Just got back from a memorial service for a close friend of lainens who passed away last month. I knew Leni (all of lainen’s theatre friends have nicknames it seems ;) from the many shows I used to help lainens out with. The memorial service was both sad and funny because everyone was telling stories about that time of their lives – they would do two or three shows a year back then.

What amazes me, and I guess people with kids will recognize this, is that while only a couple years have passed since I last saw the kids they have *grown*! Leni and Bill (Bill passed 4 years ago) have three great kids ages 14, 16 and 17 and I just remember them as three balls of energy that were always laughing and running around. Now one is almost out of high school and wants to be a teacher, one is a junior fire fighter (well almost, she isn’t quite 16 :) and the youngest is going to high school next year. It was fun catching up on their lives and talking with them.

I need to figure out how I can keep in touch on a more regular basis with them as the vibe I got about them living with their Aunt didn’t seem like it was all goodness and fun :( I did give them my cell phone number but I think we need to visit and be available if they need anything.

This Sunday we will be packing all of us into the truck and driving down to Maryland to visit with our best friend and to celebrate his mom’s birthday (July 4th — same day as my dad’s – how cool is that :). Hopefully the three hour trip will be as un-eventful as last time but you never know with lainen’s dad. It will be cool to catch up with them and mom Jinx (she lives in California now) and lainens will have a chance to hang with Elora and Kira (Welton’s kids) and her best friend Melissa (Welton’s sister.)

_topic change alert_ ;)

I’ve been thinking recently of how to keep track of unit test information and results for Chandler. Since the tinderclients perform continious builds, run unit tests and generate data for those steps, there should be a way to chart that over time and give online status information via email, irc or web.

My first thought was that a database would be needed and I’ve even started to map out what the schema would be but just now (yep, really just now ;) I realized I should use the Chandler repository to store this info – how cool would that be! I would have to mirror the data to some sort of flat file to ensure no loss of data tho.

Time to find out what the data model is and what domains of information are available and also time to go hug the family.

ciao

The first private space trip happened this morning – how cool is that! I’ve always told anyone who would listen that I would take a job as a janitor if it meant I could work in space. With this trip I really believe that commercial trips to space are a soon thing instead of a later thing.

When I started this experiment called web logging, aka journal, I decided to not turn post anything overtly political. My views are complicated and change as new information is discovered/learned, so I don’t think I need to spout my point of view :) There is enough of that already. Some recent items just make me want to scream and shout tho.

–rant on–
Recently the State Department revised the 2003 Terrorism Report – evidently they did not count the proper numbers saying many things caused it the error: like database complications and other items. My take on this is basically: isn’t this someone’s specific *job*. I don’t think that there are that many attacks that someone couldn’t go thru a monthly summary and just add the freaking numbers.

Later I heard that the whole issue came up because people basically took them to task on why *this* attack or *that* attack wasn’t on the list. Turns out that they have a very “fluid” definition of what an attack is.

This is all from an administration that is interpreting the Geneva Convention in such a way as to put into peril every military person in harms way. Even the Judge Advocate General’s lawyers have finally had enough – evidently they are talking with the New York Bar about it since it’s the civilian lawyers screwing things up.
–rant off-

We now return you to your regularly (yea right regular) updated web log

I’m glad I was able to get home in time to watch the Reagan State Funeral procession – that’s something you want to see if you can.

While I’m not a republican now, Reagan was president during my tour in the Marines so my impression of him was a good one. I now realize that many of his economic decisions were not right but you can’t discount the good he did in the Foreign Policy arena.

Seeing the honor guard brought back memories for me of my time in the Marines and that was cool.

Later I started working on a home-made light control board for a friend who does community theatre. Doing some woodwork was a good way to end the day.

I’ve updated the tbox module for tellbot to retrieve and announce emails and I’ve added a basic insult module. Well, I copied the perl code from mozbot and converted it to python :)

“tellbot 0.3″:/code/tellbot-0.3.tgz

I think I’m ready to live test my tinderbox announcement module for tellbot. Currently it is scanning for an email every minute or so and then parses any received messages. Status messages are then stored in a dictionary based on the build name.

Each new message is checked to see if the incoming status is one of the defined alert strings. If it is, the module makes an immediate announcement to the defined channel. You can also ask for a status at any time. By including a build or tree name in the status request, the module will reply with the last known status for the build or all builds that have the associated tree name.

Currently most of the parameters are hard-coded, but I’m working on a mozbot style var set/get environment to let irc messages be used to update/query any parameter values.