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Tonight we are packing up and going camping for the weekend, to a music campout in Willits, where we’ll be performing live on Friday night. A full mixed set will be published here next week. Very exciting stuff, and as a bonus I’ve got a new song to share…
This is an extended mix, which is why it’s 8 minutes long, and meant to be played live. The album version will be much shortened.
Please feel free to leave comments with your feedback. Much appreciated!
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There is plenty of excitement around Barack Obama’s potential presidency, and I think there’s a lot to be excited about. There’s is an overwhelming feeling among people I talked to in San Francsisco, how Obama is “Our President” — not a poster boy for old money or a powerful family. The fact that the Internet fund-raising helped Obama to compete and win against the Clinton clan is a testament to the truly new era, a more democratic one, where if someone can fire up a lot of people they can rally up quckly and effectively. This efficiency is something to look forward to, if and when Obama becomes a President.
Whether or not all the people behind Obama will continue to support him, is another question. People tend to idealize their heroes way to quickly, and that’s also dangerous. The recent backlash of liberal bloggers about Obama’s compromise vote — is a great example. Politics is still politics, and nobody ever gets their way all the time. Everyone must compromise at some point.
But enough said, I think that overall Obama is a great candidate, and will hopefully bring a new fresh perspective into the Washington. So, how do we get there? Well, donating money is, for once, a very easy thing to do thanks to http://barackobama.com. But now there are other ways.
Infectious.com (the company I work for) is running an open contest for Car Art Submissions around Obama. There are some restrictions – some specific words can not be used, but it’s an amazing opportunity for artists around United States to create Obama Car Art that can be seen by thousands of people commuting daily in the next few months before the election. This is as grass roots as it gets.
If you know any artists that may be interested please send them to Infectious. Or you can grab the banner above and put it up on your blog. Either way – thank you!
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After announcing to the world that Firefox 3 will be available at 10am PDT today, June 17th, amidst apparent publicity stunt to generate the record number of downloads per day (has anyone been really keeping a tally?) the web site http://getfirefox.com/ returns the pathetic
Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
Firefox is certainly a decent browser, but it’s stability seems to have gone reversely proportional to the self-professed greatness and the size of their publicity stunts.
Safari is now by far the best looking, and fastest browser for Windows, and it has been that way for mac for a while.
Good luck Fifefox 3 (when we see you), but I for one, am not buying it.
OK, so finally FF3 is available for download, and I have it installed and running. The first thing is that not all plugins are compatible, and if you are using FireBug for web development, you must install the 1.1 version available here.
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It finally happened 
I’ve been working for Infectious.com since about July last year, and it’s been a really fun run building a brand new product, from a mere conception to this moment – full public launch.
Of course some people may have caught the glimpse of this from TechCrunch article a few weeks ago. Nevertheless, here it is – Car Art For the Masses – available to you from a spanking new website, designed and developed by the Team Infectious and yours truly.
The idea of course is simple – everyone’s car looks the same! OK, so some are dirtier than others, some stink more, all of this is certainly true, but from an aesthetic point of view, if you and your neighbor accidentally buy the same model of a car, you are screwed! Well, not really, and especially not anymore.
Stop wasting time and go get some cool art for your car, make it look like nobody else, even if you drive a stinky dirty ’74 Datsun. I’m seriously.
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I rarely rant about software. Reliable software is hard to make, and I know this because that’s what I do for living myself. But once in a while I come across such ignorance that a rant is really all I have left.
I’ve been coding in Ruby on Rails for over two years now, and have been using RadRails standalone, Eclipse with RadRails plugin, TextMate, IntelliJ IDEA and just good old plain Vim. But for the most part, I found myself very comfortable with RadRails because I liked the integrated environment for automated testing, outline views, project views, and all the goodies that are so nice in Eclipse, or IntelliJ IDEA if you work with Java.
Well, sometime back RadRails was abandoned by it’s young developers, who received a comfortable package from IBM, and the whole RadRails thingy somehow was inherited by Aptana, of which at that point nobody I talked to ever heard of.
What the heck is Aptana trying to do now, I still don’t quite truly understand, but I went along with the plan and switched. Instead of Eclipse, I had Aptana Studio, and for some time (while I assume Aptana’s contribution was merely the new name) things went well, and we all got along.
Well not anymore.
Aptana stopped being useful altogether with their most recent release, but things have been slowly creeping in even before that. The software now routinely spins at 100% cpu, the log file shows nothing useful, and a couple of versions back they broke Apple-Shift-R (although a later update fixed it), the command to pull up a resource by name after selecting a resource the whole thing would just crash.
So today I was like, “heck, let me reinstall the whole thing, maybe it’s my problem”? Huh. Not so fast.
Sure, I can download and install Aptana OK, but none of their bundled sweet plugins install at all. And what meaningful error message do I get when I try to install SubClipse? “Problem with your configuration”. And this is on a brand spanking new downloaded DMG. Sweet! Useful as a brick.
I am sorry, but the ignorance of Aptana Corp, who are now a proper company in San Mateo, trying to sell “Pro Version” as a worthwhile add-on while they can’t get their s**t together with the free community edition, just stinks to me of the worst kind of amateurism.
Thanks for ruining RadRails for me, Aptana Corp. At least it took a while to add enough of YOUR code to make things really break.
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I wrote this post after hours of frustration, trying to fix my broken environment, and losing valuable time on a project that was falling behind.
I now realize that the post was overly emotional, and probably not entirely fair to the Aptana team. I’ll post updates here as I work through the issues to get my RadRails working again.
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If you like me were tasked with loading a database of recent car makes/models/years, you would start by looking on the web and seeing if someone else just has it out there, readily available, hopefully for free, but perhaps for a tiny nominal fee.?
If only it was that simple…
I looked and looked, and couldn’t find anything that would fit the above requirements. So I thought, who would know about US car models better than Kelly Blue Book? So I went on their site, and sure enough they have a javascript file that lists all known to them makes and models of used cars. Since the file is public, I figured it’s not really “evil” if I scrape and parse it for my own benefit. Disagree? Have a better source? Then leave a comment.
Anyway, to cut the long story short, I’m hoping to save a day or so to someone else who may, like me, be looking for this information. The ruby module shown below retrieves and parses the javascript from KBB site into a Ruby data structure of the following form – basically a hash, keyed on make, then on model with list of years as a value:
>> Constants::Auto::DB.keys.sort[0..5] => ["AMC", "Acura", "Alfa Romeo", "Audi", "BMW", "Bertone"] >> Constants::Auto::DB["Subaru"].keys.sort[0..5] => ["B9 Tribeca", "Baja", "DL", "Forester", "GL", "GL-10"] >> Constants::Auto::DB["Audi"]["A4"] => ["1999", "2007", "1998", "2006", "2005", "1996", "2004", "2003", "2002", "1997", "2001", "2000"] >> Constants::Auto::DB["BMW"]["X5"] => ["2003", "2002", "2001", "2000", "2005", "2007", "2006", "2004"]
The idea is that you could load the initial hash:
@models = KBB::Parser.new.to_hash
and then save the output of @models.inspect in your local constants file – hence me using Constants::Auto::DB (I actually have a Rake task for doing this — let me know if I should post it too). Then you would just re-run this every time you think new car models are added/changed on KBB. Realize, that hitting their site every time you need the data is clearly evil. So use this class to load the data initially, save the result of inspect() call into a ruby file, and use that cached version in your app. Re-run the load every time you want to update your database.
Please let me know if you find this code useful, or if you find a better/cleaner/more comprehensive way of maintaining car make/model/year database.
#
# author: Konstantin Gredeskoul © 2008
# license: public domain
#
require 'net/http'
require 'uri'
module KBB
MODELS_URL = "http://scripts.kbb.com/kbb/ymmData.axd?VehicleClass=UsedCar"
class Models
def initialize(js)
@models = {}
@makes = {}
n = /ymUsed_\[\d{4}\]\s*=\s*'([^']+)'/
m = /ymmUsed_\["(\d+)~(\d+)"\]\s*=\s*"([^"]+)"/
js.split(/\n/).each do |line|
next if line.strip.blank?
if matched = n.match(line)
matched[1].split(/,/).each do |token|
id, name = token.split('|')
@makes[id.to_i] = name
end
end
if matched = m.match(line)
year, make_id, models = matched[1], matched[2], matched[3]
models.split(/,/).each do |t|
id, model_name = t.split('|')
make_name = @makes[make_id.to_i]
@models[make_name] ||= {}
@models[make_name][model_name] ||= []
@models[make_name][model_name] << year
end
end
end
end
def to_hash
@models
end
end
class Parser
def initialize
@m = Models.new(Net::HTTP.get(URI.parse(MODELS_URL)))
end
def to_hash
@m.to_hash
end
end
end
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It’s been a little quiet here, as things were a little busy towards the end of November, and now I am away on a short trip to Australia visiting my family, relaxing and sun-bathing on fantastic beaches of Queensland, while sipping overpriced Jameson whiskey
Australian Christmas is in full effect, with enormous pines towering over hot beaches fully decorated in typical X-Mas crap, while in the former hippie town Byron Bay pines are dressed with shiny peace signs.
Australians just had an election, where labor party (a weak parallel of US Democratic party) have won — a welcome change of government after 11 years of Liberals and John Howard (smart, but creepy suck-up to George Bush). The new power has immediately ratified Kyoto protocol in their first week “at the wheel”. It’s refreshing to see reusable green bags at the supermarkets here, just as they are becoming a norm in San Francisco.
A weird fact discovered today — capitalism does not mean the demand is satisfied with supply. Beach mats are not heard of in Byron Bay – a beach town with $50 beach towels. There’s a few things Australia can learn from third world Thailand, where beach mats were everywhere.
Signing off for now, but stay tuned, as I’m planning a PostgreSQL performance tuning post in a few weeks. This seems like a subject not well covered widely, not sure why.
