Simon Says

Job Opening: iPhone part-time / contract coder wanted -- we'll teach you

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 03:07:00 +0000

My iPhone custom software development business is expanding and we need more part-time programmers. Our recent apps include Unitron's uHear to test your hearing, OurKids, an upcoming app for Kik, and others.

You must:

know C, C++, pointers, object and object-relational patterns already
be ready to learn the iPhone SDK fast (we'll help)

I've personally been programming on the Cocoa SDK since 1998 back when it was called OpenStep, so if you can pick things up, we can get you up to speed in a few weeks.

Demonstrate your qualifications by answering 2 out of these 3 tricky questions:

[Question 1] (C Pointers) Here is some slightly odd C code, but it will produce an (int) result, provided that you make some small changes in order to make it compile. What is the result going to be, and why?

int * a = 1990;
int result = &5[a];

[Question 2] (ORM) Draw an relational/DB model that would work for the Twitter database or the Facebook database. You don't have to cover all of the features, just the basics. You can use ascii art if you like.

[Question 3] (C++ Objects) The C++ program below has just 2 compile time errors, 1 runtime error, and there is 1 single line missing. Send us a fixed version that compiles and runs correctly. The errors will test your knowledge of object use and management in C++, and the missing line will test you on abstract/virtual inheritance.

SEND TO: simon@semacode.com. Include your answer(s) and some source code that you have written, whether it's open source, for assignments, for fun, or whatever.

REMUNERATION: Competitive.

MORE INFO: http://simonwoodside.com/pages/consulting

(PS Please keep the answers to yourself)

//// File: futurama.cpp ////
#include <iostream>

class Drinker {
public: Drinker(); void drink( int potency ); int _numberOfDrinksSoFar;
private: virtual int cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() = 0;
}; Drinker::Drinker() { _numberOfDrinksSoFar = 0; }
class Robot : public Drinker { int cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() { return INT_MAX; } };
class Human : public Drinker {
};
void Drinker::drink( int potency ) {
  _numberOfDrinksSoFar += potency;
  if( _numberOfDrinksSoFar > cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() ) { std::cout << "I'm all done." << endl; }
}

int main (int argc, char * const argv[]) {
  int beer = 5, coffee = 3;
  Human fry;
  Robot * bender;
  for( int i=0; i<6283; i++ ) { bender.drink(beer); }
  for( int i=0; i<100; i++ ) { fry.drink(coffee); }
  std::cout << "Bender: " << bender->_numberOfDrinksSoFar << "  Fry: " << fry._numberOfDrinksSoFar << std::endl;
  fry.drink(1);
  return 0;
}

(Update Feb 14: updated code to make my intentions clearer)

Real or Fake?

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:37:00 +0000

It's getting harder to tell. Be sure to watch it in fullscreen:

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Not only that but Alex Roman did a fantastic job on this. The Third & the Seventh homepage. Thanks to Tinselman.

Previous related entry: Fake or Real?

14 Errors in anti-Light Rail thinking

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 21:46:00 +0000

I'm part of a group called Hamilton Light Rail which has been pushing for the development of a european-style light rail (aka Tram) in Hamilton. Recently the Hamilton newspaper The Spectator published an anti-LRT rant by a businessman who owns, among other things, a car wash. His opinion piece is so full of factual errors that I couldn't resist making a list. I actually found 14 factual errors (that is errors that require no argument, simply a correction of information from easy to access sources). So, without further adieu (sic) here it is:

Chicago does not have a light rail. (It does have a heavy / commuter rail system. There was an LRT proposal in Chicago which was cancelled at an early stage.)
Detroit does not have a light rail. (There is discussion underway to develop one.) (It does have a medium/heavy rail rapid transit line which loops overhead, running the same system as Scarborough RT.)
Hamilton employment in 2008 was 362,000. I don't know how much of that is downtown.
The LRT project in Hamilton began moving in 2007, whereas issues related to the Pan Am games did not arise until 2009. Metrolinx plans, and LRT in Hamilton in particular, were already firmly developed, including routes and support statements from different government levels, before the Pan Am games began to influence planning.
The 2007 Pan Am Games in Rio attracted in the range of a billion viewers, so it's difficult to assert that people haven't watched it.
When you drive to downtown and park you face the same issues of finding a parking location as you do if you drive to an LRT terminal.
The US Department of Energy projects that gasoline prices could double in the next decade (AEO2009).
Downtown will not be closed off. One recent proposal suggests a pedestrian zone for one block (TODO I can't find the source) of King Street.
Downtown parking garages will still be accessible by cars either from the reduced lanes, or in the case of a pedestrian zone, from the opposite street. For example, Denningers (outdoor) parking lot is accessible from both King and Main.
Statements regarding access to business assume that shoppers drive to a parking lot in front of their target business, make a purchase, get in their car and drive to the next business. In fact today even with our current car centric model that is not the case in downtown Hamilton. Many shoppers drive to the vicinity of the business, park, and then visit multiple stops on foot.
LRT plans do not include removing sidewalks. Pedestrian areas would increase.
Parking provisions should naturally be different in areas with different densities of population and business, including differences between the mountain and downtown.
An overhead railway proposal for Hamilton in the early 80s was roundly and appropriately dismissed due to the effect it would have on the street environment. The few overhead railways that have been built worldwide do not share the success of on-street LRT. Manhattan recently converted its defunct Elevated railway platforms into garden parks.
LRT does not require 20 metres width. Each direction requires the width of one standard lane of traffic, which is 11-12 feet wide (3.5 metres).

Reise Zum Mars film

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 19:53:00 +0000

Mucho thanks to The Cartoonist for discovering this lovely Steampunk film "Reise Zum Mars" (journey to mars, in german). Made by german film student Sebastian Binder, along with Fabien Grodde and Alexander Schumann, it's a short film based on a draft screenplay by Walter Dexel, an early 20th Century Constructivist. But don't worry, it's just music and action, so there's no need to know any german to watch it. And what's more, the lyrics to the song are in english anyway.

And you can watch it at their cool web site, which also has some interesting making-of videos.

Unfortunately they only show the video at the original size. So, if you want to watch it full screen, here is a direct download link that I hacked out of their SWF file: Reise Zum Mars direct FLV download (106MB).

Overall I have only two criticisms: one, that it needs an increase in brightness, it's quite difficult to make out what's happening. This is a simple post-production blunder. Second, the music is a little heavy. On the other hand, the silent-movie farce kind of atmosphere/acting works well.

I love steampunk, and I love this film.

Full lyrics to Yazoo (Yaz) song "I Before E Except After C"

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:14:00 +0000

The full lyrics for this great Yazoo song are not to be found on the entire internet. I did some fun audio processing to extract all the different voices... some of the words are a bit tricky.

There would, stop because
there will always be, because
there will always be, for two
there will always

inside, you can feel the
outside, you can see the difference
inside, stop, inside, difference
outside, out stop, inside, you can feel the difference
feel the
you can difference, difference, difference
you can see the, feel the difference
you can stop, stop, and see the, you can stop, you can see the difference

Dragons, the policeman knew,
were supposed to breathe, to breath fire, fire, to breathe fire
and occasionally get themselves, get themselves
slaughtered, slaughtered, slaughtered
he decided.

That would definitely not he decided
stop, stop
definitely not
stop, stop
not
definitely
That would that would that would
stop
definitely decided
decided decided decided
not not
stop
he decided

(repeat)

[old woman 1]
the basis of the all important process
involved in the mixing, and regeneration, of a person's voice
incapable of any distinction, between frequency response
is such that the entire output, is revealed in the voice
is the actual voice itself, and the voice being used
is the voice being used, is the voice being used
used voice being used
being used voice
being voice

(repeat)


[young woman, with laughter]
this type of formation can only be explained
when two or more separate units are linked together
thus forming a string only detectable
through specially designed equipment
or at least that's what I thought
stop.

is that enough?

(repeat)


[old woman 2]

despite the pure outlook
which have been forced upon me
stop stop upon me
force the tools available
I decided to use the tools available
mainly because the function of the stop the stop
available being used
demanded an experience which I did not fully understand

(repeat)

Yes, I'm all right [laughter]

The only word I'm not 100% sure about is "pure" for old woman 2. Aside from that it's solid.

Is the man Vince Clarke? Is the young laughing woman Alison Moyet?

What I want to know is, where did they get the text these people are reading? Did they make it up? None of it seems to search in google.

Mobile phones access agricultural market price information in developing nations

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:46:00 +0000

The most critical piece of information for any farmer is what to grow. What grains are going for good prices at the market. What is overproduced and what is underproduced. What is in demand. Farmers must know this information in order to make a living, hopefully a profit.

Let's say you're a farmer in rural part of western Africa. You have very little in the way of communications—the roads are poor, telephone lines are poor or non-existent, internet access is not there. In fact, your village may only contain a few people with literacy to even use the internet. Aside from travelling for hours or days the only way to access market information could be through a shared mobile phone.

Then you need a trust-worthy source of information on the other end. Preferably one that can communicate via SMS text messaging, because it's much cheaper than making a voice call. I've been collecting some information about these kinds of services in Africa and intending to write up what I found for quite a while, so here it is, a summary of the agricultural market information providers operating in Africa that I am aware of.

Esoko

Esoko is the easiest to find on the internet. It was founded by Mark Davies, a serial entrepreneur who started up a number of successful internet companies including CitySearch in the UK before transplanting to Ghana where he founded BusyInternet, an internet café, ICT centre, and business incubator in Accra. In 2005 he started TradeNet which is now renamed to Esoko.

I've played around a bit with Esoko and it looks like the real deal. I viewed prices for a variety of produce for a wide variety of markets in Ghana, for example. The data seemed to be fairly up to date. I was able to set up an alert for myself on prices for certain commodities in certain markets, so the system would SMS the prices to me on certain days of the week. You can also 2-way SMS into the system with different code and they will send you back the info you are looking for by return text message.

I couldn't actually test the SMS because I don't have an African cell phone # but assuming that works (and I'm sure it does) this looks like a great system with tons of accessible and useful information. They currently have at least some data for Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Mali, Mozambique, Ghana, South Africa, and Sudan so if you're operating in any of those countries, check it out.

They also seem to be looking to expand their platform as a service into other parts of the world, see: esokonetworks.

Others

Another service is Trade at Hand, which operates in Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso. I haven't been able to try this service, but their representative Raphaël Dard tells me via email that they are oriented towards international exporters in those countries, and provide prices in the major agricultural market in Rungis, France. They distribute information via SMS to farmers who sign up at federated agencies within the country.

Hans Hesse tells me on his blog that Zambian National Farmers Union runs a service for that country at http://www.farmprices.co.zm/, unfortunately the site is down as I write. There is some information on the ZNFU site, which appears to be right up to date, and have an SMS interface with short-code 4455 (from inside Zambia). Good stuff.

Last but not least, Engineers Without Borders's Megan Putnam shared with me a report from an EWB volunteer who examined a project called ECAMIC which facilitated the use of Esoko. One issue they noted was charging the phones in the many locations where no grid power is available. Another is dealing with the metrics for quantity and quality of each commoditiy, which may not be easy to transmit over SMS (some might be weighed, others rated by size and quality).

To summarize. It's important to be skeptical of any technologically driven development initiative. That said, I'm quite keen on this one because it is based on mobile phones, which are a huge and expanding business concern in Africa, a huge force for development, and probably the continent's biggest success story right now. They are also durable, cheap, and run on very little power. The information systems I've mentioned here are early days, but they seem to work and provide value to their users. I won't link to testimonials and success stories because I'm too skeptical about them as marketing for development agencies. But reading between the lines there are enough different people trying this out and getting positive results that I would encourage everyone involved to stick with it and keep pushing the boundaries.

Light + Music

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:12:00 +0000

I'm proposing a talk for TEDx Waterloo. The subject is Light + Music, an overview of visual music, the past and future, of this wonderful field where two of your senses get together and jam and have a good time.

The theme of TEDxWaterloo this year is Tomorrow Started Yesterday, which is pretty appropriate for this subject. The visualization of music certainly started with dance, which was probably one of the most ancient of human arts, although we cannot say for certain when it started. Music certainly existed over 50,000 years ago. On the other side, the future of music is certainly digital, and the digital signal lends itself to being interpreted in multiple ways—witness mp3 visualizers and VJs.

But I want to start with what is sound. In 1904 Heinrich Rubens created a tube to see the sound as light—literally—glowing from the flames of his curious contraption:

Sound is a wave through the air, and like all waves you can reduce it to a sum of waves at different frequencies. I won't get into sine waves and circles and cycles and oscillators because I don't have the time. But take waves of different speeds, some large and slow, others small and fast—just like in water—and add them up, you get sound. The rube's tube simply shows the amplitude and pitch of the wave as it creates a standing wave inside the tube.

An oscilloscope does the same thing!

Guess what, your iTunes visualizer does the same thing too. It just jazzes up that information into prettier pictures. The basic ones show an oscilloscope like the ruben's tube, or a "spectrogram" which provides much more information—it actually breaks down the signal into the component sine waves, and shows the strength of each. Usually frequency is vertical, time is horizontal, and the intensity of colour is the intensity of sound at that pitch. Here's a spectrogram of a violin:

And here's a video of a whiz-bang mp3 visualizer. It may look crazy but it's just oscilloscope + spectrograph driving it:

Maybe you can look at the spectrogram and tell a flute from an electric guitar, but most people can't. That's why Anita Lillie made a program that tries to show the timbre of different instruments in colour against the notes of the scale. This is where the future of direct visualization is going:

Visualizing Music by Anita Lillie from S Woodside on Vimeo.

All of that said… there is more to visual music than can be imagined by computers. Artists will surely have a word to say. And we can go back to the early days of film to find inspiration from Len Lye, famous for his abstract film, A Colour Box (1935):

And you might have already seen this one. Fantasia: Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor, by Oskar Fischinger in 1940!

There is much more, such as the Star Gate sequence in Kubrick's 2001, Lapis by James Whitney, The Bead Game by Ishu Patel, Synchromy No. 4: Escape by Mary Ellen Bute in 1938. Bret Battey's Luna Series #3: Sinus Aestum is more recent—2009. After three quarters of a century, the art is being revived.

Tomorrow though, it will be the other way around. Instead of looking at sound, you can go the other way, you make light and get sound.

The most significant entry in this green field is surely TENORI-ON, a completely new form of digital instrument created by Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori for Yamaha in Japan. It's being used in concert by artists such as Little Boots. I would like to leave you with these two examples, which might blow your mind.

Little Boots .. watch her set it up :-) :

Jim O'Rourke ... a little deeper, but stick with it and your mind will expand. Steve Reich needed 18 musicians! :

I've skipped over a lot of really cool stuff, so if you want to see more in a fast, wide-ranging and crazy presentation, head over to TEDx Waterloo and nominate me for the show :-) I might even do some live demos :-)

A little ToneMatrix Music

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 22:45:00 +0000

André Michelle, inspired by the TENORI-ON, created a grid-sequencer called ToneMatrix. It's an interactive experience written in Flash 10 that merges graphics, visualization, interactivity, and music. There are also iPhone knock-offs such as the free TonePad. As for ToneMatrix, click here to check it out and create your own tunes. Here's one of mine.

Eine Kleine ToneMatrixMusik from S Woodside on Vimeo.

You can also right-click on the ToneMatrix flash app and copy/paste numerical sequences to load and save your music. The sequence for the above is:

98386,1024,4096,1024,67474,96,65540,32768,65618,1024,64,0,65618,4,65600,0

Share and enjoy.

How to prepare a build for distribution in the App Store using the Program Portal, XCode, and iTunes Connect

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:59:00 +0000

Apple does a pretty good job of explaining how to prepare the meta-data for an app submission in iTunes Connect, but it's not completely obvious how to prepare your actual build in XCode.

Assuming that you've already got Ad Hoc distribution working, it's not too hard. I was looking for advice and didn't find it, but I did find a question on StackOverflow that people had actually downrated and not really answered. So I figured out how to do it and added a proper answer. So without further adieu, rate me up on StackOverflow to give me wonderful wonderful karma, and view,

How to prepare a build for distribution in the App Store using the Program Portal, XCode, and iTunes Connect on StackOverflow

something I found written on a piece of paper

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:22:00 +0000

I don't know what it means.

What happens when you don't understand open source licenses?

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:20:00 +0000

I was just checking out a TextMate-like editor for Windows called E Text Editor. It looks pretty good, but I was a bit surprised when I read about his "Open Company License".

To be clear, this is something he came up with himself, and it's not a bad idea. To be double clear, it's NOT open source. And he says that up front. He added "just one" clause to the standard BSD license:

Any redistribution, in whole or in part, must retain full licensing functionality, without any attempt to change, obscure or in other ways circumvent its intent.

Not bad. Users gain because they can modify the software and use the modified version all they want for in house purposes, and they don't have to share those changes with anyone. But they still have to pay him, and that's why it's not open source.

Unfortunately for him, he made a little mistake, because the clause only stipulates on redistribution.

So if you want E Text Editor for free, just download the source, modify it to remove the licensing code, build and use it. As long as you use it only yourself, you're perfectly legit and don't have to pay.

In addition, he left open a rather major hole. Anyone can now make a completely separate small program which downloads the source code, automatically applies a patch which removes the licensing code, builds it and installs on the local computer. This is the way in which many applications include GPL software into non-free, just in reverse. To be clear, my hypothetical program does this:

You download my program, FreeE and run it on your computer.
FreeE goes online and grabs the source code for E Text Editor.
FreeE applies a patch to remove the code that makes you pay.
FreeE builds—on your local machine—a new copy of E Text Editor without the pay code.
FreeE quits and you delete it.

As long as you never distribute your copy of E Text Editor that you get this way, you're totally clear and legally able to use it without paying.

Alexander Stigsen, the author of E, might want to consider changing his license. But even if he does so, the versions he released under the current license will always have this hole. So go ahead, get some free as-in-beer software :-)

My university can't draw.

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:57:00 +0000

This is their idea of a good new logo.

After the previous new logo got crapped on because it totally sucked.

The new new one? Looks like a beer glass being poured out.

While that may be appropriate reflection of the student body, it's not my idea of a good image for the school. Please UW, fire your graphic designers and hire new ones who can draw. Maybe go to Toronto to find some good ones? Or New York?

Prediction: this is going to go on for a long time...

Maemo is coming

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:54:00 +0000

So according to what everybody is saying, Nokia is going to start using the Maemo operating system + SDK in their high-end smartphones. This is good news. Symbian is basically a smoking pile of junk. It's too old, and too crap, to be fixed. Toss it out the window and good riddance.

I realize this won't happen overnight, but the sooner we can get a more modern, well-documented, programmer-usable SDK available for Nokia phones the better. Maemo looks good at first blush. You develop on Linux instead of horrible, horrible windows, which is good and means that a proper SDK for Mac is probably possible. You use Qt which is apparently pretty good. So, good news all around.

Nokia needs to fix a lot of other things to keep their game going in the smartphone market. They need to stop messing around with resistive touch screens for one thing. But without a great OS they can't make anything else happen. So, I hope that they follow this up with more symbian abandonment and more alternative awesomeness.

UPDATE: And here it is (video of N900).

Google: what is zero?

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:05:00 +0000

Apparently it's 1.15463195 * 10^-14.

Who Will Get What? -- a US healthcare infographic

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 20:42:00 +0000

Who Will Get What? This is an information graphic based on Health Insurance Reform in Three Steps by Nicholas Beaudrot. I thought it would work better in this format, which shows the proportions of people as the thickness of the lines.

If you have updated/more correct numbers post them—I might roll an updated version.

This is licensed CC-Attribution-ShareAlike!

Also available on Flickr.

Saying goodbye to Guido Sohne

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:05:00 +0000

Some people's deaths hit me harder than others. When Douglas Adams died in 2001 I was devastated. I also took it pretty bad when Guido Sohne died last year. I'm glad that he's now been rewarded with a post-humous award—in his name—and triggered a belated reaction to the original news.

Guido Sohne was an African software developer and open-source proponent who grew up in Ghana, went to Princeton, and then—amazingly—returned to his native land. Why did he do it? It's awfully tempting to stay where wages are high, where computer products are easy to get, peers are easy to meet ... he would have had no problem there. But instead he chose to return to Accra, and later Nairobi (Kenya).

I met Guido on a mailing list called PubSoft, focused on global issues around open source software. I've been an open-source nut for a long time. I've also been interested in international development and especially Africa since I lived for 6 months in a rural development project in Lesotho at an early age.

Guido and I struck up a cyber-relationship—we never met in person and only talked a few times on the phone. I was really interested in his views on the development of internet and computer technology in Africa. I can go and read what people are saying, but Guido was "one of us"—a CS grad from a big school—and a really nice guy and had a lot of credibility. I learned a lot from him about the realities. And, also, lets face it he was ahead of me in terms of exploring the boundaries of web technology—introduced me to Ruby on Rails for example.

Somehow or other I wound up hiring him to do some work for my company Semacode—I needed software written, didn't have many connections at that time, and he was looking for work. He did some himself and also managed another African native who he managed very effectively. We had a great business relationship which is especially important since he's on the other side of the world, and trust in business is so critical. He was totally reliable.

The source code by the way is still in the Semacode barcode decoding source base and is good code—has been built on over the years (since 2004 or 2005??).

And I know that Semacode was a great opportunity for him too as it has great web presence and is (still) really cool up-and-coming technology.

He had some business ideas that we discussed, we exchanged I don't know how many emails, and finally he got a job at Microsoft. Crazy, I know, because he was a Linux fan and always used a Mac. But I know other people who are otherwise good people who wind up at Microsoft and anyway: (a) MS is much less evil now and (b) this is Africa we're talking about ... how many major software companies have significant operations there?

(As an aside, did you know that there is only one major software company with HQ outside the USA?)

And then... I got an email that he died. At 34. In his sleep. There was no warning that I knew of. He always looked and sounded healthy. Maybe he had a heart condition or something. I don't know.

I often wonder if the reason he went back to Africa was because he had been diagnosed with some kind of "eventually-will-kill-you" illness and had a sort of revelation, to do something more meaningful than the traditional CS job. Well, that's looking for a reason for someone to be so extraordinary. I know good programmers and he was well up there. But he also had a vision, great people skills, drive, energy, communication and a good heart. So. I still can't believe he's gone.

IEEE Spectrum article from 2008
The Guido Sohne Fellowship, another award in his name
Princeton obituary
Blog post by G. Pascal Zachary
You can still see sohne.net at the WayBack Machine although without the cool skin he had.

Where have all the great actresses gone?

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:00:00 +0000

Movies are great for many reasons, but having a superstar actor/actress can make even a half-ass movie bearable or even good. There's lots of great actors who can pull it off these days. To give a few random examples. Benicio Del Toro. Bruce Willis. Brad Pitt. Clooney. Clint Eastwood, after all these years. ... much as I hate to admit it, Leonardo DiCaprio.

We used to have them. Just looking at the 80s & 90s: Sigourney Weaver pulled off many hits, including Alien, Terminator, ... Renée Zelwegger was awesome headlining in Bridget Jones, Nurse Betty... Jodie Foster carried Silence of the Lambs & Contact. Meryl Streep, Katharine Hepburn, Kim Basinger.

Where are they now? They seem to have faded away. Julia Roberts seems to be gone. Zelwegger is doing voiceovers. Foster hasn't been seen lately. Hepburn is out of town, and Basinger seems to be mainly in movies I haven't heard of.

Does Kate Winslet count? Uma Thurman? My theory is that there's still great actresses out there, but they're not getting good parts.

Regarding growing up your acts_as_taggable and lack of primary_key

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:53:00 +0000

This is a comment on "growing up your acts_as_taggable" post on Evan Weaver's blog snax.... because comments there are closed.

If you are upgrading from an older acts_as_taggable installation and moving to has_many_polymorphs, as I did, your old table will have create_table :id => false. That will be unhappy. You should add this to your migration:

add_column :taggings, :id, :primary_key

And that's all.

Fictional magazine covers from Blade Runner

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:31:00 +0000

Blade Runner is one of my all-time favorite films. I got my hands on the extended features and one popped up that I thought I'd share with you—some fictional magazine covers from a fictional news stand on a fictional street in a fictional universe. I believe that the news stand is seen—briefly in passing—during the chase through the streets. Here are all six grabbed from the feature, designed by production illustrator Tom Southwell.

Praise for uHear

sbwoodside@yahoo.com (Simon) — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:37:00 +0000

I still think that the uHear application I made for Unitron is pretty cool. So do some other people.

Can't believe it's free *****
by DancingRomantic - Version 1.0 - Jul 22, 2009
It's apps like this that make the iphone the most powerful of all smartphones. Great work!

It's amazing how much app crap there is out there.