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SubscriptionsSites I Read
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| TaxBreakdown Lives!I've finally finished working on the web project I started last fall.
Did you know that the average American thinks that 20% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid? Do you know how much money actually goes to foreign aid? Take a guess...
Then find out! (hint it's less than 1%)
http://www.taxbreakdown.org
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| NostalgicI guess since it's getting so close to the end of my time at MIT, I'm starting to miss some of it. I went back and read some emails from 2003, put on some music I downloaded (shh, don't tell the RIAA) freshman year, and reflected a bit. There were some really shining moments here, and I will miss this place's attitude.
I won't miss the work, to which I now must return. Anyone know anything about repeated games?
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| The Last TestI guess it's a fitting end that the last test I will ever take at MIT was a train wreck.
It would have been awful cool if optimization would have been a prereq
for game theory, since you know, 1/6 of the test required you to know
it. Thxadoodle, Asu.
6 more weeks till I'm done? Can't wait.
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| Despite everyone crowing about how awesome OpenOffice.org is, it really isn't going to be stealing any Office users away from Microsoft anytime soon. Here's my first experience with OpenOffice.org 2.0 Calc (the Excel "equivalent"). Keep in mind that I have been using spreadsheets for ~12 years, supported them at the Help Desk for three, and had at least a passing familiarity with OpenOffice.org Calc 1.0. The instructions are to fill in a tutorial list for 6.002, adding student names, email addresses, and tutorial assignments to the spreadsheet.
If an expert user runs into this many issues, taking 55 minutes to do what I expected would take 10 minutes in Excel, the application needs help.
1) If you click in a cell, and then try to type, it is in some kind of wacked out command mode. You have to click in the formula box at the top to type. There is no visual indication that it is in some kind of strange mode, so jumping around the screen and pulling up dialog boxes is completely unexpected.
2) Crashed ungracefully. Program stopped responding. After 10 minutes, gave up and killed the process, taking my data with it. Document recovery worked about as well as in Office (i.e. didn't work at all).
3) Autocompletes words, without asking, so M1 turned into M10 every single time I typed it.
4) Couldn't turn off Autocompletion of words, not listed in the Autocomplete dialog box, or in Options. Manually corrected each M10 entry.
5) Copying and pasting a formula column makes it turn into !#ref garbage
6) Trying to paste text, I can't make it match destination formatting, so everything I paste in comes in as Cumberland 10.
7) Couldn't figure out how to paste values, instead of a formula. Tried google, openofficetips.com looked promising but was down. For whatever reason, pages there were designed so that Google's cache doesn't work without the host site.
8) Tried Paste Special. Tried all the options. Gave up.
9) Manually typed in @mit.edu for all rows.
10) Crashed again. Document recovered successfully.
11) Quit while I was ahead. Emailed the spreadsheet back to the head TA and asked him to fix my formatting in Excel, where it's easy.
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| I've been meaning to extoll the beauties of TurboGears for a while. I've been poking around with web development, and there is some truly beautiful stuff in there.
It's a stack of Python-based utilities and a little bit of glue to bind them into a complete web framework. SQLObject is one of the most elegant solutions I've ever seen for streamlining database access. CherryPy is a pretty neat webserver, and when you combine it with SQLObject, you can put together some heavy lifting really fast.
I'm less impressed with Kid and Mochikit, the other two components to Turbogears 0.9. I think Mochikit is actually really well engineered, but it's hard to tell. JavaScript does not much impress me, and the DOM is a pretty painful API. Top that off with the Mochikit author and documentation writer coming at it from the perspective of a hands-down expert, and it makes the whole thing daunting for newbies like me.
Kid irritates me more. I didn't need any of Kid's special features since I needed to write everything in JavaScript anyway, so all it did was get in the way. Sometimes it requires a "<", and other times you need a "<" <br> doesn't work without a matching tag. Etc.
But if you're going to be writing web applications and you're not ready to face the music with Ruby, give TurboGears a shot.
To wrap up this dorkfest with another angle, I read Freakonomics over the break, and it made me start looking harder at statistics before I swallow them. It's probably not good enough to buy hardbound, but if you're bored at home...
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