fool’s paradise

Luxury 1BR condo with den, 800 sqft

We recently moved to West Virginia for a new job. Would you like to rent our our beautiful condo in Falls Church?It’s an 800 square foot, 1 bedroom + den, 1 bathroom unit, built in 2001. The den can easily be used as a second bedroom. Our community is private, quiet, people and animal friendly and very safe, with no through traffic. There are many restaurants, shopping centers and gyms just a few blocks away. The W&OD trail, which is a great place to walk, run, or ride a bike is only 2½ miles away. Other things that are conveniently nearby:

• Right around the corner from both Routes 50, 66, and 495

• Less than 3 miles from the Metro (Dunn Loring station)

• 6 miles from Tyson’s Corner

The unit includes a parking space right next to the front door of the building, and one guest parking pass. We just finished cleaning the place up really well, and would like to rent it out as soon as possible. We love pets, and have three cats of our own. We also know how much trouble they can be, so if you are bringing yours, we’ll have to budget that in. About our condo:

• Open kitchen, with lots of space

• Large bathroom with oversized bathtub, curved curtain rod for extra room, and oversized “cascading” style shower head.

• Fully carpeted (sans kitchen and bathroom)

• Two bedroom closets, one of them a large walk-in, ideal for storage or big wardrobes. You could almost use it as a bedroom, if you really hated your roommate.

• Full sized washer and dryer, and laundry room doors that close to keep the noise down. Perk: We’ll be buying a brand new washer, and YOU can help us pick it out!

• Central air and heating. Both work very well, and we’ve had no trouble staying comfortable in the hot summers and cold winters (the windows are insulated too). Also, the combination furnace/water heater is brand new.

• Fan and overhead light in bedroom.

• Track lighting in living room.

• Trash and recycling is in the basement of the building - no need to drag it outside.

• Geek perk: The whole condo is wired with Cat 5 cable for ethernet. There’s a network patch panel in the walk-in closet, with jacks in every room for easy high-speed networking.

• There’s a large elevator just inside the building entrance, and our condo is right across the hall from it on the second floor. Makes it really easy to move in and out.

The Community:

The community, High Pointe at Jefferson Park, has a pool and a 24-hour fitness center open to residents at no extra cost. A footpath leads to the closest shopping center, which includes a Starbucks, CVS, Papa Johns, Grevey’s, and a grocery store. They remove snow and ice in a very timely manner. They are super pet friendly and have a dog run, BBQ’s for people to use, conveniently located trash receptacles for pet waste, and bags. The Condo Association also throws pretty frequent parties for the entire community. Please come see it for yourself, this is a great place to live.

• Living Room : 

• Kitchen : 

• Bedroom : 

• Den : 

• Bathroom (sink) : 

• Bathroom (tub) : 

• Bedroom (window) : 

• Kitchen (cupboards) : 

• Kitchen and entryway : 

• Laundry room : 

• Video walkthrough :YouTubeMPEG (large - 35 megs)

Please email us! Sincerely, Aaron & Eileen

I really like Valve Software. Not only do they make great games, but they have a reputation for treating people well and keeping things in perspective. Their website has always been simple and efficient, they are innovative and supportive of smaller developers, and they are helping to fix the broken game publication and distribution system with Steam. I found this quote the other day in response to some Valve-doomsayers, and wanted to share it:

“I drive away from the company that was built from the royalties we made on Steam, in my sports car paid for by the royalties we make on Steam, to the home that I pay for with the royalties we make on Steam. If that’s exploitation, I’ll take a little more.”  - John Gibson, president of Tripwire Interactive, makers of Red Orchestra and Killing Floor, on whether Valve is exploiting small game developers via the Steam distribution platform.

Source : http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3176474 

I sent a facebook message this morning to a nice fellow that was complimenting my wife… 
 

I recently installed an app on my iPhone that integrated with my Google Voice account. It allowed me to place calls from my Google Voice number instead of my standard cell phone number, very convenient! In order to access my Google Voice account however, the application needed my Google password.

The moment I entered it, I regretted my decision. My Google account isn’t just some random service I use on the internet. It’s the key to a vast amount of personal and sensitive information about me - Gmail has all my contacts and communication history both personal and professional; Google Docs has my financial information; Google Checkout has direct access to my credit cards for making online purchases, Google Notebook has information on many of my current projects that would take months to catch up on if I lost access, iGoogle has my to-do and wish lists, Calendar remembers birthdays, holidays and appointments for me, my video game studio’s domain is linked to my Google account, as is the new domain I created for my day job, and of course Google Voice itself manages the phone number I’ve given to everyone I’m actually interested in hearing from.

Giving up this password put me at risk not only of losing access to all of this information, but having someone use it against me. This is a risk I should never have taken. So within a couple of hours, I made up my mind to change my password.

This is just a friendly warning - be aware of the access you’re giving out when you sign up for cross-site services. Whenever an organization or application asks you for your account information for another service, you’re opening up that account and everything that’s linked to it to the owners of the other site (and any black hats that might get into their systems). It’s easy to forget how the convenience and accessibility of today’s online world makes us vulnerable.

I’m a pretty tech savvy guy, and I’m generally good at protecting my devices from external malice. But I’m stil susceptible to innocuous-looking “convenience” applications to link my various online identities together. It’s bad enough that most people use the same usernames and passwords for different sites. Consider your choices carefully.

Related resources:

Coding Horror - Please Give Us Your Email Password 

Traditional GUI-based tools are great for looking up information in a database or making a quick change to a single instance, but their utility often diminishes when you’re working on a prototype system.

For example, take the common scenario of a commercial application that requires a dedicated database. A prototype of the database is designed and created using the author’s favorite tool (SQL Server Management Studio, Oracle Designer, TOAD, etc.), and then exported into script form using that tool’s built-in utility. The resulting script is then used to generate copies of the database for the customers.

The install process is rarely a smooth one, however. First of all, all the elements of the database mirror those of the development environment - users, passwords, and so forth. Those need to be changed, probably through some manual changes to the generated script.

What about updates? Any changes to the database in new software versions create a dilemma: should the changes be deployed as a patch or as a whole database drop-in replacement? The previously described process of modeling the system in an editor and then exporting a script file isn’t granular enough to support most patching operations, but replacing an entire database creates its own problems - most notably the scale of the deployment procedure and the customer’s (usually reasonable) expectation that their data will persist through upgrades.

Anyone who’s had to modify automatically generated code before probably sees the problem here - the job just got a lot more complex. Since no humans were involved in the creation of the script files, there’s no institutional knowledge about their structure, so every change must be carefully researched in order to ensure it does what it’s supposed to and doesn’t break anything else in the process.

Then there’s the question of rollbacks. What if something goes wrong? Can the system be restored to its previous state? Not many database tools have an export feature for rollback scripts.

The problem is, these tools simply weren’t designed to handle scenarios like this.

On the other hand, engineering a custom solution can result in more robust systems in less overall time. Here’s a technique I’ve used several times to simplify database development and management.

At a granular level, any change to database structure; creating or dropping objects, changing permissions, modifying data; can be encapsulated in a SQL (or PL/SQL, or Transact SQL, etc) script. Where database visualization software frequently gloms all these SQL statements together into large “install” scripts, I propose treating them discretely. The important distinction is that for each action, there is an associated “undo” action that returns the database to its prior state:

Action: create table
Undo: drop table

Action: grant permission
Undo: revoke permission

Action: drop table
Undo: create table and restore all data

Any install, upgrade, or rollback activity can be defined as a sequence of these types of actions. Scripting these operations as part of any release can go a long way toward streamline testing and deployment of your changes.

(more…)

I’ve been seeing more and more people rely on “lines of code” to measure various things in relation to a software project - its size and scope, the amount of effort required to create it, defect density, and so on.

Unfortunately, the “lines of code” measurement is a poor method at best, like measuring a painting by the number of brush strokes. It tells you nothing about the complexity, quality, or composition of the piece itself.

There are, unfortunately, few aspects of software that can be quantified in a way that suits today’s charts-and-graphs management methods, so this metric has been relied on to produce a wide variety of measurements in recent years.  While it may have some utility in comparing codebases with similar designs and styles by the same author, it is more frequently used in less meaningful scenarios.

The truth is, a million lines of code can be rewritten into less than 20,000, and vice versa. And when you take into account that most projects are developed by multiple programmers, using a variety of styles and approaches, you quickly come to the conclusion that even within a single project, a “lines of code” comparison is, at best, an arbitrary measurement criteria.

Is there a better option?. Personally, I like the idea of “use cases”, especially when it comes to measuring defect density. Defects in a physical product are measured by situations in which someone tries to use the product and is unable to do so due to a defect. Why shouldn’t the same be true for software?

Of course, figuring out all the possible ways someone could use a program is no walk in the park, but we could start by looking at some of the tools that already exist to trace logic paths in an application and identify each potential sequence of commands that could be executed.  

Google Apps, the suite of online office applications from the Mountain View giant, has been available in various forms for a number of years. Only recently, however, have they started marketing the product to businesses. As part of this marketing effort, Google representatives toured several major cities, inviting users of the software to visit and discuss its uses. I attended one of these events, and this is my review of the offerings.

The Google Apps suite consists of several applications, including Gmail (email service), Google Talk (chat and messaging), Google Calendar (scheduling system), Google Docs (spreadsheets, documents, presentations), and Google Sites (web portal with custom gadgets). Most of these applications offer similar features to those we’ve come to expect from desktop software of the same genre. They also interoperate quite well, are available at low or no direct cost, and support importing and exporting of various file types.

The services are hosted on Google’s servers, and are primarily web-based, with some exceptions - POP and SMTP access to mail, specialized mobile device versions, a desktop chat client, and some management utilities. Although Google does not provide details of their hardware platform or internal security measures, they are widely considered to have one of the most reliable platforms in the technology services industry, with no public history of security failures.

From a technology and usability standpoint, Google Apps is an excellent choice of platforms for community and collaboration software suites. The software is updated and improved frequently, the help system is thorough and accurate, and the technology is powerful and easy to use.

There are important limitations to consider as well. None of the programs in the Google Apps suite are available for hosting elsewhere - all operations are performed on Google’s servers. That means access to your files and applications is subject to the whim of your internet connection. Also, any sensitive information is not only being stored on another company’s servers, but can potentially be accessed via unsecure protocols. Finally, Google doesn’t open its doors to outside certification or accreditation authorities. If your system has to go through DoD Information Assurance Certification and Accreditation Process (DIACAP) or some other information assurance process, Google Apps is probably not your answer.

Overall, Google Apps is a solid offering with strong capabilities in today’s business world. Its platform independence, ease of use, low cost, and reliability make it a competitive product suite worthy of consideration by any entity making a platform decision.

<just for reference, this is what a healthy relationship is like>

her: I need to stay away from bridal magazines, they are evil. I never realized all the shit that was supposed to happen for a wedding to occur…who was supposed to get presents etc…wtf…why can’t you just…get married?

him: A lot of women are more excited about GETTING married than BEING married.

her: I’m excited about getting married…but the being married lasts more than a day. I don’t want the entire marriage to be the day we GOT married. I want to look pretty and have amazing memories…but LOOK AT THESE MAGAZINES! ITS OFFENSIVE! Why spend all that money? I’d rather donate it to orphans or something…our future children’s college funds…i mean…come the heck on. I want to get dressed up…and have my family and friends around…and be the damn center of attention. But…not for 100,000 dollars…

him: I abhor pointless shit. Your practicality is sexy. Some people take it too far and forget that having a good time is also a worthwhile goal, but not us.

her: Baby, I refuse to stress about my wedding. I just want to have fun. I refuse to allow there to be a bad memory.

him: Well, good thing we aren’t inviting my mother ;)

her: lol! My grandmother makes incredible wedding cakes. BTW…why the hell am I planning this already? What is wrong w/ me?

him: You’re in love?

her: Oh yeah. But why all of this … obsession with marriage? I mean…there is more to a relationship than marriage.

him: You want to lock in your profits ;)

her: hahaha…I love when you say that, but it is sorta true. I don’t want to lose you….do you want to lock in your profitS?

him: No. I don’t. I want my profits free. They are of no value to me if they feel confined or required somehow to be with me. If my profits choose to stay with me, that is all I need.

her: Sigh…does that mean I can sleep w/ other guys? :-p You know…I really have no desire to…that I think suprises me more than everything else.

him: See, that’s the point. You are free to make your own choices. And because I see day by day that you choose to stay with me and be faithful to me, I know that is what you truly want. And that makes me feel much more secure in our relationship than a legal document and a loop of metal would.

her: I like metal. Especially pretty metal.

him: Me too :) And one day, I’ll probably give you a pretty metal loop. But if and when that day comes, it will be a celebration of our relationship, not a validation of it.

her: Mnnn, I like that.

I just figured out how to spell bureaucracy.

I realized it’s based on “bureau”, like “bureau of public affairs”. It’s always been impossible for me to spell based on the sound.

Beaurocracy? Thats how it sounds, like “beautiful”.

But now I know.

Bureaucracy is not beautiful.

I had a chance to see Avenue Q performed in DC this week, and it was great. A novel storytelling approach, a great set, some fantastic acting, and ingenious writing. I can’t say anything bad about it - I had a wonderful time.

I didn’t go to a lot of events or organized entertainment in my youth, so my idea of a good time has historically been relaxing at home, wandering around town / the wilderness, or maybe going out to dinner or a movie. Since moving to DC, I’ve been amazed at the variety of options on any given day - concerts, plays, museum special events, not to mention the everyday “happening” places - it just goes on and on.

I think I’ll me sampling a lot more of these in the future. There’s great stuff to be had here.