Daley Ponderings

When a customer says that he has a smaller project than the one I just did, don't pay attention, and think about the quote, rather than simply estimating the time as less than the previous project. Yesterday, I did a project for a friend (one who let me have better access than average... (More)

I don't know if it is only relevant to Allegheny County or if it is more universal, but a friend asked me to write a parcel id (parcel/block/lot) parser to help him out in his real estate searches.  It was kind of a fun project (3 hours) and it was neat to see how well it worked out in... (More)

As some of you know, we have been looking for a house for the last couple of months, and we think we have found one!  I asked a couple guys from church to come look at it today, and give their thoughts, and they generally approved.  Someday, I'll probably make the kitchen nicer (ie.... (More)

This month has been full, busy, and blog-sparse.  Because we're actually living life instead of blogging about it!  But here goes: Noah is experimenting more with sounds.  He copies a lot.  Still not much consistently, but here are some things we've heard him say:... (More)

So - where can I buy one of these ? (More)

pure-ftpd isn't designed to work with TCP wrappers, which is unfortunate, because then I can't simply add an ip address to /etc/hosts.deny to block the hackers when they guess passwords.  But, since the hackers have tried to login to my servers thirty thousand times this month, and... (More)

We went to Florida for vacation with the Daleys for one week and the Wightmans for another week.  It was a great time.  But this leaves me behind on posting, so here we go... On one of our many walks in Clearwater Beach, Jonathan was walking along with a little stick hanging out of... (More)

I have been meaning to get around to putting at least some of these in my "Links" panel on the right, though I suspect that it would be too long to place all of them there.  But, anyway, here are the blogs that I read regularly.  (The RSS feed reader makes it possible to... (More)

Noah's height chart is doing the same straight-line projection that Jonathan's weight chart did. 28" tall, 18lb 11oz. I never pay much attention to the head circumference number, but that chart was also straight-line. The last two times, the nurse has double-checked that measurement, but... (More)

Jonathan is two years old today. Amazing! When we visited Florida, I found a couple of Bible storybooks (one in rhyme) that were true to the Bible and not boring or condescending. (There are some horrible products out there intended for children.) Jonathan enjoys listening as long as I will... (More)

Since we paid for the professional license, we get OpenMake for "free", so I figured I would try it out. The conclusion is that it isn't worth anything.The longer version is that it, like all Merant products, is quite hard to actually get up and running. When the manual says, "you aren't... (More)

The name of the software that runs this blog used to be called pLog, but Amazon.com registered this name in the US. Even though the project is hardly a US run project, I think most developers are in Europe, and a bunch in China and Taiwan, we decided to change the name, rather than argue with... (More)

Thursday morning, we drove up to Jon's Aunt Janet's place in Hamilton, Ontario. We stopped at "our" Wal-Mart at the two hour mark for a bathroom break and to buy some snacks. (I think we've stopped there every time we go that way - it must just be at a good break point.) Going through customs... (More)

Jonathan was playing with Heather's hair band, and was calling it a bandand, his word for rubber band, (close to his word for baid-aid: bandane)Heather encouraged him to call it a rubber band, and he made the face that means, "that word is too hard for me to say", so I just said, "rubber", but he... (More)

Since I always need to go back to my email to find out the instructions of how to set up the server, here are the settings we need at DynaVox to make Tracker work properly.We no longer need to install Oracle locally (yay!) Simply run tracker setup (can be over the network). You only need... (More)