Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

I’ve been reading this book lately, Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. It’s a first person account of the creation of Linux, as told by Linus Torvalds to David Diamond.  So far it’s been very interesting, I like the way they’ve mixed the technical details of developing Linux with some personal background on Linus’s life as well.  Hearing about the viral growth of Linux is really cool too, it’s funny how it makes you want to go and download a copy and start using Linux as your desktop OS.

I was doing some web development this morning and after installing some software I needed to do a restart. After the machine came back up, I tried to access the local site that I had been working on, but it was trying to download “index.php” rather than serving it up in my browser, which was weird.

I opened up IIS and for some reason my Default Web Site was stopped. I tried starting it, but got this great error message, “unexpected error 0×8ffe2740 occurred.” Wonderful. Thankfully, the first result on Google was a MS site for this error and the reason. The problem is that something else had already taken port 80, so my site couldn’t use it. (As an aside, you’d think IIS could catch this error a little better, its not a very exotic situation). So I switched my site to port 8080 and it worked, but I still wanted to find out what was using port 80.

After running “netstat -a” from the command line, I could definitely see that something was using it, but didn’t know what. If you run “netstat -a -b” you will get a list of all ports, and the program thats using it as well, and low and behold, Skype had decided to use port 80. I quit Skype and my web site started with no problem. I believe that Skype searches for an open port to use when it starts up, so it must have gotten to port 80 before IIS could and took it, lame.

I got a pretty flattering email today from a recruiter:

“Unknown,
Good morning, I thought you might be interested in a programming opening we have available……”

They must have misinterpreted my name from “Ben” to “Unknown”, it’s a common mistake. But seriously, if anyone is looking for work in the Twin Cities, contact the company below, they probably pride themselves on the personal touch the bring to the table.

On-Demand Services Group, Inc.
12400 Portland Avenue South, Suite 105, Burnsville, MN 55337
952-894-9039

Instead of going to the gym today, I opted to try a local beer that just recently started selling their beer in cans at the liquor store. Previously you could only get Surly from several local bars, but now I can bring the goodness into my own home. I bought a 4 pack of the Bender, which is their brown ale, it’s fantastic. Think New Castle but with a richer flavor and a little more carbonation.

While I had the camera out, I also snapped a couple pictures of Bob the Boxer, we’re dog sitting Erin’s parents’ dog for two weeks while they’re on vacation. He’s about a good a dog as you can get, in spite of his constant slobber, because this is how he spends his days, nestled up against the leg of a table.

I thought I’d show some screenshots of the project that I’ve been working on in my spare time for awhile now. I haven’t touched this in a couple weeks, but I’ve just got a couple more tweaks to do on it, then I’ll put it up for download, if anybody wants to use it.

The app is called Walnut, for no reason in particular. It’s a time entry tool that I use at work to track the time that I spend on any given project. The reason I made this in the first place is that I was working on 3 different billable projects and I was just making paper notes of the time that I spent on each one on each day and I wanted something a little better.

I tell Walnut that I’m starting work on a project and it starts a timer and when I’m done it stops the timer, then at the end of the day I can check my totals and fill out my timecard. I’ve started using it for other stuff too, like surfing the web, to see exactly where my time has gone. You can also enter in notes for each task throughout the day. You can click the screenshots for full size images.

This is the main screen in Walnut. You can see the current elapsed time for your current task and Start/Stop/Pause/Resume the task. Below is a list of today’s tasks. On top if you switch to the Notes tab, you can enter notes about the current task.

This is the view if you switch the bottom tab to Day’s Totals. This shows an aggregate view of the day, with some basic stats. It groups the tasks together and adds up the time, so if I surf the web for 5 times for 10 minutes each time, the Web task would show up here with 50 minutes. You can view the totals for any other day by switching the date in the date box. One of the things that I think is really cool is that the aggregate view updates in real time if you are viewing the current day’s tasks.
I have some more ideas for features here and there, but I’d like to have something to download soon, let me know if you’re interested, if anyone emails me I’ll be more likely to finish it faster