Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise!

What are the ways of the ant?

Off to the anthill.

Leading in Service to Others

You gotta do it with heart!

You have succeeded if your absence is as good as your presence; things just get done.

You see Joshua's who see a Moses in you.

Love Leadership or just don't be greedy

I shared my two cents with Mr. John Hope Bryant after reading his recently published book, Love Leadership. This is a great read for anyone. My comments were published in a blog post here http://www.johnhopebryant.com/john_hope_bryant_/2009/11/love-leadership-reader-testimonial.html

I couldn't have read this book at a better time after watching the Michael Moore's movie; Capitalism a love affair. They both point to greed as the cause of the current economic challenges.

Distributed and Scalable Non-Relational Database Systems

Fascinating read on non RDBMS distributed scalable databases.

http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7579/1.html

Forecast: First freeze and flakes for Twin Cities | Updraft | Minnesota Public Radio

Forecast: First freeze and flakes for Twin Cities Updraft Minnesota Public Radio

No doubt the weather is one of those things that cycle through each year. In this installment of 365 and again, I present the annual question of when is the first flake going to fall on the Minnesota soil.

Genealogy Logical Data Model (LDS)

This is a simple genealogy logical data model that I developed in 10 minutes. Excuse my ascii art.

I hope to build an application on top of it.

                           +---------------+
                           | FATHER        |
      +--------------------+---------------+
      | fathered           |               |
     -+-                   +---------------+
      ^                               v
+---------------------+              -+-
|PERSON               |               | father to
+---------------------+               |
|person_id            |---------------+
|~~~~~~~~~            |
|person_date_of_birth |
|person_place_of_birth|
|person_name          |---------------+
|person_details       |               | mother to
+---------------------+              -+-
      v                               ^
     -+-                   +---------------+
      | mothered           | MOTHER        |
      +--------------------+---------------+
                           |               |
                           +---------------+

This is how it reads

• About each person we can remember their person_id, person_date_of_birth, person_place_of_birth, person_name, person_details, person's father, person's mother, person mother to and person father to.
• About each mother we can remember the person, and people mothered.
• About each father we can remember the person, and people fathered.

One interesting this about this model is that a person can father and mother themselves. I hope this is not how life begun.

365 and Again

Life in general seems to repeat itself every 365 days or 1 year ignoring the details of leap years and the likes. Sure you celebrate your birthday on the same day each year unless you were born on Feb 29th or any other anniversary for that matter.

What I find fascinating is how our world is tuned into those life's circles. You tend to hear of the same stories around the same time of the year each year. Call it Groundhog if you may. I have been catching myself in this dejavu moments and I intend to try to document them as much as I can.

While you are at it think of this: Our ancestors from however millions of years ago ejoyed the same sun that we are.

Removing Crap

Well after finishing the installation I let windows fix bugs (yes can you believe that I was already off Gold Status). All bug fixes chewed up the my remaining disk space leaving me with only 48Mb. Sucks twice.

The first option that I thought of is to get rid of some crap that I could not bring myself to use on a netbook. Earlier soon after the installation, I tried using Windows Media Center that had been installed. The video performance wasn't all that great but it worked. I am thinking it would have been okay if I used the 9" screen instead of the external output to the tv.

To get some disk space back, I removed a the following (Using Turn Windows Features on or off):

• All games (everything minus solitaire)
• Windows Media Center
• Print Documents and Services
  
• Windows DVD Maker
  

At the end of it all I managed to free up ~1gb of disk space. In between I installed MS Silverlight which did not consume that much space.

Now that I have some space, I am going to try working on a couple of things.

Networking

I would say the new networking features work great. It wasn't that hard configuring my WEP wireless service at home.

Graphics

As expected the graphics and displays are crisp. The OS comes packaged with a couple of themes which in my experience I can summarize to be a set of wallpapers that keep alternating.

Sound

Sound works!

Installation

This past weekend I installed Windows 7 "Retail" ultimate edition on my netbook. Here are the machine specs:

• Intel Atom CPU
• 1GB ram
• 8GB (more like 7.2GB) SSD
• 4 hour battery life
• 9 inch screen

That is enough to give you an idea of what this machine is capable of. Basically it is a Dell Mini 9 n series.

Prior to the installation I had Ubuntu Netbook Remix installed on there.

Besides struggling to prepare the installer on a 4GB usb stick, the installation process lasted less than an hour. I used the following instructions to prepare the USB stick:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_to_install_windows_7_beta_a_usb_key

I did try to compress installer files as suggested here http://gizmodo.com/5257386/how-to-install-windows-7-on-almost-any-netbook but it did not work as described.

After the install I was left with about 650Mb of disk space. Now for starters that sucks.

Creating a Windows 7 bootable usb stick

This instructions work:

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/howtos/how_to_install_windows_7_beta_a_usb_key

So I got the RC1 copy of Windows 7 from Microsoft after the beta test period was over. I also just so happen to have a Dell Mini 9 Netbook that is running Netbook Remix. With the two ingredients to test W7 on a netbook at my disposal I hit the blogs to get instructions on how to prepare my machine.

First and last I found this post on Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5257386/how-to-install-windows-7-on-almost-any-netbook

Being on Gizmodo I assumed that he instructions had been tested and retested so they had to be solid. Boy was I wrong... I have been at this trying to build an image for the last 12 hours with about 6 hours inbetween to get some sleep.

Windows 7 testers to get a free copy on August 6 - Ars Technica

I guess afterall I can install this bugger on my netbook to see how it works out. I am glad I tried out the beta program.

Windows 7 testers to get a free copy on August 6 - Ars Technica

What do you need in order to buy an iPhone?

Well multiple studies and surveys show that you need to be at least around the age of 30 and be making more than $75,000 a year.

http://www.smartcompany.com.au/telecommunications/what-is-the-profile-of-an-iphone-buyer.html

http://www.bizzia.com/brandcurve/who-will-buy-an-apple-iphone/

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/06/the-profile-of-an-iphone-line-waiter.ars

Well go figure. On all counts I won't be getting an iPhone any time soon.

Comic relief

On a serious note this is how information can be distorted. MediaMatters http://mediamatters.org/ finds what crazy things media organizations and their announcers say or do. I love this site for mere comic relief.... if you get my drift.

Need to get the TADA demo ready

I think it is high time that I got the TADA workshop demo ready. I have most of the pieces in place but as any project the last 10% consumes the most amount of time.

http://davis.nyabuti is up

The website is up but still needs a lot of work and database implementation

My website

My Flex + HTML website is about done ... will be coming out soon on http://davis.nyabuti.com

The Last Ruby

My intention with the title was to blog about an experience I had being one of the last few dusty rubies that was still lying around as the rest of the miners took off with all the refined rubies. This whole story is a pure analogy.

Phewks!!!

Talk about trying to do the same thing over and over again for one week without succeeding... Well the prize of persistence is so so sweet at the end. Nway I'll be back in a few..

Agile in the enterprise

http://www.smashingapps.com/2009/05/06/agility-an-approach-to-fight-global-recession.html

A key goal of every IT department is to reduce the time and effort needed to deliver value to the business. To accomplish this, the best long-term trend we have in IT beyond Moore’s law and the power of the Internet is the improvement of IT agility. Increasing IT agility is important because it provides a value innovation and delivery method that harnesses these fundamental advances in infrastructure.

Interesting article on Agility the Enterprise and how it can be leveraged to to implement systematic changes in the business.

Wolfram|Alpha

WolframAlpha

I am not sure if this is a move closer to debunking the impossible assersion of creating a machine that can tell for every statement whether the answer is yes or no. http://www.cut-the-knot.org/impossible/machine.shtml. I can't wait for an API to this system to be released, it just looks awsome.

What happened to that poor horsie?

Have you ever come across a story that points towards the future for its conclusion. Take for example a few weeks ago I came across a story profiling a horse that was going to be on the Derby. It immediately sparked my interest in the Derby and I was for sure looking foward to finding out what happened to this poor horsie.

The Derby happened but unfortunately it was difficult for me to find what came of this horse. Did it make it, did it fail, did it run were all questions racing through my head after I got news of the completion of the race.

This happens every time now would it not have been nice if I could somehow tag this overnight sensantion of a horsie then over time be able to track it. It might not be the favorite but even reading a blog post by some unpaid blogger would suffice to satisfy my curiocity. How can this be done?

ActiveRDF

ActiveRDF

I am starting to work on some semantic web stuff in Ruby on Rails. After a few google searches it doesn't seem odd that I find another Active* in this case ActiveRDF for ruby related Resource Definition Framework needs.

I do not intend to share much beyond my experiments with this library and if I do remember, I will try to log each downside or upside to this library. I content that if it does not work for me I might have to start exploring other languages with better library support. For now stay tuned for a summer of fun.

What am I reading

I started reading The Mythical Man-Month by Fredrick Brooks, a book that investigates the relationship between man hours and months and the level of their sustitutionality. The book seeks to address the reasons why most major scale software development efforts fail; that is they are over budget, delivered late and half the time the functionality is not what was promised.

Besides that Ann and I are reading the seven habits of effective people. So far an interesting read.

I will share my view of both books when I am done reading them in a few weeks.

Summer of research

Coming up this summer is a new set of responsibilities after securing a publication spot in two Journals. The IEEE and TADA workshop journals. In the next day or so I need to go over the preliminary draft for the research papers that the MinneTAC team, I included submitted for review a few weeks ago. Of significance too will be amount of RoR and Java work that I will have to do to prepare all the elements of my research. I am looking forward to a busy summer.

Mozilla Bespin

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Bespin

Ever wondered if you would write code using the browser as your IDE? Well wonder no more for Mozilla has made it a reality. My tiny brain can think of a few interesting applications of this kind of an IDE but for now this is just an amazing idea. I ran into this a few months ago but it has been real labor getting to mention it leave alone remembering the name of the project.

Enjoy.. but don't delete my code.

Interactive Heuristic Evaluation toolking

Great site that helps identify heuristics that are worth considering when designing for different types of presentation.

http://www.id-book.com/catherb/

This was a suggestion from one of the classmates.

Setting up the Lamp Stack

"As of the 7.04 release, the Ubuntu base system includes Tasksel. You can either install LAMP using tasksel or install the LAMP packages."

Here are the instructions: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ApacheMySQLPHP

On windows you can use the Wamp stack: http://www.wampserver.com/en/

omaha - Google Code

Update your way with google update.

Apparently people were starting to become worried that Google is collecting more information than they are revealing. How do they solve such an integrity question? Open Source.

omaha - Google Code

A weekend With Jetty

Jetty is a pretty good HTTP server for purposes of embedding. This weekend I have been working on an application (existing in Java) that will be publishing web services for consumption by a client application that I am developing (in RoR).

First things first I tempted to set up authentication on my server because lets face it this thing will be living on the scary internet. The documentation on the jetty website shows you how to set up your real from a configuration file on the system. In my case I have the username and password set up in a different configuration and I did not want my users to set this up again in yet another configuration. In simple terms here is what I ended up using for my real setup.




server = new Server();
Connector connector=new SocketConnector();
connector.setPort(SERVER_PORT);
server.setConnectors(new Connector[]{connector});

Constraint constraint = new Constraint();
constraint.setName(Constraint.__BASIC_AUTH);;
constraint.setRoles(new String[]{"admin"});
constraint.setAuthenticate(true);

ConstraintMapping cm = new ConstraintMapping();
cm.setConstraint(constraint);
cm.setPathSpec("/*");

SecurityHandler sh = new SecurityHandler();
//read username and password from non jetty conf source
HashUserRealm realm = new HashUserRealm("admin");
realm.put("admin", "test");
realm.addUserToRole("admin", "admin");
sh.setUserRealm(realm);
sh.setConstraintMappings(new ConstraintMapping[]{cm});

server.setHandlers(new Handler[]{sh, new MyHTTPHandler()});
server.start();
server.join();



In ruby all I had to do in my model is:


self.site = "http://admin:test@localhost:8080/"