Murphy Bytes

Learning to use the Internet

admin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:23:30 +0000

I was thinking about how I’ve changed the way that I use the internet over the years and how over time I’ve gotten a lot better at using the net for what I need. Through informal interaction with other technical people and on my own I’ve been exposed to different tools, sites and applications that have made me a lot more productive than I would otherwise be. A few of the many tools I like are Delicious, Google Reader, Firebug, Firefox, and Wikipedia. The point is that it has taken me years to really learn how to be as productive as I am today and a lot of what I’ve learned has been accidental. I think that the evolution of internet has begun to stabilize a bit to the point that some best practices should be emerging in terms of its use but I wonder if school curricula are keeping up? I wonder how kids learn to use the internet? When I was a kid we had classes that taught us how to use a library to find information. It seems like today internet skills are much more important than library skills were when I was a kid. I know that there are classes kids can take on internet research but I have to wonder how relevant they are. I can’t help but think how tough and time consuming it would be to start from scratch and learn how to use the internet. In effect this is what every child has to do. How do they learn internet skills? What’s the best way to teach someone to use the internet? What things do they need to know?

Another Infrequent Blog Post

admin — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:03:46 +0000

I got an e-mail from a recruiter looking for a Software Engineer. The recruiter was looking for someone with open source software experience, multiple language experience etc etc and someone who has an active blog. I’m not really interested in the position the recruiter was seeking to fill but the bit about someone who has an active blog did precipitate a twinge of guilt about being so delinquent when it comes to posting to my blog. To all you hordes of internet users who have been waiting for a blog post from me… I’m sorry, I’ll do better in the future… maybe. Part of the reason I haven’t posted is that there is so much going on is that in true ADD fashion, I can’t really settle on anything to write about. I start thinking about writing something and then something else comes along, I get distracted, and pretty soon I forget that I was going to write something in the first place. By the way, the article I linked to about ADD is really interesting, at least the first paragraph or two and the bit in the middle is, I never made it all the way through…. where was I?

I’m doing a bit of web development. I’m surprised at how easy it is compared to the stuff I normally do for my day job. Web development seems formulaic. All the original thought seems to go into the work that the designer does in terms of user experience and ascetics. Translating the designer’s ideas into executable code and html is pretty trivail IMHO. I’m not very experienced in web development so I encounter things I’ve never done before all the time. When this happens I spend a few minutes digging around on the net or on #rubyonrails and I have my answer usually with accompanying source code. The biggest challenge for me is not to over optimize. I don’t think anybody really wants to pay you to spend the days squeezing a few microseconds out of some code that generates a web page. It is really satisfying writing a few lines of code and immediately seeing the results pop up on a browser. If I keep doing this I’m going to dig into the ascetic side of things. My first major in college was art and I’ve always loved creating visual stuff. I’m just clueless about contemporary computer graphics tools.

It’s Official

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:25:42 +0000

I’m divorced. Here’s to the end of something old and the start of something new.

Configuration Files

admin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 20:09:28 +0000

I hate them. I am especially annoyed when a library that exposes some sort of API requires it’s own configuration file. So, not only do you have a configuration file for your application, you also have to have another for this stupid library you integrated into your application. Wouldn’t it be nicer for the API to expose some methods, structures or something so that the data needed by the api could be set from the consuming application? That way, if you insisted in persisting these settings in a file you could do so in the application config file, giving you a single config file instead of two. I suppose one might make an exception and have a separate config file for a something that is so pervasive that is canonical like the log4XX logging libraries.

i hate the internet

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:26:49 +0000

i’m hanging out at lisa’s house, noodling around with this some stuff i’m working on with some of my friends it’s cool and it’s got me excited about doing tech stuff again using lighttpd ruby memcached sqllite and a bunch of other cool stuff anyway i’m setting up a development instance of lighttpd and i want to see if i’m doing anything with port 3000 on my dev box so i fire up firefox and type http://localhost:3000/ in the address window great server not found oh hey i think i’ll look at facebook oh hey that link to christopher walken’s twitters looks cool oh hey i think i’ll check my rss reader oh hey this article looks interesting and two hours later i haven’t accomplished a fucking thing

UNIX Epoch time being 1234567890

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 22:34:22 +0000

In the Midwest this occurs at about 5:31 PM Friday, February 13! Coincidence? I don’t think so. If you are on Facebook there is an event dedicated to this auspicious occasion.

Defensive Programming

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:42:14 +0000

Defensive Programming is usually thought of as a software quality technique but I have another use for the term. Defensive Programming happens when you are dealing with two or more modules of code that interact with one another in some way and the modules are written by different developers. That’s the programming part. The defensive part happens when something is wrong and each of the developers blames the other for the as yet unknown problem because they are covering their ass, have low self esteem, are lazy, are arrogant, you fill in the blank. This drives me nuts. Let’s just collaborate to solve the f*ing problem. Software has bugs. It’s fundamental. If the defensive programmer spent half of the time they spent pointing the finger at someone else fixing bugs in their own code we’d all be better off.

Corporations

admin — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:03:54 +0000

I work for a big corporation. Well I don’t know if its really big when compared to other corporations but its much bigger than the little company that I used to work for that was bought by the corporation that I now work for. Be that as it may in the past I’ve made disparaging remarks about the corporation that I now work for and corporations in general. It’s kind of fashionable to do that kind of thing if you’re an OSS Linux tech geeky kind of guy. Corporations Evil!!! Just read about Microsoft on Slash Dot and you’ll get this gist of what I mean. Lately I’ve been appreciative of the corporation I work for. There are several reasons for this change of attitude. One of them is that I am still employed. I’ve got an open position in Jersey and I see stacks of resumes from people that just a few months ago were working at big investment banks and hedge funds that have imploded. Comparing these pedigrees to mine is like comparing a Westminster Dog Show Best of Breed to some mutt in a dog pound. Suffice it to say I am glad I still have a job. The other reason that my attitude about the big corporation has changed is largely philosophical. I think that in an increasingly crowded world the ideal of individualism is outmoded or maybe it would be better to say that the priority placed on individualism is excessive. I think more priority should be placed on utilitarianism. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few. The big corporation is comprised of many individuals working together for the good of the corporation and it’s shareholders. In return for this work the individuals are rewarded. Some individuals are rewarded to a disproportionate degree but all individuals are rewarded. Sometimes a few individuals are discarded but this is generally done for the benefit of the corporation as a whole. The good of the many outweighs the good of the few. Sometimes dealing bureaucracy in the big corporation is a bit frustrating when compared to doing things in a little start up but it stands to reason that one has to be more collaborative when dealing with many more people. As long as the bureaucracy doesn’t become a reason for people to not do things or to delay doing things or to shift responsibility it’s really not much of a problem. So I try to be a good little worker bee anonymously doing my part for the greater whole. I get my allotment of honey and all is good.

Obligatory I Haven’t Posted in Over a Month Blog Post

admin — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:37:05 +0000

What to say. I’m going on the infamous Bike Ride to Rippey aka BRR on February 7 with my girlfriend.

Other than that bit of insanity I’ve been doing a lot of software optimization at work, ice skating, running, playing guitar and not blogging. I really wish I had something profound to say but I don’t. Sometimes I think of something profound to say but when I do I’m not around my computer and by the time that I am I forget what the profound thing was. Oh well, c’est la vie.

Happy Birthday to Me

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 02:23:52 +0000

I got a nice long weekend in NYC for my birthday. We went to August: Osage County, MoMA, went to the top of the Empire State Building at midnight and walked around looking at Christmas lights. Here’s a bunch of pictures from the trip. New York is nuts around Christmas. The sidewalks are just packed with people and it’s fun just hanging out people watching. Some of the store window displays are amazing and in general the street life just can’t be beat. We hooked up with Lisa’s cousin and ate at a fabulous vegetarian restaurant called Candle Cafe. Oh, one thing that was really cool was how useful the maps application on my iPhone worked to navigate through the city using public transportation. As some of you may recall, my Android submission was an application to do just that, help people use public transportation to get from place to place. With iPhone update 2.2 the maps application will not only show you the best way to drive from point A to point B, it will also show you the best way to get from place to place using the subway, bus or walking in many major metropolitan areas. I know it works in New York, and Minneapolis, but it doesn’t work in smaller cities like Ames Iowa. Anyway, it works great. When I needed to get from where we were staying down in the financial district to any place we wanted to go to, I’d just use ‘Current Location’ and type the street address to where I wanted to go and the maps application would show me the best way to get there by subway. It would also include how to walk to the nearest metro station, and how to walk from the station where you get off the train to your final destination. If all you type in is the street information, neglecting to supply the city, state, etc, the application is smart enough to fill in these details for you. It really is one of the most fabulously useful applications I’ve ever used.