Watching the women's uneven bars. The announcers have spent the vast majority of the time whining and moaning Nastia's the 2nd place finish.

Now I recall earlier gymnastics events where these same announcers said starting first is a huge disadvantage and effectively penalizes the American competitor (pretty sure it was …

Wife is in Florida with the youngest kid, and the other two spent most of the weekend at my parents', giving me a chance to engage in plenty of bad habits. Mostly work and sleep.

It's an amazing feeling to wake up after more than 8 hours of sleep. Really …

All the cool kids are into Git these days and I've been reading plenty of articles about how good it is and how to use it. The problem is, I don't really have a problem with Subversion. I know I should, because all the cool kids do, but I just …

This is just incredible. The effects are amazing, but I'm guessing the models and tools behind what they do are going to fundamentally change the way we use video. Apparently these guys are divining a pretty good depth and color projection map from videos and photographs. With that you've added …

I couple of years ago I wrote about Taste Vectors, did a bit of hacking, and not much else.

The Strands folks have launched a similar concept in OpenTaste. Worth a look, will write more if I get a chance.

Via Duke Listens!

Funny.

My wife tells me no one listens to lyrics. Perhaps it's true; I found myself singing Pony Up's Matthew Modine today. It gets real interesting a few paragraphs into it.

Excellent article on Simple Top-Down Parsing in Python. The nud and led business could be better explained, but the rest of the article and code is great. I learned several things I hope to employ shortly.

I'm trying to remember if we studied this in compiler class or not. I …

Another one in the category of always-forget-how-to-do-this-so-noting-here:

class Entry(models.Model):
    blog = models.ForeignKey(Blog)

b = Blog.objects.get(id=1)
b.entry_set.all() # Returns all Entry objects related to Blog.

# b.entry_set is a Manager that returns QuerySets.
b.entry_set.filter(headline__contains='Lennon')
b.entry_set.count()

Full docs here …

This morning while trying to close a firefox tab I accidentally hit a button on Gmail that made it magically faster and better. I'll share it with you: look at the top right hand side of your gmail screen. Look for the link that says "Older version":

Click on this …

Still thinking about iPhone versus BlackBerry. The iPhone is great, but I prefer the BlackBerry for business use. The iPhone's weakest points:

• The speakerphone is unusable. Volume is far too low, quality of sound is below par. Unusable.
• There isn't a good way to carry the phone and/or stuff …

I'm a bit of an iPhone fanboy, it's true. However, Fred Wilson's post on mobile apps has me thinking - the main reason I carry an iPhone as well as a BlackBerry is the iPhone's browser. The rest of the stuff is great, but the killer app is the browser.

And …

My brother-in-law bought Arabian Nights (aka 1001 nights) to read to his 2 year old daughter, thinking they'd be nice, quaint stories. He thought better of it and gave it to me, so I gave it a quick read.

You probably know the general story: there's a cruel king that …

Update: Gotta love it. Genius, I am. Turns out the laptop was on "Power Saver" mode.

About 2 weeks ago my Vista laptop started slowing down. I don't know what caused it, but it started sometime after I updated to service pack 1, although I have no idea if that …

Interesting essay from David Adewumi on Why Black Nerds Are Unpopular. My observation on nerdism and popularity, based on going to school in three different continents, is that "nerds" are an American invention. Popularity, or lack thereof, is of course universal, but being a social outcast due to intelligence is …

Interesting new open source release from Google called Protocol Buffers. Language neutral data serialization and exchange via protocol definition and generated code for C++, Java, and Python.

Apparently Protocol Buffers are heavily used inside Google, so they look to be a robust implementation. Should be a good format for wire …

I'm trying to examine and modify form variables from jQuery by catching the submit event. jQuery has a serializeArray method that hands you the form variables in a nice array. For example:

    $('#someform').submit( function() {
        $.post("/some/url/", $(this).serializeArray(),
            function(data){
                console.log(data);
            }, "json");
        return false;
     } );

This is …

I just cancelled my Verizon broadband account, mainly because the card was no longer working in my PC and the mac doesn't take PC cards. I was surprised at how little effort Verizon put in to keeping me; I've been paying the $80 per month for almost 2 years now …

In most programming languages (Java, C, Python, Perl) I'm generally thinking "I'll put this thing on this shelf here, then I'll do x, then I'll pick up that thing, do some work on it, put the result over here," and so forth.

With Javascript, particularly when used correctly, which for …

A friend forwarded me an email about yet another group using a database to implement what's really a queue. Not surprisingly, performance is an issue.

Queues are still not part of the average developer's standard set of tools. At least the Java world has a standard API and several good …