Joe Crotty

It’s been a whirlwind three plus months. My apologies to regular readers for the lack of recent posts. A recap is in order as to what exactly I have been up to. March 15, 2010 or so my wife and I decided to launch a hastily planned attempt to buy our first home.  We went down this same route in 2004 and abandoned ship when it became clear that the housing market was awash with over priced homes. Invigorated by the thought of an $8,000 federal tax tax credit that would apply only if we could get under contract by April 30, 2010 and close by June 30, 2010 we charged forward forcefully. After a lot of looking, researching, showings and a few false starts we found a great house in Broomfield, CO and closed May 13, 2010 and moved in May 15.

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Gulliver, as the system, washes ashore to be tamed by the custodians.

Warning, this is a an article by a software geek for said geeks. Rapid boredom will probably ensue even for the target audience. Most of us at one time or another have worked on a Big Ball of Mud. For a less seasoned hacker the first tour or two of such a haphazard system may go unnoticed due to a number of circumstances the least of which being naivety. But, over time, the imprints of sloppy, duct tape, spaghetti code jungles come to be recognizable. By no means complete a few standout examples from my career:

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For the last four years I have volunteered at Holy Trinity Catholic Church & School as a catechist for the religious education program forming young adults. Classes are offered twice a week on Wednesdays evening and Sunday afternoon during the regular school year. My wife and I, Heather, teach the Wednesday class. This year we moved up from teaching second to third grade sacramental kids (i.e., they receive both reconciliation and first communion in the Spring).

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Maltese Cross Keys of St. Peter

For a few years now I have been yearning to put a maltese cross styled window sticker on my truck topper. Something that hollers out to a distressed and a generally non believing world that I am Catholic and Proud! I poked around the web and came up with a few ideas but nothing that really stuck. If you want something done right then you have to do it yourself.

The Order of Malta and the associated Maltese Cross are old by almost any standard. Yet,even though the wiki maltese cross image is decent enough they get the geometry wrong. After locating a correct geometric maltese cross layout the next hurdle was designing it such that at least fellow Catholics would get “it.”

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I live in Westminster, Colorado a growing suburban area northwest of Denver. It’s a mixed profile of semi-industrial areas, quaint residential neighborhoods, parks, schools, and the the usual sprinkle of hustle and bustle that accompanies suburban life. Having lived here for ten years I know a thing or two about some of the local urban legends. For example, “air guitar master” Mark who makes infrequent rounds on Federal Boulevard in the Federal Heights region in retro ’80′s metal rock garb hammering out licks to his walkman.  I hope to highlight him in a future post, but today’s feature character is the “sign dancer.”

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Yesterday while looking at the new blog header I decided to have a hand at adding a quote mechanism. I have always been fond of the hilarious tongue in check The Tao Of Programming series – the first self titled book being best by far. My initial notion was to put it in the footer which seemed vacuous. Puzzled I gave up for a few hours and wandered to a tangential stream of thought. Later, while talking with my wife just before bed an idea hit me like a ton of bricks.  Why not put a sliding quote panel in the header animated by jQuery? Nearly sick with excitement I “uhm”-ed my way through the rest of the talk with my wife and then stole off the first chance to get to a computer to hammer out some initial code before the ephemeral concept evaporated from my mind.

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It was an arid posting week here at the blog trying to come up with something fresh to say. In the process of looking around at the ship shape of the blog the realization that the header and logo look squirrelly occurred. So I fired up Photoshop, vim and git and changed things around to a more streamlined, recognizable and social/web 2.0 header area.  Also, the archive layout issue was fixed yet again. Now if I could only come up with a good idea to blog about.

In have been eying the Nikon D90 DSLR for the better part of three months. At the start of March, 2010 Nikon Rumors reported some deep online discounts were in the works and with my birthday pending at the end of the month I pulled the trigger and purchased a D90 camera kit including a Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VRII all around lens from B&H Photo Video. Much to my joy even my wife approved the purchase. Now that the easy part is done it’s time to learn how to use this interface monster.

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As a programmer and all around nerd dating back to my teen years I have covered a fair bit of computing terrain. However, at a recent job interview requiring Java skills I completely floundered when asked, “Talk to us about design patterns and illustrate some instances where you have applied them?”  Baffled and not one to beat around the bush I admitted my naivety immediatley. In a gesture of kindness the interview panel threw a few classic design patterns at me like singleton and abstract factory both of which I was aware of, but only had a vague grasp of. One guy on the panel suggested I read up on a famous engineering design pattern book by a group referred to as the Gang of Four. I took him up on that offer a few days later and ordered a used copy of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software from Amazon.

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Recently, while developing a web charting application I ran into a problem involving combinations and permutations. The application mimics an existing paper charting method with it’s own meta language to describe certain visual biological markers.  One subset of the meta language defines eight shorthand notation character codes:

• B = Brown (or Black) Bleeding
• C = Cloudy (white)
• C/K = Cloudy/Clear
• G = Gummy (gluey)
• K = Clear
• L = Lubricative
• P = Pasty (creamy)
• Y = Yellow (even pale yellow)

Each code can be selected once with any other combination of codes.  Some examples of possible code string combinations with dash separator(s):

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