04.25.2008/04:26
Guzzler
I never thought I'd be the kind of guy who would drive the sort of vehicle that took fifty bucks for a fill-up. But I have become just such a person: $50.45 to refuel the Camry yesterday.
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"cheap gasoline"
03.21.2008/17:16
The Poor Clio Time Machine
I'm taking a class in May on Adobe AIR for Flex Developers, so I've been trying to build up my chops enough in Flex 3 to make the class productive. Slogging through tutorials is always instructive, but I find I really pick up my learning pace when I try to actually create something and then have to learn all the things it takes to flesh out my idea.
So, I have created the Poor Clio Time Machine, which lets the user find a spot in the historical continuum of Poor Clio postings and see what was posted on that day; to make it more visually interesting, I have also allowed users to limit the results to photo entries. One major caveat: the older a posting is, the more vulnerable it is to any linked pages long ago having disappeared. This is especially true, as you might guess, for news citations.
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"Adobe Flex 3"
03.2.2008/13:20
Sentencing issue
Susan and I have been married so long that we tend to finish each other's
So much so that it's gotten to where sometimes I just don't even bother to
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"finish each other's sentences"
02.9.2008/12:55
My life
After citing the BBC story about Hemingway-inspired six-word autobiographies, I of course had to have a go at it myself; so, here is my life in six words:
Sought music; often heard only noise.
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"sought music often heard only noise"
01.28.2008/15:56
Tiny companion
The other day I purchased, through Amazon, one of those tiny little Asus EEEPC 2G Surf computers. It is very light and tiny, about the size and weight of a trade paperback, but its 7-inch 800x400 monitor is very readable, and, since I have somewhat small hands, I find the small keyboard very much usable.
Out of the box, it is very easy to hook up to Wi-Fi or ethernet for Internet; and to read, edit and create Word and Excel documents in Open Office, etc.
However, for my purposes, there were a few things I needed to be able to make it do in order for it to qualify as a real traveling companion in the place of my Toshiba Windows laptop. I need to be able to not only read email, etc., but also do simple web page editing for maintenance purposes, and also want to be able to use my Sprint EVDO connection. Here's what I added (or found!) to make it all work:
1. I quickly found a link that described how to use the Sprint U720, and after about a fifteen-minute process, had the Sprint device working. I simply call it up through a terminal.
2. There is a need to do some photo editing on occasion when I am on the road, usually only cropping and resizing, but still, best done in a real photo editor. From the WIKI at eeeuser.com, I found a list of repositories for packages that work with the debian - xandros branch of Linux, and had GIMP, the versatile open-source graphics editor, working within minutes (note that I had to use "apt-get install" rather than the somewhat squirrelly Synaptic package handler.. but then, I kind of like command lines).
3. These repositories also included a package for the MySQL Query Browser, which allows me to manipulate databases as needed in the rare case where I am faced with a task that I can't address with the CMS I have built for one of my web sites.
4. A line editor was on my list of things to hunt for, but the kwrite that comes installed on the EEEPC (1) can be made to show line numbers and (2) can be made to highlight ColdFusion markup. It is a very rare occasion indeed that I would have to edit ColdFusion code in my serious "on the road" mode - usually page code is written and tested on the dev box before being loaded on the production server - but it is good to know that it would be easy to read the pages should I need to be able to. (In an "emergency," I suppose a page can be tested on my own server or under a temp name, etc., but I think I have had to do this perhaps once in the last four or five years... almost all the adjusting I do in "road mode" is to content.)
5. Similarly, an FTP client was on my list, but I read that the File Manager on the EEEPC was based on Konqueror, and it turns out that you can open an ftp window through the address bar. I will need another solution, though, for Secure FTP.
All in all, I am pleased to say that my $300 EEEPC will be the computer I take the next time I fly out for a few days. For longer road trips, I would still lug the now-luxuriously-large-seeming Toshiba, or, since space wouldn't be at such a premium, take them both along!
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"Asus EEEPC 2G Surf"
01.24.2008/13:50
Bon Voyage!
When Susan got wind of the likelihood of some kind of tax rebate that might put a thousand bucks or more into our pockets with the aim of stimulating the U.S. economy, she quipped, "Now we can afford to go to Europe." She was... kidding, of course.
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"dollar euro pound we're staying put"
01.23.2008/10:00
Made it!
Well, look around, here it is mid-January, and the pleasing realization sinks in that I have made it through that recent set of holidays.
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