Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

John Paul seems to be enjoying the morning and since John Paul is all smiles when visiting Costco everything should work out. In Colorado Springs, Costco opens at 9:30 AM mountain time on Saturday mornings. Costco sells a variety of things in bulk quantities and a few things in single serving size. Today just might be the day that John Paul and I grab a few items for Joni in preparation for the big celebration tomorrow. Outside of considering traveling plans I have been stuck on why the Fox executives cancelled two promising if not rather low production budget shows “Breaking In” and “The Finder” in preparation for new fall shows. What franchise reboot or derivative crime drama are they planning on debuting?

Have you heard the weight of our present situation call out, “Now would be the time…” or maybe it could have been my imagination? If you have been paying attention, then you probably have already guessed that coding is probably going to happen every weekend throughout the entire summer. This summer really is going to be my summer of code. I’m pretty sure that I am going to have to replace the beta version of Windows 8 on my Asus Eee netbook with Fedora 16. More or less you could probably say that this will be the summer of big data coding. I’m going to designate my netbook “The Coder.”

Summer of Code Project Update: The project is currently 25% complete. Module one is now complete and running within my production environment. This marks the first significant update I have made to my basic web crawler/spider since the winter of 2007/2008.

Now is the time to make it happen… code development at the NPL Research Group is now in full swing. All kidding aside building a new piece of software is all about seizing the day and the night (carpe diem carpe noctem). The basement has been transformed into a fully functionally workplace. My desk area is clean and the bookshelf is fully covered with a 4×6 whiteboard. Both the Microsoft wireless elite keyboard and the explorer mouse have new batteries.

I was able to complete all of my project scoping. Completing project scoping marked the realization of a major milestone. I almost ran upstairs and yelled, “Carpe vinum!” Instead of grabbing the wine bottle I decided to grab a Five Hour Energy and get back to work. I’m handling all of the coding myself I had to full scope the project and then break the project into manageable chunks. Fortunately, in the coding work a large software project can sometimes be divided into modules. It should take me about 4 weekends to complete the principle development. Building one major module a week is an aggressive goal with a development team of one, but I think it is possible.

While I am working I would like to be able to watch some Blu-ray movies on my second screen. However, it does not look like that is going to happen anytime soon. I’m still a little pretty mad about Cyberlink’s PowerDVD not being able to function properly when installed on a Windows 8 computer. Who designs security restrictions that render software unusable when the operating system is upgrade? Apparently, the software engineers over at Cyberlink are more interested in locking down features than in providing battle tested ready for anything code.

The integrity of CyberLink PowerDVD is under threat

Some of Cyberlink’s code developers are apparently working to correct this issue, but a solution has not been announced or even foreshadowed. Let’s talk about something that works for a few minutes…

I’m a big fan of the new Amazon Prime PlayStation 3 (PS3) software interface. For those of you playing along at home, last week’s pan-ultimate-uber Amazon Prime video picks of the week were “The Man with One Red Shoe” and “Mr. Baseball.” This week’s Amazon Prime video picks of the week are “Short Circuit” and “Spies Like Us.” Over the next two months I’ll be building a top ten list of watchable movie classics that are available via Amazon Prime streaming.