It occurred to me that in the long run the leaves falling off each fall and growing back in the spring seems like a really inefficient process, not just for the trees but for everyone involved.  If I was a tree, I wouldn’t like to kill off all of my leaves when it got cold and then have to go through all the effort to grow them back when it was not longer freezing outside.  As a person who had a yard, I know first hand that raking leaves isn’t the most useful way to spend an October weekend.

If you view the process a tree grows through on a per-year basis it doesn’t seem as crazy because you don’t capture the repeat N years step but the second you start zooming out it starts to seem a lot dumber.  The leaves that grow back in the next spring won’t be any better than the current leaves.  It’s not like they are evolving to better survive the winter or photosynthesize faster (at least to my knowledge).

Let me provide a really confusing analogy, we’ll talk about databases.  I need to backup my database every few months because that is the season that my hard drives typically fail.  Unfortunately, I don’t have enough hard drive space to back everything up, so I delete a bunch of rows in my database.  Who needed them anyways, right?  After successfully backing the database up, I run the program that puts back close copies of the rows that I previously deleted.  They’re not the exact same pieces of data, but they are reasonably close.  Most people would probably tell you to buy a bigger hard drive and save yourself the hassel.

But this keeps happening.  I don’t like to use the term “mother nature” because I don’t think nature is very maternal, but the natural forces must know something about what’s going on here. This process has been repeating itself for a really really long time.  Maybe it is easier to delete all those rows from the database since the newly added ones can perform the job just as good, if not better.

Unfortunately my basement apartment doesn’t have much of a view out of the 5 windows I have, so I won’t be able to watch Fall happen like I normally do.  I miss having a view I think.  Maybe I will recreate Fall on a screensaver or something like that.

Things are always changing, always.  I change clothes every day, which I would classify as a low-profile change.  I change classes every few months,  probably a medium-profile change.  Over the past few weeks I think that I’ve probably encountered a large number of higher profile changes, the ones that come around every few years.  Perspective is something I need to keep focused on, I mustn’t forget that these high profile changes are likely to occur every so often and, regardless of their desirability or undesirability, I can’t always effect them.

It is far to easy to get caught up in all this change and find yourself “depressed,” I think I do sometimes. Things are not the way they were, the way I was usually comfortable with.  Initially different might seem bad but it, like everything, is what you make of it.  If I remind myself that the sun looks like it will come out tomorrow, definitely a good move for it to make.  I have frequently jumped back to the desert when things appear challenging.  At least I am not trekking though the middle of a desert with a limited water supply… that would be a very high profile change with potentially life-threatening consequences.  Everything else should just be a walk in the park, right?  No matter what change I face in my apartment, academic, professional, social, whatever environments I try and remind myself that someone out there statistically has it much worse than I do.

The least pleasant situation I’ve found myself so far occurs kind of like an eclipse, when two events line up at the same time.  One of the situations that occurs is being alone.  Maybe I’m spending the day in my apartment, hanging out in the Union, surfing the internet, etc.  Where ever I am, there is no one else, so I’m left to occupy myself with myself which I’m not very good at without this second factor.  The second factor is a lack of motivation.  Unfortunately, I lack motivation sometimes just like everyone else.  I hate telling that to the DS too.  When I don’t have the drive to do work and there are not others around to occupy myself with, I start to feel… well, very blah.  I don’t know how to describe it; if it was a colour it would be grey.

Solving the alone problem is much harder for me, so I concentrate my efforts on the motivational challenges.  My observation has been that with the correct motivation, nothing else really matters.  Just like Rihanna says: even though she is on fire, she likes the way it hurts.  Domestic violence discussion aside, I admire her motivational control there.  I will assume she cannot control weather she will be on fire or not, so she has decided to find something pleasant in the most unfortunate circumstances. I was about to say that maybe we all could learn something from Ms. Fenty, but Wikipedia just let me know she is 22.  Never mind that then.

Good Night Moon.

This past weekend included more socially interactive experiences than just about every other weekend at RPI this year, possibly combined.  I wouldn’t rate this experience as an all-time/absolute most interactive experience in my time here at RPI, but it probably rivals many of my sophomore year adventures.  Without giving everything away I’d like to talk about, I’ve got two possible directions to head in with this post.  I can spend my time providing a blow-by-blow observational report or I can try and throw some darts at a few non-low hanging fruit… I’ll start with the dart tossing and see where that takes me.

One of the observations that stays with me the most is how things have changed since my last involvement in these sort of things.  I suspect just about everyone has forgotten that two years ago it was not uncommon for me to participate in social activities.  Having “taken” a hiatus of sorts, I haven’t experienced the gradual changes that everyone else has.  I discovered myself commonly labeled as a newcomer, when I should probably be labeled as one of the persons who was involved so early you don’t even remember me.

I think the size of the social group has grown significantly which has made everything much more complicated.  There are no longer 4-8 people considering a trip to the movies, there are more like 15-25.  A larger group doesn’t necessarily complicate everything, but with this particularly group things definitely don’t scale well.  I shan’t spend my time trying to identifying someone to blame for the dismal scaling behaviors, but instead would like to remind everyone to just “be friends,” which is a bit strange for me to say because I don’t consider many people “friends,” but I do encourage people of all walks to get along in a civil and socially acceptable way.  Everyone should also bath regularly and practice proper hygienic behaviors.  End public service announcement.

The growth in group membership has dramatically changed the leadership structure and social stakeholder composition of the group.  I’ve identified maybe 1.5 individuals who have remained (or maybe grown) in their previous roles of influence, the rest being pushed out by those more outspoken, obnoxious, or socially desirable.  In ye olden days, I think one of the reasons that activities were as successfully as they were was because everyone was interested in getting along first, and figuring out exactly what and who would do something second.  Today it seems the reverse is regularly entertained, whereas one person gets an idea and develops it hoping others will jump on board… but others participation is heavily contingent on a very strict set of terms and conditions.  It is no longer “lets go to eat at X,” its now “lets go to eat at X if and only if Y comes along and if Z hasn’t already eaten”.  Please note those variables have no correlation to real people; you’d waste your time assigning names to X,Y, and Z.  Mind you, all of this is coming from someone who doesn’t regularly engage in these sorts of practices.. and when I do I try my best to minimize any additional clauses and strings I bring to the table.  I usually cause no immediate problem if being left out or being unable to participate.  If everything I did had this many strings attached, I’m not sure I’d be able to untangle myself and get out of bed in the morning…. which may be why many people struggle to untangle themselves and rise before the afternoon hours.

One of the things I always try to do before I get involved in a group, socially or otherwise, is evaluate what impact I’m going to have on things.  For those of you who’ve worked on programming with version control systems its very a much like a diff; I try and evaluate what exactly I’m going to change by becoming involved, taking a public stance on a topic, or doing any number of things that people are likely to notice.  The challenge here is usually trying to get an accurate picture of all the different elements at play, so you can really figure out what sort of changes you might cause.  Its easy to identify that by taking step 1 you’ll move in a certain direction, but it’s less clear if that move is going to prevent someone else from moving to that location or create a far more complicated chain of events; this prediction stuff isn’t easy… which I why I usually don’t just do things on a whim.  I’ve spent a particularly large quantity of time evaluating the changes one or two people have made over the past few years, and I’m impressed by the sheer quantity of social adjustments they’ve managed to cause.  I suspect one of the persons may have some clue what they’ve done (which leads me to believe it might have been a well-calculated step) while the other seems to be far less clear on what’s happened.  I’m hesitant to toss blame because it was strategic, at the time, for that person to be kept in as much of the dark as possible because the parties involved didn’t want the individual to know that door existed, never mind be opened or reviewed.  Everyone once in a while I am like hrm, I should buy one of those pine-tree shaped air fresheners and try and clear the bad air here, but then I get reminded how that just is not feasible given my current position and acknowledgement level (or lack thereof).

On another note, it seems common for people to “dance” at events where music is being played.  I do not dance for a multitude of reasons, and when I am coerced into “moving with the music” I usually just vertically bob up and down. I’ve found this move sufficient in large crowds, but doesn’t seem to suffice in more intimate settings.  I don’t try to act like Lady Gaga often, so flailing my arms wildly in the air doesn’t appeal to me very often.  Without drinking, I can’t blame any strange behavior on an inebriated state and get away with all sorts of nonsense.  I also find no cause to “get low” like many songs suggest, and you won’t find me “jump”ing without due cause.  I have no interest in being a backup dancer for any music video so duplicating those moves is of no value to me.    To me, demonstrating an ability to dance is like a trump card, something I should only pull out when I really really really need to.  Until that point, I will continue to stand while you make a fool of yourself.  I will avoid laughing to your face because you probably need the exercise.

On a different topic; I recently uninstalled the Office 2010 beta and installed the final version… I’m pretty impressed with it.  It feels a lot more polished than Office 2007.  This is kind of like the Vista to Windows 7 update, except Office 2007 (aka vista) wasn’t as broken to begin with.  I am also trying to figure out what I should request as a token to celebrate my graduation.  My dad has told me to buy something, send it home, and he will wrap it so I can act surprised.

Good night moon.

From what I hear, the press has descended on South Hadley and as I type, Anderson Cooper is going all 360 on Superintendent Sayer.  Unfortunately, South Hadley’s school department lacks anyone who is skilled in the art of public relations so there is zero chance the School Department will be able to show the progress they’ve made on the bullying front.  It’s too bad, because there are tons of people out there willing to share their opinion on what the schools have messed up, but not many people are coming forward to say anything good.

You’ll note that most of this has been written well before 9 students were criminally charged in connection to the suicide of a student.  Not knowing these students or the underlying causes for these charges, I’m not going to comment on the specifics.  The below represents statements I’ve been developing since February.

First, what qualifies me to speak on the issue?  Well, I’m a senior in college.  I like to think I’m sufficiently removed from the situation (4 years) whereby I can offer some unclouded views.  That said, as a student I was more familiar with the administration of the high school and school district than just about any student I met during my four years in the school.   Also, I’m not 40, married with 3 kids, and spending every waking minute on MassLive.  I’m familiar with what actually happens on sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter because I’ve used them since before parents heard about them.  Lastly, I spent most of my four years in high school observing.  I compartmentalized most of my social activities to 1.5 hours each day and spent the rest of the time watching what others did.  I was at that lunch table that was mostly empty, or standing in the corner watching everyone else mingle after lunch.  Not like in the creepy way, but in the I’ve only got a handful of friends and we don’t talk loud enough to stand in the middle of everyone and still hear ourselves kind of way.

On to the meat of the issues here…

I think everyone is on the right page when they say there are bullies in high school.  I think everyone is on the wrong page when they say South Hadley has a bullying problem, or a situation that significantly deviates from the norm.  I think the climate is providing an easy environment for people to say that South Hadley has a bullying problem because of some of the recent events and subsequent news coverage, unfortunately that’s just fuel for the mirage.  What South Hadley does have right now, that most communities don’t, is a great way to start (and continue) the conversation about bullying in our schools.  Dozens of students, former students, and parents are now coming out of the woodwork to talk about how they are/were/represent someone who was bullied during their school years.  I think this is a really good conversation to be having, but we need to get the context right.  We should all be working together as a community to solve this problem, not just dropping our complaints in the complaint box or pointing our finger around at past events… but that might just be my approach, I much enjoy moving forward.

At the School Committee meeting following the incident people lined up like it was a church confessional to detail the times they had been bullied.  All the stories were very sad, and clearly everyone is still haunted by their high school bully today, but most people failed to present reasonable next steps.  For the dialog to work, someone should have presented a story like this “I was bullied blah blah blah, but thinking back on it, I really could have used some help standing up for myself or asserting my beliefs,” not just “I was bullied blah blah blah, and you should fire everyone for not caring.”  One of the things that did stand out to me was that some people were stepping forward to speak about abuses many years ago, before lots of the current faculty/staff were in their current roles.  Maybe the current staff could do more about these sorts of things, but it seems like this trend isn’t new to this specific set of administrators or teachers… it has been going on since the dawn of time!

What strikes me as a little odd is the ratio of those bullied that have come forward compared to the bullies that have come forward (i.e large to zero).  I think people often forget that being a bully and being bullied are not mutually exclusive states.  Based on my experience, there’s actually a pretty decent probability that you’ve been responsible for “bullying” someone at least once during your four years in high school.  Maybe you didn’t want to be their partner, choosing to work with your group of friends instead, maybe you laughed or snickered when you saw their test grade and then went to tell your friends about it.  The tricky thing about bullying is measuring it, it is not like punching someone in the face.. counting the welts on face isn’t as easy as measuring the emotional damage someone may or may not have suffered at your tongue.

For example, I could tell my parents that someone made an insulting comment about my clothes in school today.  They could be worried I was being bullied without every asking how I felt.  Personally, I probably couldn’t care less if someone insulted what I wear…. but for someone else this could be a defining moment of their high school experience.

Based on my experience with the administration of South Hadley High School, they do a bang up job.  As always, there is room for improvement, but I’ve observed them doing the best they can given their limited resources.  The fact is that most people don’t care what happens at the high school until something really bad happens.  In some of the younger schools parents involve themselves in the education process with things like the PTA and parent-teacher conferences.  By the time the students are in high school, they’ve found something better to do with their time.  I attended (filmed) School Committee meetings for a really long time, and the only time I saw more than one parent show up was when the sports or music budget was going to be cut.  Parents never came to speak when the budget for counselors was reduced or when teaching positions were going to be reduced, it just didn’t happen.  If you claim the school is in a terrible state, I can assure you it didn’t get here overnight.  Where were the watchdogs last year?

There is a lot of people out there tossing blame saying that administrator X or teacher Y was made aware of the bullying and failed to stop it.  I suspect if an administrator kept a list of students who they suspected were bullied, something like 75% of the school population would be on it.  That’s not to say an administrator sees you gets punched in the face and just marks it down in a book, but they can tell when you’re having a rough day.  There is also the parent-reporting issue.  I think that a lot of the time parents report issues and kind of make a huge deal out of things.  That is not to say the mold fits for the presently discussed scenario, but a lot of the time your parent calls and they are going to be furious, failing to even consider that they’re kid could have presented them with a slightly exaggerated story.  It’s not like they were emotional or anything I’m sure.  It’s also not likely they called in concerned their student hadn’t been doing any homework or anything educational like that; some of the most effective parent-administrator/teacher relationship I saw were parents that were concerned about their child’s school experience as a package… which includes both last weeks math test and the latest rumor about them.

I try to think what I would do if someone complained to me about a bullying issue.  Having limited educational training, its a tough call.  For starters, I first need to verify that an issue exists. I’ve heard one, probably over dramatized version of the story, and I need to hear the other side.  The problem is that you just can’t sit the other student down and be like are you talking smack about person z?  They’re gonna say no, and if they legitimately weren’t talking smack about that person they now have a reason to do so.  Logically, my next step might be to conduct some digging around and ask teachers and counselors.  Unfortunately, I remembered that the teachers are short handed and underpaid so they’re not the best witnesses.  The counselors might be helpful, if we hadn’t reduced the number of them to four.  Hrm, where does that put me.  I guess I could check out some technology, unfortunately its kind of creepy to be friends with your principal on Facebook.  The school resource officer might be worth a go, but I suspect his undercover Facebook skills are worse then mine.  I guess I’m left with the hold-my-horses approach, raising an alert level but waiting until there is something indisputable I can catch someone on.  A punch to the face would make things much easier.

I have no doubts I will be classified as very pro-South Hadley Public Schools.  I don’t think that would be a lie; heck, I held a sign when I was 10 encouraging you to vote yes on 2 so we could renovate the schools.  My allegiance does not come because I spent summers working for the school or because I’ve been pretty involved.  My allegiance comes because I see that South Hadley Schools produce, on the most part, decent, successful, contributing members of society.  Sure, I can go online and find tons of underage students drinking, but I consistently find them ending up in college and doing something decent with their life.  SHHS produces very few homeless students.  I also think that South Hadley is, on the whole, a pretty decent place to be raised.  I don’t care about how many millions of dollars the golf course is eating, I care that people don’t get shot in gang related violence.  Sure, there might be some drugs here or there, but it doesn’t get in the way of an AP Calculus class.  You think South Hadley has problems, try going to Springfield!  Not that I want to bash Springfield specifically, I’m just trying to point out that things could be worse…

Maybe I am not thrilled because I am a member of  no group. I possibly hold the title captain of the “not affiliated with a group” group which contains those of us that intermittently interact with everyone or no one; however the nature of the “people who aren’t in a group” group is that we don’t act like a group.  Us unaffiliated folks don’t organize group trips to Denny’s at 3 AM in the morning, as a majority of the membership (remember, these folks are really the not-members) may actually go to sleep at a regular hour or happen to be at the right place/time to tag alone.  I hope I can attribute the staying-up-super-late-and-then-complaining-or-bragging-to-me-about-how-you-didn’t-sleep routine to the end of the semester, it would be very nice if next semester others were well-rested and interested in doing work before 10PM.  Personally, I strive to get most of my work done between the hours of 8PM and 5PM, though I must admit I’ve been sleeping a little late this past week and my average work-start time has been around 9:30pm.

Its disappointing to me the lack of progress all these groups are making.  Everyone always “understands” that the semester is busy and such but the semester is always busy.  Instead, I will cite my lack of strong motivating presence, especially during the beginning of the semester, as the primary cause for failure.  Some have made up for this lack of work over the past week or so, but a few of our core units continue to disappoint.  I have trouble identifying where exactly the priority and time-allocations got shifted to.  I don’t see strides being made in other areas, unless those areas are secretly being explored behind my back (which, as of late, is becoming more and more likely).

I’ve toyed with the idea of building a metaphorical campfire for everyone to sit around it to sing kumbaya, but I know that most of us don’t like singing and aren’t very good at it.  Those who do like singing, tend to sing really really badly.  I’m glad they enjoy singing and all. but they’re not the ones who need to participate in this bonding experience.  Also on my mind was the idea of meeting with the segment owners to figure out exactly what is going on.  I’m skeptical I will receive any useful data, as its much easier to make something up then to make progress on tough issues.  One idea I keep returning to is this bottom-up change concept, which involves me violating several contracts and engaging the less influential segment members in a general discussion.  I suspect I can step on just about everyone’s toes by doing this, and I might even produce a situation that is more partitioned than the present.

In another area of my life, I may have mapped out an execution plan for a burden I’ve carried for over two years now.  I am fairly confident that it will work out well for me in the long run if my strategy is successfully executed, though the short-term losses will take some time to realize.  The real trick is the presentation and delivery of this strategy, I can’t just lay it on the table because no one would buy into it at that point.  Unfortunately my casual communication with all the parties involved is extremely limited, so I’ll have to go about this a more subversive way.  If all goes well, you will have no clue what I am talking about in this monologue.

Dodging back to my previous segment discussion, I should give more though to the notion that the segments may interact more than I know.  Recognizing there are likely some extreme outsiders, I’ve recently been lead to believe that people might interact more in my absence.  I won’t directly attribute that to my absence, but maybe the coincidence that I am not present during well established time.

Goodnight moon.

I’m going to cut to the chase here.  If Ruby on Rails can run on Google’s App Engine (via JRuby) I figured that there is no reason why  PHP shouldn’t be able to work.  Of course I wasn’t interested in writing my own PHP interpreter in Java or something like, so I used Google to find Quercus.

Using the instructions to get JRuby working, as well this very useful guide about getting Groovy to work, I set off to piece together something for PHP using Quercus.  My biggest problem during this whole process was extracting the jar’s I needed.  For some reason, anything I downloaded from the quercus website wouldn’t extract correctly on my Mac or my PC… with the specific quercus.jar file being corrupt.  After dropping them into my war/WEB_INF/lib folder and starting my Web Application (I’m using Eclipse FYI) I would get errors about zip not being able to do its job.

Google helped me find a SVN repo out there that had the 3 jars I needed, and  after loading them into the correct folder. Eclipse stopped throwing errors.  If you’re looking for the files I used, you can find them here: http://lportal.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/lportal/portal/trunk/lib/development/.  I determined that quercus.jar, resin_util.jar, and script-10.jar were needed for Quercus to do its thing correctly… at least that’s what I think.  Drop them in the WEB_INF/lib folder and you should be all set.

Configuring PHP to work was surprisingly easy.  Edit web.xml to have the following lines:
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Quercus Servlet</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>com.caucho.quercus.servlet.QuercusServlet</servlet-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>ini-file</param-name>
<param-value>WEB-INF/php.ini</param-value>
</init-param>
</servlet>
…..and….
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Quercus Servlet</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>*.php</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
I don’t know if any order is important here, but I put the php servlet first, followed by the default servlet, followed by the php servlet-mapping, followed by the default servlet-mapping.  By default I mean the one that was generated for me when they thought I wanted to use Java.

Next on the to-edit list was appengine-web.xml.  I can’t take credit for knowing to do this, I read it on purrrgatory’s twitter. I added the following lines, right after the close of the system-properties tag.
<static-files>
<exclude path="/*.php" />
</static-files>
<resource-files>
<include path="/**.php" />
</resource-files>

Looking back at that file I wonder if my exclude path is correct…. but hey its working.  I’m not going to complain.  I created a php.ini, which is completely blank at the moment, in war/WEB_INF.  I think I can put stuff here later.

The last step: write some PHP.  I through together the lamest test php file I could imagine, and saved it as war/index.php.

Initially when I tested this out I was getting a wierd error about org.mortbay.util.ajax.Continuation not being there.  I don’t know what that is, but its included in the jetty-util-6.1.0.jar file, which I found here.  I’m unsure if this is specific to the development platform (where I know jetty is used) or required somewhere in the Quercus mix.

Once in a blue moon, when I start the application up I get an error “java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: `org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler’ not valid: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler” but refreshing the page seems to clear that up.

I deployed to Google App Engine and everything worked perfectly! (http://txter.appspot.com/)

Of course I quickly remembered the JDBC wasn’t supported, so in turn the database wrappers that I could easily enable from Quercus weren’t going to work.  I’ll play around with this more, trying to figure out how to get it to interact with DataStore or something.

Here are some screenshots incase you’re as confused as I was when I started out with all this.

And I’ve uploaded my war directory, incase its of any help.

Best of luck!

– UPDATE 1 –

Initially, I was very wearsome of getting PHP to talk nicely with the datastore.  Doesn’t look like it will be too bad to sort out.  I’ll post a more detailed post about getting the datastore to work cleanly… maybe with a nice php or java wrapper class, but for now I’ve posted some sample code here .  The two .java files went in my source/projname/ directory, and the php file went with the other PHP files.

It makes sense to me that an existing framework should be used if you are prototyping an application. Pushing an application into a production environment, especially one where you are expecting thousands of users, should force you to rethink your implementation. Personally, I am about 90% confident that rails, cake, etc will do what I want it to just fine for a few hundreds users. There are probably dozens of use cases where these same tools will scale fine to thousands of users, but unless I have a cake or rails contributor on staff, I cannot risk that decision.  My applications (assumed to be important) just cannot experience issues that I, or another programmer on my staff, have not coded in to our application or reviewed the code for [I would never pay someone to review the RoR code or anything like that].  If your applications are junky, say… like a Facebook application, then I say who cares.  You don’t really control the important end of the stick anyways.  Use whatever gets the job done well enough.

By the time your prototype (you might call it an ‘application’) is taking off, take some time to look at your implementation. I understand you have the smartest caching scheme in existence and you’ve done a super job with load balancing Mongrel, but are all the ‘DESCRIBE TABLE’ queries really the best use of your resources? Go ahead, if you have buckets of money to throw at hardware do it… It’s probably cheaper and easier than having to pay your people to think anyways. In my shop, after a prototype gets the final sign off and it looks like people actually want to use it, a php, python, or html/perl fork is immediately started.  I no longer have to guess what a framework will think of my application; I am telling my application how to think on my own.  Yes, this might mean I am hard-coding SQL and doing my own string escaping.  A security risk? Probably. But one that I have control over and can take responsibility for.

Don’t get me wrong here, I like frameworks just as much as you. In this “tight” economy a framework can be the most cost effective way to get a new product off the ground. Recognize though, that once it’s flying those training wheels are going to slow you down.

My favorite example, Twitter.  If you don’t know what Twitter is, you probably didn’t understand most of what I was just talking about.  Twitter is my favorite example for a few reasons: 1) It is written in Rails 2) The service is freakishly simple and 3) It did not scale gracefully.  It turns out people wanted to communicate in under 160 characters, and twitter was the hot way to do so.  I got onboard a few months ago, and found myself unable to use the service for a solid 2 week period.  Every time I had something to say, the tactfully designed error page was presented indicating “over capacity”.  While it was much more graceful than no response, or a standard 404 or 500 error page, it still carried the same effect to me; you can’t do what you want to right now.  Go away.  Of course, twitter had (and still has) no real incentive to be operational.. until they can make money of me saying short messages, its just costing them money.  It took twitter a few months of what seem (and continue to be) pretty solid re-architectural work.  Features that were initially available quickly were ‘disabled’ [read as: poorly implemented], and there were rolling outages amongst the rest of the features.  No, I can’t blame the whole thing on their choice of languages, but rails helped avoid some of the core thinking that I put in to every application I work on.  Crafting in  rails mostly avoids the whole database thing, and does a pretty strong job to avoid the whole “now which components will I need to include for this feature.”  I don’t mean to insult twitter.  I use it and it works great,  there are tons of other poorly implemented MVC framework applications out there.

You’ll still see me writing in popular MVC frameworks, but probably not for any application that I expect to ever take off.  In the freak chance there is an application that I do produce and keep in an MVC framework after its popular, you can be certain of one of two things.  You choose which is more likely.

1. I haven’t had the time to rewrite it.
2. I’ve spend more time than I should testing the framework.

Off topic: My annual Christmas blog will be arriving later this week.  My iTunes must be playing from my Top Music list, or the shuffle is treating me extremely well today.  I need to call Larry and be like “Hey, give me the name Bamnet back!”

I think in detail about some of the tasks I have to complete and I struggle to identify reason/reward pair for lots of them.  Clearly homework has a reason, it has been assigned for me to complete, with a pretty clear reward, get a decent grade -> pass the course -> graduate.  Most other things are less clear.  Take my programming work for an example.  The reason tends to be because someone else wants feature x or function y.  I have trouble thinking of any code I’ve written for Brian’s personal stuff in the past few weeks… it simply gets pushed aside.  The reward is really hard to identify, and I’m one thats usually pretty patient in my identification processes.  I don’t require a cookie the second I complete my task like an animal would, but something down the line at some time would be appreciated I think.

A group distribution can factor into this a lot.  In a group some people can be tasked to generate reasons, others to implement them, and others to absorb the rewards.  When I’m in a position to recieve thanks, or any potential credit, I do my best to pass it on to those who deserve it… in past I’ve actually passed it on to people who don’t deserve it just to help them out.  In the past its been as simple as putting those who are least likely to get recognized for their work at the top of a productions credits.  During my tenure, I would always save myself and other “senior” members for the end of the credits.  Not because we didn’t do work or anything, but because I felt that the camera operators and tech crew were the real ones who deserve the credit.

And now I find myself as the tech crew, someone who’s work generally goes unrealized.  My name is barely is hardly associated with things I work on.  Kevin Bacon is probably more connected than I am for all I know.  Its challenging to continue to find motivation sometimes.  In the past I’ve always looked forward, saying to myself “well self, if you keep working on X for another few months, someone might appreciate what it is you do.”  I can safely say that my timeframe must be off, years have passed and I can’t say I’ve ever been shown any appreciation.  If it was my job to give the appreciation I would do my best to do that, but its not.  I have 0 recognition to distribute.

I am off to bed, where I will convince myself that I appreciate me.

Good night moon.

I was cruising the net not to long ago and found myself on pownce, a site I still don’t understand where I found a link to Fire Eagle.  Fire Eagle is this thing run by Yahoo! that stores and distributes the location of a user to create “location aware” Internet services.  A few weeks ago I was skeptical of this whole “location aware” idea.  As a web developed I rarely care where users are.  I actually prefer to not know where you are, the idea of running into users of a program of mine in public is a scary thought… but I digress.  Tonight when I was looking at Fire Eagle I got excited about the idea about location aware services.

What form this data will be used in, I have no clue at all.  I think I am out of ideas because I really had never imagined having the data of a user to be reliably accessible.  I could see a potential application or two with Concerto, but that’s a ways off.  There would have to be more than 1 Concerto install running in the world for your “location” to matter at all.  Right now everyone is close to the RPI install.

Location aware data isn’t new by any means, its just newly accessible and newly in the hands of users.  In the past location was determined by IP address.  Thats one of the techniques used to serve ads where they have a city near you in the image.  This data isn’t very accurate, nor is it being put to good use at all.  I’ve seen some adds for “Hot Singles Available Tonight in Troy” where they have a few photo’s of females on webcams with their town posted as Troy or a surrounding area.  I find that funny, because there is a 1% chance that the girl in the photo could locate Troy on a map, never mind live here. (Now that I think about it, I wonder what percentage of the Troy population could find it on a map…)  But its crazy to think that by putting my local city into an ad you can get me to believe it.  Yes, I’ll give you that it does make me look more than those “Shoot 10 ducks and win an Xbox*” ads, but that’s only because I enjoy seeing how accurate they’re getting lately.  Clearly someone downstream is selling out the location for 128.113.x.x as Troy, NY.. and there are plenty of people interested in buying it up.

I do wish there was a strong, smoother way to update all this information about me online.  Having to twitter, update my location, consider updating my facebook status, etc is a lot of separate programs to run.  Things would be much easier if a background process on my iPhone could keep my location in check, or even a cron style job every 2 hours or so.

I look forward to playing around with the idea of knowing where I, and others, are in future web applications.  Who knows what will come of it, but it might be neat.

Good night moon

Right now I am backing up my mac-mini to bamsrv.  My “new” all purpose box I’ll bring to college with me. Its not new at all, but hopefully it will make a good file server for my stuffs and anyone else’s stuff who I permit to use it.  After this test backup, I’ll be starting what I call the great backup.  I have to move lots of gigabytes off my Windows dynamic raid NTFS drives to a temporary storage location so I can reformat those drives in EXT3 or something to connect them up to bamsrv (running Ubuntu).  Unfortunatly I know the hard drive I’m backing them up to is corrupt.. so it will be an interesting backup procedure. If I had a spare 500gb drive I’d be all set, but I don’t.  Thinking about it, going windows raid probably wasn’t the smartest move for the long term, but it did work quite well for the short term.

I’ve been busy working on the redesign for Katie’s site.  If all goes well it will be live in a week or so.  I’ve also been busy working on a site for my parents, who are going to be renting out our Vermont house this fall/summer.  I’ll make sure to link to it when I get it up and running, but you should definately consider renting it.  Don’t tell them my blog referred you or anything like that, just pretend you heard about it on the internet or something.

Now I’m mad.  Facebook has been working on this redesign thing.  Personally, I don’t care too much about it.  I haven’t spent enough time on facebook in the past few weeks to have an opinion one way or the other.  I do however, care about my application: quotes.  Right now it seems like the quotes boxes aren’t being allowed on the main “wall” tab, being forced into the looser “boxes” area.  Junk.  I was aware of the changes coming up, but I figured I would be pretty save.  My application isn’t exactly complicated.  It just works, or at least thats the goal.  Now I’m going to have to spend time figuring out why my box can’t be in the same spot as the gifts, notes or superpoke.  If superpoke can be there, I should be able to be there.

I must start debugging this immediatly… maybe immediately after sleep.