roguelazer's website

Hello dear readers. I just thought i'd give you a life update, since it's been nearly a year since my last post. In no particular order, some things that have happened since then:

• I've been dating a lovely young woman for the last eight or so months who actually gives me a reason to go home from work at the end of the day. Which is a refreshing change!
• I got some new musical instruments and computers and things (my custom shop '52 reissue tele is pretty much the most pleasant guitar I've ever played, even if it is ridiculously extravagant).
• I'm leaving my position at yelp this Friday and moving to uber. I'm bitter enough to be tired of the petty politics at the place I'm leaving, but optimistic enough to think that there won't be any at the place I'm going to. It's a... delicate balance.

I'm sure I'll come back and post tech things here again at some point but, well, there's my annual personal update. Cheers!

I wrote a fun sed script today:

sed -E -n -e ':t ; s/(.{21})(.*)/\\bf\{\1\}\n\2/ ; p ; s/\\bf\{(.*)\}\n.*/\1/ ; h ; :q { n ; G ; s/(.{21})(.*)\n\1/\2/ ; tp ; s/(.+)\n.*/\1/ ; bt} ; :p { P ; bq }'

Short, but effective. Can you figure out what it does?

(solution after the break)

One of my co-workers wrote up this gem on why PHP sucks. I don't agree with his points (having a "development server" isn't an important or even particularly useful feature of a framework, much less a language; prepared statements aren't the pinnacle of SQL), but he does do a good job of showing off some of PHP's more spectacular failings.

I'm naming all of my PHP functions __lambda_object now.

(yes; I do appreciate the irony of linking to his post from a formerly PHP site)

As of today, February 10, 2012, I am now officially debt-free. I decided to use my tax refund to pay off the rest of my student loans, which have been sucking down thousands of dollars a month since I graduated. Here are the results:

Yep. It took a few days longer than expected, because Sallie Mae is terrible at ACH. And, of course, their obnoxious rounding means that at some point in the next six months, I'm going to get a cheque from Sallie Mae for 80¢ (presumably plus 6.8% interest). But it's pretty nice to be free...

This is going to be the worst post ever for attracting spam-bots, isn't it?

Storage is cheap, or so we're told. Amazon will sell me storage for $0.055/GB/month in “the cloud”; 3.5" hard drives are hovering around $0.06/GB. However, my laptop has a little 250GB SATA drive that is (a) slow and (b) getting full. So I desire to replace it with a fast little SSD. But that raises the question of what to do with my stuff. I'm asking you, Internet. Details below the fold.

I used to post these on Facebook as Notes, but since the Timeline refactor, I frankly have no idea how to use Notes; so I guess I'll just post on my own blog. I use last.fm (me) to track my music-listening habits (and sometimes for other things). As of some time recently, I've passed 60,000 scrobbled plays since 2006. Yay!

Here's a graph I made (click for ps version; gnuplot continues to be the best thing ever):

Cheers, all.

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but Merry 2012. As a sort of celebration, here's my favorite animated GIF of all time (courtesy of Evan a long time ago):

Maybe I'll actually write some useful content this year.

So, you might have heard about Amazon's new Kindles. They're kind of a big thing. There's even talk that Jeff Bezos is the New Steve Jobs, which is kind of silly, but serves to underscore the point that Amazon is big news these days. Anyway, you might also remember from an earlier post of mine that I have a Kindle 2. Well, when I saw the new Kindles, I couldn't resist. So now I also have a Kindle 4 (non-touch). It's pretty awesome. Let's start with some sexy comparison shots (flickr set):

The most stunning thing about the new Kindle is, without a doubt, its size. My old Kindle 2 is 290g, my new Kindle is 160g. That's a very noticeable difference. I imagine that most of the weight savings comes from losing the useless keyboard. Which is, in turn, possible because the screen refresh is approximately 90,000 times faster. In my scientific opinion.

Aside from those hardware differences? It's still a Kindle. The software is the Kindle software (and now I know one of the guys who wrote it, so I have somebody to blame for java.lang.Integer errors), which is cool. There are some little tweaks, like the option to decrease inter-line spacing, but it's the same e-reader software that I know and love. I've gotten two and a half years of great use out of my Kindle 2, from reading the Times every morning on the subway from the 116th St. station to the 14th St. station in 2009 through reading the Times every morning while I ponder the San Francisco fog in 2011. Books are awesome, and eBooks are eAwesome. For $109 (without ads), how can you say no?

What about the other new Kindles, the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire? Well, I think the Touch is pretty ridiculous. I've never had an urge to touch my Kindle's screen to change the page. Why would I pay $30 more for the privilege of touching the screen (and also the "privilege" of 50g extra mass)? And the Kindle Fire is cool hardware for an amazing price, but scary software. All the bad things I've said recently about Chrome breaking the internet (with 60-second socket timeouts and speculative prefetching) are nothing compared to the mess that is Amazon Silk. But that's all a post that can wait until the products are actually released next month. I have an iPad and a TouchPad, so I don't think I'm in dire need of any new tablet computers for a little while.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I should go read a book or something.

So, I got one of the Internet-legendary $99 TouchPads (well, $149 actually, but whatever). As some of you may know, I was an enormous Palm fanboy during the 90's. So it was pretty inevitable that I would end up purchasing one of their WebOS products, even though there's not a lot in common between this and Jeff Hawkins' wooden cutout Palm Pilot. Anyhow, this is probably going to be the nerdiest review of the TouchPad posted on the Internet. It mostly is concerned with keyboard mappings. Enjoy!

If you've read any kind of tech news in the last few days, you might've noticed that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion is out. I wasn't going to upgrade for a while, but then it launched and I did. So I've been using Lion for a few days now, and I thought I'd join the endless ranks of people on the Internet talking about Apple's latest big cat. I'm not really going to be much competition for the real tech writers, so if you want to learn nearly everything about Lion, I recommend making a pot of tea and sitting down to John Siracusa's latest tome. Otherwise, read on to see what I think of the new features.