Posted in apple/mac/ipod at 8:54 am by Josh Peters
While I was healing I purchased a new (technically refurbished but otherwise new to me) iPod nano. I got a purple one that has 16GB of storage. So far I love this little gizmo. The screen quality is remarkable; the battery life is decent.
I do have a major complaint though: none of my existing accessories can charge this darn thing!
This is my 3rd iPod; the first was a display model version of a second generation iPod followed by a iPod mini (my wife also has a first-gen. iPod nano). As you may expect, over time we’ve purchased some friends for our iPods: car chargers, speakers, docks, etc. Why oh why has Apple screwed up on their design so that none of these existing accessories can charge this thing? The same dock connector port is present but apparently it is too much work to solder in support for the two wires that charged older models. For an otherwise wonderful machine, this design is flawed.
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Posted in gross, health at 3:03 pm by Josh Peters
Well, I had another surgery last week, this time for my ailing sinuses. My sinuses have been an ever-increasing problem ever since I moved to Normal. It seems that I’ve been having more and more incidents of sinusitis year after year, so I finally decided to have something done about it.
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Posted in technology, w3c, web, work at 6:24 pm by Josh Peters
How the BBC makes web sites. Dang, the BBC has put a good deal of thought into information design. This is a great read for anyone interested in information architecture.
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Posted in blogtech, left-brain, right-brain, swag at 5:47 pm by Josh Peters
While listening to this week’s Mac Break Weekly, a panel member picked Pulse Smartpen from Livescribe
as his pick of the week. Amazon’s got some nice videos explaining the pen but I’ll summarize. This pen can record what you write as well as the audio during your writing. It’s being marketed as a study aid, but I think this would be a hugely useful tool regardless of where it was used. How many times have I written something down and wanted to have it available on my computer? The Pulse pen automagically reproduces what you’ve written on your computer for you to file away, convert, or whatever. This sort of thing would be perfect for a wannabe journalist or blogger on the go. My only gripe about interesting sounding technologies like this one is that I would love to be able to try one out for a week before deciding to plunk down the money to purchase it.
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Posted in books, left-brain, reviews, right-brain, science, society/culture/news at 9:14 pm by Josh Peters
I’ve been listening to a fascinating book (recommended by TWiT and purchased from Audible.com) written by Jeff Hawkins called “On Intelligence
.” In it, Hawkins presents his theory of what intelligence is by specifically describing how he believes the neo-cortex of the human brain works. I haven’t quite finished it yet (there’s about another 45 minutes to the book as of this writing) but this book has been so challenging and rewarding that I just can’t not write about it.
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Posted in java, work at 10:35 am by Josh Peters
One of the dependencies for dbUnit on it is SLF4J (a.k.a. the Simple Logging Facade for Java). SLF4J aims to be a wrapper replacement for Java Commons Logging similar to Log4j. The biggest bonus for using SLF4J is the fact that at runtime you may use whatever logging implementation you choose. In addition, there’s a trick that one can do in a Maven build that will force all JCL commands to use SLF4J, which means that JCL can then be logged over Log4J!
Here’s how to replace JCL with SLF4J:
<dependency>
<groupId>commons-logging</groupId>
<artifactId>commons-logging</artifactId>
<version>99.0-does-not-exist</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<artifactId>jcl-over-slf4j</artifactId>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<version>1.5.6</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-log4j12</artifactId>
<version>1.5.6</version>
<scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
<artifactId>slf4j-api</artifactId>
<version>1.5.6</version>
</dependency>
Here’s an explanation of what’s going on:
- The first dependency tells Maven that commons logging will be using a non-existent version. You’ll need to use an empty JAR file or find a repository that will serve you such an empty JAR. The trick is that the version number is ridiculously high and trumps all other versions of JCL.
- The second dependency tells Maven to use SLF4J to provide the API for JCL. All Java commons logging calls will then use the SLF4J runtime implementation to provide logging.
- The third dependency is the runtime implementation of SLF4J over log4j. In essence, the only calls to log4j are made through SLF4J.
- Finally, we’ll bring in the SLF4J API so our code can use SLF4J instead of JCL or log4j.
Here’s an example of replacing log4j with SLF4J:
Old Version
private static final org.apache.log4j.Logger LOG = org.apache.log4j.Logger.getLogger( Taco.class );
New Version
private static final org.slf4j.Logger LOG = org.slf4j.LoggerFactory.getLogger( Taco.class );
This one line change allows you to change out your runtime logger at will 
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Posted in best-practices, work at 4:02 pm by Josh Peters
Google’s Testing Blog introduced me to a presentation on Context-Driven Test Automation by Pete Schnieder of F5 Networks. It’s a good presentation that discusses some of the different perspectives with regards to unit testing and how to best involve those disparate groups in the process. Slide 8 is a great chart describing the “contexts” and responsibilities therein. Good stuff.
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Posted in politics/government at 6:28 pm by Josh Peters
Given the current discussion about the “Big Three” automakers asking for a loan in order to keep afloat in these rough economic times, I started thinking about taxes. Currently in the U.S., businesses and individuals pay (or are supposed to pay) both state and federal income taxes.
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Posted in music at 7:50 pm by Josh Peters
Download “Elevator Operator” by Jim Bianco, performed on December 13th, 2008 at the Double Door in Chicago, Illinois.
My wife and I (along with a few friends) saw this guy when he opened for Over the Rhine for their semi-annual Chicago Christmas show. It was a great show; we were in the very front row but not overly smushed. Jim Bianco opened for OtR and he did a great job entertaining and warming up the crowd. I recorded two of his songs (the other I may post here if it turned out okay). He spat quite a lot; from my angle his saliva was well-lit and very noticeable. He had a good sense of humor about it and joked with the people directly in his line of fire.
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