The Goldfish Chronicles

Gianugo’s wife is expecting. Yet more fodder for a future kids.apache.org to fill in the missing ‘K’.

Add the white chocolate drops at the end: http://blog.generationjava.com/roller/bayard/entry/200701241

Today’s daily deal is The Police’s Synchronicity. I think I have this on tape somewhere, but as the car is the only place that plays such things and I don’t drive, time to dig around for $1.99.

Just finished making cocoa oat white chocolate cookies. Still warm and out of the oven - and I’m restricting myself to a mere three. Plus lots of milk to wash them down. So good.

Btw, I’m quite impressed with the Lux game for the Mac. It’s a fair amount of fun and I splashed out the cash… eventually. My old Dell laptop is getting very tired, but I’ve found I’ve been playing Microprose’s Risk on there a lot. Now if only Lux could add the Sametime feature, it’s a much better version of Risk - planning your moves without knowing what your opponent is planning at the same time.

I just upgraded to Firefox 3, very nice so far. a) It’s fast, GMail is now quicker than using Outlook or Thunderbird and b) I love that when it asks to remember a password, it does so in such a way that you can wait to confirm that that is the right password. So as my wife would say, color me happy.

Of course after checking that GMail was nice and quick, I checked the personal sites and then went to Amazon.com. Where I was reminded of the new Daily Deal cheap album bit on the Digital Download site. Friday it was $1.99 for a Coldplay album we have, I didn’t look yesterday but today it was a Barenaked Ladies album that my wife doesn’t have, so for the princely sum of $2.99 I bought my first ever mp3s (amazing I know… up til now I’ve always bought CDs because it hadn’t passed the magic price point for me of having an automatic backup disc.

I’ll be looking tomorrow to see what the next daily deal is

So far our house search has seen us like 4 houses.

House 1 - on second look we decided it needed too much (new electrics and new windows).

House 2 - we liked it, but Levi was too soon around the corner for us to be doing with such a thing.

House 3 - we liked it, we put an offer down, they refused to budge more than 1% from their asking price.

House 4 - we saw it on Sunday. Really liked it. Same price as House 3 but with no negatives. We decided tonight to put an offer down first thing in the morning. 5 seconds later it was “Subject to Inspection”.

I guess a good house still goes quick, it was only on the market for 6 days.

I’m finally getting near the end of my every now and then hacking at a static version of a JIRA.

The basic story is that I want to turn off the computer that is running in my attic doing nothing but hosting a JIRA. The slicehost I pay for isn’t a great place to try and squeeze in the memory hungry JIRA/JVM combination, and as the project has mostly moved to Google Code it seemed like a good idea to get the JIRA gone too. Google Code doesn’t have any simple methods for uploading the data (basically you get to do HTTP and have no control over dates etc), so I decided to dump JIRA as XML, and XSLT a nice look to it. Maybe one day I can migrate it to Google Code or elsewhere, but I doubt it matters.

Pulling the XML down is easy - in fact I don’t even implement that. I assume you have used the IssueNavigator in JIRA to get a dump of all your issues as RSS. That’s right - probably will make a big JIRA explode. Ah well. I also pull down attachments for you. Just not the audit history.

Then I use XSLT (stunning architecture eh?) to put together a simple static site that shows users, issues, projects and versions (couldn’t be bothered with components though I should add them some day). The nice part here is that as I have the xml, I can restyle and make it better if I ever want to. It will support the project and issue URLs out of the box, while version and user urls will require a mod_rewrite rule, however no one goes directly to those links anyway.

Here’s the site:

http://www.osjava.org/issues/

I need to redo it from the latest xml dump, and then maybe it will be done and that light hum from above can go quiet.

If you want the code to do this (you’ll have to modify it yourself as it’s got little hacks in for osjava specific bits) it’s public domain and available at:

https://svn.atlassian.com/svn/public/contrib/jira/jira-outlet/trunk/mig4jira/static

In the spirit of finding something I agree with and using it to justify my belief; here’s a BBC report entitled ‘Web worlds ‘useful’ for children‘. The subject came up at the doctor the other week about how much TV a child was watching. The general rule we try to live to is that our son doesn’t watch TV alone (occasionally broken when absolutely necessary - such as Apache board meeting while Carrie is at the doctor), but that he either watches TV with us or we are playing video games together. Again, with the last bit - the rule is to not have him playing video games on his own.

The doctor’s view was that the visual display was the bad thing and he should not be spending much time interacting with a visual display - that it was damaging for his ability to work at school.

There are a few thoughts you get here as a parent.

1) AARGGGHHHH I’m a BAD parent.
2) Hang on… what’s medical about being a good student and why is a doctor preaching this?
3) Wait a minute, your definition of normal wouldn’t include me.
4) I want my child to be normal.
5) I don’t want my child to be limited by my generation’s (or the preceding generation’s in reality) view of normal.

Computers are invading every day life. It’s like saying you won’t let a kid near a hammer until they are old enough - no toy hammers, no helping you while you use a hammer, no getting to hit the nail in under your guidance (which Nathan and I had huge fun doing the other weekend btw… my son helped me put up shelves… it rocked). Social activity is increasingly through computers. It seems very fair to ask:

“What is a more valuable skill - socialization in the playground or socialization on the Internet?”

The answer is obvious to me - they’re equal. My point being that I’d rather see schools embracing the technologies that the article talks about rather than trying to block them. I’d love to see work done on having kids in the school all having a shared virtual environment (what we’d call a MUD back in the day eh?). Hell I want the same for an office - even today in a tech job I find that people want to pick up a phone (worst possible medium) or have a face to face meeting (good, but needs to be kept for important issues) than have a long running email or message board thread. People haven’t learnt to express themselves, or to innoculate themselves against flames and trolls.

The majority of employees out there are quite frankly unprepared for where the modern work environment should be going; and the solution is to hide things from our kids so they’re not prepared either (except through their personal lives - turning the environment into gossip and not constructive).

So there I sat having been told that studies show that TV stunts a child’s ability to focus; and I’m thinking “what about their ability to multitask? What you’re really saying is that schools can’t support multitaskers, just highly focused one taskers”. Looking back, experience agrees. I did well at school until it got really hard and I needed to focus deeply - I was used to multitasking. However, I did obscenely well up to that point because I could multitask. I’ve since taught myself how to focus deeply, but it’s multitasking that continues to be the increasingly valuable skill.

Side note… I remember a report that kids were getting better at multitasking. Maybe I blogged about it. The weird thing was that the report thought that was a bad thing. I was stunned. Kids need to multitask more; they’re adapting. What’s not adapting are the schools and the common wisdom.

I read Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” for the first time over the last few days. I was a Marvel reading kid growing up, so didn’t get to see how the other half lived (yeah I know, the cool kids read indies… like you could find those in the corner of SW Herts/SE Bucks). I’ve brought a few Star Wars graphic novels over the last decade, maybe one a year, but this is the first real comic book in a long time. I’ll also be rereading “Kaven’s Last Hunt” - a Spiderman story I remember liking a lot. The Batman graphic novel was very good by the way - I liked it and recommended Carrie read it, but I doubt she will.

I took part in my last real Apache board meeting. I’ll be in the next meeting, but for the purpose of handing over the reins to the new board. I’ll also unsubscribe myself from a few more lists - the silence of being on so few lists (down to maybe 20 or so) is already deafening. I look over the shoulder at Carrie’s busy inbox and realize I can go a day without reading my email and it wouldn’t be much effort to catch up with the near empty folders.

Not a lot of Commons code though - Levi has been less happy in the evenings and I’ve been more tired. Carrie continues to bear the brunt of baby hours while I get Nathan to tire me out. I like the look of the Childsplay project - Python implemented games for kids. Coding GCompris didn’t interest me, too much C hackery to mess around with,
but Childsplay looks more fun to dig into. Need to get focused soon into writing some games.

Work is tiring - the old job keeps any spare moments that the new job allows nice and busy. Main thing I’m doing right now is grokking the build’n'deploy system - fortunately I like grokking build systems so this is one part pain in the arse and one part pleasure.

Lastly - I’ve spent some time running the numbers for house buying. There are two numbers that I find interesting. 1) What house can we afford with the same mortgage payments as our current rent, and 2) What house can we afford with the same interest in the first year as we’re wasting on rent. I began by factoring out property tax (pricey here), water/waste/sewage bill and rounding it up with $50 a month on ‘general repairs’. Based on that I worked out that unless we can find somewhere extremely cheap, it makes better financial sense to keep renting our current place.

Obviously that’s not a good long term plan - rent increases with inflation while mortgages stay fixed [I look at the fixed 15 and 30 year interest rates]. House value also goes up, presumably by more than inflation or at least what money in ’safe’ savings is likely to get - but right now house values aren’t going up and from a budgetary sense I find it very hard to justify buying. The mortgage tax bit doesn’t mean much as the amount we would pay in tax equals the standard amount for having 4 people in the house. Frustrating.