Zobar's Journal

11/20/2006 16:37 #37393

nobody asked
Category: geeky

...but I wanted to see what it would look like if I put our entire bar/business/gallery/restaurant directory on one map. Answer: really crowded.

[requires Google Earth]

If anybody can think of any real use for it, I'll fix it up real nice and officially put it on the site; otherwise, I'll just leave it around as a curiosity.

Also, you can get notified of our events by RSS now; there are feeds for each calendar, category, and venue in the database.

I think this would be an excellent application for the wireless web, but sad to say, I've got other stuff that needs to get done first.

- Z

carolinian - 11/20/06 23:41
Three cheers for zobar!

It's about damned time the city of Buffalo had some XML functionality to it.

11/17/2006 20:00 #37392

foiled again
Category: drugs

Dammit! I had my meth lab all set up in my basement and ready to go - until I got to the drug store and found out I had to ask the pharmacist for a 24-pack of Sudafed. Damn, damn, damn! Curse my bashfulness! Now that I can't corrupt the youth of America I guess I'll have no choice but to spend my spare time helping old ladies cross the street.

And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling legislators.

- Z

zobar - 11/18/06 09:02
The ironic thing is I don't even like pseudoephedrine. It works miracles on my sinuses, but it makes me feel all spacy, and it's really expensive. I ended up buying the phenylephrine instead in the hopes that it has fewer side effects.

What I object to more than the supposition that I'm some kind of crank dealer, is the assertion that limiting retail purchases of nasal decongestant is going to have any sort of noticeable impact on wholesale meth manufacture. If it works at all, it will only serve to help eliminate mom & pop meth labs and strengthen the market position of the large-scale manufacturers, who most assuredly do not buy 24-packs of Sudafed.

It is also troubling that it took a large-scale media scare before there was any real research into less freaky nasal decongestants. [see also Tamiflu :::link::: ]

- Z

joshua - 11/17/06 21:34
OTC Sudafed seems a little silly, although anybody that is buying a massive quantity of the stuff isn't buying it because they are feeling stuffy.

Jay and I are always talking about the 'nanny state.' This is a perfect example.

uncutsaniflush - 11/17/06 21:30
you give up too easily my friend.

you could get a bunch of your meth-head friends and customers to go and buy a box or two each at different locations.

in no time at all, you could have all the pseudoprine hcl (or whatever the fuck it is) that you need.

You can thank Linus Torvalds for this idea. Working in Linux, I've become accustomed to "workarounds"

I do ask one favour. Please let me know when you are homebrewing so I can stay away from your lab.

11/10/2006 16:57 #37391

he gets results
Category: potpourri

I have to get this off my desktop, but I don't want to lose it. One of the video guys sent this to me a while ago. He was putting together a commercial for a client and had the video cued up wrong at the end.

::DOWNLOAD MEDIA::

He gets results.

- Z

11/08/2006 11:23 #37390

why i am proud to be latvian
Category: booze

- Z

joshua - 11/08/06 16:37
21st century bootlegging!

11/02/2006 20:04 #37389

great minds, right?
Category: geeky

I got some productive fucking-around done at work today.

I've been playing around with Django

a lot. It's a very young framework, but as long as the developers retain tight control over the architecture, I think it's got staying power. Not very long ago I started reading up on J2EE and Jakarta Struts, and it seemed to me to be such a brilliant idea, but like anything Java, it was just way, way more complicated than it needed to be. As I read more about it I kept saying, yeah, if this were done in Python instead we could just cut that out, ... and that ... and wow, you'd actually be able to use it. Django is gunning for everything in J2EE and Struts that is useful, without all that other bullshit that's only there to circumvent Java's fascist static typing. I get the impression that Django is a lot like Ruby on Rails

- except that I know Python.

Today I started poking around at the Yahoo Flash Maps API. I like it. I know this is going to offend certain people, but let's face it- AJAX+DHTML is an egregious hack based on a misbegotten API [XMLHttpRequest

I'm looking at you]. I think using Flash instead is a much more elegant solution to map service in particular, and Flash's HTTP library, while a little weird, at least suggests to me that someone thought it over before they released it. Also, Yahoo offers the Boring-old-image API to their maps, which I intend to use on our fledgling mobile website. Feature request: you should be able to dump a pile of markers onto the map and ask the map to make sure they all fit. Yahoo's agreement says Non-Commercial Use Only, but as long as (e:ajay) doesn't blow me in, I think we're cool.

- Z