Externals

I hate going 10 days without writing.

Internet is still on hold. They needed on the roof to install the antenna, and I don't have the key. The process to get the key involves asking my management company, which asked my community president (of the neighborhood), who has to ask everyone in the community if they object to the antenna. It's a wonder anyone makes any improvements at all to their homes with such a process. Sadly, I'm sure many neighborhoods in the US operate similarly. Something tells me this will drag on for a week or two, at which point, if they say yes, I'll have to get a new installation appointment and wait another few weeks. If that is the case, probably not going to be worth it.

This week a group of high schoolers from Burbank, California is here. I guess it is their spring break. Unfortunately it has been raining and cold all week, some spring break for them. They seem to be making the best of it though. Three are in my class and they are amusing. Talking to 16 year olds makes me feel ancient though. When they asked what I studied, I told them that I had already graduated. Then they asked what college I was planning to attend. It took me a second to realize that they thought I was talking about graduating from high school. Heck, I've been out of college well over a year now. Crazy.

Spent the last hour or so fixing my screwed up vendor directory in my rails project. Not entirely sure what was going on, but it would error when I tried to update, commit, cleanup, delete, or change the svn properties. Finally resorted to nuking it completely in the Repository Browser and exporting the latest rails tag and all the plugins instead of using svn:externals. In the process of committing all that now. I think I like the idea of keeping it cleaner anyway.

Bah, today is just not my day. Commit won't work because of a subclipse bug. And, long story short, have to wait for Joe to do something tonight before I can finish committing it.

Tonight I have to write a paper for conversation class. Que Guay! I'm just going to quit writing before I start whining.

UI

The last couple days I have been schlepping my laptop around to various places to use free wifi. In the process I have had to reboot many times (I dual boot gentoo and windows [for games]) in order to play a random game of DotA in between programming sessions.

If you are like me, by the time your computer boots up, you already have about six programs in mind that you need to start. For instance, booting into windows for DotA, I open up the healthbar hotkey script, the war3 banlist, gaim (to see if any of my friends want to play), and War3 itself. When I boot into gentoo, I usually open gaim, firefox, eclipse, a terminal or three, etc...

The continuous rebooting this weekend led me to discover the single most annoying UI problem ever in the existence of man... focus grabbing.

For instance, in windows, I get the hotkey script and banlist open right away, while war3 is loading up... but then after I'm into War3 trying to get on bnet, gaim decides that it is very important that I see my buddy list load up. After this annoyance, I'm back in War3, maybe even into a game, when someone IMs me. If a convo window is already open, no problem. If it opens a new convo window, obviously it's necessary to rip me out of my game and show me my new message (*sarcasm bleeds*).

You would think that Gentoo would be better to me, but every new app I open demands my attention at random after loading. Azureus grabs focus every time I add a new torrent to it. Gaim acts the same as in Windows. Eclipse plays nice mostly, but firefox pops up windows demanding my attention all over the place. (Although I did find the awesome download bar plugin that minimized some of that.)

Grabbing focus should be on the canonical list of UI no-nos. It destroys the user's flow. It's like a forceful context switch for your brain. I believe this is why popup ads are so annoying. They are basically a forced context switch. Instead of continuing with whatever you have at hand, you must pay attention to this interrupter. It is both disorienting for novice users and downright death-by-1000-annoyances for experienced users.

If software needs your attention, it should flash in the taskbar. It can play sounds. It can blink it's systray icon. It shouldn't just assume that whatever it needs is more important than whatever you are doing.

The same goes for forms in webpages. I can't count the number of times I have been typing in my password to a bank/credit card site and the page finally finishes loading and an asinine onload event moves the focus to the username field. This is especially annoying when someone is looking over my shoulder. Nothing better than having my password shown in plain text.

So I make a resolution to never manipulate the focus in any software I write. I will use a message area, blinking taskbar items, whatever. I only wish others would do me the favor of removing their focus grabbing shenanigans.

Das WiMax!

Well finally got a notice that they are coming to install interweb access in my apartment on the 23rd. This means 24/7 net access, which means that I will just sleep less and get out less. On the upside, I won't have to move around constantly searching for net access. Also, instead of 4-5 hours a day (mostly work), I'll have on the order of 10-12... not to mention I'll finally have something to do on Sundays.

Magic site work is coming along. Can now add/remove cards to/from your cart. Next up is the actual price/availability matching. That should be pretty fun. Hoping to work through it Saturday.

Today has been an odd day in general. I just feel like doing nothing at all. I just want to watch a movie, eat junk food, and sleep. No idea why. Hopefully it passes soon.

Paris

So my brother is stuck in Paris overnight. Te lo juro, nunca debes volar al aeropuerto de Paris. (I swear, you should never fly to Paris' airport.) Not only did they lose his bag for a week (he got it back about 12 hours before he left), but now he is stuck there for a 24 hour layover. I guess at least his Europe trip was interesting.

Not much else is new with me. Battery is about to run out, so this will be a quick post. Trying to get as much as the new SG-1 downloaded before that happens. Also looking up vocab to use tomorrow when talking to Joaquin about withdrawing from class.

Hoping for an 80% refund... considering I got a 15% discount originally and my cheap living conditions, I can live with a bit of wasted money. If not, then I guess I'll finish out the courses.

Granada

Well my brother and I have been tourists the last couple days. I took him to Gibraltar on a day trip yesterday to see the Monkeys and the coast of Africa. Today we came to Granada, and are about to head up to the Alhambra.

I must confess that I am looking forward to getting back on the magic project. Problem is that with school and work, this isn't likely to happen for several days. Oh well, at least I can try and squeeze it in. Honestly been debating about withdrawing from school to work on it more full time. I think I might go talk to Joaquin about it on Monday. Part of me thinks its a waste to be in Spain and not focus on learning Spanish, but I don't feel very focused on it anyway. Work I have decided to put up with out of necessity, but at least I can focus on being nerdy most of the time.

Anyway, I feel like I rant about the same thing a lot here, so I'll drop it until something changes.

The weather has been awesome the last week. It's getting into the 70s pretty much every day, with lots of sun. Hopefully the cold days and nights are behind us now.

Well, Ben is back... time to run...

Taxman

Accomplishment for today was doing my taxes. Only getting $71 back though. While normally I would be happy about this, (since I think I can allocate my capital far better than the government can allocate it for me while I loan it to them for a year) my Kansas tax owed was close enough to the penalty line that I think I will adjust my W-4 claims.

Not much else to report, as that consumed most of my internet time. I read a bit about Rails and the stock market. I also caught up on all my work email. How exciting!

Well, off I go to eat some dinner and find something to do with Ben. Hasta pronto!

Que Mala Suerte

Well Ben finally got here. His first flight was delayed an entire day due to bad weather in the US. Then his second flight got into Paris two hours late, so he missed his third flight and had to take another one 7 hours later. When he finally got to Malaga (31 hours later than originally planned), his bag was still in Paris. It was supposed to arrive the next day, but it wasn't there, so now they are supposed to send it to us. At least we are about the same size, so he is wearing my clothes. Hopefully we will get it tomorrow!

Had my monthly test this morning. It was harder than I expected, but I only needed a 50% to pass, and I know I easily got that. Considering I didn't study at all, it was a success.

Randomly read a really good idea for solving the options backdating issue. I agree completely.

Speaking of IRS changes, I should go finish doing my taxes and submit those. Yay (tiny) refund!

Dia en el Parque

Today is El Dia de Andalucia... so everything is closed and everyone is out in mass to enjoy the warm weather. Last I checked it was 68 (but very sunny). Since things are closed, I logged my hours for work in the park today on a bench. I'm speaking in the past tense because I only have 15 mins left.

In about an hour in a half Kathy and I catch the train for Malaga. It should be a fairly relaxing ride with a short stop in Bobadilla to change trains. I won't be taking my computer (or really anything electronic) with me, but I hope to waste about 30 mins a day checking email in the bus station in downtown Malaga, and I'll most likely blog there as well.

Been reading a lot of stuff over at news.ycombinator.com today. I like the site, as it functions equivalently to Reddit.com, but stays focused on technical and cultural articles related to startup websites. Since I am trying to be in that crowd, it's nice to immerse myself in it.

I have also been actively trying to ignore the outside world. I get too bogged down in reading news and blogs about news and financial news... and just generally news. Really knowing what is going on in the news changes my daily life not one bit, so why should I waste hours a day on it?

I wish I had my Rails books here with me. If I knew what box they ended up in, I'd have my mom send them over. Oh well, when I'm connected to the web I can find stuff just as fast (if not faster), but the books would come in handy at home.

In other news, my financial situation dramatically improved today because my supplimental paycheck finally appeared. Yay for having money!

Gauntlet

So I almost never see Bob, John, or Mark online anymore... so I am calling you out. Not like you need to sleep/work/do things during the middle of the day when I am on... you sacrifice your careers and education for me! (Not really.)

Today I worked more on my gentoo install... did some stuff for AJLA... and finished downloading the magic images. Also went 7 and 1 with Skeleton King in DotA. Right now I'm installing newest firefox...

Not much time left, just wanted to get an entry in for the day. Ben comes to visit Saturday... so that is exciting. I'm going to spend my weekend hardcore studying for the test on Monday. Hasta luego!

Survivalism

"I've got my violence in hi-def ultra-realism... All a part of this great nation..."

Ahhh, motivation music.

So the free wireless at the library was mysteriously absent today. Oh sure, the library's wireless was still there, but it has serious issues that make doing anything productive impossible. The network I was using belongs to someone else... I just happen to be able to see it from within the library.

So now I'm at the pay place. Reliable fast connection, but costs me about $1.60/hr. Oh well, have to spend money to make money.

Today I got a basic RJS action working. RJS is very neat, but took me forever to find the documentation and a decent howto. I'll explain more later... back I go...

Sunny Day

Today has been a particularly sunny day. So much so that I had to find shade in order to see my screen. For those that don't know, on Sundays my only internet option is to sit outside the Library in the park and use the wireless. Normally it is overcast and I can see well enough... but today is bright. It's like 60... only downside is that it's also windy. I can't wait for summer.

Yesterday we went with the school to Sevilla... where we spent the morning going on tours of stuff I have already seen. I understand much more spanish this time around though, so I actually understood the stories about the things we saw. Among other things, I saw Christopher Colombus' tomb, the building that was once in charge of the entire New World (adminstrative building for the colonies under Spanish control), and a Palace where several important moments in history happened (Christopher Colombus and Magellan were given permission to set sail, Franco assumed power at the end of the Spanish Civil War, King Ferdinand died... etc. Also learned that the dollar symbol ($) originated from the royal seal used by King Carlos V... two pillars representing the Pillars of Heracles, and a squiggly line representing the wind of the Atlantic.

The highlight of the day for me was spending about 3 hours lounging on the banks of the River Guadalquivir under a full sun and 75 degree temps. Was actually warm enough that I bought some ice cream. Kathy and I just took in the sun and talked... was a relaxing afternoon. Think everyone else divided their time between the Cruzcampo Brewery and shopping. Cruzcampo is like the Spanish Budweiser... and the Brewery apparently gives out all you can drink beer and ham on the tour.

While here I have found that I really have no desire whatsoever to go out to bars or clubs. It's strange, because that stuff is supposed to be fun... but I find that all I want to talk about is Magic, programming, DotA, grammar, and finance... you know, nerdy things that don't usually play well at bars full of American college kids. I kinda feel like I'm in High School again, insofar as I prefer to be antisocial and do nerdy things. Oh well, that is probably a good thing as far as productivity is concerned.

Other cool news is that a project named ActiveMerchant has sprung up in the Rails community to automate handling payment gateways. I'll obviously have to read up more on it when I get that far, but at least it should speed up the PayPal integration.

Anyway, it's getting cloudy and cold now, so I'm going back to my apartment. Adios!

Insert Witty Title

So this was a whirlwind week in class. I didn't even go Monday (sick) and today (Friday) we just played scrabble and talked, and we still got more done this week than I think any other week I've experienced here. Hardcore reviewed las frases adverbiales and did a lot of writing for conversation. Also got a complete explanation of accent marks. A lot to study and keep track of for the test (in about 10 days), but I feel up for the challenge.

Worked more on the magic site today. Didn't do anything incredibly special, but made lots of little changes to what I have. I played with script.aculo.us (AJAX framework built upon prototype... which is another AJAX framework) for a bit to do something that I ended up solving with pure CSS. At least I got a bit of time playing with it... since I will soon be using it quite a bit I think.

Big find of the day was a group dedicated to archiving hi-res images of all magic cards. They are organized enough to release torrent files and a program to automatically update the images as new scans become available. While I have a script that is already pulling the images from another site, I queued up the torrent anyway, just to have the really hi-res ones available at some point. For now I'm not going to worry about images past the point of having something there to display.

I have a basic user login setup working (thanks to acts_as_authenticated), but it definitely will need more work at some point. As long as it works well enough so I can start (probably Sunday) on the idea of collections... which I'll just hash out enough to get to the root problem of defining shopping baskets and doing the price matching. Once I get the basic matching working to satisfaction, I get to backtrack and flesh out everything ad infinitum...

Once that basic feature set is up and running... Should be able to pretty it up with a real design and go live with first version... but I'm getting ahead of myself... we are talking months of work... especially since I'm slowed down by dividing my time with school, and the lack of internet for the majority of the day.

On that note, I will hopefully be getting a 1mb/256k connection in my apartment in about three weeks or so. I just have a feeling it won't go as smoothly as that though. It is a WiMax connection, which means a guy has to come install some kind of antenna and router in our apartment. They haven't given me an installation appointment yet, and we are never home, so hopefully they give me some notice so I can be there to let the guy in. It would be really nice to have though, as I could work at my leisure in my own place... not to mention do my AJLA work for free.

Speaking of AJLA, that is becoming a real distraction as well. I keep going back and forth about working there. On the one hand, it's easy work that pays $21/hr, with benefits (for $95/mo pretax), and they let me work 20 hrs a week telecommuting. Sounds like the perfect job. I make enough to live comfortably and devote the majority of my time to my own ideas. On the other hand, I just have no drive to actually do the work, and I feel bad being less than productive. It looms constantly in my mind because I know things need to get done, but I'd rather be working with rails. I just don't know whether improving my mental situation is worth throwing away said perfect financial situation. If I didn't work there, I'd have to work somewhere, since I, like most people, need money to eat. But, working a non-programming job has the benefits of allowing me to focus on one project... trying to continually context switch between AJLA and rails is difficult.

On the other hand, it's really only an issue because I have 6 hours of internet a day, and devoting four of them to AJLA is a downer. If I wasn't going to school in the morning, that'd free up a lot of time to devote to both... and if I had internet in my apartment, I'd likewise have more time. So, I'm hoping this lurch is a temporary one that will solve itself when I get the WiMax connection. Of course, when I get back to Kansas, it'd be nice to not have to find a job, and there I won't have school taking up time.

Anyway, that is my brain dump for now. More tomorrow I'm sure. Nos Vemos.

Tres Semanas

So I kinda haven't been blogging. Oops.

I've been in Ronda a little over three weeks now, and am settling into a routine. I wake up at 8, shower and eat a sandwich and yogurt, go to class from 9am to 2pm, eat a big lunch, do household chores, get on the internet from 4ish to 9ish, then eat dinner, do homework, and sleep. It's actually kind of nice. I sleep a solid 9 hours a night but I feel like I have a ton of free time each day. I think it's because I actually wake up semi-earlyish, instead of at 11 or noon like I was in Lawrence.

I have once again been working on the Magic site. I wrote scripts to automate the scraping of several card databases for card info and pictures. I have all the card info loaded now, and am about a quarter of the way through downloading the pictures. I also switched the templating to HAML, instead of ERb... it's much cleaner and faster to write. Only thing that bothers me is there seems to be a lack of flexibility to do some things. Not sure if I'm going to just write helpers for everything or try to modify HAML a bit to do what I want. The problem I am having is conditionally outputting tags. I don't like putting html in the helpers because it seems like that should be in the view templates. However, I am timid about patching HAML myself, because frankly I'm not that good at ruby yet. For now I am avoiding doing any fancy design, because I tend to get bogged down in it (since I'm not a designer per se).

I was thinking last night that when I return to the states, I'm going to try and work from 9am to 2pm so I can maintain this same schedule. I really like it. Op, class time!

Buenas Dias

Hola desde Ronda! Os escribo mas manana... hasta pronto!

Bored

So British Airways threatened to strike the week of my flight to Spain. Since I absolutely needed to be there before the 1st of February, I had to move the flight up to yesterday (Friday) instead of this coming Tuesday. I basically had 72 hours to move my stuff out of the apartment, attempt some semblance of cleaning it, and pack my bags to make my plane. I made it, oh so barely, but I left my parents with a pile of boxes to figure out how to store and Harry with a kitchen to clean. On top of this, I barely got to say goodbye to anyone... so to whomever should read this... goodbye!

I'm now sitting at London Heathrow waiting for my flight to Malaga. It is the last of my three flights, and I'm excited to get there. I reserved a room in a hostel while sitting here on the net, but have no way to print the reservation. Hopefully they will just accept it if I give my name... or turn the laptop on and show them the reservation.

Wireless in airports is not cheap. I suppose that if I spent a significant part of my life travelling, the T-Mobile monthly WiFi plan would make sense (it works at Borders to boot). But, just buying a day at time, it costs like $10. I guess it's better than sitting and doing nothing.

Only downside is that it's early Saturday morning back home, and no one is awake. I was trying to get some work done, but the VPN client doesn't like me so I had to send an email to the Network Admin that probably won't get answered until Monday. Oh well, Stumble will save me!

Hasta luego...

Stargate Movies

Just a quickie... MGM announced two Stargate SG-1 Movies which will star the entire cast from the SG-1 TV Series. Go MGM! Hopefully this avenue will be a success for them and Sci-fi gets what it deserves for the hard bargaining.

Why Podcasting Is Retarded

Oh my god, did I just say that out loud?

Yep.

Thankfully I'm not recording myself, or I could make you listen to me rant about how podcasting is retarded.

I simply cannot understand the reason behind podcasting something. It makes sense for a music show, where someone plays samples (or entire songs) in order to discuss them with a band or the audience. You know, like they do on radio. What I don't understand is why interviews and press conferences are suddenly being podcast left and right. There is a reason that radio was largely replaced by television and the internet. Listening to people talk is slow. It is much faster to see something or read something than to listen to it.

I won't even argue the video point. I'll just let that stand by trotting out the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words.

When it comes to text, you can skim. You can look for subheadings of interest. You can read a summary. Better yet, you can hit Ctrl-F on your keyboard and search the damn thing. With an audio podcast, you are forced to resort to a tactic that should have stayed dead with the cassette tape... skipping back and forth, listening for a few seconds at a time, trying to find what you want to hear.

Nevermind the fact that the term 'podcast' annoys me for the very fact that it's a trendy buzzword for 'streaming audio'. I will get over that eventually.

So what set me off? I actually came across a site today that only offered the article in podcast form. No transcription. To top it off, the podcast was almost an hour long. You only need to go to college to find out how little can be said in an hour. Speech is by nature slow because we have all these built in error-correction mechanisms (facial expressions, tone of voice, pauses for effect, etc.). Listening to an interview via an audio-only medium is even worse. We lose all the visual cues and are left with lots of pauses and enunciated speech. In short, the conversation is slow.

Humans are visual creatures. While podcasts may be suited to sounds that are hard to describe in words (music), they are simply a waste of time for things that are easy to describe in words (details about the release date of a new product, or an interview with some designer about his favorite tools). Please, stop chasing buzzword compliance with your website. Make it easy for your visitors to locate what they are looking for. Your podcasts and your flash intros may look really cool, but they just turn the average (highly impatient) internet user away.

Glorious Interweb

Apparently IU doesn't care nearly so much about Linux machines getting on their network. I guess that makes sense, as they are generally less prone to viruses and the like. So as long as I use my laptop in gentoo, I can enjoy the hugely fast connection. (I'm pulling down stuff from portage at 10mbps).

I'm nearly through season 1 of Rome. What a brilliant show. Season 2 starts tonight, but I hate waiting in between episodes, so I might just wait until this summer to watch it. Guess it depends on how hardcore the end of season 1 cliffhanger turns out to be.

I have been slowly updating packages on my laptop the last couple days. Went ahead and sprang for MySQL 5 and got the user accounts all worked out finally. Now I'm waiting for konsole to compile and update.

Anyway, not much has been accomplished due to Rome. At least with this big pipe I can update my system quickly. I guess that is something productive.

Sweet Victory

Woke up at 5:45 again!

Take that!

Now to find something to do until Kathy wakes up...

Early Riser

So this morning I woke up at a quarter to six... and actually stayed up. I hope to do this tomorrow and make it two days in a row.

In Indianapolis tonight. Jack has a nice apartment. Too bad the IU tech people are a bit nazi-ish and I can't get on the net with my computer. Anyway, I need to sleep now, but I plan to write more tomorrow. I just wanted to brag about waking up early. Wish me luck in the morning.