Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Uncle Joe's Knot
August 07, 2007

I used to live near a paper mill. Several of them. Some of my family worked there, including my grandfather and my uncle Joe (my grandmother’s sister’s husband). Both my grandfather and Uncle Joe were in the Navy, and they plied their skills at tying knots to their new trade in the private sector.

Perhaps it is not widely imagined how paper is processed by a mill. Actually, all of the paper mills in Downingtown are recycled paper plants. They don’t use cut trees to make paper, just old paper and cardboard. The paper is put into a big vat of chemicals to help break it down and re-form it into pulp, then it’s pressed out through some machinery to be flattened and dried. The resulting paper can be any thickness, and can be used to construct many things, like boxes for board games, french fry containers, or inch-thick concrete pillar molds.

New Features out the Wazoo
August 04, 2007

Have you heard about Habari? If you’re a regular reader here, then of course you have. What you might not know is that Habari development is not dead.

It’s weird how a summer can bring a natural stall to the activities usually relegated to the development spawned by countless hours of hibernating indoors. To outside appearances, it might not look like a lot is going on with Habari. Even though commits continue to trickle in, but it’s not the full-blown force that it was six months ago. I’ll assure you now that the project is still quite alive, and that we’ve even got release news to back that up.

PHP5 Table Model Classes and Framework Failings
July 29, 2007

I’ve been doing a bit of development in PHP frameworks lately, and the way that they handle models in their Model/View/Controller setup has be bothered. The major issue is that the frameworks aren’t using PHP5, and so they can’t take advantage of “true” objects for data retrieval and operation.

One fancy thing we’ve done with Habari is use PHP5’s built-in PDO classes. Apart from giving us access to many database types (MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL, SQLite, etc.) simply by changing the connection string, it allows us to tell the engine to store retreived record information not just in a generic class, but in a class that we define.

Someone Please Explain Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
July 22, 2007

I will start this post by saying this: If you didn’t finish the book, come back later. Ok, now with that out of the way…

The Deathly Hallows was a pretty good book. I was satisfied by the story and thought it brought a decent close to the Harry Potter series. I particularly liked the descent into Gringotts, and the clever traps awaiting Harry in the Lastrange vault. I enjoyed the quest into the Ministry of Magic, too, imagining how the elevator scene would play out in movie format – something akin to a Keystone Cops flick. I suppose that I could generalize and say that the key stand-alone adventures in the book were all very satisfying.

The downside of the book has mostly to do with the book construction. The camping scenes were meant to seem long and solitary for the group of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, but the book really drew out in those areas. I think some editing could have reduced those significantly. But my main gripe with the book is that the “fight scenes” were often not comprehensible. Here’s where I hope you other Harry Potter readers can help me out.

I think I may have finally figured out the end, after re-reading pages 742-743 five times.

On this day in 1999
July 17, 2007

On this day in 1999, we were sipping free champagne on a flight between Amsterdam and New Delhi to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.

I was working at Kruse at the time, and our off-shore contractor wanted us to come visit and have some personal contact with the team. The ramp-up for the visit was quick - only two weeks, which was quite possible in the days before 9/11. When it was decided that I would be going on the trip and the date was picked, the question was essentially, “Got anything going on that week?” And my answer - “Just my first wedding anniversary.”