Matt Warren

Took out the motorcycle for the first ride of the year over the weekend. We went for a ride up the coast to Squamish. It is one of the best roads to ride near Vancouver.

The road hugs the coastline and has all been freshly re-paved for the olympics.

Saturday was a pretty good day for it too. It started off a bit chilly since the sun hadn't really come over the mountains yet. As a result we were shaking by the time the hour long ride was over. We stopped for lunch at The Nest and had some delicious French toast.

After warming up with some food we stopped at Wal-Mart to find a cheap pair of mittens for Heather to make the ride home a bit warmer.

By the time we started heading home the air temperature had risen to about 12 degrees and there were a lot more bikes on the road.

Looking forward to going on another ride soon.

I finally got the basics in place for my blog. All my old posts have been pulled from my old blog. There's still work to be done though. I'm trying to figure out how to get my comments working again and there are a few theme tweaks still to be done. The new blog engine is proving to be a very educational experience.

One of the programming projects I decided to work on was learning how to build websites using Python and Django. So I'm in the process of using this blog as a guinea pig to get everything figured out.

The work is coming along nicely.

I managed to get a good workflow figured out that allows me to develop the website on my local computer, test it there, then deploy it to a test server and set everything up in an automated way. When everything is ready to go live all I will have to do is repoint the domain name to the production server. Everything should just work.

The one major difference when moving from this Wordpress install to something I write myself is that wordpress gives me a lot of stuff for free and I have to program or install and configure components for a django website.

The test website includes a major overhaul of the website theme. I'm going for a very minimal look.

Check out the progress at test.halotis.com

What I need to still do is:

1. Write a script to convert all my posts to the new database


2. Add XML-RPC so I can post with my desktop tools

The city of Vancouver has gone insane! Just trying to get home from work is an ordeal. Even with Robson street closed to vehicles the whole thing is effectively a giant sidewalk and it's so packed with people that it takes 50% longer for me to walk home.

I have never seen anything like it.

All the venues, all the events, all the concerts have a minimum wait of 30 minutes to get in (if you're lucky). Most of the good places - the Irish house, German house, Northern House, Atlantic house have seen lines more than 3 hours long.

The nightly fireworks, constant music and cheering are overwhelming.

Vancouver has transformed overnight from a laid back bunch of early to bed, granola crunchers to a city that never sleeps like New York.

The absolutely amazing weather we have been having makes me wonder if it will change the perceptions of canadian winters for visitors. I wonder how many tourists will come here, fall in love with the city, and decide to move here. If that does happen will it be enough to hold real estate prices at their astronomical levels? Only time will tell.

Just walked home from work. Opening day of the Olympics and the city is an absolute mad house.

Robson street is closed to cars, and jammed packed with several hundred thousand people.

The Cambie bridge is closed to make room for all the busses.

Today I got a nice upgrade to my computer at the office. A 64GB SSD drive to replace my spinning disk hard drive.

The difference was amazing.

Boot time on the computer (Windows XP) went from almost 6 minutes down to 57 seconds. Applications start up instantly. The speed of compiling all my java code improved by a factor of 5!

If you're looking for a reasonably priced upgrade to your computer that will make it scream consider putting an SSD in as your main drive.

I think they should roll these out to everyone at the office. From a productivity stand point this is going to make a huge difference. Hopefully I'll be able to keep my train of thought and not get side tracked when applications take 15 seconds to start, or load files.

I'm just catching up on some pictures that were on my camera. These pictures were from a day at Cypress on January 8th.

The trails were in pretty bad condition. Most of the water crossings were down to waking on crates over flowing rivers. There were lots of roots showing. At the top of the mountain things were only slightly better. Snowshoeing in the rain and fog.

Heather was at training today for her volunteering at Canada Hockey House during the Olympics. So I spent the morning working on a little project for my motorcycle.

For the longer trips that I want to do over the summer I got a nice duffel bag that is bigger than the hard case on my bike. It should allow us to pack more camping equipment and food.

I went to Home Depot this morning to get some tools to build a platform on the bike that would hold the softer bag. A couple hours later and I finished my little project.



It still needs some tie down hooks to easily attach bungee cords. Other than that It's ready to go.

Lots of things are quickly going up now for the olympics which will be starting less than a week from today. Here are a couple of the photos that I've taken of Downtown Vancouver as it gets everything ready.



The transformation has been quite amazing to watch.

We're going for a long walk around today so there should be some more pictures to share tomorrow.

Another technical post. The next few will be about Vancouver and the olympics.

Java is an interesting beast. The language itself it a hold over from C++ but with a ton of extra cruft to know about. You have the benefit of not really having to worry about memory management (most of the time) but there's a ton of complexity involved in getting anything working. I have been programming Java for 5 years and I still get lost anytime I read through the documentation of anything more advance than basic Java.

Every now and then I try to get a web application server up and running with some demo applications. And every time it is a complete failure. Simply finding an open-source webapplication, importing the project into Eclipse and then deploying to a server never seems to work. Even using something like Maven which should download all the required libraries hasn't worked for me.

There is an endless - ENDLESS number of acronyms that mean nothing. For example EJB, Enterprise Java Beans, is so general that it means nothing and reading through the documentation is just like reading more of the same. It's impossible to figure out.

Last night I spent an hour to try out a Python Blog application. Downloading the source code, setting up the environment and running the development server took less than ten lines at the command prompt. It was up and running with sample data, a full backend for admin, support for twitter, proxies, bookmarks, image manipulation, robot files and more.

I can't tell you how many days of effort I have wasted to figure out deploying to Java web servers.

Java actually pisses me off.