save the Canis Major Dwarf

Omniauth 1.0 Strategy for Yahoo/Flickr?

2011-12-01T14:29:00.002-07:00

Is anyone working on a yahoo/flickr strategy for Omniauth 1.0? I couldn't find one yet....

Visual Studio Command Line Compile Hanging

2011-11-15T12:50:00.003-07:00

My colleague Chiwoong Moon and I have spent a bunch of time in the past weeks trying to stabilize a Windows build of a C++ project on Windows 7 and Visual Studio 2010 (with and without SP1), which involves a series of command lines calls to the "devenv.exe" which compile various Visual Studio projects. On different machines we had some different failure modes--on my machine it randomly got "stuck" and left behind idle processes.

Chiwoong eventually found out that some of the source files had extended ASCII characters in the comments, and when we removed those characters, the builds worked every time.

An earlier clue should have been that the compiles worked every time if done from Visual Studio directly--although why the command line would not accept the same character set is a mystery.

2010-07-06T10:38:00.005-06:00

Does anyone out there know if these tomatoes are actually grown in the San Marzano area, or how to find out?

Update: Found a thread on this at Chowhound

Lava Falls

2010-04-06T17:30:00.001-06:00

Lava Falls
Originally uploaded by Snorri Gunnarsson

Volcanic activity in Iceland

tides

2010-02-15T21:09:00.001-07:00

tides
Originally uploaded by hkvam

Some amazing photos of Iceland...

How to reconcile agile and architecture in the enterprise?

2009-06-28T17:53:00.002-06:00

Here's a thought-provoking presentation from the Thoughtworkers.

Krugman's missing word

2009-01-01T10:48:00.004-07:00

There's a word missing from the English language! What do you call Laura Bush when she says something like this about Iraq:

And believe me, no one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this.

Flickr Tag Galaxy

2008-12-24T10:20:00.002-07:00

Re-blog from Phasor Burn--a seriously cool flickr tag virtualization called Tag Galaxy.

Wish list: make it bookmarkable

De-anonymizer for Javascript

2008-12-17T09:48:00.003-07:00

Here is a snippet of Ruby code to de-anonymize anonymous functions in Javascript files. It could, for example, be used in a rake file of a rails project, or a Capistrano script.
It will make your debugging and stack tracing experience a lot more fruitful:


def deanonymize(file_name)
  content = ""
  line_counter = 1
  File.open(file_name).each_line do |line|
    content += line.gsub(/(\w*)(\.?)(\w*)\s*(=?)\s*function\s*\(/) {
      $1 + $2 + $3 + ' ' + $4 + ' function sbrew_' + $1 + '_' + $3 + '_' +
      file_name.split('/').last.sub(/.js$/i, '_js') + '_' + line_counter.to_s + '('
    }
    line_counter += 1
  end
  content
end

Note that it tries to put as much information as possible into a function name, but not all de-anonymized functions will look the same. The information it uses is:

The file name

Line number of the function declaration (note: this will make the stack traces look a bit unusual, as you might expect to see the execution line in that stack trace but it is the function declaration line)

Enclosing object

Phrase from nearest book

2008-11-17T21:51:00.002-07:00

A meme from Phasor Burn:

Grab the nearest book.
Open it to page 56.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

My result:

Add lukewarm milk mixture and 4 1/2 cups (1.125L) flour.

I wonder how long we will have to wait...

2008-11-14T14:42:00.002-07:00

... for some of the insanity resulting from 9/11 to reduce?

Salon's Patrick Smith, as usual, has an interesting viewpoint:

"More than any clash of civilizations, tedium is the legacy of Mohamed Atta"

Hair of Dog not good for Economy

2008-10-23T22:33:00.006-06:00

I really don't get it.

Flickr photo by Bukowsky18

I've been watching the american presidential election coverage a bit too much since reconnecting my television a little while ago. The most baffling part is that lowering taxes appears to be a major plank of both party platforms.

American government, people, and corporations have been borrowing and spending like there's no tomorrow. They are involved in two wars. During and after world war two, where the US government was in much bigger hock (but to its own citizens, mainly), people worked hard and made sacrifices. Don't people understand they have to start paying back their bills? And when the government starts paying their bills, they have to do it with tax money?

The only explanation is that people still believe the Reagan/Laffer line that lowering taxes increases government revenue, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Or that nobody cares about inflation eventually catching up when every mismanaged financial institution is backstopped by taxpayers like Joe the plumber to the point where the rest of the world figures out that greenbacks are meaningless and no US corporation has to face its own stupidity.

I hope all the excitement for change in the US somehow allows this reality to percolate into the general consciousness of the population.

Gwynne Dyer - we are not heading into a second great depression

2008-10-22T22:38:00.004-06:00

Gwynne Dyer has an interesting take on the global financial crisis

Punch line if you don't have time to read the article: "Not the Great Depression, but the Reign of Folly."

Personally, I think this was a correction long overdue--and it will take some years to sort out before things become "normal" again. In the meantime more volatility means there hasn't been a better time to start dollar cost averaging for ages.

This bubble is too big to burst

2008-10-01T19:16:00.001-06:00

Too big to burst?

You can pay now or you can pay later.

2008-09-27T13:33:00.002-06:00

Many economist question the bailout, interesting thoughts about the financial crisis in the US: http://tynted.com/0LWSWjwD40U

2008-09-24T18:35:00.002-06:00

Love this one....

Is Microsoft going to get rid of this Wall?

2008-09-21T09:38:00.003-06:00

I guess Microsoft breaks down the walls--but only if you're willing to install their software on your computer. I've always felt that their hostile approach to open standards throughout the years was kind of like building walls.

A couple new Tynts

2008-09-15T16:12:00.003-06:00

John McCain thinks the economy is strong

Guy Kawasaki defends himself on a "blocked" site

Let's get it over with and build a wall

2008-08-25T17:41:00.003-06:00

Canadian Border No Longer Invisible in Vermont

Yeah--little fences and gates will keep the bad guys out. As if. I heard a very interesting podcast recently interviewing Daniel Gardner, the author of a book (The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger) outlining how irrational, expensive, and damaging recent US policy has been. Should be mandatory listening/reading for all US politicians and bureaucrats.

my greatest fear for the next 6 months

2008-08-02T21:55:00.003-06:00

I hope I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist. Honestly.

Crazy conspiracy theory

Still no iPhones for the fido faithful

2008-07-31T19:43:00.001-06:00

Fido continues to reward their contract-holders and long-term customers (I've been with them, maybe 8 years???) by refusing to sell us iPhones.

Maybe I was wrong when I said Roger's didn't mess up Fido yet.....

Free music downloads

2008-07-28T22:42:00.003-06:00

Some artists that get it...

Nine Inch Nails: http://tyntapp.tynt.com/go/0LQk93iZ40j

Kristin Hersh: http://kristinhersh.cashmusic.org/

When are the music companies going to figure out that people who love music will support musicians without being forced to?

Memcache flushing/restarting after deploy--the easy way

2008-07-19T17:06:00.005-06:00

Thanks to WillJ for an easy trick to flush out memcache as an alternative to restarting the process every time you deploy.

$ echo "flush_all" | nc localhost 11211

He also has an interesting article on how to connect to MySQL on engineyard....

Don't C++ Javascript!

2008-07-16T17:56:00.001-06:00

After reading Douglas Crockford's latest book Javascript, the Good Parts, I came to appreciate more the small elegant language hidden inside Javascript.

However, I'm worried it's going to go the way of C++ with the new EMCAScript standard. I don't think we need to turn it into a class-based language. What I think should be fixed, though:

1. Block scoping--I just can't get used to the function scoping of Javascript when it looks so much like C.

2. Getting rid of globals--default globals are just wrong.

3. A simple namespace mechanism.

4. How about generating an error if you use a variable before it's set?

5. Fix == and !=

6. Get rid of needless keywords, add missing ones (like undefined)

Maybe instead of bloating up javascript, people should focus on a re-write of the browser DOM API.

An injustice of galactic proportions

2008-07-15T20:21:00.000-06:00

This is probably old news to my astronomer friends, but I can't believe that even as you read this post, our "galaxy", the Milky Way, is cannibalizing an innocent bystander, the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy.

Here I thought our galaxy was pretty amazing in its own right, but it's really just a space hog.

What would you do with Half a Trillion Dollars?

2008-07-14T22:26:00.000-06:00

I'm surprised I haven't come across this in the mainstream or alternative media yet. It's from February 2008. Gwynne Dyer is suggesting that military-industrial complex is actually gearing up for a much more extensive and expensive cold war with China.

Just think of the goodwill that could be "bought" around the world with that kind of money. Ugh.

Fido doesn't want my business

2008-07-14T21:08:00.001-06:00

I found it quite frustrating to learn that, according to Fido customer service, I am not eligible to upgrade to an iPhone for six months. I was told there was no way to get one sooner, even after asking if I would have to cancel my two current plan (half-way through) and pay the cancellation fee.

This is seriously making me think of canceling my plan altogether and going with the cheapest available pre-paid provider of the moment.

The mind boggles.

P.S. What are Fido customers going to do if they want to upgrade their iPhone before 3 years is up? Will everybody else have to wait until their contract is complete?

Toluu is pretty cool

2008-07-13T10:26:00.000-06:00

I've been trying out toluu.com lately. It lets you upload your RSS feeds and then matches you to other Toluu members and see what they are reading. It's nicely integrated with the bloglines feed reader (the only one I tried)--if I add a new feed to toluu it pops me out to bloglines and lets me add it there too.

However, there was one problem getting going with toluu--after finally sending an e-mail to them, I learned that I needed to add more than 8 feeds before it could match me to other members and suggest feeds.

I'm always on the lookout for stuff that makes it possible to find resources from people with similar interests. That's what made Usenet so great in the pre-WWW days, before it got saturated.

Old Stuff

2008-06-20T19:55:00.000-06:00

My Twitter Feed: http://www.twitter.com/timbreitkreutz

.Mac "blog": http://web.mac.com/timbreitkreutz/Tim_Breitkreutz/Blogs/Blogs.html

I have a bunch of old blog junk still over there.