Eddie Welker.com

Links for 2010-08-31 [del.icio.us]

2010-09-01T00:00:00-07:00

25 Bizarre Coins that are legal tender « AdvanceLoan Finance Blog

Links for 2010-08-28 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

foursquare :: Simmies
Drunk food (@ Simmies) http://4sq.com/dtoRU2
– Tina Marie (jetsetpro) http://twitter.com/jetsetpro/statuses/22417221177

Links for 2010-08-27 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-28T00:00:00-07:00

Links for 2010-08-26 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-27T00:00:00-07:00

Women’s Tennis — The Beauty of the Power Game - Video Feature - NYTimes.com
NY Times has videos of woman tennis players in slo-mo http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/08/29/magazine/womens-tennis.html?ref=magazine
– Eric Pascarello (epascarello) http://twitter.com/epascarello/statuses/22170307103
Advanced jQuery Training
Bocoup is offering a 3 day advanced jQuery training Tue - Thur before the Boston conference in Oct. Here's the link: http://bit.ly/aKrZXj
– Liana Leahy (lleahy) http://twitter.com/lleahy/statuses/22189363107

Links for 2010-08-25 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-26T00:00:00-07:00

Github File Finder
just in case anyone hasn't seen Github Finder yet: http://sr3d.github.com/GithubFinder/
– langalex (langalex) http://twitter.com/langalex/statuses/22089244471
An Event aParty | An Event Apart DC After-party at nclud studios!
going to An Event Apart DC or will be in D.C. that weekend? Join our closing party, "An Event aParty" http://nclud.com/event/aparty/ #aParty
– nclud (nclud) http://twitter.com/nclud/statuses/22119908654

Links for 2010-08-24 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-25T00:00:00-07:00

On vacation: @MobyCat. | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
On vacation: @MobyCat. http://flic.kr/p/8veYyE

On vacation: @MobyCat. [Flickr]

2010-08-24T19:09:34-07:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

Posted by twitter.com/edwelker

Links for 2010-08-23 [del.icio.us]

2010-08-24T00:00:00-07:00

Pittsburgh Pirates win by losing, financial documents show - ESPN
Why we need Euro-style relegation in major league baseball: http://j.mp/d3h5ux
– Bill Mill (llimllib) http://twitter.com/llimllib/statuses/21923873014

At the beach. [Flickr]

2010-08-19T12:41:59-07:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

Posted by twitter.com/edwelker

Getting pizza. [Flickr]

2010-08-18T17:16:09-07:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

Posted by twitter.com/edwelker

Fishing reel [Flickr]

2010-08-16T22:28:20-07:00

eddie.welker posted a photo:

My small new present to myself, after getting it on as cheaply as possible.

Building profile [Flickr]

2010-08-16T22:28:05-07:00

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.

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.

Installing PIL inside virtualenv for Ubuntu 9.10

2010-04-01T01:53:52Z

I just removed a (real live) bat from my living room. That was easier than installing PIL in a virtualenv for Ubuntu 9.10. Why? Googling the subject seems to bring up a lot of old or mis-information. This will explain how… mostly so I can do it again next time.

I started with a –no-site-packages virtualenv, so as not to use (or more importantly depend) on any of the global site-packages. Ok, cool.

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages myEnv

First, I needed to install the python developer tools. (Use apt-get or aptitude, whatever floats your boat)

$ sudo aptitude install python-dev

Then, I needed to install libjpeg and libjpeg-dev. I’m not sure why, but I needed libjpeg simply doesn’t exist, so I needed to install libjpeg62. I can’t pretend that I know the difference (or if there is one). In fact, I may have gotten away with installing libjpeg62 and libjpeg-dev (rather than both “62″ versions… libjpeg62 and libjpeg62-dev), but only further testing will tell.

Why? If you install PIL without this library, you’ll get those wonderful “decoder jpeg not available” messages in Python. Or worse yet, if you’re trying to use it in a Django, you may get some errors (specifically the “Upload a valid image. The file you uploaded was either not an image or a corrupted image” warning), or you may not get any until you open the shell. Either way, you can test with the method listed below. If you get the “decoder jpeg not available” message, your install didn’t work.

The zlib package handles PNGs.

$ sudo aptitude install libjpeg62 libjpeg62-dev $ sudo aptitude install zlib1g-dev $ sudo aptitude install libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev

Alright, now we seem to be done with the prerequisites. Start your virtualenv (of course, myEnv in the example is the name of your virtualenv).

$ source myEnv/bin/activate

Download PIL and install. This will make sure to install PIL within your virtualenv’s site-packages.

(myEnv)$ wget http://effbot.org/downloads/Imaging-1.1.7.tar.gz (myEnv)$ tar zxvf Imaging-1.1.7.tar.gz (myEnv)$ cd Imaging-1.1.7 (myEnv)$ python setup.py install

If you run into further problems (the “decoder jpeg not available” message again), you may have to resort to the long directions to get PIL and libjpeg to play happily together, but I hope not.

Now that you have everything installed, test it. Open up a python shell from within your virtualenv.

(myEnv)$ python

Now try the following (with an image in your home directory) to see if everything is running smoothly.

>>> from PIL import Image >>> i = Image.open('/home/username/someJpeg.jpg') >>> i.save('/home/username/someOtherJpeg.jpg')

If all of that works, you should now be ready to work.

Note: I would love to install the jpeg, freetype and zlib packages locally as well, but that was a step beyond what I was willing to mess with. Maybe for a future set of instructions.