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jason's weblog, jason typing stuff

Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com

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Tue, 18 Jul 2006

David Duval
blog

Great interview with David Duval on ESPN.com.

Google Proxy
blog

This article on lifehacker mentioned a way of surfing the web using Google as a proxy. The cool thing about this, though, is that it reformats the web pages of this sites you click through to so that they have less formatting and just presents the content. Very cool for surfing from small devices like my Zaurus.

Fri, 14 Jul 2006

Everything is Funny
blog

There is not one un-funny line in this column by Bill Simmons on ESPN.com. Ok, slight exaggeration, but that's one funny column.

Nokia 770
blog

Well, here I go again... yesterday I decided I wanted a Nokia 770 "internet tablet." I seem to be addicted to these types of things. It, of course, runs linux. It's pretty much a beefed-up version of my Zaurus C1000: wider screen (800x480), probably a bit bigger physically to make things a little easier to read, but no keyboard. I wonder if I'll find that annoying... lately I've been using my Zaurus a lot, but primarily for web browsing. And even then I use 'links' which is a text-based browser since it's fast and makes everything very readable.

I've also been using it to read PDF books which is why I'm interested in the 770. Since its screen is just a bit wider I think it will solve the problem I have with a lot of PDF files where they extend past 640 pixels. It's annoying having to scroll left and right.

So, we'll see... it's $350 which is just about the price of an Xbox360. Hmm.

Continuing the "topics that jason always writes about"... I switched to the ion3 window manager at work this week. Mainly because it's a little better at managing windows for me, although the learning curve on the keys is annoying. The other thing I didn't really like from before is that it uses Lua as its scripting language. I'm ok with it now since World of Warcraft also uses Lua for its extensions. I actually wrote my first WoW extension and it was rather fun. A lot more fun than this enchanting excursion I'm currently on...

In other news... Amazon just announced the production version of the queing service which looks really interesting. I really like what Amazon's been doing with their developer APIs... their storage system (S3) and queuing systme (SQS) look really interesting and are apparently enabling small startup companies to bring up service cheaply and quickly. I'd love to implement something useful using both of these services sometime. I'll put some thought into what that might be.

More later!

Thu, 06 Jul 2006

BeagleFS
blog

This is kind of cool... it's FUSE integrated with beagle... or is it beagle integrated with FUSE? Who knows. Anyhow, it's cool... FUSE is a way of creating filesystems in userspace (linux only, of course). Robert Love did something where search results from Beagle are created as symbolic links inside a directory. The links are updated automatically as matches are added and removed (beagle is an indexer for searching anything and everything, sort of like Spotlight on the mac). Right now I'm trying to think something I can write that'd take advantage of FUSE... can't think of anything yet.

Beagle brings up another topic... I've been tempted to get it installed on my gentoo box at home but it involves installing a whole bunch of Mono packages (linux implementation of dot net). I'm already running Gnome (2.14), so it's not much of a stretch, but still... it's a big install and I'm already falling behind on my gentoo updates now that Xorg has been modularized. Beagle looks pretty cool, though, so someday I might check it out. Maybe if I find some ruby bindings...

Ruby takes the lead
blog

I got my objects created. Still, it's not quite as easy as it could/should be, but at least the bulk of the code is done for me. I love a good challenge.

Languages
blog

So I've been slightly frustrated lately. I'm stuck at what looks like fork in the road, although that might be exaggerating a bit.

Here's the thing... I want to do some SOAP development (primarily stuff for work) but I haven't been blown away by any SOAP support for languages I've looked at. Here's what I know so far:

We use PHP right now and I really don't want to continue using it... we actually use an older version and I know PHP 5 has some great SOAP stuff built-in, but I honestly don't like PHP as a language. Sure, it gets things done, but it's not fun to develop in. There's no challenge, nothing to make you think.

So I started doing stuff in python. I really like python... it's a nice, clean, object-oriented language, that has some functional bits that I like from lisp. And don't complain to me about the fact that it uses spacing for delineating blocks... if you're using any sort of decent text editor this won't be a problem.

As far as SOAP goes in python, I ran into a little snag since at work our primary SOAP servers are .NET. Apparently there's a hiccup between the latest stable version of the SOAP library and .NET's SOAP server bits. That got a bit frustrating so I dropped it for a bit... I forget where I left off but I might just try again soon.

After python I moved on to ruby because I've been dabbling in it lately (again, primarily at work). I think just about every day I go back and forth about whether or not I like ruby as a language. Three weeks ago I gave up on it. The past week or so I've been enjoying it and have been having fun learning how to use its functional bits that seem to create such elegant solutions to problems.

But then I tried SOAP with it... this time I actually was able to query and look at data from our servers at work with minimal amounts of code. I guess my issue with ruby (and possibly python) is that I'm afraid of the amount of utility code I'm going to have to write. This is because I haven't had much luck in using the utility which creates ruby classes from a wsdl. If I don't get this key bit going it's going to be too much of a pain to do anything real since I'll waste too much time rebuilding what we've already got.

I'm not sure if it's a problem with ruby's SOAP or me... unfortunately there's not much documentation out there. I usually take a half hour or so each day to hack at it, then sometimes some more at night. In doing so I'm becoming more and more familiar with ruby and that's nice. I still can't decide if I want to go with it or python. That might come down to which language I can get some good SOAP action out of.

Ahh, let's see... what else have I been up to lately... not much in the tech world I guess. I've been debating on whether or not to get an xbox360... I'm thinking maybe this fall. I'm really hoping for a price drop, but we'll see. Some of those games look awesome in HD.

Ok, that's it... I'll give an update soon on the language thing. I think I might have hit on something with ruby just now so that might win.

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