So in my oh-so-finite free time, I’ve discovered two new TV shows that are both unique and well written, and I thought I’d share…

Dexter is about a serial killer (protagonist) who graciously kills only other murderers. Sounds cliche when I put it like that, but it’s the best saga-drama I’ve seen since BSG. My sister-in-law introduced me to it, oddly enough. Curiously (in the sense of the writer’s take) he’s not motivated by humanitarian concerns, simply survival by staying under the radar. Lots of dry sarcasm, which if you know me you know is the cornerstone of my sense of humor.

The second is Breaking Bad, where a chem teacher decides to go into the meth business to pay for the chemo for his stage-3 lung cancer. I was literally tearing up watching the last episode. (I’m a sucker for drama involving family/marriage problems, what can I say)

“But Derek, you’re a poor college student…and you buy Showtime?” Hardly. I’ve abandoned Tivo, even my Myth box, for Miro. It auto-downloads new TV shows as they come out for you. Read about how to set it up.

Let me know what you think.

My mother sent me a link to my cousin’s blog yesterday… Reading it (and contrasting it with my own) I feel so dorky and boring! Note to self: cook more. You enjoy it, you’re not bad at it, and no one will ever love you for who you are, so bribe them with food.

I wonder why.
I wonder why.
I wonder why I wonder.
I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder!
– R. Feynman

hahahahah

http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m

Vote W in ‘08.

People kill people. Guns just make them more efficient.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/us/15shoot.html

My PyGTK skillz are improving…

Allow me to introduce gPapers, a Gnome-based Digital Library Manager. (think iTunes for all your PDF files)

If you have to ask “why?”, you’re probably not working in academia, and have never had to manage piles of journal papers. This isn’t for you. If you’re a Windows or OSX user, this isn’t for you. If you’re afraid of compiling a library or two, this isn’t for you. In fact, I believe there is a worldwide audience of perhaps seven people who will find this software useful.

But to those six others, I promise it’s a godsend.

This has been a side project for me for a little over a month now, and I’m ready to start collecting external feedback. So please, give it a whirl (and join the listserv).

Ok, so in the 2.5 years I’ve owned my little toy, I’ve been keyed no less than 3 times, had my front AND rear emblems stolen, and now my window smashed and my radar detector stolen. This just isn’t worth the hassle.

I’ve been doing a lot of python programming this last year {allurstuff, deseb, flyback, ogmaps}, and several people have asked me variations on the following:

Thought of you when I read this
http://www.xkcd.com/353/
So is python really all that??

Well the answer is: Good god no. While python’s the best “everything is a hash table” language I’ve used, it shares the same problems all such languages have: very little compile time checking of object types. Your function is expecting a list, but someone passes in a string? Opps! And it doesn’t even fail-fast - you iterate over every char in the string. Which means many possible runtime errors, which are infinitely harder to test for and debug. Plus python STILL doesn’t have multi-processor support, even though it has its own reasonably nice threading model.

But it is great for banging out stuff quickly. And the glade/GTK bindings are pretty sweet.

So I’m proposing “Derek’s PvJ Rule”:

For every minute saved typing “my_list = []” instead of “List<String> myList = new ArrayList<String>();“, one hour of debugging is lost, one customer is pissed off, and god kills a kitten.

=P

So I bought a Nokia N800, initially so I can work on a mobile version of allurstuff, but also I’m curious if I can get android working on it… But while I’m waiting for FedEx to deliver, I decided that it needed a way to access Google Maps even without an internet connection.

And so was born ogmaps. It’s a fairly simple python script that downloads all the HTML/Javascript/image files used by gmaps, and modifies them to run right off your hard drive. (or flash drive, whatever) It then looks up whatever location you give it, and caches all the surrounding map files. (within reason….grabs about 5-10mb of data for each location you give it)

You don’t need a handheld to use it either… It’ll work wherever you have python and firefox. (I haven’t tried it with IE yet, and likely won’t - get a better browser!)

Anyway, tell me what you think.

derek