Older blog entries for whytheluckystiff (starting at number 46)

I've just finished a short howto for YAML beginners called:

  Yaml In Five Minutes

If you don't know what YAML is, check it out and send me any feedback.
YAML support in now built into the Ruby programming
language and has building roots in the Perl world as well.

I've really, really, really been enjoying Luck Wander Boy.
I have only momentarily put the book down today.  I will finish by nightfall.
It's not an outrageously funny or sad book, but it is good enjoyment.  The Pac-Man
stuff is absolutely brilliant.  Pick it up at the bookstore and read just the
first essay on Pac-Man.  It's like five pages into the book.

Or, here's excerpt from the site.

bgeiger: I'm guessing you're using Heisig's book and study cards
on remembering the hiragana and katakana?  If not, I found his strange
imagery to be quite helpful in seeing the shape and sound of the characters.

also, i covered like fifty pages of a legal pad while practicing.  and i'd
also recommend some Japanese for Busy People book that is a kana workbook.

anyways, hope it comes together for you.

Syck is now checked into Ruby CVS.  You'll see it appear in the
Ruby 1.8.0 release forthcoming.  I'd like to propose Syck for
inclusion in PHP and Python as well, since both extensions are
coming along nicely.  Once YAML finds acceptance in these
communities, open source scripting languages will have an
asset not found elsewhere.

Plus, I think we'll save a lot people from writing parsers.  And
consequently, massive regular expressions.

I feel there are great possibilities for YAML and Python, since
they share indentation for scoping.  If the YAML document separator
('---') became a Python construct, you could perform assignment with
YAML rather than Python constructs.

    pkginfo =
      ---
      Name: Syck
      Version: 0.28
      Summary: YAML Parser for Python
      Home-page: http://www.whytheluckystiff.net/syck/
      ...

So check YAML out.  The best place to start is the Cookbook.

work on Syck has been extremely speedy of late.  i have the ruby
extension up and running now and it flies, o indeed!

this is great news, as all of my yaml.rb users will benefit from
(1) having it in the Ruby 1.8 dist, and (2) having a loader that
will likely run 10-20x faster.

for non-Ruby users, this simply means that you'll be seeing yaml
loading in your local scripting language soon.  huzzah!

it's a trip to read raph's overview of advogato and
think about the experience of using advogato.  for him,
it's an immersive experiment with implications as to
how he sees applied mathematics.  it's a microcosm of
humanity and relationships.

i remember coming to advogato and thinking, "oh, so
people rate each others' progress and the goal is to
get to the top."  so i forage in, rating entire villages
with casual glances at their worth.

my judgements were all based on the diary entries.
one user who magnetized me was ReadMe.  i could
appreciate the verse.  i rated him/her, he/she rated me
equally.  apparently it's ReadMe's standing policy.

the problem with rating based on writing is that
your trust network builds around a loose group of
writers who can appreciate each other, but don't really
know each other or communicate at all.  nothing to build
much trust on.

then i joined the yaml project and noticed that cce
keeps a diary here.  knowing clark from yaml development,
we rated each other based on a deeper knowledge of each
other's skills.  clark's rating me as journeyer is meaningful
in a way that other ratings simply aren't.

so then i begin to see advogato through raph's eyes.
the trust metric diagrams make more sense in context.

so here's a suggestion for building trust on advogato:
(someone should write a guide)

build trust with individuals you trust in life.
bring them to advogato and rate each other,
link to each other.  your team's real trust in each
other should translate into trust metrics here.

of course, you will then need to seek trust from
the good nodes of advogato.  i don't know if receiving
trust from stragglers on recentlog (such as myself)
will pollute your value.  i'd seek other masters and
journeyers online who work on related projects and
could see the value of your work.  e-mail them?
tell them you're seeking trust on advogato and are looking
for peer review?  or pitch in on one of their projects
and prove your worth.

(it looks like alan has got this sort of idea going
on with his mother certifying him.  and as fun as it
would be to certify a first-grader, i should probably
avoid spreading my compromised status until i find a way
out. :D)

it's hard to say how much value being a master on advogato
actually holds at this time, though.  you don't accumulate
services or access beyond the rating itself.  i'm not
saying the rating doesn't hold value on its own, it's
just easier for me to rate other people high because i say
to myself, "well, it's just a rating."

i guess the beauty of the system is that advogato likely
considers me a compromised node since i've had such a 
lackadaisical approach to certifying.

good luck on the talk, raph.  twould be fun to attend.
and congrats to bytesplit for being the anomaly.

a couple of years ago i got laid off from a coding position a few
days before christmas.  no severance, get your stuff and flee, along
with 60% of the other workers in the building.

i stood outside the warehouse, quickly accumulating email addresses
from the others who were leaving.  notions of starting a new company,
going back to school.  we all had our boxes of office crap.

i looked at one of the other guys and said, "man, what are we gonna do
today?"  he was like, "geez, i dunno."  i said, "there's no way i'm going
to go looking for a new job today.  i need to get my mind off work for
today."  we joked about a couple ideas and finally decided to go
panhandle downtown.  we might pick up a few bucks.  it was christmas, so
plenty of people would be at the mall.

and so we got some of those fingerless gloves and made signs out of
cardboard: "starving haX0rs!" "overworked.. and then BAM!"  whatever.
sang some old spirituals and entertained the masses with hat tricks
and rope tricks and gutter tricks.  i saw people from some of my previous
jobs, who made a few generous contributions.  in fact, we were 
approached by an executive from the company where we had just
been laid off!  (he tried to tell us we were going about this wrong, but
the look on his face truly inspired us.)  the news camera came by, then the night
died and the other homeless guys on crutches demanded their cut of our
wages.  panhandling can certainly be lucrative.

so then i just got a call from a friend who wants me to do a commercial.  he
needs somebody to play a panhandler!  my first acting job and i'm typecast
already!

hi.  my diary is now taking place off in a special place.  i've
been keeping a leafy paper journal for awhile, but i had one
go through the wash last year and as my friend dustin says: i'd really
like to see them fit an internet in that wash.  architecting the
diary was delightful, as i will soon have everything crossreferenced
and footnoted so i can track progress on writing, art, progg'ing.
you'll be able to link my deepest thoughts and feelings about any given
star trek episode to an encounter with a man who has steel nostrils.

many thanks to Dmitry Borodaenko, who will be creating the debian
package for yaml.rb.  also, votes to bring yaml.rb into the 
Ruby Windows Installer have been swelling.  add your vote to the wiki
page.

wednesday i found some time to open the first public rpc server to use yaml
for passing data around.  in many ways, it's no big deal.  the script
is only 1.3k (ruby) large.  that includes client and server with built-in
introspection.  i may have gone overboard a bit on the introspection.
i have four methods found in xml-rpc servers (server.listMethods, 
server.methodHelp, server.getCapabilities and server.methodSignature),
as well as two that I added myself:

    o server.about, for giving a short description of the server.
    o server.methodBlank, returns a YAML document with a template
        for issuing a given method's request.

the server.methodBlank is going to be really useful for issuing rpc
through vim.  the goal is to be able to use vim as the client for ANY rpc
server, passing raw yaml, which is straightforward to create and edit by
hand.

boxcarring is built-in through yaml streams.  if you wanted help and signature
for examples.stringecho:

  --- !okay/rpc/method
  server.methodHelp: [ examples.stringecho ]
  --- !okay/rpc/method
  server.methodSignature: [ examples.stringecho ]

the response would come in a pair of respective documents:

  --- Accepts a string parameter, returns the string.
  --- [ str, str ]

rpc really is yaml's killer app, since typing and interoperability
between languages are already the focus of the spec.  the only trick with
designing the protocol was to find a concise way to represent the method
and its parameters.

it's a fun and difficult time for yaml.  we're pounding its spec down to obliterate
unneccessary features.  there's conflict, but there's always resolution.  what a
cool project ultimately.

hangin out on the threshold.  i think my diary is rated 3.1 or something.  i easily
condemn myself with every word that i type here now.  see, but if i do get buried
beneath the Warm Line of Advo-cceptance, then privacy for my diary has a greater
guarantee.  which i suppose would be nice.  the world is covered in kipple anyways.
it's all a 3.1 these days.

just finished booking my flight for rubyconf.  it's going
to be great.

bah, i can't do this...

yeah the ultimate rating system would tag everything 3.1 and be done with it.  it's
problematic having to write a few personal paragraphs here with a score over my head.
a score that has a single precision of decimal point even.  has the science behind
writing a diary achieved that sort of grain?

i'm finding myself in the same position as criswell these
days.  as i reach the age in which a young man is supposed
to be forming his own opinions about video stores, i often
find myself frozen in line as the other "members" in front of
me engage in the video store equivalent of road rage.  it's
happened three times in the last month.  what's interesting
to me is that some of my most competent and talented friends
have worked for video stores.  times are changing though.  and
no one will be able to stop the destruction that will follow.

last time i was in line at hollywood video and this guy with
a black eye was in front of me.  he had just come back from
a carribean cruise with his wife and he was pissed.  the lad
at the counter was a british kid with blue stuff around his
eyes.  powdery blue stuff.  black eyes and blue eyes. i just
realized that!  what is it with people at video stores and
their discolorations?

so Blacks Eye was fuming in line.  he had a Playstation game and
when he got to the desk, he started going off about how his
kids were crying the whole time he was on his trip because
the game was still locked.  i guess Blue Eyes had forgotten
to remove the plastic anti-theft strip for the game.

so Blue Eyes scans the game or something and then hands it
back to the guy, "there I gave you a free week."

"oh, a free week is all?" says Black Eyes, winding his hand.
i remember him winding his hand on his shorts, like winding
up for a punch, instinctively.  "what about two free weeks?"

"well, no," says Blue Eyes, "it's actually just one free
week you get, because that's what you paid for."

"oh but it's your mistake," said Black Eyes, "see you
should give the game for free for two weeks.  it's your
mistake."

"but we've fixed the mistake," (Blue Eyes), "and given
you the free week."

"but it's too late for that now," and Black Eyes gets
this big grin on his face like he's going insane.  and
i can see him by now because they started walking over
by the doors.  i guess the worker was trying to help move
him out.  "yeah, my kids already cried over that game.
my trip's already over.  the kids already cried."

i was stuck there for fifteen minutes listening to this
little debate.  i mean they both had such good points 
and the children had cried all week.  hard to say.  i
don't know who i would have voted for.  (i mean if they
had a phone number where i could call in and vote for
Black or Blue.)  they fought all the way out the door
and into the street.  i had to find a worker in back to
check me out.

agg.  didn't mean to take up so much space.  i know i
shouldn't go on and on like this.  it's a terrible
habit.  then again, perhaps i'll buzz back through it
and post it up as a front page article.