Somewhat Daily Mutterings

G4 Cube on the Way

I just won a used Mac G4 Cube on eBay. It has a 30GB hard drive and 768MB of RAM. I'll be putting it into service as a music and web server. Its assignment to web serving duties will mark the end of my Sun Ultra 1 200e box's reign as web server, something it's done well for number of years now. The Sun box is actually still running fine (as a matter of fact it's been up for 133 consecutive days now), but it's running low on disk space and I'm losing interest in Solaris administration. In addition, the Mac has many more peripheral options (such as the ability to take a wireless card and firewire drives) and a better overall upgrade path should I choose to make upgrades (probably not). It is smaller, more elegant, and has no fan to make noise, so that's great, too.

As an aside, since I mentioned my Sun box's uptime, I thought it would only be fair to mention my iBook's uptime: 70 days, as of today. In and out of sleep, on and off AC power, switching networks, installing software, etc. It's been up for 70 days without issue. That's better even than my PowerBook (which admittedly gets the harder workout).

SRAM PowerLink Review

I just installed another SRAM PowerLink chain, this time on my Serotta. Again, the experience was superb, so I decided to write up a short review.

SRAM PowerLink SR-69

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Shoelaces and Knots

Ian's Shoelace Site - I kid you "not" (heh heh).

Bent a Rim, Dammit!

So, I was riding my commuting bike to work this morning in almost complete darkness (of course, I do use a lighting system). In a high-speed corner that I've taken a million times without incident, today I hit a giant pothole that I didn't see until the last second. I got the front wheel over it, but the back took it hard. I didn't hear the telltale "ping!" of a spoke breaking, so I soldiered on for a bit. However, the next time I put on my brakes, I heard a loud shick-shick-shick sound from the rear. So I stopped under a street light to check it out. A spin of the wheel showed that it had gone out of true, and was catching on the brakes, and that a couple of spokes were very loose. I decided not to do further damage to the wheel, and rode back home (I was only a couple of miles away).

When I got home I put the bike on the stand to have a look at the wheel and see exactly how out of true it was. Well, it wasn't so much out of true as one of the walls of the rim was bent. Badly. I don't know how I did this without flatting immediately due to a pinch flat, but there it was. I'll probably go at the rim with a pliers to see if I can straighten it a bit, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to have the rear wheel rebuilt with a new rim. A real bummer, because these rims are almost new :-(.

I left my PowerBook at work today, and will ride my Colnago in tomorrow. I always look forward to riding that bike!

What's Cool about a Blosxom-style Weblog...

... like mine (gemcast, which is written in Ruby), is that it's filesystem-based. Doesn't sound very impressive, but because of the filesystem approach, it took me only about 10 minutes to hack together a little cron job to produce the "SpringViz Download Count" sidebar box you see at the right (when you're at the top of the weblog). It updates every 15 minutes. Sweet. The Google referrals item was also done this way.

As a side note, it blows me away that I've been running my blog with gemcast for a year and a half now, and haven't felt a burning need to make do more. I guess I'd really like to have a "single-entry" view, but it hasn't been important enough to get me back into hack mode.

SpringGraph is now SpringViz

Due to a naming conflict, I've renamed SpringGraph to SpringViz.

Also, a word of appreciation to Craig Walls who's done me the favor of posting some nice things about SpringViz on his weblog, which is syndicated all over. His reach is much further than mine. Thanks Craig -- I'm glad you've found this little hack useful (SpringViz, that is, not me. I'm a big hack.).

I'm Speaking at Rocky Mountain Software Summit

My presentation, "Strangling Legacy Code", has been accepted for the Rocky Mountain Softare Symposium (RMSS) to be held November 12-14. This is pretty exciting stuff for a newbie presenter. I started keeping notes on this topic on my Wiki a while ago -- I guess I'd better get busy putting them into good shape for a presentation!

Here's the Session Listing. I'm session #62

Introducing SpringGraph

I just hacked together a little utility for Spring Framework developers called SpringGraph. It generates a graph of the bean dependencies expressed in a spring configuration file. It's based on a similar hack for Ant builds called antgraph (thanks for the idea Eric).

Here's an example graph:

Example Spring configuration graph from "jpetstore" sample

Go to my SpringGraph page for more info and the download.

Fun!

Slot Car Game. Brings back great memories.