celiaq — the last while

2009 July 01 in computer programming by corprew | No comments

So, for the last while I’ve been working on celiaq.com. It’s a social network for people with Celiac disease and other forms of Gluten Intolerance. It’s designed around the resources that that community has trouble getting reliable information about on the internet, and I think that it’s coming along pretty well.

Right now, it’s looking like that will be done and in a somewhat stable state by 7/15. It’s based on rails and hosted at slicehost right now, although I suspect that it will be moving to Amazon EC2, CloudFront and S3 as it scales to make things easier. It’s a rails/mysql application for the most past, although it would probably run on other db backends.

It’s been an interesting time taking this entire application from vision to deployment, and it’s been a good time. Currently it’s in a beta state, and is soft launched to let interested people enter resources and test the system.

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on words with -demic in them.

2009 May 06 in general by corprew | No comments

No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
–Animal Farm

The last week or so, obviously, have been somewhat transfigured by pandemic paranoia. Pandemic is ancient greek for either “all peoples” or “freak the fsck out,” it’s hard to tell. This can be easily distinguished from epidemic, which is greek for “upon peoples” and endemic, which is greek for “within peoples.”

Here’s a handy table for disambiguation of various words with demic in them, described in terms of internet memes:

greek root english literal meaning
pan-demic all peoples the call’s coming from inside the house.
epi-demic upon peoples getting mediæval on your ass.
en-demic within peoples never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down, never gonna run around and desert you.
syn-demic together with peoples I put a disease in your disease, so you could get sick while you’re sick

So, with this out of the way, we can proceed upon our merry way. It’s been an exciting week, I have been interested in public health and related things (epidemiology, etc…) for a long time so I’ve been watching the news, websites, twitter, and any other mechanism of public information I could get my hands on.

As for myself, I’m sort of guardedly watching the news (considering I’m traveling soon to Texas, where both US fatalities have occured), but am mostly concerned about the Northern hemisphere flu season. That said, there’ve been a lot of people coughing in this coffee shop today.

test pattern

2009 May 05 in general by corprew | No comments

This is a test to see if some stuff at celiaciq is working properly. Some of the navigation has yet to be folded into the main site, so things are wonky.

rice rice baby!

home page

books

restaurants

april refrain: LOLCat Wasteland

2009 April 01 in general by corprew | No comments

Since it’s April 1rst yet again, please enjoy LOLCat Wasteland.

Have Fun.

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more with geo

2009 March 12 in general by corprew | No comments

I’ve been doing more stuff with geodata and geoapis recently in support of a project. It’s been fun, as you can see from the previous entry.

One of the things that this project has made me aware of is the importance of caching. A number of the free, public services have occasionally been hit by surges in usage (apparently frequently coming from iPhone apps that weren’t making good use of reuse) and I’m writing an article about this.

In the meantime, largely grasping to consciousness today as I ended up finishing work last night at around 4:30 am. But hey, at least I’m not in a space station that had to be evacuated due to potential debris strike.

What I am up to at the moment

2009 March 08 in computer programming, location-based by corprew | No comments

This is more or less a good guide to what I am up to at the moment, although it should be noted that I’ve written this same code fragment in three languages in the last while (this is ruby, the others were PHP and Java, although the Java one was a festival of reflection due to type wackiness.)

I actually have another version of the same code that puts a URL in the debug log that can be used to click directly to google maps. Why? I don’t know. I’m beginning to value Aptana Studio’s remix of Eclipse more and more as time goes on though because I now have Java, PHP, and Ruby/Rails all in the same highly (mostly) performing IDE. The alleged iPhone mode doesn’t work on my computer but I have CRAZY LIBERRIES installed at the moment and I suspect that that’s in large part my own fault — the apple tools still work.

  def geo_desc ( geo_loc, extended = false)
     #
     #  specialized pretty printer for address types.
     #  note that there is pretty much a standard mixin for geo stuff and
     #  this works across all the geocoding packages and model types.
     #
     return "[nil location]" if geo_loc.nil?
     desc = "[" 
     desc < < geo_loc.country_code.downcase unless geo_loc.country_code.nil?
     desc << "." + geo_loc.state.downcase unless geo_loc.state.nil?
     desc << "." + geo_loc.city.downcase unless geo_loc.city.nil?
     desc << "." + geo_loc.zip unless geo_loc.zip.nil?
     desc << "] "
     desc << "["
     desc << geo_loc.lat.to_s unless geo_loc.lat.nil?
     desc << ","
     desc << geo_loc.lng.to_s unless geo_loc.lng.nil?
     unless geo_loc.precision.nil? or geo_loc.precision == "unknown"
       desc << " (" + geo_loc.precision + ")" 
     else
       desc << " ?"
     end
     desc << "]"
     if extended
       desc << " " + geo_loc.full_address unless geo_loc.full_address.nil?
     end
     return desc
  end

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The Right One — Scott McCloud

2009 February 27 in pop culture by corprew | No comments

The Right One by Scott McCloud is an interesting piece (and contains mildly nsfw cartoon images.) It’s particularly interesting to me because it’s primarily a story about categories, similarity, and ordering, and I highly recommend reading it. I thought it was astounding, and have played through the comic several times.

I’m not going to into detail about how, because that would kill the awesome, but if you read it, you should get a sense fairly easily.

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meta-fiction: On Stephen King and the Dark Tower. (Spoilers)

2009 February 09 in general by corprew | 4 comments

When Stephen King came to the end of his Dark Tower series, he felt that he had to rewrite the first book The Gunslinger because it was now no longer in sync with the rest of the series.

(Spoiler follows)
Read the rest of this entry »

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this american life: the future.

2009 January 20 in general by corprew | No comments

For those who haven’t looked at the new whitehouse.gov:

We will publish all non-emergency legislation to the Web site for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

Unknown what effect this will have, but welcome to the future again everyone.

Watching: The Human Face

2008 December 04 in general by corprew | 1 comment

I’ve been watching this series by John Cleese from the BBC on the Human Face. It’s a lot about how the face is perceived in terms of beauty, expression, emotion, and for communication with occasional insights into the nature of fame. I greatly recommend it for people, as it’s great for thinking about what is meant by beauty, and the role it, appearance, and how what we do with our faces affect our lives. I thought it was really interesting, and I don’t think it’s just the cold medicine talking.

it’s available on netflix instant viewing.

One of those interesting BBC popular science documentaries, definitely mixes the humor with the insight and makes for an enjoyable time.

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