Lonely Lion

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InI5n3NTvR4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

I heard mashup and cloud computing. Despite the buzz-ish nature of both, it’s an encouraging sign. As much as I love Everyblock, I think they’d agree that it would be nice to see the federal, state and local governments publishing data, rather than concerned parties scraping stuff.

I’ve been treading water this week, and haven’t been keeping up with the blogosphere.

So, I’m behind, but wanted to link to Everyblock…you know…so it’s linked.

Really great stuff, congrats Blockheads.

So, according to the Pragmatic Programmers you should learn a new language every year (two? I don’t remember for sure.)

Last year I specifically ignored this rule, and instead opted to learn Python more. I watched some Google Videos, read some books, spent more time looking at other people’s code, and generally didn’t gloss over the details that I had in the past. I dove deeper into the language, and am a better Python programmer this year than I was last year.

Which brings us to 2008. My side-learning-project time has been cut back by the glorious birth of the inheritor to the vast Lion-Empire I’ve built, Mr. William Christopher McAvoy. I’ve been paring down projects like a madman. Plus, my day job became tremendously satisfying, which always helps remove the need to do stuff on the side. That said, what little time I do have is currently taken up with tweaking old web projects, helping a friend with a new site, and helping (however small-ly) with Pycon.

Other than the constant old project tweaking, my schedule is relatively clear starting in mid-March. Which got me thinking about maybe learning a new language. I talk about this an awful lot, and rarely follow through, but it can’t hurt to talk about it again, right? I’m thinking it should be one that has little practical purpose, other than a joyous exploration of all things computer. So, something like Lisp, Scheme, Lua, Erlang, Haskell, or Lisp. Notice I said Lisp twice, Lisp is on the short-list.

I’ve posted these sorts of posts before, they usually go nowhere, so take this all with a heaping tablespoon of salt. Sometimes, I’m all talk…no action. We’ll see how this works out.

And really, as I sit here and think, I haven’t written a Tastebud article in ages, just bought an Arduino in the hopes I’d build something cool with all these wires and capacitors I own, and I recently committed to a new writing project that I’ll talk about later. So, really, maybe I don’t have time. Whatever I do, there will be extra points for a language I can learn on the train. As that’s about the only time I’ll really have to do any significant reading. Seriously though, I probably will just stick with what I know, and put any new creative energy I can muster into some of these other projects I’ve been messing around with.

Oh, and I like to play Eve, and got Mass Effect for Christmas. Two total nerd-time-sinks.

This is tremendously sad news. Pigeon man was a fixture on the corner across the street from Walgreens. From the article:

“Soon as I take a seat, they want to be loved and kissed like a mama’s baby,” Zeman was quoted in the Tribune article. “Like I’m their father, and they’re my child.”

I’ve blogged about my random obsession with bees in the past. The release of Pyglet encouraged me to pick it up again and try to make a bee-system associated with coordinates rather than with abstract “locations.”

Over the weekend, I started to write a trig library that could compute angles and distances, so I could move my bees around a grid. It turns out, I’m pretty bad at math. Brant Harris sat down and explained Vectors to me in about 15 minutes. I immediately ditched my trig library, and built a basic Vector bee demo in a half hour or so last night. The code for it is in my expansive public-works repository. In that same module is trig.py, which is the start of the trig library I ended up ditching. The Vector work was already written in PyEuclid, the very excellent Euclidian Geometry library written especially for Pygame development.

The code, suitable for cutting and pasting, is as follows:

[source:python]
#!/usr/bin/env python
# notes on how to use vectors to move the bees around in pyglet
from euclid import Vector2 as v
from pyglet import window
from pyglet import font
from random import randint

b = v(1,1) # bee at 1,1
h = v(150,150) # hive at 4,4

def in_range(b, h):
# return true if magnitude (distance) is less than 1
return (b – h).magnitude() < 1

# move the bee one tick towards the hive
def move_towards_hive(b,h):
return b + ( h – b ).normalized()

def move_random(b):
return b + (v(randint(0,100), randint(0,100)) – b).normalized() * 5

win = window.Window()
ft = font.load(‘Arial’, 18)

while not win.has_exit:
win.dispatch_events()
while not in_range(b,h):
b = move_random(b)
print “b: %s h: %s” % (b, h)
win.clear()
b_text = font.Text(ft, ‘b’, x=b.x, y=b.y).draw()
h_text = font.Text(ft, ‘h’, x=h.x, y=h.y).draw()
win.flip()
[/source]

Our first baby, William Christopher McAvoy, was born at 9 am on August 4th.

Last week(ish) The Washington Post published and article on micro-targeting political advertisements, essentially using data mining techniques to send super-targeted ads to households. It was a good article, and really surprising to me, essentially because I’d always assumed that political campaigns would use the same sorts of techniques that marketers were using. I didn’t know they’d be behind the curve to the point of seeing data mining practices as some sort of new thing. So, that’s naive-example number 1.

Then, the next day, I saw the author of the article had posted a blog entry about the article. I thought, “oh, that’s nice, I shall post a comment.” Fine. Done. I went back to check and see how the comments went, and it turns out the comments on WaPo blogs are rife with in-fighting bullshit. Well, duh. I should have known. Again, it turns out I’m totally naive. The open internet sure does attract some jerks.

Jonathan Messinger on a slight shift in language. A great essay on the difficulty of being an independent [anything], and how defining yourself in terms of something else is a bad thing.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss is peering into the future. Just five years into the future, but the future nonetheless.

I totally agree with his predictions. Especially the offline-apps and iPhone-clone-as-platform predictions. Teenagers drive markets. That’s my new mantra. Myspace, SMS, all this twitter-hoo-ha. That’s stuff I don’t get, until I see that kid on the train doing it, then I look into it, then I end up with 150 Myspace friends (including Ghostface Killah and Django: the webframework.)

I’m going to add a prediction to the pile, based on a pile of 7 inch records my Hozac friend Brett gave me this week, it isn’t for online journalism, it’s for online media:

* Digital can’t buy you an experience. The guys that are going to survive the death of copyright will be the guys that can sell you an experience. Hozac is a perfect example. They do very limited releases, each with super special extras, like fake fur dust jackets or spider arm bands. One of their artists refuses to say who he really is, he just sends in tapes. When you buy a Hozac record, you’re buying an experience. If someone rips it and distributes it on oink, it’s not going to compare to owning the original thing. Because the original thing is really the experience of buying it.