some background for those who either don’t know jesse andersson or don’t know what he’s been up to lately:
jesse is an old high school friend of many of us. he has a strange and wonderful mind. for the last couple years, he’s been working as a trucker. driving back and forth across the country by himself with no one to talk to. lately, he’s taken to using his free nights and weekend minutes and leaving long messages on Venice’s voicemail just rambling on about whatever’s on his mind while he drives. she played some for me that she’d saved and they’re hilarious. i decided that i would be doing the world a disservice if i didn’t figure out some way to share.
luckily this whole “podcasting” thing’s been sweeping the blogging world lately and, while i’ve never had much interest in it, i realized that it’s ideal for jesse. so we took the liberty of creating a blogspot blog and an audioblog.com account for jesse and gave him the info. they have a feature where you can just call a number and leave a message and it turns it into an mp3 and posts it to a blog for you. so now he can post from the road with his cellphone and the whole world can share the amusement.
(he has a “troll” character and voice that he’s been working on. apparently it’s part of some scheme of eventually recording an audiobook or something. you’ll need to know that to make any sense of the first post and why he’s speaking with a british accent.)
i did this about a year ago but forgot to really mention it to anyone. now, there seems to be a renewed interest in all things javascript/dhtml, so maybe someone will find it useful. it’s basically just a little javascript hack that makes it so users can dynamically resize a textarea on a page. it works in every modern browser i’ve tried it in and degrades gracefully to a plain old textarea in any browser that doesn’t support it or has javascript disabled.
i’m trying to make a point of sharing more of these little tricks with the world.
the script uses a drag and drop implementation from elsewhere. i’m not crazy about it, but i wasn’t about to write my own. at some point though, i’d like to remove the little bit of javascript in the page that it requires to make it more in line with the idea of unobtrusive javascript. that will probably require modifying the drag + drop library though, or implementing the parts of it that i need on my own.
i’m also really interested in taking this technique and turning it into a greasemonkey script so i can resize the textareas on any page on the web.
i’ve spent the entire day catching up on email and RSS feeds after my trip to austin and tucson last week.
austin to see lani and for the yearly pilgrimage to SXSW to eat, drink, and geek out with the web elite. i reconnected with most of the people i met last year and met many more new people too. i know i met at least 58 people.
i had planned on printing out a whole mess of mfr stickers to hand out to people and generally coat austin with, but i was too much of a slacker to get that done in time. so the night before i left new york i got a bunch of colored 3x5 index cards, some fresh sharpie markers, and drew a bunch of robots. like this guy. about 20 different robot designs, repeating some on different colored cards. 60 cards in all. on the back i put my contact info. like business cards but much more personal and much cooler. everytime i met someone i gave them a robot (when i remembered at least). after the conference, i had 2 robots left. hence, i met at least 58 people.
all in all a good conference. no house fires this year, so i think that makes it pretty successful.
while i was in austin, my parents were in tucson visiting my grandparents and uncle, so i decided to head over there for a few days too since i was in the neighborhood. i haven’t been to tucson since i was in 5th grade and i hadn’t seen the arizona branch of my extended family for quite a few years, so that was good to get in. at SXSW, Molly found out that i was going to be in tucson, where she lives, and insisted that we meet up for dinner. so on thursday night (St. Patrick’s day apparently), my parents and i had some margaritas and grub with her. Molly’s always fun and my parents had been spending a lot of time cooped up in the RV park where my grandparents live so i think they really enjoyed having someone new to talk to for a bit.
the rest of my time in tucson was spent visiting the relatives, seeing various sights, and soaking in the warm weather.
getting back to new york yesterday was the real nightmare of the trip. i’d planned things so that i’d be getting into laguardia at 11pm which, taking the m60 bus, would have me back in my apartment by midnight. my flight from tucson to dallas was delayed long enough that i missed my connection to laguardia. the only other flight to LGA that night was solidly overbooked so they offered me a choice of a later flight to Newark, or a flight to LGA early the next morning. this was possibly the worst choice i’ve ever been offered. worse than the last election. arriving in Newark in the middle of the night or spending a night in Dallas? well, when it comes down to it, Newark is the lesser of those two evils so off i went. we landed in NJ around 12:30. the airport shuttle was running slow so i couldn’t get to the NJ Transit terminal in time to catch the 12:44 or 12:56 trains into manhattan. had to wait for the 1:30. all in all, i finally made it back to my apartment around 2:30. i’m fairly used to that kind of thing flying standby all the time, but this time, i was worried about all the spring break kids making it hard to get anywhere standby so i actually paid a bunch of money for a real ticket. so color me extra annoyed.
two days in the city, and i’ll be off to DC for pycon. then, maybe, some rest.
we haven’t had much of a problem with comment spam here on thraxil.org. there have been a couple half-assed attempts but nothing like the 500 attempts at a time several times a week that i’ve seen at other sites like mfr and pretty much any popular movable type or wordpress powered blog with open comments is likely to see.
what we have had a bit of a problem with ever since i opened up comments is with… well… bored idiots. i delete them when i spot them, but there seems to be a surprisingly large population out there of people who land on thraxil via some google search or another and see the comment box as an open invitation to spew their garbage all over us. thraxil used to be a little island of intelligent discussion on the web and i’d like it to get back to that. garbage piling up everywhere doesn’t make for that kind of environment; it just attracts cockroaches and rats.
so i’ve made it a little harder to litter here. now, when you post a comment, it will ask you a very simple question which you will have to answer correctly for your comment to go up. anyone who’s been here a while will already know the answer. anyone new who really wants to contribute should be able to figure out the answer without much effort. but it’s some effort, and that should hopefully be enough to keep out the trash. if it proves to be too easy, i’ll raise the bar even higher. you’ll only be asked the question the first time you post from a particular browser, after that it will remember you and everything will work just like it used to.
(i don’t expect this to really block any comment spam; thraxil’s relative obscurity and the fact that it’s not built on a common weblog engine do more to prevent spam than any code i could write. )
we weren’t really surprised. after all, pitchfork (and the other sites nominated) actually have things like… a staff… and a budget. mfr has a free copy of MT, some donated bandwidth, and the spare time of a couple music geeks. seriously, we were incredibly surprised and honored just to be nominated for the same award. hell, we were nominated for an award on the same page as artists like Tom Waits and Nick Cave. Nick Cave was nominated for a PLUG award and lost too! company doesn’t get much better than that.
we did get free VIP passes to the PLUG awards ceremony in new york last week which was pretty cool. much cooler than the grammies. i have pictures up (including our celebratory pre-awards dinner at our favorite japanese place). we didn’t really meet anyone famous (Christina Ricci’s on the PLUG advisory board so i had my hopes up), but getting to watch from the VIP lounge as Dillinger Escape Plan terrified a hall full of hipsters was pretty sweet. (go see DEP if you ever get a chance. they were nominated for the ‘live act of the year’ award for good reason)
MTV (and MTV2 + MTVU) is currently airing a short piece that features music (for robots). it’s one of those hourly news break things that they’ll repeat over and over again for a few days. i haven’t actually seen it yet, but i heard that it first ran during TRL (hah!).
the story is mostly about this kid in one of jP’s classes and his band who are getting famous because of the exposure we gave them on the site.
last week they interviewed jP, blair and myself. the interview lasted about an hour. the piece was supposed to be edited down to a 2 minute segment of which we would be a small part. unfortunately, because of the presidential inauguration, they had to edit it down even further to 1 minute. as a result, jP was the only one of us that actually had any time on screen (and only a few seconds).
still, between this and being nominated for a PLUG award, we’re pretty damn surprised at all the attention we’ve been getting.
now it remains to be seen whether the site will manage to hold up to the increased traffic.
buyblue.com lists a bunch of companies and which political parties they contribute to.
it actually crossed my mind a couple weeks ago to build a very similar site. since elections are won by the party with the most money. actual votes don’t seem to matter in comparison. it was going to be a “who you really voted for” calculator. you would enter in estimates of how much money you spent with certain companies over the last month or so and it would weigh those numbers based on the amount and percentage that those companies donated to the parties and tell you who you actually voted for with your purchases. these guys beat me to the general idea, but it might still be worth building the calculator just for fun.
the buyblue site also seems focused on holiday gift purchasing so they miss some of the big ones like tobacco companies.
update:Choose The Blue has a more complete list, but still no calculator.
new features include support for simpleTAL templates, a more pythonic approach to mapping runmodes to methods, and smoother mod_python support. see the release notes for more details.
if you’re a good web backend programmer and you want to work next to me, apply now. we have applications deployed using: python, perl, java, zope, plone, mod_perl, tomcat, postgresql, oracle, db2 (but we’re moving away from it), wxPython, Flash. having some familiarity with a subset of those would be a good start.
it’s academia so the pay isn’t quite what you would see for the equivalent position in the private sector, but it’s enough to live on comfortably in manhattan plus the benefits are good, you get to take free classes at Columbia, and you get to work with a very cool bunch of people in a pretty laid back environment working on software to help educate the next generation (not just to make some rich guys even richer like some industries).
