::::: : the wood : davidrobins.net

My name is David Robins: Christian, lead developer (resume), writer, photographer, runner, libertarian (voluntaryist), and student.

This is also my son David Geoffrey Robins' site.

Octopus Multi-User Chat

Technical ·Thursday March 26, 2009 @ 21:56 EDT (link)

Octopus Chat, my first Facebook (web) application, can communicate between users. It's not very polished—it uses user IDs instead of user names, for example, doesn't style the chat names, and doesn't do emoticons like standard 1:1 chat, but those are easy to fix. No link, because it's still private. Also, my server isn't equipped to handle the demand for a decent multi-user Facebook chat application—and the same goes for the other Facebook multi-user chat applications (either that, or they're so bad nobody wants to use them).

My test users and I tried it out, and Honey tested it, then our friend Chelsea tested it and it didn't work. Why? Internet Explorer. Argh. Same problem when I tried it on Internet Explorer locally, so at least it's reproducible, but debugging tools for IE are really poor (or really expensive). Seems I'll need to install Visual Studio to be able to debug and fix things. It may not be worth the effort… I learned how to build a Facebook (web) application (I'd already built a proof of concept desktop application), and do inter-user chat (although I'd like to find out if there's any way for Postgres to generate events on row insertions etc.; I suspect I'll probably need to use a stored procedure). (Update: Postgres can do events, using LISTEN and NOTIFY, although I may want to use a stored procedure to generate the events.)

Blog mocking parents obsessed with their kids discovered via LJ childfree: STFU, parents.

Peter F. Conrey Fine Photography

Photography ·Wednesday March 25, 2009 @ 22:07 EDT (link)

A guy I used to work with at Hilton in Memphis (and is still there), Peter Conrey, has started a photography business: Peter F. Conrey Fine Photography. He has some great shots on the site, which is very polished; take a look. The blog has some nice pictures of the snow in Memphis.

Internally, he's using the jQuery Javascript library, which seems to be the PHP of Javascript libraries (it's not as clean and consistent as Prototype, and they made some bad decisions early on that they have to live with now for backwards compatibility; as a Word developer, I can empathize). I suggested he provide width and height attributes for his thumbnails to make pages lay out faster.

At time of posting this (early April), his site is down; I hope it's only a temporary issue. The hosting company seems to be TW Telecom Holdings, Inc., headquartered in Littleton, CO, but with a Memphis presence.

I came across a SOAP programming article by Peter while trying to find out what was up with his domain. It's not bad, but why mess with the hulking horror that is SOAP when better alternatives like YAML, JSON, or XMLRPC exist?

Outlook: miserable

Technical ·Wednesday March 25, 2009 @ 01:55 EDT (link)

Outlook, as well as hanging if you try to do something unexpected, like, say, read an email, or switch folders (one click, blue title bar; two clicks adds the "(Not Responding)" notification), also does something else really stupid: when you paste in pictures, it sends them as bitmaps. So, for example, 4 ~200k JPEGs (800k) take 8M (10x). Stupid, stupid, stupid, Outlook.

Oh, and it appears as if fetching the images from the Microsoft shoot really is killing my server (bandwidth-wise only; CPU usage is extremely low). So much for whatever bandwidth that Broadstripe promised. Back now, though; demand must have peaked. The static server registered a fair number of network timeouts.

Facebook test accounts

News, Technical ·Tuesday March 24, 2009 @ 22:28 EDT (link)

Chelsea is here (we picked her up at around 1400); had dinner around 1930.

I created two Facebook test accounts, Joseph and Mary Tester (and later Robert Daniel Tester). There are a couple things that Facebook should fix with test accounts (although it's good that they at least have a way to create sanctioned test accounts):

Books finished: Liberal Fascism.

Exam results; traffic tickets

News, School ·Monday March 23, 2009 @ 23:01 EDT (link)

I got a 4.0 in my class. I was surprised; I didn't do as well on the exam as I'd hoped; but that makes two for two now, with terrific pressure to keep it up in my next class. had her last exam today, which she thought went well.

Every traffic ticket should be fought; there aren't any morally valid traffic tickets—there are already laws for results of bad driving (property damage, assault, battery, etc.). It is the moral duty of Americans to oppose any traffic ticket: make the state fight for its fascist revenue stream. We may thus symbolically resist the police that issue the tickets: "following orders" wasn't a valid defense for the Nazis, and it isn't one for the thieving opportunist minions of a repressive state, either.

Proto-Menu and Firebug

Technical ·Sunday March 22, 2009 @ 05:23 EDT (link)

Installed Proto-Menu context menu for photo system. Ran into Firebug issue where it wouldn't display styles; it said I needed DOM Inspector, which was already installed—but didn't work directly either (nothing showed in the node list pane, even after entering sites; most menu items did nothing). Some advice from the review page helped: I uninstalled, removed C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\components\inspector* and re-installed, and it worked. With that, I was able to track down the cause of the extra space on the Proto.Meny context menu: it was just default margin (highlighted in yellow in Firebug) and padding space (dark blue) for the <ul> tag; I set it to zero and set list-style: none and all's well. And it's high time to go to sleep.

Vancouver gun murder rate worse than Los Angeles

News ·Friday March 20, 2009 @ 21:37 EDT (link)

Canada vs. U.S. gun violence, and the scams they pull to make Canada look better: delusional math—how they try to fool the masses in Canada.

From a Vancouver, BC news site. I'm hoping either it's a typo, some kind of funky metric math or I am in Friday brain mode and missed something.

Apparently, Los Angeles (metro population of 17.75 million), with 54 gun-related homicides "easily dwarfs" the Vancouver area (2.37 million) murder rate with 12 gun-related homicides.
L.A. gun murder rate = 54 ÷ 17,750,000 = 0.000003
Vancover murder rate = 12 ÷ 2,370,000 = 0.000005
<Hmmm, carry the 1, face left, bow to the Brady statue, and perform a self-lobotomy….>
Vancouver rate ÷ LA rate = 1.66. Vancouver, BC's gun related murder rate is 1.6 times that of Los Angeles. Abbotsford, the small town (now ~159,000) I grew up in, has had 4 or 5.4/159,000 = 0.000025 = 8.27 times that of L.A.

—From "ex-Canadian" GD, CLAMS.

.22s get no respect

News ·Friday March 20, 2009 @ 21:28 EDT (link)

From a discussion about .22-caliber firearms in the MS gun list:

ME*: Do not buy one of these with plans to shoot at a bad guy with it. Unless you are doing a muzzle-against-their-head assassination shot (which probably doesn't hold up in court as "self defense"), a .22 will not hurt or stop whoever you fire at.

BT: I dunno Matt. If someone shot me with a .22, and I found out about it, I would be really angry! :)

* Initials "M.E.", not "me."

Programming languages exam

News ·Thursday March 19, 2009 @ 21:38 EDT (link)

Programming languages (CSE P 505) exam this evening (1830-2020). Two hours goes by really fast when you're having fun. It wasn't bad. I think on four or five of the seven questions I can be pretty sure of full marks; I had some formatting/formulaic issues with the derivation question, so it depends on how forgiving the markers are. I also may have missed one or two on the odd question about the Java null-dereference type checker that only accepts 47 programs. I have a 100.2% in the the five assignments in class; the final is weighted like two assignments, and it's out of 100 points, so each mark on the final is 2/700 of my grade, which will be (501 + 2 * points) / 700.

I have a total of 300 facebook friends today (JB from work was #300).

Puget Sound Conservative Underground meetups

News, Political ·Wednesday March 18, 2009 @ 22:55 EDT (link)

We joined a couple "We Surround Them" meetups (Seattle and Edmonds) and the Puget Sound Conservative Underground meetup. Get-togethers and protests and book clubs are all being planned. Victoria is organizing one book club, Dan another. We'll be attending Dan's for various reasons:
  1. he's in Woodinville, Victoria's in Seattle, so his will be closer (eastside);
  2. Victoria's approach is more of a lecture series, with the goal of "teaching people about the Constitution"; Dan's approach is more of a discussion (we're conservatives, we can read and think for ourselves), and
  3. Victoria's are during the day, Dan's are evenings and weekends (conservatives work during the day, remember).
Unless Victoria's a professor of constitutional law, I don't think she can teach any well-read conservatives about the Constitution: we'll learn and discuss together. If you want a cadre of followers, count me out. On the other hand, less well-read people can use the refresher that a DVD series and a lecture format will provide, judging from the vote in November and the news.

Workaholics today; fixed a decent number of bugs. Co-authoring has been working fairly well for the past week or so.

Still studying for CSE P 505 exam Thursday.

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