Password Generator

My older brother first introduced me to the idea of a pronounceable password generator. At one point I took a look at the one available here., and at one point I downloaded the C++ version to try and reverse engineer the generator. Well, fast forward to tonight when I had the opportunity to do so from the JavaScript version into Python. I suspect my engineering may not be quite so perfect, as almost all of my generated PWs start with the letter 'a'. Of course it may be a function of the random number generator. As far as programs go, it is actually fairly simple - the complexity is really in the trigram matrix - which is huge, accounting for about 620 lines. Aha! I found the issue - I was seeding with 12579.0 instead of 125729.0, whoops!

So now it works. Sweet action.

You can see the source here.

Review - Buying a Home: The Missing Manual

Buying a Home: The Missing Manual

by Nancy Conner

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Are you thinking about buying a home? Then this book is for you! Buying a Home: The Missing Manual walks you through everything you need to know about the process of purchasing a home, from selecting a real estate agent, to closing (and even a little beyond). Having started the process of buying a home a few times before, I can honestly say I wish I had this book back then. I would have avoided some of the pitfalls that plagued both of my experiences. I didn't even know the questions to ask, and Buying a Home gave me questions to ask and answers to some questions I didn't even know to ask.

I seriously recommend this book to anyone who is contemplating home ownership - whether you get the digital or dead tree version, if you think you will buy a home in the future, Buying a Home: The Missing Manual is a wise investment.

Winamp and XMMS Alternative

Do you use Linux? When you were on Windows, did you love the classic Winamp? Are the hokeys z,x,c,v,b ingrained in your soul? Did you think XMMS was a great Winamp replacement? If so, you'll probably love Audacious media player. It's simple, basic, and is everything you loved about Winamp - the simple interface, the hotkeys... it's an mp3 player that plays mp3s, not a super-ultra-megazord-multimedia station. I found my new toy.

Fun with Python

This is really pretty useless... but a great example of something awesome you can do with Python:

def factorial(n):
   n = abs(int(n))
   n = 1 if not n else n
   return reduce(lambda x,y: x*y, xrange(1, n+1))

It's a waste of time when the math module already contains math.factorial, but it just shows off some of the more esoteric features of Python.

Django

Django is a Python-based, Open-source web framework. And it's amazing. I'm currently going through the tutorial, which is fairly well written. There's nothing terribly amazing about the tutorial - it's not super entertaining, but it does present everything you need to get started working with Django, which is an amazing tool. To be fair I haven't worked with anything else like Zope or Twisted, so I don't know if they're any easier/more powerful.

However, Django seems to be real solid, and I'm liking it a lot. Plus did I mention it's free?

"Saying Goodbye"...

I died a little today when I learned that the Alliance disinterest has defeated the BrowncoatsGoogle Wave.

This makes me super sad, and I wish I could say I'm surprised, but I'm not. Here's why:

1) Awesome hype with too-long beta and too-few invites.

2) Little reason to switch.

First off, I love Google Wave. I was so stoked when they first released it, especially when I finally got my invite. Unfortunately I didn't get any invites initially. This was a problem because I couldn't share my excitement with any friends or family other than to say "This is so cool! ... but I don't have anyone I can use it with..." So that sucked. And when I did get my invites it was only about three of them. Sure, eventually they rolled out tons of invites, but it took a while to get everyone set up.

The biggest problem, however, is that there was really little reason to switch to wave. With GMail, it was compatible with your friends on Linux, Windows - whether they used Hotmail, Yahoo, Eudora, or Pine. But if you wanted to use Google Wave it meant anyone that you wanted to use Wave with had to switch. They had to switch from their email or their IM, and that was the killer. If my email works "okay", and my IM works perfectly well, why should I switch to Wave? For me, because it was awesome, but your average user isn't going to want to switch when everything else works well enough. If they wanted to have better adoption, they should have built-in the ability to send emails and/or IMs. And if they put a link at the end of the email, like "Try Google Wave", then it would have been great advertisement.

Unfortunately there was no such thing, and thus ends Wave, and that's sad.

RIP Google Wave.

Bad Design

This is just bad design. There are two types of buttons - the "normal" kind, and then the two rows on either side of the keypad. Those are also buttons, though you wouldn't know it at first.

It's just terrible.