Mie's nephew Tyler brought out some Dr. Seuss books this weekend while we were having a paint the RV day in Alameda. He pointed out a particular passage in Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book that he liked:

A moose is asleep. He is dreaming of moose drinks.
A goose is asleep. He is dreaming of goose drinks.
That's well and good when a moose dreams of moose juice.
And nothing goes wrong when a goose dreams of goose juice.
But it isn't too good when a moose and a goose
Start dreaming they're drinking the other one's juice.
Moose juice, not goose juice, is juice for a moose.
And goose juice, not moose juice, is juice for a goose.
So, when goose gets a mouthful of juices of mooses
And moose gets a mouthful of juices of gooses
They always fall out of their beds screaming screams
So, I'm warning you, now! Never drink in your dreams.

I thought it odd that the otherwise adventurous Seuss was so conservative in dream juice segregation. I mean, come one, fall out of your bed screaming screams just because you drank the wrong juice? Doubtful. I decided to draw a goose dreaming of moose juice on the RV.

I'd really like to find an open source command line editor for iCalendar (ics) files. I generally maintain my calendars using iCal on OS X, but the iCal client does not allow write access to calendars you've subscribed to even if the server settings allow it. So sometimes I want to edit a calendar directly on the server and all I have is ssh terminal access.

I've gone on google hunts (and sourceforge, rubyforge and freshmeat hunts) for this several times but somehow can never come up with one even though I know one must exist. I could probably write one in under an hour using a ruby or perl library, but there has to be a more robust full-featured one than I could do in an hour out there.

Anyone know of one?

My thing for this week: a snapshot of post-dinner relaxation tonight.

I really enjoyed the first of these sorts of photos. It made me want to do a whole series of Last Supper photos, whenever I had a feast and 13 people I could arrange another shot. To facilitate this I want to design and print 13 placards. On one side of each placard will be the original painting, on the other side will be a close-up of one particular apostle (or savior) along with some meta data (name of the apostle, significance in the scene, etc). I could just pass these out in the proper order and very quickly get everyone to self organize for the photo. The whole process would probably take less than 5 minutes.

Then it occurred to me that I should do a whole series of these placards, so that I have one painting requiring N models where N is between 2 and 13. Then I can take a shot at almost any occasion with any group of people. So I'm working on this list of paintings now. The Creation of Adam is a nice one because it is instantly recognizable merely with model positioning (no props necessary to reliably evoke the original) but also you can pull it off reasonably with any number between 3 and 8 or so.

I flipped through a large art history tome and had problems coming up with others for the list though. So many paintings that the average person would consider famous aren't appropriate either because they are landscapes, or too abstract or too simple and/or require a difficult specific background/props to be instantly recognizable (like the Mona Lisa). They need to be realistic portraits of a small set of people with unique positioning. I'm thinking if I try really hard I can come up with maybe a couple dozen of these. Jeremy thinks he can find 100. So far the only other one I've found is Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (N=4). I'm looking forward to seeing Jeremy's list, I could really use some help! Feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

This gave me a chuckle: I can tell you are a math guy from Jack's Technical Blog

I can look over someone's code and tell if they are a slumming math guy. In other words, the guy who has a PhD in some esoteric math field, but now, for some reason, has to demean himself to coding for a living. Here are a few clues I see in the code:

• You use i, j, k, l as variable names, liberally.
• Your objects have no clear separation of responsibility.
• You pass way too much between functions as member variables, globals and so on.
• You don't make any use of reasonable language features like access controls, statics, constants, or anything like that.
• Your indenting looks like you just smoked some meth.
• You have no problem have three lines of continuous equation with no temporary variables.
• All of your data structures are arrays where each index has a special meaning.
• You have functions to convert between zero based arrays and one based arrays.
• All of the variables in your functions or methods are defined at the top regardless of when they are used.

I'm on vacation in the Outer Banks, a strip of barrier islands off the North Carolina coast where I spent most every summer for 7 years during my college days. I love the smell of the air here.

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.

On Monday night I went to a Ruby on Rails Meetup for Newbies. I'm not new to rails but I thought I could help answer questions plus it would be a good way to see if there are any coders who are new to ruby but talented. I am hiring after all. It was a good meeting, I ended up spending more time proselytizing Agile methodologies (Test Driven Development, Pair Programming) than Rails specific things, but met a lot of interesting people and had some good conversations.

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.

Tesla likes this video The Rhino Song so I made her a Rhino out of sculpey.

When I flew into Portland for RailsConf I walked down to Dante's to get some pizza and beer right after checking into my hotel. When I walked into the mostly empty early evening bar I noticed a spotlight on a mannequin holding a hula hoop. While waiting for my pizza slice I realized it wasn't a mannequin, it was a semi nude model surround by a handful of artists with sketch pads. Turned out that they were selling pads and pencils at the door for $5. Since I had a few hours to kill and had never tried figure drawing before I decided to give it a shot.

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).

The news has broken that Pivotal Labs has taken on the task of fixing Twitter's notorious performance problems, or as the VentureBeat article described it "Twitter brings in big guns from Pivotal Labs to help rebuild its troubled infrastructure". I think this is a smart move for Twitter. During my two years at Pivotal I was constantly impressed by the level of engineering excellence exhibited there. It was by far the smartest group of software engineers I had ever worked with and the highest quality of code I've ever had a hand in producing. I truly believe they are the best Ruby on Rails shop you can find anywhere. That's why now that I've left Pivotal to lead the engineering effort of a web startup, I'm back at Pivotal as a client. I know where to go for excellence, and apparently so does Twitter. I'm really looking forward to seeing this team crush the Twitter issue.

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

History meme.

[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

This weeks project is a portion of a larger project. I mentioned before the site Scooping Argentina and the short videos they make explaining Buenos Aires slang to English speakers. For example: Berreta:

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.

Wired has posted an article about MySpace offering an opt-in sharing of four key portions of your MySpace account with other web sites. It was inevitable that some big site would come to their senses and do this. I'm just surprised it wasn't Facebook. As I said years ago:

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.