Blogs on New Schematic

The Kirby Krackle

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 07:35:45 -0400

In honor of Jack “The King” Kirby’s birthday last month (he’d be 109 years old), here’s krackle.js, a one-line script tag to give every click on every page that signature Kirby Krackle.

Fig. 1 The King in 1992. Photo by Suzy Skaar, via the Jack Kirby Museum, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Try it out by clicking anywhere in this page, and then read on for an overview of my process, the questions I abandoned, and what I think matters about making a toy like this.

Starting with gpui

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:35:45 -0400

A couple of papercuts when getting started with gpui, the UI framework powering Zed. These weren’t exactly specific to the framework, but more that gpui is a single crate that’s part of a monorepo representing an entire product, and its develpment is inexorably tied to Zed’s.

The grander takeaway, regardless of project or ecosystem, is that you’ll have a better time if you’re pulling different crates/packages from the same source, when they’re being developed in tandem.

Installing from different sources

If you’re on macOS or Linux, and you want your text rendererd nicely, the crate README says you have to install another crate, gpui_framework. It allows for cross-platfrorm support without keeping the platform support code baked in with the UI framework. Separate your concerns, yeah? As a newish traveler to the Rust ecosystem, I tried to do some funny things which ended up not working. The listed example also assumed you were building in the monorepo, which isn’t on my todo list for today.

Branding

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:00:00 -0500

Not just for steers

I’ve long admired designers. If I’d had a different nudge in high school (specifically, known it was even a field), I could see myself going into industrial design instead of architecture. One part of that admiration is the ability to distill a company, a team, a band, a product, an experience, whatever, down to an essence. How they can hoover up anything and everything about that thing that’s in front of them, and transmit it – zap – into your brain like a lightning bolt, a revelation, satori. From my writing days, it would hit like the perfect title for a story or a poem (but likely in a way that was more financially lucarative).

Baby's first agentic loop

Mon, 11 May 2026 14:00:00 -0500

This past week, my youngest decided to start crawling. With her out of potted-plant mode and charging at anything that could be a choking hazard, I figure it’s time to implement an agentic loop into this project.

What’s an agentic loop?

If, like me, you stayed up way too late at the end of November 2022, asking ChatGPT lots and lots of questions, you’re long (for some definition of the word) familiar with the first part of the agentic loop: text output from the LLM. What we call an agent is taking that text output, evaluating it against a goal, and trying again. How do we evaluate? Run progams, send the output from said program run to the LLM, and repeat. That’s the whole loop. But, since the LLM isn’t running on your local machine (or even if it is), it needs a way to run programs, which are called “tools.”

Adding Goatcounter to Hugo, Simply

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:00:00 -0500

NB: This is implemented on the PaperMod theme

I was curious about adding privacy-sensitive metrics to my blog. When I was exploring Codename Nootka (which became Kibra), I came across Goatcounter. After emailing back and forth with a couple of dozen folks and talking with a few more, I realized that Kibra didn’t have the legs I wanted. Still, I filed away what I learned, including that Goatcounter exists.

I came across another blog post on how to do this but I didn’t want to keep track of changes to the theme, deal with a fork or git module; dependency management gets easier when you have fewer dependencies to care about. After poking around more in how PaperMod is built and Hugo’s affordances, I came across the extend_footer.html pattern.

Herzog's Rules for Startups

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 12:00:00 -0500

When I first read these on Herzog’s 80th birthday, something struck me: these rules could be applied not only to his brand of filmmaking—as instrumental and impactful as it was to my worldview—but also to the endeavor of a startup. A film is a commercial endeavor as much as it is an artistic one. Past a certain point, it takes money to realize a vision, and people who have money generally want a return on their investment. It took me a long time to realize this. A tough realization, but that’s it. That’s how it is. With that in mind, and through my own experience working in startups, I jot down some quick thoughts on how Herzog’s rules could be applied to building companies, while maintaining the same spirit of adventure, of daring, of creation.

It's actually velocity debt, not technical debt

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 07:33:27 -0500

There are many kinds of ~~technical~~ velocity debt ¹. There are those decisions you, as an engineer, make in the moment to finish a piece of work. Given more time, energy, and space to think, those are decisions you would have made differently. There’s the kind of debt that’s unused code—a retired feature, ignored test specs, multiple implementations of the same helper method or component. Then, there’s the kind of debt that we’ll cover here, debt that isn’t even directly yours, but it impacts you every single day: outdated dependencies.

How brutal is the rocket equation?

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 07:33:27 -0500

Δv

Δv, or delta-v, is what keeps orbital engineers up at night. Simply, delta-v is the change in velocity that is necessary for anything to happen in space. One of the great promises of a momentum-exchange tether is that the system can transfer tremendous amounts of delta-v to a payload without paying exponential costs to do so.¹

However, we can’t evaluate these claims in a vacuum (ha). To really get a sense of the unreasonable effectiveness of tethers, let’s first look at the rocket equation more deeply.

How to save $327.6 million using Rust

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 17:33:27 -0500

It was 1999. In my memory, I’m in Mr. Wilson’s chemistry class when I hear about the cause of the crash, but I’m not sure about that. What I am sure about, though, is the feeling: overwhelm at the sheer magnitude of the blunder. $327.6 million spacecraft was lost in seconds. Three years of development. Ten months traveling through space. All because two teams used different units.

Could Rust have prevented this disaster?

Debugging Claude's MCP Server with Nix

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 11:00:00 -0500

When I first started using Claude with my Nix-managed development environment, I ran into an interesting issue. The default examples for starting a local MCP (Model Context Protocol) server with npx were giving me cryptic error messages whenever I tried to restart Claude:

Error: spawn ENOENT

Investigation

My first step was to check the Claude logs at ~/Library/Logs/Claude/mcp*.log using tail. I also used the MCP inspector tool (so snazzy) to verify that my API keys and tools were configured correctly. Running the tools manually with npx in my terminal worked fine, so what was going on?

Default On vs Default Off

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 08:15:15 +0000

Default On chases doing.
Default Off chases resting.

Default On is thinking at least one step ahead.
Default Off is stuck in reactivity.

Default On is present in the task.
Default Off is taken away from rest by the task.

Default On is pushing, striving, and improving.
Default Off is trying to always return to a state of rest.

Default On is ready to go to the next task, which is always known.
Default Off is striving to take a break from the current task.

Books Finished in 12022

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 15:15:15 +0000

Jan. 26, Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks

Feb. 04, Rain Like Hammers, Brandon Graham 🥈
Feb. 23, Solid State, Coulton, Fraction, Monteys
Feb. 27, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t, Julia Galef 🥈

Mar. 24, The Dip, Seth Godin

Apr. 20, Leviathan Wakes (The Expanse, book 1), James S. A. Corey 🥈

May 4, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Paul Mason 🥈
May 17, Light of the World, James Lee Burke 👂 🥈
May 18, Drive, James Sallis 👂 🥈

Jun. 29, America Chavez: Made in the USA, Kalinda Vasquez and Carlos Gomez

Aug. 3, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie 🥇

Oct. 18, Venom: Lethal Protector, vol. 1

Nov. 6, Sex Criminals, vol. 6, Fraction and Zdarsky

Clearly, not much time carved out for reading in the last year! However, I was proud that I finished Postcapitalism because I had started it in 2019; it was a fixture on my nightstand for years. I was wrong to judge How to Win Friends and Influence People based on the title, but a more descriptive one could have been How to Get Along with People in Business and in Life. Burke continues to make me want to visit Montana with his paintings of sweeping vistas and rich sunsets, but that isn’t the point he’s trying to make when describing vicious acts of violence.

Movies Finished in 12022

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 15:15:15 +0000

Jan. 15, My Neighbor Totoro
Jan. 21, Transporter 2†
Jan. 26, The Eternals
Jan. 29, Prisoners of the Ghostland
Feb. 18, Ron’s Gone Wrong
Feb. 26, 300†
Feb. 27, Pig
Mar. 6, The Batman
Mar. 6, The King’s Man
Mar. 11, Free Guy
Mar. 12, Army of Thieves
Mar. 18, Spider-Man: No Way Home
Apr. 9, Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard
Apr. 15, Surrogates†
Apr. 16, Blade†
Apr. 19, Tenet†
Apr. 23, The Green Knight
May 5, 13 Assassins†
Jun. 4, Equilibrium†
Jun. 11, Eraser†
Jun. 14, Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Jun. 21, Wrath of Man†
Jun. 28, Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
Jul. 1, 47 Ronin
Jul. 2, Nobody
Jul. 8, Wild Card
Jul. 22, Venom: Let There Be Carnage
Jul. 27, Deadpool†
Jul. 30, Police Story†
Aug. 1, The Dark Knight Rises†
Aug. 1, Logan†
Aug. 3, Troy
Aug. 6, Warrior†
Aug. 9, The Paper Tigers
Aug. 11, Something Ventured
Aug. 12, Prey
Aug. 26, Lightyear
Sept. 4, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
Sept. 8, The Professor: Tai Chi’s Journey to the West
Sept. 11, Thor: Love and Thunder
Sept. 15, Avengers: Infinity War†
Oct. 14, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines†
Oct. 15, A Touch of Sin (2013)
Oct. 18, Werewolf By Night
Oct. 18, Kung-Fu Panda
Oct. 30, Black Adam
Nov. 21, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Nov. 23, Black Panther†
Dec. 17, Casino Royale†
Dec. 23, Quantum of Solace†
Dec. 24, Strange Worlds
Dec. 25, Jurassic Park†
Dec. 25, Death on the Nile
Dec. 26, Skyfall†
Dec. 29, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery

† denotes a re-watch

Thinking about now

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 23:34:46 +0000

After moving to a new state recently, I’ve started collecting my now thoughts on the go. I limited each category to one tactical task to complete, just one, but found myself overwhelmed by all of the different tasks that still loomed large.

Ordered only by happenstance:

- Community: Clean up that sidewalk - Vets: GBF monthly donation - Abe: better with people coming over - Oscar: potty training - New babe: infant CPR classes - Long term crazy: skyhook - Work: finishing ACL - Wife: more cooking - Fitness: Simple standard - Nutrition: more protein - Water: 100 oz - House: hang mail basket and then stack washer/dryer and then soil testing - Health: clear up sinus infection then ankle rehab/practice - Rowdy: rain cover

This isn’t a small list, and I like to use my now as a way of focusing on just the next step, just on what can be done now, and what must be done now.

Books Finished in 12021

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 15:15:15 +0000

Jan 17: Agency, William Gibson 🥈
Jan 30: Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani 🥈
Jan 31: Absolute Carnage, Cates and Stegman

Feb ??: Cosmic Ghost Rider, Cates and Burnett
Feb 07: Mister Miracle, King & Gerads 🥇
Feb 23: This is Tai Chi: 50 Essential Questions and Answers, Paul Read 👂

Mar 03: How to Become a Straight-A Student, Cal Newport
Mar 27: Mind Gym—An Athlete’s Guide to Inner Excellence, Gary Mack with David Cassteven

Apr 24: So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport ➰ 🥇

Jun 07: The Widower’s Two-Step, Rick Riordan
Jun 29: The Immortal Hulk (vol 1), Ewing and Bennett
Jun 30: The Immortal Hulk (vol 2), Ewing and Bennett

Jul 02: Conan—The Jewels of Gwahkur and other stories, P. Craig Russell (adapted from Robert E. Howard) 🥇
Jul 04: Talking to Humans, Giff Constable
Jul 06: Conan—The Death (vol 14), Brian Wood, et al.
Jul 14: Stumptown (vol 1), Rucka et al
Jul 18: Conan—The Nightmare of the Shallows (vol 15)
Jul 23: The Four Agreements—A Toltec Wisdom Book, Don Miguel Ruiz 🥈

Aug 11: The Sheriff of Baghdad, King & Gerads 🥈
Aug 25: The Immortal Hulk (vol 3), Ewing and Bennett

Sept 16: The Immortal Hulk (vol 4), Ewing and Bennett
Sept 23: The Immortal Hulk (vol 5), Ewing and Bennett

Oct ??: The Immortal Hulk (vol 6), Ewing and Bennett
Oct ??: The Immortal Hulk (vol 7), Ewing and Bennett
Oct 20: Willpower Doesn’t Work, Benjamin Hardy 👂

Nov 13: Zero History, William Gibson ➰ 🥈
Nov 15: The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal, M. Mitchell Waldrop 🥇

Dec 21: Bridge of Birds, Barry Hughart 🥇

Some parting thoughts for this year’s list of books finished: lots more comics this year. Marvel monthlies were straight-up popcorn (tasting more and more stale), the Conan works were much more sophisticated than I expected, and King & Gerads slay. Two audiobooks 👂 and two re-reads ➰. I didn’t track the dozens of board books I’ve read to our now-toddler, but I could recite most of them from memory.

Movies Finished in 12021

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 15:15:15 +0000

Jan. 1, Rampage
Jan. 1, Fast and Furious 7†
Jan. 3, Blood Simple†
Jan. 8, Alita Battle Angel
Jan. 9, Lone Wolf and Cub: Sword of Vengeance
Jan. 10, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back†
Jan. 15, Baby Driver†
Jan. 16, Birds of Prey and the Emancipation of Harley Quinn
Jan. 22, Hobbs and Shaw†
Jan. 31, Time Bandits

Feb. 3, Pacific Rim Uprising†
Feb. 14, The Gentlemen
Feb. 21, Captain Marvel†

Mar. 6, Too Late†
Mar. 14, The Princess Bride
Mar. 19, X-Men: Dark Phoenix†
Mar. 27, Judas and the Black Messiah
Mar. 28, Get Hard
Mar. X, Captain America: The First Avenger†
Mar. X, The Transporter†

Apr. 8, Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)
Apr. 11, John Wick 2†
Apr. 18, John Wick 3†
Apr. 24, Central Intelligence
Apr. 25, Mortal Kombat (2021)

May 1, Eastern Promises†
May 2, Joker
May 7, eXistenZ†
May 8, Wrath of Man
May 15, Galaxy Quest
May 16, Tenet
May 26, The Take
May 26, Army of the Dead
May 28, Deadpool†
May 28, Thief†
May 29, Eurovision

Jun. 1, Spy
Jun. 4, The Trial of the Chicago 7
Jun. 6, Snyder Cut of Justice League
Jun. 7, The Hitman’s Bodyguard
Jun. 16, Conan the Barbarian†
Jun. 25, Angel Has Fallen

Jul. 3, Ava
Jul. 10, The Clash of the Titans (1981)
Jul. 11, F9
Jul. 24, Under Siege†
Jul. 30, Jack Reacher†
Jul. 31, Black Widow

Aug. 8, Gunpowder Milkshake
Aug. 15, The Last Boy Scout
Aug. 29, Predator (1987)†
Aug. 31, SAS: Rise of the Black Swan

Sept. 5, Wrath of Man†
Sept. ?, Congo†
Sept. 9, Clear and Present Danger†
Sept. 17, Chain Reaction†
Sept. 22, The Suicide Squad (2021)

Oct. 2, The Net
Oct. 9, A History of Violence†
Oct. 15, Altered Carbon: Resleeved
Oct. 30, Get Out†

Nov. 6, Blazing Saddles†
Nov. 7, Desperado†
Nov. 14, Shang-Chi and the Ten Rings
Nov. 19, Jungle Cruise (2021)
Nov. 22, Dune (2021)
Nov. 23, Ready Player One
Nov. 25, Casino Royale (2006)†
Nov. 26, Quantum of Solace†
Nov. 28, Good Time

Dec. 1, Skyfall†
Dec. ?, Red Notice
Dec. 10, Kate
Dec. 14, Blade Runner 2049†
Dec. 17, Spectre†
Dec. 18, The Little Things
Dec. 20, Deep Cover
Dec. 27, Matrix Resurrections
Dec. 28, No Time To Die
Dec. 29, Hudson Hawk
Dec. 30, Don’t Look Up
Dec. 31, Snatch†

† denotes a re-watch

Writing Emacs-Lisp, or elisp

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 06:06:06 +0000

In the much-vaunted style of literate programming, here’s an emacs-lisp function I wrote recently.

The motivation was to convert a shell alias I added this morning, which counts the number of Zettelkasten notes I’ve written that day. (“Jesus, him, too?” Yes, dear reader, I’m afraid that this is one trend I haven’t managed to dodge forever, but my adoption has been cautious and deliberate.)

alias today_count="fd $(date -u +"%Y-%m-%d") ~/org/zd | wc -l"

Using the lovely fd utility, I find all files in my Zetteldeft directory, which start with today’s date. Then, I pipe that output to wc -l to get the count. Easy peasy, chicken breezy; took me about two minutes to write. Turns out this doesn’t work as an alias; the date isn’t recalculated every time the alias is called.

The Carmack Method

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 15:15:15 +0000

Eventually working around high-productivity professionals like John Carmack made me realize that if you want to excel, then you have to work hard and focus the whole time.

I remember Carmack talking about productivity measurement. While working he would play a CD, and if he was not being productive, he’d pause the CD player. This meant any time someone came into his office to ask him a question or he checked email he’d pause the CD player. He’d then measure his output for the day by how many times he played the CD (or something like that – maybe it was how far he got down into his CD stack). I distinctly remember him saying “So if I get up to go to the bathroom, I pause the player”.

Books Finished in 2020

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 15:15:15 +0000

Pittsburgh, Frank Santoro

The Churn, James S. A. Corey
Bttm Fdrs, Ezra Claytan Daniels & Ben Passmore
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Mariko Tamaki & Rosemary Valero-O’Connell
Space Riders, Fabian Rangel Jr. & Alexis Ziritt

Zero to One, Peter Thiel with Blake Masters
Sabrina, Nick Drnaso

Kettlebell Simple & Sinister: Revised and Updated Edition, Pavel Tsatsouline

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Emil Ferris

High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row, Damien Echols

Big Red Tequila, Rick Riordan
Dept. H Omnibus, vol 1, Matt Kindt & Sharlene Kindt
Effective TypeScript, Dan Vanderkam
Atomic Habits, James Clear
Pulp, Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips

Power to the People!, Pavel Tsatsouline
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, Apostolos Doxiadis & Christos H. Papadimitriou & Alecos Papadatos & Annie Di Donna
Pragmatic Thinking & Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, Andy Hunt

X-Force (2014) vol 1: Dirty/Tricks, Si Spurrier & Rock-He Kim & Jorge Molina
COPRA, Round One, Michel Fiffe

The War of Art, Steven Pressfield
Hogfather, Terry Pratchett

Some parting thoughts: Not as many books finished this year compared to the last. I didn’t read many graphic novels that I loved, and didn’t finish any books in the months of April and August. The pandemic shut down my monthly graphic novel book club, it was easier to de-stress in front of the TV, and — probably the biggest factor — my wife gave birth to our first child at the very end of 2019. Having a newborn isn’t great for reading (books for adults) or sleeping, but the rest of the experience makes up for it. This year, I want to focus on modeling good behaviors, so I’m going to make it a point to read more around the baby.

org-mode shortcuts for literate programming

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 14:30:56 +0000

Recently, I had occasion to complete some coding exercises. Since there was some exposition involved, I wanted to take advantage of some of the affordances for literate programming provided by org-mode in Emacs.

I won’t get too much into the definition and benefits of literate programming here. My intent is to create a reference of some of my favorite org-mode commands that, in practice, I don’t get to use that often; but, would like to have collected in one spot.

Hashing Pipelines with Joblib

Mon, 11 May 2020 15:15:15 +0000

For the last six months or so, I’ve been working on building out the infrastructure for our machine-learning service at work. One thing that had me scratching my head last week was trying to compare two fitted pipelines, trained on what could be the same data. To ensure that I wasn’t re-uploading a duplicate fitted pipeline, I wanted to compare the MD5 hashes of the fitted pipelines. Joblib has a way to do this, but I spent way too long trying to find an example of getting it working.

Books Finished in 2019

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 15:15:15 +0000

The Last Lecture, Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow
Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chögyam Trungpa
Garlandia, Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky
Bingo Love, Tee Franklin and Joy San and Jenn St-Onge
Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets, Al Ramadan and Dave Peterson and Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney

Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future, Frank Bien and Tomasz Tunguz
On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden
Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Scott Anderson

Crux, Ramez Naam
The Worst Is Yet to Come: A Post-Capitalist Survival Guide, Peter Fleming
Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity, Kim Scott

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Mark Fisher
The Oven, Sophie Goldstein
House of Women, Sophie Goldstein
The Wild Storm, vol. 1, Warren Ellis and Jon Davis-Hunt
Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writings, Neal Stephenson

Algeria Is Beautiful Like America, Olivia Burton and Mahi Grand
Victory of Eagles, Naomi Novik
Zero K, Don DeLillo

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
The Russian Kettlebell Challenge: Xtreme Fitness for Hard Living Comrades, Pavel Tsatsouline
Passing for Human, Liana Finck

The Complete Ballad of Halo Jones, Alan Moore
Dune, Frank Herbert

All You Need is Kill, Takeshi Obata and Ryōsuke Takeuchi and Yoshitoshi Abe

RASL, Jeff Smith
Star Wars: Darth Vader: Dark Lord of the Sith, Charles Soule and others

Tongues of Serpents, Naomi Novik
By Chance or Providence, Becky Cloonan

The Silence of Our Friends, Mark Long and Jim Demonakos and Nate Powell
November, vol. 1, Matt Fraction and Elsa Charretier

Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked the World, Pénélope Bagieu
Mastering the 21 Immutable Principles of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, Paulo Guillobel
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World, Sasha Sagan

Adding Custom Meta Tags to Hugo

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 14:34:56 +0000

After reading about the Mozilla Foundation and Coil’s announcement, I decided I wanted to try an experiment and add a Coil micropayment meta tag to my blog. I couldn’t find an obvious way to do this with Hugo or much information about it in their docs. I first tried just adding the key-value pair to my config.toml.

# config.toml

monetization = "$coil.xrptipbot.com/zP3gu5RkRVSdjBhe_fu3XA"

The values didn’t end up in the <head> tag on my site, though. Then, after skimming through Hugo’s discussion forum, I hit upon the idea to check out the theme’s header.html partial. I added a check and a spot for the monetization meta parameter on my fork:

On Inquisitive Variable Names

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 14:30:56 +0000

They say that code should read like well-written prose, and that code is written to be read by people—it’s only incidental that machines do something with whatever we create.

To those ends, prefixing the names of variables of the boolean type with “is” or “has” or another interrogative word has the effect of leading the reader to expect an answer—“yes” or “no,” or in the parlance of the language, true or false. This communicates to the reader that the variable represents a boolean, and primes them for approaching the next part of the expression as something that may or may not happen.

Climate and Environmental Variables

Sat, 09 Mar 2019 14:34:56 +0000

A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he’d been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage.

“Those guys must have been freezing!”

That’s one of California’s hidden advantages: the mild climate means there’s lots of marginal space. In cold places that margin gets trimmed off. There’s a sharper line between outside and inside, and only projects that are officially sanctioned — by organizations, or parents, or wives, or at least by oneself — get proper indoor space. That raises the activation energy for new ideas. You can’t just tinker. You have to justify.

DM's are an Anti-Pattern

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 14:30:56 +0000

this post is in reference to Slack/Hipchat/Hangouts Direct Messages, not Dungeon Masters

An all-too-common approach to communication I’ve seen is DM’s for any number of subjects which should be public: how to set up a server, a discussion about an architectural proposal, how to address the content in an open PR, and so on. At best, they limit information sharing among the team members; at worst, they further fracture a team’s cohesion and ruin any efficiency in communication by forcing folks to repeat themselves.

Building Lists in Scheme

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 10:29:08 -0600

Or, the differences between `append`, `cons`, & `list`

from sicp

2.26: Suppose we define x and y to be two lists:

(define x (list 1 2 3))
(define y (list 4 5 6))

What’s the output of the following?

(append x y)
;; (1 2 3 (4 5 6))
;; but actually
;; (1 2 3 4 5 6)

(cons x y)
;; ((1 2 3) (4 5 6))
;; but actually
;; ((1 2 3) 4 5 6)

(list x y)
;; (1 2 3 4 5 6)
;; but actually
;; ((1 2 3) (4 5 6))

An RSS Feed

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 17:33:27 -0500

This blog ~~is now featuring~~ has had RSS all along. Did you know this? I didn’t know this. But, I know now and now you know, too.

If you’re so inclined, you may subscribe for intermittent updates: https://newschematic.org/blog/index.xml

Dada Photo Boo-booth

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 10:29:08 -0600

As the next step in the exploration of the ideas behind the Dada Photo Booth, Adam and I reworked the project for showing at the Museum of Human Achievement during the 2018 East Austin Studio Tour. Responding to a call for artists working with the concepts around taking selfies, we intended to directly transplant our piece into one of about 30 stations in a selfie gauntlet. Personally, I was looking forward to the challenge of architecting and coding a stand-alone, self-service iteration of the Dada Photo Booth. However, once we received the requirements and context around the selfie gauntlet, it became clear that this would be an exercise in doing more with less coding.

Using emoji in Matplotlib

Sat, 23 Dec 2017 06:54:34 -0600

tl;dr

Download the Symbola font and install it; using, for instance, the included Font Book application on macOS.
Trash Matplotlib’s font cache file (probably located at ~/.matplotlib/fontList.py3k.cache, again for macOS).
Start your Jupyter Notebook. The font should be available and if it is, it’ll be used to render the final graph. If not, the default font will be used and all of those silly emoji will show up as empty rectangles of sadness.

'We did what we always do...'

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 22:40:37 -0500

We did what we always do when there’s a problem without a clear solution: we waited.

from “Toward Go 2”

Adding node.js test coverage from CircleCI to Code Climate

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 14:25:20 -0600

install istanbul & codeclimate-test-reporter in your dev dependencies: npm install --save-dev istanbul codeclimate-test-reporter
add to circle.yml:

general:
 artifacts:
 - "coverage"

test:
 post:
 - CODECLIMATE_REPO_TOKEN=$CODECLIMATE_REPO_TOKEN ./node_modules/.bin/codeclimate-test-reporter < coverage/lcov.info

In Code Climate, get the test reporter token from https://codeclimate.com/repos/YER_PROJECT_ID/coverage_setup and take it to the “Env Var” section of your Circle CI project settings page, like https://circleci.com/gh/USER_NAME/PROJECT_NAME/edit#env-vars – add a variable with a name of CODECLIMATE_REPO_TOKEN and value of the test reporter token from Code Climate.
Update your test command in your package.json from

gempm: Sharing JavaScript Code Between Rails and Node.js apps

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 02:44:31 +0000

Background

Here at OwnLocal, we’ve built lots of Rails apps and added lots of Ruby code to those apps. As our products and tools have grown organically over the years, our systems have become more opaque and, in some cases, more brittle.

In the last quarter of 2016, my team was tasked with automating away a large portion of our bread and butter: writing parsers to extract, transform, and load data from text files sent to us by our partners on a daily basis. Studying the requirements, it seemed to me that the proposed data flow—passing in a text file along with a partner-specific configuration for how the system should translate that data—resembled a pure function: we’d always get the same output from the same input, no side-effects. When I pitched the idea that we build a greenfield project, rather than bolting more functionality onto a Rails app we plan to sunset next year, Drew told us to go for it.

invoke and execute in Rake

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 20:03:27 -0600

When writing tests for a Rake task at work, I came across invoke and execute as two different ways for calling a specific task. Most of the content I found online about the difference was fairly superficial: invoke can only get called once, execute can be called as many times as one wants.

There, are you happy? Move on.

Never being generally happy, I did not move on. I wanted to know how these similar-looking methods were executed differently. So, I consulted The Truth.

New Schematic

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 04:28:20 +0000

Combined my blog with my portfolio, and got them all hosted on my own business. Drop on by!

[goto](https://newschematic.org/)

Hello Again

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 07:33:27 -0500

With the recent announcement that Vine will be getting shuttered, I’m reminded of the uncertainty that all free web-based services face. As such, I’ve decided to move my blog off of Tumblr. While this decision is partly about wanting to get ahead of any potential disruptions in service, its roots are in mainitaining control and exercising autonomy.

For this site, I decided to use Hugo, a static site generator written in Go. I could talk about how fast it is, how there’s no point in my reinventing this wheel, or how I get to write my posts in Github-flavored Markdown. But really, most of my decision was based on the fact that Julia Evans uses it for her very excellent blog. #socialproof

Installing Golang on OSX with Brew and oh-my-zsh

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 02:25:22 +0000

brew install go worked well, as expected. However, at the end of the installation, the notes suggest I add GOROOT to my path:

You may wish to add the GOROOT-based install location to your PATH: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/opt/go/libexec/bin

Buuuuut, it didn’t work. After trying out some different iterations, I was reminded when ls-ing through the surrounding directories that /usr/local/opt/go/... was aliased because Homebrew. This Stack Overflow answer reinforced my hunch. So, I updated my .zshrc:

Photo for 2016-09-24

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 20:49:23 +0000

Learning about the random function in Processing is evoking the same feeling I had when I first learned about HTML’s <blink> tag.

Quote for 2016-07-21

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 19:30:04 +0000

In 1996 Keith Shafer and several others proposed a solution to the problem of broken URLs. The link to this solution is now broken. Roy Fielding posted an implementation suggestion in July of 1995. The link is now broken.

src

Quote for 2016-07-18

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:14:27 +0000

…making positive outcomes the easiest and default approach creates positive feedback loops

src via this tweet

Photo for 2016-07-17

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 17:22:07 +0000

Sunday Funday.

Photo for 2016-07-12

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 17:19:15 +0000

http://frontside.io/blog/2016/07/07/the-conjoined-triangles-of-senior-level-development.html

Quote for 2016-07-08

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 18:05:55 +0000

PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that is a kind of a moral crime.

Alan Kay, src

'Recursion is the GOTO of functional programming.' -- Erik Meijer

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 04:30:35 +0000


def fact(n):
 return reduce(lambda x, y: x * y, range(1, n + 1))

print(fact(5))
#=> 120

Photo for 2016-06-13

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 12:47:12 +0000

Quote for 2016-06-05

Sun, 05 Jun 2016 16:13:04 +0000

This book is dedicated, in respect and admiration, to the spirit that lives in the computer.

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don’t think we are. I think we’re responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don’t become missionaries. Don’t feel as if you’re Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don’t feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What’s in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

Massimo Banzi’s 13 Rules for Open Source Projects

Sun, 15 May 2016 17:05:02 +0000

brucesterling:

Adapted from a talk by Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino, presented at World Maker Faire 2011 in New York.

1. Don’t make something you don’t use yourself.

2. Know who you are making it for.

3. Know what you want out of it.

4. Make projects, not platforms.

5. Respect the intelligence of the beginner.

6. Experts are not the best advisors when you want to make tools for beginners.

Photo for 2016-05-01

Sun, 01 May 2016 16:12:38 +0000

Photo for 2016-04-30

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 22:14:39 +0000

When my teammates try to push to the same branch at the same time

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 14:11:05 +0000

thecodinglove:

/* by chrisbodhi */

Use this one trick to get the version of a locally-installed Node module

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 17:21:18 +0000

npm view MODULE | grep version:

Photo for 2016-04-15

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 17:06:40 +0000

iamdanw:

Confusion / Anxiety / Resistance / Frustration / False Starts / Change / Vision / Skills / Incentives / Resources / Action Plan (via A Framework for Thinking About Systems Change · Intense Minimalism)

Quote for 2016-03-15

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 13:48:55 +0000

Good software is approachable. It can be understood completely in independent, easy pieces. You don’t need to understand everything before you can understand anything.

Good software is consistent. It lets you take what you’ve learned about one part and extrapolate it to the rest. It doesn’t self-contradict. It is parsimonious, avoiding superfluous elements.

Good software explains itself. It has affordances for learning and discovery. It is role-expressive and minimizes hidden magic.

Photo for 2016-02-12

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 05:10:23 +0000

Deploying the Howdy.ai Botkit to Heroku

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 20:11:51 +0000

It wasn’t difficult, but like they say, blog about what would have helped your previous self.

Presumbaly, you’re here because you have a rad bot you built using Botkit, and you’re looking for a bit of guidance on getting it out of your local environment and into the real world using Heroku.

If you’re not already familiar with Heroku, or just need a refresher, check out their tutorial on deploying Node.js apps.

Writing Zsh Completion for Padrino

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 07:30:25 +0000

Just the first code block was 🙌

goto

Quote for 2016-01-09

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 16:01:17 +0000

It has been extensively documented that programmers are willing to put in long hours of effort in order to save ten minutes of “unnecessary” labor. This is known as optimization.

src

Working on an open-source contribution

Copy & paste terminal output like a chump no longer!

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 21:09:40 +0000

run command_with_output | tee /path/to/destination/file.txt

You’ll still get the output of your command to the terminal, but that output will also get piped into file.txt, thanks to the tee command. Pre-installed on OS X.

Mike Heavers | code-item

Sun, 26 Jul 2015 20:13:26 +0000


var uniqueArray = duplicatesArray.filter(function(elem, pos) {
 return duplicatesArray.indexOf(elem) == pos;
});

Lovely.

[goto](http://mikeheavers.com/main/code-item/removing_duplicates_in_an_array_using_javascript)

Web Design - The First 100 Years

Thu, 23 Jul 2015 04:05:37 +0000

“There is something quite colonial, too, about collecting data from users and repackaging it to sell back to them. I think of it as the White Nerd’s Burden.”

[goto](http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm)

Three takeaways for web developers after two weeks of painfully slow internet

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 21:41:42 +0000

goto

Too Many Content Requests

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 15:01:22 +0000

During a phone screen recently, the CTO of the company was going through my portfolio site. He checked the browser’s network console and noticed that the site — a page built with React components — was sending multiple requests a second for data from a JSON object [the object serves as the page’s datastore because spinning up a database in this instance would be overkill]. A learning moment!

I revisited the React docs and the code for the components. With a better understanding of React, the issue was quickly apparent: every time the Dealer component was rendered, an AJAX request for data.json fired. Which, just to get static data, was a lot.

Turn On or Off Color Syntax Highlighting In vi or vim Editor

Sun, 05 Jul 2015 06:30:28 +0000

Short version: once vim is running, hit the : key to get to the Action Line [as I’m now calling it] and type syntax on before hitting your enter key. A wonderful world of colors awaits you.

[goto](http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/turn-on-or-off-color-syntax-highlighting-in-vi-or-vim/)

Photo for 2015-07-04

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 15:23:52 +0000

nowonlyghosts:

sixpenceee:

Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist and mathematician. She was the lead software engineer for Project Apollo. Her work prevented an abort of the Apollo 11 moon landing. She’s also credited for coining the term “software engineer.”

Those stacks are the code she wrote for Apollo 11. Incredible.

Video for 2015-07-03

Fri, 03 Jul 2015 20:06:38 +0000

git clean

Today, I’ve been trying out various Yeoman generators to kickstart a web app coding challenge. After manually deleting the generated files from the first generator I tested, I took a moment to look up a command that would quickly remove all of the untracked files in my working directory.

git clean -di not only removes the untracked files [leaving the repo’s README.md untouched], but the -d flag also deletes untracked directories, while the -i flag does it all in interactive mode; it lists the files to be removed before asking me how to proceed. Easy peasy!

SE Block Gets an Update

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 14:47:43 +0000

This week, I released an update to SE Block, the Chrome extension that removes some of the cruft from the otherwise-excellent Stack Exchange pages. I had initially struck upon the idea for the extension shortly after I started my last job. Spending a lot of time on Stack Overflow, I found myself getting distracted by whatever was trending on the rest of the network—analysis of characters in Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy? efforts to build supercapacitors using graphene sheets? mining the bowels of the English language to satisfy an itch for the perfect word choice? #relevant to this blog’s interests #productivity drain

Video for 2015-06-28

Sun, 28 Jun 2015 06:30:32 +0000

Sponsoring Captioning at JSConf 2015

Thu, 28 May 2015 06:30:24 +0000

npmjs:

Last year, shortly after returning from JSConf 2014, where npm had sponsored the coffee, I pinged Chris Williams on IRC:
19:07 -!- voodootikigod is away: Auto-away
19:07 isaacs: First of all, jsconf was amazing and awesome, as always
19:07 isaacs: I hope that you're taking some time to decompress...

[goto](http://blog.npmjs.org/post/120056493625/sponsoring-captioning-at-jsconf-2015)

Using Stormpath as an SSO Provider for Discourse

Sat, 25 Apr 2015 16:58:39 +0000

Stormpath: User Auth & Management as a Service [UAMaaS?]

Discourse: an open source forum, designed for reading

SSO: single sign-on; “… a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.” [src]

As we’re moving toward an open beta for the company’s new product, web work to promote, support, and disseminate information is ramping up. I was tasked with using Stormpath as the SSO provider for our Discourse forums. If I made a mistake with this configuration, I would be locked out of any settings panel on the Discourse side. The only way to regain access would be ssh-ing into the Discourse box and executing some commands from irb. The catch was that no one knew the address for that hosted box. The solution?

Quote for 2015-04-01

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 20:07:55 +0000

It’s strictly an 8-to-5 kind of place — there are late nights, but they’re the exception. The programmers are intense, but low-key. Many of them have put in years of work either for IBM (which owned the shuttle group until 1994), or directly on the shuttle software. They’re adults, with spouses and kids and lives beyond their remarkable software program.

That’s the culture: the on-board shuttle group produces grown-up software, and the way they do it is by being grown-ups. It may not be sexy, it may not be a coding ego-trip — but it is the future of software. When you’re ready to take the next step — when you have to write perfect software instead of software that’s just good enough — then it’s time to grow up.

Video for 2015-04-01

Wed, 01 Apr 2015 06:30:40 +0000

And after you’re sufficiently hyped, this.

The Webâs Grain by Frank Chimero

Fri, 20 Mar 2015 15:51:59 +0000

Come for the dial-up tone, stay for the philosophical & practical discussions.

[goto](http://frankchimero.com/talks/the-webs-grain/transcript/)

Photo for 2015-03-10

Tue, 10 Mar 2015 06:30:29 +0000

im-simply-me:

I will never not reblog this.

Photo for 2015-03-09

Mon, 09 Mar 2015 06:30:22 +0000

Quote for 2015-03-08

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 16:47:22 +0000

Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand.

src

Getting Going with React, Part II: On to Development

Sun, 01 Mar 2015 22:07:20 +0000

part one here | completed portfolio site redesign here

Rather than jumping into a full web application, I decided to start small with something I could finish in one sitting. I already had designed my portfolio site to use card-like visual components for each project. Having read over this article on thinking in React, I figured a rebuild would be a natural fit.

Step one was to dump all of the content into a JSON file, which I could use instead of an actual database. This approach made sense because of the small amount of content, the lack of updates to the site [working on this!], and my lack of interest in setting up & maintaining a database through my shared web hosting service.

Photo for 2015-02-26

Thu, 26 Feb 2015 07:30:24 +0000

bodhisattva-belladonna:

superbestiario:
Original illustrations of Blade runner by Syd mead
*nerd breathes heavily*

Photo for 2015-02-25

Wed, 25 Feb 2015 07:30:32 +0000

arkitektonas:

Amphitheater of Parque Villa Lobos, Sao Paulo, Brazil

Photo for 2015-02-24

Tue, 24 Feb 2015 06:07:08 +0000

huzn:

大友克洋

Photo for 2015-02-23

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 15:00:24 +0000

todayinhiphophistory:

Today in Hip Hop History:
Prince Paul released his second studio album A Prince Among Thieves February 23, 1999

Video for 2015-02-22

Sun, 22 Feb 2015 15:36:38 +0000

briannavictoriaaa:

Holy shit.

How is this venue not jam-packed? That was amazing.

Photo for 2015-02-22

Sun, 22 Feb 2015 07:30:38 +0000

brucesterling:

*When they say “elegant,” they don’t mean aesthetically attractive, because they’re engineers

Where does “easy to read” fit? Because that’s my favorite.

Getting Going with React

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 21:04:30 +0000

Part I: Before I Typed a Single Curly Brace or Semicolon

When I first saw some JSX code in a tutorial on React, I immediately poo-pooed the whole library: “What is that, HTML in JavaScript? Facebook, grrr! I’m no wizard, but that’s a terrible combination of concerns! Also, it’s ugly and please give me back my Jade, immediately.” But, as time went on and as one of my co-workers continued his incessant gushing about React, I finally broke down and gave it a spin. And I really, really liked it.

bash command magic

Wed, 18 Feb 2015 15:12:56 +0000

Since I can’t upvote the question or answer, I thought I’d just give a shout-out to this question on unix.stackexchange.com.

To delete duplicate rows from a CSV file using the command line:

awk -F, '!seen[$0]++' inputfile.csv > outputfile.csv

Fantastic.

assert_equal in MiniTest

Sun, 15 Feb 2015 17:18:00 +0000

https://gist.github.com/chrisbodhi/b7b10f5e428088fa38da

@chrisbodhi I also find it difficult to understand how the test cases are passed. I’ve checked them and they do, but in my opinion test_name_sticks should fail as every call to name will append a new random name to the previous one instead of returning the same string. For example, if we run a simple test:

robot = Robot.new
2.times{puts robot.name}
we get:
QF658
QF658YV199
making it clear that the test should fail. —franrodalg

XML Shenanigans

Mon, 09 Feb 2015 02:44:31 +0000

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a project at work that has involved, among other things, parsing XML and updating existing XML files. Just like every other time I have to deal with XML, I do two things:

Throw up a little bit.
gem install nokogiri

I found lots of code samples, including in the Nokogiri tutorials, that discussed how to create a new node and then insert a string as the node contents. This would have been ok if my node contents didn’t contain more nodes. Nokogiri tried to be helpful and escaped the node contents. So, not very many < and >, but lots of > and <.

Video for 2015-02-01

Sun, 01 Feb 2015 21:23:25 +0000

I just started playing around with Beats, a command-line drum machine installed as a Ruby gem. It accepts YAML and outputs .wav files like it’s 1998.

As I started noodling around with the tutorial, I noticed that the feedback loop could be tighter. I’m used to working with tools like grunt watch at work, and wanted a smoother flow. Rather than getting grunt running, I searched for some command-line solutions. This is what I found.

Refactoring. It's a delight.

Sun, 01 Feb 2015 07:30:38 +0000

From

https://gist.github.com/chrisbodhi/15210705414f1b4afcf2

file_info[:control_info].map {|arr| arr[1] }

file_info[:control_info].map(&:last)

Add GitHub gists to your Tumblr posts

Sat, 31 Jan 2015 23:21:25 +0000

https://gist.github.com/1395926

(&:stuff) > {|a| a.stuff}

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 18:46:00 +0000

Rather than writing

object.map{ |o| o.action },

I just found out that I could write

object.map(&:action).

I’m currently attempting to suppress a very strong urge to refactor everything in my current project. No curly braces, no pipes? Sign me up!

src & in the Ruby docs

Markov bot that degenerates over time

Sat, 17 Jan 2015 19:01:07 +0000

As the bot goes on, its algorithm degrades as elements of randomness are introduced.

Photo for 2015-01-17

Sat, 17 Jan 2015 05:47:34 +0000

ASCII Charts

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 23:34:46 +0000

“A Ruby library for generating plain text x,y cartesian plots and histograms that can be displayed in a terminal session.”

on GitHub

Quote for 2015-01-13

Tue, 13 Jan 2015 17:49:01 +0000

XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.

Nokogiri project page

Starting a new project today that will heavily involve, you guessed it, XML.

Quote for 2014-12-18

Thu, 18 Dec 2014 18:25:07 +0000

The key point is that there was no programming or learning involved to create the behaviors. The connectome of the worm was mapped and implemented as a software system and the behaviors emerge.

“A Worm’s Mind In A Lego Body” http://i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/7985-a-worms-mind-in-a-lego-body.html via http://interconnected.org/home/

Photo for 2014-11-30

Sun, 30 Nov 2014 19:15:05 +0000

New Chrome extension in the works: Glitch Vision - replace .jpgs across the web with glitched-out versions of themselves. Makes heavy use of this project: https://github.com/snorpey/glitch-canvas

Your Consent is Not Being Violated by Accident

Sun, 12 Oct 2014 19:24:23 +0000

unquietpirate:

unquietpirate:

When you start looking for examples of nonconsensual culture in technology, you find them absolutely everywhere.

- Deb Chachra, Age of Non-Consent

About a month ago, someone sent me this lovely rant and asked me to publish it anonymously. I’ve been sitting on it mostly because I got…

[goto](http://unquietpirate.tumblr.com/post/97550017813/your-consent-is-not-being-violated-by-accident)

Quote for 2014-08-24

Sun, 24 Aug 2014 23:17:43 +0000

But after 1.0 there is no finish line, there is no bottom of the 9th inning. There are more bugs to be fixed. There are new releases ahead. The march continues, because software is not a product, it is a process.

Mostly a reminder for myself.

http://www.jessesquires.com/apples-to-apples-part-two/

How to Mock JSON with $httpBackend in Jasmine

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 00:45:40 +0000

There is a lot of information out there on running tests for Angular using Jasmine + Karma. One thing that was tripping me up, though, was being able to access a mock JSON file, rather than trying to hit a server with an HTTP request every test.

Working from this code sample, I injected the mock file with the beforeEach call. However, I wasn’t able to access the JSON response until I injected the defaultJSON directly into the specific test:

Loading Partials in Mustache

Sun, 13 Jul 2014 23:12:15 +0000

This took me a while to put together. Luckily, RTFM helped. By the way, the example is written in Jade, which I compile to HTML [with Mustache braces in place] using a Grunt task.

index.jade has this thing: {{> header}} but it renders to a blank line.

I had the header.mustache file in the same directory (mustache/) as index.mustache [which is the file to which the Jade template compiles]. That directory, however, was not the default location that the grunt-mustache-render task was using. So, in my Gruntfile, I simply added options: {directory: "mustache/"} to the mustache_render task.

Edit Comments and Descriptions in Bugzilla

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 16:28:15 +0000

I found it a bit baffling that this functionality was not built in, but from an archival perspective, it makes sense. If you need it for your project, there’s an easy workaround:

Go to this GitHub repo and from the Extensions directory, copy the EditComments directory over to your installation’s Extensions directory.
In your Bugzilla directory, from the command line, run ./checksetup.pl to build the necessary tables and extra columns and other magical things.
Lastly, in template/en/default/bug/comments.html.tmpl, add the following line to your comment_text div: [% Hook.process('a_comment-end', 'bug/comments.html.tmpl') %]. This provides a link to turn on editing for that field.

Since I don’t have memcaching enabled [yet!], I commented out line 229 from extensions/EditComments/Extension.pm. Once I get that memcache going, though, that pound sign is coming right out.

SE Block

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 13:33:50 +0000

Block all of that distracting sidebar stuff in the otherwise excellent Stack Exchange network.

My first Chrome extension. Which I suppose isn’t anything to get excited about because of its simplicity, but it should help me focus.

[goto](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/se-block/ffpkepieaocfchmcokenleighplnifjh)

Writing Custom Bugzilla Extensions

Tue, 20 May 2014 23:03:03 +0000

To see the effects of custom Bugzilla extensions, restart the server. Otherwise, they won’t render.

Quote for 2014-05-13

Tue, 13 May 2014 15:50:46 +0000

The Template::Service module provides a high-quality template delivery service, with bells, whistles, signed up service level agreement and a 30-day no quibble money back guarantee. “Have a good time, all the time”, that’s our motto.

http://template-toolkit.org/docs/manual/Internals.html#section_Outside_Looking_In

Things I Learned This Week

Mon, 05 May 2014 06:30:27 +0000

Resolving the $ conflict between jQuery and YUI…
- …and what YUI is.
All sorts of Apache configuration business, which turned out to be a lot of setting file permissions.
- chmod g=rw myfile gives read and write permissions to all of the current group members for myfile
87% of the CSS being loaded on my current project aren’t being used
- Use Chrome Dev Tools to audit yourself
Intro to vi commands!
- i to start typing, esc to stop [i for “insert mode”]
- Once done typing, :wq to save and quit
- Jump to line 34 when not in insert mode: :34

Vagrant and Ubuntu Server 14.04

Thu, 24 Apr 2014 23:14:53 +0000

Trying to apply the instructions for the Vagrant tutorial to Ubuntu Server 14.04 Trusty Tahr and I ran into a problem when trying to load up the localhost in order to take a peek at my shared directory. I kept getting an Apache error, which meant that the web server was running locally, just nothing was getting served. Running down the error, I came across this Ask Ubuntu post. Rather than trying to mess with any conf files, I simply dropped an html directory to /var/www/ and voila - it worked.

Gems & Libraries in Rails 3.2

Fri, 18 Apr 2014 18:31:58 +0000

Getting up to speed during my first week on the new job. My first task has been upgrading the versions of Ruby and Rails for the main website. To handle some of the common tasks across web applications, we use an in-house gem. While testing the upgrades, I noticed that some of the JavaScript libraries called in the web app weren’t being pulled out of the gem. It took some digging to discover why, but here’s what I found.

Changing git remote origin

Sun, 13 Apr 2014 01:41:32 +0000

“Midway through development we decided to switch from private shared accounts to a corporate account. Switching local repos couldn’t be easier:”

git remote rm origin #Removes old origin
git remote add origin https://username@bitbucket.org/your.new.repo 
#Adds new origin pointing to BitBucket
git push -u origin #Pushes commits to new repo

[I love it when this stuff works so easily.] src

Short-term File Sharing — Torpedo

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:45:55 +0000

minimalmac:

Share files, passwords, and more with self-destructing private links.

Really handy. I’ve used it a few times now. Works as advertised.

I had this idea a while ago, before I even knew how to code. I was thinking of building it as a web app, but this still looks great. I’m just glad that it’s out there so I can cross it off my To Make list.

[goto](https://usetorpedo.com/)

Photo for 2014-03-31

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 06:30:54 +0000

~~Smashing~~ Squashing Git Commits for Open Source Contributions

Recently, I made my first contribution to an open source project, homebrew-cask, “a CLI workflow for the administration of Mac applications distributed as binaries”. Basically, it’s a way to install applications through the command line, rather than visiting a website, clicking to save a disk image, opening said disk image, and clicking and dragging the application icon to the application folder. TIme-consuming and full of opportunities for distraction.

Photo for 2014-03-28

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 16:52:26 +0000

“Part of Unreal Engine, JSified.”

On Asm.js: Ending The Ice Age of JavaScript

Quote for 2014-03-12

Wed, 12 Mar 2014 06:30:27 +0000

Engelbart’s law of technology prediction says that all technology predictions overpredict what technology will do for you in the short term and underpredict what technology will do for you in the long term.

–David Maynard

Meta laws.

(Busted: Yes, I was reading Fast Co. Yes, I’m sorry.)

What's an HREF?

Fri, 28 Feb 2014 07:30:33 +0000

In case you were also wondering about the origins of

<a href="some link address">linky link</a>

“A” is for “anchor”, “HREF” is for “hypertext reference”

from a W3 article on making a server, by way of this place

Backups

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 07:30:37 +0000

I copied my `gem list` and `brew list` outputs to text files in Dropbox today [is the next step writing a script that installs the listed packages when called?]. I then did some sort of nasty copy-and-paste job on my Sublime Text 2 settings, putting them into the Reboot folder, too. Then I came across this response to a question on Stack Overflow. It’s so much nicer & will continue to backup automagically. It’s another one of those too-rare instances where technology makes life easier.

Markov Aurelius (MarkovQAurelius) on Twitter

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 05:57:00 +0000

My latest project: a Sinatra-based Stoic quote generator that yammers on Twitter. Working from the “Meditations” written by Marcus Aurelius, a Ruby gem by the name of marky_markov creates a Markov chain and the Twitter gem feeds it into the Twitter silo. Which is to say, Marcus is [sorta] still sharing his insights today.

Currently, the thing posts only when hitting a local URL. Next steps are to give it a presentable face, host it online, and automate posting [looking at you, Heroku Scheduler].

Give a follow if you don’t already have enough bots in your life.

ToDoApp

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 21:09:30 +0000

I made a thing. It started out as an assignment and a learning experience, using JavaScript for the whole stack. Then I learned that it was taking too long. Thus, a classic Ruby on Rails application with some AJAX-y goodness thrown in. Perhaps my favorite features are the differentiation between to-do items and those overdue; and the inclusion of Action Mailer to send a daily agenda.

a basic todo list that let’s you know when you’ve failed as a person

daily agendas delivered early every morning!

[goto](http://arcane-ridge-2246.herokuapp.com/)

Running A Sinatra Console

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 07:30:49 +0000

mikeebert:

For the past couple of months I’ve been searching for (and bemoaning the lack of) a proper ‘console’ command in Sinatra to access my data. Rails has its aptly named rails console command that allows you to quickly see things like User.all or User.last—but despite my best Googling, I’d found no…

[goto](http://mikeebert.tumblr.com/post/29941784481/running-a-sinatra-console)

Photo for 2014-02-15

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 04:43:36 +0000

slavin:

Hi Google. Can we agree that “definitions” should be clearly separable from “sponsored results” and that a sponsored definition is, basically, the evil that you promised not to do?

Node.js errors need some work.

Sun, 09 Feb 2014 06:37:43 +0000

Writing this in routes/api.js…

 exports.posts = function(req, res) {
 var posts = [];
data.posts.forEach(function(posts, i) {
posts.push({
id: i,
title: post.title,
text: post.text.substr(0, 50) + ‘…’
});
});
res.json({
posts: posts
});
};
exports.posts = function(req, res) {
var id = req.params.id;
if (id >= 0 && id < data.posts.length) {
res.json({
post: data.posts[id]
});
} else {
res.json(false);
}
};

[d'oh! Note the two `exports.posts`.]

…and then attempting to run the Node server will through a less than helpful error:

CSS Things I Learned This Morning

Fri, 07 Feb 2014 17:13:51 +0000

Put those dang media-specific styles at the bottom of the sheet. Cascading means cascading.
When inserting ZURB’s Foundation Icons, trying to write
```
<i class="fi-social-github"></i>
```
as
```
<i class="fi-social-github" />
```
makes for some funny [in hindsight] repetition of the icons.
I thought Viewport Resizer was going to save the day for iPhone testing. I thought wrong.
Not directly related, but Cyberduck has a “reload” button for transfers. Sure beats clicking and dragging the same file repeatedly.

Quote for 2014-02-05

Wed, 05 Feb 2014 16:35:31 +0000

Open up a terminal and type:

$ cd /home/somedir
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer

That’s it! Now your http server will start in port 8000. You will get the message:

Serving HTTP on 0.0.0.0 port 8000 …

Now open a browser and type the following address:

http://192.168.1.2:8000

You can also access it via:

http://127.0.0.1:8000

If the directory has a file named index.html, that file will be served as the initial file. If there is no index.html, then the files in the directory will be listed.

Mars Attracts!

Tue, 04 Feb 2014 07:30:50 +0000

Our final project for MakerSquare: an app for booking flights to Mars. Whimsical? Absolutely. Ahead of its time? Slightly. Completely ridiculous? Only if you’ve forgotten how to dream.

[goto](http://marsattracts.com)

Quote for 2014-01-24

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 22:29:39 +0000

Although the protocol is optimized for use as a payment scheme it is suitable for the transfer of larger amounts. The protocol is also suitable for use as an access control or resource allocation mechanism. With modification the protocol could be made to provide anonymity guarantees.

W3C proposal for a micropayment transfer protocol…from 19 years ago.

Photo for 2014-01-18

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 07:30:49 +0000

The red, green and blue colors derive from stages of Mars’ transformation from barrenness to life depicted in the epic “Red Mars,” “Green Mars,” “Blue Mars” trilogy written by Kim Stanley Robinson. Red, green and blue are also the primary components of the spectrum, symbolizing unity in diversity, as well as light itself, and thus reason and enlightenment. The tricolor form also traditionally represents the republican values of liberty, equality and justice. The flag was sewn by Maggie Zubrin and brought aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery at the invitation of astronaut John Mace Grunsfeld.

'Oh node, he didn't.'

Fri, 17 Jan 2014 18:37:15 +0000

Day 35 of MakerSquare.

Morning: lesson on node.js and gelato. We got a quick and dirty introduction to node, its asynchronicity, and the Express.js framework. In the span of the class, we

Installed node.js and npm, the Node package manager
Registered API keys with Facebook and Twitter
Ran our first node.js server
Ate homemade gelato - cookie dough flavor!
Poked around the Jade page renderer
Ran a node.js server to collect our Twitter stream
Posted through the server to Facebook when “JavaScript” was mentioned in said Twitter stream
Played Bomberman, as built with node.js
Built a chat server

Whew.

Keep on Developin'

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 07:30:47 +0000

Day 34 of MakerSquare.

Morning was perhaps our last lesson on vanilla JavaScript. We learned about prototypes and the .call method. Unique about our preparation was that Gilbert had recorded a version of the lesson as a video for us to watch the night before. I felt that viewing the video and then sleeping really primed my brain for maximum absorption. Moral of the story? Take more naps.

Spent more time this afternoon on getting Mars Attracts to a solid place with the Rails portion. We’re growing our databases and are not without pains. But we hammer down the errors as they pop up and keep on developin’.

'Mars Attracts!' Might Be Renamed 'Maths, Not Hacks!'

Wed, 15 Jan 2014 07:30:56 +0000

Day 33 of MakerSquare.

Morning lesson was on algorithms and using Big O notation to note how long they should take to run. The basis for the lesson came from a co-founder’s conversation with a Google recruiter and her suggestions for what we should know for technical interviews. I enjoyed the lesson because ti was stretching a different, but parallel, part of the brain.

Afternoon was project work. We worked on figuring out where our hackathon project had holes and how to patch them. I added dropdown menus that populate from the database. It works for now, but it looks like we’ll be restructuring our models & it probably won’t work tomorrow. Probably means it’s time to start writing tests.

@font-face and Rails and Foundation

Sun, 12 Jan 2014 07:30:45 +0000

TL;DR If you are new to the asset pipeline in rails, using custom fonts can be a bit confusing. This is how I recommend getting started: add fonts…

[goto](http://aokolish.me/blog/2011/12/24/at-font-face-with-the-asset-pipeline/)

'No plan survives first contact with the enemy.' -- Helmuth von Moltke the Elder

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 07:06:00 +0000

Day 32 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. Shout out to everyone else who wore a tie, especially the ladies who rocked them with dresses and blouses. Keeping it classy.

Front-end: Adding ZURB Foundation to a Rails app and using Sass to write markup. In the evening, I found a blog post detailing how to incorporate custom fonts in Rails, which I’ll link later. Once again, going through Foundation, I admire the speed and ease with which I can get something looking decent, especially next to what I made before I started at MakerSquare. Not that the older stuff was bad, but writing code by hand takes a lot longer.

We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell.

Fri, 10 Jan 2014 01:44:46 +0000

timoarnall:

mostlysignssomeportents:

Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them…

It’s basically all being driven by Netflix. Everyone in the browser world is convinced that not supporting Netflix will lead to total marginalization, and Netflix demands that computers be designed to keep secrets from, and disobey, their owners (so that you can’t save streams to disk in the clear).
We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell.

When Worlds Collide

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 05:36:26 +0000

Day 30 of MakerSquare.

Front-end: We covered a couple of topics today. First, we worked with a weather API to pull a JSON object using AJAX within a JavaScript tag. APIs are powerful tools, but as we saw earlier in the program when GitHub changed theirs, too fragile. Maybe APIs need a versioning system and/or a way to allow developers to test their code against updated APIs to ensure the new release doesn’t break stuff.

Getting down to business [logic]

Wed, 08 Jan 2014 03:57:47 +0000

Day 29 of MakerSquare.

Front-end: more jQuery and then digging into Presenters for riot.js. We continued to build our app that allows for posting and commenting on pictures of animals. Our directive today was to study changes in the code and then add a feature to tally the total “likes” on comments for a specific picture.

Back-end: Helpers of all sorts in Rails. Partials for the views and helper methods to take “the business logic” out of the views and into model helpers. Glad I completed the Hartl tutorial over the break because: seeing things a second time helps with learning, and I have a new appreciation for Haml, which we used today.

'Do you remember how to dream?'

Tue, 07 Jan 2014 07:30:56 +0000

Day 28 of MakerSquare.

The day started with a rundown of the schedule and structure of the next week and an impromptu MakerStory from Osei, our new instructor. He previously did a seminar for us on debugging JavaScript in the browser console & was really energetic about it. So, looking forward to seeing what else he has in store for us.

Front-end: Lordy, my JavaScript got rusty over the break. Luckily, we had some WD-40 in the form of another review before learning more about the presenters in riot.js. The title of this post came from Gilbert, as he questioned us on how functions are called & the dreamspace they manifest.

Photo for 2013-12-31

Tue, 31 Dec 2013 07:30:51 +0000

When we first started writing tests, I developed a sort of existential test crisis: How can I ever know if my tests are right if I’m the one writing them? Is there a way to test my tests? & if so, do I need to test the tests that test my tests?

Thankfully, I found my answers in this book.

Reading “Everyday Rails: Testing with RSpec” by Aaron Sumner.

chrisbodhi/CLI Alias

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 07:30:52 +0000

Alias for my command line - Gist is a simple way to share snippets of text and code with others.

Listened to a Ruby Rogues episode on sharpening one’s tools. Finally started to put together shortcuts for my command line. Thanks to Boggsy & Mike for sharing how to get started over the MakerSquare mailing list.

Photo for 2013-12-26

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 03:19:13 +0000

Find the folder you want to modify.

CMD + I to open up the info window. Set this aside.
Find the image you want to use.
CMD + I to open up its info window. Click on the thumbnail then CMD + C to copy it.
Go back to the first info window you opened. Click on that boring thumbnail.
CMD + V to paste the new thumbnail image. PROTIP: this can work with any image. Transparent .png icons work the best.
Bask in the glory of Nibbler waiting to gobble up your code.

*Tested only in 10.6.8 because I’m old school like that.

Ol' Gus & His Crazy Ideas

Sat, 21 Dec 2013 07:30:39 +0000

Day 27 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day.

Analog morning: we got a quick lesson on working with clients [read: ask good questions] & how to translate their ideas into specs, which we can use to determine what sort of product to build and how to build it. Then, Casey put on a ten-gallon hat and turned into Mr. Gus Chiggins, Idea Man.

Mr. Chiggins asked us to build a web app he dubbed “Weightable” which will allow users to sign up, set weight goals, and start tracking their weight daily. Their friends can see their progress and give them encouragement along the way. We then worked in groups to put together the client spec and clarify what he said he wanted.

➜ makersquare git:(yesterday) git stash

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 07:30:27 +0000

Day 26 of MakerSquare.

Started the day with an update from the career services duo. We got some pointers on how to get our online selves together. We were also reminded that even though we’re here at MKS to eventually get jobs in development, we need to learn to be better developers first. Moral of the story: code.

Front-end: using presenters in riot.js to perform actions for our webpage, all illustrated with incredibly un-fierce puppies. We did a lot of reading code and practiced verbalizing what was going on with it.

Quote for 2013-12-20

Fri, 20 Dec 2013 06:00:34 +0000

“Leaning in” is not the answer to our larger cultural problem and the unrealistic expectations the tech world sets for both men and women. Leaning in is an option, certainly. But, for most of us, “leaning in” will keel us all over into burnout. It will lean us all into lives we’re still inexplicably unhappy about living, always seeking the next way to “lean in” and “get ahead”, no matter what physical or emotional toll it may take. No matter what drugs you have to do. Never mind that you’re falling apart and haven’t had any time for yourself all week in between working and your commute back and forth to Palo Alto.

What Sheryl Sandberg ignores is that whatever we’re leaning in to is an arbitrary boundary that will lead us into nowhere. To “lean in”, as she describes, or as society has taken it to mean, is to push harder in the workplace and to keep going despite the fact that our laundry hasn’t been done in weeks and our apartment is hardly lived in.

And, personally, I feel that pushing into other people’s bullshit boundaries and arbitrary organizational frameworks is a waste of my time.

An Open Letter to Sheryl Sandberg from a Twenty-Something Woman in Tech | Techendo - Tech Life. Culture. News. (via slavin)

'Ruby's too cool for computer science.'

Thu, 19 Dec 2013 07:30:41 +0000

Day 25 at MakerSquare.

Front-end: started mucking around with MVP - model, views, presenters - with our host of JS libraries. Conceptually, it seems similar to what we’ve seen in Rails. I think the next step to take will be getting a better understanding of the file structure and where to store what code.

Back-end: sending emails with Rails Action Mailer. It was interesting to see how this system used the MCV style of Rails to incorporate with the rest of the application. Also, there’s something really awesome about reaching into the world from one of our applications and interacting with some aspect of it.

'Closure' will probably not provide any.

Wed, 18 Dec 2013 07:30:40 +0000

Day 24 of MakerSquare.

Front-end: closure in JavaScript will, ironically, open many doors and even more questions. More concept review to really nail down the basics of JavaScript. The language is so patchy and quirky that it’d be easy to disparage it for those properties [guilty!]. But, really, it’s probably a matter of becoming more familiar with its strengths and peculiarities. At this point, there’s only one course of action and it involves finally getting a library card.

'Devise does not suck. You suck.'

Tue, 17 Dec 2013 07:30:45 +0000

Day 23 of MakerSquare.

The day started with two short presentations from possible clients for our final project. Will from Million Mile Month and RC from Shop141. What was interesting about both of these projects is that they’re both focused on improving lives. The code for these projects wouldn’t just be about getting more users or for another social network hoping to topple Facebook [which will happen one day, but not today], but to make tangible differences in people’s day-to-day lives, differences that can have many positive consequences down the road. I’m looking forward to what comes out of these projects.

Quote for 2013-12-16

Mon, 16 Dec 2013 07:30:43 +0000

HOWTO: Open Your Work from Sublime in Chrome with a Key Command

In Sublime Text, go to Tools > Build System > New Build System. A new tab will open in Sublime Text named untitled.sublime-build, with the following text in it:

{
“cmd”: [“make”]
}

If you use a Mac, replace it with the following:

{
“cmd”: [“open”, “-a”, “/Applications/Google Chrome.app”, “$file”]
}

Save the file. Name it Choose Browser.sublime-build. Sublime Text should be smart enough to put it in the right place for you, but if it doesn’t, save it to the following locations:

Photo for 2013-12-14

Sat, 14 Dec 2013 06:19:16 +0000

Hacker News has 44% of its users in the 18-24 age bracket and is 77% male (Slashdot is 87% male, StackOverflow is 76%). Hacker News further has a well-documented history of hostility and abuse towards women, and posts that speak specifically to the experiences of women in tech have a tendency to be “disappeared” off (good job, Paulg). Meanwhile, sites like Reddit, while having technology channels like r/programming, are well-known to support misogynistic clusters that attack women en masse during high-visibility incidents of sexism.

Hey, I remembered a Title Today

Sat, 14 Dec 2013 06:09:41 +0000

Day 22 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day.

Project/catch up day. In addition to working more with riot.js, I built a video playlist manager in Javascript. It’s similar in style and functionality to what we had earlier built with Rails. I’m curious about the advantages and disadvantages of using JS versus Rails for web applications. I imagine that considerations of scale and functionality may be factors.

Didn’t get into much Rails work today but, wow, I watched a lot of the new videos from Ruby Conf 2013. Key takeaways from those: leave cryptography to the experts; I’ll better understand garbage collection in the future; there’s a wrapper for git for users of Github [conveniently called hub]; running Ruby on robots looks both easy and fun; and programs like MKS rule.

runrun

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 07:30:53 +0000

Day 20 of MakerSquare.

Frontend: Inception references to describe variable scope! Yes! Got my first look at riot.js, which deserves a closer & more in-depth look. Secret for the day: we’ve always been in the window object in JavaScript.

Backend: More work with associations and references. Finagled some Haml and even got it to [eventually] do what I want. Learned a few tricks, like reload! in the Rails console to process any changes.

this. & Model, singular & [Mark] Haml

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 06:02:34 +0000

Day 19 of MakerSquare.

Frontend: We started with a much-needed refresher in Javascript. After Gilbert had us all repeat “‘this’ points to the object calling the function” not once, but twice, I decided to write it down. It could be important. </understatement>

As an aside, will the next generation understand jokes referencing closing HTML tags after we all start using Haml and other templating engines in the Future?

Anyway, we broke for lunch before getting into `for` loops. Met up with a friend of mine who wants to develop a game to teach kids programming concepts. Luckily, I could follow along with his idea and even understood the funny stories he told about his CS undergrad experiences in the lab. At the very least, I’ll be a much better guest at cocktail parties after this program is over.

Quote for 2013-12-09

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 23:58:24 +0000

[I]nstead of constantly griping about having to type Hirb.enable, I found how to automagically load it in the Rails console:

1. In your home directory [ ~ ], type subl .irbrc

2. Paste in this bit:
if defined?(Rails) && Rails.env
require ‘hirb’
Hirb.enable
end

3. Save and enjoy*.

*Confirmed working with OS X 10.6.8 and [Rails] 4.0.2

Yes, my OS is old and janky - stop laughing.

via Poop’s comment at http://tagaholic.me/2009/09/07/hirb-tips-for-rails.html

Friday is Tie Day

Sat, 07 Dec 2013 06:54:04 +0000

Day 18 of MakerSquare.

All sorts of things going on today, with a half-hour delay due to the weather. Practiced using Git in new ways to collaborate in preparation for the hackathon. In the afternoon, we used YouTube’s API to populate fields in our MyTube web application just based on the video’s ID.

And if that wasn’t enough, we watched this video on the projector.

Instead of starting to wind down at 4 pm today, we instead started our first hackathon. My group, Team CEE Low [it’s an acronym thing], is working on Text-spiration, a service from which people receive inspirational text messages daily. Users will be able to select from a category of messages and a time of day to receive said message.Everything on the backend seemed cut-and-dry, but after we got to work following dinner, things didn’t look so clear. It probably won’t be easy, but I’m looking forward to doing what I signed up for: building stuff.

I Had Something for This.

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 07:30:53 +0000

Day 17 at MakerSquare.

I had some sort of idea for a title on the bike ride to MKS this morning, but it was lost. Pretty sure it was brilliant and insightful.

Rails week continues:

Using Active Records to associate tables in the morning: tables talking to each other!
Test-driven Rails development in the afternoon: red to green with Rails!
Surprise visit from the folks at Ordoro: they brought us burritos and now rank among the greatest people in the world.
Started to plan the co-authoring of documentation for a Ruby gem we used in class last week. But, that will have to come later: our first hackathon starts Friday afternoon.

It’ll probably be wise to go over my Ruby and Javascript notes tomorrow, and healthy to go over the yoga moves I practiced today, ahead of the ~~madness~~ good times of the coming weekend.

Ah, CRUD.

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 07:30:49 +0000

Day 16 of MakerSquare.

More Rails today - are you detecting a theme? Got into the nitty-gritty of CRUD - Create Read Update Delete - systems. We mimicked nearly the entire development history of Web 2.0 over the course of a day.

The program has been evolving, as well. We started taking daily progress exams at the end of the lessons. The gut reaction to ‘exam’ is always one of apprehension and resistance, but aren’t we here to be tested? It ties back into the OODA loop, and the near-constant reaction to changing conditions. It certainly wasn’t hyperbole when we were cautioned, on Day 1, that things move quickly around here.

A Dispatch from Cafe Bedouins

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 06:31:08 +0000

Day 15 of MakerSquare.

More Rails today, with an introduction to ActiveRecord. Got into the dirt of databases - making them, reading from them, writing to them, modifying them, and deleting them. So much better than messing around with placeholder hashes to store and read data. Ah, the joys of encapsulation.

We continued to see our Ruby terminology carry over. As I was discussing with a classmate here at Cafe Bedouins, learning Rails before Ruby seems incomprehensible at this point. One question lingers from the day, though: Why hasn’t Hirb.enable been rolled into the Rails console as a permanent, always-on setting?

Photo for 2013-12-03

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 16:02:42 +0000

http://xkcd.com/1296/

Add this to the list of jokes I now get.

Quote for 2013-12-03

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 06:30:46 +0000

XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it.

http://nokogiri.org/

'Clown down the repo'

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 02:00:35 +0000

Day 14 of MakerSquare.

All Rails, all day.

Routes, parameters, controllers. The diagram was just a stack of blocks at first, but once we started getting into building things, the language of Rails became natural. Well, maybe not natural, but familiar. Ish.

We built a YouTube-style video-viewing site, cleverly called MeTube. Initial impressions: lots of capacity to do lots of things, but wow, gotta keep those naming conventions organized. [Note to self: invest in Post-It notes] We worked with hard-coding information into the site, then moved to passing in parameters through the URL - both query strings and dynamic segments.

Photo for 2013-11-28

Thu, 28 Nov 2013 05:21:02 +0000

itscolossal:

Circuit Scribe: Instantly Draw Functional Electrical Circuits on a Piece of Paper

Short Day

Thu, 28 Nov 2013 05:20:40 +0000

Introduction to Sinatra after building a reservation system with JavaScript. It was a half day and when I had an opportunity to get a ride home, a strange thing happened: I didn’t jump at the opportunity. I had enjoyed experimenting and learning Sinatra, and wanted to keep going. Momentum is key in situations like this (cue a speech about inertia being synonymous with death, set to take place in two weeks).

Photo for 2013-11-27

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 16:57:54 +0000

That thing when your design is foiled by a pop-up window.

Hey, Someone Reads This. Cool.

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 04:34:31 +0000

Day 12 at MakerSquare.

Inspired by yesterday’s talk, I got up at 7am to bang on my keyboard and attempt to understand the Twitter gem. I didn’t get far, but I had inadvertently prepared for the day.

Front-end: $(this) & jQuery. The concepts were almost confusing, but not quite. I may have had an advantage today because my partner is an old-hand in the Java world. Interesting bit: ‘undefined’ is not less than 2.

Aw, CRUD.

Tue, 26 Nov 2013 06:30:48 +0000

Day 11 at MakerSquare.

Started the day with a motivational/direction-giving/advise-giving talk from a graduate of cohort #2, who two weeks out from graduating, has accepted an offer at a local company, which is sort of a big deal. The main bit of advice for us was that we should code, code, and code. And then code some more.

Front-end: Javascript objects look like hashes but they’re not; they’re objects. We saw something like this structure later in the day, which was a great way to reinforce it.

Quote for 2013-11-25

Mon, 25 Nov 2013 06:30:46 +0000

This one is hard to find out there so here it is. If you have an uncommitted change (its only in your working copy) that you wish to revert (in SVN terms) to the copy in your latest commit, do the following:

git checkout filename

This will checkout the file from HEAD, overwriting your change. This command is also used to checkout branches, and you could happen to have a file with the same name as a branch. All is not lost, you will simply need to type:

iron_man = SuperHero.new('suit_of_armor', 'arrogance')

Sat, 23 Nov 2013 00:28:23 +0000

I had a dream the other night that I initialized a man with magnets in his hands.

Day 10 of MakerSquare.

Project Day is Friday is Tie Day.

Back-end: Working with tests and Rspec to build out a program to score a game of tennis, as described on the Coding Dojo. Jammed up my Sublime Text’s RubyTest package so I have to hop over to the terminal to run my tests like I was sort sort of prole. So, fixing that is going on my list for the weekend, right after I code up some deuce and advantage action.

Maybe Writing This on a Phone Will Keep It Short

Fri, 22 Nov 2013 05:59:00 +0000

Day 9 of MakerSquare.

Back-end: more work with Rspec. Asked more questions today and got a better handle on the process. Diagramming the example code helped, as usual. A side benefit to this program is the opportunity to deeply examine how I best learn. Ammunition for the future.

Front-end: more functions in JavaScript with an assist from jQuery. Also better than yesterday. I have developed some sort of value judgment against JS, which means I need to spend more time with it. Preferably while drinking less java.

Photo for 2013-11-21

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 05:27:04 +0000

Day 8 at MakerSquare.

Came across this image and it’s fairly representative of my learning experiences of the day, specifically the “No” and the choppiness.

Back-end: Introduction to rspec and test-/build-driven design. Follow along with the code during the lecture, take notes, work through the lesson. All good. Sit down to write my own tests and, well, see above image.

Front-end: More Javascript, specifically jQuery functions. Same story as the morning: follow along, take notes, work through the lesson, but sit down to do my own and …no.

Photo for 2013-11-20

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 06:31:09 +0000

http://xkcd.com/1289/

Every block is a nail when you have a Ruby-hammer.

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 00:48:16 +0000

Day 7 at MakerSquare.

Back-end: Algorithms demystified. Got into the nitty and/or gritty of the Great Hash Versus Array Quandry. There’s the balance to strike between what’s best for the computer [which really is about the user] and what’s easiest to write. Ruby was created with the user [read: programmer] in mind; I wonder where the other trade-offs will be.

Spent too long drawing diagrams and writing pseudo-code to solve an aspect of an extra credit problem that wasn’t actually requested. Ha. Takeaway: Beware the trap of walking around with my Ruby-hammer, looking for the question-nails.

Video for 2013-11-19

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 16:02:11 +0000

Get out your popcorn and a notebook [the paper kind]. A thought-provoking watch with some actionable bits if you want to make some Sublime Text extensions.

Seriously, I need to stay away from this subversive nonsense. At least for the next nine weeks. After that, I’m taking on all assumptions and eliminating them.

Quote for 2013-11-19

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 06:31:02 +0000

I saw the best minds of my generation… writing spam filters.

Neal Stephenson, Solve For X

Expect These to Get Shorter...

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 05:04:00 +0000

Day 6 at MakerSquare.

Week 2. This time, I’m in a new building, which is really the old building. The atmosphere is different, but that might just be the absence of glass walls and paint fumes.

Upsides: standing desk and a coffee maker.
Downsides: one bathroom for 20+ dudes and too much coffee.

Back-end now happens in the morning, which is the opposite of last week. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse [but it’s probably neither - “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them”]. Dug deep into Ruby classes with my new pair. Seeing as I’m writing this after catching up on the morning’s work [at 2245], maybe we dug too deep. If we hadn’t though, I wouldn’t have learned that the ‘puts’ method looks for a custom 'to_s’ method in classes, and print that output as opposed to the unreadable-by-human object! My notes from that moment read as, “implicit class methods to make objects readable?! mind blown!”

Photo for 2013-11-18

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 06:31:14 +0000

Start of my redesign for Austin Books & Comics. A matter of getting the content in, taking care of some non-critical bugs, and building out the rest of the pages.

Not pictured: nifty expanding ‘store’ hours bar revealing the actual store hours

Photo for 2013-11-17

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 03:35:20 +0000

An oldie but a goodie, particularly applicable over the next nine weeks. Probably will need to bust this out every Friday.

Quote for 2013-11-16

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 06:31:12 +0000

The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts.

http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/

This is news to me.

Better Than Stir Friday

Sat, 16 Nov 2013 04:42:46 +0000

Day 5 at MakerSquare.

Friday is Tie Day. & also project day.

Front-end: Pick a website and redesign it. I had originally picked the site for my favorite diner in town, Kerbey Lane. Excellent pancakes, cluttered website. It was correctly suggested that the scope of that redesign would be too much. I then picked another local institution, Austin Books & Comics. I started by sketching out some mockups and jumped in.

No good. No good at all.

'Charlie Sheen #{emotion}-ing at the bank.'

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 04:17:59 +0000

Day 4 at MakerSquare.

Started with explanations of why and how things happen here, which is always awesome. I like to understand thought processes and how decisions are made, especially related to design [speaking in the broadest sense of the word].

We were reminded of the Three Pillars to be instilled in us: teamwork, independence, and a love of problem solving. All noble qualities. This reminds me - I need to see if there’s a Twitter account that automatically sends out quotes from Stoic philosphers. If not, well, I’ll add it to the to-do list.

Quote for 2013-11-14

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 06:30:53 +0000

The gist pointed out that Hash.new, with its default values, is good for implementing Fibonacci sequences. So I decided to check:

fib = Hash.new do |hash,key|
k = key.to_i
hash[key] = case k
when 0 then 0
when 1 then 1
else hash[k-1] + hash[k-2]
end
end

This recursive (and memoized!) definition means that you can do fib[18] and get back 2584, plus you get the Fibonacci numbers from F0 (fib[0]) to F17 (fib[17]). Recursively defined Hashes are useful auto-memoized structures.

Kleptomaniacs take things seriously.

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 03:57:04 +0000

Day 3 at MakerSquare.

A pun-y morning with wireframing and CSS layout. Looking back at the web design I’ve done in the past [which involved a vicious amount of Googling about <div> and floats and inline-blocks], I’m excited about developing the skillz to quickly iterate on designs I’ve sketched out. No more sweating over how the introduction of a new paragraph could break the layout.

They say that by suffering with manual CSS layout, we will develop a greater appreciation for frameworks. Without having touched a single one of them, I can confirm that yes, frameworks are awesome.

Yoga & Researching Array#each This Weekend

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 05:08:20 +0000

Day Two at MakerSquare.

First full day of class.

Front end in the morning: Mostly stretching the HTML/CSS muscles and practicing pair programming. Realized that float:left and float:right size the element down to the width of the child element - light bulb!

Starting to scratch the surface of best practices, from using “-u” in the initial git push to writing in the present tense for git messages. And, enjoyably, making the Sublime Text experience even more awesome by tweaking settings and learning shortcuts.

Video for 2013-11-12

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 06:31:05 +0000

If there is no such thing as offline, does this mean that web programmers should be exploring how to code for web-enabled physical devices? Like, starting yesterday?

42

Tue, 12 Nov 2013 05:04:39 +0000

Day One at MakerSquare.

Half day, on account of the Veteran’s Day parade, which I sadly missed. Heard that the oldest surviving WWII vet was there. Richard Overton. 107 years old. From Bastrop County, Texas, born in 1906. From the Great War to the Depression to the Pacific Theater to television to the civil rights movement to a man on the moon to Watergate to the oil crisis to the moral majority to the dot com era to 9/11 to a persistent world wide web to the recession to the present day.

Reference: Starting Points

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 06:30:58 +0000

0. Completed the entire “Web Fundamentals” Track on Codecademy

1. Completed the “Ruby in 100 Minutes” Tutorial

2. Completed the “Ruby” Track on Codecademy

3. Completed the “Ruby Primer” Course on RubyMonk

4. Completed Terminal Basics

5. Complete through Exercise 11 “Moving a File” of the “Learn Code the Hard Way” Book

6. Completed the JavaScript Track by Codecademy

7. Completed “Try jQuery” by CodeSchool

8. Completed all of “jQuery” by Codecademy

This was the necessary prework ahead of MakerSquare. I’m looking forward to the day when I can comfortably and clearly explain everything that I have learned through these sites. For now, though, it’s lots of sketching, experimenting, doc reading, and staring thoughtfully at irb.

Photo for 2013-11-09

Sat, 09 Nov 2013 06:30:52 +0000

The stops on my roadmap to developerhood

Quote for 2013-11-08

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 16:38:27 +0000

Programming a drone is easy!

Install Node.js and get the ar-drone module. All you need to do then is to execute the following code with node. That will make your drone take off, move around, do a flip and carefully land again. Seriously, that’s all!

var arDrone = require(‘ar-drone’);
var client = arDrone.createClient();

client.takeoff();

client
.after(5000, function() {
this.clockwise(0.5);
})
.after(3000, function() {
this.animate('flipLeft’, 15);
})
.after(1000, function() {
this.stop();
this.land();
});

Quote for 2013-11-07

Thu, 07 Nov 2013 22:21:15 +0000

I love inject. To be more specific, I love Enumerable#inject. I find it easy to read and easy to use. It’s powerful and it lets me be more concise. Enumerable#inject is a good thing.

Jay Fields’ Thoughts

Facts. I’ve seen this thing in action before, but really started to scrape the surface today. It seems to be a good example of Ruby is about, namely making coding more friendly for people & allowing multiple ways of doing things.

Quote for 2013-11-05

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:02:28 +0000

When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow and exclude people. so create.

Why the Lucky Stiff, via Twitter, via Smashing Magazine

slideDown() to slideToggle()

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 18:37:44 +0000

Finally learned enough jQuery to update my website from “copied-and-pasted jQuery that sorta works sometimes” to “works gooder all the time.” Small steps.

How software engineers think | Reasonably Logical

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 21:11:29 +0000

goto

Quote for 2013-11-02

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 20:29:04 +0000

So: the technical reason we started counting arrays at zero is that in the mid-1960′s, you could shave a few cycles off of a program’s compilation time on an IBM 7094. The social reason is that we had to save every cycle we could, because if the job didn’t finish fast it might not finish at all and you never know when you’re getting bumped off the hardware because the President of IBM just called and fuck your thesis, it’s yacht-racing time.

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2013/10/22/citation-needed/ via Infovore

Quote for 2013-10-31

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 21:17:59 +0000

…Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: “badBIOS,” as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.

Ars Technica

Quote for 2013-10-30

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 01:21:00 +0000

The Ruby ‘case’ expression is a powerful beast: a multiway ‘if’ on steroids.

Programming Ruby

No joke, I almost leapt off the couch when I first saw these in action.

About

Tue, 29 Oct 2013 23:54:00 +0000

Howdy.

This blog is a map of my path toward and through MakerSquare. Code snippets, revelations, and general musings are to follow.

Blogs on New Schematic

The Kirby Krackle

Starting with gpui

Installing from different sources

Branding

Not just for steers

Baby's first agentic loop

What’s an agentic loop?

Adding Goatcounter to Hugo, Simply

Herzog's Rules for Startups

It's actually velocity debt, not technical debt

How brutal is the rocket equation?

Δv

How to save $327.6 million using Rust

Debugging Claude's MCP Server with Nix

Investigation

Default On vs Default Off

Books Finished in 12022

Movies Finished in 12022

Thinking about now

Books Finished in 12021

Movies Finished in 12021

Writing Emacs-Lisp, or elisp

The Carmack Method

Books Finished in 2020

org-mode shortcuts for literate programming

Hashing Pipelines with Joblib

Books Finished in 2019

Adding Custom Meta Tags to Hugo

On Inquisitive Variable Names

Climate and Environmental Variables

DM's are an Anti-Pattern

Building Lists in Scheme

Or, the differences between append, cons, & list

An RSS Feed

Dada Photo Boo-booth

Using emoji in Matplotlib

tl;dr

'We did what we always do...'

Adding node.js test coverage from CircleCI to Code Climate

gempm: Sharing JavaScript Code Between Rails and Node.js apps

Background

invoke and execute in Rake

New Schematic

Hello Again

Installing Golang on OSX with Brew and oh-my-zsh

Photo for 2016-09-24

Quote for 2016-07-21

Quote for 2016-07-18

Photo for 2016-07-17

Photo for 2016-07-12

Quote for 2016-07-08

'Recursion is the GOTO of functional programming.' -- Erik Meijer

Photo for 2016-06-13

Quote for 2016-06-05

Massimo Banzi’s 13 Rules for Open Source Projects

Photo for 2016-05-01

Photo for 2016-04-30

When my teammates try to push to the same branch at the same time

Use this one trick to get the version of a locally-installed Node module

Photo for 2016-04-15

Quote for 2016-03-15

Photo for 2016-02-12

Deploying the Howdy.ai Botkit to Heroku

Writing Zsh Completion for Padrino

Quote for 2016-01-09

Copy & paste terminal output like a chump no longer!

Mike Heavers | code-item

Web Design - The First 100 Years

Three takeaways for web developers after two weeks of painfully slow internet

Too Many Content Requests

Turn On or Off Color Syntax Highlighting In vi or vim Editor

Photo for 2015-07-04

Video for 2015-07-03

git clean

SE Block Gets an Update

Video for 2015-06-28

Sponsoring Captioning at JSConf 2015

Using Stormpath as an SSO Provider for Discourse

Quote for 2015-04-01

Or, the differences between `append`, `cons`, & `list`

The Webâs Grain by Frank Chimero