Andrew's (Tumbling) Interwebdiary

Apr 1

Seventeen Years Ago in Hampton Roads

Excerpt from today’s Ledger-Star

Let’s take a moment to remember an event that occurred on this day 17 years ago: the day Mt Trashmore exploded. Thanks to Tommy Griffiths and Henry “The Bull” del Toro of WNOR, the only members of the local media with the courage to report the seismic anomalies and chemical irregularities, thousands of lives were saved. Though they were warned of the panic that would ensue, their commitment to truth and public safety set an example for local news to come.

“I told them, ‘The people that live around [Trashmore] are just a bunch of ignorant rednecks who’ll eventually die in meth lab explosions or tractor demolition derbies’,” said WAVY-TV 10’s Alveta Ewell. “‘Saving them will only forestall the inevitable’. But Griffiths and del Toro showed me the true measure of a newsman that day and I have striven to atone for my words ever since”.

Others were not so flattering. “For their defiance of the Council of The Trapezoid [the cabal of local news organizations in Hampton Roads], they should have been thrown into the Pit of Argonzac!” said Jim Kincaid, formerly of WVEC from his basalt tower in Elam, Virginia. “But that dastardly FCC stepped in and inflicted their own mediocre punishment before we could act. Oh, the agonies we had in store for them! When a man spends seven months with a broken back in a Vietnamese hospital, he learns a lot about the peripheral nervous system.”

In closing, we have only to say thank you, Tommy and “The Bull”, for you service to our region.

Keys to the cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach were presented by Mayors Fraim and Sessoms to Griffiths and the del Toro’s widow, Glenda “The Cow” del Toro.

Happy April Fool’s Day to everyone back home.

Feb 27

Mysterious DM-Salesforce Issue Solved!

I did my good turn for the day and wrote up a Salesforce issue on the dm-salesforce project wiki that held me up for an hour or so.

If you’re trying to use the ruby datamapper adapter dm-salesforce to connect to a sandbox and you get “INVALID_LOGIN: Invalid username or password or locked out. (SOAP::FaultError)”, you should take a look. The thing that really held me up was having to clean out my old version from ~/.salesforce.

Feb 11

From 15 or so years ago… It’s eerie isn’t it?

Feb 2

If your not familiar (warning: irritating singing ahead) with Microsoft Songsmith, it’s an application that adds background music to any song (or any spoken word for that matter).

Overall, the instrumentation is mediocre for a human, yet impressive enough for a completely automated process. I don’t think it’s going to put any musicians out of business, but it’ll enable scores of teenagers and emo-kids to record their “music” without running it through the filter of public scorn first. I fear for us all.

Soooo, how does it compare to the real thing? Some intrepid youtubers are trying to find out. Crazy Train sounds ridiculous. White Wedding actually makes a very interesting blue-grass murder ballot. Eye of the Tiger sounds like Against the Wind. Johnny Cash’s Hurt is ruined forever. And there are more…

Original report and more information from the Christian Science Monitor.

Dec 18

XRVG: Vector graphics library for Ruby

I’m looking forward to trying this out. From its philosophy section:

Nearly every programming toolkit that you may find, in any programming language, instanciates shapes with absolute geometrical coordinates. What that means is that if you want to do graphics programming with them, you rapidly get lost in a list of basic drawing primitives with lots of numbers, without being able to recover the abstract compositional content of the graphic.

Actually, a graphic is foremost a composition of basic shapes and color. It is not their absolute values (that is absolute spatial and color coordinates) but their relations that matters. This is even more true because our visual perceptive chain processes its inputs in a relative way, as paradoxical visual games highlight it.

As a consequence, XRVG strives to get rid of these absolutes, by using shapes and functions as numerical patterns to compute shapes and composition. Thus, if you want to draw five circles in a regular way, you must be able to do it without using trigonometric formulae to figure out where these circles have to be drawn. Instead, you just need to use a first circle and “sample” it five times to have subcircle centers.

Dec 8

Shoes 2 is out!

This looks pretty awesome. The more Shoes grows up, the more it seems like Ruby has finally found its GUI toolkit.

Nov 25

Entscheidungsproblem Solved Cheap!

Something tells me they’re not going to be able to deliver on time.

Nov 14

Shocking, absolutely shocking.

Ruby Proxy, or Roxy

Very interesting. I could see a lot of code cleanup that could be done with this.

Nov 11

Classic Neal Stephenson Article

I was reminded of this recently. When I started my first job at a telcom analysis firm, this was required reading. And even though it was 8 years old at the time (and 12 now) and makes many predictions that never arrived, it’s still a great primer to submarine cables. That and Neal Stephenson is awesome.

Fans of Cryptonomicon should find a lot to be entertained by.