Ignite Seattle 9

I went to Ignite Seattle last night, and even more than the Jonathan Coulton concert last week, about which I failed to blog, that placed was a "This Is What The Internet Looks Like" moment. I ran into fallenpegasus and a number of other people, most of whose names I cannot now recall because I did not write down.

Ran into one of my co-workers from the Unfunded Startup last year. He said that they took a break for Christmas, promising to call one another after the new year, and nobody did. So I guess the project is dead. That's too bad... it was kinda nifty. It's just dead now.

There were two interesting projects presented, one in the prototype stage, one in the "I'm looking for help" stage. The chording keyboard for unusual body configurations (meant to help people with various forms of palsy, by letting them keyboard with their working elbows/knees/toes) was fascinating and SF-worthy.

The reciprocating kite-powered generator idea was interesting. It featured a mechanical computer for operating a large kite, rising and diving in a high windstream, and on the rising it would brake some of the energy into a flywheel, which could then generate electrity as well as store some energy for the machine itself. It looked like it had a lot of moving parts that were potentially risky, but it was still a very cool idea, a high-maintenance solution. Having multiples of these flying in tandem seems like it would be problematic: you cannot guarantee the integrity of all of the machines at once, so one malfunction could cause the entanglement of a lot of lines. Better to make a few with very broad power-gathering surfaces; each failure would be individual, but would cut out a larger portion of your carrying capacity.

There were other, less geeky presentations. The City of Seattle sent its Director of Communications to give us "You paid for it, you might as well as use it," a quick speech about all of the information sites the city supports. One man gave a quick presentation on Living With (his wife's) Cancer, and another on landmine and cluster bomb issues in Vietnam. Krow gave a rant against NoSQL, a quick half-tongue-in-cheek about how "just throwing more raw computing power at it" is not the solution, but that's what NoSQL is selling.

Unfortunately, I left at the intermission. I was exhausted after the night before, and my allergies kicked in hard inside the King Cat theater. I really would have liked to stay. The crowd was hawt in that intimidatingly geeky way.

Lost in time, and lost in space... and in meaning. ("Me-e-e-e-eaning.")

Ugh. I've totally lost track of time. I forgot today is Friday. Usually, I work from home on Friday. Instead, I drove into the office, as if it were an on-site day.

I am a schlub

I think it can be said without contradiction that I am a schlub.

In four weeks I've cranked out two new websites for my new employer. They're essentially microsites feeding off the infrastructure of the mainsite-- the deep content manager for movies was already present and loaded-- but I've demonstrated both strong design sensibilities and a powerful agility in moving toward our major goals. I've created new websites, learned new technologies (AWS, Haystack, Node.js), and even broken out the ol' Wacom Pad of Pleasure.

Which only proves one thing: the months that I was laid off? I was either a neurotic mess who couldn't think straight, or a lazy SOB who didn't want to create anything but cover letters.

Now, how do I change that?

Vi’s “paren bounce” feature for Emacs

I need to make clear that I did not invent the code below. I’m not sure who did, but the topic of making vi’s “paren bounce” feature work in Emacs came up in a conversation I had the other day, and I’m posting the chunk of code that’s lived in my .emacs file since, oh heck, must have been back in my days at F5 Networks.  This code creates a new function, “paren-bounce”, and binds it to the key sequence “CTRL-%” (I know, that’s probably not a real control code, but Emacs Doesn’t Care).

(defun paren-bounce ()
  (interactive)
  (let ((prev-char (char-to-string (preceding-char)))
	(next-char (char-to-string (following-char))))
    (cond ((string-match "[[{(<]" next-char) (forward-sexp 1))
          ((string-match "[\]})>]" prev-char) (backward-sexp 1))
          (t (error "%s" "Not an expression boundary.")))))

(global-set-key [(control ?%)] 'paren-bounce)

Similar solutions can be found here and here. I suspect the latter is where I got mine from– there are minor differences, but his page hasn’t been updated since 2001, so that’s about right.

This entry was automatically cross-posted from Elf's technical journal, ElfSternberg.com