Matt Brubeck: Planet Matt

A programming language by why the lucky stiff.

10 minutes from Seattle: "Are we in Portland yet? Why are we not there yet?"

"For early-stage startups and their founding teams."

"A few small things you can do to improve performance of your HTML5-based applications. Our focus here will be on performance bottlenecks related to the database and AppCache."

Looks like a new competitor to blist/Socrata: "You can upload tabular data sets and share them with your collaborators or with the world. You can choose to share all of your data with your collaborators, or keep parts of it hidden."

"Scripts can be run interactively in a terminal, started as a long running service, or started via Locale. Python, Lua and BeanShell are currently supported, and we're planning to add Ruby and JavaScript support, as well."

"They are the characteristics of what intelligent people do when they are confronted with problems, the resolutions to which are not immediately apparent."

"The Bayou system was designed to support collaboration among users who cannot be or choose not to be continuously connected."

"Sammy is a tiny javascript framework built on top of jQuery inspired by Ruby’s Sinatra." Looks like a nice lightweight alternative to JMVC, at a tiny fraction of the size (3 KB gzipped).

Yet another DHT, with memcached interface and Tokyo Cabinet back-end, and a fairly complete replication/partitioning/proxy/failover system. I think it's just highly-specialized OCD that keeps me cataloguing these at this point.

"The goal of JsTestDriver is to build a JavaScript test runner which: 1. easily integrates with continuous builds systems and 2. allows running tests on multiple browsers quickly to ease TDD style development." Developed by two Google engineers.

Google TechTalk slides and video.

"A lightweight drop-in replacement for rubygems to facilitate faster loading of gems as well as reducing memory consumption considerably."

From $4/month for 64MB/1.5GB.

I want to start my own software company whenever I finish at Kiha, whether it succeeds and I'm rich, fails and I'm laid off, or just gets big and I get bored.*

Specifically, I want to work on a very small and focused project with one or two partners, fund myself for 3–4 months, launch a product by the end of that period, then decide whether to put in more time/money, seek outside funding, or what. Anyone want to join me—not this week or this month, but maybe this year or next? Let's talk. See my profile for contact info, or add a comment below.

*Don't worry, bellwethr, I'm not suggesting anything is imminent! I'm very happy at Kiha. This is a longer-term dream, but I figure it needs some advance planning if I want it to be real someday.

I just got an ORCA card, the new stored-value card for our local transit agencies. Now instead of getting a new card each month, I can just go online to renew my ORCA pass. I can also check the current status and transaction history online, and set up a monthly auto-payment plan. But that also means that there's an electronic record of all my trips, associated with my name and address.



ORCA offers both "registered" and "unregistered" cards. Unregistered cards (they claim) are not associated with any identifying information. This means they are potentially more private, but they also have fewer features. If you lose a registered card, you can deactivate it online and get a new card for the same account. Unregistered cards are like cash; if you lose one then you lose any balance associated with it. And registration is required for monthly payment plans and other online account management.



I got a registered card, since the balance protection seemed worthwhile. I don't value my privacy that much, and anyway I'm not confident that the unregistered cards are really that much more private. (Several of ACLU-WA's privacy concerns apply to unregistered cards too.) Mostly I thought it was interesting that they make the trade-offs explicit, and offer customers a choice. Also, I think that just knowing that I could get an anonymous card made me feel better about ordering a registered one. Another version of the see salad order fries effect?

"This is the Hg-Git plugin for Mercurial, adding the ability to push to and pull from a Git server repository from Hg." From the folks at GitHub.

started working on Project Euler again. Just hit Level 2!

I got at call at 3am asking me to "restart the database please." It was a wrong number. Man, I do not miss that at all.

Shared by Matt Brubeck

So true. I'm a language maven, but most of my co-workers are tool mavens.

Oliver Steele writes about the divide between language mavens and tool mavens. In short, if you use a fancy IDE like IntelliJ but an older language like Java, you’re a tool maven. If you use a fancy language like Ruby but a minimalist editor like vim or TextMate, then you’re a language maven.

You’ll probably find the habits of the opposite camp fascinating, like watching a National Geographic documentary about the native peoples of some far-away land. I suspect the two groups have much they can learn from each other.

Via Netflix, Sarah and I are catching up on the past decade of television. Here are some of my impressions while watching The West Wing seasons one and two:

• Oh, so this is what fueled my more political friends' Obama fantasies.
• So many things seem bittersweet in hindsight:
  1. An administration that considers it catastrophic to have an approval rating of only 42% (in early 2000, cf. all of 2006–2009)
  2. Space Shuttle Columbia having problems that endanger its landing (in May 2000, cf. February 2003).
  3. Saying they "still don't know where bin Laden is" (in October 2000, cf. 2001–present).
• Hopefully not bittersweet in hindsight: worries throughout season one about racially-motivated assasination attempts.
• For a show that's really quite shockingly well done in almost every way, they sure do make some clumsy use of thunder and lightning when people are supposed to feel gloomy.

position:fixed in Android Webkit

Good news for mobile web developers! In the latest development build of Android ("cupcake"), WebKit supports iPhone touch events and CSS3 animations/transforms. This means that Richard Herrera's iPhone fixed positioning hack will soon work Android too.

The WebKit CSS Animation demos also work, but lack of hardware acceleration in Android makes them painfully slow compared to the iPhone.

Async Map and Fold in JavaScript

My latest experiment is an implementation of asynchronous/parallel "map" (and other array functions) in JavaScript and Oni. Oni is a "structured concurrency language" embedded in JavaScript. For my source code and commentary, see oni-map at GitHub. You can leave comments at GitHub too.

All this time reading Real World Haskell must really have warped my brain if a simple testing framework for a JavaScript program has got me thinking about higher-order functions and concurrency semantics...