Misc

Stardate 57080.3 (08-03-2004)

For anyone who is on the edge of your seat about the banana cream pie, it turned out splendidly. The saying is that the third time is the charm, but the second worked out in this case. It does help that the second attempt was without three kids arguing over who gets to put what in. The step that was missed the first time was to add the egg yoke mixture to the main mix, and allow the entire thing to cook for a few more minutes. The first attempt I added the egg yolk mixture without any further cooking. The dog didn’t seem to mind.

The dog is getting better at locking his jaws to avoid the pills. I can’t say I blame him. He gets two pills three times a day, and another twice a day. Eight pills and cream for the ears is not fun. 

Patrick won the argument over stacking the bunk beds. Sunday we moved his bed to the top. He was a little scared come bedtime, but he made it. He has been sleeping much better since getting the new mattress. Once of the pros about putting his bed on top is that Smokey is to old to jump that far, and Frisky has moved into his new home, so no cat hair to bother him. I had a bunk bed as a child, and I do remember waking up at night for a while to the ‘bump, scratch, scratch’, as our cat, Maxine, would jump from the floor four feet up to the top.

Patrick also helped put the beds together. He did a lot of twisting on the hex (aka Allen, although I have never found out who Allen is or was) wrench to drive the screws into the wood. I kind of wished the designer had used Phillip head screws, which would have allowed me to use the cordless drill. It’s hard to get a lot of torque on a 1 ½ inch metal sliver. Maybe they need to study Archimedes a little more.

Rachel started art camp this week. She is a little bored, and because she has been to so many camps this summer, we gave her the option of skipping it. 

One of the sitters who watches the kids was telling Rachel about World War II. I guess he has a book about it. She relayed a lot of the details to me after. When it started, when it ended, and when the US got involved. She told me over and over that some of the ships sunk at Pearl Harbor are still there, although she could not remember the name (USS Arizona).

Someone at Paramount must be listening. An article on Sci-Fi Wire says Manny Coto wants to take Star Trek back to it's roots, and show some of the aliens in the Original Series. Ok, maybe a few others had the same idea, and it even may have been Manny's original idea in his head. Either way, it sounds good.

The warp drive article got me thinking, which is a bad sign. Sometimes we get a little stuck on certain ideas. One of those is that the impulse drive in Star Trek is a simple action/reaction system. The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual by Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda seems to follow in this rut, until you read the text about creating a field effect and allowing the slippage of the continuum past the spacecraft. Kind of vague, but on purpose. I always like the explanation found in Diane Carey's Final Frontier, where impulse is I. M. Pulse, which is short for Internally Metered Pulse drive. Lasers compress a fuel pellet smaller and smaller. The energy is collapsed in on itself, and 'escapes' as space distortions. The ship rides the distortions like a surfer on a wave. It sounds pretty good.

Yuck, I didn’t do to well on this phishing test. I have had a few of these show up in the inbox.  I tend to assume if some email is asking to verify account information, it’s a fraud. 

A code review was done on one of my C# projects. It came back very good. The main complaint was that I used the C++ Underscore_between_words on variable names. The preferred style is camelCase (first letter lowercase, and each word after capitalized) or PascalCase (each word capitalized). One little embarrassment was that I used a foreach to search an ArrayList like this:

ArrayList aList = new ArrayList();

int new_id = 4;
boolean found = false;

foreach (int id in aList)
{
        if (id == new_id)
            found = true;
}

if (!found)
        aList.Insert(new_id);

It works, but I could have done:

int id = aList.IndexOf(new_id);

if (id < 0)
        aList.Insert(new_id);

The IndexOf method is probably faster, and definitely less IL code. What bothers me is that I knew the method was there, I just didn't think to use it. I fell back into an older way of doing things. I also don’t use K&R bracing style out of old habit. 

Christopher Anthony has been interesting to read when he was bashing Windows. The inevitable fight ensued, and it became known he was basing all of his opinions on second hand knowledge. He has since installed XP, and does like it. I found his comments interesting, especially myth 5, on the support you get with Windows vs. Linux.