Joel Hainley

I’ve been reading Paul Graham’s book on ANSI Common Lisp, and Gleick’s Chaos, and probably a Remo Williams adventure or two ( gotta have the mindless fiction, it’s like TV but, Remo is entertaining ). At some point, while reading either Graham’s book, or essays on his website, i realized that i could implement a “top level” ( of a sort ) in PHP. It wouldn’t be as powerful , but it would allow me to interact with my system in a way that would normally require lots of screwing around otherwise.

So I sat down and coded it up before work one morning and then a few days later I updated the console to utilize a bit of AJAX to support history browsing. It has worked terribly well, i’ve been pretty impressed with what i’ve been able to pull off with it. Building new classes has gotten easier, because i can build out a test harness quickly and just keep executing it while i’m developing, but the more impressive bit is when I have a bug in the system, i’m able to test specific pieces in the system quickly without having to open up a bunch of different files.

I realize that this is not the behaviour that a top-level provides, as a top level allows you to drop new classes/methods into the system and they stay there until the system is rebooted or you get rid of them. However, i’ve sorted through this by using a text area for the input, giving me the ability to write large bodies of script. This allows me to write classes/methods/etc and execute it all at once, so while it is not exactly the same, the spirit is there. I suppose it would be relatively straightforward to add in some stuff to actually write out these things to files and then have them hang around indefinitely, but there’s some issues with the implementation that make it a non-trivial problem, and i don’t know that there’d be much benefit.

The system is almost completely stabilized from the massive rewrite of pretty much everything. The resource management system is almost there, a few things to finish as part of the cleanup of the database during the move to Postgres.

I found the posting below on slashdot. It is specific to slashdot, but it sums up my conclusions on the state of all online forums. Link To Original Post On Slashdot Posted below for your convenience.

Doug,

If you weren’t aware of it before, you probably know it by now. Anything interesting or useful that rears its head on Slashdot will likely be ripped to shreds by what has quickly become the nets most vicious and petty peanut gallery.

Slashdottians know nothing, they accomplish nothing, and their opinions are worth nothing. They are uniformly bitter, small-minded geeks who overestimate their own importance and their own skillz. They are, for the most part, losers. Their biggest accomplishment is in insulting others’ spelling and grammar, attacking the GPL license despite their grade level understanding of it, and tricking people into clicking on goatse.cx links. They are know-it-all blowhards who use their computers primarily for Pornography and online gaming, at which they cheat regularly to offset their complete lack of motor skills.

Despite touting the wonderous greatness of linux and open source, they all use Windows and Internet Explorer. They like Macs because of OSX, but want it to run on X86 so they can steal a copy and give nothing back. They will eventually buy a Mac due to their inability to run Windows without crashing it constantly by their own stupidity, and become raving unbalanced lunatics who do more harm than good for the Mac community by claiming that the G4 is quadruple the speed of a dual 3Ghz Xeon box.

They lie about their own experience to make their case, and when you win an argument with them, they post anonymously in order to tell you they’ve had sex with your mother.

Don’t become a regular here, you will become retarded.

Signed,
Yoda the Retard

First century of the year, completed! I’ve had a hard time getting into shape for this one, and it showed in my time ( ~9.5 hours total, i can’t find the results page on the website at the moment so i can’t be more exact than that, i’ll get the riding time off of my computer and update this at some point ).

I was a little concerned about this ride, i didn’t get as much training as I would have liked, to prepare, and I was making seat adjustments the weekend before. I had a few pains in my knees on the rides and i was trying to find the right front/back position for the saddle. The Brooks sits a little different than the original saddle, and I got it as close as I could, but I could tell on 70+ mile rides that it wasn’t quite right. Making adjustments this late in the game is a little unnerving but I couldn’t see me completing DV if I didn’t get it sorted out.

Drove down to DV friday morning, drove through Kern River Canyon, past Lake Isabella, through Ridgecrest and into the desert. It was a nice drive with some great views, but I was glad to be out of the car. My parents came up to meet us and to keep Amy company while I was riding on saturday. We grabbed dinner, put a Stephen King book in the ipod and went to sleep listening to Dink talk about his job.

Up early saturday morning, instant breakfast and cheerios, air up the tires, stretch, make sure what i’m wearing is going to be the right layers for the day’s weather and i’m off for the starting line. Rode up and the 6:40 group was leaving so I just jumped onto the back of that group and headed out.

The ride from Furnace Creek Ranch to Badwater was a good warmup ( ~18 miles ), i had a little bit of knee discomfort to start the morning but that seems to be typical. Pulling into the first rest stop, i filled up one water bottle, stretched again and hit the road.

The second leg of the ride was pretty flat, it had some great scenery and just seemed to take care of itself, however I noticed that i was starting to go through my liquids at a much faster rate. Things were going along just fine singing 70’s show tunes to myself when out of nowhere, about 35 miles into the ride, a fixed gear passed me, “how’d she do that?”.

Pulling into the second rest stop, i drank down my second bottle, refilled both of them and jumped back on, no time for dallying I wanted to get to the turn around point as quickly as possible.

Riding out of the second rest stop I hit the grade up to jubillee pass within a 1/2 mile, it would be about 7 miles of climbing before I reached the summit. I started pulling, on the middle chain ring, but after a while dropped to the low one ( i have a touring rig remember ) and started spinning up the hill. Not terribly fast, but I didn’t know how I was gonna hold up later on in the ride, especially since I felt a bit out of shape to be doing a century. So I settled back for the climb and looked at the sights, about 3.5 miles into the climb when things started getting steeper, that fixed gear passed me again. It appears that I made it out of the rest stop before she did, she wasn’t even puffing up the hill just climbing. “Goodness gracious she’s in good shape”.

I made it to the top of the pass, refilled a bottle with some sort of supplement stuff from Hammer Nutrition and started back down. The down hill was fun and I was feeling great, I was over halfway and i was feeling pretty good, i remember thinking “well theride back will be a good solid ride, but it’s not gonna be too bad”. I hit the bottom of the hill and the bike pointed north and WHAM!, headwind ( 10-20mph ).

I pulled into the rest stop, refilled, had a snack and got back on the road, for the next 27 miles I battled that headwind. It was brutal, every time i got to the top of a hill and thought i’d get a nice rest going down the other side, it wasn’t to be I had to pedal downhill to make any headway. I just couldn’t get a head of steam going and just spent most of the time watching for the next hour marker so I could get off the bike and take a break.

When I finally pulled into the final rest stop, I had a 1/2″ of water in my last water bottle, and was completely wiped out. I had a peanut butter sandwich, a coke, and drank a bunch of water. I was dehydrated and feeling the workout the wind had just given me. The worst part, some smartass was flying a kite at Badwater, so I knew there was no respite on the final leg of the ride. 18 more miles of wind to go.
After a 1/2 hour rest, and my first pee break of the day ( see, it’s a dry place ) I headed out. At this point it was just stubborness that kept me going, the damned wind knew I wasn’t prepared for this ride, and was going to punish me the whole way back. Head down, and my jaw set, I eked out mile after mile, the views sucked now, no more shadows, it was just the same view mile after mile. In the desert you can see the road 10 miles away..it just keeps GOING AND GOING AND GOING…

I finally made it to the only stop sign in the entire 105 miles of the course, and promptly ran it, as I made a left turn towards the finish line. 1/3 mile later I see my mom, dad and Amy standing alongside the finish line waiting for me. I went and checked in, grabbed a couple of cokes and some oranges and headed back to the room for a shower and a change of clothes.

My Dad asked me that night at dinner, “you gonna do this ride again?”..”I donno, i’d like them to schedule the ride without a howling wind next time”.