John Doe's personal blog

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 better 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.

ProggIt had this amusing gem today, but it’s pretty obscure, so I put it here instead of the Homestarmy

So where can this argument possibly go?
I don’t have to tell you; I’m sure you must know.
By reductio, there cannot possibly be
a procedure that acts like the mythical P.

Great stuff.

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:

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.