Blogging for more than a year..

It's been more than a year since I started this blog. Wow. When I started the blog, I was working on finishing off the Shopgreen site, a site that was very well tested and laid out, but got no love (it really was kind of a dry project) from the higher ups.

A year ago today, I had just started on the CNN Trivia project for Red. Wait scrap that, I was waiting to get started on the trivia project and still working on shopgreen site while waiting for the 'producer' to figure out what to do. That project pretty much soaked up my time from July until it eventually finished after some delays in October, but was still ready for the re-launch of the Cnn site.

After that project I basically sat around for 3 weeks until I was let go the week of thanksgiving. Thanks, assholes. After that, I was annoyed with the whole prospect of having to work for another crappy non-engineering company and took the month of December off.

I started looking again in January, and with no work and no interviews beyond one at the beginning of the month, I started to get worried about paying to bills and actually applied for unemployment. But the interview earlier in the month panned out and I was able to tell the employment office that I didnt need unemployment after all.

February started with OpenID.. a crappy configuration hell project which made me doubt my skills as a python programmer due to bug after frustrating bug, most of which were in the repoze.who openid implementation. But at least I learned a ton about wsgi.

March brought the end of the OpenID project as it turned out OpenID didnt really provide what the tech lead wanted after all. At the end of the month I started on the Asset Admin project which entailed finally having to give up avoiding javascript/html/css. I've actually become rather good at it, but I'm still not entirely enthused about having to work on js/html projects.

In April I finished the first portion of the Asset Admin, the Playlist Editor, but due to work overload on the tech lead, it was never released. I completely rewrote Playlist Editor 5 times due to having to learn js/jquery at the same time, but in the end I was proud of the result. At the end of April I started on the second part of the Asset Admin, the Media Picker which was basically a continuation of what I had learned from Playlist Editor.

During May I continued working on the Media Picker, updating Playlist Editor as I learned more javascript/jquery tricks. Around this time I took the plunge into really understanding CSS. I got the two sub projects looking pretty good. I finished Media Picker and started on the last piece, the Asset Editor towards the middle of the month. I worked hard to make it so that the Asset Editor could be used anywhere (with Playlist Editor or Media Picker) and still look the same (no shifting of images or changing of heights).

But in June, the whole backend project which the Asset Admin was an administrative front end for was basically canceled through a decision by the parent company to allow serving of media through youtube and facebook etc. Everyone scrambled around looking for work until we started work on the current project which I'm not too keen on working on, the dashboard project, which is basically just a nice display of a bunch of CEO porn (aka random statistics about various things that are applicable to the company).

Non work related, I played soccer! From February '09 to August '09, I played soccer with the team we had at Red. Not since I was 17 in high school had I last played, but I was still one of the better players on the team. Surprisingly, one of the most artsy guys at the office was the best player on the team. We played for two seasons in which I had the most goals for our team the first season (3: headed the ball over the defender then blasted it in, the penalty kick, and the loose ball calm shot) but only got one second season (left footed shot!) That being said, we were a pretty sorry bunch with more than half the team having never played soccer before. Most scores were around 8-0 or some such.

In August, for the end of soccer party, I got drunk for the first time during an epic 14 hour pub crawl. Just a bunch of guys from the soccer team talking and drinking. Good times.

In October, the trainer I had been working out with for the past year finally opened his own gym. I trained with him in the gym as he was still building it; before the pull up bars were up, before the rubber mats were down. Previously we had been working out at one of those small gyms that big apartment complexes provide as an incentive to move in, but nobody really uses. And before that we were at some place in Monrovia which was owned by some guy who reminded me of a shorter smaller version of Mitch.

In November I got drunk for the second (and probably last) time during another pub crawl for JR's birthday. Wasn't as great as the first time as I ended up getting sick at the end of the night and had to crash at JR's place.

In December I did almost absolutely nothing.

In January I managed to find a job while continuing to save tons of money.

In February, my gf got a roborovski hamster (Hammie). A neurotic and seemingly suicidal hamster that is bascially crippled by fear. After a few weeks of having the hamster hurl itself from great heights to escape us, the gf got a second hamster. This one is a much more hamster-y hamster which we named 'Cookie'. Cookie lets us pet her and is very aware of heights and is generally adorable.

In April, for my birthday, the gf bought a second damn dog on complete impulse, chopped all her beautiful hair off, put on 15lbs, and was a complete bitch. The three weeks after my birthday she was basically the most unfriendly and bitch that I've ever known her to be. On several occasions I was bound and determined to call it quits, but I remained calm and kept telling myself that she was just going through some rough times. She eventually came out of it.

And so there's a year.

Windows Key remapping

So today I wanted to remap more than just capslock -> lctrl. I searched around a bit to try and find scan codes for registry hacks but didnt find much. I did find, this little tool, which is great but you need to make sure that you're editing boot mappings and not user mappings.

Go to Mappings-> Show and select 'Boot Mappings' to ensure that you're editing the right keys.

The "Big Lebowski" Office Management Method

Keesey: We'll just let stuff happen, man

jbum: "go with the flow"

Keesey: It'd be beautiful, you dig?

jbum: if a meeting wants to happen, it'll happen, dude

jbum: otherwise, it wasn't meant to be

Keesey: free your calendar and your mind will follow

wickedSA: the "big lebowski" office management method

Suppression.

"There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That's perfectly alright. It's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self correcting process. To be accepted, new idea's must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

The worst aspect of the Velikovsky affair is not that many of his ideas were wrong or silly or in gross contradiction to the facts. Rather, the worst aspect is that some scientists attempted to suppress Velikovsky's ideas.

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge and there is no place for it in the endevour of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system and the history of our study of the solar system shows clearly that accepted and conventional idea's are often wrong and that fundamental insights can arise from most unexpected sources."

- Carl Sagan: "Cosmos" Ep.4 - Heaven and Hell. It's on Netflix.

The Tedious Questions..

Q: In SQL what does 'Group By' do?

A: The GROUP BY statement is used in conjunction with the aggregate functions(avg, sum, etc) to group the result-set by one or more columns. Note that only the columns used by the GROUP BY statement can be used in the SELECT statement.

fred| 100
bob| 100
fred| 400

SELECT Customer,SUM(OrderPrice) FROM Orders
GROUP BY Customer

fred| 500
bob| 400

Disable Ease of Access in windows 7

Finally found a command that will completely disable Ease of Access in windows 7. On the command line, run

cacls %windir%\system32\utilman.exe /C /D Everyone

and hit Y when prompted. This will remove the functionality behind that stupid button on the windows screen and will stop the stupid ease of access dialog from popping up when you're typing in your password to the login page.

How to ask (and answer) a question

Asker (1): Heys, is the requirement that the service provider 'client' part be in a wsgi module?
Asker (2): I've got my test stuff running in a tornado instance simply for ease of development (dont have to setup/configure apache... simple yes, but still dont have to do it)
Answerer (1): i want to wrap wsgi things with it, in a wsgi serving framework -- sounds like it'd be a wsgi middleware of some sort
Answerer (2): tornado is completely different
Answerer (3): we're not gonna redo everything to use tornado
Answerer (4): you don't need apache for anything
Asker (3): ok, that's why I was asking

So the above is a recent q/a session that took place a few moments ago in the real world. There are a number of problems with this q/a session. We'll start with the asker first.

Asker line 1 is fine. It asks the question 'is it a requirement that something be done in a certain way'. Asker line 2 is trouble. It's adding potentially confusing details to the question which the answerer has to evaluate and determine if to ignore it or not.

Answerer line 1 is a perfect answer to line 1, but as we can see in answerer line 2, the answerer picked up on details in asker line 2 which were extraneous to the actual answer. This is common for people who are very detail oriented and don't let needless details slide. In doing this though, answerer is now making assumptions about asker and briefly discussing Tornado and Apache, which the asker didn't ask about. This is even more of an issue on the internet and potential flame bait when it comes to online discussions since asker can become annoyed that the answerer has assumed that asker doesn't know what tornado is or what apache is needed or not needed for and respond with inflammatory comments such as 'that wasnt what I asked, asshole' or some such.

This simple example illustrates the reason that brevity is not only the soul of wit, but the key to good communication. Ask simple questions, give simple answers, ignore needless details when required (either answering or asking).