I am currently working up something dealing with testing sinatra with webrat and a review of Time Management for System Administrators, but I haven’t had time to work on them much recently.
Monday I had fencing.
Tuesday I went to game night at the GSLIS building
Wednesday I went to the CUtweetup.
So, busy.
I’ve always been a ‘how do things work’ kind of guy. I like poking and prodding at systems, disassembling things and trying to understand why they are designed the way they are. More recently I have been reading things like Jakob Neilsen’s site and the Design Of Everyday Things.
In the last week or so I have been playing Red Alert 3 with my girlfriend, going through the coop campaign, which, annoyingly, you have to use their servers to do. You can play skirmishes on a LAN, but no coop. Hmm.
That in itself is not a huge problem, we have fast internet through the cable company and I am sure EA games can take the traffic. But, the interface sucks.
One big annoyance is that some actions are performed asynchronously, including logging in and out. Clicking the logout button greys it out, but does not change the rest of the interface. You can still post chat messages and probably even invite people for games while the system is logging you off.
Working with javascript alot, I know that doing things async can make a lot of sense in places. But, the behavior that RA3 has bothers me because the only feedback I get is the disabling of the button. I feel like it should take you back to the login screen, but it doesn’t show that until the logout callback has finished. I find that aggravating when something is not working properly and I am trying to log out and log back in to see if reseting my session fixes it.
Gah.
Went to the first cutweetup.
It was at Boltini’s which is a martini bar in Champaign.
Talked with Brian Marick for a bit.
He explained Micro-Scale Retro-Futurist Anarcho-Syndicalism. Which is about as complicated as it sounds. Or not, I am too tired to explain, but he talked about it at mwrc.
I also chatted with some CS students from UIUC, working on social projects. One of them had developed a twitter app for hungry CS grads to notify others in the building when they wanted food, that they might pool their efforts and cash.
There were also some more entrepreneur, businessy type people and some twitter groupies(yes they exist). But, I mostly didn’t talk to them.
My friend Brendan has started a reputation market/identity tracker called mnikr. I am in the top ten right now, but I expect that to change.
w00t.
Written while in Japan ~ Jan 28th 2007
If you ever find yourself in Yokohama wanting to see a big Buddha, I recommend you go to Kamakura.
I went there while I was visiting a friend in Tokyo. I would not say that it is a happening place by any means, but if you are looking for a very Japanese tourist experience there are few better places. Plus, you can get your picture taken with the world’s second largest outdoor bronze buddha.
I became interesting in going there through the entry on wikitravel, which is not as informative as I would like, but not bad. Whenever I go somewhere listed on that site, the information I get from it seems pretty good, when it is available. I often want to add my own advice and anecdotes but I have not had much practice writing in the tone of voice they use. But I digress.
Kamakura, the city is pretty typical for a suburb of a major metropolis, but it seems to have a lot more rich people than I usually see. I think this because I saw many houses with lawns while I was there. Anyone who has spent a fair amount of time in Japan will realize that larger yards are either a) ludicrously expensive, or b) in a place with low property values.
To get to the big buddha, I followed a small mass of Japanese tourists. The route has a fair amount of signs but for those who want more help, there are also many maps. The only tricky bit for me was getting to the station for the railway that goes to the big buddha from kamakura proper. it is on the other side of the station that goes to yokohama
I was, as a nonflickr user up until 5 minutes ago , apparently uncool — tragically even. A situation I have just fixed.
Honestly though, I think I had an account before, years ago and just didn’t get into it that much. But looking again makes me realize how many cool pictures I have that I could have shared with the internets by now. For example, those I seeded my account with.
I would like to think that I am pretty hip to the social networky awesomeness that is the modern social network, but lately I find my self spending more time on simpler mediums.
Part of the reason why I got a flickr account is because I have tried to put images on my own site, like Brendan talks about and I have experienced the pain of trying to build my own or use others gallery software. It would be easier to let someone else maintain that stuff while I can focus on making and uploading the pics.
The other thing I like about the modern flickr, which I noticed adding the pictures, was how easy uploading new content has become. Compared to other services, like deviantART, which I have an account on(dead, mostly), it requires the least effort and thought on the users part.
That I think is part of why more sites will move to using technologies like OpenID and OAuth, even though implementing them can be annoying sometimes(just use a library, or middleware). They are better for the consumer of the sites services. Less passwords to remember, more control over your information are awesome things.
Oh and if you were wondering, the shoes are still awesome.
Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.
“Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full.
My VFF(Vibram FiveFingers for those not in the know) feel even more like my feet. I am still not entirely use to them though–I still get the giggles thinking ‘I am barefoot AND yet I am wearing shoes’ every so often.
It rained today. I successfully tested the shoes in wet conditions, as well as mall conditions. Champaign has this really big mall that has sucked the life out of the smaller, more centrally located one in Urbana(not surprisingly). It was a good test wet asphalt followed by corporate tile and occasional carpet.
I talked with a shoes salesman who was unable to have and yet envious of my shoes. Apparently, his big toe is not the longest by a good margin. This I have read can be a problem. Luckily for me I didn’t have that one.
Flashback:
At first, the VFF, or crazy shoes as Sara calls them, felt a little loose and I was afraid that I might need a size smaller. But since adjusting the strapes, they have been awesome.
Back:
So, the VFF are snug. And Comfortable. I guess I could be called a satisfied customer.
It is spring, and as I promised my self, I bought me some spiffy new shoes.
So far so good. They stick to my feet pretty awesomely. So much so, I sometimes feels like I am walking around barefoot. It feels strange, wandering around a supermarket feeling barefoot.
That, and I was a bit of a spectacle at work. Which was part of the point of getting them, apart from feeling like I am not wearing shoes.
After yesterday, I have a lot of grokking to do. And, some projects to start.
The talks, like the day before were great. And having the opportunity to talk with so many people about what they do with ruby was enlightening.
I wanted to write up my thoughts about yesterday, but they haven’t really congealed yet.
Short summary:
Like last year, I am again suffering from mac envy. But, oddly it is easier to deal with now that I could, hypothetically, buy one. On the other hand, I think that the number of PCs(mostly Linux mind you) is higher than last year.
I still want a web capable phone though.
James Edward Gray II started things off wonderfully talking about how reading code helps you to understand it better and write better code yourself that fits in the community. He tied it into Little Big Planet by showing how he developed a Tower’s of Hanoi level. It has its own developer community who borrow ideas from each other and its own style and idioms.
It was great to see someone who I had seen posting on comp.lang.ruby when I first began following it in person.
Restclient looks pretty awesome as a way to interact with services. It is a microframework for consuming webservices, sort of like an inverse sinatra.
James Edward Gray II recommended it as interesting reading. He also suggested looking at BJ and Terminator.
Or, you could just pick a gem and gem unpack it. But, it probably would be better to start with something less complex than rails.
Rack Middleware was the next talk. \m/
Essentially, the goal of rack middleware is to make webapps more composeable. Rather than mixing in open-id oauth and session management inside your app, you use smaller middleware apps and selectively apply them to different url spaces.
map '/private/awesomeness' do
use OpenID
run AwesomenessApp
end
You can also set internal headers inside special namespaces that allow middleware further down the stack to access messages set for them in a secure manner like for instance, whether the current session is authenticated.
One neat idea: do you need to have a proper web app at the end of the middleware stack? Not really.
Yehuda Katz made me think more about what Rails 3 will look like with its merby goodness. It is being reworked to be a set of rack middleware so different components will be more pluggable. For instance, right now, using datamapper with rails is alittle painful. standardizing the expecteds will make this much easier.
Puppet looks pretty freakin awesome.
I would care more about rubyCocoa if I had a mac.
TenaciousG is a super cool name for a graph(DAG et al not pictures) library.
Jeremy McAnally’s talk on DSLs was slick.