New Site Theme

general

I’m experimenting with a new WordPress theme that supports WordPress Widgets and also has good support for a 3rd column. I had been looking at adding a 3rd column to my old theme but it was also built for WP 1.5 which meant that it didn’t take advantage of some of the new features that WP 2.0 provided for theme builders. I think I have everything back to the way it was except I don’t have all the links from the sidebar on my original page migrated over yet. I’ll get to that this week most likely.

I’m still on jury duty so I’m pretty busy right now. I’ll publish my daily journal once I’m done with this trial.

Jury Duty Notes

general, jury duty

I was called for jury duty sometime ago but originally requested a postponement due to a vacation I had scheduled. I was rescheduled for September 18th and I reported as required. The first jury pool request was 90 people so I knew this was going to be a big case. They started to read names from the list. My name wasn’t called…until the very end. I went up with everyone else to the jury room to find out the next step.

I can’t say much more than that except that I’m still in the jury selection process and it’s now September 22nd. We didn’t have selection on the 19th and the 20th ended up being a half day. We had a full day yesterday and this court doesn’t operate on Fridays so come Monday I will be back in court again.

If I get excused then I’ll publish all my notes and thoughts from the process as soon as that happens. Otherwise I’ll post a message that I’ve been selected and that you won’t hear more about it for about 4-5 weeks. After my work on the case has ended either way I’m going to publish detailed notes from the experience. It’s been an interesting and at the same time, extremely boring and frustrating process.

I will say, however, that it is interesting how often they point out that the burden is on the prosecution to establish guilt rather than the defense to establish innocence. I thought everyone in this country took Civics class in junior high but I guess not.

An interesting Hibernate 3.2 annotation gotcha

hibernate, software

Here I am working on a project and using Hibernate Annotations 3.2 CR1 and Hibernate 3.2 RC2 (because the annotations CR1 won’t work with CR4) and I ran into a little gotcha. I had just created a few persistent classes and marked them with @Entity and then I setup the annotation configuration in my Ant script and ran it. Nothing happened. That’s not entirely true. The script ran but it never showed that it was processing any classes. Whaaaat? So I try running it by manually creating the configuration and running the SchemaExport class myself. Still nothing. So I start debugging and I see my classes getting added to the AnnotationConfiguration instance but when it comes time to process them, they’re gone. Same instance of AnnotationConfiguration so I start tracing deeper. Then I find what I’m looking for. It only processes classes that are marked with the Entity annotation (MappedSuperclass also but that’s not important right now). The javax.persistence Entity annotation. I had accidentally selected the Hibernate Entity extension annotation when I did an organize imports in Eclipse. Doh!

So I start looking through the documentation and there it is on page 29 of the annotations manual,

@javax.persistence.Entity is still mandatory, @org.hibernate.annotations.Entity is not a replacement.

I will have to file this one away and remember it. While it is documented I think it might be a good idea to rename the Hibernate Entity annotation because as it is, you have to name it absolutely since you must have the EJB3 Entity annotation regardless. And we all know that developers always read the manual before they start coding with a new library. At a minimum I would put a check in to spit out a warning message if a class has an instance of the Hibernate Entity annotation but not the EJB3 Entity annotation. Maybe I’ll submit a patch this weekend since this was bugging me so much.

If you come across this kind of behavior, just double check you imported the right Entity annotation in your code.

Flying Highs and Lows

politics, rant

We flew to Chicago today, one day after all the crap started with no liquids and no gels of any sort. So, let’s start with the good.

Security took almost no time to get through. I think we got through security in about 10-15 minutes. They were professional although the guy going over the rules in a loud voice multiple times did get a little annoying. I think it was his tone more than anything.

Okay, the bad.

The sign says “essential non-prescription drugs” are allowed but no one could tell us an example of one. We told them our doctor said flying with a decongestant for our daughter was essential because she has had some sinus problems lately. But apparently that doesn’t qualify. Actually, no one could actually come up with one that did qualify other than insulin, which was specifically listed as permissable. Next, we missed one item. Our daughters little rubber pig from Bed Bath and Beyond which is filled with a pink gel and these little plastic hearts. They saw on the screen and pulled it and said we couldn’t take it with us and if we wanted to mail it back to ourselves we’d have to get out of line and go back and mail it back to ourselves and then go back through security again. For a $3 pig. Yeah right. I’m just glad our daughter didn’t see them throwing it away. You can’t through a 2 year old’s favorite toy away without consequences. Luckily we’ve been distracting her when she asks for it but now we have to go and find a new one tomorrow. Thanks guys.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to marginalize security. Far from it. I just wish it was really good security. If I’m committed to blowing something up, at this point I’m going to get fake prescription bottles and put stuff in there. How hard is it to get a prescription and change what’s in it? You can’t ‘make me take one to show it’s not an explosive since it’s not a regular fluid. What can you do?? Also, some people could get through with liquids if they drank them in front of security. What’s to stop me from putting in a fake bottom that would have about 3 oz. of real liquid and hide the nasty stuff? Seriously folks, if I can think this up on the fly while waiting in line I think the real bad folks can come up with much worse ways to get around this. This just pisses everyone off and creates a false sense of security (that no smart person really buys…but then again, 1/2 of all people are below average I suppose) that can be exploited.

Call me a skeptic, but every time Bush and GOP and Co. need a pick me up they or an ally announces some big sting operation.

Oh well. Hopefully the trip home goes better.

The Paperless Home — Options?

computers, general

After looking at the mess of papers that my wife and I try to keep track of all the time we’ve decided to try and go paperless. By this we plan on scanning everything in that we get from a financial perspective and then hopefully just ditch the paper. Of course, shredding it first.

After discussing it and knowing how we are I’m pretty sure that we have to make this simple. If it’s not simple we just won’t do it. So, single page scanners are pretty much out. We get too many multi-page documents, statements, etc. I just wish we could get all of our statements online and this wouldn’t be necessary. Next, it has to be easy to get them in to a format that’s usable. PDF is probably the easiest. We want them searchable too, though. I’d love to have document management as well because I’d like to be able to search them, categorize them, whatever so that finding one down the road or searching for a particular term would bring up all the documents.

I figure we’ll just have an external hard drive that we dump the document to, encrypt the drive if possible and then back them up on DVDs using encrypted files. If our house gets broken in to the hard drive basically has all the information to steal our identity so it’s gotta be hard enough that a common criminal or even someone he pawns the drive to can’t break the protection.

So, I started searching. On Windows, at least, I have a few options. It seems like the following fit the bill:

Fujitso S500

Reviews Amazon, NewEgg, and PCMag

This one seems to get universally good reviews. It’s fast. It does duplex. It’s easy to use. It has a small footprint. The downside? At $400 street price it’s relatively cheap for a full document feeder. You also have to use its software since it doesn’t support TWAIN or any other standard interface. It does scan to PDF and comes with Acrobat 7.0 and Abby Reader OCR which makes up for it a bit. Still, it makes me wonder how easy it will be to upgrade its software. Am I always going to be stuck with the current versions of Acrobat and Abby? They might be very good but with a TWAIN and ISIS driver it would be easier to upgrade. Right now, as I write this, it’s the one I’m leaning towards.

Microtek ArtixScan Series

Reviews: Well, all I could find were bad ones to be honest. I really kind of stopped looking after this. Microtek is not really known with document scanning product groups so I’m just going to skip it.

Xerox Documate 152.

Reviews: PCMag and NewEgg

I couldnt find as many reviews for this as the ScanSnap but it seems to come with a good software setup including PaperPort’s document management and OCR software plus it has a TWAIN driver. Nice. It is a little more expensive than the ScanSnap but I like the fact I can use it with other software if I want to. It does duplex as well. It will create searchable PDFs and so on. Is relatively small from a desktop footprint standpoint. The main downside is that it is a little more expensive than the ScanSnap.

Other

I looked at some reviews of a Canon DR-2580C and HP ScanJet 7800 but both were out of the price I would find value at for home document scanning. The Canon lacked software I would require as well. The HP had really good software but I’m not sure I really need some of the software that I’m essentially paying for with the scanner.

When I make my final decision I’ll post it up here along with some early inputs as well as the final document workflow solution I put together.

TestNG 5 is out

software, unit testing

TestNG 5.0 is out. I’ll be upgrading to this one pretty much right away. I like the new tags like @BeforeClass and @BeforeMethod (and their corresponeding after annotations) which are a little more suitable than the @Configuration attribute in the previous releases. I had experimented with JUnit 4 a little bit and definitely liked the simpler annotations easier.

Could someone please make these default reports look nicer??? Yes yes, I know I could do it…I’m just hoping someone else would beat me to it.

The other annoying thing in Eclipse is that when I run a test by right clicking on it and running a TestNG test it creates a bunch of reports in the project directory by default. That’s not great default behavior. Why even create them by default when executing from within the Eclipse environment?

Dell Laptops Suck

general, rant, software

I’ve had this Dell D620 laptop for about 2 months now. It’s one of the Core Duo based laptops.

After two months my battery will not charge more than 79%. It says it’s full but then when I unplug the thing it immediately shows 80%.

If that’s not enough it will occasionally come out of suspend mode on its own. Normally it happens when I’m on BART and I put the laptop into suspend mode. Then, when I take it out of the bag a couple of hours later it’s running again and hot. And this particular issue is not limited to my 620. It happened on my previous D600 and D610. This never happened on my previous Thinkpads.

BTW, Whoever thought widescreens were a good idea for regular work? That’s the only way to get a Latitude now I think. For coding I would much rather have the older profile. Sure, for watching a movie it’s great but I would rather have a better screen for coding. The wide screen does nothing for me in that regard. I wish my company would go back to Thinkpads.