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Upgraded the MoveableType instance here at Alpha-Geek to v2.64 because there is, apparently, some script injection vulnerabilities for all of the earlier versions. Surprisingly, all went completely well; no data lost.
Now, I must return to my home lair which is without Internet and continue packing...
I am mere minutes away from performing the complete dismantling of my computer systems -- one WinXP, one FreeBSD, and one Debian; KVM switch; cable modem; router for the entire house's Internet; switch coming off of router for my b0X3n; 5 piece Creative Labs speakers. At that point, I will have no Internet at my home base for several days. These are the dark times...
But, there is one bright side to all of this.
I was happily working on my project when one of the System Administrators poked his head into my office notifying me that the development DB server had to be rebooted.
"Why are you rebooting it?" I ask.
"We need to add more disk space."
"You need to reboot a Sun Fire Server to add disk space? Doesn't it have hot swappable drives?"
"Yes, but we need to reboot it."
"Okay."
I am going to the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention 2003, and now I have no idea what to do. Before I can complete the registration, I have to choose what sessions I attend. There are a lot of sessions that overlap. Take a look here -- OSCON 2003 Grid. Which do I choose?
Has my interest waned so much so quickly that my last posting on this was almost two weeks ago?
Basically, though, work has been busy and moving from house-to-house has kept my occupied (and, then, you know, all the drinking that happens in between). At any rate, this is going to be short.
I just so happened to be hopping around the ol' Internet and ran into a couple of on-line photo albums. Almost all of them, had the concept of "albums" to use for their categorization.
I don't want to jynx it, so I am not saying anything about it, yet.
Other than that, I concur with Chuckie, moving really, really sucks.
$b=sub{(99_-@_-$_||No)." bottles of beer on the wall\n"};
warn map{&$b.substr(&$b,0,18)."\nTake one down, pass it around\n".&$b(0).$/}0..98
Impressive. Most impressive. It was Dave Rolsky who threw that one together.
When you walk into someone's bathroom, and you are encountered with two rolls of toilet paper hung on the wall, which roll do you pull from?
There are people out there that do not know...
Do you think CWRU will send me to the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention 2003? I think that they should -- Apache, Perl, PHP, Java, Web services, XML, web applications, emerging technologies. These are all items going on at Case. I think I should be there, they should send me, and they should foot the bill. We'll see how this turns out...
Proof positive that Java can be as weird as Perl --"hi there".equals("cheers !") == true
Ooh, she's a crafty one. So, my dear, sweet Emily is in dire need of new struts. And, since I am replacing the struts, might as well go ahead and replace the shocks, too (they, also, need replacing; just not as badly). "What," you may ask, "would cause dampers to go bad after about 20,000 miles of use?" Well, when I purchased my big suspension package, I assumed a nice set of KYB's would provide enough dampening power. Apparently, I was wrong. The springs overworked them and now their dampening ability makes one feel as if they are cruising around in a Wrangler.
So, off I go hunting for new dampers. And, I find that not very many after-market manufacturers create suspension components for second generation J-bodies (who would have thought?). Lack of options and market saturation is not something you want to find when looking for car parts. Koni makes inserts, but I do not like the notion of sticking Koni internals into an AC Delco housing. So, I am down to one vendor -- Mantapart. They have three offerings -- sporty dampers ($350 for the set), Bilstein sporty dampers ($650), and competition level Bilstein's ($700).
This is funny stuff for anyone who has ever had to attend project meetintgs -- Classic Microsoft humorous e-mail: Alice in Blibbetland, Part 1
Yesterday (Sunday) was Autocross. Talk about a damn good time.
Scott and I, coming off a night of hard (slightly illegal) city drivin' followed by some drinking, woke up around 6:30 in the forsaken morning. We made the trip East to Euclid Mall (where the event was being held) rather quickly.
The course had an anti-Emily layout. (And, no, I do not mean "anti-Emily" in the sense that the course had turns.) About 6 feet from the starting point was an immediate 90 degree left turn. This is no good because Emily quickly exhausts the tires' friction abilities just trying to go straight. Trying to get to speed and turn... well... that's no good. I wish I could just do what the Vettes were doing -- mash the gas and slide the rear end around. Damn the FWD! At any rate, by the 3rd run, I was lining up at an angle; so I could basically take a straight shot to the apex of the corner.
So, here I was playing around with some HTML and CSS; and trying to be a good little web monkey by not using any table's anymore -- all CSS. I quickly discovered that IE is the most retarded piece of software. (And, previously, I have always liked it and considered it to be one of the only good products to ever emerge from MS).
Now that we have a rough sketch of some requirements for the on-line photo album, we can begin answering some of the questions that were poised. It's easy to see that one of the more complex issues will be organization/categorization/presentation of the pictures, and that the choices made concerning how the pictures are stored/organized will directly affect (and limit) how they can be presented. For example, if we do not associate pictures with specific categories such as "Summer Vacation Pics"; we cannot present them to a viewing user as that group. That is, a user cannot choose to view all of the "Summer Vacation Pics."
But, this can be easily simplified with a couple of general assumptions. The first is that we can assume (for the first iteration of the web app, at least) that categorical pictures usually fall within a similar time frame. That is, a category such as "Summer Vacation Pics" will most likely all occur within a one month time frame. Reworded another way, pictures happen in timeframe groupings. Thus, pictures will be organized according to date. Now, we need to choose what time frame for the date -- store pictures according to the day they were uploaded, the week, the month, the year? I believe month will be more than adequate.
Furthermore, we can continue to reduce complexity by saying a thumbnail is a thumbnail is a thumbnail. There is no reason to have differently sized thumbnails. All pictures get compressed to a thumbnail resolution all the same even though the pictures themselves may be different. I think 160x120 is a good size for thumbnails. (View what that size looks like at http://www.pbase.com/gallery/ddyer/yellowstone.) It's not too small that one cannot make out the picture, but not too big that you cannot easily fit many photos on a screen. But, how many can you put on a screen leaving page size still reasonable?
So, last night, I ended up going to Borders instead of going for a bike ride. The funny thing is that I walked out with a book entirely dissimilar to Programming Web Services with Perl, which was my only reason to go to Borders in the first place. I left with Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, instead.
Why?
Because it was Flaubert, and it fit; and my mind has the weird preoccupation with forcing actions to mimic art. But, I am odd; and I am digressing. Let me bring the two together whilst discussing the nuances of Flaubert's philosophies.
Tim O'Reilly has an interesting take on Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters essay in Why Scripting Languages Matter. Compare this with my more scathing comments in Melding Brain Halves Via Painting Code
If I had a nickel for everytime I have read over the past five years articles like this -- More Companies Seek Microsoft Alternatives. It is just not going to happen; not for a long, long time.
I had planned on writing an exhaustive review of good web application design/architecture/engineering, but that never came to pass. So, I am going a different route.
A (longer) while ago, I had planned on writing a small web app that would serve the basic functionality of putting up a web photo album. To combine these two tasks, I am going to go ahead and write the web app and over-engineer/over-design the snot out of it; all the while, blogging away with justifications and reasoning for my design decisions. We will see how long this holds my attention span...
An article such as chromatic's What I Hate About Your Programming Language is difficult to write. It's like answering why you like your favorite pizza topping or why you prefer dark green shirts to brown.
He breaks it down to the fundamentals:
There are many syntactic and otherwise superficial differences [in different programming languages]. At one level, all languages have a philosophical axe to grind. They exist for a reason. At another level, they're all just flipping bits and jumping around in a long chain of ones and zeroes. Everything in between is a matter of taste...
It's a nice day out here in C-town, so I should be going for a bike ride. However, early today, I had made the resolution to go and finally purchase Programming Web Services with Perl, which of course, leads me down the long, long path of post-work Borders OCD. If I know that I am going to Borders, I must recognize the fact that I will inevitably sit in Borders, read, and drink coffee for an hour. If I know I am going to be drinking coffee directly after work, I need to stop somewhere and grab a bite to eat lest I become afflicted with caffeine-mind-fuzziness. If I am going to stop for food and go to Borders, I need to realize that I will not be arriving home until 8:30 - 9 o'clock. So, it comes down to bike ride vs. book.
Did you know that they made anti-depressants for dogs?
I do not know who to blame for this -- the culture that allowed the saturation of pharmaceutical companies to the point of media over-exposure or the decadence of the white, middle class suburbanites who feel the need to justify their own shortcomings via personification of household domesticated animals.
The last time I rode my mountain bike was last January when Scott and I decided to do some excruciatingly cold trail riding. The end result was a very, very dirty, muddy, grimy bike that sat in my basement. Last week on one of the nice days, I went to bust it out only to find it in a similar condition as I left it. (Imagine my surprise at discovering bikes do not lick themselves clean.)
So, today, with the temperature in the 70's and not quite yet raining, I decided to do some cleaning. It began simple enough. I hosed it top-down to remove the larger clumps of mud. I pulled the front wheel off and gave that a good spraying. I, then, went to remove the chain rings only to discover the hex bolts were completely stripped. They were now perfect circles with no toe hold for any device. I fumbled around for a while, cursed my bike, cursed Shimano, and finally settled wiping them, the bottom bracket, and the crankset as clean as possible.
First of all, I am alive; just in case anyone was wondering. As luck would have it, I had taken a vactaion day yesterday to go to Cedar Point. I found out about it at around 10:20pm when I returned home. I made some phone calls, and this is the extent of my knowledge (plus, I would like to evanesce a myth the media was touting last night).
There's a random picture of me in the most recent (the one for May 7th to the 13th) Cleveland Scene Magazine on page 24. Don't know how it happened to get put in there. Must be my unabashed sex appeal *wink*.
Alpha-Geek.com and all the hosted sites will be experiencing a short amount of down time today as it moves to a fatter pipe. Everything should be normal by, at the latest, 4pm.
Alpha-Geek.com and all the hosted sites will be experiencing a short amount of down time today as it moves to a fatter pipe. Everything should be normal by, at the latest, 4pm.
In Hackers and Painters, Paul Graham lambastes one categorization and metaphor for computer programmers and attempts to set out a new one that falls equally short. Not that I am blaming him for aligning himself with a faulty analogy, it's just that anytime you attempt to make a correspondance between one occupation or activity with another, there is going to be holes; but it will provide interesting insight assuming it was written sufficiently well (which this one is).
His whole gist is that programmers (he refers to them as "hackers," which I am not doing so to avoid the connotations of that word) are more like painters and writers than they are like mathematicians or engineers. I would agree there is a huge component of creative thinking that occurs during implementation. But, I would also agree that a lot of analysis, design, and modeling occurs, also, in other phases that are equally as important and relevant as the actual "coding."
Here is IBM's "All You Ever Wanted to Know about Web Services But Were to Afraid to Ask" -- Speed-start your Web services reference collection.
Because I sometimes have horrible bouts of forgetfulness of real world going-on's (especially when I am nearing crunch time on a project at work), I had failed to renew my car's registration in a timely manner. So, today, off to the BMV I go knowing full well that a simple trip to the BMV can unravel much saner men than myself.
The greatest living dialogue writer -- Aaron Sorkin.
For my next TDD blog entry, I am going to describe the process of TDD as it applies to writing a function that performs factorials (in Perl).
We start with a quick subroutine for an assert statement (for this little blog entry, we are going to use something simple):
sub assertEqual {
return shift eq shift;
}
Pretty simple. Now, we can move on to the TDD. Our first test of the factorial method is to guarantee that f(0) returns 1. So, let's write the test.
assertEqual( f(0), 1);
Now that we have a test, let's go and code. What would a subroutine look like that passes that test. (Don't think too ahead of yourself, now.)
It's hard to be terse when one is trying to describe programming techniques and the benefits/drawbacks thereof. This is especially true when you are deriving the examples from real world occurrences. Stuff in the real world is always messy. But, I will try to be as straight forward as possible.
When you come to Case, you receive two email addresses. You get a primary email address that is your initials followed by a number to make it unique as in 'abc12@cwru.edu' (if a portion of the name is missing like if a person did not have a middle name, an 'x' is substituted in like 'axb12'). The second email address you get is your alternate email address, and it is of the form 'first_name.last_name@cwru.edu' something like 'Jon.Smith@cwru.edu'. If 'Jon.Smith' is not unique i.e. more than one person has that name (quite possible), we stick in the person's middle initial -- 'Jon.A.Smith'. If even that is not unique, we start tagging numbers on the end until it is -- 'Jon.A.Smith1', 'Jon.A.Smith2', 'Jon.A.Smith3',...
The code that handles this is in dire need of refactoring and has fallen under my umbrella as I redesign our meta-directory / account system.
I just stumbled upon this article, Template Engines, from the guy who wrote the bTemplate PHP library. It's an interesting article in that it is almost completely contrary to how I think it should be done. I have always been a big fan of the ultra-simple template models like Text::Template, which come with no mini-programming language in them. But, I did always feel as if that was the wrong way, too. Why should the presentation logic be in with the "business logic" (by the way, I am going to call it code logic instead of business logic from here on out).
This is good stuff -- Creating Richer Hyperlinks with JSP Custom Tags. A working implementation of it is located at Multi-Destination Link Demo. Hmmm... I would like an MT tag to do this.
All right, let me preface this with how much I despise Internet quizzes that tell you what dog you are like, or what type of female you will fall in love with, or what flower best represents your big toe. But, admit it, you've probably taken one or two. (At the very least, I know your girlfriend -- assuming you're male -- made you take one because chicks dig quizzes and believe that they can find incredible insight via them.) Okay, that's enough disclaimer.
So, The .NET Guy in his blog entry, incredibly entitled, What Kind of Thinker Are You?, linked to the What Kind of Thinker Are You Quiz. And, wouldn't you know it, an on-line quiz had nothing but good things to say about one of it's visitors after having completed the quiz. Shocking! But, that's not the point of this entry. The point of this entry is Existentialism, and why I hate it, and why I always dwell upon it (along with Linguisitics and Bentham's Utilitarianism).
Here we go again; some more Sin City apocrypha. If you haven't heeded the warning thus far, no point in starting now.
When you are sitting at a local watering hole, it is very important where you place your cigarettes and lighter.
My feelings on modern poetry are not unknown. Ezra Pound impaled it on the stake of the dada art movement, and it has never recovered. All we get now is TV poetry -- skits of words that are entertaining and shiny but possess no architecture, no expressed intent of creation. However, one unique poet emerged from all of this; captivated this style; and perfected it. Every other tried to recreate it... since. And, with absolute disregard of any kind to whatever applicable copyrights that may exist (if it's on the Internet, it's free), I will reproduce one of his more technical pieces here.
Okay, I fall pretty far left on the political spectrum, but I liked the idea of getting some moolah back from gov't. But, I also think that one should always listen to Greenspan (he smart guy) -- Greenspan Says Tax Cut Is Not Needed for Growth
Okay, so I finally had to make the leap to test driven development (it's hard to try and improve your own programming skills when you no longer have another alpha-geek to bench yourself against). Many respected individuals espouse the wonderous virtues of it. I knew it was a more correct way to do things, but I did not know if it would, necessarily, help me be more productive.
Here are two interesting little blog-utils -- The World as a Blog and BlogMatcher.