stuff is cool

My recent obsession has been collecting Yankee Candles. I recently discovered a treasure trove of rare and discontinued scents on Ebay, but cannot afford to indulge as I would like. Some are selling for upwards of 80 dollars!

My current rotation goes between store-bought Mediterranean Cypress, Vanilla Cupcake, and Fresh Cut Roses (that scent will be present at my wedding by strategically placed candles to enhance the fragrance of the real roses on display.) I frequent the store so much I probably should consider working there.

I think I am very much calmed by soothing fragrance, and it is one of the “tools” my therapist encourages me to enjoy when I need to calm down and be at peace.

When spring officially comes I look forward to Yankee Candle Greenhouse scent and Island Spa. Both would make lovely, inexpensive wedding gifts, incidentally.

But that’s neither here nor there.

My NEW hobby ties into my love of history. I should like to collect prints of the portraits of my favorite historical figures. Due to being an Anglophile, they are all Lords and Ladies, Dukes, Duchesses, Kings and Queens.

I was so thrilled and lucky to come across an immediately recognizable antique print of an unidentified “Baby Stuart” on a trip to Belleville, TX at Christmas time.

A very old rendering identified at Henriette Anne that is basically the exact image I posses, only mine is, of course, a print dating only to the 19th century:

Who would have guessed I’d find such a treasure in a small Texas town? My beloved Danny bought it for me, to go along with my beautiful portrait of Mary, Princess Royal, sister to the great Charles II.

She looks so sweet at the tender age of preadolescence. My mother presented me with that portrait after she returned from her trip to England. To see the real painting in person would be a dream come true, but really, to see where they lived and died would be sublime.

I love the portraits because I admire the people.

The baby’s identity is vague. Some say she is Henriette Anne of England, daughter of Charles I and sister to Charles II, raised in the French court and married to the Duc D’Orleans, the cruel brother of the Sun King. I have a special place in my heart for her, if that is indeed the child in the portrait.

My research suggests that the child is in fact just a young Mary, Princess Royal. EDIT: No, I am now convinced the portrait of the infant actually depicts James, Duke of York, later James II of England. Either way, I greatly admire the entire House of Stuart.

My point? There are other ladies and gentlemen I wish to add to my eventual portrait gallery, starting with the rags to riches Emma, Lady Hamilton, the great love of Lord Nelson.

I have long admire Nelly Gwynne, one of many mistresses to Charles II, but hands down the most charming and down-to-earth and beloved by the people. However the only portraits i could find online of her had in in a state of undress, and since this is a family blog, I refrained from sharing them here.

Yes, I have plans to seek out prints of portraits of all these illustrious royals and courtiers. They are my “celebrity obsessions.” No Britney or the Olsens or whathave you. Historical figures who lived scandalous, merry lives full of intrigue who managed to outwit so many plotting against them. They are my inspirations.

I love history, for it is peopled with incredible people, flawed nonetheless, who weathered their stormy lives with dignity not seen in decades. For some reason British history draws me most. I owe that passion to author Karleen Koen, who I am excitedly looking forward to acceptingly her invitation for coffee and chatting history, once the wedding wildness has died down.

But a half hour ago I was tormented by my ever-present, seemingly worsening rash, and I was lost in tears. I focused on what I love: history, and it got me out of the terrible feeling.

Tonight, as I lay in bed after my second IV of steroids in 4 days, I got a bit randomly nostalgic and headed for my Hedwig and the Angry Inch soundtrack. One of my all-time favorite movies that i have yet to find a soul-mate for. I admit, it’s a weird movie, explained here in these lyrics:

My sex change operation got botched; my guardian angel fell asleep on the watch; now all I got is a Barbie doll crotch; I’ve got an angry inch!

Yes. Hedwig, once a young gay man in East Berlin, got a sex change operation and got left with a useless nubbin. Now s’he searches for her soumlmate, not knowing that her “other half” is not who s’he thinks it is. It’s a beautiful tear-jerker story of self discovery that leaves me in happy tears. Hedwig believes we were once 3 great races: One made of two men, one of two women, and one of a man and a woman. Then the gods cut us in half right down the middle and sent a great storm to divide us from our other halves, and Hedwig truly believes his other half is still out there. It’s really a beautiful movie if you can handle the unbelievable weirdness of it. I first watched it in a class on the history of musicals. GREAT class.

Anyhow, I must share the lyrics that make me cry and the quotes that make me laugh: (If you read not this stuff read past to my message at the end.)

Quotes:

How did some slip of a girly boy from communist East Berlin become the internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you?

Don’t you know me Kansas City? I’m the new Berlin Wall. Try and tear me down!

So if any of you out there are looking for the song that’s going to be your big hit, you should pay attention, because we are talking to Phil Collins’ people. But then again… aren’t we all?

Lyrics:

Midnight Radio

Here’s to Patti
And Tina
And Yoko
Aretha
And Nona
And Nico
And me
And all the strange rock and rollers
You know you’re doing all right
So hold on to each other
You gotta hold on tonight

And you’re shining
Like the brightest star
A transmission
On the midnight radio
And you’re spinning
Your new 45s
For the misfits and the losers
Yeah, you know you’re rock and rollers
Spinning to your rock and roll

Wig in a Box

I put on some make-up
Turn on the eight-track
I’m pulling the wig down from the shelf
Suddenly I’m Miss Farrah Fawcett
From TV
Until I wake up
And I turn back to myself

Wicked Little Town

and there’s no mystical desire
no cosmic lover, preassigned
there’s nothing you can find that cannot be found
cause with all the changes you’ve been through
it seems the stranger’s always you
alone again in some new wicked little town
and when you’ve got no other choice
you know you can follow my voice
through the dark turns and noise of this wicked little town
it’s a wicked little town
goodbye wicked little town

That last one got me through some very lonely nights as I cried alone in my empty bed. It’s my own voice I was following. I still follow my own voice. i don’t believe in cosmic lovers, as Hedwig did, and as s’he learned, your cosmic other half is in your own self. You can’t find all the answers, all your happiness, from someone else. I once thought I could.

I found great joy with Danny but I cannot hang my entire happiness on him. I have to make my little joys on my own, too. Hedwig taught me that. Too bad I hate the name or I’d use it on a kid.

Anyhow, if you are looking for a random movie to watch one night soon, try it. You may like it. You may hate it. But I loved it.

Last month I found a pretty incredible deal on web hosting over at Dreamhost. For $20 up front, I got everything you see in the “Crazy Domain Insane!” package seen here for an entire year. And considering that I drop $60 a week on poker sometimes (of course, I make some of that back…), I figured I could justify this.

Anyway, since it has so much more disk space and bandwidth (compare: 1.5GB disk/23.4GB bandwidth to 200GB disk/2 TB bandwidth … and each of those grows per-week), I’m going to try moving everything from stuffiscool.com over to my Dreamhost account this weekend. Currently, the 1.5GB disk space available would barely be enough to hold half the photos Meg and I have taken with our her digital camera in the past year. Meanwhile, not only can I put every photo we have up on the Dreamhost space, I can put a lot of my personal projects up there as well under a different domain name as well. Once I get those up and running I’ll be posting about those as well, since apparently the consensus opinion of the readership (well, the vocal readership anyway) is that I should just go ahead and post anything that I feel is worth saying.

So, if you can’t read this, then I’m probably moving things. Just a heads up. But it won’t be happening until this weekend (11/4, 11/5), so live it up for now.

UPDATE: So far so good, I’ve got most of the stuff moved over for the blog and I’ve got the DNS updated. Now I just have to re-theme it and reinstall the WP plugins I had installed before, as well as redo gallery.stuffiscool.com

UPDATE 2: Got Gallery up and running but due to some version mismatches that I couldn’t really fix, I’m going to have to recreate the albums and re-upload all the pictures that I had already done as a sort of pre-staging thing yesterday. I’ll try and get the theme and plugins done tonight when I get home.

UPDATE 3: Bah, all of the images uploaded into the older posts are going to be broken unfortunately (see my Web2.0 Greek Festival post for example), and rather than muck about with more DNS changes and wait for them to take effect so that I can get the files back and move them over, I’m just going to chalk that one up as a loss. Oh well. Getting it about 95% right isn’t too bad

A little over 2 months ago I signed up for the Blingo search engine which is basically just Google plus Prizes. It gives you all the same search results as Google would, with perhaps a bit more busy interface, but hey you can win prizes

What they do is they pre-pick several times during the day where they’ll give away a prize to the person who searches closest to that time, and if you’re that person then you get a little notification that you won a prize. They only accept your first 10 searches every day, so sitting there searching over and over for “purple monkey dishwasher” doesn’t help your cause any, really. But a lot of us (myself included) typically search at least a half-dozen times a day, and now I find myself sometimes using Blingo instead of just hopping over to wikipedia like I might normally do, just to increase my chances. Inevitably, wikipedia is the first link returned anyway, but no harm done really.

If you want, please use my referral link to sign up, because that way when you win, I win prizes as well. Since I just won a $10 iTunes gift certificate, so did Jeff Croft, who first informed me about Blingo in one of his blog posts a while back. That, of course, means that any of your friends that you invite will win stuff for you as well.

It’s not for everyone, but for those who search enough to potentially make it worthwhile, give it a shot.

After much reluctance I’ve gone ahead and somewhat embraced the blogosphere and Web2.0 and all the fancy internet jargon that’s being thrown around today. (As a side note, MySpace still sucks.) However, I found that once I started embracing it I became just inundated with “stuff” and had no real organized way of making any real sense of it. It used to be that there were only a handful of things I really checked with any regularity on the web: email, a few news sites, and a few message boards. However, with my own blog now and with several other cohorts and family members having blogs, I had to add that to the list. And once that was on the list, I might as well add blogs related to some of my interests (sports, programming, etc.) to the list as well. Oh, and they have a bunch of bookmarks online that they want to share as well. And so on, and so on, and so on…

Needless to say, what once was a short excursion I could repeat as needed (20-30 minutes to check all my email accounts, all the news sites, and all the message boards), now became an exercise in futility. Inevitably I’d “forget” to check one of the many things on my burgeoning list. In this day and age of information, that simply wouldn’t cut it, of course. So I was left with a problem: I liked all the stuff I would routinely check, but I simply didn’t have time to check it all and get anything productive done during the day.

Now, being the technologically savvy guy that I am (thanks to all the things on my list), I heard about Netvibes (and a few other similar sites like protopage and pageflakes) and decided to give it a try. I had tried protopage a few months before and was soured with how little actual content it gave me to help pull stuff together. It seemed mostly to just say “look what we can do with javascript, you can drag and drop stuff!”. However, now that writing a site that can do that is relative easy, that’s not as big of a selling point anymore and sites can no longer “get by on their good looks”, so to speak. Enter Netvibes. I actually was convinced to give it a shot by Brett, who wrote up a pretty interesting and fairly detailed comparison of Netvibes and Pageflakes here (for those who don’t want to read it, he is staying with Netvibes but thinks Pageflakes is promising). At first, it seems a bit daunting because there’s just so much stuff to put on there and all you start out with is a single blank page/tab. However, adding RSS feeds is pretty easy (and that’s what most of my stuff is), and setting up the email account checkers is fairly simple to do as well. The end result can be seen here.

The best part about it is I really only have to look at one place to see if I there is anything new in my World Of Stuff now, and that place is the “my stuff” tab on the top-left. Even when I’m browsing other stuff (or writing a post here), I can just look up and see if anything new has been posted at any of those places. So now I don’t even need to take the 20 minutes to check all the stuff I have, instead I just take 2 seconds to look up.

This post is a response to the blog post by Luke Plant titled Why learning Haskell/Python makes you a worse programmer. Now, in the interest of disclosure and keeping things civil, I actually do like this guy’s blog and particularly enjoyed his post A Django website that took (a lot) more than 20 minutes, and I think he’s shown himself to be quite a competent programmer in the other posts of his that I’ve read. That said, I heartily disagree with his contention that learning Haskell or Python makes you a worse programmer, and here’s why.

To the non-geek-inclined readers of this blog who have made it this far, here is a quick summary of the point/counterpoint. Python and Haskell are somewhat-lesser-used programming languages (read: tools), and his contention is that even though these tools are much better at getting more jobs accomplished it makes it more difficult to get the job done with more popular but inferior tools (in his case, the programming language C# which he is forced to use at work). With license for a little hyperbole, it’s kind of like saying that one shouldn’t learn how to use a Swiss army knife because it makes building things with just a hammer more difficult.

Now for a blow-by-blow. The first argument Mr. Plant raises in his blog entry is that it’s basically a letdown that he can’t use Python or Haskell in his work, because they more accurately reflect how he thinks about the problem at hand. A few choice nuggets from that portion of his entry:

It’s very common for me to notice that using either of these languages I could decrease a chunk of code by a factor of 2-5, and not rare to see a factor of 10-20 in certain parts of the code base.

Further, my experience with Haskell means that I now see potential bugs everywhere in imperative code.

Just reading those two things makes me think he’d be arguing the opposite point of view. At least in the latter one, he’s already improving his coding as a result of knowing Haskell, even though the first quote presents more of a “What if…” scenario that may never happen (since he must use C# at work). But, here’s where I think things start to go wrong:

The net result of these things is to make me very depressed and demoralised. I feel like a human compiler, translating the Haskell or Python in my head into a language which is a whole level lower.

Aha, we’ve found the problem and really it’s not an uncommon one at all. I mean, different programming languages are, after all, different languages. Perhaps often even more so than spoken/written languages. So as anyone who knows multiple languages (of any kind) probably realizes, we often treat the new language as something that we just have to translate to, often word-for-word. But, the new language might have constructions/tenses/idioms that don’t make sense in the original language. However, since we’re unfamiliar with them we tend to avoid them for a while at first. Eventually we adopt them into our understanding of the language and then we can even begin to use them effectively. Once you develop a sufficiently deep understanding of the new langauge, you may even find yourself “thinking in” that language (I’ve done so with Spanish, it’s very interesting). Now, while you may be able to make the smooth transition between the two languages, you’re no longer treating them as two dialects of the same language, you’re recognizing them as the separate languages they really are.

Keeping that in mind, let’s push forward to the second point Luke makes, and that is “using functional style obfuscates your code when using other languages.” (Translation for the non-programmers: literal translation gives messy results) Well, yeah, this shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially anyone who has tried to use Babelfish to translate anything semi-complicated. The tool that Mr. Plant is using (C#) has limited (and relatively new) functional language constructs, and the language wasn’t initially designed with them in mind so they don’t have the nice syntax that Python and Haskell have for dealing with them. As a result, trying to literally translate from Python or Haskell into C#, you get a mess. I mean, yes, it works but it’s ugly and awkward. Much like someone who doesn’t understand English well (but speaks another language fine) might be said to be speaking “broken English”, he is effectively writing “broken C#”. He apparently hasn’t learned to compartmentalize the two languages into different portions of his programmer brain, and is still trying to treat these programming languages as different dialects of some superlanguage (or maybe metalanguage) which all programming languages derive from. Now, in a sense, all programming languages are the same in that they can all quantifiably produce the same results, but lets not confuse Turing completeness with equivalence. Programming is, after all, a process and not a result — it’s not just making sure that you get there, it’s the path that you take to get there.

So, to conclude, it’s not learning Haskell/Python that will make one a worse programmer, it’s trying to shoehorn one language into another that will. Recognizing when is the right time to use certain idioms for certain language is a skill that takes time to develop but should eventually come along.

Ever since Google’s GMail public beta made such a huge splash, it seems that every Web2.0 product to come out these days decided to follow suit, releasing their product while in the “beta” stages.

Now, a quick recap for those of you who don’t know about the terminology. The first three letters of the Greek alpha bet are alpha, beta, and gamma (in that order). In software development, there’s a convention that something that’s mostly-functional, but not quite tested enough or feature-complete enough to be ready to release is considered “beta” software. Consequently, something that shades more towards “production-ready” is considered “gamma” — that would mean that it mostly just needs more testing and sprucing up, most functionality is already in place and tested fairly well. Likewise, something leaning towards the opposite side is “alpha” — something you probably don’t want the general public banging on as it’s not really well tested and may not even be very representative of what you envision the final product to be. I’ve never seen anything (publicly) labeled “delta”, because putting together a “gamma” release is rare enough; at that point, it’s done.

Now, the idea of having public betas isn’t something Google spearheaded, but they certainly did add a new responsibility-dodging wrinkle to it. Releasing beta software may have been old hat, because most software up to now was just something you either purchased or downloaded, so your copy didn’t change. However, now with online services like GMail, things change without the user doing anything. That means that, ostensibly, things are getting fixed and that they are polishing things up a bit more … you know, heading from beta to gamma to “finished”. But therein lies the wrinkle. GMail’s more than a year older, and hundreds of thousands of users stronger now since it’s initial public beta release in early 2005. But what do we still see up in the top left corner?

This:

And it’s not like they’ve forgotten that it said beta in the logo, because that “+ talk” feature was added just a few months ago, and the actual mail functionality hasn’t changed much since then. So, at this rate it seems like it’ll be stuck in perpetual beta.

Now, here’s a quick rundown of some other Web2.0 applications that are following suit (mostly stolen from this list):

- purchased by Yahoo! in March of 2005, up until recently Flickr was just “beta” but it was “upgraded” on May 16th according to the Wikipedia article on it.

- one of the many web calendar options out there, 30boxes has been around only since about February of this year, so I won’t harp on them just yet about remaining beta

- Writely was actually purchased by Google though there’s no telling whether or not the “beta” label was there before-hand, since I never use it

- Google’s social networking site was actually developed in the spare time of one of their developers … back in January 2004. It was in beta then, and it’s apparently in beta now. I haven’t been back there in a long time (probably about two years!) so I can’t say how much has changed, but I don’t hear Orkut making huge waves in the social networking space.

- EditGrid does one thing that none of the others in this list do (that I can tell) — they actually have a release plan. Not only that they have a Roadmap/Future Plan.

- now here’s one case that having the “beta” in your logo is probably a Bad Thing(tm). You expect people to give you their credit card information even though your product is admittedly not ready for general release yet? I’ll wait a while, thanks.

- I don’t quite get how Jellyfish works, but it’s something like an exclusive cashback club plus price search engine. I couldn’t successfully sign up, (”Application Error (Rails)”), so it definitely is still beta!

- Zillow’s fun to play with (when it’s working, duhh beta), check out how much houses in your area sell for

- lastly we have an “alpha” entry! This one’s a bit more understandable, since it’s still quite new and it’s a pretty complex product. If you’ve ever wanted to roll your AIM/ICQ/MSN accounts together into one interface without having to deal with Trillian, Miranda, or Gaim, try this

Two great tastes that taste great together: one of the few TV shows I watch, Lost, and my web framework of choice, Django.

Jeff Croft has put together a site, Lost Theories to allow folks to add/rate/comment on theories regarding Lost. And, to make things even better he’s distributing the source code to it. He says he borrowed a lot from the Zyons folks, and that’s actually the app I was looking at as well when trying to figure out some auth issues (see a few posts ago). However this site seems to use user authentication and authorization more like my site needs to, so hopefully his stuff will have stripped out some of the stuff that was confusing me. I haven’t taken a look yet because I was just so happy to have read this that I immediately came to post about it

Also, if anyone wants an example of just how kickass a Django-powered website can be, check out Jeff Croft’s blog (link above). I’m actually not a huge fan of the front page layout (too much stuff at the bottom), but everything else is very nice. The “live search” at the top is incredible - try it out by starting to type stuff in the search box and watch as results appear before your eyes.

I’m currently working on building a poker league tracking app in the Django web framework (powered by Python), and it’s been a pretty fun/awesome (© 2006 Team Awesome) experience being able to build so much with so little (as of this post, the actual code is only 314 lines long, with only 659 lines of template code building all the pages). We’re using it to track our poker league currently — check out the site for our current standings, and I’m working on adding in more stuff as we go along to “enhance” the experience and maybe at some point making some sort of marketable product out of it.

(warning: geek stuff follows)
One of the bigger things I’m working on now is having it so users can log in and that way they’ll have a little dashboard where they can check their own stats more easily (click on “view my stats” instead of having to go through the player list and finding your own name), and they’ll also be able to do stuff like register for upcoming games. Unfortunately, I’m having a bit of a time with getting authentication working, and it’s fairly frustrating since Django has gotten just about everything else “right” and already I’ve found a few very annoying things. Maybe it’d all be solved with a simple tutorial for all of this, but I’ve only found one app that uses Django authentication and it uses it a little more extensively and differently than I plan on doing, so it’s not just a matter of mimicking it.

Basically, what I require is:

• The ability for unregistered users to view the site just fine, but perhaps not having access to certain things (perhaps actual dollar amounts or contact information). However “certain things” almost never is simply limited by “this page, or that page”; it’s usually nuggets of info within a page. So, Django’s login_required decorator doesn’t fit the bill here.
• A way for users to be logged in such that I don’t have to pass the request object to each template for a user check. The documentation for django authentication seems to hint that this is the case, but I have only been able to get the behavior they describe by passing the “request” variable to each template. (This isn’t huge, it’s more a case of wishing that the documentation matched up with reality.) (update: I just can’t read the docs, it doesn’t hint that you won’t have to pass request or request.user at all)
• Not having to use the template path that Django specifies for the Django-contributed auth views. The fact that I can use the django.contrib.auth.views.* views is awesome, I love that it builds the form and such for me already and handles error reporting and whatnot. The fact that they point to a hard-coded template location (registration/login.html for example), is decidedly not awesome. I have to think this is just an oversight that will be fixed pre-1.0, and I think I saw something to that extent either on the wiki or the newsgroup, but it’s really surprising that it’s made it this far.
• Even if I were to use the login_required decorator, I think it too, like the contrib auth view, has a hard-coded destination involved: /accounts/login. That seems like something that could (and should) be passed to the decorator, like @login_required(’/myurl/not/djangos/login/’). Or maybe even as a keyword-arg named login_url if you want to be more explicit (and I kinda like that).

Also, the documentation doesn’t tell me exactly what installing the authentication middleware does for me. I would hope that that’s the part that made me not have to pass around the request to each template, but I haven’t seen that happen, so I’m not sure what it does. Maybe I’ll have to dig in and check it out myself, especially since one of the potential feature additions to the site might involve writing my own sort of site-specific CacheMiddleware.
(update: I checked, and really all the AuthenticationMiddleware does is add the user attribute to each request, and I’m actually amazed at how simple it is to write middlewares that do stuff like that, score one for Django)
(end of hardcore geek stuff)

All in all, I love writing in Django, and recommend it to anyone aspiring to develop web applications but doesn’t want to spend a lot of time building everything from the ground up.

And if you run a poker league and are looking for some sort of tracking application like this, let me know, and we’ll talk

Okay I’m not nearly as much of a Google (the company) whore as some people, but I do think they do some really cool stuff and they give us lots of fun toys to play with. Now they’re giving away another, a 3D modeling tool called SketchUp. I haven’t actually downloaded and played with it yet, but I did notice a few things from watching their little tutorial/intro video that make me think of how clever this move is, and that’s what I’m here to write about.

So, the premise is this. Basically, people play with this 3D modeling tool, and they see that they can place their models in Google Earth. “Oh, that’s cool,” they say, and then they are told that they can share it with everyone else by uploading it to Google’s 3D Warehouse. The end result? A more detailed Google Earth for everyone else. All you have to do is install this “network link” into Google Earth and any georeferenced (ie, placed on the right spot on Google Earth) model in the 3D warehouse will automatically be available to you. So now when you’re viewing an area, you can view/download any of the georeferenced models available for that area.

But where’s the clever part in all of this? Well, if SketchUp is really as easy to use as the video purports it to be, pretty soon you have amateur modelers providing decent quality facsimiles of landmarks all over and georeferencing them for you and sharing them. Instead of having to pay modelers to do all this work and researching what might need to be modeled, instead you harness the general population and their own favorite places and encourage them to do the work for you. With the network link, you don’t get forced to see some crappy models either, you can pick and choose what you see. And I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point they start incorporating some of the user-submitted models into the building data layer in general. After all, they have to fix the St. Louis Gateway Arch at some point, and someone already made a better model for it.

Google’s “building data” version:

User-submitted SketchUp version: