JedFonner.com

Talking with my friend Brian, I was reminded of a story from my first year in computer science class at the University of Pennsylvania. From that story, we realized we’d known of the best name for a programming blog ever, we just hadn’t realized it.

Back in our CS 100 days, we had many late nights spent in the lab. And usually, when we were in the lab, we spent a lot of time banging our heads against the wall trying to figure out tricky problems. Of course by “tricky” I mean relatively obvious things that should have been taught to us if our professor actually ever taught us anything. And this was before professors were irrelevant because you could just go online and Google your question and find the answer.

But there was one bastion of hope and help – the TAs. We could IM the TAs while in the lab and ask them questions. One night, while struggling with a problem which I have long since forgotten, Brian and I threw ourselves at the mercy of the TA on duty. We posed our question to him, and this was his first response:

I swear Brian and I stared at that one line for what seemed like an eternity. Eventually we humbled ourselves and asked him what the hell he was talking about. He calmly explained that OOP is “object oriented programming” and “grok” means to understand deeply (don’t believe me? Look it up).

From there the conversation got easier. But now I can’t help thinking that one line would be the best name for a programming blog ever.

So once I have enough time on my hands, I fully intend to start the How much OOP do you grok? website. It will be very web2.0ish, or maybe web3.0ish depending on how long it takes me to set it up. And in case you were thinking of snagging it away from me, you’re too late, I’ve already registered www.howmuchoopdoyougrok.com.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about The World Without Us, a book by Alan Weisman which explored a hypothetical world where all humans suddenly disappeared. It described what would happen to everything we’ve built and the environment which we’ve come close to wrecking.

Well now National Geographic has created a new TV show called Aftermath: Population Zero that will bring to life in vivid detail many of the scenarios described by the book. As the website says, “Aftermath: Population Zero investigates what would happen if every single person on Earth simply disappeared. This is the astounding story of a world we will never see.”

Here’s the trailer from the National Geographic website:

I can’t tell if the new TV series is conected with The World Without Us or not, but regardless I expect it will be incredibly interesting (especially in HD)!

Nat Geo recently aired a similar show called Six Degrees. It shows how increases in the global temperature of just a few degrees will utterly change the world we know it. Why they decided to debut it on Valentine’s Day is beyond me. Nothing’s quite as romantic as a show about global devastation, right? But hopefully they’ll re-air it soon.

(Thanks to Brian who brought this to my attention)

Keith Olberman from MSNBC goes on an awesome rant against the FISA bill and President Bush. It’s a must-watch regardless of how you feel about Bush and the current administration.

If you can’t watch the whole thing, jump to point 7:40 and listen from there, as that pretty much sums it up.

This totally kicks ass, although it does make my little blog post on the topic seem pathetically tame in comparison.

I’m finally getting around to making some upgrades to this site. But I didn’t want to do it in a haphazard fashion. I wanted to use some of the common development practices I use every day at work. The first and most important, of course, it to put everything into version control. I chose Subversion because it’s what I’m most familiar with.

Setting up Subversion on Dreamhost is a piece of cake. Importing the current code for this site was also very straightforward.

The only big problem I had was finding a good Subversion client for my iMac. At work I use TortoiseSVN by the good people at Tigris. TortoiseSVN has its pros and cons but it’s not an option for me here because it’s Windows only.

Tigris has a SVN client for Mac which called SCPlugin which looks like a clone of TortoiseSVN. It is supposed to plug into the Finder and provide much of the same functionality as TortoiseSVN. If you Google it, you’ll find as many people praising it as lambasting it. I gave it a shot but I found SCPlugin to be very flaky (it was constantly having problems with my repositories) and I wasn’t thrilled about having it integrated into my Finder.

So I went looking for other SVN clients for the Mac. Here’s what I found:

• MacSVN: interesting, but it hasn’t been updated in over a year
• Syncro SVN Client: looks great, has some powerful features, but it costs $60 and I’m used to free developer tools
• svnX: has potential, but hasn’t been updated for Leopard and requires you to install the subversion libraries

In the end, I was only able to find two usable clients.

The first was RapidSVN. Installing is a super simple process and I was up and running in under a minute. It allows you to do all the normal SVN actions. It does show the spinning beachball a little more than I like, but overall it’s a very capable client.

As nice as RapidSVN is, I’ve decided to go with a tool that I also use at work when I’m in the Windows world: Subclipse. It’s a plugin for Eclipse and isn’t OS specific. It works at home just like it does at work. Since I needed an IDE for editing code anyway, this was a perfect fit.

If you are familiar with Eclipse and are planning to use it as your IDE, I highly recommend Subclipse. Otherwise, go with RapidSVN unless you need the powerful features of Syncro SVN.

DC is in the process of switching from its crazy zone system to a more common metered system that every other city uses. Of course, the city’s cab drivers haven’t been too happy about that or the new metered fare structure. Even though all analysis of new fares has indicated that cabbies will make about the same amount (the main purpose for the switch has been to reduce confusion and cheating), the cab drivers chose to institute a series of strikes. The first two strikes were fairly uneventful, unless you were trying to hail a cab of course. Up until now, many people were sympathetic to the position of the cab drivers in this matter. But after today’s strike, I can’t imagine anyone being on the side of the taxi drivers anymore. I’d be very surprised if even the people who like the zone system would support the cab drivers now.

If you read the comments on the DCist post on today’s unannounced strike, you’ll see that the taxi drivers have changed their strategy. Instead of just staying off the roads, which frustrated people needing cabs but delighted everyone else who got to drive on traffic-free streets, today they’ve decided to become incredibly annoying nuisances.

Here are some examples of their obnoxious behavior:

• A huge line of taxis is driving very slowing around Freedom Plaza, in front of the Wilson Building, all honking their horns.
• This morning, about 100 taxis made their way SLOWLY down 16th past U street. They were even getting out of their cars to talk to one another. People had to wait for about 20 mins for the cabs to finally pass before any cars or buses could get by.
• Many cabs just stopped in the right lane of 16th Street. People had to walk for miles in the frigid wind because no buses could get through.
• So many cabs were driving slowly around the Ronald Reagan Building and laying on the horn that it’s affecting official city business, including making it impossible to hold teleconferences.

This is ridiculous in that it’s not just affecting people who ride cabs, but also people who take buses and drive.

I can’t understand how the cab drivers think that by making themselves a nuisance they will win anyone over to their side. If anything, this stunt has just enraged people even more. The whole point of a strike is to make people see how important you are to daily life. The point is not to show how annoying you can be. That’s just bad business.

I for one hope the MPD is racking in some nice money by ticketing the hell out of these crazy cabs.