paper napkin

Lateral Move

2006-04-04T14:46:00.000-07:00

I can now be found at http://papernapkin.wordpress.com…

Google Pages - Online notepad?

2006-02-23T06:15:00.000-08:00

I just discovered Google Pages. It’s a nice basic WYSIWYG web page editor. Honestly, I don’t really have use for a web page editor as I do all my editing in Visual Studio or UltraEdit. Anyway, I’m excited to use it as an online note pad. That is one thing I feel is missing from GMail. I usually use an email draft to store notes. This may provide a sufficient alternative. We’ll see.

Self-Discipline

2006-02-10T14:49:00.000-08:00

I am a natural procrastinator and lack some basic self-discipline. I came across a great pod cast from John MacArthur on self-discipline. Below are some of the key points and I would like to star integrating these into my life:

Start small (create a list)
Be on time
Keep your word
Do the hardest task first
Finish what you start
Practice self denial (just say no sometimes to know you can say “no”)
Volunteer

The Biblical basis for these concepts start with 1 Peter 1:13

DateTime Visualizer for Visual Studio 2005

2006-02-10T14:40:00.000-08:00

I was doing some DateTime manipulation in a recent project and I could not remember which DateTime format gave me which output. I searched Google for any existing visualizers and could not find any that fulfilled this purpose. So, I created one. Below are some screen shots of what it looks like. Even further down are the binaries and source code. Enjoy!

Screen Shots

Downloads

DateTimeVisualizer_bin.zip (Visualizer Dll)
DateTimeVisualizer_source.zip (VS2005 Project)

My New Favorite Quote

2006-01-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

“I'm not going to tell the story the way it happened. I'm going to tell it the way I remember it.” - Finnegan Bell in Great Expectations

Moodle Is The New Orange

2006-01-18T13:58:00.000-08:00

I stumbled upon a great open source project yesterday called moodle. Moodle is a web based Course Management System (CMS) for creating and maintaining online courses (e-learning, I suppose). It boasts a metric ton of features without being too bloated. The features come in the form of modules and there is a fair amount of them out of the box. Some of them include: Lesson, Quiz, Book, Grade book, Calendar, Forum, Glossary, Survey, Wiki, Workshop, and Assignment. Each of these modules has quite a few settings and can be a little confusing to set up. I had a little trouble setting up a test course the way I wanted. Perhaps it was the shear number of settings but I think it was just that it doesn’t do everything one could think of. However, most of the screens contain a pop-up window with help that is actually informative. After spending some time with it, I feel right at home. I’ve also had some time to think about what I’d like to see in the future. It’s nice to see this project under active development. I really look forward to the future of moodle.

Below I’ve listed some features I’d love to see:

Integrate Flickr accounts directly into the Resource manager
Somehow integrate Lesson/Book and Quiz together so I can have a required Quiz at the end of a Lesson.

Currently, Lesson puts a quiz question at the end of each page. Book doesn’t have a quiz feature.
Once the student starts the Quiz, the Lesson/Book is no longer available until the completion of the Quiz.
The Quiz review page should have links to the Lesson/Book page on which the answer is found.

Provide RSS feeds for new entries to modules

I’ll post more ideas as I think of them.

In the mean time: Bravo, moodle team. Bravo.

Jabber Client Concept

2006-01-06T15:21:00.000-08:00

I share a lot of files with my cube mate at work. We have an internal jabber server running but I hate using the file sharing feature. Half the time it doesn’t work because the other person has to correctly accept the file (which means re sending if it gets screwed up) and, when the person isn’t there, no one clicks “Accept.” I would like to be able to cut-and-paste things I find interesting to send to my buddies around the office. I want to do this without having to use the file transfer feature. The pictures below pretty much sum up what I’m looking for:

I think it would mostly consist of providing interfaces for enclosures—like RSS. I think it could be done with some Flash (for media controls) and C# (my language of choice). Any takers?

Defroster All Over

2005-12-08T16:45:00.000-08:00

It snowed for the first time this winter. I think it would be nice to have defrosters on all windows. I don't know what the additional cost to my windows, and thus vehicle, would be but it's nice to think about. Note to self: Install a mirror defroster behind the vanity mirror to quicken morning shave time.

The Pilgrim's Progress

2005-12-07T11:44:00.000-08:00

I have been reading The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan. I’m about a quarter into it and it’s a great book. However, it’s in an Old English style of print. I really have to be in the zone or else it’s hard for me to read. If you would prefer not to tackle the old English, there I found a couple of updated versions available: The Pilgrim's Progress in Modern English (Pure Gold Classics) by L. Edward Hazelbaker and “The New Amplified Pilgrim's Progress,” by Jim Pappas. I have read neither but I did scan the first chapter of each. The modern English version reads very easily and I think I prefer this over the amplified version. However, the amplified version still retains some old English and has part of the original feel. I think I’ll check out the modern version first. Read the original too. It’s really great.

Faucet Feedback

2005-12-02T11:09:00.000-08:00

I would like to see an attachment for my faucet that tells me current water temperature. It could be done with an LCD (numeric water temperature) or LEDs (a gradient from blue to red indicating temperature). It could attach like those Brita faucet mount filters. There are already high end faucets that do this but I don’t want to spend $3k; I want to spend $30.

Update: I guess someone in Japan reads my blog. Still a little pricy at $110.

VAiPod

2005-12-01T13:07:00.000-08:00

I would love to see an iPod dock-port attachment for voice activated commands.

“Play Waiting For The World To Fall by Jars Of Clay”

“Repeat”

“Shuffle”

+ Bonus points for compatibility with iPod Shuffle. Are those considered ancient now?

Whose data?

2005-12-01T13:03:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about data ownership a lot over the past few days. Specifically, I was looking at possibly joining Ancestry.com to trace my family’s roots. A friend of mine has recently begun his own family tree research on this site using their two-week trial. We started discussing whether or not he was going to subscribe and what features the site has (or lacks). It’s a nice site with many cool features. However, they do not allow me to export my tree data into any format but PDF. I understand that they don’t want me down-loading their database and using it somewhere else. But what about the data I entered? What about the hours I spent researching and entering my past? Ancestry.com is charging me for the use of their extensive resources, which is great, but they are also charging me to access other people’s family trees (and vice versa). Who owns the data: Me or Ancestry.com? Shouldn’t I get to take, at the minimum, the data I entered? The same thing goes for my preferences, ratings, and reviews on Amazon.com.

One possible solution is to use an open source project to host my data and use Ancestry.com, et al, to research. Below are a couple okay looking open source family tree projects:

Update: I would really like to see an open source family tree web application built with ASP.NET and SQL Express.

Small Tees

2005-11-23T08:01:00.000-08:00

I wonder about buying micro-tees for my golfing habit. Who wants to break tees in half when I could just grab a 1” tee? I guess I’ll just have to take some of my tees to the pencil sharpener.

Inventory

2005-11-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

I would like a home inventory application (web or thick client) that could post things I want to get ride of to online selling sites like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy. Just select that old book or antique pocket watch and post with a price.

Keeping Track

2005-06-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

The Idea

Quick way to build relationships between files for later consumption.

The Case

I do a lot of reading online and I often find an article to read later or something I want to keep for future reference. I want a quick easy way to store articles without dragging links to my desktop and having 50 “to read” or “keep” articles cluttering up my desktop. There are programs like the Google and MSN Desktops. Both those programs are awesome and productive. However, they just index the aforementioned “to read” files I’m trying to stay away from. This may even be similar to an RSS feed aggregator, where the feed is created as I add items to it.

The Proposal

What about an target—perhaps a box icon—on your desktop where you could drag your files: links from your browser, Office documents, xml documents, etc. These files would be examined (IFilters) and “processed” for filenames, keywords and embedded links. I was thinking about Bayesian filtering but after reading some case studies on how it works, I’m not sure this would fit the bill. Perhaps a tagging structure similar to del.icio.us or 43 Folders. Anyway, some sort of processing. Then I could see what my latest “to read” documents where and they would automatically be categorized, perhaps even by a rank.

Notes

I watched the Longhorn Heart RSS video on Channel 9 the other day and think the RSS List concept might be worth considering. Perhaps RSS List Heart Bayesian Filtering Heart Tags?

It turn's out I'm Kip

2005-03-09T06:17:00.000-08:00

Do I really need to justify this?

You are Kip Dynamite and you love technology.

Which Napoleon Dynamite character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Halo Tuesdays

2004-08-13T14:23:00.000-07:00

Currently, Tuesday nights are consumed with generating bonds that only carnage can create. I'm talking about Halo Tuesdays. My wife and her friend go to Bible study while my friends Mitos, Saucy, RedDeath, Ghost, and Donut (myself) enjoy the lost art of pistol sniping. Halo Tuesday, however, may be a thing of the past. I was asked recently to join the ranks of the middle-school youth leaders at my church. I'm actually excited about working with youth again. I was the middle-school youth leader at my old church (with Kristin for a while) and I've had enough of a break. It sounds like good times. I'm hoping to have a positive Christian role model impact while at the same time helping to promote a Fear Factor meets American Gladiator type meets Willy Wonka feel. Working with middle-school is great and highly underrated. w00t!
I'm working on regex editor still. The parser is almost done. It currently parses a regular expression into an object model I created. I'm still working on the graphics paradigm. I actually had the idea of using DirectX today for the drawing engine but then I came back down to reality. One thing that's nice is I'm writing this whole thing with C# Express so maybe I will get something done by the end of the Channel 9 Summer Of Express Coding Contest (September 17, 2004).
Kristin starts school on Monday (she's a 3rd grade teacher). Go Gators! Good luck this year!
Every time I hit save, the blogging tool I'm using says, "Transmission Received." Freaky.
My 2nd semester of Grad. School starts next Thursday. And, I'm learning Greek and Lithuanian right now. What am I doing?

Well, I've got to leave. Kristin and I are going to the Muny tonight to see ~~Guys and Dolls~~ 42^nd Street. I've heard it's good. I'll let you know. Until then...

Grace and peace to you,
John

Update - 42^nd Street was very good. I'm not really into tap dancing but I typically enjoy musicals. Kristin and I saw Les Miserables at the Fox a few years ago and I loved it. It was one of the best productions I've ever seen. Anyway, the temperature ended up being about 55F and was a little chilly. This was delightful considering St. Louis weather in August (usually a sweltering 95F and 90% humidity). We couldn't have asked for a better evening. Pre-show dinner at P.F. Changs was delicious as well. Thanks for getting us the great seats, babe!

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - A new classic?

2004-07-07T11:33:00.000-07:00

Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.
Willy Wonka

I am very much looking forward to Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. At first, I was a bit skeptical about someone taking on what I consider to be a classic (Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory). I have since changed my mind. I am a huge Tim Burton fan (although I didn't really care for Big Fish) and I really enjoy the darkness of his films (especially Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, and Sleepy Hollow). Willy Wonka was also a dark movie and, given his absolute brilliant performances, I think Johnny Depp can pull it off. From what I understand, the screen writer (John August) hadn't even seen the original before he sat down to pen. This is a good thing. Here's to a new classic.

Update: Okay, I have to admit that I am ~~very~~ a little nervous after seeing the trailers.

Notables

2004-07-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

VS2005 Express

As a mostly Microsoft centric programmer and an early adopter, I was very excited about the news of the Express editions of Visual Studio 2005 (okay, I'm more excited to get my hands on VS2005 Beta 1). In fact, I'm installing WinXP on Virtual PC right now. I think I might tackle the Summer of Express Contest. Who doesn't want another Xbox and Halo 2?

Update: I am really loving the Express suite. I hope to download VS2005 Beta 1 this weekend. I just love that the Express components are less than 2 Gig! Weighing in at 56 Mb isn't to shabby.

Halo 2

I would just like to take a moment and express my absolute and utter excitement regarding Halo 2. I think I've read every single piece of information out there. I still haven't pre-ordered but I'm pretty sure I'm going to get the Special Edition with a tin box and extra footage DVD. The only thing is, will my wife let me get it with the release date so close to Christmas??? I'm sure she will. Right honey?

Bible Study

Kristin and I did a Bible study for a while (31 days) to try to a) get into the Word more and b) spend time together learning about God. Basically it was a bunch of Bible verses (supplied by our young marrieds group leader) with specific purposes for each verse. We did a "What's the point?" and "Application" for each verse and then did prayer requests for someone we know and for each other. It was really nice and I think it helped us grow closer together. However, we've finished and need something new. We've looked at devotionals but they don't seem to fit the bill. I'm a huge fan of John MacArthur and am going to look a little more into his Bible studies. They look all right. Actually, we've talked about doing the Bible walk through in the front of Kristin's Bible. It's a neat really deal. It has topics like "Jesus' ministry" and "Paul's missionary journies." That may be the route we take.

A Thinner Outlook

2004-06-22T09:38:00.000-07:00

I was married 18 months yesterday (I love you babe!) and that, combined with a love of food, has increased my girth (okay, in reality, it started before we got married but I enjoy the excuse anyway). I play softball on my church softball league but only during the summer and finding time to workout seems hopeless. At this weight, I'm not going to run off the weight. When I was in college I lost around 40 pounds on the Atkins diet. I've put about 25 back on and it's time to regroup. I've tried Atkins a few times since putting on a few pounds, but to no avail. I've known some people whom have used the Weight Watcher Point system diet with success. So I'm trying that. I've created a simple "weigh in" web site on my home computer, complete with point calculator. However, it got me thinking about usability. Having it on a web site is all right. However, I would like to take a note out of both FranklinCovey's and NewsGator's books: Outlook integration.

A pleasant fiction:

I get to work this morning, fire up Outlook, and my Today page tells me that I've lost 5 pounds since last week. I click "Weigh In" and navigate to my weekly weigh in page. I can see a line graph of my progress and some encouraging messages from my Weight Watcher/Atkins/South Beach/etc RSS feed. There is a food/point search so I can see how many points are in my Krispy Kreme donut and a point calculator so I can figure out the points for items that aren't in the database. There is a grid with my weigh in history where each entry links to the calendar. I don't enter the foods I eat throughout the day but, suppose I do. I can see what I ate on any given day just by clicking on the entry. Suppose I also subscribe to a low-fat recipe RSS feed. Clicking on the feed adds the recipe (along with ingredients) to an appointment (with a reminder) so I know what to get at the grocery store for dinner tonight. I enter my weight and lament the Krispy Kreme donut.

Possibilities

I wonder if anyone would use such an addin. Perhaps the information is too personal to keep in Outlook. But maybe it's not. I keep email in my Outlook I don't really want anyone to see so I would probably not mind keeping my weight history in their either. Then again, I'm a guy. I wonder about the ladies...

Grace and Peace to you,
John

DataTable Field Dump

2004-06-22T06:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I just don't want to look up which fields are being returned to me in a DataTable, especially from a Stored Procedure. So I created this VS.Net macro to dump the field names for a DataTable or DataView. I also have a macro for dumping an entire DataTable or DataView but access to the runtime debugger values is too painfully slow for practical use (it's okay if the row count is < 20). If anyone has any ideas for speeding this up, please comment.

Enjoy!

Grace and Peace to you,
John

Usage: Use by selecting a DataTable or DataView during runtime and double-clicking DumpDataColumns in the Macro Explorer.

http://webpages.charter.net/superjodash/Data_Field_Dump.txt

Note: I included a link to the macro source code as I could not get the VB web formatting to work.

Regular Expression

2004-06-16T14:57:00.000-07:00

The situation

Regular Expressions are worth their weight in gold. I use them daily and can pretty much think in Regex when needed. But what about devs who have never seen one and need to create an expression right now? Sure, one could go to RegexLib and grab any of the hundreds of great expressions freely available. However, what if a custom expression is needed? I propose, and am in the process of developing, an easy to use, result based solution for creating regular expressions. No previous knowledge necessary.

What do I mean by result based? Excuse me while I grab my easel... I need a regular expression to validate a credit card. Simple enough, right? It might look something like this: ^5[1-5][\d]{14}$ (from the begging of the line, any value that starts with 51 through 55 and follows with 14 digits). Simple, right? What about dashes and spaces? Okay, how about: ^5[1-5][\d]{2}[\- ]*[\d]{4}[\- ]*[\d]{4}[\- ]*[\d]{4}$. We are starting to get a little more complex (we can optimize this but I will save that for another day). I would like a solution whereby I could enter "5411-1111-1111-1111" on the IDE canvas and get the pattern from the needed result.

Is there a way to represent a pattern visually without the visual representation becoming more complicated than the pattern itself?

Current tool box

I typically use Expresso for my quick and dirty regexes. I also sometimes use The Regulator (which now has an intellisense pop-up. w00t!) for more complicated ones. In the super user category I put The Regex Coach. It is a great program for seeing the parse tree and having a "debugger" type interaction with the FSM. However, I already know how to write regular expressions and these applications are designed with that in mind.

What about existing visiual editors? There is really only one program I am aware of and it seems to be on the right track: The KDE RegExp Editor for linux with KDE (also available for Win32). This program basically visually represents a regular expression with a series of nested containers (groups and character classes). It's the most "visual" editor I've found for regex editing (although buggy on the Win32 edition It uses GTK+). In all the various ideas I've come up with (so far), I'm starting to wonder if this is the best visual option. My only beef with this solution is that is is designed for editing the pattern in a visual way; not visually designing the pattern.

YAREE (Yet Another Regular Expression Editor)

I've spent my idle moments (commuting to and from work, shopping with Kristin, watching TV) trying to come up with what I feel would be an easy and intuitive regex editor. I seem to always hit a road block when trying to decide the best way to visually represent a pattern. I don't want to rehash programs like The Regulator, The Regex Coach, or KDE's RegExp Editor (although I do want to incorporate many of the great ideas these programs exhibit). Instead, I want to focus on the end result. I want to visually work with the data I'm trying to match or split on. I want to abstract away the character classes and endless groupings.

I've run into hurdles while trying theorizing this utility. Below are a few hurdles I encountered:

Verboseness of expressions - Regex patterns are verbose in nature. Coming up with a way to express this verboseness visually is a challenge. I feel like this is a major bottleneck.
Lookaheads/lookbehinds/repeating/nested tokens - Representing things like nested double quotes and repeating values are going to be hard. This ties back in with the verboseness of the language. I think there are certain constructs that can be used as a pattern for repeating and nesting but the pattern may need to be tweaked by hand.
Optimizations
Plug-in architecture

I will think about this some more over the next few days. I know there is a way to do this. I just can't seem to see the forest for the trees.

Grace and peace to you,
John

Infamous first post

2004-06-16T09:31:00.000-07:00

It's time to get the infamous first post out of the way:

I'm John Kemp and I'm a programmer. I live in St. Louis, MO with my beautiful wife Kristin.

I've been following the blogscence for a few years and even had a blog over at http://weblogs.asp.net/jkemp/ for a long time. However, I've never really been the journaling type and so I didn't write much (or at all). However, blogging has become an excellent social networking and word-of-mouth approach to getting "known" in this industry. Therefore, I have decided to try it again, this time on blogger.com. My ideas and thoughts will be available and yet not published on hugely syndicated lists. I'm still a little intimidated about others reading my posts. :)

Anyway, wish me luck.

Grace and peace to you,
John