It wasn't too long ago that I moved most of my sites over to Slicehost. It was a great service, and the price was far better than what I was paying before, and I got better service. But, new services come along, or at least we become aware of other services, and another move was in order. Danwatt.org, and all related sites such as our …
A few days ago I had my first experience with Amazon EC2. I have been wanting to try it for some time, and had some really nice use cases for it at my previous job (had a program that would have been awesome to rewrite as a map/reduce), but never got to use it. Well, recently that changed. We have a process that runs quarterly …
So I promised to some that there would be some big news on Thursday, so here it is. Some people had to find this out first (mainly my boss) before I could post it publically. A few have known about this for a while, so thank you for holding your tongues. This post should only be visible to some, and I have tried to set …
While working on a project at work, I started to see some weird things coming across in an e-mail that the system is supposed to send out. There have been several other developers working in the code, and it had not quite reached the testing phase just yet. Since I had some time on my hands, I started looking into the issue. When the e-mail …
While working on a project at work, I started to see some weird things coming across in an e-mail that the system is supposed to send out. There have been several other developers working in the code, and it had not quite reached the testing phase just yet. Since I had some time on my hands, I started looking into the issue. When the e-mail …
It has been a very busy week / 10 days, and I finally have a free moment before going to be bed to reflect on what has happened. A week ago this last Thursday was my last day at CARFAX. It was hard to say goodbye to a company that has treated me and the family so well (more on leaving later). I did go …
So I promised to some that there would be some big news on Thursday, so here it is. Some people had to find this out first (mainly my boss) before I could post it publicly. A few have known about this for a while, so thank you for holding your tongues. This post should only be visible to some, and I have tried to set …
Well, our last wedding before our child’s birth is over with (we do have one in 1 month, but that would put the baby at 43 weeks). It was actually tamer and more, oh, meaningful, dignified, reverent? There was very little drinking compared to previous weddings, the guests all had fun, stress levels were low, and everything went off without any issues (except maybe a …
Well, we are back from our trip to Jackson, MS. We were down there for the wedding of our friends Shaun and Mary Frances. It was a beautiful ceremony and reception, and we got some great pictures, despite a few roadblocks. The trip down was fairly uneventful. We stayed with Summer’s parents Thursday night to get a head start on Friday morning. We managed to …
We are safely down in Salem, MO, which will be our brief resting place before moving on down to Jackson, TN for a wedding that we are shooting for some good friends. It is nice to have some down time, which is why I am actually able to post twice in a 24 hour period. I’m not a bigtime reader, at least of the printed …
I had an interesting reminder today that I still have a pleonast account, and that sometimes completely strangers will occasionally read what I say here (hello to new readers Tom, Doug, and Eli). So, here I am, back for a quick installment. Tonight was an interesting night at our mid-week study. The teachers for the “junior” class were out, so one of our elders suggested …
I want to thank once again those of you who have been an encouragement to my wife. This year did not get off to a good start, and we ended up in a situation where we felt like we could not trust people who we once thought were friends. Hopefully this is all in the past now, and we have moved on. When I got …
Over the past few weeks, I have been working on a study of how much we spent on cloth diapers since Silas was born. I threw in some research on the costs of disposable diapers, to make sure that so far we have saved money. By my accounting, we will actually break even in February or March, and see significant benefits with future children. The …
At work we are using gson to do some soft serialization between some applications. Our production application started to throw some errors this afternoon, and after looking into the problem it would appear that gson has a static reference to SimpleDateFormat (or, more correctly, a static member that was constructed with DateFormat.getDateTimeInstance(), which returns a SimpleDateFormat). You can see the problem here, line 58. A …
Ecc 1:9-14: What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things …
I ran into this problem last night.
Another quickie. Evidently if you have PHP installed on your system after installing WAMP, Apache likes to go grab the php.ini file out of your main install of PHP, not the one installed with WAMP. This was causing issues in connecting to MySQL. If you get an error connecting to MySQL on a clean install of WAMP, try adding the following line to the end …
At work we use Struts 2 for a lot of internal applications. Lately, we have started to code a lot of our business objects in a fluent style (beans that return a ‘this’ reference in every setter). We were working on an application this past week that used both Struts 2 (2.0.11) and a fluent API, only to find out that the two are not …
I will post a little bit of what I posted to Summer’s blog. I am hoping that we can all help each other out and find ways to cut back in ‘tough economic times’. Cutting Back Another key to getting us back on track was to find ways to trim back. One of our frustrations is that every time we saw a ‘top 5 ways …
(imported from an old blog) For those of you who are friends with my wife on pleo, who is a gold member, she is about to post something privately that I wrote. It is about our reasoning behind switching to the process that Dave Ramsey calls the “Total Money Makeover”. Several have scoffed at the idea, and I figured some explaining might show others that …
For the last three years, I have been my team’s representative to all job interviews. CARFAX is still doing quite well in this tough economy, and we are currently interviewing interns for the coming summer. I believe we even have a few full time positions open as well. One thing I have observed in all of these interviews, however, is how unprepared many of the …
Hopefully you have been keeping up with my wife’s blog (she has a much larger following than I). Our son, Silas James Watt, was born on Tuesday at 7:56 am. He was born 9lbs, at 22.75 inches long. The Lord has blessed us with a healthy boy, and mom and child are both doing well. Thank you everyone for your prayers. We will post updates …
Summer and I are taking our wedding photography business online. So far, we have served only friends and have been recommended to several couples by word of mouth. We have formed DSW Photography, and have put some of our recent weddings online. Take a look!
Welcome all to the new danwatt.org. There isn’t too much to see here. You might want to explore the links to the right.
