So, exactly what do I mean by oddly? Well, the needles on the temperature and fuel gauges would slam back and forth wildly. The tach and speedometer gauges would jump from zero to very high RPMs or speeds, respectively, then fall back to zero. Diagnostic lights would come on and go off, with their accompanying beeps. See for yourself.

It got so bad that finally the instrument cluster stopped talking to the immobilizer. This caused the immobilizer to think the car was being stolen, so it kept killing the engine when I tried to start it.

At that point, I had to have the instrument cluster replaced. Although this is a common problem with TTs, Audi has yet to issue a recall in the US.

And, no, the mice had nothing to do with this.

C3P0 wraps the JDBC driver’s PreparedStatement class with its C3P0ProxyStatement. Unfortunately, it doesn’t override toString() to return something useful. So, you just get the default of a class name and the hash code for the instance. Not helpful.

Unfortunately, there is nothing in the API that gives you an obvious means of getting at the real PreparedStatement, which I can see in the debugger inside a private variable named inner. I knew that the rawStatementOperation() method might be the key, but it wasn’t obvious. However, a bit of googling turned up a solution in the unit test code for C3P0.

Unit tests are awesome. Not just for testing your code, but also for providing example code.

So, here’s some example code. First, I created a simple table in the test database of a local MySQL install.

create table rs (a int);

And here’s some code that connects to the database, sets up a prepared statement and then extracts the SQL from the prepared statement with the parameters bound:

import java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException;
import java.lang.reflect.Method;
import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.PreparedStatement;
import java.sql.SQLException;

import com.mchange.v2.c3p0.C3P0ProxyStatement;
import com.mchange.v2.c3p0.ComboPooledDataSource;

public class C3P0Demo {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

    // Get a connection
    String url = "jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test";
    ComboPooledDataSource ds = new ComboPooledDataSource();
    ds.setDriverClass("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver");
    ds.setJdbcUrl(url);
    ds.setUser("myuser");
    ds.setPassword("mypassword");
    Connection conn = ds.getConnection();

    // Prepare the PreparedStatement
    PreparedStatement ps = conn.prepareStatement("insert into rs values (?)");
    ps.setInt(1, 10);

    // Extract the SQL
    String sql = "";
    try {
      C3P0ProxyStatement c3p0Stmt = (C3P0ProxyStatement) ps;
      Method toStringMethod = Object.class.getMethod("toString", new Class[] {});
      Object toStr = c3p0Stmt.rawStatementOperation(toStringMethod,
          C3P0ProxyStatement.RAW_STATEMENT, new Object[] {});
      if (sql instanceof String) {
        sql = (String) toStr;
        sql = sql.substring(sql.indexOf('-') + 1).trim() + ";";
        System.out.println(sql);
      }
    } catch (SQLException e) {
      System.out.println("Exception extracting SQL: " + e.getMessage());
    } catch (SecurityException e) {
      System.out.println("Exception extracting SQL: " + e.getMessage());
    } catch (NoSuchMethodException e) {
      System.out.println("Exception extracting SQL: " + e.getMessage());
    } catch (IllegalArgumentException e) {
      System.out.println("Exception extracting SQL: " + e.getMessage());
    } catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
      System.out.println("Exception extracting SQL: " + e.getMessage());
    } catch (InvocationTargetException e) {
      System.out.println("Exception extracting SQL: " + e.getMessage());
    }
  }
}

Inside the C3P0ProxyStatement is a com.mysql.jdbc.ServerPreparedStatement. For my example, ServerPreparedStatement.toString() returns:

com.mysql.jdbc.ServerPreparedStatement[1] - insert into rs values (10)

Last weekend we headed up to Geyserville and I decided it was time to climb Pine Flat Road. The photo above is from the top. I started out way down at the bottom of that valley, around 3000 feet below where I took that photo. The dirt road is actually a fire road. The real road is paved, but almost as steep in parts.

There’s a benefit ride coming up on June 6 that I wish I could make it up there for. They describe the route as “extremely tough and extremely steep” and “straight up with a beat-down at the top”. I concur. Check the altitude profile on that page.

The ride up was actually fantastic, despite the punishing climb at the top. The wild flowers during the bottom part of the climb were amazing and the canyon walls were beautiful. While I was happy to get to the flat part of Pine Flat Road, I knew the crazy steep finish was next. The climb finishes with over 1.5 miles of mostly 10-15% gradient, with one stretch of about 500 meters that had to be about 15% the whole way. I had to take my only break about 2/3 of the way up that stretch to avoid Roger Rabbit syndrome after my heart rate shot up close to 180.

Getting started again was fun, as it’s a very narrow road. I had to ride across the road a few feet to build momentum and turn hard and straight up the hill to avoid riding off the side of the mountain. If I didn’t make the turn in time, I probably would have gone 100 feet down the hillside before the brush or rocks stopped me. At that point, the vultures flying overhead would have suddenly taken an interest in my ride.

The descent started out a bit scary, as the steep turns with the big drop-offs made for feverish braking and cornering. Then as I entered a steep left hand bend, I heard the terrible sound of a flatting tire. The valve stem separated and the tire went completely flat almost immediately. Since I was in a hard turn, the now flat tire rolled over the rim and jammed in the brake. Of course, it would be the front tire, so I was launched over the handlebars. I went right shoulder first, with my body completely twisting over and landing on my left hip.

Fortunately, I had slowed way down for the turn, so I didn’t have much forward momentum. However, the road was so steep that gravity sent me sliding a few more feet. I scraped off all the skin near the bottom joint of a finger on my left hand and a rock took a small chunk out of my right thumb. Thumbs bleed much, much more than fingers. Especially near the tip of the thumb.

Of course, I had no cell reception. And the only car I had seen at the end of the road (it’s basically a dead end at a closed gate leading onto a private road) had already headed down the mountain. After gingerly (partly due to big scrape on my hip and partly due to Look cleats with covers on a steep downhill) walking my bike an 1/8 mile down the road, I caught up with the car that had just left. Fortunately, they were bird watchers and had stopped to check out the wildlife. They very kindly agreed to give me a ride down until I could get cell reception and call my wife to come meet me a little farther down the road with her Uncle Fred. Thank you bird watchers! You rock!

A week and four bike rides later, I’m fortunately almost completely recovered. Yay, magic healing powers.

This image was forwarded by a cousin, who is a medical doctor, with a suitable warning that the CDC does not condone, encourage or reward the above activity.

[via Boing Boing]

Tonight my wife and I found a suitable, albeit more expensive, replacement at Casa Orinda. It’s an Italian restaurant with a Western theme (no Ennio Morricone background music, though), but they serve a wicked fried chicken plate. The mashed potatoes and gravy are delicious and the biscuit with honey is divine.

The place was packed early on a Sunday night, so we ended up eating at that bar, which is generally fine by me. The friendly bartender even shared some info on how the chef gives the biscuits a really buttery flavor without using much butter.

And they’re not a one trick pony, either. The orecchiette with broiled chicken and portobello mushrooms in a marsala sauce was also very, very good. The beer lineup, all in bottles, was just okay, though I did enjoy a Lagunitas IPA. Probably not the best pairing with the orechiette, but it was what I was in the mood for.

And thanks to the best of 2008 list at Oakland Magazine for tipping me off to Casa Orinda’s fried chicken.

The surface area of a seat on a bike is quite a bit smaller than for a car, yet in chillier northern regions of the country, I can imagine that the first minute or so in the saddle on a bike that has been waiting for you in the wintry wonderland could be bracing. That’s why I like the thinking of the person who designed this heated bike seat.

As far as I know, this is not a manufacturer’s equipment option. If you’re thinking of customizing your ride with one of these, I recommend looking for one with a bit of heat-conductive padding. Maybe some wadded up mylar sheets. At least up front on the point.

via: Makezine via: Momentum

Here’s a photo of me enjoying the baths.

Alright, alright, this wasn’t at Szchenyi. It’s in Yamanouchi, Japan (Photo by EPA at http://telegraph.co.uk). And those are macaques, but surely you recognize the resemblance.

I went to the gorgeous Grand-Lake Theatre in Oakland tonight with wife and friends to see Quantum of Winter Solstice. I was totally expecting an educational film on astronomy, so the guns, car chases and boring villains were quite the surprise. However, I did take solace in the kick-out-the-jams performance of the organ player who rises up from the orchestra pit with his Mighty Wurlitzer Organ and then descends again just before the movie starts. That’s something you don’t get at the 38-screen multi-megaplex at the suburban mall.

Spoiler Alert:

I accidentally wrote Soiler Alert, at first. But that would be more apropos to the Baby Brigade at the Parkway Speakeasy.

Bond movies often have intriguing villains and well thought out storylines that meaningfully build to a climactic conclusion. Well, before the bit where Bond gets busy with the beauty pageant contestant, martial arts expert, nuclear physicist, gun/knife toting woman he’s been fighting/flirting with for most of the movie. Quantum Solace, in contrast, seemed to primarily be about Bond’s quest for revenge over a dead girlfriend being played out indirectly against a poorly explained pack of bad guys who seemed to be wedged sideways into the plot because there simply “has” to be an evil cabal in every Bond flick.

And usually the axis of evil has cooked up some plan that will result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people unless they get paid a huge ransom. Or will simply result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people because the bad guys are unrepentant misanthropes. However, Dominic Greene of the bashful evil supergroup Quantum has his sights set a bit lower. In the midst of arranging for a military coup in Bolivia, he tricks the new dictator into agreeing to pay double the going rate for municipal water.

WTF??? That’s the frickin’ evil plan? Is Quantum the secret name of EBMUD? After all, they raised our rates. I don’t think it was double, though. Heck, the real life Aguas del Tunari consortium in Bolivia raised rates by 35% after taking control of the water supply.

There’s has been a long history of water issues in Bolivia. In fact, when the little bit of a plot that was there played out and revealed a dictator trying to come back to power, I immediately thought of General Hugo Banzer.

An amusing aside for me was that Greene ends up being left by Bond to die in the Atacama desert (footage was shot in Chile rather than Bolivia) with a can of motor oil to drink when he gets thirsty. Many years ago Sandra and I were stranded in the Atacama desert when the truck that our guide was driving completely broke down before dawn on the way to the geysers near San Pedro de Atacama. Fortunately, the driver’s thermos of hot tea was more refreshing than motor oil. We also had to walk only about 7 miles before being picked up and brought back to town.