Officially Lucky tumble log feed. By Clint Ecker.

Twitter: Just wrote a super-complex template tag for django-friendly

2008-07-14T01:16:17Z

I’m now an iPhone owner :) (Torres Talking)

2008-07-14T00:42:05Z

I swore off the iPhone for at least a year when it was first announced. I had good reasons (to me at least). To recap:

I couldn’t synchronize with Exchange over the air (ADDRESSED)
Couldn’t swap the battery out for a better one
The EDGE network was/is so slow to be unusable (ADDRESSED)
It was a closed platform (ADDRESSED)
It was ridiculously, insanely expensive (ADDRESSED)
It was a v1 from a company that’s never built a phone before (ADDRESSED)
Typing on something without feedback won’t work
I didn’t want a phone that could get scratched easily
Functionally, it didn’t do more than my current phone (ADDRESSED)

I compromised on a few of these things – but Apple addressed the important ones. So I ended up waiting in line for 2.5 hours (I think it was actually more like 3!) yesterday morning to get one. I don’t even know where to start with this thing, I dig it so much; it’s easily the most excited I’ve been for a toy since I got my first PalmPilot in 1997 (the thing that started this addiction).

I likely won’t be writing too much about my iPhone though, for a few reasons: 1) I don’t want to gush, and I will end up gushing 2) I’m not blogging that much anyway - even though the iPhone is inspiring me to, 3) It’s been covered to death, 4) Anything I write can’t do justice to this little marvel.

So, just in case anyone cares, I now have an iPhone (syncing it with Windows Vista and Exchange Server of course). Using it is like having a magic wand ;)

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Last.FM: Goldfrapp - Monster Love

2008-07-14T00:31:59Z

View "Goldfrapp - Monster Love" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: The Rocket Summer - So Much Love

2008-07-13T23:04:08Z

View "The Rocket Summer - So Much Love" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Yellowcard - Big Apple Heartbreak

2008-07-13T23:00:19Z

View "Yellowcard - Big Apple Heartbreak" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Midtown - We Bring Us Down

2008-07-13T22:57:59Z

View "Midtown - We Bring Us Down" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: New Found Glory - No News Is Good News

2008-07-13T22:54:52Z

View "New Found Glory - No News Is Good News" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: The Early November - All We Ever Needed

2008-07-13T22:52:19Z

View "The Early November - All We Ever Needed" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: All Time Low - Holly (Would You Turn Me On?)

2008-07-13T22:48:19Z

View "All Time Low - Holly (Would You Turn Me On?)" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Something Corporate - Bad Day

2008-07-13T22:40:41Z

View "Something Corporate - Bad Day" on Last.FM.

Twitter: Last.fm app is on the App Store. Badass. http://ping.fm/rjHOk

2008-07-13T22:31:16Z

Read on Twitter.

Twitter: @ryanberg ha! oops. I'd totally forgotten about that site :o

2008-07-13T22:23:04Z

Read on Twitter.

Macenstein | Developers furious over App Store “Line Cutting” (macenstein.com)

2008-07-13T21:40:16Z

Clint: These Jirbo guys are jerks

There’s a bit of bad blood brewing between developers of iPhone Apps these days. It seems several different companies have renamed their iPhone games to begin with either a space, a quotation mark, or some other symbol so that they appear first in the list of 197 games on the iPhone portal to the App Store.

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Twitter: it's called django-friendly: http://ping.fm/Ql1bp -- basic funct. is there

2008-07-13T21:37:56Z

Read on Twitter.

Twitter: I wrote a small django application yesterday that'll sync all your friendfeed stuff to a local db

2008-07-13T21:37:09Z

Read on Twitter.

Twitter: @gruber http://tinyurl.com/6eysxy seems they left the shipping color more warm and then toned it down in a slightly diff firmware. its weird

2008-07-13T21:27:44Z

Read on Twitter.

Twitter: @gruber The screen temperature changes if you "restore" the iPhone in iTunes. You get a new firmware (5A347 vs. 5A345). 345 is yellowy.

2008-07-13T21:26:25Z

Read on Twitter.

django-pagination - Google Code (code.google.com)

2008-07-13T21:17:48Z

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DjangoCon Officially Announced (Empty Thoughts - Home)

2008-07-13T21:15:17Z

There’s been lots of discussion and hints over the past several days about a forthcoming Django based conference called DjangoCon. The official announcement was just released. I’ve always been fond of small intimate group settings and this one will certainly be that with only 200 attendees allowed to participate. I only hope that I get one of the coveted spots.

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Twitter: I'm installing "Banner" on my iPhone. Looks like fun :) It's a scrolling LED message for your phone.

2008-07-13T21:13:00Z

Read on Twitter.

Twitter: DjangoCon: http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2008/jul/13/djangocon/ #django #djangocon

2008-07-13T20:59:34Z

Read on Twitter.

MobileMe doesn’t push from Mac to Me.com and handheld devices (JeffCroft.com: Latest bookmarks)

2008-07-13T20:37:55Z

Turns out, MobileMe doesn’t “push” changes to calendars and contacts made on your Mac to the Me.com web apps and your handheld devices. From an Apple Knowledgebase article:

Changes made on your computer will be synced to the MobileMe “cloud” once every 15 minutes (or every hour in Mac OS X 10.4.11).

Changes to calendars and contacts made on Me.com or on your iPhone will be pushed to your Mac immediately, but the reverse is not true. Strange. From Apple’s MobileMe features page:

MobileMe stores all your email, contacts, and calendars in the cloud and pushes them down to your iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, and PC. When you make a change on one device, the cloud updates the others. Push happens automatically, instantly, and continuously. You don’t have to wait for it or remember to do anything — such as docking your iPhone and syncing manually — to stay up to date

Emphasis mine. For many people, including me, a 15 minute sync time is probably just fine in real-world usage. But, it definitely seems contrary to how the service was promoted and demoed at the WWDC keynote, and I can definitely understand why so many people are complaining about it on the MacRumors forums and across the Internet. This sort of reeks of deception.

A couple things worth pointing out about this, for those wondering why it’s a big deal:

It’s an especially big deal for laptop users, who are prone to opening their laptop, adding a calendar event or contact, and then closing it again. If MobileMe really “pushed” from Mac to the cloud, then this behavior would be fine — the update has already made it to the cloud by the time the laptop is closed. If a user has to sit there, laptop open, for at least 15 minutes, to ensure the sync takes place, that sucks.
MobileMe isn’t all about the iPhone. It’s supposed to keep all your devices instantly in sync, including multiple Macs. Someone who doesn’t have an iPhone but has two Macs might want to keep their laptop in sync with their desktop. The old .Mac did this at a 15 minute interval, and MobileMe was promoted as an improvement that made the sync near-instantaneous. In reality, for this user, MobileMac is not an improvement at all — and that also sucks.

Visit site (http://www.macrumors.com/2008/07/13/mobilemes-push-services-detailed-no-mac-to-mobile-me-push/)

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DjangoCon 2008 (The Django weblog)

2008-07-13T19:48:00Z

For the past year or so, people have been asking for us to hold a conference all about Django. Putting together a conference is an imense amount of work, so it took us a while to get the ball rolling. However, over the past couple of months we've found a few good volunteers who've taken on the task of planning a "DjangoCon," and now the dream is a reality!

For the details, I'll turn this space over to Robert Lofthouse, the conference chair:

I am pleased to announce that DjangoCon will be held on the 6th and 7th of September, 2008 at the Google headquarters in Mountain View. This will tie in with the 1.0 release of Django, and so we'll be also having a 1.0 release party on Saturday September 6th.

All the details including a schedule of speakers will be made available when we launch the conference website on Friday. Space will be limited to about 200 attendees, so we'll be releasing tickets in batches to give everyone a chance to come to the conference. Admission will be free, but we'll be asking for an optional donation to the Django Software Foundation to help cover our costs.

Thanks to everyone who has been helping out, and also thanks to Google for working so hard to get everything done!

I look forward to seeing those that can make it! It's going to rock!

— Robert Lofthouse, Conference Chair

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Last.FM: High Places - Canary

2008-07-13T19:29:07Z

View "High Places - Canary" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Atlas Sound - Small Horror

2008-07-13T19:26:21Z

View "Atlas Sound - Small Horror" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: M83 - Until the Night Is Over

2008-07-13T19:23:27Z

View "M83 - Until the Night Is Over" on Last.FM.

Oh MobileMe :)

2008-07-13T17:36:39Z

Twitter: I keep trying to watch ST:TOS episodes and I never make it through the full thing. It's so campy and boring.

2008-07-13T17:06:20Z

Read on Twitter.

Last.FM: Samamidon - little satchel

2008-07-13T16:16:04Z

View "Samamidon - little satchel" on Last.FM.

Monkeypatching For Humans (Coding Horror)

2008-07-13T15:00:53Z

Clint: Can you not subclass the String class in other languages?

Although I love strings, sometimes the String class can break your heart. For example, in C#, there is no String.Left() function. Fair enough; we can roll up our sleeves and write our own function lickety-split:

public static string Left(string s, int len)
{
    if (len == 0 || s.Length == 0)
        return "";
    else if (s.Length <= len)
        return s;
    else
        return s.Substring(0, len);
}

And call it like so:

var s = "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious";
s = Left(s, 5);

Fairly painless, right?

But with the advent of C# 3.0, there's an even better way -- extension methods. With an extension method, we "extend" the String to add the missing function. The code is fairly similar; I'll highlight the changed parts in red.

public static string Left(this string s, int len)
{
    if (len == 0 || s.Length == 0)
        return "";
    else if (s.Length <= len)
        return s;
    else
        return s.Substring(0, len);
}

And now we can call it as if this very method existed on the String class as shipped:

var s = "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious";
s = s.Left(5);

Pretty slick. It's difficult not to fall in love with extension methods, as they allow you to mold classes into exactly what you think they should be. This is fairly innocuous in C#, as extension methods only allow you to add new functionality to classes, not override, remove, or replace anything.

But imagine if you could.

Well, that's exactly how it is in other, more dynamic languages such as Javascript, Python, Perl, and Ruby. Something as prosaic as C# extensions is old hat to these folks. In those languages, you could redefine everything in the String class if you wanted to. This is commonly known in dynamic language circles as monkeypatching.

If the idea of monkeypatching scares you a little, it probably should. Can you imagine debugging code where the String class had subtly different behaviors from the String you've learned to use? Monkeypatching can be incredibly dangerous in the wrong hands, as Avdi Grimm notes:

Monkey patching is the new black [in the Ruby community]. It's what all the hip kids are doing. To the point that smart, experienced hackers reach for a monkey patch as their tool of first resort, even when a simpler, more traditional solution is possible.
I don't believe this situation to be sustainable. Where I work, we are already seeing subtle, difficult-to-debug problems crop up as the result of monkey patching in plugins. Patches interact in unpredictable, combinatoric ways. And by their nature, bugs caused by monkey patches are more difficult to track down than those introduced by more traditional classes and methods. As just one example: on one project, it was a known caveat that we could not rely on class inheritable attributes as provided by ActiveSupport. No one knew why. Every Model we wrote had to use awkward workarounds. Eventually we tracked it down in a plugin that generated admin consoles. It was overwriting Class.inherited(). It took us months to find this out.
This is just going to get worse if we don't do something about it. And the "something" is going to have to be a cultural shift, not a technical fix. I believe it is time for experienced Ruby programmers to wean ourselves off of monkey patching, and start demonstrating more robust techniques.

Try to imagine a world where every programmer you know is a wannabe language designer, bent on molding the language to their whims. When I close my eyes and imagine it, I have a vision of the apocalypse, a perfect, pitch-black storm of utterly incomprhensible, pathologically difficult to debug code.

I was just looking at random PHP plugin code the other day, and it was, frankly, crap. But that's because most code is crap. Including my own. It is, sadly, the statistical norm. That's why sites like The Daily WTF are guaranteed to have more material than they can possibly ever publish for the next millennia. (Note to self: invest in this website). I can only imagine what that PHP plugin code would have looked like, had its developer been granted the ability to redefine fundamental PHP keywords and classes at will. These are the sort of thoughts that drive me to drink Bawls. And that stuff is disgusting.

You might say that PHP, sans the fundamental dynamic language ability to monkeypatch, is just another crappy Blub language. But there's also a ton of incredibly useful PHP code out there. So it seems to me that the ability to monkeypatch doesn't stop people from producing a huge volume of useful code, even in a kind of.. horrible language. Some of it is even good!

While I acknowledge the power and utility of dynamic language monkeypatching, I know enough about programmers -- myself absolutely included -- to know the vast majority of us have absolutely no business whatsoever re-designing a programming language. There's a reason some of the most deeply respected computer scientists in the world end up as language designers.

Perhaps then, given the risks, monkeypatching should mean reaching for the meta-hammer as infrequently as humanly possible. This is a position that Avdi himself espouses in a followup comment:

I'm afraid a lot of people have missed the actual meat of my argument -- that dynamic extension of classes is currently overused in Ruby, in ways that are:

Needless - another technique (such as a mixin, or locally extending individual objects) would have worked as well or better.
Overcomplicated - the use of a monkey patch actually created more work for the author.
Fragile - the solution is tightly bound to third-party internals, reducing the usefulness of the plugin or gem because it is prone to breakage.
Excessively wide in scope - by hardcoding extensions to core classes, the author takes the choice to scope the change out of the plugin/gem user's hands, further limiting utility.

My point is that there are alternatives - often alternatives which are actually easier to implement and will make your plugin or gem more useful to the user.

While I enjoy the additive nature of C# extensions, even those are enough to make me a little nervous, as mild as they are. Full-blown dynamic language monkeypatching goes even further; it might even be the ultimate expression of programming power. Is there anything more pure and godlike than programming your own programming language?

But if wielding that power doesn't scare and humble you a little, too, then maybe you should leave the monkeypatching to the really smart monkeys.

[advertisement] Read the largest case study ever published about lightweight peer code review in Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review. Free book, free shipping.

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Clint's iPhone home screen (page 3/3)

2008-07-13T07:01:09Z

Clint's iPhone home screen (page 2/3)

2008-07-13T07:01:08Z

Clint's iPhone home screen (page 1/3)

2008-07-13T07:01:07Z

Premium Rock Band 2 Drum Kit Surfaces: "Badass" Is The Word You're Looking (Gizmodo)

2008-07-13T05:51:15Z

Shared by Herschell / Special*Dark Liana sez: With a drumkit like THAT... who the hell would even want to touch that old guitar. lol.

I play Rock Band like a champ, and when I'm with my crew I'm usually on drums. I'm a drummer, and I love playing them, and the included drum controller always seemed just fine to me. Kotaku found this photo of the premium Rock Band 2 kit and I've decided I must have it. UPDATE: OK, so this kit doesn't ship with Rock Band 2, it's an $300 optional purchase. [Kotaku]

Instead of just four heads, the badass looking kit gives you four heads, hi hat, crash, and ride cymbals. This kit, which will come with Rock Band 2 certainly beats the Guitar Hero: World Tour offering, but it also signals something unusual: the start of a music games arms war. I hope they bring it hard.

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Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Dr. Carter

2008-07-13T04:37:15Z

View "Lil' Wayne - Dr. Carter" on Last.FM.

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in (dive into mark)

2008-07-13T04:19:40Z

Google (my current employer) has finally open sourced protocol buffers, the data interchange format we use for internal server-to-server communication. The blogosphere’s response? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Aaaaanyway…

Protocol buffers are “just” cross-platform data structures. All you have to write is the schema (a .proto file), then generate bindings in C++, Java, or Python. (Or Haskell. Or Perl.) The .proto file is just a schema; it doesn’t contain any data except default values. All getting and setting is done in code. The serialized over-the-wire format is designed to minimize network traffic, and deserialization (especially in C++) is designed to maximize performance. I can’t begin to describe how much effort Google spends maximizing performance at every level. We would tear down our data centers and rewire them with $500 ethernet cables if you could prove that it would reduce latency by 1%.

Besides being blindingly fast, protocol buffers have lots of neat features. A zero-size PB returns default values. You can nest PBs inside each other. And most importantly, PBs are both backward and forward compatible, which means you can upgrade servers gradually and they can still talk to each other in the interim. (When you have as many machines as Google has, it’s always the interim somewhere.)

Comparisons to other data formats was, I suppose, inevitable. Old-timers may remember ASN.1 or IIOP. Kids these days seem to compare everything to XML or JSON. They’re actually closer to Facebook’s Thrift (written by ex-Googlers) or SQL Server’s TDS. Protocol buffers won’t kill XML (no matter how much you wish they would), nor will they replace JSON, ASN.1, or carrier pigeon. But they’re simple and they’re fast and they scale like crazy, and that’s the way Google likes it.

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Twitter: If you've played with the FF API, is it true that I can't page back infinitely? I can't get old entries past a few days old

2008-07-13T04:16:50Z

Read on Twitter.

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Prostitute 2

2008-07-13T04:12:07Z

View "Lil' Wayne - Prostitute 2" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Dontgetit

2008-07-13T04:01:56Z

View "Lil' Wayne - Dontgetit" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana & Fabolous - You Ain't Got Nuthin

2008-07-13T03:52:05Z

View "Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana & Fabolous - You Ain't Got Nuthin" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & D. Smith - Shoot Me Down

2008-07-13T03:37:07Z

View "Lil Wayne & D. Smith - Shoot Me Down" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Let the Beat Build

2008-07-13T03:32:38Z

View "Lil' Wayne - Let the Beat Build" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & Bobby Valentino - Mrs. Officer

2008-07-13T03:27:29Z

View "Lil Wayne & Bobby Valentino - Mrs. Officer" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & Robin Thicke - Tie My Hands

2008-07-13T03:22:43Z

View "Lil Wayne & Robin Thicke - Tie My Hands" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Phone Home

2008-07-13T03:17:24Z

View "Lil' Wayne - Phone Home" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & Babyface - Comfortable

2008-07-13T03:13:51Z

View "Lil Wayne & Babyface - Comfortable" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & Jay-Z - Mr. Carter

2008-07-13T03:01:41Z

View "Lil Wayne & Jay-Z - Mr. Carter" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - 3 Peat

2008-07-13T02:54:23Z

View "Lil' Wayne - 3 Peat" on Last.FM.

Last.FM: The Wire - "Later for that gangsta bullshit."

2008-07-13T02:51:02Z

View "The Wire - "Later for that gangsta bullshit."" on Last.FM.

Zooey Deschanel Web Gallery: Click image to close this window (FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE)

2008-07-13T01:02:34Z

via http://zooey-deschanel.us/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=7528&fullsize=1

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Officially Lucky tumble log feed. By Clint Ecker.

Twitter: Just wrote a super-complex template tag for django-friendly

I’m now an iPhone owner :) (Torres Talking)

Last.FM: Goldfrapp - Monster Love

Last.FM: The Rocket Summer - So Much Love

Last.FM: Yellowcard - Big Apple Heartbreak

Last.FM: Midtown - We Bring Us Down

Last.FM: New Found Glory - No News Is Good News

Last.FM: The Early November - All We Ever Needed

Last.FM: All Time Low - Holly (Would You Turn Me On?)

Last.FM: Something Corporate - Bad Day

Twitter: Last.fm app is on the App Store. Badass. http://ping.fm/rjHOk

Twitter: @ryanberg ha! oops. I'd totally forgotten about that site :o

Macenstein | Developers furious over App Store “Line Cutting” (macenstein.com)

Twitter: it's called django-friendly: http://ping.fm/Ql1bp -- basic funct. is there

Twitter: I wrote a small django application yesterday that'll sync all your friendfeed stuff to a local db

Twitter: @gruber http://tinyurl.com/6eysxy seems they left the shipping color more warm and then toned it down in a slightly diff firmware. its weird

Twitter: @gruber The screen temperature changes if you "restore" the iPhone in iTunes. You get a new firmware (5A347 vs. 5A345). 345 is yellowy.

django-pagination - Google Code (code.google.com)

DjangoCon Officially Announced (Empty Thoughts - Home)

Twitter: I'm installing "Banner" on my iPhone. Looks like fun :) It's a scrolling LED message for your phone.

Twitter: DjangoCon: http://www.djangoproject.com/weblog/2008/jul/13/djangocon/ #django #djangocon

MobileMe doesn’t push from Mac to Me.com and handheld devices (JeffCroft.com: Latest bookmarks)

DjangoCon 2008 (The Django weblog)

Last.FM: High Places - Canary

Last.FM: Atlas Sound - Small Horror

Last.FM: M83 - Until the Night Is Over

Oh MobileMe :)

Twitter: I keep trying to watch ST:TOS episodes and I never make it through the full thing. It's so campy and boring.

Last.FM: Samamidon - little satchel

Monkeypatching For Humans (Coding Horror)

Clint's iPhone home screen (page 3/3)

Clint's iPhone home screen (page 2/3)

Clint's iPhone home screen (page 1/3)

Premium *Rock Band 2* Drum Kit Surfaces: "Badass" Is The Word You're Looking (Gizmodo)

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Dr. Carter

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in (dive into mark)

Twitter: If you've played with the FF API, is it true that I can't page back infinitely? I can't get old entries past a few days old

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Prostitute 2

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Dontgetit

Last.FM: Lil Wayne, Juelz Santana & Fabolous - You Ain't Got Nuthin

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & D. Smith - Shoot Me Down

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Let the Beat Build

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & Bobby Valentino - Mrs. Officer

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & Robin Thicke - Tie My Hands

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - Phone Home

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & Babyface - Comfortable

Last.FM: Lil Wayne & Jay-Z - Mr. Carter

Last.FM: Lil' Wayne - 3 Peat

Last.FM: The Wire - "Later for that gangsta bullshit."

Zooey Deschanel Web Gallery: Click image to close this window (FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE)

Premium Rock Band 2 Drum Kit Surfaces: "Badass" Is The Word You're Looking (Gizmodo)