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"Murphy was an optimist!"

All things come to an end May 2, 2006 9:52 pm

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Family, Lucy, Pets , 6comments

Our Lucy

Our older dog, a golden mix, is wasting. I think she has decided she is at the end of her days. She has not eatten or drank for 3 days. She would not even take a hotdog or hamburger from me tonight.

She is a great dog! I do not want to lose her. I want to take responsibility and blame myself thinking that I could have done better for her somehow. She sits in the yard right now and is refusing to come in yet as I speak to her and pet her she holds her head high and wags her tail like a puppy. I will not force her in quite yet but will check back on her in a bit and give a more forceful encouragement. Perhaps outside is better right now as she is not holding her stomach, bowels or bladder well. All this developed rapidly.

How am I to prepare the children? Will this totally disrupt Tommy’s final weeks at school? Do we spend money trying to buy Lucy some time or assume she is in pain and put her down? What does Lucy want? There should be more time.

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Project Done! May 2, 2006 7:19 pm

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : ColdFusion, Daily Life, Programming, Technology , 1 comment so far

Most of the time I try to avoid talking about my work. Often it just is not appropriate. However, many people have no idea what I do. I find solutions to computer problems with a focus on web application development and database design; usually my work is in content management, inventory control, and e-commerce/point of sales. I have bid projects on automation of assembly lines, and done work as diverse as writing C++ programs with the aid of Russian programmers (that app had many millions of downloads btw). I sometimes get hands on and build computers or troubleshoot and repair systems. Often, I find some of my solutions to problems both fun and really cool.

I just completed two fun projects that each tormented me with overruns on deadlines due to technical hurdles. The latter was simply a statistical report of some tracked performance on a website. The challenge in organizing and categorizing the data came down to database design choices previously made by the client including housing some of the data in a MS SQL database and some of the data in a MS Access database. A requirement was speed so the choice was made to place as much onus on the MS SQL database for preparing the data. Unfortunately, this came down only to using some aggregate functions to get the totals and unioning a couple of tables. I did have the pleasure of writing a neat little UDF to convert a list into some table results. Because of the way the aggregate functions had to be written, the data came out neither grouped appropriately and with some unavoidably duplicate data.

Fortunately, ColdFusion now has the ability to perform queries on queries including the joining of data across different datasources. So now that I had data appropriately summed albeit out of order and with some duplicates (as stated previously), I could write a query to pull the labels from the MS Access database. All labels and details were in Access; all statistical information, referred to only by id, was in SQL. Next I used a query of query to join the resultset from the stored procedure with the result set from the Access database and now the data started to resemble something meaningful; however, duplicate information still litered the results.

ColdFusion also allows for manually building a result set. I’ve seen the unfortunate growth in popularity of the term "fake query" which is a terrible misnomer. It is a manual query result set. You, the programmer, are programmatically reproducing a set of data that otherwise would have been delivered via a database engine. So, using a loop to step through our latest result set formed from the QoQ and logic within the loop, I create a result set that combines information from the semi-duplicated rows into a single row. In the process I wrote a slick little number using a structure to hold the grand totals for each segment that I could refer to mathmatically when outputing the result set. Then I simply display the results reaching into the structure for additional information when necessary.

Wahla! Greek.

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$10,000 for your idea; $2million for your robot May 2, 2006 6:16 pm

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Contest, Of Interest , add a comment

Microsoft is having a contest for your ideas. 12 entrants will actually develop their ideas.

It begins with contestants submitting their cool ideas for projects built with Express, and completes when 12 selected finalists complete their projects and compete head-to-head with each other. The Grand Prize winner walks away with $10,000.

Oops. The rules state that the idea phase just ended. "The Idea Phase of the Contest begins 12:01 a.m. (PT) on March 13, 2006 and ends at 11:59 p.m. on April 30, 2006."

You still have time to enter the Darpa Challenge!

Teams will compete to build an autonomous vehicle able to complete a 60-mile urban course safely in less than 6 hours.

For track A, $1million development funds are available; for track B, $100,000 is available.

One way involves teams submitting a detailed proposal for up to $1 million of technology development funds in response to a DARPA solicitation. The Government will obtain limited license rights to technologies developed using this funding.

or

The second track is similar to that used for Grand Challenge 2005: teams will submit applications and participate in a series of qualification activities. Each team that participates as a semi-finalist in the National Qualification Event (NQE) will be awarded $50,000. Each team that is successful at NQE will receive $100,000 and compete in the Urban Challenge final event.

Details on competing for funding are available.

I so want to do this!

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Next Darpa Challenge Announced May 2, 2006 7:40 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Announcements, Of Interest, Robotics, Technology , 1 comment so far

I swore I was going to participate in the next Darpa Challenge. I actually had discussions with some people when the first one came out. I think we could have done well.

Teams will compete to build an autonomous vehicle able to complete a 60-mile urban course safely in less than 6 hours.

Not sure I can move fast enough. Need funding!

More in the press release.

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Code Whippin’ May 2, 2006 4:47 am

Posted by Doug McCaughan in : ColdFusion, Daily Life, Programming, Technology , add a comment

ColdFusion’s StructSort has been kicking my head in. Showin’ me who’s boss. Byting me to bits. Making me loopy.

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