writing code; smiling on the street; making the world a better place
I am a web developer currently playing in Atlanta.
I have been programming mostly in Python / Javascript.
Flying, I am free. Diving, I choose to pull up. Landing where I wish.
Programming, a love and a hate. It's hard to view code as a means rather than an end. I'm submitting a talk proposal to pycon this year, the working title is "Sockets for fun not profit." I've been thinking about my relationship to code alot. Am I a lover of code? A lover of solutions? An enabler? A poet? If what I write are answers, what are the questions? Are the questions I'm working on worth thinking about? Iphone applications which let you modify pictures of your cat, or rent cars online, or compare prices in the store are all interesting, fun to some, useful to some, but don't seem to matter at all. Do I have the skill to solve _actual_ problems? World hunger? Milaria? Oppresion? Ignorance? What about motivational crisis? Can I get people to love their neighbor, pick up trash, smile on the street, or call their grandma by writing code? ::Slow pan of camera:: Digital Windows. One very small step toward the shared dream of not letting miles seperate us from our loved ones. When I talk to my friend Joe on skype, it's great to see joe, but the experience is sub par. The video is great, the audio is great, the UI doesn't suck that bad, but it's not what I was promised. I don't end up "calling" joe on skype that often, why? Because I hate talking on the phone. Skype is like talking on the phone, but you get to see the other person. GREAT! If you have something specific to talk about. Terrible if you just want to hang out with joe. I have a 20MB i-net connection and I don't get to feel any more connected to joe than my grandma did when she got her first rotary telephone. Welcome to the future, one (maybe one half) step in the right direction. My friends and I came up with the simple idea of having a picture frame like screen which showed you views into other people's living rooms who also have the digital window. As a gift two of my friends created an initial implimentation throwing together some off the shelf (windows) tools. This implimentation had the unintended "feature" of about a minute of round trip lag. This ended up being my favorite feature. It helped deliver the promise in a way that a real time system never could. I can see into JW's living room, but the minute of lag means I can't interact with him directly. IT'S GREAT. It removes the feeling of being watched all the time, it also removes the feeling of filling the silence. When I'm talking to Joe on skype I feel compelled to actively interact with him, like you'd be expected to on the phone. But when I see JW working on his computer or building something on his work bench I just feel connected with him. If eric just got home from work, maybe I'll IM him and say what's up. The digital window does force direct interaction, but it creates a context which in which I choose to directly connect to them more frequently. My talk is about programming for your self. Not worrying about scaling, not worrying about supporting your beautiful creation to a bunch of unapreciative consumers, but instead pushing yourself for the sake of your friends.
Busy busy busy. Lizz and I got married! We had a beautiful ceremony in England and a wonderful reception in FL. Fun was had by all. I've been behind in just about all my projects since I got back, but have been working on a small image sharing / commenting site for friends / familiy. It's still young, but it's been fairly fun.
Updated mypubliccode.com to a github page. I really wish I could just point the URL @ my profile page, oh well. Ended up just using the github api to populate some data via JS. work in progress.
We started using github @ work, after a week of using it at work I sadly could not stand to use hg @ home =/. Moved all my code to a github micro acct (well worth the 7$/month). Sadly, github does not allow you to point a domain name @ ur profile page. Still trying to figure exactly what i'm going to do about that. Dont really want to keep up my own page, that's one of the reason I pay for git hosting!
I moved my code to bitbucket! How can you turn down free hosting w/ a wiki / ticket tracker? They also allow you to point any domain you want at your account, so I was able to update mypubliccode's dns record + CNAME it to bitbucket. yayyy. Also, I moved my blog from blog.oneinchmile to everythingisabsurd.com. This was always the original idea, it just took a long tim to happen =]. Sadly, blogger is not as cool as bitbucket and you can only point a subdomain @ your blogger based blog. That's ok though, gave me an excuse to setup a sweet landing page, go check it out: everythingisabsurd.
I deleted my FaceBook account. I used it primarily as a place to publish my contact information for those people I don't talk to regularly. Since this site has my contact information on it I felt like it wasn't worth the privacy invasions of late to keep it up. The main drawback in not having a FB presence is that I can't view the photos that other users post (not that I would do that with any regularity). I'm probably going to add a page / form to this site which allows people to drop me a note, maybe even create a comment section (aka wall). I've been working on a project on the side (near the edge) for publishing all my information from my own domain instead of using outside services (twitter,FB,blogger), though that is not far enough along to put to use yet.
Oh noes! I managed to brick my new N900. I was re-flashing it from my netbook when I accidently bumped the USB cable (which was mistakenly plugged into a bad usb port) interupting the flash. Reflashes always fail while writing the new image. I haven't put much time into figuring out how to fix it, nor have I figured out how / where to send it to get it fixed / a new one. I (historically and currently) tend to enjoy bouts w/o my always reachable connection.
Been writing alot of good code recently trying to create a
pure python library for handling torrents. Thanks to
Bram Cohen'sclient implimentation
I've been able to quickly start
pulling something together. His client's code wasn't
written to be used as a library but is chuck full of fun python
=]
My friend JDLC
put out an all call looking for
people to help rip
10 years worth of data from the hand updated HTML on
musicOMH. I've been
hacking away
at a small section of the site to see what I could do.
