What's Going On?

Ah, another notch on the ol’ snowboard belt, this time at Mountain Creek. The longest trip of the season, so far, at about 5 hours of legit snowboarding, so I’m decently sore (by the way, does anybody else get sore in their neck, back, and arms, or am I really just _that_ out of shape? )

Maybe I just never noticed because I always slept on the bus, but MC is awfully close. From Jersey City (the Grove Street PATH, to be exact), it’s only about an hour’s drive. Unfortunately, the mountain itself wasn’t that great: ridiculous patches of ice at the worst parts (i.e. right in the middle of a steep slope) and still too many people (even though relatively speaking it was a light day).

Thankfully, this was all offset by the group I tagged along with (thanks Ben!), a great group of 6 others, 3 of which were just a little bit better than me. It’s more fun to have other people to lift up and ride down with, chat about the right and wrong way to do things, and laugh about falls and eats, and this group was cooler than most.

Thanks again to Ben, I got a “exclusive DOUBLE DOWN” deal, so I got a two day lift ticket for $69 rather than a one day for $61.99; that’s pretty sweet (I just need to remember and go again!). I couldn’t get any deals on the rental (standard $34.95 for the day), so it was ~ $100 for the day.

Since home (Jersey City for everybody but me) was so close, we just went back and had dinner at Pittie Soochow, a brilliant Shanghainese restaurant. I had absolutely no idea what we ordered, but it was really the best Chinese food I’ve had in a long time, for not too much. We were stuffed to the gills, which just feels so great after a full day of snowboarding.

Miscellaneous: I put the Violent Femmes‘ Viva Wisconsin on my iPod on a whim, and I’ve really been jamming to them for the last few days. I haven’t checked out their other albums, but I really like their sound and lyrics; they sound _almost_ bad, in a good way, and I love their lyrics, “parody emo” is the best I can think of to describe it. For reference, they’re the guys who did “Blister in the Sun”. My song du jour (du semaine, heh) is “Gimme the Car”.

Decided to put in some more time on Mozilla Weave 1.0 minimal server after this attempt, but a little less ambitious: getting it working locally on Mac OS X (10.5.8), where I have full admin rights. While the instructions are _technically_ sufficient, there’s a lot more that can be said to make it more straightforward.

By far the most frustrating and poorly documented part are permissions issues. The instructions below are pretty crude and insecure, but it’s just for practice. So here’s what I did:

1. Download the minimal server, and read the README.
2. Move the whole “weave_minimal” directory into your DocumentRoot; for me, it was at “/Library/WebServer/Documents”. Note that you might have to `sudo` to get it in there. It also doesn’t hurt to rename it to something that doesn’t begin with “weave”, to minimize weird path conflicts down the line. E.g.: `sudo mv weave_minimal /Library/WebServer/Documents/minimal-weave-1.0`
3. For good measure, change the ownership and groupship to root and admin, respectively, and give them full permissions: `chown -R root minimal-weave-1.0`, `chgrp -R admin minimal-weave-1.0`, `chmod -R 775 minimal-weave-1.0`
4. Modify your “httpd.conf” (in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf) by adding the following line at the end: “Alias /weave /Library/WebServer/Documents/minimal/index.php”
5. Restart your local Apache instance by going into System Preferences > Sharing > Web Sharing (check to enable)
6. Per the README, hit the URL to initialize the sqlite database: http://localhost/weave/1.0/blah/info/collection
7. You should get a pop-up that axks for authentication info (username and password). You MUST enter “blah” for username, and the SOMETHING (anything) for password (it CANNOT be blank).
8. You still won’t be able to authenticate, but if you look at your minimal-weave-1.0 directory, you should now see a new file called “weave_db”.
9. If you’re this far, congrats, you’ve finished the most annoying parts! Now we create a new user; thankfully somebody in the comments tipped me off to this, otherwise I could have wasted hours. The “create_user” script in the installation is actually a PHP commandline script, and MUST be run this way on the commandline: `/usr/bin/php create_user` (you probably need to sudo).
10. Now you’re done, and can install the Weave client from the project page. Some last notes during client installation: in Firefox Preferences > Privacy, you MUST remember some kind of history, otherwise the Weave preferences tab will be greyed out (this was very confusing, and I hope it’s clarified in the next version of the client).

This is admittedly a very ghetto and unprofessional installation guide (PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t set up your instance like to for _anything_ other than playing around, on a non-production machine), but it was just an experiment to learn what’s _supposed_ to happen during an install. Now I can try and get this thing working on Dreamhost. We’ll see.

Did you know there are two Mamoun’s in NYC? I had only ever gone to the one in St. Mark’s, but there’s one much closer to Washington Square Park, near Bleecker and MacDougal (I guess this is actually the one people generally mean, since it’s “by Washington Square Park”). As I was walking from the station, I thought “Huh. I’ve never been in this neighborhood before”. As usual, I’m just forgetful.

Anyway, Mamoun’s can’t be beat: a simple, inexpensive Middle Eastern menu: a falafel sandwich + lamb shawarma sandwich = $2.50 + $5.00 = awesome.

Really did have a nice time hanging out last Friday (thanks Charlie!), and got a book recommendation (thanks Hallie!): Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann.

The 1.0 release yesterday seemed like a great time to try Weave again. Following the big bold suggestion at the top of https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Weave/Sync/1.0/Setup, I hit up http://tobyelliott.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/weave-minimal-server/ and tried to install my own instance. Alas, Dreamhost bested me. Too tired to fully explain why, but quickly:

1. Dreamhost doesn’t allow “Alias” directives in .htaccess (either that, or you can only have Alias directives in httpd.conf/apache.conf, in a VHost block; whatever, the bottom line is you can’t use it).
2. You somehow need to map some path to a PHP file. That is, something like “host.com/weave/a/b/c” is actually supposed to be a request to “host.com/weave/install/dir/index.php” with a bunch of extra URI stuff after it (in this example, “/a/b/c”). Don’t worry, this sentence doesn’t make sense to me either.
3. Apache rewrite rules are confusing enough, but factor in PHP processing, and it’s more than I can figure out right now.

Damned shame, from the instructions it sounded like it would take 10 minutes, max. <sigh/> Will try again another day. Gods, I hope somebody else figures it out by then.

Doug’s “Super Remove Dead Track v2.1″ works like a charm: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=removedeadsuper

Installation takes about 20 seconds. Note that if your music collection is large (mine clocked in at 120 GB…), and you have a lot of dead links (I had around 10-15 GB), it could take up to an hour.

Conveniently located (for me, from work) at 26th and 8th, the Upright Citizen’s Brigade was a surprisingly good (and cheap, at $5, with no drinks required) time.

Our reservations said to get there about 30 minutes before, but we accidentally got there about 40 minutes before. And guess what, there were literally 4 people (2 groups of 2) in line. Great, now we need to kill time, and <sarcasm>what better way to kill time than at the next-door Gristedes?</sarcasm>. For the hell of it I peeked outside at the line around 7:30, and the line had swelled to about 15 people, and by about 7:45 the line was past the end of the building! So in the end it turned out to be a good idea to get there early.

The show itself was actually pretty cool: the “hosts” were “Totally J/K” (http://newyork.ucbtheatre.com/shows/2011), these two random white kids who opened with a bunch of random videos, which was not unfunny. Then Kristen Schaal of Flight of the Conchords fame did her routine, which was mostly (intentionally) cheesy and weird pickup lines; not bad! The second act, and the part I liked the most, was Kumail Nanjiani. The best part was when he talked about Call of Duty 2 having a stage based on his hometown in Pakistan: “Hey guys, I used to rent video here! Let’s hide here!”. Heh heh heh.

(Quick nerdy aside: Apparently, COD2 didn’t do their localization homework! All the signs in the stage based in Pakistan were in Arabic, while that region speaks Urdu. Ha!)

The wrapup for the night was a live band, “Via Audio“! This was a pleasant surprise. They weren’t half-bad! I’ll have to check out more of their stuff sometime. The show closed with Totally J/K coming back out, doing a ten minute routine on Inspector Gadget (I did chuckle at parts of it; c’mon, you have to admit that’s impressive), and then like 15 PowerPoint slides worth of random joke ideas they discarded. There were some real gems in here, though I can’t for the life of me remember any of them. Oh well, I’ll live.

Hey, for a 20 minute walk and 5 bucks, it was totally worth it, and hard to beat.

PS: brgr is meh. Pretty damned small burgers for ~$8 – $9. Decent sweet potato fries though. Verdict: would not buy again.

For the record, I am hurtin’. I have never gotten so excited about a product launch before, and now I know the bitter sting of disappointment.

Now that I’ve had a little bit of time to calm down (and stop <sob/>’ing), I just can’t get away from this: there is really nothing revolutionary about this. It’s literally a bigass iPhone. Let me count the ways:

1. The physical layout is exactly the same: volume controls on the right, power button on the top right, home button on the bottom, headphone jack on the upper left. They really did nothing more than expand it.
2. The home screen is nothing more than a scaled up version of the iPhone home screen. It’s 4 icons by something; I still haven’t checked out the new 3.2 SDK since it’s Snow Leopard only), with a dock/quicklaunch at the bottom (6 versus 4! Ooooo…).
3. No multitasking??? Hopefully it’s just around the corner like the rumors say (like it’s been for like a year now). It _really_ doesn’t make sense, given that the official reason before was battery life; this thing is supposed to clock 10 hours of usage, and a month of standby!
4. Virtual frakking keyboard, only. This is what’s killing me: there’s so much potential to revolutionize data entry with this form factor, and it just feels squandered. How can you use two thumbs to reach across a 9.7 inch diagonal slab??? Putting it in your lap is super-duper lame. Basically, it’s as efficient to actually write something (even an email) with the iPad as it is with the iPhone. <sob>What a waste</sob>.

Other thoughts:

1. The price is pretty freakin’ amazing. On that, Apple certainly did deliver. Kudos for the 3G plans as well; thank the gods there’s no contract madness. Oh, and unlocked, of course. In terms of commercial viability, I think this point alone makes up for all my complaints above, and this thing will sell.
2. No camera? That’s kinda crazy; I’m assuming that it’s going to get one very soon.
3. I wonder if this is something that’s supposed to replace laptops for the average non-technical user (like Mom). But, see point #4 above.
4. I really don’t care about the name; it sounds fine to me. I mean, c’mon, is “iPod” really that good of a name? One of my first impressions of the name was that it sounded like something out of a bad scifi movie: “The iPods are here… to eeeeeaaaattttt yyyooooouuuurrrrrrr BBBBRRRRAAAAAIIIIIIIIINNNNNNNNNSSSSSS!”
5. Arg, I really want to try out the iPad simulator, but then I need to finally clean my machine and get Snow Leopard. @apple Hurry up and refresh the Macbook Pros please!
6. That dock thing looks retarded. Also, who the hell is going to carry around a keyboard??? Wtf????? I really don’t understand this one.
7. 4:3 aspect ratio (1024 x 768)? Huh? I guess it’s easier for reading? That really sucks for watching movies though. By the way, the iPhone is 3:2 (480 x 320), so I’m wondering how auto-scaling for existing iPhone apps is going to work.

Now, the million dollar (well, $499 to $829 question): will I get one?

1. Yes, I probably will.
2. No, I will not get it right away; I just don’t trust Apple’s Rev A stuff (they don’t exactly have a great history), and I’m calling there’s going to be key feature upgrades (camera, please?) between the first and second gen, like there was with the iPhone.
3. Yes, the above might be a damned lie and I’ll just get it within a month or two of it coming out. Reason: point #7.
4. Yes, I can see how this will be the device I spend the most time with. Browsing and watching movies is by far my dominant task, so curling up in bed for hours with this thing seems pretty cool. BUT how do I put my own movies on it? Huh, need to think about this one. Mobile VLC???
5. No, there’s no way this will replace my laptop. But that’s because I need to write stuff and program. _Maybe_ it’s good enough for casual mail and spreadsheets.
6. No, there’s no way this will replace an iPhone. This one’s obvious, right?
7. No, I am not getting one because it’s awesome (thought it seems like if you use it, you fall in love with it pretty quickly), but because I want some of the App Store madness that will probably happen. The gold rush probably won’t be quite as crazy as the iPhone gold rush, but it’s still going to be a hell of a lot of fun (and profitable???) developing for it. The simulator is really no substitute. My experience with iPhone development is that UI and convenience issues that are obscure and abstract in the simulator just scream out at you when it’s actually on the device. And, think of the kinds of games you could make… <drool/>
8. Yes, I will probably get the 3G, even with the $129 increase in price. Seriously, no computer is worth anything if you can’t get online, and this thing is supposed to be mobile, right?

<sigh/> Time for me to get back to the real world and figure out real problems.

Man, what a weekend. Yesterday (Sunday), a mere 24 hours after getting back from AC, I was on my way to Belleayre again. Nothing much else to say, except that this time (in addition to continue to use the rental car), we stopped about halfway at Potter Brothers to pick up our Belleayre Flex tickets (http://www.potterbrothers.com/p-1-belleayre-flex-ticket.aspx) for $24, saving another $20 over the previous trip. So this trip cost $24 (ticket) + $27 (gear) + < $19 (transportation) = < $70.

On the way home, we hit up the Peekamoose Restaurant (http://www.peekamooserestaurant.com/), about 10 minutes away from Belleayre. Meh: pretty standard fancy-shmancy restaurant with $13 burger and fries. At least I was proper full for the price.

Overall, more good times.

This sounds like a fun side project: the Analytics X Competition. It’s basically a competition in the Netflix format, where it’s your job to attempt to predict homocides in Philadelphia. You can use any datasets you can find, and the organizer provides a form to submit predictions and gets scores. There are month winners ($20) and an end-of-the-year winner ($100); obviously, nobody’s in it for the money.

For the hell of it, I created an account, and will work on it randomly when I’m bored. Initial (empty) project page here: http://dev.thmttch.net/analyticsx

More out of curiosity than any expectation that I’ll be able to buy more than a coffee with the revenue, I’ve added Google AdSense ads to this blog. Initial observations and notes:

1. With the right plugins, it’s pretty damned easy. Fortunately, Wordpress seems to have a pretty decent ecosystem of plugins. Currently, I’m using Advertising Manager (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advertising-manager/)
2. My previous theme with its 2 column sidebar layout (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/plaintxtblog) wasn’t too conducive to the ads, so I switched to this one (http://www.wpshoppe.com/themes/simplex/). It’s really too bad, I slightly prefer my original theme.
3. Maybe because I rushed through it, but AdSense is “hella” confusing. Fortunately it seems like all the defaults are fine, at least for now.
4. I tried to also add Google AdSense Search, but it looks like I’m actually going to have to _read_ and _understand what I’m doing_, so that’s for another time.

All in all, it took less than an hour and a half to get it to the current state. Now let those (fractions of) pennies come!