Penny Arcade Expo 2008 in Seattle

Not much more to wait now. This will be my third year with my youngest
boy. I enjoy it. It's a trip to Mecca for him. Last year he was at the
Lord of the Rings booth correcting some of their phrases in Tolkien's
elvish dialects.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/147360.asp?source=rss

flash player now on linux-32 and -64 as well as freeBSD-32 and -64

http://www.brooksandrus.com/blog/2008/08/22/flash-player-10-platform-ubiquity/

How about a little MC5, shall we?

ok...

"Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!"
-MC5

"Thanks, But No Thanks"

"They want us to reward them for the last eight years with four more years."

-Bill Clinton

Collaboration Components

From Ryan Stewart on Adobe's

"Being able to add collaboration components to your own applications.
That's where CoCoMo is going to come in. You can check out more at the
Collaborative Methods blog. We're exposing almost all of the
functionality from Connect Now into components that you can use inside
of your own Flex applications. Even better, CoCoMo will provide all
the hooks you need to add a real-time collaborative element to your
application. There's a recording available from a meeting with the
CoCoMo team if you're interested in more info."

http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/?p=1611

There will be hands on development events at the MAX conference...

"The first session is going to be more of an overview, really
highlighting the scope of functionality offered by Cocomo, along with
a few simple sample apps to get the audience started. For the second
session, we're choosing one big sample AIR app that ties a bunch of
functionality together, and using it as a framing device for diving
into some slightly more advanced topics. Both should be a lot of fun -
multi-user apps are so much more interesting to build than single-user
apps, "cloud computing" is a pretty hot topic these days, and you'll
likely walk out of either session with something.. actually working."

http://blogs.adobe.com/collabmethods/2008/07/cocomo_max.html

It's about time the collaborative software landscape started shaping up again.

The Devil and Obama

We can't afford four more years of McSame...

Obama could have chosen the devil himself as a running mate and I'd vote for them over four more years of this crap.

"I'm not dead yet!" - the one-off data center

Dion Hinchcliffe writes...

The announcement this week of the launch of Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) has added another vital piece to the overall cloud computing picture. The EBS announcement is particularly significant since it takes the gloves off when it comes to meeting the demanding needs of enterprise class computing requirements. The Elastic Block Store finally makes it practical, cost effective, and relatively easy to put traditional storage and processing of very large amounts of data in the cloud from a credible vendor.

[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out...
[rewr!]
...your dead!
[rewr!]
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
CUSTOMER:
Here's one.
CART MASTER:
Ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
What?
CUSTOMER:
Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
'Ere. He says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER:
Yes, he is.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm not!
CART MASTER:
He isn't?
CUSTOMER:
Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
DEAD PERSON:
I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER:
No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
CART MASTER:
Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
DEAD PERSON:
I don't want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER:
Oh, don't be such a baby.
CART MASTER:
I can't take him.
DEAD PERSON:
I feel fine!
CUSTOMER:
Well, do us a favour.
CART MASTER:
I can't.
CUSTOMER:
Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.

Portland Confidential

Phil Stanford is a local columnist for the Portland Tribune. He keeps a pretty good tab on the local government, their past and present shenanigans, especially their involvement with the seedier side of Portland over the years.

See: "Did a city ‘hit team’ lower the boom on Cindy’s?"

He turned a collection of his Portland Confidential columns into an entertaining book, whether you are from Portland or just enjoy reading about the real underbellies of society that many folks would just assume you ignore.

See: "Portland Confidential"

What happens when all of Old Town becomes New? Currently it appears the underbelly is headed about 80 blocks east of downtown and beyond. Is that any better? I guess for the real estate developers downtown, it's out of sight and far away for a while. Does a healthy city need something of an underbelly?

I remember moving to Portland 20 years ago and all that is hip in the Pearl District and what's fast becoming hip in Old Town was really very rundown. Still in spite of all the improvements every block displaces more people living on the edge with few options. It's easy to say getting rid of this one adult bookstore is an improvement, but most likely, as Stanford lays it out, the builders and real estate developers are the low-lying movers and shakers in city politics, and they are on a mission that considers little more than how to keep their gravy train flowing. Another former "house of prostitution" closer to Powells' City of Books, if you know where that is, is about to become a McMenamin's hotel. Well, that could provide an entertaining motif.

One group of folks my family, friends, and I have helped with every now and then for the last 15 years or so is Potluck In The Park. David Utzinger works his butt off every week making sure everyone who can get downtown can get a good meal; every Sunday. No one knows the last time he took a week off, looking back well over a decade. Plus they throw a party every Christmas day, and a huge barbecue every summer. There's no better group I know of that's just bare-bones, keep people fed and give them a place to socialize every week of the year. Most people in this kind of need aren't homeless, but if Portland continues revitalizing its Old Town, and similar blocks, there will most likely be more people on the street who currently at least have a roof.

Oh yeah, the small O'Bryant Square, the original "Paranoid Park", they've barely been able to hold on to for their Sunday dinners is also up for "revitalization" and PLitP has been trying to maintain some visibility in the "visioning" process. PLitP had already been moved out of the nicer park blocks several years ago. There were no problems, it's just such a large, weekly gathering of so many people in need, is just a bit "unseemly" for many people.

TriSano

An even better idea...

TriSano.org

Tri is a prefix meaning three. Tri represents the collaboration between local, state and federal entities. It depicts the primary disciplines of public health: epidemiology, biostatistics and health services. Tri also refers to the epidemiological triad of host, agent, environment.

Sano is an adjective meaning promoting good health. Our goal for the application and the community is to help protect the health of people throughout the world.

This is Mike "Fuzzy" Herrick's thing. Good deal.

The TriSano™ Eye represents a zooming (micro/macro) view on disease detection and prevention.

OK, I was good until being told this is an eye. That's kind of creepy. Isn't it a leaf?

Mike fills in the details about the logo. I really like the logo, graphically. I just need some time to adjust to it being an eye, not a leaf. Oh.

Open Quote

An interesting idea...

OpenQuote is an open source, web based, insurance quotation solution which allows quotes to be produced, and products maintained, over the web. Any number of products can be configured to support any line of business via externalised product definitions and rules.

Groovy;

The same three of us have been programming in groovy in ernest for the first time. We've each dinked around a bit at one time or another previously.

Overall I like it. Especially closures and the syntax for block closures when the receiver's last argument is a closure. The spectrum from programming nearly all-like-java on one end of groovy style, and programming nearly all-like-lisp-and-smalltalk at the other end of groovy style flows more smoothly than I initially gave groovy's designers credit for a few years ago.

One quirk - bit me for a dozen minutes or so, the oddity/convenience that groovy wants the keys of a map to be strings. What bit me was the expression...

{ foo: bar}

where foo and bar are variables.

The "convenience" groovy provides is the interpretation of foo as a string, i.e. "foo". The value for the pair is still the result of evaluating bar. So you end up with the pair (if bar is the integer 1)... "foo" : 1

If foo has the value 3 and you'd like the pair to be... 3 : 1 then you have to put foo in parentheses to force evaluation...

{ (foo): bar}

That's the closest thing to a true quirk I've encountered. But for parameter lists, etc. the convenience does pay off in neatness. The result is a very smalltalk-ish keyword message send, and combined with the block closure syntax, is a pleasant and familiar style for smalltalk-lovers. (e.g. coding a seaside-ish web framework using paul-graham-ish closures rather than continuations would be very fitting in groovy.)

Meanwhile the other affect groovy has had is that now when I edit java code, I'm forever not using semicolons at the end of statements.

Oh, and the tools still really suck.

git out

Three of us have been using git with a shared (git) repository on a server. We've been pushing and pulling to/from the shared repository as opposed to peer-to-peer just as a matter of convenience and familiarity.

I have to say I like the concept of distibuted version control, or more to the point: versioning locally, pushing, and pulling. This is the first I've used such a tool. Mostly I've been using svn for the last few years. We've not tried the svn/git combo pack, just because we did not need or want to use svn in this case.

I also have to say after a couple two three weeks of using git, I am not crazy about git per se. Aside from just the learning adjustment that this is not svn and this is distributed version control, the adjustment and learning about what I would call the "quirks" of git have been somewhat discouraging.

I'd compare some of the cryptic language of git to some of the cryptic error messages a programmer new to erlang sees, or haskell / complexly type inferred languages. Combined with a vocabulary only a kernel linux hacker could appreciate, I suppose. I don't think this language is due to the concepts of distributed version control per se, rather to git's implementation and implementors.

And whatknot.

So git seems to be winning. I've not tried mercurial or other distributed repositories. Is git so good? Or just the one that's winning for reasons other than usability? And stuff.

My "Handling" Fantastic Contraption

I just love the trial and error that goes into making these contraptions.

My latest... "Stand Tall" is a solution for the "Handling" scenario.

"The most amazingly lifelike CGI"

Via Shawn Levey, movie critic for The Oregonian...

"The most amazingly lifelike CGI"

Yeah, seems kinda good.

details

Magic Pen

Another great game my son pointed me to after showing him Fantastic Contraption...

Magic Pen

Concurrent Programming with Erlang / OTP

Manning has a draft PDF available of a new Erlang book, with an emphasis on OTP, the platform/framework/library/what-cha-ma-call-it that helps in the development of robust, concurrent, distributed systems. I bought it, yes, I did. Co-authored by Martin Logan - no relation that I know of, and no damn discount on the book either!! (Well, I didn't ask. :-)

There are only a couple of draft chapters currently in the draft. But this should be a good addition to the growing supply of help getting going with Erlang.

I think the Seaside folks have made this "the year of Smalltalk" but there's an argument to be made for this being "the year of Erlang" as well.

Awash

Here's my resulting design for Awash I am pleased with, and fascinated by...

http://FantasticContraption.com/?designId=633065

This scenario was fun to evolve -- I settled on the approach fairly quickly, it wasn't a really difficult configuration, but getting the angles and positions just right took a few iterations. The to see the creation finally make it to the target - it is alive!

This would be a good scenario to see which design takes the least time. Every time I run mine there are a couple seconds when I lose all hope of success.

Between You and the Cloud

Damien Katz wonders...

"Cloud computing is great. Right up until you lose your connection, then what?"

http://damienkatz.net/2008/08/quick-blog-entry.html

Then you wish your software was a little more aware of the difference
between you and your cloud.

As programmers, a lot of us toss around the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing but
then expect the network to always be there anyway.

I absolutely believe most people and businesses should be using cloud
computing for nearly everything... soon. But most of the software has
to catch up to cloud style, and cloud style has to evolve toward more
awareness of the sometimes-impassable distance between the cloud and
the cloud user.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/impassable

That condition will not change anytime soon, so software has to become
more aware of the issue.

Silverspoon

Let's see. The open source community is at fault for not getting
Silverspoon running on Linux?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9214&tag=nl.e539

The article begs for sympathy...

"Now, one could get all huffy and puffy and blame Microsoft on this
state of affairs, but in this case, I have to lay this problem
strictly at the feet of the Open Source community. I know for a fact
that De Icaza and Microsoft have pretty much a completely open
relationship, they give him free flowing access to all the .NET API
documentation and their developers, he spends a good amount of time on
the Microsoft campus in Redmond, and Novell and Microsoft are
committed to both making .NET run on Linux. However, Novell and
Microsoft can only do so much to have the community contribute efforts
to keep .NET development at pace on Linux with Windows."

Yeah, right. The most successful software company on the planet could
fund the work if they wanted to. Maybe Linux is not a priority
Microsoft, I can understand that. Maybe Novell has enough troubles of
their own to get Microsoft's software running on Linux. I can
understand that.

Adobe has Flash / Flex / AIR running just fine on Linux. This is not a
technical problem. It's an organizational / business problem.

Maybe Linux does not need Silverspoon. Isn't open source a meritocracy
for software?

Fantastic Contraption

Fantastic Contraption is quickly becoming one of my most favorite
games since the Pinball Construction Set on the Apple II and the Mac
512...

http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/08/fantasticcontraptioncom.php

After several levels I became stuck on a theme of using a lot of wheels, multiple vehicles, and not attaching the goal object. This one is my current favorite...

"More Rails"

Free for basic play. $10 to save and share, building scenarios, etc.

There are some amazing contraptions built by others. I'll link to some of them later, like the "thrower" - just great.

Someone built this "Orbital Launch" contraption which is just out of nowhere... first the goal object gets stuck in this pocket and you wonder will it ever get out. Then after a few revolutions the object and a chain attached to it are launched... but apparently *away* from the target. The object flies out of view for what seems like forever... only to drop down from above.

The gods must be crazy. It makes no sense.