Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I’ve been trying to setup CruiseControl.Net to only build a project when the ‘Force’ button is clicked.

After scouring the internet for the proper setup to do this, I don’t see any trigger that allows me to do this. I’ve setup a ScheduleTrigger that only allows builds at 9:00:00 each day, so right now there’s at least one build a day, but it’s just wasteful. I only want a build when someone specifically needs one, not at random times.

Does anyone know if this setup can exist in CCNET?

UPDATE: Erin tells me that she just got an email from Netflix, saying that due to feedback, profiles will NOT be removed, whew!

Erin and I use Netflix and we’ve each got our own queue so that she can get her movies and I can get mine. Actually, I even have two queues for myself - one for movies and one for TV shows.  Erin got an email from Netflix yesterday:

“We wanted to let you know we will be eliminating Profiles, the feature
that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account,
effective September 1, 2008.”

…..

“While it may be disappointing to see Profiles go away, this change
will help us continue to improve the Netflix website for all our
customers.”

I’m trying to think how removing an incredibly useful feature helps them improve the website? To me, managing separate profiles seems like something that many households would use to manage different movie tastes. On top of that, if you DON’T need separate profiles, just don’t use it.

I’m guessing what they meant is: “this change will help us save money.”

A couple weeks ago I noticed the gmail widget on my Google home page was adding check boxes to the side of each email that was displayed:

The check boxes were inconsistent - I could refresh the page and they would be gone, and then back again. I haven’t seen them since that one day a couple weeks ago. I’m hoping they’re adding some features to the gmail widget, like the ability to multi-select messages and delete them, or mark them as read.

I did my second triathlon last Saturday morning in New Brighton. The weather wasn’t bad like last years, but being that it was early June the water isn’t warm yet in the lakes. The temperature was around 65 degrees and the triathlon web site said that wetsuits were “recommended, but not required.” I don’t own a wetsuit and I wasn’t about to buy one the week before a triathlon, never having used one, so I decided to tough it out.

I was NOT prepared for how cold 65 degree water feels. It’s unbelievable. I got into the water about five minutes before starting to get used to the cold,  and it shocked me. I couldn’t breathe and I was SERIOUSLY considering just walking out, getting my stuff, and leaving. It was that cold. But, I had made Erin get up before six on a Saturday morning, and I had also recently bought a bike for this purpose, so I figured I better stay.

The swim was absolutely horrible. It took me nearly thirty minutes to swim a half mile (that’s real slow). The bike was fourteen miles and went much better, but my lack of training was showing during the run as my legs were weak. I had to stop and walk several times.

But, I finished and that’s fine by me.  I knew I was going to get a crappy time as soon as I started,  so that wasn’t a shock. My final time was 1:56 I think. The winner’s time was something like 1:01 which just blows my mind. In the time that it took me to do the bike, this guy could nearly complete the whole triathlon.

(Erin thinks I look like a big dork in this one. I have no idea why I’m smiling, I’m NOT happy

I brewed a Hop Head Double IPA from Midwest Supplies several months ago, right in the middle of winter. Because of the low temperature the beer takes a little longer to ferment in the winter, so this one took several weeks to finish. This beer was fun to brew because it was a dry hopped recipe. Dry hopping is when you put some hops in the beer while it’s in the primary fermenter. These hops are supposed to influence the smell of the beer more than the taste, so you should get a real pungent hop smell when it’s done.

I was disappointed with how it turned out from the hoppiness perspective. It wasn’t as hoppy as the Bell’s Hopslam that I had earlier this year, and that was what I was going for. It still tastes great and I’ll have no problem finishing the beer, with the help of friends of course.

Another reason I took awhile finishing the beer was that I was adding another keg to my kegerator setup in the basement, so now I’ve got two taps, the java stout and the double ipa are currently in there.

Unfortunately, I must have forgotten to write down any of my measurements for this beer, so I don’t have dates or readings for you on this one

Here are a couple photos of the keg setup in the basement, I don’t think I’ve ever posted pics:

This is a shot from inside the fridge. You can see the two kegs, the co2 tank and all the tubes coming from the kegs to the taps that are drilled into the door.

And here’s a shot of the door from the outside, showing the taps.

I want to get some cool tap handles at some point, but it’ll take some modifications to the fridge. If I made the existing handles any longer then whenever you opened the freezer on top you would knock the taps forward and spill beer. What I think I’m gonna do is  put a piece of metal to connect the fridge door with the freezer door, so that when you open either of them, they’ll both open up and no beer will be spilled. I also need to add the drip trays, I have them but I’ve just been too lazy to put them on. There’s a bucket to catch the drips right now that you can’t see in the photo.

Erin and I have had a list of restaurants that we want to try out for a long time now; Erin just recently added dozens of restaurants to the list, all in the Twin Cities area.

She also had the good idea to blog about our experiences as we try out each restaurant on the list, so you can follow along if you’re interested in food in Minneapolis/St. Paul. We recently added our reviews of the 331 Club in NE Mpls, and Al’s Breakfast in Dinkytown near the U of M.

We Got Served: http://wegotserved.blogspot.com

Check it out!

I love my MS Natural Multimedia Keyboard, I’ve used them for years, I even bought my own that I use at work.

I’ve had my keyboard at home for probably 4 years now and it was starting to get really nasty; there was lots of dirt and grime on/in the keyboard. I had half-assed tried to clean it in the past by just rubbing the grime off, but I decided recently to do it right. I unplugged the keyboard and used an alcohol swap to wipe the whole thing down and got it really clean, it was great.

I left it to dry for a couple days and used a backup keyboard in the meantime. After a few days I plugged it back in, on a day that I was working from home.

I am a big fan of Yahoo Music Jukebox, and I have it on when I’m working, especially if I’m at home. As I was working and listening to music, the volume would get muted off and on at random intervals.

After awhile this got really annoying and I started to pay attention to what was going on. Eventually I figured out that my left shift key was functioning exactly as the Mute key on my multimedia keyboard. It would capitalize my letters, and toggle the volume mute. Here are the different search terms I tried in google to find someone who had run into this before:

• windows left shift key mute
• windows shift mute
• vista left shift key mute
• vista shift mute
• left shift mute
• shift mute
• vista left shift
• windows left shift
• left shift key mute
• left shift key mutes speakers
• shift key mute
• shift key mutes speakers
• shift mute
• shift mutes speakers
• shift mute volume
• shift  = mute

It seems that NOBODY has had this happen to them before. I gave up and plugged in the backup keyboard, but I was annoyed. I had simply wanted to clean my goddamn keyboard, is that so wrong??

I tried fixing this issue again yesterday. I tried several key remappers but nothing was working, and not only that, but when you remap keys you need to reboot your machine for it to take effect so I was rebooting my machine a bunch too.

I finally found a solution that fixed my problem. I used SharpKeys to disable my multimedia Mute key, as well as remap the left shift key to the right shift key. I suspect that simply disabling the Mute key would have worked, but I didn’t want to tempt fate again, so I’ve left it as is, I never use the Mute key anyways, so I don’t care.

I also tried using KeyTweak which has the same ability to disable/enable keys and remap keys, but I never tried disabling Mute with KeyTweak, but I would guess that it works the same as SharpKeys.

Anyways, there you have it, if your left shift key suddenly starts muting your speakers, here’s your solution.

I mentioned in my write-up of the last beer that I had also purchased a Java Stout kit and that I was going to try and brew it the same week as the Honey Porter. I didn’t end up brewing the Java Stout until early January

Waiting that long to brew a beer turned out to be a big mistake. Since I bought the kit in September and didn’t brew the beer till January, the yeast sat around in the fridge for nearly four months. Yeast is a time sensitive ingredient in beer, so by the time I got around to using the yeast, it was way older than it should have been. Not only that, but I didn’t realize that I was supposed to prepare the yeast for a couple days before brewing because of its age.

I put the yeast into the beer and waited a couple days for signs of activity in the beer, but I saw nothing. Usually after a day or two the beer will bubble, which indicates that the yeast is actively eating the sugar from the malts. So, I figured my yeast was simply too old to use, but I saw no reason why adding newer, active yeast would cause any issue, so I went and bought some more yeast and threw it in.

This time around I did notice some subtle activity, but not like I would have expected from previous batches. After a week or so, I moved the beer to the secondary fermenter and added the coffee. The directions said to brew a strong pot of coffee using the beans and dump that into the secondary fermenter. I did that and let it sit for 12 days.

When it was time to keg the beer, I tried some of the un-carbonated beer before adding it to the keg. It didn’t taste good. In fact, it tasted like coffee, and not much else. The final reading on the hydrometer was 1.020 which indicates that there is not much alcohol in the beer (the closer to 1.000 the more alcohol is present). I kegged the beer anyways, waiting to try it again after it was carbonated to see if that made it any better.

I tried to have a pint of this beer as I wrote this post, but I couldn’t do it, I’m having a root beer instead. It was too nasty, like cold, carbonated coffee. I’m not sure what to do with it either. Its unethical to dump beer down the drain, especially beer that you’ve spent several weeks making; I also don’t foresee any of my friends liking this enough to take down 5 gallons in any reasonable amount of time.

Here are the details:

• Beer: Java Stout from Midwest Supplies
• Brewed on 1/6/2008, initial reading: 1.050
• 1/8: added fresh batch of yeast
•  1/27: transferred from plastic to glass carboy, added 48 oz. of Peace Coffee
• 2/9: transferred to keg at 33psi, final reading 1.020

The day after I kegged this one, I brewed my next batch, the Hop Head Double IPA, I’m really excited about this one, I just transferred to the secondary fermenter today, and it smells delicious.

My buddy Rett recently launched his new online beer festival site, brew52.com. Erin and I picked up the first 5 weeks of beers last night and I just posted my first review of the Snowstorm from Schell’s brewery. Erin is still finishing her beer while I write this, her review should be up shortly, with some pics, if Rett lets her

I’ve been comparing Spring.Net and Castle tonight to try and form an opinion about which one is better suited to use at work. I’ve used Castle MonoRail and ActiveRecord in the past and I’ve recently figured out dependency injection by using Castle Windsor, so I know what Castle offers.

After scouring the Spring.Net site I don’t see much difference in terms of functionality from either project as far my interests lie.

• They both have an IoC container
• They both have web frameworks (granted the frameworks are different, but they’re both better than WebForms)
• They both have some sort of ORM capabilities

Spring.Net seems to use xml configuration a lot more than Castle and it also seems to have a ton more “stuff” in it, just based on sheer size of the documentation page. I’m not sure if this means that Spring.Net is a heavyweight framework or not. I definitely like Castle better when it comes to configuration (or lack thereof) and the availability of a programmatic API that can be used instead of xml, but that doesn’t mean that either framework has any functional difference, just a different way of getting there.

Can anyone tell me if theres something that I can do in either framework that can’t be functionally reproduced in the other? I’m mostly concerned with the Ioc, ORM, and web frameworks that each of these offer.