Brandon's Blog

4/13/2009 #

Music Exceeds the Headphones

I am almost taken aback this morning at how good Better Than Ezra’s Deluxe actually is, once I stop pressing the “track backwards” button each time “Good” finishes playing.

I always saw this album as being kind of a bee-bop alternative precursor to the much more sophisticated, polished, and beautiful Friction, Baby. Baby is certainly all of those, but Deluxe is better assembled than I originally had assumed.

They lay down a nice jam progression in “Rosealia,” and “Cry in the Sun” evokes quite a bit of Black Crowes for me. I’d like to hear a purely acoustic rendition of “Porcelain,” because the bongos really work for me. Altogether very much fun to work my way through between hacking up a lung on the way to work this morning.

My hand muscle massage hocus pocus must not forestall new exotic international illnesses, because I’ve been totally wrecked by a nasty cold all weekend. I’m just glad to be getting it out of my system before London.

I read through the Wikipedia entry on the Stone Temple Pilots this morning, and I am struck at how many grunge bands got panned by Rolling Stone as being Pearl Jam soundalikes. Apparently, in one year STP was voted best band by fans at the same time the editors voted it worst band.

STP was headbanger hard alternative. This was punch beat, high energy music for working through deep personal issues and angst by rattling your brain around and slinging water off your 8” combed-back grunger hair.

It was good music. Trippy, playful, but not too progressive. I’m sure we’d all like to see a present-day David Bowie or Rush show up to save us from this rat crap we’re being served up now, but we don’t need hundreds of those types of guys. I think the nineties was such an incredible time, everyone could afford to be a little too picky.

Sometimes you just need to tap your foot, bang your head, or ask a girl to dance. I mean, Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4” might be pretty musically important, but “Colour My World” is a better song to me.

As to the title, my new snazzy blue Phillips headphones have already (1 month or so?) found a way to sever the connection to the left bud. Not a big loss for work listening, as I tend to keep the boss-facing left ear unbudded, but it’s a serious deal-breaker working my way down the noisy Buyukdere Cd. on the way to work.

How many sets of earbuds have I thrown away in my life?

4/13/2009 #

Around the Bend Again

I’ve decided that a sound bar (Yamaha-made) is the way to go for the Pearland house’s living room audio needs. These are made for people exactly like me, who want more fidelity at higher volumes without (1) installing a 5.1 system, or (2) spending a whole bunch of money pointlessly.

My Wife Acceptance Factor band (generally just slightly a subset of my own acceptance range) is especially narrow because our “TV nook” architecture doesn’t give me a lot of room to place a bunch of souped up free-standing equipment without pretty much putting it in tripping hazard territory. Plus, this stuff generally looks hideous enough without being crammed somewhere it clearly isn’t meant to go.

Sound bars are elegant and include the receiver (it takes special technology to drive an array of speakers meant to project sound in different directions). The Yamaha versions provide a iPod dock functionality through an inexpensive attachment, and the look is more than acceptable given you’re installing one module (and maybe a subwoofer attachment behind the table somewhere) that drives something like a well-placed 60 W at a decent level of quality.

Uniquely, the WAF is more permissive of a 5.1 system primarily hanging from the ceiling, but this is such a visual and logistical mess I personally can’t take it. I’m more a recessed-speaker guy for surround systems, which for various architectural reasons would look terrible in our house.

Most negative reviews seem to come from Monster Cable buying types who actually expected to get 5.1-quality surround out of a mono-located system. Give me a break.

In fact, the next best option is actually just a really good 2.1 computer speaker system. They’re really not that bad!

Our big problem is our living room backs up against the kitchen, which is open floorplan in a big way. This is not the ideal installation case for a sound bar (since it must count on various angles of reflection to make the surround thing work right). But, this floorplan is not the ideal case for just about anything home theater-wise.

When you don’t have a back wall, it’s hard to know where you would even install the two rear channels. I’m sure Tweeter or whoever [did Tweeter go broke?] would come out and say it’s no sweat when installing using the proper credit card, but I’m really just looking for an acceptable solution for basic stuff. Even if the sound bar can’t be a 5.1 mimic, it’s pretty nice to have a decent slim-featured receiver without needing a discrete unit.

4/9/2009 #

Whoa Man

This section of the Python docs blows my mind in a unique way.

How many code sections in Sigma could be refactored to take advantage of this delightful grammar?

Anything that looks like this is a top candidate, and I know I’ve written a bunch of loops like that.

For those for whom something like Python documentation induces vomiting:

Modern computer languages are completely incredible in the way they permit expression… expression! Meaning things are more like a dialogue and less like a bunch of control sequences like

10   PRINT "HELLO"
20   EXIT

This is especially true for flow control, which is pretty hard to teach a newcomer because you’re teaching them to think like a computer. Things like printing to the screen make sense in an in-out fashion, but once execution paths start looping, skipping, recursing, etc., things get more abstract to an accomplish-the-task mindset.

Languages like Ruby do this with cuteness. Their grammar is very adaptive, kind of fluid. This tends to be how Ruby people think, as well. I’m not dissing Ruby here (although elsewhere in this blog it is available).

Python works very pragmatically. To me it is almost like every programmer in the world was basically given a yes/no vote on each feature, and only the popularly-needed ones were included. I like this feeling very much. It’s like you’re backed up by common sense.

4/9/2009 #

Efendi Moves Along

The blog project, efendi, moves along at a much quicker pace now. Templates are being generated on the admin side (the published side is trivial comparatively). The data store is ready to go and all packed up in a nice ORM ball, which is a first for me. Still no capability to get anything into the database as of yet, but with the class approach this shouldn’t be as hard as getting the tables sketched in.

I’m using git for version control (totally locally from my server), and I have to say I’m enjoying it now that I’ve started with the local no-remote scheme. As I am prone to do, my first test case was a two-way mirrored remote repository scheme, which crashed and burned horribly and really scarred my opinion of the software.

Anyway, I should have some interesting proof of concept up soon. The admin side is tastefully pimped up with AJAX, so there are a few sliding text boxes and live previews. I couldn’t help myself.

4/8/2009 #

You Can't Have One and Then Laugh at Another

Why do people say the MUD is dead when I have to stare at a telnet window to get the financials for a company with over a half billion dollars in net assets?

And Sigma tolerates bad key presses better than this IBM AS/400 terminal ever has. They actually gave us a “RESET” button if things go really wrong.

4/8/2009 #

Antechondriac

I’m not one to hang out with the granola eaters, but I just tried the thumb-forefinger massage thing and it seems to help somehow, perhaps in that delightful placebo way.

I decided it was a good time to experiment, because I’m not sick at all, but I just have some sinus pressure from a weather system or something here.

This also exposes the vulnerability of the male psyche to hoodwinks, as I didn’t think the technique would work until I saw the warning to pregnant women about uterine contractions.

This is incidentally also how I selected my soap scum cleaner back in the States.

4/7/2009 #

If Only

How would the internet be different if Microsoft had chosen white instead of gray as the background for a transparent PNG in IE6?

4/6/2009 #

Turkey on CNN

This video was pretty interesting to see. In addition to featuring the very strange Garanti posters we’ve been wondering about for a few weeks, you get some amusing man on the street interviews and a few views of the Ayasofya.

And, I have to put this in: I’m not going to contest their existence, but we’ve been here for a little while now and do a lot of walking through touristic and non-touristic areas, and I have never once seen a “water pipe cafe.” And the only time I’ve ever even seen a water pipe is in the tourist zones of the Grand Bazaar and a few old ones at antique stores. The authority on all things Turkish mentions it as a new fad in some trendy bars and cafes.

By the way, the big square thing in the background at 1:58 is a drinking fountain from the Ottoman era! It’s around the Sultanahmet neighborhood (Sirkeci? Kristin’s the expert.) on the way to the Blue Mosque and Ayasofya.

4/2/2009 #

You're The Nonsense In My Life, You're The Inspiration

I don’t defile a great Chicago ballad for nothing: this templating language really sucks.

When I first saw this while shopping for blog platforms, I said, “Hey, XML tags, that’s hip.” Then I realized that almost the entirety of Textpattern templating involves obtaining the state of the application from the template. Especially whoppers like <txp:if_article_list />. Now it inspires me to do something simpler.

These conditional tags seem noble at first. Whenever a programmer hands off to a designer, any attempt to hand logic in addition to content can kind of be seen as a magnanimous gesture.

But, seriously, who is filling out the forms here? The program kicks logic capabilities out to a flat unexecutable text file, which bounces back questions to the program, which answers them, which in turn results in a submission of a sort of post-processed template to the program again, to put the values back in the blanks.

Why didn’t the program just retain the logic capability? It always knows its own state!

I mean,

<body>
  <div id="content">$content</div>
  <div id="menu">$menu</div>
</body>

What’s wrong with that? Let the decisions be made upstream. Demand-Pull. Let the themer override rendering patterns (like how an article node is displayed), and provide a fallback so no configuration is technically required. Almost every template engine’s tutorial I’ve seen lead off with “See? You can put your for loop right there in the template so all your articles will render!” No. Or better yet, Why?

Framework-itis, I think. Passing too much control on to the designer.

This is a blog. Stacks of articles with links to individual articles with comments forms. Nothing too tough about it.

I got Framework-itis with Sigma’s combat system during the stall when I didn’t do anything with it. I wanted to hand the designer all the little choices. In the end, the ultimate framework is the programming language that you’re using to write the framework. If you’re not making some decisions for them, they might as well write it themselves.

So, when the program sees that it’s in an article list and needs the $content variable, it asks the theme override (or the default) how to render an article list. The theme replies with a pattern for stacking articles. Then, the program needs to figure out how to render individual articles for the stack, it asks how to do that. The answer comes back.

This is actually the same information as before, but I contend that the average designer will not need to modify many of the things, especially workaday items like how to stack articles. This is even moreso the case when CSS is provided for richly (lots of id and class attributes in th default), which allows skinning via CSS instead of <div> tag monkeying.

Plus, you’re keeping the theme pure by making all the conditional decisions for it. All the theme does is talk back when it’s time to render something.

4/2/2009 #

There

Well, hard drives are certainly There, with my $60-$80 benchmark price spread now occasionally being occupied by 1 TB drives. With an onboard cache larger than the total memory in some old Pac Bells.

I feel like CPUs got There on muscle at about the P4 2.8GHz, and the Core 2 line got us There on efficiency, heat, and elegance.

Laptops aren’t There. Not a single component.

This, while a Gigabyte rather than my beloved Intel and ASUS, may be There. Dual LAN, 16 GB memory support, dual firewire, modern CPU support.

Being There is so nice. It kind of makes you want to sit back and let out a Vonnegutian “If this isn’t nice, what is?”