I will be in Jasper, Texas this week on business. I will be returning home on Sunday, July 20th.

This entry is a summary of the Apache guide for Installing Ant. It is targeted specifically for Windows.

1. Download the current release of Ant and place its contents under C:\Program Files\ant\.
2. Set the JAVA_HOME user variable under Environment Variables to a JDK, and not a JRE. In my case, this is %PROGRAMFILES%\Java\jdk1.6.0_06.
3. Modify the PATH user variable and append %PROGRAMFILES%\ant\bin to the end of the list.

Opening a command prompt and running ant -version, we obtain the following result:

C:\Users\tbarik>ant -version
Apache Ant version 1.7.0 compiled on December 13 2006

The Ant installation recommends setting the ANT_HOME variable to %PROGRAMFILES%\ant as well, but this can be redundant as the script automatically checks for this location.

I’ll be at Orlando, Florida for the entirety of next week on business. Yes, I’m still working for Arch Chemicals.

Update: I arrived back home on Saturday. I left Friday from Orlando, but it got late and so I stayed at a hotel in Tiffton.

It doesn’t work. I always get the following message when starting up the application:

Either Apache or MySQL cannot run because another program is using it’s port.

MySQL successfully starts, so it appears that Apache is the one that is causing the problem. The Apache Error Log is completely blank, and the Instant Rails log has nothing meaningful other than the message given above. Any ideas?

Update: It’s definitely a bug. Uncheck ‘Verify that the ports are available before starting servers’ under Configure / Instant Rails and you should be good to go.

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write down the answer.

Grades for ECE 520, Digital ASIC Design, have finally been posted. I took my final exam after the official deadline so it took a few weeks to manually enter my grades into the system. The grades are as follows:

• Midterm Exam, 85%
• Homework 1, 100%
• Homework 2, 100%
• Homework 3, 100%
• Homework 4, 100%
• Homework 5, 100%
• Final Project, 103%
• Final Exam, ?

Final average: ? (A+)
Costs: $2040 (tuition) + $112.20 (books)

I find that I do better in classes that are project-oriented rather than exam-oriented.

FreeBSD does not automatically include a default my.cnf for MySQL. Instead, a set of sample configuration files can be found under /usr/local/share/mysql. These configuration files include my-small.cnf, my-medium.cnf, my-large.cnf, my-innodb-heavy-4G, and my-huge.cnf. The appropriate file can be copied and used as a template configuration by performing the following actions:

cd /usr/local/share/mysql/
cp /usr/local/share/mysq/mysql-large.cnf /usr/local/etc/my.cnf
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server restart

The course outline for Object-Oriented Languages and Systems is as follows:

This course will cover object-oriented languages and the systems that can be built with them. Topics include object-oriented design and analysis, including methodologies such as the CRC-card method and the Unified Modeling Language. Systems concepts, including inheritance, static and dynamic binding, and aspect-oriented programming; implementation in specific languages.

The course is being taught by Dr. Edward Gehringer. Erik Boisen, one of my co-workers from Arch Chemicals, has decided to take the course as well.

Peer reviews for the course are done through the Expertiza system.

ECE 767 turned out to be an incredibly difficult course for me, especially since I lacked the Digital Communications pre-requisite. The lack of a final project and the low weight of homeworks, areas that typically boost my grade, also hurt my final score. The material was somewhat esoteric as well, and good references were hard to come by.

• Midterm Exam, 70%
• Homework 1, 100%
• Homework 2, 100%
• Homework 3, 85%
• Homework 4, 95%
• Homework 5, 95%
• Homework 6, 55% (dropped)
• Final Exam, 75%

Final average: 77.00% (B-)
Costs: $2040 (tuition) + $117.25 (books)

Still, I scraped by with a B-, and I’ll be more cautious about selecting 700 level courses in the future.

Generally speaking, people provide better maintenance for their cars than for their own bodies.

Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future