Drove out to Arcadia to watch the sunset.  Took a couple fo great photo's of a quiet evening in Oklahoma.

The pond is full after all of the rain and storms.

Managed to catch the moon is this photo of the sunset.  The moon is that little white spec in the middle of the photo.

Against my better judgement, I skipped the long haul biking I had planned, stayed home, and grilled some meats.  It was a good decision.

Some very good things happened on this grill today!

I tried out Tabasco's new garlic marinade today.  It is wonderful!  Not spicy at all, but has that great Tabasco flavor.

Smoked pork shoulder and a couple of loins. Lunch will be very, very good next week!

May was a busy month! It's been a while since I posted anything.  I changed jobs in May.  I am working with a new Team, assisting with the development of iOS apps and a company search engine. In addition, I've spent a lot of time upgrading my home domain software and development environment.  I'm deeply (and somewhat unhappily) involved with Sharepoint Foundation 2013.

I installed Microsoft Sharepoint Foundation 2013 on my back up domain controller.  I'm a bit disappointed.  I didn't read the installation requirements, and I've managed to bring my little under powered server to it's knees.  My fault.  I can tell you that if you are intending to install Sharepoint 2013 or Sharepoint Foundation 2013, you need ram, and lots of it. My little server only supports 4 GB of RAM (Max!) and it's not nearly enough.  My event log is filled with these events:

The SharePoint Health Analyzer detected a condition requiring your attention.  The Current server is running low on memory.

The memory usage on the current server is about {0}. This can cause the eviction or throttling of the Distributed Cache Service/

Check the memory usage on the machine.And try to free up some memory or add more ram on the machine. For more information about this rule, see "http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=224261".

My advice is to purchase the self published Amazon booklet "Sharepoint 2013 Development Machine." There are some negative reviews, but I found the booklet very helpful.  Had I read the booklet, I would have purchased a new computer with a lot more memory and more processor before undertaking this work.

I've thought about uninstalling Sharepoint Foundation, and actually initiated the process, but something always comes up to prevent me from removing the software.  While the system is clearly not a good test, experiment and development set up, it is a functioning system that can be used for development (if you are patient.)  I've found the system is workable when writing and testing code -- barely.

Back to my new job:

I'm working with Java web services, developing in eclipse.  I'm also working with JavaScript (massive amounts), PostgreSQL and a host of other technologies.  It's interesting and I am reading a lot of material.  Wish me luck!

Low carb diet info:

I was on a cruise in mid May, and I gave up all pretense of living the low carb life style.  Now that I'm back, it's back to salads, veggies and chicken.  Unfortunately, I've played a little fast and loose with the diet, and I am having to make up for it.

Here's a picture of me with Mt. Edgecumbe in the background. Yes, it is as beautiful as it looks.

I was working on a side project to remove http post operations to a web service and replace it with a proxy component.  Easy right?  I thought it would be.  But the service I was looking at didn't utilize a WSDL or SOAP.  And Visual Studio 2008 doesn't like that when you set up a service reference. So, I had to look at writing my own proxy.  Not so easy, but doable.  The real issue is that the group that writes the web services uses VS 2012 and .Net 4.0.  The group I work in uses VS 2008 and .Net 2.0 (when we actually use .Net.)  These two don't play well together when you need to create references.

It took me a little while to realize the dll's the dev had sent me were targeted at .Net 4.0, and the best I could do was target .Net 3.5.  Goodbye project references.  (Except, a little magic with managed C++ might do the trick.  I'll discuss that in another post.)

"Best laid plans of mice and men" and all that other rot that doesn't really help solve the problem.

Here's some results I got while piddling around with webkit's SunSpider benchmark program this morning.

It's not scientific, or even well controlled.  I'm using the latest updates for IE 10, Chrome and Firefox as of April 20.  Links will take you back to the test results.  My laptop is an old dual core machine running Windows 8 64bit, 8GB RAM and a slow 500 GB hard drive.

IE10 - 203.5 ms

Chrome - 280.9 ms

FireFox - 310.9 ms

 Just some food for controversy.