Today is the first of the month. The first of December. Where has the time gone? It seems like I just barely started my workterm. These past 4 months (or 8 months really) have just sailed by and I was barely paying attention. I guess it is true what they say that time flies when you are really happy and having fun. Despite Algos and other crazy times in the past couple terms, this has been one of the best times of my life. Who cares you say? Good point... I should be talking about Christmas. And with regards to Christmas I have decided that I am going to put my head to good use this month. I have divided my hair into 25 distinct pieces that I will shave off each day until Mr. Claus pays me a visit. And instead of littering this front page up with photos of the process, I will be creating a page for them to go. I will keep you posted when this happens.

If you have been to the PHP website in the past little while you might have noticed a link to PHP Quebec 2004. This is a conference which will be held in Montreal this coming March. It would mean missing a few days of school, but I imagine that one could handle that. If anyone is interested, the price for students is only $75. Of course the additional cost of making it to Montreal is also associated with that as well. I guess I should be careful in saying $75, that was the price for students this year, they don't have the prices up for next year. I don't imagine that they would raise it much if at all.

If anyone is interested in going, please let me know, as I am fairly certain that I will be going. I would love to get the university to pay for my trip, but I really doubt that will happen. I was going to fly, but if there was reason enough to travel by other means, please let me know. Also, if anyone knows anyone that I can stay with in Montreal, that would be great. Cheers.

If I haven't told you that I love Opera mostly for its mouse gestures then let me do that now. Mouse gestures make my life just that much better and it is overlooked by other browsers. However, my laptop continues to amaze me now that I found Cocoa Gestures. This software allows cocoa applications to accept mouse gestures - and fortunately, Safari is a Cocoa app. So is Mail and iCal, so I can send and receive email and toy with my schedule all with mouse gestures. This might not sound like a huge advantage, but don't knock it until you have tried it.

On a completely unrelated note, I loved the movie, About A Boy.

I heard on the radio this morning that they are going to be installing iris-scanners at the CANPASS kiosks in the Halifax International Airport. Similar kiosks will be installed across the country in an attempt to speed up the process of Canadians returning through customs. Apparently iris scanning is far more accurate than other biometric identification and a person's iris doesn't change from the time they are one year old. In order to use this service, someone would sign up for between $50 and $100 per year and be subject to a thorough background check. Obviously this isn't intended for the casual vacationer - yet, but holds promise for business travellers. Something to think about.

While PHP 5 is still in Beta 2, I have decided that I can't wait any longer and I am in the process of installing it on my laptop. However, I need libxml2 in order to use some of the cool new XML features of PHP, and I apparently don't have a high enough version. I have been trying to update my libxml2 with fink, but that doesn't seem to be going well. So after work today I will just try to install it from source. This is fine, because I am installing php 5 from source as well. For those people who haven't done so, I would suggest taking a look at the new features in PHP 5 and perhaps you will be as excited as I am. The only problem will be developing software that is meant for distribution, as it will take a while before php 5 is as widespread as php 4 is now. However, for developing on one's own server, php 5 provides an excellent object oriented platform for your web applications. Yeah!

I am currently building PHP 5 after I got fink updated properly (thanks to some advice from my Programming competition teammate and fellow Mac user, Jesse). I got the new libxml2 and all was well. Then I hit a snag on installing the GD libraries including libjpg and the like - so I bailed on the idea of actually installing GD and went on my merry way. Fortunately I had saved my ./configure command in a text file so I could save it and then source it when necessary.

- OK it is finished compiling and I installed it. This is pretty exciting I must tell you. I'll let you know if it is as good as I think it should be :)

I'm sure that many of you have seen the movie Tron - for those that haven't don't worry... your soul may be saved. However, in that movie, there is a scene where two 'light cars' are racing around each other leaving a trail of 'their coloured light' behind them. If either player collides with existing light, they are killed - so to speak. What I am trying to say is that there is a game for KDE called ktron which is a rough version of that game and I have become addicted to it. It is crazy. I have gotten to the point where I am getting quite good at it. I imagine that playing against a human opponent would be much harder, but as it is - definitely a fun little game. Chances are if you have KDE on your system, you have this game. There are similar Windows based games, or so I've heard. Cheers.

I'm not sure if I mentioned it to anyone other than Chris and Sarah, but Anna was down and out all this week. I was home to Durham this past weekend and while I was gone the power went out. Normally not a huge deal, just turn the computer on when I get in and set a few clocks. Not this time. I hit the power button on Anna and she made this funny fan noise - not a great sound, and then it seemed like it was hanging on the IDE drive detection. It found my optical drives, but said [None] where it should have had a couple of hard disks. Boot Failure. Obviously.

So I used my laptop all week and tried to not think about how insanely quiet my apartment was. So tonight after an interesting day at work, I was up for opening her up. I took the IDE connectors out of the motherboard and stuck my hard disks in where my optical drives were. Tried booting - four [None]'s. Crap. Went into the bios - it recognized my drives. I rebooted and voila! GRUB popped up. I chose Gentoo... going well, except that it numbers the drives depending on where they are in the IDE chain - and now my drives are Secondary. So it had a kernel panic. Reboot, into Windows this time and here I am - using about the only piece of software that I bothered to install on the Windows partition - Opera.

I'm going to see if I can't get the bios to recognize the drives in the primary spot and be rid of this whole mess - and Windows.

I just came into the possesion of another computer today - I hesitate to say bought, because it was only $10, and it isn't much of a computer, but it should be fun to play with. Her name is Maxine and she actually has a network card in her already. I have no idea what is on it, maybe nothing, I'm not even 100% that it has a hard drive. But she is a PII 200 with 64 megs of RAM, it has a CD drive so I might put Linux on her and totally mess around with it, or optionally I might put Dos on it and use it to play old Sierra games. In addition I got a 24-port, 10mbps switch. I may not have a lot of use for it, but it looks cool. :P

The Christmas season is upon us now that I have bought my Christmas chocolate balls. I realize that these chocolate balls are likely last easter's chocolate eggs reshaped, but that doesn't really matter to me. What matters is that we would always have those chocolate balls around at home during the Christmas season.

While I'm discussing my chocolate bender I would like to mention a great chocolate bar that I hadn't tried before: Kitkat Chunky Caramel. Sarah told that the KitKat Chunky were good, and they are, but I also got a Caramel one and let me tell you - that is the stuff that dreams are made out of. Chocolate dreams.

We got our first real snowfall last night here in Halifax. Snow is good, when it is just snow, but unfortunately, this was snow and rain and slush and made for some really wet times outside. It is also the point where I realized that I can't wear my sneakers anymore because they have a huge hole in the bottom of them that allows much slush in. But besides the mess, it was a nice enough day to go out and mock those people who are writing exams.

Along those lines there has been much discussion lately about study space on campus. And while, I personally have never had a problem with this because I live on campus (and I don't study), I can sort of see that this would appear to be a problem at first glance. The computer science building seems to be the study haven for all sorts of people, none of whom appear to be in computer science. It kind of creeps me out. That being said, there was plenty of room to study. I think that people's definition of 'full' is pretty meager. Things aren't full until you are elbow to elbow with some stranger that smells like a mixture of bad tuna and Fisherman's Friends. That being said, none of my damn business... I try to help out by not sprawling out over three couches reading my novel - which I thought about doing, but realized that my apartment had more more appeal - and rootbeer.

I just got word that my workterm report from my last workterm was accepted after one resubmission. Apparently I did a much better job once I made my corrections. Now I only have to do it again. Hopefully I can learn from my mistakes, but probably not.

Tomorrow I will take some pictures of our decked out office. Decked out with Christmas. Chris and I are having a bit of a competition with the Help Desk trying to see who can decorate their respective area's the best. I'm not sure what the best means, but we have both more or less leaned a bit on the tacky stick and I think that is great. The real challenge now is trying to stay focused and working while in the office and resist the urge to make/add more decorations. Since this is an evolving process, there aren't going to be any final photos until the weekend I think, but I will certain grab some good shots in the morning.

Until Return of the King! Obviously people can see that from my countdown, but I am getting pretty excited. It's not often if ever that I have anticipated a movie release like this, let alone mark it on my calendar. Ring Day! What can I say I'm a convert who is absolutely blown away by the filmmaking. Not only that but the love and the dedication that can only really be appreciated by watching days and days of special features. Anyway you can resume whatever it is that you were doing... I am off to see the Nutcracker soon.

I have finally pulled together the photos that Chris and I took of our office for the contest that we were having with the help desk. Enjoy.

I'm not exactly sure how long the Nutcracker is playing at the Cohn, or whether there are any tickets left for that matter, but if you get the chance to see it don't pass it up. Obviously the performances vary from group to group. Various interpretations result in various quality shows. However, the show I saw last night was quite amazing. It was about two hours long, but it flew by. The dancers weren't very old, with a few dancers being between 8 and 12 if I were to guess. That did not detract from the performance however which I feel was on par with if not better than anything you might find in this part of the country. Bottom line, excellent show and I had a great time.

The society potluck/dinner/drinking get together was actually pretty fun. Not to say that I spent 8 hours of my Saturday in the CS building, but it was all in good fun... moving the society office into its new location. I have some photos that I am hopefully getting from other people that were there and might post a few... there aren't many exciting photos, but you can get the idea.

I am glad that I work less than 40 seconds walk from my apartment. However, I am not happy that my mother commutes 1.5 hours+ each way into the city - especially when the weather is shitty like it is today. Drive safe everyone.

This is my new religion. A lot of people this time of year are anxious for Christmas. And it is true that I am as well. But Christmas comes once a year. Sometimes you are waiting for an event for longer than that, like two years. Such was the case for the conclusion of Lord of the Rings. It hit me rather unexpectedly during the Christmas break of 2001. A friend wanted to see the Fellowship of the Ring and went along. It blew my mind. Melted my brain if you will - I was in love. The Two Towers didn't disappoint, although the extended version was far superior. Then was the waiting game for Return of the King.

And oh but it was worth it. Worth every second of the 3+ hours we spent in line, worth the three weeks I held onto my ticket, worth so much more than I had to give. Great seats, great friends, great movie. A great movie that I would love to describe in detail, but won't. If you have read the books then you know generally what should happen, but the execution of it is simply stunning. Obviously, those people who have seen the first two movies are going to see their investment through and most likely will see this one, but see it in theatres. See it a couple of times. Enjoy it. Savour it. Wow.

If you ever decide that you need an IDE hardware RAID, be wary of Western Digital drives. One of our computers here has a 3Ware Hardware RAID controller with WD disks, and apparently the Western Digital drives go to sleep when they are not being used which essentially is causing the RAID controller to think that they are dead, or missing and it tries to restore it, and sometimes a couple of disks might sleep which could cause the controller to freak out and molest your data. Apparently there is a fix for it, but if you only learn of this problem the hard way that is only a small consolation. Be ye warned.

For those of you who haven't heard, there is a clinic in Australia that is offering Calgary men the opportunity for a free trip to Australia, two weeks accommodation and a daily allowance in exchange for sperm. This advertisement has elicited a lot of response from around the world. And why not? The package is apparently worth $7000 and they require you to donate every second day that you are there. So that is about 7 times which would be about $1000 a pop. What guy in his right mind would pass up an opportunity like that?

But there is a catch - other than the fact that this is only open to people who can attend the two councilling sessions in Calgary and pass the blood and semen test.

A new law in Australia will require that children born using donated sperm be allowed to know who their biological father is when they come of age. This is the biggest deterrent for the Australian public. However, donors have no legal resposibility or obligation over children born of their seed. Personally, I don't think I'd have too much of a problem if around my 40th birthday I had a dozen or so Aussie kids look me up and start calling me Dad. That being said, I might feel differently then. Clearly a decision about this must not be made lightly.

Most of the factual information above has been regurgitated from various news sites. Meh.

There are only like three days until Christmas. I am home after a small adventure trying to get here. I left normally enough on Friday afternoon - I took longer than planned to get out of the door, but that wasn't unexpected. A quick stop at my aunt's place to drop off some gifts and I got behind the wheel to give my mom a much needed break from driving. (I'm not sure how she can drive 150+ km each way back and forth from work.) We missed the rush hour so getting onto the bridge was relatively uneventful. All is quite well as we drive through Dartmouth and then all of a sudden the engine revs up to 5000 RPMs - I figure that I have knocked the car into neutral with my knee and quickly check to fix the problem. Nope, it was still in drive. So I am driving a car that has no ability to accelerate. Good.

Popping the car into neutral and then back into drive seems to fix the problem - temporarily. After a couple more episodes of this slippage, I pulled into the MicMac Mall parking lot. Long story short, my mom tried, same deal and then we called my uncle who works for Ford to see what he could arrange. Unfortunately no one with the authority to make magic wheels turn are working on Friday evening. :P We spend the night at my uncle's place after he drove our car to a dealership (without incident). In the morning we find out that the transmission guy won't be in during the weekend, but their certified mechanics couldn't find any problems and didn't notice the issue when they test drove it. So we loaded my stuff back into the car and away we went - no problems all the way home. The real irony is that my mom's lease expires today and she was going to trade in the car last week, but didn't get a chance.

The good news is that I got some Futureshop shopping done when we were 'stuck' at the MicMac Mall. And it just wouldn't be Christmas without some sort of car related incident.

PHP 5.0.0 beta 3 was released yesterday. They keep adding in new functions - some that I don't ever imagine using, others that I at least want to try out. Two such examples are php_strip_whitespace() and php_check_syntax(). These functions will strip out the whitespace and comments of a script and check it for parse errors respectively. All told I am really looking forward to the full release of php 5.

I guess it is technically Christmas eve right now. I should probably go to bed, but I am too compelled to stay up and wish you all a merry Christmas. However, I don't suspect that many people will read this very soon, because who really checks my website over Christmas? Oh wait - everyone does. Thanks guys, I'll see if I can't get you something for Christmas.

I think that this is the warmest Christmas that I have ever been witness to. It is like 14° here.

I hope that all of you are safe and happy. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy Holiday Season.

I hope that everyone had a great Christmas. Mine was very good, things were very similar to other years which is good, because I definitely have loved Christmas in the past and this was definitely no exception. They say that you get less excited about Christmas as you get older, but I am not so sure that is true. I do think that the focus changes and you aren't as preoccupied with the presents and the surprises and more focused on family and friends. I also enjoying getting gifts for my younger brothers, which isn't something that I did a lot before. Sure there were presents from me for them before, but often Mom and Dad were involved. Now things feel more real. Plus I like actually being able to sleep on Christmas eve instead of sitting up all night in my room wired out of my mind with anticipation.

I hope the remainer of the break (for most of you) is enjoyable and relaxing. Merry Christmas.

Happy Boxing Day folks. Some of you might care that this front page now validates XHTML 1.0 Transitional now. That being said, I doubt that many of the other pages do. The templates for this directory do (that's right each directory has a different template), but many pages were written in HTML 3/4 days where you wanted upper case tags - which is what I learned when I got into this business 7+ years ago. And my CSS implementation is without any errors or warnings - and this one applies to all my pages.

Look, this is me procrastinating on my workterm report.

Apparently my alterations to the front page a couple days ago made it do some funky things with Internet Explorer. Obviously I didn't know this, nor would I have cared much except there are a few important people who use IE and therefore I am going to see what can be done. Obviously this wouldn't be an issue if IE conformed to standards, but I think I have bitched about that in the past and won't bother now.

When put into strict mode, by the use of a DOCTYPE, IE becomes case sensitive with regards to class names for stylesheets. It also starts to do inheritance in a weird way. So I think that all of my IE woes should be gone. But I know that more will creep up in the future.

Yesterday I bought a piece of shareware. Not only that, it was Mac shareware. I have been on a quest to find an acceptable editor for using when I am on my laptop. Obviously I don't want to spend a lot of money on this, but then I found skEdit. This program is written by a CS student in Ohio named Sean Kelly and he is a couple years younger than myself. So when I realized that the program was only $20 and that he took Paypal, I was game. It has all the features that I was looking for including a couple nice little extras. There are one or two issues with it, but when I emailed him about them he said that they should be resolved in the next version - which I get for free because the cost included lifetime updates. I doubt that any of you are looking for such a product, but if you are, it is worth a look.

I just picked up a copy of Jurassic Park on DVD from Walmart for $5. This is not a bad deal considering that my family's copy on VHS was starting to show its age.

I also picked up a used copy of Basic and a new copy of Run Lola Run from Blockbuster a couple of nights ago. It is all about the post Christmas sell off. Every once in a while you find thing you like. :)

Well... I think I did OK on this one. I spent like 8 months of this year working - which I quite enjoyed. Summer in school was also an interesting time. I also managed to get most of my new year's resolutions taken care of. I got two taken care of for sure. One is up in the air depending on whether or not you consider my front page to be my entire site. echo! is still waiting to be finished. Although I will tell you that I am making a system with my newest project that I am working on and a large chunk of it should be done by the end of January. And I don't think I made it to a rave this past year, but quite frankly I don't care about that anymore anyway.

So as I spend my first new years away from my family, I wish everyone a happy and safe night. Cheers!