We played a 5-some at the San Jose Municipal Golf Course yesterday. Ugh it was ugly. Very bad off the tee, not too good with the irons, short game wasn’t terrible, but very bad putting. I did come in 3rd with the final score being Alec 85, Kojo 110, Me 119, Dave 121, and Mike 134 but I should’ve done much better. We were playing off the womens tees and moving pretty quickly so we didn’t have our usual problem of playing too slow. Alec shot one of the best rounds of his life on a pretty easy course. With the handicapping we gave, Alec and Dave played very well and I played very poorly.

These links stolen from other places(as most good viral links are). The amount that you laugh at these is directly proportional to your geekiness. “The Gamers” is long, about 30 mins iirc.

• WW2 chat as a real time strategy game
• Leeroy Jenkins
• The Gamers(long).

I like systems architectures where all you need to do to increase your throughput is add in a few new machines. That’s pretty much the definition of scalability. How do you get there? Make your system stateless and distributed. That’s pretty hard, but if you can do it, you’ll be rewarded with not only scalability, but also greatly simplified redundancy, recovery, and systems management. When you make a system stateless and distributed the crash of one component isn’t a problem, just start up another copy of it somewhere else and point all your systems to it. Now most applications can’t be totally stateless, that’s why there are file systems and databases of course. Making things stateless is also simpler for developers who want to interface with your systems. As your architecture matures and stabilizes it’s ok to add in more and more state because you’ll know where the problems are. HTTP is a good example of how things progress. It was originally stateless and that made the paradigm simple to build web applications. As it stabilized and evolved they were able to add more state information in it and finally people were able to develop monitoring and inspection tools. If only all designs could grow as well as HTTP has.

One thing that is great about Java has nothing to do with the language. The J2EE environment provides a standard framework so that all application server developers can create standard servers. If you correctly create your application as a webapp you can just add one file to the proper directory and everything should run. It’s not always that simple, but it often can be if you invest a bit of time to package your application appropriately. As the guy who does both sysadmin work and development work, I know what a great thing it is when deployment is a one step process. It sounds like a small thing, but it’s not. Every action you have to do manually multiplies your chances for a mistake.

Tracy has done a remarkable job of scoring free maternity and baby stuff from other people who have recently had babies. So thanks to everyone who has donated stuff. We have picked just the right time to have a child because we can inherit a bunch of baby odds and ends from others who are just getting rid of theirs. It feels like the maternity clothes market is such a great thing to the clothing industry. What more could they ask for than for their clothes to be unwearable after 9 months. Among the things Tracy has acquired include a bassinet, a small baby car seat, a half dozen baby toys, a few sets of maternity clothes and some miscellaneous odds and ends. My role in all of this is to just quietly agree and say “Yes dear” whenever she asks me to do something for her. It’s a tradeoff that I’m happy to make.

There are so many baby decisions to make. Midwife or no. Drugs or no. Breast feeding or no. Nanny or daycare or neither. I hope baby appreciates all these things when s/he gets old enough. They say pimpin’ ain’t easy, well having a baby isn’t either.

I was talking with my friend Sam yesterday. He works on the AI for DD Poker. He had some interesting things to say. He says their main competitor is Poker Academy, because both DD Poker and Poker Academy are designed to make you play better. (There are a bunch of “Entertainment” type of poker programs which have fancy graphics and sound, but generally terrible computer play.) He had some interesting things to say. His analysis of the Poker Academy stuff was that it played a better mathematically correct game, but there were some flaws. Fundamentally, Poker Academy doesn’t teach you to play better against people, only mathematically correct bots. DD Poker on the other hand has options that mimic real life play, like going on tilt after a bad beat and a tendency to chase draws. Of course if you are very bad, both DD Poker and Poker Academy will help your game. But DD Poker is designed to help you play better NLHE tournaments against real players.
Another thing that Sam was proud of about DD Poker is that it gives better reasoning behind the advice it gives to players. While Poker Academy can tell you to call, bet or fold, DD Poker can go one step beyond and tell you what factors it is using make its decision. Sam’s philosophy was that he would rather have even bad decisions with the logic behind them rather than just the raw advice. Because poker is so situational there is rarely an absolutely right answer. This lets the player reject advice when the situation warrants it.

Ugh. I’m getting sick I think. Not enough sleep, lots of work, no exercise, bad diet, and sleeping with the window open made me vulnerable to a cold I think.

A couple of months ago I posted about hot chicks that I liked. I like to make fun of Tracy because she has a thing for Andy Roddick. I actually think she’s outgrown it, but it’s good fun anyways. But she wondered what guys I thought were hot. So in no particular order, I thought of: Brad Pitt, Pierce Brosnan, Jude Law. Here’s my question, based on the hot chicks I blogged about earlier, would you have guessed who I think is a hot guy?

Just the other day I was complaining that I hate all front end software developer tools. JSPs have good back end integration but really are a severe pain to develop. PHP is the opposite, it is the best HTML templating system, but when you try to integrate it with other back end systems, it can really suck because it does a terrible job of promoting object oriented and modular design.

Then today I came across a news story telling how IBM has open sourced Lazslo. Now I had never heard of Lazslo, so I decided to check it out. I’m impressed with what it can do. It’s a toolset made with server side java(it requires a servlet container) for building rich client side web applications. Sort of like other AJAX. So I downloaded a copy and tried it out for just a few minutes. I don’t generally do much front end work, but this is the kind of tool that might get me interested in doing it. It’s got an architecture that makes sense to me and with IBM’s support could be a popular new environment that helps developers get the more impressive UI without all the trouble of writing raw AJAX stuff by hand.

Laszlo won’t replace JSP and PHP because it serves a different purpose, but it’s a step in the right direction and maybe it will make me enjoy UI work again.

Become.com has just had a major release with our new shopping engine. We have our site divided into the research engine and the shop engine. Go check it out and tell me what you think of it. We are building up our merchant base, so the number of items will grow rapidly as it starts to get better press coverage.

Being a member of Moveon sort of defines me as a card carrying liberal.(Sort of like being a member of the ACLU used to do). I get regular bulletins on what Moveon is doing and what issues they want to use to fight the Bush administration. But I have to say, the organization looks increasingly desperate and more and more like a fringe group. It feels like they still haven’t accepted the political realities of the last election and are trying to rally their supporters around causes that are nearly hopeless or make them look a little too far left to get taken seriously. I think they need to take stock of what they are doing and try to pick some fights they can actually win, rather than a simple “Bush is bad, fight everything he does” sort of mentality.