Ravings of an Intermittent Fool

While watching Survivor the other night it struck me that when voting people out, there is so many variations on how the contestants spell each other's names. You would think that being stuck out in the middle of nowhere with these people would afford them plenty of chances to learn this simple bit of information. Although, truth be told. I bet asking a fellow tribe member how to spell their name shortly before tribal council must be a big faux pas.

Too bad I don't program in Lotus Notes anymore because this article on Notes and Eclipse would have been helpful. Basicly it goes through all the steps necessary to develop Java agents in the Eclipse editor and how to connect up the Eclipse debugging enviornment to the Notes Server. Apparently exposing the switch that enables debug support in the Notes JVM is a relatively new feature (it wasn't there back when I was doing dev work).

Thanks to Josh for pointing out that RSS feeds including ones for individual shows. Its been on my personal TODO list to scrape the sites of Day to Day and Fresh Air for quite some time now. Thanks to Josh's find, I can scratch that task off the list.

Of all the new tv shows this fall season, I have been most pleased with Lost from ABC. Basicly the plot is that an trans-Pacific flight crashes in the middle of nowhere onto a mysterious island. The crash survivors are equally mysterious and that's all part of the fun: trying to figure out the backstories of the survivors and what in the world is going on with the island. I won't give anything away but its got me excited and has me tuning in next week to find out more.

A couple of asides: The production values for a network broadcast show is tremendous. The CG work is excellent and the initial confusion of the crash is expressed so well to the viewer...you are confused and disoriented along with the characters. Also, the series is shot in Hawaii as far as I can tell and its always nice to see such beautiful vistas week in and week out.

Last night I was watching Angela reading the Oprah Magazine and I noticed an interesting name in one of the articles. The article featured three pull quotes from readers and one of them was named 'Vendetta'. I would love to meet the person who names their child Vendetta.

I've been using the Related Entries MT plugin for quite sometime now with great effect to show related entries on each entries' permalink page. I just recently reenabled it in this blog and noticed that it was giving incorrect results (i.e. it was showing the last n entries from the site overall, rather than last n related entries). After pouring through the comments on the related entries site and some of my own investigations, I found the solution. The problem stems from an issue with the plugin. Out of the box, copious warnings are issued about unitialized variables and array offsets but the plugin works fine. In the comments, a patch is suggested. Applying it removes the warnings but causes the problem that I was experiencing. (I applied the patch without thinking and didn't bother to check the results). I decided to try the simplier suggestion found in the code to explictly give the $method variable a value:

my $method = "primary_category";

and then removed the my keyword from the next line. This removed the warning about the uninitialized variable but left one about the array indexes. The problem line in question was:

splice(@entries, $lastn)

I'm no means a perl person (I favor python), but some quick web searches helped me decipher the intent of this line. The splice function in this case takes an array and an offset and truncates the array starting at that offset. I surmised that this warning is being raised when the size of the array is smaller than the offset being used (i.e. Show me 10 related entries in a category that only has 5 entries). A few more web searches on how to find the size of an array in perl yielded this code to fix the problem:


if ( scalar(@entries) > $lastn) {
splice(@entries, $lastn)
}


Voila! That feels pretty good to a person who actively avoids perl at all costs. I realize that perl undoubtable has a terser syntax for what I just wrote, but to me that feels the cleanest and most straightforward approach to the problem.

Back when we brought the eTango Blogs online again after the huge crash/hack attack, we changed the network architecture slightly to use a cheaper networking scheme in Billy's apartment. What we did since we only have one static IP address is to run one box with Apache and mod_forward. This lets us proxy connections to all the internal boxes where we have various websites running. This works very nicely but has the downside that the downstream web server sees the client IP address as the proxy web server rather than the true client IP address. This sucks because the logs become less useful and any IP based tools in the blogging software is neutered. The solution is mod_rpaf or Reverse Proxy Add Forward. This was simple to install and simple to configure. I was quite pleased with how well it went. My only complaint is that the website for the mod doesn't list an e-mail address where I can send a short note of thanks.

Did I just hear John Edwards say that he is for 2 cent screws? :-)

This is very cute.

I saw this on the guy taking my money at dinner tonight. I just knew that there had to be a website for it.

I love the idea of the Google SMS Service. What a cool way to get some local search results. I also like that they have already baked in support for the dictionary. That something I use big Google for all the time and can see myself using a lot when I am on the go. Just like Gizmodo, I have tried using the service a few times today and haven't gotten any replies yet to my queries. They must be getting hammered.

Update: I just tried it again before heading to bed and it worked. Not super accurate results but pretty cool nonetheless. I look forward to using this more in the future.

Tonight's dinner was Rachel Ray's Pasta al Forno. It was very easy to make and very accomodating of added ingredients. For example, I added some Ricotta cheese to the pasta mixture before it went into the oven. Damn tastey. I highly recommend this dish.

I'm not sure how long this has been the case, but I have recently noticed that the excellent TV Column in the Washington Post now sports a seperate RSS feed. It looks like their RSS page for the whole site lists lots of per column feeds. I know I recommended this to them when they first announced limited RSS support. What a nice addition to the site and will certainly make me want to use it more (and it warms my heart that my idea was implemented).

I have recently said that I love the new Google SMS service. Now, there is GooglME which is a great little J2ME app that makes using the Google SMS service prettier and easier. I am running the app on my Nokia 6600 and it works great. The only thing that I would add to the app is to be able to receive the returned SMS messages from Google directly in the app. I have to read up on WMA to see how feasible it would be to implement that.

(via Russell Beattie)

ABC is on a roll this new fall season. I've already said Lost is excellent. Add Desperate Housewives to this list. Its all about a series of familes who live on one block who are forced to stop and think about their own lives and happiness after one of their seemingly perfect friends commits suicide. Its got intrigue, comedy, drama and a nice juicy mystery (just why did she kill herself?). The show is well written and I have yet to see a weak link in the ensamble cast. Its got me tuning in each week (and by the way ABC seems to be rerunning this show on Saturdays). Check it out, you won't be disappointed.

I don't always agree with their editorial opinion, but I do enjoy their programs. That's why I just made a donation to one of my local public radio stations. I've ben wanting to do this for some time now but found myself in a quandry somewhat since there are at least two other public radio stations that I can pick up (including one that is closer to me physically than the one I dontated to). The other thing is that for the most part, the shows I like are the national NPR shows like Fresh Air. I rationalized my support to the local station because a.) NPR's website didn't make it easy to donate to them (they seemed more focused on big time donors from foundataions) and b.) I listen to the station I donated to the most, mainly during my drive home from work. In the grand scheme of things, I didn't make a huge donation but its important to support the thing that helps me ease my way home.

While running today, I caught a marathon of Season One of Arrested Development on FX. What a pleasant reminder of the funniest and wittiest show of last season. The Season One DVDs will be released Tuesday. I highly recommend picking this show up or at least renting the discs when they become available. The writing and acting are superb. They really make such a weird and twisted family come to life. Also, all the twists and turns all come for circle for some amazing conclusions which remind me of Seinfeld at its best. Reading my previous review of the show, I can't help but think I like it even more than I did then. Good news on that front, according to the show website the second season starts on Sunday November 7th. I can't wait and neither should you.

Last Tuesday, Tim, Cuong, Josh and I headed up north to play a round of golf at the Blue Ash Golf Course. I'm not much of a golfer, but this was a challenging course. Lots of water and hilly terrain. I played awful except for draining a 30 foot putt. But considering that I know I am awful, none of that matters. I had a good time, so that is what is important.

More pictures are available.

I finally got around to recreating the All eTango Blog feed. If you need to find it later its linked in the side bar on the site home page.

Just came across the Easter Egg Archive. Its nice collection of hidden features found in software. This site is nice because it also includes Movies, DVD, hardware and Music CDs eggs in addition to the software ones.

Here is my first attempt at making a Bookmarklet. In this case it is used to open up the MT Blacklist tool to despam a user supplied comment. To use this, you will have to modify the text below to point to your MT Blacklist instance and then make this a bookmark in your browser.

javascript:document.location='http://people.etango.com/cgi-bin/mt-blacklist.cgi?__mode=despam&_type=comment&id='
+prompt('Comment ID?', '');

Electoral-vote.com is the best electoral map/site that I have seen so far in this political season. Lots of good information and a very clean, ad-free site. It even offers an RSS feed with frequently updated information. I just wish I would have found out about it sooner.

Thanks to Tom for sending me the link.

BiddingForTravel.com is a site that I came across today in a New York Times article. It is a group of people who share information about their tips and experiences with Priceline.com. The site has a lot of users and lists historical accepted bids on a per-city basis. If you are armed with this information (and the tips that they give you), you will certainly increase your chances at having your bid accepted. I think these kinds of things are great because it really shows off the power of the web to organize and share information. It makes the marketplace much more transparent. I look forward to the next time I travel so I can try and put this new found knowledge to use.