I see what you did there, Mr. Belichick.

I don’t normally go in for Abstruse Goose (I’m more of an XKCD man myself), but I really enjoyed this comic I found in his archives:

If you listen to the TrekWest5 podcast, you know we’ve been promoting the podiobook trilogy "7th Son" for some time now. I’m really glad to announce that as of Oct. 27th, you’ll be able to buy this book in print (in fact, you can preorder it now). To quote the email JC sent me:

This is huge news for me (the trilogy was also optioned for film development by Warner Bros.), and for podcasting. Considering that 7th Son was rejected by dozens of publishing pros before I released it as a podcast, we have accomplished something extraordinary with its publication.

To celebrate the release, he’s announcing a number of new promotions that I wanted to make all of you aware of:

- A brand-new podcast recording of the "print edition" of the novel (with new scenes, twists, and character tweaks)

- A prequel audio short story anthology called 7th Son: 7 Days. (I am currently listening my way through this and am really enjoying it)

- Serialization of the novel in PDF and and the text at Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing.net

There’s a lot to like about the 7th Son series of podiobooks, and for those of you not inclined to partake of them in the audio format, I hope you’ll pick up a copy of the deadtree edition.

Came across this meme on a friend’s blog, and it sounded kind of interesting, so I thought I’d give it a try.

The rules, as I got them, are as follows:

1. Put your music player on shuffle
2. Press forward for each question
3. Use the song title as the answer
4. NO CHEATING!!! What you get is what you get!

I’m more than a little bit disturbed by the pattern that began to develop as the experiment wound on…fortunately, I can point it all to the fact that I didn’t have very much music loaded on my ipod when I did this, so maybe I can try it again later with a broader selection of my music and it will end up feeling a bit less like my ipod is trying to question my sexual orientation.

I don’t think I’ve kept secret my admiration for what Jeff Atwood does over at codinghorror.com. One of his most recent entries really appealed to me.

One of the (many) unfortunate side effects of choosing a career in software development is that, over time, you learn to hate software. I mean really hate it. With a passion. Take the angriest user you’ve ever met, multiply that by a thousand, and you still haven’t come close to how we programmers feel about software. Nobody hates software more than software developers. Even now, writing about the stuff is making me physically angry.

He quotes an interview where someone suggests that “One bad programmer can easily create two new jobs a year.” Having recently discussed a tangential subject with my TrekWest5 co-host, Peter, and given my on-going involvement in Freenode’s ##PHP channel I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. Once upon a time (in the early 90’s), there was an attempt by a group known as advogato to provide web-of-tust like metrics to certify a programmer’s skill. Given the explosion of social networking in the intervening period, I’m wondering if any of you have ideas on how we can really bring some muscle to bear on this?

Reading this article on “rootkits” for Javascript has really got me thinking about the kind of evil you could do by poisoning the base datatype Prototypes in a javascript environment. I recommend you read it if you do a lot of work with Javascript.

What is CouchDB?
CouchDB is a new kind of database system. Instead of tables, columns, and rows, it’s just a collection of JavaScript (JSON) documents.

Design your own Kindle (and win it) with Engadget, Amazon, and Adafruit Industries!
The Amazon Kindle is an awesome “Electronic Book” device. We’re getting closer to having a PADD.

Upgrade Rules for Windows 7 RC Users
If you’ve been using a Windows 7 Release Candidate, you need to be aware of these.

Survey says most companies won’t deploy Windows 7
Not really news, but good information to have in your pocket.

The ‘R’ Programming Language
‘R’ is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

Build a 10 Terabyte Storage Solution for ~$1000USD
The guys Tom’s Hardware are always looking for the next edge – I certainly could put 10TB of space to use!

1TB Hard Drive for <$80 USD @ TigerDirect
The Tom’s Hardware article sent me looking for this – this is really good news!

Google Releases ‘Remote Desktop’ Software Based on NX
NX is an attempt to make the Unix X Windows system a more viable solution for remote desktop display. When Google announced their upcoming Chrome OS operating system, a lot of people were trying to figure out what their new display system would be – the common thinking now is that it will probably be this NX implementation.

Video interview with author of O’Reilly and Associates book: Programming Collective Intelligence
Examples of Collective intelligence might be Amazon’s or Netflix’s “Recommendations” services, or the all-powerful Wikipedia – where the body of knowledge becomes something more than the sum of its parts. If you’re not sure why Collective Intelligence is important, I urge you to read the excellent book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

I saw Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris back in 2005, and thought it looked interesting – especially because he was a local – but never bothered to pick it up. I didn’t hear the name again until he was selected by James Rigney’s widow to finish The Wheel of Time, a fantasy series I’ve long held dear. When I heard that Harriet selected him based on his Mistborn series, I decided to get them on audiobook and listen to them.

Six hours into the audiobook, I was crushed. THIS was the style of writer Harriet chose to finish my beloved Wheel of Time? The story is disjointed, with great swaths of time passing between pages. The dialog is overly-simplistic, as if the author were writing to the Harry Potter crowd – which, OK, I have no proof that he WASN’T, but it’s certainly not a style of writing I find enjoyable. I never even finished the Harry Potter books, having put down Book 6 and realized “I’m not enjoying this, why do I keep reading it?”. The quality of characterization is uneven, with secondary characters like Hammond or Breeze being far more entertaining and vibrant than the “main” characters of Kelsier and Vin. All hope for a pleasant ending to the Wheel of Time faded from me, and I became a bitter and angry fan.

Then, my good friend Peter suggested I read a book called The Name of the Wind – perhaps the best new work of fantasy I’ve read in the past 5 years. I started following the author’s blog, which eventually led me back to Brandon Sanderson’s blog, which – to my astonishment – I found I thoroughly enjoyed.

So, it is with no little trepidation that I bring you links to the free, online copies of Brandon’s upcoming work, Warbreaker. I have not yet read it myself, but here’s the piece of Brandon’s entry on the book that really caught my attention:

How would [being transformed into a deity] affect a person? What if they, themselves, didn’t believe that their powers made them a god—yet everyone else did believe it? Could you have a god who didn’t believe in his own religion?

I’m willing to give him another shot, and maybe even go back and finally read Elantris, which some people have told me is quite good – of course, they also really liked Mistborn…sigh

I’m often accused of being “too serious”, so when I have something that proves I have a sense of humour, I like to share it. This snippet of a conversation thread from this post on proggit really made me laugh – it mixes incredibly obscure geek humour with a long-dead internet meme regarding some strange creatures chasing a kitten through a field – you know what I’m referring to.

It’s been a while since I posted a “Monday Break”, so I’d like to get back into the swing by bringing you Every Extend – a free, fun, single-button game with what appears to be a Japanese origin. I could easily see something like this doing well on the Blackberry or iPhone.

I’m sitting here, waiting for our European offices to get back to me on an issue, and the only thing I could think of to do with my time was watch Season 2 of 30 Rock – and the only thing I can tell you about it is that someone has bottled pure ‘funny’ and unleashed it in concentrated, 20-minute doses.

Well, my share of the meta game has gone live. I have to say, I’m more anxious about this than I’ve EVER been before. Will people understand what I’m trying to say? Will it be as moving for them as it was for me? I don’t think I’ll handle it very well if they don’t like it, and it’s incredibly unusual for me to pin my own emotions that much on the reactions of other people. I’d guess it’s because writing the last few paragraphs of that story were so important to me that any rejection of it will feel like a rejection of me. Bleh, I’m starting to make myself sick…but if you don’t like it, do me a favor and keep it to yourself?

This week’s batch of ST:TNG episodes includes one titled ‘The Ensigns of Command’, which Memory Alpha cites as coming from this poem by John Quincy Adams, which I found to be…not horrible. For those not inclined to read the entire poem, here’s the relevant section.

[Edited on 2009-07-13 to include link to Radar’s original article, as I just noticed I never linked to it directly]

[If you don’t know how Watchmen ends, stop reading now. This is a good rule of thumb for my blog: I have no qualms about “spoiling” – if you’re reading an article discussing a subject, you’d darn well be familiar with the material.]

Let me start here by pointing out something I don’t know that I’ve ever mentioned. I owe The Mad Giggler a deep debt – back when The Homestarmy looked like this, asked me if I would be interested in writing a Guest Post on his blog/web site, thehomestarmy.com. To that point, I didn’t get it – the whole concept of blogs escaped me – and frankly, pissed me off a little bit. (Hmm…sort like Facebook and Twitter do today – no, no; don’t chase that particular dragon right now, Joey, you’re going somewhere with this post…). If it weren’t for him encouraging me, I might have missed out on a number of incredible things, including the two blogs I write on, as well as my podcast with The One Named Peter. Thank you, MG.

Last night, or early this morning, over at The Homestarmy (as it is TODAY), Radar posted what I believe is his longest entry to date

[
    wait, let’s just check that…

    select title from blog_entries where authorid = 8 order by length(body)+length(extended) desc;
    16305: Where I Boldly Went
    11273: The Watchmen: Novel or just Graphic?

...discussing graphic novels in general, but focused mostly on Watchmen. Radar made a lot of apologies for the quality of his writing (which turned out to be entirely unnecessary, man), so I’ll follow his pattern – the main body of this article was written between the time Radar posted his article (around 01:00 on Thursday) and the time I went to bed. In between putting my thoughts down here, I was also working, and so wasn’t giving the care I usually prefer to give to my writing. However, at this point, I’m so late in publishing this response, I’m more interested in getting it out than in quality-checking it, so I’m sorry if there’s anything wrong, rude, offensive, or dumb.

No podcast, no php-bot, and no article on creativity vs. originality – spent the entire weekend debugging this:

For the ‘hardware impaired’, here’s what you should be looking for:

Yeah – hard drives aren’t supposed to look like that.

That first image is a link to a REALLY LARGE version, for those who want to fully revel in my pain – Radar, I’m looking at you.

Something came up in IRC today, I thought I found a pretty nice solution to it, thought I’d share it here. A guy has a table in his database that contains ‘prefixes’. It looks like this:

id	number
1	1
2	1800
3	18
4	180
5	1801

Given the phone number “18005551234”, he’d like to find the longest valid prefix. He had suggested to me that he was considering a stored procedure which loops, character-by-character, through the input looking for the longest match. Instead, I recommended he use ‘replace’ to trim the ‘prefixes’ off of the input, and let an ‘order by’ tell him which of those actually resulted in the shortest remaining string (and thus, was the longest match).

The query I ended up with goes something like this:
select id from prefixes order by length(replace('18005558355', number, '')) asc limit 1;
Given a better understanding of mysql’s ‘replace()’, we ended up using this instead – note the identities are renamed to reflect his actual sytem:
SELECT id, prefix from routes where locate(prefix, '18005558355') = 1 order by length(prefix) desc limit 1;

Is there a better way? Below the fold is a quick (postgresql) “dump” of the database in question so you can come up with your own proposals.

Let’s be honest – there aren’t many of you reading this, and there’s just not that much of me to go around, so if you read blog.joeysmith.com, I’d like to hear from you regarding what sort of topics I should write about. Here are some ideas, but feel free to submit your own:

• Information Visualization – I have at least a half-dozen articles on the subject laying around in various states of (in-)completion.
• Parsing Expression Grammars – how to stop using regular expressions and use a parser instead
• PHP WTFs, tricks and anecdotes – a decade of participation in FreeNode’s ##PHP channel has given me some great material in the “WTF” category
• Data Structures and their Algorithms – this would probably consist of discussing a particular data structure, showing an implementation in a couple of different languages (Maybe “JS, PHP, Python…???”)
• Book reviews

This week’s Trek West 5 podcast will be discussing The Measure of a Man, which contains a (brief) mention of this sonnet, one of the few I’ve actually memorized. Here it is in its entirety:

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope, With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Wikipedia brings us an entry on Kryptos, a sculpture that stands outside the CIA headquarters in Langley, VA which contains 4 puzzles – three have been solved, the 4th continues to stymie everyone who attempts to solve it.

Watching Star Trek: The Next Generation for my podcast reintroduced me to the poem “The Spell of the Yukon”, by Robert W. Service. This poem often makes me think of my childhood in Wyoming where I would spend hours and hours getting lost to the world in the alley behind our house…

It’s the great, big, broad land ‘way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

The rest of The Spell of the Yukon below the fold…

Here are the last of the “leftovers” from the project:
Squeak by Example
The WikiBook ‘Practical PHP Programming’
Basics of Algebra and Analysis for Computer Science
Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming [pdf]
.Net Book Zero
Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++

There’s plenty more still to come, and if you apply a little bit of your own energy, there are many out there to be found.

If you do find something you really enjoy, drop me an email or let me know in the comments here.

Our ISP has a planned maintenance outage for the UPS unit powering our machine on Mon Feb 02 17:00:00 MST 2009. It should last about 4 hours and may result in the site being unreachable for that period.

Some books we didn’t have time for:

Getting Started with awk
Introduction to Design Patterns in C++ with Qt 4
Logic, Programming and Prolog [pdf]
The Scheme Programming Language
A Tutorial on Pointers and Arrays in C
The OpenGL ‘Red Book’
Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl

Also, here’s an entire “directory” of online SciFi novels.

We’ll end the project with a list of Python books :

• Dive Into Python
• The Standard Python Library
• Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python
• The Django Book
• Building Skills in Python and Building Skills in OO Design

Another great handbook to have around – The Handbook of Applied Cryptography

John Sundman dropped by my blog a few weeks ago and mentioned that his new novel, The Pains is also available now, as well as his novella Cheap Complex Devices

Jeff Zeldman writes, regarding The Pains:

The Pains is a story of faith in a world that appears to be falling apart. It tells the story of Norman Lux, a 24-year-old novitiate in a religious order, who becomes afflicted with something akin to stigmata.

Data Mining with R – R is an interesting language which recently made the New York Times.

Peter Watts has made his entire backlist available, but I recommend starting with Starfish.

Note: I had someone challenge the past few entries, suggesting I was running out of ideas for ‘recreational’ books – I can assure you, those are books that are very dear to my heart, and I would rather recommend them than any of the 15+ other books I have on my list because I do love them so much.

I repent! I never decided on a video for the “Sunday Special”, and the article self-published before I realized I had forgotten it. To make it up to you, I’m posting several:

Brian Cantwell Smith, dean of the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto Smith, the author of “On the Origin of Objects,” combines degrees in computer science and philosophy and is an expert on the interdisciplinary convergence brought about by digitization. His talk is titled, And Is All This Stuff Really Digital After All?

And a couple of items from the brilliant folks over at archive.org:

From the National Film Registry comes His Girl Friday, a classic screwball comedy from 1940 starring Cary Grant.
Suddenly, a quirky thriller from 1954 starring Frank Sinatra.

The Internet Archive did a blog post a few years ago that points to all of Frank Baum’s works that they’ve categorized.

Another textbook, this time from MIT – How to Design Programs

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist Learning with C++ – also available in two Python editions, 1st and 2nd.

Little Women is another great classic that I really, really enjoy.

My Antonia is a very important book for me – when I read it in 3rd grade at the urging of a teacher, I was convinced there was nothing worth reading in the ‘Classics’ – they seemed likely to be dry and uninteresting compared to the scif/fantasy fare I was more fond of. It’s something like 24 years later, and the beauty of this book still haunts me.

Algorithms, a forthcoming textbook from the fine professors at Berkeley, is the more “technical” half of today’s post

Programming Ruby – The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide
H. G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine is worth a read if you like SciFi at all.

As of the time this post is being written, Robert Finn’s Underlife is the most downloaded book at the excellent free-book portal Manybooks.

Programming in Lua has a similar place in life – it’s popularity is under-appreciated. Sure, Lua’s not what most people would call a “mainstream” programming language. On the other hand, it’s the programming language for writing addons to the massively popular “World of Warcraft”, so…

Practical Common Lisp, which makes a great supplement to Day 9’s On Lisp, and 1633, the first sequel to Day 5’s 1632

Philip Greenspun is an interesting character. An instructor at MIT, he’s one those people that strikes me as “justifiably arrogant”, and has written two great books which are readily available online: Software Engineering for Internet Applications and SQL for Web Nerds. This second one focuses on Oracle – which is unusual for books that you can find free online – and actually helped me come up to speed with some of that RDBMS’ idiosyncrasies when I started at my current employer.

Another person who strikes me as “justifiably arrogant” would be Sherlock Holmes, and you can find The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes here. It contains the following Holmes stories:

• A Scandal in Bohemia
• The Red-Headed League
• A Case of Identity
• The Boscombe Valley Mystery
• The Five Orange Pips
• The Man with the Twisted Lip
• The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
• The Adventure of the Speckled Band (one of my favorites)
• The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
• The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
• The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
• The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

Jeffrey A. Carver’s entire series The Chaos Chronicles is joined today by Text Processing in Python, an incredibly handy book.

Today, we’ll focus on Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society Lessig is the author of “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace” and an expert on the issues of copyright and “copyleft”.

His lecture video is here, as well as his books The Future of Ideas [pdf] and Free Culture.

Charles Stross’ ‘Accelerando!’ – I have this as a paperback, as well. A fun read.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! – I’d love to, but I still haven’t managed to get a working GHC.

I’ve linked to this before, but The Big Online Book of Linux Ada Programming is awesome. Ada is a fun language that has seen lots of use in NASA.

The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It is available in a number of formats, including PDF, HTML, and an “Annotated” version – from their site:

With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

And, since we’ve passed the ‘halfway point’, I’m going to include a movie. His Girl Friday, #19 on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Laughs as well as being selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry is a great comedy that has recently hit the public domain. Enjoy it.

Higher-Order Perl is a good example of using a language in ways that probably weren’t intended by its creator(s), but there are some great concepts in it that really helped me start to think about “Higher-order programming”.

Prof. Lessig’s Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace [pdf] is another great mind-changing book – only focusing on how the Internet is redefining constitutional law.

If you’re working with the PostgreSQL database engine (such as the one backing this blog), Practical PostgreSQL is an incredibly handy book to keep around.

The Forlorn has pretty good reviews – one Amazon reviewer called it “reminiscent of Andre Norton’s early books”, which is a pretty favorable comparison in my esitmation.

My friend Eric ‘tagged’ me, so I guess I’m supposed to write 7 things you may not know about me. I’ll give it a shot.

• I never graduated from High School, caused by a paralyzing fear of failure which prevents me from trying many things to do this.
• I am a published poet – in fact, my poetry has twice been selected as “Editor’s Choice” by the Internation Society of Poets.
• I have performed, at last count, 17 mercy killings for people with sick and/or dying pets. 9 dogs, 4 cats, 2 birds, and a lizard.
• I have written a number of “fanfic” episodes for Star Trek: The Next Generation
• I am ineligible for employment by the United States Government due to my involvement as a young man in a ring of programmers who turned out to be what the media today would probably call “cyber-terrorists”.
• I have, at some point in my life, read all 20 volumes of the OED (I want to say that at the time I read it, there were only 18 volumes).
• I am having incredible difficulty getting the Glasgow Haskell Compiler to build on SuSE Linux Desktop’s 64 bit distribution.

I feel like I’m cheating on that last one, but it was lig’s idea, and I really couldn’t think of a 7th interesting thing.

I’m also going to punt on “the rules”, which appear to be:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some wierd.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

I don’t care for the way that 3rd rule makes this game exclusive like an invitation-only party, but with the peer-pressure of a chain letter. So if you’re inclined to participate, consider yourself tagged by me and link back here. If you’re not so inclined, feel free to wipe your mind of this entire experience.

Since I just posted about Subversion, I should point out that I actually use git as my front-end suite to svn these days. It’s a large (and often confusing) piece of software, which is why I’m glad there’s git Magic

Jack London’s White Fang is a pretty fun book – I mean, it’s about dogs – I hate dogs – but I still enjoyed this book.

Even though I’ve been administering and using the Subversion VCS since before it hit 1.0, I still find myself referring back to the O’Reilly manual Version Control with Subversion quite often.

Edwin Abbott’s Flatland was given to me by my sixth-grade teacher, and I still enjoy it today.

This week’s video lecture is from Brewster Kahle, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive, and originator of the print-on-demand Bookmobile. Therefore, it seems only appropriate to link to two books available in the Internet Archive.

First, there’s Eric Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming [pdf].

Secondly, how about Richard F. Burton’s The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 (sometimes called “1,001 Arabian Nights”).