Monthly Archives: November 2005

Online gaming

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I decided to try out online gaming, so I got a network adapter for my PlayStation 2 off eBay. Yesterday I also picked up a USB headset for it (it was $16 at Circuit City if you bought it online and picked it up at the store). So far the experience of playing against others is a bit frustrating as I really stink. The voice quality also has much to be desired, but I need to make sure it isn’t my firewall causing the issue. I’m going to try use the handle “scrubbbby”, so if you see me, join me for a game. (Scrubby comes from sgruby as that was my login name in college and due to how much I used a computer, my friends started calling me that.) I had to add a few b’s to get a unique account name.

Useful Applications for the week

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I do a lot of work on two machines; one for testing and the other for development and is my main machine. When I’m testing, I regularly have to copy logs and files back and forth. This requires me to copy the file/log to my server and then pull it down from the other machine. After awhile, this gets quite repetitive. There is/was a program called Clipboard Sharing that allowed me to synchronize the clipboards of all my machines, so I could copy from one and simply paste on the other. However, the auto sync part stopped working in Tiger. I sent the author email, but was impatient so I started writing my own. I got as far as having everything work well before the author got back to me with a version to test under Tiger. It worked beautifully and now I’m pleased as punch. The author has published it as freeware, but has asked for donations. I sent him a nice donation yesterday because of how much time it has already saved me. (In fact my donation was more than I spend on most software.)

The second program is one called DropCopy. It lets me quickly and easily send files/folders across my local network to other machines. It works quite well, but the user interface is just awful. It is another free application. Definitely worth checking out and I hope the author can clean up the interface as it will make a top notch utility.

Registered Professional Engineers

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Some time ago, my father and I had a discussion about being a registered professional engineer and what it means. He’s been a registered professional engineer (civil engineer) his entire career. He’s always told me that being registered means that you certify that your work is going to hold up and it is a matter of safety. Some states (I believe Texas), have attempted to register software engineers. I think that this is a complete and utter mistake. As a software engineer, there is no way that I can certify that my work will function properly on any machine at any time other than on my machine at the time I ship it. There are some many interactions between the hardware, the operating system, other applications, and hacks that I simply can’t say that it will work. While I’d love to have the moniker “registered professional engineer”, there is no way in good conscience that I could even apply for it if it became available.

However, I think the title “engineer” should be reserved for those that have successfully completed a 4 year engineering education. Engineer is thrown around by Microsoft, Cisco, and other companies when people complete a short course. I think that this is unacceptable. Microsoft lost a case in Canada and was told to stop using engineer for their MSCE certification. Like that will really happen. Furthermore, many programmers are not engineers; they simply code without designing and understanding the implications. This is where I see that engineers differ from programmers.

BTW, I am considered an “Engineer-In-Training” and will be my entire career as I passed the grueling California Engineer-In-Training exam while I was in college.

Worst burrito ever

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I’m a big fan of Mexican food (OK, maybe Tex-Mex) and Saturday night, my wife let me choose where to go for dinner. We were out at San Diego State at some open house to see the electron microscope and some telescopes (my wife loved it and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t as fascinated as she was), so we decided to eat out that way. We went to a place that she’d been to in the past, but she said the name had changed. Well, it was quaint and looked authentic. I started eating my steak burrito and hit some fat. OK, so I pick it out and keep munching away. Hit more fat, removed it and continued. I finally unwrapped the burrito and looked at the meat. About half of it was fatty. I ate the tortilla and complained. The waiter didn’t seem all that surprised, but took it off the bill. So much for trying someplace new. I guess we’ll go back to Chevy’s; it may not be real Mexican food, but we’ve been consistently happy with the food and service.

Spark – Cool tool for keyboard shortcuts

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When Mac OS X 10.4 came out, Apple broke the ability to assign a keyboard shortcut to an AppleScript in the AppleScript menu. Normally I wouldn’t blame Apple for breaking something this obscure, but it is clearly documented in the Apple Help. Now 7 months later, I finally had to find another solution as I miss my AppleScripts (they are to get around a design change Apple made that I argue is a bug, but despite by exchanges with them, they refuse to acknowledge it). I looked for apps to do this and found Spark. It looks slick and the price is right (free). So far, I got it doing what I want, but now I’m intrigued as it looks to do a whole lot more.