One of the things I was most looking forward to at BARcamp this year was BARcompany.  We’ve tried to foster entrepreneurship in the past but there hasn’t been much success.  This year we had five teams start to build something, and three made it through to present their idea.  The winner was RuggedScents, a campfire scented cologne put made Sacha De’Angeli and myself.  Check out his write up of how the idea came about.  This is why I’m not building a Hero’s Fountain anymore: I was only focusing on that to make a kit that I could sell, but since RuggedScents fell in my lap there’s no need to work on the fountain.  I’ll still get back to the fountain and other kit ideas I have eventually, but for now RuggedScents looks promising!

Below is the test apparatus.  It uses a plastic bowl and two milk jugs for the water vessels.  The nozzles are pieces of copper tubing and are attached with plumber’s epoxy.  The hoses are simple nylon (I think?  The material for that isn’t really important.) tubing and are attached to the nozzles with twist ties.

Hero's Fountain Apparatus 1

Hero's Fountain Apparatus 1 Internal

The first mistake was using the plumber’s epoxy.  I used it because it’s simple and fast and I’d seen it used successfully in a similar application before.  Unfortunately, after I was half done attaching the nozzles I saw the instructions said it’s not recommended for use with polyethylene, which is what milk jugs are made of.  As you can see, the epoxy didn’t bond with the milk jugs, which broke the air seal. This is most visible on the leftmost nozzle in the picture above.

Beyond that first failure the rest is more speculative.  My apparatus has both lower chambers at the same height, which means the water has a long way to rise from the blue topped milk jug to go through the fountain spout at the top.  The air moving between the pink chamber and the blue chamber will rise much easier, so I believe raising the blue chamber to shorten this distance will improve performance.

Also, it takes a substantial amount of water to fill the tubes between the chambers, at least compared to the amount of water in the red bowl.  Priming the tubes with water would probably improve performance, but hopefully that will prove unnecessary.

Finally, as the water drained from the red bowl I didn’t consider that it would form a vortex.  That pushes some air down the tube as well as water.  I don’t think that’s a problem, in fact it might make the machine run a little longer, but it’s something I will pay attention to in my next attempt.

Another approach is to use a “dumb” SMTP server that receives the e-mails locally and displays them to the terminal, but does not actually send anything. Python has a built-in way to accomplish this with a single command:

python -m smtpd -n -c DebuggingServer localhost:1025

This command will start a simple SMTP server listening on port 1025 of localhost. This server simply prints to standard output all e-mail headers and the e-mail body. You then only need to set the EMAIL_HOST and EMAIL_PORT accordingly, and you are set.

There’s still some problems with this idea. First, how do you ensure the evidence is real? With no direct debater there’s no one on point to dispute the credibility of evidence. The reader can do this themselves but that shouldn’t go on too long. There could be a wiki tag to show that a particular piece of evidence is disputed. That would create a claim page for the claim that the evidence is false.

Also, this is vulnerable to spam. It literally invites things like “extenze-makes-your-penis-bigger.herestheproof.com”.  I don’t know if I consider this a problem. That is a legitimate claim, and the “evidence” would be disputed if any were provided as for any other claim. There could also be totally unrelated content added as evidence for a claim. Crowdsourcing and backend behavior tracking algorithms could help solve this problem.

Overall, many of the problems this would have are similar to ones experienced by wikipedia, so that would be the place to look for solutions.

Please leave me comments with your thoughts on this idea. I’m unsure if there’s enough differentiation from existing resources for this to be worth pursuing, but I haven’t spent much time thinking this through yet.

I came up with Book Sprints.  Basically, iterate through books a chapter at a time and treat them as a choose your own adventure.  Choose your starting point, probably the first chapter, and as you go keep track of what topic you understood the least or want to learn about the most.  Then skip to another chapter that addresses that topic the best.  Many people do this already, but it could be enhanced by collaborating with other people who are reading or have read the same book.

The value add in this idea is to create a web site that allows people to participate in a discussion about each chapter of the book individually.  This discussion can help the reader to keep track of what they’ve learned from the book, and to enhance their understanding with input from other people who may be subject matter experts or may have just read more of the book.  The discussion can pique the reader’s curiosity about another section of the book and inspire them to keep on reading.

So what do you think of this idea?  Is it worth thinking out a little further, or is there not enough here to be worth anything?

I was more likely to have this problem because of the joining syntax I was taught:

select *
from table1, table2
where table1.id = table2.id

As you add more tables the where clause gets longer, and combined with the rest of the query’s constraints it gets easy to lose track of the ones that are necessary to do the joins properly. My boss never has this problem because he uses a different syntax:

select *
from table1
inner join table2 on table1.id = table2.id
where ...

This way, you can easily see what constraints are joining the tables together and would know if there was something missing. Also, this syntax is more like what you would use for left and right joins, so your queries will be more consistent. So from now on I’m going to use this syntax to try and avoid wasting time figuring out a problem that’s so easily preventable.

While I was working on the portfolio on this site, I had a problem like this. I wanted to float the screen shot to the left so the text would wrap around it, but I had to get the container for each screenshot/description to actually encapsulate them so its external spacing would line up properly. The usual way I knew to do it was to put another element in there that cleared the float so the container would be forced down where I want it. However this seems hackish and entangles the display with the content more than I like, so I looked for a better way.

I found a page on the subject of clearing floats and immediately I could see that the solution described there was the “right” way to do it. It’s simple, unentangling, and above all it works. This is one I’ll have to remember for next time.

A few days ago I implemented an “email this product to your friend” feature for my new employer Reusable Bags. It all went smoothly until I tested it with products like “ACME Bags™ Workhorse Style 1500″. The ™ in that name caused me endless problems, all related to one of the least known aspects of computing (at least for English speakers), character encoding.

I’ve read Joel Spolsky’s article on character encoding, so I know just enough to identify that my problem has to do with that, but not enough to know how to fix it. I find out that on our website, where the ™ displays fine, the charset is “ISO-8854-1″ a.k.a. Latin1. This is used without problems all over the place. The curiosity here is that ™ is not in that charset. Somehow Firefox translated a sequence of bits from the web page into a character that shouldn’t even exist. I couldn’t wrap my head around that, so I kind of assumed that it was expressing it some other way I didn’t know about and kept going. In the emails I was sending, the character was displaying as a sequence of 3 unusual characters, meaning it was being interpreted wrong. The charset in the email was Latin1 so that was what I would expect from the browser. Since it was 3 chars, that reinforced my idea that it was being encoded in some other unusual way (with multiple bytes) and I kept looking.

I tried everything I could figure to try and make some headway on this bug. I used every English charset I could find everywhere to see if I was inputting the character in one set and interpreting it with another, but nothing worked. I would recount everything I tried, but there was so much I don’t remember it all. I spent probably half a day just switching charsets and retrying things.

Eventually we gave up on representing the character properly and just wanted to strip it out, so I threw in a “str_replace(”™”, “”, $string)”. This didn’t work either! I could replace anything else in the string, but not that blasted ™! This problem was preposterous. There’s no way PHP isn’t recognizing this character. I wrote a testing script to verify the problem in absence of the rest of the page, and there it was recognized and replaced just fine. So what was the difference between the two scripts?

The difference was the source of the text being searched. In my testing script, I typed both the needle and the haystack. In the real page, the haystack came out of the database. I don’t think the database pays much attention to the character encoding, it just stores whatever sequence of bytes you enter. So the encoding used on that string depends on who entered it. Who did enter it? A Windows user. Therefore, the encoding was undoubtedly Windows-1252, which is one of the only encodings I found that includes the ™ character. If I had been smart about it earlier I would have realized that must be the case, because someone obviously entered the character and Windows-1252 is the only encoding that contains it in a way that’s easy to enter.

So how do I type that character in our code files that aren’t Windows-1252? Well I know that in that encoding, ™ is represented by the number 157. That means I can get php to give it to me with the call “chr(157)”. I put that into my str_replace call from earlier and it worked perfectly; detected the ™ and stripped it out no problem. Originally I was going to berate the PHP developers for assuming the Windows-1252 charset in the chr() function but I subsequently realized that it doesn’t matter what little picture is associated with character #157 in any encoding, the binary is still the same.

So the lesson here is to not assume something quasi-magical is happening when two facts seem to conflict, like when I assumed the ™ was encoded in some multi-byte extension to Latin1. It can’t be, that’s not possible. The only common encoding in the English world that includes it is Windows-1252, so that had to be what I was seeing, despite Firefox reporting otherwise. If I had realized and accepted that earlier I would have saved myself a lot of shotgun debugging. Why Firefox did that is a separate question that I don’t really care enough to answer, but IE does some auto-detecting of character encodings and displays whatever it thinks will work the best. Maybe Firefox did the same thing, ignoring the encoding specified in the document, and forgot to update the page info? That’s all I can figure.

I still have my resume available, and now I have portfolio as well.

I’m starting a new project that will be fairly large and independent from the rest of the site, so I’d like to introduce some better development practices. I don’t know much about php frameworks and stuff, so if you have any suggestions for what I should use please post them in the comments. The only major requirement is that it can be used along side the existing code. So what do you suggest?