The Johnson Blog

Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…

  • Recipe Sharing and Beta 2

    Chef Beta 2 isn’t quite as far along as I’d like it to be thanks to the Holidays and work.  I’m targeting the middle of January for its release and that’s coming up fast.  A couple dozen bug fixes and features/enhancements since Beta 1 have been done though, with the major ones out of the way.

    One of these big features is Recipe Sharing, which I think will be a compelling reason to actually put recipes into the application.  It’ll be very handy to just click the mouse  a few times and be able to give recipes to fellow Chef users. And for sharing with non-Chef users, there’s always copy to clipboard.

    So those of you interested should keep an eye out in the next few weeks for the final Beta release, with 1.0 hopefully coming in another month+ after that.

  • DVD Changer

    A week ago, Jay brought up the topic of movies on demand in his house. He was starting to look hard at going the DVD-to-hard drive route, when he ran across this awesome Media Center setup from Sony. That’d be a fantastic solution if I were willing to pay that much for it. Unfortunately I’m not.

    Int he past I’ve made several attempts at having a computer in our living room hooked up to our tv. At one point we had been using MythTV for a year or more. It was a bit clunky but worked. But then we got an HD tv and started renting a dual tuner HD DVR from our cable company and disbanded the Myth box. Several months after that, my parents gave me their unused Tivo so I setup Galleon to allow us to play our MP3 collection with it. I think we’ve used it once. And now that my PC is in the next room with a decent set of speakers, I see us using it even less than once in the future. Shrug, I’ve tried.

    But now the thought of on-demand movies… We have a lot of DVDs but hardly ever watch them because we’re…ahem.. too lazy to get them off the shelf I suppose. Instead, we often find ourselves watching the same movies we own on TV – with the commercials and crappy picture. On-demand would be very helpful. However, I don’t like the idea of (these overlap, don’t complain) 1) building a computer to drive it, 2) paying for the computer to drive it, 3) have the annoyance of MythTV or the cost of Media Center. In short, I don’t want a computer in my living room running it all. I’ve tried it and I find it just too annoying.
    So today I think we solved it by purchasing Sony’s 400 Disc DVD Changer. It took a while to get configured with all of our movies, but it’s now up and running. All 200+ of our DVDs are now just moments away for a lot less money, time, and annoyance than a PC.

  • Back to work

    Tomorrow I head back to work after the nice little Holiday break.  On short notice I decided to take today off and play with my new toys rather than try to concentrate at work.  For the remainder of the week I’m planning on leaving work an hour or two early each day instead of just taking the entire day off.  Ana, on the other hand, has to burn some vacation time so she’s home all week.

    I received some great gifts this year.  Among them are: a dvd burner; a gamepad for my pc; a couple of software-related books; and a pair of Garrison Keillor CD Sets.  I hope everyone we gave gifts to enjoy theirs as much as we’ve enjoyed ours!

  • Visual Studio 2005 sp1

    I just kicked off the installer and was notified that the process could take several minutes to several hours!   Greeaaat, nothing like having a potentially unusable machine for a couple of hours.

  • Home Office

    Over Thanksgiving weekend we rearranged things at home a little bit.  We have a formal dining room that has been sitting without furniture since we moved in, with no plans of filling it any time soon.  So we decided to start getting use out of the area for something other than junk.

    We moved Ana’s Piano from the living room (the front living area in the house) into the dining room and then moved the office from upstairs down to the living room. I always disliked having to go all the way upstairs to sit at my desktop and work – it just felt so isolated.

    So now I am sitting in our front room while Ana is in the family room watching tv, and I can watch it too.  And we can still hold a conversation, unlike when I was secluded upstairs.  All-in-all I really like it, I’ve gotten lots more done since I’ve been down here.  The only downside so far is that I’m sitting right next to a window, one that’s a little chilly when it’s less than 10 degrees outside 🙂

  • Common Thread Among Geeks

    I love office supplies.  There, I said it out in the open.  I don’t know what it is about them, but I could spend hours (and have come close before) in office supply stores.  There’s something good about knowing that I’ll have paper, pens, binders, notebooks, etc. on hand at home whenever the need arises – which is just never anywhere near enough to use the surplus I have amassed.  It’s hard to walk around stores and not spend a disproportionate amount of time in the office isles.  I just plain enjoy it. Is that weird?

    I don’t think so.  I have noticed over the past several years that there’s a very close relationship between one’s geek self and the love of office supplies.  I can’t think of any of my friends who don’t have this affinity.  Maybe it’s just coincidence; maybe it’s some other personality trait linked with office supplies. I’m pretty sure it’s geekiness.

    I’ll ponder that as I continue to print and hole-punch and bind my way to organization…

  • The Leg Move

    Ladies and gentlemen… Justin Long’s patented Leg Move.

    Edit: Don’t know what happened to the link, but here’s the real link.

  • Perforce

    A while back I discussed needing to look into a new source control solution for Chef.  To recap, CVS had just gotten on my nerves for a few things: file deletion and moving; pretty crappy windows client support (gui); clunky (to me) branch management; and poor infrastructure on my network.  I just don’t feel comfortable using it on Chef going forward.

    Some of my requirements for the replacement system:  stable; reliable; simple backup/restores; good Windows GUI tools for management; inexpensive (read Free); intuitive; good documentation; preferrably a Windows server (to simplify my backups).   The two forerunners were a coworker’s recommended, SourceGear Vault, and Perforce.  Vault was built as a Visual Source Safe replacement and is free for a single user.  Perforce, I learned, is a very popular and robust scm server that is free for 2 users or 5 workstations.  After comparing the two for a while I settled on Perforce mostly because it met all of my requirements, and did so in a very elegant and polished fashion.  Documentation has been spot-on and things work as advertised.  I was able to import Chef, get it backed up and configure Visual Studio’s Source Control integration all in a span of a couple hours.  Pretty impressive. Thank you Perforce for the free license.

  • Chef Beta 1!

    Well it’s a week and two days later than desired, but it’s finally here.  The first beta of the new Chef!  For those of you that are going to be trying it out and providing your feedback, thank you very much – I really appreciate it.

    Details available at www.ejichef.com.

  • Brrrr ^ 2

    Yesterday just was not fun.  All of the freezing rain from the day before and the snow in the morning caused problems all over the city.  From various reports, have of Springfield didn’t have power.  Our neighborhood was fine, but only our house had no natural gas.  I didn’t know it was possible for the cold weather to impact the gas line coming into the house…

    I stayed home because of the weather and worked on my computer.  At around 11am I thought to myself that it felt a little too chilly inside so I decided to turn on the gas fireplace.  The pilot light was out, surely just blown out by a draft or something.  After 20 seconds of not being able to light it, I went over to the stove and discovered no gas was there either.  I called the gas company and reported it, they responded saying they’d send someone out.

    Sometime around 2 I went outside to look at the gas meter (no clue what I expected to find, but I went anyway).  I could hear the gas “hiss” on the neighbor’s meter but mine was silent.  It was also completely covered by a hill of ice and snow.  Not wanting to mess anything up, I decided to just wait for Ameren to show up.

    At around 6pm, after a day of a chilly house, they showed up.  I chatted with the guys and they said they had been working on gas problems all day, which suprised me.  I watched as they wiped off the gas meter and then knocked all the ice off the regulator with a wrench.  Almost immediately you could hear the gas flowing again.  They stayed around and checked our furnace and made sure everything was flowing as it should before taking off.  Thanks AmerenCilco for keeping us warm!