Sentient Monkey

"You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets."

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:23:05 -0700

“You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets.”

- Jeff Bezos in WSJ (via TechCrunch)

125 Pounds of Hell

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 11:40:08 -0700

And it begins… TeachStreet’s weight loss challenge. We as a team plan to lose 125 pounds (all together) in the next 52 weeks. And boy do I need to get on this again. Here’s my plan:

Walk to/from work (easier now that I’m closer to work, even though Denny’s a big hill)
Work out 3 times a week, then ramp to 5 times. Again, having nice workout room in new apartment should help lots here, so I have no excuse.
No more snacking at work
Continue eating healthy dinners during the week with Jane (will continue on this one, because Jane’s already pretty awesome at that)
Eat Healthier at work for lunches (bringing in more salads/sammiches)
Limit coffee/tea to 1 a day (unless I have without sugar/cream)
Lower beer intake (switch to mixed drinks with soda water and/or only drink on weekends)

Any other tips? My personal goal is to lose 20 lbs, and my stretch goal is 30 lbs.

Two things our cat likes: playing with his mouse and metal. Here...

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:11:52 -0700

Two things our cat likes: playing with his mouse and metal. Here he’s playing with his new pink mouse and listening to some Slayer. I have to “attack” his belly so he thinks the mouse is fighting back.

How to use Amazon S3 to Scale Image Hosting

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:18:09 -0700

How to use Amazon S3 to Scale Image Hosting:

Most startups have been there – you have a simple site, and you want to have users upload photos of themselves or something else to share. We were there as well just a few years ago, when building out the very first versions of TeachStreet. While previously working at Amazon, I worked on a few image hosting solutions and already knew some of the pitfalls and challenges of building out a system to scale…

Goodsie looks really fun. (From the guys who made flavors.me)

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 08:57:54 -0700

Goodsie looks really fun. (From the guys who made flavors.me)

Dear Chrome, Please stop “Aw Snappin” while the...

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:34:47 -0700

Dear Chrome,

Please stop “Aw Snappin” while the inspector is open. It makes my head hurt and want to throw my monitor across the room. Please don’t make me go back to Firefox. She’s broken my heart far too many times, and eats memory like a hog.

I got a chance to get some Wooly Pig last Sunday and made some...

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:17:08 -0700

Salt & peppered

Browned

Sautéed onions & sage

Sautéing apples

Place pork back in skillet, then in oven

Reduce sauce

Served w/ garlic mash

Goes well with Éphémère

I got a chance to get some Wooly Pig last Sunday and made some amazing food. Mangalitsa pig, if you’ve never heard of it, is much fattier and tougher than normal pork, but it’s amazingly rich and wonderful. I got two shoulder chops from Bill the Butcher over on Madison for about $10. Pretty good price from what I’ve heard from buying from other sources (wooly pig can get expensive because it’s hard to find).

I found a great recipe on the Seattle PI Blog and changed it up slightly.

Here’s what I came up with for my adaptation on the recipe:

Preheat oven to 275 degrees.
Wash and pat dry chop thoroughly with paper towel. Lightly salt and pepper and let sit for about 30 minutes.
Add a small amount of oil to a small, heavy oven-proof skillet. Over medium-high heat, sear chop for about 60 seconds on each side to brown, then remove from skillet.
Turn heat down to medium and add 1 medium sliced onion with several sage leaves cut or torn into smaller pieces. Cook for several minutes, stirring occasionally until browned lightly and beginning to soften. Add 1 granny smith apple, peeled, cored and sliced, and 1-2 tablespoons maple syrup. Cook for a few minutes to warm apple, and add 1-2 tablespoons maple syrup. Remove pan from burner to cool several minutes
Add chop to pan and settle into onions and apple. Cover, and place in oven for about 60 minutes or until internal temperature reaches 160 degrees (the USDA’s benchmark for safety).
Remove skillet from oven, and place skillet back on burner on medium-high heat for a few minutes until juices are reduced, then serve with chop.
Serve with some nice garlic mashed potatoes & some Éphémère (if available).

Cooking Notes:
I increased the cooking time, and had to keep the chops in the pan when reducing to cook them all the way through. This was most likely because I had some seriously thick chops to cook though. I also picked granny smith apples because of their tartness, but sweetened them back up with maple syrup (which I love that combination). I could have served the pork a bit pink, but I’m always uneasy with doing that with pork.

Overall, I’d say this was really amazing - I can’t wait to try some of the wooly pig bacon Bill’s curing right now. I think the only thing I’d do different is take some of that wooly pig fat and whip it into the potatoes instead of milk/butter. Jane and I both ended up with leftover pig fat on our plates when we were done (trust me, we did get lots in the marbling, it’s sooo good).

Bitching about Basecamp

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:50:54 -0700

I’ve been a rapid Getting Real, Rework, Ruby On Rails, and overall 37 Signals fanboy for a long time. But I’ll tell you something — I’ve never used their products (other than rails) until now.

Recently, I’ve been working with a project with a couple of overseas teams, and the project manager uses Basecamp. There are a number of things it does well: it organizes for you, handles email updates to tasks, handles attachments well. But there are a shocking number of things that it doesn’t do, or does poorly. Maybe the product is better suited for designers or a design shop (me being a developer and all), but it just seems like there are holes here. I understand the 37-signals philosophy (and trust me, if you work in my office, you’ve heard me spout it enough), but these are a few things that I just don’t get.

No time estimates
There is no place for adding a time estimate for a task, only a due date. This doesn’t work at all for any complex project - dates are meaningless, especially since stuff is always late, and the dates are always shifting. Time estimates (or points or jelly beans or whatever in the SCRUM world) are also going to be wrong, but at least they allow you to communicate that this work is more expensive (will take longer) than this other work. Pretty important communication point for Task-owners and Task-definers.

Tasks have no correlation to Milestones
Maybe I’m missing something here, but if tasks can’t be assigned to a Milestone, then how do you know your progress on reaching that Milestone. I might just be missing how to do this, but I’m not sure.

You can’t change To-Do details on the Comment page
This is more of an interface miss to be, but I find that after discussing that item, I sometimes need to change the details. Not having a way to change the details on this page (or even a direct link), means I have to go back and visually search the To-do list. This can take a bit of time, and get frustrating if you do this a lot.

Too much Drag & Drop
This is a bit more of a usability nit, but I find that drag and drop can sometimes be difficult to use. If you start re-ordering items you have to drag and hold and it can be time consuming. It’s good in some cases, but it would be easier in many cases to have “Move up/Move down” arrows (since those tend to be common use cases). Also, the entire bar should be draggable (rather than just a “handle”). The hover-handle usually means a bunch of extra mouse movements to make it show up, then you have to move back to get it to move, then drag. That’s a lot of work for a quick change.

Why 6 categories of messages?
The six categories of messages are “Assets”, “Copywriting”, “Design”, “Development”, “Miscellaneous”, and “Transcripts”. This might be because I’m not an admin, but why these six? What if I was a construction company? Or a lawyer? Or an accountant? I’m not saying that you should let users go hog wild and create 100 categories, but at least letting them rename them or customize them, they might be more useful to non-design shop (or even different design-shops).

Yeah, I’m one of those people that posts videos of their...

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 22:49:01 -0700

Yeah, I’m one of those people that posts videos of their cat online.

HR Violation #5

Thu, 27 May 2010 14:23:17 -0700

hrviolations:

L: Ok, now it’s open for everyone.
D: (whispering) That’s what she said.

Been Violated? Tell me.

"I hate blogs. Blogs are for angry people who are sitting at their computer with a glass of wine at..."

Thu, 27 May 2010 14:06:31 -0700

““I hate blogs. Blogs are for angry people who are sitting at their computer with a glass of wine at midnight with nothing better to do. No companies use blogs anymore.””

- (via clientsfromhell)

GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS: Viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiim

Fri, 21 May 2010 10:23:57 -0700

GIANT ROBOTS SMASHING INTO OTHER GIANT ROBOTS: Viiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiim:

In light of our recently announced Vim for Rubyists course, co-taught by Ben Orenstein, here are more vim tips from those in the trenches all day! For prior tips from us see part one and part two.

From Josh:

How does vim help me kick ass at life? It’s simple. I type less.

Vim allows…

Really, amazon? I can’t image that users’...

Sat, 15 May 2010 13:32:00 -0700

Really, amazon? I can’t image that users’ experiences will be better with IE8. Unless they are using IE6 or IE7.

Using Silk for Neural Bioelectronics Researchers in the US have...

Tue, 11 May 2010 13:45:11 -0700

Using Silk for Neural Bioelectronics

Researchers in the US have developed a new way to connect tiny electronic circuits to the human brain. John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleagues have developed a high-quality biocompatible interface from silk substrates containing electronic components that can “wrap” itself around biological tissue. The system allows electrical activity of living tissue to be measured with unprecedented precision, without damaging the tissue in any way.

Andy Rooney is a crazy old man. He hates music, watches,...

Tue, 11 May 2010 09:21:46 -0700

Andy Rooney is a crazy old man. He hates music, watches, kitchen utensils , models, and carrying things.

This is either the best or worst ideas I’ve ever heard. I...

Mon, 03 May 2010 09:04:11 -0700

This is either the best or worst ideas I’ve ever heard. I need to try it.

thedrunkenmoogle:

T-Virus (Resident Evil Shot)

Ingredients:
3/4 shot Silver Rum
1/4 shot Everclear
1 Blue Twizzler

Directions: Wind a blue Twizzler around a tall double shot glass. It should stick to the sides of the glass. Pour in the silver rum and top with the Everclear. Drink, then eat the Twizzler for a sweet and tangy aftertaste. You will have to fish out the Twizzler with your finger after you drink, as it will still be stuck to the side of the shot glass.

This is part of a series of Resident Evil drinks I’ve been making. More to come!
(Original drink created and photographed by The Drunken Moogle.)

Something that stinks about Ruby’s core library

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 09:14:55 -0700

Something that stinks about Ruby’s core library:

The other day my teammate said, “I finally found something that stinks about Ruby’s core library.”

What was wrinkling his nose? The Dir class gives you no way to ask for files only, or for directories only. He had a point. The Dir.entries is inflexible. And even the flexible …

I really disagree with Nils Jonsson’s take on ruby’s standard library and so does matz. Nils claims that Something stinks about Ruby’s Core Library, and goes on to provide an implementation for Dir.files and Dir.directories. Yes, there might be functionality that is missing here, but it’s trival to implement. His solution shells which is both dangerous and non-portable. It’s also unnecessarily complex. The beauty of ruby is that it can be changed in very simple ways to solve your problem - even the core library. Here’s my alternative (and much shorter and portable) solution:

class Dir    
  def self.directories(path)
    Dir.new(path).entries.select do |e|
      File.directory?(File.join(path, e))
    end
  end
  
  def self.files(path)
    Dir.new(path).entries.select do |e|
      File.file?(File.join(path,e))
    end
  end
end

Now, his two main arguments where:

if you don’t mind some computing time and space wasted and you want to write as little code as possible
if you know the contents of the directory in advance

The computing time and space will be much much worse with forking out to the shell listing all of the files, then gsubing out the items with a trailing slash. The ruby filtering will be much faster. But, if performance is a concern, I’m sure my code could be re-written as ruby C much like the rest of the Dir class, and it would be even faster. In the non-windows example, ‘ls -d’ is begin used to filter. In most POSIX implementations of ls, it uses opendir(), readir(), and stat(). So, ls is looking at each file and determining if it is a directory or not. This could potentially be sped up by using scandir(), but that’s a newer POSIX standard, so it might not be available on older unix systems.

If I just image Lost as Johnny Quest it becomes...

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 18:27:43 -0700

If I just image Lost as Johnny Quest it becomes awesome

thedailywhat:

Reimagination of the Day: Slick, stylish, Saul Bass-inspired Lost title sequence by Hexagonall.

See Also: Saul Bass x Tron.

[/film.]

Ruby Can't Scale (Don't Listen to John Metta)!

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 09:20:32 -0700

This is a follow-up to Ruby Can’t Scale! by John Metta

I want everyone to believe that Ruby can’t scale. I want you to think that Ruby is an awkward, weird little academic language that shouldn’t be used in “real” production deployments. I want you to think that it’s slow, memory hungry, full of security holes and breaks the rules of proper programming.

I don’t want everyone to use Ruby. I want to keep it for myself. I want my company to build software faster, easier, and still be able to go home before it’s dark out while outbuilding you and your product. I want to have my pick of small startups and recruiters breathing down my neck to hire me because I know this weird, obtuse, little language. If you learn it, then I’ll have to work even harder to beat out the next guy.

So beware of Ruby! It has lambdas, class evals, blocks, mixins, and all sorts of scary things. These are weird and strange! Stick to what’s tried and true. Java and C++ aren’t going anywhere. They are stable, and besides, that’s what real companies use. Save Ruby for me.

Introducing simplegeo-ruby. This is a simple ruby client that I...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:23:52 -0800

Introducing simplegeo-ruby. This is a simple ruby client that I wrote for SimpleGeo API. It’s a pretty cool service that allows you handle all of your geo-spatial queries in the cloud (it’s like twillio for geo services). Check it out and let me know if you see any bugs!