Aku Aku

How to Find a Dragon and Defeat an Evil Wilderness

One of my favorite jobs was a consulting gig I did between when my co-founder and I realized we were running low on cash and were not going to be able to raise the funds we needed to grow our two person startup Meexo (most investors didn't believe people would use smart phones for dating in 2011), and when my co-founder got us acqui-hired by Live Nation (for enough money to pay back our investors' convertible note and pocket a little for ourselves, he's really good). Anyhow, the main reason I liked that gig was the people. They were just a great bunch to hang out with, and their product was visionary and interesting as well. I was only there for ~6 months before I ended up at Live Nation, and soon after they also got acquired by Yahoo.

Their product was an iPhone app that functioned as kind of an expert system personal assistant. It could hook into your calendar, your contacts, use location services to help you get to your next meeting, that kind of thing. The CEO was a highly thought of designer (and not just pixels, but UX chops too) so the product was beautiful and a joy to interact with. The small founding product/engineering team was also bunch of accomplished talented people. Notably several were from the early Netscape days. These people helped make history already, so I was pretty happy to be rubbing elbows with them. Every single one was a particular joy to spend time with in their own way.

One of my first tasks was to help overhaul the bespoke windowing system one of these founding engineers had created. At the time, Apple had an official SDK for creating iPhone apps including a windowing system called UIKit. Rather than learn this new system, he had taken an old windowing system he had previously created on a different operating system in a different language, and ported it to the iPhone's operating system in Objective-C. The problem with this non-standard approach (I think it was called something-Box, let's call it DBox) was that he was the only person who really knew how DBox worked. If they were going to grow and hire more iOS engineers, either they would all have to learn DBox or the app would need to be refactored to use the Apple's standard UIKit system. Switching to the standard system not only would make the new engineers more productive, but comes with all the other benefits of using a broadly used and official approach: easier to hire experts at it, continued improvements by Apple, etc.

So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work figuring out how to convert to UIKit. At this point the app was already quite built out with many screens filed with text, buttons, images, animations ... and all of it was some component of DBox. It took a few days of studying the system but I started to get an idea of how DBox worked. It wasn't easy because compared to UIKit which was built by a team at Apple and battle tested across thousands of apps, DBox was limited, bare bones and a bit more difficult in general.

One day at our morning standup, where the team gathered to update each other about the things we were working on, rather than jump into technical details I said something along these lines:

Back in the early 80s I subscribed to Dragon Magazine, a monthly periodical for Dungeons & Dragons nerds. It was mostly filled with game-specific articles but it also often featured a short fiction story. One in particular that always stuck with me was about a person who entered a massive dark evil forest for reasons unknown.

If you want to read this very short story for yourself first, issue #54 is available on the Internet Archive (here). It's on page 49. Scroll down past this image of the cover to continue with my recollection of the story.

This was a gnarled woods that few dared to enter, and none had came back out. Everywhere and everything in this forest was corrupt and trying to kill the person from animals and poison plants to treacherous passages, but they trudged deeper and deeper until they reached the very heart of the forest. When they reached the very center, exhausted and bruised, they opened a pouch and drew from it a single seed. This person was a druid, a wizard of the natural living world. They planted that seed in this deepest depth of this forlorn forest and began to chant spells of growth and protection causing that seed to grow into a massive and powerful conduit of Good in the center of the Evil wood, and as they continued the Good spread outward relieving the surrounding flora and fauna of their malevolent enchantment until the whole forest was free and wonderful. Yesterday, I concluded, I replaced a DBox button in our main screen with a UIButton.

LOLz. This morning I woke up thinking about that story again, probably because I am once again working for someone from that team and decided to try to see if it was online. I did some searching on DuckDuckGo but nothing was really turning up. There is a comprehensive list of all the short fiction ever published in Dragon Magazine, but none of the titles rang a bell. The indefatigable Internet Archive of course has every issue of Dragon Magazine available for download as PDF (other than the one featuring the lone George R.R. Martin story of course :eyeroll:). I knew the story had to be from the late 70s / early 80s so I started poking around to figure out where that started and decided to download issues 40-99 and search through them. I downloaded a couple through the IA web interface, noted that the URL of the PDF was standardized, so I wrote a quick ruby script:

(40..99).each do |i|
  puts i
  `wget https://archive.org/download/DragonMagazine260_201801/DragonMagazine0#{i}.pdf`
  sleep 0.25 # just a good habit
end

Then I converted all the PDFs to easily searchable text:

find . -name "*.pdf" -exec pdftotext {} \;

And finally, grepped the .txt files for something I could remember from the story. "Druid" turned out to be too many hits, but "seed" was only 20 or so, and it was quickly obvious that the usage in issue #54 was from a story. It took about 20 minutes from waking up thinking about this story to being able to find it and read it again for the first time in ~40 years. That's a great way to start the day! The story is as powerful as I remembered, although I had forgotten important bits, particularly that it is told from the point of view of the wilderness itself. Also that the druid was a half-elf, which was always my choice of character to play in AD&D since I was a half-Asian half-Caucasian myself.

Besides the hapa-based identification with the hero why has this story stuck with me all these years? The month this issue came out, I turned 14 years old. I was a poor-not-white-enough-trash kid growing up deep in the actual woods of North Carolina. My home life with my retired Marine Corps alcoholic adoptive father was physically and emotionally abusive. I was bullied at school by racists (both white and black). We lived pretty far from other houses, surrounded mostly by a forest owned by the local paper mill and I spent a lot of time alone by myself venturing into the woods with my dogs, playing adventurer. I didn't feel powerful though, and was troubled with my own burdens of anger. I didn't feel I could change things although I desperately wanted to.

At 14 1/2 I started working as a dishwasher, and made enough to buy a Commodore 64. Coding became the new forest to explore. Christmas of 1982 my mother bought me a 300 baud modem and I've been online ever since; it took the rest of the world almost two decades to catch up. Somewhere along the line in this digital online world I started to live, as the short story ends, "for life and not hate, free to have good with my evil and calm with my violence."

CLI editor for ICS files?

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?

Slumming Mathematician Coders

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.

Newbies on Rails

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.

Pivotal Big Guns Ride Into Twitter Town

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

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

my space / everybody's space / center space

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.

weird mysql date issues

We got a new Continuous Integration box from Pivotal Labs yesterday and I ran into some weird MySQL time based issues when trying to get our tests to pass on it. It turned out that the CI box was running MySQL v 3.0.38, but all of our dev boxen were running v 3.0.45. Here's some difference between these two versions:

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)

I found out that the production box is running v3.0.51 so we've now upgraded all of our workstations and deployment/testing machines to that.

Upgrading to Rails 2.x from 1.2.6

One of the first things I needed to have done at my new job was to convert the application from the Ruby on Rails 1.2.6 to the latest 2.x version. This wasn't the first time I've upgraded a 1.x app to Rails 2, but it's the first time with a significantly complex application. Some issues we ran into:

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

Which changed the ids on several of our input tags to something arbitrarily prettier but unexpected by the application.
Associations on models were screwy. From script/console:

>> 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
=> #

This was annoying. I dug back into the active_support/dependencies.rb and started puts-ing around with the code that does the loading. I found that the Game constant was being defined when the Migrator class was being loaded. It turns out that a migration was defining Game in order to cheaply access some ActiveRecord methods, but not bothering to declare the associations. I could have added the association in the migration, and I thought for a moment of changing the AutomaticMigration code to clear any constants it loaded when it was finished, but decided the safer and quicker appproach is to just rename the class in the migration and use set_table_name to point it at the games table. This goes along with my general notion that using ActiveRecords in migrations is a bad idea.

30 of 52: Coachella Explorer

As I've mentioned before, the Coachella web site helpfully provides one or two tracks for most of the 100+ artists at the festival so you can hear samples of the bands you don't know to help determine if you want to go see them or not. They even have a scheduler page where you can select the bands you want to see and hide the ones you know you don't. The user experience is poor though. While listening to the provided tracks you can't easily make note of which ones you like or not, and there is no real link between the schedule page and the listening page. Plus in the end, how are they going to handle it when you select two artists scheduled at different stages at the same time?

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.

Test Driven Recruitment

I need to hire some Rails developers at Lumos Labs, so I decided to write a spec for the position:

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.

An Ode to Roblox as a Gathering Place

I haven't spent a lot of time in Roblox, even though both of my kids have spent significant amounts of their time and my money there, but this essay about how it compares to those places where teenagers hang out and create their own space away from the rest of the world really resonates. It makes me want to give it a try again.

Some choice excerpts:

On his first experience in Roblox:

In one of the very first games we played together (a work-in-progress safari game, the link to which I have since lost), V became a zebra, and I was a lioness. We ran around a broad plain populated by other animals, trees in the distance, low clouds overhead, and the buzzing of insects on a 2-minute loop. The chat was full of messages from prey to prey, predator to predator. V was almost immediately killed by a cheetah who then got in the chat to say, “Overyone come to pr,” “theres meat.” Summoned, I did so, and as I ate the still-living digital body of my friend in the company of a stranger in the shape of a wild dog, I thought, “Oh. This is special.”

On the game creation tools:

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Roblox Studio is the Toolbox. Other game engines have assets stores, but none of them feel like this: a rollicking, copyright-fucked, messy, virus-filled, unsortable pile of labor and of love.

On the long tail of forgotten worlds (games) waiting to be stumbled upon:

But the things I am making in Roblox are not what are unique or compelling about Roblox, and the same could be said for most of the big games that populate the platform’s front page. Instead, what is so special here are the millions of bizarre little worlds, all networked together and waiting (mostly empty, sometimes for over a decade) to be dropped into and explored with friends.

On the "brutal" monetization situation:

As a developer, you can monetize your own games in a variety of ways, from the above-board (tip jars! cosmetics!) to the scammy. Developers earn 70% of Robux spent in their games, which is a pretty standard cut for an app store/developer split. However, getting USD back out of Robux is a different story. The payout exchange rate drops to $0.0035 USD per 1 Robux, meaning the takeaway in real world currency is roughly 24.5% of any in-game commerce—a brutally extractive exchange rate.

Fighting Date Rape With Nail Polish

Now that Bill Cosby got an early release from prison, my friend Paul brought my attention to the company Undercover Colors that developed a clear nail polish that allows you to check a drink for drugs by dipping a fingernail into the drink. The nail polish changes colors if drugs are encountered.

Brilliant! And love that it was founded by NC State students (didn't to school there, but did participate in their rugby club as a townie).

 

It looks like the product has evolved slightly to a more typical strip test kit though. I supposed the manufacturing costs proved too high? Hopefully they are still working on the more subtle version.

Post Pandemic Predictions

I started compiling this list before George Floyd was murdered, and its triteness bothers me now so I'm just going to post it and move on.

In no particular order:

• Masks largely stay culturally accepted in flu and allergy seasons from now on in the USA, but will always carry a political connotation so some groups will never wear them and mock those that do, but like punk rockers have always mocked people in suits.
• 15 years from now, a common trope will be determining how old some young adult is by what basic K-12 subject they seemed to have completely missed. "How old is Alexandra? Well she can never remember what a gerund is, she must be 27-28."
• It'll be seen as the inflection point for polyamory going mainstream when the released masses just can't get enough of each other 😂.
• 2021: long hair on dudes is back in fashion.
• The artist live stream phenomenon is too beloved to simply disappear, but outdoor live music venues are going to see a boom. There might even be a combination of the two.