I think I spent 3 hours in the past couple of days looking at this stuff. Really, anything passes as entertainment for me lately. But cmon, it’s kinda funny, isn’t it?? NO??? Sigh.
sitez ta clik on da internets for piks: http://icanhascheezburger.com/ and http://lolcat.com/
Got this as part of a spam today. The whole “image message” thing isn’t new, but the “skewed image” seems to be, to me anyhow. Anti-anti-spam-OCR?
Well, it’s been forever (nearly 4 years I think!) since Val and I saw Prince in concert… which is pretty much an eternity by our standards. But we did catch him at the Orpheum theater this weekend, thanks hugely to our friend Dale who sold us his extra set of tickets. It was a good show, a good mix of hits and newer stuff, a nice Pink Cashmere-seque thing, and the highlight was a bunch of the Escovedo family onstage rockin’ out a Salsa version of Glamorous Life preshow and then with Prince doing a funky rendition of Alphabet Street. Good stuff. Now, the audio was too loud (my ears hurt for 48 hours afterward) and got distorted a bit much about halfway through, and Prince did goof once and say “thank you Las Vegas!” (DOH!) but overall, as usual, a great experience. Oh, and hey, a huge plus–he didn’t end on Purple Rain! It was PR then Let’s Go Crazy this time, to switch it up.
Was it worth $170/ticket? Yeah, Prince is pretty much worth whatever the ticket costs 
Oh, it’s been a bit of a death march, having taken over the Brand Universe project from a different team 6 weeks ago, throwing out all of their code, starting over with a brand new team, and creating this site from scratch, while trying to keep in mind this has to be modular enough to launch 99 more in 2007, and eventually with no engineering assistance for a new instance. Oh, and of course the new requirements from the SVP 10 days before launch! But, we launched it last night, the team kicked ass, and it looks pretty nice. There’s a few bugs, and we’re doing another push shortly, but it’s great stuff. Check out the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End site on Yahoo!
[tags]TextMate, apple, software, coding, blogging, emacs, Ruby, rubyonrails, wordpress[/tags]
I’ve been trying out [TextMate][] for a couple of weeks on the Mac. So far, I’m really impressed, and very likely to fork over the license fee (around $75). Which is really quite a lot for an editor when you consider the wealth of good editors already out there, and free, not the least of which is Emacs, which I’ve been happily using on and off for hmm, probably 15 years at this point. Sure, I’ve forayed into the Visual Studio IDE when I was developing on Windows, and used the Borland (text-mode) environment when I wrote a lot of Turbo C++ before that; I’ve toyed with Eclipse as well more recently. But Emacs ports on the Mac aren’t too great (including stability issues), and TextMate pretty much seems to be written with an Emacs state of mind with regards to extensibility, etc. It even has some Emacs keybindings lurking in the default configuration.
But what got me on this kick was playing with [Rails, or RoR, or Ruby on Rails][rails], the almost sublime web-application framework built on [the Ruby language][Ruby]. It seems a lot of the influential RoR community, are Mac-heads and use TextMate for developing code. The Ruby support in TextMate is quite good, and there is special ‘modes’ to use Emacs terminology (’Bundles’ to use TextMate terminology) just for Rails as well. And they’re very nice.
My essentially frothing at the mouth praise for Rails and Ruby can wait for another post, although let me say they are both quite excellent, especially if you keep in mind the problem domain, and don’t think of them as C++ or J2EE replacements. (But PHP and typical Java web app replacements, well that’s another story… and I recommend reading [O'Reilly's Beyond Java book][Beyond Java] to get it.) The interesting bit is how much having an excuse to feel out the editor and understand some of the hooks and extensions available for it, have made me really understand how it can empower me. I guess it was always that way with Emacs as well, although the alternative was something edlin-ish (I don’t think the Prime I first started using it on had a vi port, even.)
But here’s my first words on this: TextMate is excellent, so far. Ruby (and Rails) are as well. I feel excited to be exploring this stuff.
and p.s., this blog post was written and edited from within TextMate using the ‘blogging’ bundle and [Markdown][], via the [PHP Markdown Extra][] plugin for WordPress! About all it needs now is to support the [Ultimate Tag Warrior][] plugin, and I’m never using WordPress’ writing interface again… from my Mac anyhow. (**Update** it seems you can still get the main tagging stuff to work if you turn on ‘embedded tag support’ in UTW and then use the SimpleTag format. Cool! Thanks to [this blog post][vimposting] about posting from vim of all things, for the hint!)
[vimposting]: http://coopblue.com/blog/2006/06/posting-to-wordpress-from-vim-with-tags-and-markdown/
[Ultimate Tag Warrior]: http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
[Beyond Java]: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/beyondjava/
[Ruby]: http://www.ruby-lang.org/
[rails]: http://rubyonrails.com/
[TextMate]: http://macromates.com
[PHP Markdown Extra]: http://www.michelf.com/projects/php-markdown/
[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
[Wordpress]: http://wordpress.org/
Yes, I know it works. Is education the answer to this? Spammers wouldn’t do it if people weren’t clicking on this dumb shit. Here’s one from today, with links edited to not help them:
Subject: Hey, are you watching Lost?
Which show do you watch, lost or survivor? I can’t wait to see what happens on lost this week, (its my favorite one). The last episode was so good. I can’t believe Sun is going to die, Anyhoo if you like lost or survivor there is a company that has incentives just to answer which one.
As a thanks for your time, they give you a five hundred dollar best buy gift card. I’ve already got my gift card and now I have both of these shows on d.v.d. from best buy10 seconds of your day is all it will take.
http://15-<my-email-address-backwards>.<spammersite>.com
Sincerely,
Brad—————————————————————————————————–
RCC 4 8 7 e.1000s o uth , pleasant Gr UT 840 62
<spammermail>@<spammersite>.com
And if you go to <spammersite>.com, it gives an 500 Internal Server error, sweet. That must be effective. It does work if you use one of their email-capturing subdomain-formatted URLs (I faked one up), and turns out to be a thing for YourTopBrands.com, which appears to be a sleazy rewards-arbitrage scam site. Lamers.
Regardless of the female love interests in each of the Pirates of Caribbean and Spiderman franchises, seriously, the lead characters are likely gay. Johnny Depp does his best Prince impersonation throughout, but without the cool guitar playing. Tobey Maguire seemed pretty hetero in the first 2 Spiderman movies, but in the 3rd, well, not so much, and not so good, either.
Warning: there may be spoilers within. But you’re likely going to be snoozing through a bunch of Spiderman 3 so it won’t likely make any difference, in fact you could see this as a public service–I felt compelled to stay awake throughout the flick, although it would have been really tough without the giant frozen drink and pound of Junior Mints.
So yeah, I saw Spiderman 3 (the ‘3′ is for “third rate”) today, and was not impressed. It’s Marvel comics if produced by the Lifetime channel. Peter Parker cries… several times. He gets big help in the final battle scene from his way-too-chipper best friend. You know they are best friends, because when Spidey’s crying, he says they are “BEST friends”. I almost though he was going to pull out a “B.F.F.” locket through the weeping. And yes, Kirsten Dunst is in a lot of scenes. If her face doesn’t make you consider going gay, I don’t know what would. At least they got her to brush her teeth this time, although she’s still got the choppers of some malnourished woodland creature.
On the bright side, there is a choice moment when Peter Parker looks skyward and says the Sandman’s first name, “MARCO!” Which, I must confess, is an awesome time to yell out “POLO!” which was of course what I did. I’m a laugh riot in a theater! Look, I grew up in Detroit, we yell shit at the screen, it’s just how we roll.
So in addition to crying (about his girlfriend dumping him, people dying, flashbacks of people dying from the earlier movies, wondering if his new black spidey suit makes him look fat, etc.) there is a scene that apparently got picked up off The Mask’s cutting room floor. Seriously, it is WAY out of place, and silly, and doesn’t work. Peter Parker playing piano! Peter Parker dancing modern jazz! Give me a fucking break… swing from some lightpoles and kick some ass… and no need for spirit fingers or Astaire footwork while you’re doing it.
Stan Lee gets his couple lines, too, gee, nice cameo, did you realize your hair looked like you just got a $5 haircut from a blind barber? Sadly, the best part of the flick was the Bruce Campbell cameo, which was totally unbelievable but fit in with the tone of the other movies and was well-executed. Always good to see B.C., even without his boom stick.
So… one summer disappointment down, on to the next thing. Pirates had better kick some serious high seas booty. (See what I did there, because “booty” is what Pirates covet, and also a slang term for “ass”. Damn I’m clever!)
I was writing some javascript to show/hide table rows based on user input (filtering to match search terms), and saw some really weird behavior. Now, of course, the first problem is that I was writing JS code, which I pretty well suck at. But, this seemed simple enough.
Whenever I’d hide a row, and then make it visible again, the header row would get confused, and all of the unhidden rows’ columns would be squeezed under the first header column. Weird, since the DOM hadn’t changed, and they had equal numbers of columns, etc., as always. After a bunch of head scratching a searching, I finally found this short article which talks about exactly this issue, and apparently it’s specifically a Firefox oddity.
The net/net is that Firefox has another CSS ‘display’ value besides just hidden/inline/block… they have a very special one called “table-row” which makes this work properly. Whodathunkit. But, it works great now, using the try/catch strategy outlined in the link above.
