It isn't actually an app, it's an extremely simple script which just tweaks the boost so that the Touchpad can get louder. If you're reading this on my actual site, you'll notice a new "webOS" tab up top, that's for supporting this, and what I hope will be many more apps in the future.

Now for the fun bit, I wanted to talk about my experience getting the script out there. The webOS Homebrew community is absolutely amazing for many reasons, but I just want to mention two:

• They are consolidated. Unlike similar efforts on other platforms and projects, there's very little community fragmentation here. The webOS homebrew community is entirely centered around webOS-Internals, with their awesome wiki being the number one knowledge repository outside HP's own developer center. Their wiki, their git repositories, and their irc channels are open to anyone. They have systems in place for outsiders to immediately start making contributions, and while they are vetted and might be rejected, they always try to tell developers what needs to be fixed for inclusion.
• They are approachable. While trying to figure out how to package this script for distribution through Preware (wOSI's Homebrew App and Patch installer), I hit a few dead ends because of my lack of knowledge of the homebrew distribution system and how it differs from HP's own, and what the limitations are for different methods. No problem, I just dropped into their IRC channel and every time, within a few minutes I had solid info on a better direction to look into.

Anyway, I'm in now--the badge next to my name on the PreCentral forum says "Homebrew Developer". I'm pretty proud to have that badge, even if it's for something so simple.

My webOS adventures are moving along--I got my hands on an unlocked Pre 2, which is a terriffic phone, to test some of my stuff on. I found that my favorite app idea, a WordPress App, has already been done fantastically well in Poster, and with a bunch of features I hadn't planned on putting in mine, so I'm going to keep plugging away at my other ideas.

As I mentioned, my work life has been pretty nuts lately — I had done 58 hours this week before I stepped into the building this morning — so I've stepped out of my d&d group for the time being. It's sad, my character in this particular game is a totally awesome assassin-mage, who, while I originally intended for him to be a quiet, stealthy poisoner, has turned into a rambunctious swashbuckling lover of all that is flashy. The other group members are a lot of fun to play with, too- the youngest is actually only 11, but she's the strongest fighter in the group and was the only person to get my UMass CS binary tree shirt. Yeah. She's about as cool as it gets. I could go on about the other players, and our DM, but let's just instead say I'm really going to miss playing until things cool off at work.

Anyway, I left off work at a reasonable time today and saw Sucker Punch. I thought it was good, but Mikah didn't. So we made another mistake. We rented The Last Airbender.

Now understand, I expected it to be bad; I expected it to break from the show in pretty dumb ways. But I never would have expected a movie featuring marial arts and elemental magic could ever be so exquisitely boring.

Apparently Shyamalan can't event make a magical war interesting. It could have been just about any other director and this movie wouldn't have been a freaking lullabye.

This is enough, I think, for now. Until next time, then!

I never watched UPN's Enterprise (You know, the Star Trek prequel with Scott Bakula), despite being a long time and rabid Trek fan. I've watched almost all of The Original Series, definitely all of The Next Generation, and a good chunk of Voyager. The franchise has always seemed like it would be a great one to be like America's response to Doctor Who, because in the same way as every Who fan knows exactly which Who is "their" Doctor, every Trekkie can respond quickly to "So, who's your captain?"

You may have guessed; Mine is Jean-Luc Picard. But really, if you put the words "Star Trek" on the screen, get me ready to accept a wholly optimistic future, and have some strong figure who knows right from wrong in the captain's chair, I'll watch it. I know I'm not the only one.

So why didn't I watch Enterprise? After all, I was already a Scott Bakula fan from Quantum Leap, and I'm a sucker for a pretty ship (and yes, the NX-01 is *very* pretty). It's because they were ashamed of the franchise. I didn't watch DS9 because I was never as interested in politics and that sort of thing as exploration and contrasting the human condition, but at least it was positioned as part of the grander whole. I didn't watch Enterprise because for three seasons, they didn't even put the "Star Trek" label in the title with it. They made the opening inspiring, but ultimately too "today"--rather than timeless instrumental themes we we expect from the series. They were ashamed of the show's heritage.

Star Trek is an unabashedly optimistic view of the future. It's a world where people have resolved almost all of their differences on Earth, fixed our political troubles, and decided between us that the pursuit of knowledge and understanding is worth more effort than any petty squabble. And then we met other species who hadn't decided this, and learned we had much left to do in order to live amongst them. That's what those instrumental themes mean to me. As an example, here's the Deep Space 9 opening, and the opening for Voyager. I didn't watch as much of Voyager as I could have, but the Voyager intro really stands out as one of the best in the series. Everyone remembers that retro-futuristic warble over The Original Series, and The Next Generation's intro is pretty much the standard by which all others are measured for me.

Contrast with this.

The visuals are excellent. But the music does *not* feel like trek. It feels like I'm ten years old and I'm going on a school trip and the teacher turned on the radio to some music she thought we'd like so we'd settle down and let her read her paper. Not good. I'm just not prepared after hearing that song to really be in the Star Trek future. I might be ready for an optimistic sing-along, but my suspension of disbelieve that the world actually *could* be that good ends as soon as you bring some element of what the world *is* into it. Guitars and raspy singing voices just entirely break me from that feeling.

Ultimately, that optimistic belief is what I come to Trek for. To never get me set up to believe it is to have me approach your show as a cynic, which is *really* going to hurt any show in Star Trek's universe.

Anyway, here's an opening for Enterprise that would have kept me watching beyond the first two episodes.

Anyway, since I don't know much about the actual show... was it good? worth picking up for after I've exhausted what I'm currently watching?

So I didn't do as much productive hobbies this week, though I did learn the chords to the main theme from Legend of the Seeker (the show somewhat loosely based on the Sword of Truth novels by Terry Goodkind) on the guitar, and later on piano.

Really, I spent my time here:

This year, since leaving taking a 10 day vacation out of the country isn't an option given the craziness going on at work, Mikah and I decided to take a jaunt out to West Virginia to celebrate Valentine's day with a weekend at a nice B&B. Mikah found us the Hillbrook Inn in Charles Town, a place which is exactly as it looks in the photos--remote, secluded, gorgeous. We spent most of Saturday wandering around Harper's Ferry, even exploring a Flea Market.

We were there only two nights, and I wish we could have been there longer, but I feel greatly refreshed, and am glad to have had the time to reset myself.

I did briefly stop at Micro Center and took a look at books for getting myself into a new development skill. I've been talking and talking about several things, including 3d game development, and mobile app development, specifically for webOS. Game development is very different from my actual development path, and it would almost certainly take a long time to learn to use the tools of that particular trade; therefore I decided a few weeks back to work on making an app for webOS. Now I'm running into some rough patches with that, because, while I can easily get through the various tutorials I've found and get some pretty pictures displaying on the screen, I don't actually know certain best practices for code organization and, well, mainly, how to fetch new information from an outside server.

This is certainly something that, with a little more time and patience, I could learn from the documentation and from reading through more examples, but to assist me on the path, I was thinking of buying a book on webOS development. Unfortunately, Micro Center only had one which had very low ratings online, so I left it. I'll just have to keep looking, and reading.

For music, I sat down at the piano long enough to learn the introduction to Ben Folds' "Still Fighting It". It will take a bit more time to commit the whole song to memory, but the song is fairly simple, short, and calm--which is a good recipe for a song I can pick up fast and feel good about playing for others. Didn't spend any appreciable time on the guitar, but this is a good start.

I also spent a bit of time playing with Inkscape and drew a new pig. Here's the old one for comparison:

Phlox, the Phlying Pig

And here's the new one:

Phlox, the Phlying Pig

I still like the old one better (it's just a better drawing to start), but I like the new one's open eyes and more comic-like lines. I need a sharper version of Phlox for an icon anyway, for upcoming projects.

This is the biggest thing I've started: I'm making a Palm webOS app. There's a few of them that I have in mind, so my plan is to start with a very simple app and work my way up to more awesome ones after I get the gist of how webOS development really works. So I pulled down the Palm SDK and started tinkering. So far, I've got very little that I want to show off, but I've learned a lot! So we'll see what I can come up with for next week.

Until then, what's your free time like?
Adrian

We already have this idea of "classes", thanks to CSS and how it interacts with HTML. Future specs of javascript (and many current js libraries) already include a getElementsByClass function that work with this as well as the getElementsById that already exists.

So we're already to an extent treating these elements as "instances" (with a unique ID in the DOM) of one or more "Classes". So why doesn't the Javascript conform to this?

What I'd love to see is for something like this:

HTML:

<div id="article-1" class="article">
<h3>Article Header</h3>
<p>Paragraph 1</p>
<p>Paragraph 2</p>
</div>
<div id="article-2" class="article">
<h3>Article Header</h3>
<p>Paragraph 1</p>
<p>Paragraph 2</p>
</div>

Nothing new there.

new CSS:

.article {
  h2 {
    padding-bottom:10px;
    border-bottom: 1px solid black;
  }
  p {
    padding: 5px;
  }
}

See what I did there? It's actually not that far a stretch. Typically this would be done by using ".article h2" and ".article p". This format mostly just allows for greater clarity in the CSS--at a glance--for what your style really expects elements to look like. Let's face it, styling has a dependancy on content--you can't theme a webpage unless you have some vague idea of what's going to be represented.

The next part is where I get serious:

Javascript:

class article {
  var header = this.getElementsByTagName("h3")[0]; // We expect only one of these
  var paragraphs = this.getElementsByTagName("p");
  var hidden = false;

  function onContentReady() {
    this.header.addlistener('onClick',this.hideShowContent);
  }
  function hideShowContent() {
    for ( var i in paragraphs)
    {
      if (this.hidden) { paragraphs[i].style.display = ''; }
      else { paragraphs[i].style.display = 'none'; }
    }
    this.hidden=!this.hidden;
  }
}

You get the idea, I think. Your non-class CSS defines what to do with elements occurring outside of classes, and gives styles that will cascade into classes unless overridden. Your non-class Javascript would include basic functionality used in many classes, and some of your classes might even require helper javascript classes that would be pulled in at need, and only once. (say, a date picker class that is required by several parent classes).

You could even separate your class-based js and css out, storing them locally, and providing "glue" in your base-level javascript, so that whenever the browser loaded a class it had not already seen in the DOM, it would look at that glue, and go and fetch the necessary JS and CSS if necessary.

This means that unless there's an Article on the page, you'd never load the Article css and javascript. The javascript and CSS would never be loaded more than once.

Clearly, my example is not incredibly good--the idea could probably use a lot more work, but what strikes me as funny is that when I look at it this way, it seems like it's almost meant to be. Javascript/ECMAScript is constantly improving and is at this point a full-fledged programming language in its own right, albeit one without a canonical interpreter. HTML and CSS specs are constantly improving as well, but there is a divide sharply between the two. I wonder if perhaps Javascript not being under the purview of the W3C has something to do with how separate it is from the HTML/CSS setup, and why they don't seem to be converging, aware of each other, toward something cleaner.

As I was stumbling through the internet a moment ago I came across an interesting photo of an underwater restaurant that is enclosed entirely in glass such that the diners have a constantly changing view of underwater life while they eat. Looked really cool. There was the obligatory comment as the third or so on the page:

"Definitely photoshopped. I can tell by the pixels, and I've seen a lot of 'shops in my time."

Given the fact that goons are known for stockpiling clubs and hunting dead horses for years at a time, the comment should come as no surprise to anyone. But I just thought of something, three little letters that are like gold to any business: "EAV".

EAV stands for Equivalent Ad Value. When companies get positive face time on large networks such as a news network or paper or a highly trafficked website, they are essentially getting ad space for free. And it's extremely valuable ad space, because it is placed in content spaces where people are actually looking to read the content. Here's an example: My company, TripAdvisor, got mentioned a couple months back in the show "The Office". If anyone remembers, it's the episode where Dwight Schrute opens an Agrotourism Bed and Breakfast at Schrute Farms. Its page is still at tripadvisor, and the clip is up at both tripadvisor and youtube. The mention cost us very little, but the value of it is exceptionally high, since it is in front of millions of people across the US who watch the show.

for an even better, slightly less biased example, Research In Motion says it estimates that it had millions of dollars of EAV from the whole "Barackberry" debacle, and I'd believe it. Think of him what you will, there is no denying our President's intelligence and simultaneous stardom, and if he uses a RiM smartphone, then hell, shouldn't I look into it. They paid nothing for that plug, and they didn't even expect or look for it. The fact that Obama didn't actually use a blackberry doesn't matter at all.

So now we go back to this meme: it seems there are like 20 goons or farkers or the like who spend hours a day going across thousands of websites and delivering equivalent ad value to Adobe with this tired joke, and you know what? They hit all the highest trafficked images first. I'll bet it's worth tons.

They wrote that these machines are supposed to select and aim at a target, and "[wait] only for a human to pull the trigger." Except that sometimes, "these machines start firing mysteriously on their own."

They call it a software glitch. A malfunction. The problem I have with these terms is that, similar to the term "accident" in a traffic collision, they tend to imply no one is to blame.

I submit that somewhere, some programmer is to blame. If you write code, no matter how trivial, your job is to ensure the efficiency, consistency, and most of all the accuracy of your code. To fail in this regard can be tantamount to negligent homicide.

Coding errors can cause great cost; in the simplest of projects, this cost may only be in time, but soon that cost becomes money. In greater projects, it might be personal possessions, or public relations, or in still greater projects, lives.

This is not the first time something like this has happened. I am reminded of the infamous Therac-25, which between 1985 and 1987 was involved in at least five deaths due to poor interface design and failure to sanitize inputs. The Northeast Blackout of 2003, caused by a race condition in power monitoring software. The MIM-104 Patriot whose failure resulted in the deaths of 28 soldiers in Saudi Arabia in 1991 due to an error in time synchronization.

These are our responsibilities, laid upon us by virtue of our interest in the technologies which run our world today and those that will tomorrow: To provide value through technology by relieving stresses in tasks, or by relieving those tasks altogether, and to protect ourselves and our fellow man from those very technologies we create, and to the best of our abilities, from himself.

~Pigsflew

According to Reisinger, linux has either three directions from here: 1. Become super user-friendly at the expense of the tweakability and under-the-hood capacity of linux, 2. go back to "linux' roots" and follow Linus Torvalds, or (and here I quote) 3. "face a "civil war" that could lead to total Linux annihilation."

I'd like to present something to you. In the good old days of the Microsoft world, we had MSDOS, a relabeled version of the "Quick and Dirty Operating System", QDOS. In this world, everything was configurable. You could do anything you wanted. Unfortunately, because doing anything complicated took too many steps, people didn't often do much. This is why they developed (following Apple), Windows. Now Windows didn't do much, but what it did do was easier and more honed to human beings than was the command prompt.

Windows took a step further from that with WinXP and Vista, wherein the command prompt, while still there, is crippled to the point of being barely usable.

On the other hand, Apple's newest, OSX, is a BSD-derivative operating system, and while it has a fully functional and exceptionally usable GUI, it also has a complete shell available to the user, with approximately all the tools from Linux/BSD available.

This "civil war" Reisinger presents is a fear that's ungrounded. I am an Ubuntu user. This is because the simple tasks that I perform on a daily basis, as well as the setup tasks that prepare the machine to meet my standards, are made extremely easy for me, and with minimal interference. It's important to me that the terminal remain always available to me, that I can still write and run bash scripts, that, when it's faster to do so, I can still fire up a shell.

But I shouldn't be forced to.

This is where the dichotomy becomes entirely flawed. There is nothing that says an operating system can not be both oriented toward usability, and fundamentally malleable. A person should be able to fire up an application and have it, within reasonable tolerances, do what he or she expects. This is a mark of a conscientious programmer; any code which is not designed with, or with the ability to have, a GUI attached should be viewed as nearly wasted code.

Linux' roots are the same place that any other operating system's roots are: a collection of applications and machine code which enables the user to utilize the capabilities of the machine. An operating system which does not do this is an unfinished operating system.

Unlike any other operating system, we can keep working together to finish Linux.

I want other people to use Ubuntu. I've been putting up posters, wearing stickers, giving out burned copies, telling people about it, I've been evangelizing this because as an OS, Ubuntu is almost finished. It's friendly, it's usable, and I don't have to hold a newcomer's hand quite as hard to get them into it. It's not about money, because I can't, don't, and won't ask for any--and I don't think Canonical ever will either.

What I want is users. I want a whole boatload of us. I want enough of us out there that choose Linux over non-*nix that open source libraries start getting used to reach us. I want games designed by corporations in OpenGL2, rather than DirectX. I want applications to be released using Mono instead of .Net; I want these things to happen so that anyone, anywhere, on any operating system--Even Windows!--can use everyone else's software. And that's only plausible if we get attention.

So I applaud Mozilla for providing the best cross-platform browser and email client, Canonical for the easiest Linux distribution, HP for their open printer drivers, System76 and Dell for providing preinstalled machines, Blizzard for already releasing OpenGL games (like World of Warcraft), and all other companies that stand behind the choice of the user.

A song by The Verve, with a fairly large sample from an orchestral song by the Rolling Stones, this song was in the end the Verve's downfall, as they can no longer play it without the Mick Jagger's permission.

The song is most notable for the Bittersweet Hypothesis, outlined below. The phenomenon was noted by the University of Awesome's own Professor Adrian during his research on Jesus' iPod

The Bittersweet Hypothesis

The hypothesis states that, for all music players, as the time of ownership of said music player increases, the probability of that player containing The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony approaches one.

Exhibit A: Topical graph outlining the basis of the hypothesis

Supporting Evidence

1. If you have a music playing device, take it out.
2. Turn it on and look for Bittersweet Symphony.
3. If it's there, I told you so.
4. If it isn't, it'll probably be there soon. Also, you're an outlying data point.

Consequences

The consequences of the Bittersweet Hypothesis are dire. The most important one is that this song may cause severe clogging of the tubes.

There are over 7 billion people in the world. if one in 20 people have portable music devices, that makes 350 million such devices. Each one will in all probability eventually cause a download of Bittersweet Symphony, which is approximately 4 MB, or megabytes, or million bytes. This turns into 1.4 Billion megabytes, or 1400 Terabytes of the same song repeated over and over. Now, remember that for most portable devices, the song is also repeated on a personal computer, doubling the number to 2800 TB of the Bittersweet Symphony.

Just for good measure, that number is roughly 2,800,000,000,000,000 Bytes, which are 8 bits each, 11,200,000,000,000,000 bits (Eleven thousand two hundred million bajillion infinity).

Solutions

Several solutions have been proposed to resolve this issue. One is to create a central data center to store a single copy of the 4 MB file, and then every music playing device would have to stream it from there, but unfortunately this does not resolve the problem of clogging the tubes, it only reduces the places it ends up stored.

According to Joshua, the supercomputer from War Games, it is "an interesting game. The only winning move is not to play." It has been suggested that the song be banned from the tubes in order to protect them from this magnitude of clogging.