Reggie's Ramblings » Personal

Atkins – 2 weeks in!

reggie — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:35:58 +0000

Time for my 2 week checkin. I’ve lost 11 lbs so far and starting to notice clothes fitting a bit better. Didn’t eat very good this week. I ate fewer vegetables and had too many meals where I ate too much. Discovered these large low-carb tortillas and that led to several very large chicken and cheese burritos. I think I also need to start taking some type of fiber supplement to help “move things along”.

Still, 11 lbs in two weeks is excellent progress so I’m still pretty excited. Here’s to week three and the march to dropping another 10 lbs.

Atkins – 1 week in

reggie — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 18:02:00 +0000

So far so good. After 1 week on Atkins, I’ve lost 8 pounds and can definitely tell I’m having fewer “sugar lows” where all I want to do is take a nap. It’s very relatively easy finding things to eat for the main meals of the day but I’m definitely missing snacks. Sugar-free Jello only goes so far.

But still, 8 pounds is an excellent start and I’m very excited what the next week will bring. Stay tuned!

30 Day Challenge – Atkins

reggie — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 15:10:47 +0000

It’s time for action and a quick update. Starting today I’m beginning the induction phase of Atkins and I’ll be using this blog to track progress. I did Atkins for a couple of months several years ago and really lost a lot of weight but I guess the new eating habits just didn’t stick because here I am again.

My breakfast this morning was 2 sausage patties and 3 scrambled eggs with cheese with ice water. Zero carbs. I can already tell that eggs every morning will not work so I’ll need to find some alternatives for some of the days. I’ve seen some muffin recipes that might be tolerable.

So, wish me luck and talk soon.

Battery testing my mobile phones

reggie — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:37:20 +0000

I have 3 mobile phones that I have carried in the past year, an iPhone 4, a Samsung Focus, and a Samsung Galaxy S2 (ATT). There are things about each of them that I like and dislike but the biggest selling point for me is battery life. Recently I decided to do some testing of these phones to see which one has the best battery life. To do this I came up with a simple script that represents some real world use of these phones. I wanted to get an idea of battery life with only 2-3 hours of testing on each phone so the script uses the phone extensively and notes that current battery level at predetermined points.

The script is as follows:

Load 10 predetermined websites (the same websites were used for every phone). We will load each website 5 times each.
Watch a YouTube video at least 30 min in length (same video used for all phones)
Listen to a playlist of music that is stored on the phone. Music is played at max volume through the attached speaker. Playlist was allowed to play for 30 minutes and the same playlist was used by all phones.
Make 10 phone calls, each 1 minute in length. The calls used the speakerphone with the phone placed face up on the desk. The same number was called for each of the 10 calls.
Play video game for 10 minutes (vary by phone)
Take 10 pictures at the highest resolution in common on all phones
Take a 20 minute video at 720p resolution
Use the GPS to navigate a short road trip. The trip was just a few miles and we used the same trip for all phones. Note that we were not doing turn by turn as some of the phones doesn’t support that natively. During this trip we will be bluetooth streaming some music to our truck radio.
And our last test is to load each of the 10 websites we used in test #1 twice using our 3G connection (non-wifi)

Before we give the results, it’s important to note a few things about the phones:

The iPhone 4 is approx 14 month old so it’s reasonable to believe that it’s battery life would be degrated somewhat.
The Samsung Galaxy S2 is running a custom ROM so it’s numbers might be somewhat different than stock though it’s believed that stock might be slightly worse.
The websites we used for the first test are listed below the table
The YouTube video we used was a GOP debate. We used that video because it was 1h 40m long. The url is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBRxb07PPWA
The playlist was a collection of our personal music.
All phones had WIFI enabled and connected to the same access point. All phones had GPS and bluetooth enabled and were set to maximum brightness with auto brightness disabled.
We attempted to test each phone from the same location (our desk) but since we were testing with active sim cards in them and the tests were taking at least 1 hour, some random events did occur which we have noted.
Each phone had a single GMail account enabled and set to push emails to our phone
Every attempt was made to stop any additional background tasks from running during testing
Our Windows Phone 7 phone had their Facebook and twitter accounts removed and the other phones had apps like Facebook removed
The game played on the iPhone was Temple Run. The games played on the Samsung Focus were Shuffleboard and Angry Birds. The game played on the Galaxy was Angry Birds.

And now the results in table form. Note that the battery percentage listed in each column is the battery percentage the phone reports after running the test.

Test	iPhone 4	Focus	Galaxy S2
Load 10 websites	96%	96%	97%
YouTube video	88%	85%	90%
Music playlist	84%	79%	87%
Make 10 phone calls	78%	73%	83%
Play game	73%	68%	78%
Take 10 pictures	71%	67%	77%
Shoot 20 min of video	58%	54%	66%
GPS trip	50%	43%	58%
Non-wifi Page Loading	45%	36%	54%

The websites we used for our web loading test are full desktop versions of the home pages for the following sites.

Yahoo
Slate
CNN
Microsoft
New York Times
ESPN
Oracle home page
Fox Sports
Slashdot
Fox News

This study is pretty unscientific but every effort was made to treat the phones fairly and get an accurate read on battery life on each device. Due to the age of some of the devices, your results may vary. Drop me a line with any comments.

XAMPP – Where have you been all my life?

reggie — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:28:06 +0000

I love WordPress. Really there isn’t a better blogging platform on this platform. It’s that good. And I’ve been using it to self-host my blog for the past year or so. For awhile, I hosted it using II6 on WHS v1. That was a real pain as it took several days to find a URL rewriting solution that worked with IIS6. The past few months I’ve been hosting it on my Windows 7-based media center. Since that runs IIS7, URL rewriting was easier using the standard URL rewrite module.

A few days ago I decided to test out WHS “Vail”. After installing it, I wanted to move my blog onto it so I downloaded the Microsoft Web Platform Installer. It promptly let me know that it couldn’t find any products in my selected language. Huh? This is what drives people crazy about Windows software. Crap just doesn’t make sense sometimes.

I googled and found several links describing how to manually setup WordPress on Windows Server 2008 but each of them had about 30 steps. Sheesh. I was about to punt back to media center when I remembered trying out XAMPP a few months back.

Man, this thing is beautiful. I downloaded the installer, double clicked it, and watched it dump Apache, MySQL, and a bunch of other stuff into c:xampp. It then brought up this nice UI where I could enable Apache and MySQL as a service and start them.

A simple file copy of my wordpress folder to the c:xampphtdocs, a copy of my wordpress mysql database to c:xamppmysqldata and create the proper username in mysql and I was set. That only other thing I had to do was to open the appropriate holes in my Windows firewall. Five minutes and I was done! Windows may be pretty awesome but XAMPP is pretty awesome too.

My month on OS/X is finished

reggie — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 20:28:20 +0000

Well, I’ve finished my month on OS/X. It wasn’t really a month but rather a couple of weeks here and there. To be honest I didn’t really hit too many situations where I felt like I needed Windows. I didn’t have good luck with Chicken-of-the-VNC and the Mac version of remote desktop is not nearly as good as on Windows. That being said I love the fact that iCal and Contacts sync with Google.

I’m writing this under Windows 7 but I’m typing it into the web UI. I’ll likely hang out in OS/X a bit more as I have some video editing I need to do and iMovie just blows away any free products on Windows.

Loving me some mint!

reggie — Mon, 10 May 2010 02:14:50 +0000

I’m not sure if I manage my money like most people but I’m sure falling in love with Mint. To be fair I’ve only been seriously using it for the past week of so but I’ve but with a key workaround I’ve managed to replace Money with Mint. Yes, I know Money has been discontinued by Microsoft so I could move to Quicken.

I signed up for Mint several months ago but they just recently added my bank so I can manage my checking and savings accounts. The charts are great. The quick links that show my spending in a given category are nice. And the budget tracking and alerts are awesome. They also recently added a feature that allows you to manually add a “pending” transaction. This is part of what I needed to fully move. The other thing was the ability to “reconcile” transactions against the bank. This is where the workaround comes in.

The way mint works is that you login and then it downloads transactions from your bank and shows you all non-pending transactions along with your current balance. Seeing my current balance is nice but I also want to see money spent on things that have not cleared yet such as bills paid or large expenditures I just made. This is where the manual add comes in.

To reconcile your receipts to the bank you have to be a little clever. You have to use the tags feature of Mint. First, create a new tag called ‘Checked’. You can call it whatever you like but I thought ‘Checked’ sounded good. Then you need to apply the ‘Checked’ tag to all of your transactions that you are satisfied are correct. My guess, at this point, is that is all of them.

The next thing is to understand that when new transactions come in they have no tags applied. So, to see all transactions that are ‘not checked’ then you simply need to do a search. Enter this in the search box -tag:Checked. That means find me all transactions that are not checked. Then, compare each one with the receipts you have and apply the checked tag appropriately.

It’s actually very easy. Now you have the power of mint with the ability to add pending transactions and reconcile your account with your receipts. Nice.

My 30 days on OS/X – day 6

reggie — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:32:05 +0000

Well, I’ve only had to run back to Windows once. I have VNC installed on my Windows 7 Media Center computer but somehow I just couldn’t get Chicken of the VNC to work right and we were having a volume issue.

So far what’s the verdict? Well, there are some things I really like and some things I don’t. Here’s a breakdown of the software I was using on Windows, what I’m using on Mac, and if it’s better or worse.

HydraIRC is a great Windows IRC client. On the Mac I’m using Colloquy and I must say I prefer Colloquy. It’s faster to connect and has a better default profile for notifying you when things happen. With HydraIRC you could easily miss a PM. Not going to happen with Colloquy.
Skype is skype
I use Digsby for IM, Facebook, and Twitter on Window. On the Mac, I’m using Adium for IM and Facebook and Twhirl for twitter. This is a push. I prefer how Adium handles conversations but prefer Digsby for twitters.
Use Chrome for browsing on both but I have to say that I prefer Chrome on Windows.
I love how Apple Mail handles mail. The keyboard interface is great and the find is awesome. Much better than Thunderbird. I also love the LDAP integration with Address Book (seeing my co-workers pictures in mail is great)
iMovie is GarageBand is better than anything at the same price on Windows
iPhoto is ok

I still plan on finishing my 30 day experiment. Will I stay on OS/X after the experiment is over? I doubt it. There’s simply not enough ‘can’t live without’ features on OS/X to justify the pain. Ok, back to work.

It’s time for something fun

reggie — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 16:23:04 +0000

So, a few years ago I had this rule that about every 6 months I would use a version of Linux for a few weeks just to see how it had progressed and compare that to Windows. I can’t really recall when I stopped but I do remember that I really enjoyed having a better understanding of other systems. I think it’s time to do it again. However, this time I won’t be using Linux.

I have access to both Windows 7 and Macs. I’ve been a Windows developer for a long time but with the improvements made in virtual machine solutions I’ve started doing most of my development work in vms. I find it refreshing to keep all my development work sandboxed in a system that I can easily take and rollback snapshots as needed. I recently ran some winsat checks on my native box (a Core i7 rig with 8gigs DDR3 memory) and a virtual machine configured to use all 8 cpus. The results were nearly identical with the virtual machine turning in 95% performance on cpu tests and beating the host system in disk tests (the vm was using a 80gig file as a disk).

So, since the VM is giving me enough performance to do my work I am really free to use whatever I like as a host system. So, here I am preparing to embark on a fun adventure.

I”m going to use Snow Leopard (in 64 bit mode) for 30 days while doing my Windows work in a VM. I don’t intend to run back to Windows for anything during that time as I really want to force myself to use OS/X. During this time I’ll blog frequently about issues I’m facing, things I like, things I don’t like, and work arounds I’ve found.

So, to get started here’s what my day normally looks like on the computer.

Lots of development work on Windows (Visual Studio 2008 and 2010)
IRC/Skype chatting with friends and co-workers
Email with co-workers
Using Google calendar to manage my day to day activities
Editing Word/Excel/Powerpoint documents (these are more rare these days but they do happen)
Watching recorded tv shows from my Media Center HTPC
Watching shows from NetFlix and Hulu
Listening to music from Pandora, Slacker, Sky.FM, and personal music collection
Blog reading/writing
Facebook and twitter’ing

Well, wish me luck.

Enjoying March Madness

reggie — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:12:52 +0000

It’s been a lot of hard work (and we are still not finished) but it’s time for March Madness and there’s nothing like watching it in 140″ of glorious 1080i HD. Behold!