There's a ton of poker time software out there and even some nifty looking dedicated hardware. At the games I attend we'll usually use a computer for the timing, but often there isn't one in the room and no one wants to bring over a laptop. However, there is almost always a TV with DVD player in whatever room gets temporarily re-purposed as the game room.

That got me thinking that a DVD that could serve as a poker timer would work in all the rooms in which we play poker and would offer these other benefits:

When editing source files checked out from CVS I sometimes want to prevent them from going back in to source control without further edits. Until now I've just used // FIXME comments and have tried to remember to grep for FIXMEs before committing the files back.

Problem is others use FIXME comments, and sometimes I forget to grep. So I've tweaked our CVSROOT files to prevent custom FIXME tags from going in to source control.

I wrote an article that got posted on the O'Reilly Network. It sounds a little more huckster-ish than I'd like, but the tech does get explained pretty well. There's a link to the new beta 2 release of SwarmStream Public Edition at the bottom of the article.

My latest project for Onion Networks has just been released: it's a first beta release of SwarmStream Public Edition, a completely free Java protocol handler plug-in that transparently augments any HTTP data transfer with caching, automatic fail-over, automatic resume, and wide-area file transfer acceleration.

SwarmStream Public Edition is a scaled-down version of our commercially-licensable SwarmStream SDK. Both systems are designed to provide networked applications with high levels of reliability and performance by combining commodity servers and cheap bandwidth with intelligent networking software.

Jetty is a great Java servlet container and web server. It's fully embeddable and at OnionNetworks we've used it in many of our products. It, however, has the same 2GiB file size limit that a lot of software does. This limit comes from using a 32 bit wide value to store file size yeilding a 4GiB (unsigned) or 2GiB (signed) maximum, and represents a real design gaff on the part of the developers.

I got sick of having to edit the launch file whenever I ran my Poker Timer (https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00038.html), so I wrote a quick CGI that generates a JNLP file which launches the app with the specified settings. You'll need to have a 1.2 or higher Java Virtual Machine installed (http://java.com).

So we've got a Perl interpreter dynamically producing a JNLP file that tells a Java Virtual Machine what to do. Talk about an unholy alliance.

Some friends and I have been playing poker a couple of times a month for the last year or so. Our play is terrible, no one cares, and we usually spend more on beer than we win. It's a good time.

In November a few of us decided to head to the local card club and try our hands at play in the wild. We decided to enter a tournament. Tournaments are a great way to start out playing at a card club because you know going in exactly how much money you're going to loose from the start. Ninety or so people each pay a fixed entrance free, and only the top nine of them get any prize money at all. Tournaments all offer good initial chip parity -- everyone starts with exactly the same amount of money so you can't be pushed around by bigger stack from the start. Another added bonus is that for your initial buy-in of twenty or so dollars you get a few thousand "dollars" in tournament chips. They're not real money but they're the closest I'll ever come to saying, "I raise 2000," without having to append, "pennies."

I try to lead a very uncluttered life whether one's talking about hard drive layout, personal responsibilities, or physical clutter in my condo. Three years ago I got my first TV and DVD player. Each came with its own remote control. Not wanting to deal with two remotes on my coffee table (which at the time was a cardboard box) I went out and bought a nice $20 universal remote that was very programmable and easily handled the functions of both the TV and the DVD player.