattern entry field.  By running Lock2 when the phone locks itself, the only thing prying eyes will see under the security screen is the Lock2 interface.  Best of both worlds, though there’s an annoying extra gesture in the mix now…

The Hero build still has some issues, mind you – the LEDs don’t work, the camera button is useless, I still seem to miss an occasional text message, and I don’t know that bluetooth works yet, but it’s fast enough to be extremely usable and still give me the apps and integration I want, so I think I’ll stick with it.  BT is a non-issue for me, and other than the dropping SMS issue everything else is just minor annoyance.

The Language of URLs

So, here’s a thought that occured rather spontaneously this afternoon.  What if URLs had a codified set of rules, akin to linguistic grammar?  Right now there is a minimal required form, that of protocol://host/<arbitrary-and-optional-stuff>, which is perfectly reasonable in a limited fashion.  What I’m suggesting is that <arbitrary-and-optional-stuff> have a set of rules as well.

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Personal Development

Muddling through the interwebs, as I do every day, I came across a few interesting thoughts on personal development, “Business-2.0,” and blog categorization.

Starting with the last element, is the addition of a “Thoughts” category.  A good place to drop half-formed ideas, random thoughts, and things that just don’t fit elsewhere yet deserve better than ‘Uncategorized.’  I guess this post is one of those “Thoughts.”

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The Switch Case

While working on some code recently, I noticed a preponderance — neigh, an outright overabundance — of swith/case logic blocks to control content.  What’s worse is that the input variable to the switch block happened to be the value of a specific hash key, which got me to thinking — what is the purpose of a switch/case block, after all?

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