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I hate database programming. As far as coding tasks go, it tends to be one of the more monotonous and unstimulating forms of computer programming areas. It’s also highly corellated with business apps, since 99% of business apps are database oriented.

However, sometimes a database is the right tool for the job, so reluctantly, I must mention a sweet little database package I’m playing with now called HSQLDB. It’s a pure java DBMS that can run either as a recular JDBC server, or as a integrated embedded database system right in your java app. How sweet is that! No end-user deployment issues.

The next version of OpenOffice.org uses HSQLDB for it’s new database component.

Why the hell am I playing with it? Well, as much as I like my CalorieKing software for tracking my diet, I find it lacking in that it only tracks basics like calories, protein, carbs, fat, & fibre. For a good CRON diet, I need to make sure I’m getting my RDAs of all the important nutrients. There is some software out there that does this, but it’s poorly designed, poorly supported, and not free. So naturally, I’m now coding my own super kick-ass nutritional tracking software.

I’m currently importing the nutritional data for nearly 7000 food items into my hsqldb database. The data is published by the US Department of Agriculture and contains amounts of vitamins, minerals, amino-acids, and any other important goops and compounds we know about.

Now I’ll be able to figure out if my daily intake is deficient in any important nutrients, and then I can have the program search the database and recommend food items that I could eat to satisfy the contraints.

Why yes, I am a geek. How did you know?

Capt. The Rev. J.A. Davidson reads the heavy wooden nameplate that sits next to my desk at work. My Grandfather was known as “big J.A.” and I as “little J.A.”, since we share the same initials. He gave me his old nameplate many years ago in recognition of this connection.

Captain, because of his time in the army. He was a signals officer in WWII, and if my memory serves correctly, he landed in Normandy on D-Day+6 or so, and then spent a harrowing time on the front lines all the way through the flooded plains of Holland. After the war he became an army chaplain and conjured up my father and his three sisters. Hence the Reverend portion of the nameplate. It’s too bad the plate was made before he received his honorary PhD.

He died on friday, after several years of unfortunate deterioration from Alzheimer’s Disease. 🙁

This friday I’ll be flying out to Victoria for the memorial service on Saturday, so don’t expect any fresh postings until next week.

First up, I’d like to draw your attention o’er to my father’s web site to gander at a sneak preview of his latest creation, the flying carpet. It’s only partially completed, but it represents 3 years of off and on embroidery work. I’ve seen this sucker in real life and let me tell you the pictures, unfortunately, don’t do diddly.

Meanwhile, on the diet front, I’m now weighing in at 168 pounds. That’s a net loss of 16 pounds so far, as I’ve been dropping at a steady rate of 2 pounds a week.

I’m currently reading a fantastic book by Sid Marty called Switchbacks. It’s a collection of stories from his days as a warden in the canadian rockies. He’s a fantastic writer, and manages to really convey the nuances of the mountains, and the life of the mountain men. What makes it all the better is that many of the stories are set in places I’ve hiked in banff, yoho, and jasper. The book is passionate, and it’s given me a few good laughs and even a few good tears. Two thumbs up.

Today we got a kick-ass review in MacObserver, by none other than Bob LeVitus, a long time Mac magazine columnist. Not only was the review glowing, but it was also very well done. Thanks Bob!

We were also recently mentioned in a review of our ‘competition’, DDPoker. Despite them reviewing DDPoker, it ends up making the case for our program instead.

And we also got a review in this month’s PC Gamer Magazine. Unfortunately it isn’t online yet, but it compares Poker Academy, along with DDPoker and another product. Again, Poker Academy was rated highest [80%/Excellent] of the three. Music to my ears.

Finally, I hear we’ll also be getting a write up in a future issue of Playboy. Finally a legitimate excuse to buy a Playboy. Scratch that. Wanking is perfectly legitimate.

Made a batch of Sherm’s Mega Muffins this weekend. Haven’t tried MR’s recipie yet, but I think that I will for the next batch. Besides being a lot of work, the regular recipie seems a tad on the pricey side to get all the ingredients. Especially with the 2 cups of dried blueberries. Yummy though. They take a lot of work to make, but it is fun for the same reason. They have about nintey thousand ingredients, so the shopping trip is half the work.

Made an omlette for dinner using dried cottage cheese curds instead of cheddar. It was really good! I think I’ll be making that one more often, as it’s so high in protein.

One of the megamuffin ingredients is an Avacado. Naturally I had to jab toothpicks in the seed and try and get it rooting. I had an avacado plant when I was a kid that grew pretty good. I didn’t prune it properly and it grew all crazy and unweildy. I did some googling on the subject and I think I can do better this time.

It is now official. I have transcended the natural human state and become a cyborg, part man, part machine. I have attached a peice of technology to my body that bends light and alters the way it enters my optical nerves. I feel so high tech.

Feast your eyes upon the new transhuman Alpha-geek.

Had a refreshing weekend in Jasper. Christine and her sister and I drove out to Jasper on friday night. The drive takes about four hours. It was pitch black when we left at around 8:00 PM. By the time we hit the mountains around 11:00, the full moon was out, illuminating everything brilliantly. About 30km from Jasper, we pulled over to stretch and look at the stars and moonlit mountains, Tragically Hip on the car stereo. A true Canadian Moment ™.

We were thrilled to discover free wireless access in our room, but sorry I didn’t have any time to post. The next morning we had breakfast buffet, and hit the slopes of Marmot Basin for some beautiful sunny skiing. The snow was a little packed and icy in places, but besides that it was ideal conditions. Christine’s Mom and Aunt and cousin arrived at the hill as well and we had a great day of skiing. We avoided the over-priced, crowded, crappy cafeteria food we would normally suffer, and instead skiied down to the car and made a healthy lunch in the parking lot instead.

The next day was more of the same, except that Christine nagged me to climb ‘the knob’ with her. The knob is the peak above one of the lifts, that does not go all the way to the top. The only way to the peak is to climb it, carrying your skis with you. The ascent is fairly steep, but there are stairs chipped into the hard packed snow, from the previous climbers. I panted my way to the top in about 30 minutes, then made some yellow snow at the summit, and ate a granola bar. The veiw was awesome, as you could see the full 360 degree panorama of Rocky mountains. It took about one minute to ski back down. All said, a lovely weekend warrior trip.

So given the discovery (see last post) of an entire galaxy of dark matter, it brings back a memory of a fascinating idea I once read. I think it was first posed by Robert J. Bradbury on the extropians list, but no clue if that is the origin of the idea.

Dark matter has been a mystery for quite some time now. Another great mystery, given the Drake equation, is that we have not detected or come across any other life in the galaxy. It seems truly odd, given the extreme unlikeliness of our race being the first in the galaxy.

In a post-singularity situation, a transcendant AI wanting to grow smarter and more powerful would need to build as large a computational device as possible. It would need to dissasemble the solar system’s planets and asteroids in order to build as much computational substrate as possible. Besides raw materials, the other thing such a being would need is energy. Nothing could match the sun as a source of raw power. What if the AI was able to build the computational structure as a huge solar shell, completely enveloping the star in a lattice of solar computational material. From the outside, it would appear as if the star had dissapeared. Where are all the aliens?

Perhaps there is no ‘dark matter’, but only billions of missing stars, blacked out by the superpowers for energy, and we just can’t see them. Perhaps this dark matter galaxy is the end result of an exponential growth runaway superpower that has devoured the entire galaxy for energy. Obviously, I’m no astrophysicist. But I can smell a good SciFi novel.

Oh man do I hate jerks who rip off people’s honest work. It has a particular sting when they rip off the stuff I’ve been working on the past six years. I’ll write more on this when I cool down in a few days, and have more information. I’ve said it before; the internet provides one with an endless supply of jerks.

In other news, this is really cool. Astronomers have discovered an entire galaxy of pure dark matter. That kind of news just makes me tingle all over.

Back to work today. We had a Press Release today about how we donated a bunch of our software to a University AI course. They’re going to use our Meerkat API to write their own custom poker bots and then presumably compete with one another. Sounds like a fun class. I hope we see some creative ideas come out of there.

Also confirmed that we’ll be attending the Canadian Poker Summit in March, when it rolls through Edmonton and Calgary. I’ll probably spend most of it manning the booth and working the demo.

Gotta go get my eyes checked. I think all this computery stuff is finally catching up with me. Oh well. With glasses, I’ll finally be geek complete. I never was truly accepted into geek circles, with just the two eyes.

Listening to: Hate Files by Fear Factory