fedward, tumbling

PSA P.S.

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:53:16 -0400

The code in that last post will leave other junk lying around on web sites that roll their own facebook features, and you’ll have to clean that up by hand. For example, here’s a rule to completely hide the facebook boxes on slate.com:

{
  "name":"slate facebook thingy",
  "urlRegex":"^http://(www.)?slate.com",
  "urlExcludeRegex":"",
  "enabled":true,
  "preserveDocWrite":false,
  "css":"",
  "html":"",
  "js":"",
  "filters":
  [
    {
      "tags":"div",
      "attribute":"id",
      "value":"fbog_module",
      "valueRegex":""
    }
  ]
}

You can use this and “view source” as a guide to cleaning this up on the sites you visit.

Public Service Announcement

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:46:21 -0400

If you:

Use Google Chrome;
Use the Personalized Web extension;
Hate the encroachment (and annoyances) of facebook everywhere:

Then use Personalized Web’s “load dump” feature and paste in the following (you might need to remove the whitespace, but if I know JSON syntax correctly you won’t):

{
  "name":"facebook everywhere",
  "urlRegex":"^http://",
  "urlExcludeRegex":"^http://www.facebook.com",
  "enabled":true,
  "preserveDocWrite":false,
  "css":"",
  "html":"",
  "js":"",
  "filters":[
    {
      "tags":"iframe,embed,script,img",
      "attribute":"src",
      "value":"",
      "valueRegex":"http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/"
    },
    {
      "tags":"iframe,embed,script,img",
      "attribute":"src",
      "value":"",
      "valueRegex":"http://www.facebook.com"
    }
  ]
}

You’re welcome.

architectureblog: Watha T. Daniel-Shaw Library / Davis Brody...

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 12:18:15 -0400

architectureblog:

Watha T. Daniel-Shaw Library / Davis Brody Bond Aedas | ArchDaily

Hey, I know that building!

randomdc: dvness: washington dc KS money clip by the...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 13:28:11 -0400

randomdc:

dvness:

washington dc KS money clip by the map

There. Fixed that for you.

A Joke That Only I Will Find Funny

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 09:09:05 -0400

Watch the Kelly brothers, who will command two spacecraft at the same time

Over men and horses, hoops and garters, lastly through a hogshead of real fire! In this way, Messrs. K will challenge the world!

How Being Stateful Would Improve Starbucks

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:55:00 -0400

As a followup to the REST rant the other day, here’s a digression that occurred to me:

Imagine that instead of buying a Coke at 7-Eleven (simple object acquisition with no preparation required), picture buying a coffee at Starbucks.

Now, I don’t actually hate Starbucks qua Starbucks, but I do hate two things about Starbucks. One of them is the coffee itself (over-roasted, excessively astringent), and the other is the order delivery process. (If you’re asking what that leaves, it leaves the ubiquity — bully for them! — and the cafe environment outside all the shouting, which generally involves non-awful music, comfortable chairs, and available power and wifi, all good things in my book).

There’s an interesting article about Starbucks that says their process is actually a good thing. The experience described in that article, however, is not the experience I have on those occasions when Starbucks is my only option. The article refers specifically to a correlation identifier. In my (admittedly small) sample of Starbucks experiences, the number of times my name has been written on my cup (or even asked for) is exactly zero. Without any correlation identifier, how do customers know whose (ugh) Venti® nonfat latte is whose?

In software terms, what Starbucks is doing is really just a half-assed version of asynchronous processing. When you do this in software, you (the client) register a callback. A software callback is the equivalent of giving the barista not your name, but your phone number. Many restaurants have those pagers for tables, which are essentially the same thing — when you register your callback, you’re given a handle, which is unique to you. You get the actual call (or the pager vibrates) when your coffee (or table) is ready.

The brute force software alternative to this is scheduled polling. You’ve probably had this experience at a poorly run Starbucks, actually, when the shouty person is inadequately shouty, and you have to keep returning to the counter to find out if your drink is done yet. The canonical example of polling in real life is “are we there yet?” But I digress even more.

The Starbucks problem is that they don’t have a proper callback, they just shout “Venti® nonfat latte!” In practice there’s no queue management. Everybody who ordered a Venti® nonfat latte (and I’ve never seen the number be less than two) has to figure out who’s where in the queue, with somebody invariably feeling like they’ve gotten their drink stolen. I’m not sure there even is a term for what sort of queue “management” that is. It’s just a mess.

But (and this is where this ties in to the previous rant) not only is the Starbucks model a callback done wrong, it’s a broken hybrid of REST and stateful services. They treat the part where they take your money like a REST transaction, queue the process of making your beverage, and then forget who you are. In a true stateful model, each cup would have a serial number (not a name), and they’d have to record the completion of the process to get the name that associates with that serial number. That way they’d have not only a 1:1 correlation of processes to customers, they’d actually know how long each process took in the real world and be able to see where processes could be improved and beverages could be repriced or eliminated from the menu based on actual data.

They could do this without writing anything or wasting paper, too. They could just have a hundred plastic coasters (forty would probably do it, actually) with numbers on them, so that a number (handle) could be reused endlessly. Put a cup on the numbered coaster and put the number into the POS terminal, along with the customer’s name (or hand the customer a pager tied to that same number). When the order is done, the shouty person keys the number in, the system records completion, and the shouty person can then thank the customer by name. Add the pager and they don’t even have to shout, making the environment for everybody else that much more pleasant.

Then they just have to start making better coffee.

A NEO-FUTURIST PLAY SIMULATING THE EXPERIENCE OF LYING ON A D.C. ROOFTOP TO WATCH A METEOR SHOWER

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 23:44:29 -0400

A NEO-FUTURIST PLAY SIMULATING THE EXPERIENCE OF LYING ON A D.C. ROOFTOP TO WATCH A METEOR SHOWER, GO!

BLACKOUT.

FEDWARD enters and lies center stage, feet stretched towards stage left. What seems like an eternity passes.

Someone throws a balled up piece of paper from the wings, SR to SL.

CURTAIN!

OK, DC coffee people. This is the Hario Skerton (Engrish for...

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:03:00 -0400

OK, DC coffee people. This is the Hario Skerton (Engrish for Skeleton) hand coffee mill. It is the larger of two made by Hario (the smaller one is called the mini mill). Your mission this weekend is to find me a store in the District or near-in suburbs that actually has one of these in stock, so I don’t have to order online. If nobody’s tracked one down by Monday morning I’ll order from Intelligentsia simply because they’re closer than everybody on the west coast and cheaper than the people in NYC. But if I can find one for under $50 here I’ll happily support my local coffee geeks.

Spread the word!

(photo via ah_blake on flickr)

Do You Have the Time?

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 11:36:05 -0400

When you’re a developer you read a lot of documentation. When you’re a technical point person for an organization, you read a lot of proposals. When you’re looking for work you read a lot of job listings. What this means for me is that I see a lot of buzzwords, and they drive me crazy (hint: there is no one Software Development Life Cycle, so referring to it with the definite article is a great way to indicate that you don’t know what on earth you’re talking about). I have many such complaints. Today’s is the description of a web application as being RESTful.

And now if you’re not a programmer, you probably are going to ask, “What’s restful about the web? Why is the REST part in all caps?” So I will now rewind.

REST is a design model for applications, generally (but not necessarily) on the web. It stands for REpresentational State Transfer. Here’s a real life example of a RESTful exchange:

“Do you have the time?”

“It’s 10:44 AM.”

In REST architectures, you (the client) ask for the state of something (a bit of data, the answer to a question), and the server answers you. Its answer is the representation of the current state of things. There is no implication that the information you have been given will stay true, but at the moment you ask the question (plus the amount of time it takes the server to process it) the answer is guaranteed to be true. If you ask again:

“Do you have the time?”

“It’s 10:44 AM.”

You might get the same answer again, depending on how quickly you ask. But you might not:

“Do you have the time?”

“It’s 10:45 AM.”

REST as a design model is two things: (1) completely obvious, and (2) somewhat revelatory in the software world.

Wait. Asking and answering is revelatory?

Uh huh. Before somebody actually described REST, the general assumption in client-server interactions was that the server would keep track of YOUR state, not just its own. Let’s expand our real-world interaction:

“Do you have the time?”

“Yes, sir, it’s 10:54 AM. Sorry about the wait; I’ll bring you a fresh cup of coffee and check with the kitchen.”

So part of that interaction is just a standard representational state transfer, but the other part demonstrates that the server is aware of your state (hungry, impatient, undercaffeinated) too. In software terms, this would be considered stateful. Until somewhat recently, this was the norm. It was assumed that the server needed to know the state of every client, because the client wouldn’t be keeping track. The client in this case placed an order for something (say, coffee and a cheese danish, warmed up), and the server’s job was not only to serve up the request but to keep track of it for as long as the transaction took to complete.

In software terms, though, this assumption doesn’t need to be true. A lot of software is designed around the assumption that the server should keep track of things that, really, it needn’t bother. The server doesn’t need to remember that it told the client what time it was, because that information is expected to change. If the client asks for something that requires no preparation, the server can just hand it off and be done, with the client, the transaction, everything. Somebody• finally sat down and said, “you know, this is actually a practical way of doing things, and not just a lazy one.” And then other people who had already been doing things that way saw that there was now a name for the thing they’d been doing all along (because it made sense), and it became a buzzword.

The somebody in question was an author of the HTTP specification and is generally a Very Smart Guy. REST was documented in his doctoral dissertation.

Here’s the thing, though: most of what happens on the web is RESTful, whether somebody thought to attach the buzzword to it or not. The things that maintain state are the outliers. Amazon remembers what you’ve bought, but 7-Eleven doesn’t know who you are when you pay cash for a 20-ounce Coke. They probably don’t even know who you are if you use a debit card to buy that Coke, because they only hold onto that information for long enough to process the transaction. You can keep returning to 7-Eleven for more Cokes, and the transaction will always be a RESTful one, even though the actual shopping experience at 7-Eleven isn’t particularly relaxing. But that doesn’t stop people from describing their applications as RESTful.

Again: REST means that the client asks for something, the server hands it over, and that’s it. If the client wants something else, that’s a whole new interaction.

But since most of the interactions on the web are RESTful by definition, saying that your web application is RESTful is like saying that dinner is SATISFYing (Scheduled, Aromatic, Tasty Intake of Sustaining Food, Yum: backronym subject to change by the time my doctoral dissertation is published). You’ve written a web app. Of COURSE it’s RESTful. Tell me something I don’t already know. Tell me when it’s something else. If you insist on telling me it’s RESTful, I’m not going to hear anything else you say over the voice in my head shouting about how you’re an idiot spouting buzzwords without knowing what they mean.

And I will now leave you with a line from the Simpsons, in the Itchy & Scratchy (& Poochie) writers’ room: “Excuse me, but ‘proactive,’ and ‘paradigm?’ Aren’t those just buzzwords dumb people use to sound important? … I’m fired, aren’t I?”

legoexpress: pootling: game night by djFargo (via)

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 20:10:07 -0400

legoexpress:

pootling:

game night by djFargo (via)

Mr. Crowell attributes his ability to achieve a good shave with...

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:43:50 -0400

Mr. Crowell attributes his ability to achieve a good shave with a basic blade to his strong putting game. “People who have a good feel for the contours of the putting green don’t need a fancy razor,” he says. “If you’ve got some degree of touch and feel, you can follow the topography of your face accurately.” (via Fancy Shavers Leave Some Men Feeling Nicked - WSJ.com)

My insanely expensive silvertip badger brush was my gateway into the world of old-school shaving. I think the $60 I spent on a chrome Merkur has already paid for itself in blades, and the actual shaving part doesn’t take me any longer with the double-edged razor than it did with a Sensor or Mach 3. Getting a good lather whipped up with the brush, on the other hand …

Now the only problem is that the blades I liked best were discontinued, and I had to go through another round of testing to find substitutes. Even an “expensive” double-edged blade is about a quarter of the cost of a single Fusion cartridge, though, so it was worth the trouble.

And it is surprisingly relaxing. Few things empty your mind like shaving with a double-edged razor.

"Reading all this, I find myself wondering why on earth writers would bother setting down rules for..."

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 14:40:08 -0400

“Reading all this, I find myself wondering why on earth writers would bother setting down rules for other people’s drinking. People telling you how to drink is every bit as tedious and annoying as people telling you not to drink at all.”

- Essay - Drink What You Know - NYTimes.com

The Best Backup Drive is Two Backup Drives

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 22:14:52 -0400

In the past year (or so) I have had four hard drives fail on me. Three of them have failed since about Thanksgiving, and the trendsetter actually kicked off this horrible slide something like a year and a half ago, but four drives in two years doesn’t sound as awful as it felt. Four drives in a year sounds much more awful, although still not actually as awful as it felt. But anyway:

The first was a Western Digital MyBook, 500GB. Its failure was one of error correction and firmware. Western Digital, of course, denies that anything could possibly be wrong with its drive firmware, but there you are. What happened in my case (and seems to happen a lot) is that the drive failed to seek a particular bit of data in the time it allots, and so it recorded an error. This happened a lot, as the drive was in use as DVR storage, and eventually the error count got so high that the drive decided it wasn’t going to work anymore. Age at death: 2 years. For what it’s worth, I voided the warranty* and got most of my data off, installing the replacement drive (a 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda) in its housing.

* You can buy an internal hard drive with a warranty. If you buy an external hard drive, even though the drive contained inside is the same thing you could also have bought at retail (with a retail part number on the label and everything), opening up just the housing (which is plastic bits that snap together) is considered to be beyond the skills an end user might have. Yes, this is a stupid distinction for the company to make. No, this is not the first time I’ve argued with a company about their warranty being inadequate. I bat about .500 when I do that.

The second drive to fail was the oldest of them all, a Seagate Momentus 4200.2 which was the OEM drive in my 1.42Ghz Mac mini. Age at death: 4.5 years. It seems to have died of old age as much as anything else.
The third item in this sad parade was that 1.5TB Seagate, you know, the one I bought to replace the 500GB MyBook. It died of a firmware bug that Seagate denies exists (it is JUST LIKE a firmware bug they eventually acknowledged in a different manufacturing run of the same drive, but they’d rather give me the finger than admit another firmware series has the same problem). Seagate also refuses to pay for data recovery (which they did for drives affected by the bug they did acknowledge), since in doing that they’d be admitting the existence of that firmware bug. Seagate can go to hell. Age at death: 1 year.
The final straw: two days ago the 320GB WD in my MacBook Pro failed to boot. Its power management won’t start up. Now, the MBP itself had a fall a week ago, but the drive worked for several days after that so it’s hard to say if the failure was caused directly, indirectly, or not at all by the fall. Anyway, the drive is dead. The MBP was long in the tooth anyway, with the screen bezel broken through on one side, keycaps falling off, and the LCD backlight starting to flicker with some regularity, but still, this was my main computer and losing its startup drive hurt most of all. Drive age at death: 2 or 3 years. I can’t remember exactly when I bought it.

When people ask me what kind of external drive to buy for backups, I tell them it doesn’t matter, just to buy two of them. The past year I’ve had provides all the empirical data I need in order to make that recommendation.

fuckyeahdc: 7th and M St SE. Ha! I didn’t even think of...

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:31:27 -0400

fuckyeahdc:

7th and M St SE.

Ha! I didn’t even think of submitting this. Thanks!

The Vista: a proposal for the SI unit for failure

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:45:23 -0400

penllawen:

Like the Farad, the Vista is an overly large unit for everyday use. Should you hit a patch of black ice and skid your car into a busload of nuns, you might say “I’ve had an awful day, it’s at least 600 milliVistas of fail”. NASA smearing the Mars lander across the surface of the planet after confusing metres and feet scores 3 kiloVista. Stubbing your toe getting out of the shower is around 2-3 microVistas, rising to 80 µVi if you cause a fracture.

Since Windows 7 is mostly Vista with a new hat, maybe the unit should actually be named the Bob.

"The process can frustrate employees, who may have a lot at stake — from a raise or promotion to the..."

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:31:10 -0400

“The process can frustrate employees, who may have a lot at stake — from a raise or promotion to the general arc of their career. And at the least, they want their contributions and talents to be recognized. Rather than using performance reviews, Culbert suggests that management “just tell the employee what he or she needs to do to become more effective.””

- Annual Job Review Is ‘Total Baloney,’ Expert Says : NPR

Oh come on, that will never work!*

* sarcasm

via ilovecharts

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 16:30:43 -0400

via ilovecharts

Digital Camera Question

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 15:29:48 -0400

Once upon a time, it was supposed to be a good idea to format memory cards in one’s digital camera instead of in one’s computer (supposedly something to do with either the mapping of bad blocks or the vagaries of FAT32 compatibility). My camera will, of course, happily format CF cards but it renames every one of them to EOS_DIGITAL, forcing me to rename them on the computer so I can keep track of them (otherwise I have no idea which 2GB SanDisk Ultra II card is which; 2GB_1 has different front and back labels, but 2GB_2 and 2GB_3 are identical down to the batch number).

Is this conventional wisdom still true? Does it even matter anymore?

Link-Supersized Cocktails - The Atlantic

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 22:44:10 -0400

Link-Supersized Cocktails - The Atlantic:

americandrink:

THE ADIOS MO-FO is among the most popular drinks sold at Howl at the Moon, at Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles. A friend and I ordered one on a recent visit, then watched the bartender deftly hoist and upend four bottles at once—rum, gin, vodka, and blue Curaçao—letting loose long strands of colorful liquid, as if from the udder of a magical cow. Sitting and sipping, I found the drink to be memorable in any number of ways. For one, it was very blue—more blue than any swimming pool I’ve seen, and roughly as enjoyable to drink. But mostly, I was taken by its swimming pool–like proportions: 86 ounces, served in what appeared to be a plastic paint bucket sprouting two-foot-long red straws.

Oddly enough, we’ve been looking for coupes for over a year now, but we still need to solve our glassware storage problem.

My blog just turned 2! Thanks for the Team USA victory, Landon...

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:06:24 -0400

My blog just turned 2! Thanks for the Team USA victory, Landon Donovan! It’s the best blog birthday present I’ve ever gotten!