Huffman Coding

Saturday the entire family went to a meeting for prospective parents at our adoption agency. No, we’re not doing it again-we were there to share our stories and answer any questions the new parents might have. Claire, as has been her temperament frequently lately, was extremely fidgety. She raided the snack table that had been set up and wouldn’t sit still.

After the short meeting, Chris wanted to go out to eat. Claire continued to be an uncontrollably free spirit at the Mexican restaurant so after ordering my meal I grabbed Claire, handed my cell phone to Chris and told her to call her own cell phone back in the minivan where I would be killing time with Claire.

I returned with Claire in tow and watched Chris eat while holding Claire. When mommy finished a few minutes later, the girls headed back to the van. We didn’t have wait on the girls finishing. We hadn’t ordered for Katie as she had reported she wasn’t hungry and Marissa didn’t eat her quesadilla because the cheese was on the inside instead of being on top where she preferred.

I finished my meal alone before joining the family waiting in the parking lot. Doggie bag in hand.

The next day at lunch Marissa had reconciled with the left over internally-cheesed quesadillas.

Coming home from camping last weekend, we were greeted by cat feces in the family and living rooms. There was urine on baseboards. This, sadly, was not surprising to us. For several months now Dino, our larger cat, has been less than selective in his choice of evacuation locations. Often we have awoken to find stool on the rug outside the shower despite the fact that an unused litterbox is 3 feet away. The bottom of the bedroom closet door and some the baseboards around the house are permanently discolored.

After months of threatening to do so, Chris made the decision to return the cat to the Humane Society. We had the girls say their final goodbyes to him. Even though Katie was bawling, we doubt that either understood the true implications of sending Dino back to the “farm.” We weren’t about to the explain the circle of life just then. How do you tell an adopted child that your adopted pet annoyed you to the point that you were allowing it to be put to sleep.

Every adopted child, after realizing that they were once given up, wonders if it could ever happen again to them. Occasionally when Katie misbehaves she’ll, I guessing as a defense mechanism will announce she wants to go back to China. We reiterate weekly that a Daddy’s (and Mommy’s) love is unconditional and forever.

Unless, of course, you pee on the bathtub.

We went camping this weekend. Deer Creek was full so we went to Paint Creek. With Claire at grandma’s, Chris took the girls Friday afternoon, and I joined them later that evening. I put up the tent while Chris grilled hotdogs on a fork over the campfire. Quote from Katie after seeing the result: “I want to burn my own.” For the rest of the weekend, daddy cooked the meals.

We got to see old animated movies each night in the ampitheatre. Friday we saw “American Legends,” a collection of folk stories about John Henry (former slave able to lay railroad tracks faster than a steam engine), Johnny Appleseed (famed planter of apple trees), Paul Bunyon (the giant who could straighten rivers with his ox), and Casey Jones (the famous train engineer). Afterward I asked the girls which person was not real. Their unanimous verdict? Johnny Appleseed was least believable.

With the park naturalist, we went wading in the creek with nets. I caught a minnow and a crawdad. And after washing their muddy shoes we went fishing. I caught (and threw back) a Blue Gill. They didn’t want to hold the pole. Marissa was fascinated by a yellow and black longhorn beetle on the shore.

We also took a hayride past a “Youth Turkey Hunting Area.” Personally I think it is cruel to shoot only baby turkeys.

We came home to Grandma, Grandpa, and Claire. And a houseful of cat urine and feces. But that’s another posting.

After a week of Bible School, Katie has learned a valuable lesson:

“God makes boring stuff for adults.”

The week I got my WiFi PDA a co-worker, Dave, got one as well. Different brand and operating system though. And thus began the endless comparisons on which brand was superior. Being geeks one of the things he suggested we do is find a two person game that we could play over the Internet from the couches of our respective Wireless-enabled homes.

Well I searched high and low and there are only a few multi-player games and none of them were Internet based. All the games out there required the participants to be within a few feet of each other. Might as well break out a deck of cards and actually talk to one other. Well that won’t do. Since that is too low tech for my tastes, I felt the need to write my own. Coincidentally I had just learned a new card game that was perfect for taking online.

In a few days while on a business trip, I wrote the desktop (Windows/Mac/Linux) version. A no brainer. We test drove it and got hooked. Others are playing. So much so that it has become the most visited site on my web server, ahead of this blog.

But writing for handhelds was a learning opportunity for me. Because it is less capable than a desktop computer, code I had grown accustomed to wasn’t available on the PDA. I had to do more coding “by hand.” The difference between using a calculator and doing long division on paper. I was able to use yet another open source library, but only after fixing a fex bugs in it. The code had been abandoned, so there is no one to report the fixes to and others will encounter the same problems if they haven’t already. But the program is finally working and it is high on the cool/geek factor. Recently I played one game while I was giving my girls a bath and Dave was gaming at his own house.

I coded it in Java (specifically J2ME CLDC/MIDP 1.0, for you geeks out there) because that platform is theoretically available for both handhelds. The version of Java for my PDA, while free, is ancient. The version for his PDA was modern and a cheap download from handango.com. Or so we thought. After charging his VISA number, he received just a license agreement that stated he had the right to use the software, but they didn’t actually give him the software. He had to get ahold of the software himself elsewhere. And they never told him where he could find it.

After numerous Google searches, we discovered that we had to download and install a trial version of an expensive developer package, Websphere, to get access to the Micro Edition software he had paid the rights for. No where in this product did it explain which files were necessary for his PDA or how to install them. More fruitless Google searches followed. My only user gave up and went back to the PC version.

Eventually I posted a message to a few mailing lists (with thousands of members) looking for beta testers for the game. I was hoping for dozens of testers with at least one other user with the same software and hardware as my frustrated friend. After a week, I only had two replies, and the only guy who was willing to test it has a phone display that is too small for the program. Another dead end.

So, with no one with the hardware to run my handheld program, what do I do? Write a THIRD version that will run in a Java-less browser. Perhaps now I’ll have users.

But that’s it. I’m drawing the line there. Really. Well, maybe. We’ll see.