tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-100247062011-11-27T17:19:02.088-06:00Scribblings from the Edge of NormalBrian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.comBlogger401100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-31418688821305365112010-08-07T22:39:00.004-05:002010-08-16T20:53:30.391-05:00

I took a T'ai Chi workshop this weekend, presented by Robert Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin is one of the founders of the St. Louis T'ai Chi Chuan Association. The Association is affiliated with Mr. Benjamin Lo (no link), the senior student of Professor Cheng Man-Ch'ing. This lineage is important. I once again find myself in the position of being both happy and sad. I am very glad that I took the workshop

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-90571496856243454992010-01-26T23:57:00.005-06:002010-01-27T00:04:15.136-06:00

I'm a software "guy". And by some definitions that makes me a "geek". And when it comes to cool, inventive and creative things, I really am a software geek. But lately I've become a woodworking geek. Sadly, the term "woodworking geek" suffers from a plethora of problems, not the least of which includes a sort of cognitive dissonance. So I've decided that I'm a "week" (woodworking geek). Is that

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-42863946191489641252008-02-19T23:23:00.001-06:002008-02-19T23:24:53.741-06:00

One of the great tragedies of our existence is the way in which man's baser instincts run roughshod over his transcendent ideals. Greed, aggression, and cruelty can undo, in moments, the painstaking efforts of millenia. Are we so fundamentally flawed that we are destined to ignoble oblivion?

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-62027936012670637292007-11-07T00:17:00.000-06:002007-11-07T00:27:01.284-06:00

I've been feeling lately like I'm middle-aged. It's not something I could explain it in any clear way, beyond the obvious things (like having a couple of kids, a job that I need to pay the bills, thinking about whether I'm saving enough for retirement, etc.). Besides, you can have those things and not feel middle-aged.Then, tonight, it hit me: you're middle-aged when you read the vast majority of

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-38452114820072013962007-07-19T15:46:00.000-05:002008-12-09T11:48:10.423-06:00

Well, Delta Machinery has had a countdown clock on their website for more than a month now:I think they are going to announce a new line of tools at the big AWFS woodworking show in Las Vegas. I hope it's something cool and not just an excuse to introduce a lower-quality line of tools made in China.Looks like I'll find out tomorrow.

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-83498127185675788222007-05-15T22:32:00.000-05:002008-12-09T11:48:10.741-06:00

I recently completed my latest woodworking project. It's a bathtub reading table made of mahogany.I designed it to be just wide enough between the outside supports to allow felt pads on the inside edges. This prevents the table and tub from being scratched, and provides a nice smooth surface for sliding the table back and forth.

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1169446553476254872007-01-21T23:52:00.000-06:002007-01-22T11:07:20.166-06:00

I've been wondering which frameworks on Mac OS X I should learn. It's hard to know the answer to this, since different applications will need different frameworks. But it occurred to me that examining the frameworks that Apple uses in their own applications might be a good start.Not too surprisingly, you can determine the shared libraries used by an application. So I whipped up a little shell

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1169425961327661352007-01-21T22:32:00.000-06:002007-01-21T22:54:35.596-06:00

Well, after quite a bit of reading and trying to puzzle out how to use Interface Builder to work on applications using Cocoa Bindings, I've concluded that I don't understand well enough. This is rather surprising to me, since I have more than twenty years of development experience with more than fifteen years of object-oriented and GUI programming experience. But whether I'm in the early stages

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1169408332707160282007-01-21T13:04:00.000-06:002007-01-21T13:38:52.756-06:00

I'm starting to spend more time trying to learn the Cocoa development frameworks. For those not familiar with it, Cocoa is a set of software development frameworks based around the Objective-C programming language. There are a number of different frameworks within Cocoa, including GUIs, networking (and IO in general), graphics & imaging, distributed computing, etc.The most obvious site for

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1157953356812365192007-01-21T08:41:00.000-06:002007-01-22T11:25:50.873-06:00

It's amazing to me how much good material there is on Wikipedia these days. It's getting to the point where I'm about to switch from doing a Google search as my first step in research to doing a Wikipedia search. This obviously doesn't work for very dynamic or overly specific things, like a recent news story (Google News) or some very detailed aspect of a software package. But for terms, or

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1168459894208444312007-01-10T14:07:00.000-06:002007-01-10T14:11:34.210-06:00

I've decided to split my blog. I'll use this blog for more 'personal' items, not related to technology. My other blog, View From the Fringe, which has been almost unused since I created it, will be for more technical content.So if you come here looking for something and can't find it, it may have moved over to the other blog. And if you come here looking for technical material, check out View

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1167709588540113932007-01-01T19:39:00.000-06:002007-02-01T12:29:49.086-06:00

I've been working to install built-in, adjustable storage in our closet since late September. It was a fairly large project to tackle, since it would involve building the equivalent of seven bookcases, except the cases were taller (8 feet) and deeper (15 or 22 inches) than normal bookcases. In addition, I planned to build them into the space permanently.These are some pictures of the closet at

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1157954585279288432006-10-05T23:09:00.000-05:002006-10-06T00:08:37.563-05:00

I recently set out to configure the PC my girls use for educational games to allow them to print from the PC to our printer connected to our 20" iMac. I had just slogged through getting a WiFi card to work with the Windows box, and was already pretty grouchy. But I figured printing is a solved problem, so what could go wrong? Silly me.Being a long-time Mac user, I decided to turn there first. I

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1158634925270971312006-09-18T21:47:00.000-05:002006-09-18T22:26:10.200-05:00

Tonight I saw no less than four ads for 'sexy' commercials for products. From 'sexy' makup to 'sexy' undergarments, it was a veritable cornucopia of underweight, over-painted, and under-dressed women (and a few leather-coated men). The topper was the advertisement from JCPenny, of all retailers, with few words, lots of innuendo, high heels, and leather coats.The last time I saw such overt

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1158281387776639702006-09-14T19:29:00.000-05:002006-09-14T21:06:50.020-05:00

With the latest release of iTunes, Apple added some very nice features. Several of them depend upon you having album art in order to make effective use of them. So it's not that surprising that Apple now offers album art through the iTunes music store. It is a bit surprising that they offer free album art even for albums you didn't buy through the music store. While this is mostly to enable the

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1157954126126375022006-09-12T21:07:00.000-05:002006-09-13T22:46:14.773-05:00

I recently installed a generic WiFi card in the Wintel PC I retired as a game machine and gave to my girls to play educational games on. Talk about an experience in frustration.It's not that I was unable to figure it out. I did get it working. And I certainly forgot one thing while doing so that slowed me down for a bit. But the completely opaque manner in which the install went and the total

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1157955928968823092006-09-11T01:21:00.000-05:002006-09-11T01:25:28.966-05:00

I had forgotten that today is 9/11 until I checked Goggle news. This is going to be one painful news cycle. I hope it dies down before the end of the week. I hate news mongering.

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1157955535180912612006-09-11T01:03:00.000-05:002006-09-11T01:19:10.236-05:00

More than a year ago, my friend Brad Shuler gave me a strip of paper with some little bits of some kind of plastic on them. He told me they were to keep my 15" PowerBook G4 from having its lid pop open while in a backpack or shoulder bag. When this happens, the machine can come out of sleep and end up draining it's battery completely.The idea behind these little do-dads (called Wildeepz by their

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1157951896383495412006-09-11T00:16:00.000-05:002006-09-13T21:36:09.833-05:00

As part of a project to move my noisy Power Mac G4 to the basement (see my blog entery Silence is Golden), I recently bought a LinkSys WRT45GL. This is a 4-port ethernet and WiFi (802.11g) router which is hooked up to my DSL line and provides a firewall and port forwarding for the G4. I know that Kevin Heifner got this same router and immediately installed Thibor's HyperWRT version of the

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1157951785061763652006-09-10T23:58:00.000-05:002006-09-11T00:26:32.786-05:00

I recently got a new 20" iMac (yes, recently enough to be saddened that they just came out with a 24" model). Since I got the new machine, I've been working to make a place in the basement where I could move the six year old Power Mac G4). The G4 is the mail server for the family domain and will eventually host a family web site.I finally got that project completed today. It involved running

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1155572920681550402006-08-14T11:17:00.000-05:002006-08-14T11:33:51.726-05:00

So I've been working with Parallels Desktop for Mac lately and it's a rather nice package. It does most of the things you'd want and does them well. Today I discovered that the full-screen mode is just a big window with no border or with the border outside the visible region of the display. As a result, you can Cmd-tab to other Mac applications and the full-screen Windows VM is still there. You

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1129870858441114932005-10-21T00:00:00.000-05:002005-10-21T00:13:35.240-05:00

I just checked Google News before heading to bed and was confronted with this:It reminded me of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail by Jared Diamond.Will we destroy the biosphere to the point where it can't sustain us before we learn to appreciate the consequences of our actions?I fear we will.

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1128177164878404072005-10-01T09:26:00.000-05:002005-10-01T09:32:44.883-05:00

Well, Apple has teamed with the O'Reilly folks to offer a Safari-style subscription service for searching and reading 1000 Mac-related books online.Brad Shuler told me about nine months ago he thought such 'online bookshelves' were the wave of the future. I mostly dismissed the idea at the time, probably because I like reading a physical book and find I absorb the material better that way. I

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1127854055378805502005-09-27T15:02:00.000-05:002005-09-27T15:47:35.386-05:00

So, a number of people have commented about the inability to navigate GUI's completely via the keyboard (without having to use the mouse). I don't find using the mouse that much of a burden, but there are times (especially when filling out forms in websites) that I'd like to do things like pick my state from the choice/combobox without having to go to the mouse.It turns out you can turn on "full

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1126710383703296982005-09-14T12:04:00.000-05:002005-09-14T10:34:31.386-05:00

A study (published by Reuters in the U.K. but not in the U.S. as far as I can find) shows that a patient's success getting follow-up care after an emergency room visit for a serious condition was determined primarily by the quality of their health care plan.So if you thought that America has great health care, it depends on how much money you make and the job you have. The 45 million (>15%)

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1126704904038705882005-09-14T10:32:00.000-05:002005-09-14T08:36:48.873-05:00

Today is a very diverse history day. For example:It was on this day in 1638, a young clergyman, just 31 years old, died in Massachusetts, and in his will, left his library and half of his estate to a local college. To honor his memory, the college changed its name. The clergyman was named John Harvard, and the college changed its name to Harvard University, and it's the oldest in America.And

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1125982090851457142005-09-05T23:41:00.000-05:002005-09-05T23:48:10.856-05:00

I've been following the research into "paper-like" displays for at least ten years now. My dream is to have a display that is essentially an unrollable scroll. It would be like paper or thick plastic, have a high contrast display, allow for large 'paper' sizes (e.g. a 17-20 inch high-definition display) and consume little power (to make portable computer batteries last as long as possible).This

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1115942977392154212005-05-12T19:07:00.000-05:002005-05-12T19:09:37.396-05:00

It turned out to be much more difficult than I expected to get my picture back on the blog profile. It's done now, but it wasn't straightforward. I had to dig through HTML source and find the 'true' URL for the image stored on Flickr. Flickr uses JavaScript to obfuscate (perhaps unintentionally) the image so Blogger doesn't like it. You have to dig and find the 'normal' .jpg URL.

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1115942449212509292005-05-12T19:00:00.000-05:002005-05-12T19:10:00.776-05:00

BrianSmiling.jpg Originally uploaded by icebrg. I lost my picture. So I'm trying to use Flickr to get a photo online that I can use in my blogger profile.

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1168459599856252202005-05-10T20:04:00.000-05:002007-01-10T14:06:39.866-06:00

I am only mediocre when it comes to being a good person. I don't think I'm a bad person, and I think I've never done anything particularly terrible, but since even sociopaths feel that way I know that's no compass for moral values. My wife, on the other hand, is an amazingly good person. How she manages to see through the frustration and temptations of life on a day-to-day basis I find

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1115272636992300452005-05-05T00:46:00.000-05:002005-05-05T23:55:52.516-05:00

It turns out that just doing -W with the names of the options to svn ends up disabling the normal file name completion. This is rather painful when you want to do things like type 'svn add ' and hit tab to get a list of files you might want to add to the repository. To fix this, you have to specify the -f option after the -W option, like this:complete -W 'add blame praise annotate cat checkout co

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1115264455219573252005-05-04T22:34:00.000-05:002005-05-04T22:40:55.226-05:00

Bash has a very handy and (as far as I'm concerned) obscure feature that allows you to specify completion words for commands. This is useful for providing some brief feedback when typing a command line. For example, you can specify the completions for the 'svn' command like this:complete -W 'add blame praise annotate cat checkout co cleanup commit ci copy delete del remove rm diff di export help

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1108847280258469582005-02-19T14:46:00.000-06:002005-02-19T17:34:33.423-06:00

Alex Miller read about my notion of runtime geography and posted some excellent analysis. As I've thought about it more, I agree that the notion of runtime geography is more intuitive and feels more general than the notion of an ontology, so let's run with it and see where we end up.If we think about locating things on a map, there are numerous types of things, and their locations can be

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1108677470072619622005-02-17T15:55:00.000-06:002005-02-17T15:57:50.073-06:00

A friend of mine responded and asked how I envisioned solving the problem of runtime geography. I don't have an answer yet. To me, identifying the 'true' problem is valuable because now I can search for solutions to the problem and know what I'm looking for, instead of just having a vague sense that something is wrong.I don't think annotations are the right thing to do, because they are also

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1108675260317851932005-02-17T13:52:00.000-06:002005-02-17T15:21:00.320-06:00

I recently attended a St. Louis Java User's Group meeting where Alex Miller discusssed the various forms of dependency injection. It was a great talk, and it got me to thinking.I believe the problems we have with dependency resolution (which dependency injection attempts to solve) are not the real problem, they are the symptom. The real problem is that we have no ontology* for a running Java

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1105682801176639762005-01-13T23:54:00.000-06:002005-01-14T00:15:16.416-06:00

I went to a presentation of the St. Louis Java User's Group tonight where Patrick Linskey of Solarmetric talked about advances in object persistence and some things coming soonish. He gave an overview of issues surrounding object persistence, discussed Java Data Objects, and went on to discuss the current collaboration between the Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0 working group and the Java Data Objects (

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1105568126937612912005-01-12T16:09:00.000-06:002005-01-12T16:15:49.380-06:00

Well, for a clearly reformist website you can check out the Heritage Foundation's 'Social Security Reform Center'. It's amazing to see how much spin this issue is generating. Everyone is busy pushing their agenda and using inflammatory statements. For example, many people describe Social Security as bankrupt because in thirty or forty years it can't pay benefits as paid today. This is a rather

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1105558299693890962005-01-12T13:38:00.000-06:002005-01-12T13:50:02.716-06:00

Over on Brad's World, Brad Shuler expresses skepticism about some of the plans being discussed for private savings accounts as a reform for Social Security. I agree with Brad's assessment that these plans seem to assume it's okay to rack up additional deficits in order to get people off of Social Security. The basic premise seems to involve a two-pronged approach to the problem: Get people off

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1105382620289852492005-01-10T12:39:00.000-06:002005-01-10T14:46:24.543-06:00

Well, the information about Medicare is on a completely different website. I still need to peruse the documents from the trustess describing the state of Medicare. This business of predicting how the finances of these programs will fare in the coming years is becoming more and more murky. Everyone has their own set of estimates and simplifying assumptions. I think I'm going to stick with the

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10024706.post-1105165679180817552005-01-08T00:08:00.000-06:002005-01-08T00:35:50.996-06:00

Well, the Internet is clearly still a work in progress. I've been researching Social Security and trying to educate myself on the various proposals starting to fly around for reforming it. Google is my friend of course, but there are so many sites that get hit with only slightly different queries. I hope to publish something a bit more formal over on The View From the Fringe soon. In the mean

Brian Gilstraphttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11799840454645440786noreply@blogger.com1