breakfast first

Galaxies. Twelve of 'em.

I should have known that Frank Chu has an entry in the Wikipedia, but it honestly never occurred to me.

Passwords for Private Feeds

I had dinner tonight with some friends, one of whom was frustrated that he wasn't able to view one of my other blogs in his newsreader (he uses rss2email) because the site requires a username and password. This is a pretty common problem these days.

One lesser-known feature of the URL spec is the ability to specifiy a username and password in the URL itself. To use it, you prepend the user and password to the machine name, as so: http://user:[email protected]/blah/blah/blah. Most full-bodied http libraries support that URL option, so I checked rss2email (which uses Python's urllib) and it worked like a charm. So if passwords are bugging you too, give this a shot -- your reader will probably handle it.

You're kidding, right?

I ran across this "article" on CIO Insight about the problem with splogs. The article, which would be more appropriate on the back of a cereal box, has about one sentence of original content and quotes a few lines from Mark Cuban on the topic -- but it's absolutely buried in ads. This article is a case study in the problem they're describing!

Sewage Falling on Cedars

Late on Wednesday afternoon, while I was working in my office (in our basement), I noticed a tiny stream of water running down the wall -- never a good sign. When I went to investigate further, I realized that the carpet near the wall was completely soaked. Really not good. The leak was right below our kitchen sink, which had just been snaked the week before after the disposal backed up. It couldn't be coincidental.

We called up a plumber, who came out at 7:30 this morning. After talking about the problem, he said, Well, you've got to find the source of the leak. I can tear your walls apart for several hours at $150/hour, or you can try it yourself. I was pretty up for saving $600, so I told him I'd call him later. As a new homeowner, my toolbox is still pretty light, so I headed to the hardware store and picked up a 2" hole saw, a little flexible mirror, and a jab saw.

I was pretty sure that the drain line from the kitchen sink was just a vertical run into the basement, where it turned into a horizontal run. The plumber warned me that it might not be that simple, since there might be a lot of horizontal line to get to vent line, which we could see (from looking at the roof) was many feet away from the sink. He suggested that I start tracing the line starting in the kitchen, punching holes and peeking around until I found the leak. That sounded a little crazy to me. My gut told me that the leak was near the basement, not the kitchen. And since the cost of starting in the basement and being wrong was less than the cost of starting in the kitchen and being wrong, it was clear that the basement was where to start.

To cut to the chase: my hunch was right. Photos and details of finding the problem are in this photo album. The leak was pretty nasty, but it's isolated to a single wye joint and should be pretty easy to replace. The plumber's coming out tomorrow to replace it, so we'll see how it goes. The really good news is that, despite this leak looking like a long standing problem, there's no damage to the framing members. The first thing I did was poke a screwdriver at the sill plate, but it looks solid. What a relief.

In his classic How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler talks about how marking up a book with notes and underlining, far from defacing it, personalizes it and makes it your own. The same is true of a house, I've found. The first time you put a hole in your wall, you switch from mere mortgage payer to true homeowner. Well, the first time you deliberately put a hole in your wall, that is.

Always ten pins

Last night I went bowling with some guys (at the surprisingly decent West Seattle Bowl, not too far from our place). Whenever I go bowling (extremely infrequently*), I ask my fellow bowlers the same question: why don't pro bowlers consistently bowl perfect games? Bowling must be the most controlled, consistent sport: it's indoors, so there's no weather influence; the distance to the lanes is always the same, as is the arrangement, weight, and size of the pins; you use your own bowling ball, so that's the same; and, most of all, there are no real opponents (in the sense of people playing defense).

So why do we not see perfect, or near perfect, games out of every bowler? When I ask, most people speculate that it's a mental game, and people get psyched out. My counter argument to that is that there are a decent number of basketball players who can't miss a free throw shot, even under pressure, so that can't be it. So what gives?

* The last time I went bowling, I believe, was many years ago with Trevor and Shelley in the very strange Presidio Bowling Alley in San Francisco. Strange because: (a) it was in the middle of the enormous decommissioned army base/national park that is the Presidio, and (b) because it was across the street from the even weirder "World's Most Beautiful Burger King", as Trevor used to call it. That Burger King had an entire wall made of glass which revealed a sweeping vista of the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay. It was truly a sight to behold. Sadly, I believe both the bowling alley and the BK are closed now.

The Diaster in the South

As with many natural diasters, some of the most helpless victims of hurricane Katrina are the animals. The stories of people and animals being separated bring me to tears. Many people were unable to return to their homes, and do not know the fate of their pets. Others have tried to stay with their pets, only to find that they cannot bring them into shelters or on the evacuation busses:

Many people had dogs and they cannot take them on the bus. A police officer took one from a little boy, who cried until he vomited. "Snowball, snowball," he cried. The policeman told a reporter he didn't know what would happen to the dog.

Pets aren't the only animals suffering. On farms and in zoos, animals are succumbing to flooding, starvation, and dehydration. I can't imagine the horror.

I've found some organizations that are rescuing animals, and they're all accepting donations. I encourage everyone reading this to send just a few dollars to help them out.

• Noah's Wish: an organization focus solely on rescuing animals from natural diasters. The donation link, via Paypal, is about halfway down the page.

• International Fund for Animal Welfare: Their donation page accepts credit cards.

• American Humane/The Humane Society of the United States: You can make a donation by credit card here. They're teaming up with Petco, where you can make donations in-store or online.

There are plenty of other places that are helping, too. If you know of some, please add a comment with the details.

Flickr, Yahoo, and Testing

Frank points to an interesting interview of Eric Costello on the development and evolution of Flickr. What caught my eye was this statement from Eric:

But we also have a very agile development process. We deploy code to the site maybe 10 times a day on a busy day. And we’re constantly adding new features, small and large, even though lately it’s been relatively small features, sadly.

I assume that most of the ten changes on a busy day are cosmetic, but still, that's very rapid, and it got me wondering about their development process. It turns out that Cal Hendersen of Flickr is giving seminars (in London) on their development process, which Tom Coates writes about here.

I'm most curious about Flickr's approach to testing. In my experience, changing a production site ten times a day can only work if you have very effective automated testing. This is even more crucial when you're dealing with a distributed app, where developers in one area can make a perfectly reasonable change which passes their unit tests and local functional tests, but has unexpected consequences in wider system integration. Without thorough, automated functional tests, it's only a matter of time before you'll get blindsided. If anyone has details on Flickr's strategy for testing, please share.

How Flickr's development process will mesh with Yahoo's, now that they've been acquired, will also be interesting to watch. From reading the above articles, my guess is that they'll probably blend well. My understanding is that Yahoo does not formally QA much of the software deployed on their site, but rather relies on the developers of each property (as the various components are known) to test the software themselves and deal with operational issues that arise. That's an interesting approach, but it can lead to wide variance in quality between properties. But since this already seems to be Flickr's modus operandi, and since the Flickr team seems to really care about quality of user experience, I'm sure it will work out well.

Baby digs the K&R

For the littest nerd in your life.

(via DaddyTypes)

For the Ava fans in the audience

Friends and family have been asking for more, and more regular, updates on Ava, so I set up a blog for her. It's password protected to keep undesirable elements out. To get in, enter the name of our oldest cat as the user, and the name of the city where Miss J and I first lived after we got married. If you have any trouble, send me an email.

PDF and PS

Every time a PostScript file lands on my desktop, I'm amazed that Adobe hasn't chosen to support the format in Acrobat Reader. Certainly, early on in the life of PDF, Adobe had incentive not to support PostScript in Acrobat -- many free apps could write the PS format, and Adobe's strategy was to make money on writing the files, not reading them, so supporting PostScript viewing in Acrobat would have cut into PDF's base.

But now, 12 years after PDF burst on the scene, the battle has been won. PDF has gone far beyond its page layout roots and has spawned a whole family of products for Adobe, while PostScript has generally been relegated to a few dusty corners of academia where TeX still reigns. (I'm talking mainly about text documents here.) I was curious to see how severely PDF trumped PS in the popular vote, so I checked with Google on a few random terms:

word	Number of PDF docs	Number of PS docs
dog	1,930,000	18,100
topology	1,080,000	160,000
election	4,330,000	15,300
electron	2,580,000	95,100

As you probably guessed, it's a landslide.

So what's a poor user to do when he wants to read a PS file? Assuming he doesn't have a copy of Illustrator handy, he's going to need to find and install GhostScript and GhostView. GhostScript is a very powerful and flexible application (it has no problem handling PS, EPS, and PDF files, among others), but the viewer lacks the polish of a commercial offering. From my perscpective, forcing consumers to use a third-party app such as GhostScript tarnishes Adobe's reputation -- it makes it appear as though Adobe has turned its back on its firstborn.

Obviously it would require effort for Adobe to add PS support in Acrobat Reader, even though all of the hard work is already done. There might even be a bit of customer support cost to go along with it. But in the long run, I imagine those costs would be a drop in the bucket compared to Acrobat's revenue and it would generate goodwill among the academic community.

So come on Adobe, dance with the one who brung ya.