Being Tony Buser

Carl Sagan Ring Tone

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:04:10 -0400

I never thought Auto-Tune could ever be used to make something this awesome. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos is one of my favorite shows of all time. It has a permanent place reserved on my Tivo and I still watch it often. (it’s also available on Hulu!) I could seriously put this song on a loop and listen to it all day. There’s something about Carl Sagan’s voice that I find incredibly calming and inspiring even when distorted and with a cheesy techno musak track playing in the background.

The person who made this video made a ring tone out of it, however I think he chose the wrong part. The instant I heard the Ah Woop Woop Ah Ah loop I wanted it as my ringtone. So I spent a few minutes figuring out garageband and voila: the Carl Sagan Ah Woop ringtone was born.

Gay Marriage is Socialism?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:45:43 -0400

According to Republican Congressman Steve King, Gay Marriage is “a radical social idea, it is a purely socialist concept”.

Also: Springtime for Hitler from The Producers was a gay recruitment tool.

Antique Kinoki Foot Pads?

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:35:13 -0400

Looks like snake oil salesmen have been trying to sell Kinoki footpads for over 100 years.

Found while browsing the excellent Popular Mechanics archive on Google Books from Jan 1905.

More technical details about Google Chrome Frame

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:01:38 -0400

jimray:

I am completely smitten with Google Chrome Frame. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to call it one of the more interesting developments in the web landscape to come about in some time, because it finally provides a real solution to the horror that is Internet Explorer. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s an audacious start. If nothing else, it should give Microsoft a rather swift kick in the ass.

As I’m in love, and a huge nerd, the first thing I did was start stalking my new affection. The first step was to test the installation process — if you’re reading this page on IE, you’ve experienced the browser detection already. Google makes a script available that handles detection and redirects the user accordingly — it’s fairly straightforward and configurable enough to meet most needs. The installation is painless, no more complicated than installing Flash or a PDF reader.

Next, I surfed around a bit, forcing “Chrome Frame” on certain sites — the best way to do this is by typing “cf:” before the full web address[1], including the “http:” e.g. “cf:http://google.com/”. I tested several sites that I visit regularly, just based on “feel”, and the anecdotal speed increase I noticed was incredible. Heavy sites, with lots of javascript, CSS, images and calls to third party sites, like ad servers, loaded in an order of magnitude faster. I didn’t run any hard and fast numbers, but this was the first time I’d ever say IE “felt” fast. It wasn’t flawless, crashing IE on me once, with an error that “Whoa! Google Chrome has crashed! Restart?” but this is a pre-beta developer preview, so I suppose that’s to be expected.

Something that surprised me is that Chrome Frame continues to use IE’s underlying architecture for non-rendering features, like cookies, history and remembering passwords. As a developer, I’d say that this is a nice to have, but as a user, this is essential — replacing the rendering component of the browser should be seamless and it shouldn’t require me to re-log into Hotmail. I’m surprised, though, because this is the sort of thing that I’d expect to be Hard and missing from a pre-beta preview yet it Just Works.

Another nifty bag of tricks that Chrome Frame brings along with it are the Webkit developer tools, as seen in Chrome (the browser) and Safari. Right click on a page being rendered in Chrome Frame mode, select “Inspect Element” and the inspector opens up. If you love Firebug or the Webkit web inspector, you’re going to love this. Of course, the DOM that you’re inspecting is the Chrome Frame rendered DOM, not the IE rendered DOM, so this doesn’t give you Firebug for IE, but it does provide a handy tool for debugging your code as Chrome Frame sees it.

I also got curious about the User Agent strings that Chrome Frame embedded inside of IE might return. If you’ve spent any time with User Agent strings, you might expect a certain amount of schizophrenia, depending on where you look for them, either on the server side or the client side. I wrote a quick PHP script to echo out the User Agent as PHP sees it and to echo out the User Agent as javascript sees it. The server-side detection sees the browser as IE, with one tiny exception: it adds a string “chromeframe” to the User Agent that you could easily look for and act on. The client-side detection sees the browser as Google Chrome — the exact same User Agent as when you visit the page using the Chrome browser.

If you think about how Chrome Frame works — a meta tag in the head of the page tells the browser to use a different rendering engine if that rendering engine is installed — this makes sense. Of course the server-side detection sees it as IE because nothing is telling the browser to switch identities yet. But the client-side detection sees it as Chrome Frame because the page itself, including the javascript that performs the detection, is rendered by the Chrome engine. As a developer, this is exactly what I want — the ability to see the actual browser based on the headers sent to the server, to detect for Chrome Frame via the added keyword in the User Agent string if necessary, and for the client-side to behave as if it’s been rendered by a single engine, not some Frankenstein hybrid. Bravo Google for getting this right. (To be perfectly clear, I’m not advocating browser sniffing as a path for development. As Kurafire points out, sniffing causes vastly more problems than it solves).

Finally, I investigated just a little bit about how Chrome Frame is actually implemented. Google doesn’t seem to have made the source code available yet, but if you check out IE’s add-ons preference panel, you see that Chrome Frame is something called a “Browser Helper Object” or BHO. I’m not terribly familiar with the concept, so I spent a little time on the relevant Wikipedia page and Microsoft’s support sites.

It turns out there’s a sort of irony here — BHO’s were introduced in IE4 by Microsoft during the height of the browser wars with Netscape as a way of allowing developers to extend IE itself, so that the browser could become a development platform; sort of a precursor to Firefox’s Add-ons and XUL platform. Of course, with IE as your platform, you’d want to write your web pages so that they’d render in IE and use all of the proprietary IE extensions that Netscape didn’t implement, or so the conspiracy goes. It turns out that BHO’s were most popular as a way to add toolbars — like the ones from Alexa and Google’s own search toolbar — and as a vector for writing viruses. Microsoft tried to fix this in IE 6 SP2 by sandboxing BHO’s and including an Add-on Manager that would let users scope out and uninstall any BHO’s that had installed themselves with nefarious purposes. This is also why you need to have at least Windows XP SP2 to use Chrome Frame, to support Chrome’s own security sandbox.

The irony here, as I see it, is that an old, insecure feature Microsoft built to try to beat Netscape is now being used by Microsoft’s biggest current rival to patch IE. The upside for developers is that Microsoft is going to have a hard time killing Chrome Frame because it actually does the right thing — it’s not hacking IE via undocumented APIs or unscrupulous haxie-like code injection. They used Microsoft’s own well-documented and fully supported platform to do this. Bravo indeed, Google.

So, what’s a developer to do with all of this? Of course, we can’t scrap IE entirely just yet and your own development plans should be dictated by your site’s unique audience. However, I’d suggest that Chrome Frame potentially makes designing for progressive enhancement even more realistic. Imagine being able to design with all of the modern tools like HTML 5, CSS 3, SVG, and performant javascript and telling all of your users, even the ones using IE 6, that this can all be theirs if they’ll just install a quick plug-in. No need to migrate to a new browser, learn a new UI and port over all of your bookmarks if you’re so curmudgeonly that you haven’t abandoned IE by now — those features can come to you!

Maybe one day Microsoft will finally get with the program and embrace the future instead of dragging the weight of the past decade along with them. Until then, we devs have a new love.

[1] You can also hack the registry to force CF mode on particular sites but I’d be careful, thar be dragons.

I would never say that Republicans are all racist. That’s...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:35:00 -0400

I would never say that Republicans are all racist. That’s ridiculous and wrong. But if you’re a racist nowadays in America, you’re probably a Republican.

— Bill Maher

Congress Needs a Version Control System

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:01:00 -0400

Max Baucus’ “America’s Healthy Future Act” was released today as a PDF on the painfully technically antiquated Senate Finance Committee website. (Is that a Netscape NOW! button on the left?? Welcome to 1998) The excellent OpenCongress has a discussion on how inaccessible Congressional data is.

OpenCongress has done a great job making bills accessible, searchable, linkable, and commentable. However, there are a few things it’s still lacking. For instance, there’s no easy way to get a handle on the differences between all the health care reform bills, what changes have been made by different committees, and by whom.

There’s lots of talk about wanting to update congressional standards to use XML and API’s, etc. It seems to me what they also need is a version control system. Something like Git. I’m thinking a git4gov or github.gov. Imagine an obama/health-care-2009 and then each committee forks the project, makes changes, then sends a pull request upstream. Every change to every line is attributable to a specific person/committee. Each change has a commit message explaining the reasoning for it. Built in commenting per line. RSS commit logs. Anyone could fork a bill and and make suggestions. And of course git blame would quickly end many arguments.

Someone smarter than me, please make this happen.

Importing Typo to Tumblr

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:33:00 -0400

I’ve decided to start blogging again and my old blog at http://juju.org was running an ancient version of Typo. For various reasons, I’ve decided I don’t have the time to administer a whole web server just for my little blog. So I decided to move to a hosted service and settled on Tumblr. (I also decided to finally put away childish things and register http://tonybuser.com) Unfortunately, there’s no way to import a Typo blog to Tumblr. So this has given me a good excuse to finally play around with the HTTParty and Hpricot ruby gems. During my adventures in trying out different blog services and importing all my old posts, I had already exported my Typo blog to Wordpress XML format. Then to import a Wordpress file to Tumblr was simple. Here’s the script:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require "rubygems"
require "hpricot"
require "httparty"

class Tumblr
  include HTTParty
  base_uri 'www.tumblr.com'
  
  EMAIL     = "[YOUR_EMAIL]"
  PASSWORD  = "[YOUR_PASSWORD]"
end

doc = open("wp.xml") { |f| Hpricot(f) }

(doc/"item").each do |item|
  params = {
    "email"     => Tumblr::EMAIL,
    "password"  => Tumblr::PASSWORD,
    "type"      => "regular",
    "format"    => "html",
    "generator" => "Ruby + HTTParty Import Script",
    "date"      => item.at('wp:post_date').innerHTML,
    "title"     => item.at('title').innerHTML,
    "body"      => item.at('content:encoded').innerHTML,
    "tags"      => (item/"category").collect{|category| category.innerHTML}.join(","),
    "group"     => "[YOUR_ACCOUNT].tumblr.com"
  }

  puts Tumblr.post("/api/write", :body => params).inspect
end

DiggBar Bookmarklet

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 09:51:00 -0400

I’m really digging the new DiggBar. However, I found it odd that they didn’t give you a bookmarklet considering it would be a trivial thing to do. So, I made one. Drag this link to your bookmark toolbar:

Digg!

Find Intersection of Two Date Ranges

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:23:00 -0400

Say you have a database of events that span multiple days and you want to filter all events between a certain date range. At first I had this giant mess of this AND that OR this AND that… until I found this:

NOT (range1_start > range2_end OR range1_end < range2_start)

That freakin’ rules.

Receiving Faxes in OSX

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:27:00 -0400

Today I setup a shared Fax modem on our OSX Server. Attached a USB modem and it recognized it just fine. Sending faxes was working great, but I couldn’t get it to receive. No matter what I tried, it just wouldn’t recognize that the phone line was ringing. According to Google a few other people had the same problem, but there were no solutions. So I dug around and found the problem. My modem was showing up as /dev/tty.usbmodem246802461. However, OSX expects it to be at /dev/tty.usbmodem. I couldn’t find anywhere to configure it. I tried creating a symlink to it, but that didn’t work. So what I ended up doing was modifying /usr/bin/fax and changing lines 37-38 from:

DEV=cu.usbmodem
DEVANSWER=tty.usbmodem

To:

DEV=cu.usbmodem246802461
DEVANSWER=tty.usbmodem246802461

Then killed the efax process and now it works. WTF Apple?

Green Acres is the place for me

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:10:00 -0400

I’ve been neglecting this blog. Main reason? I’ve turned into a farmer. srlsy :)

MyFolia.com is an excellent website, btw. Highly recommended. Excuse me, I have to go turn my compost pile.

MacBookPro "clunk" Solved!

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:16:00 -0500

Ever since I got this MacBookPro (15” Rev A. 7200 RPM HD) I had noticed the harddrive makes a “clunk” sound. Not really a click, it almost sounds like a marble dropping on a table. Coincidentally, some things like youtube videos would periodically freeze for no reason. I had tried all kinds of things over the years and nothing helped. People in forums have talked about it, some said it’s normal, some said your drive is about to die. Well I just found hdapm!

I used that to set the APM (power management) to max performance and all my problems have gone away. Some tasks even seem a little faster, but it could be my imagination. Apparently, the OSX power management “better performance” doesn’t really set true max performance on some hard drives. What was happening is the read head was periodically trying to park even when disk access was happening. So it was parking and then unparking right away. It does that to try and save power. Well my laptop is almost always plugged in, so I don’t really need that.

Couchville = EvokeTV 2.0?

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 22:04:00 -0400

The King is dead. Long live the King?

Something looks strangely familiar here…

No, I’m not involved with Couchville. (and neither is TV Guide) Yes, the UI and features are nearly identical to EvokeTV. All it’s missing are the personalized rss and ical feeds of favorite shows.

Oh look, Techcrunch featured them saying “they’ve nailed the most important feature - the guide itself”. Where was Michael Arrington when I needed him?

Yes, I am feeling a little bitter. I wish them luck though, hopefully they will be able to survive. (the money behind Snapstream will surely help)

ruby-nxt in MacTech Magazine

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 16:11:00 -0400

Check this out, MacTech did an article on using the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT on a mac and talked about ruby-nxt. Even linked to my website. Unfortunately, they spelled my name wrong! :)

Ruby 1.8.6 and Oniguruma on OSX

Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:26:00 -0400

I’m working on a project that requires some complicated regexes and for the first time actually needed to do a look-behind. Unfortunately, ruby 1.8.6 doesn’t support it. You can accomplish it using Oniguruma and Ruby 1.9 will come with it. There’s a gem but then you have to specficially reference it and might require code changes when 1.9 comes out(?), not to mention the fact that it’s a pain in the ass to install on osx. So I set out to figure out how to recompile ruby with it patched in. The only info I could find in english was for ruby 1.8.5. Finally figured it out, here’s how (also works on linux, not just osx):

curl -O ftp:// ftp. ruby-lang. org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz

curl -O http:// www. geocities. jp/kosako3/oniguruma/archive/onigd2_5_9.tar.gz
tar xzvf onigd2_5_9.tar.gz
cd oniguruma
./configure --with-rubydir=../ruby-1.8.6
make 186

cd ../ruby-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-pthread --with-readline-dir=/usr/local --enable-shared
make
sudo make install

ruby -e "puts Regexp::ENGINE" # should return Oniguruma

Solar Power Revolution?

Thu, 22 Feb 2007 00:40:00 -0500

I just found out about this fascinating new company called Citizenre which is starting a service in 2008 called REnU. Despite the unfortunate choice of naming, it looks so awesome it’s almost too good to be true. Basically, they are going to offer to install solar panels on your roof for free and charge you a fixed rate based on usage (I think… there’s some confusion on this point) which should be equal to or less then you pay now from your utility!? You’re basically renting the equipment, but there’s nothing to buy, no installation cost, no maintenance fees, and just a $500 deposit. They also have a very moving video (if you’re a tree hugger… ok, maybe I’m just a dirty hippie) describing it all with Ed Begley, Jr (hehe) and some narration by Morgan Freeman.

I emailed them the following questions, hopefully they’ll get back to me soon:

The FAQ says you pay for the energy you produce, not the energy you actually use, however the Net-Meetering page says that excess energy produced is sold back to the power company and is used as credit for times when you do not produce enough energy to meet your needs? The Overview page says “Performance-based contract means you only pay for what is delivered”. This is confusing. Also, the Net-Meetering page says a map of existing net-meetering laws is given below, but there is no map on that page?

How does the controller send reports? Is a phone line required? I don’t have a phone line, I have cable modem and Vonage VOIP phone service. Will this be a problem? Can it send the reports using a regular internet connection? One page says a phone line is needed, but then this page says it reports daily via a simple ISP connection.

The How Solar Energy Works page seems to suggest it mostly gathers power during the day and sends most of it back to the power company for credit and then at night it draws power back out of the power company. Why not store most excess power in batteries to draw from when needed? Seems like I would end up losing money because I doubt the rates the power company buys from me would equal what they charge me?

I’m curious about the 25 year contract option. Solar panels will undoubtedly see many advancements over the next 25 years. Will there be an option to upgrade the system and at what cost?

Probably a stupid question, but I don’t know much about solar panels. I’m wondering how it handles snow. Must snow be cleared off the panels? I thought it was funny how one of the pictures at the top of one of the pages shows a house covered in snow, but the solar panels are perfectly clear.

I’m also curious why there’s no contact email address listed anywhere on the REnU website. The link to Locate an Associate doesn’t work and I’m not quite ready to register to reserve a system. I had to goto the main Citizenre website to find an address to email, which is pretty annoying.

UPDATE

I actually got a response quite a while ago, but didn’t get around to posting it until now. Just for the record here it is:

1) The page the FAQ refers to (Net Metering) is actually accessible on the home page - as well as the rest of the site - labelled “Service Territory and rates. Thank you for pointing out the error; it will rectified soon.

2) The controller needs to use a phone line to send data. You do not need a dedicated (separate) line and VOIP as well as broadband internet also qualifies.

3) We are not offering energy storage at this time. Although useful, battery packs are not sufficiently friendly to the environment. The system are engineered to meet up to 100% of the historical consumption, so it is higly improbable that there will be an excess.

4) Yes, upgrade options will be available as new technology is implemented.

5) Snow can be cleared off the panels if necessary in the very same way that dust is washed off in the SW. Performance guarantee states that they do not pay a rent if the system is not generating for them. A heating device might be supplied (33 degrees) that could clear off the snow.

I’m still a little confused as to if a phone line is really required. His answer to #2 makes me thing the person doesn’t really know what they’re talking about. VOIP and broadband != a phone line to send data if it uses a plain old modem.

I’m still very interested in REnU, however I will probably wait until they start to roll it out and people start sharing their experiences. I really hope it succeeds!

EvokeTV.com May Soon Return

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 15:57:00 -0500

Things are still developing and I can’t say for certain when or even if EvokeTV will be back online, or if I’ll be involved in future development, but cross your fingers. I must say it makes me feel good to know that something I created was purchased by a TVGuide! Unfortunately, no, this doesn’t mean I’m filthy rich, but it looks a lot better to have a startup that got bought out by TVGuide than having a typical failed startup on my resume.

I sure hope it will be a triumphant return like Mashable says. ;)

Update: Looks like someone posted it to digg, so show your support and go digg it too!

Ruby on Rails OSX Console Aliases

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 10:07:00 -0500

I found that every day when I goto work in the morning I do the same things whenever I go to work on a rails project:

open firefox
open iTerm
cd ~/Code/railsprojectx
mate .
script/server
open another tab in iTerm
svn update
goto http://localhost:3000

Sure it only takes a few seconds, but it wasn’t very DRY. :) I figured I could create a shell alias to basically reduce all that to a single command. I also thought I’d finally start giving mongrel a try. So this is what I came up with for an rdev command (along with a bunch of my other rails related aliases):

alias rdev='svn update;mate .;mongrel_rails start -d;sleep 2;open http://localhost:3000;tail -f log/development.log'

alias ss='script/server'
alias sc='script/console'
alias sg='script/generate'
alias sp='script/plugin'
alias sr='script/runner'
alias rt='rake test'
alias rtu='rake test:units'
alias rtr='rake test:recent'
alias mr='mongrel_rails start -d'
alias mrs='mongrel_rails stop'

Just stick that in your ~/.profile file and either reopen your console or run:

. ~/.profile

Wii Friend Code

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:25:00 -0500

I got my Wii yesterday. (“my wii”, the name still cracks me up) This is awesome. My neck and arm is already sore! Wii Sports has a fitness training system. According to it’s measurements my lazy geek ass’ fitness age is 56. (I’m 28)

After wasting entirely too much time trying to get it on the internet, I found this site called MapWii, a google maps/wii friend finder mashup. I was impressed to see two people in my city. One even appears to live in my neighborhood. (MapWii puts your marker at a random spot nearby to protect your identity). If anyone out there has a Wii feel free to add me as a friend, by code is:

7705 9722 5338 0231

Wii + Amazon = lucky

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:36:00 -0500

Went to Amazon, saw a note in red saying some would be available somewhere between 7-11am PST, started hitting reload over and over again… a few minutes later I realize I’m not going to sit here for another 2 hours reloading, so for the hell of it I click see all buying options… there it is for $250. Click buy with 1-click… head explodes.

Update: Who needs a ruby script to poll amazon when you’ve got such amazing luck? :)