Gnubbs Blog

I was reading a post over on Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters about search engines and relavance. Reading it got me thinking about what I need in search results that I don’t currently get. I came up with a couple of features that would be very nice.

Does this page include pop-ups? I almost could care less how good the info on a page is if it is going to use pop-up adds. Knowing this up front would allow me to avoid a lot of pages that are too annoying to make the info they provide worthwhile.

Does this page have a feed? Hey nothing says a page contains worthwhile content like it being enough in the loop to have an RSS feed of some type. There are plenty of examples of worthless pages with feeds, but it is a good clue.

Does this page use flash? Similar to pop-ups. I want to know if a page is going to waste 15 seconds of my life loading flash before I click on that link.

Informing me of these items would help me a lot in sorting my pages. There could even be a button to reorder so that pages that use pop-ups are at the end of the list. I don’t think any of these should be used when computing ranks, but it would be a nice extra bit of info to know.

gnubbs

Stephanie and I are driving to California this coming saturday to spend a week roaming around San Francisco and Yosemite. Before I put that many miles on my car, I wanted to replace my oil and transmission fluids. On saturday I suckered my friend JT into giving me a hand because, well, I am still down one hand. On friday I went to get my fluids from the local Subie repair shop, and discovered that they didn’t have any of the fluids I was looking for despite what they told me on the phone.

The oil was no big deal because I am going to have to change it out after the trip anyways. So, I just put in Mobil 1. The transmission and rear diff are another story. Since these are only changed out every 30K miles, I didn’t want to settle for what they had. So, I did some searching and found a company called 3R Racing. Saturday morning I gave them a call and they had what I was looking for. Jt and I hopped in the car and drove the 45 minutes to the south side of denver. We got there and discovered that this place is a supply store for actual race cars. Being careful not to accidentally grab something absurdly priced (like a $75 quart of brake fluid), I get the Redline 75W90NS for my transmission and 75W90 for my rear diff.

75W90NS: “This GL-5-type geal oil doesn’t contain the friction modifiers for limited-slip hypoid differentials. This makes the transmission synchronizers come to equal speeds more quickly, allowing faster shifting and much easier low-temperature shifting. Can also be used in racing limited-slip differentials where weak spring design causes too much wheel spin.” (by way of Redline Oil)

I chose this fluid because the WRX 5sp is a quirky transmission. It is honestly a bit of a pain in the ass. It grinds if you are not careful, getting into first gear can be interesting, and it is generally just odd. I have read from a couple of MTF whores on NASIOC that this is one of the better working oils for this transmission, so I thought I would give it a shot.

Back at JT we set to work. First up we pulled off my front rotors and took them to be turned. Next we replaced the oil. We quickly discovered that the shop had given me the wrong oil filter. Back to the auto parts store. Our final pain was getting the rear diff fluid into the car. Obviously the people at Redline don’t expect hillbillies to be doing this work in thier driveway, so their bottle is not designed to make this easy. With a water bottle, rigid hose, and some electrical tape we rig together a way to get the new fluid into the fill whole.

Eerything assembled and I get the car started again. Watching the engine temp I check and make sure there are no leaks or odd sounds. The tranny whines for the first 30 seconds or so after starting, then that goes away and everything sounds normal. I let the engine come up to temp and then power it off and check the levels.

The transmission is definately a bit nicer now. Engaging first is better, and there is a good decrease in the amount of force needed to shift. No miracles, just a small but significant improvement. Unfortunately I have heard that this only lasts a few thousand miles and then it will get back to it’s old self…

gnubbs

I have been doing software testing all week, so haven’t posted much interesting. This weekend I am going to be replacing the oil, transmission fluid, and rear diff fluid on my car. Have to stop by my local subaru unauthorized repair shop to get parts on the way home from work. The only downside is between Redline or Motul motor oil and Redline gear oil I need 10 quarts at about $8.50 a quart. The upside is that I only need to change the transmission fluids every 30k miles.

On another note I have discovered the first thing wrong with my car. One of the coolant lines that runs from my turbo to the resevoir that sits above it has a slow leak. (My turbo is both water and oil cooled.) So, I get a drop of collant dripping off and hitting my uppipe about every 15 seconds. Looking at the build up of scale around the leak it looks like this has been going on for a while. I am finding out tonight if the repair shop has this part and how much it is. If it is more than about $20, I will just spend the $130 to buy all Samco silicon accessory hoses.

I got the stitches out of my hand today. They were replaced by butterfly bandages because there is still a ton of healing that needs to occur. Today is my first day without large portions of my hand covered in bandages in about a week. That hand is still very sensitive and pretty worthless, but less worthless than a couple of days ago.

gnubbs

It has been a couple of days since I posted. Not much is going on. My hand is back to being able to be used for typing without too much pain (sans use of my pinkie.) Talking to coworkers about my hand though, it seems like a couple times in our lives we just get hurt really badly doing something really common.

Stephanie’s mom got her hand eaten by a lawnmower. My mom got severe cuts when a glass broke while she was washing it. A coworker almost lost a couple of fingers to a table saw. Another coworker tore a bunch of muscles in his back working with drywall this weekend. I guess that it is just a risk of living. Don’t get me wrong though, I am certainly going to be more careful with my knives from now on.

Other than that not much is going on. I am changing my oil, transmission, and rear diff fluids this weekend. And turning my front rotors to try and get rid of some shutter in my brakes. Well, I am going to do the best I can but I think JT might get stuck doing a lot of it. Stupid hand….

gnubbs

On Saturday Stephanie, JT, Mariko, and I went to see the Cubs play the Rockies in Denver. We didn’t buy tickets in advance so, we just headed down early to see what the scalpers had. We found a guy with four tickets behind home plate. They were $50 and 34 rows back though, so they didn’t seem like a great deal. We ended up getting tickets in midfield out a bit past 3rd base. We were 20 rows back, but the tickets were only $25 each.

This is the first time I have went to a pro baseball game in a really long time. I think since high school. That is really too bad, because I had forgotten just how fun they are. It would have been more fun if the Cubs hadn’t lost, but that is they way it works sometimes.

We even found a bar while we were waiting for the game to start that sold Old Style. It isn’t quite the same as seeing a game at Wrigly I hear, but as good as we could do in Denver. A nice way to spend the day.

(For the record, I am a White Sox fan. However, I would much rather see the Cubbies when then the Rockies.)

gnubbs

(I am slowly starting to get back to normal with my bandaged hand. Typing is a mix of 50% pain, and 50% frustration at only being able to use three of my left fingers. Damn hand.)

So, I was just given $100 and I am planning on spending it on my car. However, I am not real sure what to buy. I could get floor mats because my car has none and I don’t want to wear a whole where my right foot sits. Nice, blue floor mats with STI embroidered in pink (ur. I mean cherry blossum red). $74.95

I could get a nice MOMO shift knob to match my steering wheel. ~$80

I might be able to get stainless steel goodridge brake lines. Although by the time I throw in shipping in Motul brake fluid I will be closer to $160 which I might not be able to do today.

The problem with getting anything that I really have to install is that my hand is all jacked up and it will be several weeks before I can do any work on my car. Any other suggestions? I wonder if I can find a used GTech on ebay….

gnubbs

Last night while cooking dinner, I tried with all of my heart to cut off my left pinkie at the base. I didn’t succeed, but did some real damage trying.

In the end I got to see one of my tendons, got 5 stitches, a month off climbing, and taco bell for dinner. Not a great night, but I was pretty sure I was going to have to see a hand surgeon, so it could have been worse. It does not appear that I have done any serious damage, but it has now taken me about 5 minutes to type this with only my right hand. Not sure how long it will be before I do any long posts again.

gnubbs

This weekend Stephanie and my brother had a conference to go to in Snowmass (about 1 mile down the road from Aspen, CO.) So, Bryan’s wife Teri and I tagged along to have a good time while they were going and sitting in rooms filled with lawyers. It ended up being a really good time.

We left Boulder around noon on Friday, arriving at our condo in Snowmass at about 4:30pm. After having a beer or two, we headed down to a big dinner for the conference attendees. The band was not great and the crowd was not exactly a group of hard partiers. However, the food was pretty good and there were halfway decent clowns and magicians. It was enough for Stephanie and I to keep ourselves entertained for a couple of hours. Afterwards we all headed back to our condo for a pretty tame night in.

Saturday, Stephanie had a meeting to go to starting at 8am. I woke up around the time she got back at noon, and the five of us (including my niece) headed into Aspen. We spent the day shopping, trying on expensive things, and pretending to be rich. I tried on a nice white sports coat (a cool grand at Ralph Lauren), and a cowboy hat. Stephanie did something truely entertaining though.

Bryan, Stephanie, and I left Teri and Marly while they were shopping in the gap. We headed across the street to check out Gucci and Dior. Stephanie found some things she liked, but walked out empty handed. We then headed into the jewelry store next door. I knew this was a mistake when I saw there were about 12 pieces of jewelry on display. While chatting with one of the sales guys, he insisted on showing us the largest diamond ring I have ever seen. It was something like six carats of brown-pink diamond. He then insisted that Stephanie try it one. She of course loved it. The downside — it cost $495,000.

While she had it on, I noticed that the salesperson had something in his hand. He was holding a panic button in case we did something stupid. Can’t say I’ve ever seen that before.

For dinner we went to Matsuhisu, owned by very famous japanese chef Matsuhisu Nobu. Oddly, his restaraunt in New York is more known for one of the chefs that work for him — Iron Chef Morimoto of Iron Chef and Iron Chef America fame. The food was excellent, although I would bet it would have been much better if I had gotten one of the fusion japanese dishes Nobu is famous for. Overall, we had a very nice dinner.

Sunday morning we headed back to boulder pretty early.

gnubbs

A while ago I posted about creating an online store that used a DB, templates, and perl to generate static web pages. It sounds like the time has come for me to work with the owner of that site again on some improvements.

In doing research for these changes, it suddenly clicked with me that I should have just used mod_rewrite and dynamic pages instead. I don’t know why I didn’t do that before… Anyway this time we are looking at scrapping the current ecommerce provider and using a suite of tools called osCommerce. I have been playing with it some and it seems incredibly nice.

It is open source and runs under most web environments that support php and mysql. I wasn’t expecting much out of it, but my intial foray into setting it up was very impressive. Basically, copy the files to the server and run a web based install. It creates all the DB tables. It checks and warns you of configuration changes you need to make once the install is done. (For example, if it detects an install directory it prints a warning when accessing the page saying it is insecure.)

Overall just very nice. If you are looking for the tools to set up an online store of some kind, I would stronly recommend checking this out. I will post more thoughts on it as I work on converting the store over.

gnubbs

So, I decided last friday that I wanted to spend some time and squash all reported bugs in my software. I didn’t have any high priority bugs to fix, just some little things that would make the Everything Engine a little more user friendly. This has been a productive week and I feel that this is actually making a very significant improvement in the site. Not giant new tool improvement, but lots of polishing. Lots of tedium. I am down to my last confirmed bug that I am fixing, and I have one that I am pretty sure is fixed but I am in the process of testing.

The downside is that it is so, so boring. None of the bugs are particularly interesting, and none have been too challenging to fix. Just a lot of little things that have crept up over time. However, I am going on a week of work and I feel my mind is turning to mush. How do I combat this boredom? Thinking about the next project I am going to be working on helps some. Reading up on some of my favorite bloggers helps as well.

The biggest help is the Software Reading Group that have started participating in at my company. Basically a bunch of the software engineers get together and discuss some topic. Rigth now we are talking about the boost libraries for c++. Even though I am not programming in c++ these days, it is nice to sit around and talk shop with other programmers. That is one thing that I miss about living in the hive.

Oh well. Back to the editor. Fixing my logon script to always redirect back to the page that you were trying to access when your credentials failed.

gnubbs