wednesday night / a site for sore eyes
choose one:
a few recent posts;
links to embarassing things;
rss was for robots.
February 3, 2008
amateur hour in obamaland
what is obama thinking? scheduling an event in boston at the same time as the BU/BC beanpot game? this just shows how out of touch he is with today's... boston-area college hockey fan? anyway, i missed a friend's birthday party in october to see him (and patrick, who was great, as nat says) speak at the common, but honestly. it's the beanpot!
February 4, 2008
i called it
i think one of the first things i said last night after we finally got around to watching the game was that if the pats lose, bostonist was totally going to blame the red hoodie.
well, it happened.
the best part about watching the pats lose was the almost complete lack of emotional investment either way. or maybe it's because i am going to see seven hockey games in the next nine games?
February 4, 2008
never trust a wolf
robert, the beanpot is tonight; tomorrow it is our beloved saviours of freedom, the bruins, who do battle with the misanthropic sabres of the old empire from buffalo.
if you are in the area, subscribed to cable, and have a large enough tv, you can probably see joe eating nachos between periods behind the in-building studio. if you merely have radio or internet, your imagination must suffice.
February 10, 2008
my whole foods doesn't have oaty bites
they also kind of miss the forest for the trees (*ahem*) in this article: biofuels do nothing to help traffic congestion, make streets safer for pedestrians, especially children, or help build good neighborhoods, or reduce private debt, etc., etc., etc.
(of course this also goes for electric cars, despite their awesome benefits)
the first word in that article is also curious: almost? i have been led to believe that brazilian sugar-based ethanol may be the exception here, but it would have been a good time to point out another reason we should end our domestic corn subsidies.
not that i'm bitter. yesterday i finally went and rode the mattapan trolley line. they ride was definitely a little rougher than the new cars on the green line, but acceleration was excellent. the cars were very clean, and it being a saturday afternoon, plenty of seating was available. the scenery along that line is also not to be missed. all in all, a lovely trip.
February 11, 2008
off the grid
with no news on an end to the writers' strike in weeks, the other day i went down to my neighborhood best buy and picked up an HD antenna. i also subscribed to the brookline socialist internet service. today i took the final step: i canceled my cable service. well, the final step really is going out to arlington to return the cable box and cablecards (why the guy disconnecting the service can't pick them up, i don't know). so now i have an HD tv with rabbit ears, and listen to bruins radio broadcasts in 7.1 stereo. and i play records.
February 17, 2008
introducing Gom
for hack week, i decided to continue working on a project i started tinkering with a few months ago. i didn't think i'd get as far as i did, but here i am, ready to release it to the world.
or at least to the three people i think might be interested in it.
so, what is Gom? Gom is two things.
first, it is an implementation of the W3C Document Object Model (Core) Level 1 interfaces for GTK+. what this means is that it takes your widget hierarchy, and presents it as a DOM tree. you can use the painful DOM interfaces to manipulate your GTK applications in C.
the second thing Gom does is provide a JavaScript wrapper for the DOM apis, and a JavaScript runtime for running GTK apps. this lets you write GTK apps in a way familiar to web authors:
<GtkWindow title="Gom 0.0" ondestroy="quit()" border-width="20" default-width="200" default-height="50"> <GtkLabel label="Hello, World"/> </GtkWindow>
the C version of the above program is much longer. i would go so far as to say that Gom even looks nicer than these six other GTK hello world examples.
it may be interesting to note that my goal is not to provide a full JavaScript wrapper for GTk; it is actually to provide a featureful enough JavaScript runtime to support writing GTK apps using the wonderful jQuery library. this means XMLHttpRequest, which means you can write GTK apps using things like JSP, ASP.NET, or WebObjects, if you are crazy enough.
Gom is hosted at google code and has a google group. you can download gom 0.0.
February 19, 2008
america's most reviled team
toured fenway park
they didn't check our pockets
i stole a press phone
February 20, 2008
last night i ate my weight in fried mac + cheese
static void dialog_button_clicked_cb (GtkDialog *dialog, gint response_id) { if (response_id == GTK_RESPONSE_HELP) g_warning("help"); else gtk_main_quit (); }
yeah, i have no idea why someone might submit a bug report saying help doesn't work.
February 21, 2008
trying to bite my tongue
the atlantic has a mostly fluff piece about the oncoming reversal of the greatest mistake in american history (so far). my advice? buy suburban real estate now, and wait 50 years for everyone to realize suburbs were a good idea after all.
February 25, 2008
some followups
off the grid: well last thursday came and went without a ring from the rcn guy, until the evening when my landlord called to ask if i'd done anything with the cable; theirs was off. i told her that i had canceled it, and this latest bout of idiocy was just another reason for that action.
you see, last summer, in order to save some money between hockey seasons, i tried to set up what those in the industry call a "seasonal disconnect." this means that, while you are on vacation, or not watching tv, or whatever, they won't charge you, and i was assured there'd be no reconnection fee when i restored service in the fall. i guess i never wrote about it here, but basically every month i called rcn asking why there was a new $300 charge for unreturned cable cards, and was given a $300 credit. they were a little dumb, or something, because in the end, with all the credits, i don't think i even paid for my internet service, plus the tv worked all summer.
all throughout this, my landlords downstairs kept having their cable turned off. the lines for our units come to the house in different places, and for whatever reason the service guys don't know which is which. so, when i canceled my cable two weeks ago, i tried to insist that the guy contact me when he came to turn it off, so that they didn't do the wrong one. so i had to get up realy friday and wait four hours until the guy finally showed up at 12:15 (he was supposed to be there by 11).
the reception on my antenna works even better after i adjusted it a little and moved my airport. the internet service is pretty ok; there are problems when i'm playing to an express and trying to download something, and i don't know how to fix that.
awful vpn software: also, after ditching rcn, my vpn connections now stay up forever, instead of being disconnected every 45-90 minutes. i downloaded an iso (7 hours, umm, this isn't fios) in one shot! amazing.
whew, next!
Gom: while it has not gotten as much attention as i may have hoped for, i am increasingly convinced that it is awesome. i spent much of the weekend finally getting support for "native" GObject property access and signal connection. that is, you can do widget.title = "footitle!" instead of via the dom api widget.setAttribute ("title", "footitle!").
i also wasted a ton of time writing unit tests that will always pass for the code that converts GValues to jsvals. i did find one or two bugs, so it was well worth it, but i don't think the tests are good enough. it's a start, at least, and thinking of some cases to break it won't be difficult.
unless some unforeseen social happenings develop, i hope to get a much more useful release out next weekend, after merging the dom and JSObject-based attribute and event code. will it be awesome enough to get someone on a planet to link to it? only time will tell.
and, finally.
the atlantic article: call me simple, but i'd choose hardwood doors over air conditioning, having cupboards, or ice-free stairs any day.
the election: the debate sketch was terrible, but the milkshake one was really great. i need to go watch it again. but without that stupid ad at the beginning. grr!
February 27, 2008
in theory it shouldn't even exist. ...
... but it does, and nobody knows how to combat it without intensifying unemployment on the one hand, or inflation on the other. The puzzle of stagflation has done more than destroy expectations of smoothly running, manageable economic life in already well developed economics. It has destroyed the very intellectual foundations upon which all schools of macro-economic theory rest. The reality of stagflation has done nothing less than make nonsense of some two centuries and more of elaborate theoretical thought.
for those of you interested in reading more about stagflation than wikipedia will tell you, i greatly enjoyed reading the above book. i must confess, however, that this may have been only the second economics book i have ever read. the first, read the previous weekend, being her earlier work, the economy of cities. catwof continues where this book leaves off.
i have not yet looked for the latest and greatest on stagflation theory, but as a casual observer it seems like people still don't know what's going on? any appropriate recommendations on the subject would be greatly appreciated. it's an open call for indoctrination.
anyway, part of her theme is that economies are real things, not some abstract machines, and are shaped by real events. the economic decline of the london docklands and manhattan docks had nothing to do with interest rates, foreclosures, or any other theoretical calculation: it had to do with the very real fact that containerization came along, making the labor of many people basically worthless. in the name of "protecting" their jobs, london and new york missed out, and the ports of felixstowe and elizabeth grew savagely. if you'd like to read more about containerization, the box was a fascinating read.
unrelatedly, upon joe's recommendation last week that the latest minefield nightlies were superfast, i gave it another try. while the continued lack of keychain support is less and less annoying with each password i manually import into firefox, there were a couple of things that bugged me that seemed a little more within reach. so, hmm, my first firefox patch first firefox patch, almost ten years late.
god those toolbar bookmarks are embarrassing. but at least i could keep tabs on my interrupts, unlike on a modern machine.
it's too bad i didn't act on an earlier desire - the now-obvious tabbed browser - but i guess i should feel a little ok in that it probably would have been a little much. i did, however, manage to hack in my own throbber. it happened to be a W that morphed into an N. wonder why i picked those letters...