MuddyHorse Farm and Tech

I broke down and bought a new Xbox 360 Arcade unit to replace my variously failing boxes.  If you remember back just a bit in time, I tried a couple of strategies to fix my machine.  They all worked — for a time.  The time the fix worked, however, was variable, ranging from 5-30 hours for a good fix, and as short as 30 minutes for a bad fix.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the boxes, and unfortunately, the time I spent fixing seems to have eclipsed the time I spent playing.

The thing I’ve found most fascinating about the process is that, while buggy, the 360 hardware is quite resilient.  With enough twiddling of screws, I can get a box up and running quite consistently.

The Company was pleased with our performance last year.  So they went against everything we’ve been teaching our kids, and gave us candy pills.

That’s Jelly beans on the left, mints on the right.  Or so I hope.

One cool thing about Buzz: I get more replies than before on my posts.

One bad thing about Buzz: Those replies are on the Buzz server, not here.

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I haven’t formulated exactly what I’m going to say, but I wanted to start a series on the Clumsy pattern in software development.  Don’t get excited, I’m neither adopting patterns as a beloved thing (that sentence needs its own post), nor am I trying to establish a new industry term.  I’ll do a Clumsy Pattern post when I come across things that are so archaic or broken that they have no right still existing. (more…)

Alternate titles for this post:

• How Gamestop ruined my Valentine’s Day
• Gamestop Made Me Do It
• I’m an Idiot

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I just picked up three books on Design, based largely on the recommendations in the JavaPosse Roundup 09 sessions on the topic.  I haven’t read them yet, but just perusing them makes them look to be a lot of fun.  (more…)

I thought I was in the clear as far as the 3 red lights goes for the XBox 360… it happened, I was under warranty, Microsoft send a cardboard coffin, and I sent it back.  End of story.

Oops, it happened again.  There’s no free lunch this time.  Even if I paid the $100 to MS to repair it, they would only give a 90 day warranty on their work.  So, either buy a new one (with a massive extended warranty, of course) or try to fix it myself.  After attempting to buy a new Arcade unit for $200 at K-Mart twice, but failing both times because they were out of stock, I went the fix route.

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I just wanted to capture the current set of podcasts I listen to. I commute two hours a day, and this set keeps me lightly stocked — Sometimes I run out for a day or two, and I rarely fall behind.

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I know I’m late to the game, but I was looking over Mozilla Bespin — a web-based IDE with a surprising amount of features, including source control and syntax highlighting.  Right now, it’s all about web techs, with a strong focus on HTML, Javascript, and CSS, but it is extensible and seems like it is headed in the right direction.

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… that you’re cool if you find yourself ever saying any of the following:

• buff
• debuff
• tank
• aggro
• DPS
• AoE
• Bonus:
  • Tapping
  • Untap

In some cases, you may even be fooling yourself that you’re playing a game.  Seriously, though, I’m a nerd, and listening to people talk like the above makes me want to take their lunch money.

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Buy.com recently had a great deal on some games and battery packs.  One of the games included was Crackdown.  Here’s a quick review, after playing about half the game.  I get the feeling that Crackdown is one of those games everyone’s heard of, but few have played.  It’s never had a mega promotional campaign, but it’s a solid, well put-together title.  To sum up my feelings about the game: it’s a blast.  And it gets blastier the farther along you get.

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While looking around for an online loan amortization creator (nice one here), I came across a Google ad for the Nexus One, the “Google phone” that there’s been much buzz about.  Apparently, it just came out today, while the great Snomaggeddon blankets the world (or at least Missouri) and I’ve been oblivious.

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NTLM proxies are relatively common corporate web proxy. It takes special software to pass through it, unfortunately. One must essentially log into an NT domain to get to the web past the proxy. By default, web browsers are the only software on Ubuntu Linux that know how to perform the complex handshake. Many core tools (like apt, etc) cannot do what they need — and your system can’t download software updates.

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Well, we’re going to try out the WildBlue through Dish Network for internet.  *Sigh*.  It feels like a defeat.  I have only heard good things about Satellite internet from one person, and all the anecdotes online are negative.  But at least it is something.

Chickens are delicate creatures, sometimes dying for no good reason.  Unfortunately, they are also delectable creatures, and find themselves in harm’s way.

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Play Achievement Unlocked

This game makes me so happy.  Did I mention that I got all 1250 achievement points in Mass Effect?

Memorial day weekend, we broke the ban on Wal-mart.  Why, you might ask?  Because of Nibbler.

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Continuing the Java build systems discussion, today I want to focus on Maven, what it does well and what it does that frustrates.  We’ll get a little taste of the minimum expectations for a new build system as well.  Note:  this page may be subject to edits, as I come across more pros & cons of Maven.

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We had to go through a number of steps to support the combination of Maven + OSGi + Spring + JavaFX-1.1 in our Swing-based application. This document describes all the steps and technology we’ve gone through to get it working.

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Two recent posts on the java-weblog circuit spurred me to motion:

Maven Adoption Curve (Alex Miller, coworker at MetaMatrix)
Maven and Ivy (Ryan Senior, coworker at BJC)

I was trying to think of the ideal build system.  I won’t pretend that I’m going to get there in this post.  Instead, I’ll enumerate what we do every day and what we need from a build system so as to start thinking about the ideal system.

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