1 down, 2 to go

November 29, 2004 by Eric Richardson

It'll be a little quiet here over the next few days. This is the last week of classes, and I've got a whole lot of work due over the last few days. Today through Wednesday night, all I get to think about is paper writing.

Today I wrote a 6 pager. Thursday I've got two due: one's 15 pages and one's only 5. After that I've got one more due a little over a week later, during finals.

It felt good to actually accomplish something writing today. I've had a pretty good brain-lock over the past few weeks that's kept me from getting a whole lot done. So now I've written one paper, and it went ok. Maybe that'll be the jumpstart I need.

eThreads: the need for speed

November 26, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I just put a new eThreads snapshot in place, so hopefully things will feel a little faster here. I'm valuing speed over a small memory footprint, so I added a cache in memory. I also rewrote the way internal links work (links within the blog... all URLs stay the same) to do some stuff I couldn't do without good speed.

Most of what I did wouldn't make any sense to anyone but me, but here's the kind of cool stuff the new link structure does: the template being linked to determines what the link looks like. A simple example: From the main page I link post titles to the permanent URL for the post. In the template code on the main page there's this little snippet:

{link "/blog"}{qopt "id"}{$p.id/}{/qopt}{/link}

That tells the link code that we're linking to the /blog template. It then loads up that template and makes sure "id" is an option /blog's looking for. At that point it knows it can link to /blog?id=$id. But it also looks at the /blog template's keys, and sees that it has id defined as a key. That means that it can link a cleaner URL as /blog/$id. That's the one it uses.

Now I just have to keep an eye on memory usage and figure out how best to expire things out of the cache. Fun fun fun.

ice skating downtown

November 26, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Yesterday I walked around my neighborhood a little bit and ended up spending some time in Pershing Square watching the people at the ice rink. For the most part it was kids who inched their way around the walls to start. Of course there was also the girl who brought her own skates and had the t-shirt that said "If figure skating was easy they'd call it hockey," so I guess some people do skate here in socal. I hadn't skated in a really long time, but I got it in my head that it would be fun to do, so I talked Kathy into going back with me later in the afternoon.

The rink's little: I think 50x30 or so. But it is outside at Pershing Square, and that's a juxtaposition that still seems pretty odd. It took me a little while to get a basic fell back for not making a fool of myself, but I think I ended up ok in that regard. Kathy, despite growing up in Michigan, has never ice skated much, but she showed definite improvement from the start of the session to the finish.

At $6/hour (and $2 to rent skates) the ice time isn't all that cheap, but it's one of those things that's just kinda cool to do. This is California, after all: you're not going to find a whole lot of ice alternatives.

everybody's talking about firefox

November 25, 2004 by Eric Richardson

There's a good article on Mozilla in today's LA Times. It's been amazing to see the positive press that has accompanied the release of Firefox 1.0. This is totally representative of the stuff you've been seeing all over the place:

Firefox's advantages over Explorer make its rapid acceptance unsurprising. Among other virtues, it's faster, more resistant to viruses and spyware and full of useful features that Microsoft, complacent in its near-monopoly, has never provided for Explorer.

You couldn't buy the good press they've been getting, and it's absolutely deserved.

zap zap flash

November 25, 2004 by Eric Richardson

When I was a lot younger someone brought me a broken fax machine once to see if I could fix it. Needless to say, I couldn't... What did I know about fax machines?

Well the other day our friendly Town Crier brought me his digital camera to fix. It had dropped, and now was making a really friendly grinding noise before giving an error and shutting off. Grinding noises are good -- they signify it's something mechanical, and that gives me a lot better chance to fix it. Don also brought a really good guide to fixing a couple problems with the Nikon Coolpix 950. Yesterday after work I took the camera apart. That's easy enough... I'm good at taking things apart. The symptoms matched the second repair on that page, the lens coupling issue. Long story short, don't ignore the warnings on that page that say things like "High Voltage" -- there may not be the amps to do any damage, but the cap on that flash unit will give you a real good zapping.

I gave myself two.

Today, though, I finished, put everything back together, and -- wonder above wonders -- it's working. I consider myself more lucky than skilled.