The Iranian government has blocked access to Facebook. This in the run up to its June 12 presidential elections.
The blessing hiding behind the headline to this story is that this action boldly demonstrates just how much Ahmadinejad’s administration fears the thought of what may be possible if its governed citizens have the opportunity to communicate with each other in such a public and open forum.
Good luck ousting the douche bag, Iran.
General Thoughts elections, Facebook, Iran, politics, wtf
I’m so excited about this, I couldn’t wait to post about it before diving in. I present proudly to you Data.gov.
From the site’s home page:
The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often.
Thank you, Obama Administration, for sincerely treating federal data as belonging to the People.
Check it out, Linking Out data.gov, government, Obama, web service, wow
I broke down and hacked my MIE. But just a teeny bit, though: I simply installed the Flock browser and added it to the application launcher.
I needed to know it could be done.
Having satisfied my need to see the proof-of-concept, I intend to return to using the non-hacked configuration (by disabling what I’ve done) for a little while longer, while I complete a review period during which I use the computer with only the applications found on the default system.
That said, I will mention that am rather pleased with the initial results of my efforts in hacking this thing.
Once I’m done assessing its performance and capability as configured in its “out-of-the-box” mode, I intend to hack the hell out of MIE. Maybe I’ll even manage to fix the damned issue I’m encountering with the Mail widget on the home screen that HP’s customer support facilities have utterly failed at helping me resolve… but I’ll get into the saga of HP’s epic failures at customer support in a future post.
Read more…
General Thoughts, Tutorials Flock, hacking, howto, HP Mini, Linux, MIE, tutorial
I’ve recently been working on Symfony / Propel projects that deal with particularly large data sets. In such cases, Propel’s documentation recommends a “lazy hydration” approach.
This “lazy hydration” of Propel’s looks like this:
[#!php]
// query all the author entities as a Creole ResultSet
$rs = AuthorPeer::doSelectRS( new Criteria() );
while( $rs->next() )
{
$author = new Author();
$author->hydrate( $rs );
echo "{$author->getLastName()}, {$author->getFirstName()}";
}
The code above does the following:
- it queries the database for all records in the
author table, and loads it into a Creole ResultSet object.
- enters a loop, iterating over each result (ie, table row) in the
ResultSet, and with each of its records, it:
- creates a new, empty Author object
- hydrates the empty object with the data in the
ResultSet‘s current row
- writes the author’s last and first name to the output buffer
In this way, only one Author instance is in use at any given time. Each iteration discards the previous instance and creates a new one.
But I hate it — it’s ugly and unwieldy.
This overt use of the ResultSet object is an awkward practice when using an ORM. The primary design goal of ORMs is to allow the developer to work at a higher level of abstraction than SQL queries and database result sets.
So what should it look like? Read more…
Tutorials announcement, development, laziness, PHP, Propel, Symfony
I recently bought my very first non-Apple computer. It’s a netbook — the HP Mini 1120 NR. It comes in two flavors: Windows XP and Linux. The Linux is a heavily customized version of Ubuntu 8.04, which HP calls MIE (Mobile Internet Experience).
As a years-long Mac user (since 1991), the decision to purchase a non-Apple computer was not one I settled upon lightly.
Read more…
General Thoughts Apple, HP Mini, Linux, Mac OS X, MIE, netbook
