Hey, you know what I really hate?

Moved my baking to a NEW BLOG

2006-04-24T16:11:00.000-03:00

Yes, Ritchie has turned me into a one blog per idea kind of person.

Or at least, that's what I'm going to try.

So, my baking (and perhaps other cooking) will now be on a seperate blog:

http://bakinginbinary.blogspot.com.

This weekend we attempted to create Egg Tarts, trying to bring a bit of Vancouver to Halifax.

No bagels this week, sorry

2006-03-25T23:01:00.000-04:00

I'm heading to Vancouver from the 27th to the 3rd!

Anyone want to hang out, email me...

Perhaps I'll make those bagels anyways!

-greg

Baking In Binary: Poppyseed Challah

2006-03-21T18:49:00.000-04:00

Welcome to my new semi-regular column-- Baking In Binary, because I usually do all this baking as a good way to take a break from coding. And since my coding is done about 10 feet from the kitchen, I can really get into some good stuff.
Like a challah! Here's today's, fresh out of the oven:

One nicely done Challah!

After some rising it started like this:

Then turned into this after some squishing:

The after some rolling it turned into this:

And just before the oven it looked like this:

Voila. It's tasty. And if you want the recipe, you're going to have to *gasp* contact me directly to get it. :) Although I can't guarantee any results.

Odds, ends, and promises

2006-03-20T23:32:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I really hate people who don't update their blogs too.

Ok, as you may have seen on the other blog page, I got into grad school. Woot. Dalhousie here I come.

And I'm baking a lot, so my next entry (tomorrow) will highlight whatever I decide to make. Probably involving poppy seeds. So tasy, so black, so heroin producing--- I mean, Ukranian.

I would blog about my pita breads, but I ate them. Twice. I promise to blog about batch #3.

-greg

Sightseeing with Google Maps

2005-11-25T12:30:00.000-04:00

Yes it's a blogtastic day today... just found this link and I'd like to share:

Sightseeing with Google Satellite Maps

A web site of interesting links to interesting places on Google Maps.

Today's funny links

2005-11-25T09:59:00.000-04:00

This has been making it's way around the 'net:

Webmasters who didn't think when getting their domain names.

A page about a dude who'll eat anything, and blog about it:

Steve Don't Eat It!

These links were courtesy of my new favourite news machine: reddit.com

Why I Love Lisp

2005-11-25T09:52:00.000-04:00

You can make your own language!

http://i-need-closures.blogspot.com/2005/11/or.html

Risk on Google Maps

2005-11-08T08:54:00.000-04:00

Need I say more?

http://www.ashotoforangejuice.com/gmrisk.html

Last day!

2005-11-04T10:02:00.000-04:00

Today is my last day at Xwave!

I'm sad and excited at the same time... I'm now going to be working for Intrawest again, albeit from 6000km away.

I'm looking forward to some real challenges and getting away from trivial bug fixing!

Money For Music

2005-11-03T16:22:00.000-04:00

Today I donated $30 a month to Radio Paradise.

After over a year of awesome listen, I figure it's about time.

I hate booleans

2005-11-02T09:25:00.000-04:00

Especially those pesky "true, false, maybe" kind. :)

Here's a really interesting article about why booleans can be evil, and how checkboxes in UIs are especially so. Definately makes me want to replace any checkbox I see with a radio button. :)

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000430.html

PS. Sorry about the blogstorm today!

Donkeyfaces??

2005-11-02T08:59:00.000-04:00

Well, a synonym maybe... :)

http://www.secretgeek.net/passfaces.asp

Portals and Browsers

2005-11-02T07:50:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I'm just reading Slashdot comments about the new Windows Live launch. What's Windows Live? Apparently it's supposed to be an online version of Office and whatnot. If you go to the site, you're presented with what is, essentially, a portal. It's still in beta, but the idea I think is to make it your one stop web homepage.

Now this all seems familiar somehow, and Slashdot commentators where talking about the bygone days of Excite and all the other web portals-- how they had their weather, stocks, newsfeeds, etc all configured on it and made it their homepage.

When I look at my browser right now, I see weather thanks to ForecastFox, news feeds courtesy of Sage, and even web email notifications with the Yahoo Mail Notifier. So I guess I should call up some VCs and IPO my browser configuration? I think Microsoft may have once again misjudged where things are headed. We don't need web pages to aggregate our information if the tools are already in our hands.

PS. And I didn't even get started about Office! Who is going to want to pay a subscription to use Word? Even Google has balked at that and is propping up OpenOffice instead.

Visual Studio Rots the Mind

2005-10-25T09:14:00.000-03:00

Ok, this one's for the boys at 900 W Hastings:

http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html

Charles Petzold in one of his more enlightened moments...

Teach your kids what real life is like!

2005-10-17T09:54:00.000-03:00

Railroad Slums

Playmobile Security Checkpoint

Man, what has this world come to. These are almost as scary as the junior executive kit.

Lisp Rampage

2005-10-07T09:24:00.000-03:00

From the c2 Wiki on Why Lisp Users are Arrogant:

Lisp is like TheRedPill -- after you take it, you think that maybe you should start killing other programmers who don't know any better and seem opposed to taking TheRedPill anyway. This wears off eventually, and you focus on building your own little submarines that fly. Occasionally popping into the net and fighting mythological creatures like trolls, or offering strangers odd red candies.

Heh. Time to don the trenchcoat and start firing. :) I've been reading Practical Common Lisp and damn I forgot how cool Lisp is. so... damn... cool...
Lock and load!

Did you know?

2005-10-05T14:57:00.000-03:00

SQL Server 2005 has built in support for running C#. Did you know that PostgreSQL has had the ability to run almost any language for quite some time? Or that there's even support for Ruby!

Ricky Gervais is writing and starring in an upcoming Simpsons episode?

Someone thinks Paul Graham is a blowhard?

Eric S Raymond has written about sex tips for geeks?

*shudder*

Web + Non-Web Apps

2005-10-04T16:03:00.000-03:00

Okay, sometimes I think he's a tool and other times I think he's brilliant. Actually, I think as long as he isn't being a fanboy about the company he works for then I can stomach it.

I think he has a really valid point about where web apps are good and when they aren't. Of course, it depends on what kind of user you are. I use a word processor (read: fully fledged formatting tool) about 3 times a year (usually to pound out some sort of cover letter), so perhaps a web app version would suit me just fine. If I were a writer, however, I think I'd like one that has a slightly better and responsive UI.

For those building, I dunno, let's say call centre apps. Used all day? Or only occasionally? Hrm?

:)

Flagpole sitta'

2005-09-30T11:53:00.000-03:00

Harvey Danger has released their new album for free on the net!

http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/

When you're this cool, they call you Doctor

2005-09-27T21:29:00.000-03:00

DrScheme that is... Why?
- it's an IDE
- it's a language
- you can use it to write a compiler (AspectC for example!)
- and it even has it's own web server

So maybe Paul Graham doesn't love Scheme as much as Common Lisp, but I do. :)
http://www.drscheme.org/

Mr. Heath in Halifax????

2005-09-23T21:42:00.000-03:00

At least, it really LOOKS like Eric...

My bike route

2005-09-23T21:26:00.000-03:00

Well, here it is: my bike route. The yellow one is my route to work and the just white dotted one is my route back. It's designed to keep me on the side streets on the uphills and on the more direct busier streets on the downhills (record so far, 66 km/h on Dutch Village Road).

Ah... americans...

2005-09-23T15:45:00.000-03:00

http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html

A new name!

2005-09-21T10:13:00.000-03:00

Okay, so at Tudor's suggestion I have renamed my blog... The "The adjective plural-noun" formula apparently no good.

So instead how about my most frequently uttered phrase at work?

Today what I really hate is VISUAL SOURCE SAFE. ARGH! What a huge pile of steaming poo. And what's worse, the people who use it are rarely prepared to change to something else until way way too late (ie. the database corrupts, or as is the case at work right now-- it's effing useless over a WAN).
Of course, by that time their processes are totally entrenched in the SourceSafe model and you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who understands the concept of branching or merging. And OMG what's this about "concurrent" working models?

Anyways, the main problem we're seeing is a combination of stupidities where we _need_ to use Visual Studio to pull down the project out of SourceSafe since it has web projects within it that it needs to create. And part way through it just freaks out and stops downloading from the repository. And apparently there is no way to fix this, and the only way we can get the code is to go locally to Fredericton and get it there. VSS is NOT designed to work over a WAN, as it basically treats the repository as a local filesystem (it just happens to be on a network share, I guess it assumes) and opens files left, right and center. Pretty inefficient.

However, I _am_ able to get all the code when I just use the standalone client. But I can't open up the solution because it contains web projects, and for some reason it _has_ to go to sourcesafe to get those. ARGH! This is why people should NOT program via Wizards.

So, long story short, I am investigating two options. One is a client/server app called SourceOffSite that essentially is a proxy for VSS. The server runs on the LAN, and is a VSS client. The client runs on your machine (integrates with VisualStudio) and basically is a proper client/server protocol that is clean and mean. The messy shit happens over on the server side which should be local to the VSS repository.

The other option is to change the Web projects into DLL projects so that they can be opened without any freaky Visual Studio integration to the IIS web server. It means you have an extra step of set up initially (import the Web applications into the IIS configuration metabase) but damn, at least you can use a standalone client!

So, I promise I won't talk always about what I hate. But it'll most likely come up frequently. :)

Hope y'all are doing well out there on other coast. I miss all you guys!

Quick Update

2005-09-04T09:12:00.000-03:00

We're in Halifax, mostly moved in, and just got the internet a couple of days ago. For those of you desperately wanting access to certain web galleries--- smolyn.org is back in action.

I managed to get a job already, in fact enroute. Come the 6th I'll be working at xwave.ca.

More to follow on the main blog once we get things organized!

An Open Letter to Web Apps

2005-08-09T14:57:00.000-03:00

Dear Web Apps,

why are you so hard to program? What went wrong? When I first met you, you were naught but templating utilities and form-based data entry. I used you to sign up for mailing lists and maybe order a book.

Look, it's not that I don't find you useful. You're awesome. I mean, reading and composing email from anywhere is great. So is keeping my life organized on my web calendar. But let's face it: for anything complex I still resort to good old windowing-system GUIs. They spent decades perfecting the UI system for Windows, and with Qt and GTK ported to almost all systems I have a huge choice of frameworks. Am I going to start building spreadsheets with ExcelOnline? Or programming in VisualStudioDotInternet?

Ok ok, so maybe I'm a hypocrite-- this very letter is being written with a web app. Maybe I'm frustrated because you're just so difficult to build. Trying to pipe form data through HTTP is one thing, but trying to turn that into a fully fledged event-based GUI programming model is like trying to turn your garden hose into a telephone. Microsoft tells us this is what we want, and gives us a half baked component based model to do it in. Sure it's pretty, but with having to send every button click back to the server pretty much kills the user experience. And god forbid you want to use the *gasp* Back button! The Java world may be better, but it's like getting a blind tastebud-missing person to pick a flavour for you at La Casa Gelato-- there's a good chance you're getting durian. Some frameworks are awesome, some are awful, and many are just too plain cumbersome (why oh why so much XML configuration!!).

Some pundits say component-based frameworks (ASP.NET, Java Server Faces, Tapestry) are the future. But how can you put event-based components over HTTP? Sure, it's technically feasible, but in a way it contravenes the first law of distributed objects--DON'T. We learned with CORBA and RMI, you don't want to make many small requests through a network, so why would we do the same over web pages? A form post was meant as a large grained request, and yet we're abandoning that to send "OnMouseMove" events. Isn't that a step backwards?

Others have come forward and said AJAX is the true solution. Ok, so in ways it seems to solve the fine-grained request problem. But now we're splitting code all over the place... The view of our nice clean MVC model is now partly in Javascript and partly in whatever framework we wrote and if you're used to working with crappy code, probably partly in the database. :) So instead should we write our entire UI in Javascript (it worked for Google)? That would force us to depend on browser implementations even more and leaves us with yet another language to deal with.

So, Web App, my issue is not with the functionality you provide, but mostly with the technology on which you're built. You've made me spend far too much time programming needless plumbing code that should be taken care of automatically. And too much time writing XML configurations that are basically duplicates of what I just typed in code. And too much time thinking about how a component's post-back will affect the session state.

Why can't we just use you to buy books and leave complex user interfaces to technologies designed for it?

Sincerely,
greg.

First post!

2005-08-04T01:50:00.000-03:00

Ok, so please excuse the template... I'm in the middle of moving and I haven't had time to build anything personal. Don't worry, it'll get there.

And why am I not hosting this on my own server? Well, keeping the gallery up and running is enough for me, not to mention the frequent crashing I probably cause when playing around with Rails or Tomcat.

Anyways, very importantly:
NEED JOB IN HALIFAX

There... I've said it. I've got a few leads, but anyone with any info please let me know.