My Weight Loss Story

Yes you do, inquisitive baby.

It has been an interesting project, these last couple months. A project to better my health and test my will power. After all this time and progress I am happy to say that I consider all of my effort and weight loss a success. My health has improved ten-fold and I am happier and more fit than I have been in years. Back to high school weight and athletic level.

I have been asked by friends, family, and coworkers how I accomplished this so I have written out my regimen in hopes that other people can pull in a tip here or there to help push them towards their own health goals.

Advertisement

Source Code Visualization

There are a couple cool projects out there for visualizing code commit history. Just for my own memory’s sake I am listing them here so I can check them out later for any larger projects I may take on:

• http://www.michaelogawa.com/code_swarm/
• https://code.google.com/p/gource/

Example of minimal Apache CXF2 web services deployment

We had a requirement to add a web service to allow our partners to upload their events to our Calendar. Rather than spin up an entirely new application to handle this, we wanted to embed a very simple web service into the existing application. We wanted this to be very light weight and easy to implement.

I had used Apache Axis in the past so I decided to look into that first. To get a sample Axis2 application working (http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/community/tutorials/BottomUpAxis2WebService/bu_tutorial.html) with one simple class representing a single web service operation it created an 11MB package, dirty folder structure, admin pages to add more services, etc. Essentially a full blown web service server with admin options. I did NOT need this and it seems a little bulky. I tried to delete some of the /WEB-INF/lib JAR files but it was not obvious what was required and what wasn’t. I tried deleting the /axis2-web folder but that made it unusable. Not to mention all the config files required/generated. Let’s try something else…

Gaming marathons for charity

I saw an article on slashdot yesterday about a group of guys (half are Canadian…awesome) who are playing a Final Fantasy marathon over a week for the autism charity ACT Today. The group from http://www.thespeedgamers.com/ is rotating players and randomly playing all Final Fantasy games up to 12 (excluding the XI MMO I believe). The 3 live streams lets viewers watch the game feed, the “couch” where the gamer is seated along with the others gamers stretching for their game, and the color commentary via a laptop webcam. The commentator reads the live chat and banters back while telling funny gaming stories and making bets with the charity contributers such as:

• for every $5 donated during a set period of time, one of the waiting gamers will complete a barrel roll. They got up to 113 rolls, the first half being quite impressive while the later half of them was a sleep depraved gamer laying on the floor barely moving.
• a single $100 donation dare had one gamer drink…ahem…a mana potion, mixed with a health potion, mixed with a spoonful of 2 day old vegemite, and a menthol cough drop.  The gamer actually vomited BEFORE drinking it due to the foul smell and having been awake for 40 hours. Funny stuff.

At this moment, they are at $33 000 which blew away their previous goal of $20 000. They have reset the bar to $50 000 and will probably clear that before the deadline of July 24th. They are getting a lot of news coverage and I encourage people to go check out the site and watch for abit. Drop some money on a great charity too if you feel inclined!

Birthday

Well…I reached the ripe age of 27 last weekend on May 23rd. It was probably the best birthday I have had. My lovely wife bought me a fantastic Toshiba laptop from BestBuy (that I helped her pick out 🙂 ) and got me GTA4 for PC AND a big bottle of Baileys to boot. Yes she went overboard…I love her for it.

Family and friends met up to eat at Scores and then head over to Kanata AMC 24 to check out the new Terminator Salvation movie. Ummm….it wasnt the best action movie of the summer that is for sure. For a war between humans and machines it certainly didnt feel like much of a war. I pictured in myhead  thousands of humans duking it out with futuristic weapons against thousands of machines. I think that I saw maybe 15-20 machines in the whole movie. The only saving grace was Arnie’s image (albeit CGI’d from Terminator 1) beating on Bale for a whole minute and a half. This movie is 2/5 stars in my opinion.