little bear's vegetable omelette @ 07:28 pm

It's that time of year again. Does anyone want to join me for da Vinci Days in Corvallis this year? My current plans are to be there on Saturday the 19th. (I have a thing in Keizer to be at on Sunday afternoon.) Kinetic sculptures, human kaleidoscope, fun stuff.

Let me know if you're interested in going.

fish tacos on the front lawn @ 11:35 am

Yesterday we went on a trip to Ikea -- my first time -- to pick up a floor-to-ceiling wardrobe unit for my new room. I spent the entire evening, with the help of several friends along the way, putting together the frame. Now it's time to put on the doors, and I'm looking at the opening in the assembled piece, and looking at the door measurements, and it becomes clear that they sold me the wrong doors. After talking to three Ikea reps on the phone, I finally got someone to admit that they screwed up (because the doors were selected by someone on the sales floor), but my indignation roll wasn't high enough to defeat the third service rep, and I failed to get them to deliver the replacement for free.

So I'm requesting the assistance of someone with a vehicle to take me and the stupid doors back to Ikea for an exchange. The vehicle must be able to carry packages 7'8" long. (We got them here in a Honda Element. The back didn't close, but Jeff tied stuff down.) I will compensate you for vehicle costs (gas or zipcar rental or whatever) and buy you lunch.

We also went to the Rebuilding Center yesterday, which is a pretty incredible place, and they have a lot of doors. But trying to search through that entire pocket universe of doors for some that would fit a 31.5" x 89" wardrobe opening sounds like even a more daunting task than running the Ikea exchange department gauntlet. (...and I'd have to return these, in any case.)

chix burrito @ 07:56 pm

It's been something of a flickrtastic week for me, apparently. Do you recognize the picture on this supercheapelectricity.com post? I also have a picture on this blog in a language I can't read. Relatedly, someone else asked for permission to use this photo of the burdock at Long House. And another photographer asked me about a location and then did his own model shoot there.

This is all in spite of the fact that I haven't taken any pictures in months and months that aren't snapshots of things like fuse boxes and rats.

artichoke @ 01:16 pm

Sometimes the software we run generates errors.

I mean, it'd be nice if it didn't, but it does, and so what we hope for is that the error report includes enough information about the conditions that led to the error for us to track it down and fix it. Generating a report for a particular error is something pretty well understood; we generally use some variation on stack traces and core dumps, which works well enough.

The part I don't manage so well is what you do when you're receiving these errors from not just a single customer working with your application, but from the global set of all your users at once. (This problem is most obvious in web applications, but plenty of desktop applications have "report crash to developer" functionality now as well.) The approaches I've seen so far are

1. show an error message to your user, and leave it to them to figure out how to communicate the error to you. I trust I don't need to go in to all the ways in which this sucks.
2. dump everything into a log file, which is easy to do, but has insufficient structure to get a high-level view of what the current state of things is.
3. send an email with every error, which works fine in many cases, but it makes bad problems worse, because now in addition to dealing with a bug that needs fixing, you now have to deal with a torrential flow of emails (with large chunks of debugging data attached) clogging your developers' inboxes.

The balance I need is to be informed of a new type of error as quickly as possible, but to not be flooded with redundant reports. I need to know if the problem is affecting 80% of our users, or just one in a thousand. I need all the debugging information stored somewhere for inspection if I need it, but not all pushed down to my email/phone/jabber/whatever in case I don't. I want to classify reports by exception type, code path, and perhaps other random details (browser version, IP address, etc).

I know I'm not the only one with these requirements, so I'm sure an application for managing this exists somewhere, I just haven't found it yet. What is it?

tomato curry [company lunch] @ 02:30 pm

I've been working with Ruby on a semi-regular basis for a while now, and there's something that's still bothering me. Well, to be honest, there are a number of things, but one of them in particular seems like it should be solvable.

Here's the last few frames of a typical Ruby on Rails traceback:

And here are the last few frames of a typical Nevow traceback in Python:

It's not just the web environment either, you can make similar comparisons between ipython and irb.

Is there any help to be had? Or should I tell my office manager to get one of those inflatable punching bags to smash the next time someone sends me one of these stupid crippled ruby tracebacks?

seedy bagel [bagel friday] @ 03:03 pm

We play a little foosball here at JanRain World Headquarters. About a month ago we started keeping stats. That is, we started recording data, but our interpretation of the data could still use some work.

Things we want to know include:

• Who is king of the hill? How hard do I have to beat them to take their place? (With variations for best player on offense, defense, and best of the week vs all-time.)
• Which pairings of players will present the closest matches?
• Given a set of players, how should the bookie set the odds or point spread?
• Which pairings of players should play in order to best increase the statistical significance of the data?

The math is nontrivial to those of us who haven't done much statistics, because we want stats for individual players, but our data points come from four-player games. Help?

pumpkin pie @ 02:52 pm

Last night I went to see Schäffer the Darklord and MC Frontalot. The show did not get off to a great start. The venue was cold, filled with loud canned music that nobody wanted to dance to, and there were few places to sit. The stage was empty for the first half hour after the posted show time, without a single word from anyone as to why. The opening act, a local Portland song-and-dance number who probably had no idea who it was they were opening for, did not go over very well.

Finally STD and his black box took the stage, and things got better.

I went because I really like the fact that there are bards who go on nationwide tour with songs about things like Infocom text adventures. STD warned us about zombie Jesus. MC Frontalot ran a mini-campaign with the audience and a d20 to decide what to play next in the set. They did a duet about how terrible and bad this blog is. It was pretty great.

Nerdcore is not quite my favorite genre. Most of its appeal lies in clever lyrics, which would be great but for the fact that I couldn't understand more than 5% of what Frontalot was saying over the drums, keyboard, and bass. (STD was somewhat more intelligible, which I appreciated.) But it's still geek barddom, and seeing those guys on stage is good inspiration. One of these decades I'll get the Silicon Forest Choir going.

In a week or so I'll be down in Mountain View again. We'll see if there's any good geek filk to be had there this time around.

dark chocolate pistachios @ 01:23 am

I haven't been much involved in Stand these past few months, but I'm going to plug their upcoming workshop, because the workshop I went to last year was the best workshop on organizing I have ever attended. If you care about organizing for improvement in Oregon schools, this workshop is mandatory for you. If you care about organizing grassroots efforts for anything else, and you are willing to pretend you're doing it for Oregon schools, you should still go -- although you will be surrounded by mothers and teachers talking about schools, the "voice" and "skills" tracks will be useful to you no matter what your cause.

It's a day-long event. They give you lunch. And snacks. And childcare, if you need to bring some of those with you. If you register right now, it costs fifteen bucks, but the deadline for the early registration discount expires real soon. It's a pretty sweet deal in any case. The most difficult part is that you'll have to be in Tualatin at 9 AM on Saturday, November 10th.

Here's the workshop schedule.

08:09 pm

Not that I'm going, but I feel this deserves spreading the word:

"Not to be outdone by J. K. Rowling and her wizard crew, Stephen Colbert's book, I Am America (and So Can You!) enjoys its own midnight book release party. [...] The evening will also include drink specials, drinking games, and other things that involve drinking and honoring America."

- from the Powell's Calendar. Monday the 8th, 11pm, at Blitz.

cannelloni con spinaci @ 10:52 pm

I tried to go to the Tibetan place in Davis Square. It closed for renovations on the 17th. It was closed when I tried to go to it last time I was in town. I feel thwarted.

I have lunch and evening plans both in Camberville tomorrow, but I haven't figured out what to do inbetween; silly people have to work at their day jobs during the day. Suggestions?