Guest Posting

I'm guest posting on my wife's blog once a month for a while to talk about music and what we're currently listening to in our house. Check her blog out at http://uniquety.blogspot.com. She's a righteous babe.

And so it begins...

Tomorrow I start into my healthy kick again. I know that sounds kind of like an arbitrary day to start, but for the past two weeks we've had some people visiting our site from Germany, and we've taken them out and shown them to some good restaurants. Yes, another excuse, but no longer! I am going to get back into the habit of using my BodyBugg and entering my food consumption on the website. I hope to be back down around my low by summer time and I hope to stay there instead of going back up. Wish me luck.

Motivation

Last year between January and May I dropped about 55lbs of weight and felt really good. I did this using a BodyBugg device and being a stickler about entering my food intake and uploading my calorie burn. Jogging with my wife almost every night to help her train for the Wasatch Back Ragnar was also a large factor. My problem since May of last year has been the eating. I really enjoy food. Different foods, with different textures, with different spices really interest me. My wife is a great cook and she makes pretty healthy stuff, but I eat too much of it. That is my problem. I do like healthy foods, they satisfy my interest in different types of foods with different textures, tastes and spices, but I eat too much of them. Even healthy foods, when eaten in large quantities, will add to one's waist. I've been trying to get the motivation to be a stickler about entering my eating and calorie burn like I did last year, but I can't seem to do it. I don't know why, I felt way better in May of last year than I ever have in my life. I weighed less at 28 than I did in high school. Any tips would be appreciated.

Old Times

In the past, my wife has asked me to play my trombone again. It's a "talent" I have and really enjoyed middle school through the first year in college. I started out in college as a music major. I really wanted to follow in the footsteps of Mr. Polychronis, my high school band teacher, and teach music to high school kids. Then, reality set in my first semester of college. I had 11 classes and 17 credit hours. I had to practice a huge amount and I realized I wasn't really that great at the trombone. I can play in groups pretty well and contribute a good sound, but I don't think I would ever be good enough to teach trombone to other people and have them turn out that great. It was a hard lesson I had to learn. So, after the first week of my second semester in college, I made the decision to switch majors. I went to the registrar and switched my schedule to be that of a computer science major. This decision was one of the best decisions I have ever made. I enjoyed computer science classes way more than the music classes, but I still played in a couple bands and enjoyed that. I think it was my second year in college that I stopped playing trombone at all. I didn't really have time in my schedule and I wasn't a music major, so I just quit. I've missed playing in a group. There is something about being in a group of musicians, and playing a piece of music that is really moving for me. Music speaks directly to my soul. Some pieces of music have the power to elevate my thoughts and feelings (this is mostly classical music; Dvorak's New World Symphony is an example). I haven't played my trombone regularly for about 6 years. I haven't practiced regularly and the only time I've played it is when my kids really want me to. My wife asked as a Christmas present to her that I audition for the EVMCO, an LDS music group that has children's choirs, adult choirs and an orchestra. I told her I would. I filled out the "I'm interested" form a week ago and received a response telling me about auditions and so forth. I'm nervous. I haven't played regularly in so long, I wonder if I am wasting the time of the audition people to go in there. I do love music; it has been a passion of mine for as long as I can remember. I miss it. So, Merry Christmas, My Love, I'll do my best.

Cover Me

I saw this link on Digg that said "Neil Young sings 'Fresh Prince'" (or something similar) and was instantly hooked. I love covers, especially when someone completely outside the genre of the original does the cover. Johhny Cash singing "Rusty Cage" by Soundgarden?




Love it.

Me First and Gimme Gimmes doing "100 Miles" by the Proclaimers? Awesome. (Couldn't find a video of this one).


Matt Weddle singing "Hey Ya" by Outkast?




Great.


I don't know what it is about covers, I just like to see other takes on a piece of music. Generally, if the musician doing the cover is good at what they do, they put their own style onto it and I get to hear something that is sometimes completely different from the original, but still holds the essence of that original.

Here's the video of the Fresh Prince cover.

War and Peace

For about 10 years I have been trying to read the book War and Peace. The first time I started, I got about 20 pages in, got bored and moved onto something else. A few years later, I got about 100 pages in, something came up and I didn't get back to it for a while and by that time I had forgotten everything I had read before. The time after that I got about one third of the way in, something came up again and I gave up one more time. Recently, I was looking for something to read and saw that old nemesis War and Peace sitting on the shelf. I don't know why I wanted to read War and Peace so much. I might be that it's a long book and supposedly a challenge to read and I like challenges. It may be that I am interested in history enough to want to read the book, or it could just be that I like classic books. I've enjoyed Crime and Punishment, The Count of Monte Cristo, and some other classic books, so why not give War and Peace a shot?

I decided that this time, I wouldn't let anything get in the way of finishing the book. This was especially hard because about half way through War and Peace, the 12th book in the Wheel of Time came out, and I've been waiting for that for a long time. We also purchased the 2nd and 3rd Books of Ember and those tempted me too. Something was different this time; I read the whole book and enjoyed it. I don't think it's a fantastic book, it doesn't rate in my top 10, but I did enjoy the book.

I found some things to be a little annoying in the book. Pierre Bezukhov seemed to change too often; we're not just talking a little change, but his whole outlook on life seemed to change frequently. It does seem to be a big of his personality to find something to grab onto and go after head first, but it seemed that every time Tolstoy was describing his story, he changed his life in some large way. He becomes a Mason, he decided he loves someone, then he loves someone else (this seemed to happen to many characters). I did like how Pierre changed over the course of the book, but I think his intermediate changes were a bit drastic.

Nicholas Rostov was one of my favorite characters, along with Andrew Bolkonski. They seemed opposite ends of the spectrum of characters and ended up in the end at peace with who they were. I think Denisov was great too. He showed courage and compassion throughout the book, but never ended up the way that I would have expected. He didn't turn out as heroic as I thought he should.

I did enjoy the book, but I don't think I'll read it again, unless something makes me rethink that in the future.

I'm on to the Books of Ember and The Gathering Storm for now; I also have a couple more books by Jack McDevitt that I need to read.

SpiderMonkey

The other day at work, I had a great idea come to me. For the longest time the hardware team at work has been wanting some way that they could write simple debug tests for our test boards, but they didn't want to keep a whole source tree with everything up to date, so I thought to myself "wouldn't it be great if I could write a simple little script parser for them?" Their needs are not great, generally just reading/writing registers on the processor and board, maybe some sort of logging and stuff like that; pretty simple really.

I started thinking I should brush up on my flex/yacc/bison/etc when it occurred to me that there had to be a simple script parser out there already that I could build into my embedded, bare metal, environment. So, I opened up google and typed in "C javascript engine" to see what I could find.

Lo, and behold, one of the first responses was for SpiderMonkey, the JS engine that is used by Firefox. Now, when I saw that, I thought there was no way that SpiderMonkey could possibly work for what I wanted, but I decided to take a look at it just to see what it looked like.

I had previously looked at the v8 scripting engine for another project and so I was expecting a rather large source tree, but SpiderMonkey 1.7 was only 1MB tar gzipped. So, I spent about 30 minutes hacking up the makefile a little bit so it would work for cross-compilation, got onto #jsapi on irc.mozilla.org and asked a couple questions about the custom implementation of dtoa and then got my first static library compiled.

Now, anyone who has ever ported something knows that compilation is a pretty big step, but just having something compiled doesn't mean that it will work, so I didn't have much hope.

I grabbed some simple embedding howto code that evaluated the JS code "22/7" to approximate PI and fired up my trusty compiler. Again, I had little to no hope that it would actually work, but to my surprise I got a nice print-out on my screen of the approximation of PI.

I spent another 30 minutes implementing some wrappers for some native functions (logging, etc) for JS and wrote some simple little test scripts.

I was very impressed by SpiderMonkey 1.7, it was easy to hack up a little to get it to cross-compile, it doesn't require a lot of external libraries (none really) and it runs very nice on my embedded target.

My next step will be to try with one of the releases that includes TraceMonkey and the speed improvements that come with JIT.

I have yet to show my idea to the hardware team at work, but I think they will like it. I will support a simple executable that takes a script on the command line and executes it. They just need to write the simple test vectors they need and don't have to worry about the whole code environment.

Thanks SpiderMonkey!