Nation of Greg

If there was any thought that the experiment would not work, I can definitely show that it is. From the beginning of the great diet experiment to now I have lost over 20 pounds purely by changing behaviors that are relatively easy to change. I still haven’t achieved my goal of reaching the target weight of 187, but I have definitely lost a lot of weight. In fact I have lost so much weight that people who see me comment on the fact that I have lost weight.

It will be another couple of months before I know whether or not the goal could be achieved within my constraints - but so far it appears that the experiment is definitely working and it is possible to lose and maintain substantial weight loss without going forward with substantial exercise or punishing changes to diet. In fact what I’m finding is that with relatively small tweaks to behavior it is possible to lose weight and keep it off.

I have not gotten down to where I want to be from a blood pressure perspective, but from a weight perspective I am succeeding beyond my expectations. Yay for the scientific process :)

After a long road and editing process, the book is finally headed to stores worldwide. (http://www.packtpub.com/unity-ios-game-development-beginners-guide/book)

It is a book that tries to cover a LOT of ground and as such there are some things that simply had to get cut, but there will be another revision of it to cover those things soon enough :)

One of the systems that I’m currently evaluating as a content repository is Nuxeo. I’m currently looking at it as an alternative for Alfresco as I need to see which would serve better as a platform for a content repository.

One of the first things is that Nuxeo is largely unknown in the world. There are a lot of people who know Alfresco, and nowhere near as many that even know that Nuxeo exists. This doesn’t really bother me as Nuxeo got its start ‘later in the lifecycle’. Because of this, Nuxeo definitely has a better architectural footprint than a lot of the engines currently available as it is taking advantage of more recent advances. One area where this really shines is with its adoption of OSGi and how this impacts the ability to extend the platform without breaking it or having the Nuxeo developers break your modifications when a new revision rolls out. I just wish that they would have started AFTER the world realized the diseased dream crushing JSF API needed to be abandoned.

I’ve been chatting with people who are trying to get development servers spun up on Ubuntu 11.10 with Java 7, MySQL, Apache, and Tomcat running on port 80 and here is the easiest set of commands to get it all set up.

1) Make sure your Ubuntu distro is up to date with repos and patches

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

2) Install Mysql

sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

3) Install OpenJDK 7

sudo apt-get openjdk-7-jdk

wget {whatever is the URL for your tomcat binary}7

7) Install Unzip to open the zip file

sudo apt-get install unzip

8) Extract the contents of the zip file into a directory

unzip {whatever .zip file you downloaded}

9) Move the tomcat installation to its permanent home

sudo mv {apache-tomcat directory} /opt

10) Create a symbolic link to this version so that you can easily change the version later without having to change paths all over the place

ln -s /opt/{apache-tomcat-directory} tomcat

11) Install Apache 2

sudo apt-get install apache2

12) Install the proxys for Apache - you need this to bridge to Tomcat

sudo a2enmod proxy

sudo a2enmod proxy_http

13) Restart the apache service

sudo service apache2 restart

14) Open your browser and make sure that Apache comes up on that URL

15) Configure Apache to forward traffic to port 8080. Replace the / with the specific webapp if you want something other than root redirect (i.e. /foo http://localhost:8080/foo)

sudo vi /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/

ProxyPassReverse / http://localhost:9090/

<Location “/”>

Order allow,deny

Allow from all

</Location>

16) Restart Apache so that the changes are reflected

sudo service apache2 restart

17) Create an init script for Tomcat so that it starts on machine restart and can be administered in a normal Unix way

sudo nano /etc/init.d/tomcat

18) Insert the following:

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.0-openjdk-i386

case $1 in

start)

        sh /opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

        ;;

stop)

        sh /opt/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

        ;;

restart)

        sh /opt/tomcat/bin/shutdown.sh

        sh /opt/tomcat/bin/startup.sh

        ;;

19) Start up the tomcat server

sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat start

20) Open your browser to the URL of the server and you should see the tomcat home page.

Done.

One thing that I had to confront today was a “carb crash”. This basically means that the body has finally said ‘hey stupid - I’m used to you giving me a lot of carbs, WTH are you doing.’ Essentially the body is doing what the machines in the Matrix were doing. Carbs are plentiful and easy, but now deprived of them the body needs to switch to its alternate energy sources (fat and protein).

While I haven’t been doing the nutty Atkins 20g carb/day diet all that has happened is that over time the body has depleted its glucose reserves and my brain is sending out all sorts of messages to get my to carb binge. Or at least that’s what I’ve read.

My dietary response is going to be to continue to stay low carb, but give the body something else to burn - protein and fat. Tonight I grilled Chicken Breast and did some Stir Fry vegetables. All low carb, and there was no salt so this is also keeping my sodium count for today within check.

I’m also planning a desert from Smart Ones tonight which is low carb and low calorie. This should fit into the trend of forcing the body to be busier processing food and not constantly trying to store it between meals.

All in all today was an interesting day with the salad fiasco, but I should be able to recover that over the next week.

In fact, the average salad you’re going to get from a restaurant is going to be your worst enemy! For lunch today I happened upon Houlihan’s and decided to grab a salad. Since salads are the stable of a diet I figured I couldn’t go wrong. Grabbed the Mandarin Chicken Salad and about midway through it realized that I was actually pretty full. Well, here’s why:

1015 calories, 114g carbs, 2089mg sodium (Damn, seriously?)

This is in a salad, something that is supposed to be your fallback if you go out to eat with non-diet people.

Even a basic Caeser Salad is just crap:

1020 calories (Dude, its a meatless salad!) , 22g carbs, 786mg sodium

So if you’re going to get a salad at a restaurant, opt for something basic and have then bring you some meat on the side or something.

Ah well. Knowing is half the battle as this is a day that going to McDonalds would have actually been BETTER than trying to eat healthy.

Yeah yeah yeah its early in the year and everybody is dieting because they want to fit into something, look good on the beach, etc. My desire to examine the diet was motivated by something entirely different - I have terrible Sleep Apnea which is either causing or somehow related to me being overweight.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at me, but according to all the various tables my ideal weight is around 187 pounds. When I started the experiment I was about 220. So I had a choice to make: sit on my fat ass and risk diabetes and heart disease like so many African Americans, perform a nutty regime like P90X which I wouldn’t be able to maintain for any extensive amount (for those that can, I applaud you), or find a set of repeatable behaviors around a reasonable diet that I could actually stick to for long periods of time without really thinking about it. My hypothesis is that any fool can do a “diet” for a short period of time, but a true “regime change” would require something more than reading a book and getting a gym membership.

It is my hope that this blog topic can be used by others to find a reasonable way to diet that doesn’t make you hate life, because if you hate doing it - eventually you’ll just stop doing it. Given the situation that African American in general have with obesity and high blood pressure, I have determined to find a way to live a ‘reasonable’ life - but live it a hell of a lot longer than one might otherwise.

Knowledge is KEY

It is impossible to really know what your situation is until you measure your initial state. With any scientific experiment, my first goal was to figure out what my current diet actually looked like. If you’re anything like me you eat “3 square meals a day” (or if you’re REALLY like me - 2). Thanks to good friend Steve Meister I was turned onto the Lose It website (loseit.com). 

The site itself isn’t anything special, but it does 2 things very well. First it allows you to link up with your friends (the social aspect and the ‘gamification’ of dieting is something I consider crucial to long term success), and it has an app. Any program that you’re using that doesn’t have an app is prone to absolute failure. Why? Because people forget, they don’t enter because its not convenient and soon they don’t understand their situation. Lose It has an app - not the best one in the world, but it is an app that allows you to enter what you’re eating, it can scan the barcodes of various foods, you can capture exercise, and it syncs with your friends. For the past 2 weeks it has been my constant companion.

As I began to looking up calories for various things I found CalorieKing.com which will give you nutritional information on pretty much everything under the sun and they have a nice app for those things that other apps don’t cover. CalorieKing has nutritional information for most places you’ll want to eat as well as most things you’ll find in the supermarket.

Next, you need a scale. Get over the fact that you won’t like what it says. You can’t improve if you don’t accept (like I had to) that you’re over your ideal weight. Get over it. Get a scale and move on. Soon you’ll find that you enjoy getting on the scale to see how you’re doing. You’ll very quickly find behaviors that work and those that don’t - and trust me, it absolutely won’t be obvious. Your subconscious brain is a heck of a lot smarter than your rational mind and you’re going to have to figure out what your BODY wants if you’re going to win the diet game.

With those two knowledge points let’s turn to the next issue - getting started. Don’t wait until after the party/game/etc. Your body will be just as bad off after the party/game/etc. if you just keep putting it off because you’ll procrastinate.

Low Carb for non-nutjobs (60-110g)

Now there are people out there who are doing no-carb diets and such and its certainly possible to lose a lot of weight that way - QUICKLY. Its also possible for you to do yourself a LOT of damage (including getting hospitalized) if you don’t know what you’re doing. For the average person its also not sustainable. Remember, my goal was a diet that would be easy to live with.

For a lot of scientific reasons that I’m neither qualified to discuss nor interested in discussing, let me just say that your goal is to reduce your carb intake so that your body has to use fat in order to fuel itself. Most fast is the result of a lot of unprocessed carbs. The USDA suggests a daily Carb intake of 300 grams. If you think that’s a lot, think of this - an Angus Bacon & Cheese from McDonalds has 66g. The fries that come with the meal have another 48g. The Coke that comes with the meal has 58g (yeah - more than the fries… that was a big surprise too). So if you have that single meal you’re already at 172g of carbs. Now I don’t want to bash McDonalds because they have done an admirable job in creating healthier food than most, but if you want to really lose weight - this stuff is going to wreck your progress. Further, to REALLY lose weight we need to be substantially less than 300g. For my diet the goal was between 60-110g carbs per day - aiming most certainly for the bottom of the spectrum. Considering that Atkins is a 20g/day diet - you can definitely see how what I’m targeting is reasonable.

Calorie count (1773)

The goal of any diet if fairly simple - work off more calories than your body consumes, but make sure that you set yourself up so that there are no crazy carb cravings such that you eat a lot of carbs that your body immediately stores as fat because you’ve been depriving it of them with a “crash diet”. This goes back to my original constraint, the diet must be sustainable. If its something you find yourself wanting to cheat with - its worthless. When using the LoseIt site/app, I was given a calorie budget to work with (and note that this budget decreases as you lose weight since your body requires fewer calories to keep the shop running). My goal is so stay at or beneath this line while not violating my other constraints.

For my friends that like to have a drink from time to time, here is a ‘sobering’ (no pun intended) fact - a single shot of most alcohols is 96 calories and it provides no nutritional value. If you’re drinking a regular drink - its about 520 calories per drink. Remember that our goal is 1773 calories, so drinking more than the recommended one alcoholic drink per day is absolutely not sustainable. Sorry to bring that up after the Super Bowl.

Sodium (Damn… seriously?)

I say with confidence that if you’re reading this you’re eating too much sodium - WAY too much sodium… and you probably don’t even know it. Sodium coupled with several other factors (like being overweight) are a recipe for hypertension, stroke, heart disease, and an early grave. For African Americans this is enemy number one and unfortunately this causes a very non-standard complication for the the diet. 

A healthy adult shouldn’t take in more than 2,300mg of salt per day, according to Penn Medicine. However if you are sensitive to sodium or hypertension (i.e. black) you really should be on a low sodium diet where you’re taking in between 1500-2000mg per day. Trust me, that absolutely is not a lot.

Lets take another trip to McDonalds. That Angus Bacon & Cheese? 2070mg. Medium fries 270. Coke (Medium) - 15mg. So in this one meal you’re already over your limit for low sodium. Hell you’re already over your sodium count for a healthy adult… FOR THE DAY. Sadly sodium counts are high in lots of stuff that you normally eat. Slice of cheese pizza? 530mg. Meat Lovers? 860mg. Keep eating a lot of this and you’re eating your way to a bad health picture. I’m certainly not saying STOP, but awareness is the key. Now you know and you can plan around the reality. I never thought I’d see statistics that told me that McDonald’s fries are one of the healthiest components of most the meals on the menu! That should tell you something.

Now for the really sad realization - most diet foods are ALSO full of large amounts of sodium. A lot of this is hidden in very dubious packaging where the manufacturer won’t really disclose how much is there. For example I stopped to look at some microwave popcorn and they didn’t give the numbers for the bag. What they’d say is X number grams of popcorn yield so many calories and so many mg of sodium. Then they’d say that that number of grams of popcorn yield so many cups of popcorn which has different calorie and sodium numbers. Unfortunately the bags of popcorn used a different measurement making it confusing or impossible to determine the actual counts. Other “diet” foods would play the other game. They’d publish one number on the front of the package, but that number is per serving and only if you examine the container do you learn that the box is the equivalent of 2,3, and in one case 7 servings!

The folks from Lean Cuisine do a decent job of providing sufficient information so I’ll use some of their stuff to illustrate the sodium issue. A Lean Cuisine ‘thai-style chicken’ only has 300 calories (yay), 40g carbs (meh - okay), and 600mg of sodium - more than a slice of cheese pizza.

So what?

So now that I’ve kinda walked through the ground rules of my diet: sustainable, low-carb, low-sodium and some of the motivations lets walk through some of the things that I’ve changed early in the process:

Drinks

============

I consider drinking only water an admirable goal. Certainly there are reasons other than diet to consume larger quantities of water, but if you’re used to something with a taste - you need something with a taste. I explored two options so far:

1) Drop regular soft drinks. Drink Coke Zero or Diet Coke. While there is some minimal sodium intake still, these drinks are really 0-1 calorie per 12 ounces so you can in fact drink them like water. I continue to research Pepsi Maxx versus Coke Zero, but so far Coke Zero has become a favorite drink. 

Gain (vs old life): 89 calories, 3mg sodium, 25g carbs per drink

Considering that at least 3 of these were going down on average per day that a net of 270 calories, 9mg sodium, and 75g of carbs.

Lose: 31mg potassium

Sustainability: Stupidly easy. 

2) Investigate water enhancers. I happened to find Mio while browsing the aisles in Target. THe Fruit Punch flavor and Peach Tea flavors are actually pretty good. If you happen to be adventurous and mix it in with mineral waters (I used Pellegrino) you actually get something that’s pretty damn close to a soft drink in taste and texture. The downside is a gain of sodium.

Gain (vs old life): 90 calories, 21mg sodium, 25g carbs per drink

Considering that at least 3 of these were going down on average per day that a net of (270 calories, 63mg sodium, and 75g of carbs.)

Lose: Nothing

Sustainability: Easier for women since you can put a Mio in your purse. 

Breakfast

===========

People claim its the most important meal of the day, and perhaps it is. It is however one that is pretty easy to get wrong in my diet.

Old Life

Starbucks Venti Cappuccino

183 cal, 117mg sodium, 15g carbs

+ (4)  Sugar in the Raw (20 calories and 5g) .

263 cal, 117mg sodium, and 95g carbs

Options

Milk (meh… nasty anyways)

What about milk? Milk I’m afraid to say is a weird bird from my diet perspective. An 8fl oz cup of milk is 91 calories, 130mg of sodium, and 12.3 carbs. Yes you need calcium, but you need to pay attention to what you’re doing if you’re drinking large quantities of milk.

Coffee

I frequent my local coffee shop and Starbucks fairly often so I wanted to get a feel for how it would fit in the diet. As seen above that wasn’t sustainable from a diet perspective as eventually I’d be eating meals with that many calories and I certainly couldn’t consume that many carbs in a diet. So I needed a replacement for it.

Civilization is one of the most revered PC games in the history of PC gaming. Back during the ‘golden age’ of PC gaming this one of those games that you’d probably be playing for hours on end except when you stopped to play Master of Orion. Civ has always been an expansion upon the previous iteration, but for the most part the game has had the same fundamental rules and play style. With Civ5 I’m sure the developers realized they were doing something akin to changing the rules of Monopoly. There are so many people out there familiar with the game and how it plays that even the slightest change would shine like a beacon in the night. Nevertheless the developers rolled the dice and come up with a new creation that has a lot of good, a lot of bad and some stuff that’s just broken.

Lets get past the fluff stuff: its a very pretty game, its got performance issues with the new graphics engine, its crashy, and it needs some patches for some of the glitches. Now with that out of the way lets get to more review type stuff…

Civilization is still the turn based game of empire building, but the play mechanics have been heavily tweaked. Yes you will still yearn for one more turn, but the reason you’re yearning will be a bit different.

Empire Building

One of the things about prior civilizations was that it was relatively easily to pop out a civilization and over farm the world with settler units until you run across other civs and start establishing borders. That speed is definitely gone in Civ5 as there are almost always city states within a stones throw of you and since cities and their zone of control grow rather slowly you won’t quickly get neat little borders like in the past. In fact you will find that many times the only time you can really grow quickly is by expending money to buy tiles at the edges of your current zone of control. These two facts coupled together means that you likely won’t have some massive empire that runs to the ocean unless you’re really militaristic and take down the city states - though that will cause the others around you to declare war on you and attack. So from that perspective its a lot more believable than prior civs. However it also slows the game down a lot. You will end up expending money to peacefully coexist with many of the city states as the more readily available way to appease them is tossing them some coin. For the most part they aren’t really anything except an obstacle (normally to the sea) and while they will often give you missions to kill another state or connect them to some resource - for the most part they just aren’t really interesting which is a real letdown.

One thing that is a huge change is the social policies system. I remember back during the MOO3 days talk of such a system - which was subsequently watered down and scrapped before the game was “released” and killed the franchise. In this system you have the ability to ‘paint the culture’ of your society and gain bonuses from how you’ve shaped them. This is a great improvement though there isn’t a lot of variety in many ways. Some things such as religions that were pulled from Civ seem to fit better here in the social policy system. However it never seems that the social policies really do much more than give you a bunch of benefits - there are never really any penalties are consequences of shaping your society in one way or another. More depth in this area would have made this a more welcome addition and created a more interesting game.

Combat

The biggest thing here is the hex system and the single unit per hex. Once you get over the fact that there is one unit per hex its pretty straightforward though sometimes confusing when you have to coordinate for movement for an attack. It gets even more confusing because air units CAN stack on the same space so it gets a little weird that ground units cannot at all. Somewhere of the design of this one unit per hex system they just didn’t get all the kinks out. Speaking of attacking - no longer are military units these rapidly built things that you can just thrust into combat without concern for whether or not they live or die. Units take a LONG LONG time to build so when you lose one, it hurts quite a bit. I’m cool with this - actually I think this is a great addition since you’re more focussed on developing units and protecting them. This “unit breakdown” makes more sense with the later game units than the early game units and I think it would have made some sense if having a Great General would have allowed you to stack 2 units into an army - but that’s neither here nor there - the whole thing is a little big busted. They probably didn’t do it because in the late game it seems that Great Generals are raining from the heavens so often that they are best used to kick off another golden age. One thing about combat is that the game almost feels like it was built around combat and the hex system. Those appear to be the more polished areas of the new engine. Nukes and Atomics still feel underpowered and since you have to build them from finite resources on the map, you will find that there are better ways to wage war than nuking people - or more specifically you may have one or two but that’s about it. Given their relatively subdued impact on a city, its not worthwhile to use them - better to build nuclear power plants and crank out more conventional forces from the added production.

One major plus is that you no longer have to build boats and micromanage moving units across oceans.

Science/Technology/Specialists

This is an area that is one of “big messes”. Technology can be built out rather quickly as you get to mid game. There are a considerable number of things that you can use to get massive increases in the amount of science that a city can produce so mid-late game you will find that you’re rolling out advances pretty quickly (the tax rate system is no more as far as I can tell). The technology tree isn’t full of surprises, but somehow it seems that the play balance for all of the new Wonders was just lost. Similarly with specialists its not clear that they really finished this part of the game. Great Scientists are either usable for a golden age or you convert them into a free technology? Great Engineers can ready production, but not on a wonder? Specialists feel like they weren’t finished and were next on the list before spies and such. I dunno, they just feel almost useless or at least not well thought out in a lot of ways - though for multiplayer the culture bomb is likely to be a worthwhile enhancement.

Conclusion

The game will have to grow on most people to really make you feel the same way you did about the original civs. By changing the secret sauce of civ you will find that you do suboptimal things for a while (like putting roads on lots of improvements) until you realize that you just have to play the game different. Overall the game is still very good but it feel to me that it isn’t finished and needed some more baking in design and QA to be a quality release.

I recently made the switch from using my MacBookPro to just carrying around my iPad and I have several observations that some folks might be interested in hearing.

First a little about my setup. I have a MacPro with 3 displays as my home machine. I have a MacBook Pro 15” that is a max’d out DualCore - can’t remember the speed, but its a couple of years old now. I almost always have my iPhone 3GS with me and I carry an iPad. At work I have a Lenovo and many times I will have a Sprint EVO with me for various things. I do have a Blackberry from the office, but I don’t even know where it is anymore :)

Use Case

I spend most of my time in meetings during the week, and deal with emails, budgets, and other more administrative things. I do enjoy writing code and spend a LOT of time writing it, but never in the office. I also do a lot of development with Unity for game development.

Findings

1) I tend to be more comfortable just moving my iPad everywhere I go and I mean EVERYWHERE. I wouldn’t take my Pro to every meeting because I knew I would be fighting to get a plug, whereas with the iPad I know that it will last the entire meeting and then some. I do take my iPad outside and read, despite that the Kindle commercial suggests that it shouldn’t work.

2) Evernote is one of my most important applications as it helps me keep things organized or just lets me record things on the go. Its also just a good companion to have around, although its interface needs a lot of work on the iPad. Everything feels like you’re sending an email.

3) Having a WiFi only iPad has its own set of complications unless you have a jailbroken iPhone that you can tether it with. I have a Sprint EVO as well, but when I really looked at it - a jailbroken iPhone was doing the job just fine. This is one of those rare moments where i think the 3G version would have been a better purchase for me as I don’t tend to jailbreak my iPhone unless its necessary.

4) Printing remains an issue - even with iOS 4.2 beta as not everything cleanly integrates with the iPad. In order for printing to get a pass from me it would have to work with pretty much any printer that is connected to the network I’m on - not just those directly connected to a Mac or PC.

5) Exchange support still isn’t great as there are issues with calendars and changing/updating meeting requests. Its also an annoyance to deal with unlocking my iPad when I don’t have to do that with my laptop. I’m just as likely to lose my laptop (actually moreso according to the statistics) as I am my iPhone or iPad. This is one area where the industry got it totally WRONG because they spent too much time listening to the complaints of system administrators on a power trip.

Conclusion

You will continue to think that you need your laptop until you actually cut the cord. However once you do you will find that you really survive much BETTER with an iPad - at least that’s been my experience. The only thing that I find I’m missing is being able to write code, but in reality I only do that when I’m at home so its not that big a deal. The only time it looks like I’ll be taking the laptop with me is when I go on a trip and I want to write code in IntelliJ Idea as there is no way I can do that without having access to the MacPro.

If someone was smart they would come up with some cloud based way for me to do all my build world and come up with some nice code editor on my iPad :) That I would pay a fair amount of money for.

I was talking a look at some of the uses of OAuth this weekend and spent some time looking at Yelp and came back confused. The whole point of using something like OAuth is so that the user won’t have to provide their username and password to some entity that they don’t want to have it. However in order to authenticate a user with the Yelp access_token method, what do you need to have - the users email and password.

I am completely confused by this. If the user is going to give you their user name and password, then you might as well just cache that!