A week or so ago I got a message from someone saying that they “get why I hate everyone…”. I can understand where the idea comes from that I hate everyone; even though it’s not really true, but I was more realistically thinking that this person was just being a smart ass. So I replied back with the fact that I was just giddy with anticipation to find out what insights this person had into my psyche. The person wrote back with the fact that they just got a glimpse of life through my rose colored glasses that I view things through, but no other details. Well, me with my charming wit and stellar personality couldn’t let someone think that it was just as simple as saying “I hate everyone”, because it is more complicated than that. To wit.
catchy music.
I now have this song stuck in my head. Everyone else should too.
music for a wednesday.
This is more of a test to see is the new install of WordPress inside of Quercus is working properly. For such a test, here is some Alabama Thunder Pussy.
django and sunone
I’ve been working on this basic little application for one of the businesses here at ${work}. It was one of those things that really didn’t need to be written in Java since it would never see the outside world and large amounts of traffic. It would be the perfect opportunity to try out one of those new fangled scripty framework things. You know like that Ruby and Rails stuff, only not. I went down the path of Python and Django just because a) it’s not RoR and b) Google App Engine looks like it’ll handle Python stuff pretty well if I ever wanted to mess around over there. I’m starting to ramble here, so back on point. Running the Django stand alone webserver thing is pretty good for development, but if I want to really drop it somewhere for folks to use it would be better as a FastCGI or mod_python setup. Since I run SunOne Webserver on my development machine the FastCGI approach is what I’m going to use.
Freemarker Macro
For those of you that use Freemarker for something here is a basic little macro that I created for something here at ${work}. It takes a chunk o’ text and if there is a http link in it
<#macro href status>
<#if status?contains("http")>
<#assign start = status?index_of("http")>
<#assign end = status?index_of(" ", start)>
<#if end == -1>
<#assign end = status?length>
<#assign url = status?substring(start, end)>
<#assign new = "<a href='${url}' target='_new'>${url}">
${status?replace(url, new)}
<#else>
${status}
</#macro>
I’m actually surprised when I used The Google there aren’t more Freemarker macros out in the wild.
Solr on Sun One Webserver
For a project that I’m messing with here at work the request has been made to add in search capabilities (along with a few other things) to it. The first choice of course is to use Lucene and beat it with a hammer to get it to work the way you want it to. I could have done this, but the application has multiple parts to it running on different machines and some of them will need to feed data in and other will make the search queries. I didn’t really want to also have to write all the interfaces for the various bits and pieces to talk to the search engine. Where is the fun in that these days. Looking around a little more I found Solr which is built on top of Lucene and seems to do exactly what I want.
religion and tithing
A bunch of folks I know got into a conversation about religion today since it’s Good Friday. The conversation, well let’s just say it’s probably not suitable to reproduce much of the conversation in any sort of print medium. 
That being said there was talk about tithing and how much the various religious sects expect their sheep to hand over. Of course being a Pastafarian I was wondering something. It doesn’t seem as if the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster has a rule on tithing anywhere. Does the religion support such a thing or is it upon the individual member to decide what is a proper tithe to support the needs of the FSM. Better yet, is putting money in the garters of strippers a valid form of tithing to he who has touched me with his noodley appendage?
the roomba
I purchased a Roomba from the iRobot corporation a while ago. Why did I go and get me a robot vacuum cleaner? Why shouldn’t I? I mean I’m a geek and like gadgets and gizmos, so why not a robot vacuum cleaner. When the thing first showed up of course it came out of the package and I started pressing buttons on it. The little demo was rather lame, so let’s go ahead and press the big “Clean” button.