The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

Author: eajhnsn1

  • MySpace

    As promised a while back, I have a few comments on the short time I’ve been a member of myspace.

    First, a quick background.  I’ve been quite curious of the whole social networking fad that has been going on.  As such, I first joined Facebook to get a peek at what it was all about.  I created my account, added a few people, checked it frequently.  Then sat there.  Outside of getting in contact with old classmates/friends, it’s a pretty damn boring environment.  I think it’s safe to say that I still didn’t get it.

    A little time went by, and I got tired of hearing all this roar about MySpace.  I assumed it was just another site like Facebook, but wanted to be sure before I wrote it off.   So I went and created an account…..

    Now that I’ve been on it for a month or so, I feel no need to hold back judgement.  Holy crap, what a steaming pile MySpace is.  I was definitely wrong when I first thought it was another Facebook.  Hell no, at least facebook has a web application that is clean, relatively fast, and… here’s a thought… WORKS!  I can’t keep track of how many times I’ve tried searching and get a stupid error page saying their engineers have been notified of the error.  I’m throwing the bullshit flag on that one!  They’d probably receive on the order of magnitude of 100,000 emails a day if that were the case.

    I then tried setting aside my frustration from the technical side of myspace, and focus on the idea and not the implementation.  Yeah, there’s nothing there either.  I now fully believe that 90% of MySpace users are legally blind, and 85% of the remaining 10% are color blind.  I’ve never seen so many webpages that make me wish I’d just have the seizure and get it over with.  Again, I tried setting my disgust aside and focus on the content.  But then I realized I couldn’t focus on the content because some really annoying song just started playing from someone’s page!  When I finally turn that off, all I see are retarded internet joke images, lame shout-outs on the bulletin boards, and shitty camera phone pictures.  To those I say: 1) everyone has seen those jokes, they aren’t new.  Ever.  2) Oh boy, you’re only the hundredth person to say “Wow, it’s been a long time!” and 3) just because your phone has a camera doesn’t mean it was meant to be used all the time.  Seriously, put it down.
    I’m convinced that MySpace needs to just be buried in internet history and forgotten about.  I admit that I still don’t care about social networking sites, but someone’s gotta come along and beat MySpace.  Please!

  • You just can’t rush multithreading

    A week or so ago in Chef, I needed to add some multithreaded code.  At the time, I saw a few things that were going to be issues in a multithreaded environment, so I quickly put some syncronization code around critical resources.  I didn’t feel like taking the time right then to really think it through and get it right – I even recall thinking something along the lines of This should work ok, but I don’t really think it’s enough…

    Sure enough, a bug popped up tonight from that block of code.  It didn’t take long to see what was going on, because in the back of my head was the suspect syncronization code.  But the moral of the story is (even if you try to ignore/deny it) you just cannot rush multithreaded programming.  Period.

    I’ll be fixing that code tomorrow night.

  • Game 5

    Game 5 goes to the Cardinals!  Woooo!  They now take a 3-2 lead in the series headed back to NY.

    The Cardinals have been extremely lucky, knock on wood.  The weather has aligned twice in this series to give much needed rest to the pitching staff at critical moments.  The first postponed game allowed Carpenter to throw game 2 and the postponed game yesterday allowed another day rest for Weaver.  Who could ask for better timing?

  • News sites, please

    Stop posting so many stories on your websites that are videos.  This is so frustrating – you go and scan the headlines on your favorite news site and find an interesting headline.  You click the link, but does it open a nice webpage where you can scan the article? No!  It plays a video.

    I don’t know about you, but I can’t really scan a video like I can a webpage.  Not to mention the 30 second commercial that precedes it.  So now a task that could have taken me maybe 15-20 seconds (scanning the article for pertinant information) now takes 30 seconds just to start viewing the story.   Is this really what we want the web to be?  I could probably use Google News to get around this problem, but Google News really hasn’t kept my interest for some reason or another.

    News sites, can you please stop this practice?

  • Sore Sunday

    Played some more paintball yesterday, more accurately woodsball.  After a long drought of non-play, we’ve been able to play twice in three weeks and even managed to pick up a couple new players.  The player pool is probably over a dozen at this point, which should make it easier to get 7-8 guys to play at any one time. 

     

    My highlights (and lowlights) of yesterday include:

    • crawling on my stomach for 200+ ft. to sneak up on Jay.
    • Running the remaining 100ft to ambush him, only to be unable to stop (damn boots!) and landing in the gully next to him.  I also didn’t hear the yells for me to surrender until I landed next to him.  I surrendered.
    • Getting shot by my dad about 3 seconds after surrendering.  He was on my team.  That’ll teach me to ever surrender again, I suppose.
    • A long range shot to hit John on the ass as he was hiding from a teammate in another direction.
    • Chasing after Jay in our last match and finally landing one on his shoulder as he was asking his teammates if he had some paint on him.

     

    All in all it was a good outing; I ended up with 3 or 4 kills.  Today I sure am sore though, between diving onto my knees, crawling, and general running and jumping in boots, my legs are killing me.

  • Taskbar Shuffle

    I’ve been using this great utility for a few months now, and it’s installed on every one of my computers now. If you’re using Windows and find yourself inundated with applications in your taskbar you should give it a shot. I started using it just to rearrange running applications but I just installed the latest version (2.0) and it has some cool grouping options that are going to come in handy.

    Oh, and it’s free. The author does take donations, however.

  • 2006 NLDS Champs

    Go Cardinals!

    Ana, myself, Dave and Josh went to Game 4 of the NLDS last night.  The umpires sucked – from our seats approximately 3,997 rows back from home plate and 35,000 feet in the air, we could clearly see the terrible ball and strike calls.  The pitching wasn’t very crisp but the Cardinals pulled it out and are now headed to New York to play the Mets.

  • MedievalMoto

    Picture this.

    You fire up your game console of choice and in no time you are driving a motorcycle (actually any motororized vehicle) in medieval times!

    • MotoJoust
    • MoatCross
    • MotoSeige (attack and overtake the castle)
    • Princess Run (mad race through the castle, up to the princess in the tower)
    • Cannon Dodge (avoid getting hit by the barrage of cannon balls)
    • More to come!

    Doesn’t that sound like a blast? It would fly off the shelves, I mean who doesn’t want to race through the woods on a bike and knock an opponent off their bike with the jousting stick?!?!

    You know you want it.   If I get enough pre-orders I’ll start development.

  • New Photo Gallery

    Due to some technical issues, I’ve upgraded to Gallery 2.  Bookmark http://gallery.ejinnovations.com.

  • Early Autumn

    It looks like we’re getting an early Fall this year, and I love it.  I’ve come to realize that my favorite time of the year is autumn, and I don’t really know why.  The most tangible part is the cool, crisp air that just seems relaxing; but there’s something else that I just can’t put my finger on.

    Here’s a list of things that might contribute, if you have other suggestions then leave a comment.  I’d really like to be able to pinpoint this if possible, so please help:

    * cool, crisp air

    * bonfires/campfires

    * playoff baseball (..come on Cardinals, get your act together)

    * colorful leaves

    * tailgating

    * lack of bugs (great for astronomy)

    * lower humidity