The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
Joey deVilla's Personal Blog
It’s funny when Ray the cat from the web comic Achewood wears a thong.
It’s even funnier when Ray’s real-life human equivalent does the same. Warning: I’m not sure if this photo is safe for work; check your human resources department for their policy on Speedos.
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It’s funny when Ray the cat from the web comic Achewood wears a thong.
It’s even funnier when Ray’s real-life human equivalent does the same. Warning: I’m not sure if this photo is safe for work; check your human resources department for their policy on Speedos.
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As you might know, this blog is a “mirror” of the Blogger version of The Adventures of AccordionGuy int he 21st Century. Since Blogware is still in stealth mode, nobody outside the Tucows/vpop world knows of the existence of the Blogware version, and hence I haven’t been too worried about the appearance of this version. All I’ve made sure is that whenever I post to the Blogger version, I post the exact same thing to the Blogware version.
This weekend is a long weekend up here in Canada — Civic Holiday, they call it — and I plan to take some time to do some serious fixin’ up. I want to look good for the launch, and have every intention of being a Blogware poster child, spreading the Blogware love and using my Googlejuice to spread the Blogware message. It’s certainly a fine tool, and I hope to someday get a chance to contribute to the development effort. Nice work, Blogwarians!
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Check out this Bruce Eckel interview at Borland’s community site. The interview’s all over the map, covering what you’d expect: C++, Delphi, Java, Borland’s IDEs, Java vs. C#, and of course, his new favourite language, Python. There’s also stuff you wouldn’t expect: his favourite song, his favourite movie, and whether he’d rather eat the fat from a moose’s eyeball or a Pop-Tart™ (really!).
In honour of tonight’s meeting of the pyGTA (Greater Toronto Area Python User Group), I’ll end with the most Pythonic quote from the article:
Saving the best for last [he discusses other programming languages just before this part], I’ve said in numerous places that Python is my favorite language, and this is because I’m most productive in that language. I can get so much more done in Python than in any other language I’ve encountered that it’s very hard for me to use those other languages, because to do so means throwing away time. Also, I’ve found the Python community to be my favorite group of language people; I can’t figure out how or why this is the case, but it retains the gentleness and enthusiasm that I most value in my interactions with a language community. I look forward to when I finally get my plate cleared enough that I can continue working on “Thinking in Python.”
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On OS X, I believe there was some magic keystroke — possibly a magic click on a “close window” button — that closed all the windows and revealed the desktop. I’m pretty sure I’ve used it once before. I think.
On OS 9, it was easy — you’d just select “Minimize All” from the application menu (once again, I think that’s what it’s called — OS 9 and prior feel like distant memories now. On Windows, you can either click on the Desktop icon on the Taskbar or use the magic keystroke Windows-M.
Now you can get that capability in Show Desktop, an app that you can have either in the Dock or the menubar that will hide all open windows with a click. You can even provide it with a list of apps to exclude, just in case there were apps that you’d never want it to minimize (“Someone may be trying to reach me on iChat right now!)
I was going to post this entry to Forwarding Address: OS X, after looking for such a utlity to install on my spiffy new 12″ Powerbook. While checking to make sure that nobody on that blog had already written about it, I found that Ben Hammersely posted such an entry…today!
Damn you, Hammersley! Damn you to Hell!
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I’d just installed Red Hat 9 on my work desktop box, fired up XMMS and pointed it at Groove Salad when I got a dialogue box saying something along the lines of:
In order to stay out of any trouble with Thomson, who charge royalties (75 cents per unit, or a one-time fee of US$50,000 – $60,000) to anyone who develops MP3 encoding or decoding software, we’ve removed MP3 playback capability. Sorry.
Finding out that XMMS no longer plays MP3s is like finding out that your set of flathead screwdrivers will no longer actually turn screws, but still can be used to open cans of paint.
Luckily, there’s a quick fix. This site has an RPM that restores MP3 playback capability to the versions of XMMS that come with Red Hat versions 8 and 9.
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It’s Friday, which means it’s time to gather at the pub over beer and engage in debate! Programming languages, especially ones by Microsoft, are always good for raising ire and blood pressure. May I suggest, for your reading pleasure:
I personally have no religious tendencies when it comes to programming languages, other than an aversion to Perl. To close, allow me to quote Master Yoda and his opinion of Python vs. Perl…
EXTERIOR: DAGOBAH — DAY
With Yoda strapped to his back, Luke climbs up one of the many thick vines that grow in the swamp until he reaches the Dagobah statistics lab. Panting heavily, he continues his exercises — grepping, installing new packages, logging in as root, and writing replacements for two-year-old shell scripts in Python.
YODA: Code! Yes. A programmer’s strength flows from code maintainability. But beware of Perl. Terse syntax…more than one way to do it…default variables. The dark side of code maintainability are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you when code you write. If once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.
LUKE: Is Perl better than Python?
YODA: No… no… no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.
LUKE: But how will I know why Python is better than Perl?
YODA: You will know. When your code you try to read six months from now.
(Taken from the Python Humor Page.)
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As Tucows’ new resident developer schmoozer, one of my job responsibilities is “building community”. That’s a rather touchy-feely crunchy-granola primal-scream-session-is-over-let’s-have-a-group-hug-ish way of saying “talking to people who are doing interesting things in the geek world so you know what’s going on out there.” If these people gather in one place, the job of talking to them becomes much easier.
Lucky me, Joichi Ito, better known as “Joi” (you pronounce it like “Joey”, and for a while, he spelled it that way too) has his own IRC channel, #joiito, on FreeNode’s IRC servers. It’s become a hangout for lots of people, many of whom you might have heard of: Mark Pilgrim, Cory Doctorow, Halley Suitt, Marc Canter, AKMA, Aaron Swartz, Elizabeth Lane “mamamusings” Lawley, Kevin “Morbus Iff” Hemenway, Dave Sifry, my boss Ross Rader and many other characters. Maybe I can get Elliot on there — he and Joi have some kind of mutual admiration society going.
The atmosphere is friendly and the conversation flows like delicious pork gravy down Marlon Brando’s throat. Jeanniecool plays den mother to us all, while AKMA serves as the chaplain and I play part-time court jester. Once you’ve figured out the commands for jibot, a bot that heralds you entry into the channel, you can have it announce your presence with a quick summary of who you are! It’s like a 19th-century salon with intellectuals exchanging ideas and bons mots, except for the lack of absinthe. We’re working on that.
To join the channel, point your IRC client at irc.freenode.net and then /join #joiito.
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artima.com has two more parts of an interview with Bruce “Thinking in C++/Thinking in Java” Eckel in which he talks about why his new favourite programming language is Python. They are:
…the idea is that the programmer is able to say, “I would like a Bag of Cats.” The thing says, OK, as long as I can perform these various operations on Cats that I want to, I don’t care if it’s Cats or whatever. That’s what you get for free with Python without any of that [C++] template syntax. It turns out that’s incredibly powerful. It makes your programming a lot easier to write and, I think, to read.
A few years back I was having dinner with Guido van Rossum, and I said, “Life is better without braces.” That ended up being a conference slogan, along with a smiling character who looked like he had just gotten his braces off. The next year, I suggested to Guido a slogan that I think somebody else probably said first, “Python. It fits your brain.” That’s what I was talking about when I said, “My guesses are usually right.” Python allows you to get into this uninterrupted flow, and just go with that without having to think too hard, even if I have to look up the way a library works.
If you haven’t read them yet, there are also the first two parts of the interview:
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You might’ve heard of DARPA’s latest announcement, which has been described as a web site where you can “wager on terrorism”. If you haven’t, here are some links:
This idea isn’t a new one — it’s gone by the name of Idea Futures or Prediction Markets for some time. The general idea is described as…
Our policy-makers and media rely too much on the “expert” advice of a self-interested insider’s club of pundits and big-shot academics. These pundits are rewarded too much for telling good stories, and for supporting each other, rather than for being “right”. Instead, let us create betting markets on most controversial questions, and treat the current market odds as our best expert consensus. The real experts (maybe you), would then be rewarded for their contributions, while clueless pundits would learn to stay away.
The idea behind the “terror futures market” would be to harness the collective knowledge, insight and instincts of as many people as possible and give them a financial incentive to contribute. Viewed this way, it’s kind of like the peer-to-peer software approach: decentralize what would be too costly to maintain or what only a large collective would have (thinkers), and centralize the thing that you need most (ideas).
The idea of tying it in with the Internet isn’t new either: a guy I actually know — Marc Stiegler — wrote about this in his science fiction novel, Earthweb. In it, the entire world places bets on the strategies and weaponry of an invading alien race, and these bets are used to guide a crack team of soldiers sent to stop them.
The problem is that it’s a political hot potato. It’s too close in “feel” to a dead pool, and it runs the risk of annoying friendly and neutral nations and enraging enemy ones (imagine trying to maintain some kind of diplomatic decorum when someone’s betting that you’ll be killed in a bloody revolution in next year).
My bets would be:
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This weekend, I picked up my first-ever Powerbook. I debated over whether to get the 12″ or the 15″. Both have the 867MHz processor, but the 15″ version has two additional features: a 1MB level 3 cache and a faster graphics card. However, portability, and more importantly, budget, determined that the 12″ with the combo-drive (CD recording and playback / DVD playback-only) and RAM maxed out to 640MB was my best bet.
Now that I have the Powerbook, the 500 MHz iBook that I bought used is redundant. It has served me well, helped pay the rent and will make a great machine for someone who’s doing writing, Web surfing and even some programming (I used it for PHP/MySQL development). I just needed a faster box on which to do my work and master the complexities of unix-y network hackery.
I bought the iBook in November and put another 256MB RAM into it for a total of 384MB. It has a 10GB hard drive, with about 2GB free. One of the reasons it went so cheap is that the trackpad doesn’t work. The warranty ran out before it went kaput, and I’m told that replacing the trackpad would require replacing the motherboard, which would cost as much as buying a new machine. When I used it, I plugged a Logitech optical mouse into it, and I’ll include this mouse with the laptop. The battery doesn’t last terribly long, either — I treat it more of as protection against a fuse blowing rather than as a battery. A replacement battery should solve that problem. Otherwise, it’s a pretty solid machine.
My asking price: CDN$800.
As a price comparison, the Toronto store CPUsed is selling a used iBook 600 — slightly faster, with a 20GB hard drive and 128 MB RAM — for CDN$1300. You can see what else they’re selling used on their price list (remember, it’s a Canadian store; all prices are in Canadian dollars).
If you’re interested, drop me a line!
Low End Mac’s review of the iBook 500.
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Once again, work has kept me terribly busy. I’ll be back with more bloggy goodness on Monday.
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Such as, would you believe, another date? One that might be even more harrowing? Even though neither ABBA nor butterscotch schnapps are involved?
It’s true. I’ll pick up the storyline next week.
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It’s an unusual day for email here at The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. First, spam for a dimensional warp generator. Then, email asking why I’m not a bitter man. Now this:
Date: 7/23/2003 06:53:39 -0700From: XXXXX XXXXX
To: webmaster@kode-fu.com
Subject: kode-fu.com
I am contacting you about cross linking. I am interested in kode-fu.com because it looks like it’s relevant to a site that I am the link manager for. The site is about US Navy Seals products including: Navy Seal training, workout videos, manuals, survival gear, Luminox watches, and fitness books.
I don’t think I’ve even ever mentioned the phrase “Navy SEALs” in the blog.
But hey, if any Navy SEALs want date survival training, I’m a black belt!
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REALBasic, if you haven’t heard of it before, is a Visual Basic-like IDE and programming language that first gave the Mac a pretty easy to use drag-and-drop GUI builder and fairly easy-to-grasp programming language similar to VB. The earliest incarnations of RB could only deploy applications for Mac OS, and later ones were capable of cross-compiling to Windows. The current version of RB, version 5, is available for both Mac OS and Windows and and each version can cross-compile to the other OS.
In response to customer demands (and many long discussions on the REALBasic mailing list), REAL Software has announced that RB 5.5 will be capable of cross-compiling apps for Red Hat and SuSE distributions of Linux, with other distros being added according to demand. You’ll still need either a Mac or Windows box to create and cross-compile the app for Linux. You’ll have to wait for the Linux-based REALBasic IDE, but REAL Software says that they intend to make one available in a later version.
RB 5.5 is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2004.
REALBasic’s FAQ on their Linux support.
MacWorld recently gave REALBasic 4.5 mice out of 5 in a review.
I’m not sure how much traction REALBasic on Linux will get amongst geeks, as Basic is the least respectable of the “Ghetto Languages”, an LFM (Language For the Masses), not an LFSP (Language For Smart People). I don’t agree with this LFM/LFSP bunkum; it smacks of nothing more than programmer/muggle class snobbery, the same kind in which some Slashdotter refer to those who don’t program, play D&D and fansub anime as “sheeple”. The Masses may have dummies, but they have many smart people whose primary interest isn’t computer programming. These people might have domain knowledge that we programmers lack (“Never!” say some geeks, “We know everything!”).
Maybe we should call them Languages For Mom.
It’s more likely than not that your Mom is one of “the masses”. My mom is, and she’s not dumb: she’s the Chief of Cardiology at St. Joseph’s Heatlh Centre, a large hospital here in Toronto. If you called her stupid, she’d kill you and make it look like natural causes.
I know lots of people like my Mom who’ve crafted their own applications using things like HyperCard. They have the domain knowledge, they couldn’t afford to hire a programmer to write the app for them, and in many cases, some apps don’t get written because they’re not itches that programmers feel like scratching. Shouldn’t they be given the chance to whip up their own apps?
Go ahead, call your Mom stupid. I dare ya. (Eminem, for obvious reasons, is excluded from this challenge.)
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