Jamcleat

My niece, her husband, and 3 boys were here. My wife got out the Playmobil and Lego’s for them. In putting them away, she noticed that the wheel has been off one of the Playmobil airplanes since our kids played with them. “Can you glue this back on?”.
A wad of Seal-All or Goop would have held it on, or perhaps a wad of epoxy. But is one those small areas with high shear and high bend potential where glue has real difficulty.
Instead, I decided to drill a dowel to make a bushing, drill the landing gear strut to hold a screw and assemble the wheel, bushing, self-tapping screw and washer. I filed the point of the screw where it came through.

I found a good collection of math jokes.
For example:

Q: Why did the chicken cross the Mobius strip?

A: To get to the same side!

So just exactly what is the composition of Dust Bunnies?  Clearly an understudied science.  I believe that when the truth comes out, that Dust Bunnies will have a fabric content of insect or more likely arachnid  origin.  Part of some small animal’s quest for food, be it airborne, flying, or crawling.  Or maybe nest for food for offspring.  Somebody else’s grant to write, I’m having fun here in the exciting, dust free world of Information Technology.

A while ago, I posted that I was learning about GTK and more important (to me), GTK for C++.  I have been carefully working through the tutorial.  The way I learn best is by preparing to teach others.  I have been taking notes and creating some exercises which I will contribute back to the GTKmm project when I get them into decent shape.  I have worked through the entry widgets and next is the progress widget.

In the mean time, my wife, a sometime  techno-phobe, asked me to help her purchase an online airline ticket.  Not a big deal.  An hour later, we have a printed ticket at a price that is not prohibitive. My wife, who had not heard the joke before, was amused by the phrase “World Wide Wait”.  Forty-five minutes of the ticket time was spent looking at what I call a “spinner” and some at what techies call a “progress bar”.

The spinner is a screen that acts like it is doing something while you are waiting.   The spinner that might be part the browser.  If it were the cursor on your system, it would slow down or freeze when the local system is waiting for resources.  Other times they hang because they are waiting for a remote, synchronous service like a firewall or a security check. But usually, they are just blinky lights, like the ones that used to chase each other around the marquee at the neighborhood theater until they burned out and nobody replaced them.

More important is the “progress bar”. Or more precisely, the lack-of-progress bar.  This is supposed to move along steadily and indicate how close the web page is to being complete.  I usually see it rush quickly toward half-way.  Then slow down until at 75%, the progress becomes nil.  Finally, after a time twice as long as the wait to half-way, a message box appears that the request cannot be completed due to a condition the user cannot do anything about.  The message never suggests that the web host capacity planner has been sleeping in his chair after a beer at lunch or that that the host DBA meant to re-org the database last month but was at the beach.

And so I propose the “lack-of-progress bar”.  This little gem, when embedded in your web page will not only entertain you by advancing in a non-monotonic way, arbitrarily falling back to a lesser state as the http under-covers encounters adversity, it will put out a meaningful message, pointing the finger at the actual cause of the delay, be it end-point host, local system, or the ISP.  If there are multiple culprits, it will name them all.

Wait there is more! If supplied with the appropriate information, it will simultaneously, write a letter to the U.S. Representative, both Senators, the President, the FCC, the ICC, the DHS, and least effective  but most annoying the TSA. It will  Twitter a spurious rumor about the failing service provider, and a short sale order to your broker.

Or maybe it will meet the release date deadline.  But probably not both.

Shakin’ it up here boss.

My wife went to a Thrift Shop in Minnesota and sent home a pile of LP’s. They have been sitting waiting to be played, filed or discarded for a couple of months.  On a slow news day, I took the first one off the pile and played it.  Ray Confiff Memories Are Made of This.  S’ Typical.  A Scandinavian looking woman on the cover wearing a pastel purple bulky sweater, studying some small artifact.  A bunch of guys that sound like trombones.  A bunch of gals that sound like trumpets.  And Billy Butterfield who actually plays the trumpet on Love Letters in the Sand. Doc Severinson plays trumpet on Three Coins in the Fountain.

Next, completely off the radar, The Dell Trio – Cocktail Time – Harmony (a product of Columbia Records). An apparent re-release of a 1949 album.  Cornball?  If there is a single recording that defines cornball, this is it.  Lawrence Welk, move over.  A sweet (in the diabetic sense) combination of accordion, Hammond, and jazz guitar.  Percussion free.  Who needs drums when you have an accordion?  A quick Google shows that this album may still be popular with some and that someone thinks it might, just maybe, if it don’t take up space in his inventory too much longer, be worth $10.  Mighty clean copy, missing a sleeve.  I didn’t know they ever made records like that.  Whoa!

The Religion (HUM112) mid-term exam consists of one question:

The number of angels  on the head of a pin is which one of the following:

A) an integer

B) a real number

c) an imaginary number

d) an irrational number

Provide a formal proof.

I usually let the music “On the Player” speak for itself. I comment on “Schlagers” because of the fabulous talent that Warner Bros was able to bring together. Joni Mitchell, Mike Post, Frank Sinatra, Miriam Makeba, Vince Guaraldi (not playing Peanuts or Cast Your Fate to the Wind). I put this on because I asked my wife “Suggest some music that we don’t play much”. “What about those collections that I used to get”. Yes, Schlagers is a Promotional Album. Not to be sold. Basically for the cost of shipping, you got half-a-party of music for $3 (barely covered shipping).  From back when Warner Bros  had something worth promoting.  And they promoted the dickens out of it.  Promotion is euphemism for sharing.  For free.  Thank you Ms. Elaine Geller for many happy hours.  I presume that Ms. Geller ran the fulfillment office.  I hope that she is happily and richly retired.  And that she has sold her stock in that loser Warner Bros and the other scum companies that are members  of what the RIAA has become.

I opened the Summer issue of the Furman alumni magazine only to find a picture of my neighbor. (Unfortunately, the webmaster cannot keep up with the print publication and and there are many broken links besides). I would post links to the pics but cannot. Please make do with this scan.

I got the notion to learn something about GTK and review my C++. I have recently upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 so some of the things I had before are gone.

Before you start, you will need libgtkmm-2.4-dev (version 1:2.18.2-1) installed.

When you install it should also call for

libcairomm-1.0-dev (version 1.8.0-1build1) will be installed
libglibmm-2.4-dev (version 2.22.1-2) will be installed
libpangomm-1.4-dev (version 2.26.0-0ubuntu2) will be installed
libsigc++-2.0-dev (version 2.0.18-2) will be installed

You may wish to install
gtkmm-documentation (version 2.17.4-0ubuntu1) will be installed
libglademm-2.4-doc (version 2.6.7-2) will be installed
libglibmm-2.4-doc (version 2.22.1-2) will be installed
libgtkmm-2.4-doc (version 1:2.18.2-1) will be installed

At that point, you can copy and paste the example code found on Wikipedia.

In order to follow the example literally, you will need to save each of the text files as the name indicated in the first line comment into an empty directory. Start a command line window and switch to that directory. Then the command given in the example should work.

If you copy and paste the g++ command you will get it right. If you type it, the “`” things are in the upper-left on most keyboards under the tilde (~), not a single-quote (‘)

me@home:~/Projects/gtk/hww$ g++ *.cc -o example `pkg-config gtkmm-2.4 –cflags –libs`
me@home:~/Projects/gtk/hww$ ./example
Hello world
me@home:~/Projects/gtk/hww$

There was a camp. All boys at camp Y-Noah in those days. Maybe different now. Back then  a big treat was to go to a pine grove on the south side of the lake for an overnight. Great camping, quiet. And pine duff is soft and smooth. In those days, we carefully stepped across the spillway of the dam to get to the grove.

I am sure that many things have changed since those days. But one thing I know for sure is the same. The concrete dam that forms Lake Noah is still there. Which means that Headless Haddie still does not sleep at night.

That was already an old legend 50 years ago when I was a camper at Camp Y-Noah. Haddie was said t0 be a local girl,  just about 12 or so. When the workmen were building the dam, somehow, Haddie, too close to where the concrete was being poured, was struck by a bulldozer, her head severed instantly by the impact, rolled into the flowing concrete and was buried. Her folks buried her body in a nearby graveyard. But on moonless nights, her ghost comes to the lake to see if she can find her head.

The sound you hear in the pine grove is Haddie’s dress, blowing gently in the summer wind.

Make sure you know where your stuff is.  Especially your flashlight.  Did you remember fresh batteries?

Sleep tight campers.