Ray Gun Robot

So if you’ve been on the internet the last few days, you’ve heard about the new browser project from Google; Chrome. It has some rather provocative features, I think, but I haven’t tried it yet myself.

Why? Because Google has only released a Windows version. No Mac version; no POSIX version. Just Windows.

Just who the hell does Google think is building the web, anyway? At least Sergey Brin thinks it’s embarrassing.

On some days, you’re trying to make a call to imagettfbbox() (which is a pretty necessary function when it comes to SigFeeder) and you just keep getting Internal Server Errors, and looking at the logs you can see that the FCGI process seems to be crashing, and you can only guess that it must be a glitch somewhere higher up in GD2 or PHP or maybe even Lighttpd, but everything’s up to date and you don’t want to bother wasting time replacing stuff piecemeal to see where the problem may lie, and you could just upload it to a live server and see if the same errors are happening there, but you’d rather not because this thing is going to be a whole lot easier and faster to work on and test if you can work on it locally, and it doesn’t help that you have a headache and Jesus it’s 5:30 already and you don’t want the three-day weekend to end just yet. We’ve all had days like that.

Meh. I think I’m going to go for a walk in the woods in the park near my apartment while I still can.

If we celebrate the flag on Flag Day, and we celebrate veterans on Veterans’ Day, what do we celebrate on Labor Day?

The blood bank sent me my donor card on Saturday, which means I don’t have any nasty diseases, I suppose. Apparently I’m a type O negative, which Wikipedia says means I’m a “universal donor” because people of all other types can accept my blood. So I kind of feel bad for not having the spheres to start doing this years ago…

At work, the pace as slowed on PIRETS, so I’ve started making inroads on the new sites for the Northern California Small Business Development Center, a non-profit which helps out small businesses with writing up business plans, getting loans, compliance… all that fun stuff. This is going to be my first multi-site Drupal project to go live. (I started work on another one several weeks ago, but we ended up losing the contract under surprising circumstances…) The Domain Access module is proving useful, though it’s still a bit young for such an ambitious project - I’ve been contributing a few patches as I’ve been going along and working with it.

Back on a personal level, I’m still slowly chugging away at updating SigFeeder. Project X fell through. I made some initial pokes at moving the Animation Republic forums to Drupal, but I’m unsure how exactly I want to go about it yet.

I started a new round of Japanese classes last Monday. The class was pretty packed on the first day, but enough people quit by the second one that I think that I’ll be able to “crash” my way in. Funny thing about these Japanese intro classes… there tends to be a pretty sudden drop in attendance early on. I think it’s because a lot of people join them for kicks and then get freaked out when they realize they’ll actually have to be able to read things like これは英語じゃないよ in order to pass…

I think one of the other students - one who was actually a college kid - was going to organize a study group over the weekend, but it’s looking like maybe that’s not going to come to pass. A bummer, because part of the reason I’m doing this is to get out of the apartment. Maybe I’ll have to organize one myself…? I don’t want to come off as a know-it-all, though, even though in this case - in this class - I really do know most of it already.

There’s always been some talk (occasionally justified) about a “Mac tax;” that is, the perception that Apple computers are more expensive than similarly-configured boxes from Dell or Sony or some other Windows monger, so someone who prefers to (legally) use the Mac OS has to pay more for the privilege.

Well, every once in a while, someone actually crunches numbers and finds that the price difference is minimal or even non-existent, but never mind that; let’s just humor Windows fanboys and pretend it exists for a moment.

Well, today, I started up Parallels on my Mac at work in order to test a web site in WinIE. Parallels ships with a copy of Kaspersky Internet Security, a suite of anti-virus, -spam and -spyware tools. I don’t have much familiarity with such tools, being a Mac user, but it seemed like a fairly nice one; the interface was easy to use and the program itself mostly unobtrusive. Well… except for today. Apparently, the license that came with Parallels expired; would I like to renew it? I can’t recall the exact numbers, but the price was something like $60 to continue using it for one year, or $100 for two.

In consideration of this, I proffer the following. If the Mac tax must exist, then so must the Windows tax; that being the cost to protect the Windows machine from malware and/or to repair it after it succumbs to these evils. The tax is in real financial terms and/or in terms of time lost, since time is money. And I’ll bet that, over the lifetime of the computer, the Windows tax totals out to at least as much as the Mac tax, and likely twice it or more.

Here’s a list of stuff I’m currently working on.

PIRETS 2.0

My first big project when I joined Precision Intermedia was that of a real estate company, Benchmark Realty. They wanted to have searchable real estate listings on their site. The local realtor’s association provides a database of such listings through a third party, which is accessible using a protocol called Real Estate Transaction Standard (RETS).

When I was hired, work on this project was underway by some programmers who work out of the office, but they weren’t getting very far; as budgets and deadlines became increasingly doomed, I was brought into the project to see if I could help. And though I may sound immodest, I did end up finally wrapping my head around RETS and bringing the project to something resembling a state of completion. Among the problems were that the documentation for RETS is all sorts of confusing at first, and that even once you think you’ve got it, the company that was providing the RETS server sometimes had things implemented differently than was in the documentation.

Most annoyingly pointless, though, were the field names. You’d think the property ID number and price would be in fields with names like PROP_ID and LIST_PRICE, right? Nope, they’ve got names like LIST_105 and LIST_87. The server does provide a metadata option which provides a list of fields and what they mean, but you’d think the field names themselves could be a little more self-explanatory. And some fields plain did not work. The client wants properties which are listed as active or are pending with contingencies to appear on the site. The server will tell us if a property is active or pending (I think it was LIST_32 or something), but even though the metadata tells us there’s a field for letting us know if a property has contingencies (LIST_55, maybe?), it’s always empty. The hack we ended up implementing was searching for “contingen” in LIST_78 (the description field).

So it should go without saying that PIRETS, as we called it (Precision Intermedia RETS; we are so clever) is a messy, hulking, fragile behemoth built by too many cooks which we did a whole lot of unpaid debugging on even after we went live, well past the deadline and over budget.

Fast forward a year; we have another realtor client who wants another searchable web site. Only this time, I know what I’m doing and what the client is expecting, I’m aware of Drupal’s presence and how it can make life easier, and my own skills have increased manifold. It was time for PIRETS 2.0.

This time, instead of bothering with trying to query the RETS server for each search a visitor does, we’re instead caching all of the property data locally and just searching on that. The hard part has been making sure the local cache is reasonably up-to-date with the RETS server… and handling pictures, which are their own special headache because they must be requested one at a time. And if we want to hotlink the pictures off of the RETS web server (the alternative is caching those locally as well - no thanks), we have to - get this - actually download the image, then just peek at the headers the web server sent us for the “Location:” header. The rest of the data is disposed of. Sadly, this seems to be directly to RETS spec, so I can’t blame the data provider for this one.

Anyway… I’m hoping by early next week to have something worthy enough to show the client. From there, we might even end up taking it back to Benchmark and saying, “hey, we did it for reals this time!”

SigFeeder 2.0

After that tl;dr-age above, I won’t go into depth about SigFeeder. I’ll just say that I’m glad to see that so many people are still using it, yet frustrated that I can’t use it myself since it’s incompatible with the feeds Drupal provides. So I’m rewriting it - in Drupal, of course. Progress is slow since I don’t really feel like working on it very often; I’m just now at the point where I’m starting to figure out how I’m going to fetch the incoming feeds. FeedAPI’s the word. Like many other third-party APIs, it’s kind of poorly-documented, but it’s small enough that I was able to wrap my head around it without too much difficulty. Still a long ways to go before it goes live… If I recall correctly, I spent about a month and a half coding the original SigFeeder, and that was when I didn’t have anything resembling a full-time job.

Pathologic Beta 12

I released a new version of Pathologic today, to squash a bug. I even managed to get the correct files uploaded to CVS on the first try this time. Go me!

Project X

I have another project I’m working on, but since I’m contributing to it anonymously, I don’t want to link it with my real name; at least, not yet. Let’s just say that it has to do with using Drupal as a wiki. There’s various modules to help with this, but I’m not satisfied with a lot of them - I might end up reinventing more wheels than I really should.