Recently completed: our half-US tour

With stops in

Auburn CA
Reno NV
Winnemucca NV
Wells NV
Metropolis NV
Bonneville Salt Flats UT
Salt Lake City UT
Green River WY
Cheyenne WY
Denver CO
Littleton CO
Centennial CO
Lincoln NE
Omaha NE
West Des Moines IA
Indianola IA
Sigourney IA
Fairfield IA
Hannibal MO
Fenton MO
Crestwood MO
Sikeston MO
Memphis TN
Little Rock AR
Texarkana AR
Texarkana TX
Plano TX
Dallas TX
Garland TX
Wichita Falls TX
Amarillo TX
Albuquerque NM
Williams AZ
Bakersfield CA
Plesanton CA
Milpitas CA

(Edited) Here's a map of our approximate route:

View Larger Map

Anticipating "it's all crazy..."

One of my favorite bands is releasing a new album tomorrow and I though I'd take a short moment to gush about it. I've been a long time admirer of mewithoutYou's work. Their abstract poetry filled with vivid imagery combines with highly energetic rich sounds and hits a sweet-spot. Certain lines tend to resonate with me. I find "O Porcupine" in particular to be moving.

I like to think of myself as having broad musical tastes, but if I do tend to be critical of a song it is very often overly simplistic lyrics which I fault. I don't know that I've ever sat down and thought through why that is, perhaps another time.

From listening to a few preview release tracks from this album, I don't think mewithoutYou runs any risk of that sort of problem. In fact, while listening to "the Fox, the Crow and the Cookie" I found myself pulling out the dictionary to look up the words canzonette, corvidae, and escadrille! Some of those rhymes are absolutely majestic. I think this album may satsfy even Xirzec's bombastically erudite lexical tastes. Thanks again to Andy for introducing me to their music.

A Two Pun Day

If I were a rock, I wouldn't want to be marble because I wouldn't want people to take me for granite.

I told one of my good friends that I was allergic to milk and he said, "No whey!"

I would estimate that I make at least two puns per week. Something someone says will just strike me at an odd angle and the pun percolates out effortlessly. The other day I thought of the above two. I'm not sure if the first is original, but we were in an elevator debating whether the stone walls were made of marble or granite and I couldn't resist. Later that day, someone mentioned cottage cheese and I thought of the second. It's a certified groaner, five out of six friends agree!

Our New Pi Day Laptop

To commemorate this year's pi day, we've christened our newly purchased laptop PiPuter. It's an Acer Aspire. We were looking for a super cheap full sized laptop with decent spects and found a good deal at the MicroCenter. Vanessa says that our computer has graduated magniu cum laude from its factory and it is currently watching us - watching, watching, always watching.

Septoplasty

I never dreamed that I too would be undergoing septoplasty just a few short months after Joe Greogorio had his operation. It turns out I had a pretty severely deviated septum which likely contributed to the annual sinus infections which I have been experiencing. My allergist recommended I have this operation to straighten the inside of my nose, as my left nasal passage was almost completely blocked near the bridge of my nose. In looking for a possible sinus infection I had a CT scan of my sinuses which revealed just how severe the deviation was. By the way, looking at a slice by slice cross section of your own head is fascinating.

This past Wednesday I had the surgery and I will have the stitches and splints removed next Tuesday. It's been a bit different than I expected. I anticipated some pain but, surprisingly, the part that hurts most is my upper front teeth. I also didn't expect quite so much bleeding. In any case, I'm not feeling too bad and I am looking forward to the long term benefits. Also, this has been my first experience BWOV (blogging while on vicodin).

Two Guys Arguing - Five Questions

I noticed that my friend Ben is participating in a new blog named Two Guys Arguing (in addition to blogs one two and three :-) and I thought I'd piggy back on a recent ice-breaker post.

1. What are you currently hacking on?
2. What are you currently getting better at?
3. What do you do when your computer is asleep?
4. Describe that ‘big fish’ project that’s been stewing in your brain.
5. What are you gonna post about this coming week?

On to the answers:

1. As a small part of my day job I'm currently working on a rewrite of significant portions of the gdata-python-client to support version two of the Google Data API protocol (check out the v2 branch).
2. I've been trying to focus on writing speedier unit tests. Unit testing is great, but sometimes it is necessary to write end to end tests which can take a rather long time to run. Slow tests are run less often, so I've been thinking of some ways to cache some of the more expensive pieces of these end to end tests while still preserving their utility.
3. Playing with Claire is easily one of my favorite non-computer related activities. I have a wonderful wife who keeps me company and there's nothing like relaxing with the family. Aside from the yard work, remodeling, and other house related items, I do very much enjoy playing guitar now and again. I even have a somewhat regular weekly gig.
4. I have a few side projects I like to hack on here and there in my spare time. One of them I've been thinking more about recently is a computer language I've decided to call "Headspace". I wanted to try an experiment and see what the effects would be of applying the rule of seven to programming.
5. I've been planning to write a bit about the surgery I've recently undergone so stay tuned ;-)

Two Guys Arguing seems like it's off to a great start and I look forward to reading along.

Google Tweets

Earlier today, Google posted the following on Twitter

I'm 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010

This looks suspiciously like ASCII, so I set out to render it in a more human readable form:

Bin       Hex ASCII
0110 0110 66  f
0110 0101 65  e
0110 0101 65  e
0110 1100 6C  l
0110 1001 69  i
0110 1110 6E  n
0110 0111 67  g
0010 0000 20    (space)
0110 1100 6C  l
0111 0101 75  u
0110 0011 63  c
0110 1011 6B  k
0111 1001 79  y
0000 1010 0A  \n

I doubt I'm the first to post this, but there you have it :-)

Brief Haitus

I'm taking a short break from posting here to study for the GRE. I'm planning to apply to grad school in the not too distant future, and figured I should study. Apologies for the pusillanimously prosaic post.

Guitar Hacking

In highschool, I began learning to play guitar. I took private lessons at a local music store, and although I had read sheet music for over seven years by this point (mostly while playing trombone), my teacher started me out by drawing guitar tabs. Unlike sheet music with staffs, clefs, meters, and measures, guitar tabs read like a simple map of where your fingers belong. In some cases, tabs are a picture of the neck of the guitar. For example, most books of guitar chords contain diagrams that look something like this:

 E A D G B e
0___________
 | | | | | |
 | | | | | |
 | | | | | |
1-----------
 | | | | | |
 | 2 | | | |
 | | | | | |
2-----------
 | | | | | |
 1 | | | | 4
 | | | | | |
3-----------
 | | | | | |
 | | | | | |
 | | | | | |
4-----------

The long vertical lines are the strings, while the horizontal lines are the frets. The lower pitched strings are on the left, while the higher pitched are on the right. Finger placement is indicated by the numbers written in the strings. The index finger is 1 and the pinky is 4. This diagram is of a G major chord and it uses three fingers, two on the third fret, and one on the second.

However, you could also draw a guitar tab like this:

 0       1       2       3       4
e|-------|-------|---4---|-------|
B|-------|-------|-------|-------|
G|-------|-------|-------|-------|
D|-------|-------|-------|-------|
A|-------|---2---|-------|-------|
E|-------|-------|---1---|-------|

The above looks a bit more like the neck of the guitar from the point of view of the person holding it.

One great way to learn how a musician plays an unusual chord, is to look at a video or picture. In that case, you'd see the neck of the guitar reversed, like this:

 
4       3       2       1       0
|-------|---1---|-------|-------|E
|-------|-------|---2---|-------|A
|-------|-------|-------|-------|D
|-------|-------|-------|-------|G
|-------|-------|-------|-------|B
|-------|---4---|-------|-------|e

Unless, of course, you are watching one of the many left-handed guitar players (Hendrix, McCartney, etc.) in which case, you neck would look like this:

 0       1       2       3       4
E|-------|-------|---1---|-------|
A|-------|---2---|-------|-------|
D|-------|-------|-------|-------|
G|-------|-------|-------|-------|
B|-------|-------|-------|-------|
e|-------|-------|---4---|-------|

The interesting thing about learning to play guitar using tabs, is that you actually have less information to go on than with sheet music. Tabs tend to lack information about the rhythm being played, tempo, and volume which are all present in sheet music. The one thing which sheet music lacks, however, is an indication of where your fingers should go when playing a particular chord or riff. Unpacking finger placement information from a cluster of notes on a staff can be difficult enough that guitar tabs make an attractive tradeoff. It is the musical equivalent of a domain specific language.

With the prevalence of recorded music which can be rewound and replayed over and over, a guitar player can often reconstruct the rythms and other necessary information by listening to the song. No longer need all information live on the page, the quick and dirty guitar hacker plays with tabs on the stand and the music in her head.

Mashup Camp 8

I participated in MashupCamp8 and created a simple mashup in a few hours which I have now open-sourced. It is a blog post editor, or article editor if you prefer, which finds key words in your text as you are writing and displays web search results for those key words next to the editor. Here's my elevator pitch:

When writing an article or blog post, I'll often note places where I should add a link and go back later to add them in. Sometimes searching for good resources to link to uncovers new information which I wish I had known while I was writing the article.

As I was walking around here at Mashup Camp, I saw a few web services which would allow me to do some data mining on raw text (like this blog post I'm writing) and search the web for relevant information.

I created a simple Ajax editor, which is hosted on Google App Engine. It takes the article's text, sends it securely (over HTTPS) to Open Calais which extracts key words then disambiguates, dedupes, and scores them for relevancy. Using this semantic web data from Calais, the editor then performs a web search on each of the keywords and requests results from the Yahoo Search BOSS API in the JSON format. The text analysis and web search is done automatically when the editor detects that you have stopped typing. To avoid excessive and distracting search refreshes, the editor will wait between three and eight seconds before performing the search.

You can try it out here:
https://sippycode.appspot.com/article_editor.

Download the source code here.

This simple little mashup was well received, and I think part of the reason is the potential for growth. The fundamental idea, is to have an environment in which relevant data is brought to you as you work. You don't even need to go info hunting, our computers can find relevant information and bring it to you automagically.

For this particular mashup app, I had envisioned a few additional features, the addition of which is left as an exercise to the reader if you should so choose.

• A WSIWYG editor to create rich HTML instead of just plain text. (I looked at tinyMCE but ran out of time.)
• Search on combinations of keywords instead of just individual items identified by Calais.
• Search other information sources, like news results, images, videos.
• Search on multiple search engines. (Google has an easy to use Ajax search API, but I wanted to try something that was totally new to me.)

XML Library with Versioning

I recently created a simple Python library for converting objects to and from XML. Code samples up front, here's how you would define some class to represent some hierarchical XML:

class AtomFeed(XmlElement):
  _qname = '{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}feed'
  title = Title
  entries = [Entry]

class Entry(XmlElement):
  _qname = '{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}entry'
  links = [Link]
  title = Title
  content = Content

class Link(XmlElement):
  _qname = '{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}link'
  rel = 'rel'
  address = 'href'

class Url(XmlElement):
  _qname = '{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}url'

class Title(XmlElement):
  _qname = '{http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}title'
  title_type = 'type'

Now for the whys and hows.

For the past few years I've been working with Web Services and most of them use XML to represent the data (though I hope JSON catches on more widely). There are some great XML libraries out there, and my library is based on one of them (ElementTree). XML parsing is certainly nothing new, so why create a new one?

The Why

There are a few limitations with the XML parsing approaches I've used in Python:

• XML structure isn't documented or available using help()
• No autocompete for finding elements in the XML
• If the XML changes in a new version of the web service, my code needs to be rewritten
• My code interacting with the XML is verbose

Source code can provide a wealth of information, but parsed XML doesn't have the same level of information richness as source code. Between tool tips in IDEs, auto-generated documentation, and autocomplete, having classes loaded for your XML models can bring the tree traversal logic closer to your fingertips. Many software development tools are optimized for working with predefined classes rather than generic XML objects.

However, one of the biggest drawbacks to representing each type of XML element with it's own class is that you end up needing to write lots of class definitions. For this reason I've tried to make the XML class definitions as compact as possible. Specifying a simple XML class only takes two lines of code. For each type of sub-element and each XML attribute, you can add one line of code. You don't need to declare all of the elements or attributes either. The XmlElement will preserve all of the XML which it parses. If there are class members which correspond to a specified sub-element, the element will be placed in that member. Any unspecified elements will be converted to XmlElement instances. You can search over all XML elements (both anticipated members and unanticipated generic objects) using the get_elements method. XML attributes are handled in a similar fashion and can be searched using get_attributes.

I've saved the most unique feature of this library for last: Sometimes web services change the XML definition thereby breaking your code. If it is something small like a change in XML namespace or changing a tag, it seems like such a waste to have to edit lines upon lines of code. To address this kind of problem, this XML library supports versioning. When you parse or generate XML, you can specify the version of the available rules that you'd like to use. You can use the same objects with any version of the web service.

To use versioning, write a class definition with tuples containing the version specific information:

class Control(XmlElement):
  _qname = ('{http://purl.org/atom/app#}control', #v1
            '{http://www.w3.org/2007/app}control') #v2
  draft = Draft
  uri = 'atomURI'
  lang = 'atomLanguageTag'
  tag = ('control_tag', 'tag') # v1, v2

class Draft(XmlElement):
  _qname = ('{http://purl.org/atom/app#}draft', 
            '{http://www.w3.org/2007/app}draft')

If you create an instance of the Control element like this:

c = Control(draft=Draft('yes'), tag='test')

Then you can generate XML for each version like this:

c.to_string(1)

returns

<control xmlns="http://purl.org/atom/app#" 
    control_tag="test">
  <draft>yes</draft>
</control>

while

c.to_string(2)

returns

<control xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/app" 
    tag="test">
  <draft>yes</draft>
</control>

Note the difference in XML namespaces in the above. I also added an example of an attribute name which changed between versions, though "tag" doesn't actually belong in AtomPub control (so don't go trying to use it m'kay).

Since this library is open source, you're free to examine how it works and use it however you like. Allow me to highlight a few key points.

The How

Earlier I showed how to define XML element classes which look for specific sub elements and attributes and convert them into member objects. I also mentioned that this XML library handles versioning, meaning that the same object can parse and produce different XML depending on a version parameter. Both of these are accomplished by creating class level rule sets which are built up using introspection the first time an XML conversion is attempted.

In pseudo-code it works like this.

XML --> object
  - find out the desired version
  - is there an entry for this version in _rule_set?
  - if not, look at all XML members of this class 
      in _members
  - create XML matching rules based on each member's type
      (and store in _rule_set so we don't need to generate 
       the rules again)
  - iterate over all sub-elements in the XML tree
  - sub-elements and attributes which are in the rule set 
      are converted into the declared type
  - sub-elements and attributes which don't fit a rule are
      stored in _other_elements or _other_attributes

When generating XML the process is similar but slightly different.

object --> XML
  - create an XML tree with the tag and namespace for this 
      object given the desired version
  - look at all members of this class in _members
  - tell each member to attach itself to the tree using 
      it's rules for the desired version
  - iterate through _other_elements and _other_attributes 
      and tell each to attach to the XML tree

Armed with the above explanation, understanding the source code should be a bit easier.

Vim Line Length

I happen to be a fan of the vi text editor. I also happen to be a fan of code style guidelines. And sometimes it is very handy to know if a line in your source code has gone over eighty characters long. Some style guides still recommend a max line length of eighty characters, a tradition dating all the way back to IBM punch cards, circa 1928. For an even more impressive feat of long term engineering influence look up how the size of Roman war chariots determined the size of NASA space shuttle booster rockets. But I digress.

To mark the characters which are over the eighty character limit, enter the following either within vim or in your .vimrc file.

:match ErrorMsg '\%>80v.\+'

I've noticed that some blogger templates tend to display fifty-five characters in a fixed width format (as in a <pre> block or <code>). To edit code which I plan to post on Blogger, I sometimes turn on

:match ErrorMsg '\%>55v.\+'

Atom-Powered Robots Run Amok

I imagine a grand total of two of my readers will recognize the title of this post. (Hint: it's from RFC 5023.) But it seemed an appropriate title for a recent addition to a local office building where some Android developers tend to congregate.

(Note the tiny t-shirt logo.)

Ai luff mai Android.

Twitter Client

As a proof of concept for using the sippycode HTTP library which I wrote about in my last post, I decided to create a simple text console client for Twitter. Download the Twitter terminal application here.

Twitter's RESTful API is quite simple, and I wrote an open source library for Twitter based on the sippycode HTTP library in a few minutes. Here's an example of posting a new update (tweeting):

import sippycode.http.core as http_core
import sippycode.auth.core as auth_core

class TwitterClient(object):

  def __init__(self, username, password):
    self._credentials = auth_core.BasicAuth(username, 
                                            password)

  def update(self, message):
    request = http_core.HttpRequest(method='POST')
    http_core.parse_uri(
            'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml'
        ).modify_request(request)
    request.add_form_inputs({'status': message})
    self._credentials.modify_request(request)
    client = http_core.HttpClient()
    response = client.request(request)
    return response

In the above, the client sends an authenticated POST to the updates URL. Using the TwitterClient in your code looks like this:

client = TwitterClient('my-username', 'my-password')
client.update('Try out this Twitter client: http://oji.me/wP')

To try out this Twitter console app, unpack the download and run sippy_twitter.py. With it, you can update your status on Twitter or read the updates from your friends. When reading, the client displays five updates at a time, since showing more at once would likely cause some to scroll off the top of the screen (assuming the terminal displays twenty-five lines).

This simple application was designed to be a proof of concept, but it's really grown on me. Cycling through all of my friend's updates doesn't require any scrolling, and it feels snappier than the web interface. It seems like others are enjoying this terminal client too.

There are quite a few ways that this client could be improved, so there's plenty of opportunity to pitch in if you are interested. I have received feature requests from friends who previewed this app, such as: support command line arguments which will allow the client to perform updates when being run from another program, show a running countdown from 140 characters as you are typing your update (could probably be done using ncurses), ability to follow users, and read updates from just one user. If you'd like to participate in any of these, let me know in the comments.

Fire up your terminal and give this client a try. Why not post an update to @jscud right now?

An Open Source Python HTTP Client

At Super Happy Dev House 27, I made significant progress on an open source library for making HTTP requests in Python. For the past few years I've been working with web services and APIs (SOAP, REST (wikipedia) - specifically AtomPub, etc.) and I wanted to create an HTTP library which is simple, clean, and precise. Python has a couple of great HTTP libraries already, but one of them is a bit too low level (httplib) and the other is too high level (urllib2).

For example, in httplib you call a method to send data as if you are writing to a file (httplib uses sockets, after all). Required HTTP headers like Content-Length are not calculated for you. You'll need to handle cookies and redirects on your own. On the plus side, you get full control of what is being sent. The higher level library, urllib2, is built on top of httplib. It adds some handy abstractions, like calculating the Content-Length, but it also has some limitations. I haven't yet been able to figure out how to perform a PUT or DELETE with urllib2.

When making HTTP calls to web services, there are often a large number of HTTP headers, URL parameters, and components to the request. Making a request feels like making a function call in most HTTP libraries. In the past, I've wrapped these functions with successive layers containing more and more function parameters. For example, in a request to send a photo and metadata to PicasaWeb, you need to include an Authorization token, Content-Type specifying a MIME-multipart request and the multipart boundary, and a multipart payload consisting of the Atom XML describing the photo and the photo's binary data. If you add in the the ability to specify other headers and URL parameters, your function call might look like this:

def post_photo(url, url_parameters, escape_parameters, 
               photo_mime_type, photo_file_handle, 
               photo_file_size, metadata_xml, 
               metadata_mime_type, auth_token, 
               additional_http_headers)
...

# Sets the request's Host, port, and uri. 
# Makes the request into a MIME multipart request, 
# adjusts the Content-Type and recalculates 
# Content-Length.
# Sets the Authorization header
post_photo('http://picasaweb.google.com/data/'
           'feed/api/user/userID/albumid/albumID', None, 
           False, 'image/jpeg', photo_file, photo_size, 
           atom_xml, 'application/atom-xml', 
           client_login_token, None)

To use the above, you have to gather all of the information in one place, and make the function call. There are cases where you want a design like the above.

However, more and more I think of ways the program could be more cleanly structured if this information could be compartmentalized. This new library relies on an HttpRequest object which various parts of the program modify. Once all of the modifications have been applied, the fully constructed request is passed to an HttpClient which communicates with the server using httplib or urlfetch if you happen to be on Google App Engine. (Support for more HTTP libraries is certainly possible.)

The photo posting example from above could look something like this. Keep in mind that these steps could be carried out in a different order in different segments of code.

photo_post = HttpRequest(method='POST')
# Sets the Authorization header
client_login_token.modify_request(photo_post)
# Adds to the body and calculated Content-Length, 
# sets the Content-Type.
photo_post.add_body_part(atom_xml, 
    'application/atom+xml')
# Makes the request into a MIME multipart request, 
# adjusts the Content-Type and recalculates 
# Content-Length.
photo_post.add_body_part(photo_file, 'image/jpeg', 
    photo_size)
# Sets the request's Host, port, and uri. 
parse_uri('http://picasaweb.google.com/data/'
          'feed/api/user/userID/albumid/albumID'
          ).modify_request(photo_post)

In fact, the above code could make up the body of the post_photo function described in the first code snippet.

I created an open source project for this and other small projects called sippycode (a play on sippy cup). This is a place where code can grow up.

In Praise of screen

I've used screen for a few years now, but I only recently learned about one of its highly helpful features. As I was using my XO laptop in text only mode (ctrl-alt-fn-2), I was using screen to simulate multiple terminals, and I needed to copy and paste text between them. In the past, I've usually used screen when ssh-ing into a machine, and putty (my ssh client of choice) provided copy and paste, so I had never needed screen's system.

It turns out, screen's built-in, cross-window copy-paste system is a breeze to use. Press ctrl-a [ to enter copy mode, press enter to mark the start point and enter again to mark the end point. You have now copied the text. Switch to the desired window, and paste in the text using ctrl-a ].

This feature is especially handy in the XO laptop, where I've never been able to figure out how to copy and paste in the Terminal Activity.

For me, screen's most useful feature has been the ability to detach and reattach to a session which continues to run on the server. If I lose my ssh connection, all of my processes continue to run, and I can reattach to my screen session as if nothing ever happened.

Screen can be difficult to understand if you've never seen it in action, so I recommend watching this video. You can also learn more in this tutorial.

XO Give One Get One - Round Two

As I was looking for some information on running the XO laptop in text mode, I stumbled across this page in the OLPC wiki:

One Laptop per Child is launching its second 'Give One, Get One' (G1,G1) program starting in November, 2008, delivering its XO Laptop globally via Amazon.com. Although the first iteration of the 'G1G1' program was extremely successful and sold more than 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated. Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.

The laptop's operating system will be Linux-based (it will not dual-boot Windows and Linux, contrary to some reports).

If you've been thinking about getting one of these little green machines, it looks like the window will open once again. I wrote about the program last year. (Here is a list of all posts I've made on the XO Laptop.)

As for running in text mode, I've settled for using the terminal by pressing ctrl-fn-alt-1. To switch back to the normal view. press ctrl-fn-alt-3. For some reason, I can only start screen as root.

The Ascention of JavaScript

I added a couple of new things to my little JavaScript library (q12). It turns out there was a flaw in the library when making HTTP requests which included custom HTTP headers in Firefox3 (and maybe others). If you ever run into (NS_ERROR_FAILURE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.setRequestHeader], try opening the HTTP request first (as I recently learned). I've always said that writing this library was for education more than any anticipated serious use.

I also added a function for ARC4 encryption, which doesn't provide strong security, but it is still used in some places.

This has been quite a big month for JavaScript. In just a couple of weeks V8, Tracemonkey, and SquirrelFish Extreme have leapforgged one another and improved the state of JavaScript execution speed. It's gotten me thinking.

The more I use JavaScript, the more I like it. The language itself is extremely simple, I would argue even simpler than C - it's the APIs in browsers which are sometimes complex and inconsistent ;-) With all of these optimizations, JavaScript is looking better and better as a language in which to implement a new dynamic language.

Between the Just In Time compiler (JIT) and the polymorphic inline cache, some state of the art tools are coming to bear on one of the most widely available programming languages today. JavaScript is making strides to overcome a very difficult problem: maintaining complete runtime flexibility while providing speedy execution. There are significant investments being made in JavaScript as a language, and it seems that some of these open source components should be reusable. I'm not sure how much of these libraries would stand alone, but it would be a very interesting experiment to see if a new language could be implemented in JavaScript.

A Revived Project

q12 is back!

I'm slowly starting back up again on my note taking wiki application. I created my own version of TiddlyWiki several months ago, but then started working on other projects. I'm planning to rewrite my note taking Ajax application to run on Google App Engine, and as I was getting started I realized that there were a few things missing from the Ajax library that I had written as part of this project.

I had created my own simple unit test framework in JavaScript, and I finally got around to uploading the unit tests for the library to the open source project. I've also been learning about manipulating browser cookies from within JavaScript. Aside: Cookie's in JavaScript are weird! When you say document.cookie = something, reading document.cookie doesn't give you the same thing back (the expiration, domain, and path information are squirreled away somewhere else).

I've also added a minified version of the q12 library, it weighs in at a mere 10k. Download the library today!

Dirt Simple CMS

I recently created an App Engine app to run www.jeffscudder.com. At the moment the code is extremely simple, and I get so few visitors to that web page that I doubt I will need anything complicated.

When I write blog posts and web pages, I have always preferred to just edit the HTML, and I have always wanted a simple content management system that just let me edit the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, ect. in the browser. Blogger comes awfully close to the perfect tool in my opinion, but it is geared towards displaying a series of posts. I wanted a landing page with links to all of the other content I put out there in the blagoweb. And I wanted to be able to host the simple web app's that I write (like the recently mentioned password generator).

With those design goals in mind, I set out to create my super simple content management system. It runs on App Engine, and the admin (me) is able to sign in to a special secret /content_manager page which lets me assign a specific blob of text to the desired URL under my domain. I can also set some basic metadata, like the content type (so that your browser knows how the content should be rendered) and cache control information, since HTTP caching is excellent and saves puppies from drowning in lakes (ok seriously it will alleviate congestion and unnecessary traffic when you want to give the same content to thousands or millions of people).

Editing pages through the /content_manager looks like this:




I've also decided to open source the code and I called the project scud-cms. Since App Engine is free for you to sign up, you can just upload this code and start setting your own content from right there in the browser.

(P.S. The idea for this simple content manager is very similar to one of my earlier projects: Scorpion Server, with which an authorized user could set the content at just about any URL they wanted.)