January 2010 Archives

I decided I want to make pineapple tarts this year. I have not gotten a chance to taste them since I came here over 4 years ago except last year when my mum flew here with a container of pineapple tarts.

So I bought the pineapple tart mould online last week. Planned some time this weekend to make them. I was a little nervous because I was making a batch of them and if I screwed up, it would all be over.

It all went well. I could do better with the pineapple filling by cooking it longer so that it thickened more. The pastry was soft and buttery. And Topher wanted to give 3 thumbs up if he could.

After running version 1 of my ABuddy through a few test cycles, I figured there was enough potential to rework it into a more viable project.  I already had several improvements I wanted to make, and as I started thinking about it seriously, came up with several more.

In the 1st version everything happened at once: the quotes were harvested, the analysis was made and the static report file was generated for that day.  If anything failed along the way, the whole thing just horked.

Fixing all that was pretty much the motivation for reworking it into version 2.  I wanted these key features:

• Tolerance of network issues.
• Separation of data and presentation.
• Self-maintained reference database of analyst recommendation scores.
• Flexible rule engine.

First up, I separated everything out to distinct components.  Like so:

Klepto: The sole responsibility of the klepto is to acquire the raw quote data.

Duke: The duke is the keeper of all the analyst recommendations.

Professor: The professor's job is to perform the needed analysis and report the final scores.

I probably could have made the Professor into two components rather than one, but I didn't want to be breeding rabbits.  The analysis step is actually just a matter of collating all the gathered stuff into the report itself, so those two tasks fit nicely together.

So that's it.  ;)

We just got back from the Doctor.  We officially have a jellybean with a heartbeat.




The baby is about 8 weeks old, 1.69 cm long, with a heartbeat of about 171 bpm.

For the first time in many years, the latest and greatest version of Ubuntu is actually worse than it's predecessor.  I installed Karmic onto my Dell laptop over New Years weekend, and I was very disappointed.

I have a long list of complaints about the beast, but today I just want to rant about the butt-ugly notification tray icons.  I'm talking about these guys over on the right.

Now, to set the stage a bit, my laptop is a modest old Dell Inspiron 1525.  It's actually a hand-me-down from my wife.  It was not top of the line even when we bought it a little over 2 years ago.  But even this antiquated beast is capable of displaying at least 16-bit color depth at 1280x800 WXGA resolution.

Over the holidays I spent an afternoon trying to get Jack to walk.

Jack, he's the guy who is the main character in some little game I'm thinking to write up.  I scribbled up some animation frames of him walking, then loaded them up into a little program I cobbled together to show animations.

It looked like some Junior High kid drew a little frame at the bottom of each page in his Chemistry book and then flipped the pages with his thumb.  Horrible!  Blech!

I'm not really sure why I was surprised at the results.  I basically did exactly that, except I scanned the pages into a computer and had the computer flip the pages for me.  Same difference, neh?!

So, I guess I need to come up with a better way to get the animation frames built.