Star Wars Padawan Training Available in July 2009

I just discovered this unique and interesting toy via Scott Adams (Dilbert Blog). Well, it’s not so much a toy as it is just a cool device.

Wearing a custom built device that slips on your head, you can use your brain waves to move a sphere vertically in a container. There’s no wires and no interaction via control pads or buttons. The wireless headset reads your brain activity, similar to an EEG medical test, to translate the brain waves to physical activity.

Loving Day

I first learned of the US Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia when I was researching constitutional laws and court cases regarding same-sex marriages. The SCOTUS decision overturned Virginia’s law against interracial marriages and ended all state’s raced-based restrictions on marriage.

In 1966, interracial marriages were illegal in 17 states. Before this court case, interracial bans were considered legal as long as both parties were equally punished.

May 35th, 2009

Twenty years ago, I was just a student in high school, but I remember watching the events unfold on the national news. I was a bit shocked, but it took many years later after understanding the events, growing a bit older, and reading a lot more that I began to fully understand what had happened.

The day in 1989 is censored by the Chinese government which is why it is now becoming known as May 35th instead of today’s date (since that date is blocked by the censors). This year those speaking about the day are trying to refer to it as “May 35th,” “535″ and “VIIV” (Roman numerals).

Balancing the California Budget

LA Times just uploaded a interactive tool to give everyone a chance at balancing the California budget. After playing around for a little bit, it’s easy to see how much you’ll need to comprise in order to make any substantial reduction of the deficit. Although both sides might not admit it, there’s just no way to balance the budget without new taxes and spending cuts – you just can’t do it without both.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Movie Review)

I watched X-Men Origins: Wolverine movie at the local IMAX theater. I have long been a fan of X-Men and Weapon X series, so I had pretty high expectations for this movie. Learning that one of my favorite comic book characters, Deadpool, was going to be in this movie gave me some hope that he might spawn off another Marvel movie of his own. I’d love to see a Deadpool and Cable movie. I was disappointed, yet again, with the storyline diverging from Deadpool’s origin and abilities. The movie left me with the feeling that I’ll never see a Deadpool movie, unless they disregard this movie’s content and story.

Okay, enough about Deadpool – the movie’s about Wolverine.

** warning spoilers below **

San Diego Super Heroes

A few weeks ago, I came across a video via AllahPundit about Cincinnati’s masked super hero. Little did I know, San Diego has it’s own league of super heroes led by Mr. Xtreme.

After a bit of research, it appears this San Diego crime fighting group has been active for over a year. The first report of the Xtreme Justice League was in March 2008.

The purpose of the XTREME JUSTICE LEAGUE (X.J.L.) is to STOP violent crime in the streets of San Diego through prevention, physical intervention, and community outreach. The main methods are street patrols on foot through crime infested areas, raising public awareness through campaigns, and encouraging and empowering other like minded individuals to take up the training to become crime fighters.
– Mr. Xtreme

Creating a FAST ESP entity blacklist

FAST ESP is a robust enterprise search platform that I’ve worked with and administer for a couple of internal projects. One of our requests for the FAST contractors was asking how we could fix the entity extraction algorithm to create a more accurate extraction.

The platform uses a complex method to determine and extract companies, persons, and location names. However, sometimes their algorithm provides false positives.

Here’s a few examples of what we saw as company names using the default FAST ESP company names extractor:

• Program Support
• Visio
• Personnel Management
• IT Support
• JSP (meaning Java Server Pages)
• Database Design

Here’s a few examples of some person names extracted from our documents using the default FAST ESP person names extractor.

• Lan, Wan (meaning local area network, wide area network)
• Columbus Day
• West Virginia
• Norton Antivirus

California Special Statewide Election 2009 Propositions

On May 19, there’s a special statewide election for California. There are six propositions on the ballot and each related to the statewide budget. The propositions, summaries, and commentaries are provided below.

I’m still debating several of these. I’ll solidify my decisions a few days before election day when I put the stamp on my ballot.

The YouTube video (included in links section at end of article) illustrates how the state got into this problem using charts and graphs.

Using Microsoft WCF with Microsoft CRM 4

I experienced a problem with Microsoft CRM 4 that I hadn’t encountered in Microsoft CRM 3. When I upgraded my code from version 3 to version 4, I kept getting an error saying “Server was unable to process request.”

My first thought was that maybe I was doing something wrong. My code had worked fine with CRM version 3. Maybe I had forgotten to set a property or had improperly configured my WCF client settings.

After much debugging and using the server trace utility of Microsoft CRM 4, I began believing that it wasn’t my code, it was the CRM code. The server trace logged internal error messages such as “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

Watchmen (Movie Review)

It was about a year or more ago, when I found out the Watchmen movie was coming out. I hadn’t remembered this graphic novel and I wasn’t familiar with the story. Somehow, I had missed this comic.

I avoided spoilers and reading the novel before the movie because I wanted to see the movie first. After watching the movie, I’ll probably read the reprinted graphic novel.