Camel Knights

Go-nowhere idea: driving speed graphs

My windshield was dusty the other day so I applied some wiper fluid while driving down the highway. It reached around towards the driver-side window, and there was a small river moving across. It was actually moving upwards, and the faster I went the higher it would go. And when I slowed down, it dropped. I started wondering if it would end up being something like a record of my trip, just as a track on the window.

At the very least it would make for a cool “explaining mathematical concepts” scene in something like NUMB3RS. Not that I watch NUMB3RS. Anymore. To be fair, it had the worst intro I had ever seen on any show (We all use math! Every day! every day! every day), and I only saw a few episodes anyways which is pretty standard for TV show grace periods (unless you know from the beginning that you’re not going to like it, and to be honest there have been shows which I kept watching long after the grace period had ended (Heroes, anyone?) so it’s not like I have any real cred for dropping NUMB3RS when I did, and besides NUMB3RS isn’t *awful*) but anyways, as long as we’re talking about TV shows, for whatever reason, I can’t seem to enjoy Big Bang Theory, don’t ask me why, maybe it’s just a little too much (I don’t find it that funny when characters who should be talking normally use big words or scientific words in place of regular ones strictly because it displays how “nerdy” they are, plus I *despise* canned laughter) oh and another show that I never really got into is Always Sunny in Philadelphia and I know I *should* watch it but I’ve only seen a few episodes and I never seem to find the time (though I certainly find the time to watch 30 Rock) but like everyone I know is always going on about that show so I’ll def give it another chance, and I should also probably give Avatar: the Last Airbender (totally different from James Cameron’s epic which is absolutely worth seeing, especially in 3D) a second chance while I’m at it, since I literally could not make it through the first season (every episode seemed to end up with them learning a Life Lesson and laughing while flying away on that flying buffalo of his) and it’s hugely popular with plenty of people whose tastes I used to respect and is it really such a bad thing to listen to critics? Or at least be mindful of what they say and endorse? It’s really easy to mock someone for following Pitchfork too much, or placing too much dependence on Rotten Tomatoes/Metacritic (those two sites are *slightly* different in that there’s at least some variety of input vs. just one critic), but at the same time, there is a TON of stuff out there! Way too much music to ever possibly get through. As I see it, there are 3 solutions. The first is random walks, either on Myspace or Lala or some other way to just sample a huge variety of music. This works very rarely, as 90% of everything is crud, and given that the remaining 10% of music is in fact “something”, Sturgeon’s Law again applies and informs us that 90% of that, too, is crud - which is a roundabout way of saying you probably won’t find much you like. So that leaves you with the other two ways: networks and filters. Networks are friends or recommendation engines - if you like A, you’ll probably like B (or if you’re friends with person A who likes B, you might start listening to it). This works pretty well, to a degree, but can become somewhat stifling as your (non-automated) network doesn’t quite grow quickly enough for some. Automated networks seem pretty good (Pandora specifically), but I haven’t really found any new artists through them. Although I’m always willing to try the latest one. That leaves us with the filters - people who listen to everything (or as much as they can) and make opinions for the rest of us. Pros: if you find a critic or site that you tend to agree with, it makes a great recommendation engine as you’re fairly confident you’ll appreciate most of its recommended music. Cons: everyone’s tastes are different and you’ll undoubtedly miss out on something that the reviewer didn’t care for that you would have loved.
But come on, there’s *so* much music out there, you’re not going to find everything you could have possibly loved anyways! (Sidenote: could this be any harder to read, do you think? A huge centered block of text with no formatting… at least it’s not in Comic Sans or Papyrus) So long story short I don’t think critics are that bad, and I’m not ashamed to read what they have to say and think about it. Where “it” is music or movies. I’m trusting their tastes to mostly mesh with mine. Recently I’ve been really getting into lists, as imperfect as they are. And there are a ton of them. Best ____ of 2009, Best _____ of the decade, and of course the list of lists of the decade over at kottke (and just for 2009 over at fimoculous). In particular, I’ve been obsessing over the music lists. I want to know a *lot* of music. Like every list I can find about the top whatever albums I’ll try to listen to them. Some of the lists overlap a lot which is very helpful. But the biggest ones right now are Pitchfork’s top 200 albums of the 2000s, eMusic’s Best of Decade, most “essentials” lists, and even Esquire’s deeply flawed “75 albums every man should own” (full list here). It’s also very rewarding to come upon one of these lists and already be familiar with most of the items on it. Agreeing/disagreeing with the particular author is kind of icing on the cake for me right now.

Anyways I’m now on vacation so I’ve got more time than ever to soak up some music, missed TV shows, tons of movies, and get started on reprogramming WBOR. I’m thinking of using the app engine, but I haven’t quite made up my mind. Oh and I’m going to try to learn Cocoa and write a kickass iPhoto-like Flickr client with it. Unless I get a better idea for an app (maybe something having to do with twitter? i’d like it if twitter were more like google reader in that i could access it on my phone or any computer and it would tell me what I missed/haven’t read/whatever rather than having to get it all on my phone)

Longest post ever? I sincerely hope you didn’t read this entire thing up to this point, as I have few coherent thoughts and that first neverending sentence was actually deliberately written to be as hard to read as possible.

Oh, and finally, in case you’re not reading it already, you should be reading The Awl (choice articles to be found here, here, here, and here)

Mono output

Protip: if you have a set of speakers only one of them is broken so that every song you play is like 100% bass with no vocals (or maybe just backing vocals and guitar with no lead or synth) then one of the things you can do on the mac is to purchase and install audio hijack pro and this monomaker plugin and pipe the audio from itunes -> audio hijack pro -> non-busted speaker. this is the simplest way I have found to accomplish this.

Valid not before not set.

So we’re working on a Java project dealing with X509Certificates. We thought we were all set, until we ran across this error.
“Valid not before not set”.

What the hell does that mean. At first we thought it was “Valid ____ not ___ before ___ not set” or something, with a variable that just wasn’t properly initialized or something? But it made no sense.

Anyways. It turns out that certificates have a property called “valid not before”, and it wasn’t set. So we had to set that property.

It took way too long to figure out. Hopefully this helps someone else though.

Sometimes Computers are Too Smart

I’m working on an application that needs to be able to read a date from a string. Obviously there are countless libraries that will do this for me, so I essentially renamed the long datetime.datetime.strptime(string, “%m/%d/%Y”) to a shorter name.

I had initially assumed everything would be in mm/dd/yyyy format, but occasionally I would notice people leaving off the first two digits of the year. So I altered my wrapper method to deal with that, and things were working well. Then I noticed that sometimes people left off an initial 0 in front of a month, like 6/31/2008 vs. 06/31/2008. So I altered it again to deal with that.

But I was still having trouble parsing certain dates, and I couldn’t figure out why. Specifically, “6/31/08” wouldn’t work. At first I thought it was because it was both missing a leading 0 and two digits of the year, but after a while I realized that it wasn’t formatting because June has only 30 days, not 31.

Kind of annoying, but I guess it’s a good thing.