saladwithsteve


Monday, April 29
  Saturday night I saw The Salton Sea. Warner Bros is trying to kill this movie by not giving it very much press and opening it in a very small arena, I think. pansies. It's really quite good despite the heavy subject matter. It even manages to be funny in places where it added.

Sunday night saw NoFX/Rancid/US Bombs/Real McKenzie's play Slim's. It was awesome. They all busted out the favorites. I was stoked that nofx played Hotdog in a Hallway, and parts of The Decline. That song doesn't get enough credit. Fat Mike also spoke a few words of how politiks really are important to punk rock. Fatty's interesting, a character study in how much people can change. A vegetarian now, he was asked a while back: "How do you feel having written songs like 'Vegetarian Mumbo-Jumbo'" "Pretty stupid".

Duane was sober! This is the first time I've seen the bombs where duane hasn't been totally sloshed. Stacy says the first time she saw Duane Peters she thought to herself "oh, that's nice of them to let that old homeless punk guy in. Wait, he's getting on stage. Oh! he's the singer!" That pretty much sums up the Master of Disaster.

Lars from Rancid was fresh off back surgery. Some moron from the pit jumped on staged and accidentally rammed Lars into an amp, nearly flooring him. That nearly stopped the show, but Lars played on. Why? Because Lars kicks ass.

Lately I've also been reading The Amatuer's Mind trying to get my chess game up to snuff again. I'm still waiting for my copy of Pocket Fritz to make it out of Europe and onto my iPAQ. The reviews for PF crack me up:

Pocket Fritz managed a draw against a top ten player, GM Peter Leko, rated 2730. Keeping this in mind, one can quickly become demoralized even before pushing the power on button. Doctor Frankenstein supplied the electrical current to his creation and the countryside was never safe again. The same can be said for the tournament and online landscape.

I've been listening to pieces of the Distiller's new album lately, the reviews have been great. Even Stacy, who hates girl bands, digs the Distillers.

Andrew Loewenstern reminds us not to get drunk and say stupid things in public because the internet has ears now. and apparently a remixer. 22:53#


Tuesday, April 23
  bencode is worth reading if you're thinking about if decode(encode(x)) should equal x or not. Pay attention to long vs int and special attention to list v. tuple.

One of my favorite points of RPG's Patterns of Software is that we (software engineers) should be reading lots of source. He argues that not being exposed to enough actual programming (as opposed to talking about programming without real examples) before graudating college is like only writing limericks before wandering off to write the Great American Novel.

In other news, The E folks are currently pretending to not be a scripting language for Java. Now, I do understand the bigger plans but until they're no longer just taming the already horrible Java API's, they're going to continue to feel like a Java scripting environment everytime I try to write a GUI in E. I'm not really sure what to say, I created a big stink when I was at OpenCola about how backwardsly incompatible changes would keep me from writing production code in E so I'm reluctant to step forward and say "let's write our own API's, I hate the wrapping Swing nonsense." Dean Tribble stole half that thunder. I'm really glad he did. It's ironic since I don't think E will stop feeling foreign to Java programmers until after they stop wrapping Java. E call() gives me shivers.

Hey! I found a bug in Chimera's User_Agent string. sweet, Blogger Pro will be supporting 0.2.4! (I'm using Blogger Pro with Chimera right now using a trick that I can't tell you about. I'm so bad). The Chimera guys rock. So far, this has the most potential of all the OS X browsers I've used.

When I first moved into my new apartment, the fog horns would keep me awake at night. I figured it was the price I had to pay for a spectacular view of the bay. Now I rather enjoy them.

One last thing. I'm 24 today! I was thinking about this the other day: on 23/4/56 I'll be 78.If I ever create a variant of 7-card poker, that'll be a winning hand.

(Happy birthday to kevin burton as well who turns 26 today.) 01:33#


Monday, April 22
  Burton added my rss feed into Reptile's default list. Neat!

Also, Python 2.2 for OS X finally includes the xmlrpclib module. I may be the only person who blogs using just a python interpreter. 15:03#


Sunday, April 21
  This morning I was listening to the clash's cover of the original song they're playing right now in this wifi'd starbucks: pressure drop by toots and the maytals.

small world. 16:08#


  Yesterday, instead of doing something useful, I ported an early version of zooko's eimp (e implementation in C++) to ObjC. I really like Objective-C, I always have, but I'm starting to see how I wouldn't mind actually programming in it full-time instead of just weekend hacks. I really haven't spent enough time with selectors yet so don't hold me to that..

I had the strangest idea last night for a templating system written in Javascript. Make the client do the work, those lazy bastards and their spare cpu cycles. Templating@Home.

Also, a tiny virtual machine written in javascript.

I blame luke gorrie's Jscm (a scheme in javascript) for these horrible ideas.

It's been beautiful lately, I should really take some pictures of the bay and my new apartment.

Emerging Fads is coming up fairly quickly, I need to double-check on my pass and book a room. It'd probably serve the best interests of all involved to book a double occupancy.

Anyway, I'm off to have big sandwiches (bigger than my head, and that breaks one of my rules) with kevin burton near irving and 9th. I'll have my powerbook with me so no doubt he'll try to get me to add some more to Blogger Pro's RSS feed. ;-) Actually, it still needs dc:time. 11:46#


Saturday, April 20
  16:22#


  bbum turned me on to RadioService, neat tool! I'm harassing him about how much he likes WebObjects as it's something that's been on my mind for the past few weeks. This is one of the unfortunate side-effects of products without demo versions, I can't play with it on my own time. And if I can't play with it, I probably won't ever use it unless forced at gunpoint or at paycheck-point.

Tonight I had some excellent thai food with stacy, we goofed off for a while and I wowed her with my feet-clapping prowess. I thought she was going to collapse she was laughing so hard. I was pretty impressed with myself. Please don't ask me to demonstrate, it involves me laying on a flat surface with no socks on. You probably don't want that at your next party.

Then I hacked out an interpreter for an OO language I came up with. It's a prototype-based dynamic language with no public fields and method update. I don't know what it'll do when it's done. Maybe it'll only be capable of crashing. Whatever, I'd be fine with that.

dnm's talking about hacking capability-semantics into my SwapVM. I think that'd be fun. Right now it's a dual-stack based VM with no fixed instruction set (that's why it's called SwapVM, you can change instruction sets at runtime). It's really just a toy, that's why I wrote it in java and use reflection; I don't care about performance. But it'd be fun to do some more work on it. Oh yeah, and put the cvs tree online. Not that people should give a shit about it. Please don't. It'll just embarass me in a few years.

Speaking of virtual machines, I finished 'Virtual Machine Design and Implementation in C/C++' tonight as well. I really wasn't all that impressed. He designed a VM exactly how you'd imagine a C/assembly programmer on x86 would design a VM. There's excessive asm in the source, too much talk of ISV's and IRQ's, and just a gaggle of x86'isms that I didn't think added to the student's understanding of how a VM does what it does. His talk on instruction set design was interesting, his explanation of how to implement a debugger in a VM was unimpressive. He did a decent job of explaining why he chose to use registers in his VM and not stacks, and why he prefers manual memory management over garbage collection in his VM. The first several chapters are really quite fun to read, it reminded me of some of van der Linden's work, but the rest of it frustrated me. I don't honestly mean to be excessively down on the book, I'm glad people are writing on the subject but I felt a lot of the book was extraneous to teaching how a VM works and clouds the issues significantly.

Tomorrow's plan: finish E paper, send it off to the combex kids for approval and revision, then hack in a few things to SwapVM, then work on my interpreter in ObjC. I need to find a regex Framework. Maybe MiscKit has one. 02:34#


Tuesday, April 16
  Did my taxes tonight. Damn, what a nightmare. Two jobs, one consulting gig, and a mountain of deductibles that still left me in the hole. Yes, I got it in before the deadline. At least I'm not in hole as much as ernie. 8 grand! Holy cow. 01:26#


Sunday, April 14
  Sweet. With Project Builder, Interface Builder, and Mulle's xml-rpc Objective-C library, I was able to build a pretty functional, not to mention attractive, UI to wrap around the objective-c blogger client I wrote yesterday afternoon.

It only took me about 3 hours for both the UI and the non-UI together. That wasn't so bad besides a few API snags. 20:08#


  Douglas Rushkoff has a blog, I believe it's a Blogger Pro blog. There are clues.. 01:11#


Saturday, April 13
  It's taken me a long time to cozy up to Cocoa programming mostly because I find dealing with Project Builder to be a nuisance. It's not bad as far as IDE's go, but I do tend to eschew any environment that I have a hard time using from a commandline. Squeak is an exception to that rule.

Regardless, I'm publishing this with a client I wrote in Cocoa in about 20 minutes. No fancy gui until I figure out how to wander my way through the IDE Builder. 17:30#


  Padl's implementation of xml-rpc in Objective C. They say they haven't released it yet. The last objc library I tried use to deal with xml-rpc had all sorts of problems building.

My RSS feed should be a lot cleaner to those of you out there that care. Please let me know if you have any troubles. Thanks to Morbus and AaronSw for help.

Update: That first Objective-C xml-rpc library that I had trouble building cleanly built from cvs and I'm successfully using it to publish this blog entry.

I'd still really like to see the Padl implementation. 01:58#


Thursday, April 11
  Goodbye HailStorm. 14:13#


Monday, April 8
  Frankly, I hate DST. Good riddance. Having to change the time on my clocks doesn't bother me; all of my clocks recognize DST. My bedside clock listens for radio waves from the Martians, excuse me, the US Atomic Clock, my cell phone (which is the only watch I carry with me) synchronizes when somebody calls, and my powerbook and other unix machines use the power of ntp to figure it out. I see no reason to muddle with the sunrise time. It'll rise when it does.

LtU linked to a usenet thread about violating traditional Scheme semantics with valid R5RS macros which I think is definitely worthy of sharing. Most things on LtU are worth sharing.

Today was another p2p-hackers meet, spurred by dnm's imminent departure (hopefully he'll return in a few weeks for good). It was kevin burton, len sassaman, bram cohen, the moniz-inator, and myself wandering around San Francisco in a pseudo-socratic dialogue about pretty much anything you can imagine we'd talk about: chicks, drugs, lame pundits, food snobbery, who's making what mistakes with what projects, who's doing the right thing with what projects, current events, etc. So far, the last two meetings have lasted about 9-10 hours apiece which tells you that there's been a lot to talk about.

I'm going to ask Ev if I can have a page on the blogger.com proper site to talk about RSS 1.0, why we're using it, and some best practices regarding parsing RSS feeds.

I'm still not entirely sold on RDF but I like some of the expressiveness that the Dublin Core and mod_content modules offer.

I need to find a better way to list my blogs on the left navbar. I want to list it by who I read more often, which is linked in my mind to how often they update. 02:03#


Sunday, April 7
  From BoingBoing:

An Italian fertility clinic claims to have knocked up one of their customers with a clone, and she's eight weeks along. Link
Last night I had the opportunity to do something I rarely seem to do anymore, I wrote a small program generator. I had a massive switch statement to write so I wrote a litle generator in less than a dozen lines of python to make it for me, I just gave it a text file as input and it wrote a 'case' based on each line's contents.

Busvan for Bargain's is shutting down. Check it out if you're in the Bay Area and need cheap furniture. I found a coffee table and a rolling kitchen cart-cum-counter for under 250 including delivery and tax. 4th and Clement.

As a public service, LawMeme has annotated MPAA president Jack Valenti's recent interview with ZDNet's John Borland

For my birthday, Stacy found tickets to the Rancid/NOFX/US Bombs show on the 27th at Slim's. I'm really stoked to see all three bands on a single night. Besides touring together, Rancid and Nofx recently released a split where they covered each other's songs. I really like the album but if you're not pretty familiar with both bands, you may not. 00:36#


Thursday, April 4
  CNet gave us 8 out of 10 stars. Boy, that's pretty neat.

On a good recommendation, I picked up Building My Zen Garden, which should prove to be an interesting. I'll let you know. 15:05#


Tuesday, April 2
  New RSS feed here 19:58#


  guinea pig 19:31#


Monday, April 1
  There's a long thread on MacinTouch about OS X and fragmentation. Worrying about fragmentation is so Personal Computer. A few people in that thread set the whiners straight about just how traditional unix file systems handle file writes so as to minimize fragmentation although I'm not entirely sure that's how HFS+ works. Jeff Darcy would be sure to know.

Sorry for the long outage, my head has been completely buried in work these past two weeks and my extra-curricular activities have been at a minimum so there really hasn't been much I could talk about.

I'm thinking about having a Twin Peaks marathon one of these days. I have the first season, the pilot, and the movie. and cera has the second season on vhs. I can fit maybe 8 people in front of my TV.

Rosco and I used to describe Pendleton as being Twin Peaks-like. A very strange little rural town where bizarre things would happen. Maybe it was more like Lumberton in Blue Velvet. Lynch seems obsessed with small towns as the bizarre underbelly of America.

I found myself re-reading a large chunk of Catcher in the Rye this morning while trying to get to sleep after a long hacking session. I never noticed before how much Holden Caulfield is like my old friend Bill. I mean, we all have small parts of Holden Caulfield in us, and if you don't then you should seriously think about acquiring some, but Bill is dead-on Holden. Well, half of Bill is dead-on, the other half is very anti-Caulfield. There's a definite dichotomy. Maybe that explains a lot about Bill. 19:27#