December 2007
39 posts
As Seen on TV: The 10 Most Laughably Misleading... →
Awesome. (via livejamie) — david The car wash one made my laugh out loud. Actually spent an evening with some friends a couple months ago just staying up watching infomercials and being astounded with the claims. The best one was the iron that claimed that it shot “hot dry steam” due to “italian technology.” Water-less steam? Sign me up!
Tetrablock →
It’s up and hosted. Did a couple bug fixes, no known bugs at the moment except for it not working in Internet Explorer. Enjoy! :)
Kid tested, mother approved
Tetris is 100% ready for release, yay! Turns out the “minor annoying” bugs I had annoyed me more than I wanted and were more difficult to solve than I anticipated. Luckily, play is very solid now and, dare I say, fun! I signed up for some hosting at a2hosting.com after doing some research. Looked like the features I wanted for a good price. Unfortunately it’s not yet set up so...
Focus
Short post. Just want to express my disdain for television as hearing it right now is killing my mental encapsulation of the logic I’m trying to program. I have a problem that seems to be contrary to the typical, modern nerd…I need near silence to truly focus. I do not have the ability to tune out all the distractions around me and still be productive, I need quiet, perhaps just some...
Street Fighter 4 footage →
Non-SF fans probably can’t understand my excitement for this game, but let’s just say its the ONLY game that I’m absolutely gaga over, Starcraft 2 doesn’t even compare. I have been playing SF3 since around 1999/2000 and, while there have been big breaks in our playing, it’s always been a game that I treasure over all others. I will buy whatever system that this comes...
“Graciously you move through my closed hearts artery
Can I escape with my blue...”
– Serj Tankian “Blue”
Rating music on your MP3 player is masturbation
MicrosoftZune: New rating system. The one-to-five-star rating system has been replaced with a simpler "heart"-"broken-heart" rating to indicate songs you like, don't like, and that remain unrated. This has made for some controversy in our forums, and some will no doubt be loathe to lose the work they've put into their detailed ratings. Personally, I'm starting to like the new rating system. I think it will be fine for new users, and for those who aren't heavily invested in using the more detailed rating method.
Mike: You know what's a good fucking rating? Me having it on my god damn MP3 player.
Me: no fucking kidding
Mike: Rating music on your god damn mp3 player has got to be the music equivalent of masturbating. Nobody can SEE it unless they fucking see your player
Me: you know what i do with songs that get a broken heart? i put them in the trash
Mike: Exactly, If I don't like it, it's not going to be on there. I don't know why you need two ratings, much less fucking five.
Mike: "I have it on here, not so I can listen to it, but so I can remember the disdain I have for it, hahaha, one star bitch!":
Mike: People fucking piss me off
Mike: It would maybe be one thing if your shit was uploaded to ms or apple headquarters so you could see a user wide rating system
Mike: But you know what would be BETTER than that and require less work for the end user?
Mike: Just collecting play counts
Mike: That's a fucking rating
Open source does work! →
Impressed with Restlet so far. Thanks guys!
The Nerd Handbook →
This is just so true. I wish I had this for myself 5 years ago.
Life changing
Well, I’ll start this out with a little history… You know how you grow up being told that you’re special and awesome and good at stuff and then reality hits and its all bullshit? You know how you grow up idolizing these great people and even assimilating some of their memes but never really adopting any of their actions? You know how you talk about how great and awesome your...
JavaScript Gamer →
Needed to find a good way to set up a game loop in JS and found this tutorial. Seems pretty good so far with the heavy CSS and Prototype usage.
“Verbosity when alone, Brevity with company.”
– Me brainstorming to my dog and two cats (they don’t count as company!)
The future of programming (for me!)
Short post but…I have decided to fully embrace web programming and all the Javascript wackiness that goes along with it. I have always viewed it with the bias that most people unfamiliar with the language do, as a little hacky thing that script kiddies know how to play with and whats necessary to do stuff on the internet, just “another language with braces.” I picked up...
“Every coder knows who Joel Splosky is but I don’t know a single person who...”
– James Maki
“And you can attend my seminar on it for the low, low price of $499.95! Hahaha,...”
– Steve Yegge This quote is apparently famous but I just found it so I’m posting it again. He takes two of my favorite things and puts them together: Fight Club and making fun of Agilistas!
Steve Yegge: Code's Worst Enemy (size!) →
I don’t know how I didn’t find this guy earlier! Since the first time I was taught UML and design patterns (the semester after I was taught brevity and concision in ML) I was skeptical about all the new fangled Java crap just doing the same stuff that coders have been doing for decades…but with more code. I don’t believe 100% in line with what he’s saying but the...
Karius Vega - Out of the Ground Riser →
This track defines one of the things that I specifically look for in music: It elicits a very specific feeling and imagery that brings me to another world. When it comes on at work I just close my eyes for a few minutes and imagine myself in my ideal post-modern cyberpunk world. It just feels like…Hyperion meets Blade Runner meets Diamond Age. I also get slightly sad at the thought but its...
Artist on Artist: Patton Oswalt and Maynard James... →
— mayde I absolutely loved this, made me laugh out loud at work, had to stifle myself.
I R Smrtz (RESTlet cookie usage and encryption)
Today I implemented an algorithm for securing the cookies used for the sessions of my REST web service. It’s really nothing elaborate but I feel good about the fact that I came up with the strategy on my own and then, after some more research, found that it (only the hashing transport strategy, everything else could be way off!) is the commonly accepted proper way to do things. It’s...
Disqus comments
Integrated a commenting system from Disqus (http://www.disqus.com) into my Tumblog. Was very easy! Someone post a comment. :)
Closed Twitterific
I found seeing that little blue bird in my menubar incredibly distracting, always wanting to make it go black again. Also, I started following a handful of people that I found through http://www.davidsterry.com/tweetscan and they followed me back. So, naturally, I ask some questions about Ruby hoping to get some answers or engage a little bit with them. Any responses? Nope. My guess is that people...
Setting up Ruby on OS X
USE MACPORTS Oh you didn’t hear me? MACPORTS It’s not even finished yet but I just spent the last 3 hours trying to get Ruby 1.8.6 and Gems 0.9.5 on my machine so I could play nice with Rails 2 and have encountered nothing but annoyance. After installing MacPorts all I did was “sudo port install ruby” and bam, it all works. No dealing with GCC flags to get readline to work,...
Comfort in prosperity
“Once you’re good at connecting consumers with advertisers, it’s hard to be good at anything else.” - David Sarnoff Anybody out there have a take on what it could mean? Maybe that it’s easy to get comfortable with money? — rickyv I think it is in part because of that comfort, the rest due to momentum, culture, and the business processes in place. Pre-Internet,...
“Typing in languages, either do it (ML) or don’t (Ruby). This half-assed...”
– Me
Matz discusses why Ruby is the best language →
This is what I’ve been saying all along. The syntax and semantics of the language don’t matter all THAT much, if its turing complete they are basically equivalent when it gets down to the machine. With all the tools that modern languages (from C#/Java to Python/Ruby) give you, rapid and fun programming is possible from all of them. I’ve been saying this for a while and the fact...
Even Forrester knows about Twitter →
If even Forrester has picked up on it, it means one of two things: a) It’s too late and we should be looking for something new (usually the case! LOL on all their SOA/ESB reporting) :P b) You’re a fool for not using it if you want to stay on the pulse of what’s going on (what’s the case with Twitter!) I find it funny that they essentially admit that if you want to stay up...
Chowhound →
Very cool Rails (I looked at your CSS :) site that helped me find a Sushi place today.
Someone is getting paid to...
Someone is getting paid to rock climb right now. Someone is getting paid to taste test coffee right now. Someone is getting paid to experience the world more than you. Food for thought.
Walter Cronkite: Our troops must leave Iraq →
I was going to do a long post on Iraq. But then I found Walter Cronkite’s recent article. (did any big media outlets pick this up yet?). — bijan Just wanted to keep spreading this around.
Oblique Strategies
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/oblique.html Now that you’re on the same page as me, I’m going to try posting Oblique Strategies of my own that I’m trying out as experiments to force myself to experience more in life. My trying out twitter is a small example of one (actually took a fair amount of force of will to...
Very cool QuickLook plugins
Zip files: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/t_trace/20071125/p2 Finder: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/t_trace/20071124/p3 Kudos to Apple for making QuickLook so good and extensible, now open up my dang iPhone already will you!
Get all of the EJB3 jndi binding names
I’ve spent the past few days getting accustomed to using EJBs. I’ve previously used Hibernate and Tomcat but the JBOSS world is a whole different environment. It’s another level of indirection and configuration that you just have to learn. One thing that tripped me up was mapping the EJBs. I read through the Trailblazer tutorial (http://trailblazer.demo.jboss.com/EJB3Trail/) and...
Propogation
I now have Tumblr and missingmuse.com loving each other. Sweet! Will have to look into reversing that though eventually and propogating the RSS feed from Tumblr into a blog section on www.missingmuse.com. This is perfect for now though. Also I just registered on Twitter. At the least, its interface is freakin amazing. It’s the epitome of everything Web 2.0 and attractive. Will have to spend...