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White stuff

In case you missed the thirty hours of news coverage, it snowed this weekend. My car is punk: it has a snohawk.

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Cow

There’s a raging debate on at work on the best cut of beef around here: Mortons vs. L’Auberge. This weekend I made my first long overdue trip to the one place that could possibly top either of those: Five Guys. Bacon double cheeseburger with pickels, lettuce, fried onions, ketchup and mustard, and those wonderful fries whose pedigree is prominently displayed for all to see… Yum.

What other “super” activity did I do this weekend? Oh yeah, I ignored some football game while learning as many songs as I could. Guess what? Plenty of previously unobjectionable songs really start to suck on their tenth consecutive listen.

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Band

It’s about time I got back on the road again. The Herndon circuit. Crossroads, will you ever let me go? So, I’m auditioning for a new band next Tuesday. If all turns out well, I’ll be back where I belong this summer: playing cheesy 80s pop songs to drunk people who don’t care what day it is much less that there’s a band playing. Before I get there though, I have to pass the audition, and before that, I have to learn forty songs this weekend. I heard you had a big mp3 collection…

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Two degrees

I’m Kevin Bacon on BoingBoing today, for some reason. First we have the link to BBS Ads which then links to my projects page because they used my awesome ansiconv program. Actually this program is pretty dead and numerous better projects have sprung up to replace it, but I still claim first mover status.

Then there’s former roommate Matt’s dad, saying that beer serving robots are just an attention grab compared to real robots like Roomba. To that I have to say: I want a beer pouring Roomba!

Anyone know what happened to Matt?

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jconsole

I still hate Java, but I do have to say that J2SE “5” is a much needed improvement. Ahh, generics, where have you been all this time? This week I’ve been rewriting an old buggy, crufty server we had sitting around (before: 5000 lines of code, after: 600) and discovered one of the neatest new whizbang features: jconsole, a standalone JVM monitor and JMX console. If you’ve used JBoss’ jmx-console webapp before, it’s the same idea, just prettier.

All you have to do to use it is add -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote to the java command line, and then run jconsole. Then you can monitor memory usage, get live stack traces on all the running threads, and get general VM statistics. If you create an MBean interface and implementation and register it with the platform MBean server, then you can interact with the application just as if deployed in a JMX container. For example, I have MBean methods to make the server enter and leave maintenance mode for software upgrades. To use them, we just connect with jconsole and click the proper button. Neat.

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day verbed noun

Recent minutiae:

Saturday, saw vampires.

Sunday, visited National Building Museum. Didn’t pay $5 suggested donation. About as dry as sounds, though translucent and fiber optic concrete are interesting.

Tuesday, used no pronouns or articles.

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in-kernel

ChangeLog-2.6.16-rc1:

commit 0e6e1db4ac7acfe3e38bbef9eba59233ba7f6b9a
Author: Bob Copeland 
Date:   Mon Jan 16 22:14:20 2006 -0800

[PATCH] partitions: Read Rio Karma partition table

The Rio Karma portable MP3 player has its own proprietary partition table.

The partition layout is similar to a DOS boot sector but it begins at a
different offset and uses a different magic number (0xAB56 instead of
0xAA55).  Add support for it to enable mounting the device.

Signed-off-by: Bob Copeland 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

Who wants to touch me?

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Fete

By the way, readers of this who happen to know where I live, if you are wondering what to do next Saturday night, the 21st: party at my house! Though I may cancel the thing since there are a few conflicts and I’ve heard yesses from only a couple of people. Incriminating photos will be posted here.

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Mishmash

While riding the Rosslyn escalator today, I wondered where it stood in the hierarchy of tall escalators. Wikipedia seems self-contradictory on this point, but I believe it is credible in proclaiming Wheaton the West’s largest. Go WMATA! Now if you can just extend the superior escalator tech to keeping them running.

I believe myself simpatico with everyone at hates-software. So allow me to air a gripe of my own: LaTeX, WTF? Why must you have no useful interaction mode that actually tells where the errors are? Why must I run you twice to fix up references, couldn’t you try rescanning yourself? Why must you, even in batchmode, tell me that you got wedged, and refuse to exit? Too bad you are still way better than Word.

Crankcase oil smell not doing it for you? Better go more manly…I think. Orange County Choppers, the tough guys known for the series American Chopper, now have their own line of cologne: Full Throttle. Hilarious.