Author Archive for john

Help needed on objective-c/requirejs interop

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I am hosting the webview controller in an OSX app. I have followed the code sample in calljs and i can successfully call javascript functions inside script tags from objective-c. This integration requires that the objective-c program know the name of the javascript function. for instance i have a javascript function called “objective_c_entry()”, and in my objective c wrapper, i can call that entry point using:

NSString *callResult = [[webView windowScriptObject] callWebScriptMethod:@"objective_c_entry" withArguments:args];

Now I want to move all my javascript into require.js modules; i am not clear how to reference a function in a require.js module from within objective-c. if i am moving my “objective_c_entry” function into a require.js module named “integration”, what string do I pass to callWebScriptMethod?

Dear Satya, please include an ssh client

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http://noncombatant.org/2014/03/03/downloading-software-safely-is-nearly-impossible/ — and this only scratches the surface. Of all the reasons why I don’t use a Windows machine for development, this is the stupidest, and simplest to fix. Just ship a reasonable ssh client, it is not that hard.

Recent Books — kind of on a Beatles kick

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https://www.flickr.com/photos/badgreeb_records/

  • Tune In by Mark Lewisohn. Fascinating telling of the Beatles’ early years. Massive detail. Uplifting in many many ways, the group overcame great odds, while staying true to themselves. But never let your kids catch you admiring this book, the young Beatles were not exactly role models.
  • All The Songs by Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin. Exhaustive notes on the writing and recording of every Beatles’ song, which provides an interesting window onto the arc of the group.

OK I need an OSX Webview/Webkit expert…

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So I have a little app that hosts the Webview control and doesn’t do a whole lot more. I am running it on a MacBook Pro Retina display. I’ve enabled fullscreen display, I’ve set the window in the xib to be full retina 2880×1800.

But the webview seems to think it is running at 1440x790ish or so. Basically half res. As reported by NSScreen. And it is pretty clearly running at half resolution.

The same web page looks fine in Chrome, full retina resolution.

Ah interestingly, in Safari, it is also running at half resolution. Hmmm.

Nothing obvious on StackOverflow. Nothing obvious in Apple developer doc (tho I certainly probably missed something).

UPDATE: Mr. Sobeski gave me some ideas. The retina devicePixelRatio is probably involved. Apparently this creates some problems in some configs. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4405710/uiwebview-w-html5-canvas-retina-display might be a direction to try.

I have finite outrage capacity.

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Bigotry, poverty, abuse, healthcare, education, government waste and incompetence — I could go on, these are big issues in our society, and I can get outraged about them and have occasionally done so. There are certainly other issues in this category.

Whether or not a certain kind of taxi service can operate in a certain way, or whether or not cars can be sold in a certain fashion at a certain location? Yawn.

Recent Books — Parasite, Ice Harvest, Crace, Fowler, Mr Peanut, Byatt, Auchincloss

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  • Parasite by Mira Grant. The start of a new series by the author of the Feed series, which I found to be among the best of the zombie novels I read. This is also a lot of fun, a twist on zombies, in some way much creepier. Looking forward to rest of series.
  • The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips. A Fargo-esque spiral of crime and misdeeds. Fun.
  • Harvest by Jim Crace. Crace does not write happy tales. This story details the collapse of an insular farming village in the face of political and economic change, and how one man in the village experiences the changes. Kind of grabbed me tho it is a mostly depressing little tale.
  • We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler.download Gripping. A woman tells the story of the unusual family tragedy that occurred at age 5, and how that has rippled through her life and her family’s life. Very hard to put down, and the messages will sit with me a long time.
  • Mr. Peanut by Adam Ross. Three intertwined marriages beset by problems and power struggles, with some Hitchcockian murder built in, or maybe not, and with a mix of fiction and maybe truth. A lot going on here. And a lot of pain. Not sure how I feel about.
  • Possession by A.S. Byatt. Snore. I need to remember that Man-Booker Prize != interesting.
  • The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss. A charismatic school founder and his impact on all the lives of the people around him, both good and bad. The power and charisma of a founder/leader can lift some people up and drown others. Really excellent tale and relevant in many walks of life.

I’m starting to care more about my LinkedIn profile

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IMG_0130I didn’t really want to, I don’t use LinkedIn much, but we are hiring a couple people for the stealth startup I am working on, and I am starting to see traffic to my profile that might be related to job search. And so I am starting to think my profile should look better (thought I haven’t done a thing about), and I considered paying for a higher grade of LinkedIn service so that I could see who was pinging me. But, wow, $240 a year for LinkedIn business service?? That explains their lofty valuation I guess. That is a very rich price to expect of every business professional, the marginal cost to provide the service is effectively $0. I’d worry that this price will drive substitution, it is certainly making me think about that. I need to get a lot more for my $240 than they are offering.

Who else gets $240 a year from business professionals for a software/communications service? When a corporation rolls this up for all their sales and marketing people, how are they going to feel about it? I am sure there is a corporate discount plan tho.

Aim high, Ultraviolet, Aim High

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Over the holidays I had to create an Ultraviolet account. I was trying to watch a movie on our new XBOX One and I could only find it on the Vudu provider, and so first I had to create a Vudu account, and then that chained into having to create an Ultraviolet account. No idea why all this fuss was required, and I didn’t really know what Ultraviolet was for, but we got to watch our movie.

Now one month in, I get a piece of marketing spam from Ultraviolet, and now it is all clear:

Imagine … the freedom to access your movies and TV shows through many retailers

Wow. Mind blown. What a world that would be. I am so thrilled and excited. It sounds so much better than the 20 other legal or not-so-legal ways to watch videos. And I am so glad that retailers are fully involved, that sounds like it is going to be so much better for me.

Javascript is the worst tool ever. Actually every tool is unhappy in its own way.

Javascript tools suck, all the sample code on the web is invariably wrong in some way, variable scoping as practiced is horrible, debugging is terrible. And I am just focused on a single browser target! I’ve spent a day chasing after some pass-by-reference and scoping problem. Grrr.

Of course when I spend a day on Objective-C problems, I am pretty convinced it is the worst tool ever with its bloviated syntax and huge masses of obsolete sample code.

And when I spend a day on python I get so cranky about crappy IDEs and crappy debuggers and crappy library documentation.

The only constant is me, probably I am doing it all wrong, regardless of the environment.

Barnes and Noble (@BNBuzz), can’t you at least try?

5 people in line waiting to pay at Barnes & Noble Bellevue vs 1 chatty cashier. 1 Nooklehead standing over at the Nook stand doing nothing while we are all trying to give the store money.

I finally called the store and asked whoever answered to come up front and help, they said they were busy with a customer. When it was finally my turn the clerk spent 1 minute on the script trying to get me to sign up for their loyalty card — not understanding that the last thing I want to do is buy more books here.

So many things wrong here. As a start, give the idle Nook dude a square reader and let him do check outs on the Nook. Giving him something to do, a chance for me to handle a Nook, and completing my transaction more speedily.

Hey I’m now a member of the (github) mile-high club!

cloudsDid my first git push while in-flight! Awesome. Doesn’t feel dirty at all!

Resisting temptation for lame cloud computing joke.

UPDATE: not surprisingly, I am also now a member of the mile-high “broke the build” club!! Along with the mile-high “you stupid jerk, now fix it” club.

Recent Books — Burning Paradise, Submergence, Reacher, This Town, S

sbook

  • Burning Paradise by Robert Charles Wilson. YA pre-apocalyptic alternative history. Fun premise: a somewhat-intelligent organism has pervasively and surreptitiously infected the earth’s biosphere for hidden purposes, but some humans have started to trip to the fact. So fun but characters weak.
  • Submergence by J. M. Ledgard. Moody tale about a spy and scientist submerged in their respective worlds, submerged in very different ways, trying to come out of their worlds and build a relationship. Not sure how I feel about, I think I’d have to be in just the right mood to like this book.
  • Never Go Back by Lee Child. Another great Reacher book, stronger than some, we see inside Reacher a little more as he grapples with the possibility that he is a father. We need more of this in the Reacher series.
  • This Town by Mark Leibovich. Inside look at Washington DC. The author knows it is a cesspool, and writes appropriately cynically, but it comes across even worse than he thinks. and he is pretty open about what a self-dealing cesspool it is. So, read this if you feel like stocking up on cynicism.
  • S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. Well. This book is flawed, the story wavers, it is a pain in the ass to read, there is no way to buy a convenient electronic form because of the physical complexity of the book. And those are all the reasons why I like it as well — ambiguity, confusion, excellent use of physical media, etc. If you wonder how physical books can survive the onslaught of e-books, this is a great book to read and think about.

Microsoft needs to get out in front of the developer parade

David Sobeski has a great writeup on facebook covering Microsoft’s methodical destruction of developer trust over the last 15 years:

Post by David Sobeski.

I am relearning how to be a software developer after many years away and it is notable that, not only am I not using any Microsoft technologies or tools, nothing from Microsoft even entered the consideration set as I selected targets, libs, tools, etc.

Rehashing all the missteps is entertaining, David does a great job of that, I never tracked all this stuff and many of the acronyms and decisions around them are lost in the fog of history. For whatever reason, Microsoft is at the nadir of its developer influence.

If I was the new CEO at Microsoft, fixing this would be job 1, and I wouldn’t be timid. I would have a 6 month plan to make Microsoft relevant to every developer. And there is no way to do that without buying a bunch of assets to get out in front of the existing parades. I’d buy Github or Atlassian. Stackoverflow. I’d buy or embrace a Linux dist — CentOS maybe, or screw it, just buy RedHat. I’d jump into the vagrant/docker world and buy a position in that space. I’d buy modern leading noSQL and Hadoop distributions. Xamarin as a tool. And 10 more things. At the end of this, Microsoft would be in the conversation with every developer on the planet. OK it would be a chocolate mess of technology assets, but read David’s write up — Microsoft has a chocolate mess of assets now, without any developer relevance.

I wouldn’t worry at all in the first 3 years about cleaning all this up and rationalizing it. I’d run the teams separately, I’d encourage them all to go go go, and I’d create organic opportunities for them to talk and discuss collaboration, without forcing it. Relevance as measured by developer use, and speed of evolution would be my top criteria. Every developer who is not using a Microsoft tool or runtime would be viewed as a failure. Internally I’d direct the Visual Studio team to become the tool for every developer, regardless of what platform they are targeting — iOS, Android, AWS, whatever. Rationalization could come later if at all.

This strategy will create confusion, overlaps, duplications, conflicts, and chaos — but dammit, Microsoft will be relevant again. Relevance will make up for a lot of sins.

Best board games of the holiday season

We always go on a bit of a board game binge over the holidays. We played some holdovers from past years — Settlers of Catan, Seven Wonders. I got an awesome bamboo catanboard for Catan, that was a great gift. And we got the Cities and Leaders expansions which added additional layers to this game. 7 wonders is a typical resource accumulate, barter, and build game, with a ton of strategic options.

triassicAnd then we tried a bunch of new games, the ones that passed the bar:

  • Triassic Terror. The great thing about this game is that we all finished within a couple points of each other, and the outcome was in doubt throughout the game. I have a lot of admiration for a game design that keeps everyone engaged and excited, the designer clearly thought hard about scoring mechanisms. Makes me think a lot about how to design games — if I were designing a game, I’d ignore the genre and backstory and visuals to start, and just get the mechanics and scoring system down, with a goal towards keeping everyone in the game. Only after I had nailed that would I start to overlay the story and visuals. I’ve bought a lot of games that had a great look or great theme, but fell apart completely as a game.
  • The Phantom Society. A very different game of ghosts and ghost hunters. Super simple game setup and game play so you can bring in people who don’t love the complexity of games like Seven Wonders, but you can seriously overbrain this game.
  • Renaissance Man. This game was good but not great. A lot of richness at the beginning of the game, but towards the end the paths all kind of peter out and the game gets a little constrained. But we played it several times and didn’t give up on.

We had some failures too but I won’t dwell on those…hope your holidays were good!

Our package is visiting all of central Washington

UPS facilities must be absolute zoos at this time of year. The status for one of our packages below. Here’s hoping it doesn’t loop again at Redmond.

  • December 18, 2013, 5:44 am, Redmond WA US Out for delivery
  • December 18, 2013, 5:29 am, Redmond WA US Package arrived at a carrier facility
  • December 18, 2013, 3:55 am, Pacific WA US Package has left the carrier facility
  • December 18, 2013, 3:29 am, Pacific WA US Package arrived at a carrier facility
  • December 18, 2013, 12:23 am, Moses Lake WA US Package has left the carrier facility
  • December 17, 2013, 11:30 pm, Moses Lake WA US Package arrived at a carrier facility
  • December 17, 2013, 9:46 pm, Kennewick WA US Package has left the carrier facility
  • December 17, 2013, 9:06 pm, Kennewick WA US Package arrived at a carrier facility
  • December 17, 2013, 8:01 pm, Walla Walla WA US Package has left the carrier facility
  • December 17, 2013, 7:15 pm, Walla Walla WA US Package arrived at a carrier facility
  • December 17, 2013, 11:06 am, Walla Walla WA US Possible delay in delivery due to arrival at incorrect carrier facility
  • December 17, 2013, 11:06 am, Walla Walla WA US Possible delay in delivery due to arrival at incorrect carrier facility
  • December 16, 2013, 8:45 pm, Redmond WA US Package arrived at a carrier facility
  • December 16, 2013, 8:15 pm, Seattle WA US Package has left the carrier facility
  • December 16, 2013, 5:55 pm, Seattle WA US Package arrived at a carrier facility
  • December 16, 2013, 3:55 pm, Louisville KY US Package has left the carrier facility
  • December 16, 2013, 1:33 pm, Louisville KY US Package received by carrier
  • December 15, 2013, 6:18 pm, US Package has left seller facility and is in transit to carrier

Recent Books — Vanished Kingdoms, Testament of Mary, Prince of Risk

  • The Testament of Mary by Colm Toibin. Very moving tale of the last days of Jesus, written from the viewpoint of his mother. Great capturing of the anguish of a mother losing a son in terrible fashion.
  • Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies. Thorough discussion of 17 kingdoms/empires/states that have disappeared from the world. Not Rome or Sparta, but lesser known examples, that probably all thought they would last forever. Humbling but a bit of a slog.
  • The Prince of Risk by Christopher Reich. After the prior book needed some mental floss. Reich writes a solid suspense tail. A fine distraction.

What exactly are people searching for when they search for “Bud Light”?

From Twitter, apparently Bud Light is the 2nd most popular search on Google for a beer brand:

I’m scratching my head, what exactly do people need to find out about Bud Light? I have nothing against Bud Light. It is ubiquitously available and ubiquitously advertised. Certainly people aren’t having problems finding the product at Retail. Certainly there is no mystery about what it is. I just can’t figure out what people are thinking when they decide to turn to Google to learn more about Bud Light.

Diving into webgl — man is this stuff fun!

webglPlaying with shadertoy, threejs, kineticjs, chrome experiments. I can feel my macbook heat up and i can watch the battery drain! Pretty stunning what you can do with webgl.

I am trying to figure out the best practice for integrating webgl with a webpage, in particular text. Overlay of CSS/HTML on a webgl element? Stuffing the text right into the webgl? Does the next version of webgl change anything? What lib to use on top of wegbl to make this easier?

Historical aside — what a huge missed opportunity for Microsoft, read for instance Alex St John’s story of the early days of really expressive content on the web. Microsoft had a browser code-named Chrome in the 90s that had the idea of webgl built into it. Sadly internal machinations killed it — political infighting about ownership of graphics leadership within the company, and a lack of vision in senior management — not enough people were excited about the idea of a browser and web content that brought a PC to its knees, failing to understand that thanks to Moore’s Law, this problem would go away within a short time.

NBC, don’t screw this up by making better TV musicals

Apparently the live Sound of Music was hugely popular:

NBC’s gamble of filling an entire night with live musical theater paid off handsomely on Thursday as “The Sound of Music,” with Carrie Underwood in the Julie Andrews role of Maria, posted the network’s best entertainment ratings for a Thursday night since 2009.

And so we are going to get a lot more of these apparently:

…this gamble — live theater on network television, a throwback to earlier eras of the medium and events like “Peter Pan” and “Cinderella” — paid off so well it is almost a certainty that the network will be looking for other musicals to mount live around holidays.

We turned it on and left it on for a while and were stunned at just how bad the show was. We found ourselves asking “How did this get on the air?”, “They must have known it was awful, didn’t they?”. And apparently we weren’t alone, as twitter was alive with hate-watchers, and the critics dumped on the show.

So, NBC, don’t screw this up by doing more of these with bigger budgets, more rehearsals, better actors. That is not why we watched. We watched for the same reason we read about Lindsay Lohan, the reason we watch Jerry Springer and New Jersey Housewives. We love watching carnage unfold before our eyes in slow motion.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/seattlemunicipalarchives/My advice — rehearse less. Have Taylor Swift sing live, maybe in some more duets with Stevie Nicks. Hire unstable people — Amanda Bynes and Alec Baldwin seem perfect for the next one. Intentionally antagonize your stars. Inject some randomness into the live performance — have part of the set collapse mid-scene. Liberally stock the backstage area with alcohol. Surprise one of the stars with a cameo from a recent ex.

I’ll watch the next one if I know there is a chance someone will walk offstage in a huff, or go in a rampage live and light part of the set on fire.