ThePanda

I am told people don’t need moral lessons about the real world, and are aware of the real world. This is a strange observation, especially when made by someone I am TAing, but whatever, this is not meant to be an object lesson on the real world, or perhaps it is meant to be one, but who the hell cares, you are the one reading my blog, much like he was the one reading my e-mail. Either ways, I shudder to think what the RIAA or MPAA would think, should they hear that I have been providing people with “moral” lessons on breaking DRM in the “real world”. Bah, sucks, all this while I believed being in academics was all about ignoring the real world, hmph.

Anyways, interesting as this weekend has been (it involved sleeping at unnatural hours, missing meals, and other fun things), I can finally claim to have dabbled for a bit in webservices and AJAX, and have come out appreciating webservices, and PHP to an extent, and not really liking AJAX too much, it has its uses, JavaScript is a cooler language than I remember it to be, but everything remaining constant, I would rather not design an AJAX thing, but then again, I have never really been a big fan of webdesign and the like. That being said, PHP seemed like a fun language, I plan on learning more about, if only to add it to the list of languages I have dabbled in, and because it has certain cute features which make me happy. That being said, having functions which might or might not return values, depending on input parameters, is something I find mildly scary, but then again, I am easily frightened.

Darn, I have too much work, and no real motivation to do any of it, perhaps this is all about the beautiful weather out there and the fact that it is spring, but nopes, it’s not like I have been out there that much, unless being in the CS department means being out there. I received a gigantic package today from one of my father’s friends who had been to India, and the mailroom guy made a comment about how it seemed to be packed solid. For a while there it even looked like I was walking back home with a care package, funny how that works out, another experience to add to a growing list of things. Well anyways, not doing much in terms of work, umm I need to do work, will probably do it soon, since some of this is some really pretty math, I have been surfing the internet thing, not that work has ever prevented me from doing this in the past. Along with focusing on the many parts of the Nature, Britannica debate, looking up Francisco Franco (this was work, he comes up somewhere in the Japanese decission to go to war in China), and other things, I noticed my roommate looking at a Matrix-like hex dump, and I went on to explore it and read his nerd documents (there are many more than there seem to be, just look through the ones he lists and follow the links), and I really like this guys writings, he rants about things I haven’t liked in the past, speaks of things I hadn’t known of, and the like. He’d make a good Netscape counterpart to Andy Hertzfeld and the Folklore project.

Some time ago, when I needed to come up with a CS final project, me and my roomate had seriously considered making a text editor, one that we’d want to use, and which would do some of the cool things Emacs does, but alas, we got drawn into photo managers, and one whose final specs I am not completely convinced with, and I am sort of wishing making software decissions and text editors weren’t contentious issues. Two group projects down, and into a project, I have come to the conclusion that there is such a thing as too small a project to do as a group. You sort of want a project which is big enough to be easily divided, and yet not be something which any one person can take over and finish, and like really software development teams, perhaps like research groups, need to be dictatorial and not democratic. Also I hate design meetings where multiple people thinking at different levels have to come up with a design. It isn’t always very simple, and it annoys me. It’s been a while since I have screamed at anyone, this not being acceptable social behaviour, but I am coming close to the point where I am going to start screaming at people, I am tired, in general, and I seem to be in this sort of always annoyed frame of thinking, except during those parts of the weekend when I am doing fun things, and perhaps when everyone else is gone so I can just concentrate on watching TV, and doing fun stuff, and eating good food. Hmm, perhaps I’d make a better code monkey than code monkey manager, I don’t seem to do well with telling people what I want done.

I am going to try and write a text editor, even a simple one, which does like just a little more than TextEdit, and yet is not as funky as SubEthaEdit where the colors sort of distract me, and in general does all the things I want. I guess I just want a text editor written for me, or for someone to get me a copy of BBEdit ($199.00), so that I don’t have to use TextWrangler, which is great, but doesn’t do like a fraction of the things I’d like it to do. In the mean time I have been trying out AquaMacs which is pretty much EMacs, but is faster than my last Aqua based Emacs installation, which now refuses to run on my computer. I want to go back to writing software for myself, I like hacking, I want more time.

Earlier today while going through a TA interview I was asked what I did in my free time, and was mildly embarassed to admit that I wasn’t really sure I had any, but oh well, I guess this counts as free time, except I should be doing other things. There’s always this thing about doing other things. I need to find something I can mention in reply to these pesky hobby questions, I used to have hobbies, I used to do stuff, it has been a while.

So it turns out that everyone other than me knows how to get cover art from Amazon (programatically), and no one seems to document this, leading to issues when I needed to implement this as a part of one of my group projects. Like really no one has much support code up there, and the ones they do have seem to like take too many lines doing not too intelligent things. Thus, I am going to place my function to do this online, it ain’t very long, works in PHP 4.3, I believe there are better ways to do this in PHP5, the CS department doesn’t have PHP5. You need to get an Amazon Web Service account, and need to set

$ACCESS_KEY

to your Amazon Access Key, but you should be set once you are done with that. The code’s provided without copyright or licensing requirements, I was planning on saying it was LGPLd or GPLd, but both those statements require much frameworking to be put in place. Oh and don’t use this in anything like a space ship, missle defence system or a critical piece of machinery in a hospital, it’s not designed to be mission critical.

That’s pretty much it for now, I need to go work on math, and other things, and try to not procastinate, and other things.

Ze Panda

PS: All moral lessons in this blog were unintentional.