Irresponsible goldfish
John is truly a master of international relations and foreign policy. I’m referring to John Oliver of course. From episode 41 of The Bugle
Listen to the file.
posted on: August 16, 2008
My morning
When I saw what they had to do to clear the bathroom sink, I felt less bad about my inability. I had taken the drain apart and, using a bent coat hanger, had fished out what was clearly years of backed up hair and filth the likes of which I hope to never see again. But this was merely the tip of the revolting iceberg, as the two handymen had to cut the drain pipe in half with a hacksaw and extract even more disgustingness. The hair was clearly not ours. It was very, very long. Like haunt my nightmares long. So that threw off my whole morning.
Rapunzel must have grown old in my apartment.
posted on: July 15, 2008
The Bugle
The last week I have been catching up on The Bugle, a rather enjoyable weekly “audio newspaper for a visual world”. You might recognize the voice of John Oliver from The Daily Show but who really cares about that. It’s hilarious. I’ve excerpted a short bit from Episode 34 that I was compelled to replay a few times my first listen. Also gives me a chance to try out the embedded Flash player I just wired up. Have no fear, those of you on the iPhone without Flash can still hear the clip.
Also, another geeky technical point, I stumbled upon a useful way of making clips from iTunes files. Right click and Get Info on the track, select Options, and set the Start Time and Stop Time. Then right click on the track and select Convert Selection to MP3. Done.
Listen to the file.
Update: Had to add one more excerpt as some people didn’t quite think the first one was funny enough. What’s not funny about a nuclear submarine and some bleeped swearing? Did they bleep shipmates, or did the XO say shitmates? Funny either way really.
Listen to the file.
posted on: July 15, 2008
Beats and Pieces Volume 1
Beats and Pieces Volume 1- Intercooler – All Coming Back to Me
- Steve Earle- Satellite Radio
- Jose Gonzalez – Down the Line
- Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – Gone Gone Gone
- The Cave Singers – Seeds Of Night
I tried last.fm a few weeks ago and quickly concluded that sharing my music listening habits with the public was a bad idea, despite openly sharing things like photographs. I have an irrational and vociferous response to people when they say to me: “You listen to that??”.
I’d still like to experiment with sharing music that I like, but God help the first person who questions my taste. I’ll hold off on the electronic music to start with in the hope of achieving wider interest. This batch of tracks were all things I liked from the KCRW Top Tune podcast.
These links all point at the Amazon MP3 page for the track, in an attempt to help encourage the uptake of DRM-free music. Amazon only samples 30 seconds, but I’m sure you can find the full tracks if you want to. Otherwise, you can give me $0.99 worth of trust. When people link to things via affiliate programs that always makes me a bit queasy, so none of these links make me money. Comments such as, “I heard that 6 months ago” or “That’s too mainstream/obscure” are really not useful and will be filed in my shoe after I extract it from your face.
Is 5 tracks too many or too few, or just right?
n.b. Yes, I stole the title from Ninja Tune.
posted on: July 13, 2008
Powerhouse
Remember that song they always played during construction in Warner Brothers cartoons? This be it:
Also, a nice animation featuring the track on YouTube.
I’ve only explored a bit of his discography but it he clearly seems to be a predecessor to the jazz influenced electronic music of today.
posted on: July 07, 2008
Little white dot
I think this might be the most amazing space photo I have ever seen. Not only did we put a probe onto another planet, we had a satellite in orbit to take a photograph as it parachuted in for a landing.
posted on: May 26, 2008
Democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not
from radaronline
“We are at the edge of a cliff and we’re about to fall off,” says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. “To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There’s no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this-for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, ‘We have to be cautious.’ The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, ‘You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.’”
posted on: May 21, 2008
Death, taxes and
Some highlights from searching for “Death, taxes and” :
Sport:- Major League Waivers
- Fifth Place
- Leaky Waders
- Comparing Golf Courses
- Mrs. Clinton
- McCain
- the fact George Bush is an asshole
- Sarbanes-Oxley
- Failing Chips
- Convergence of Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing
- Relational Databases
- MMORPGs
- Death Taxes
- tax avoidance
- the IRS
- Wesley Snipes
- Chuck E. Cheese
- Leaf Blowing
- the evil which lies in back of them both
- left side throat burps
- Dandelions
posted on: May 14, 2008
I am not a puppet
Saw this photo on the cover of the NYTimes walking down the street today. Immediately the Imperial March started playing in my head.
Dun dun dun, dun dun…
posted on: May 08, 2008
So we know that you’re paying attention.
Two weeks ago was my last week at Three Rings, my home away from home for the last two years. I wrote some software, played a few games, received careful mentorship, and made some close friends. Basically everything you could want working for a company. I’ve decided however it is time for me to try my hand at the wheel. We’ll see how that goes.
For a hint as to what I am doing, here is Landon’s post on our first open source library, PLDatabase.
posted on: May 07, 2008
Jpkg and Antidote
I’ve finally gotten my act together and released Jpkg, the project I have been working on for the last few months at work. It is a Java library and Ant task for creating operating system packages, currently only Debian packages. The Ant task and library are heavily unit tested and provide as strict an implementation of the Debian specification as possible. Not all features of the .deb format are supported, but enough are implemented for the packages to be useful outside of the context of the Debian distribution itself. In the future, I’d like to add a command line interface to the library as an alternative to the Ant task.
Jpkg is actively being used to package production Java software and ship it via APT to FreeBSD servers. A build server compiles the code, copies the code into a destroot, invokes Jpkg to package the code, and then rsync mirrors the generated APT repositories throughout the infrastructure. By leveraging an existing packaging system we were able to easily support isolated distributions, dependencies, versioning, and rollbacks, none of which the previous Ruby/rsync deplyment mechanism provided. Nick Barkas did all the heavy lifting of porting dpkg/APT to FreeBSD.
In the process of writing Jpkg, I ended up writing a library called Antidote, which is included with Jpkg. This library contains useful features inspired by implementing a number of Ant tasks over the last two years, mainly to deal with mutable state and Ant reference handling. I also wanted a way to collect data validation violations and then present all of those issues to the user at once, much like a compiler, along with clear suggestions and/or reasons why the user supplied data was invalid. I’d be curious to hear from anyone who uses this library if they feel it has improved the process of writing Ant tasks at all.
I’d like to thank Landon Fuller and Robin Barooah for all the advice during development, and Three Rings Design for supporting me in open sourcing the results. Drop me a line if you find Jpkg useful.
posted on: April 20, 2008
Is this a Men’s Warehouse advertisement?
“We’re getting every barricade known to man and hauling it in from everywhere,” Mayor Gavin Newsom said. “And that is very significant because of what happened in London and Paris.”
Originally quoted in the nytimes, but the quotation has been removed from the article.
Seriously, is he a mayor, or a clothing model?
posted on: April 09, 2008
Lego arms dealer
I was looking at this pretty impressive Lego recreations of famous photographs, when I noticed one of the Lego characters holding a gun. There were “muskets” for the pirate set, but I don’t remember ever seeing modern weapons. That’s because there is a company called BrickArms that sells an entire arsenal of Lego compatible weaponry. That’s right, a Lego arms dealer. This is equal parts unbridled awesome and childhood destroying what the fuckness.
FREE Weapon in EVERY order!
posted on: March 31, 2008
The only subject of drama
MametFor, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.
posted on: March 12, 2008
Still Alive
What is the #5 most popular track currently selling at Amazon MP3? Why Still Alive of course. Do not listen to this song if you have not finished Portal. All of you have played and finished Portal, so it won’t be a problem.
posted on: December 29, 2007
SoundWaves
- Jean-Pierre Gauthier – “Chants de travail”. Annoyingly they don’t have video of this. All of the horns etc. were powered by these crazy electronic “bellows” and the whole apparatus was motion activated. As the first person in the room I had the joy of triggering the beast.
- Celeste Boursier-Mougenot [damn French names] – “Untitled, 2001”. This was really amazing. Watch the video. Three kiddie pools full of china and glasses. The effect was really impressive. Her other piece was great too.
Also, I have to agree with the various folks who ripped on Apple for the first iPhone commercial. It is uncannily similar to Christian Marclay’s “Telephones”, which predates it by at least 10 years.
One day these damn artists are going to realize that random people taking photographs and writing about their work is a good thing so I don’t have to rely on crappy Flash interfaces to discuss their work.
posted on: December 22, 2007
Experimental Epistemology Laboratory
Clearly, Hegel was trying to say …Gentlemen, gentlemen, this is why we created the Experimental Epistemology Laboratory, to settle disagreements like this.
In my day, we didn’t have some crazy lab. Whoever could yell the loudest won the philosophical argument.
posted on: December 08, 2007
FeedSalon
Casey has quietly launched a microstartup that unifies all of your disparate personal rss feeds. I was doubtful initially, but I have to admit that my combined feed is actually a decent way to track my various bits of digital detritus and was stupid simple to setup. There are of course other services out there that attempt to address the same issue but FeedSalon is all about the easiness. You don’t even need a password to set it up initially.
Of course you may want to set a password unless you want me adding the NYTimes obituaries feed to your account.
posted on: December 01, 2007
Bum bum bum
This holiday season, give the gift of being inside of Larry’s head.
And yes, I was tempted to purchase it for myself.
posted on: December 01, 2007
More tumble, less dry
I’m done with the two column layout experiment and have switched over to much more of a classic tumblelog look, along with a few style tweaks. I’m pretending this is because it will make me post more, but really I was checking out tumblr and got jealous. They may still have just a few features I haven’t gotten to.
n.b. I almost managed to pull this off without triggering older posts showing updated in the rss feed, but then I noticed I had been using periods at the end of a few post titles, and that resulted in links topic..html and that will not stand.
posted on: November 02, 2007
Lock them in the basement of the Capitol
Congress has another route to enforce its will, an inherent power of contempt. But that has not been used since early in the 20th century. It has long been deemed unwieldy in the modern era as it entails Congress stopping all work to hold its own trial and imprisoning any offenders in the basement of the Capitol. nytimes
Sweet.
posted on: July 21, 2007
I, too, would like myself to be President
Mitt Romney said he had once more turned to his personal fortune to help finance his presidential campaign, suggesting that his fund-raising has fallen off. nytimes
This has always bothered me. How is it that Mitt Romney is not just another random citizen who wants to get Mitt Romney elected President? It seems to me he should be restricted by campaign finance laws just like the rest of us, to $2k per cycle or whatever.
posted on: June 26, 2007
Imagine if Bush had a twin
From: Sarkozy Takes Center Stage in Europe
But the real obstacles to a deal were Lech Kaczynski, the Polish president, who attended the meeting, and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, the prime minister, who stayed behind in Warsaw. Unlike Mr. Blair, who simply wanted concessions, the Poles challenged a central element of the proposal, its voting system.
I wonder if, like the characters in Heroes, one can fly, and one can absorb all the socialist leanings of Western Europe and redirect them into their healthcare system. Just goes to show how self-centered we bastard Americans are that I had no idea twins were running a country.
posted on: June 24, 2007
Make check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt
How do you make a contribution to reduce the debt?Please follow these important steps to make a contribution to reduce the debt.
1. Make check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt.
2. In the memo section of the check, notate Gift to reduce Debt Held by the Public.
I wonder how much people contribute a year.
posted on: January 27, 2007
More Lego
My sister was quick to remind me that a percentage of the Lego stock that I used was inherited from her. She had sets dating from 1981, whose pieces were almost always compatible with future sets. A lot of the space sets from that era were so damn cool.
posted on: December 18, 2006
The Monorail
Some dedicated person has put the entire history of Lego manuals online. I remember quite fondly pouring over each instruction with my father, spending an entire afternoon in deep concentration. It looks like my prime years were 1985 to 1993. Even 15 years later, I can remember without hesitation every single set I owned and how I repurposed each piece into some new creation. There are many favorites: the pirate ship, the Robin Hood themed series, the police station. I think it is safe to say though that no Christmas will ever be like the one when I received the Monorail. If it was sitting in this room right now, I would stay up all night building it again.
posted on: December 18, 2006
Helicopter YouTube Madness
I was sent a link to a CNN/Money story which features the helicopter I bought a month ago. My suspicions were confirmed:
By October, YouTube-fueled demand allowed many retailers to sell the Picco Z for more than its $30 suggested retail price. RadioShack raised its price to $40; some online stores were asking $99.
I distinctly remembered seeing the lower price before they mysteriously “sold out”. When they were available again, it was $40. Damn YouTube.
posted on: December 10, 2006
Baltimore locations
Kottke linked to a satellite view of Marlo’s concrete hangout on ‘the Wire’. This inspired me to scroll around the map of Baltimore for a bit, hugging the edge of the water, until I found what I was looking for: The tug boats on the side of the building, the playground on the roof, and the low row of shows/stores/bars across the street; pretty sure this is the harbor headquarters from ‘Homicide’.
posted on: November 29, 2006
Temple of Ego
The Temple of Ego is a proposed service that would combine all of your personal feeds into one. I’m sure you could use one of the existing aggregation tools to do this, but I am kind of tempted to give this a shot with just a simple cron job. You could even try to time your blog posts to respond to previous flickr images or del.icio.us links in the ego feed.
posted on: November 25, 2006
More computer monitoring with music
IBM developerWorks (yes, they even studlyCap their site names) has an article about monitoring your system using something called FluidSynth and perl. Things like RAM and CPU usage influence the music, compared with the output of tcpdump in my Lisp program. Might be useful as an ambient signifier for companies. When their servers are melting through the floor, the music should become pretty annoying.
posted on: November 25, 2006
Podlinez
Podlinez is a truly bizarre service that reminds me of my earlier post on a cellphone radio service. You find a podcast you wish to listen to, and Podlinez links a unique, real phone number to that program. You can then call that number and listen to the podcast, skipping around as you desire. I wonder how many numbers they have reserved for this?
posted on: November 12, 2006
Airwolf
I finally got over a rather tragic crash in high school and bought an RC helicopter. This cheap model available from RadioShack arrived a few days ago and has been endless fun.
I made a short video using the digitial still camera to show off a typical flight. Still working on some control issues but since the body is made mostly from Styrofoam and the blades are very flexible, it has been a fairly forgiving learning exercise.
posted on: November 04, 2006
No relation
A new insurgent propaganda video shows how guerrillas have dramatically upped their kill rate of US soldiers with the help of The Ultimate Sniper, written by a retired US Marines major, John Plaster.
No relation.
posted on: October 29, 2006
Cellphone radio
Walking home, wanting to listen to the World Series, I found myself wishing for a service [ad supported naturally] that I could call from my cell phone and listen to the game. Various other radio programming would work. Of course, I could just carry a portable radio, but why can’t the cellphone radio cover that?
posted on: October 27, 2006
Passwords after death
Bruce Schneier pointed out an article on the trouble with user’s passwords after they die which seemed similar to my previous post on legacy code. Web based email providers will give families of dead users their passwords if shown a death certificate.
posted on: October 08, 2006
Legacy code
When people die, often their tools are passed down, be it carpentry, medical, or photographic. What should happen when a programmer dies? Should his personal tools collection built over a lifetime die when his computer is thrown away? Or should someone login and preserve his legacy? I’m certainly going to start writing as if my grandchildren will be reading my code.
posted on: September 28, 2006
Chicken bone crumbs
Walking into work today I started seeing a chicken bone, picked clean, every 50 feet or so. On the next Law and Order: “Suspect entering building. Follow trail of chicken bones. Watch out for greasy fingers.”
posted on: September 27, 2006
Tokyo station jingles
I was sent a pointer to a listing of station jingles for the Yamanote line in Tokyo. Text is Japanese, but I still had a fun time clicking around on the various sound links. This one could easily be the intro for an electronic music track..
Two things need to happen. Someone needs to construct an entire ambient album based mostly on these samples. And, I need to find a way to slip these into the BART system.
posted on: September 26, 2006
Ambient Signifiers
Evidently the Tokyo rail system uses different chime music to indicate stops so you can subconsciously learn when to get off. Also the BBC provided some brilliant ambient signifiers on their site:In another case, the BBC’s 2002 redesign of its bbc.co.uk website introduced the wonderfully elegant idea of digital patina (sometimes referred to as “digital color footprint”), in which usage patterns create worn paths (e.g., the more you visit the BBC Sports section, the darker the Sports box on the homepage becomes).
I need to keep this guys concept of the ambient signifier in mind. Where else can this be applied?
posted on: September 25, 2006
Create to understand
I’m slowly learning the lesson that just staring at source doesn’t lead to understanding. You have to tinker and even go so far as to rewrite in order to really see what the code is doing. Coding Horror makes this point with a Feynman quotation written on his blackboard when he died:What I cannot create, I do not understand.
posted on: September 24, 2006
Dawkins on scientific meaning
Richard Dawkins makes the point rather elegantly in this Salon interview that meaning can still be found in the scientific worldview:
“Unweaving the Rainbow” specifically attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades – before we die forever – in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe. And those of us fortunate enough to be living today are even more privileged than those of earlier times. We have the benefit of those earlier centuries of scientific exploration. Through no talent of our own, we have the privilege of knowing far more than past centuries. Aristotle would be blown away by what any schoolchild could tell him today. That’s the kind of privileged century in which we live. That’s what gives my life meaning. And the fact that my life is finite, and that it’s the only life I’ve got, makes me all the more eager to get up each morning and set about the business of understanding more about the world into which I am so privileged to have been born.
posted on: September 24, 2006
Existentialist definition of culture
The sixth Google search result for “existentialist definition of culture” sends people here. In the interest of skewing the PageRank some more I shall now offer my definition:
You are what you choose to watch.
posted on: September 21, 2006
Collaborative tacit knowledge
Jon Udell dumps some thoughts about tacit knowledge and collaboration:
In my talk I suggested that this kind of unconscious transmission of tacit knowledge may be a key rationale for the practice of pair programming. Two programmers, working side by side, exchange tacit knowledge by osmosis.
To generalize from programming to all use of software-based tools, the equivalent of pair programming – that is, direct observation of one another’s use of such tools – is ideal.
A number of times I have seen a trick over someone’s shoulder that they would never have thought to mention to me. I keep trying to get friends and coworkers to let me watch their monitor or view their terminal using something like screen. Understandably, most people are sort of uncomfortable with this. Not sure what the fix is.. maybe a highlight reel of someone’s hacking session?
posted on: September 19, 2006
The Anarcho-Capitalism Team
I never knew that when I watched the A-Team as a kid, I was actually learning political and economical theory. I wish I had thought to write a paper for one of my political philosophy classes on how Hannibal Smith was the leader of an anarcho capitalistic anti-leftist team of enterprising entrepreneurs.
Clearly the A-team is an example of an anarchistic creativity, but certainly of the capitalist version, not the leftist one. The crew’s actions are based on the advanced division of labor—it concerns both the internal organization, and the external, since the A-team obviously uses the external market in order to achieve its results. The clients are mostly people who are not good in the production of security, but instead devote their time to producing something else. With earned income they hire people with comparative advantage, the A-team, to protect their rightful property and lives.
posted on: September 18, 2006
Feature diagram
I like the way one of the 37signals guys lays out a new feature (graphical example included). Just rails action, then an indented list of important fields on the page, and a list of actions away from that page....black text is a Rails action…purple is anything worth mentioning that has to be in the screen…and red is user actions, like links and submit buttons…it doesn’t include everything, but that’s the point. it includes enough that i feel like the whole feature is under control, and i can start building it without keeping too much in my head at once.
posted on: September 17, 2006
Cheat sheet gem
I’ve got all these damn cheat sheets floating around in pdf, bookmarked, in text files etc. But never where I need them: on the command line. Enter the cheat sheet gem. Gives you the cheat command and a useful list of sheets are already written. If only there was a builtin bash command that was as useful as cheat bash. The author is posting a lot of great stuff on errtheblog as well.
posted on: September 17, 2006
Homicide Season 8
Of course “The Wire” is good. David Simon just decided to finally write the next season of “Homicide”. The only difference is that the world of “The Wire” has no room for the impenetrable Frank Pembleton. The implosion of “Homicide” left no moral super heroes to populate “The Wire”, as it should be.
posted on: September 16, 2006
Google scores
I’m sure every sports fan has already noticed this, but being a mere enthusiast, I had not noticed Google’s sports score results until the World Cup. This morning I was trying to look up the Angel’s scores from last night on both Yahoo and mlb.com and they were taking forever to load on the Treo. ‘mlb baseball scores’ returns the most recent game, but you can use ‘mlb baseball scores angels’ if you want to get specific and see what kind of free lesson we gave the Sox. The annoying part is this only seems to work on Google mobile, so YMMV.
posted on: July 31, 2006
Binary svn commit emails
A few weeks ago I decided to do something about the commit emails at work that included binary data, mainly images. The big thought is that for anything that gets committed, we should be able to see a “diff” for it. For audio files it would be great to have an audio sample indicating the kinds of changes that had been made. The same for video edits. For image files, it would be cool to have a text diff of the actual image edits that had occurred to a GIMP/Photoshop file, extracted from the application history.
I decided to start simply, generating thumbnails for image files that were being committed. If the commit added an image, just one thumbnail would be generated. For a change to a file, the previous revision and the new file would be shown. For deletions, no thumbnail would be generated. The thumbnails would be generated by ImageMagick and inserted into the body of the email using MIME. It was decided that we should limit the number of images embedded to 8, but this can be changed. So I modified the svn-commit-email.pl script that ships with subversion to add thumbnail support. The colorized diff is available, as is the complete modified script
I hope people find this useful. My intention is to have people who traditionally get very little value out of commit emails, such as artists, to find value in the “diffs” of their work. The next thing to figure out is how to make this work for other binary file formats.
n.b. It turns out that PSD files can have a thumbnail generated by ImageMagick. An animated GIF is outputted which appears to have every layer of the PSD file as a frame in the animation. I included support in the script for this but for the most part it is annoying, and thus disabled.
posted on: July 30, 2006
Another Vader
I wonder, how awkward is it when two Vaders bump into each other at ComicCon? Does it kind of kill their buzz?
posted on: July 29, 2006
ATC quotations
These transcripts of air traffic control chatter are downright hilarious. One of my favorites:A military pilot called for a priority landing because his single-engine jet fighter was running “a bit peaked.” Air Traffic Control told the fighter pilot that he was number two, behind a B-52 that had one engine shut down. “Ah,” the fighter pilot remarked, “The dreaded seven-engine approach.”
posted on: July 20, 2006
Movie video games
The next time a movie comes along like Pirates [the effects for Davy Jones by the way were pretty damn impressive], I am going to buy the DS game of the movie and bring it to the theater. That way when the long, boring, pointless fight scenes come along, I can just fire up the game and fill in that section of movie with something a bit more interesting. Hopefully the piercing glow of the Lite won’t piss too many people off.
posted on: July 09, 2006
Wright and Eno
Saw Brian Eno and Will Wright chatting on stage tonight. Would have been worth it just for the live Spore demo but the rest of the talk was interesting. Towards the end Brian Eno gave his definition of culture: “Culture is everything you don’t have to do”. His example was that in a cold climate we have to wear some kind of clothing, but it could just be a sack. We choose to wear fancy clothes and eat fancy food, we don’t have to. Why do we have culture? The human imagination forces us to try alternative ways of living and working. We have a sensitivity for difference. Will responded that games are play that act as modeling exercises. Our ability to model other humans is what gives us empathy. This is where storytelling comes from. We watch movies and read novels to put ourselves in other people’s situations, to better empathize.
posted on: June 27, 2006
Closing time for Animal Crossing
I have to admit that Animal Crossing is a lot cooler than I thought it would be. My first big shock from the real time play is that the stores close at 11pm. Clearly it should look at my age and let me stay up a bit later. I haven’t been told to go to bed in years.
posted on: June 25, 2006
todo via AIM or cell
Ideas coming from lifehacker/todotxt for my long suffering todo manager. Interact with todo.txt via AIM/chat room. Load items and add entries. Also send context specific via SMS.
posted on: June 25, 2006
Music by duration
On occasion I sort my music by duration. There are quite a few tracks at 4:42. I wonder what listening like this does to me. If I went a few months listening only to music of the same duration, would I be able to tell when that much time had passed exactly?
posted on: June 11, 2006
Network data sonification
This post over at information aesthetics on the sonification of network data reminded me of a program I wrote for a class at UCSC taught by Cope. The output from my program was pretty annoying [I can’t seem to find any rendered audio example, only the raw .midi file]. soundtomind sounds a lot more interesting. You could basically have some ambient sounds going all the time at your work/home, and if there was a disturbance in the force, you would know instantly, but it wouldn’t irritate everyone else, in theory. Looking back at my lisp code inspired me to try VIM’s source to html script. Pretty damn cool. Run :let html_use_css = 1 followed by :source $VIM/syntax/2html.vim and another window appears with your exact syntax highlighting recreated in html/css. Here is the output for tcp-midi.lisp
posted on: June 10, 2006
Forest Type 5
Eric’s most recent ‘game’ is cool. There is something so satisfying about pretending you can conjure. I think that’s part of what makes the Sims games so enjoyable.
posted on: June 09, 2006
Xavier’s kids
In case you are ever in a jam and need to get onto a very nearby island with a bunch of people, some of whom can fly, the most efficient way is to rip a massive bridge from its moorings and levitate it across a bay. You should know though, that doing so causes time to flash forward by at least 5 hours, turning a bright sunny day into the darkest night. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
posted on: June 04, 2006
Multiple dispatch and S-expressions in Ruby
Few cool bits from this article on Pattern-matching multiple dispatch, S-expressions, and DSLs in Ruby.
Let’s usegem install -r multi and bring in multiple dispatch/function overloading into Ruby:
multi (:fib, 0) { 1 }
multi (:fib, 1) { 1 }
multi (:fib, Integer) { |n| fib(n-1) + fib(n-2) }
So return 0 if called with 0, 1 if 1, and if called with another Integer, run the code in that block.
Let’s alsogem install -r sexp and bring some S-Expression/Lisp like syntax into Ruby:
"(this is an sexpression)".parse_sexp ===> [:this, :is, :an, :sexpression]
'(content
(title "S-Expression Demo")
(rated 5))'.parse_sexp
===> [:content, [:title, "S-Expression Demo"], [:rated, 5.0]]
And the opposite:
[:this, :is, :an, :sexpression].to_sexp ===> "(this is an sexpression)
Sweet.
posted on: June 04, 2006
NASA missions
This is a cool resource. A list of what appears to be every active and previous NASA mission. It is a long damn list. I note they haven’t expunged Skylab from the list. Yet.
posted on: June 03, 2006
Testing has_many associations
So I found myself wanting to test has_many associations and came up with this nastyness:
def test_has_many_association(obj, collection, accessor)
obj.send(collection).each do |e|
assert_equal obj.id, e.send(accessor).id
end
end
I think for years I have been wanting to do what .send does in Ruby. I’m sure a bunch of languages have that functionality, but it really is the hotness. The best part about this test is it also tests the belongs_to relationship.
posted on: June 03, 2006
The power of the grep
This linux.com article implies that these are new features for grep, but man have I wanted -o for a long time. So damn useful. I seem to recall seeing —color before, so maybe I have just been ignorant of -o for way too long.
posted on: June 01, 2006
Burninating
Going to try linking to a flickr picture to see how images are going to look. We installed that switch so you could turn the lights on and off, not so you could throw light switch raves.
posted on: May 31, 2006
Possibly sinful boolean
I used this construction today: var = (obj.param or default.param). The result of which is var gets obj.param if its not nil or default.param if it is nil. The parenthesis it turns out are needed in order to get the default value as a string, or some such weirdness. The real question is, does this count as codesin?
posted on: May 31, 2006
What we license
I was researching fishing licenses for an upcoming camping trip when I stumbled upon this crazy page from the California Department of Fish and Game. My favorites are Scientific Collecting Report of Specimens Captured/Salvaged and of course Nonresident Request for Raptor Capture. I wonder if the Jurassic Park employees had to get one of those.
posted on: May 31, 2006
Reworking the CSS
Based on a bunch of comments I have reworked all the CSS on the site. I still have some tweaks to do to make the RSS a lot better and various other bits but I think it is starting to look not so bad.
posted on: May 30, 2006
Ruby interpreter in browser
I realize these exist for most interpreted languages, but this is basically a web based ruby irb session. Sweet.
posted on: May 30, 2006
We never get on bash
(13:44:29) Me: what are you hacking on?
(13:46:15) Brian: a tree
(13:46:37) Me: hehe
(13:46:40) Me: that made me snicker aloud
(13:46:43) Me: and for that I hate you
(13:46:54) Brian: hehehe
(13:47:16) Brian: the fact that you snickered made me do the same
(13:47:23) Me: hehe
(13:47:25) Me: and now me again
(13:47:26) Me: THIS MUST STOP!
(13:47:41) Brian: hahaha
(13:48:05) Brian: okay now I’m full out laughing out loud
(13:48:09) Brian: almost bashworthy
(13:48:14) Me: hehe
(13:48:23) Me: except nothing we ever submit makes it
(13:48:32) Me: we must have the suck our balls flag toggled on
posted on: May 29, 2006
We got both kinds
I think I’m more like Nat. Not more like in the sense of being a good hacker though.“I think there are two types of programmers—those who code for users, and like to affect other people; and the other type likes to build big abstract worlds of logic, APIs, and architecture. They would sacrifice the user interface for cleaner code. One writes out of empathy, one writes to write code. A good coder is both of those. I fall pretty heavily in the user interface camp.”
posted on: May 29, 2006
Why
So why the two columns? Partially because I want to force myself to have a balance between these two areas in my posting. I haven’t implemented it yet but I want it to be the case that if I write too many coding posts, then I will have fewer thought posts showing up, indicating I am not balacing. I realize this won’t make a big difference to rss readers, this feature is much more for me. I also have some kind of notion that these two columns should be in conversation with each other. Hopefully I can find a way to link posts at the same height somehow.
posted on: May 29, 2006
How
I spent the weekend building this attempt at a tumblelog. The left column on the site is for code related posts, the right side is for thoughts. Implementing the balacing of the columns wasn’t too tricky until I ran into sorting by date. But the absolute hotness of ruby came in and let me define <=> in the Post class and then magically post.sort worked perfectly.
posted on: May 29, 2006