Screaming Penguin

Google Wave Cinema - Pulp Fiction

charlie.collins — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:50:06 +0000

This being Temple of the Screaming Penguin (home of Jules and all), I HAVE to pass this completely f-ing awesome video along:

The JVM and garbage collection

charlie.collins — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:12:57 +0000

http://dhanji.posterous.com/taking-out-the-trash-and-other-cliches

The SoftReference class should really have been called the SuccubusReference, because that's what it is--a seductress of meretricious and superficial beauty, who will drag your soul to hell and leave your corporeal body a listless shell, exhausted and empty.

Not much more to say, excellent article, read it. (Really well written, interesting, and addresses some important stuff anybody using the JVM should be aware of.)

select * from internet

charlie.collins — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:44:14 +0000

I have been working on a few Android apps lately that use various public APIs. Some of these APIs are excellent, easy to use, sensible, some are, well, not.

To make a long story short, I ended up stumbling on the Yahoo Query Language (YQL). This is a fantastic thing. Maybe I am late to this party, having never seen or used YQL before, but basically it's a common and public front end for various public APIs. It's a big wrapper (with one format) around all of the intermash.

Take a quick look, really, you can use the console in an instant and get an idea of what it is.

An SQL like syntax is provided, and of course it works over HTTP. A concept called "open data tables" allows developers to "map" APIs into the YQL system - genius.

Another example:

http://query.yahooapis.com/v1/public/yql?q=

And then pass in your query (which must be url encoded, of course):

use 'http://yqlblog.net/samples/search.imageweb.xml' as searchimageweb; 
select * from searchimageweb where query='pizza'

YQL example URL

I haven't incorporated YQL into any Android apps, yet, but I do plan to investigate it more and possibly use it to replace a few custom parsers I am using. +1 for Yahoo.

Android Drawables Explorer

charlie.collins — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:28:40 +0000

I spent several hours this weekend poking around GWT 1.7, and introducing myself to AppEngine. I have several ideas for applications to build, but as a starting point I wanted to keep things simple so I built Android Drawables Explorer. This is an application that displays all the android.R.drawable resources that are included in the android.jar archive for reference (basically, it's an updated version of something I did a long time ago without GWT/AppEngine). I built this with GWT, and used an ImageBundle rather than a ton of separate little images (and wrote a little utility to generate the ImageBundle GWT code from android.jar). This app isn't complicated, but it did allow me to get started with AppEngine basics, and while writing it I also tried to get reacquainted with GWT (which I have not used professionally in a year or so - and there have been many changes since the 1.5 days).

I really - no really - like the new GWT stuff. The new Jetty embedded stuff, and new project layout is much easier to use, the styling is better, and small conveniences like more robust IDE support and an automatically created/associated style sheet with each project are great. (I haven't gotten into any underlying detail yet.)

Also, AppEngine is just a beautiful thing. In addition to this little GWT app, I have also been playing around some with other AppEngine projects using both Java and Python. I haven't deployed a monster app and scaled it around the world or anything like that, yet, but what I have seen of my limited exploration so far is fantastic. Very easy to use, extremely powerful, and the power and price are certainly right - well done Google.

Now I am hoping that having a nice foundation and set of tools such as this inspires me to start actually working on several of the "big" ideas I have had over the years. ;)

Asus eeepc 1005HAB and Ubuntu - FTW!

charlie.collins — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:51:08 +0000

I am immobilized this weekend (nothing serious, just have to stay off my feet for a few days, doctors orders), so I decided it would be a good time to work on some GWT/AppEngine hacking. Enter my need for a good portable computer (don't want to sit at the desk).

My long lived first gen Intel Mac has been acting up lately (can't really complain though, as it worked well for 3+ years or so, and I used the hell out of it) so I decided to just finally pull the trigger and grab an eeePC - so far I love it. I grabbed the 1005HAB model at my local retailer (Atom, 160GB non solid state, 10 inch) , because I was in a hurry (normally would order online), and because they had an open box deal for $239 (reg $299).

First I formatted it and installed Ubuntu (the XP license it came with might get used at some point, but not now). I will try Snow Leopard on it in the future - but Ubuntu is my OS of choice nowadays (really, about the only thing I outright miss on the mac is Omnigraffle anyway). I went with plain Jaunty, and it worked fine out of the box, with the exception of networking, which was easy enough to fix (http://www.jfwhome.com/2009/08/06/perfect-ubuntu-jaunty-on-the-asus-eeep...). I didn't go with eeebuntu or easy peasy because I am just comfortable with regular Ubuntu, and prefer the regular desktop - even on the small screen (may check out netbook oriented variants more later).

All my peripherals work, and did so the first time out without hassle. I am posting from this machine now. So far, great, but I will follow up with another post (and more detail) once I have used this thing for a while - we will see if it and I still get along after a few days of slinging code. ;)

Dark Energy

kebernet — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:59:15 +0000

Since I am back to blogging, somewhat, I just want to note what Pam Gay from Astronomy Cast explained to me.

So, there are two big lies in common science literature about The Big Bang (or inflation) and Dark Energy. I always knew they were bullshit, but I never knew what the real problem was. Pam cleared me up.

So space expands. Things are moving apart, but not in an "explosive" way There is more space between everything. The cliche analogy is dots on the surface of a balloon. It isn't that the dots are moving away from each other, it is that there is more balloon between the dots. Space has a multiple "growth" half-life. Everything, in every direction is accelerating away from us relative to its distance from us, because each bit of space might become space * X / space at any time.

There isn't a center of the universe. Everywhere is the "center"

This, obviously, is a property of space. The big lie that the mainstream science media relays is that there is "Dark Energy" that is pushing everything away from itself. This isn't the case. This implies "explosive" "work" being done to push the galaxies apart "through" space, not that there is simply more space there. I never understood where this "Dark Energy" crap came from.

This is the story:

In every cubic meter of space, there is about 3 protons worth of energy (4.50983192 × 10-10 joules). Sometimes it is particles, sometimes energy, but it is always there. Space expands, but vacuum energy, this flux of Brian Greene's turbulent (femto) universe is there. That is the mystery. Conservation of energy is out the window. Sometimes it is energy, sometimes matter, but that is quantum flux. Why is there constantly more and more of it as space grows.

That is the Dark Energy question.

Mac OS kernel_task runaway Android

kebernet — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 00:21:25 +0000

I am using a spammy title for this because there are a number of similar issues. HOWEVER, if you leave your Android phone plugged into your your Mac with USB debugging, particularly if you are using a MacBook Air (MBA) USB ethernet card, the "kernel_task" will runaway on you. Especially if you are streaming Flash video or anything that spams the network card.

Unplug your phone or turn off the USB debugging in the developer settings.

The Greatest Thing on the Interwebs in Months

kebernet — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:44:35 +0000

Man, I miss Carl Sagan.

Penguin server back up - now Ubuntu

charlie.collins — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:26:45 +0000

I finally got around to upgrading the penguin server this weekend, it wasn't without pain, but it's done. I was running an ancient version of Fedora there, and have now installed the latest Ubuntu server (9.04). Everything is working again, I think.

It's amazing how nice Ubuntu is to work with. From the days of compiling my own kernel and then customized Apache on Red Hat, to literally a few apt-get installs. With a few command lines Apache with PHP5 and MySQL/Postgres is running (and so other several other services). And I even like the way the packages are setup (in terms of Apache, sites-available/sites-enabled and a2enmod, conf locations, logging, etc). Now I know this isn't all attributable to Ubuntu/Debian, Apache is much more modularized now to make this possible, and other packages have also gotten more mature, but it's still remarkable how easy it is to do today compared to 5 years ago.

That said, it still wasn't pain free. Enter Drupal. I appreciate the effort, but that codebase is a gigantic mess, and third party modules are often worse. I ended up upgrading at the same time as the move and had to manually manipulate several tables to get things working again. I am going to be looking at moving TotSP to AppEngine and using something like Bloog in the near future. Drupal is just too brittle. Besides, I want to learn more Python, and AppEngine, so moving things there should be a good learning experience.

Anyway, we're back on the air, though we still don't have any decent recent content ;).

Demotivators - Star Wars style

charlie.collins — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:23:26 +0000

Saw this in the feed the other day, funny enough to repeat:

http://jeffisageek.posterous.com/regrets-those-were-the-droids-you-were-...

Big in Japan, and now the states are catching up: QR Codes

charlie.collins — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:47:40 +0000

I just installed my first mobile phone application on my G1 Android phone using a QR Code linked on a web page. If you know all about this and it's old hat (apparently it's been big in Japan for quite some time), then that won't impress much, but if you haven't seen it before, like me, it's really damn impressive - the people that just saw me do thought it was cool as hell too.

Here is how I installed Google Listen, I went to the download page that contains an image of the QR Code:
http://listen.googlelabs.com/download.html

Then I pointed my phone at the computer screen to scan the image, then I clicked the link that was decoded and hit the "install" button and voila! Nice.

GWT architecture "best practices" - MVP, dependency injection, command, event bus

charlie.collins — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:09:35 +0000

Nice intro tutorial for the GWT best practices architecture Ray Ryan described at I/O this year over at Hive Development.

This is the setup that the AdWords team came up with, and at first glace it looks very impressive. It uses two sub projects I have been wanting to employ for a while now: GIN (which is a GWT wrapper for Guice dependency injection), and GWT-Presenter.

Actually, back in the day when working with GWT (a few years ago now), and when writing GWT in Practice, we used a very "presenter" like pattern, even though we called it MVC. We didn't have the event bus, we just used PropertyChangeSupport, but we did discuss it. It's nice to see GWT getting a bit more solid in the "architecture" area as that really seems to be where new developers struggle. There is no set pattern - it's up to you - and that leaves a plethora of options that can seem overwhelming.

Many people take digs at GWT for this, but that's missing the point, as we also noted in GWT in Practice GWT is a very much a "toolkit" (it's in the name), and NOT a framework. I have always maintained that the important part is the toolkit itself (performance and capability) and architectural solutions or frameworks will come later organically as third party projects, or they may come from the GWT team, if it expands or has time, but more likely they will come from other Google users (aka Ray and that team, or the Wave team, etc).

Other nice GWT related I/O talks are available too:
http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-web-toolkit-at-google-io.html

Fired For Being A Good Employee

jwill113 — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:18:11 +0000

The story begins with an accusation against myself and another employee of the Geek Squad. Best Buy participates in a recycling program. Customers can bring in their old unwanted computers and other miscellaneous electronics for recycling. The accusation was that myself and the other employee were removing parts from these recycled units and taking them home for personal benefit. One day, I was asked by one of my managers to come to the back office for a few moments. In the back office, I was told â€œYou have been accused of theft from recycled computers. Other employees have stated they saw you removing components and taking them home.â€ I was outraged and confused by the situation seeing it as an attack on my character since I am not a thief or a liar. I wrote in my statement that I had not removed any components and taken them home for my personal benefit. I did admit that I would take the units apart, simply to learn the mechanics of how it operated, them put them back together. I would practice seating processors and even re-solder blown components to try and get the unit working again. Seeing as the Geek Squad precincts (the in-store techs) are not allowed to do these things on customer computers, I figured it would be a great way to â€œlearn by doingâ€ without having any collateral damages. Any customer computer that has an issue related to the motherboard or any other repair that required a little more than do-it-yourself has to be sent to the service center for those repairs. I thought a while about why others would make an accusation about me stealing things. I then remembered a time a few months ago when Geek Squad did its annual cleaning. Any parts, cables, and items that had no home behind the precinct where set to be thrown away. Some of these items included optical drives, floppy drives, SATA cables, IDE cables, heat sink fans, casing buttons, etc. Myself and a few other employees were given permission from our supervisor who received permission from a manager to have any of these items if we wanted them. A internal CD-ROM drive grabbed my attention, since I need an optical laser for my senior design project. Other employees also took items from the same pool of items I had gotten my CD-ROM drive from. Back to my statement, I wrote down that I had taken the CD-ROM drive with permission from my supervisor. I was very descriptive in my statement saying â€œa CD-ROM drive from a Gateway computer.â€ As anyone with a clue knows, each manufacturer has specific components they use in their products. I knew the drive was from a Gateway computer. I had also remembered that prior to this happening, we had two store used Gateway desktops that were broken, scrapped for parts, then thrown away. I figured the CD-ROM drive was from one of those units. I told the manager who had me writing the statement this event. Her exact words were â€œYou need to put that in your statement. I can't help you if you don't help me.â€ I put this information in my statement to help clarify the statements against me. Maybe someone saw me take the CD drive and assumed I was stealing. I had no clue this statement would ultimately be the basis of my termination.
Two weeks later, I get called into the office. The manager reads off:

â€œ..in a statement prepared by you on ...you admitted to removing a CD drive from a Gateway desktop computer and taking it home. You stated you were given permission to remove the item from the store but there is no credible evidence to confirm this. This conduct is a violation of Best Buy's Inappropriate Conduct policy ans consequently, grounds for termination. Your employment with Best Buy is terminated effective immediately.â€

I was flabbergasted. I tried to help the investigation, which I understood the need for and did not get flustered over, and I get fired over it. Where's the justice in this? No credible evidence? I immediately went to my supervisor who I consider a friend and asked him about it. No credible evidence meant someone above me denied the approval. My supervisor informed me that in his statement he originally wrote down he had approval from said manager for certain items, which he listed. When he handed it in to the manager, who happened to be the manager that approved the removal of the items, the manager told him this is not what the investigation asked for. He was instructed to rewrite his statement by which he wrote, â€œI did not approve of removal of any parts from recycled computers.â€ True, the investigation at the time was about the removal of recycled components, but the pool of items that multiple employees drew from were scrap parts, none of which came from recycled units.
There is slight hope. Best Buy has a policy called a peer review. In a peer review, five employees (which go from part-timers up to assistant managers) sit in a meeting with you and discuss the results of the termination and decide if the decision was justifiable. If they deem it unnecessary, you can get your job back. If they agree with the termination, the termination is final. The day after I got terminated, I filed for a peer review. I waited a month to hear about my peer review. I went into the peer review and was greeted by 5 employees. They asked me multiple questions to which I replied the corresponding truth. The review took about 30 minutes. After I left, they separately interviewed the terminating manager, the general manager, and my supervisor, who conveniently drove to the peer review together. When I got home, I waited 3 hours and finally got the call. My termination stands. Reason being, the peer review had no evidence that I was given permission to remove the item from the store.
What do I think happened? I think poop rolls downhill. I believe the manager was in the wrong and is trying to cover his own backside by denial. It goes from the manager denying, to the supervisor, and down to the good old part-timer of five years (yes, FIVE years) me. Its gone past the fact of my job, it the principle behind the matter now. I am a lot of things, but a liar and a thief are not one of them. This is an attack on my character and for that, I am am highly upset. The entire situation I feel was handled improperly and as a result, the company has lost an important asset to their company. Screw Best Buy.

Best Buy and Walmart Suck!

Mojorisin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:51:45 +0000

The other day I set up my friends wireless for him so he could get online with his xbox 360. After I was done I went home and turned on my own Xbox. I was shocked and angered to see three red lights flashing. This is now my third xbox that has fallen to the red ring of death. After I talked myself out of throwing the damn thing out the window I called and scheduled a repair. I didnt feel like waiting for 3-4 weeks to get my new one, especially since the new madden is coming out Friday, so I went to Walmart. I try to avoid that place when I can but it was late and therefore the only place open (probably the only good thing about Walmart). I purchased the Elite version because I figured I would upgrade to a better system and sell or give away the old one when it is repaired. I noticed that the seal on the first one the clerk pulled out of the case had come undone so I made him get another. The other one also had a broken seal. He told me the weight of the box must have made it come undone. I trusted him and did a quick look over the contents and everything seamed like it was there. When I got home however, I noticed that the two bonus games that were supposed to come with it were not there and the headset was missing. I turned it on and noticed that there was a profile already created and that the SOB had acheivements for the games that were missing. Walmart appearently took this system back, didnt bother to check if everything was there, and put it back on the shelf. If I wanted to buy a USED xbox I would have bought it on Ebay for a USED price. I didnt think that they could even do this shady sh*t. So now I am really pissed, I just had to deal with the rrod and now the one I just paid $430 for is used and missing things that were supposed to be included. I decided I would deal with it tomorrow and somehow went to sleep.
The next day I go to Walmart and get my money back. They didnt want to at first but I told them I didnt want them to have any of my money. I went to Best Buy. BIGGG MISTAKE. I got the last one they had. They assured me that the box hasnt been opened. I took it home and guess what??? IT DIDNT WORK!! The power brick is not supplying power. I take it back up there and they tell me that I can only get my money back in the form of a gift card that is only good in Best Buy stores, or I can wait two weeks for a check to be mailed to me. WHAT KIND OF BULLSH*T ARE THEY TRYING TO PULL AT BEST BUY???? I just gave u $430 cash for a product that is broken.........give it back to me. I could see if they had another one to give me and I didnt want it, but they dont have the same exact product to exchange. I know I could go somewhere right down the road to a different store and get one but you f*ckers wont give me my hard earned money back! *deep breath* I call to the other store in town and they too do not have one. I call another store 90 miles away and the woman tells me that they do have one and that she will put it to the side for me with my name on it. K, this seams like my only option. I get the gift card and make the hour and a half drive to the store. When I get there the woman that I talked to has left for the day and that they do not know what I am talking about. They tell me that they do not have one. They check the system to make sure. Its all I can do not to go completely nuts in that store. I should have made a recording of myself in the car on the way back,
and sent it to best buy headquarters.
So this is where I am now. I have called around to every best buy in the state and surrounding states and none of them have the Xbox 360 Elite. I have a Best Buy gift card with $430 on it and an old xbox 360 that needs to be sent off for repairs. Im going back up there tomorrow to get the one that I returned. I will just have to call M$ and hopefully get them to send me a new power brick. Free of charge I hope. Thanks for listening to my rant. I know it may be childish and that there are other people with bigger problems than this, but it doesnt make it right that these businesses can do this kind of stuff to their customers. I just want what I pay for. If it doesnt work then give me my money back in cash, not a gift card and not in the form of a check that I have to wait half a month to get. I used to like Best Buy. Its a shame.

Opera Mobile (with Flash) coming to Android

charlie.collins — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:08:35 +0000

http://gizmodo.com/5331460/opera-mobile-for-android-means-flash-glorious-flash-on-every-android-phone

That's not Opera Mini, it's Opera *Mobile* - see the Gizmodo links to actual content for details.