prog | Entries tagged with programming

Ask Bjørn Hansen wonders why there isn't a Google Checkout module on the CPAN. And now it's a month later and there still isn't one!

Besides that post, googling for ["google checkout" perl] reveals a handful of mailing lists with about five posts each on them since the summer.

I am reading the API docs today.

I wish there was a nearby shrine to MySQL I could go visit. I'd like to go there and burn some incense or something.

In the middle of some pretty hairy DB work in order to make the revenue reports work, and I swear to you, all my guesses as to syntax for bizarro table relations that looked like they might work actually did work.

If this were Oracle, this would have taken me a week to figure out.

I shall have all the code necessary to make our payment system testable by this time next week.

That doesn't mean it will be online then, but all the parts will be in place. A month of testing and handwringing will follow. Then we will take it online. Exciting times to follow.

This is possible because Zarf has already done all he can in Gamut and the Python libraries. I need to follow through in the Bookkeeper and the Perl libraries. woo woo

I like to hear people talk about their jobs, if they enjoy them. Here is a survey of people on my friends list whom I know mainly through an admiration for their work, and who have blogs where they often talk about what they do. (Are there others I ought to be reading?)

jwz runs a nightclub in San Fransisco, and frequently posts of his adventures, often including a copious amount of his photography. Occasionally posts something that draws from his cred as the maintainer of xscreensaver or the brash alpha-hacker responsible for much of Netscape Navigator, back in the day. Grumbles about macs sometimes (he is maybe the most famous Mac user known to the Slashdot crowd, besides Jobs and Woz I guess). Most of his posts, though, are either fascinating links or crazy photos and movies. His tastes in non sequitur are quite similar to mine, I suppose.

grrm is still writing the Song of Ice and Fire series, that thing I repeatedly declare that I hate forever and then continue plowing through. Posts infrequently, but often enough to assure us that he's still there. Likes SF cons and football.

tmcm is a cartoonist most famous for Too Much Coffee Man and whose cartoons haven't really been all that good in a long time. But I love his posts and photographs about his life otherwise, including his recent adventures in producing an opera based on his famous character. He posts all of his finished cartoons, as well as many preliminary sketches and doodles. Sometimes he gets the blog involved: in a recent post he grumbled about not being satisfied with a particular punchline, and ended up replacing it with one that a fan suggested in comments.

urbaniak is an actor living in New York City. He's most recognized for his roles in the film Henry Fool, which I have not seen, and Venture Brothers, which I adore (he provides the voice for Dr. Venture). About half of his posts are bizarre, slow-paced flamewars with (so far) two particular LJ users who might not even be real people. These are not very interesting. Much of the rest is stories of being an actor in New York, and are great. His fans enjoy making animated gifs of his babies beating each other up.

officialgaiman is Neil Gaiman. Much of the content is public responses to fan mail, which gives it a very different feel than the other journals listed here. Most of the comments are the ladies swooning every time he posts a picture of himself, which is often.

(Was going to add

zarf for the yuks "gee he's been quiet lately" but he doesn't actually use his website as anything remotely like a blog, so.)

OK, so Origins happened, and this that and the other, and Volity's investment trail, while still warm, has yet to reach a conclusion. I am now even broker than I was the last time I said I was broke - I am no longer frequenting cafés coz I have lost the ability to pay for things in cash - and since there is no salary for me in the foreseeable[1] future I'm going to pick up where I left off three weeks ago and look for short-term part-time contract work.

I've cruised jobs.perl.org and got a half-dozen applications ready to go, and my question is: knowing what y'all know about me - basically, I am a super-expert at whateverthehell these people want me to do regarding Perl and databases and websites - what should I be asking for? Is $125/hr too much? (too little?)

[1] While it is true that, things being what they are for us, "the foreseeable future" describes a time period about 50 hours long, the fact remains that the particular such slice I refer to here has no paycheck for me in it.

But this is a startlingly accurate breakdown of what my experience working on the volity.net website has been like.

Right now, shipping three people from Boston to Columbus n back 'round Origins-time is $1,200, total. We're gonna wait and see if that gets better over the next few days, but the Andys have made it clear that driving just won't work, so we might just have to take the hit.

On the upside, it does indeed look like all three of us are set on attending Origins. So yay. (Now to deal with the hotel and everything else and bllrghhl.)

I have been putting off making an Inform 7 post. There's miles to go before I'm done reading the docs, but let me just say that the damn thing is amazing. It makes me want to make a game. Right now.

Even though the language is only part of what makes the system great (much of the rest of it is the fantastic IDE), I want you to look at a lengthy source code example that Mike Gentry posted elsewhere. (It starts with the line '"Anchorhead" by Michael Gentry.')

Please look at the code even if you don't consider yourself a programmer. Just look at it. And start to understand why this language is blowing peoples' minds the way it is.

(It defines the first few rooms and objects of Anchorhead, Gentry's Loftcraftian IF masterpiece from several years ago that he's been porting from I6 to I7.)

Why would Firefox + prototype.js recognize an X-JSON of "monkey" just fine, as well as "['gibbon', 'ape', 'baboon']", but not "{'monkey_count': 42}" or even, for that matter, "{}"?

Safari is handling all of these just fine. Firefox ain't; it evaluates the latter two into "undefined". This is the latest Firefox for Mac.

Sarcastic/self-deprecatory answers from people who don't know what I am talking about not welcome. I am very grumpy right now. I am seriously about to go looking for a clock tower. For me to climb to the top of and then for me to point at people while saying pshew pshew.

Also if you comment to tell me that an ape isn't a monkey I will punch you in the head with my fists.

Update I discovered a workaround: if I wrap the curly-braced object spec in square brackets, and then pull a json = json[0]; on the receiving end, it works. I'll take it. This does not answer my question, though.

My continued failure to figure out how to deploy a Java application on Windows is holding up the entire volity.net website rollout, and thus delaying our search for money. I have been consistently enraged for about a day now. I have not been this angry at a computing platform for being an uncaring behemoth since the time I was forced to work with Oracle at Harvard.

I have found programs that will take my Jar and make an .exe out of it, and even some that make an .msi installer file out of it. This is a good start, but in every case the resulting program, if opened on a machine without Java installed, will not do the sane thing of silently downloading and installing Java, but instead tell the user that they don't have any Java and leaving them to do something about it.

And this is retarded. Most any non-technical user presented with a dialog nattering about unmet dependencies or (worse) thrown to an apparently random webpage at sun.com is going to include that the program is broken or virused or something, and will trash it without further thought.

Do Windows developers not know this? Do they just not care? Does working with an OS that is already user-hating in a thousand little ways desensitize you against not wanting to produce one more way?

SO ANGRY

No longer automatically funny: zombies, and zombie accessories ("braains" et al)

[Flying graphic resembling "DONE" if stamped with a "DONE" stamp swoops in and lands with a THUDD diagonally over frame, fades.]

Feel free to remind me of this the next time I make a zombie joke.

I think I have been tired by all the stock "geek humor" characters for a while actually. (Free feel to remind me of this etc.)

Somewhat relatedly, let me use this space to announce that I'm purposefully going to avoid taking another programming job, even if I have to take a job sometime in the future. I actually have been consciously thinking for a while now that I've lost any will to hack on things I don't really care about. Or rather, to care about things solely because I'm paid to hack on them. (Feel free etc.)

Funny thing is, after spending hours chasing down what ended up being a bloody-damn scalar/list-context bug on a single line, I am exactly in the mood for more Martin.

My parents finally picked up a Globe to check real estate prices 'round here. They didn't believe the numbers I have recited to them, until now. But then this led into another long lecture (in the academic sense) about home-buying strategies, so I know it didn't really discourage them from their dream of seeing their youngest become a homeowner; owning property is the one true form of financial security, to them.

I'm still not convinced of why I'd want to own a home versus renting one. However, I suspect that I just haven't collected enough reasons yet. I still feel that it's pretty likely that Linden's the last apartment I'm going to rent, before entering the real estate market on my own. I feel that it's equally likely I'll live here for more than a year. Perhaps I'll break the two-year record I set with my W-ville place! But, yes... we'll see.

Volity news:

Volity isn't behind schedule, but I feel like it should be. I guess I'm just impatient. Some of this also comes from the fact I'm repeating myself in mail to people, including curious strangers who've been joining the mailing list. I've had to write two separate emails about how the graphics're going to work, to two people who independently asked the same question. The question was perfectly reasonable, emerging from the currently published doucmentation describing the graphics system in general but not in detail. This makes it clear to me which book chapter I ought to write next, which is great, but on the other hand I'm hesitant to write anything definitively until we actually have a client, and can prove (to ourselves as much as anyone else) that these ideas will actually work.

That's actually what I'm impatient about. Clients we have so far include a very basic command-line thing that

daerr wrote, and the Java client that K has recently started building. The latter is going to be the big deal, but it's a month or three away from usability. What to do in the meantime? I predict that I'll spontaneously sink some hours into mutating d's client to use the Jabber libraries I wrote, and then extending it from there to handle all the functionality I'm adding into the server code. Either that or talk d into doing it. We'll talk.

Random thought (spurred by the music the diesel is playing right now, dunno why): One of the Karate Kid movies (II? III?) had the title character visiting Japan, and the TV trailer depicted him awkwardly asking a local girl "Are you... arranged, like?" (Referring to arranged marriage.) My dad, when we watched this ad (long, long ago, mind you) thought he said "Are you arranged right?" and exclaimed about what a crude movie this no doubt was.

I'm pretty sure I saw Karate Kid II, but I don't remember anything about it other than the Bad Karate Man (he wore a black gi, boo hiss) and a scene of KK and his coach on the long flight to Okinawa (IIRC). The fact that they were flying wasn't as important as the fact that they were traveling, and the focus of their scene was conversation about their destination. I think I remembered that scene because it seemed inspiring to me, who was (and remains) jittery on cross-country airplane flights, and here were these guys not even thinking about an intercontinental flight.

That Christmas I got an action figure of the BKM, who didn't have kung-fu grip per se, but did have a button on his back or hip or somewhere that made him kick, and came with little plastic oil barrels or something for him to kick over. The other figures based on the movie all did different things, chop and punch and so on, but I didn't have any of those. However, the BKM was like twice the height of my Star Wars guys, and so made for an effective exotic villain in young jmac's chop-socky playhouse of the mind.

Has anyone ever created a piece of media titled The Kung-Fu Grippe? I'd check now but I'm not online. It could be about any number of things, anyway.

Crap. I just asked the girl "C'n I have half a refill of the dark?", but it came out as "have have a refill"... I'm speaking in thinkos... and now I have a second large coffee here, which is too much. If I drink it all I can't let myself have any coffee until I finish peeing all this out, which won't be until 6 p.m. or so, or I will turn into Mr. Coffee Nerves and ineffectively fly around the office with my little jet pack and ruin marriages until it's time to go home.

True fact: I'm less shy about the word "girl" than I have been, perhaps as recently as a year ago. UMaine isn't the most oppressively P.C. place on earth but it does encourage what I imagine is the standard battery of Right Thinking through Word Elimination that one sees in American universities. There, "girl" is never ever the right word, unless one is talking about an actual young child. It took years of soaking in the Real World to get a feeling for the contexts when the word is just fine -- even stylistically appropriate -- to apply to an adult female-type person, and the contexts when it is legitimately too squirmy for the 21st century. (Which are many, granted.)

I'm probably like this with a bunch of words, actually.

Of course, this assumes a rational audience. A friend once told the story that someone crossed out the phrase "The home of Boston's chic shops" from an ad poster in the T, and wrote "WE'RE CALLED WOMEN" over it.

Also, it's old news, but still: did I call it, or what? I was guessing that his downfall would have been a misstatement, not a sound effect. But, whatever. Doom doom doom. I will do what I can.

This week has been quite fun and productive so far. Swung back into the groove at work fairly well, and got back into Frivolity code hacking. Got the test suite, running on my laptop, to work locally, and again when pointed at the new volity.net Jabber server that

daerr set up. Hope to post a bugfix release by this weekend, and then start in on the new stuff that K will need for his client to work correctly.

Good game night yesterday, for me.

dougo suggested we play Currents, which I haven't tried in years. Playing with three highly critical game geeks resulted in many rule-change suggestions being collected, some of which I can't wait to try. One in particular makes me especially excited because it might let me do away with those lame Goaltending rules. The last time I worked on the game, I was puzzling about how to fix Goaltending; it didn't occur to me to just throw out the rule entirely, making the game simpler, which now strikes me as something to strive for. I like to think this is a reflection of my growth as a writer/programmer since then!

Also got to talk about Volity with this group for the first time, which was neat. (It was a natural segue, as playing Currents reminded me that it was one of the reasons I started to invent Volity -- I wanted to be able to rapidly create computer versions of new board game ideas, allowing me to test them out with both humans and bots.) I also got to show off my pure-SVG/ECMAScript rock-paper-scissors game (sorry, not on the Web yet, though it probably should be), running in Squiggle. Oh, and I learned to pronounce "Batik" correctly, since it hadn't occurred to me Google for its real-wordedness. (It's [bə-TEEK].)

(And, link of the day: IPA alphabet table with Unicode keys and full names, the latter of which I've never seen before. All the letters are named, not after their sound, but after the position or activity of lip, tongue, tooth and lung necessary to produce the sound. Yes, you've known this for years, but it's new to me.)

And I won a hand of Lamarckian poker! And then Shmike won with a royal flush (of the strongest suit, too) and rightly declared victory over the entire concept of that game. (In Volity vocabulary he could have said, "I have beaten the ruleset", or colloquially "I have beaten this URI".)

And now you know what today's project was.

Went ahead and wrote my own Perl script, though I'm sure plenty of these exist already. CPAN Modules used:

Mime::Parser
LJ::Simple
Image::Magick::Thumbnail

I may post it somewhere if I get around to fixing an embarrassing hack (based on my apparent nongrokking of umask()). If you want to see it before then, go ahead and ask.

Observations:

Image quality is, offically, shitty. Of course it's kinda what I was expecting (it's a phone that can take pictures, not a dedicated camera), but to actually see it: eh. Not convinced that there aren't better models in the same price range, but this was an utterly unresearched purchase, so them's my cookies, ma.
Typing is easier than I thought it'd be. The default mode for typing text messages lets you just key in the numeric pattern for each word, and the phone's internal dictionary guesses what word is the one you most likely wanted, from the possible combinations. If it guesses wrong, you can see the whole list of possible words, and select the correct one (or define a new word). It looks like it doesn't do this contextually, or does so imperfectly, hence "where I an" (which I didn't notice at the time).
Another reason to regret not thinking this purchase through: no GPS! I mean, really; these posts need to have attached global coordinates. Maybe next year.

Working a lot on the same old ICCB project. Left a page of sample output in Dara's mailbox before going home. I'm at the fiddliest part now, trying to tune the output so that it matches what the researchers expect to see, and I have been discovering that their expectations are rather removed from the program's concept of reality, unfortunately.

Friday will be my six-month anniversary in the group. Without any projects done, I still feel like a newbie. Boss hints that I should feel grateful about working on a project with no set deadline or budget. Yeah, but.

This coming weekend has interesting bits in it... I'm allegedly going to stop blowing off

magid's coming over to teach me to cook things, and I'm seeing old friend jjohn again. He is a fine example of a friend whose friendship I've been rather delinquent in my end of the maintenance contract. A recent conversation with another friend has reminded me that the other people in my life are actually complex critters and not dancing automata who live in a state of suspended animation through the days, months or years since I last spoke with them.

Last weekend I went to Cthulhia's epiphany thing, and got a little crazy with the presents, as was previously implied. Everyone who got something from me got either a word game or a math book, except for the fellow who got an O'Reilly book. (I feel a little silly about the ORA book gift, since they give a fort-building amount of free books to anyone with any sort of relationship with them, more or less. Also I feel silly for feeling silly.) I think that I chose wisely all around.

I'm a fair ways into the Wiki-for-one project. Its working title is BrainDump, which is OK, but I've also been entertaining names which more emphasize its focus around hyperlinks, names like HyperNotes or LinkLetter. The latter I've been leaning towards in my musing, bizarrely.

C&M@ORA worked all day yesterday putting the QC2 edits to bed. There are no further edits after this, friends. I had all of four changes to make, two of them to my acknowledgments. I hope all the name-spelling corrections take.

I should be able to hold an actual copy in my hands before this month is over. We're just barely missing MacWorld, but attendees are getting a discount flier, and there are... many backorders, already.

I am starting to have nervous dreams about how the book will be received. But I am not nervous in my waking life, as I was when P&X was emerging.

I've already started to take notes for the second edition. Things sure do move quickly, don't they. I would imagine that updating a book is a hell of a lot easier than creating it from scratch, but I should probably talk to someone who's worked on updating one of their own books. Hmm: I know just the person.

I have been following my nose with the "wiki-for-one" idea, and have an idea for a Cocoa application that will likely preempt Duck (the DocBook editor) as my first public Mac OS X app. The idea is far simpler, and should teach me a lot about text-hacking with Cocoa, which I can then confidently apply to the more sophisticated tasks that Duck will require.

Vapor, vapor.

A smart person of whom I think highly just posted a fatalistic message to a mailing list discussion about palindromic timestamps, doubting that humanity will survive to experience 2112. This attitude, epsecially in such a person, I find deepy disappointing.

Sitting in the 1369 now, in the rear corner, very comfortable.

How are the books doing? I'm supposed to be drafting up changes I want to make to the current P&X draft while it's moving through copyedit. I have maybe ten days before Linda starts sending mush-mush email at me, so I'm taking it easy. Maybe too easy. But, yes, I am feeling quite done enough with that book. The only changes I know it needs are code tweaks. (For instance, super-reviewer Mike Stok pointed out to me how nearly all my example programs that take filenames as arguments would choke with files named "0", since they check the command line values for truth, instead of for definition. I'd say something sarcastic about how I must accomodate readers who'd knowingly name a file "0", but I block myself by imagining a half-dozen murky situations where this might happen to a sane person. So be it.)

Meanwhile, Chuck has my revised outline, which I mailed on Saturday. Or so I think. I haven't heard from him since we last met Friday, which is unusual.

It's interesting to compare Linda and Chuck. So far they both seem really laid-back, but Linda prefers to take a hands-off approach with her writers, always available for communication but rarely starting it herself, while Chuck has so far been a lot more proactive with me, forwarding lots of thoughts and ideas my way and scheduling meetings, at least for the first couple of weeks after he first popped the question to me. He has said that he's been increasingly busy very lately, and that's probably the whole reason for his sudden lack of response. It won't hurt to pong a ping his way, though. I really want to get started! (And get a check.)

I've decided to next try wrapping my head around AppleScript Studio, Apple's new suite for developing Cocoa applications in humble AppleScript. I think this would serve as a fine introduction to Cocoa and Aqua programming in general. Mastering this would get me familiar with all of Next/Apple's magic IDE tools and hooks a lot faster than I would coming at it from a purely Objective C angle; AppleScript is a much simpler language, and an interpreted one, meaning less groveling over syntax while I learn. Nice.

While here at the cafe, I opened a packet brother Ricky mailed me, and which I happened to have in my backpack. It conatined some extraordinary things: a short letter from Ricky, a Philip K Dick fanzine from 1989, containing an outline to an unpublished PKD novel, and two cute-yet-austere black-and-white photographs I have never before seen of Baby Prog playing peek-a-boo, one with blanket on head, one with blanket not on head. Ricky has never sent me interesting things before. How random! Belated happy Chaoflux, brother.

Have exchanged some more mail with Chuck. He wants someone to write about two-thirds of the book. As someone else at ORA once said, Mac OS X is really just FreeBSD Unix with plastic no-slip bathrub flowers stuck all over it. So, the Terminal command reference and all will just be a dance remix of previous books on that topic (cat or even emacs looks and works on OS X exactly like it does on Linux); he needs a writer to cover all the stuff specific to OS X.

Going to see if I can't meet with him today. I spent some of the weekend messing around with Project Builder, Apple's development IDE that comes with OS X. It really is rather impressive. I'm curious how deeply he'd want me to get into programming for the OS. I'd love the excuse to learn C for real, of course. Actually, prog, consider: where I'm headed later this year, be it another job or grad school, knowing C can only help me.

Hum. Well, I dug up my copy of Kelley and Pohl's "A Book on C" yesterday. Guess I'll go get some coffee and start in on this a second time, taking Project Builder for another spin at the same time.

I wonder why Chuck thought of me for this project. My glomming onto OS X was well-known in the company after I got my iBook and started blubrling about it on internal mailing lists, of course. However, there are definitely other OS X-using writers on ORA's radar, and I was imagining that I ruined my chances of writing more after "Perl & XML" because of my open whininess about it (sometimes); it's a sure thing that Chuck spoke with Linda before coming to me, and she apparentlly did not suggest that he find someone else for it. This boggles me, to be honest. But: shrug. Let's see what happens, hm?

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A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

That's awful high, Jason. That's awful high.

Entries tagged with programming

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