mmmm... keg cans

December 01, 2004 by Eric Richardson

We had a meeting at my apartment on Monday, and one of the attendees brought with her some coffee and a box of Mousse Pocky sticks. I now have a new appreciation for the culture around me and a desire to go explore more of its tasty treats.

This coffee she brought wasn't normal coffee: it was cold. Now iced coffee isn't that weird of a concept; while I haven't much drank intentionally cold coffee, I do see it on menus at coffee shops. It's my understanding that usually iced coffee is sweetened, but I drink my coffee black so I was perfectly happy that this was black. In fact the name was "Drink It Black" (third item on the page). Apparently canned coffee is a pretty common thing in Asia. I had never heard of it.

Having now corrected that lack of knowledge, I made another radical discovery. Japan has black cold coffee in a keg can. Look at this. Amazing. Given the college lifestyle, what better to accompany an all-nighter than a six-pack of coffee keg cans? It's like you're halfway to the weekend, but you're staying awake.

My new mission is to explore Little Tokyo until I find such a wonder. I don't know, though, if it'll happen before my all-nighter that's set to be held tonight.

1 down, 2 to go

November 29, 2004 by Eric Richardson

It'll be a little quiet here over the next few days. This is the last week of classes, and I've got a whole lot of work due over the last few days. Today through Wednesday night, all I get to think about is paper writing.

Today I wrote a 6 pager. Thursday I've got two due: one's 15 pages and one's only 5. After that I've got one more due a little over a week later, during finals.

It felt good to actually accomplish something writing today. I've had a pretty good brain-lock over the past few weeks that's kept me from getting a whole lot done. So now I've written one paper, and it went ok. Maybe that'll be the jumpstart I need.

eThreads: the need for speed

November 26, 2004 by Eric Richardson

I just put a new eThreads snapshot in place, so hopefully things will feel a little faster here. I'm valuing speed over a small memory footprint, so I added a cache in memory. I also rewrote the way internal links work (links within the blog... all URLs stay the same) to do some stuff I couldn't do without good speed.

Most of what I did wouldn't make any sense to anyone but me, but here's the kind of cool stuff the new link structure does: the template being linked to determines what the link looks like. A simple example: From the main page I link post titles to the permanent URL for the post. In the template code on the main page there's this little snippet:

{link "/blog"}{qopt "id"}{$p.id/}{/qopt}{/link}

That tells the link code that we're linking to the /blog template. It then loads up that template and makes sure "id" is an option /blog's looking for. At that point it knows it can link to /blog?id=$id. But it also looks at the /blog template's keys, and sees that it has id defined as a key. That means that it can link a cleaner URL as /blog/$id. That's the one it uses.

Now I just have to keep an eye on memory usage and figure out how best to expire things out of the cache. Fun fun fun.

ice skating downtown

November 26, 2004 by Eric Richardson

Yesterday I walked around my neighborhood a little bit and ended up spending some time in Pershing Square watching the people at the ice rink. For the most part it was kids who inched their way around the walls to start. Of course there was also the girl who brought her own skates and had the t-shirt that said "If figure skating was easy they'd call it hockey," so I guess some people do skate here in socal. I hadn't skated in a really long time, but I got it in my head that it would be fun to do, so I talked Kathy into going back with me later in the afternoon.

The rink's little: I think 50x30 or so. But it is outside at Pershing Square, and that's a juxtaposition that still seems pretty odd. It took me a little while to get a basic fell back for not making a fool of myself, but I think I ended up ok in that regard. Kathy, despite growing up in Michigan, has never ice skated much, but she showed definite improvement from the start of the session to the finish.

At $6/hour (and $2 to rent skates) the ice time isn't all that cheap, but it's one of those things that's just kinda cool to do. This is California, after all: you're not going to find a whole lot of ice alternatives.

everybody's talking about firefox

November 25, 2004 by Eric Richardson

There's a good article on Mozilla in today's LA Times. It's been amazing to see the positive press that has accompanied the release of Firefox 1.0. This is totally representative of the stuff you've been seeing all over the place:

Firefox's advantages over Explorer make its rapid acceptance unsurprising. Among other virtues, it's faster, more resistant to viruses and spyware and full of useful features that Microsoft, complacent in its near-monopoly, has never provided for Explorer.

You couldn't buy the good press they've been getting, and it's absolutely deserved.