A very geeky family moment

My daughter, home from college, plays Dungeons and Dragons.  She is playing in a campaign over this summer with some college friends who happen to live in the area.

My son, who is now living in Charlottesville, used to play with these same people.  But he’s two hours away now, too far to stop by for a nice little game of D&D on the weekend.

Enter technology.  My son got himself a webcam yesterday.  He’s going to play remotely – at his computer in Charlottesville while the group here in NoVa play near a webcam.

We did the test of this last night.  The connection worked great.  (Video over AIM has some problems in my house, for some reason.  But Skype worked just fine.)

At around this time, I got an IM from my wife, who is in New York this week at an art seminar.  She has a Macbook with her, with a built-in webcam.  I IM’d her through installing Skype, and video IM’d with her from my Powerbook.

So, at one time, we had my son vid-conferencing from Charlottesville to my PC, while my wife was vid-conferencing from New York to my Powerbook.  And here I was in the middle, seeing and talking to them both real-time.

What a wonderful world we live in!

A criticism of Ruby

In general, I’m really loving working with Ruby on Rails.  (For the non-technical, that is a programming language and development environment.)  I’m astonished at how fast I can build things with it.

But I do have one criticism.  I am frequently finding one certain type of bug that is really annoying to me.  A bug that would not occur in Java or C++ or another strong-typed language.

I  write a valid Rails program.  It fails with strange errors somewhere in the bowels of the Rails infrastructure.  I scratch my head in great puzzlement.  Finally, I realize what happened: I used a variable name that was already used by Rails.  Something like “url” – something that you would expect that I could use.  Ruby never warned me that I was overwriting a Rails variable – that’s perfectly valid.  (Java or C++ would give me a compile error, tell me that the variable already exists.)  Instead, with Ruby things just break.

I change the name of my variable to something a little less general, something like “story_url”.  Suddenly, things work perfectly.

Not only does Ruby on Rails give me no warning, but I have yet to see a set of complete documentation of semi-reserved words (words that I should not use in my Rails application, though the Ruby language allows them).

How annoying!

A criticism of Google

This past week, I’ve been spending my time installing software of various sorts for my new job.  Much of that has involved doing new things, including finding documentation for things that I need to do online.   In the course of this, I’ve run into a limitation of Google.

Much of the software that I’m installing is relatively new, meaning written within the last five years.  And as popular open source projects, they’ve undergone frequent updates.  And the documentation is not all that great.

But there’s been plenty of people who have shared their experiences in blog posts and others.  And so you’d think that Google would be a great resource to find stuff.

But Google has a big problem in these cases.  One of the major components of Google’s search algorithms is link traversal.  A page that has many links to it is rated higher than one that has no links.  But older pages are far more likely to have links to them – after all, they’ve been around longer for people to find and link to.

As a result, Google search results tend to skew to older pages.  Which is a big problem if you’re looking for information about something that has been around for a little while, but has changed much in that time.  The resources that you find are likely to be out of date.

You can go into advanced search and limit results by date.  But I’d like to see all results, just skewed to the most up-to-date data.

Which goes to show, even the mighty Google is not the perfect solution for all problems.

Curse you, entropy gods!

The gods of entropy have been having much play with the Dzikiewicz family of late. Within the last month, we’ve had breakdowns of a washing machine, car, and AC unit. Today I’m dealing with the biggest issue yet.

Julie got a call last night from one of the neighbors at the beach. Apparently water was streaming out of our house. That could be something relatively minor, or something relatively major. So we got her father to stop by the house to report further.

Alas, it was something relatively minor that has relatively major consequences. The toilets here have a habit of clogging up. The last time we were here, apparently we left the upstairs toilet clogged, and the flapper not completely closed. Had someone been here, the result would have been that we would have heard the toilet running in an annoying manner, someone would have noticed it, and we would have fixed things. But we were not here, not for the past two weeks. So the toilet overflowed and water continually dripped out, onto the floor, into the floor, onto the floor below, into the floor below, and onto the carport below that.

So, a relatively minor issue, but we’ve now got sopping carpets on two floors, water stains on a ceiling, and buckled hardwood floors in one section of the house. Which is particularly annoying because those hardwoods were just replaced about a month ago.

And here I am, sitting here in the beach house, having come down to meet the plumber and now waiting for the water-clean-up people. And cursing the gods of entropy – let them hover over someone else’s house for a while!

Launching my baby bird

This has been a season of great changes. But this weekend was probably the greatest. Julie and I packed the van and drove one bed, four chairs, seven cartons of miscellaneous items, and our son Andy to Charlottesville, where he is working this summer.

This is not Andy’s first summer working in Charlottesville. He has, in fact, worked there for the past three. But this time, he is doing it as a college graduate, and he is not planning on returning to our home as a resident. Our little bird has left the nest.

I have mixed feelings about this. There’s the obvious fact that I’ll miss Andy a great deal. He has grown to be a fine young man, with a lovely dry wit and a wide range of interests and talents, and I always enjoy his company. His absence certainly makes our home a poorer place.

But I have always viewed this as the end goal of parenting: to bring a new adult to the point where he is ready to face the world on his own, capable enough to take care of himself and others, and decent enough to make the world a better place by his presence. In this, Julie and I have succeeded, and I feel a great deal of pride.

After a long day of heavy lifting, Andy took Julie and me out to dinner. It’s an old tradition amongst our circle: when your friends help you move, you treat them to a meal afterwards. Andy’s been on enough moves to know the drill. And it was a fine moment to see him step up into that responsibility, to treat us to this last meal together before he goes off to make his place in the world. A little funny, to be the one treated. But a joy to be the guest of such a good guy.