And it’s away! CoM 0.8 is out the door for your dietary tracking enjoyment.
- Food database upgraded to USDA sr19
- Added nutrient data for Choline, Caffeine, and Fluoride.
- Search results can be sorted by rank or alphabetically by clicking column headers
- Updated CRDB
- Remembers last window size and position
- System Tray icon for handy access (Requires Java 6 to be installed)
- Added daily note pad for keeping free-form notes for each day
- New Help Browser and help content
- Fixed typo: Cholesterol was incorrectly labeled in grams instead of milligrams.
USDA sr19
The USDA food database has been upgraded to the most recent release.
In addition to adding and updating many foods with more recent data,
CRON-o-Meter now adds data for Choline, Caffeine, and Fluoride. Note
that data for Choline and Fluoride may be under-represented in the data.
Some foods that existed in sr18 have been deleted in sr19. We’ve kept
these foods for backwards compatibility, but they will show up in the
program greyed-out with accompanying warnings.
Updated CRDB
The special CRDB (CR Community Food Database) has been updated with new data
for Brewer’s Yeast Lewis Labs. The USDA’s entry for Almond Butter, Unsalted
is missing data for Vitamin E. A corrected entry was added to the CRDB. We’ve added
several new foods submitted by Michael Rae and Aaron Davidson. As always, we
welcome quality submissions from our user community for inclusion in the next
release.
Nutrient Editors
In the food editor, there is now a distinction made between a nutrient having a
known amount of 0 and missing data. Nutrients with no data are shown in grey.
Cool. Poker Academy is now Dutch!
I’ve been looking at a lot of frameworks and platforms and big fat libraries lately to do mainly enterprise distributed messaging and the like. I keep trying to understand these big behemoths and what they do and how they work. I have yet to find a simple tutorial style application that I can whip up in under and hour and feel like I have an inkling of how the technology works.
I keep feeling like I missed the boat. I just can’t grok what these frameworks are all about — they all purport to solve problems and simplify writing these kinds of applications, but I can’t see what problems they actuall solve and where the simplicity lies. To me, it looks like a false-economy. And yet these things are wildly popular. I can’t tell if I’m just not bright enough to get what it’s all about, or if hundreds of thousands of enterprise IT workers have been fooled. Occam’s Razor says that it’s more likely that I’m the dunce. In either case, I hope one of my smart friends can someday explain all this nonsense to me.
I suspect none of these so-called ‘enterprise’ system can actually handle the problem I’m looking to solve. hey simply don’t have the performance or scalability I need. Part of the problem is they are all based around web-centric design and requirements. Secondly, they are over-generalized and bloated abstractions have too much cruft getting in the way to be performant.
What’s been stewing in my brain throughout, is that it may be a matter of personality type. There’s a whole class of developer that works well with big bloated frameworks. I’m from another world … where frameworks are equated with hand-cuffs. What I want are lightweight, small, simple tools. I want small libraries with clear functionality and purpose. I don’t want a big fat framework … just some elegant high-performance messaging libraries. I could have written my own in the time I’ve spent looking for one. I would hate to reinvent the wheel… (actually that kind of thing is very fun, but you know, frowned upon).
This weekend I’m tinkering around with learning cocoa programming (native Mac OS X coding). I’ve been a mac user since the early 90’s, and used to code lots of Mac programs back in the day, for Mac OS Classic. In 1999 I switched to working mainly in Java. I’ve never actually written a native Mac OS X program in all this time. So today I’m working through some tutorials on making basic GUIs wih Apple’s interface builder, and wiring up the plumbing in XCode with Objective-C. Moof!
It’s a little break from my normal weekend of CRON-o-Meter tinkering.
I added a new page for the buddhabrot to my site today. It includes an applet that renders it (slowly), along with the source code. While I was playing around I experimented with a different rendering tweak and got the following image after a running a few hours:
click to enlarge
As much as SNL can suck, it’s still worth watching for moments like Laser Cats and of course, Lazy Sunday.
I’m having a classic lazy sunday. Of course, my idea of a lazy sunday is sleeping in, then drinking lots of coffee and writing software all day. This is pretty much what I do all week, except I don’t sleep in, and I write software in an office and don’t get to decide what type of software I work on. At home, I tinker away with CRON-o-Meter and other little toy programs. Perhaps a tad too much time in front of the screen…
Currently Listening to The Fountain [Soundtrack] by Clint Mansell. (Which was a kick-ass movie BTW, watch it: [trailer])
The University of Alberta (where I was studied) has been in the news lately over a potential breakthrough in fighting cancer. DCA, is a small compound that messes up glycolysis, that fast-growing tumors rely on to supply energy. When glycolysis is disrupted, the normally suppressed mitochondria are re-activated. The mitochondria can then trigger cell-apoptosis, the self-destruction the cell. This is possibly one reason why low-calorie, low-sugar intake has been shown to help slow down and in some cases reduce some cancers. Malignant tumors need a lot of glucose in order to grow. The problem with DCA is that it is not patentable — so no big pharmaceutical company will touch it, let alone spend millions running clinical trials. They can’t profit from it. DCA human trials are going to be publicly funded.
MEGAMUFFINS!!!!! I just popped my first batch of Irish-style megamuffins in the oven. Our new place has an oven, so after running around the stillorgan shopping center this morning, I picked up the last couple of things needed to make them. I got a muffin tray and blender last night in city center, and this morning bought some nutmeg and ginger, and an avocado. My brother sent me some Goji Berries, Hemp Protein powder, and flax seeds for my birthday, so I used those (instead of soy protein and dried cranberries). I found way overpriced rice bran, brewers yeast and psyllium husk at the local health food store.
So these are going to be slightly different than standard issue mega muffins. I had smaller amounts of some of the ingredients, so I added some oats for bulk.
I love breakfast cereals — the good stuff, not the sugary candy stuff. I think I might take most of the dry ingredients for mega muffins and make a mega-cereal mix to try out. I’m thinking it will have oats, wheat germ, flax seeds, hemp protein, brewer’s yeast, goji berries or raisins, and maybe some diced nuts. Yum! A small 40g serving with 125ml of skim milk should pack a good portion of fiber, protein, and nutrients.
* If you don’t understand the title of this post, that’s because it’s an inside joke.
So a little under two weeks ago we moved into a small, but modern townhouse in the Dublin town of Stillorgan. Our ecological footprint is so much smaller here than it ever was in Canada. Part of that is the climate — you just don’t need to burn so much fossil fuels here with the milder winters. But that aside, many other factors contribute to a massive reduction in our footprint. Here we don’t own a car — it’s self-propulsion and efficient public transport. Our place is small, but designed to use the limited space effectively. The water heater is tankless — it heats water on demand with natural gas. To compare, our Edmonton home keeps a full tank of water boiling hot, 24/7. You know, in case I want to have a shower at 4am. Here, we only heat the water as needed. The shower is an electric unit that heats the water right in the shower unit. The appliances are all energy efficient and small in size. Everything’s smaller here. It seems the Irish public is more concerned with being efficient and ecological. Part of that, I think, is due to the necessity. Being a tiny, formerly impoverished island nation, everything is much more expensive. It makes sound financial sense to be efficient. Secondly, the country is small, and there’s a clear need to not squander the limited environment. In Canada we are spoiled by our riches of land and nature. We can do a lot of destruction without feeling any true loss or pressure to our lifestyles. In many ways, our abuses are hidden by the vastness of the land.
Ahh, sorry, I got away on a little bit of a tree-hugger rant there. As you were.
Uh-oh, I think this is rapidly turning into a developer blog. I find this stuff easy to write about. I hope it doesn’t bore non-geek people to death. I’ve been sitting on the couch in my undies this morning working on CRON-o-Meter. I’m upgrading the food database to the latest USDA sr19 release, and adding values for Choline, Flouride, and Caffeine. The tricky bit is that they decided to delete some foods that were in sr18. Now I have to deal with a tricky issue when a older version of CRON-o-Meter upgrades, if the user has included any of those foods in their logs or recipies, how do I handle it? I could just remove all the references from the user’s history, but that seems rude. I think what I will do is warn the user, but keep the old food references and data, but remove those deprecated foods from active use so that they can no longer show up in searches.
CRON-o-Meter is like a personal hobby playground to try out new technologies. Back when Chris and I started building the original program, we tinkered with a lot of tools like Maven, HSQLDB, and JIRA.
I’m planning to try out two cool Java layout managers: MigLayout and DesignGridLayout. I do all the layout programmatically, so good layout managers are important to me.
I probably won’t get to play too much more today — We’re moving to our new apartment in Stillorgan this afternoon, and then heading out to meet some people for drinks tonight at a pub in Blackrock.
