This project is long exposure photographs of a beach grill, capturing the twisting trails of individual embers flung from the grill as a single mass of fire flower. I just thought it would look neat, and it did.

The only uncool part was a recruiter (who didn't identify herself as such) and her boyfriend who pretended to just be interested in learning to code ruby, but snuck out soon after the meeting started when it became quite obvious that the ruse wasn't going to pan out very well. Note to Vanessa: if you're going to recruit, do so honestly and actually engage with the geeks. We're ok with recruiters and newbies, but don't much like dishonesty.

One of the cooler things I ran across that evening was Debate Graph which the host, Mark Carranza pointed out after I started talking about my Belief Graph pipe dream. It's a system for structuring debates/beliefs in a way that is more productive than a common verbal argument. I'm quite excited to look into it more, hopefully during vacation next week. The subject came up because Mark is working on a very ambitious cognitive software project called blissn that reminded me a bit of Ted Nelson's Xanadu Project. It's not public yet but he has a couple of working prototypes that are quite interesting. He's been recording and linking his thoughts for quite some time now and has a large number rapidly available at his fingertips. Looking forward to more from Mark. Plus he was a great host for the meetup.

The first one is really crappy, but after 90 minutes (and a few beers) I think I showed a lot of improvement. Yes, still not good, but come on, look at that first one! I think that's they key with people who are good sketchers: it's not that there is necessarily some natural talent that one either has or doesn't have, it's that they do it all the time and just get better and better at it.

By the way, those are feathers on her pasties, not tassels (some folks I showed these to were confused by that).

Note, depiction is not necessarily the actual Twitter team at Pivotal, but they are some of my favorite Big Guns there :)

[dav:~] $ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
128 ruby
75 cd
57 ls
35 rm
25 sudo
13 rake
10 vi
10 ssh
9 ping
8 cat

My project this week is my first script for doing something similar. You can imagine what next weeks project is going to be. Please leave suggestions for other Northern California slang that should be covered! I've registered the domain Slangsh0t.com and will build a site that can host a series of these in various languages. More on that later as well.

(japanese)

Hello. This is _______________ of Slangsh0t.

Californians have their own slang dialect that is not used elsewhere in the United States. Scooping Californa is here to equate you with the words of the natives.

Today we are going to learn about the word, hella.

Hel la

Hella means 'very', or 'extremely'. It is an intensifier word, primarily used to modify an adjective.

For example:

(english)

That dog is hella filthy, I think it rolled in mud.

(japanese)

or That dog is hella filthy, I think it rolled in mud.

Exaggerated pronunciation can be used to intensify the intensifier:

(english)

That dog is HELLa filthy. I think it rolled in its own feces.

(japanese)

That dog is HELLa filthy. I think it rolled in its own feces

Hella has a diminished version: hecka. This version is primarily used by children who would get in trouble for saying hella.

(english)

That dog is hecka dirty, mom. I think she rolled in the dirt.

(japanese)

That dog is hecka dirty, mom. I think she rolled in the dirt.

I'm ___________. Thank you for watching Slangsh0t Japanese.

I've long ranted about how Friendster blew an incredible opportunity to become the social network maintainers of the entire globe. Despite being a crappy application, they were in a position to become the center of everything if they opened up their database of connections to external application developers. Countless applications (both desktop and web-based) would have been tapped into that system and presumably sharing profits with the Friendster corporation. Having a Friendster account would have been as basic as having an email account.

Now MySpace, despite being a crappy website, are in a position to become the center of everything.

Inaugural Launch of the Camp Tipsy Bar from Dav Yaginuma on Vimeo.

v.45 will happily take a clause of the format SELECT * FROM a_table WHERE end_date < '07-12-31' while v.38 isn't so happy with it. In this case, I have to hand it to v.38, because that date was in YY-MM-DD format which is about the most retarded date format I've seen in production code. I changed the Date#to_mysql method to use YYYY-MM-DD format and all was well.

The second issue was more odd. In v.45 if you compare a date column value with a time, the date is treated as a time value set to 00:00:00 of the day for the comparison. In other words, if the value in the date column is 2006-07-05 and you compare that with '2006-07-05 00:00:00' they are equal. Not so in v.38:

mysql> create table delme ( a date );
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)
mysql> insert into delme (a) values ('2006-07-05');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
mysql> select * from delme where a < '2006-07-05';
Empty set (0.00 sec)
mysql> select * from delme where a < '2006-07-05 00:00:00';
+------------+
| a          |
+------------+
| 2006-07-05 |
+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The dreaded "Expected X to define Y" error message. This message can come from a few places in the rails code, and it is a usually useless message that obscures the real problem. In this case I added a rescue clause around an internal require statement in active_support/dependencies.rb and reported the true culprit: a model definition was bombing out when trying to require acts_as_list. Many of the acts_as components of ActiveSupport were pulled out to plugins in Rails 2. So the solution was to script/install acts_as_list.

The rake deprecated task is handy, but it just does a context-free grep of the source code and warns about code that isn't problematic, like complaining about @session_key with "@session is deprecated, use session instead". Still it's a helpful place to start. It didn't catch everything of course. It was fine spotting the deprecated render_partial calls, but it didn't complain about render_text for example.

We had a number of problems in tests that had been dependent on the fact that in Rails 1 fixtures loaded into models didn't set the timestamps. In other words, unless you specified a created_at or updated_at in the YAML file you got NULL for those columns in the database. In Rails 2 apparently that's no longer true. It sets the timestamps on all fixtures. A quick workaround for this that worked for us was to clear the fixtures before tests that were dependent on only certain records having timestamps. The tests and fixtures will need to be fixed eventually.

Behavior change in the radio_button_tag. Rails 2 added this:

def radio_button_tag(name, value, checked = false, options = {})
  [...]
  pretty_name = name.to_s.gsub(/\[/, "_").gsub(/\]/, "")
  [...]
end

>> g.game_category
NoMethodError: undefined method `game_category' for # 
from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/activerecord-2.0.1/lib/active_record/attribute_methods.rb:205:in `method_missing' from (irb):2
>> g.game_category_id
=> 1
>> class << g
>>   belongs_to :game_category
>> end
=> nil
>> g.game_category
=> #

My project for this week is a remix of the coachella web site to help make the exploration experience little better: Coachella Explorer. Here you can listen to the tracks from the official website, but as you listen you can also rate each artist on a scale of 1-5. When the official schedule is released, the site will be able to take your ratings and calculate a schedule for you. If there is a conflict it can perhaps be resolved by the relative rating you gave between bands in the same time slot.

This took a bit longer than I thought to complete. Partly because TextDrive sucks (I don't feel like going into details on this now - too annoyed), and partly because I never have time to work on these things anymore it seems. There are certainly features that would make it nicer, from little things like Netflix-like stars for rating instead of a select drop down to major features like sharing your picks with your friends and then producing an optimized schedule that keeps you at the same shows as much as possible. Maybe next year. As it is, the festival is less than a week away and probably no one is going to use this thing except me. Which is probably for the best since I was forced to host it on my decade+ old linux server that's slow as a turtle dragging a cinderblock. Any significant traffic would likely slaughter the server.

By the way, I call it a remix because all of the media (music and images) are still being served from the Coachella web site. I'm just sort of putting a new interface on top of it.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/eng/646385102.html

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../spec_helper'

describe Developer do
  before(:each) do
    @developer = Developer.new(ideal_developer_qualities_ hash)
  end

  it "should test drive" do
    @developer.should be_test_driven
  end

  it "should know rails 2.x" do
    @developer.experience.should include(:rails2)
  end

  it "should know REST patterns" do
    @developer.experience.should include(:rest)
  end

  it "should use selenium" do
    @developer.experience.should include(:selenium)
  end

  it "should use capistrano" do
    @developer.experience.should include(:capistrano)
  end

  it "should receive competitive compensation" do
    @developer.should respond_to(:competitive_compensation)
  end

  it "should like brains" do
    @developer.should be_familiar_with('www.lumosity.com')
  end
end

I know the 'it' thing seems a bit odd, that's just how rspec works. I could have created a new dsl but then he_or_she looked dumb too. I was tempted to add an "it puts the lotion in the basket" but figured that would be just a tad too creepy for a job listing.

Here is the first: a ruby script that saves all 210 of the Coachella tracks as normal MP3s that you can play anywhere. It even inserts the correct artist/title info and image file into the ID3 structure of the MP3. This makes it easier as you can use the iTunes (or equivalent) rating system as you listen to the songs and then sort by rating later to get a quick list of the artists you want to see at the festival.

This was written for OS X, but if you are ruby savvy on Windows you can easily get it to work there too. The main hiccup will be that it depends on a third party library in order to manage the id3 song info in the mp3s. Download this library from Here's the steps, sudo will sometimes ask for your password, just type it in when asked:

1. Save the pullem.rb script to your Music folder.
2. Open a Terminal window
3. Type: cd ~/Music
4. Type: sudo port install id3lib
5. Type: sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install id3lib-ruby -- --with-opt-dir=/opt/local
6. Type: sudo gem install xml-simple
7. Type: ruby pullem.rb

This will start the download. You'll end up with a little over 200 shiny new MP3s.

The port install id3lib part is what installs the third party library. In order for that to work you have to have DarwinPorts installed. And in order to have DarwinPorts, you will have installed the OS X Developer's Toolkit that came on your OS X DVDs when you bought your Mac. The toolkit is not installed by default.

If you are on Windows you can download a binary of the id3 library from sourceforge.