Rocket Surgery

I’ve created a project (with my friend Tom) to create Character Cards for D&D from the files produced by Character Builder.

http://www.charactercardcreator.com

I just uploaded a whole mess (400+) of photos, many of which I came across during my genealogical research.

I realize that most of you couldn’t care less, but it might be useful to someone researching their relatives.

I recently upgraded from Family Tree Maker 16 to FTM2009.

Wow, what a difference!

One of the best things about it is that they finally embraced the fact that nobody does genealogical searches by loading in CD after CD anymore — they use the internet. So this version really takes advantage of the internet. It does web searching at Ancestry.com right in the software, and they’ve done some sort of magic where selecting items in the web page interacts with the software and tells it whose record you’re looking at — no more copy and paste.

Then, the best part – you can merge web-based records into your record with a button press. You can merge in entire families from census forms. All the family members get the census form image attached to their records, plus consistent source citations for all members involved. This alone has saved me tremendous amounts of time.

If you’re doing genealogy and haven’t upgraded to FTM 2009, do yourself a favor and go do it.

I just got a comment from an anonymous reader on my previous post, asking if WoW was the reason I haven’t posted in months.

The answer is “yes, in part.”

I recently moved into management at work, so I don’t spend nearly as much time coding as I used to — even less in recent months…in fact, I haven’t done any coding for work in a couple of weeks.

So, when I get home, I’m pretty wiped and looking for a way to decompress – which WoW did (note the use of the past tense) very well for me.  When a release date of Wrath of the Lich King came out, I started up again, and started a new undead priest.  By the time WOTLK came out, I was about level 60, so when I got to 68 or so, I got WOTLK and played it through to level 80.  I also started a twink orc hunter.

But here’s the really weird thing – although it’s an MMORPG, I solo everything – or just about everything.  “Why solo a multiplayer online game?” you may ask.  “Because I’m nuts,” I would answer.

But, once I got my toon up to 80 and saw all of Northrend (except the instances), and got my twink about as tricked out as I could manage, it got dull again.  I haven’t played in about three weeks….

… because I have gotten re-addicted to genealogy.  My mother-in-law found some old report cards for my father-in-law’s dad when he was a 7 year old boy.  He’s always been the thorn in my side with the family tree, since we can’t seem to get any documentation of his birth or his father.  So when she showed me these, I started digging again and got re-hooked.

But, on the plus side, I did start writing a new Java library for reading GEDCOM files (GEDCOM’s are the standard interchange format for genealogy programs).  I even put it on google code.

So, I’m going to wait a while before cancelling my WoW membership, but I don’t really expect I’ll be playing it much anymore.  I don’t like grouping and I’ve done about everything you can do solo.  In the meantime, I’ll keep playing with the family tree and I may write some more coding posts from time to time.

…and I’m back into World of Warcraft.  I could not resist the urge to play once the date for Wrath of the Lich King was announced.  I have an undead priest (my first priest character) that I am enjoying very much.  And yes, the damn game is still like crack.

One thing that changed during my time away was that you get your mount at level 30 now – makes questing in Stranglethorn Vale and Desolace very different.

I recently have been tasked with writing Java code to insert records into a SharePoint list, and I have been mildly successful, so I thought I’d share some of my experiences.

First, the important thing to know is that SharePoint’s API to stuff that’s not .NET is through Web Services.  SharePoint exposes a large number of Web Services for doing stuff with their tool, but for this particular assignment there were two of primary interest:  Lists and Views.

I’m a CXF guy (Axis2 works the same way), so to get started you get the WSDL, run WSDL2JAVA to generate a client and JAXB classes for the data types defined in the WSDL, and start going.

But here’s one part that really sucks:  The schema in the WSDL defines many of the objects as type ANY, so when you access their JAXB objects, they contain exactly one member called “content” of type List<Object>.  That’s right, you get back DOM nodes which you get to parse yourself.  If you thought you’d get some rich object model for marshalling and unmarshalling your requests to the web service, think again.   And not only do you get back lists of nodes as results — you get to build up a DOM for your requests too.

As I get more done, I will add more.  Stay tuned.

In the same vein as my list of best books ever, I have decided to make my lists of best movies ever. And this time, for no defendable reason at all, there are 20 entries.

20. Requiem for a Dream

19. Star Wars: A New Hope

18. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

17. On Golden Pond

16. Ordinary People

14. Full Metal Jacket

13. The Shawshank Redemption

12. Animal House

11. Dances with Wolves

Read the rest of this entry »

I thought for sure it would be Kaine. Kaine seemed like a better choice to me…safe, southern, seriously up Obama’s, um, alley…..

Biden?! Really?!

I don’t really see how it helps him at all. Don’t get me wrong, I actually find Biden funny and interesting, so I don’t object to the choice, but this is a guy who seems to me like a cross of McCain and Cheney — a more aggressive old bastard of a 20+year Senator who shoots his mouth off and irritates orthodox party loyalists.

True, He won’t having any trouble playing bad cop to Obama’s good cop. I guess what Obama wanted was someone with foreign policy and national security experience (as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) — more than he wanted someone who can bring swing votes or has his own “change appeal”. Without a doubt Obama will need experienced advisors and cabinet members, and Biden would have been a pretty good choice for a number of cabinet posts (perhaps State, or Defense).

But I don’t see how it will help in the election…The draw of Obama is change, and the selection of Biden diffuses that message by giving the appearance of trying to tap into the experience of those who have been running the very things he is trying to change. Seems to me like he’s just trying to mollify the people who worry about his lack of experience by adding Biden to the ticket — which I don’t think will really work.

I was recently writing a program to find classes that had a certain annotation on them:

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

/**
 * This annotation works similarly to the @WebMethod
 * annotation. It is used to indicate that the annotated method is allowed to be
 * made visible on a generated facade, and how to do it.
 *
 */
@Target(ElementType.METHOD)
@Documented
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface FacadeMethod
{
	/**
	 * This is the operation name that the annotated object will have on the
	 * generated facade. This will be used as the value for
	 * operationName in the @WebMethod
	 * annotation as well as the name of the method in the facade.
	 *
	 * @return the name that the annotated object will have on the generated
	 *         facade
	 */
	String operationName();

	/**
	 * This is a description of the method which will be used to generate
	 * javadoc on the facade.
	 *
	 * @return a description of the method
	 */
	String description() default "";
}

Methods annotated with this method look something like this:

@FacadeMethod(operationName = "effectivelySame",
              description = "Return true if the two strings are identical, both null, "
                            + "or equivalent after converting to same case and trimming")
public static boolean effectivelySame(String s1, String s2) {
...

What I needed to do was look through a whole mess of jar files that weren’t in the classpath, looking for classes with methods annotated with this annotation, so I could read the operationName and the description properties of the annotation.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s my list of the 10 best books (series) ever:

10. Lord of the Flies, William Golding

9. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

8. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

7. The Godfather, Mario Puzo

6. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess

5. Harry Potter Series, J. K. Rowling (Of these, Half-Blood Prince is my favorite)

4. Catch-22, Joseph Heller

3. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

2. The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger

1. 1984, George Orwell

(Also, as a side note, the worst book ever was Billy Budd by Herman Melville)