Joe Crotty

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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Infraspinatus Muscle

It has been just over six weeks since injuring what I thought was my Latissimus Dorsi. After four weeks of total rest from all sports I was nearly pain free except in the late evening when the wear and tear of the day would lead to some aches.  So, I took two more weeks off and decided that at six weeks I would see a PT specialist to help direct my recovery. My main concern was discerning what exercises to use and when so I could return to full sports ASAP – especially climbing.

As luck would have it one of my fellow parishioners at Holy Trinity Catholic Church, Daneen Luna, is a back specialist with many years under her belt at the Veterans Affairs facility here in Denver, CO. Daneen has a cozy PT facility setup at her house in north Denver and after catching up on life for a half hour we settled down in the examination room. After 15 minutes of background discussion she began probing, pulling and testing ruling out lat, teres major, and teres minor muscle injuries. More then likely she was sure I had an infraspinatus muscle injury that was for the most part healed. Further, she noted that my caved in chest and over development of certain muscles had left my upper back susceptible to injures. Of course her assessment was spot on as I have had many shoulder injuries the last five years: trapezius muscle both right and left, left SLAP tear +/- (i.e., barely), left rotator cuff strain three times, and some deep muscle injures between the lumbar and cervical regions affecting breathing (i.e., mostly resurfacing injuries from snow boarding/skiing accidents).

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About a month ago I revised the website look.  Today I fixed a few subtle things:

1. ‘Featured Posts’ widget images in the sidebar now link directly to the post.
2. Padding between all the sidebar widgets (e.g., ‘Featured Posts’, ‘Recent Posts’, etc.) is now even.
3. ‘Archives’ sidebar widget is now collapsible. Note, there is a bug in IE6-8 and I am not sure when I’ll have time to fix it. My recommendation is to switch your browser to Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.

Just before the move that partially tore my latissimus dorsi. Note the upper body rotation.

Monday January 18, 2010 I hiked into the remote Diamond Head crag in Eldorado Canyon State Park with a few friends to try some obscure climbs that I had long dreamed about. Just as we arrived at the base of the climb the wind picked up and a fresh bank of clouds rolled in plummeting the temperature 20 degrees. I donned my heavy winter down coat, but my under garments were all wet from the nearly two hour hike and I remained rather chilly. Due to our location at the crag and a lack of any easily accessible warm up climbs we opted to get on Cameron’s Corner . I did a set of 30 jumping jacks before my lead. This was only my second day of climbing since my wife and I took a two week vacation and my body felt great having just recovered from a minor upper back injury to the middle of my right trapezius. 40′ above the ground you climb past a large ledge into the crux corner (.11b) which consist of making a rotating reach with your left hand for a great ledge while holding a chest high right hand crimper. The foot work mostly freezes your hips and the rotation and extension come primarily from the upper back. As I pulled into the move I felt a transverse shooting pain along my right middle back which nearly caused me to fall off. However, I wanted the onsight badly and reset my foot slightly to get a bit more left hip rotation and fought my way through the back pain successfully. Some ten minutes later lounging at the belay I was uncertain of what I had injured or the extent.

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This is probably the third site re-design in the last six months or so, but for the first time I can honestly say this one just might stick. First, let’s give due credit to WooThemes design team for this fabulous free Bueno theme. In the future I’ll be using almost exclusively free and premium themes from ad hoc design shops like WooThemes due to the time saved and my lack of design skills.

Bueno is a simple modern theme that puts the focus squarely on structure and typography that fits well with my general post style. The only theme switch  hassle was resizing all of the larger images which is typical. The only old design element lost was the roll up archives which I’ll make an effort to reinstate at a later date when I tidy up this new theme.  For now we are ready to roll!

Two months ago in early November 2009 Heather, my wife, and I attended our Church’s annual school auction to support Holy Trinity School.  The auction concluded with a hat drawing for the grand prize – an all expense paid cruise to the Bahamas. To our utter amazement we won!  After a few talks with the travel agency we decided to go on our four day cruise January 10-14. Our only expenses would be round trip plane tickets to Orlando, a rental car and a few nights in hotels.  Our grand plan was to fly to Orlando January 7, 2010 rent a car and spend one night in Orlando.  Then drive up the coast to St. Augustine and visit with my wife’s uncle Phil for two days and tour America’s oldest city and by most accounts settlement.  Then drive to Port Canaveral and board the ship for the four day cruise and take a shuttle back to the airport for the return flight to Denver, CO.

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It all started a few years ago when I became obsessed with a new line in Eldorado Canyon.  Eventually, things culminated and I began to set out to figure out how to bolt the new climb.  With a borrowed drill, charged batteries and good selection of drill bits I drove to a semi secluded overpass in North Denver and walked down to a secluded creek bed next to a biking trail and located some suitcase size granite boulders to drill a few practice holes.  Right away I slapped on a 3/8″ bit and went to work.  The action of the hammer drill produces a lot of rock chips flying about as you start the hole and the noise level is significant.  It’s not jack hammer loud, but much louder then your typical hand held home handyman drill.  The hole start is critical.  You have to get the angle correct in the first half inch or less because the rock is totally unforgiving any deeper.  After the 3/8″ hole was down to about 3″ depth I started a new hole with 1/2″ bit which seemed about twice the work.  After about an inch I quit and then just for kicks tried out another 1/2″ bit that looked fairly dull.  This was a total nightmare as the dull bit refused to gain any purchase no matter how hard I pushed.  Keep in mind this is standing on both feet using my full body weight.  I could only imagine what it would be like hanging from a rope on an overhanging cliff side with a dull drill bit.  Feeling confident in my foray I packed up and went home.

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It’ pretty obvious thing have changed. The old is out and in it’s place a new bright blue look is born based on the WordPress Stripey theme.  Really, there are only a few key changes with the new look:

1. Header logo and binary code which adds a cleaner more professional feel.  I plan to add a maltese cross, but ran out of time on this effort.
2. Better search box.
3. Subtle post header meta data changes.
4. Archive posts in the right sidebar are rolled up by year and counts listed for each month.

Shot me an email or drop a comment if you find any bugs or simply can’t stand it!

Website Speed

Recently a web client asked me if I could figure out why their page was loading so slowly. Simple enough question on the surface. Like any sensible web engineer I immediately opened Firefox enabled the Firebug plug-in and went to Net Panel. It was clearly evident after poking around for a few minutes that the WordPress site in question, which I built but didn’t do the design and image work for, was sized at just over a megabyte of which ~50% was images. In the scramble to get the site up and running I just took the images the designer handed me and plugged them in without any further thought then “Hey, those do look very good!” I informed the client that the images were hogging up a good bit of bandwidth and they should have a graphics expert put the  images on a diet via PhotoShop.  However, that other 50% of overall slowness that was not related to the images nagged at me.

Within the hour I had mentally resolved to figure out why the rest of the site was slow and apply anything learned to improving current and future site builds. My basic game plan after googling for a few hours and discovering YSlow was as follows:

1. Serve the HTML gzip’ed and cached
2. Serve the CSS/JS gzip’ed and cached
3. Reduce the number of overall requests by combining CSS/JS files where possible
4. Add Expires Headers
5. Move as many images as possible externally

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