Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

The house is real quiet. It’s just me and my thoughts.

For the past week Katie has been home on spring break. We did a few things together, and she slept a lot, because she arrived home kinda sick. The past two days Matthew was home too so we had 2/3 of our bunch. Yesterday we saw “Bride and Prejudice” which was cute. Today we played Scrabble and Hearts while watching several DVDs. A good time was had by all. Tomorrow they both leave and then Tuesday Kathy heads to New York for three weeks, so it’s gonna get real quiet around here real soon.

During a design discussion of parsing that we needed to do, I got the idea that we should create two parsers, that is, a set of cascading parsers. One parser that reads from another parser that reads from the input file. The former is an expression parser and the latter parser is preprocessing parser. This requires that the latter parser appears to the former one as a stream of characters. After an hour of protoyping, a co-worker and I had developed a sample. It was neat and it was good.

Some of the work I’m doing is to migrate capability that is currently written in C/C++ over to Java. To insure that we’re doing it right we need to exercise the C/C++ code. However this code is a very large system so we need to pare it down to just a subset. Yesterday a co-worker and I started cutting out a piece of the C/C++ system. This required us to copy function by function into a new source file while minimizing the number of tenticles or strings of references to the overall system. We started in the afternoon, then took a break for dinner. We were going to continue on Monday, but I was stoked and kept working on it until midnight. This morning I woke, did my exercise (13 mile long run for class), and then went back to it. Now it compiles and runs and is only about 3000 lines of a 150,000 lines system. This should help my co-worker develop the equivalent subset in Java. The source can be used to understand how the capability is implemented, and the executable can be used for comparison during testing. Finally I need to understand it to be able to write a design document on what we’re planning to do.

I woke early. The weather was great – sunny with a light breeze. Our front oak tree doesn’t drop leaves in the fall instead it drops leaves, newly grown last year, in the spring. So I had to rake our little front lawn, and then made a pass with the leaf blower. Three thirty-gallon bags later I was done with that job. Next Matthew, who came home yesterday to say goodbye to Dylan who is moving to Kentucky, left for San Antonio to be with Beth. Then I mowed the front lawn. Next I had to remove one stump of the front shrubs we removed last fall. Then I planted new shrubs to replace them. After an early lunch I went to see the movie “Robots”, which was ok, but not great. Next I drove down to Zilker Park because today was the yearly kite flying day. There were thousands of people and hundreds of kites sailing in the breeze. After an hour I returned home and went to Goodwill to drop off old clothes of mine – getting rid of stuff. On the way home I went shopping. Whew! I’m tired and need to get off my feet.

Kathy and I went to the Melting Pot restaurant. It’s a fondue place and it’s was very good. We were joined by Debbie, and Janet from Kathy’s work, and Jim, Janet’s husband. Dinner took two hours, but everything was fresh and delicious. I would recommend it.

In the article “Are Bloggers Journalists?”. It mentions the phrase “Web diarists, aka bloggers”. Now that’s a new one on me. I’m a web diarist.

For the past few days I’ve been working on my blog book. It is now over 100 pages as a large Microsoft Word document with numerous imbedded files. It includes all my blog posts, along with the marathon course weekly schedule, and pictures from each race. The appendices include my race results and running account ledger. It’s getting there.

No this is not about physical running, as in marathon running, instead my website is almost out of space (maybe I shouldn’t use the site, but hey why not). That’s why I’ve shortened by posts, and doing less of them. But then I wasn’t very active anyways. I’ve now got to shrink my space requirements. My plan is to archive my “Watt’s Running” blog to hard copy – yes, you heard me – hard copy. I’ve always felt that there is a business in creating books from blogs, but so far no one had done it for me. Right now I’m not planning to do it either, but it’s an idea that should happen someday. A nicely bound book in chronological order – but then how would one capture the non-sequential nature of hyperlinks…