2004 was an incredible year for space exploration and discoveries. I found a flash presentation on JPL's website that does an excellent job of recapping the MER-A and MER-B Mars missions. You can view it here.
More on this entry to come soon, but I just wanted to get this link up.
Now that I have finally got my Sony Ericsson T637 Bluetooth enabled phone, the fun has begun with setting up the bluetooth on my Gentoo laptop. I currently have a couple of bids in on ebay for a D-Link DBT-120 USB bluetooth dongle at the recomendation of John since he is using the same model and a similar phone on his Linux laptop and I know it works. John let me borrow his dongle for a bit to get my configs set up properly and make sure everything works before I actually get my own dongle.
The task was simple and the steps are fairly straight forward. I just had to recompile my kernel with the following options:
Device Drivers --->
Networking support --->
<M> Bluetooth subsystem support --->
--- Bluetooth subsystem support
<M> L2CAP protocol support
<M> SCO links support
<M> RFCOMM protocol support
[*] RFCOMM TTY support
<M> BNEP protocol support
[*] Multicast filter support
[*] Protocol filter support
<M> HIDP protocol support
Bluetooth device drivers --->
<M> HCI USB driver
[*] SCO (voice) support
<M> HCI UART driver
[*] UART (H4) protocol support
[*] BCSP protocol support
[*] Transmit CRC with every BCSP packet
<M> HCI BCM203x USB driver
<M> HCI BlueFRITZ! USB driver
I then rebooted my machine and emerged bluez-hcidump and bluez-tools. These provided the tools to poke and prod at the bluetooth dongle and search for other devices. blues-tools also provided an rc script that would start up all the necessary services on server boot.
I was able to get my phone and laptop talking to each other successfully. Next step will be to get rfcomm working so I can use my phone as a modem.
This article just absolutely blows my mind! How can an organization that preaches tollerance and "love thy neighbor", be so hypocritic of their own teachings when it suits them? I have not seen the video in question, but I would really like to know how it "promotes acceptance of homosexuality" in such a way that kids would pick up on this and be offended?
I can't even begin to comment on this abomination and complete lack of stewardship for the rights and feelings of ALL people.
Today, I ordered a shiny new Sony Ericsson T-637 phone with service through Cingular wireless. I had, and still technically am as of this moment, been using T-Mobile for my cellular/PCS service ever since I was in college and signed up with the local carrier that was bought multiple times. Don't get me wrong, I've been very happy with their customer service and coverage, however, there are a few dead areas around my house and my parents house that Cingular seems to cover well. All of my family has AT&T/Cingular phones and they get great service in their house and at my house.
Another thing that convinced me to switch is that I could get the phone I wanted from Cingular for free! The last phone I bought was a nice flip phone, but cost me $200 for nothing really. Now I decided to do a bit of research and find one that has the features I really want, not just one that looks kewl. My only real concerns were to get a phone that supported Blue-tooth technology as well as J2ME or Java. I want to use this as a modem for my laptop so I can get on the internet when we are out as well as just play around with learning J2ME. What better way to do it than get a phone that supports it.
The only potential downfall I see to this is that I decided to port my number form one carrier to another and order the phone online. I just hope I'm not without cell service for a couple of days while I wait for the phone to arrive. Anyone have any experience with this?
Lately, I have been hit with a lot of comment spam on my blog, and I'm quite frankly tired of it. I've been thinking of ways to alleviate the time spent cleaning all this up, but can't seem to come up with a good solution. As per the recommendations on Six Apart's website for curbing if not eliminating comment spam, I have installed MT-Blacklist as well as renamed my mt-comments.cgi script to something else. While MT-Blacklist catches hundreds of attempts per week, I still get around 100/week that get through. Renaming the script has had no effect as the bots have adapted to that trick.
I've resorted myself now to looking into either upgrading to MT 3 to get a lot of the new features like requiring a TypeKey account to comment, or switching to another blogging software altogether. Not sure what switching will buy me, but this would be my opportunity. The one advantage to switching is that I would have to purchase a license for MT 3 since I have 2 blogs and 2 authors, and the free version only allows for 1 author. It's not that I don't want to support the development efforts, I just have better things to spend my money on now, like my daughter.
I read a news release from Google today that says they are joining the fight against comment spam by allowing blogs to put a special tag (rel="nofollow") in the URL's that would tell Google to not give that URL any credit, and eliminate the purpose for comment spamming. There is also an article speaking out against this idea as it will invalidate Google model for their page rankings and make the web of legit hyperlinks "pointless". I'm not sure which side I agree with. I can see both sides of the coin, although I know how much of a pain it is to clean up all the comment spam. And will this "solution" really eliminate the spam? Doubtful.
After finding my second bug in production code with a NullPointerException being thrown if data is not passed into the bean, I wonder if there is a product out there that will point these out during either development or build time? IE: trying to do a .toUpperCase() on a NULL string. I am using Ant to build as well as Eclipse 3.0 to develop. Anyone know of anything? How is FindBugs with this?
After a bad day at work, I decided to try and get something accomplished. I never really looked into it before, but wanted to get a category based RSS feed working on my MT 2.6 installation so that I can list my blog on java.blogs. I don't post java related entries all that often, and one of their "rules" is that the blog should be mainly about java. I figured if I used a category based archive to only "send" them my java postings, I would be ok with this.
Thanks to this article I found, I got my category based RSS feed working, and added my blog to Java.Blogs.
Turns out, this is hot once again. A Federal Judge in Atlanta Georgia ordered one school to remove stickers from their science text books stating that evolution "is a theory, not a fact". MSNBC has an article about the decision, as well as a poll. The results of the poll as they stand now really surprise me, since MSNBC tends to be read by a more liberal audience. There is pretty much a statistical tie when it comes to either allowing the stickers, or declaring them unconstitutional. As I said in a previous post, I disagree completly with schools trying to show religious based alternatives to evolution.
Ever since Todd's wireless router died and he had to replace it, I have had trouble being able to get on his network. My configuration had not changed, and I have no problems getting on my network or any of the other ones that I use. As a last ditch effort, I decided to look at the capitalization of his ESSID and what I had in my configs. Turns out they were different, so I made them match, changing the case of 1 (one) letter, and all is well now. Is this a known "issue"?
Lately, I've found myself becoming more and more conscious of what I eat. Not just eliminating the fast foods and other foods that are "bad" for you, but truelly attempting to eliminate everything that is "bad" for human consumption. I grew up in a household and a time where organic food was never mentioned, an not something that I ever thought about.
After taking our Bradley Method classes for the birth of our daughter, I really started paying attention to what is in some of the foods I have always eaten. I find myself looking for the hydrogenated oils to stay away from as well as looking for foods that are labeled "All Natural", meaning there are no artificial sweeteners or preservatives, among other chemicals, used. I have even gone so far as to purchase the organic vegitables, fruits, and meats if they are available. I've been impressed with our local food markets, they all seem to have a decent section devoted to the organically grown produce, and the prices are not that much higher, although they are a bit. I've even found a stand at Lancaster Central market that sells organic produce that I can have Karen stop at.
This year, we had Christmas dinner at our house, and we used a free range turkey, organic milk, organic celery, and a few other organic or natural ingredients in our cooking, and it all turned out very well. That is one thing I have noticed, the organic/natural foods taste much better, they have a "cleaner" taste to them, than their counterparts. Even the organic coffee I order from Green Mountain Coffee Roasters has a much cleaner taste than even the Jamaican Blue Mountain ($36.00/lb) coffee that I had been drinking previously.
Sarah is on a strict diet of organic fruits and vegetables, and will continue to be fed the organic Tender Harvest by Gerber foods until she is out of baby food. I would really like to continue to feed her organic food as long as she is in our care, but we'll see what happens.