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2010

  • 1 min read

If you were MEANT to understand it, we wouldn't have called it 'code'

I'm looking over code from my last job. This is not my code, mind you--these were written by my guys in my last gig. I've been looking at them for the last three days or so, and, damned if I haven't grown thirty years older in frustration.

I'm not saying their code was bad... I'm saying their code was fucking horrifying. It's not even The Daily WTF-bad. It's the Oh-ghod-please-help-me-manage-to-get-these-fuckers-out-the-back-so-I-can-shoot-them-dead kind of bad.

Sure, it's just a job: you get paid regardless of the quality of your code (until you get fired) and you won't get awards by writing elegant code, anyway. But, I mean, for ghod's sake... Why write code that makes it look like you went out of your way to actually fuck it up?

By no means am I a good code monkey, but, by-ghod, I try my best. And, to be honest, I actually find it harder to write bad code in the long run, because then I'd have to be high to be able to understand what I wrote when I wrote it.

I'm so pissed right now, I'm actually cursing and stomping while I'm fuming and writing this.

  • 1 min read

Physicist able to achieve quantum teleportation for 10 miles. Too bad it doesn't work for matter.

Source via crazyangelblue

How far can you beam information instantaneously? Try 10 miles, according to a study in Nature Photonics that pushes the limits of quantum teleportation to its greatest distance yet. At that distance, the scientists say, one can begin to consider the possibility of someday using quantum teleportation to communicate between the ground and a satellite in orbit.

  • 1 min read

In line with the de-Google-ifying...

... I'm trying to effect, I'm sharing a few links to alternatives.

  • Duck Duck Go for search. Great for keyboard and privacy nuts.
  • Zoho as an online office suite. My personal-personal email goes through them.
  • Tumblr for microblogging. I like that Buzz doesn't have the usual 140-character limit, coupled with the fact that it's lightweight, which I can sort of replicated with Tumblr.

I'm also looking at Bloglines as a replacement for Google Reader.

At some point, I'll be looking into hosting my own computing-in-the-Cloud solutions, to remove my reliance on Zoho and possibly Tumblr and Bloglines.

Update: I think I'll go with Cheetah News for now. I can't quite get over how easy it is to go through feed items in Google Reader, though. :( I might stick with it until/unless I can get that own cloud-computing thing going.

  • 1 min read

I'm too invested in Google...

... and it's scaring the crap out of me.

So, starting a couple of days ago, I've moving my life out of Google as much as possible.

But, really, this is just a preparation for when I buy an Android-powered phone; that way, when that day comes, I'd have an excuse to spend the next week or so moving my life back in.

  • 2 min read

Colophon: Under the hood of Ersatz Genius

I’ve had more than a couple of people express interest in learning the setup behind Ersatz Genius. In the interest of having a single thing to point to and say “In there’s the stuff you want to know” no matter how many times I am asked, as well as yet another way of stroking my own ego, I’m putting up this colophon.

(If you’ve never encountered a colophon before, you should check out the colophon of S. Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. I’ve never read the book, but I came across it years ago (while trying to figure out what a colophon was) and it blew me away. I love elegant ego-stroking mechanisms, I do.)

So, without further ado, the machinery behind Ersatz Genius.

The entries ported over from my Tumblr account were originally written using Tumblr’s dashboard in Markdown (except for reblogs, written by other Tumblr users, which tend to be in HTML fragments). These were then retrieved unto my development laptop using an in-house tool I wrote for this purpose called keel (not yet publicly available; will update this post when it is). The retrieved Tumblr posts are saved as they were received using Tumblr’s own API; i.e., XML files containing Markdown data.

The body of later entries—i.e., those that went up after the move away from Tumblr—are also written in Markdown, although the posts themselves are contained in a traditional Py/Blosxom format.

Typefaces employed throughout the site are League Gothic, Cuprum, Linux Libertine and Biolinum, and Inconsolata.

The design is an adaptation of the one I used for the Tumblr iteration of this blog, streamlined and with features (such as the list of recent posts) added, that weren’t really possible under Tumblr. The basic elements of the design were, in turn, adapted from the design of a SourceForge project I have.

The whole shebang is tied together using PyBlosxom, modified through in-house plugins that are publicly available under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. These plugins do work that range from creating lists of recent posts, to helping facilitate pagination, to parsing the XML containers retrieved from Tumblr.

Entries are returned marked up in HTML 5 (validate), styled using CSS 3 (which, unfortunately, fail to validate as of this writing, mostly due to the draft status of said technology).