neovore: there is only the pattern

no title (quote)

ben vandgrift — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:27:10 -0700

When evaluating other developers I rate them to a scale from One to Ben. ...

search button

ben vandgrift — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:47:42 -0700

now i have a search button. ho ho ho. ...

git migration phase 1: complete

ben vandgrift — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 19:31:00 -0700

moved this site to git.

phase 2: opening up the code on github. (which mostly means checking to see if I have any passwords or suchlike in the dern thing that i need to move to yml files.)

phase 3? probably setting up cap, though on dreamhost this has proven .. problematic. ...

on seeing the target

ben vandgrift — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:59:57 -0700

i walked out onto my deck a few minutes ago; it was after sunset, the light was quickly fading. in this twilight next to the overgrown garden i completely failed to cultivate this year crouched a thing not normally in residence: a cat had come a-calling.

the cat wasn’t lounging around. its stance indicated it was hunting, but i didn’t see anything else in the yard. so i followed its eyes.

perfectly camouflaged twenty feet from the cat was a bunny rabbit. i hadn’t seen it—it blended perfectly with the dead grass and shadow and hiding is its business. but looking from the cat’s point of view i saw it dead on. its predator gave it away.

this got me thinking (harder than i usually do on a saturday): let’s classify the cat as an Actor. by following the Actor’s gaze, i saw its Target.

basic tactical analysis, right? prone to misdirection, yes, however: the cat didn’t know it was being observed, and i was not it’s target, and these are important contributors to the fidelity of the intelligence. i was, at that moment, a bystander.

as an exercise, let’s apply …

mysql not starting? check your lo

ben vandgrift — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:02:13 -0700

having killed a few hours on this problem, here’s the notes.

getting some problems with FlowMingle—specifically, mysql wasn’t starting, and was giving the ‘Couldn’t bind to ip address’ error. the bind-address in my.cnf was 127.0.0.1.

havoc ensues.

what precipitated this? we expanded the home slice, and restarted the server.

to make a long story short, in /etc/network/interfaces, there was a pre-up directive to reload the iptables configuration, but the iptables conf’s name had changed. so the loopback interface never got up.

ha ha. everything was broken.

long story short, make sure your loopback interface is configured correctly, or be prepared to hassle for a while trying to figure out what’s wrong. ...

just a little more

ben vandgrift — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 22:37:42 -0700

i’ve done the math. i have numbers. i can work with numbers. to that end:

102,500 calories to go. 29 lbs.

it won’t matter if i cut them out of my diet, or burn them on the trail or the bike or in the gym. that’s how many i have left to hit my target.

it works like this:

my resting (basal) metabolic rate is around 2000 calories / day. take that, plus the exercise i do in a given day, and subtract the amount i eat. i’m trying to keep things in line at around 1000-1200 calories a day for food.

so here’s the plan:

1/4 cup of oats for breakfast (150ish calories). been doing that for a while.

either no lunch and dinner, or a late lunch and no dinner. something filling, but not terrible.

(a naked chicken burrito at qdoba with cheese and habañero salsa is 750 calories, it turns out.)

a piece of fruit or something similar if i’m desperate.

no beer. okay, maybe one. (100 cal, or thereabouts)

with no exercise, that’s 102 days. with around 500 cal/day’s worth of exercise, it’s 62 days. (riding my bike to work would yield 500 cal/day.) i intend to count …

ruby / rails interview questions

ben vandgrift — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:18:07 -0700

i’ve been digging around lately for interview questions to use when interviewing a ruby and rails candidate.

there are few good resources for this:

ritirisi

joe sniff

i’m adding a few more with some solutions, designed to test the breadth of someone’s knowledge.

what do you not like about ruby on rails? identify its weak points.

the answers i expect here are fixtures, routes, scalability. bonus points for identifying the weakness in using multiple databases.

a good followup on scalability is: how have you in the past dealt with the scalability problems, and what does your preferred deployment environment look like?

what is the difference between a symbol and a string? when should they be used?

a symbol has a shorter reference number, which makes it faster to look up. if you’re using something as a reference string, a symbol is a good idea. if you’re planning on a string being editable, then a string is a better idea.

good information on this here: 13 ways of looking at a ruby symbol

when would you use request.xhr?

to test for an XmlHttpRequest, if you were writing a single method to deal with each request type. bonus: this has been dusted …

up and coming

ben vandgrift — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:31:24 -0700

applied for a few jobs today .. got a bunch more in the email box that i didn’t apply for. that’s the way of the job hunt now for a guy like me.

don’t read this wrong: flowmingle is still alive and well, we’ve launched our signup page and as soon as we get good populations we’ll start putting together jumbles for everyone. but as this phase of the project’s development comes to a close, we’re either going to need to seek funding or find some contract cash to keep the lights on. the heavy lifting’s done. now it’s about the waiting. and the advertising. and the supporting cast.

given monday’s run (1 mi @ just under 10min) i think my foot/knee is in reasonable shape to move forward. let’s hope.

life continues to be strange. there’s a holding pattern here that i’ve trod into a deep rut. it might be necessary to break out of it, we’ll see. several of the jobs i’m being looked at for are far enough away to form a separation from my current life. curious to see how i’ll handle that in the face of free …

yeah, i know

ben vandgrift — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:03:33 -0700

5.15 mi, 4/1 intervals. 70°, 85% humidity.

haven’t run in a while, as the good ankle and bad knee remind me pointedly.

the way this route works is a .1 mi warmup, followed by three 1.4mi laps, then a .85 mi route. after two of the long laps, i was 1:00 behind where i wanted to be, which isn’t that bad all things considered. after that things fell apart. i’m going to keep running the intervals for a little bit to get back into the swing of things. there’s a 5k on the 27th i’d like to run in, but don’t expect great shakes.

in the fall, i try and wax whatever car i’m driving as proof against winter salts and because it makes me feel good. did this over the weekend and got sunburned where my sleeves should’ve been. now i have that slightly tired system shock that comes from a sunburn.

i’m pretty sure that jumble is going to launch on saturday in full registration mode, though we’ve changed the name. i will of course link here.

having learned of certain health tendencies in my family, i’m making more of a concerted effort to lose weight. ...

no title (quote)

ben vandgrift — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 21:48:40 -0700

Now he’s having an emoment. ...

no title (quote)

ben vandgrift — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 16:25:17 -0700

... like, William Shatner old. ...

fact-checking bill clinton's dnc speech

ben vandgrift — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:25:00 -0700

bill c, speaking at the dnc yesterday said a lot of things i can get behind, particularly that a lot of the world’s problems demand uniquely american solutions, and that by increasing our standing in the eyes of the world and taking the reins of that leadership, we and the rest of the world will be the beneficiaries.

that said, a fair amount of his speech was tripe, aimed at the usual voter who doesn’t bother to understand context or look back in time more than ten or fifteen minutes.

with that in mind, a few fact checks:

“The American dream is under siege at home… Middle-class and low-income Americans are hurting, with incomes declining, job losses, poverty, and inequality rising, ... health care coverage disappearing, and a very big spike in the cost of food, utilities, and gasoline.”

incomes are not declining, the poverty rate remains the same (see here for some perspective. more people have health insurance now than at the same time last year. and the cost of food and utilities had not risen enough to justify the phrase ‘a very big spike’.

not so for gas—its price has gone nuts. also, the unemployment rate is high …

no title (quote)

ben vandgrift — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:11:46 -0700

... that’s when I realized that, in both poker and life, you can’t read people any better than they can read themselves. ...

todo: code overflow

ben vandgrift — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 07:54:03 -0700

giving the code tags in the syntaxed code a width, then setting the overflow. not urgent, but a nice to have.

thanks to phillip. ...

miniscule victories

ben vandgrift — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:45:05 -0700

.. which is sometimes all i have.

0.5 mi @ 4:24. climate controlled.

after a 30-minute circuit routine and around 9 miles on the bike, mind you.

in august i’ve somehow managed to put on 6 lbs while keeping my body fat % the same. i wanted to see that number go DOWN.

i’m expecting my weight to go up over the next couple of weeks as i try to slice off some bad habits (eating late, drinking too much, etc). afterwards, i’ll probably hit some kind of detox, through month of october.

it’s good to have dreams, right?

i need to widen the display just a bit, and maybe shrink the dates down. ...

back on the road

ben vandgrift — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:09:55 -0700

so to speak.

5.5 mi @ abysmal. 84°, 45% humidity.

i was reading through my old entries from 2006 the other day – and many, many posts were concerning my running times. granted, they’re all pretty sad, but in recording them, the idea was to look back on them and see my growth over time and laugh, noting what a slow, fat bastard i was back then.

boy, is my face red. i stopped running regularly, and now i look back at the times and distances with pride and envy.

is it a deadly sin if you envy yourself?

in an attempt to keep myself on the straight and narrow running-wise, i’m going to start writing down my times again. i might make up a special partial for it, we’ll see. stay tuned.

and try not to laugh.

i’ll just grab my shit and leave ...

catching up

ben vandgrift — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:57:32 -0700

so today i’m filling in the missing parts of this travelogue. there’s a period of about six months starting in june of 2006 that i’ve skipped (save the fic) since i’d rather not remember anything i don’t have the scars to remind me of. added tags too, though that was trivial. there’s a strange double-post thing going on sometimes as well. not sure what the deal is there, but i’ll hunt it down when i feel like i want to dig through the code some more.

i really need to add a search feature. as in, really. the tags are intended to make finding things easier by category, but until i get everything labeled it’s still going to be a bitch and a half to navigate.

so here’s the wish list, not in priority order:

search: cuz, why not? might just use google though.

tag cloud: pointless at the moment, maybe less so in the future. beats having a directory.

excerpting and a ‘more’ page: these pages can get long.

pagination for the tags listing pages: could also get long.

fixing all the auto-markup, whether by direct exclusion in the markup finder or by fixing the text on a …

"art"

ben vandgrift — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:20:51 -0700

“art?”

scene: two men in stylish suits, standing in front of a lovely nude painting at the met.

“you can definitely have too much—you evolve to less anyhow over time.”

“how do you mean?”

“it’s like this—no matter how much you have, you keep coming back to the same handful of pieces, the same few images that speak to you, that evoke something. much of your collection will be transient, but a few pieces are going to stick. you won’t be able to get rid of them.”

“so over time, the other stuff will just seem redundant and you’ll end up ditching it all in favor of the smaller, but more meaningful collection?”

“right—redundant. you’ll get rid of everything you don’t ever look at, and be left with those few serious bits. it’s a value over time thing; how much time have you spent looking at the quality works, versus how much wasted being distracted by the rest?”

“i can totally see that.” nods.

“i mean, collecting as an investment is one thing, but if you’re seriously passionate about the art, the money doesn’t matter as much, if at all.”

“art? oh yeah—art.”

“wait—what did you think i was talking about?”

“er …

"confession"

ben vandgrift — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:19:31 -0700

there is a world next to this one .. only, it’s not really, it’s only in my head .. only it’s not that either. it’s a lot different than i thought; more dangerous, and much, much more real.

i have been exploring it for years. now it wants to explore me – and you – and the place where we live. things are about to change, and not for the better.

and i have a feeling it’s all my fault.

sorry. ...

"bad dreams"

ben vandgrift — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:08:48 -0700

the needle stung – james knew it wasn’t supposed to, but it did. he would’ve given a jerk with the pain but the straps around his arms, legs, chest, and head prevented the movement – instead, he noted it in his mind, holding onto this one thing, this one feeling. he pushed aside the dismal room, the surgical lights, the viewing window where the favorite sons of the news media viewed his predicament. there was only the pain – a slight prick, but one he could expand to fill what remaining experience he had left. he wanted to die angry, he wanted to die in pain. he wanted to slip into hell with a grudge, ready to whip the ass of the first fallen angel he came across – but in the end, it wasn’t enough. his life came forward and was burned away, one memory at a time; dollar bills in the fireplace. he smelled (tasted) something acrid, like the last edges of cheap cigarette smoke.

james awoke with a strangled gasp, sweating. he sat up, the motion sensors in the room telling the home’s expert system to raise the lights just enough for him not to trip over his …

flight patterns

ben vandgrift — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:46:31 -0700

...

once more

ben vandgrift — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 07:19:32 -0700

‘ran’ this morning, which means at this point, a bunch of running and a bunch of walking in between. nearly three miles, abysmal time. but i got up early and went, and i think that’s the important thing.

life’s funny sometimes. funny, to quote the apotheosis saga, like a fist in the gut. ...

no title (quote)

ben vandgrift — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:01:36 -0700

You can’t direct the wind, but you can adjust your sails. ...

bumping around

ben vandgrift — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:47:12 -0700

fixed a couple of things with this site this evening. mostly because adam wouldn’t stop pestering me about not having an xml feed up.

so there it is. right there. now shut the hell up.

a few other tweaks, nothing major. about to start putting in permalinks, because .. well, i should. tightened up security just a hair. added some in-place editors if you happen to be logged in.

my last day with RS is thursday. i’m somewhat adrift. ...

snippet: return value silliness

ben vandgrift — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 08:17:05 -0700

was shooting for the smallest, most extensible preferences class i could get. email me any comments—i’d like opinions on this.

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

... class Preference < ActiveRecord::Base belongs_to :user #FIXME descriptions should be in a config file? COMMON_DEFAULTS = { :email_on_message => [true, "Email when you get a message?"], :online_status_visible => [false, "Status visible to everyone?"], :public_profile => [false, "Full profile visible to everyone?"] } class << self def description_for(key) (COMMON_DEFAULTS[key.to_sym] && COMMON_DEFAULTS[key.to_sym][1]) || nil end end end

strange dreams

ben vandgrift — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:22:30 -0700

as is par for the course, the dreams that disturbed an otherwise peaceful slumber were vivid and troubling. it was good to see my little brother, however, even if it was in the aftermath of our mother star going nova. what followed that (yes, we lived) was the kind of ‘oh now what’ moment usually reserved for cartoons—the nova blast set off all the automated counterstrike conditions for the world’s nuclear arsenals.

boom.

the thing currently stuck in my memory’s craw is my brother tugging at a piece of loose skin (in spite of my warnings) and pulling away most of his shoulder muscle.

first ‘nightmare’ i’ve had in a while.

when waking from dreams of the annihilation of humanity, one’s mind predictably turns to various apocalypses. as i recall from monday school god said to moses something to this effect:

‘this time a boat was for the win. next time wear asbestos.’

this begs the question of other pure elemental destructions. ‘earth’ would be easy to accomplish—massive earthquakes devastate the whole thing, possibly caused by the orange-peel-like crust sliding on its molten bearings and careening willy-nilly around the earth’s surface. it can be argued that this …

puzzles and the ritual mind

ben vandgrift — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:33:46 -0700

games and puzzles entertain me to no end. i have something of a collection, and often the more obscure the better. games require a deconstruction that works the mind. puzzles are somewhat simpler, but still engaging.

the ritualist in me finds these things meditative.

one of my mother’s favorite things to do to me is to find some decrepit puzzle at a yard sale, preferable scrambled, in pieces, or in some other disrepair, and then drop it on me on her next visit. she knows that i can’t stop until it is solved.

well, i CAN, i just usually don’t. on her most recent visit, she dropped off a few wooden puzzles which were solved within a few minutes (more assembled rather than solved, but i’m not picky). generally that’s how such things go.

with one exception:

last year around august she brought a bunch of rubik’s type puzzles up. i made short work of all of them but one; this one did not have an obvious solution.

that isn’t to say it didn’t have a solution, or i couldn’t figure out how …

joe bob briggs

ben vandgrift — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:32:47 -0700

.. was the best host TNT ever had. sure, rhonda shear was cuter, but jbb was seriously funny. example:

”... nothing makes me madder than watching that mint-condition 1971 Hemi Cuda get totally destroyed in that crash scene. What were they thinking? That car, you could just barely touch the gas pedal and that car would make a sound like a 747 taking off. The engine in that thing was so big you had to use a booster seat to see over it. [...] That was THE most powerful car ever built. The greatest of all the Muscle Cars. And now we have one less Hemi Cuda in the universe. [...] Anyway, that’s just irresponsible. You know, anytime they RUFFLE THE FUR on a poodle in a movie, you’ve got the ASPCA complaining, you’ve got PETA protesting, you’ve got people going to jail for poodle abuse – but you can just TRASH a beautiful machine like that, with impunity. I’m sick. Go ahead. Roll film.” – jbb on monstervision, concerning phantasm 2 …

it's a problem

ben vandgrift — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 13:21:58 -0700

‘fetishistic consumerism’

i am guilty of this—maybe not as guilty as some.

when i get a little down, one of my urges is to go buy something. the further down i feel, the more expensive a thing i want to buy. the psychology behind this is easy; i was raised with a siege mentality with regard to finances, and making a big purchase establishes my wallet’s dominance. i feel better about myself because of the cash i have on hand.

this is incredibly stupid, and i feel incredibly stupid for doing it, but it’s hard to overwrite the programming. not impossible, but it’s easier to mitigate than to override. i can mock it out most of the time.

the way i do this? i don’t make any big purchases generally. i know that when i get depressed i’m going to go buy something, so i save up my wants until then. i keep a mental list of these things, and when i start to slide into blackness i haul it back out.

today is like that. this week has been rough. rosetta stone has been jerking me around for a few months now, so …

Molly Brooke's

ben vandgrift — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:50:54 -0700

meh. small place. golf on the tv. bored. ...

religion is silly, pt 435

ben vandgrift — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:05:12 -0700

.. before any of the more rational readers to convince me that i’m not going to change the mind of any über-thumpers: i know that. this is as much typing practice for me as anything else. willful ignorance is a powerful, pitiful thing, but it does bring blissful and unshakeable certainty of belief.

but, concerning the bible as the perfect word of god:

while it has been almost a year since i last looked at the dead sea scrolls, i don’t remember them having been written in english. granted, it was pretty dark.

which version is, in your mind, the perfect version (in english)? wycliffe? tyndale? king james? (and please specify either the 1611 version, which included the books of the apocrypha or the 1768 rewrite which cut them out to reduce printing costs.) niv? is it possible that they are all flawless, despite their difference?

a fact of linguistics: there is no such thing as a perfect translation from one language to another. not possible. as a result, translations are compromised, imprecise, or downright erroneous.

as an example (and one that’s pretty old hat for bible scholars) let’s consider the ‘virgin birth’:

first the prophecy, from isaiah 7 (asv):

14 …

on deployment, pt 1

ben vandgrift — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:41:31 -0700

Barry: i run this from /usr/website/deploy TAG=branches/jp_release cap -f (host) -f sites/jp -a clean_deploy_content
Barry: I do this on (host)
Barry: It gives me a funny error
Barry: REPORT request failed on ’.../jp/branches/jp_release’ svn: ’.../jp/branches/jp_release’ path not found
b.vandgrift: that is correct. there is no such branch as branches/jp_release
b.vandgrift: there is branches/release, but that hasn’t been updated in 8 months.
b.vandgrift: the last tag is three days old.
b.vandgrift: the last trunk is 5 hours old.
Barry: I was drunk. ...

update in brief

ben vandgrift — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:04:49 -0700

not briefs, you dirty minded bastards.

the past couple of weeks have been me clearing my head and docket so i can be sane. this has been something of an uphill fight.

i am now 17 lbs lighter than i was when i left for the subcontinent. i’ve been trying to maintain this with some hard biking, and watching what i eat to a stronger degree.

i am now driving an 07 civic, which should net me a $3000/year savings in fuel, maintenance, insurance, and payments. with the potential savings, i got a new tv.

i was, it turns out, around $50k over the limit to get a ‘stimulus package’ tax refund. stingy bastards.

wednesday i head back to the burg for another week of covering for a new father, and copying text from word documents into web forms. while a waste of potential, it’s their nickel.

for the moment. ...

from the latin quarter, rue de le huchette

ben vandgrift — Sun, 18 May 2008 09:53:37 -0700

my first impressions of paris: there seem to be quite a few more visitors than parisians.

my second: it’s good not to have to rush to the toilet every half hour. i’m still taking my anti-biotics though. and the malarone for that matter.

i’ve walked quite a long way today, on top of a very long flight. (10 hours.) clay recommended a nice hotel, which is where i am staying, about two football fields from notre dame. i’ve napped already. i’m feeling like i probably should try it again.

found a shogi set in a game shop a little ways off.

there’s a point at which you stop taking pictures. there’s too much. it’s impossible to capture. so i’ve started taking pictures of ugly little corners and details. i’m more comfortable with those things than grandeur anyhow.

i have to keep reminding myself that the value of the euro was intended to be somewhat less than a dollar, and it’s only by virtue of the fact that we’ve spent a good many years fucking our currency over and mortgaging ourself to the chinese that this is an expensive place to stay, eat, and drink. maybe …

from the subcontinent

ben vandgrift — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:17:55 -0700

so for the past couple of weeks i’ve been in sunny chennai, india. sunny, as the avg temperature while i’ve been here has been 104°.

i don’t really know where to start. the thing that most recently occurred to me as i was washing my hands was ‘what does it mean to be clean here?’. the water is not drinkable, carrying bacteria which will make me quite ill. when i wash my hands, i transfer them to my hands. someone truly ocd would pull their hair out here.

i haven’t had any regular transportation, since you can’t rent a motorcycle, there’s no way i’m driving a car, and the Madras Club, where i’m staying, is far enough from the nearest taxi stand or auto-gathering corner that walking it is pretty rough. i could call in a car, but after work it’s always dark, so there’s nothing to see really. i can’t go to most nightlife events as i am a single male and won’t be allowed admission, and i neither speak the local language or have anyone to show me around the kinds of places i’m likely to want to frequent.

combine this with an …

giving the iPhone a run

ben vandgrift — Thu, 01 May 2008 14:59:44 -0700

Yeah, I am behind the times. But I had to get a new phone anyway so why not treat myself? ...

bad news ..

ben vandgrift — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 06:41:17 -0700

the manager at rs that i so respected is leaving the company. good for him, sucks for me. he is like the zen master of the intersection of technology and office politics. easily the best manager i’ve ever had.

if you’re reading, you will be missed. ...

home again

ben vandgrift — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:19:05 -0700

the house is a mess. feels good to be back in it, however. tomorrow, or perhaps monday i need to get a couple of new shirts to take with me to chennai.

working on getting the feed reading part of this site working with backgounDRB. since this is hosted at dreamhost, i wonder how i’ll be able to keep things running?

it’s been time to move for a long time, but i’m resisting. maybe after jumble gets rolling. ...

w2e fri session 3: web 2.0 workflow

ben vandgrift — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:06:52 -0700

merging agile and ucd processes

host: kelly goto @ gotomedia

the big ball of mud! questions about what’s working for people. not many people seem to have a process that works.

why does everybody end up in the big ball of mud? time, cost, experience, visibility, complexity, change, scale.

the cure, from the BBOM paper: agile and refactoring.

what we’re doing here? finding a best practices toolkit.

i am running out of battery, and hope that i can get the slides for this.

will post the generalized review of the conf later. ...

w2e friday session 3: the 'how' of oauth

ben vandgrift — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:33:44 -0700

using chuck.e.cheese as a way to describe oauth.

what oauth gives you:

signed http requests.

safe, password-less token exchange.

what’s the process?

three actors—user (not me!), service provider, consumer (the app that’s getting the protected data).

three sets of tokens/credentials: access token – (tickets redeemed for prizes, signed), request token – (tokens, fake quarters, etc.), consumer keys – uniquely identifies an application

therefore, you have three urls: request token issuer (token machine), auth page (confirm access by user), access token exchanger.

as a service provider, you have to decide what urls you are going to use.

now, the meat.

building a consumer. (in ruby!) auth.net website has code for many languages. fiddly part: getting signatures correct.

get a consumer key and secret. we register our app with the service provider (not defined how in the spec—get this from the app).

[code] gem install oath [/code]

some code here.

1  consumer = OAuth::Conser.new("key", "secret", {
2    # options
3  })
4  
5  request_token = consumer.get_request_token

step 2.

1  request_token.authorize_url
2  # => http://mysite.com/authorize?oauth_token=XXXX

keep the following token around: it’ll be used to make subsequent requests. the user has control over the access token—they can go into the service provider and revoke the token, for example.

1  token = request_token.get_access_token
2  # simple, right?

and we’re done with token exchange.

1  token.get('/me')
2  token.post('/topics', {})

now, ...

w2e fri session 2: mozilla add-ons

ben vandgrift — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:53:09 -0700

presenter: mason @ wesabe

(pretty sparsely populated here)

add-ons, introduce them, where they are, and how they differentiate themselves from add-ons a few years ago.

why would you want to go there? the biz argument.

add-on development, jargon, &c. how to build. setting up a development environment. (lightweight overview)

some resources at http://www.wesabe.com/downloads

http://add-ons.mozilla.org – add-ons extend firefox.

personalize your browsing experience, and differentiates firefox from the crowd.

button or menu item
toolbar
sidebar

aren’t limited to firefox—flock, thunderbird .. built into the platform.

the standard:

google
yahoo
delicious buttons
stumbleupon—a good example of a company that raised itself with its addon.

the innovative:

google browser sync & gears – deep firefox and web app integration.
delicious bookmarks—now fully browser-integrated
glubble
ebay companion

?:why use an addon?

downloaded apps are a lot of work, with a slow release schedule. add-ons are quick to prototype and build.

simple tool set
xul
javascript

quick and easy to relese

mozilla add-on site
push new releases and updates

cross-platform support, easy localization

add-on to app independence: migrate via xulrunner. flickr uploadr, ex.

add-on dev 101

xul – xml based user interface language. worst acronym ever. there is no dana only xul. or use xhtml (add the namespace, tweak)

(i …

w2e fri session 1: games 2.0

ben vandgrift — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:56:53 -0700

jeremy lieu @ lightspeed venture partners

we’re talking about the future of game development and game types with web 2.0.

panelists:

lots of things have changed in the web—mostly the variability of cost. these changes are tricking to the web industry.

aaa games can cost upwards of $30M. marketing driven by print and media advertising. building is about levels, and monetization is through box sales.

changes parallel the web industry.

small agile teams can get in-browser games out quickly.

(really want this slide .. don’t want to record it here.)

web games are multiplayer—not ai driven. no level design. &c.

some numbers:

halo3 $30M, yielded $700M.

powerchallenge < $8m. 1M players.

friends for sale < $1m. 7m players.

marketing:

$30M marketing dollars, 10M copies sold, 90% through retail.

the rest—facebook.

aaa game sales declines over time.

social games are backward—they grow over time.

one of the critical issues for multiplayer games online is asynchronous play.

online gaming revenue: $3.8B 2006, $5.3B in 2007, more in 2008, and growing.

panelists:

seqi chen (serious business)

johann christiansen (power challenge)

shervin pishevar (social games network)

mark pincus (zynger)

warbook—developed in two months by two people.

there have been improvements in play since launch, since it’s server hosted. just launched a sequel.

johann …

w2e thu session 3, 4: data mining for social networks.

ben vandgrift — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:23:37 -0700

session 3 was on testing web sites, and was largely a review of BDD and rspec. good, not useful.

—

this talk concerns finding knowledge among social network data—emails/messages, recommendations, tags .. etc.

baysian filtering. once set up with some initial data, it classifies things by preferential frequency.

examples uses: personal ads. built a basic filter so you can detect what city they came from.

interesting breakdown of what people talk about, as separated out by a baysian filter.

distance metrics. could be people, concepts, movies.

preference distances—who is similar to each other? whose tastes are close? therefore, whose recommendations are likely to apply to whom?

(collaborative filtering) weight votes based on preferential distance.

linguistic distance. different are two texts?

valleywag – huffingpost > slashdot – wired. (for instance)

heirarchical clustering. group similar preferences (or whatever), chart in a dendogram. there is a chart with bloggers that’s pretty neat.

decision trees. yes/no characterizations in a graph. can be built automatically from any set of data.

hotornot.com example.

network analysis. PageRank, example. clustering coefficient. (how many of a person’s friends are friends with each other?) generally, social networks are highly clustered.

(network graph created with freebase, board members …

w2e thu session 2: influence is overrated

ben vandgrift — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:20:44 -0700

coming into this a little bit late.

(with jonah peretti)

we’re talking about viral marketing, and the effects of social influence on people’s choices on the web.

this is mainly based on an experiment with buzzfeed—some users saw the social data, others didn’t. there was a widely different distribution of popularity.

the problem: radical unpredictability.

accidental incfuential hypothesis wiggest that we can’t predict who will make something popular

the music lab experiment suggests we can’t predict what will become popular.

how to succeed anyway?

solution #1 contagious media

forget influentials and make something that people want to share.

make it easy to understand, easy to share, and include a social imperative.

(this moves very fast)

viral math: r > 1

each generation has to increase in repetition; at this point, it becomes viral.

nike ‘sweatshop’ email

he customized a pair of nike’s shoes that were customized with ‘sweatshop’. they mailed to say they couldn’t make the shoe.

he forwarded the email, which led to a viral cascade. it grew out into an activist community and reporters, even though the host wasn’t that into the issue.

example 2: ‘the rejection line’

example 3: blackpeopleloveus.com

hindsight bias—jonah is viewed as an expert in fields he doesn’t really understand, because of the growth of his viral …

truncating long posts ..

ben vandgrift — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:52:01 -0700

.. needs to be something i add in. ...

w2e thu session 1: designing for a web of data

ben vandgrift — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:07:12 -0700

as an aside, textmate has a textile bundle. i’m working offline right now, as the wireless i’m connected to seems to be horked. also, my screen brightness has been turned all the way down to save battery life. will probably charge up over lunch.

(and possibly play around with backgrounDRB, which really needs an installation doc update.)

decided to go with the ‘designing for’ session, with tom coates (tom@plasticbag.org) of y! brickhouse. (who threw a rockin party last night.) was originally going into the ‘censorship’ panel.

on to the panel:

things interesting lately—things that are not sites, but the sites are exploratory interfaces to data services behind the scene.

(listed are flurrie, freebase, twitter, dopplr, google earth, amazon, facebook, veomanes, wikipedia, flickr, delicious)

(back online now.)

five things:

your site is not your product.

you must play well with others.

you can never have too much data.

heirarchies can’t take the weight.

the importance of collaboration.

we are moving from siloed data to aggregate data manifested through api’s.

the web of data: datasources, services for exploring and manipulating data, and ways people can plug them together.

your site is not your product—your territory is everywhere your network touches.

the important thing about twitter is the data …

w2e thu, morning keynotes

ben vandgrift — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:39:52 -0700

morning announcements ..

giving some thought to adding a live feature to this post.

marc andressen talking about his career, and the internet, how people are approaching it.

media companies are unprepared, telecom companies are enabling.

lots of questions and answers, most rehashing his blog, some conversation about microsoft.

(went ahead and added the live editing during the speech.)

jonathan zittrain—talking about his book ‘the future of the internet, and how to stop it’.

US 1.0 -> everybody be really nice, and if that doesn’t work, just move west.

lessons to be learned by the constitutional power-limiting for web platforms. ad-hoc community based models, etc.

mitchell baker, mozilla foundation. reminds me of miller canning. talking about the user experience.

the mobile web shouldn’t be something we have to think about.

‘what can i get to, and what can i do with it’ should not be dependent on the device.

use cases for mobile are likely to be the same as everything else.

while this is all interesting, it’s the kind of visionary-speak we keep hearing here.

some shilling for firefox.

yahoo cto, ari baloch, talking about open platforms. searchmonkey.

‘social’ as a dimension, not a destination.

next speaker—current tv. with torture porn (waterboarding). strange.

steve pearman with myspace.

a few fundamental …

w2e post-keynote

ben vandgrift — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:01:38 -0700

finally put the updates out in the interwub. clearly i have some learning to do as regards the shortcuts of textile.

ended up leading a panel of sorts on web 2.0 and politics. most of the attendees were politcal operatives and not technical. was fairly useless. such is life.

the keynotes were okay; about 1/3 of the audience got up and left when the microsoft guy showed up. that was pretty entertaining.

someone recognized me from my twitter photo, too. that was .. odd.

there’s some sort of pub crawl later i’m looking forward to. i think i’m off to find some food at the moment.

when i get back to this system—twitter listening, and a few others. ...

w2e session 4: micromedia and microblogging

ben vandgrift — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:44:30 -0700

there is an app up on the screen that posts the twitters for the audience to the screen. almost everyone here uses twitter. this is somewhat chaotic.

gregarious narain, jeremiah owyang, stowe boyd, brian solis.

micromedia = twitter and a bunch other stuff.

blogs = essay format.

utters = audio twitter. others.

history of micromedia?

stowe: buddy gopher—you could pull statuses for contacts on aim. users updated their status very frequently.

hollywood folks started using this as a status board for their projects.

with the emergence of the facebook minifeed &c the number of applications and users increased dramatically.

brian: twitter, pounce, tumblr and different micromedias have different communities, little overlap. different than blogging. asks questions, converse, update, talk to communities.

greg: a slightly different mindset to consumption.

- the notion of streams?

stowe: there’s a difference and big chunk consumption and being embedded in a stream of bite-size information.

a partial attention model. don’t have to dedicate your full attention to something.

more like being in a cocktail party—a different mindset.

opportunity to engage in a conversational space is moving off of the blogs and into twitter and friendfeed, alert-thingy, and the comments are happing in these tools instead …

w2e session 3: the massively multiplayer internet

ben vandgrift — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 14:48:02 -0700

if you look at what the internet has become, it’s a massive data entry system that people are incented to deliver.

almost everything can benefit from a little game theory.

is it game, a service?

rajat: nitro, bunchball. drive user behavior via game mechanics.

chris: areae

gabe: game design can make people do irrational things without the threat of violence. bringing game design into non-gaming contexts.

so what is a game? where is the line?

the definition is a game, and what is a game-like experience has evolved over the last few years.

3 basic things you add to an app to make it fun:

challenges, leaderboards, and trophies. these things cause people to change their behavior.

does games = fun? you shouldn’t feel like you’re wasting your time. if you get more trophies, for some reason, you don’t feel like you’re wasting your time.

is there badge fatigue? facebook is the ultimate trophy room. whereas your ‘life trophies’ are irritating, social networking has made a trophy room cool and acceptable, rather than irritating.

how to you keep people engaged with the brand of the sponsor, while they’re playing the game?

nbc’s office has a game (dundermifflininfinity.com)—you earn ‘bucks’, by building a dunder-mifflin branch. ...