Z425

New $45 video camera

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37482520@N00/466034895/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37482520@N00/466018858/

When it rained hard, our porch roof would leak. I finally got around to looking into the problem last Friday.

So I got the ladder out and inspected the roof. Yep. A bit soft over here. I'm guessing it's just due to rot.

After ripping off the shingles and the first strip of OSB, this is what I found..












Upon first inspection this looks pretty bad, but when I tore off the inner roof I saw the BIGGER problem.

See those old boards.. On the front side they are sitting on a support. On the side near the house they are sitting on NOTHING. They are held in place by sitting against the angled siding. Across the entire 16' length there where two 2x2 support. WTF.

So my day project turned into a still not done project a week later. That's with taking off two days of work! I never take days off of work. Bah.

It has been an interesting build so far since after I realized that nothing was holding the roof up.. I was not going to walk on it again. This meant I had to tear the roof down while I was building the new roof across! Bah2.

At this point I have the old outer roof ripped down with inner roof intact. I've framed most of the way across and there is some OSB up there to protect from the rain.

Oh.. Did I mention that it keeps raining here. Oooh.

If I get a decent amount of time to work on this tomorrow it should be framed and skinned by the end of the day. I've never done shingle work before, but Jason has and he can help me pick out what I need.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92

It says it's 20 minutes, but it is broke into smaller pieces. At least watch the first part. It's worth your time.

Profile 1st!

It's not often that I can get a 3 orders of magnitude speedup with 10 minutes of work. haha.

I was using a lexer I wrote in one my work projects and it was SLOW. When I wrote the lexer I was using it as an experiment in lolo style lexing (which I will talk about in a future post)..

http://luna2.informatik.uni-osnabrueck.de/alumni/bernd/lolo/

I was just playing around with the concept and did not care about speed. All my little toy datasets were very small, but when I threw a 1.5meg file at it. SMASH. haha.

Ya see.. I was being INCREDIBLY lazy.

I was loading the entire file into a String. When I wanted to eat some characters off the front I did the INCREDIBLY lazy thing of..

this.readerText=this.readerText.subString(eatLength);

OMG is right. haha.

The solution was obvious of course, just pass in an offset and index from that instead. POW! 1000X speedup. haha.

Stephanie Miller doesn't start until 8am. Which was fine when Turing would get up before 8am because the Young Turks was on. Too bad the mic changed their lineup and put on a local guy Lee Rayburn in that time slot.

Lee Rayburn is annoying. It seems that literally half the things that come out of his mouth are in an attempt to reinforce that he is politically correct. Stephanie and Ed are overly PC too, but Lee takes it to a new level.

Today he was talking about how he doesn't want to refer to himself as straight because that would imply that the LGBT community is bent. He then went on to say that hetero-sexual/homo-sexual is not good enough either because the word 'homo' has such bad connotations.

Uhh.. Ok dude.

Sorry about this post. Turing got up at 7am today and I just could not take it and had to vent a little.

http://www.z425.com/blogger/atom.xml

Word.

The programmers still are working at home since the fire. We'll see if we make it back at the office on Monday.

Since I'm not at the office I've been doing the old coffee shop routine. The most efficient time block I've found is 2 hours which happens to coincide with the battery running out of juice. My goal is to get in 3 units a day for 7 days a week.

Two hours is enough to get something done, but not enough to screw around on the inet. I do a tiny bit of screwing around in that time, but it's on the order of 2's of minutes per unit. So pretty good.

If I do end up getting 3 units in then I think I am doing really well compared to most programmers in an office environment. Most office environments are TERRIBLE for productivity for most people ( most people don't even realize how much they are not working ). So 6 actual productive hours in a day is WAY ahead of the game and it is scalable across 7 days a week.

Another cool bit about my work units is that it takes me 15 minutes each way to/from the coffee shop. It's really nice having that time to rev-up and cool-down between sessions.

Geez. I don't need another reason to get a vertical mill. I've been holding off on my cnc conversion until we move and I have a place for it. I mean.. Those suckers are HUGE. However. Seeing pepole making 3d printers and especially stuff like this..

http://www.ciciora.com/picknplace.html
http://www.ciciora.com/surface_mount.html

When I build my custom servos I probably should go ahead and do something like those. Sure it'll take more time, but think of the busy-work savings! Also. Once you have one of these suckers set up the things that you can make are just insane.

I guess in the mean time I could build it out of extra robot parts..

http://robosavvy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=318&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=4

Beginning of main was the launch of the new Centrino pro stuff. The two main nice things about Centrino pro is 802.11N and DX10. Forcing a high end standard sure is nice.

All the notebook forum kiddies thought it would take forever for the DX10 laptops to make it to market and that they would be expensive at first. They were wrong. I dunno why I listened to them.

You can go to freak'n egghead and for $1500 get an ok setup machine with a Nvidia 8600M DX10 card. If you order from a reseller for about $1500 you can get..

15.4 WSXGA 1600x1050
Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz
8600M 512M
2 gig
160 gig drive ( 5400 )
1G crazy Robinson memory card deally
wifi card
dvd/cd read-write

Whoa. So much easier to do than my last laptop purchase. I'm going to be doing some more research, but I think another Compal will be in my future. Now the big question is... Do I go for 4 gig?

What the hell.

I guess technically it was on the fork holding the lettuce, but it sounds cooler that the lettuce did it.

The chip is quite small, but maybe it'll allow me to get some free "cosmetic" dentistry done on the calcium deposit on the same tooth. Ya know.. Cuz they hafta.