steve cooley presents

Wow. Check out all the big ticket hate mongers and homophobes. http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pe2023SzWXxE8wYX5qWeoIw.

Despite what the talking points say for the measure (and I have read them), this ballot will officially discriminate against a minority class of citizens. That is very, very dangerous territory to walk into. Once you legitimize discrimination, who is next? Who will be targeted next if this law passes? Maybe you!

I was originally spurred into action when I learned that the Church of Latter Day Saints of Utah (utah!) has been sending in big bucks to pass this measure in California. Big, as in Millions of dollars. Aside from the obvious hypocritical nature of this (any church pushing a law legitimizing discrimination and hate), I think it’s a bad road to head down. Then I saw parents making their young children hold up yes-on-8 signs at the corner of my community center, and that really pissed me off.

I wish everyone on the above list would go read this post: http://californiamormonon8.blogspot.com/2008/10/view-from-california.html It’s extremely well written and thoughtful. Here’s one passage:

I know that the “Yes on 8” campaign has created deep divisions within Mormon families. As Mormons, we are obligated to search ourselves, to ask if our relationships with our family members are loving and appropriate. Do we reject or deny our family members because they are gay? Is the zealousness of the “Yes on 8” campaign an outlet for our own feelings of shame, revulsion, disappointment, and failure in having gay children or family members? Some of the leading Mormon figures with the California Mormon “Yes on 8” campaign have gay children. Does God want us to sacrifice our relationships with gay children and relatives in order to serve Him? God led Abraham to Mount Horeb to teach him that child-sacrifice, a common practice among pagan peoples, was no longer warranted. It was no longer acceptable to Him. Henceforth, only God would sacrifice His son, Jesus Christ, to atone for the sins of the world. Now, after that great and atoning sacrifice, the only sacrifice we are asked to commanded to offer is that of a “broken heart and a contrite spirit” (3 Nephi 9:20). Do we sacrifice our gay children to impress God?

Don’t fall for the suggestion that this proposition protects anyone. It strips civil rights away from a whole class of citizens. It protects no one, and I’d argue quite the opposite. Hatred, meddling, and discrimination are no values I believe this state should be about, which is why I’m voting no on 8.

Vote NO on proposition 8.

Technorati Tags: 2008, california, no_on_8, noprop8, politics, prop8, prop8no

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Things move pretty quick around here these days. Not two days ago, joe the plumber was all the rage in the Republican party, and now that he’s (presumably) heard solid advice from a finance-savvy person, he’s come to the understanding that, in fact, and despite his previous statements, and despite how the McCain camp would want the public to see, he would receive a tax CUT from Obama’s proposed plans. NOT an increase. Sentences intentionally running-on for effect.

So that sort of takes a lot of the wind out of the sails of McCain’s whole 3rd debate, doesn’t it? Yes. It does.

Technorati Tags: mccain, politics, unfit

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I write code for a living. Primarily PHP, but increasingly HTML, CSS, XML, JSON, Objective-C/Cocoa, Processing, and Arduino code. Over the last 8 years, I’ve been going back and forth using several editors. It seems kind of silly to think that I could have used 5 or 6 different programs to edit text, but there are good reasons why. So here’s an incomplete list of things that caused me to use, stop using, and maybe restart using these GUI programs:

• BBEdit
this is by far the program I’ve used the most. It’s the only program I trust to open a 100 Megabyte text file. I’ve been lucky to have my company pick up the latest version of BBEdit pretty much immediately after it’s released, so I’m particularly excited by the version 9 features. Code completion is nice. It seems to be pretty good about knowing about PHP. It doesn’t automatically close tags for you, but it does seem helpful. Another great feature new in this version is being able to drop a folder onto the BBEdit icon, and it will give you a file browser in a sidebar, and let you edit documents, tab free, directly from the file browser. Like every other modern text editor, it has clippings, or snippets, which is helpful. It’s search really is the best I’ve ever used. It’s just really nice. It saves search and replace actions for easy callback. It uses Grep. It’s nice. I would be nice if you could choose other syntaxes, grep certainly seems powerful enough. Mostly it would be nice to get some interactive experience using other regex modes. Not a deal breaker, I get my work done when I use BBEdit. There are so many great features in BBEdit, it’s hard to condense it down to one paragraph. As of version 9 and these new features, this application is back in my application dock. 

• TextMate
Textmate popped up a few years ago and was a stark contrast to BBEdit at the time. It’s major features that are different from BBEdit would be tab-commands, where you predefine snippets or commands and assign them to a key combination. Then when you’re editing text, you can type things like snippet-[tab] and whatever you defined as “snippet” will be replaced. It’s very powerful and can be very, very helpful. It has support for lots and lots of languages, and I’m sure there are a ton of features that I don’t know about. For PHP, i haven’t found it to be spectacularly helpful. As I’ve gotten into using SVN, I’ve noticed that TextMate creates a hidden .filename for *every* file it comes into contact with. So along with not being extraordinarily helpful with code completion with PHP and creating lots of not-invisible files, I’ve taken this off my application dock for now.

• Coda
Coda is kind of a lighter-weight text editing tool whose main focus is to reduce the number of tools required to do web development. It’s major feature is having text editing, CSS editing, web browser for code preview, terminal functionality, FTP connectivity through Transmit, and a slightly weird technical reference… all mashed into one application. It has some nice features… Really nice, in fact, for a budding programmer looking to learn or troubleshoot html/php/css code. I used this app to cement my understanding of how CSS works because of how easily you can roundtrip from editing to preview, in fact, on the same screen in the same window with screen splitting. Pretty nice. My particular job doesn’t require me to do this much, so while I admire the product immensely, I do not have this in my day-to-day set of tools. I am using it as a teaching tool, though, because I feel like it’s aimed directly at being fast and useful for learning CSS. 

• Komodo Edit
This app is a recent entrant to my toolbox, and I have to say that I’m *really* impressed. Komodo Edit is the “free” version of Komodo’s larger suite of development products, but I’m finding it to be very full-featured. What I love about this program is how extremely PHP aware it is, and how it helps me keep my tags closed. I find writing code in this program to be very easy, easy to read, easy to understand what’s going on where, and generally kind of awesome. There are a few things that aren’t quite as awesome as I would like, such as: It would really prefer you start a new project for everything. You can open individual files without doing this, but if you want to drop into a folder to edit more than one file, you gotta start a project. It’s not so annoying that it’s preventing me from seeing the awesome PHP code editing power it has, but I would love this app more if I could skip the project files and just edit files from a folder browser like every other text editor in this list. Also, I find the search and replace to be kind of annoying because it requires you to check a “replace” checkbox every time you bring up the search field. Even if you were just there and want to tweak your search or replace criteria. When I’m starting whole new projects, I’m trying to use Komodo Edit, but lately when I’m editing preexisting projects, I’ll drop them on BBEdit.

• Processing/Arduino IDEs
I’m only putting these in this list because they have two features that i wish I had in other text editors: keyboard-shortcut code cleanup and reformatting, and a “prepare for discourse” function where it creates a snippet of HTML that’s ready to post to a blog or discussion board. Super nice. Otherwise, these IDEs are kind of painfully minimal. But I put up with them because of what they produce. Which is awesome.

• XCode
Xcode is hands-down the best text editor I’ve ever used for objective-c and cocoa. It has *The Best* code completion niceties I’ve ever seen, and should be the absolute envy of every other text editor on this list. Hear that, everyone? Emulate the code completion functionality that XCode has. Sadly, XCode seems to want to actively not be useful for PHP. I’ve long held the idea that XCode would be a *killer* IDE for PHP if it only knew about its syntax. It’s unbeatable for Obj-C and Cocoa, and possibly for other languages, but I only use it for Mac OS X and iPhone development. Since all of these things are text based, I end up wishing I had some of the features from XCode in *any* of the tools I use for PHP… but oh well. 


Technorati Tags: arduino, bbedit, coda, komodo edit, processing.org, textmate, xcode

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it’s hard to believe, but it was a year ago that we did the last SIDESCROLLER event, so we’re WAY overdue. Come join us Saturnday, November 8th, from 6:00pm to midnight-ish for a night of retro and not-retro games in the genre of the futuristic side scrolling shooter. $5 donation is requested so we can help pay the rent and electricity bill at Works/San Jose. OMGWTF?! Sidescroller is t3h awesome!1!

Technorati Tags: game, games, gaming, retro, san jose, San José, sanjose, sidescroller, works, workssanjose

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So I’ve been using and enjoying subversion for many months now. I think there are a lot of things that I don’t use, but I still find it immensely helpful in my day to day work. Up until recently, I’ve been using it locally, so that would be “file:///” instead of “svn://” But now I have a need to set up SVN as a server, so I’ve been trying to parse through the instructions, and it seems almost too easy. You edit the “passwd” and “authz” files in the “conf” folder, annnnd… pliff.. nothing happens. You can’t check stuff in. So I was starting to doubt SVN as a viable tool for this project because I just couldn’t get it to work, and… I need to get past this stupid step and get on to getting things done.

And then Homg, I just figured out what this guy said:

> Any suggestions out there?

Look at the conf/svnserve.conf file in your repository, it defaults to
allowing only read-only access, to get write access you'll either need
to turn on anonymous writes, like this:

[general]
anon-access = write

Or you'll have to configure a password database, as described in the
file's comments.

-garrett

So there’s *ONE CHARACTER* that you have to delete from the “svnserve.conf” file. The pound character “#” in front of the line that is this:

# password-db = passwd

so that it (comically, at this point) reads:

password-db = passwd

I feel like this should have been more obvious, but I don’t know how it could have been more obvious. It just wasn’t for some reason.

Technorati Tags: svnserve, subversion, svn

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Hey, come check out my arduino project box that I’m working on! That’s what the post about the SPDT switches was all about.

Related items

• Arduino Project Box
• construction steps
• prototyping process
• toggle switch wiring problems fixed and explained
• sneak peek: wildstyle font

Hey, check out my fine art blog to see my new arduino project box. Here’s a little preview video:

arduino project box construction timelapse from stevecooley on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: arduino, stevecooley

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Man, i thought heredocs were the weirdest PHP construct. I accept them for what they are and do I use them. I’m not afraid of them, but I thought they were yet another weirdass PHP thing. Nope, turns out they’re not. Learn something new every day. Oh, wait, what the hell is this nowdoc thing? I guess that’s two new things for today.

Technorati Tags: php, programming

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I’m working on my arduino project box, specifically the wiring. I ran into a really strange problem. Strange to me until I thought about it, and then I realized how not-strange it is.

I had wired up a lot of mini / micro switches to various things on the panel of a big project I’m working on for fun. The problem is that all of my toggle switches were working backwards to my expectations. (If you’re reading this and have already learned this lesson, you know where we’re going. )

I wired things up to what I thought would be a logical way. Wire this to that, just like the slide switches I’d also been using without incident.

Then I had my epiphany about how these toggle switches work. I tried to imagine cutting one in half to visualize how they worked based on the scientific research that had been forced on me. My slide switches work great, but my toggle switches are all working backwards.

Aha, so based on what would now make a lot of sense, if I wanted to have my switches indicate directionality on my panel, I would need to switch how they’re wired on the back of the panel in order to emulate the behavior I want!

And now, look at that. Switching the wires will in fact give me the results I had originally intended, even though it seems like a trick I have to pull on my brain in order to get it to do what I want. Not really, but.. without being able to actually see inside the switch, visually it looks like the opposite of what made sense.

Sooo… yeah, now I have a lot of clean up work to do on my project. Recut and strip a bunch of wires, desolder and remove a bunch of work I’ve already done… sigh… Oh well. Such is the price of Doing It Yourself. my hard lesson learned will hopefully translate into less of a mystery for you.

Technorati Tags: arduino, componentry, design, DIY, diy, electronic, howto, panel, programming, wiring

Good golly.

Technorati Tags: bad judgement, liar, mccain, palin, politics, unfit

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The cocoa programming class at West Valley College has returned. Sign up now.

http://westvalley.edu/documents/catalog/2008-2009_WVC_Catalog.pdf

“Page 62″

CIS 37.6 COCOA APPLICATION
PROGRAMMING
3 units
Co requisite: CIS 97.1A
Acceptable for credit: California State University
Programming Apple OS applications in Cocoa is
explored in this course. Using an object-oriented
paradigm, Cocoa builds graphical-user-interface
applications to run within the Apple Macintosh
operating system. Cocoa relies upon object-ori-
ented concepts: Objects, Classes, Methods, and
Messages as well as the collection of classes
called Frameworks. Students in this class begin
their work on simple applications and, by adding
features and re
inements create more advanced
applications. Credit/No Credit Option

The specific class you want to search for is:

CIS*37.6*63169

There’s probably a lab course you will be compelled to sign up for. Last semester it was:

CIS*97.1A*67759

I don’t know if that last part of the course is correct because I can’t register quite yet. If you took the class already, you may need to have Pat Fenton intervene on your behalf with admissions (like me)… Hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: cocoa, mac, programming, westvalley, wvc

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well, as you can tell from parts 1, 2, and 3 of my comparisons of Zazzle and CafePress in regards to their print-on-demand services on black and dark t-shirts, it was kind of a toss-up as to which one was “better”. Now in part 4, I can show you the effects of one washing in a normal day-to-day kind of situation.

First up is Zazzle, since they were 7 whole days faster delivering my order:

If you click through and view these photos, you’ll see that the solid red color in the “sidescroller” t-shirt is not consistently covered with the original color that was there when I got the shirt. Kind of a disappointment to me. Still not a bad looking t-shirt, but not even close to the quality you would get with silk-screening. The “tea”-shirt (haha) actually fared better, probably because it’s a continuous tone image versus the relative solid color vector image in the first shirt. These shirts are actually being shown after two washes.

And now for the Cafepress shirt:

Uh oh. Now here’s a big problem in my opinion. After ONE wash, every solid area of color is cracking. This is totally unacceptable for a product that I would sell to people. So, at this time, I really can’t recommend cafepress for black and dark color shirt printing. I’m not totally sure Zazzle has the right action going on their game, but at least their shirts (which feel nicer to me, and are tagless) are free from the cracking problem that cafepress’ shirt is doing already… I would expect this cracking to happen even in silkscreened shirts after 20-30 washings, but after only one wash seems to indicate that there’s still significant room for improvement. This cracking problem certainly isn’t going to get any better from here on out, so this really isn’t the kind of product I want to promote.

So, the 2008 print-on-demand showdown winner is: Zazzle.com

* faster order fulfillment
* customizable
* nicer shirts
* no cracking after 1 wash

Technorati Tags: cafepress, zazzle

here’s a sneak peek at a font I hope to release later this year. it’s a block letter wildstyle. I’ve been wanting to do this kind of typeface for a long time, and fontstruct seems to be one way to get it done. It’s a little stiffer than I’d prefer it be, but I’ll see it through and maybe take another stab at it later in life.

Technorati Tags: fonts, fontstruct

I would prefer to stop coal burning plants and make a serious effort into solar, geokinetic, and geothermal sources to generate the energy we need. I just read a story on CNN.com about a kind of tree that you can press the seeds of and have it produce fuel oil you can use without any further processing. Sounds awesome! I read the story all the way through and by the end, the math was bugging me. I did some thinking and some relatively weak number crunching. By my rough calculations, you would have to plant over 60,000 plants, just to supply the fuel required to run the 4 tractors mentioned in the story.

• 4 tractors
• 120 gallons each
• 480 gallons of fuel per day
• 2,400 gallons per week, guessing on 5 days of work per week averaged over the course of the year
• 124,800 gallons of fuel = 2,400 x 52 weeks in a year
• jatropha plants produce 2 gallons per tree per year, so:
• 62,400 trees would be required to produce just the fuel required to run the 4 tractors mentioned in the story. Not even taking into consideration the energy required to process the seeds.

Right now they’ve got 176 trees growing.. somewhat short of being free from diesel purchases. Every little bit helps, and I’m of the mindset that it’s better to do something *now* rather than say that since there’s no perfect solution, we should do nothing. Definitely do something now… just.. keep looking for better solutions. I mean, I guess I should be happy that there are people looking into biodiesel fuels that use a plant that isn’t something I already eat. Using food crops for fuel instead of food is the dumbest idea we’ve had in a long time.

Technorati Tags: biodiesel, jatropha

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