Eddie Welker.com

Links for 2010-03-13 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-14T00:00:00-08:00

msysgit - Project Hosting on Google Code
Setting up a new remote git repository
Village Pump on Gowalla
With Frank. — at Village Pump http://gowal.la/s/33H1
Aprihop Dogfish Head. on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Aprihop Dogfish Head. http://flic.kr/p/7KuWJM
Palo Santo Marron Dogfish Head. on Flickr - Photo Sharing!
Palo Santo Marron Dogfish Head. http://flic.kr/p/7KvjAZ

Palo Santo Marron Dogfish Head. [Flickr]

2010-03-13T20:21:40-08:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

Posted by twitter.com/edwelker

Aprihop Dogfish Head. [Flickr]

2010-03-13T19:43:34-08:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

Posted by twitter.com/edwelker

Links for 2010-03-12 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-13T00:00:00-08:00

Designing for the Web: A book by Mark Boulton
Create a Clean and Classy Web Design in Photoshop
MRR Software
http://citythatbreeds.com/2010/03/adorable-alert-baby-dolphin-arrives-at-the-national-aquarium/
RT @examorata: So. Cute! // RT: @citythatbreeds: ADORABLE ALERT - BABY DOLPHIN ARRIVES AT THE NATIONAL AQUARIUM http://ow.ly/1ihTe
Font Squirrel | Create Your Own @font-face Kits
django-command-extensions - Project Hosting on Google Code
52 Weeks of UX
Activating Browser Modes with Doctype
Kind-of a definitive text on browsers and doctypes.
Clouded Leopard Cub Photos - National Zoo| FONZ
@frank_emilio did you see this yet? http://bit.ly/d9Rtd8 did you follow @nationalzoo?
Klobys Smokehouse on Gowalla
Dinner out as a Friday party! — at Klobys Smokehouse http://gowal.la/s/2qYA
Checkin at Klobys Smokehouse on Gowalla
Photo: @epascarello should like the flag hanging up. — at Klobys Smokehouse http://gowal.la/c/q2Me
6 of the 10 richest counties in U.S. are in DC area | Washington Examiner

Links for 2010-03-11 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-12T00:00:00-08:00

Old Yankee Stadium Upper Deck Comes Down - CNN iReport
RT @_jensane_: "If only the upper deck had been full of Yankee fans when it came down." http://bit.ly/aYYezf

Links for 2010-03-10 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-11T00:00:00-08:00

Packrati.us = Twitter + Delicious
Win the Entire Rosenfeld Media Book Collection
Hey @sixrevisions if I win the entire @rosenfeldmedia book collection, I'll read Mental Models first http://bit.ly/Rbooks
RunServerPlus - django-command-extensions - RunServerPlus-typical runserver with Werkzeug debugger baked in - Project Hosting on Google Code
Jinja2 Documentation
This is the documentation for the Jinja2 general purpose templating language. Jinja2 is a library for Python 2.4 and onwards that is designed to be flexible, fast and secure.
Own a piece of Baltimore’s corrupt history! $ The City That Breeds
Own a piece of Baltimore’s corrupt history! http://bit.ly/ca8MS5 This is kinda awesome. I want it. Only $800 right now.
welcome to Mako!
PylonsHQ - Home
Triumph of the Cyborg Composer | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. | Miller-McCune Online Magazine

Links for 2010-03-09 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-10T00:00:00-08:00

Links for 2010-03-08 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-09T00:00:00-08:00

Links for 2010-03-07 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-08T00:00:00-08:00

Phys Ed: How Little Exercise Can You Get Away With? - Well Blog - NYTimes.com

Leaves [Flickr]

2010-03-03T22:29:04-08:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

iphone antenna [Flickr]

2010-03-03T22:28:55-08:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

Making sure I could get a decent signal to listen to my first baseball game of the year.

The wireless gave kept going out until I stood the phone up. More tests to come.

Looking up [Flickr]

2010-03-03T22:28:48-08:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

Url Fairy Tales

2009-03-31T16:28:19Z

On Mar 31, 2009, at 11:45 AM, Edward Welker wrote:

>> Aaron wrote:
>> This may be one of the best URLs I have ever seen:
>> http://www.ringling.com/FlashSubContent.aspx?id=11654&parentID=320&asset
>> FolderID=340
>>
>> Just looking at it, I can tell exactly what I can expect when I click
>> it.

***

To me, that URL tells a delightful children’s story…

FlashSubContent = a wonderful fantasy world
[elephant] id = 11654 [Dumbo]
[elephant] parentID = 320 [Mrs. Jumbo]
[cage] FolderID = 340 [because they took her Dumbo away, and Mrs. Jumbo got angry, so she had to get locked up]
aspx = evil clown makeup wearing Microsoft employees who locked Dumbo’s mother up

-e

Check-in

2009-08-04T12:58:33Z

Not a technical post, but a personal update. I promised over a week ago.

I’ve been exceptionally busy at work, we’re beginning to finish up a much needed, much discussed by librarians, redesign of PubMed. We’ve put a ton of user interaction effort into this project, as well as a good sprinkling of graphic design (watch out, I even did some parts!) I think people will be really positive about these new changes.

[Just for the record, if someone happens to stumble upon this from the librarian community, yes, release date is still end of summer, and yes, there will be a Beta period, so no need to worry about a short timeline to update your class or instructional slides. We do listen!]

It’s also been exciting that we’ve brought a few new people on board. Always exciting to have new hires, despite the fact that it’s a lot of work… and all of the trainings I have to do.

What else… I’m planning on attending the DelveUI masterclasses this week in Brooklyn. It will be interesting to see what some of the heads of state have to say about the field. I’m a little excited, this masterclass format isn’t the usual boring no-content fluff that you hear at most conferences. I get the feeling that there will actually be code present! My thanks to the lovely Jina “Sushi & Robots” Bolton for the opportunity for the free ticket.

I’ve been reading… way too many things. I’ve been reading Learning jQuery 1.3, jQuery UI 1.6, and jQuery in Action and you’ll see the reviews of those two books very soon. (Can you tell that we’ve switched to jQuery at NCBI?) I’m a little behind with that reading, but I’ve been working hard on other things. Additionally, I went on an Amazon spree, and started reading Programming the Semantic Web, An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists, To Mock a Mockingbird, 101 Things I learned in Architecture School, Code Complete 2. Last but not least, I’ve also been reading any photography book that I can get my hands on.

Yes, that is a lot of books, and I haven’t had much time for them. I’ve been working hard at work, and I want to relax a bit when I come home. Once summer ends, things will return to a slightly more regular pace. I’ve been learning so much on the job, that I’m not very worried about falling behind in reading.

It’s the summer, so I have been riding… not a ton, but some. I wish I had time to do more, but I don’t have time for everything. I have been taking long-ish 7 mile rides home, and then going out to play some basketball with my roommates. That’s a good time. As soon as I finish this post, I am going to go and fix my fixie… my favorite Bianchi… I somehow mashed the pedals hard enough to shear off part of the thread of both the crank and the pedal, so there go the original cranks and some lovely MKS Sylvan Track Pedals that were on there. I’ve got a new, generic replacement crankset and new Sylvan’s. Also, I’m moving from a 42×15 to a 46×17, but with the change in crank length (172.5 down to 165mm) I’ll have the same gear ratio as before. I’m interested in seeing how the shorter cranks feel.

Not to mention le Tour this year… I was captivated.

And then I’ve been taking some photos. Still have been good on my New Year’s resolution of taking a photo every day… with the exception of Jan 20 (yes, Inauguration Day, the day more people in my Washington DC area took photos than any other this year).

I also got an iPhone. While I was in California for Joel and Olga’s wedding, I dropped my phone of more than 5 years on a rug, and the antenna that had been barely holding on for a few months finally fell off completely. I had previously told myself that I would try to wait until my phone broke before getting a new one. So I was going to buy one at the first sight of antenna problems, until it was suggested that I wait for a new version. Well, my phone’s demise and the new version’s release coincided, so now I have a 3GS. Really the thing I like most is having my calendar with me at all times. The only other part I really like is the speaker, so I can listen to music while on my bike for the first time.

Alright, so that’s about that for the moment. Go out and do something summer-y, that’s what I’m doing.

Bad chain tool, bad

2009-09-10T03:32:15Z

Finally got the cranks on, the pedals on, the new 17 tooth cog on the old wheel that I re-tensioned and trued (well, partially trued at least), only to put the chain on with a broken chain tool. (I didn’t realize it was broken). So one of the bushings became bent, and on my ride home, I popped the chain. Tried to use alternate links to fix it, but they stuck (and ended up with only slightly bent bushings). So a new chain it is for me, unfortunately.

Sorry

2009-09-10T03:32:44Z

I’ve been… not away, but simply taking pictures. I should get back to writing… more JavaScript (to refresh myself), more XLST, a little Django/Python here or there. I’ll do that soon.

Boring “I moved” post

2009-09-10T03:39:34Z

Summer was ending so I decided to move. Ok, not really, it was simply time.

I’ve moved back to my parent’s house in Laurel, MD… which is exceptionally close to Columbia, MD. I’ve moved into my parents house in an attempt to save some money, I want to clean it and restore it, while putting my would-be rent money into the property taxes here.

The move wasn’t difficult in and of itself, but tied with the work that needed (and still needs) to be done at the house, it has been quite an undertaking. I have so much to do it’s quite overwhelming.

All of that mess aside, I am looking forward to getting back to study.

Cutting Scheme in Half

2009-09-10T03:39:43Z

: Apple in Half, by LuLu Witch

The Scheme steering committee has decided to sever the Scheme language into “Large Scheme” and “Small Scheme.” Can we expect the same from Scheme-inspired languages like JavaScript?

Review of “Prototype-Based Programming”

2009-09-10T03:40:40Z

I ran across a mention of “Prototype-Based Programming” back when I was first learning JavaScript. I thought it would be an interesting read, but forgot to bookmark it, and forgot to look into it further. Once I finally remembered it, it proved hard to find (and an expensive gamble from Amazon), until I found it through NIH’s interlibrary loan system.

I was quite excited to get my hands on a copy of this book, I was interested in learning more about the general theory that went into languages with prototypal inheritance. I thought this would allow me a special insight into JavaScript. However, as I found reading it… despite it’s 1999 publication date, JavaScript wasn’t even mentioned in the book! Regardless, I found parts of it to be quite interesting and insightful.

The book is broken up into three sections (as mentioned on the cover), Concepts, Languages, and Applications. Each section has 4 associated chapters which are really various papers, some of which seem to be difficult to find elsewhere.

The first section, “Concepts” was the most interesting. The first was titled “Classes vs. Prototypes: Some Philosophical and Historical Observations.” This chapter provided a nice introduction to the topic, including the history of classification, going back to Aristotle and proceeding to Ludwig Wittgenstein who had an interesting example about classifying the characteristics of an item as simple as a “game”. It goes on to transition to a programming perspective. A point that is made repeatedly throughout many chapters that the idea of classical inheritance necessitating construction from the top (superclasses) to the bottom (subclasses) is inherently contradictory to the way humans think. When unfamiliar with a domain, a person can more easily deal with concrete examples, and only discern the abstract general form after discovering these patterns in the concrete cases. Though unable to put my finger on this idea, I’ve experienced it a number of times when programming myself, and couldn’t agree more.

The next chapter, “Classifying Prototype-based Programming Languages” sought to categorize the theoritical aspects of different prototypal languages. This is the chapter where I most missed the reference to JavaScript, but I may look into doing that myself some other day. “The Stripetalk Papers: Understandability as a Language Design Issue in Object-Oriented Programming Systems”, made an argument that prototype based systems could be used to enhance the learnability of languages. Finally, the chapter “Classes versus Prototypes in Object-Oriented Languages” looked at the advantages and disadvantages of class-based and prototype-based languages. This chapter was quite interesting, however brief.

The second section, “Languages”, lacking JavaScript, was less useful than I had hoped. “Programming as an Experience: The Inspiration for Self” was interesting as it described the thought process going into creating the Self language, and expanded some of the ideas presented in the book’s second chapter. Alas, I’ve haven’t yet gotten around to learning Self, but the ideas and history presented were interesting in the abstract. “NewtonScript: Prototypes on the Palm” was interesting mostly because of it’s Lisp-like syntax and it’s description of internal closures, while “The Prototype-Instance Object Systems in Amulet and Garnet” took an in-depth look at the implementation of these two languages. I only skimmed the “Omega: Statically Typed Prototypes” chapter, as it was rather brief, and I don’t feel confident enough (or have any real desire) to enter the static-typed/dynamic-typed languages argument.

The final section, “Applications”, was where this book showed it’s age. “Self includes: Smalltalk” involved translating Smalltalk programs into Self, which is interesting, but I don’t see much practical application for this today (maybe if you’re translating Ruby to JavaScript? Not sure). “Using Prototypes for Program Restructuring” demonstrated the use of an algorithm that would help to restructure code into a slot-based prototype system in a application called Guru. “Prototype-Based Programming for Abstract Program Visualisation” ended up being skimmed, because while the topic matter seemed interesting, the demonstrations from the black-and-white mac era looked totally antiquated, and I am sure that they have been written many times in other languages since the writing. Finally, “Agora: The Scheme of Object-Orientation, or, the Simplest MOP in the World” detailed the Agora language, a pure OO language which relied only on objects and message passing, while being implemented as a reflective language inspired by Scheme, of all things. Weird, but interesting.

You know as well as I do that computer technology is a moving target, and something published in 1999 will be outdated to a certain degree. The good part of this book is that the abstract notions in it are rather timeless, as they have been built on over time. Parts of this book may be out of date, but parts aren’t, and regardless, it’s an interesting read. I recommend it, if you’re even slightly interested.

Review of “Expert Python Programming”

2009-09-10T03:41:02Z

Based on the title, Expert Python Programming, (by Tarek Ziadé) I had expected a book covering the Python language… syntax, advanced data structures, maybe some functional programming… stuff like that. This book surprised me. Rather, it contains a hodgepodge of information about the world of Python development, from setting up editors to distributed version control to application distribution. “Expert Python Programming” does contain some information on the Python language itself, but not as much as I would have hoped. While it does contain a good amount of useful information, overall, I’d have to say that it misses the target.

Quickly summarized, the book contains 3 chapters on package management and distribution, 2 on syntax, 2 on optimization, and one each on language setup, naming conventions (style guide), version control, project management, documentation, test-driven development, and design patterns. Based on the content, I might have titled this book “Expert Python Development Practices”, and think I would have been happier reading it in that case. The discrepancy between the title and the content is especially bothersome to me, since it would be easy to assume this book focused specifically on programming, rather than code management.

Expert Python Programming’s greatest asset is the number of tools and utilities that it covers. As a mostly casual Python programmer, there were a number of things that I learned, especially with regard to package management and distribution. I’ve never needed to build a package, and never used Atomisator or zc.buildout before, so I found these chapters rather interesting (though not personally useful at the moment). To be sure, when I need to use these, this book will the be the first place I come.

I was familiar with a decent amount of the information in the documentation, test-driven development, and style-guide chapters from reading some of the Python Documentation and a few of the PEPs (Python Enahncement Proposals). These chapters would be good for anyone who doesn’t want to have to go and search for this information on their own, and I think it would be rather handy to have all of this information in one place.

The weakest part of the book were the chapters focusing on Python itself. The majority wasn’t anything particularly groundbreaking here that I haven’t read elsewhere, while the interesting sections, such as “How Python Deals with Memory” and “Multithreading” were short and not particularly detailed. The sections on optimization were nice, but limited.

My only other observations were that the Mr. Ziadé at times made statements of opinions that he presented as fact. I would have preferred him presenting code as evidence towards these opinions and leaving the reader to decide for themselves. To be fair, these moments were infrequent enough that they weren’t that bothersome.

Through no fault of the author, Packt Publishing did let a number of small editorial mistakes slip through. Additionally, I found myself often wanting a better presentation of code samples. The overall design of the code examples and body text of the book ended up being quite similar, and I wish that they had made a bigger differential between the two.

Personally, I was disappointed that the Expert Python Programming’s didn’t feature aspects about the language as prominently as the everything else. I can only recommend that any potential buyers of this book borrow a copy, or make a trip to the local bookstore to flip through it first. Otherwise, this may not be the book that you were looking for.

Theme change

2009-09-10T04:30:58Z

I am fighting the typical developer’s feeling that I should write my own blog software… something that does what I want how I want it (less I forget, eats up a lot of time and would almost certainly be worse than an out-of-the-box solution).

Instead, I ditched my theme in favor of something different, and added a few links. Enjoy.

Review of Learning jQuery 1.3

2009-09-24T13:37:47Z

There were many things to like about this book Learning jQuery 1.3 by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. The stand-out positive in my mind is the wealth of topics covered. Both simple and difficult concepts are included, and both are handled with ease. Good coding habits are repeatedly mentioned throughout. Subjects like progressive enhancement are encouraged, and pitfalls like memory leaks are warned against. Many real-world examples are included, as well as the full source code.

Learning jQuery 1.3 has a writing style that is very dry for a book written in a semi-conversational voice. I prefer a writing style with a little more personality to it, but acknowledge that’s not for everyone.

I did have two small complaints. First, I like to see the API list out at the top of the chapters. Appendix D contains a complete reference, but I like having a list of methods to be covered at the beginning of the chapter. While I’m at it, I may mention that the “complete” reference is little more than a cheetsheet style list. Perhaps a little more would have been useful.

My second complaint is about the poor code syntax highlighting. Just for record, this has nothing to do with the content, it’s just a complaint against the publisher. Take page 145, where three-quarters of the page is example code, but contains only bold line at the top showing the emphasized line. First, the bold often wasn’t enough to draw the eye… especially at the beginning of the book when a novice reader has to mentally separate standard JavaScript from jQuery code. Second, I understand that the example code is included, but couldn’t it have simply been excerpted here? I don’t understand wasting an entire page, when much less would do.

Based on the overall quality of the book, I recommend it for jQuery beginners.