I recently upgraded my personal computer from Fedora 21 to 22, and in the process ran into some hiccups with my Postgres server. Since it was such a nuisance to bring it back up correctly after the upgrade to Postgres 9.4, I wanted to document the steps here: I’m sure I’ll need these notes later when I have to perform a similar upgrade on a different machine.

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Off to a late start, almost noon by the time I hit the road. Neither Rachael nor I were very eager to get going, and we were both pretty emotional in the parking lot. I am really grateful to have a wife who’s so supportive of me, and who has as much faith in me as she does, because the extent to which my family worries about me is truly discouraging. I got moving, though, and onto the first set of maps I had prepared!

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After resting on Saturday for Rena’s graduation, I woke up at 6:30 and had breakfast with my mother-in-law Jen: scrambled eggs, croissaint, blueberry jam. I loaded up my water and headed out to New York! It started off chilly and almost eerie quiet: Very little traffic or signs of life, really.

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This morning I woke up at 6:30, and wasn’t on the road for an hour and a half. I didn’t really have my head in the game for some reason, so I forgot some important stuff: Two of my water bottles were still on my Trek, my Road ID bracelet, and a bunch of hard-boiled eggs for snacks.

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Today I started my bike tour just before noon in York, ME. I started at the Nubble Lighthouse, because it’s always been a bit of a landmark for me, as it was always a favorite place for my parents to bring me for as long as I can remember. Besides, it seems appropriate that a journey like this should start at the ocean, and it also means that I can end my first day at home, allowing me a good opportunity to make adjustments as necessary at the end of the day.

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Today I had to deal with a couple different interesting problems when using Angular.js to interact with a postgresql database. I’m not normally a Javascript guy, or for that matter a UI guy either, so I ran into a few complications along the way, and I thought they were worth documenting.

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During lunch today I had a conversation with a coworker, who brought up Tom Coburn’s Wastebook 2014. I’d heard about it in previous years, but never actually read the contents of it directly before. This time I figured I’d actually read up on it so I could respond to her stances more coherently.

I haven’t read it through yet. I admit, I found myself distracted. While I appreciate the citations, I found myself infuriated that such a well-cited document would make it so difficult to actually reference the citations, especially considering they’re mostly URLs. There’s no links from the citations themselves to the bibliography, and the bibliography itself doesn’t contain links, so the text must be manually copied and pasted into a browser. Why is this so needlessly difficult?

I figured there was no need for that. I figured this was an excuse to practice my vim / sed / regex skills, and clean it up a little. I figured I’d share what I’ve produced: An HTML version of the document that includes citations as actual, clickable hyperlinks.

Extracting text from a PDF isn’t really as nice a process as I’d like, so there’s a lot to clean up, but maybe this will at least be a handy tool alongside the original PDF version.

Link here. I might clean it up a bit more when I have a chance. Feel free to do so yourself - I apologize if the copyright is questionable here, I’m just trying to make things more readable.

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I have a Surface Pro 2, and I really like the device. Metro style apps are great for casual use, like browsing the internet while on the couch at night, and I love having the ability to install traditional desktop applications as well, including developer-oriented software like Cygwin and Notepad++. Managing many windows with a touch screen is central to my process, but it’s clumsy with the touch screen, and the touch pad on the Type Cover doesn’t help a whole lot. It’s tempting for me to imagine a workstation that doesn’t use a mouse at all, but we’re definitely not there yet. As an experiment, I decided to try envisioning a mouse-less, touch-screen workstation that I might be interested in using for software development. The result is TouchWM. What follows is some of my observations: What I’ve learned, liked, disliked, and what I still need to figure out.

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I'm a software engineer based in New Hampshire. I work with databases, Java and C++ for enterprise software. For fun and learning, I tinker with the stuff you can read about here. I'm also a cyclist and a home brewer, so that might show up too from time to time.