Sometimes when I’m bored, I do vanity searches for jUploadr. Usually, I find people saying the same thing: “It’s great”, “It’s easy to use”, “It’s better than the actual Flickr uploadr”, etc. However the last time I searched, I found this, which is a huge pan.

Funny thing is, the guy harps on it being written in Java like he’s some uber geek, and then goes on to complain that it doesn’t support adding to sets or tagging photos. He also complains that jUploadr “expects me to go into preferences and set them (tags)”, then he criticizes it for not being ‘intuitive’.

You know, if you’re going to write a snarky post like that, you might want to actually be *right* first. Over 8000 people have downloaded jUploadr, and everyone else seems to be able to edit tags on photos. How are they accomplishing this complex act? By double-clicking the photo. Is it not intuitive to double-click things? Not to Mr. Techie. Did he just drop his photos into jUploadr, say “this sucks” and close it? It’s not like you have to do some strange incantation to access these supposedly missing features, after all they are clearly shown on jUploadr’s screenshots page. What’s irritating is he was having problems, but rather than sending me an email or posting on jUploadr’s blog, or doing anything productive, he just writes a sarcastic i-am-so-smart blog post and is done with the whole thing.

Look, you can complain that jUploadr isn’t exactly like the Flickr uploadr, but when I wrote it, I hadn’t even seen the their uploader, and now that I have, I’m glad I didn’t replicate its design, which isn’t nearly as powerful as jUploadr’s. Even the Flickr admins steer people toward jUploadr when the default uploader fails them. Do you think they’d do this if jUploadr wasn’t intuitive?

So, my techie self, in the future before writing a snippy little post about how some software fails you, perhaps you should actually check some documentation, or send out an email or *something*, because it’s clear that even my technophobic mom is well ahead of you in technical ability. At least she can double-click.

And *that’s* how to write a snarky post.

Summer is in full swing, and we’re growing tomatoes. This picture was taken about two weeks ago, and since then the tomatoes have grown in size, but they’re still frustratingly green. Why won’t you guys turn red? The anticipation of having home grown tomatoes as opposed to those horrible store-bought things is driving me wild. That and whenever you touch a tomato plant, your hands smell wonderful until you wash them.

Hurry up little guys!

….and this is why you shouldn’t do anything remotely photogenic when there are 50 people around you with digital cameras.

On Sunday, I went for a ride with Paul. We did the typical 92->35 (skyline) -> 84 -> pompano beach route, with a stop at Alice’s for lunch. At the beach, Paul asked if I wanted to switch bikes. I was hesitant at first, after all, he does have a $14,000 motorcycle (MV Agusta Brutale), but he persisted and I accepted. I told him that I’d take it easy on the bike, and he said he’d do the same on my VFR.

As I was waiting to turn out of pompano beach, I was immediately taken at how light the bike was beneath me. The VFR is a porker, and I’ve gotten used to the heft. I was also surprised at how nice my arms looked in the rear view mirrors –that’s all I could see out of them. I think the mirrors on the Brutale are even worse than the mirrors on the 999, so congratulations MV on taking the ’shittiest mirror placement’ award. It’s nice to know Ducati has such serious competition.

Pulling out onto Highway 1, I noticed something else –you can’t see anything in front of you. No instruments, no lights, no fairing nothing. This took some adjustment for me, as I’m used to at least seeing some gages in front of me, but the Brutale makes you think you’re in wonder woman’s invisible plane. Highway 84 came up much too quickly and as I eased in to the right hand 90 degree turn, I hit a bump. Normally my VFR would absorb the bump and I’d go on, but the Brutale was set up for Paul, who is a fit 30 or so pounds heavier than I am (I’m still 6′1″ and 160). The Brutale bounced me clear out of the seat, immediately, my confidence was shot. In an ideal world, we would have first set the preload on our shocks, but this was a spur of the moment thing — a crazy idea thought up by a madman– and madmen don’t touch preload settings. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to be going at 10/10ths pace and risk turning Paul’s $14k toy into so much pretty wreckage.

Soon enough, the dreaded minivans of doom appeared in front of us, which was actually fortunate because we were still in the sweeper and passing zone section of 84. Time to test out the power –I blipped the bike, snicked down a cog (the shifter was nearly as nice as the viffer’s), and totally blew the shift. The MV’s engine revs much faster than the VFR’s and I overshot my mark. No matter, I was in a lower gear and accumulating massive speed as I blasted around the minivan. Paul was right behind me or at least as far as I can tell, the mirrors were quite buzzy, so all I could see was a blur of lights and red.

We were rapidly approaching the twisty bits, and route 84 with its mountain hugging switchbacks and generally impeccable road surface ranks among my favorite roads in the area. I’m no fan of in-line fours, but the MV had enough power at every RPM range that it didn’t feel like I had to work too hard to keep the engine on the boil. I also got better and better at blipping the thing –it’s really great to only have to make slight movements with the wrist and –ka-snick– I’m in a lower gear. I also got to slide around the bike a little bit, which on the MV is pretty tough. This is a bike that you sit in, not on, and I’ve never been comfortable with that. However, it forgave my amateurish movements (for the most part, I missed a line here and there) and the throttle seemed hard wired into my brain. The throttle was dead accurate, and allowed you to scrub speed with absolute precision. You could tell some Italian engineer worked many late nights on the fuel injection.

We caught up with traffic on the best part of the road (that always happens!) and 84 was over. The biggest problem with the MV is that it attracts attention. As we passed Alice’s Paul tells me that people were pointing. Heading back on Skyline (not my favorite road, BTW) the MV performed admirably, but I was getting cold. It was extremely windy up there and that was killing my confidence yet I still managed to make a couple good turns and hit some admirable lines. I wouldn’t call the MV confidence inspiring, but instead consider it an effective tool. The freeway ride home was less fun. My right knee started cramping up and I felt like a spinnaker with no fairing to protect me from the winds of freeway riding. I lost Paul for a bit, but when I merged back on to 101, the familiar red and bright blur was back in my mirrors. I downshifted from 6th to 2nd on the off ramp and was greeted with some inspiring machine music. I heard the familiar gear whine of the VFR behind me as well as the overly throaty exhaust, and knew Paul was still there. Fun times indeed.

Oh, and the D&D reference? That’s what Paul put on the license plate holder (click the picture for more)

Well, according to Radar it’s not; you see, all of its “glory” is gone. Indianapolis, on the other hand is chock full of glory. Fundamentalists are strange people indeed.

I’m also not sure how a world class city doesn’t have traffic. World-Class and heavy traffic seem pretty synonymous to me. What’s really tragic is he lives within 50 miles of Chicago, but he favors Indianapolis. That’s a shame, because Chicago is a fantastic city with global reach. Indianapolis is slightly safer than Chicago, but it’s nowhere near as safe as old no-more-glory.

He must think “Glory” means assaults.

I think I cracked his code.

Nikki introduced me to Burma Superstar a couple of months ago. I’ve never had Burmese food, but it’s like a combination of Indian and Thai –and it’s delicious. One of my favorite things to get is the beer cooler, which is a refreshing summer drink. I did a little experimentation, and came up with a reasonable approximation, which I will share with the world. So, without further delay, here it is, the recipe for Burmese Beer coolers.

For each 12 oz of beer, add:
2 tbsp. Sugar
The juice from one lemon (pulp optional)
1/4 tsp freshly grated ginger

The cooler is very sensitive to which beer you use. You’ll want something that has no chance of being ’skunky’ –a skunky beer makes the cooler taste like vomit. I tried Pilsner Urquell, but that caused the vomit smell –Heineken and rolling rock are also out. I went with Corona Extra and that seemed to work just fine, but you should be able to get away with any non-smelly light tasting pilsner. First add the sugar, which not only sweetens the drink, but removes a lot of the bubbles. Then grate the ginger with a micro-plane grater (anything else will leave the ginger very stringy). Add the ginger, then the lemon juice (you may filter the juice if you don’t like pulp. The drink at Superstar has a little pulp in it). Stir until all ingredients are mixed and the bubbles go down. Refrigerate and serve. This drink is best served very cold.

I don’t usually blog about work, but when the New York Times does a piece about your company how can you not be a little proud? What’s more, they give a lot of press to our strategy, which seems to be gaining industry momentum. Exciting stuff, to be sure.

Go Dchoc!

It’s finally out, after more than a year of development, my first Open Source project finally hit 1.0. It has all of the features that I originally wrote down on the wish list in December of 2004 and more. I’m also very happy with the user response –it’s widely considered to be better than the official Flickr uploader. So, on to the release.

Admittedly, not much has changed since 1.0RC1 with the exception of the inclusion of the new SWT libraries. Most of the time, new libs aren’t much of a big deal for end users, but in this case, the libraries decrease the scaling time of images drastically. Thumbnails now appear almost instantly even for the largest images –it’s a big improvement.

Have fun! Here’s hoping I won’t need a 1.0.1 release!

Go Get jUploadr

I got a comment a week or so ago on an old post that immediately rubbed me the wrong way. The post was talking about an open source version of Java and its many flaws. In the post, I concluded that it was an admirable project, but wasn’t mature enough to distribute widely. The commenter immediately went for my jugular –here it is:

So you would prefer no Java support at all for free software users? GCJ/GIJ currently aims to support popular apps such as eclipse, azureus, ooo2’s java components and that is the reason it is included in the distros, it is useful at it’s current state even if it does not happen to run every possible java app. You could always modify JUploadr to be runnable on gij so you don’t force anyone to change to a non-free version of java just to upload some pics to Flickr.

Last time I checked, there is a version of Java available for Linux, so you really have to be impressed by someone who starts a conversation with a strawman argument. I especially like the last sentence and how it simultaneously trivialized my application and demanded that I re-write significant portions of it. More impressive is the implication that I’m forcing Linux users to switch java versions. Excuse me? I know jUploadr is a nifty little app, but forcing people to switch?

If you read my post, I really didn’t lay into the free version of Java (GCJ/GIJ) when it would be easy to do so. GCJ acts like it’s Java 1.4, but it doesn’t implement a large part of the Java API. That’s like buying a Ford and then finding out that the engine is actually an engine-like shell with no internal parts. I ask you, if you bought a car like this, would you want to build the internals of the engine when there was a Ferrari sitting next to the Ford that you could just take?

I replied that GCJ was nice and all, but I really didn’t want to spend my development time re-implementing stuff that should already be there. The API is one of the reasons I use Java after all –it’s nice to have a bunch of well debugged code to do stuff that you don’t really want to program 500 times. I also said that if he wanted to help, he was more than welcome to. He wrote back –still not offering to help, by the way– and dropped this bomb:

My suggestion to work around this in JUploadr assumed you have desire to let your users have a good experience and make it possible for them in the first place to run the software at all. Few people are going to change to a Sun supported processor architecture/OS or change their values because of JUploadr. They’re simply not going to have running it as an option.

So now the problem is that I want my users to have a bad experience with bad software that doesn’t work well. His argument is really getting strained here since I actually disallowed GCJ/GIJ because I wanted to have my users (you know, the ones who were running my software) to have a good experience. I wanted them to do advanced features like being able to save their preferences, and have that oh-so-useful feature of uploading their pictures to Flickr. You know, the things they can’t do in GCJ. Furthermore, I really admire the two-facedness of his ‘argument’. I’m supposed to write my own preferences API, and it has to work in every architecture/OS/processor that GCJ ’supports’. That’s a task that’s most likely bigger than writing jUploadr in the first place –and the kind of task you’d expect the GCJ/GIJ people to tackle. Finally, I realize that no one is going to change their computer so they can run jUploadr, and it really doesn’t bother me –I’m doing this project out of the desire to have a great program so I can upload my pictures to Flickr. That a thousand or so people use it makes me feel very happy indeed, but I don’t feel that I have some sort of responsibility to support every arcane architecture out there. You know something? If you’re running QNX on a HP-UX processor, you’re not going to run jUploadr. Ever. Sorry.

I’ve been running Linux for ten years now, and have contributed to several open source projects and have to say that if this is the face of the new open source zealots, you can count me out. I’m shocked at the sense of entitlement given off by these posts. I’ve worked hard to write this software, and it rocks. People seem to really enjoy using it, it’s high quality and has an intuitive interface. But apparently, that’s not enough for some people, I have to meet their exact ideology as well. That’s just too bad because if I were to do so, I’m absolutely certain jUploadr would not be as good as it is.

Oh, one last thing. Mr. Open Source Zealot™ runs windows half the time.

My Finger

Originally uploaded by scohen.

Two nights ago, I made some spaghetti sauce. I used my 8″ chef’s knife to cut up celery, carrots, parsley, garlic, onions and tomatoes. Everything came together beautifully, topped off with wine, but as I opened the wine bottle, my right index finger got caught in the gears beneath the arm of the opener. The result is pictured.

Last night, I asked Nikki to take some pictures of the wound, and the results are really nifty. The new macro lens doe indeed take very close up pictures, as the main wound is only 5mm from one end to the other. The little bubbles you see in my fingerprints are droplets of Hydrogen Peroxide solution doing their disinfecting job. Very impressive.

Strangely enough, this doesn’t stop me from being able to play guitar, but it does stop me from doing just about everything else with this finger, including typing. Of course, at work, I have the datahand which causes no pain, but at home, my Natural just hurts me.