Hi I am Alex

I have been tweeting a lot lately at http://twitter.com/apretz . I think it will probably begin to replace this LJ, as I rarely make LJ posts more than three lines anyway. Actually I had been posting pretty infrequently long before I got on twitter.

I spent some time crawling around http://flurnl.alex.turnlav.net/fromlj today (anything to avoid the midterm at 2 pm tomorrow), and realized that having my own website/blog was always a strong motivator to post interesting things I found. Looking back, I'm going hey, this was pretty cool! Stuff like this makes me want to start more actively geek blogging again.

When I never finished Flurnl (the name's a tongue-in-cheek web 2.0 conflagration of flickr and livejournal meant to entertain nobody but me), the ruby on rails tumblelog I started programming in Spring 2006 (freshman year) I got discouraged. I never even wrote about the damn thing, every entry about it is at my flurnl livejournal tag; there's not much. Repeated problems dealing with dreamhost hosting and my lack of knowledge about how to not trash my DB resulted in my spending less and less time with it. I haven't updated from Flickr since November 2008 (manually) and it hasn't updated from livejournal since March 2008 (which only happens automatically).

Summer projects:

• Fix up flurnl and get it working, now that I know RoR so much better
• Fix up Yarg and really get it polished. Major bonus points for writing a tutorial in trac on how to use it with a dreamhost backup account
• Either abandon link toss or make it work more gracefully
• Write some well thought out blog entries on issues I've run into while working on these projects. Topics can include:
  • Synchronizing entries between my database and livejournal
  • Using imagemagick and flickr's metadata to pull information out of pictures
  • Security issues running privileged tasks in Cocoa
  • Writing a cocoa application that only sometimes should have a GUI
  • The wonders and pains of rsync
  • Interesting Javascript and RoR things I've learned along the way

p.s. http://flurnl.alex.turnlav.net/9-2007/1189197720
p.p.s. http://flurnl.alex.turnlav.net/11-2005/facebook-goes-open-source/

dear ruby on rails:
stop utterly failing to work on my shared host running apache with no error messages at all when you work fine on both webbrick remotely and apache locally. this is why i say i would never use you in something important.

Also, why didn't anyone ever tell me about this? Goddamn.

i'm finally getting around to trying to fix my shit.

You know you´re in Europe when you´re surrounded by thousands of well dressed people dancing madly and watching two people in robot costumes at the top of a giant pyramid who may or may not be participating in playing über groovy dance techno with flashing lights, LEDs, and projection screens behind and on the pyramid. (photo stolen from flickr, I take no credit)

In other news, my experimental website seems to have exploded so I´ve suspended its updating. Also, angle brackets and straight quotes are hard to type on spanish keyboards.

http://alex.turnlav.net/blog/ also known as http://flurnl.alex.turnlav.net/ has received a minor overhaul. Most of the changes are cosmetic but it should be generally a bit nicer.
Todo this weekend: create a script to dump out more than a years worth of links from http://del.icio.us/Wetzel/mylinks into my lj and website while I'm in spain.

When writing software that involves a loop and can operate on a database, make sure you have stopped the loop from running before trying to reverse its effects in your database.

Wait and see.

Completely object oriented + functional = crazy weird calls on the return value of iterators. I fear it's utterly illegible though.

  def has_category?(category)
    not categories.select do |cat| 
      cat.cat_name == category
    end.empty?
  end

It would look totally normal in lisp though (pseudocode)

(define (has-category? category categories)
	(not (empty? (filter (lambda (cat)
			             (equal? cat category))
		              categories))))

Although the ruby version would be faster to just return true when the comparison equals true:

  def has_category?(category)
   categories.each do |cat| 
      return true if cat.cat_name == category
    end
    return false
  end

Faster and more legible, but not very functional. Bah.

So as maybe two of you might know, I log a lot of websites I find on my del.icio.us. For actually quite a while I have been marking the links I find that other people would like, and that I want to share, with a specific tag. Now that I'm hooking my lj up proper to my website, I'm going to link my del.icio.us up to my livejournal. This is where you come in.

Links on del.icio.us consist of a link of text, a very short description, and a list of tags which describe the link. On average I post about two or three links a day. There are two ways I could link my livejournal up to delicious. Either each link gets its own entry, which would be a tiny two line entry once or twice a day with the tags from del.icio.us turned into lj tags, or once a week I generate a big post with all my links from the previous week in it.

Poll #725298 Links Flooding Your Friends Page
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

One Post Per Link or One Big Weekly Post

so a while back I wrote a post about how i wanted to write two things, a quicksilver plugin for making posts to livejournal, and a ruby blogging thingerizer.

for Item 1, someone did it for me! You can download it here, and read about it here and here (i made a little post in the second thread on how to get it to work with livejournal, if you're interested). Sweet.

for Item 2: It's coming together very well. Prototype with sometimes funkiness and not really any content can be found here. It's already pulling photos from flickr, resizing them, saving them, and making a post on itself and my livejournal with the photo. Also grabs photo exposure information automatically. Still got some kinks to roll out, but it's definitely getting there. :)

maybe I'll write an explanation if I feel like it

irb(main):004:0> try = LiveJournal::Request::PostEvent.new(me, "this is a test", "maybe I'll write an explanation if I feel like it", Time.now, "grateful dead - american beauty", "tech, awesome, ruby")
irb(main):005:0> id = try.run
=> "916"

things i want to make:

1. a quicksilver plugin (prolly using PyObjC) to post to LJ (using xml-rpc)
-- ideally in quicksilver one would make an LJ post by typing text straight into quicksilver, hitting tab, typing "lj" and pressing enter. title of entry on first line, rest of entry on the rest (or just use a title: tag?) so control+space, dot, type title, option + enter, type entry, tab, lj, enter. speedy.

2. a stripped down ruby blogging platform with multiple types of posts -- photo, scrap, long entry
accepts LJ post format, blogger post format, etc. so LJ clients still work (see where i'm going here?)
different types of entries look different -- templates, customizable
good picture handling with flickr syncage
intelligent lj syncage -- when synced to LJ, link to LJ for comments
redcloth/textile
uses same mysql layout as wordpress -- drop in replacement. no hassle.
forget pings/trackbacks/etc.

also interested in, more in the future, porting the gui of psyncx to work with proper rsync. but i don't know enough to do that yet.