Sep 29 2008

Nick's New Snowboard…

Category: WoodworkingPhil @ 6:51 pm

We picked a custom snowboard at a garage sale this spring for Nicholas. The people owned a custom printing shop and did the artwork on the board.  My dad and I made a cool snowboard holder so we could use the snowboard as “art” in his room. Hopefully, we will be able to go back out west and go skiing in the next year or so… before the boys forget how to snowboard!

The holder was made of 1/2 oak that we had left over from making the legs on my table saw extension. It turned out pretty cool. Every thing is cut at an angle… the laser on the chop saw came in pretty handy!

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Sep 28 2008

New Table Saw Extension

Category: WoodworkingPhil @ 8:37 am

The Powermatic tool company started adding solid (laminated) extension tables to their table saws a couple of years ago. I thought they looked so cool, that I had to have one!  My dad and I planed down a bunch of oak boards and glued up two 14x48x2″ slabs of oak. Fortunately, he has a 20″ spiral head planer to smooth it all out. We biscutted and glued the two pieces together and cut them to size. Having a 8″ long bed jointer sure was nice… It did not even notice that big piece of oak, neither did the table saw for that matter!  Getting that huge piece of oak to line up with the cast iron wings was easier than I thought. We then made some cool adjustable legs for the unsupported end of the table.  Overall, I think it came out really cool. (and looks just as good as the Powermatic version, and mine was free! Thanks Dad!)

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Sep 28 2008

Unit Testing is Dumb….

Category: JavaPhil @ 6:53 am

I was surfing for something last night and happened to run across this blog on unit testing.  Apparently, encouraging unit testing has turned into one of my personal missions. I don’t think testing is second nature to most developers. For me, the very first thing I do when starting a project is making sure that jUnit works. I also try very hard to write the test first, followed by the code… this is a much harder habit to develop!

There were two points that seemed to resonate with me that I seem to experience every day…

  • The difference between thinking code works and knowing it works with
    a mountain of evidence to back you up.
  • Reproducing a customer problem in minutes by extending an existing
    test and fixing the problem.

Important or not? They work for me!  Anyway, the two related post were entitled “Easy 2 Test == Less Reason to Test” and “Unit Testing is dumb

I really recommend reading the first one, as it makes some very good “Random Observations”.  Additionally, I really like this guy’s site, the graphics are really unique. (He must have an Apple!)

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Sep 08 2008

Restful Web Services…

Category: JavaPhil @ 8:04 pm

I was actually looking for information to help me setup an Ivy2 repository and ran into this information on the IBM site…. I honestly did not read it all yet… but it looked interesting! A two part web blog.

Project Zero (Part1, Part2)

If you happen to be interested in Ivy, this might be a good read too!

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Sep 08 2008

Nice site with some helpful Linux tips…

Category: UbuntuPhil @ 7:45 pm

So much to learn, so little time! When I setup my first Linux box (Slackware in the 90’s), it was not that easy, nor were there a lot of (fun) things you actually could do, once it was up and running. Configuring the window manager was about the coolest thing you could do… good old fvwm! Modern Linux distros give you a complete desktop environment, and tools that can add some interesting effects and features. Compiz is one of them. I kind of discovered it by accident, I read about it and figured it was just another thing I needed to install. Little did I realize that it was already installed with Ubuntu. I was Googling how to auto start applications when I login (go to System, Preferences, Sessions… if you don’t know!) and I found this interesting site, Adventures in Switching to Linux… Not a bad little blog if you want to pick up some pointers. Anyway, there was a nice post Compiz features. I also learned that there is a configuration tool which is not automatically installed, but looks pretty cool.

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

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