TallyHoh - danielroop's Tallied Items

Gearheads don't get it

2008-08-13T12:08:44Z

Years ago I read a book about guitar effects pedals. Something the author wrote in the intro stuck with me: “Tone is in your fingers.”

He went on to explain: You can buy the same guitar, effects pedals, and amplifier that Eddie Van Halen uses. But when you play that rig, it’s still going to sound like you.

Likewise, Eddie could plug into a crappy Strat/Pignose setup at a pawn shop and you’d still be able to recognize that it’s Eddie Van Halen playing.

Sure, fancy gear can help. But the truth is that your tone comes from you.

I often think of this story when people fixate on gear over content. You know the type: Wannabe designers who want an avalanche of fancy typefaces and Photoshop filters but don’t have anything to say. Amateur photographers who want to debate film vs. digital instead of what actually makes for a great photo. Startup folks that worry more about software and scaling issues then how to actually get customers and make money. They all miss the point.

Aspiring podcasters consantly ask Gary V about the tools he uses. He responds:

It’s not the camera that I use, it’s not the blogging software, it’s not the widgets, it’s not the SEO. It’s the two C’s: content and community…There are so many crap podcasts out there with billion dollar cameras and editing tools for days. It’s about giving from your heart with content you really understand and, more importantly, giving back to the community that supports your show.

Figure out what you have to say that’s interesting and then unleash it. Use whatever tools you’ve got already or what you can afford cheaply. Then go.

It’s not the gear that matters. It’s you and your ideas that matter. Tone is in your fingers.

Protocol Buffers, our serialized structured data, released as Open Source

2008-07-07T19:08:45Z

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

One of the core pieces of infrastructure at Google is something called Protocol Buffers. We are really pleased to be open sourcing the system, but what are these buffers?

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format

It is probably best to take a peak at some code behind this. The first thing you need to do is define a message type, which can look like the following .proto file:

message Person {

  required string name = 1;

  required int32 id = 2;

  optional string email = 3;



  enum PhoneType {

    MOBILE = 0;

    HOME = 1;

    WORK = 2;

  }



  message PhoneNumber {

    required string number = 1;

    optional PhoneType type = 2 [default = HOME];

  }



  repeated PhoneNumber phone = 4;

}

There is detailed documentation on this language for you to learn more.

Once you have defined a message type, you run a protocol buffer compiler on the file to create data access classes for your platform of choice (Java, C++, Python in this release).

Then you can easily work with the data, for example in C++:

Person person;

person.set_name("John Doe");

person.set_id(1234);

person.set_email("jdoe@example.com");

fstream output("myfile", ios::out | ios::binary);

person.SerializeToOstream(&output);

We sat down with Kenton Varda, a software engineer who worked on the open source effort, to get his take on Protocol Buffers, how we ended up with them, how they compare to other solutions, and more:

Apple B Sides Served Medium Rarities

2008-07-03T00:59:24Z

We released The Bird And The Bee Sides yesterday! We're so happy to have it out and available. A toothy smile and thanks to everyone who picked it up or who is planning on doing so.

The first twelve days of Warped Tour have been nothing short of fantastic. Every show has been so much fun, and I've made a ton of new friends so far (behind and in front of the scenes).

There's a ton of great bands on the tour that I've had a chance to meet and see on the tour. There's more than 80 bands on the tour, and I think there might be 50+ that I've never listened to before in my life. I've been chiseling away at my personal "go see" list, and I've realized that this Warped Tour is an even better value than I originally thought.

Some highlights include

Say Anything (my favorite show on the tour... it may have something to do with the fact that they've let me sing gang vocals on "Belt" a few times)

The Higher (they play a great new song, and Seth's vocal is pretty smooth on their cover of "Bye, Bye, Bye")

The Academy Is (rumor has it.... your foot will be tapping)

Reel Big Fish and Oreskaband (you can't beat a talented ska band on Warped)

Anberlin (I've seen them play a thousand times, but I still love watching my buddies tear it up)

Street Dogs (classic Warped punk rock)

The Maine (the day I saw them, they drove all night and played first on zero sleep... they still managed to pull off a superb set)

August Burns Red (I couldn't tear my eyes away from the drummer, Matt. At one point he pulled off a fill so crazy that I started laughing and yelled out "SICK!!!". I looked around, and everyone else watching was doing the same thing)

Beat Union (punk/ska/reggae from Birmingham, England. I could tell that they're really loving Warped Tour. So much fun to watch)

The Aggrolites (they play dirty reggae, and they're by far the tightest band on the tour. One of the best moments of the tour was when I watched the Aggrolites play the Warped BBQ in Las Cruces, NM)

We've also been working with a wonderful organization called Blood:Water Mission. They're providing wells and latrines for people in Africa whose lives depend on those things. A huge thanks to Paul Reed Smith (PRS) guitars for providing us with a guitar to raffle off for BWM at the end of Warped Tour.

In conclusion, I guess I'm just recommending that everyone come out and enjoy a day at Warped, and pick up our new EP/B sides record.

I'm having a lovely summer, and I hope the same applies to you.

Matty T.

Done, and Gets Things Smart

2008-06-17T00:58:07Z

Disclaimer: I do not speak for Google! These are my own views and opinions, and are not endorsed in any way by my employer, nor anyone else, for that matter. Everyone knows and quotes Joel's old chestnut, "Smart, and Gets Things Done." It was a blog, then a book, and now it's an aphorism. People quote Joel's Proverb all the time because it gives us all such a nice snuggly feeling. Why?

Comic: Seriously

2008-06-30T00:37:05Z

Seriously

Blizzard Announces Diablo III

2008-06-28T08:13:32Z

During the opening ceremonies of its Worldwide Invitational tournament event in Paris, developer Blizzard Entertainment officially unveiled Diablo III, the latest title in the company's action RPG franchise. It is in development for PC and Mac. Expectation for the announcement was running high this week, largely due to a cryptic splash screen on Blizzard's official site that saw incremental changes daily. The title will be the first new release in the Diablo franchise since Diablo ...

The MBA myth

2008-06-26T13:40:36Z

There’s a popular book on entrepreneurship called The E-Myth which claims that bakers shouldn’t run bakeries, plumbers shouldn’t run plumbing companies, and everyone else should think about how they could turn their small business into a franchise. On the face of it, there’s a lot of good advice about how you can’t just be a good baker if you don’t have a business bone in your body and expect commercial success.

Problem is that the reverse is also often true. If you just put MBAs in place — or other professional managers without deep subject matter expertise — you’re equally unlikely to end up with an uninspiring business that fails to be passionate about the right things. To stay on the ball you need to know what’s a good pass and the best way to do that is to be able to make one yourself.

Many of my favorite companies are driven by people at the top who intimately know how things should be because they could make them so. The obvious example is the detail-oriented nature of Steve Jobs at Apple. But a few other examples I like are Ulrich Bez at Aston Martin who’s not only the CEO but also part of the company racing team at places like Le Mans. Or Thierry Nataf at Zenith who’s CEO and head designer of their luxury watches as well.

But what made me think about all this was Joel Spolsky’s tale of a technical review with Bill Gates back in the 90’s:

Bill Gates was amazingly technical, and he knew more about the details of his company’s software than most of the people who worked on those details day in and day out. He understood Variants and COM objects and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables—and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date and time functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual programmer.

For people who love what they do, whether that’s programming, design, designing watches, or building cars, that’s a great motivation to not grow your company too quickly. Enjoy the time when you can actually be a full participant in the actual activities themselves, rather than just managing them.

What a Difference a Day Makes

2008-06-20T23:20:56Z

There is a scene at the end of the movie Back to the Future in which Doc Emmett Brown returns from the far future in his time-traveling DeLorean to get Marty McFly. Before going forward in time to save Marty's family, Doc Brown stuffs with apple cores and diet soda the Mr. Fusion machine now powering his DeLorean. It's a step up from the stolen plutonium or captured lightning required earlier in the film to produce the 1.21 gigawatts of power needed for time travel. Yet as we in 2008 look at $130-per-barrel oil, there are those who argue that our energy independence can be found, just like Doc Brown's, in trash. What if they are correct?

A couple weeks ago I wrote a column about SwiftFuel, a non-petroleum gasoline substitute made from biomass and proposed as an alternative to aviation gasoline. Every column generates mail not just from skeptics, but also from enthusiasts and true believers. Among this latter group is the father-son team of Eric and Andrew Day from western Massachusetts pushing their particular version of trash-to-power, which they call the Day Cycle, after themselves. I think their ideas have merit and ought to, at the very least, provoke a lot of good thinking from this audience.

But before we get to the Day Cycle, let's consider the role in our culture of what I'm choosing to call "miracle cures." Based on the medical analogy of wonder drugs that cure easily what was previously incurable, I think this concept can be applied broadly to most areas of scientific inquiry. A miracle cure comes along, appears generally to do what is claimed -- problem solved, right?

Not usually.

It's rare that any bad news is simple and without nuance. Longtime readers will recall that I've been working for six years now trying to end Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), which claimed our son Chase back in 2002. People contact me all the time with reports of a "cure" for SIDS, but I know that SIDS isn't just one condition but several lumped together under the name "SIDS." I believe most alternative energy technologies ought to be approached similarly. The Day Cycle, while having some merit, won't put Saudi Arabia out of the oil business or even put the United States directly into a state of energy self-sufficiency. The Day Cycle is just one part of a comprehensive rework of the ways we make and use energy that can have the eventual effect of making us in large part energy self-sufficient. It's just one piece of a very big puzzle.

The challenge of the Day Cycle is profound: to solve at once the problems of how to power our society and what to do with all of our garbage, all without making the world worse for the effort, which is to say without increasing the problems of greenhouse gas emissions and global warming.

I don't want to have a global warming debate here. For the purposes of the Day Cycle, it simply doesn't matter. If what the Days propose will get rid of our garbage, create usable fuel and power, and, by the way, doesn't cause any net increase of greenhouse gas emissions, that's good, right? Even those who don't believe in global warming (and I hear from them all) probably aren't specifically IN FAVOR of greenhouse gas emissions -- gas for the sake of gas. They just don't believe in global warming. That argument is not what we are about here.

What we ARE about here are the 251 million tons of municipal waste that we as Americans created in 2005, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, and the 5.1 billion barrels of oil we imported that same year, according to the Department of Energy.

Until the late 1960s most American cities burned their trash, which was highly efficient at reducing the trash volume by more than 90 percent, yielding ash that was relatively small and easy to dispose of under the prevalent rules of that time. Then came the Clean Air Act, which made burning asbestos and DDT and PCBs and various heavy metals a no-no, so we started burying our trash in landfills, which requires a lot more effort and a lot more land -- so much land that many large cities are running out of places to stash their trash. Recycling helps reduce the volume of trash, but it requires labor, costs more than it earns, and most of the stuff that could be recycled is missed. We need something better than burying our trash in landfills.

As an aside, many products that were designed in the 1960s for easy incineration are designed today for easier digestion in landfills. Disposable diapers are a good example of such a product.

Eric and Andrew Day propose going back to burning our trash, but instead of using open-air incinerators or even high-temperature Basic Oxygen furnaces, they like the idea of burning our crap in electric plasma furnaces at temperatures in excess of 15,000 degrees Celsius. Take everything that would have gone to the landfill, add to it, if you like, everything that would have been recycled, and even leave in the really bad stuff like medical waste, toxic waste, heavy metals, and radioactive waste. Grind it all up into little chunks, some of which could be in a chemical or water slurry, and pump it into the plasma furnace.

Plasma furnaces have been around for decades and are already used for disposing of medical waste in Japan. Most such furnaces are fairly small, though the Days have found one manufacturer that can make a plasma furnace capable of burning 100 tons of trash per day.

The plasma furnace, operating in a closed loop, generates a form of synthetic gas that can be burned as a fuel as well as a glasslike inert material that can be used as aggregate in concrete. That's what happens when you run your Pampers and plutonium and anthrax and last Sunday's chicken dinner through a 30,000-degree Fahrenheit flame that breaks everything down to single atoms. The manufacturer of the plasma furnace (it's in this week's links) says the syngas can be burned to generate more power than the furnace uses, making it self-sufficient. The Days go much further in their claims, but then they want to make the BIG BUCKS. They say the furnace can be optimized to produce hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Dividing 251 million tons of municipal trash by 365 days by 100 tons per furnace says we'll need 7,000 such furnaces to burn all of America's trash. That doesn't really sound like a lot of furnaces to me, when you consider that's about how many landfills we have today and about how many municipal trash incinerators we used to have. Moving to this method of waste disposal and energy generation is a no-brainer... if it works.

There's that big "if" -- if it works. I fear the plasma furnaces will get clogged, but if they don't then the result is pretty darned amazing. Here is what the Days propose to do with that plasma furnace and the chemical plant they'll build around it. The purpose of the system is to simultaneously produce hydrogen, electricity, oxygen, biofuels/biomass, syngas, and other useful products from waste.

Now, with one of the heroic oversimplifications I am known for, I'll explain that the rest of the Day Cycle involves injecting steam into the syngas to create even more hydrogen along with lots of carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide can be used to grow algae, yielding both biomass and oxygen in copious amounts. The final outputs of the plant are whatever can be made from the algae (biodiesel, ethanol, or -- what the heck -- SwiftFuel). All heat is recycled, no carbon dioxide is released (that's the theory) and all that gets pumped out of the plant is some excess electricity (not sure how much of that), hydrogen, all those algae products, and of course oxygen.

Their claimed net production from each ton of municipal solid waste:

112 pounds of hydrogen
55 gallons of biodiesel
a little electricity
926 pounds of oxygen

The potential impact of all these products is significant, though not in themselves enough to eliminate the need for energy imports. I have real doubts about hydrogen-powered transportation and tend to believe that the best use for that hydrogen is simply for generating electricity at the sewage treatment plant which is, by the very nature of sewage, close to the population, and can be pumped into the electricity grid.

Multiply all these numbers by 251 million tons of solid waste and convert them, where possible, into equivalent barrels of oil and it comes down to about 2.6 billion barrels per year if all waste treatment facilities were so converted. That's half of our current oil import volume -- enough to substantially destabilize the international oil market if that's the goal.

Will this work? I don't know. But making energy from what we'd normally just transport and bury makes sense to me.

JtestR 0.3 Released

2008-06-15T10:20:16Z

JtestR allows you to test your Java code with Ruby frameworks.

Homepage: http://jtestr.codehaus.org
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jtestr

JtestR 0.3 is the current release of the JtestR testing tool. JtestR integrates JRuby with several Ruby frameworks to allow painless testing of Java code, using RSpec, Test/Unit, Expectations, dust and Mocha.

Features:
- Integrates with Ant, Maven and JUnit
- Includes JRuby 1.1, Test/Unit, RSpec, Expectations, dust, Mocha and ActiveSupport
- Customizes Mocha so that mocking of any Java class is possible
- Background testing server for quick startup of tests
- Automatically runs your JUnit and TestNG codebase as part of the build

Getting started: http://jtestr.codehaus.org/Getting+Started

The 0.3 release has focused on stabilizing Maven support, and adding new capabilities for JUnit integration.

New and fixed in this release:
JTESTR-47 Maven with subprojects should work intuitively
JTESTR-42 Maven dependencies should be automatically picked up by the test run
JTESTR-41 Driver jtestr from junit
JTESTR-37 Can't expect a specific Java exception correctly
JTESTR-36 IDE integration, possibility to run single tests
JTESTR-35 Support XML output of test reports

Team:
Ola Bini - ola.bini@gmail.com
Anda Abramovici - anda.abramovici@gmail.com

Comic: On Perspective

2008-06-13T03:41:04Z

New Comic : On Perspective