Blaudämmerung

I’ve started a new online radio station at laut.fm

It’s based in Germany. If you can speak or puzzle out a bit of German, you can navigate the site and find a station you like.

I created this based on my playlist Blue Smoke. However, before they will play a station, you must have more than one hour of total track time in the playlist.

Even at that, laut.fm must shuffle the tracks until the playlist is at least three hours long. I’m working on it.

[update 2008-05-26] I’ve extended the list to appx 3.5 hours. I’m not completely satisfied with the trackstream but what the heck? It’s a radio station. I’m working on a new list now. Should be ready real soon now.

http://www.laut.fm/blaudaemmerung

360|Flex San Jose 2008

360|flex logo

I’m going to 360|Flex San Jose (August 18 – 20, 2008). This is my first Flex conference. I had long maligned Flex as expensive and unnecessary. I have changed my religion!

I saw Peter Armstrong (ruross.com) at the Ruby conference in San Jose. Here’s a guy who built a flex+rails app during his presentation. It wasn’t a slicky talk. No oily powerpoint slide deck. Just raw. Working with the actual tools. Fat finger typo’s in the terminal. There’s an honesty in that.

Something clicked near the end of his talk. My team at work has been dealing with a serious problem. If you look at the site, you’ll surmise the depths of our problems. I had an ‘ah ha!’ moment. I saw a new architecture. End-to-end. And Flex is a part of that vision.

See you in San Jose.

Monday’s at 1PM

New Practical Chinese Reader, Textbook 1

I take Mandarin classes at the Language Studies Institute. While studying Mandarin is fun, I wouldn’t say it’s easy.

I’ve opted for the conversational track. We aren’t learning the characters; we use pinyin (romanized tranliterations) and focus on speaking. I bought the CDs recently which correspond to my textbook and ripped them to iTunes. Once a week in class isn’t ideal; listening to the CDs really helps.

Once iTunes had the tracks, it looked up the album, artist, and track names (i.e., metadata). What a mess. Every CD had it’s own mistakes. I set about to correct the metadata. Like I said, we don’t study the characters. Here’s what I came up with through brute force. It may or may not make sense to a native speaker but I’m smugly pleased with myself. For now.

Name: Lesson n

Where ‘n’ is the book chapter/lesson number.

Artist: 語学 (北京語)

Artist is set to the book author.

北京
xué Běijīng
dialect;
language;
speech
learn;
study;
science
Capital
of PRC
dialect;
language;
speech

Literally, it means “Language Study (Beijing Dialect). It may seem weird but this was in the original metadata. I went with it. Notice that the first and last character are the same but different meaning. An example of how characters change their nuance depending on context. Context is important.

Album: 新实用汉语课本 (第一册)

实用 汉语 课本
xīn shíyòng hànyǔ kèběn
new;
newly
practical;
functional;
pragmatic
Chinese
language
textbook for
ordering
numbers,
e.g. “first”
one;
1;
single
measure
word

Notice the word for textbook, 课本, has two characters. 课 (kè) means class as in ‘I take a class in school’ while 本 (běn) is the general word for book. Kèběn is a ‘class book’ or, simply, a textbook. Can you puzzle out shíyòng and hànyǔ?

I interpret 第一册 as meaning ‘the first one’, as in ‘Textbook 1’.

If anyone wants to join the class, contact the school. I’m in the 1PM class. Love to see you there! – 紅豹/redleopard

New Practical Chinese Reader, Textbook 1

Language Studies Institute
350 Cambridge Avenue, Suite 100
Palo Alto, CA 94306
(650) 321-1867
inquiry@languagego.com
http://www.languagego.com/

What’s on Your Bookshelf?

My bookcase at work reflects what’s currently on my mind. Here’s the state of my mind in May 2008.

my bookcase circa May 2008

Apache: The Definitive Guide — I don’t know that this book is a must have. I look something up now and then.

Web Site Measurement Hacks — A goldmine. While written as a hands-on book, its value for me has been deeper understanding in the what, why and how of metrics. Err, measurements.

Essential ActionScript 3.0 — Actionscript is in my future.

New Practical Chinese Reader Workbook 1 — I have Mandarin class every Monday. The textbook (not shown) stays in my courier bag. I picked the workbook up at the same time but we don’t use it.

Practical Chinese Reader, Companion A — We don’t use the companion, either.

Extreme Programming Explained — XP Explained had a profound impact on my world view. It’s a dangerous book. A must read.

MySQL Database Design and Tuning — MySQL problems bite me on the ass every single day. There is no shortage of advice from web idiots. Sometimes, you run into someone online whose advice actually helps. This book give a structured walk-through of how to approach MySQL tuning.

MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide — When I hire the next database developer, I will have a better idea of what certification really means.

Agile Estimating and Planning — I call this the anti-stickies book. It is a policy wonks dream. It is about as lightweight as “Activity Based Costing” or Kepner-Tregoe’s “Work Breakdown Structures”. The processes should be lightened up and the book edited down to 99 pages.

The Ruby Way — Not as fun as Why’s ebook but just as relevant. Why the Lucky Stiff introduced me to Ruby. The Ruby Way just might get me out of the Java quagmire.

Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications — Why is it that publishers insist on repeating everything in every book. I would really like to see the introductory chapters relegated to a “install stuff on your computer” book. Then, scale the remaining information (the new information) to fit within 99 pages. If need be, split into two or more books and call it a “series”.

The Truth About Hiring the Best — I like the “truth about” books.

Linux System Administration — Somewhat outdated.

Essential PHP Tools: Modules, Extensions, and Accelerators — I’ve been pressed into service building a Facebook application. This book seemed interesting at Digital Guru.

Advanced PHP for Web Professionals — I worked a bit in PHP in 2002/2003 and picked this up then. It seems odd looking through the code examples now.

Flexible Rails: Flex 3 on Rails 2 — I saw Peter Armstrong’s presentation at SD Forum’s April ’08 Ruby conference. It changed how I viewed Flex.

Xen Virtualization — From Packt Publishing…home of 99 page books! (Though some of their books seem to have lost the recipe and creep around 200 pages. Boo!) I haven’t started this book. However, when I rebuild my developement server from RAID 5 to RAID 10, I’m installing Xen.

Melancholia

When nostalgia just isn’t the right word.

I put this playlist together back in January. It’s not my favorite but somehow I find myself trotting it out again and again.

I feel that swapping out two or three tracks would complete the list. I can’t put my finger on which ones to drop or what would replace them.

Blue Smoke

On a hot summer night, sitting out on the front porch under a blue light reflecting against a humid haze hung low, you find yourself silent. Quiet reflection in a blanket of blue smoke.