February 2009 Archives

Interesting question isn't it?  People use facebook for different things; networking, dating, complaining, you name it.  Just yesterday my step-daughter Courtney sent me an invite for something call Dogbook.  Yes, it seems that within facebook you can build a network for your pet, in this case my dog.  Oh yeah, it also includes cats too.  So I gave it a try, we have three dogs, a min pin, a yorkie and a big question mark.  I set up a dogbook for our min pin, felony, fel for short.  I was able to set up information about him, favorite things to do, and then build a network of friends for him.  So what's the value?  I'm not sure yet.  I was able to find groups to joins for other min pins.  So there could be something there.  But right now, I am just not sold.  It definitely does show that social networking is exploding into other directions that I would have never guessed.  And yes, I do update fel's status when he does something new.

Like most of you out there in blog land, I read a lot of tech news and views from a variety of sources.  Some of my favorites are digg.com, lifehacker.com and slashdot.org.  Just recently I came across a post about a news aggregator site called newser.com.  newser was mentioned as being the future of on-line newspapers, and I agree.  Last night on Fox Business, I heard that most of the stock prices of the major newspapers are actually less than the price of the paper itself.   I receive the CDT at home, but with a site like newser, I could be convinced to cancel my subscription. 

I am a big Mac user, right now I am typing this post on my iMac.  Also in my office, you will find a MacBook and a Mac Mini.  At home, I have a Mac Mini too.  But there are times when I need to run other operating systems for testing like Windows and a flavor of Unix.  Since all of my Macs are Intel-based, I am able to take advantage of the virtualization software that is available.  I have tried Parallels and VMware Fusion.  Under both of those products, I installed a licensed copy of Windows XP and Ubuntu.  In the end, I really liked VMWare for its features and performance.  Heck, I even went out and purchased a copy for home.  Now the landscape has changed a bit.  A while back, Sun released VirtualBox as Open Source, which is another VMWare-like environment.  From the VirtualBox site:

This one of my first posts about things in my world that have nothing to do with software.  So back to the audit, no it was not the IRS.  I had an energy audit performed on my house.  With rumors of really high oil and energy prices, I decided to take some action back in the summer and see if there were things I could to keep things under control.  In the back of my mind, I figured the audit would go well, since my house was constructed in 2000.  Ha, was I really wrong.

So I contacted the auditor, who in the end turned out to be someone I went to high school with, go figure.  Anyways, John came out and told me about the process.  We started off with a questionnaire about how we (my wife Sheri and I) feel about the house.  Is it really cold in the winter, and warm in the summer and many other questions like that.  Actually, there were three pages of questions.  After the question period, John went around the house looking for things and then started in the basement and worked his way upstairs to the attic.  The last thing he performed was a blower door test.  You can read more about that here.  John assured me the house would do well.  Well it did not. Based on the results of the test, he felt that I had huge holes in my ductwork and I was loosing energy in other places.  Ouch!  So here were some of the recommendations:

1. Fix my basement insulation, as it was installed incorrectly.
2. Insulate my water pipes
3. Seal behind my sinks.
4. Seal other areas that had drafts.
5. Add additional insulation to my attic.
   
6. And many other things (10 pages worth).

In the end, the things were easy to fix and the costs were minimal.  The audit itself ended up only costing me $300.00.  I plan on having a follow up audit later this summer to see if there are any more things I can do before the electric caps are removed.  From a tech standpoint, it was really interesting to see how technology was being used to determine the problems with my house.  Opps, sorry this was not supposed to be a post about software.  Ha!

Back in the day, there used to be a TV game show called, "Name that tune".  The premise behind the show was the contestants would state how many notes of a song they needed to identify it.  It was interesting to see people do that with one note, talk about luck. 

So fast forward to present day, a lot of times we are asked to solve a problem by programming solution.  Based on the type of problem and its solution, you may try to play the same game with a programming language.  I can solve that problem in 2 lines of Perl or 30 lines of "C", which is better?  Well it depends on the type of problem you are trying to solve, of course.  Over my twenty-some years of programming, I have used the following languages: Ada, "C", C++, Java, Perl, Lisp, Prolog, Pascal, Visual Basic, and so on.  All of these languages have their distinct advantages and disadvantages.   I think the most important part is when you try to name that tune, you are thinking about things like:

1. Will my selected language scale to the user base (current and future)?
2. Do I need to worry about any special security concerns?
3. If I pick a language like Ada, will someone be around to maintain it and/or cover for me when I am out?

You get idea, these are very important questions to ask.  Just because you can name that solution in 3 lines of Perl, does not really make it the correct solution for the problem.