June beetles

The June bugs are out and about. More accurately, Cotinis nitida, the Green June beetle. Today is the first day I've seen them and it's the middle of August. The sight of June bugs takes me back to childhood. I recall seeing them as a boy, catching them, feeling their prickly feet stabbing at my palm, examining them, watching them buzz away - clumsy, near-sighted fliers thudding into houses and cars. They're supposed to crawl out of their underground homes in June. Hence the name. Why haven't they appeared before now? Is it a global warming thing? Is it climate change? Is Obama behind it? Is the CIA screwing with the June bugs? Or is the CIA screwing with the calendar? Perhaps the June bugs are on time, and it's us who are two months late.

Wikipedia says "Junebug is a common nickname for men who are juniors born in the southern United States." I don't think I've ever met anyone nicknamed "Junebug". Maybe it's a local thing.

I'm back

I shouldn't let my blog languish like I have. But really, there hasn't been much to write about. For the last month I've been working intensely on my reminder program. I'm obsessed about getting it to a release candidate. I've developed two websites so far, and neither is public yet. They're just testbeds for the html and Javascript. One is a Comcast personal site here that is plain old html. I just discovered wix so I have a Flash website here. When I started writing the program, I called it RxReminder for lack of a better name. Then, when I went to get the domain registered 18 months later, I found that while I was working on the program, someone had trademarked the name and registered the domain name. So what am I going to call it? I chose the rather lame Reminder XR ... it has the same initials: RXR. Still searching for a name that isn't already taken. And should I sell the program, give it away, or what? I wouldn't mind making a few dollars for the many hundreds of hours I've worked on it. On the other hand, I believe in the concept of community service, of giving back, of doing something to help other people get through the day.

The National Weather Service says my local temperature is 99°. It's August in Central Virginia. I'm a little surprised that it's ONLY 99°.

It reminds me of my last trip to the beach, two Augusts ago. The heat index stayed around 115° every day. The sun was the kind of sun that makes you feel you're getting a 1st degree burn by just stepping through the door. When I got a sunburn while sitting in the shade, I cut the trip short.

(Another memorable thing about that trip to the beach was that 50 miles into the trip my right front disc caliper seized up with the brake ON. I was in the middle of nowhere, so I drove the next 100 miles with the brake on. I had 220 horses and 4-wheel drive - one locked up brake had zero chance of stopping me. But when I got to the beach and found an auto shop, that wheel was smoking hot, and I mean that literally.)

There's something about August. I recall driving into Helena, Montana, one sunny August day. The air was hot and the sun was blistering. I remember thinking, "this is the hottest place I've ever been", and maybe it was. I've never been to Death Valley, but if it's hotter than central Virgina in August, then no thank you.

Seeing The Space Station

I just watched the International Space Station (ISS) fly over my house. At 5:07 AM, it rose out of the northwestern sky, sunlight reflecting off its solar panels, becoming higher and brighter by the second, and flew seemingly directly over my house. I watched it become fainter as it sank lower into the southeastern sky. It was visible for about 6 minutes. It wasn't the first time that I had seen the ISS.

The last time I saw it, I was living in Roanoke. I had left my apartment and was walking to my car and just happened to look up. Like just now, the ISS was high in the sky. Unlike just now, there were two points of light traversing the sky, one following the other. The trailing point of light was sunlight reflecting off the Space Shuttle, which was in the process of docking with the ISS. Or maybe it was undocking. I watched them until the earth eclipsed their sun and they suddenly switched off; first the ISS blinked out, then the shuttle blinked out.

I didn't get up early to see the ISS fly over. Rather, I haven't gone to bed tonight. Or, I didn't go to bed last night. Is tonight already last night at 5:30 AM? Yeah, tonight is in the future over 12 hours away.

It's strange to see the Space Station go overhead. Moving so fast, so quietly. Knowing there are people up there riding on that point of light in the sky. Knowing that in about 90 minutes they'll be up there again in the very same spot - relative to planet Earth, that is. I certainly won't be in the same spot to see them again. Earth's rotation is carrying me eastward at 1000 miles per hour. When the shuttle is again directly above the spot I was in at 5:07, I'll be about 1500 miles to the east.

The ISS is not a spectacle, but it's definitely worth seeing.

RxReminder

I'm almost finished with RxReminder. The setup program used to install a registry key so that RxReminder would start when Windows starts. However, that turned out to have a serious flaw; the application wouldn't work properly until it was closed and restarted. So now I have the setup program place a shortcut to the application into the common startup folder.

I also upgraded the program icon. The old icon looked like this:



That design has evolved and now it looks like this:

The to-do list is getting short. The main thing I have to do now is add error-handling code in critical spots.

Stay tuned.

VirtualBox and Windows 7

I'm writing this from a Windows 7 computer. It's running on Sun's VirtualBox, a free, open-source virtualization product that is installed on my Vista box. I can put Vbox into fullscreen mode, and then there's no hint that it's running on a virtual box. It looks and feels like you have a pc with Win7 installed. Or... I can put Vbox into seamless mode, and then I'm back at my Vista desktop, but I can still run Win7 apps and they appear on my desktop as if they were Vista apps. Pretty cool.

I tried using the Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and it did work, but I think the Sun product works better, and it definitely gives me access to more of the physical machine's resources. Sun's Vbox required me to go into the BIOS and enable the iVT setting (Intel Virtualization Technology®) before I could successfully install Vbox. Windows 7 is a free download from Microsoft until August 2009. It expires in July 2010, but until then it's a free preview of Microsoft's next OS.

I just tried to upload a screenshot - and totally forgot that the pictures are on my "real" computer. That's how good the illusion is. I'll publish what I have and switch back to the real computer where my photos are located. (Back in Vista now.) This is my Windows 7 desktop before I began installing applications. (Click image to enlarge.)

(Back in Windows 7.) Now, check this out. I wanted to post a picture of the Windows 7 desktop in fullscreen mode. So I went back to Windows 7, put it in fullscreen mode, hit "Print Scrn", opened Paint, hit Ctrl-V, saved the image to my Win7 pictures folder, started up Firefox and now I'm writing from Win7 again. Here's the desktop in fullscreen mode. (You'll notice I've added a few icons to the desktop.) Notice, also, the desktop is no longer in a "box" as in the above photo. There's no way to know that this Windows 7 desktop is really just a process running on a Vista machine.

Dog Zoe

My previous post was about Zack and Zoe, only I didn't have a real photo of Zoe, only a composite photo, a 'shopped impression of Zoe, all fur and teeth. And bark. A lot of bark. I managed to get this photo of Zoe. (OK, maybe it's been 'shopped just a little.) I don't know what Zoe looks like when she's being nice. I haven't yet experienced that side of her nature.

Dog Zack

I mentioned my neighbor's Schnauzers, Zack and Zoe. Here's Zack...

He's a sweetheart. He just wants to be friends and lick you and get petted.

I don't have a picture of Zoe; however, through the magic of Photoshop (actually, Paintshop) the picture below represents my impression of Zoe when I got a little too close to her. I imagine this is the last thing you would see as Zoe lunges for your jugular and bites your head clean off.

Carey, her owner, says she's going to train Zoe not to do that.

I say, capital idea.

Windows 7

Even as I type these words, I'm installing Windows 7. I want to take it for a test drive, and see if the software I've written will run on it.

I downloaded Windows 7 RC (release candidate). The only pc I have with enough horsepower to run Windows 7 is my home pc with Vista Home Premium. I certainly don't want to upgrade my Vista system to a release candidate of unknown stability that will expire next year, and making a dual-boot system offers ample opportunity to screw up my computer (recall Murphy's law: If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong.).

I decided to install Windows 7 on a Virtual Machine. I would have liked to use VMWare Workstation, but that costs $189. Microsoft Virtual Machine 2007 is free, and I already have it installed on my pc. I use it to test software in a Windows XP environment. So I created a new virtual machine and started the Windows 7 installation. Even though I have a 64 bit computer, I had to install the 32 bit version of Windows 7. The Microsoft Virtual PC program apparently can't handle 64 bit code, but that's a minor detail.

(Time passes...)

It's done. The installation went quite smoothly and took about 20 minutes, then came the setup (account name, time zone, product key, etc.) which took about 5 minutes.

Here is a screenshot of the Windows 7 default desktop after a clean install. This is the default desktop background - Windows 7 comes equipped with a number of images from which you can choose your desktop background.

(More time passes...)

At this point I am writing this blog from the new Windows 7 machine in full screen mode. I had to reboot my computer before I was able to install VMAdditions. I probably only needed to reboot Windows 7, but rebooting the host covers all the bases. If you install VPC you will definitely want the VMAdditions. And, when I tested a program I had written primarily for Vista, it didn't function properly until I rebooted.

Here's the desktop background photo I decided to use - for a while, anyway.

RxReminder tested again / Zack and Zoe

Yesterday, I finished coding version 3 of the RxReminder task scheduler interface (one for Vista, one for XP). Last night it underwent its first sea trial, and it hit a sandbar.

I puzzled out what had gone wrong. There was no bug in the task scheduler interface; it worked as designed. There was no bug in RxReminder; it worked as designed. The new task scheduler interface has a different behavior than the old interface, a behavior that RxReminder was not designed to accommodate. Adding about 4 or 5 lines of code to RxReminder should take care of that. I'll test it again overnight.

I was outside a little while ago when I heard a lot of barking and looked up in time to see a gray schnauzer go whizzing past, chasing a black cat and trailing a pink leash. It was running faster than I could, but not faster than Carey - my neighbor two doors down the street. She caught it, so I said congrats on being in good shape - a hundred fifty foot sprint and she's not even breathing hard. So she stopped, we talked, and I got introduced to her two dogs, her "children" Zack and Zoe. They're siblings. Both are barkers, but Zack soon showed he was a lover, not a biter. He just wanted to lick my face and hands. Zoe, however, has pretensions of being a pit bull. She's definitely a biter. I wish Carey luck and patience while training those dogs. Sometimes you can get a dog and end up being lucky; you get a dog that requires little or no training. Some dogs just have very good natures. Other times you get a dog that has a nervous disposition, or neurotic, or irritable, or whatever. And then you have to train your dog. You'll be happier, and the dog will be happier. Too many people don't want to bother.

I wish I had thought to take out my cel phone and get a picture of Zack and Zoe. I'll try to remember to do that next time I meet them.

New task scheduler interface runs aground

I finished version 3 of the RxReminder task scheduler interface yesterday, and last night it got its first sea trial, and it hit a sandbar.

I entered med Alerts for 8 AM and 8 PM. Here's what the revised scheduler should have done. At 12 midnight, the computer should awaken and run RxReminder. RxReminder would have looked for the first Alert time (8 AM) and put it into the scheduler. Actually, there is a factor called WakeAnticipate: a lead time subtracted from the wakeup time to allow the system time to wake up; the default is one minute. RxReminder should therefore schedule itself to run at 7:59 AM. I checked the computer shortly after 10 AM. I was hoping to see a red X on the reminder's status, indicating the Alert was issued but there was no response. Instead, I saw a question mark, meaning the Alert was not issued. This was disappointing and puzzling.

I looked at the program's log file, and this excerpt was very interesting:

Stopped : 11:26 PM, Monday, June 22, 2009
Started : 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Resuming: 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Stopped : 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Started : 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Stopped : 12:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Started : 8:00 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Resuming: 10:10 AM, Tuesday, June 23, 2009

I stopped the program at 11:26 PM; I wanted a full test of the scheduler, meaning that the program should start itself. At 12 AM it did. Here, something strange happened. The program shut down (not logged), resumed, stopped, started, and stopped again, all at 12 AM. It apparently did schedule the 8 AM Alert, but it should have awakened at 7:59 AM. Instead, it awakened at 8 AM. The Alert is issued at the moment when 7:59 AM changes to 8 AM