The Porter Method

Another of my favorite radio shows is the Clark Howard Show out of WSB in Atlanta, GA. Clark Howard provides daily consumer advice about a range of topics mostly dealing with personal finance. His motto is “To Help You Save More, Spend Less, And Avoid Getting Ripped Off”. Now that is a show I can get behind.

Clark posts a daily recap on his site with the high points of some of the topics covered and also some of the helpful websites mentioned. I love reading the recaps, but these days if it doesn’t come through an RSS feed. I do not read it. Thus I have hacked together a Ruby script to create such a feed. The feed is located here:

http://www.theportermethod.com/clarkhoward/index.rss

If you would like to check out the Ruby script itself, it is located here: clarkhowardfeed.rb

If anyone that works with Clark Howard is interested in hosting this feed themselves, I would be more than happy to FTP it to the official Clark Howard site nightly when it is generated. Would save me bandwidth and hopefully enlighten more people to the wonders of RSS.

Don and Mike Show RSS Feed Update: I have fixed the Don and Mike Show RSS Feed, so it should function again. The only change is that due to the new site using the Wimpy audio player to host the MP3’s of the audio recaps, the feed no longer contains these recaps. This is because the audio files no longer follow a standard naming convention based on the date. Now they include the date and arbitrary text describing the content. Unfortunately all of this information is locked up inside the Wimply Flash Player on the site, so I cannot scrape it to include it. If this changes in the future I will let you know.

I have written a script to generate an RSS feed of the Daily Recaps and Audio Recaps for the Don and Mike Radio Show. The feed can be found here:

http://www.theportermethod.com/donandmike/index.rss

I have been toying with the idea of creating an unofficial feed for some time. I started out planning to create a script in PHP and did some experimenting with the libraries required to do screen scraping in PHP. That fell by the wayside and this weekend after a conversation with some friends I decided to go a different route. Enter the language Ruby. You have probably heard about Ruby these days from the excitement surrounding the web framework Ruby On Rails. My site is hosted by TextDrive which provides full support for Ruby (and Rails also) so this was a viable option. And this script provided a great opportunity for me to dive into the language.

After a little perusing of some tutorials and docs and a bit of hacking, I produced a working script that generates an RSS feed for the great Don and Mike Show. Since this could preclude you from visiting their site directly, I have added links at the bottom of each entry in the feed for their streaming Internet feed, a link to download their podcasts from iTunes, a link to shop for swag from their store, and of course a link to Hank’s Look-around Cafe (also known as O’Meara’s).

The Ruby script I wrote that generates the rss file is available here: donandmikefeed.rb

It is my first Ruby script and could no doubt be dramatically improved (and will be as a get the hang of some of the fancy dynamic features in the Ruby language) so be gentle with your evaluations. Feel free to comment here or mail me with any feedback.

Also, anyone associated with the show that would like access to this script or file, just let me know. I would be glad to have it FTP’d nightly to your server so it could be hosted as the official feed (and save me some bandwidth potentially).

I know this will come as a grand shock considering the whole domestic spying incident of late (sarcasm implied), but the Executive branch doesn’t have to obey laws. They are clearly optional.

While the domestic spying angers me greatly, this one is even more overt and really makes me want to scream.

From Bruce Schneier’s blog and full story here:

Perspective: E-tracking through your cell phone

The gist is that your cellphone’s location is fair game to law enforcement at all times without any probable cause even though when lobbying for the passage of the bill in 1994, FBI Director Louis Freeh ensured the Senate that the bill would not be used for these purposes.

I must admit that of late I have become so disillusioned with our political system. The best we can hope for is gridlock in the Legislative branch. Regardless of which team in our Two-Party system has the majority, all they do is serve special interests, buy votes, get richer themselves, and pretty well screw things up. I hope everyone realizes that not one person that is in public office and has been re-elected at least once has not made deals which compromise their integrity. The only honest ones didn’t get re-elected when they refused to play ball. (Didn’t you ever wonder why people raise and spend Millions and Millions of dollars to get someone else a $400,000/year job?)

Mid-year elections are coming up for Congress. Vote wisely. Gridlock is Good. And make your voice heard to your elected officials by writing to them. They don’t really care what you think, but at least you can say you expressed your opinion. (Congress.org is good site that lets you easily write to them online)

Most of the developers I know work much better with soothing tunes playing in the background or through some good headphones. Now this may be because programmers are artists and artists appreciate good music, but it may also be because most of us work in loud cubicle environments that are conducive for many things but deep concentration is not one of them. Therefore music helps drown out other people’s conversations, coughs, sneezes, moving around sounds, tapping on their desks, phone calls from home, etc., etc.

Now I personally have many different moods I go through while writing code and the style of music I want to listen to also changes. Often times I may get bored with my personal collection of music and really desire new music that is in the same style as what I’m listening to…but different.

Well if you feel the same way, you are in great luck. There is an online service call Pandora that does this exactly. You browse to their site, login, enter a group or song that you like and Pandora will play songs from the selected artist and also songs that it thinks are similar. Very cool app. It is a flash based app that runs in the browser but overall it is pretty good. The original intention was to charge a minimal yearly fee, but that seemed to go out the window in lieu of a banner add on the site. Either way good music abounds.

Check it out, you may find some new bands that you never new existed (I know I have). There are also other services out there that are similar. One that comes to mind is Last.FM. So take one or both of these for a a spin and see what you think.

Most tech folks have heard of a website called Slashdot where stories are submitted, rated, and discussed by readers. While this site has been around for many years, most agreed that it was an example of awful web design and color combinations and not really laid out very well at all, but it was all we had so we tolerated it.

Well, there are a couple of new players in the game that deserve a look. The first called Memeorandum comes in two flavors: tech.memeorandum and politics memorandum. This site aquires and ranks stories based on how many people are linking to them in the blogs. This is one of the great Scoble’s favorite sites, but I’m not much of a fan.

Following Memeorandum is a site that is really heating things up called Digg which was created by TechTV’s former persona Kevin Rose (who I really couldn’t stand on-air, but at least his code is quite tolerable). This site allows registered users to submit stories to Digg and they are then ranked based on how many submission are received. It has a very clean layout and simple comment system and seems to be what Slashdot should have been for so many years. I usually find that by reading Digg I’ve already read stories days before they appear on Slashdot or Memeorandum.

Update: Just saw an article on Digg that gives the credit for the look and feel to a redesign by SilverOrange.

The last is a small startup that is being funded by LISP proponent Paul Graham’s venture arm Y Combinator which is called Reddit. Reddit is even cleaner than Digg but appears to function on a similar premise. This one really has me captivated. The variety of content available here is amazing. These guys have a blog which is quite interesting (such as reading why they rewrote Reddit changing from LISP to Python, I can only imagine that conversation with Mr. Graham). I geeked out for quite a few hours this past Monday reading through the posts. I highly recommend checking it out. Don’t get scared off if you run across some growing pains (I have seen the site offline a couple of times). Just remember they are new and growing and it is to be expected.

If you know of any other sites like these that you enjoy, please leave a comment and share them.

Update: Scoble just pointed out a slew of similar sites that I was unaware of: Chuquet, Blogniscient, Tailrank, Megite

My first article has been published in the November issue of the PowerBuilder Developer’s Journal. A link to a PDF of the article is below:

So now I can add Doug Porter published author to my list of accomplishments. It is really exciting to see my name in the actual print version. Well worth the time involved in writing the article. I’m currently working on a followup article on XML parsing that will hopefully appear in a future issue.

The publisher of PBDJ is Sys-Con Media which also publishes pretty much any other magazine that ends in “Developer’s Journal”, so I’m hoping to also contribute some article ideas to Java Developer’s Journal and see what happens (maybe related to some stuff I’m doing at work with BIRT and XML).

I have to thank the Editor-In-Chief of PBDJ, Bruce Armstrong, for helping me with some of the finer points of the article. Bruce is a very actice member of Team Sybase and does a great job giving back to the Sybase user community. You can usually find him (along with myself) hanging around the Sybase newsgroups.

Update: The article has now been posted to the PBDJ website here - Working with SOA & Web Services in PowerBuilder

Also here is my author page at the sys-con site and an rss feed for tracking any future articles.

Edge.org has posed an interesting question to some of the great minds (somehow I got left out) of the world and posted the results online.

What is your most dangerous idea?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Well worth reading through. Scroll down to where it says Contributors and that begins the responses. Ray Kurzweil has an intersting one dealing with longevity and nanotech. Most of the physicists seem to be devout atheists and write about how there is no God and all that is out there are atoms and quantum particles. But still some very thought provoking stuff.

And just so you don’t think that all physicists are atheists, here is an article by Paul Davies discussing where God fits into the picture.

Physics and the Mind of God: The Templeton Prize Address

And while we are talking about things that make you go hmmmm. Here is a free fiction e-book written by Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert guy) that poses some interesting ideas

God’s Debris

Joel Spolsky just put out another fantastic article. This time it is on The Perils of Java Schools. It talks about how the ease of use of Java (feature of the language) tends to not weed out those that don’t really have the mindset to be good computer scientists.

In part I do agree with this. I have seen this firsthand at the university I graduated from. I took a data structures course in C++ that was the most challenging course I have ever had. Lots of pointers, lots of crashing my development machine while incorrectly manipulating those pointers, lots of Big O Notation and efficiency talk. Good stuff, and it made me a better programmer through the experience.

Fast forward to today, and the department at that university has moved to eliminate data structures in C++ except for those doing a pure Computer Science path (versus the other two tracks in Information Systems and Information Technology which do a “data structures” course in Visual Basic).

While I love Java dearly (and am certified in it and use it daily in my day job), I agree that data structures in C or C++ is hard and necessary to weed out those that don’t belong in the field. I have a friend that worked in the department and taught the data structures course in C++. He caught an amazing amount of flack from the administrators for the drop and failure rate in this course. They viewed it as a bad thing, I think he was doing these kids a valuable service by making the course challenging (and fair I might add). He was also doing a great service for programmers as a whole. Nothing worse than second rate programmers watering down the quality and pay scale in our industry. Hurts us all in the long run. Things like this tend to highlight that higher education (like almost everything these days) is really a business at its core. The adminsitrators want warm bodies paying tuition for 4 to 5 years so they can pay salaries, get raises, and eventually retire. The focus isn’t always on education, lifelong learning, and achieving a well rounded intellect.

Check out the article and let me know what you think…

If you have every used the normal phone company or cell phone company 411 service for directory assistance, you were probably surprised when you received your bill to find out how much they charge for this simple convienence.

There is a new service available at 1-800-FREE-411 (1-800-373-3411) that gives you this service at no charge. All that is required is that you listen to a very short (10 seconds or so) ad related to the service itself or the business you may be inquiring about.

I have used this a couple of times and it is great. The computer uses voice recognition to interpret your response to questions about the listing (unfortunately for me, every time I try I end up speaking to a live operator, must be the ever so slight southern drawl), plays a short ad, and then gives you the number and connects you.

Their website is located here: Free411.com

This is an awesome number to remember for you cell phone users that don’t have a data plan that lets you Google for numbers from you phone.

In another assault on personal privacy, I just read about a plan to move towards using biometric identifiers for hotel room access over standard room keys. Read Hotel Card Keys Edge Toward Extinction. I had never thought much about biometric identifiers as security risks until recently. I figured unique to me as a person was a good thing, but after listening to Brandon McMillon speak on A Primer to Secure Coding (Parts 1 and 2) at the 2005 Alabama .Net Code Camp many good points about biometrics were raised.

1) In computer terms, a biometric reader (fingerprint, handprint, retina scan, etc) takes unique values from the physical attribute and converts it into a numeric value (we’ll call it a hash).

2) That hash is compared to what is stored in a database and if a match is found, then identification is verified

3) So, the validation system is only accepting a hash (generated by the machine that examines the biometric attribute) which is a number, and a certain type of reader will always generate the same hash value

4) If you somehow gain access to that number, you can always spoof the reader that generates that value to the authentication system (of course this does rely on being able to gain access to the intermediate system).

And then the real kicker that has made me anti-biometric (and didn’t I just read that United States Passports will start containing RFID chips, and probably personal info, maybe even biometric by October 2006). If someone compromises the hash and has access to the intermediary system…you can’t do anything to change your identifying information to restore security to the system. The manufacturer would have to change their hash algorithm. If a username or password is compromised, I can change those easily. Hard to change my fingerprints or retinas.

So hopefully, these hotels will have some backup authentication mechanism in place. It would seem they would have to. Big Rob brought up the point last night about people with no fingers. Can’t discriminate against them. I for one will refuse to stay at a hotel that demands biometrics. I just don’t trust the security of the systems.