Great Skiing Day

 Jason  Comments Off
Dec 272010
 

Steph and I were able to spend the day after Christmas on the sunny slopes here in Steamboat. Good snow conditions and good weather combined to make it a great morning/afternoon on the slopes. I’ve been using a neat little iphone app that tracks vertical feet skied, max speed, etc… For the day we went 14.6 miles, skied 13836 vertical feet, and went down a max slope of 41 degrees. I’d love to say that max speed was 104.7 MPH but obviously I must have lost GPS signal at some point and it thought we had gone a LOT faster in that time than we did. Here’s the tracks exported from Google Earth.


View Steamboat Skiing 26 December 2010 in a larger map

The Year in Pictures

 Jason  Comments Off
Dec 192010
 

So for Christmas (we exchanged gifts early since we’ll be out of town) I got Stephanie the new Nikon D3100 DSLR camera. She’s been itching for a new camera for awhile now and wanted to sign up for our friend Okello’s camera class.

This is Nikon’s new entry level DSLR but comes with a ton of great features like 1080P video recording. This past year we really didn’t take that many pictures but hopefully there will be a lot more to share in the year to come. There are a lot of places to to feature here in DC with all of the great buildings and monuments. Of course there’s also the Cherry Blossom Festival and other events as well!

Get This Party Started

 Jason  Comments Off
Dec 102010
 

Ok, so it’s not really starting the party but performing CPR. I noticed today that I had actually only written one blog post for the entire year. There’s not one particular reason that I can point to which caused this. I can’t say that my life is any busier than it was before. If I had to guess I would say that with the proliferation of sites such as Twitter and Facebook I sort of run out of things to say.

I don’t really talk that much to begin with really and while I by no means consider myself an introvert I also don’t go out of my way to get into deep ‘life’ discussions. However, I feel that writing does make your mind sharp and helps to sort out your thoughts. So I am going to attempt and commit to writing more again. I’m also going to try and encourage Steph to start posting some of her cooking stuff here again as well. Those were some of my favorite times of the week when we’d actually cook together, experimenting in new things, taking pictures to document the results. In honor of that here’s a picture of the whole fish that we had shared at Kushi Izakaya a couple of weeks ago.

We’ll see how long this ends up lasting but over the years (since 2005 with the blog and 1998 for brdweb.com) I’ve gone through many ebbs and flows of posting to this site so no reason to just give up now.

Life as a Software Developer

 Jason  Comments Off
Apr 042010
 

So my last post was a number of months ago about setting up iTunes streaming from home for work listening. Well it turns out that hasn’t been all that necessary. It’s been much more productive for me to be at my company’s office in order to work closely with our programmers instead of at the client site.

As a result of this, I’ve been using my MacBook Pro laptop for work. It’s allowed me to be far more productive. I still use Microsoft office for viewing most files. And I do have to still use windows in VMware Fusion to connect back to my Govt. Citrix connection as a VPN. There is a Mac client and it should work, but there are issues with CAC authentication still when it’s not just a website.

For database development, I’ve been using a trial of dbVisualizer. In my mind it’s far superior to SQL Management Studio and is actually cross-platform. I will be trying to move my company over to that for some of our users.

When I started taking classes at CWU right after I got out of the army, it was as a Computer Science major. I never completed my degree for various reasons but a big one was that I never really wanted to code full time. As it turns out a huge part of my career now is SQL coding. Hindsight is always 20/20 isn’t it?

Streaming Music From iTunes

 Jason  Comments Off
Oct 122009
 

So I’m going to be changing jobs next week. As part of the switch, part of my workweek I’m going to be in an environment where I won’t be able to have my iPhone or iPod with me. That is unfortunate as probably 50% or more of my day is spent listening to different podcasts while I work.

I found PulpTunes by searching on Google. It seemed to solve all of my problems! Then I realized that there are some features that won’t work for me, namely you cannot set the port to be less than 1080. That is a non-starter for me as my work has almost every non-standard port blocked. I needed a way to make it use port 80, which is the standard port for web pages.

After searching the forums, I found that the mod_proxy module for Apache would do internal port forwarding for me. For a quick and easy install of Apache on my Mac I turned to the free MAMP install. It’s far and away the quickest, cleanest way to get Apache running quickly on a Mac. After Apache was installed, I needed to ensure that the proxy modules were loaded by ensuring that the following lines were in my conf file:

LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so
LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so
LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so
LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so

I then needed to add the following lines at the end of my conf file to pick the port and alias to forward. In this case, the default port of 15000 for PulpTunes and using the same name for the folder alias.

ProxyRequests Off
ProxyPass /pulptunes http://localhost:15000
ProxyPassReverse /pulptunes http://localhost:15000

After this, I restarted Apache to invoke the new settings. Next up was ensuring that port 80 was being forwarded to the internal network ip address of the machine I was serving from. To also clean things up a bit, I used the free Dock Dodger program to remove PulpTunes from my dock, only showing in my taskbar.

Now I can access all my my music from just about any internet connected machine! There’s a user account feature in PulpTunes so that I don’t get just anybody using up my bandwidth, I can access my playlists, and even rate the songs. It’s a great solution and I suggest you try it.

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