nick's blog

Archaic mainsheet system? Paceship P17!

2011-04-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

I bought an old Paceship P17 last summer and much to my dismay never managed to sail it. Having no sailing experience and trying to obtain all my knowledge from books led to me searching endlessly for the right parts to get it ready.

Well, Spring is here and I'm getting pretty pumped again. Most of the parts I needed last year I have, I've got folks willing to help me get it ready, and only a few questions remain. The main one is...

What the heck is this???

Specifically, the diagram on the left. Is this showing two blocks on the end of the boom, each one attached to a (not sure if this is the right term) deck block? How do you running the sheet through that? I'd love to use the original design, but I'd be willing to change it if this is incomprehensible.

I've looked at various sites and diagrams, such as this place: http://craig.backfire.ca/pages/sailing/mainsheet-systems, but none seem to illustrate this particular system.

Wrap anything within Quartz

2011-02-26T11:41:00.000-08:00

I had this idea while using Quartz at work that it rather than writing a lot of boilerplate code around libraries like Twitter4J and RestFB, it would be nice if I could just wrap any method into a Quartz Job, with scheduling, error handling, etc.; something like this:

FacebookService service = wrap(FacebookService.class);
queue(service.updateStatus(statusMessage)).schedule(nextMonday).after(new Callback {
@Override
public Object run() {
System.out.println("Posted the status, and it was: " + getResult().getMessage());
}
});

The syntax is (supposed to be) similar to Mockito's. I'm not sure how well this approach will stand up from a thread-safety perspective, but I've started a project on Github, very basic right now, that I think has some promise!

JAXB 2.1/2.2 and different Java 6 versions

2011-02-14T07:19:00.000-08:00

Posting this just in case anyone else hits this issue. We run Java 1.6.0_23 in our local development environments, but deploy to Java 1.6.0_03 (I suppose ideally our development should match the deploy target). I've seen a couple of people encountering problems with this error:

javax.xml.bind.UnmarshalException: Unable to create an instance xmltype ...

I had an abstract JAXB class and some concrete ones that implemented it and were annotated with XmlType. This worked without problems in our local environment, using (I assume) JAXB 2.1. However, when deployed I was getting the above error. Our deploys include JAXB 2.2 in an endorsed folder because we don't want to use JAXB 2.0 (which is what Java versions previous to 1.6.0_04 include).

What a confusing mess! To summarize:
locally: JAXB 2.1
deployed: JAXB 2.2

In the end to fix the issue, I ended up modifying the code that created the JAXBContext to include all of my concrete classes as well (it is using the JAXBContext.newInstance(Class... classes) method). This appears to have fixed it; I'm not sure why 2.1 is able to unmarshal without the classes all listed there while 2.2 is not.

I had read previously that JAXB would use the XmlSeeAlso annotations to look up the additional classes, but it doesn't seem to be behaving as expected in this situation. My abstract class has an XmlSeeAlso annotation that points to all of the concrete implementations.

Hope this helps someone!

Javascript trickery: direct links to Fredericton Sobeys/Superstore Flyers

2011-02-11T10:02:00.000-08:00

I've been really hankering for a simple grocery shopping comparison tool, but haven't come across one yet.

At one point I started working on one without really getting very far, but after some investigation, I discovered that most of the handling for the Sobeys and (Atlantic) Superstore flyers is Javascript-based. This could probably lead to some easy-to-parse lists of sales and prices.

One useful feature in the meantime is the ability to get to the accessible flyers for my stores quickly by looking at the "publication.aspx" source code. If you open that file up in some developer tools, you can build your own links in this format:

My Superstore

My Sobeys

The links look like this:

http://director.flyerservices.com/{CUSTOMER_NAME}/PublicationDirector.ashx?OrganizationId={ORGANIZATION_ID}&BannerId={BANNER_ID}&BannerName={BANNED_NAME}&pubtype={PUBLICATION_TYPE}&Language=en&Version=Text&PostalCode=e3a2l4&SessionId=nkg4olv1s3brluuc2cntid45&StoreId={STORE_ID}

Hopefully that session ID won't let you guys exploit anything, I'm not sure if it's required.

Chrome CSS3 bug when combining 3D effects with opacity transition

2011-01-13T07:24:00.000-08:00

Ran into a bug in Chrome recently where the background color of a object disappears during an opacity transition. I reported the bug here: Chromium bug report

You can try the code out for yourself here: https://gist.github.com/778035

jQuery PlacePicker

2010-02-04T15:47:00.001-08:00

I just realized I haven't mentioned this plugin here, and in order to get some Google ranking I'd thought I'd add some info and links! :)

A while back I created a widget for doing geocoder lookups. It's meant to be fairly generic, I wrote a Google Maps V3 plugin. The plugin interface isn't the best, I'm open to suggestions. :)

You can find more info and samples on the github page. Feel free to add any suggestions, either on the github page or here.

jQuery PlacePicker on github

Google Calendar Advanced Printing

2010-01-26T11:36:00.000-08:00

Hi folks,

So back a while ago I started a Google Calendar Gadget that was supposed to replace the bookmarklet. Unfortunately, there were problems with the Google OAuth stuff preventing it from working. Well, somewhere along the way they got them sorted out. If you'd like to give it a try, here's the link to click:

Advanced Printing for Google Calendar

Let me know how it works. Also, the bookmarklet and gadget are on GitHub, here:

http://github.com/nickspacek/Google-Calendar-Print

Perl Advent Calendars

2009-12-02T04:43:00.000-08:00

Hohoho, time to study up on Perl tricks! :) I've added a bunch of Perl Advent Calendars to my Google Reader, finding out some interesting stuff. There's a Bundle over on the right that you can add to get them too.

Advanced Printing from Google Calendar

2009-11-27T06:28:00.001-08:00

Trying to get this up quick, so I'm just gonna post the bookmarklet and short instructions:

Drag to bookmarks, or right-click and 'Add Bookmark' (if available)

Go to your calendar
Click the bookmarklet
Click the regular print text/icon in your Calendar
A new interface pops up.
Set your options and click the 'Generate' button
The link that appears will generate your calendar

Reports any problems you have!

Update:

Here are some instructions that might be clearer for some, thanks to GT Product Manager:

Drag the bookmarklet to "Bookmarks" in the menu bar or your Bookmark Toolbar.
Open a Google calendar page.
Click the saved bookmarklet.
Select start and end dates in the top boxes using the drop down calendars or typing in yyyymmdd.
Select the calendars to print and other parameters.
Click "Generate URL."
Click "Link to PDF."
A PDF page loads that can be printed or saved, or you can copy the URL to paste/post elsewhere.

Google Calendar-like Date Time Picker: jQuery DataSpanPicker

2009-10-16T05:00:00.001-07:00

Here's my first shot at a public jQuery plugin. It uses jquery.date_input.js as well. My goal was to replicate the Google Calendar start date/end date picker. Check out the GitHub page for full features! Their system implements some "smarts" when it comes to modifying the end date based on the start date, which is what I liked.

in reference to: nickspacek's jQuery-DateSpanPicker at master - GitHub (view on Google Sidewiki)

Reset Picasa2/3 Hidden Folder Password

2009-01-09T13:15:00.000-08:00

So I had a hidden folder in Picasa that I didn't remember the password for, and I found an article in the Picasa help pages that said you could reset the passwords on the folder by deleting C:\Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Picasa2\db3\catdata_info.pmp.

I only had a single passworded folder, so that probably simplified things; if you look in that file, you might see a 32-character long string with random looking numbers and letters. This is an MD5 hash of the current password. You can change this if you want (I did when testing this using a quick MD5-er at http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5/). I also wanted to know what my old password was, so I found an MD5 brute-forcer and got it in a fairly small amount of time (since I was pretty sure it wasn't a long password).

Kind of random, yeah.

Albania Pictures

2008-07-23T13:11:00.001-07:00

Maine Trip

2008-07-10T19:30:00.000-07:00

Basically we want to go tenting in the wilderness and Maine is a different place to do it. Now we just need to figure out what we can see and for how little money.

This is shows Mt. Katahdin, and a little to the south of it the lean-to along the Appalachian Trail that we may be able to stay at. I'd like to avoid being inside Baxter, since that will probably cost more. The problem that I haven't figured out yet is where to leave the car. I've looked at getting a bus from someplace to the park's edge and going from there, but I'm not sure that's going to work or be cost-effective.

Update from B. Scientific

2008-04-10T07:24:00.001-07:00

Haha, awesome stuff: