QED

FoxiPod

2006-09-21T00:41:00.000-04:00

Haven't been able to install this, but it sounds great--

FoxiPod uses Greasemonkey with Firefox
to make downloading MP3s and music files and adding them to iTunes a single-click process.

This will be help with one-off podcasts which I usually save to the Desktop - and then forget.

Bye Bye Blogger

2006-06-24T02:52:00.000-04:00

It's not you, it's me. It's time for me to move on. I need a place of my own...to be master of my own domain.

You were always so...static. I need something more dynamic.

Oh, and quit resizing my images. I hate that.

Predictable?

2006-06-24T01:29:00.000-04:00

Apparently I am. Spurred by a post about Pyrcast, which rips Pandora streams, over at Rod's place, I've been on a jag of researching the various Pandora unboxers. Pandora's Jar is especially nice, as it sports band info, last.fm integration and of course, MP3 saving. With java source.

So how am I predictable? I like the band Cake... and I've happily listened to the Cake channel for a few hours now. Guess I'm a sucker for subtle use of vocal harmony and major key tonality. Mmm, major key tonality. Bishop Allen and Rusty Truck were bands worth noting. Hopping nodes on the cobweb spun of the long tail.. or something like that.

Technorati Tags: pandora, mp3, cake

PyZine goes Free

2006-06-22T21:39:00.000-04:00

Latest Issue
Issue 08
Issue 07
Issue 06
Issue 05
Issue 04
Issue 02
Issue 01

Technorati Tags: python, learning

Amazing Ikea Commercial

2006-06-14T19:17:00.000-04:00

Use mouse to move around in bullet-time kitchen pics.

Drawing tools for sleepy people

2006-06-09T23:14:00.000-04:00

Droom Zaacht - an elegant fun drawing environment.

Do Looks Matter?

2006-06-09T22:56:00.000-04:00

Presentation Zen compares Apple/Jobs' and Microsoft/Gates' presentation styles, how they impact the viewer on an emotional level.

Which image communicates better?

Details on One Laptop Per Child

2006-06-07T22:48:00.000-04:00

Ethan Zuckerman posts some details on the laptop:

The screen is hinged to be used as an ebook or turned around. Amazing that this is strong enough for kids
NIMH batteries were used because they accept a wide range of voltages
The bunny ears are the WIFI antenna and fold down to shield the ports.
Will be sold in lots of a million to governments.
The WIFI chip can forward packets in a mesh network with the CPU turned off, using only .5 watts of power.
EBook mode: screen is in black and white, CPU is off.
Has 512MB of flash and 128MB RAM. Code is compressed; jffs2 filesystem spreads swap around the disk.
Alan Key is liking Javascript and Python: LogoWiki supports programmable wiki pages (spiral)
Comes with mic jack and recording software.
Subversive - chat app, wiki, collaborative content. Kids will learn better than teachers..it's theirs to bring home and learn.

Everybody's getting into the Shangrila Diet

2006-06-04T19:14:00.000-04:00

Technorati Tags : shangrila

Camera Toss Pictures

2006-06-04T16:39:00.000-04:00

I got several comments of "Nice Desktop" at BarCamp Boston yesterday.

The technique is called Camera Toss, and it's just what it sounds like. Bit too risky for me, I'll just enjoy the fantastic images in this Flickr pool . Some examples:

Technorati Tags : BarcampBoston

Beach Rooftop

2006-06-04T16:02:00.000-04:00

PICT0334
Originally uploaded by winkler1.

Taken on the beach on the Cape.

BarCamp Boston

2006-06-03T10:45:00.000-04:00

I'll just post here during the day... NameVoyager - with John of HotKnifeDesign and Jeff of HeyLetsGo.com .. why are there so many guys named Jeff? HeyLetsGo - element55 - auto time capture JavaScript- Venkman has profiler. To get faster performance with Google Maps. Google code not designed to be read.. even after unobfuscate OpenLayers.org - brand new, not Google. BSD license. Layers powered by WMS layers.Google Issue: data is not high-res. Need to switch to Google maps base layer, for better details. Mapstraction.com - wraps yahoo/MC/google map API's. Uses native widgets.
RiverMojo.com

Podcasting
Chris Brogan - http://chrisbrogan.com/
Funny - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Dontbethatguyfilms GrasshopperFactory - goal: be a matchmaker, aggregate by interests. Idea - fill Nano with podcasts, interstitial ads, podsafe music.

The Nose Knows

2006-05-31T23:14:00.000-04:00

Titus has written a nice intro to nose with examples. I emphatically agree:

the most important part of having unit tests is that they can be run quickly, easily, and without any thought

Thus, I was suprised not to see something like Nosy, to automagically run tests when code changes. To me, running tests by hand requires thought, and a context switch. Nosy keeps me in the flow.

Pinocchio is an extension to filter out long-running tests so tests may be run quickly. This leads me to believe his test suite was too big to run automatically.

(What is it about nose that inspires bad puns? This blog title, nosy, pinocchio...well, what do expect in a language named after comedy troupe :)

Olive Oil (ELOO) - one of the World's Healthiest Foods?

2006-05-30T00:06:00.000-04:00

For those of us who are swigging olive oil daily, here's some background on olive oil.

Olive oil is rich in Vitamin E, a fat-soluble antioxidant:

"It turns out that people who use olive oil regularly, especially in place of other fats, have much lower rates of heart disease, atherosclerosis, diabetes, colon cancer, and asthma."

This is a pretty technical article. The most interesting and relevant bit concerns storage: it should be in a dark place, away from heat. Most olive oil is in glass bottles, so that means I shouldn't store mine by the stove but in a closed cupboard :)

8 Dollar Steak Dinner for Two

2006-05-29T23:22:00.000-04:00

I'm finally making good on my promise to do more cooking. Part of this involves signing up the the Cooks Illustrated site, and having an EVDO connection to surf with the laptop.

Following the recipe from Cooks Illustrated - Great Cheap Steaks-Sept/2005, we got a pound of Top Sirloin steak, $5.95 a pound, and a couple pounds of Yukon Gold potatos for Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes.

The potatoes were fluffy and sweet, and the steak tasty and tender. We also whipped up a pan sauce with green onions, port and mustard. Three tablespoons of Grey Poupon was far too vinegary. I assume mustard is used for the sauce because it's a good emulsifier...next time we should use a sweeter brown mustard.

This is an great value, and ready in a half hour- with leftover potatoes to nosh on for the rest of the week. This is a recipe to learn and get good at.

SpringStream

2006-05-20T18:15:00.000-04:00

Bruce Springsteen did a live concert for the BBC in support of his new Seeger album.

We got the CD/DVD a couple weekends ago, and enjoyed it on Mother's Day.

The concert is up for a limited time, streaming in Real format at rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio2/r2_springsteen.ra. It sounded great streaming through the XBox.

To capture it, I downloaded an eval version of NetTransport. It downloaded the 15 Meg, hour concert in a mere 3 minutes.

Seth Roberts ShangriLa Diet Mp3 Interview

2006-05-19T09:57:00.000-04:00

Interview with the book author - in MP3. The interview seems a little disjointed, but good content. The name "ShangriLa" and simplicity (tablespoon of oil) seem too simple and alluring, but it's clear from the interview Roberts is a serious, thoughtful scientist building on previous research.

Kudos to MSNBC for posting MP3, not some annoying streaming DRM'd format.

Neil Young - Living with War

2006-05-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

Listen to the full album.

I tried to buy this last weekend, but it wasn't out yet. Here's the story in Rolling Stone.

The most rousing song is Impeach the President (the Miserable Failure). Lyrics here.

Improv Everywhere - Best Buy

2006-05-10T09:36:00.000-04:00

"Wearing clothing almost identical to the store's uniform, the agents would not claim to work at the store but would be friendly and helpful if anyone had a question."

ShowMeDo vids are up

2006-05-04T21:23:00.000-04:00

Using pyWinAuto to Control a Windows Application - this is an enhanced version of the animated GIF on the pyWinAuto Wiki. (The filename is currently 64 characters long, rename if it doesn't play).

Using Nosey for Python Testing - this is a movie of Nosy, which uses Nose to automatically run unit tests.

Ian makes a good editor... luckily my mistakes were minor enough not to have to re-record.

Icons of Colbert's Speech

2006-05-03T23:46:00.000-04:00

Someone has done up the quotes as icons. My favorite-

International Flava

2006-05-03T11:19:00.000-04:00

My readership seems to be pretty well distributed..cool!

	Netherlands	Almelo, Overijssel
	United States	Waltham, Massachusetts
	Germany	Koeln, Nordrhein-Westfalen
	Greece	Athens, Attiki
	Canada	Oakville, Ontario
	United States	Astoria, New York
	France	Nanterre, Ile-de-France
	United States	Laguna Beach, California
	United States	Cambridge, Massachusetts
	Germany	Rimpar, Bayern
	Italy	Campolattaro, Campania
	Canada	Ottawa, Ontario
	United States	Flushing, New York
	Czech Republic	Praha, Hlavni Mesto Praha

KVM's and Synergy

2006-05-03T11:11:00.000-04:00

Mark Watson writes about using a KVM switch to share screens between monitors.

Even better, if you have the desk space, is Synergy which allows the mouse to move between machines (Windows/Linux/Mac). You can even copy text between OS's!

This way, there is no context switch... you can keep reference/email up on different machines. Most folks have spare screens as the move to flatscreens continues.. why not use them?

ClearType makes bloated Screencasts

2006-05-03T10:17:00.000-04:00

I've been making movies for ShowMeDo about Nose and PyWinAuto. As a matter of course, I turn off Windows ClearType rendering. It looks pretty, but I don't think it's worth the bits.

I recorded the same movie with and without ClearType, capturing to Microsoft Video 1 at 100% (lossless) quality:

ClearType ON : 31,157 KB
ClearType OFF: 11,263 KB

The movie had audio, and things get even more interesting when looking at it with GSpot:

Cleartype ON Bitrate: 11743 kb/s
Cleartype OFF Bitrate: 3219 kb/s

So: Cleartype makes the video 264% bigger. Is it really worth it?

Colbert's White House Correspondents Dinner Speech

2006-04-30T21:16:00.000-04:00

Fantastic stuff - slyly delivering the Truth.

IT Crowd Soundboard

2006-04-28T12:38:00.000-04:00

Soundboard - brilliant.

Dashtime Notes - Constructivist Learning, Logo, Papert, DOM->Eclipse API's, SynchroEdit, DBC Use case

2006-04-28T12:20:00.000-04:00

4/25/2006
Jeff Winkler, winkler1@gmail.com
Ward Cunningham

Monkey

Uses jabberwocky delimiters - easily embedded on blog.
Idea - google Blog search RSS feed for new scripts.. (buggy? didn't find this)

Constructivist Learning / Interactive Shell

The person writing a script has to interact with objects in a safe environment. It's a conversation between the user - exploring, understanding the API's, and the objects and API's of the system. The goal is for the user to learn the objects by exploration...
The tighter the feedback loop the better. An interactive command line where Javascript code can be entered is the best tool for. See this showmedo.

Ideally, there would be an interactive Rhino shell.

Logo, Seymour Papert, Hard Fun

Before the call, I was reading up on Seymour Papert, after playing with RUR-PLE, a python learning environment. I had playing with Graforth as a kid - and it was based on Logo. What makes these learning environments succesful? Hard Fun, and this, seem to articulate it best:

1 What is Logo?

Logo is a unique piece of software. In the purest sense, Logo is a programming language; it is a full-featured computer language derived from LISP, the language of artificial intelligence. More important, however, Logo is a language for learning. It is the right tool to teach the process of learning and thinking. Logo provides an environment where students assume the role of teacher. As a teacher, they must:

understand the knowledge to be taught
plan an approach to impart this knowledge
break the knowledge into small, understandable chunks
know how to clearly communicate the knowledge
establish this new knowledge as the foundation for future learning
be aware of and build on knowledge that the learner already has
be receptive to exploring new ideas as they appear
respond to the learner's (computer's) misunderstandings and errors

.. Designed at MIT as a language for learning, Logo is by its nature:

friendly	Logo is easily grasped; we can relate to the turtle and use it as an object to think with.
extensible	Logo can be taught new commands and other commands can be built thereon.
forgiving	Logo offers immediate feedback through helpful and informative messages.
flexible	Logo is as useful with preschoolers as it is with students of higher mathematics.
powerful	Logo is a programming language, providing all the tools needed to create programs of any degree of sophistication.

Transitioning from DOM->Eclipse API's

How does a person using a DOM understand what's going on under the covers, with the underlying API's?
Ward suggested using debugger to trace into the code.

Shared document editing - shared artifacts

Though we had a great, rambling conversation, we didn't have easy tools to take notes. Though DashTime is a "virtual place" - there's no there, there. I didn't have an IRC client, and it would be a pain to download. I was jonesing for a collaborative shared text space to take notes. An IRC applet would ease the transition; something like SubEthaEdit would be better, be cross-platform and web-based. SynchroEdit looks the part:

SynchroEdit is a browser-based simultaneous multiuser editor, a form of same-time, different-place groupware. It allows multiple users to edit a single web-based document at the same time, and it continuously synchronizes all changes so that users always have the same version.

SynchroEdit's main editor is fully WYSIWYG, dynamically displaying bolds, italics, underlines, strikethroughs, with various justifications, indents and listing styles as an author inputs them. SynchroEdit also supports a simple, text-only editor for more basic documents. To clarify the multiuser experience, the editor window clearly depicts every user's changes in a specific color and also marks where each user is currently editing with a colored flag listing the user's name.

My DBC/Requirements use case

This is a low-hanging fruit which delivers value for me, and I would see having other developers in my company use.

Given the method findbook():

Book findBook ( String strTitle )

DBC suggests that the contract should state, and enforce any preconditions. In my company, we do:

/** Lookup a book by its title
* @param strTitle the book title. Case-insensitive. !null.
*/
Book findBook ( String strTitle ) {
Require.notNull ( strTitle, "strTitle");

So, I'd like to write a script to type the "Require.notNull" bit for me. I would do:

Double-click on the strTitle variable
Invoke my Monkey script (ideally, via hotkey)
The new line is created... cursor is left where it is

This entails:

Getting selected text
Inserting text into the buffer, as though I'd typed it.

Keeping your Nose Green

2006-04-27T13:40:00.000-04:00

Mark of pywinauto fame told me about nose, a unit testing tool with autodiscovery. I was slinging some python over the weekend, and needed coverage as my codebase got bigger.. so I whipped this up. I run this on a DOS window under windows. Basically every time you change any .py file, it runs tests. I call it nosy.

import glob,os,stat,time
def checkSum():
''' Return a long which can be used to know if any .py files have changed.
Only looks in the current directory. '''
val = 0
for f in glob.glob ('*.py'):
stats = os.stat (f)
val += stats [stat.ST_SIZE] + stats [stat.ST_MTIME]
return val
val=0
while (True):
if checkSum() != val:
val=checkSum()
os.system ('nosetests')
time.sleep(1)

I didn't get cute with lambda to squash it into a single line. This is simplistic, but gets the job done. I've sent it to Jason for improvement.

Update: A video of this is here.

ITMFA

2006-04-27T11:14:00.000-04:00

ITMFA

Scripting Eclipse with Jython and PyDev

2006-04-26T21:28:00.000-04:00

I joined the Eclipse Monkey project Dashtime the other day, and spend the hour talking to Ward Cunningham (Wiki inventor)... very cool.

I had seen Monkey on Wayne Beaton's Eclipse when he talked at NEJUG/BostonEdge, and scripting sounded interesting. I hadn't even installed, and didn't expect to be the only caller!

We had a good discussion, my notes are here. Apparently Rhino was selected because JavaScript is"nobody's favorite language" :)

Monkey is useful but doesn't yet have autocomplete or an interactive shell. I think that's needed to learn the API's, and delve further into Eclipse plugins and SWT. EclipseShell is interesting, but it's not a straight interactive console like Python's, where you can create and interact with objects. (Perhaps the Rhino console can be hooked up)

I use PyDev for Python development, and even sprang for the extensions, which allow an Interactive Console. I can fire up Jython within Eclipse and then import and invoke Java objects-

However, something is wrong.. I want to get the the active window (the window global in Monkey), but it is coming back null:

window = wb.getActiveWorkbenchWindow() print window None

Other API's work fine...

for vd in wb.getViewRegistry().getViews():
print vd.getId()
byecycle.views.ByecycleView
com.kodeshare.search.ui.KodeSearchView edu.mit.csail.relo.console.ConsoleView
...

There's more than one way to skin a cat--getWorkbenchWindows() works:

wnds = PlatformUI.getWorkbench().getWorkbenchWindows()
len(wnds)
1
window=wnds[0]

Great! Let's try a HelloWorld..

import org
org.eclipse.jface.dialogs.MessageDialog.openInformation( window.getShell(), Hello","World")
Traceback (innermost last): File "<console>", line 1, in ? org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Invalid thread access

At least this has a reasonable explanation (I'm on a worker thread).

So, you can use Eclipse API's and objects interactively. Excellent. Next, I would love for Autocomplete to work. Ctrl-Space doesn't work in the console. (Bug? I think so.. the console has the Jython nature now.)

For some wierd reason, the python dir() function isn't working, returning an empty list even for a builtin class:

str = "Hello"
dir(str)
[]

Normally this would return a list of methods:

>>> dir(str)
['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__doc__', '__eq__', '__ ge__', '__getattribute__', '__getitem__', '__getnewargs__', '__getslice__', '__g t__', '__hash__', '__init__', '__le__', '__len__', '__lt__', '__mod__', '__mul__ ', '__ne__', '__new__', '__reduce__', '__reduce_ex__', '__repr__', '__rmod__', ' __rmul__', '__setattr__', '__str__', 'capitalize', 'center', 'count', 'decode', 'encode', 'endswith', 'expandtabs', 'find', 'index', 'isalnum', 'isalpha', 'isdi git', 'islower', 'isspace', 'istitle', 'isupper', 'join', 'ljust', 'lower', 'lst rip', 'replace', 'rfind', 'rindex', 'rjust', 'rsplit', 'rstrip', 'split', 'split lines', 'startswith', 'strip', 'swapcase', 'title', 'translate', 'upper', 'zfill ']

So close.. hopefully pydev extensions can enable autocomplete on the console. That would make for a truly interactive exploration of the Eclipse environment.