Putting all of this into the view function with a manually managed transaction sucks, far too much code. There’s transaction middleware, but by then your view function has returned. What to do?

Simple. I added my own middleware, and I return a new property that I tag into the HttpResponse object. Python is flexible enough to allow this hack.

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'teleworker.lib.middleware.MslEventMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.transaction.TransactionMiddleware',

So in my MslEventMiddleware, I look for a new property in the response, and if it’s present, I execute the requested command, which will happen after the TransactionMiddleware has called commit.

    def process_response(self, request, response):
        if hasattr(response, 'mslevent'):
           msl.event(response.mslevent)

Simple enough. Although a real post-processing API in Django would be helpful.

Trying a variety of configuration changes, I’m unable to get it working, but I finally came across this post on stack overflow about moving the jar to the top of the classpath order. So under Build Path -> Order and Export, I move the jtwitter.jar to the top of the list.

Voila. It’s working now. Seems rather braindead to me, as should Java not simply search the entire classpath until it finds the the requested import? I don’t understand why this works, and that isn’t good, ’cause it’ll just happen again. If someone has an explanation I’d appreciate it.

Cheers.

Perhaps a Bluetooth keyboard will be needed.

Anyone else phone-blogging?

Anywho, I fired up the HelloWorld tutorial, made my project, and very quickly found that Eclipse’s wonderful generated code that was going to save me all this work of typing Java didn’t compile. I got, “main cannot be resolved or is not a field”. Huh? The main it’s referring to is my main.xml file (can’t have too much XML eh Java?) describing the Android UI layout, under res/layouts/main.xml. Invoked through the ubiguitous Android R object. What do you mean it’s not there, you stupid machine??

So I do what any modern programmer does, after swearing at my screen repeatedly, I look up the error in google, and voila, I’m not alone. This post was particularly helpful. Apparently, it’s an Android SDK issue, which Eclipse invokes to create the project. Yo, Google! Get off your butts and fix it! Seems to me that you have time…

Not so much.

twit --post 'OMG...I'm out of coffee...work stoppage!'
bash: !': event not found

Huh? Oh yeah, in the fine tradition of crappy shells like csh, bash uses ! to re-run commands from the command history. But you’d think that in a single-quoted string it wouldn’t interpret that, it would just pass it into the command I’m running. Nope.

Can I escape it with a backslash? You bet.

$ echo "foobar\!"
foobar\!

K, still not what I wanted.

Simple solution, don’t use bash.

sh twit --post 'OMG...I'm out of coffee...work stoppage!'

Works fine in a POSIX mode.

Am I missing something? Is there a simpler way to get what I want? This blows the 80/20 rule totally.

We bought a 2010 Honda Fit from Kanata Honda a while back, and you never know how a dealership is going to treat you once they have your money and they don’t have to suck up to you anymore. In general I never expect much, although I hope for the ideal. The car is too knew to have any major problems so far, although Honda is as cheapo as every other car company out there, and my OEM Dunlop tires won’t make it to 30000km at their current wear rate, which is ludicrous. Take your head out of your ass Honda, and put on decent tires.

But, the dealership is selling the cars, not making them. They rely on mark-up, and accessories like $200 steering wheel covers. Say no more. And, they rely on you coming in regularly for service, which I will not do if they are going to overcharge, or provide bad service. And they cannot afford to, as this is really their bread and butter. They don’t make much profit on the cars, the accessories are ridiculously overpriced, so that leaves service (Y’know, one of those reasons why Saturn killed their own electric car? Big I digress…).

So far it’s been oil changes, tire rotations, and I allowed a questionable brake service, and had them put in a block heater, which I love BTW. No service problems, good treatment, although their Wi-Fi was broken when I was there. Guys, c’mon. Me techie. Need Wi-Fi. Recently I had some questions, like where the jack points are for my floor jack instead of the provide scissor jack, and I dropped by yesterday to have a windshield wiper adjusted that was off due to ice buildup.

Each time the service guys at KH have just welcomed me in, answered my questions, and got me on my way without issue. I didn’t expect to be charged for the service and I wasn’t, and that’s the kind of service that keeps me coming in for oil changes. Sure, I’ll likely do my own in the summer, in the driveway, a few years down the road when most of the warranty is gone, but for now I’m drinking the Honda kool-aid and it doesn’t taste so bad. It’s our only car so I don’t have to cut corners on maintenance to try to pay for two, and I do question the services and usually allow them with some skepticism. If I was only keeping the car for 4 years I likely wouldn’t bother with anything but oil changes, but I like to keep my cars for 10 years, and I expect them to be built properly to last that long, if I give them a little love.

So, good job so far people. Keep it up please.

Within a few months, I started getting notices in the mail about my subscription ending soon (or so it appeared). I checked online, and all was well, I was good until April of 2012. So why am I getting notices about my subscription ending? Online support didn’t answer that question.

Today, I get a letter with big arrows around it, and “third notice” underlining it, in big, important, threatening text. I look online and I’m still good until April, so what the hell is going on? Well, lets talk to a human.

Easier said than done. Looking online, all of the references for support are email or snail mail. No phone numbers. I dug for 20 minutes or so, and finally came across the answers.com wiki which actually had…*gasp*…a phone number! So I called, and of course got a lousy IVR. I kept saying, “operator”, until it finally sent me to a human being.

A very nice girl explained that the letter was just a promotion, and that my subsription was not being cancelled. I asked then, why the letter gave no indication of this, and she insisted that my actual cancel date was on the letter. Damned if I can find it. The letter says,

ATT: MICHAEL SOULIER. IN case you didn’t realize it, the end of your subscription is quickly approaching. And without your renewal instructions, there’s not much we can do.

We just want to confirm the continuation of your subscription while our

discounted rates

are still in effect.

To avoid missing even one fabulous issue of CAR AND DRIVER, you must act quickly. Simply complete the Account Renewal form above and return it in this envelope we’ve provided. The regular Canadian subscription price includes postage and handling plus GST/HST (registration no. *********).

So please return your renewal instructions before the cut-off date. Thank you.

** THIRD NOTICE **

Now, I’m no expert, but I don’t think that I can be blamed for interpreting this as anything but a notice of the end of my subscription. Draw your own conclusions.

Lets just say that I won’t be renewing. I have no time or patience for this nonsense, and I don’t reward this behaviour, or have any desire to have anything to do with a company that goes to such lengths to not provide a phone number.

Dead trees do what they’re told. You turn the page, and it turns, unlike say, DVDs which tell you that you can’t skip something that the content producer deemed important, like a useless ad, a company logo or the FBI warning…in Canada.

But, books take up a lot of space, and take resources to produce. I love them, but there are definitely cons to all of the pros of dead trees. I have over 100 books on my Kobo right now, so if I go on vacation and finish my current book, I have plenty more. Many of them are copyright-expired free books, and one is from the library, as they’re trying to stay current in this revolution. Good for them. The world of ebooks is motivating me to read more than I usually would, and catch up on the classics that I’ve been meaning to read. As my eyes get weaker I can even increase the font size. Nice.

But, I recently bought a couple of books from the Kobo website, and this turned my attention to the topic of ownership. In buying the book, the books synced via the Kobo software are in “kepub” format, a Kobo extension to Adobe’s DRM Epub format. So they’re not only DRM-protected, but they’re non-standard. It’s like buying a book, but having it wrapped up a lock that needs a key that I don’t own, but can only borrow. And I’m paying money for this? Shouldn’t I be able to do whatever I damn-well please with my own property? A quaint idea in this digital age perhaps, but I think so.

Not to mention the fact that Maria and I normally donate our read books to the library when we’re done with them and sure that we’re not going to read them again, and we loan books to friends too. Thanks to DRM, our friends and the library lose out.

So, what’s an open-source hacker to do in a world of digital books and DRM? I could abstain, of course. Stick with dead trees, and stick my head in the sand and pretend that ebooks are going to go away, while shouting, “la la la” whenever someone mentions them. I’d rather explore the technology though, and understand the problem, before pretending to have a solution.

The Kobo website permits a download of Adobe DRM Epub books for anything that you’ve bought, so you can import them into Adobe Digital Editions. As it turns out, there are tools to remove the DRM from those files. As I’ve paid for the books, should I not be allowed to make legal copies for my own use? Like copying the book onto my phone in case I want to read it there? Or onto my Linux desktop? I think so. I suspect there are many who don’t agree with me though, because they want to charge me for a copy of the book on every platform that I want to read it on. Not to mention that they’re not willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, and they assume that if I can copy the book then I will copy it illegally and put it up on the piratebay or something similar.

Alternatively, if I buy a physical copy of a book, what if I don’t read it, and instead scan it into digital form so that I can read it on my Kobo? IANAL, but I think that would be a legal copy for my own purposes under Canadian copyright law, and when I’m done I can still loan that book to a friend and donate it to the library. Once donated I would even delete my digital copy, but of course no content producer would trust me to do that. I’m guilty until proven innocent.

Perhaps all print books should include the ability to download an epub version, for this very reason, or all epub versions should allow you to print off a copy for donation reasons.

The world of ebooks is far from perfect. Publishers want to impose old, obsolete ideas from the print world onto the digital world, like limiting numbers of copies, and limited loan times for libraries, when these limitations don’t actually exist in the digital world unless you create them artificially. I am positive that this world will evolve over time. I just hope it evolves into something fair for consumers.

Coming from Perl, when I find that I must do something simple like taking a string, delimited by pipes, and split it into a hash/dict/associative array/whatever.


mystring = foo|1|bar|2


So I want to take that, and split it into name/value pairs in a mapped data structure. This is trivial in Perl


%map = split /\|/, $mystring;


Now, in my language of choice, this should be simple too, right? Umm, not so much.


map = dict(zip(mystring.split('|')[:-1:2], mystring.split('|')[1::2]))


Geez, if I wanted to type that much, I’d use Java.

To be fair, there are tasks in Python that are trivial and are much harder in Perl, but this is just one of those cases that I find could be made much simpler. Why not just allow dict() to take a list?

Ruby seems to have learned that lesson, even if the syntax is a tad ugly.


msoulier@anton:~$ irb
irb(main):001:0> mystring = "foo|1|bar|2"
=> "foo|1|bar|2"
irb(main):002:0> Hash[*mystring.split('|')]
=> {"foo"=>"1", "bar"=>"2"}


Not a bad medium between the two really. I like Ruby’s design, too bad the docs suck horribly.

Elastic falling out of my door

That can’t be good.

I contacted Kanata Honda and they said that they don’t know what it is either, so they suggested that I drop by and they’ll take a look at it. Sounds good to me.

Update Jul 13: They took a wild guess that during some promotion someone tied a balloon to the car and lost the elastic string inside of the door. Too funny.