Comments of yerfdogyrag (41)

Comment on post India, weekend 1:
2013-02-06T21:06:06+00:00
Awesome pictures, love the shirt.

Comment on post Software development tools I'm grateful for:
2011-09-06T23:34:02+00:00
I'll add 'printf' to the list. Only seem to need a debugger every few years.

Comment on post Developing for webOS versus Android:
2011-08-29T14:30:26+00:00
Greg,

I've only done a little with it, but I thought you could just do a:

EasyHttpClient client = new EasyHttpClient();
System.out.println(client.get("https://encrypted.google.com/"));

To do a remote request if it's OK to block where you are.

(Note: taken from http://www.androidsnippets.com/get-the-content-from-a-httpresponse-or-any-inputstream-as-a-string )

BTW, interested in: http://bigandroidbbq.eventbrite.com ?

G

Comment on post choosing a phone:
2011-08-26T00:39:51+00:00
Quick note: I really like having the Nexus One because it tends to get really fast updates from the Google team (at least compared to other phones). Up until Gingerbread, it was getting the first release of all upgrades and GB was (as I recall) about 8 weeks from the original Nexus S release.

So, you might consider the Nexus S even though it's slightly behind the times from a hardware standpoint now.

Good luck!

Comment on post pouring good news:
2011-08-01T15:35:20+00:00
Congrats on the promotion! I'm sure it's well deserved.

Comment on post app reviews getting better!:
2011-07-07T10:15:48+00:00
You could create an app which will show the statistics for all your apps (rating over time, etc.). The proper response to any obsession should be to write code.

:-)

Comment on post productivity techniques (or: remembering stuff):
2010-10-20T20:01:37+00:00
I'll second GTD and Remember the Milk (dunno if RTM is on the palm). I'm still pretty horrible with keeping track of things, but I'm less horrible than I've been.

One fun thing: I've been using RTM to remember what I ate at a restaurant. I eat at a restaurant. Keeps me from getting the same horrible thing over and over. When I remember to check it.

Oh, yeah. It does have the ability to associate a todo list with a location, so it buzzes when I'm at Home Depot with any items I need there.

Comment on post prop 8. musical done! joining a choir?:
2010-08-09T15:21:18+00:00
I've done Austin Singers a few times and went to one of their more recent concerts. Frankly, my current church choir is a little bit better than what I saw there. They're good folk, though.

One thing not on your list: it sounds like David Stevens will be looking for more people for two performances in the fall: the Durufle requiem and for Handel's Messiah with the Austin Symphony this fall. Let me know if you want details. It might be possible to weave this in with another choir, but I'm not sure.

I know a few people in Conspirare. The Professional choir is truly impressive and you really do have to be a professional for it. You're at least on par with the few people that I know in the volunteer choir. Don't let the audition intimidate you!

Good luck!

Comment on post Brain Rules:
2010-07-22T00:08:44+00:00
I may hit you up for it when I get back. On my Android for the vacation: _Drive_, Daniel Pink and _How_We_Decide_, Jonah Lehrer. I'll let you know how they are :-).

Comment on post Accountability:
2010-05-21T09:48:53+00:00
Ya, I like Michael Lewis also. I really liked his articles when he worked for The New Republic and followed some of the alternates to the Clinton / Bush campaigns. BTW, I do have his book on the '94 campaign if you're interested. I suspect it's out of print right now.

Personally, I think (but not with Great Conviction) we could fix a lot of the financial system with two fairly simple changes:

1) Add in a sales tax of about .1% to .5% to stock trades. Day trading does absolutely nothing for the economy as a whole and I think this would end up making investors a bit more thoughtful.

2) Have the interest rate set quarterly by the Fed, but add a random factor (+- 30%) to it. The idea here is to periodically 'shock' the system which should pop any bubbles before they get really bad.

Comment on post naps!:
2010-04-28T17:49:17+00:00
I take a nap in the early evening just about every day (actually typing this from bed; have to leave for choir in 17 minutes). If I don't do it, I'm a zombie for the entire evening. Most of the time it's just for 10-20 minutes, but it can extend to a half hour if I didn't get enough sleep the night before.

Oh, and I've been doing this since high school :)

Comment on post First picture with new camera!:
2010-03-23T11:40:15+00:00
Cool! Can you take a picture of your new camera? Note: mirrors are cheating.

Comment on post Rich Dad Poor Dad review:
2010-03-14T17:52:32+00:00

"Pay yourself first": Every month you should save/invest first, before paying bills and expenses. It's easier to do this if you're not in debt. I like this idea, but what are you supposed to do if you can't afford to do this? Apparently still pay yourself and then the pressure of not being able to pay your bills will inspire you to make more money. ?

Comment on post slideshow comments:
2009-08-12T09:08:44+00:00
Thought: one thing I've wanted on a slide show screen savers was to allow it to accept keys without taking it out of screensaver mode. This would be for things like:

o Go back/forward one picture
o Show comment or date (toggle)
o Mod-up a picture/album (see more of them)
o Mod-down or kill a picture/album

Hmm... That doesn't look like much code - might not be too bad. The hard part would be seeing how the keys could be snagged. Have you ever looked at that part?

Comment on post I miss music:
2009-03-04T00:19:23+00:00
Well, singing with the choir has been a very different (and much more demanding!) experience than I've had in the past. Generally, each Sunday service has two songs: an offering and one during communion. These (for me at least) are beyond my sight singing skills, and they take me a reasonable amount of home practice to get them to an acceptable level. Then there's usually about 4-6 hymns that you just need to sight sing on the fly (though I occasionally find myself brushing up a few ragged parts between services). It's not too bad if you know the songs, but basically all of them are new to me :-).

What's fun is that the notes, words and rhythms are expected. Most of the time during rehearsals is spent on tone, line, enunciation and other fun, juicy things.

And, Greg, I know you and your voice well enough to know that you'll fit in fine in a short while.

David is out of town this week and Austin, the assistant director, will be running tonight's (Wed) rehearsal. If you're interested, drop me a note and I'll get a hold of him and make sure it's OK (I can't see that it would be a problem for a visit). Rehearsal starts at 6:45 Wed. evening.

Hmm... I always wanted to visit for a listen with the compline choir...

Comment on post I miss music:
2009-03-03T17:18:47+00:00
If you feel like maybe something short term to try, I'm going to be out for Good Friday and Easter at St. David's Ep. this year. I think your voice goes down to the baritone range, right? I think it's going to be parts of St. John's Passion and Bach B minor mass. Fun stuff :-).

I can drop David Stevens a note if you're interested.

Cheers,
Gary

Comment on post weight:
2009-01-20T17:10:06+00:00
What? No % body fat? You need a geekier balance.

Good luck!

Ya - the new guy even changed the whitehouse.gov site - the nerve of him!

Comment on post giving it another go:
2009-01-06T11:54:24+00:00
One other thought: just simply write down everything you eat. Find a small notebook or something small and geeky. Don't worry about trying to calculate calories.

The main idea is that it simply forces you to think a little more about the food before eating (even if you write it down afterwords).

Comment on post A week of happy recap, and ismydatasignificant.com:
2008-12-20T23:18:59+00:00
I remember watching a show many years back (early teens for me?). They deliberately pushed buttered (I think it was peanut butter) bread off the counter and found out that falling off the edge, it would automatically flip and land peanut butter side down. If you put it on a short box (1'-2' off the ground), it would hit peanut butter side up. If you put it on a ladder and pushed it off, it would flip all the way around and land peanut-butter side up.

So, obviously, the height of countertops was put in place by shills of the floor cleaner and peanut butter industries.

Comment on post $1 coins take two:
2008-12-09T07:49:23+00:00
If I remember right, there was fun article about the squaw in one of the science rags. The mint needed it to be the same size as the Suzy BA coin and also share the same density and magnetic characteristics, while having a completely different color. Evidently, vending machines use more than just size and weight to check coins. It was a fair bit of alchemy to get the mix right right.

Comment on post is it Saturday yet?:
2008-11-20T10:24:33+00:00
Michael Lewis was on Colbert Report last night. That was one of the (many) times that I really didn't like Colbert's "interview" style. I really wanted to hear what Lewis had to say but, of course, Colbert needed to make sure that nothing of substance came of the conversation. Sigh. I hope he lands on Charlie Rose soon.

BTW, if you want to see another perspective, this interview on Charlie Rose last week was fascinating. http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9498

Comment on post more early voting info:
2008-10-23T14:46:14+00:00
Ya - even the Austin Chronicle came out against 2, but it was very contentious even inside the paper. Basically, it sounds like it's a good idea, but it's a bit too blunt of an instrument. I liked the Chronicle's reasoning: if we don't like how the council is spending money, we should vote them out, not hamstring their successors.

Comment on post deep thought:
2008-10-13T09:56:57+00:00
Ewww. That adds a whole new meaning to 'bank run'. If someone offers for the US to switch to a mucus based model, I hope nobody decides to sinus up.

Comment on post just the usual:
2008-07-14T16:31:24+00:00
Have you seen This one yet?.

Comment on post post-WoW doldrums:
2008-05-13T17:29:18+00:00
BTW, when I see hosts doing that sort of thing, I just tend to add their IP addresses to /etc/hosts.deny. Sometimes I mask out the entire country (Bad Malasia! Bad Country!)

Comment on post positive surprises:
2008-03-20T12:23:58+00:00
There's another package similiar to Crayon Physics Deluxe called 'phun'. If you want to see what it can do, you can youtube 'physics phun'.

The water simulation runs a little slow on my linux box, but other than that it's fun to play with.

http://www.phun.at/

G

Comment on post I still dislike moving:
2008-03-14T00:12:16+00:00
I've gone to Buca di Beppo (behind D&B) a few times in the past. It's really best with a group of people because they serve family style. I don't remember the food that well (because I don't tend to remember food. Or anything else), but I do remember that we once got reservations for the 'kitchen booth'. They actually have a booth in the kitchen and you can watch the staff prepare the meals. And they occasionally will slip you a taste of things...

Glad to hear you're almost moved!

Gary

Comment on post super smash bros. brawl:
2008-03-09T20:58:36+00:00
Whoops - sorry. Wasn't logged in. I still don't know what it means or how it relates to augmented sibling pulverization. Context, man, I need context!

Comment on post a day of unnecessary stress:
2008-02-19T19:50:38+00:00
Well, the only thing I did that was strange that way was to put in a wysiwyg module for page editing. Having said that, here's a link:

http://groups.google.com/group/django-users/browse_thread/thread/ce74e0541e2d21f7

Having a real dom is soooo nice. In the Bad Old Days, you could only index the fields by numbers.

Comment on post How am I feeling?:
2008-02-14T04:18:07+00:00
Wow - that's pretty cool! What are you using to capture the data? Did it require an implant?

Comment on post house-ing:
2008-02-10T22:09:36+00:00
Ah, I'd have screamed if I knew you were going to try and do any contracting through HD. Don't do it - they don't tend to pay contractors crap and so the good ones don't tend to work with HD. Basically, HD collects a percentage of the money and just hires out to local folks for the actual work. You're better off just going with the local contractors, if you can find good ones.

Drop a note if you're going to be hiring out any work - we've got through a fair number of contractors in the past couple of years...

Comment on post houses houses houses...I made you out of clay...:
2007-12-22T08:41:54+00:00
So it occurs to me that we should change the way we signal elevators. Right now, you press that you either want to go "up" or "down". Not very specific. It would be much better to have a full button panel outside the elevators on every floor, and every elevator door has lights showing destination floors. You press your floor and then a light lights up outside the elevator door that you'll take. Of course, this has to be somewhat dynamic because stupid humans don't always enter and exit elevators at the same rate. But, given a system like this, you can really begin to schedule things optimally.

I seem to recall that there were some hard drives at one point that had multiple heads per platter face. Whatever algorithm they used for scheduling would likely be somewhat applicable.

Comment on post house-buying tips:
2007-10-24T00:31:15+00:00
Kris ended up running our agent pretty ragged. She probably looked at 20-25 homes and narrowed it down to about 5 that I went back with her to look at. But, for the most part, she would search the internet for homes and use him to get into the places. He seemed pretty knowledgeable, but I found a number of things that he told us with complete confidence, ended up not being completely correct. And we used a couple of his highly recommended contractors and they were duds as well. All in all, our agent got $8000 for a few days work.

In retrospect, I'd likely use TexasDiscountRealty.com for the buying since they'll give a rebate on the buyer agent's 3%. I'm not overly fond of the way that the real estate industry has fixed prices and does their best to keep a monopoly. It was only recently that they were forced to make MLS listings public. The only way to change the monopoly is to support agents that are working against it. What turned me on to Texas Discount Realty was that I found the owner, Aaron Farmer, had testified in congress against monopolistic real estate laws. I like that.

Comment on post wallet:
2007-08-29T12:32:53+00:00
Neither - you can be more geeky. I had one of these a few years ago:

http://www.ebcases.com/

I *really* liked having the pda and wallet all in the same package. It was slightly thicker than a trifold and slightly longer than a bifold, but it wasn't bad (palm IIIe, as I recall). At the time, I was on a diet and was recording everything I ate (I would not eat things because of the effort it took to record).

Comment on post living situation pros and cons:
2006-12-12T09:51:06+00:00
So, back in high school and early 20s (two separate times), this was my favorite book store. It didn't take much eat through my budget! Even (way) back then, there wasn't much in the way of independent book stores; Crown books was a staple. You might like Olsson's Bookstore. It's been there for quite a number of years, and I see it periodically with author talks on CSPAN/BookTV. I've only actually been there (Old Town) a few times.

On the radio, I seem to recall a station out of UMD which had some fun stuff, including a *real* metal show (in the late 80s, most of DC was bland piped in stuff), and some folk stuff. Don't know if they're still around. Oh, and you're now in one of the few places in the nation that has CSPAN radio on the air.

Comment on post between projects:
2006-11-06T10:04:13+00:00
So, here's one. It's more of a difficult design problem than a difficult programming problem. There are a lot of situations where people get together: lunch, game nights, parties, quartetting, etc. What would be nice is to have a place where you can say, "I can game on Tuesday and Thursday evening", and other people can do the same, and an Event pops up.

Now, Events need to have their own dependancies before firing. For instance, every Game Night needs a Host. A quartet needs tenor, lead, baritone, bass. Also, you need to put in how often (maximum) that you want that game night to fire. That way you're not doing game night every night. It also means that you can say, "I'll host maximum every 6 weeks".

And inviduals need to be able to prioritize their Events. I want the Northern Game Night before the Southern Game night.

This also works for restaurants. I can say, "Chili's every two weeks max". Every day at 10:00, an email is sent out with the "best" choice of restaurant(s)/people.

Hmmmm... I wonder if you should be able to "I will go to any restaurant unless xxx goes along". Naaaa.

Oh, and you'll want to do this in django.

Comment on post The Prestige:
2006-10-28T21:28:54+00:00
Ya - fun movie. Kris and I saw it at the Alamo Wed. evening.

CAUTION * * * * SPOILER * * * * DON'T READ IF YOU PLAN TO SEE THE MOVIE * * *

So the question is: when did you figure out the twin thing? I didn't get it till the very end; Kris picked it up near the beginning (one of the 'not today' lines).

Comment on post look what we can do!:
2006-08-07T17:48:01+00:00
Virginia is funny - somewhat just the opposite of Austin. Here, we have a somewhat conservative legislature in the middle of a liberal city. Richmond tends to be very conservative (I'd call it backwater) compared to Northern Virginia but most of the decisions are made by the Richmond folks. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but when I lived there you could only buy alcohol from an ABC store and they're only allowed to be open 6 days a week, and not too late into the evening.

Having said that, you can get just about anything in DC.

Comment on post Colbert nails him!:
2006-06-16T10:35:50+00:00
These days I usually watch CR up to the end of 'The Word'. Most of the interviews seem to be more agonizing than anything else. Though, the Westmoreland interview looks like it might have been interesting. And I really liked the recent re-inteview with Stone Phillips.

BTW, the writing seemed a touch off this last week. I wonder if they shifted any writers....

Comment on post Just another day...:
2005-10-25T00:04:09+00:00
So, I've been doing the melatonin thing for the past few weeks. I knew I'd have to get up "early" (6:30 is early for me) for a chorus contest, and was using the drug to slowly move my schedule back to human hours. It seems to work reasonably well - about an hour after a dose I start getting pretty drowsy. Only about 20mins to go before I

Comment on post And now I am smart...I mean tired:
2005-06-22T21:00:13+00:00
I got somewhere around level 10. Needed to cheat on one or two of them, as I recall (numerical sequence - you know when you get there). Haven't looked in a few weeks - been too busy with other puzzles.

BTW, finally got some python code at work. Managed to slip it in since it was PyQt (much easier to write with Qt than with Tk) and only about 100 lines of python. Just a user-friendly frond end to our web based trouble ticket system. Now, of course, they want Enhancements.

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