blinks

Define genuine grievance?

This isn't Canvas. It's SVG.

It goes beyond even that, with some sweet tech coming out:

http://vimeo.com/5404358

See the last paragraph, here: http://agilezen.com/features/supports-lean

This is a really cool idea. The crux of the article:

----

The code for bucket has a lot of logic that goes like this::

  if ($msg =~ GREATBIGHOARYREGEX) {
        ...
  else if ($msg =~ ANOTHERCRAZYREGEX) {
        ...

And so I thought to myself "Gosh, wouldn't it be great if this had a dispatch mechanism where you could associate regexes with functions in some kind of data structure, along with some kind of application data for context?" Oh hangon, that reminds me of...

        http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/

I've been looking at twisted, which seems to be the system of choice for writing IRC bots. It's a bit hairy and bureaucratic, unfortunately. The examples for setting up basic IRC bots are clean enough, but once you turn the page it's all factories and reactors and aspect-oriented bragging about how great it is to reduce your code to dozens of three-line classes. But it gives you that great responsive asynchronous network library, which is nothing to sneeze at!

Django doesn't have any facilities for network protocols or asynchronous coding, because it assumes that apache or some other web server will take care of all that for you. Once this occurred to me, the light really went on: twisted need only provide a sort of "IRC Client Server" model, and dispatch incoming requests to Django code the way apache does!

See also: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/3/24/

If anyone comes out with a website that purports to provide quick access to information, it'll inevitably be compared to Google (or Yahoo, or Live Search, or whatever comes next). Slate's comparison is actually even pretty close; the author took the examples provided and tweaked them slightly.

For example, "running 4mph 30 minutes 5'10" 160 lbs 40 year male" provides an answer, but "golfing 4mph 30 minutes 5'10" 160 lbs 40 year male" doesn't. I think that his conclusion was the most interesting part, about "the eternal problem for any wannabe Google competitor[: ...] Google can easily co-opt such improvements -- and suddenly everyone's got a better Google."

[citation needed]

> if acting on one datum was always fallacious, you'd think > it would be bred out of us by now.

I think that we're set up to predict and act on N data points, and sometimes N happens to be one. The point of the article, to me, was that you have to understand this behavior in yourself and watch out for fallacies.

Just as if you know about confirmation bias, so you keep an eye out for contradictory evidence, if you know about the statistical problem of generalizing from one you can watch out for that, too.

Like people continually whispering "shhh," creating more noise than there was in the first place?

I work at Google (blinks AT). Our search results are no different, but we have a corporate membership with ACM's Digital Library which is insanely useful.

I'm sure most other major tech companies have the same deal.

Also, even with the 3% revenue drop, net income increased 9%.

I've heard good things about Selenium: http://seleniumhq.org/

In python, print "hello, world" works just fine.

"We welcome new ideas. However, please do not send us information that you consider to be confidential or proprietary. Because of what we do, we receive a high volume of business plans, presentations, pitches, memos - you get the picture - and because these materials are often similar, because they come to us in a variety of forms, and because we read a ton of stuff, we cannot and do not accept responsibility for protecting against the misuse or disclosure of any information unless we have expressly agreed (in writing) to do so." -- http://www.google.com/ventures/contact.html

A better game for that group would be Fluxx (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/258) -> lots of fun, interesting decisions, but a massive element of luck. In Fluxx, if you know what you're doing and get lucky, you can win extremely fast. If you don't get lucky, though, you're stuck. I've found that people interested in a light-weight game always end up liking it.

They just redesigned the backend; hopefully this'll make changes like that easier. Personally, every so often I want to make my own version, but the user data on BGG is so useful, I think it might keep others out of the market.

Board games depend a lot on taste. Are you more into eurogames (great mechanics, generally light on theme) or "ameritrash" (great theme, generally complex mechanics)? Do you want a heavyweight, longer game, or a lighter-weight, short game? Are you a fan of luck in games, or would you rather it was more skill-based? Do you like diplomacy as a game mechanic?

If you're just looking for a list of games to try, see http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame and start from the top.

Also, most (good) board game shops have an open play night where you can go in and check out whatever you want. This makes putting $80 down for that copy of Agricola much easier.

If you're in the greater Seattle area, Uncle's Games at Redmond Town Center has a game night on Fridays. They're also the best game shop around, imho (although I might be biased, they know me by name).

Puerto Rico, Power Grid, Race for the Galaxy >> Settlers of Catan, all the way.

Basically, start at the top and go down: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgame

  man rsync

Also, buku? You mean beaucoup?

They've stated publicly that they have a business plan, just not what it is. Speculation abounds (as I'm sure you know), and many potential plans that have been dropped online could work pretty well.

No way, man, write yourself a web framework: http://nanoweb.si.kz/manual/mod_bsp.html

For navigation, at least, see http://ctags.sourceforge.net/

Thanks for the link -- I'll take a look. It'll be much more useful when I have dedicated card pages.

Yeah, sorry about that -- working to fix some of the criticisms here and caused errors for a while. Should be ok now.

Also, I think I'll need to move the help to the front page. Something to work on this weekend. Thanks again for taking a look.

Could you give some useful criticism? I know of both these searches, and I'm not a fan of the "let a thousand input-boxes bloom" search mentality.

This search is just as powerful (if not more) as these two, if you search for what you're thinking about. See http://mtgcauldron.com/help/ for examples.

Search-as-you-type would indeed be good for prefix data, but the search box itself checks quite a bit -- one-word searches are regularly in the 1,000-card range. I'll look into it, though; I agree that it would improve things.

My UI is terrible, I know. "Leftify" is a great term, btw. Do you think it's visible enough from the header, or should I move it down?

As for "known set of data," the query language is a full, SQL-like language (including compiler to SQL). This is another issue with the search-as-you-type, but compiling an 80-character (ish) search and getting a few results back should be quick and easy, so I'll see what I can do.

Also, did you notice the sorting option, or was it too hidden?

I'm indeed grateful for the criticism. I know of Gatherer, and can't stand it. I've used Essential Magic for some time, but it's slow and clunky. MagicCards.info is also good, but limited in its one-box search.

I built Cauldron as a sort-of Google for Magic. Because of this, all the power is in the search box. It can do all the searches that any other application can do, and has all cards, so I'm not sure what you mean by "limited" and "underwhelming." Perhaps an example?

I've been focusing on the backend, mostly, and I concur with the UI complaint -- I'm working on a module where I can start getting articles up on the front page, but for now, there's nothing there because nothing needs to be -- I'm not selling anything, etc.

The cards themselves currently link to the MagicCards.info card detail site as a stop-gap. I plan to get that information, as well as the kinds of information in Essential Magic, to make my own card detail pages.

As I say, my only excuse is that right now it's set up purely as a card search site -- by the way, did you see http://mtgcauldron.com/help/ ?

  There's other stuff I want to see that should be even more 
  interesting. When it's replaying, I want to be able to see 
  characters that make it into the final version in one 
  color, and others in another. Then I'll be able to tell 
  when I'm writing well and when I'm writing badly.

How about coloring text based on their age in the work? That is, characters added in the last edit are bright blue (or green), and as they age without changing, they fade to black. That would be extremely cool to watch.

The issue there is the bandwidth required for streaming audio. This is a device set up for batch downloads and not much else -- when you add time-sensitive network requirements like this, you make customers unhappy.

Also, what if you're using it as a "book on tape" in the car, on a road trip through the middle of nowhere? You lose network connection, you lose your book on tape.

tldr: I think it would be better quality, when you could get it, but at some level reliability is more important for this application.

I wrote one of these a while back: http://knot.appspot.com/e/simple-python-scanner

For his example, it needs one more line:

  simple = Scan(
    IDENTIFIER = r'[\w_]\w*',
    OPERATOR = r'[-+\*=]',
    DIGIT = r'\d+(\.\d+)?',
    END_STATEMENT = r';',
    SPACE = r'\s+',
  )
  simple.ignore('SPACE')
  simple('foo = 5 * 30; bar = bar - 60;')
  # generates tokens.