Training just not blogging

I have continued to train, but just haven't had time to blog. The days are pretty full when you train twice a day and work. That should let up now that we are closing in on race day. I have a few more days of doubles, and then I'll ease up on everything to get rested and try not to gain to much weight.
I was doing good on weight, but Labor just killed me. I gain 6lbs that weekend. I don't know how anyone could eat that much, but I did it. It took 2 months to loose that weight and two days to get it all back. Since then I've dropped a 2lbs out that, so water, etc. But really disappointing. Either way, I feel faster and ready to go.

Bionic vs iPhone 3gs Speedtest - Verizon vs ATT

The Bionic looks impressive so far. I got to speedtest one against my AT&T 3GS and I was shocked. To get right to it, Speedtest on the Bionic 7Meg download, AT&T iphone 3GS, only 3.4Meg. The Verizon network just killed AT&T. And it was off the same speedtest server. I tried the same test using my corporate wifi with my phone and did get 11meg. I just wanted to make sure the phone could go that fast.
That said, I watch Netflix on my phone at 3.4M, so what else do I need to do? I skype out and video chat all with good quality. My web pages and apps load fine, so how fast do I really need to go. Twice as fast sounds impressive, but the movie will play at the same speed. I'll be interested to watch and see what people really use that bandwidth for.

PS3 - Doesn't recognize external hard drive formatted in FAT32

I searched everywhere on the internet.. clearly not enough, for my hard drive wasn't recognized by my PS3. The most common issue was not being in FAT32 format. Which everyone says every modern OS supports, but clearly they do not support it enough, because the most common response to formatting the drive was to buy new windows software.
I tried many approaches that did not work, but maybe they did and I didn't know it, its still not clear why my eventual solution did work. After trying to format on Linux, Windows vista, Windows 7 and even putting the drive in the PS3 and then back in the USB, plugging it into the PS3, it was still not recognized.
I connect the drive to my Mac and formatted it in FAT filesystem. In 10.6 it doesn't say FAT32 but it is. Don't try exFAT either, that doesn't work. Then I created some folders, based on this article. I plugged it in and it was instantly recognized. I'm not sure if the Mac got the formatting right, or it was the folders. It seems hard to believe the PS3 couldn't get the formatting right.
Not a single article in the dozens I read said anything about making these folders to do a backup before swapping out a drive, or trying to get an external drive to work. Everyone seemed to format in FAT32 and it just worked. If you think your drive is in the proper FAT32 and it still isn't being recognized, you might give the folders a try.

Mac Battery - Replace Now - Then good??

After my upgrade to Snow leopard my battery suddenly died for good. Lots of suspicion on the internet about why that happens. I'm sure Apple didn't want to up the stock price or anything more accessory sales, but who knows. I needed a new battery so I braved the Mac Store at lunch time no less, stupid, but I did it. It was packed. The mall was empty, it was packed. I snagged a geek and in drive by, rude, interrupting question and found what I needed. Seamless check out from another geek and I was on my way. On the way out I realized they were actually having a camp for kids there, teaching kids to make videos. Who knew. I was just happy to escape in less than 20 mins. I get the battery home, swap out the old one and boot up. Then the anger sets in when its says replace now on my battery status. I finished the charge and still no luck. Before scheduling time with the geek I did a reboot, and it appears to be fully functional. Hopefully that continues to be the case. Many people online complained the new battery only lasted about a year. My first battery lasted 5 years, before snow leopard killed in a week.

Ubuntu 10.4 only had 3.2GB instead of 4gb

I noticed my Ubuntu box only had 3.2GB of RAM the other day when I was using RStudio for something. I was a little shocked. I went to the Ubuntu site which says it installs the PAE enabled kernel by default, but it clearly had not done so. The fix was easy enough:

sudo sudo apt-get install linux-headers-server linux-image-server linux-server

Then reboot and now I have 3.9 GB. I recently upgrade a windows laptop to Ubuntu 10.04 and it did install the PAE support just fine. I'm not sure why mine was not enabled, but its worth a 30 sec check to find out if you are using all your memory.

Baristas Coffee Inc - BCCI to open stores in NJ

I like technology, I like coffee and I enjoy trading stocks. I was recently in Seattle and we were talking about Starbuck and coffee when someone mentioned a little sexy version of the baristas. When I got back to Indy a friend also mention the stock BCCI. So I had to check it out. This stock has been all over the map. Its less than 1 dollar. Somewhere around .30 today. In the last 13 days its been anywhere from .11 to .84 cents with some interesting volume for a stock that small. So I have started to accumulate some of this stock. Then yesterday they announced they will open 5 more stores in NJ, with the first in the next 120 days. So in May, that's 10 locations in TX, a location in Tacoma and now 5 new stores will be in NJ. My hope, is people don't stop drinking coffee anytime soon.

Myslq2 on Ubuntu 10.04

Tried to get mysql2 adapter installed on Ubuntu 10.4 today. I just found out this existed. Its been a little while since I have coded some Rails. I'm working on 3.0.1. I also had an issue updating my gems, but I let that slide for today. I Thought that would be as easy as 'sudo gem install mysql2', but that didn't really work out.
I get an error:
ERROR: Could not find a valid gem 'myslq2' (>= 0) in any repository

I first installed libmysqlclient-dev:
sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev

Then I realized I needed to change my Gemfile, which is totally new to me. I added this line and removed sqlite:

gem 'mysql2', '< 0.3'

Then I ran:
bundle install

That got it to start working.

Ubuntu 11.04 Beta my first look

I finally installed Ubuntu 11.04 Beta. The install went well using VirtualBox. Then lots of updates as expected for a Beta and I was up and running.
Lets cut to the chase - Unity instead of Gnome. This is going to be love/hate for different people and I hate it. My first impression of how it looked was very positive. The idea behind it, even seemed positive, but I won't upgrade to 11.04 at any point in the near future with Unity. I have to recognize that Unity is different and sometimes we don't like things because they are different.

What didn't I like about Unity and the desktop environment? First it simply takes longer to find simple applications. The easiest way seems to be to search for them by name. If I wanted to do that I would just launch everything from terminal. Terminal, BTW not on the unity launcher. Who is using this thing, its Linux after all, where is the quick launch for terminal. So I get my icons already in the Unity launcher, but there are nothing that I would use. Firefox and LibreOffice are nice, but I don't use them all that much. Customizing Unity is sort of a pain. Its not like any quick launcher you have used before. It was easy to remove LibreOffice from the laucher, just right click and uncheck "keep in Launcher". What about adding stuff. This took a little bit to figure out but simple enough, launch the program you want, probably by searching for it, and the right click it and check "keep in launcher". I personally don't like this method. I'd rather just load a tool to customize the launcher and put what I want in it. Oh and then be able to reorder the list as I wanted. With Unity this feature has still eluded me. What's the big deal anyway? Well its sort of annoying and Gnome isn't that annoying. In fact Gnome lets you customize a lot more so far as I can tell.
Then it has bugs as you would expect. I ran Chrome, somehow the top of the window jumped off the screen. In Gnome you would right click the window toolbar icon and select move to get it back. Unity didn't seem to have this feature.
There desktop also didn't have an obvious or easy way to add applets like in Gnome. I right click the top toolbar but I get nothing. In Gnome I have my weather on the toolbar and my activity monitor. There must be some answer for that, but it wasn't obvious. I also didn't have multiple desktops by default. That seemed odd too. If they were easy to add I couldn't find it.
The look and feel customization, is also weak. From screenshots around the web, it looks possible, but I don't know how long that would take to figure out.
It was surprisingly stable for a Beta, but I had several crashes with different applications, from Unity itself, to Banshee and other applications. That wasn't the worst part of the experience.
After my Unity experience, I logged out and logged back in, using the Ubuntu Classic. This seemed to work as I expected. To me I wasn't ready for the switch to Unity, but the easy option to use 'Classic', I was very happy with Ubuntu 11.04. My only concern about upgrading is about what will happen to my current desktop and its options already in place. I have it working the way I want right now. There really isn't anything, I'm dying to have in a new OS. Ubuntu 10.4 is really a great operating system. Stable, fast and easily customized, I'm not sure there is a good reason yet to try something new.
If you know something in 11.04 you are dying to try out let me know, so I can give it a look. I'm waiting for the excuse to upgrade.

Ubuntu with RStudio - Upgrading to R 2.13.0

Its been a while since I posted. Mostly because there are no readers :)
(BTW - I still have my iPhone. iOS4 is pretty darn good, not sure about that AT&T)

I run Ubuntu 10.4 still. I have a VM with 11.04 on it for testing purposes, but I'm not ready to leave 10.4. However there are new versions R and RStudio available. I checked the Ubuntu repositories, but they were stuck on R2.10. I considered the OS upgrades, even to 11.04, but that had R 2.12 which meant I was going to have to upgrade something anyway. I considered not upgrading but my current version of R was having some issues. The biggest issue for me was that I could not install ggplot2 successfully with my installed version. As graphs are important part communicating the data I review I chose the upgrade as the required option. Besides, I like new stuff. So went ahead a downloaded the R source.

If you only want to use R on the command line, then its a build like any other build and you can stop reading. Remove the synaptic version, then unpack, build, and install, have fun.

I followed the online instructions for R and then installed the latest version of RStudio(93.84). It reported no errors during the installation, but when I tried to start it, I got a rather cryptic error message.
It said something like did I enable enable-R-shlib? But it didn't say if I should or should not have enabled it. Turns out you should if you want to use RStudio.

Simply do the include the --enable-R-shlib in your configure statement:
./configure --enable-R-shlib
then
make
sudo make install
Now RStudio runs, which is good but there is more.
If you want to run the byte code compiler, you have to compile that as an extra step, which is in the docs.
One the reason I wanted to upgrade RStudio was to use the library Manipulate. The documentation for RStudio says it comes with Manipulate which lets you do interactive plotting. It also says RStudio with with any version R compiled from source. However, I get this error message now:
Warning in install.packages :
package ‘manipulate’ is not available (for R version 2.13.0)

I guess I will not be using this feature for now. I did get ggplot2 to work with this setup.

I'll follow up on my future use of R with RStudio.