Hot Dorkage

Here is my latest geeky plarn project. It’s been a long time in the making. I’m very proud of how long it took me to get enough bags to do this project, and I have to say I didn’t even get all of them myself. I fashioned the bag as a backpack rather than a shopping bag so I could operate it hands-free. I got the straps too long, so I just tucked up the extra strappage. I can always undo that if a larger person ever uses the backpack. My try at doing the PHP elephant was a limited by the resolution of this large needle knitting. Also he had to be vertical, and he had to be across the short way so that he would have the right orientation and so that he wouldn’t be covered up when the top is closed. I have the pattern I created for the elephant if anyone really wants it. You could probably improve it with a slightly finer resolution–I only had 30 st of width to work with.

I have always had reservations about locking myself into a strict Object Relational Model scheme for the same reason I have been allergic to Windows. I was never able to articulate exactly why but my friend Juozas Kaziukėnas has brought it into sharp focus in his latest blog post on Doctrine.

Here’s the deal: I played with and studied Doctrine and I found it to be the most flexible and powerful of all the data mapping systems I have seen. Plus, Zend Framework is moving to it, so eventually I think it will be completely integrated with Zend Framework whether I like it or not. I had some concern due to alarming memory usage statistics reported when using Doctrine. But it seems that (as is often the case) the bad performance is the result of programmer ignorance, and not inefficiency of Doctrine itself.
Continue Reading…

They couldn’t be too long in coming! The best thing about Twitter is its API. I was told by someone in the know that 90% of Twitter’s traffic comes through its API, not through people directly surfing it. Anyway, the new lists are GREAT. They should have been there from the get-go but oh well. Here is Twitter’s widget to track lists. This is my geek list. Since I don’t know any cool automated listing management tools yet, these geeks I put on here by hand. If you want to be on it and you’re not, just ask.

Here’s a little Twitter app for you while we all wait for some serious list apps: This one is called twibbon, and what it does is overlays a little icon over your twitter avatar to show you support something. First I placed the zend framework one, then I created my own for toonlet, of which I am a rabid fan. Then it tweets it and invites all your followers to place one as well. The little widget keeps track of how many supporters it has. You can also do Twibbons for facebook.

I just clipped each individual frame of one of my toonlets and put them in an open office presentation. Then I fired up Berio and ran the slideshow fullscreen while I read the lines. Then I imported the whole thing into IMovie, clipped the beginning and end, compressed it a little and uploaded it to Youtube.

Paul Fenwick graced us with the following presentation at Barcamp Melbourne. Armed with only the documentation from Facebook’s API he proceded to submit queries to their query engine and it is amazing what he dug up on the volunteers who agreed to let him “hack” their accounts.

Bottom line: Facebook apps are scary because they open your info veins via the back door of applications shared with your “friends.” I don’t know about you but I have quite a few non savvy friends who are nowhere as paranoid as I am. I like using Facebook to keep up to date with my friends, but I don’t want people dredging up stuff on me via my friends’ lack of savvy. So your only hope is to disable *ALL* facebook apps.

I gave a 3 minute “Lightening Talk” on toonlet.com a couple weeks ago at the end of a LUV meeting. I wasn’t sure it was appropriate, because I think of these folks as really brilliant high-powered geek gurus, and toonlet is just a web app that really dumb people can use. It doesn’t even have an API. ( If it did I would have been all over that months ago.) Anyway geeks probably wouldn’t be interested in the technical end of it cuz it’s all point ‘n’click. However, I figured it’s only three minutes. Turns out that, like everyone, geeks like to have fun especially when it involves computers in some way, so they were happy to be made aware of toonlet.com.

Several of the same people were attending bar camp melbourne a few weeks later. I figured I’d just give another lightening talk but a couple of people asked me to give a full 30 minute demo of toonlet.com, so I hastily threw this together at the last minute. Unfortunately bandwidth was a bit of an issue. There were at least 30 laptops noshing on that network with the admonishment to “not be evil” but even with 30 laptops just idling it is not going to be fast for anyone. So I wasn’t able to demo the character creator.

We were lucky to have Avi Miller streaming video for us so that folks could attend bar camp remotely, and eventually everything got archived at Blip.tv

direct link:

You don’t have to look at my talking head, anyway. Any defects in the voice quality can be sourced to me organically, as I was suffering from a fierce head cold.

This blog is a thinking person’s blog. Yeah, I know, that really limits the readership, but so be it. Akismet is very good at getting the obvious spam comments. It’s even started flagging comments where the robot just picks a tag out of the blog’s tags and autocomments a slightly more targeted statement generally related to the keyword, but not necessarily dialoging with the subject of the post. I guess the robots don’t check whether it’s a do-follow or not, they just post their crap everywhere that’s not blocked by a captcha in the hopes of hitting the do-follows. Then there are the actual human-submitted ones that are, in some cases, more inane than the robot-submitted ones.

Don’t post inane comments to this blog! I’ve had people contact me and ask why their comment didn’t get posted. It’s because it showed no sign of READING COMPREHENSION of the article. If you didn’t understand the article, ask for clarification on what you didn’t understand. Don’t say “I didn’t understand this article.” Say, “How did you get from A to B?” or I don’t understand why you said “bla bla bla.” Just blasting some tangentially related statement will no longer cut it. I’m looking for added value or dialog. If your comment does neither, it will be deleted, robot or not. I do not want to bore my readers with large amounts of useless and boring comments but PLEASE don’t make me do a CAPTCHA for comments.

Ticket Mastery by taterprint

Any black humor about the business of ticket reselling resonates with me. I found this one today (this is not one of mine but I wish it was!) and it’s so true. There are so many sleazy backroom deals and stuff that goes on related to ticket sales that the honest business (like the one I used to own) doesn’t stand a chance. One wonders how all the tickets get “sold out” in one minute and how it is that often “real” people are unable to buy them even if they are poised at their little computers the instant the sale goes live. I have thought about organizing a nationwide boycott with the slogan reminiscent of Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no!” My slogan would be “Just don’t go!” Wouldn’t it be great to bring these sleazebags to their knees?

For the next 8 days this dork will be taking a hiatus from blogging. I will answer your comments when the hiatus is over.