Daniel E. Markle's Blog

While camping at French Creek State Park last weekend we encountered an ice cream location called Scoupe DeVille.

A short drive from the park, they dip Nelson's Ice Cream, locally made in Royersford, PA, as well as soft serve and various burger and fry type items. With a 50's theme inside including seating and an old fuel pump from the era, it has a fun atmosphere as well as delicious ice cream.

Every programmer I know has played Dungeons and Dragons at some point. The C++ Lands Map is a beautiful merging of the two worlds. There are some amusing comments on the map at boing boing too.

I would love to have a poster print of this on some good quality parchment-like stock. Perhaps the author will do a commercial printing of it in the future.

This delicious sandwich, called the Caitlin, is filled with corned beef, cole slaw, swiss cheese, and dressing on grilled rye bread. Available at the 3rd Street Deli across from Capitol Park in downtown Harrisburg, I have had a couple of these and enjoyed every tasty bite. Their sloppy joe is another favorite. Not the sweet variety most places have, this one has a more spicy flavor.

As the chef there once told me "breakfast is best"; I recommend their western omelets as well as the two eggs, home fries, and corn beef hash combination.

They are only open for breakfast and lunch, but if you find yourself downtown looking for a good hometown deli atmosphere and food, I recommend giving them a try.

For approximately the next eight weeks, Pepsi and Mountain Dew are available with sugar. Labeled as Mountain Dew and Pepsi 'throwback' (a reference to a marketing term used for football products), they are a refreshing return to what soda tasted like before the HFCS craze hit the soda industry in the mid 1980's.

I find the Mountain Dew throwback to have a more citrus-y taste with a lighter feel and less syrupy aftertaste. Pepsi throwback reminds me of what I liked about Coke, with a sharper cola flavor and again lacking a syrupy aftertaste. After drinking these more tasty products, I believe many consumers will find why so many are choosing to drink sugar-based products. Fortunately Boylan's, Jones, and other bottlers will continue to provide other flavor choices with sugar for consumers finding the switch back to HFCS in a few weeks intolerable.

When setting up Maildir in Debian 5.0, getting the generic mail applications working correctly can be tricky.

• Install the 'mailutils' package, not the bsd mailx package.


• Do not touch the mailutils /etc/mail.rc file; there are some promising looking variables here like mailbox-type but these do not do what is desired. When the MAIL environment variable is set correctly mailutils will automatically detect the maildir box type.


• Do not touch /etc/login.defs; the promising looking lines in here are deprecated.


• Edit files in /etc/pam.d, changing the pam_mail.so lines as shown (assuming ~/Maildir as the selected location):
  
  
  
  • login: default login shells
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir standard
    
  
  
  • su: set up for proper MAIL when using su; nopen does not show 'new mail' message
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir nopen
    
  
  
  • sshd: set up MAIL properly when logging in with ssh; this line probably has a noenv by default which needs removed to set this properly
    session optional pam_mail.so dir=~/Maildir standard
    

I wish Sun would fix this issue with empty fields in their online ordering system. Receiving a letter like this isn't exactly a confidence booster.

PostgreSQL has improved its checking for proper locale handling in version 8.3. Due to inconsistencies caused by changing defaults in past versions of Debian, some database clusters contain UTF8 and LATIN1 databases in the same cluster. This can cause problems when trying to restore from a pgdump file with errors similar to:

ERROR: encoding LATIN1 does not match server's locale en_US.UTF-8
DETAIL: The server's LC_CTYPE setting requires encoding UTF8.

Van Wagner is now on iTunes as DRM-free iTunes Plus selections. Only "Be a Tree" and "Shikellamy" are available so far.

His music is not the type of music that typically engages me the most, but as I say in my iTunes review of "Be a Tree":

Beautiful strings and well written lyrics bring the history of Pennsylvania in days past to life. Living in the state and experiencing the people and their stories, Van Wagner brings a fun and interesting perspective on everything from superstition, factory work, coal mining, and back woods philosophy to this album.

I consider this a decent capsule summary of his music in general; some albums focus more on history, others more on the atmosphere of life.

My favorite album by Van Wagner is "Climbing to the Top," but it is not available on iTunes yet.

When building Spring controllers, it is often useful to access a DAO instance which has been set up in applicationContext.xml. To do so, add a variable in the controller for the DAO as well as a setter for it. Once this is done, wire it up by reference in dispatcher-servlet.xml.

Often when working with Spring Web MVC mappings I want all calls to a certain extension handled by a generic resolver, i.e. mapping "*.html" to corresponding "*.jsp" entries in WEB-INF. This is easily done using UrlFilenameViewController which automatically passes the parsed filename to the view resolver.

After receiving one of these Chemex Coffee Makers for Christmas and using it for a while, it not only makes better tasting coffee, but I enjoy pouring the water over the grounds and experiencing different smells that emanate from them as the brewing extracts the coffee oils. With this brewing method it is possible to tell from the scent when the beans are extracted and starting to go bitter, giving the brewer more control over the flavor. I definitely recommend trying one of these to anyone who wants better coffee, but more time and effort is needed to do it, so it isn't for everyone.

Excellent Chemex brewing instructions are available. The coffee does cool rather quickly in the carafe, so after pouring myself a cup I usually put the rest of the coffee in an insulated travel mug.

On a server running Zimbra on Ubuntu, to get cron job output sent to an e-mail address, make the following link:

ln -s /opt/zimbra/postfix/sbin/sendmail /usr/sbin/sendmail

Until this is done, crontab output will silently vaporize.

A Java Swing user interface I am working on which makes extensive use of a custom JTableModel implementation was failing. In certain instances when my data structure changes, it purges empty cells. If the cursor was left in these cells while this was taking place, the table would become unresponsive, often requiring an application restart to fix.

Watch for issues with setValueAt, which in some cases can be called with invalid values. In particular if the cursor is editing a field, the table is not refreshed until the edit focus leaves the widget even if you try to force it with validate() calls. In my instance the ideal fix was to add checks and do nothing instead of throwing exceptions.

With getValueAt, some table widget types choked on my default of null, which I was returning for invalid cells. Using an empty string instead of null for these invalid cells fixed this problem.

Having just returned from the Central PA Open Source Conference, I found it to be a very informative and useful conference. A wide array of interesting topics in different fields were covered, and there were many items I can apply over the next few months to my own projects.

My favorite session was Hardware and Honeybees, in large part because it showed interesting uses for technology and hardware hacking, something as a software-oriented person I do not see much of. Using cell phone text messages to control electric fences, web cameras to monitor hive status, and inexpensive temperature monitors to find problems were all topics in this interesting talk.

While eating at Neato Burrito today I noticed these delicious looking treats in their dessert bin in front of the cash register.

Labeled Bailout Brownies, they consist of a rich chocolate brownie with gold foil-wrapped chocolate coins adhered to the top with a chocolate glue. While eating, the coins stay on the top until their location is reached, when instead of the coin falling off, a hunk of chocolate comes loose with the coin. After prying the coin loose from the chocolate base, a nice imprint of the coin can be seen in the short period before the chocolate inevitably disappears. In a caricature of the real economy, the shadow of the coin is much more tasty than the chocolate within the coin itself.

A wonderful sweet relief from the stress and woe caused by this trying time.