Skis / Toys / Fun

I admit it, I’ve been working on my middleware python server.   Here’s the basic design of the app at this point: PHP <— JSON-RPC —-> Python <–> MySql The assumption is that as things grow, you’ve already defined a good layer to scale at and have a reasonable Object abstraction from the front end.  At [...]

Had an interesting conversation the other day with another rider while heading up to the top of Page Mill — of course the whole point was to pass the time while riding the last mile and a half.  The basic premise of the conversation went something like this: California has a problem with a budget [...]

Needed an alpha channel PNG, didn’t want to fire up any real editor. echo -n ‘ccca’ | tr ca ‘\377\200′ > t.rgba convert -size 1×1 -depth 8 t.rgba opaque.png

I’m getting really frustrated at looking at site after site after site that really doesn’t solve your problem.  I want products that make me smarter or reduce the amount of work I have to do! My favorite whipping boy is groups, specifically Y!Groups or Google Groups, they’re products that are designed for “On the Internet [...]

Ok, it the last month I’ve used every one of these languages and most of them for the same project.  Some highlights: Java — decompilers are very useful in reverse engineering C++ — std::string in naive use sucks for performance (wrote a pooled string ala Java String — performance increased by 10x) Python – is [...]

I recently got yet another notification that somebody was following a feed of mine… every now and then you go, who is this person, why are they interested in my stream of ramblings.   So, I looked and found this wonderful statement on their linked in page: Track record in establishing a vision, identifying opportunities, building [...]