problem solved

must take time....

2006-02-26T19:08:00.000-08:00

The original reason i started writing this blog, was to keep track of stuff that i do. damnit...i have not been doing that lately. its odd that i can't find time to write a few sentences here, considering i spend every waking moment on my computer.

I have been learning python lately. from what i have seen of it, its a very cool language. I like languages like C and perl because of their cryptic syntax, so python is not appealing on that front. you can write some crazy looking stuff in python, but most of it seems to be written so that it is easy to read. This is probably a good thing...!

Python is more high level that C or perl, but for me is a nice middle ground between the two. C is a very strict langugae. If you know it well, then you can write quick little programs with no problem. but if you don't play with it very often, you can find yourself getting very frustrated at the complier for complaining about something that just does not seem wrong. perl on the other hand will let you do whatever you want basically. which is why a lot of hackers like it. it lets you get what you want done, done and there is not a lot of for play. python enforces a lot of the stuff that C enforces, but still gives you a lot of the flexibility of perl. i think it will take a little getting used to, but i believe it will lead to a more reliable program in the end.

things i like about python:

object oriented is good
core language is simple -- all the complicated stuff is in module,which have their own namespace
to my knowledge you have to specifically say global somevarto get access to a variable global with respect to the module.i mention this in particular because i have had problems with perl when it comes to global variables, because of my laid back attitude with them. I want the interrpreter to bitch...
list stuff (ie. looping,slicing...) it has cool list features and i still have more of them to learn
the dir function. very useful for someone learning a language you have an object returned from something, and you don't know what it is just say dir(someobj) and you get a list of all of its methods and properties

things i don't like about python, but prolly just need to get used to:

I am not a huge fan of exceptions, but they do give you a little more info than a return value of 0
no enclosing braces for functions. liked it at first, but its kind of throwing me off
don't think it supports a ++ operator or ?: conditional. i do however think you can define one, but i'm not sure how

hopefully as i learn more, i will be able to speak more intelligently about python.

i will sign off with a code snippet i wrote today. I always like to write really complicated one liners. this is my first python complicated one liner

can you guess what it does?(its actually pretty simple)


''.join([''.join(list(p)) for p in [(str(x),str(chr(y))) for x,y in zip(random.sample(range(10000),50),random.sample(range(65,91)+range(97,123),50))]])

my 20%

2006-01-18T07:02:00.000-08:00

When google video first hit the streets, I came accross a video of a presentation by the CEO of google. It was really long, so i didn't watch the whole thing. in the part that I watched, the CEO guy talked about google's 70-20-10 business plan.

Google believes that you should dedicate 70% of your resources(money,programmer time...) to the main goal of your business. In google's case this is search and advertising. These things will continue to rake in the money for them. 20% should be given to things that are somewhat related to the main goals, but not neccessarily. So gmail and google video are examples of the 20%. They promote google and are really cool apps, but they aren't going to make any money. the last 10% is meant to go towards thing that are totally unrelated to the main goals. So if a programmer wants to work out an algorithm for bass fishing that will optimize the number of fish caught in n amount of time, they can use their 10% to do that.

I really like this business plan. programmers especially need some room to roam, or they will totally lose their inspiration. So yesterday my 20% was to make something that i'm very surprised i've never seen before. The limitations of a web browser are lessening everyday. I think that many web developers are not taking into account all of the tools that are available for building web applications. And by tools i do not mean dreamweaver or golive, but rather the tools that are available in every browser and can be utilized by opening up a text editor and hacking away.

Google's homepage allows you to change the modules that are displayed on your homepage. so you can close the weather box, if you don't care, and put up the slashdot box instead. That is pretty cool, but even cooler than that, they let you drag the boxes around on the screen, just like a real application. When i first saw this, i thought it was black magic. Then i realized, yeserday, that it was actually really easy.

This is my example of moving boxes around on the screen. The code is very simple. I think this could be used for all sorts of neat things. It would be cool to not move the original, but instead to make a new div that had low opacity and move it around, then when it was in place delete it and move the original. It would also be cool to make the zindex work like you would expect normal windows to work. That is, when you pic up box a and drag it over box c, box c is still on top. That needs to not be like that.

I'm going to keep tweaking and see what else I can come up with. any ideas let me know...

google has all the answers

2006-01-15T22:35:00.000-08:00

I think many people share the envy that i have for google. They seem to be getting everything right these days. The most perfect work environment, the most successful applications, still rising stock prices...

Google also has really cool ideas, and a lot of the stuff that they do is really not that hard. When i first saw the google suggest, i decided that i had to make my own implementation of it. I worked on it for a couple of days, off and on, and got a working copy of it (you can find that at http://www.whatmind.com/goog). Once i figured out how to simulate a basic drop down/autocomplete thing, i used it to simplify some other things i was working on. Its a really cool feature to have in something that has filter fields, or a form that will contain information that has been input into a db already.

When i implemented my google suggest, i used firefox to test everything. naturally IE did not work the same way. The basic funtionality worked just fine, but some of the cosmetic effects were not exactly as smooth as the firefox version. The way i created the drop down box was to simply make a div right below the text box, that i wanted it to to a drop down for. then i set position:absolute and the display:none properties. When i wanted it to show up in the code i just changed the display property to block. Ohh yea...you have to set the zindex higher than everything else on the page too. In firefox the effect was for the box to show up right under the text box, just as i wanted. Then i could fill it in with suggestions. In IE it would show up in strange places.

This did not become a problem until i actually wanted to use my widget for something where others would be using it, and would potentially be using IE to access the feature. Instead of thinking "hmm what would the simpliest solution to the problem be...", I decided to look into the google suggest code for help. If you have never looked at any of google's javascript, then you should take a peak before you continue to read (http://www.google.com/ac.js). Either the people who right this code want to torture themselves or they have some program they use to make the code very unreadable and hard to understand. I think they do this to cut down on network traffic, but i believe it is also a protective measure.

So i spent hours trying to figure out how it was that google suggest was able to make this thing work in IE. After i started looking at the code, I realized that this was probably not going to be the best idea for my morning activities, but then i got so involved that i just could not stop. After searching through this code for a few hours, copying functions and then spacing them the way i like, i finally found the function that made the whole thing possible. And it was so simple...

function kb(s,na){var wb=0;while(s){wb+=s[na];s=s.offsetParent}return wb}

s is the object you want to find the location of in the browser window. na is the array index of the property you want(offsetLeft or offsetTop). I was not familar with this use of text array indexes so, I changed the code around to use the objects properties like i always do.

so instead of: wb+=s[offsetTop]
i said: wb+=document.getElementById(s).offsetTop

so this function finds the offsetTop and offsetLeft for you, which you can use to move your suggestion box to your text box. Then, of course, adjust it, so it appears right under the text box. That you can do with the offsetHeight property of an element.

my code is a little bit of a mess, but i will clean it up and post it here later.

the above function could also be written to be recursive and that would be pretty cool.

good old vim

2006-01-10T00:15:00.000-08:00

the first book i ever bought about unix was some awful "learn it in 20 days" sort of book. I quickly realized that these books were not the best to learn from. not only do they not give enough information about anything you want to do, but a lot of times the information they do give is wrong. I remember reading a book on javascript in 2000, and there was a section about setting up timer. it instructed the reader to define a variable time and set it equal to the number of seconds times 1000 that you want your javascript program to wait. Then you do something like this


  for(i=0; i<time; i++){e = 'i am waiting';}

i don't even want to say why that doesn't work. it should be obvious to anyone that has been exposed to programming. how do things like that make it into publication?

Anyway... the reason that i got the book was because i had recently gotten access to a machine that was unix based (i don't remember if it was linux or freebsd or what). my only exposure to the command line was through dos, and there was something mystical about it that i liked. So i learned all of the basic commands and was able to find my way around the system. I grabbed /etc/passwd and ran a cracker on it...that was kind of cool. When i tried to edit documents with the vi or vim editor, I always got very frustrated. It seemed impossible to get anything done with this insane program that didn't tell you what you were supposed to do with it. I remember getting so angry and hitting ctrl-whatever trying to get out of the program or make the document go back to the way it was before.

Of course now i have been using it for a number of years and it is one of my favorite programs. I edit everything in vim. there are all sorts of cool little tricks you can do to make things go quicker. Someone posted a cool tutorial on it, found here. Everytime i read about it, i find something new that i didn't know about before. If your a vim fan, check out the link.

I hate being sick

2006-01-04T23:04:00.000-08:00

I think half the people i know are sick right now, which is probably why I am too. Everyone seems to accept the fact that you take medicine when you are sick. You dont feel well, you take something that will ease the symptoms. There is no cure, so all you can do is ease it a little bit. For some reason, I refuse to do so... This makes me feel and look sicker than everyone else. Why must i be so stubborn?

I stared at my computer all day today and felt like my eyes were going to pop out of my head. I did find one neat thing though. sometimes you come accross something that should be really easy, because its so simple, but you just have never done it before. This was one of those situations. I was writing a perl script and i thought it would be cool to prompt for the pw instead of hardcoding it. When i started coding, I realized that I had no idea how to turn the terminal echo off, in linux. Turns out it is very easy.

turn it off with:
stty -echo
turn it on with:
stty echo

simple as pie.

Here is a little C code that I wrote to demonstrate:


#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(){
  char p[10];

  printf("Password:");

  system("stty -echo");
  fgets(p,10,stdin);
  system("stty echo");
  removeNewLine(p);

  if(getLength(p) > 8){printf("Your password was longer than 8 characters...sorry!\n"); return 0;}
  printf("\nYou entered %s as your password\n",p);
  return 0;
}

int getLength(char *s){
   int n  = 0;
   while(*s != '\0' && ++n)s++;
   return n;
}

void removeNewLine(char *s){
   while(*s != '\0'){if(*s == '\n'){*s = '\0';return;}s++;}
}

Perl...That's Hot!

2005-12-30T18:55:00.000-08:00

I would have to say that perl has become my favorite language.

Every programming language has little things about it that make it feel really nice to use, but Perl is overloaded with them. One of my favorite tricks is the map function. The reason I am so fond of it probably stems back to my roots as a young man interested in computer programming. All those weird looking nonsensical codes and symbols were so mysterious. Trying to figure out some ridiculous piece of code is so challenging and fun...

probably why i didn't like taking software development classes in college. Form! classes! who needs them?

Anyway the map function is really simple, but it can make some complicated looking code when things start to get dense. It looks like this

map{"stuff to do with stuff"} @stuff

that might make more sense to me than it makes to you...sorry. let me explain. you give the map function an array, @stuff. for every element in @stuff the function applies the thing in the {} to the element and returns another array. so if you say


@stuff = ("pie", "steak', "pizza");
map{"$_ is cool"} @stuff;

The $_ is the variable representing the single stuff element. you get a list like this:

("pie is cool", "steak is cool", "pizza is cool")

this can be particularly helpful if you are writing long database queries. instead of typing the entire thing you can use a map , in combination with a join, and get the whole query in one line.
ex:


$query = join(',' , (map{$dbvals{$_}} @dbcolumns));

who writes a blog about a function...?

37'' monitor + Mac G5 = heaven

2005-12-29T16:32:00.000-08:00

We just got this G5 and hooked it up to the 37'' monitor. it is probably the coolest thing I have ever seen. I am still learning the differences between the linux systems that i have been used to and the mac os x systems that i have been using a lot lately. I am by no means a linux wizard, but i can get around fairly well.

Today's simple Problem:
How do you add administrative rights to a user in OS x?
Todays's simple Solution:
(1) Open a finder window and navigate to utilities. There is a program called NetInfo Manager...open it.
(2) There is a list of stuff...click groups and find the admin group in the list that is displayed.
(3) When you click the admin group, you will see a description at the bottom. Expand the users arrow and then in the menubar click Directory->New Value.
(4) Enter the name of the user that you want to be an admin.
(5) Do the same thing you did in 1-4 for groups: appserveradm and appserverusr.

After all that I had to restart, but there might be a way to refresh everything without...not sure
The user you added should have access to all the stuff the original admin does.

You can check that the group stuff worked by opening a terminal window and typing groups followed by the username added above.

PS. There is also a simpler way, which is to click the checkbox that gives admin rights to the user when you initially create them. Who pays attention to that stuff though?

2005-12-29T16:29:00.000-08:00

I tend to solve the same problems over and over again. For a few months now i have been telling myself that i need to start blogging little things that i do, so this is it. I am going to put forth a good effort to blog all the solutions to the little problems that end up taking two to three hours out of my productive time, just because i forgot how to do it.