SCDJWS

You are NOT reading the blog of a Sun Certified Developer of Java Web Services.

Hopefully, you are reading the blog of a SOON to be SCDJWS. Today I got the go-ahead to expense the exam and will be scheduling it for early to mid April if all goes well. Assuming I pass, which I intend to work hard to make sure of, I will be a SCJP, SCWCD, and a SCDJWS. Oooooh lots of letters :)


You mask ask, "Why get certified? Certifications are overrated and no one pays attention to them!" Well, you may be right, but studying for the certification gives me a clearly defined goal to work toward and a reason to go beyond the minimum learning. Since I am working with the everyday, and they are here to stay at least for the foreseeable future, I may as well know them inside and out. I really would like to get my SCJD cert since its more actual development oriented and project based, but since its more expensive (2 tests) and clients ask for it less (evidently they usually just require SCJP) Sark won't pay for it.

NOTE TO SELF

Adding text to a post w/ the Google Map's tags willy-nilly may result in them being removed by the WYSIWYG editor.


GRRRRR

Reviews-a-plenty

All Saints Church Fish Fry
Last friday Em and I tried the All Saints Church fish fry and I have to say, overall, I was very pleased. They definitely had their act together, they moved people through pretty fast, and the food was good. Oh, and let me tell you. Seeing that many kids of all ages running around, screaming, and generally terrorizing anyone they can find .... thats great birth control.

- Food (good fish & slaw, mac-n-cheese was "ok", more bread choices would have been nice)
- Atmosphere (too many kids, but friendly people)
- Price ($6.50 a person for 2-piece dinner)
- Misc (no homemade cherry pie)
- Overall


Jolly Time 100 Calorie Mini Bags, Healthy Pop Kettle Corn
I inherited a package of these mini-bags of popcorn was fairly hisitent of them. In my experience, things which tout themselves as being only XXX number of calories and use fake artificial sweeteners are not nearly as good as what they are imitating. However, this time I was happily surprised. Hunger came early to today. Earlier than my normal lunch time, so a pack was opened. Upon popping I was happy to find a fair amount of popcorn in the bag, all of which was decently seasoned and had good flavor. Without knowledge of how much they cost, I can't say if I would ever buy them, but for free, they are great.

?? - Cost
- Flavor
- Amount (the amount was plenty for one person, not for 2)
- Overall (the undisclosed cost hurt it in the home stretch)


Broomball Wins x 3
Yesterday, despite having a double header and an unknown number of subs, we pulled off two huge wins in broomball. The first team had a really good goalie but could not sustain any pressure in our end. I think the first period (with the ball in their end for ~ 95% of the time) really helped our self esteem. With the two wins we improved our session standings to 3-1-1 and tripled our previous total wins (1 to 3)!

- Winning (as compared to losing)


Competition Racing + Happy Hour
This Thursday Sark has its annual monthly meeting at the Competition Racing track in Lawrenceburg, Indiana. Really fast go-karts on an indoor track chock full of coworker rivalries. You can't get much better than that. Afterward we have a happy hour at a nearby bar. Hopefully some more information on the Sark/Sogeti buyout will be announced. Either way, wish me luck ... and SPEED!

- Average work meeting
- Meetings where you have to sign a waiver and wear a helmet

BROOMBALL WIN-X0R

We won our broomball double-header games 3-0 and 4-0. Seeing as how we had only won one previous game, this was huge. My wrist is bothering me, but I can ignore it if we are gonna win. It sounds like we will be playing again next session, so that should be fun now.



Now, I need to get clean and eat the yummy smelling stuff Em is making - Avocado Chicken Salad?.

Fish Fries

Today was Ash Wednesday, which to heathens like myself, means the season of fish fry's has officially begun. So, here are the current leading candidates around the tri-state area:

[UPDATED w/ All Saints Review]

Yeah, its a Google Map. Yeah its on my blog. Yeah it took me entirely too long to debug it and to copy all of the darn addresses to the post, but it works really well now :-D

I had been wanting some way to store the locations for a given map external to a post ideally, but a couple days ago I decided I couldn't wait to find such a solution, and I figured out a decent way to handle it. I had to add two Javascript includes to the top of the template (one for the Google Map API and one for Prototype.js). Then add the bottom of the template within the body tags, I added scripts to scan the current DOM and look for any tags of class "MAPYARDSPOON". If it finds one, it looks through its attributes for the initial zoom/location of the map and uses the Google API to add a map within the DIV.

To add points on the map, the main DIV designates a class of elements which will contain data points for the particular map. The script them searches for all elements with the given class and pulls their attributes for the various points. Luckily, the API contains a built in Geocoding service so I can either add points by long/latitude or by address. I think it works pretty well. I will probably tweak it some more still but it fills the need for now. :)

Oh, yeah. I like food a little too much. And I am a huge nerd. You gotta love it!

Ignore This Post .... If you can!

I found this little gem yesterday within an application that wishes to remain nameless.
--thus the red MSPaint air brushing ... gotta protect the innocent--

If someone can figure out how to hit OK,
and not have the world come to an end,
please let me know :)

GRGLE GRGLE GRGLE

(in case your wondering, thats the sound my stomach just made)

My current hunger is prompting a post about food. I have a few food related tid bits I thought I would share for those of you who might care or at least read this on a dare but just to be fair you gotta share. (I have no idea where that rhyming came from. I may need some coffee):

1) Berghoff's Root Beer
This past weekend Em and I went to JungleJims looking for some decent produce and all the entertainment that comes along with the spectacle that is JJ's. We found what we were looking for and spent the next hour or so walking around looking at all the food stuffs we would try if we had the time, money, or any clue what the packaging said. :)

Anyway, as we were heading toward the exit I had the hankering for some unusual soda. As I was perusing the strange and exotic sodas from around the world, I saw a couple of bottles of Berghoff's Root Beer. Now, I consider myself to be a big fan of root beer, but after moving to Cincinnati I have gotten to know two people who are pushing the fan-atic end of the spectrum. One of them has often cited Berghoff's as one of their favorites. Well, I am happy to say, it is now one of mine. Smooth, clean, with a fair amount of bite. Very good. It also made a dandy root-beer-float.

Sadly, I am unhappy to report that the restaurant that the root beer gets its name from seems to have closed in the past year. No idea how this might effect the supply of the drink, but considering it can only be found locally at JJ's, it probably isn't a good thing.

2) Easy Yummy Rice Noodle Stir Fry
Last night I made up some Rice Noodles with veggies and a Hoisin-Peanut-Lime sauce which Em and I thought was very good considering how easy it really was to make. All I did was put the rice noodles in warm water to soak, microwave the frozen veggies most of the way, make the sauce, toss the veggies and the soaked noodles in a pan with the sauce and a little water, put the lid on and wait a couple minutes. Pretty simple.

However, here are a few pointers for the boys and girls who may want to try something similar at home:

• Don't believe the rice noodle package. It said 3-5 minutes in warm water would be enough if you were going to also fry them. This only works if you are going to fry them for a while with moisture in the pan. 7-10 minutes is what it really took
• We were looking to get your normal assorted frozen veggies but Em wanted baby corn and I didn't want mushrooms so we didn't choose the Kroger brand ones. We ended up with another "name" brand which I can't remember which was on sale. I don't have anything against name brands, but normally the Kroger is just as good or at least plenty good given the price difference. The ones we got, however, were in some sort of special pouch which you could microwave right in and supposedly they would be perfectly done. Well I have to say it works. Very well in fact. Took them out of the freezer, popped in the microwave for 4.5 minutes. Perfectly done. I am not sure that convenience is worth about $3 (sale for $2) compared to the Kroger $1 which I can easily toss in a pan to cook, but damn its nice not having to think once in a while.
• Decent sauces aren't nearly as hard to make as I was thinking it might be. I just tossed a couple tablespoons of hoisin sauce with a couple tables spoons of peanut butter, some lime juice, a couple chopped cloves of garlic, some soy sauce, red pepper flakes and a little water in the food processor and took it for a spin. Done and done and yummy.

And now I believe its Oatmeal time. :-)


3) [Late Addition] I did believe it was Oatmeal time when I wrote the above line, however it turns out that my watch was wrong. It was in fact Free Food in the Hallway b/c of Mardi Gras time.

Coding...

I finally pushed some initial code for Photessera up. Just some interfaces but at least its a start. I want to try a more TDD approach when writing it, so things may progress slowly. Also I am still trying to decide how much modularity I want to give it (e.g. I know I will want to test various decision and image building algorithms but I am not sure if they will just be during testing or if they will be options in the final app.) Hopefully I will decide on something soon.

...

I also pushed a rather large update (given the size of the project) today for Mag-Games. I had done a fair bit and had the latest code at work as of Friday but our network went flaky about quiting time, so evidently the commit didn't go through. But its there now. I had some trouble with deleting files and re-adding them (was using eclipse tool to generate file which was easier than modifying it by hand). I will chalk it up to inexperience with Subversion and/or Subclipse but I couldn't find a way to delete it, recreate it and have it keep the info. All well. Its still there now and didn't contain anything really worth while previously.

If I get a chance to write up the base/utility class unit tests ... I can move the project several point releases forward. Yeah its not TDD but at least I am trying.

...

Also, for anyone who might read this and not MFC, I posted an open question here which I would love suggestions for.

Honesty & Photography

How far is too far when editing photos? I guess it depends on what your intentions are: {who is your intended audience, what is your intended medium, why are you taking the photo, why are you showing it to others, and do the others your showing it to have any idea about your previous answers}. At what point do you lost the original photo and are left with someone made up and fake? How far can you go trying to make something look good before its not really what you saw?

What got me thinking about this question were some photos I took on Friday at a local park. I wanted to go out and get some good photos of the ice/snow in the park and along the lake and stream that runs through it. With ice still covering most of the trees and the fact that it had been constant cold for quite some time, I thought I might be able to get some really interesting and pretty pictures. The sun was setting when I was taking most of them and between taking photos in the small gorge that the stream flows through and taking ones in the wide open of the lake ... I had to keep changing my camera settings trying to keep the snow white-ish, and the details visible.

When I got back home and was putting them into iPhoto I noticed that some of them ended up discolored due to incorrect white-balancing and/or bad framing with the sun. Also, many of them didn't have the full dynamic range I was hoping for and/or lost contrast from what I could actually see. In playing with the settings iPhoto let me edit (including a wonderful "enhance" button which does a pre-set algorithm for adjusting white-balance, contrast, etc), it got me wondering how far you can modify the originals before your not really being "honest". I still don't have an answer.

In thinking about this, I came up with the following list of common ways to modify photos. I am curious which of the following people think are OK in today's age of all-in-one digital cameras and quick-editing features.

• historical camera abilities
• shutter speed, focus, ISO, aperture, film type (bw, color, etc), zoom, depth of field (result of above)
  
• in camera fixes / modifiers
• white balance, red-eye correction, sepia, b/w, etc, color correction, digital zoom
• post production (adjustments)
• contrast, color levels, white balance (done via above?), brightness, crop, rotate, exposure (brightness/levels/contrast)?
  
• post production (changes)
• cut/copy/paste (composite images), retouch to get rid of smudges-scratches-blemishes-red-eye, blurring, smooth edges / sharpen

I think it really just boils down to what you are trying to do. If you want to mislead your viewer, its easy. If you want an exact representation of what happened, you shouldn't do much beyond the initial capture. If you just like cool looking photos and a little modification won't keep you up at night, go for it.

So without further adieu here are some of my favorites from Friday and the past few days. The original and the edited version should be side by side (original on left, edit on right) if the HTML doesn't get too screwed up. More (but far from all) can be seen in my photo gallery here. Let me know what you think. :-)