jr conlin's ink stained banana

Things i've learned today:

1) Cassandra is an amazingly fast single key hash lookup system. That's it. Really. If you have lots of data that can be organized by a single unique key, it's terrific! If you don't, yeah, you want to keep looking around for other solutions.

2) While CPAN can be your friend, sometimes, it's not really. Say, like, when you install a library that tells you to look at the test.pl for documentation, then, when you hunt down a copy (pro tip: look in your ~/.cpan directory first) you may well discover that there's actually no documentation, the calling method there vastly differs from how you'll be using it, and it relies on a pre-release version of the library you're trying to talk to.

3) Regardless of how complex you think a problem is, always go for the simplest possible solution.

4) Stupid things make me feel stabby.

i watch an inordinate amount of shows on the Science Channel and Discovery network. Shows like Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, How It's Made, and various astronomy shows generally always wind up on my watch list. There are lots of shows they offer that i don't watch, however, and those generally tend not to stick around very long. So, naturally, yes i heard about Good Ms. Palin's potential offering.

Frankly, i'm not terribly concerned.

From what i've been able to tell, the focal point of Ms. Palin is "Get Money". She's proven oddly good at it. She seems more than happy to continue to milk her 15 minutes for additional revenue as she jumps from well paid gig to the next better paying one, without the normal concern of actually finishing anything. She, much like Ms. Hilton, is a celebrity because she's famous. If she gets the series, i expect the first few episodes will be normally tolerable and things to degrade quickly as she pursues additional interests. While i have little intention of watching any of the early episodes, i figure about 8 or so in, the show will consist of a camera held by the last assistant producer attempting to focus on the pursuing bear. That, or possibly the episode will be cut short by the network once they realize that it's nothing but a 30 second loop of Mt. Shasta.

i also expect the ratings to be huge for the first show, followed by a logarithmic descent with the final episodes going straight to download. Possibly with some sort of payment option.

In other words, i have no intention of boycotting Discovery, or any of their networks because they bought a night or two of high ratings for $3 million. If i were the network, i'd make sure that there was a clause that they only pay for what gets higher ratings than "Destroyed in Seconds", but that's not my call to make.

Plus, i'm always a sucker for accidental comedy.

Every so often, i get a note from Domain Registry of America informing me that my domain will expire soon. Recently, the tone has been significantly less urgent and the letter looks a fair bit less like a bill. One can probably thank the American legal system for these breakthroughs. Suffice to say, i don't take advantage of their services, since i pay significantly less than they ask to regularly update my domains.

Still, i wondered what sort of upstanding company this would be. So i took a look on Google maps. The cement wall you're looking at is, indeed the right address. If you switch to the non street view, you'll note that this is a UPS store address, and that the "suite" in choice is probably a 6"x6"x12" mail slot in said UPS store.

But wait! p'raps the Googles are out of date for Buffalo, and said UPS store is no longer at that address. No, it is.

While sending pizza and missionaries is probably not a good idea (since it would only bother the poor UPS guy), it does make me wonder what sort of listing assistance such a place might have. One could imagine a whole host of organizations that could benefit from such a densely packed office suite, say, Necrophiliacs Anonymous, or NAMBLA. Sadly, it's hard to see what other shared "offices" may exist for this "suite" on Yelp or Google, and Yahoo Local doesn't list much else in the category drop-down.

Fortunately, i'm above doing such juvenile and puerile things as registering that "suite" with various online services as the local branch of NAMBLA or Necrophiliacs Anonymous, regardless of how tempting the idea may be, but i do have a delightful default address i plan on using for sites i do not wish to correspond with.

And knowing is half the battle…

Every so often, i giggle a little when folks start singing to me the praises of Ruby. i don't code in it, mind you, but it's the same for folks singing the praises of python, perl, php, groovy, java or countless dozens of other like languages. There are a number of various features that are generally touted by the newly evangelized, but ultimately there's one aspect that is greeted like the first rays of dawn in Barrow Alaska is the fact that somebody else wrote a helluva lot of stuff already.

They wax poetic about the fact that there's a rich set of libraries like CPAN or PyPI, Pear or the various other centralized libraries that can be installed easily. In my not so humble opinion, that alone is what makes a particular programming language successful since you don't have to waste time trying to reinvent someone else's wheel.

Oddly, however, there's a fair number of folks that seem to be library adverse.

Perhaps i'm just a bit sensitive to it considering it's something i have to work with daily, but it always puzzles me when folks ask for help to resolve a nagging issue that's already been solved dozens of times by various libraries pointed to in our own documentation. It's a bit like folks asking Betty Crocker for help assembling their oven. Sure, we can help you, but why in the world are you wasting your time doing that? It makes me wonder if they're calculating their own logarithms and parsing XML by hand as well.

It's not just things like OAuth either, it's a good many other services like Twitter APIs, Casandra interfaces, heck i know one guy that repeatedly hand rolls IMAP interfaces, because, well, i'm not really sure since he's not really doing much more than using the default protocol. Writing a library is a pain in the butt. Maintaining a library is why Git's Project Forking ability is a god-send. If someone else is young and foolish enough to scratch build a library for me, i'm more than happy to use it, note bugs and extended features, and contribute them back. i've got other problems to deal with.

Folks, this isn't BASIC 101 anymore. You're allowed to use your neighbors code if it gets the project done. In fact, consider me your professor, and that i'm quite serious that i'll be taking 60% off your grade for recreating well established library code. Go, use them. Leave the pain for the masochists.

Can i say, first off, that this Semi-Utopian vision scares the hell out of me:

For those of you running flashblocker or freshly stocked on caffeine, Brian Schell presented a talk where he talked about the future, where your life becomes a "game" and you're awarded points for successfully accomplishing tasks like "brushing your teeth" or "watching commercials".

The openly paranoid will note that in addition to determining how many points you get, there's a lot of highly invasive activity going on here. Kinda reminded me a little of this little chestnut from the past.

Sorry, but honestly, i'm really not that much of a gamer. Having only seldom managed to get my initials on any arcade box, i really don't care how many points i have when i finish something. i only finish it because i enjoyed playing the game. Playing "Reality: The Game" doesn't really thrill me, and frankly, if the planet were to suddenly start, i'd be spending all my time trying to figure out how to hack it and cheat. "Oh, darn, you caught me. Looks like i'll lose 10,000 points and not qualify for that free bag of Cheetos. Horrors."

See, that's the one thing that's missing from good Mr. Schell's talk. Games are supposed to be entertaining. Being able to buy my way into a game, or gargle Listerene for extra points, not really that entertaining. Sure, some folks will definitely go for that sort of thing, but then, those are the same obsessive Type A folks that race you to be first to the red light and then swear at you because by the time you got there, the light just turned green and you've not lost any inertia. (Ah, physics.) After all, i don't believe that chess has points.