Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Since Google Maps exposed their API (translation for non-techies: published a way for programmers to interact with the Google Maps site), lots of sites have come out with “hacks” or “mods” to the Google maps interface. There was Frappr , which enjoyed a splurge of popularity earlier this year that seems to have died down a lot. It allowed you to create a map around a common interest or site, where members could put themselves up as if putting a thumbtack on the map with a note with their name, picture, and whatever else they might deem to add. There are all kinds of interfaces which showed various points of interest, and of course there is the housingmaps.com site, a fusion of Craig’s List’s housing classifieds in various metro areas with Google maps – so you can graphically browse a map and see what houses are for sale at what price on what street. There are even sites which came about whose sole purpose was to catalog these various mods to Google Maps, including Cool Google Maps and Google Maps Mania .For a long time with a mapping program I’ve wanted the ability to figure out exactly how far something was from me. I try to walk for exercise when I can, and we also sometimes walk to nearby stores instead of driving when the weather is nice, we have the time, and we’re not exhausted from the myriad of chores and duties that keep us busy most days. Using a standard mapping interface like Google Maps itself doesn’t quite cut it. For one thing it means knowing the address of where you are coming from and going to, which is not always known, so you have to spend extra time looking this information up, and it might not even be completely accurate (for example, according to most mapping programs which use the same data source, my house is actually almost a block from where it says it is!). Secondly, there’s no guarantee that the mapping program will design a route that is the same as the way you walk. It often chooses some other route that it deems faster by car. Of course, this doesn’t even account for some routes which cars simply can’t traverse because of a road that’s one way in the wrong direction or even no road at all! I’ve always wanted something akin to a graphics program where you draw a polymer by clicking multiple times to form the shape. In my mind, the lines would automatically stick to the roads that were closest to them.

More recently, I’ve been trying to get more exercise in during the day, and since it’s been so nice and unseasonably warm here this week, I decided to skip lunch and just walk around the neighborhood. I was wondering how much I walked, but other than the amount of time and a vague sense of how fast I was going, I really couldn’t gauge much. So I thought I’d start looking for something akin to what I’ve described above and maybe, just maybe I’d find something. Well, I was shocked that I found something perfect almost immediately!

Gmaps Pedometer is the site/hack, and it is great for anyone just wanting to know how far it is from one point to another on a map, to someone who wants to get detailed information for a walking program, a cycling route, etc. You can very easily create a walking path and Gmaps Pedometer will show you dynamically not only what the distance is, but even how many calories you will burn on this path. I’m not sure about how accurate the calorie count is, though, since my 3-mile path I created around my office was rated at 368 calories, which seems a bit high. Gmaps Pedometer even gives you a graphic of the elevation levels your path is traversing, but as much as I’d like to believe it, I don’t believe elevation is taken into account for calories. The only forum message from the author about this on the site mentions not wanting to use the elevation markers for anything else because elevation data is not available everywhere – it seems to be available mostly for the U.S.

If you can time your walk, and Gmaps Pedometer gives you an accurate measurement of the distance, you can figure out your speed and then you can plug that, the time, and your weight into some other tool to get a more or less accurate representation of you calories burned. I tried to find such a calculator on the web, but all the ones out will only let you plug in pre-specified numbers for your pace, like 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5, etc. mph. I did find one shareware application you can download that does seem to have the degree of flexibility I was hoping for.

In addition to what I’ve mentioned so far, Gmaps Pedometer also lets you save a given route, so for example, this is one route I created . Also, it lets you export to GPX format with a third party bookmarklet . GPX is a format for sharing GPS data, so potentially you could load this into your GPS and use it as a way to navigate. This might be very valuable for hikers, or just walkers or cyclists who are unfamiliar with an area and want to make sure they are taking the right path. Theoretically, one could use Gmaps Pedometer to design city walking tours and make those available for people to download, along with a set of MP3′s for each of the points of interest on the path. Really, the possibilities are endless with this thing!

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SAMS Teach Yourself … in 24 Hours series of books is designed to give a first, somewhat basic understanding of a subject, and Scott Mitchell’s Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours is no exception. This book will probably be fine for anyone who is comfortable with computers, and has used a basic set of office programs to create documents, presentations, etc. You do not need programming experience. Those with extensive programming experience would best be served with something more advanced.My background is web development, but I chose this book for a few reasons. One is that it got some good reviews on Amazon.com, and no really bad ones. Secondly, I bought it knowing that I would be taking a week-long training course in ASP.Net 2.0 in a few weeks. I wanted a book that was easy enough that I would have a good chance of completing it in a couple of weeks, and I also didn’t care if I got the most in-depth understanding of the subject. As long as I got some familiarity with it, that would be good enough as a foundation should the class go at a faster pace than my brain can process information!

Generally, what I have found is that there are three or four basic types of computer book. You have books geared towards absolute beginners which walk you through every little step, every mouse click, over and over again ad nauseum. Then you have books geared towards programmers, which are written in such a way that if you don’t have a formal knowledge of this subject, you will probably eventually get a lost. Of course for those without any programming experience or knowledge, these books will quickly go over one’s head. Most of these books are about a particular facet of a programming language or environment, but some are exhaustive studies of everything, almost to the point that they are reference books themselves. Finally, there are reference books, which sometimes double as instructional texts as I intimated, and sometimes are simply streight-forward information about the various features and functions of a given language or system.

Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours, of course, fits into the first category – that of one geared towards beginners. I often wish there were books that kind of bridged the gaps between beginners and more experienced programmers, and occasionally there are, but they are few and far between. What I have in mind is something that walks you through some fundamentals at least initially, but soon stops repeating the same steps, challenging you to remember them yourself, and also getting into some of the more advanced aspects a little. Teach Yourself ASP.Net 2.0 in 24 Hours doesn’t do this. That being said, it’s still a good book for what it’s for. You just need to understand it’s target reader so that if you have experience programming, you can just skip the repetitive parts, or parts that you already know (control structures, conditional statements, html markup, etc.).

Like many in the field of web development (at least those of us who’ve been at it for close to 10 years or more), I came to it without formal study. When I started, there were no books on html, let alone classes on it. Through the years I taught myself how to program in more sophisticated ways using Perl, then Cold Fusion, JavaScript, and ASP. But while I understand how to use all these tools to create dynamic websites, I’m not sure if I have the same “programmer mentality” that I see in others who mastered C++ or Java in college, high school, or even earlier! In my opinion there’s a kind of middle-tier market out there of those of us who came to programming in adulthood, too late to substantially effect how our brains work. We can understand programming, but are not “native speakers.” We can program, but books written “for programmers” can still start to sound like Greek if we don’t concentrate hard and perhaps reread some sentences a few times!

In any case, Scott Mitchell’s book is a good start for anyone like myself, or those who are just starting out in the field and want to gain some familiarity with what .Net is about. It will take you through many of the things you will do as a developer in creating dynamic sites – including connecting with back-end databases, form validation, file uploads, site navigation, and more. You will not get much understanding about the Visual Basic or C# languages used to manipulate business logic or to do more advanced stuff with data binding, etc. But for me at least this was a good primer before going on to read more advanced books and reference guides about ASP.Net 2.0. I think it created a great “bridge” between my familiarity with plain old ASP and what I know is going to be a much more powerful and deep environment to program websites in.

The other nice thing about this book is that it comes with Microsoft’s “Express” edition of their Visual Web Developer 2005. This is basically a paired down version of the Visual Studio software that is used by professionals not only to build ASP.Net websites, but also to develop stand-alone Windows applications. However, this will let you develop any ASP.Net website and test it locally on your machine – it comes with a version of Microsoft’s SQL Server Database, and a web server. You can easily take the files you develop on it and upload them to a hosted server on the internet or a corporate intranet server behind a firewall, etc. You can download this software for free from Microsoft, but it’s nice having the CD that you can use to do a quick install and avoid having to go find it and download it from MS’s site, especially if you don’t have a fast Internet connection.

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Assassination Vacation is the latest book by author, columnist, and public radio personality Sarah Vowel. It is about the three U.S. presidents who were assassinated within 40 years of each other, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Sarah takes us on her “pilgrimages” to various sites relating to not only these unfortunate presidents, but also to their killers and co-conspirators. Along the way, we get to learn a great deal about the circumstances in which they were shot, as well as the often interesting events after those shots rang out.

Sarah Vowel has written several books, and this latest one repeats some of the same themes of American history that her previous book, A Partly Cloudy Patriot, started. Vowel is a self-proclaimed “history geek” and also presidential-assassination-obsessed. A lot of what she wrote about in the past was about personal experiences, and that is what she talked about on the radio as well. In this book, too, there is a lot of this. It’s not just an historical text, but also partially an autobiographical journey with Vowel to various places of historical significance where she interacts with the tour guides and other tourists, and also the friends that she drags grudgingly to almost every one.

I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). If you’ve ever heard Vowel speak, you know she has a very distinct voice. You may have even heard her without knowing – she played Violet (the daughter) in the animated movie The Incredibles. It’s high and nasaly, which you would never think would be something you’d want to listen to for 7 hours, and yet at least some of us find this voice strangely hypnotic. I’ve heard her speak a couple of times in DC, once as part of a live This American Life, and a second time as just herself. The second time, she was late. She doesn’t drive, and so was taking the train up from her home in New York City. The train lost power. The woman handling the show was talking to her on her cell phone while she was rushing from the train station in a cab and actually put the phone up to the microphone. Sarah managed to keep us laughing and still did a great job once she got there in person. It’s a testament to her appeal that 99% of the audience stayed over an hour after she was supposed to be there for her to arrive. The book is available in print as well, of course.

Vowel’s dry humor runs throughout Assasination Vacation, catching on oh so many ironic twists of history, so many outlandish actions or quotes that they seem downright hilarious sometimes. She also repeatedly pokes fun at herself for her peculiar geekiness about historical minutiae, her morbid fascinations, and her various allergies and phobias. The book contains not only her own voice, but also that of a number of others – actors, writers, comedians – who ad a little spice to the mix. They recite quotes from the principal characters – presidents and assassins alike. Included are Steven King, John Stewart, Conan O’Brian, and Brad Bird (whom I think was my favorite as Garfield assassin Charles Guiteau).

While I enjoyed listening to the book, and believe I picked up some knowledge from it, I’m afraid that as with most books about history, I will soon forget many details (if I haven’t already). Even with the fairly narrow subject matter, there are still lots of facts involved with each assassination, not to mention a bunch of background information about the lives of each president and their various family members, friends, colleagues, and of course their assassins and co-conspirators. Also included is information on the wars, scandals, and other events that took place before or during the time of a given president. Of course Vowel makes a lot of this stuff more memorable by adding her own humor and passion for the subject, which makes it more memorable, but I still think many of the details will slip away despite this. Then again, this isn’t a history text, but more a kind of biographical/autobiographical journey through a few singular parts of history, as well as a journey in the present day to some of the odd memorials and museums for both the presidents and the assassins – ranging from the high reaches of the Adirondack mountains to Fort Jefferson on the Dry Tortugas, a small tropical island 70 miles west of Key West, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the Caribbean.

That being said, while I certainly enjoyed Assassination Vacation, I personally preferred A Partly Cloudy Patriot. Either book is a great listen from my viewpoint, and this latest one kind of follows from the last. I also think that this book might grow on you and slowly infect you with at least a little of that same geeky obsession for these assassinations that Vowel has herself. Then again, while I’m a geek, I’m not much of a history geek, and so I’m not sure I’ll have the dedication (or time) to devote to something as relatively arcane as 19th Century U.S. presidential assassinations!

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This latest book from George Carlin consists of many, many short riffs about language, skits involving lots of profanity and potty humor, and commentary about various things that for the most part just piss Carlin off. I listened to an unabridged audio version of it via Audible.com, which has various plans allowing you to purchase full, unabridged versions of a huge-selection of books (many best-sellers) for as little as $6 each, and download them for immediate listening either on your computer or onto a large selection of compatible players (including iPods). The audio book is over 7 hours long and is read by Carlin himself. The book is available in print as well, of course. I’ve found that Carlin is great in short doses, and so I found myself only listening to 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, etc. Maybe the longest listen was an hour. I find some of what Carlin has to say very insightful, and some of it is also very funny, but not all of it, of course. A lot of what he has to say is also meant to be fairly offensive. You can tell that Carlin is trying to push buttons mostly with a lot of his shtick. For example, there’s a lot of what could be deemed as sexist jokes, but there are also parts of the book where Carlin talks about how women are superior to men in most ways and are also crapped on throughout the world for the sole reason that they aren’t as physically strong.

I would say a majority of the book is about language and specifically about euphemisms, which Carlin finds repugnant, because they “water down” the language and make a lot of things “meaningless” by couching them in kinder sounding words or phrases that don’t impart truth or real meaning. There’s a lot of truth to this, but Carlin does belabor the point, and after a while I was starting to say, “Ok, I get the point already!”

He also has a lot of these little “skits” where he will make up a conversation among a couple of people. Some of these are funny, some aren’t. A lot are graphic, gross, “dirty” or in various ways the opposite of “political correctness.” As I said, he definitely is out to try to offend just about anyone.

There’s also some insightful stuff about politics, the irony of various political issues, how politicians are constantly trying to deceive us, and a lot of times doing so by use of language.

Of course there’s a lot about various things, not all language-related, that simply piss Carlin off. Some of these are just silly and obviously not to be taken seriously, some are things that most of us would probably find annoying, or at least will once Carlin enlightens us as to why they are so dumb.

I’ve mainly seen Carlin in some older stand-up routines, a couple of movies, and one other book, Napalm and Silly Puddy, so I don’t know if I’m familiar enough with his stuff to comment on how this book compares to earlier work. It was an interesting listen, one with some laugh-out-lound moments, no doubt, but also some interesting thoughts, and a lot of expounding on random stuff that made it a bit repetitive. I wonder if for books like this, a very strategic audio abridgement might actually make it a much more solid listen?

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I just got in the mail an offer from Sprint that might be of interest to anyone thinking of switching over to them for their mobile phone. Basically, when you get your account with Sprint, within the first 15 days after you activate your phone, you give Sprint the name and number of a current Sprint customer who referred you, and you get credited $25. So, if you have a friend who has a Sprint account, tell them to go to sprint.com/referralprogram, from which they can email you the offer, and not only will you get $25, but your friend will too. If you can’t find anyone with a Sprint account, I’d be happy to refer anyone, but they limit you to 12 referrals before the end of 2006, and I’m not sure what kind of offers will be available after that.

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