Lewies Blog

The news is buzzing that Google is now offering services found in most portal solutions. I tried it out myself. I like the part that shows movies in my area. I’m not much for stocks or weather. The Gmail part wasn’t working properly so I can’t give any opinion about that.

These guys claim that they are not a portal, but with this kind of personalization it appears that they are.

Tags: Google, Portal, Website, News, Gmail, Movie, Weather, Stock

In binary, that would mean that I only have 10 posts. This would truly be a milestone for a blog that is just starting out. Most people work with the decimal numbering system so it means exactly what it says.

My computer went down last week, and I wasn’t able to catch my 1000th post. I remember when I got my 1000th comment. It was really cool. I guess that my next milestone would be my blogiversary on September 2nd, since that was the day of my first post.

Tags: 1000, Milestone, Posts, Blog, Blogiversary, 1000th Post, M, One Thousand, K, Chiliad, G, Grand, Thou, A Thousand, Thousand

My friend had a few jokes about words women use. I went on a hunt to see if I could find a few more and was in luck. I found them for both genders.

Tags: Gender Wars, Jokes, Humor, Funny, Man, Woman, Translation, Battle of the Sexes

I had just finished watching the movie Sideways. In a brief understatement, I will say that it is dull, boring, and depressing. The trailers are misleading. It is not exciting. There are not many high-points in the movie. Actually, I think there is only one high point.

The actor runs home naked for 5 miles after being discovered having a good time with a waitress when her husband comes home. The two guys go back to grab his wallet that he left behind. A funny scene ensues as the husband is found talking dirty to his wife about the movie star encounter while he is getting his groove on. The wallet is confiscated and the husband chases the actors friend out of the house.

In the last half of the movie, I was just waiting for it to end. I was starting to get pretty depressed myself. Don’t watch this movie.

Tags: Movie, Review, Sideways, Depression, Boring

Wow, so many good things are happening today. I cleaned up my room looking for a phillips head screw driver and discoverd 3 unopened packages of blueberry pop tarts. If that wasn’t enough, I got my old computer working again! Tadah!

Oh the excitement that rushed through my body as I saw the enterprise orbiting over my home planet. Anyhow, the problem turned out to be rather simple. Again, it is one of those moments of clarity where you slap your forehead and go “Doh!”.

It appears that my Gainward GeForce 4 TI4600 128MB video card had died. The fan on the video cards CPU was still running, and the monitor didn’t complain about any bad signals, so this threw me off track. My motherboard also has a warning light specifically for the AGP slot, but it wasn’t on.

I removed my video card and pluged my speakers into the on-board audio jack. I heard the boot-up beep and was excited. Then a woman started talking stating that the VGA card was not detected and the keyboard wasn’t either. I almost ripped my other computer open with excitement to get at the MadDog Dominator FX 5500 128 MB PCI card that I had just purchased on Pay-Day so that I could play WarCraft on the spare computer. (It doesn’t support AGP).

After installation, I plugged in the keyboard as well and started the process. My monitor came on and started going through the boot-up process. I turned everything off and put the computer back together. I hooked all of the original wires up and was then well on my way back to normalicy.

Oh it feels so great to be back. I hope that doesn’t happen again. At least I found out about one of my fans not working. I would have hated to have my CPU blow out over the summer.

Tags: Video Card, Gainward, Nvidia, Crash, Troubleshooting, Fix, GeForce 4, MadDog, Dominator, PCI, AGP, FX 5500, TI4600, GeForce

My machine crashed last week and hasn’t started up since then. I took the machine apart and discovered that one of the fans was not spinning. A trip to the computer store yielded a new fan that was installed without any problems and worked when the computers power was turned on.

Unfortunately, I am still running into the same problems. I turn the power on and nothing works. The computer is on - but I never get that confirmation beep when it boots up. The monitor never shows me any text, but it doesn’t complain that there isn’t a signal either. My CD-ROM drive is able to eject CD’s when I press a button, so it doesn’t appear to be a power issue. A green light on the motherboard lights up solid. I’ve reseated most of the hardware and still haven’t had any success.

I’m beginning to thing that there is something wrong with the motherboard. Maybe the BIOS isn’t working. I have an ASUS P4B533-E motherboard.

I don’t know what is going on. The box here says that during the POST (Power On Self-Test) it should be able to tell me what is wrong if I hook up my speakers and there is a problem with the motherboard. I dont’ recall hearing anything before, but I had the speakers plugged into my sound-card rather then the built-in audio port. I’m going to try it again to see if I missed anything.

Tags: Troubleshooting, Crash, ASUS, Power, Motherboard, P4B533-E, POST, Audio, BIOS, Hardware

For the past few weeks, I have had a bug assigned to me that a client had found. The problem was that I couldn’t reproduce the bug. Even our QA team couldn’t reproduce it. However, when we went to the clients environment, there it was - as clear as the stars in the country.

We have struggled with the problem time and time again. It really hits your ego pretty hard and wears you down. There were so many different possiblities, but we would keep proving that they were dead ends.

My manager had been speaking about a line-by-line code review to find the answer. It was something that I really wasn’t looking forward to. I came in to work and started searching code in the database. Shortly there after, I found the problem. I slapped my head and couldn’t believe my eyes. Just then, my manager walked in.

I went to her and exclaimed that I think that I had found it. We needed confirmation that we could duplicate the problem. I gave her a plan and we both sat down and tried it. Sure enough, we were finally able to duplicate the bug.

So what was different between the two environments? I’ll tell you. Humans. That’s rite. It is the plural word for human. A developer such as myself was only one person testing an isolated system.

For more technical details, I’ll say that it was a trigger in the database that updated everyones data rather then the specific person who had just inserted a new piece of data.

The fix was easy and my manager gave me a high-five. She made a joke (I think) about deserving a bonus. It was just a problem that everyone in the office was confused over. I felt like there eyes were on me to fix it quickly.

The real clencher is that this is a database problem. The database is the main thing that I take care of these days at work. I am responsible. I inherited most of the architecture, but this specific feature was designed by yours truly.

There was nowhere to pass the blame except for myself. The reason being is that I would try and point this specific kind of problem out to the guy that I inherited the database from. He had always assumed triggers would be updating only one record at a time. The phrase “Do as I say, not as I do” comes to mind.

I take a lot of pride in my work. While everyone else was happy, I was dissapointed in myself for this bug.

A lot of stress was released from the past few weeks. I was able to concentrate my efforts on some of the few bugs that we have left. I got caught up working with the iCalendar format and timezones. I was so involved with it that before long, it was time to go home. I left work on a positive note and feeling better about myself.

Tags: Work, Database, Bug, Client, Fix, Programming, Troubleshooting, Trigger, Ego, Blame

My next little project with the Technorati tagging is being created with the SharpDevelop IDE in C# that I recently installed. At the moment, it can grab every page on my website and search for tags and links within the page. I eventually want to get it to the point that it can generate an interactive map to navigate my website based on the tags alone. Until then, I’ll leave you with a preview of things to come.

Tags: Tagging, Tags, Technorati, Navigation, Map, C#, Blogware, SharpDevelop, IDE, Screenshot

So I was going through some of the hits that were comming to my site and found that I have been Blogg’d. It was actually quite funny as this person posted a translation of my profile:

Lewis Moten is married to a great person, Angel. (My wife reads my blog, so I had to write this) Lewie can tell her anything (as long as it’s not “why yes dear, that skirt does make your ass look big”) and she accepts him for who he is,(what she has turned me into) and how he got to where he is today.(if it wasn’t for her I’d still be asking people if they wanted to super size their order) Angel makes Lewies’ life … interesting.(She nags me day and night, I can’t take it anymore!) Lewis only hopes that he lives up to her expectations (I am so totally whipped) It takes a lot of work to be cute. (plastic surgery wouldn’t hurt either)

He goes on to say that I’m a wuss, witch I would agree 100%, however his translation is totally off.

Lewis Moten is married to a great person, Angel. My wife reads my blog, so I had to write this

Call me weird, but I like to tell everyone in real life that I love my wife. And usually this is when she isn’t around. This goes along the lines of the wuss effect.

Lewie can tell her anything (as long as it’s not “why yes dear, that skirt does make your ass look big”)

I’m clueless to the whole style thing going on, so my wife has learned not to ask. I mean come on, who dresses like me in there rite mind?

and she accepts him for who he is,(what she has turned me into)

Nope, I was already a wuss before we met.

if it wasn’t for her I’d still be asking people if they wanted to super size their order

I’ve had professional jobs with yearly salaries a long time before I met with her. I must admit, she has supported me through some tough times, but I doubt that I would have gone so far as to work in fast food if I had lost my job.

Angel makes Lewies’ life … interesting.(She nags me day and night, I can’t take it anymore!)

Nagging? Not at all. By interesting, I guess I should say that she is eccentric.

Lewis only hopes that he lives up to her expectations (I am so totally whipped)

Yea, and?

It takes a lot of work to be cute. (plastic surgery wouldn’t hurt either)

Hmm… I didn’t mean visually cute.

Tags: Blogged, Blogg’d, Funny, Translation, Profile, Humor, Rebuttal, Angel, Love, Wuss, Critisism

Since my computer had crashed a few days ago, I’ve been searching all over the net for good software that is free. It is usually open-source software. Tonight, I just wanted to crop an image and didn’t want to do it thought Microsofts “Paint” program that ships with Windows XP.

I recalled that a free program is available for Linux called “The Gimp” and went on a hunt to see if it was ported to Windows. I was in luck. They had even made an automated installer for The Gimp.

The Gimp is a little odd if you are used to working with Adobe Photoshop. They have seperate windows that drag around outside of your canvas. If you activate the canvas window, then your tool windows are hidden.

Much of the interface such as opening files and buttons give you that impression that you are working in an x-windows environment. “Well, what ever does the trick”, I say. I was able to figure out how to crop a TGA image and export it to Jpeg format.

Tags: Free, The Gimp, Adobe, Photoshop, Graphic Design, Linux, Port, Software, Open-Source, Canvas, Crop