For whatever reason (actually I have a very good idea what the reason is, and it’s that in vim I can easily adapt a regex by watching highlighting), I write regexes in vim much more easily than in Ruby or Perl. vim‘s regexes are powerful, but annoying because of how many characters you have to escape /? /) /( /+, etc. My good feeling from today:
Before:
After:
:-)
This is pretty hot: a holiday owl.
Ben said:
I am in colorado and I’m bored [….] please send me lengthy updates on your lives, situations, problems, joys, sorrows, aspirations, favorite kinds of cheese (melted and non-melted), etc.
Then, after I didn’t respond, he said:
btw you’re not off the hook for emailing me a rundown of your life and favorite types of cheese, ESPECIALLY the cheese thing because I got a $25 gift certificate to a famous cheese store for christmas.
So, now I feel pretty compelled to actually tell him my feelings on cheese. So be it. Here are the ones that I can actually remember anything about:
You know about American cheeses, so I’m not going to bore you with a further description here.
Well, I hope that provides some utility. I’ll try to update it if anybody leaves comments below or I think of more things.
We moved offices today, away from our two month stint in Inman Square to a place by my office, here. The new place is probably a mixed bag for us… We really liked the location, windows, and size of the old place, but didn’t really enjoy the noise of the traffic. The new place won’t have traffic, but since it’s an old porn studio, it’s got a very open floor plan. This comes into play when we realized we’d be sharing it with another startup, who are probably quite a bit louder than we are. That said, beggars can be choosers.
The new place:
The floorplan:
So, I did finally manage to get FreeBSD installed last weekend. There were a few factors stabbing me in the back (and making me slag FreeBSD more than it deserved). Specifically, I’ve decided, after about 15 tries, that:
So, I ended up getting it to work by installing it on my 4Gb SCSI from the FTP (remember, no IDE at all, so no CD drive…). The machine’s been up for 5 days now, so it’s been a bit of a success. Daniel says he’ll find me some more SCSI drives so that we can get the reasonable drive space.
Final notes:
Now for the box to blow up…
O’Reilly has a book called Building the Perfect PC. I have built many PCs in the last 6 or 7 years, starting with the machine that I built for myself to take to college. Yet, I have never built the perfect PC. In fact, almost every PC I’ve built then has used a significant number of parts from that first PC despite their growing age and lack of reliability.
Anyone familiar with builders of imperfect PCs knows that they, by definition, keep huge piles of garbage, which they call “parts,” lying around the house. After years of friction with my wife caused by my collection of (worthless) “parts,” I began reducing that collection. She seemed pleased.
Yesterday, Daniel and I went to PG’s house to pick up a computer that had died. I offered to take it home to store it. This morning, I brought the computer inside. “I thought we were trying to reduce the number of computers?” was all she said above her distainful expression.
So, I was pretty stoked to finally be playing with some new parts, rather than my horrible collection of broken hand-me-downs. It even has a1Ghz processor, faster than anything I’ve ever used. And it might even have a working motherboard (something I have a problem with).
Well, I got more angry looks when I went down to Colin’s and re-possesed on of my old machines that I had given to him (see above reduction in “parts”). I spent the afternoon playing around with hardware, deciding that I liked my case better than Daniel’s, and generally getting to do everything in the most difficult way. Then I got to install FreeBSD.
Daniel likes FreeBSD for some reason, so it’s what we’re using for the servers at work. I’d sorta like to assume that the problems I’ve had aren’t it’s fault. It’s driving me to thoughts like this:
WHAT THE [HE]CK?! I’ve tried to install this worthless piece of software on every single drive I own and it still won’t work!
So, I dunno why it refuses to write to any of the drives I have (maybe the motherboard is indeed screwed). It’s getting pretty annoying, as I’ve now switched hard drives more than 7 times (not all ATA either, I tried my SCSI first…).
Hmm… so much for new parts.
I just started reading Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore and am enjoying it quite a bit. The book was given to me by a colleague who thought it was a must read because of the startup. The basic premise is this: there’s a huge chasm that separates early adopters of technologies, who are prepared to make some concessions for the sake of new, cool things, and the early majority, who will use new things, but only if they’re practical. Moore posits that many high-tech companies fail because they never full grasp how to “cross the chasm” and reach the real majority, often mistaking their early sucesses as evidence of wide appeal. I can certainly think of a ton of emerging websites that haven’t crossed chasm…
Read more on Google Print or here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm
My younger brother wants a laptop for XMas, so I’m going to give him the Apple (Lombard) Powerbook that I acquired from Colin this summer (for free!). As soon as I got it, I took the time to get Gentoo running on it next to OS 9 (which I didn’t need). It ran fine and would even sleep after I played with it for a few days.
<Skip ahead to December.>
Now that it’s supposed to go my brother, I thought I’d clean it up a little. I grabbed the newest (“Breezy”) PPC .iso this morning in a few minutes (the Kubuntu servers were letting me download at >700Kb/s), burned the disc on my iBook, and slapped it in the old Powerbook. It booted without problems and installed everything (everything!) without making me do anything but select my country and language. I’ve never had such an easy time putting Linux on anything, let alone an old PowerPC laptop.
I spent quite a bit of time Friday evening and this morning trying to get a simple Ruby script to pull search data from Google’s crappy search API. There is a standard library for SOAP/WSDL stuff for Ruby here. It is, like so many other potentially good Ruby libraries, almost totally undocumented.
I played around with that for a while and failed to get anything useful. After a little more searching, I found ruby-google on the RAA. It looked promising, specifically:
Ruby/Google offers a higher-level abstraction of Google’s SOAP-driven Web API. It allows you to programmatically query the Google search-engine from the comfort of your favourite programming language, as long as that’s Ruby.
The aim of the library is to make the details of the raw data structures returned by the Web API irrelevant, in the process making the API more accessible for everyday use.
After installing it on amartya, our development server, I tried using the thing. It barfed with some error. I then tried tweaking it for a bit but gave up because the thing hadn’t been updated since mid-2003.
The rest of the evening and this morning progressed in the same way. Long story short: tried to get a Ruby version to work on 3 different machines (and OSes), gave up on Ruby.
I switched to Perl and happily found CPAN modules that looked promising, specifically Net::Google .
I then spent hours trying to install all of the dependencies for the CPAN meta-module on amartya before realizing that it was using 5.005_03!. After that, I gave up completely on amartya, tried on my Dreamhost machine, failed because I wasn’t root [yes, I know how to fix that but was too annoyed by this point], then failed on my iBook because I somehow screwed up the urllist to download from [yeah, I tried fixing that too].
Then I stopped and looked at Yahoo’s API. It worked out of the box (in Ruby). Here’s the basic code: (with WordPress escaping the double quotes for some reason)
require 'rexml/document'
require 'net/http'
APP_ID = "whatever_you_asked_Yahoo_for"
query = "a%20search%20string"
url ="http://api.search.yahoo.com/WebSearchService/V1/webSearch?appid=#{APP_ID}&query=#{query}"
response = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url))
data_xml = REXML::Document.new(response.body)
data_xml.elements.each("ResultSet/Result") {|r|
puts r.elements["Title"].text,
puts r.elements["Url"].text,
puts r.elements["Summary"].text
}
I wish I would have tried Yahoo in the beginning.
The weather forecasters around here love to make dire predictions about the winter weather. They may be true for other parts of the state, but they’re almost always laughably wrong for where we live in Somerville.
Yesterday, however, proved them right. The forecast was for 4-7″ of snow during the day, but they reduced that in the morning to 3-5″ and said that the high would be 35 degrees F. I, of course, was skeptical, as always. Boy was I wrong….
We ended up getting 6″ during the day and the visibility when I walked home from work was comically bad–probably less than 100 yards for most of the time. I would have frozen alive if the temperature had been any lower, as the winds were gusting about 25 mph.
The most exiciting bit was the lightning, which no one at work had ever heard during a snowstorm (even us Midwesterners). I had thought it was climatalogically impossible. There was even a plane struck by one bolt:
A Comair plane on its descent into Logan International Airport in Boston was struck by lightning Friday afternoon and made an emergency landing. None of the 32 passengers or 3 crew members on the flight were hurt. The plane, which suffered wing damage, was arriving from Baltimore. Logan Airport was later closed because of the weather, as were T. F. Green Airport in Providence and Hanscom Field in Bedford, Mass.
Then, this morning, I got to clean off the Prius so that Elizabeth could go to her stained glass class at the MFA. That took 15 minutes of shovelling and another 10 minutes just to get the silly car out of the snowbank. Oh, how it made me long for my old Audi wagon with all-wheel-drive.