thoughts to blog

I know I’ve said that I’d never watch a vidcast / podcast…

but zefrank is too damn hard to pass up. humor. politics. awesome fan-base.

monday’s show was great. +subscribed

the show with zefrank

Last night, I went to see Little Miss Sunshine with Amy.

Good movie, not a great movie.

Here’s my short recap and review:

As expected, Steve Carell was hilarious. The other characters brought in strong personalities that mixed well to create a dysfunctional family. The entire movie was focused around a family on the virge of collapsing and taking a trip that will show them the true meaning of family. Kinda corny, I know, but there were plenty of humorous scenes as well as very intense scenes. A tear almost left my eye…

My final take: rent the movie. It’ll be worth a few good laughs.

Did I fail to mention that Mary Lynn Rajskub was in it? I’m still sour.

Ohh and there were two trailers that I found to be quite interesting, look out for these movies: The OH in Ohio (has a rockstar cast) and The Science of Sleep

Quite the adventure… walking down Hennepin up to Namaste Cafe with Amy for a bite to eat before catching Little Miss Sunshine (review coming shortly)…

First off: it’s a house converted to a cafe. Interesting, yet I noticed the next three houses followed the same concept.

Second: it’s Napalese food, which I’ve never had.

But I have to say, I was impressed by the service AND the food. It had a very Indian feel to it, very good curry… excellent potato salad… and a delicious mix of green beans, potatoes, and tomatoes.

Though I did sample the Tofu that Amy ordered, Tofu is not my thing.

Here’s a map of where it’s at, I definitely recommend it for anyone with a taste for Tibetan food and a cozy atmosphere.

Looks like Rob Zombie is going to take a stab at Halloween… not a prequel… not a sequel… more like, an interpretation.

I can’t wait…

But check THIS shit out, it’s a poster my brother made for the movie:

The coolest part is, is that it’s a finalist in the competition… and he needs your votes.

Yes, I know it’s a MySpace page, but it’s official and all you have to do is comment on the picture.

Make my brother famous!

GO VOTE

So last week I found one of these scurrying across the flow while watching ROME Season 1 on DVD (A MUST have).

I introduce, the House Centipede (Scutiger coleoptrata)

Imagine this sucker, an two to three inches in length… with the potential to bite (not pierce skin, but leaves an itchy sensation).

It was definitely not the most fun to catch… as it was super fast.

(Picture Credit: J.K. Barnes)

Looks like EVERYONE wants in on the Web 2.0 style…

This is funny… spam at a Web 2.0 level.

So a few friends showed up this weekend… it was great to see everyone! Annie, Kim, Tom, Leonard, and Jen! Went out a few nights, lost some sleep, ate some good food, and drank some beer.

Pretty busy weekend. Now I have to catch up on some sleep and get some shit done.

Jake’s weekly todo list:

• Pay bills


• Don’t pay bills


• Get a date, plan a makeout session… any takers?


• Catch up on sleep


• Eat


• Prepare for the .Net User Group


• Play kickball


• Read


• Play some Texas Hold’em on XBL


• Finish ROME Season 1


• Work on wheresmycomedian.com

That’s about it.

So we all know that I’m a huge fan of Guitar Hero… and have been waiting for the sequel.

Here’s a tastey tidbit, Guns N’ Roses - Sweet Child of Mine

I’ve been gone since Friday morning… just got back from Ohio, visiting the lovely Jaclyn.

So thats why I have been missing, for those of you who were concerned.

It was a blast… I definitely needed to see her and I had a really good time.

Here’s a breakdown of what happened:

• Friday - she made me dinner (our favorite, chicken lips) and we went out with some of her friends…


• Saturday - saw some of the OSU campus, hit up some darts and beer / cheese / bread, got a stomach ache, at at the Cheesecake factory…


• Sunday - ALL DAY at Cedar Point… FUN! It’s a HUGE rollercoaster park with some of the worlds largest and fastest coasters… We sat in the front on all of these rides, makes the rides 10x better… Top Thrill Dragster, Millenium Force, Mantis, Raptor, and Iron Dragon. Weird thing is, we only rode those once… and that was all we did the whole day. Lines were pretty fast according to Cedar Point experts.


• Monday - Had some good ol’ Bob Evans breakfast (it’s an Ohio thing)… flex home and slept.

It was really good seeing her, that’s for damn sure… and to get away from the stress!

Hopefully I’ll hear some good news this week… stay tuned.

Well… its official. Farhan and I have been exchanging emails and I will be presenting at the Minneapolis .Net User Group…

Here are the details:

9/7/2006. 5PM - 7PM

Topic: Windows Presentation Foundation – Declare Your Next User Interface

Presenter: Jacob Good

Abstract:

The next generation of UI development is here… Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF for short, is Microsoft’s newest User Interface platform… designed from the ground up to introduce declarative syntax, graphics card powered, next generation experiences for users. This talk will walk through an introduction to WPF, examples of how you can take advantage of it RIGHT NOW in your applications, and where to get more information. There are plenty of tools and resources out there… and with the release of .Net 3.0 (includes WPF) right around the corner, you’re better off being prepared.
About Speaker

About the speaker:

Jacob Good is a Senior Consultant with Inetium and has been consulting / developing software in the Twin Cities for nearly 3 years. His development experience has been primarily focused on smart client development and mobile development. He dabbles in all kinds of technologies from Ruby on Rails to bioinformatics packages in Perl and of course .Net.

MAP TO LOCATION

I’m excited because I actually get to be a main speaker at the group… no more being the “if people want to stick around and listen to you” kind of presenter…

I’m famous bitch.

includes three things:

beer

+

Ruby on Rails

+

Quick Design Documents like this:

(Note: I actually gave this to Mike, cause he’s designing this shiznit… It’s how I roll)

Go here… watch video. (or watch below)

Laugh your ass off…

I love del.icio.us a lot… it let’s me bookmark my internet findings (currently over 800).

I love how you can subscribe to practically EVERY page at del.icio.us.

I used to think subscribing to everyone’s page via RSS would be fun… but quickly I had a folder filled with 4 or 5 feeds, different feeds.

Until now.

whoisjake’s network… I quickly added my favorite users and BAM, instant aggregated page of THEIR posts to which I can subscribe to…

Ohh… by the way, if you want to see MY links…

I have been working on wheresmycomedian.com quite a bit today and I’m so incredibly excited (possibly too excited) about through associations in Ruby on Rails. It’s sad that I’m regurgitating an example from a really good article explaining the differences between the two many-to-many association models… but I’m going to put it into my own context for wheresmycomedian.com.

So here’s a simple scenario: I have a list of comedians that do shows at venues… how can I get meaningful associations between the objects?

Traditionally you would create a many-to-many relationship using habtm, which in turn makes a calling JOIN statement to find the relevant association.

You could do something like this:

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class Comedian < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_taggable
  validates_presence_of :name, :description
  has_and_belongs_to_many :shows
end

class Show < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_presence_of :date
  validates_presence_of :name
  validates_presence_of :venue
  belongs_to :venue
  has_and_belongs_to_many :comedians
end

The schema is simple, code is simple… but what about this… Sometimes you might have a show that has multiple comedians. Each comedian appears at specific times… and you want to be able to model that within the show. Maybe your users only want to see a particular comedian and only wants to know about the times they are appearing.

This causes a problem, as the join association is purely a SQL statement, not a meaningful association.

Enter in has_many, :through. The concept is simple, create an association model that holds the meaningful data (ex. time of appearance). Using some ruby syntax, we can still have our clean model code and associations…

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class Comedian < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_taggable
  validates_presence_of :name, :description
  has_many :appearances, :dependent => true
  has_many :shows, :through => :appearances
end

class Show < ActiveRecord::Base
  validates_presence_of :date
  validates_presence_of :name
  validates_presence_of :venue
  belongs_to :venue
  has_many :appearances, :dependent => true
  has_many :comedians, :through => :appearances
end

class Appearance < ActiveRecord::Base
  validate_presence_of :date
  belongs_to :comedian
  belongs_to :show
end

Excellent! Now we can have meaningful data… with the Appearance holding the date of the comedians appearance…

Once we get the :uniq patch, we’ll be able to specify more distinct associations… without specifying an ugly select statement in our :through clause. Another really sweet thing about has_many is that we can have polymorphic (heterogenous) associations… nice.

Watch out… two of my bright friends are starting a company.

And not just any company… but a company that… you know, I really don’t know what the heck they’re going to do…

but yeah… I visited them today.

Watch out for them. It’ll be HOT to death! (stealing Mike’s line)

My Cubicle

Yeah… I write code. I write code a lot. I write code almost all day at work ( hehe… almost ) … and then I come home and write some more.

It’s sad.

So I write so much code, where are the fruits of the labor?

Good question.

I’ve shown you a few examples before (Color Chart, Topological Sort, and of course RIDE-ME) but the REAL fun hasn’t been completed yet…

Here’s a glimpse at what’s in the works, where it’s at, and what I’m planning on.

FlickStuff - A smartphone (WM 5.0) application that allows you to browse and capture/upload images directly to Flickr. It’s about 45% Done.

CompactFlickr - A Compact Framework 2.0 library to wrap Flickr into a nice .net API. The other .Net APIs out there can’t / don’t work on the Compact Framework. 30% done.

EvolveStuff - A complete genetic algorithms framework / application for .Net. Including a sample Checkers implementation. It’s 79% done so far. Just have to write the Checkers implementation and tweak the GA framework.

www.developstuff.com - a small project site to host binary drops, code browser, and bug tracker for all my projects. Maybe I should use activeCollab or trac… haven’t started it yet

www.wheresmycomedian.com - a small little Web 2.0 idea that I came up with to track and find tickets of your favorite comedians… Right now it’s very tough to find shows or figure out what’s going on in your town when it comes to comedy… it’s envisioned… just need design and code

Other things that I want to get done eventually

www.goodwithurls.com - I don’t know yet.. I want to go into the business of URL consulting. How sweet would that be? I think I’d be damn good at it… I get calls all the time to come up with creative URLs. Such as this and others on this site. The ONLY problem I see with this is that businesses usually want their business name in the URL… for search indexing and branding purposes… so it might not be the right market.

www.notyourfather.com - A PSA site when you just want to tell someone… that “Im not your father.”

www.whoisjake.com - my personal site to eventually contain my DVD collection and resume. lame.

With this many projects… it’s no wonder that I don’t have a girlfriend and that I write this much damn code. Though I do get out ;) and booze it up… eat good food and play kickball. So :P

Any other project ideas for me? :)

SO this weekend was pretty boring…

• Thursday - hit up some darts, pool, and light drinking with some ladies… Rachel, Jessica, and Chrissy


• Friday - Worked, left work early due to frustration, picked up my huge expense check, picked up some new networking equipment and some movies… chilled at home.


• Saturday - Slept in… went to Justin and Val’s super cool pool party at their magnificant house… played some Guitar Hero afterwards.


• Sunday - Sleep… Eat… Talladega Nights (fucking hilarious)…

Then came Sunday night, where we’re at now…

Short Story:

I was on my way to my favorite Sunday meal and I saw this weird looking car. I’m not impressed with your car old man, even if it does cost nearly a half a million dollars (Porche Carrera GT). I forgot that I’m in Eden Prairie… I’ve seen Lotus, Bently, Ferrari, Lambo, you name it… but never a Porche Carrera GT.

So I pulled up next to Chipotle and saw a new restraunt in the strip… a new joint with a possible Tier 1 fast food aura to it.

It was called… Kabobi. mmm grilled food. I went in.

Nice place. Very snazzy for a strip mall fast food joint… I would put it at the same quality as Punch, above Panera, and Chipotle.

The prices though… phew.

Here’s my meal: A chicken shish-kabob and a steak shish-kabob… lettuce with feta… some pita bread and a lemonade.

Total bill: $17.21

Kinda pricey, but when you do kabobs, it’s never cheap… even when you do it on your own.

Now to watch my favorite HBO show… Entourage and work on some secret stuff. Mwuahaha

We’re happy to announce the public release of Project RIDE-ME 1.0!!! (Setup MSI)

Some HOT new features including:

• Add-in support


• Console built into the IDE


• Configurable tab colors for MVC and Tests


• Code Folding


• Server Error notification (View errors actually open the view file and go to the LOC)


• Model / Member drop downs for easy movability in code. (Think Visual Studio above your code file)


• Fixed Project Stats view


• Of course, big bug fixes…

I haven’t put as much time into this project as I would like… but big MIKE, EL, and JEFF have put in quite a bit of extra time to get this out the door. :: claps::

If you guys want to start with Rails on Windows… here’s the BEST tool you can use… with the BEST name (given by me).

Hit up the trac and submit some bugs and features!

DOWNLOAD NOW

ohh and btw, DIGG US

I totally did a video similar to this when I was a kid… anyone remember NKOTB? Yeah. Hopefuly that video never sees the light of day…

The Crazy Frog Brothers…

Let’s start the day off with some good quotes:

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.” - Robert Green Ingersoll

“Men never commit evil so fully and joyfuly as when they do it for religious convictions.” - Blaise Pascal

“You keep believing, I’ll keep evolving.” - Seen on a Bumper Sticker

“I still say a church steeple with a lightning rod on top shows a lack of confidence.” - Doug McLeod

quotes pulled from this site

I talked the other day about an idea I had for a question/answer site… some people emailed me about the idea and further discuss was had. It was fun.

One of the things brought up was Yahoo! Answers. It’s a neat site.

What do they have that Good Call (TM) doesn’t?

Stephen Hawkings asking “How can the human race survive the next 100 years?”

ohh… yeah, it is the REAL Dr. Stephen Hawkings.

And it gathered soo much feedback that he took it upon himself to offer an explination:

His answer: We have to colonize space.

Now that’s a novel idea…

I can’t wait to get home… somehow figure out how to hook up my 360… and download this.