ceej : Fri, 09 May 2008 11:59:16 PDT

Pointer

I'm updating over here more often these days.

ceej : Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:11:28 PDT

Most eye-bleeding page ever?

Today's contender. Discuss!

Zink : Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:56:59 PDT

FreeBSD: why so lame?

Here's a simple task: you have no FreeBSD systems in your world. You want one. You have a new box, but it's weird enough no off-the-shelf pre-compiled BSD seems adequate.

What you naturally want to do seems simple: make a directory. Unpack a bunch of FreeBSD stuff into that directory. Configure, configure, configure and make. Install the newly made OS onto a CD-Rom or a SanDisk or some other place. Boot and go. (actually, I want it on my PXE server).

What you actually get after a great amount of digging is a source tree with Makefiles designed for "FreeBSD make" which does many weird things, the most important of which is NOT BE PRESENT on your existing O.S.. And the Makefiles just don't work with other "make"s.

It's like the comfort zone for the FreeBSD people is "overlooked".

ceej : Sun, 13 Apr 2008 12:45:10 PDT

Project rewrite building steam

My Python rewrite of my project is now on parity with the ruby version, only with a bunch of bugs fixed. (As usual in a rewrite, I'd imagine.) The Python code looks messier than the Ruby code, and I find myself missing some of Ruby's syntactic sugar.

For instance, properties are ugly: write a predictable getter and setter (less typing than Java would force on you, but in the same category), then type
title = property(fget=lambda self: self.getTitle(), fset=lambda self, v: self.setTitle(v), doc="the title, no really")
over and over. Note that this isn't the obvious way to do properties, but it's the way you have to to get the results you expect. Lame.

On the other hand... woah faster. Woah yay sensible string slicing.

Though I am still catching up with the changes in Python since 2.4, which was the last time I really paid attention. Decorators improve some of the clumsy syntax.

Zink : Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:05:04 PDT

I shoulda been a lawyer

Then I could help innocent people get the death penalty. Imagine the power in that. The sheer sense of personal satisfaction. I love the slippery slope argument proposed as justification: "Once you start saving the lives of innocent people, who knows what might follow? Guilty people might receive just punishment!"

There's a clear difference between a Legal System (like we have) and a Justice System. The goal of Justice System is—well—justice. The goal of a legal system is public entertainment, with teams competing against each other under constrained and archaic rules, all the more exciting because the stakes are high. And really, no one gives a damn if justice is served.

If you're bored, google "Alton Logan". It's kind of sweet. Just this once, lawyers did too little, too late. But it's so much more than anyone expected them to do.

ceej : Wed, 09 Apr 2008 19:31:22 PDT

The Python choices

To replace merb + Datamapper + haml:
TurboGears + SQLObject + Mako.

Mako's a step up over haml, and I liked haml so that is a compliment. I also considered and rejected Breve (not allowing html directly in templates is insane) and kid (XML in templates is insane).

SQLObject is a step down in usability from Datamapper, and here is where I think there's a giant opportunity for an intrepid python programmer. Datamapper isn't even at 1.0 yet, and it's dripping with the sort of conveniences I used a lot in a mere 700 lines of code or so. A little more convention in place of configuration, please. Learn a few lessons from the Ruby ORMs (data finders, a first() method on classes, better naming).

TurboGears itself, hmm, I don't know yet. I haven't rewritten the web app segment yet. That'll be this weekend.

ceej : Tue, 08 Apr 2008 10:52:24 PDT

Ruby vs Python

Ruby's not ready. Somebody attempts to evaluate Ruby+Rails and compare it to Python+Pylons. Link via cjd.

It always comes down to this for me: Rails and its successor frameworks are wonderful, and Python's frameworks aren't yet competitive. But Ruby+libraries is so deficient in comparison to Python+libraries that the framework suckage is overcome.

So... why is Ruby getting the mindshare and the interesting new packages right now? Hopeless trendiness?

ceej : Sun, 06 Apr 2008 20:50:30 PDT

Snicker

Okay, that calendar bug is funny. I think I'd better fix it.

ceej : Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:00:58 PDT

Yargh

Spent today moving extremely slowly through building the skeleton of my first merb app. The near-total lack of documentation for DataMapper and merb itself makes progress somewhat glacial. And the not-really-finished nature of the packages I'm using didn't help. (I wasted two hours trying to figure out why a DataMapper object validation was returning false, because there's no way to get errors bubbled up from subobjects. Printf debugging ftw, as ever. On the other hand, I like the DataMapper approach to ORM, so I retain my patience.)

HAML is pretty nice, though. Definitely something to consider instead of the messy erb.

ceej : Fri, 04 Apr 2008 09:11:57 PDT

I earned a new geek merit badge recently

The Glasgow Haskell Compiler is a robust, fully-featured, optimising compiler and interactive environment for Haskell 98, GHC compiles Haskell to either native code or C. It implements numerous experimental language extensions to Haskell 98, for example: concurrency, a foreign language interface, multi-parameter type classes, scoped type variables, existential and universal quantification, unboxed types, exceptions, weak pointers, and so on. GHC comes with a generational garbage collector, and a space and time profiler.

Huh. Space and time, you say?

What are all these knobs?
What these? Instruments.
These are for controlling our flight.
Flight?
Well, yes. You see, we travel around in here through time and space.
Oh, no, no, no, no. Don't laugh. It's true.

I installed it anyway, despite the obvious dangers.

ceej : Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:03:00 PDT

Also

As of right now I'm taking steps to ensure I never see any content served from snap.com ever again. Internet death penalty time for them.

ceej : Thu, 03 Apr 2008 08:00:24 PDT

99 problems with fill in the blank

99 problems with Python
99 problems with Ruby
99 problems with a language I've never heard of before and probably never will again
The 99 problems, originally intended as a Prolog problem set.

ceej : Sun, 30 Mar 2008 19:18:38 PDT

Tile lust

I'm having lust for this tile.. Why yes, I went to Home Despot today, and looked at the various expensive ways I might turn my kitchen from a pit into a place where I can cook without hunching and bake with confidence that the temperature is what I want it to be.

ceej : Fri, 28 Mar 2008 16:11:36 PDT

Dumbledore revisited

I pretty much think Daniel Hemmens is right flippin' on target about JKR here.

ceej : Mon, 24 Mar 2008 11:57:59 PDT

Twitter for personas

What I need is a multi-login Twitter client. Does this exist? I have two accounts and two sets of friends, and never may the twain meet. But it's a pain to track whichever one I'm not logged into Twitterific/my own client with.

I've handed over my hiptop Twitter client to somebody else, who's supposed to finish it, but I might fork it and write this feature in. Though twice the polling: ugh.

ceej : Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:45:47 PDT

The OED says

That "crapula" is an old word for a hangover. And further that crapulence is about the same. But I am not buying it. I think it's an evil plot. "Crapulent" is a back-formation and a play on "opulent", and you can't tell me otherwise. NO NO NO NO.

Yes, I know, it can be both. Shut up.

ceej : Mon, 17 Mar 2008 14:19:18 PDT

Batteries

Craig Hockenberry, the dude who wrote Twitterific, writes about network activity eating the iPhone battery:

Twitterrific on the iPhone could definitely make use of a background process to gather new tweets. In fact, a prototype version of the software did just that. And it was a huge design failure: after doing XML queries every 5 minutes, the phone’s battery was almost dead after 4 hours. In fact, the first thing I said after giving Gruber this test version was “don’t use auto-refresh.”

I dug my Danger hiptop out of my messenger bag this morning. I'd left it on all weekend (as usual). Also as usual, my not-shipped Twitter app was running on it all weekend. It also polls for the Twitter data every five minutes. (JSON flavor, because xml is yucky.) My device still had battery life to spare. More than 50 hours of run time.

Except that there's gotta be something wrong with this story: the power management has got to be better than that. Or the prototype app was doing something exactly wrong to make radio behavior pessimal? Dunno. Or maybe it's the data size: most of my polls return not-modified, because I don't have a very active feed. I could drain the hiptop battery with constant huge data downloads, I suppose. Polling the public feed every five minutes would be an interesting test.

Push FTW either way.

ETA: Or imagine that cpu wake is expensive, and it sleeps every 3 minutes or something like that. Waking every 5 to poll would then be awful. But anyway, it's obvious that the iPhone is a device with a very different intent & direction than the hiptop is. Messaging-intensive vs media-intensive. I freakin' love that I pick my hiptop up, pop it out of keyguard, and find my email, IM messages, and tweets waiting for me.

ceej : Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:41:43 PDT

Two records of note

Kiln, Dusker
Mutated and slightly glitchy electronic timbres that are melodic and warm in ways that the word "glitch" tends not to imply. Understated beats, and mostly a sunny tone. Love. Try "Airplaneshadows" and "Sunsethighway" to see if you'll like it.

Hammock, Kenotic
Shoegaze, guitars with layers of effects and reverb, occasional vocals. Spacy, moody, dark. Try "Blankets of Night" and "What Heaven Allows" to see if you'll like it.

ceej : Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:13:45 PST

Materialism has an upside

Flatscreen HDTV + Vudu + Jason Bourne == premium viewing experience. I may never watch another movie in the freakin' theater again. I mean, why bother? It's more expensive, less comfortable, has sticky floors and people talking on cellphones.

The movie theater experience is good for group experiences, though. There's nothing quite like seeing a premiere with a bunch of fans. Or seeing a much-loved favorite in an auditorium full of people who love it as much as you do. But for everything else, there's my living room.

Zink : Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:33:04 PST

Jobs's World

Steve Jobs is apparently so dedicated to his Christian Science^H^H^H^H^H^HNewage religion that he tried to cure his pancreatic cancer by distorting reality.

In other news, he said the weirdest thing today about Apple TV's pathetic rental selection (not even half-way to their promised 1,000 by the end of Feb):

Jobs said it's taking movie studios more time than expected to get approval from various rights holders, the paper reported.

Huh? Over at my employer the major studios managed to dig up the rights to nearly 3,000 rentable movies.

Apple did manage to remove any way of seeing how many movies there are from the UI.