My Quirky Bucket List

My Quirky Bucket List
Ahh the proverbial bucket list. Its that time of year, when people begin to think of New Year’s resolutions. So I prefer to think a little longer term, not just in the next year, but lifetime….  As we complete yet another orbit around the sun, its time to  realize as discomforting as it may be, ...

Bitcoin – currency fail .. or future of money?

Bitcoin - currency fail .. or future of money?
I’ve been pretty intrigued by bitcoin lately. If your not familiar with bitcoin you can of course head over to the wikipedia bitcoin   entry or you can head over to this no nonsense  post bitcoing post on  gizmodo .  In a nutshell bitcoin is an on-line digital currency (sometimes referred to as a crypto-currency) ...

html5 – javascript game frameworks? – Game Development

html5 - javascript game frameworks? - Game Development
HTML5 Gaming I’m beginning to look into various html5 javascript game and graphics frameworks.  The toughest part is always choosing a good framework in the beginning, since its such a time investment to learn a new API , plus hope that the framework is popular enough so bugs are fixed quickly and it matures rapidly.   This ...

the Running 3-Amigos

the Running 3-Amigos
Christine, Duncan and myself, have been very competitive this year. What I find so enjoyable about our ongoing running rivalry , is how close in capability all three of us are. On any given day one of us can beat the other two and this has made for some memorable races.

Code Samples – Preventing simultaneous web updates 3

Code Samples - Preventing simultaneous web updates
Below are some interesting problems and solutions that I have come accross. Problem: In a web based system how to you prevent simultaneous web updates (aka overwrites) to the same record by different users seeing potentially different data. This is a play on the old airline reservation problem you find in older computer science text books. If ...

My first visit to Dominican Republic

My first visit to Dominican Republic
I recently traveled to Dominican Republic (D.R.) . I had previously been to the Bahamas, Cancun and Puerto Rico, so I was curious to visit D.R. as I have several friend who are from there.  It was a fun trip and I had a good experience.  There were a few hiccups, like my gms phone didn’t work with the ...

Open Water Swimming 2012 2

Open Water Swimming 2012
I took up swimming in earnest at the end of last year. Knowing I had wanted to take part in a couple of triathlons this season, I figured I better work on my swimming. Never having swum as a kid , I was pretty much self taught. Even though I had swum before my freestyle ...

Triathlon Season 2012

Triathlon Season 2012
2012 Triathlon… a return So 2012 was an interesting year for me. After more than 15 years of not competing in any kind of athletics I decide to take up running, swimming and biking and take part in a bunch of races all in one year.. . Crazy .. for sure.. but sooo .. much ...

Sample Code: Quick and Dirty PHP Cache 4

Sample Code: Quick and Dirty PHP Cache
Here’s a variation of a PHP caching script. One of the things I frequently find myself doing for page(s) that take a long time to render, especially if they are a long running process, is to generally save a recent cached page (or more specifically) cached content and serving that up, when I need to have an immediate page ...