Natural Bridge & Red River Gorge
November 30th, 2009
Almost, But Not Quite, Entirely Unlinke Tea
October 15th, 2009
The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser is a product of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. The Guide has this to say on the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser:
When the ‘Drink’ button is pressed it makes an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism, and then sends tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centres of the subject’s brain to see what is likely to be well received. However, no-one knows quite why it does this because it then invariably delivers a cupful of liquid that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
And that is how I feel about Pappy’s.
Chatting with a bot
September 29th, 2009
- Bot:
- You aren’t nothing to me, I actually respect you a lot.
- Me:
- excellent, I like cats too
- Bot:
- I’m trying to learn spanish.
- Me:
- Spanish is a silly language. Learn Japanese instead.
- Bot:
- Spanish.
- Me:
- Japanese.
- Bot:
- Spanish.
- Me:
- Japanese.
- Bot:
- Spanish.
- Me:
- Japanese. Japanese. Japanese. Japanese.
- Bot:
- Spanish.
- Me:
- nihongo
- Bot:
- Nihongo uno quapa?
- Me:
- iie. nihongo hanashite kudasai
- Bot:
- Boku mo Nihongo wo hanashimasu. Tanoshii to omoimasu.
- Me:
- hai. watashi ha nihongo wo manabu desu.
- Bot:
- Desu.
- Me:
- DESU!
- Bot:
- Desu?
- Me:
- DESU GA HITSUYOU!
- Bot:
- Desu desu desu.
- Note:
- This bot is the Pidgin Jabberwacky autoresponder. http://bluesuncorp.co.uk/article/pidgin-autoresponder-using-jabberwacky
Boulder Photos
September 28th, 2009
I finally uploaded the pictures of my Boulder trip. Enjoy. [link]
iPhone Push and My First App
August 13th, 2009
I’m working on my first (useful) iPhone app. It’s a push mechanism for Twitter updates and functions similarly to the Polar Bear Farm Tweet Push updater app ($0.99/30 days). Their app pushes all friend updates, which is quite a bit too much. Instead, mine is set to only push those tweets with users marked for notifications. That’s an option not available in any of the push notification Twitter apps that I’ve seen so far. This is to save on the outrageous SMS costs on which I still refuse to subscribe to any more than the base plan on. Twitter can eat that like candy if I want alerts. I may opt to allow ad-hoc distribution to friends’ iPhones, we’ll see. Until then, my server’s hard drive seems to have crashed so service quality is a bit low!
As far as thoughts about my experience with developing the app, I followed a recipe that I had seen in an article on Ars Technica before the 3.0 SDK was public. Overall it was very easy to write the skeleton push app and have it launch Twitterific once it loads, but the notifications certificates and other required handshakes were fairly hard to navigate. After all that’s done, all I had to do was make a daemon to check Twitter and push it over Apple’s network. For this, I used Python Twitter Tools to great success.
I did run into one fairly odd problem. It turns out that Twitter’s API doesn’t actually match up to what I’m fairly sure it’s supposed to be at the moment. Requesting a user’s friends status list (statuses/friends, max 100 at a time) seems to correctly report which users are set with device notification turned on. However, the friends timeline (statuses/friends_timeline) function that returns the last X number of tweets has a user tag in it for each update. This user tag doesn’t show the same value for notifications that the friend list does. That’s a problem since my app is suited to using the friends_timeline to get the last few updates to push out, but can’t use the notifications without spending another API call per 100 friends a user has. A bug report has been submitted to the API folks. For now, I can manually filter the users out without using Twitter’s data, but if I were to let anybody else use the app, I’d really prefer it to work correctly.
Honesty.
June 24th, 2009
- Me:
- if I’m honest
- Me:
- which sometimes I am
- Jordan:
- but usually not
- Me:
- I’d say the sour mash beer went sour
- Jordan:
- hah
- Me:
- and the can lid I found in the fermenter may support this hypothesis
- Me:
- but for now I’m going to say the flavor is on purpose and will mellow out
- Jordan:
- well
- Jordan:
- you went for a sour
- Jordan:
- so there you are
- Me:
- I did go for sour
On buying international books…
June 16th, 2009
- Reuben:
- hell yea. how much is this book listed for
- Me:
- $140 new.
- Me:
- I consider buying internationally as helping an emerging country in poverty though.
- Reuben:
- lmao
- Me:
- In my mind, I just fed 10 starving kids for 3 months!
- Reuben:
- lol
- Me:
- It’s all about mindset.
- Reuben:
- well with both are contributions i think the country is in better conditions
- Me:
- excellent.
- Me:
- They may just pull out of their situation with our help.
- Reuben:
- we just ended the war possibly
- Me:
- possibly? PROBABLY!
So I’ve Almost Graduated
May 11th, 2009
This came in the mail so that I’d have a diploma at least until they give me a real one at the end of the summer. Very nice of them.