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Something about this new commercial for the Discovery Channel got me. I don't if its the catchy song, or seeing all their main personalities singing it, or having Dr. Stephen Hawking in it. Whatever it is, I like it.

I saw Geni.com now allows you to embed your family tree in other sites so I decided to try it here. Check out my family tree which we traced back 18 generations for one line! View more of Brian's tree | Get your own family tree at Geni.com

So Gmail added IMAP support this month and the biggest benefit I got from the new addition was a simple way to import my pre-Gmail email. When I first got my account several years ago I looked into importing all of my old email messages into my Gmail account but found it would be tedious and fraught with problems. The biggest one being there seemed to be no way to import the emails and preserve their old header information such as who sent it, what address they sent it to, when they sent it and when I originally received it. All the import tools I found were nothing more than glorified resenders that simply emailed my old emails to my new account. But now with an IMAP link between Gmail and Apple Mail, my current email client, importing my old email is as easy as dragging and dropping them into my Gmail inbox. Unfortunately Apple Mail 3.0 is still flaky and trying to move too many emails at once causes it to crash. If I import them in about one-month batches it seems to handle it...

I recently was forwarded an email about Google's "scary" (for some) feature of reverse phone searching. You can read more about the email at Snopes.com . Anyway, I was bothered enough by the false sense of security a FUD email like this provides for those who aren't as wise to today's Internet issues that I was forced to write the following response for my family to read as a counterpoint. I receive many forwarded emails, but I award few with more than a passing glance. This one is so misguided though, I felt it deserved a response at least to those I know and care about. Phone numbers and addresses aren't private information and shouldn't be or they betray the very nature of what they are, location devices. Reverse searching for a person or address based on a phone number has been available for a very long time on many websites, the most well known, for me at least, being http://anywho.com. The advice the original email provided will lead many who rea...

So try this in Maven. Create a project A and don't install it. Create two subprojects, B and C, that have A as their parent. Make B depend on C. Install C. Try to build B. You won't be able to as Maven claims it can't download A. Huh? Why did C build then? The cause is that Maven can resolve a project's parent on the local drive using a relative path. But if a project has a dependency, it will only look up that dependency's parent through the repositories, even if that parent is available via a relative path. The solution, install A into your local repository. If another developer gets B out of your SCM and tries to build they will fail with the same problem. So I've now learned. Deploy more snapshot builds of parent POMs to keep my fellow developers happy.

My coworker asked me to describe how Maven compares and differs to Ant. I realized how hard it was for me to describe what a developer gets for moving their build process from Ant scripts to Maven. I can't make the argument that you can do X with Maven but not with Ant because I don't really have a valid example. However, I am inclined to make the argument that you can do X with both but with Maven it's easier. With Maven, you collect metadata about your project instead of writing scripts defining the steps your build will take. For example, if you look at an Ant script you'll immediately see that it is organized as targets which many developers use to define and group the steps of their build process. In a Maven POM file, you won't see similar build steps defined. This can be confusing for a new Maven user coming from the world of Ant. I know it was for me. Instead, you'll see lots of metadata about the project such as dependencies, Maven plugins to use...

Jen, had a report on The Weather Channel! It's the first time I got to see her on TV. I took the time to grab it off my TiVo, decrypt the video, reencode it, trim out the leader and trailer and upload it to YouTube. Take a look!

So I was brushing up on my CS fundamentals recently and was reminded of the topic of Markov chains . In college, I created an applet that simulated flocking behavior in animals using a Markov chain and it turns out its still up on my college site.

I found this great example of how to implement the CSS2 properties of max-height, min height, max-width and min-width in Internet Explorer.

Today I finally got around to releasing a widget I created for the Google Web Toolkit. It is an extension of one of the Google-created widgets, Grid, and adds the functionality of draggable column headers to support column reordering. The release is version 1.1 to imply its compatibility with GWT 1.1.0 and the fact that it contains bug fixes from my initial unreleased package. You can download the release , browse the API documentation or view an example online .

So I've been meaning to get around to creating this for a while. The idea spawned from my search for a 401(k) calculator that didn't just assume one given future. By that I mean, I wanted a calculator that didn't calculate the return on my investment based on just one average annual return. I wanted a calculator that showed me lots of different futures, based on the standard deviation, a.k.a. the risk, of what I've invested my money in. I want to see the most pessimistic futures, you know the ones where all my investments bite the dust, as well as the most optimistic futures where everything is rainbows and bunny rabbits, as well as everything in between. So in that sense, I wanted a forecaster, not a calculator, similar to the hurricane landfall maps you see on the Weather Channel where the most likely landfall is that red wedge in the middle while wider is an orange wedge and even less likely is the widest yellow wedge. So last week I threw together this 401(k) ...

I saw this blonde joke and had to share. Truly excellent

So in my interest to see how easy it is to transfer video from my TiVo to a video iPod, that is until TiVoToGo does it for me, I've been experimenting and discovered a combination of tools and solutions that I wanted to share. My process for transferring video breaks down to the following steps: Transfer the video to my PC using TiVo Desktop 2.2 Unlock the video using the Direct Show Dump Utility Convert the MPEG-2 video to an iPod-compatible format, 320x240 H.264, using PSP Video 9 Transfer the video file to my Mac Set the MPEG-4 atoms that iTunes uses to organize video as a 'TV Show' using AtomicParsley Add the video file to my iTunes Library Transfer the video to my video iPod The End! Phew! That was a lot of work. Well, it feels simpler and easier than it sounds on paper. I'm going to follow up with posts that expand on several of the steps.

June 2006, that's when my first child will arrive upon the Earth for all to behold! Yes, it's true, I shall be a father this time next year.

So I don't know if 27 is old, but man do I feel it when today I finally created an account at del.icio.us! "Why does that make you feel old", you ask? Because I'm usually the first in line for new tech, a fad, or a new site/service, especially if its popular. I've been hearing about del.icio.us for a long time now but didn't really know what it was until a day or two ago. My friend Tim explained folksonomy to me and I associated it with Flickr. He mentioned del.icio.us as another example and so I finally learned what del.icio.us is, a bookmark sharing service.

3 months ago I switched to Eclipse after using IntelliJ IDEA for years. I soon learned that Eclipse doesn't let you configure the JDK it uses to compile your workspace, but the strange thing is, it allows you to configure the JRE it will use to run your code. I thought that was odd and would probably cause me headaches someday. Well today is that day. Today, I learned the extent of the problem when I attempted to run an Ant script through Eclipse. Long story short, when using Eclipse make sure you run the eclipse.exe with the -vm switch to define which JDK it should use and make sure the tools.jar in the Eclipse Ant classpath matches that same JDK. It's absolutely retarded that Eclipse allows them to be different. It caused me all kinds of 'class version mismatch' headaches. Why they thought it was a good idea to build projects and run Ant scripts in the same virtual machine that they run the GUI in is beyond me. IntelliJ IDEA has a much cleaner separation wh...

So I recently bought a 17" Powerbook G4 and it has become my main computer. I'm an iPackrat so I wanted to move my 5 years of email, contacts and calendar events from Outlook XP for Windows to Apple Mail, Address Book and iCal for Mac. I will be posting about the process it was to move my email but for now I'd like to post about the contact and events migration. The contact and events migration was relatively painless but it took a few man-hours of searching to find this simple solution. The basic overview of the final solution was, I emailed the contacts and events to my Powerbook as vCard and iCalendar files, respectively. To send Outlook contacts as *.vcf (vCard) files: Goto the Contacts folder Select all of the contacts From the Actions menu choose, "Forward as vCard" In the resulting email, choose "Plain Text" as the email format. This prevents a problem where the attachments aren't readable by the Mac because they are lumped together in ...

My friend Leon is selling his best friend on eBay. Go read about Tape Man .

Found this site Friday night while searching for my town's mil rate . It contains appraisals of houses throughout New England including pictures and floor plans, all open to the public. Talk about scary invasion of privacy. Since its all info that is part of the public record, its legal.

So for those wondering, here's a pic of me and my wife . It's from our vacation last year.