Open Source Life

"Remember that groundhog day-like Star Trek episode where the Enterprise keeps getting destroyed?..."

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:29:59 -0800

“Remember that groundhog day-like Star Trek episode where the Enterprise keeps getting destroyed? News coverage of Greece feels like that.”

- @karlseguin

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Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:42:39 -0800

"If Rush [Limbaugh] was the villain in a movie they would have to tone his bullshit down so his..."

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:25:39 -0800

“If Rush [Limbaugh] was the villain in a movie they would have to tone his bullshit down so his character would be plausible.”

- 0252

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Fri, 27 Jan 2012 23:09:33 -0800

Video

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:46:22 -0800

"If God didn’t intervene in the holocaust, he’s not going to intervene in your football..."

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:44:11 -0800

“If God didn’t intervene in the holocaust, he’s not going to intervene in your football game. #fb”

- @LusciousPear

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Sat, 24 Dec 2011 22:33:02 -0800

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Sun, 27 Nov 2011 09:12:05 -0800

staff: Yesterday we did a historic thing. We generated 87,834...

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 09:59:06 -0800

staff:

Yesterday we did a historic thing. We generated 87,834 phone calls to U.S. Representatives in a concerted effort to protect the Internet. Extraordinary. There’s no doubt that we’ve been heard.

So just to keep you updated: The well-intentioned, but immensely flawed “Stop Online Piracy Act” is still in the House Judiciary Committee. The hearing was yesterday and now members will debate and bring amendments to the bill. The Committee will reconvene in a few weeks — the date has yet to be scheduled. Nothing has been brought to a final vote. Everything is still very much in play. We’ll keep you posted on what’s going on and what you can do to help. But for now, we want to thank you.

One encouraging thing we heard yesterday:

I don’t believe this bill has any chance on the House floor. I think it’s way too extreme, it infringes on too many areas that our leadership will know is simply too dangerous to do in its current form.

— Representative Darrell Issa

We also want to express our tremendous gratitude to our friends at Mobile Commons who, on 30 minutes notice, hooked us up with their amazing platform (and provided their expertise) to automatically connect callers with their Representatives.

jmcbks: #OWS “camping” permit. From Crooks & Liars...

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:24:35 -0700

jmcbks:

#OWS “camping” permit.

From Crooks & Liars (BlueGal) via Bill in Exile.

Bank Transfer Day is November 5th

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:13:10 -0700

Take America Back from the 1%

November 5th Bank Transfer Day

More info on finding a local credit union and moving your money.

liberalsarecool: Millionaires in Congress. Kind of explains why...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:34:52 -0700

liberalsarecool:

Millionaires in Congress. Kind of explains why we always do the half-assed wrong thing.

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Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:17:49 -0700

kateoplis: Bush tax cuts cost the rest of us $11.6 million an...

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 20:23:45 -0700

kateoplis:

Bush tax cuts cost the rest of us $11.6 million an hour. Yes, an hour.

fat-moonkin: worldjumpin: I created this inspired by Andrew...

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:57:26 -0700

fat-moonkin:

worldjumpin:

I created this inspired by Andrew Khunar, who recently created minimalistic posters of vanilla World of Warcraft bosses. His artwork can be found after the jump. [Link]

This is the Curator from one of my favorite instances in WoW: Karazhan.

“The Menagerie is for guests only”

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Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:52:54 -0700

Some screenshots of gobook.

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 00:48:28 -0700

Some screenshots of gobook.

A Weekend With Go

Sun, 09 Oct 2011 23:13:09 -0700

This weekend I decided to learn the basics of Go and see if there was a way that I could experiment with the language with a quick project, preferably a web app.

I started by reading up the Getting Started guide on the golang.org website and then started using A Tour of Go. About half-way into it, I felt like I had absorbed about all that I could without reading some more complex examples and experimenting.

Installing Go on my laptop was pretty simple. I did have a few issues with getting environmental variables correct to get goinstall to work.

A few google searches lead me to the projects section of the Go Dashboard. From there I started looking at the web frameworks and toolkits. I’ve got a good amount of experience with some of the more do-it-yourself web frameworks like Tornado, so I was looking for the closest thing to that as I could find. The Twister project looked pretty promising.

At this point, I decided to port the logbook project Go as a first project. I picked this one because it is a fairly simple CRUD web application that I wanted to port over to use MySQL from SQLite and integrate bootstrap into it.

This meant finding solutions to two problems: How do I engage MySQL? How should template handling be done? There were a few MySQL client libraries listed on the projects page and a few additional ones mentioned on the mailing list, but the majority were either abandoned, incomplete or unstable. I ended up using GoMySQL, although it has been updated since 5/2011. I’m really hoping that I stumble on or someone recommends a better alternative.

For templating, I saw that there was a mustache library, mustache.go, and went with that. It supports the basics that I’m looking for and I’ve had an itch to use it for a little while now. Although it hasn’t been updated since 4/2011, it seems pretty stable.

Porting the code over was pretty fun. It feels like the standard library set in Go is a bit bare and lacks some of polish that Python has, but all of the basic functionality ported over without a fuss. I had to write a string scanner to parse space/quote separated tags out of a list and deal with MySQL in an ugly way, to name a few.

With all of that said, the project is “done” and all of the functionality ported. Take a look at the gobook project on GitHub and tell me what you think. I’d love to get a quick code review from some people more skilled in Go to learn about how I could be doing some things better.

First impressions: I love it. At my current job I do about 70% Java and 30% c++, mostly building concurrent and distributed backend/platform systems. I usually work on multi-threaded apps and use several different libraries to work (or fake) async functionality: nio, akka, boost thread, libevent, zmq, etc. My last job was 100% Erlang, which has an awesome reputation for massively concurrent development.

What I love about Go is that it feels like it takes the best of what I’ve worked with and distilled it down into a pretty basic set of primitives that cover most of them. I’m not sure if I’ll get to work on Go projects much, but I’d really love to.

jessiethephreak: College^

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:38:35 -0700

jessiethephreak:

College^

Oh God, what is this mess branded as Delicious?

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 08:59:53 -0700

I saw today that new Delicious.com site is live and it is “back to beta”. I honestly can’t believe what I’m seeing here. It is far to early (in the day) to go into full on rant mode, so I’ll summarize my grievances.

Popular topic links are no longer the first thing you see when you visit the site. Nor are recent popular tags.

Where THE FUCK did my RSS feeds go?

They’ve introduced an additional layer of organization called “stacks” which is absurd. Delicious uses (read as: pioneered) tags because of their simplicity and efficiency at organizing thought. Stacks feel awkward to try to integrate into the existing collection organization model.

The nav bar has been rewritten and the basic links to my bookmarks, settings, etc are no longer clearly visible without mouse-over effects.

Looks like my friend list and networks are gone.

No quick link or indicator that someone has bookmarked something for me. That one is a real bummer.

The edit link dialog no longer shows the full URLof what has been saved. It also looks like they’ve tried cramming stacks into it as well.

If it isn’t obvious, I’m extremely disappointed. Granted, I used to work on Delicious at Yahoo a few years ago. I’m no Josh(ua) or Les, but I really loved that site because of its simplicity, efficiency and usefulness. When Yahoo announced (leaked) that Delicious was going to be shutdown, I switched over to Pinboard and until Delicious can get its act together, that is where I’ll be.