Silly Kat’s Daydream

I finally got my ChumChum! I have been waiting for days for it to arrive and there it is at my doorstep today! It’s so adorable!

Wait, have I mention what my ChumChum is?  I guess I have skipped that part. =)

As part of my birthday presents this year, along with a John McCain birthday card, I received a Chumby.  =P But on my birthday, I think it was still in transit somewhere above the Pacific Ocean.  It took a few days for it to be shipped from China to California.  Meanwhile, I was already checking out the widgets and costumes.  It just felt so natural that I started calling it ChumChum.  Finally, today, it arrived safely at my doorstep, in one piece.

When I was opening the box, my first impression of it was how earth friendly the wrapper was.  There’s no fancy box, no hard plastic cover, just a simple yet sturdy cloth bag.  The Chumby Charms and AC Adapter were in two smaller, and equally simple pouches.  Nothing complicated.  No scissors involved, no trash to throw away.  You would think cloth bags and pouches must feel like cheap wrapping.  But quite the opposite, it feels special, because it reminds me of hand-made bags that friends would make as little gifts.

The setup was simple and straightforward.  A thin “get connected” booklet with large and clear fonts provided all the information I needed to get ChumChum setup and start loading widgets.  The booklet’s recycled-paper-cover gave the same earth friendly message.

I just started loaded some widgets to it and cannot wait to find out more use about it.  For now, check out my ChumChum page to see my virtual pet. =)

My dear friend Tracy is pregnant and is expecting her first baby girl this October.  I thought, what a perfect chance for me to make a baby blanket!  So I set out the mission to make one.

Once I made the decision, I realized that I have never made a baby blanket before.  Strangely, I have done two or three adult size afghans, but never a baby one.  I guess I just never had a friend having a baby before. So I went for a quest to find a nice and easy pattern…

Boy that proved to be hard.  I don’t particularly like the granny square ones.  I prefer something simple and clean looking, at the same time pretty and practical.  Am I asking for too much?  *sigh… I spent a few days digging online to find the “perfect” pattern.

At the end I set my eyes on a teddy bear one.  Oh it is so cute!  I picked Bernat Softee Baby yarn in pink to do it, but it just looked too pink for me.  So after trying with 3 or 4 other yarns and colors, I ended up using one strand of white and one strand of pink.  The color looks girlish but not too pink. I kind of like it. :)  Here is a picture of what it is supposed to look like.

Teddy Bear baby blanket

While working on this blanket, I discovered another pattern that I just LOVE.

Knit baby blanket

I am starting on both patterns now.  How I would love to get both of them finished this month.  I just can’t wait.

Here are the links to these two patterns:

• Teddy bear pattern: http://www.knittingonthenet.com/patterns/babyafbear.htm
• Baby blanket pattern: http://andreatung.blogspot.com/2007/08/baby-blanket-pattern.html

And here are all knitting and crochet patterns I have found online: http://www.evernote.com/pub/sandyq/KnittingAndCrochetPatterns/

I finally uploaded pictures of some of my past cross stitch projects. As you can see, I am a big fan of cats, and all those cute cat patterns are from Margaret Sherry, my most favorite cross stitch designer.

You can see all of my projects here . Now all I need, is to frame them, and find some place to display them… That’s going to be a challenge.

I haven’t been blogging much in the past year or so. Well, nothing major happened! I have not been as silly as before (so I hope), and I have not been traveling at all. So really there is nothing worth blogging about.

But I managed to keep myself quite busy at home, very busy indeed. I got hooked on cross stitching most of last year, especially Margeret Sherry’s designs. There are so many adorable cat designs! I simply could not resist the temptation to collect all that I could get my paws on. And where else could I better find them than eBay, I say. So I did quite a lot of bidding and receiving few packages almost every other day for about two weeks. Then I stopped completely and quite suddenly. Why? I had just collected enough patterns that would take me years if not my entire life time to stitch! I got to upload pictures of some of the finished projects here. They can make any cat lovers go “OhhhhHHH” and “AwwwWW” in a second.

I’ve been using log4j for years. Viewing those long files have been a pain no matter what projects I worked on.  It’s not the format itself, but just long long lines and even longer files…

Windows by default opens .log in NotePad, which isn’t designed to handle large text files.  Try opening a 5mb text file.  NotePad is going to hang.  What a pain.

I’ve been using NotePad++ and TextPad for quite a while and have grown to depend on them quite a bit.  NotePad++ is light weight and fast.  I highly recommend using it as replacement of Windows NotePad.  It has syntax highlight and can handle large files.  TextPad has syntax highlight as well.  But biggest advantage of it is the ability to do automatic reload when the file is changed from external sources.  That works very well with log files.  I have yet to find another text editor that can do auto reload as well.  Both software can do file edits (trim line, convert tabs to spaces and vice versa), find ASCII values of characters, number conversions in hex, oct, etc.

Having NotePad++ and TextPad definitely beats opening logs in WordPad or NotePad.  Sometimes I prefer to read the logs from within IDEs.  This, surprisingly, has a lot more options.  There are a number of plug-ins for Eclipse and IntelliJ to read (and tail) log files.  These log viewers work the best when you are running/debugging the application from within the IDE.

But still, imagine having to scroll 10000 lines just to find the part that you are looking for.  No matter how good TextPad and NotePad++ are, the log is still in black text white background (actually you can change the colors and fonts, too).  Every line looks just about the same as the rest!  I get dizzy having to stare at them.

Just yesterday, I found my new best friend with log files: LogMX.  It’s not free, but it’s a much better tool to view log4j logs.  Just specify the pattern that’s in the log4j/log4net config file, and open the log file.  You can let it reload the log, or suspend it any time.  Different levels of severity are in different colors, so any warning or errors REALLY stand out.  Not to mention the ability to filter the log for just certain packages and certain severity level.  Man I fell in love with it so fast and so hard that I was was telling my teammates about it the very next day!

Maybe there’s something even better out there for viewing logs, especially for log4j and log4net logs because they are so common in the development world.  Anybody knows any?  I would love to try them out.

I finally had all my wisdom teeth pulled last Friday. Yak!

I had been postponing it for years for fear of the pain. Then this year I started to feel a nagging pain around my jaws. The stupid wisdom teeth somehow decided to grow up so fast as if they were trying to break the soil and see the sun. So I finally made up my mind about having all of them taken out. Once decided, I didn’t let my mom persuade me away with her scary tactic: “That’s pulling bones out of your mouth. You are going to lose a lot of blood. And not to mention the pain afterwards! I wouldn’t do it in a hundred years if I were you.” Yup, she still has all hers till this day; her mom’s scary tactic worked on her.

It was a point of no return for me. So I just went in, had the surgery done with general anesthesia (I so don’t want to know what happened during the surgery, especially hearing the drilling or sawing noise). I think I actually did wake up very briefly to hear some machine/motor turning on; it sounded like the doctor was going to saw… But it might as well been my silly dream. I was woken up an hour later. The doctor asked me if I would like to keep my teeth. Oh hell no I said. (My mom expressed a slight sadness that I didn’t keep them, ‘cuz they are part of my body after all, she said. That sounded almost like those ancient Chinese who kept their entire life’s clipped finger nails and toe nails in a red envelope. Creepy.)

So, it’s done. I didn’t feel too much pain afterwards luckily. I didn’t even need to take the prescribed pain killer. I just couldn’t chew very well with the back teeth. I am still eating soft food the 4th day after the surgery, which is driving me nuts at home, especially being surrounded with beef jerky, yummy unopened Valentine’s day chocolate, dried Lychee, nuts, chocolate cookies, and greasy Chinese food. Ahhh! It’s killing me!

Last month I started to learn and use C# for work. Everybody on the team is new to .NET. But in a Scrum environment, we have much to deliver with very little time (or no time in this case) for training. So I picked up a book or two and dived right into it…

At first I was so excited about Visual Studio 2005’s design view for all our UI need. Comparing to Java, I used to hand code every bit of UI code in a third-party SDK that’s a subset of AWT. We had to write tons of inner classes for event handling. C#’s delegate makes things sooo easy.. It’s like a dream. =)

Then when I started to work on the code, I found Visual Studio 2005’s refactoring support to be terrible comparing to Eclipse or IntelliJ. It’s a pain to move code around, or trying to change signature of a method. I won’t know what’s wrong until I compile. How I miss Eclipse & IntelliJ’s real-time error detection…

Then I found ReSharper. That’s like a heaven-sent gift! I spread the good news about it to my teammates and one of them commented “I don’t know how I have coded without it!” =) Great job in run-time error detection and tons of refactoring. I loved it, can’t live without it now.

On a different matter, I agree with one of my coworkers that just because you did it once, you become the dedicate person to do it in the future. She became our graphics person, though her title is User Experience Lead. I somehow become our team’s UI person just because I showed some interest in doing Ajax a while back, and devoted one week on trying to fix some UI bugs on the all-dreaded-Javascript code.

But I am starting to love this role. Everybody on our team likes to do hardcore Java, all the server side, database, web services, multi-threaded, multi-platform/multi-server support stuff. Nobody cared about doing UI before I came on board I guess. And now I get to work on stuff that pleases one’s eyes, easy to use, functional, intuitive, and, did I mention sort of pretty? Ha! It’s actually quite fun. But sometimes I do miss all my desire to do architecture and design work, as well as coding and debugging like a “real programmer”.

Can’t do both I guess.

I have been looking for a website to create my own avatars the last few days. Here are what I have created so far.

———-
Resources:

http://www.abi-station.com/english/
http://www.simpsonsmovie.com
http://www.sp-studio.de/
http://images.southparkstudios.com/games/create/

Actually, it didn’t happen today. It was something that I found maybe a week ago, some oddity I thought, or maybe I was just being ignorant.

One of the tasks I have been doing for my project is to make a web site XHTML strict compliant. Well, the site was designed ages ago when it was probably still HTML 3.2 time. There used to have no DTD and the browsers rendered the site just fine. Now by just adding that one line of DTD declaring all pages to the XHMTL strict, we are doomed. None of the pages could be validated. *sigh.

Among everything we had attributes that are no longer supported in HTML 4.01, such as “target” attribute in <a href> tag, and attribute “name” in <form> tag. But almost all forms use “name” attribute! And inline+external JavaScripts depend on that!! Oh lord…

Luckily help is always somewhere online if one is willing to dig and dig and dig. I followed this tutorial by Kevin Yank to resolve all <a target> issues. Apparently that solution was out there for ages; I just didn’t know. =) That was nice and easy. <form name> issue was resolved by substituting “name” to “id”. I just had to remember all references to it in JavaScript.

One that that tripped me was the <tfoot> tag. The pages had a lot of data presented in tables. <tfoot> was introduced when we separated CSS from all pages. But browser validation always complains about it. It looked right to me. =\ I dig deeper into the World Wide Web begging for some clue. Eventually I found out that <tfoot> has to be declared before <tbody>. So the order should be <table><thead></thead><tfoot></tfoot><tbody></tbody></table>. What dah? It still doesn’t make sense to me. But oh well, as long as it validates…

It’s been damn hot around here the past two weeks; everyday over 90 degrees out there, and I have to walk at least 5-7 minutes one way to get to my car at a surface parking lot for work. I don’t usually sweat much. In fact, 80 degree is my perfect temperature. Yet now I am alway sweating from walking and walking and walking.. Damn the weather.

Company parking lot is huge. Not as big as Disneyland or Magic Mountain parking lot, but pretty big as a surface parking lot. It’s as big as some shopping malls, except longer aisles, with no trees and no shades, and constant construction going on right next to it. The noice and, dust clearly does not add any pleasure in parking there.

As if that is not enough, the parking lot is always 90% full by 9am every work day. That can explain part of the reasons why I need to walk so far. But with such a huge lot, you would expect big spaces? NO! Most of them are compact spots that a mini van or truck can easily step on both sides of the lines. My solara has huge doors unfortunately, which makes parking at tight spots even more painful… If it’s difficult for me to get out, you know the space is tight…

I think I will just blame the weather…