James Drews Blog Spot

Comics and Math

jdrews — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:34:42 +0000

This Sunday’s comic for Fox Trot forced me to do some math problems to be able to read the comic. Nothing like having to do math to figure out the punch line of a comic. *sigh* Maybe that’s why I like this comic - not your ordinary every day comic. I just wish he would go back to daily, instead of Sunday only.

Purge or Keep

jdrews — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:19:07 +0000

This weekend took another quick stab at shoveling out the basement of clutter. Trying to figure out why I was keeping some computer manuals for things like printers I no longer have, or software I won’t ever use again (Winfax). Also a bunch of developer journals that are no longer needed. The recycling cart is full again.

More Building Demolitions

jdrews — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 19:28:15 +0000

Here are a couple more demolition videos of a building right next to my office…

Retro - Rubix Cube

jdrews — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 14:30:14 +0000

Well, there is now a “cube cheater” app for the iphone that will show you how to solve the Rubix Cube. You just enter in the state of the cube, and it will tell you how to solve it. Ok, I used to be able to solve these things back in the 7th grade, and fairly quickly as well.

I guess what impressed me the most about the app, is you can use the camera on the phone to take a picture of the cube face, and it will automatically detect the cube and enter the state of the cube for you. Pretty impressive. A demo video of it in action.

Tech Tip #2

jdrews — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:46:04 +0000

My office computer recently got upgraded. It is now running Windows Vista 64bit as it has 8Gig of ram in it (32-bit can’t make use of more than 4Gig of ram). Why so much memory? For running VM’s mainly (lots of test environments, etc).

Well, I was back to working on a program that uses the ODBC drivers to connect to our Oracle database. I had previously installed and configured the Oracle 64-bit ODBC drivers, and the test in the ODBC Configuration panel works just fine. But the program won’t connect.

Guess what - you have to use the 32-Bit ODBC drivers (ok, I kind of suspected that). The real catch tho, is to configure it, you have to launch the control panel from the command line so you get the 32-bit version of the ODBC configuration tool. The command line is:

%WINDIR%\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe

If you just run odbcad32.exe, windows will run the 64-bit version (despite the name showing 32).

Tech Tip

jdrews — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 01:27:36 +0000

Today, like many, I was trying to watch the inaguration while at work. The campus has some TV channels that you can watch over the network using multicast. For some reason, I wasn’t able to make it work on my office computers. I tracked the problem down to having VMWare Workstation installed. It appears the “virtual” network that it installs was causing problems. The program to watch the stream would send out the subscribe multicast request, but it would go out the VM network, not the real one (and no, I wasn’t trying to watch this inside a VM).

My solution was to adjust the network properties to make Windows Vista prefer the real ethernet card. In the advanced settings of the TCPIP configuration, turn off “automatic metric” and set a value.

Cold and no power

jdrews — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 21:16:25 +0000

Well, the building I work in has a number of scheduled power outages over the next month or two. One is tonight - the coldest night of the year so far. Those of us with plants in our offices have moved them out into an interior room with no windows. With no power - no heat. Temps are expected to be below zero for much of the power outage time - and our windows are a bit drafty.

Wow - that’s a lot of cement

jdrews — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:16:10 +0000

The constuction site outside my office window has 2 lanes of traffic blocked off today while they pour cement. They have 2 cement pump trucks going with 2 cement trucks pouring at each of them. There has been a constant stream of cement trucks all day. They are dumping 110 truck loads of cement today, and it appears it won’t cover the entire first floor of the new building.

Letters Home

jdrews — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:52:31 +0000

Yesterday was Veterans day. While I am sure most people didn’t notice, and went about their day as if it was like any other. I hate to admit it, I’m in that group too. That is until I went to the Letters Home performance last night. A number of actors dramaticly recited letters from those serving in Iraq and other wars. A fitting thing to see on Veterans day.

Quite a range of emotions in the letters. Some talk of happy times, others about loss of comrads, and still others of how much they dislike war or being there. Quite a powerful performance, and really made you think. They provided a small glimps into those that serve our country and the sacrifice many have made so that I can go about my life.

Questions for God

jdrews — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 12:35:18 +0000

I’m on the tail end of a cold and the other day my mind wandered to this subject. When you meet God, what question would you ask. The thing that came to my mind is “Why did you have to create snot?” I mean really, do we really need flem? Couldn’t you have created something a bit less obnoxious?

This of course comes after spending a few days with a very drippy nose (not being able to get more than a few feet away from a kleenex box).