Saturday, September 21, 2002

PRESTO BASEMENT BATHROOM SYSTEMS (prestobath.com) We found out about these two guys from Minnesota who formed a business making pre-fabricated bathrooms for people's basements. We plan to install a bathroom in our basement and PrestoBath can do it for half of the cost of our contractor's estimate and in about 1/3 the time. They only sell them in Minnesota. They have high ratings on Angie's List. I cut and pasted the customer comments here for Presto Basement Bathroom Systems from Angie's List just to show how great Angie's list is and show why you should sign up for it. We just visited a friend's basement to check out their Prestobath installation. I brought a copy of the New Yorker to test the crapper, and I must report that it is comfortable for a long sit.  I imagined walls that would tip over if you leaned against them, sending you and the toilet contents spilling out over the basement floor. Don't picture a portapotty. These fixtures are fixed securely to the foundation of the house and they would be hard to knock over. Presto Bath does not include walls. The walls are up to you.  Also, you can have any color you want as long as it is white. 9:50:44 PM    comment []

Kids, go ahead and fight. I know it is wrong, but I am going to advise my kids to get into fights.  Looking back, the fights I got into as a kid form my most visceral memories.    The feel of a teacher's arm around my chest as I was pulled away from Jon Roncalli.    Being asked "what'd you do to the kids face?" after my fight with Mark Weatherhead. Not being able to breath after Mark Dropkin punched me really hard in the adam's apple but having the satisfaction of seeing his nose bleeding.  Brian Martzen's fat face smiling as he wiped the floor with me as my friends looked on in horror.  John McGinnis's fist smashing into my eye and blurring my vision for the remainder of the day.   Win or lose, my fights are some of my best memories ... as vivid as  sexual experiences and sometimes more pleasant.    The other advantage is that if you are known to start wildly windmilling your arms and frothing at the mouth at the smallest provocation, then bullies will leave you alone.  And when you are little, up until about 9th grade, you don't have much to lose in terms of permanent damage.  3:10:20 PM    comment []

JUG HEAD The second DNR Java Users Group was excellent.  One Java programmer handed over his code to get picked apart by the experts and we all learned from it.  Tim Loesch wrote a small application in JSP that had most of the java logic inside the JSP pages.  Mica showed him how to implement the Model View Controller (MVC) way of doing things that separates out the database logic (SQL) from the view (HTML) and ties it all together with an applet called the Controller.  The benefits are many.  For one thing, the HTML looks clean and java only shows up as custom tags.  Another is that all the database connections scripts are contained in one connection bean that is stored as an object in the session. Mica used an Interface to store a list of constants.  Is this what interfaces are for?  I looked it up and it is most definitely not what it was intended for... Oh well.  They are really to implement protocols so unrelated objects can interact just like the remote is an interface between you and the television.  It translates finger movements into signals that the T.V. understands.  Reasons to use interfaces: Capturing similarities among unrelated classes without artificially forcing a class relationship. Declaring methods that one or more classes are expected to implement. Revealing an object's programming interface without revealing its class. The DNR uses MySQL for as many database apps as possible.  This allows us to get a smaller Oracle License.  Our Oracle license depends on CPU cycles and we need to watch every cent. In JSP don't bother using Try-Catch.  The JSP server has this built in.  Catch errors by redirecting to something like error.jsp Mica used a custom tag to do something that I want to try in PHP.  It is very unsophisticated of me, but I have been generating option lists with tiresome loops through recordsets.  I should be letting a PHP object take care of that for me.  Just send a result set to one PHP function that builds an option list out of my own custom template.  In any case, JSP and its custom tag libraries makes this available and very slick.  Tim also bore witness to the wisdom of using the stringBuffer object instead of concatenating strings to output HTML or text. We all agreed to use connection pooling as a standard way of doing things. The DNR java elite recommended Visual Slick Edit  It supports C, C++, PHP, Java, VB, PERL, ETC. 3:00:28 PM    comment []

Matt and I went war chalking over lunch in downtown St. Paul yesterday. Matt got all geeked out in a running jacket and huge backpack filled with electronic gear and his sketchers sneakers. I have never seen him in that guise before. We found 7 or 8 wireless networks just wandering around with Kara's new ibook and airport card. It literally just snatches the signals out of the air. There is one really strong network exposed in Rice park with an ID of "Linksys" that we could get into but not access the internet from. There were none that we could just log onto easily except for Dunn Bros. Matt's site has a picture of me drawing the open network symbol on the wall of Dunn Bros. Most of the networks we found needed a password to connect. I there are programs out there like airsnort that allow you to test the security of these password protected ones. Some just said, "Can't find specified server" when we tried to use them. It was learning fun and we identified several things we don't know: How to find out the bandwidth of a certain signal How to get directionality so we can move closer to signal How to use networks that don't seem to be connected to internet 2:41:31 PM    comment []

On a less than hopeful note,  The Wellstone campaign emailed us to say to watch it because lawn signs are getting mutilated and set on fire.  How do you argue with a burning lawn sign?  2:32:34 PM    comment []