The Codebelay Blog

Author: barce

  • 16 Years of Telnet Access to The WELL Ends on 9/24

    When I logged onto the WELL via SSH today, I got the following message of the day:

       You own your own words. This means that you are responsible for
   the words that you post on The WELL and that reproduction of those
   words without your permission in any medium outside of The WELL's
   conferencing system may be challenged by you, the author.

   ******************************************************************

      Support is in the wellcome conference, at (415) 645-9300,
      at http://www.well.com/help or by mail at helpdesk@well.com 

   ******************************************************************

   Access change:  Effective Wednesday Sep 24, we will start blocking 
   telnet access to well.com, and will require that all shell users 
   connect to well.com via an SSH client instead of a telnet client.  
   If you're still using telnet for Unix and Picospan sessions, see 
   news.3126.1638 for details on updating your security.

    I applaud the security change that is coming to the WELL, but it is also a sign that the Internet will never be a safe place.

  • Stack Overflow Answers Your Hardest Tech Questions

    From Jeff Atwood, the blogger who gives you Coding Horror, your hardest tech questions get answered at Stack Overflow. I wanted to see if somebody had coded a way to edit text fields in Vim, and bam, there was the answer.

    picture of stack overflow
    The idea behind Stack Overflow is that the collective wisdom of technologists will always be better than the experts.

    So far it has surpassed my expectations on the quality, obscurity, and speed at which tech questions get answered.

    Will entropy, otherwise known as spam, kill this site? Or is its reputation system good enough to prevent that?

    Has anybody stumped Stack Overflow yet?

    As always, your comments are very welcome.

  • Yahoo’s BOSS API Example and Notes on Yahoo’s Hackday

    For Yahoo’s hackday, I was able to finish up this script in Ruby that returns back search results from yelp and chowhound from Yahoo’s BOSS API. The great thing about it is that you can hit the API an unlimited number of times!

    Here are a few notes that should help anybody the next time they attend a hackday – Yahoo’s or anyone else’s:

    • The night before install libraries you think you won’t need. I really wish that I had prawnto installed. I got mired in prawnto idiosyncracies, and was out of the race pretty quick.
    • Good coders are fast. According to Eran Lahav-Hammer, one of the authors of OAuth, good coders can code an OAuth implementation in the language of their choice in less than one day. Are you a good coder?
    • Have fun! It’s a pretty rare opportunity to have so many folks in the industry in one spot.

  • Wow, PHP has a wordwrap function!

    http://www.php.net/wordwrap

    picture of php wordwrap

    Woot!

  • Weening Myself Off of Eclipse PDT

    I really just want to stick with Vim, and Vim is really making that sort of commitment easy because of technology I talked about in my last post, as well as learning how to use subversion just from the command-line.

    Today I learned how to:

    • create folds in Vim with a split view so that I can get perspectives similar to Eclipse’s object explorer. (There’s a great folds tutorialon Linux.com.)
    • merge by just using subversion on the command-line

    Tomorrow I’m gonna learn about:

    • Using ant at the command-line
    • Being more adept at file version comparisons, e.g. (svn diff)

    Have you weened yourself off of an IDE? And if so, what do you now use for text editing?

  • Ctags and Code Completion in Vim 7.2

    At work we switched the whole dev team over to using Eclipse. I still haven’t gotten used to all the point and click crap on it, but really admire the use of code completion and ctags.

    When I saw that Vim had these, I’ve upgraded and now use ctags and code completion from Vim.

    To get code completion, I type out the little bit I know and then type ctrl-o and ctrl-x:

    pic of code completion in vim

    To get ctags working, I installed it using sudo apt-get install ctags and then at the root of all my php files I typed:

    ctags -R .

    This generated a tags file.

    Now when I open any file and have the cursor over a function or class, I just type ctrl-] and the file containing the class or function opens up.

  • What School or My Parents Never Taught Me

    If there’s one emotion that’s colored my entire year, it’s been anger. I’m doing my best with the hand that I’ve been dealt, but I’m realizing now that the man I dreamed I would be just might not ever happen. It’s making me pissed.

    Let’s start off with things that I just haven’t learned:

    • controlling my emotions and impulses
    • how to trust people — i pretty much don’t
    • live in community and forge good relationships
    • how to organize for positive, social change

    This pretty much makes my life a solitary hell-hole. I’m working on learning these things, though.

    Now I’ll reflect on those things that I should’ve been taught by school or my parents but wasn’t. This is stuff I’ve learned on my own and often with the help of strangers, and I’m glad that I learned these things.

    • communicate well
    • how to meet the women I want without using the Internet
    • manage financial matters
    • code for a living
    • do practical things, to clean, cook, make, repair, grow food
    • be good mannered and know etiquette
    • accept responsibility
    • deal with grief, loss, and suffering
    • clicker training dogs

    Now that I look at it, my college degree is pretty useless except for down economic times when some HR stooge has to choose between someone with a degree and someone without. I really think my parents short changed me because during summers they would keep my locked up in my house, and I never really learned how to socialize or keep friendships. That really makes me and my dog, Niles, really similar because his previous owners locked him up in a yard, too, and that’s one of the reasons he’s messed up.

    What do you wish your parents or school taught you but didn’t? What did you learn on your own, and were glad you did?

  • The HTTP Status 122 Error in IE7 in Ajax Apps

    Summary: Don’t use the GET method in Ajax Apps, if you can void it, because IE7 craps out with more than 2032 characters in a get string.

    Here’s the page that craps out at 2033 characters with IE7:
    http://www.codebelay.com/status122/?i_limit=2033

    You won’t see the error with other browsers.

    Here’s the page that’s okay:
    http://www.codebelay.com/status122/?i_limit=2000

    What’s going on here?

    picture of http status 122
    Sometimes you’ll write a piece of Javascript that uses prototype and looks like this:

      var url = '/status122/listener/?stuff=' + encodeURIComponent($('js_stuff').innerHTML);

  // This is where we send our raw ratings for parsing
  var ajax = new Ajax.Updater(
	 'jskitdecoded',
	 url,
	 {
		method: 'get',
		onComplete: showResponse
	 }
  );

    If you print http.status you get an HTTP Status of 122. WTF?

    What’s going on here is that IE7 sets a limit of 2032 characters on GET strings, so you have to do a POST instead like so:

      var getvar = encodeURIComponent($('js_stuff').innerHTML);
  var url = '/status122/listener/';

  // This is where we send our raw data for parsing
  // If we use method: 'get', IE7 will return a 122, but
  // b/c Firefox is RFC2616 compliant and realizes that
  // there is no minimum length for a URI, we get success.
  // Here we use method: 'post' b/c IE7 is lame.
  var ajax = new Ajax.Updater(
	 'jskitdecoded',
	 url,
	 {
		method: 'post',
		postBody: 'stuff=' + getvar,
		onComplete: showResponse
	 }
  );

    I hope this helps.

    What Ajax quirks have you run into?

  • SubEthaEdit for Linux?

    SubEthaEdit is a fun editor that links coders via OS X’s chat. You and your friends can see each other’s cursor in the editor and edit accordingly. From a management perspective, it’s quite satisfying to see your coders collaborate on the same tough problem that crops up and you have to have everyone talk about it.

    pic of subethaedit

    Dear Lazy Web,

    I have two questions:

    Is there a SubEthaEdit for Linux?

    What collaborative technologies do you use for coding?

    Cheers,
    Barce

    PS I use eclipse, svn, pastebin, IM, IRC, and sometimes ventrilo. I would love to just use SubEthaEdit though.

  • Gearing Up For HackDay At Yahoo on September 12th

    picture of hackday at yahoo

    I just signed up for HackDay at Yahoo, which will bring together a lot of cool people in the industry.

    I’m hoping to just spend the day and talk to folks about what’s inspiring them lately.

    Comment below if you’re going. Also share with me and the folks commenting what you’re hoping to solve or build.