Free Comic Book Day
It's Free Comic Book Day! Go get some.
It's Free Comic Book Day! Go get some.
Just got back from the a screening of Iron Man, graciously sponsored by TechCrunch. Despite the drama associated with the screening, everything went smoothly. (Got to say I appreciate Ira Rubenstein's use of the whole fiasco to plug Secret Invasion though.)
I only got into Iron Man and the Avengers in general relatively recently, right around the time Avengers Disassembled, so I don't have the full history down. (For instance, I have no idea who Pepper Pots is, and so don't know how Gwyneth did in the roll.) In general, I thought it was a pretty fun movie, a really good start for the the summer blockbuster season. Robert Downey, Jr. as expected was a slam dunk as Tony Stark, I just hope the inevitable sequel will feature more of womanizing Tony Stark, and not the enamored Tony Stark. To me the highlight was the pilot flight of the mark 2 suit, it really got to the heart of the spandex (*ahem* iron) superhero fantasy realization. It was an exhilarating ride that was full of joy at just the act of flying, that is sure to hook any kid into the series.
Looks like this list will get a lot shorter very soon. The Exterminators is canceled, it just seems like this quirky book never found it's audience. (It only found me for the last 4 issues or so.) Shadowpact is also done, which I always thought was a fun book. Deadpool and Cable is also done, since Cable moved off to his own title. I personally love the Deadpool character, and even though I feel like it's never been written as well as Joe Kelly did in his solo title, I'll still miss him. Inexplicably, Crossing Midnight also never found a strong following so it's also canceled. Checkmate which is perennially on this list is also losing it's fine writer Ed Brubaker. We'll see how his replacement does.
With no further ado:
http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/12431.html
111. Checkmate
118. Ex Machina
121. Shadowpact
123. Simon Dark
125. Invincible
134. Young Liars
137. Northlanders - At WonderCon Brian Wood told us that this series would really start moving at #4. He was right, it finally makes my list.
149. Grendel Behold Devil
159. 100 Bullets
162. DMZ
196. Scalped
204. Exterminators
215. Vinyl Underground
232. Fear Agent
236. Crossing Midnight
246. Casanova
257. Transhuman
Right now I'm just working off the Techcruch article about Google App Engine, but hopefully I'll score a developer account and I'll update the article. First of all, we (at work) are users and huge fans of Amazon AWS (even considering today's EC2 outage). I think our experiences were pretty typical for a startup, where we sort built bits and pieces of the app, and slowly and hesitantly dipped our toes in the cloud. Now even though major parts of the system are built on top of it, it's still somewhat loosely integrated, and we could definitely move off if it becomes necessary or economical. And since EC2 just provides you with a linux image is also infinitely flexible, able to process backend logs with ruby, serve static content with nginx, load test using siege, monitor machines with nagios, whatever you need it to do.
Google on the the other hand is offering a way to run scalable web apps... written in Python. While I'm sure it will scale like the dickens, the downsides seem to big. Depending on the implementation, I fear that there will too much application lock in, particularly if you have to code to a particular API. I think this is a reason why I don't really hear so much about GWT anymore, and more about Prototype/jQuery/YUI/ext. While a pain, you can move from one javascript library to another, but you got no where else to go from GWT.
It would take a lot of faith to just hand over your entire operations to Google, and pray that you will never have to move off of them. They are suggesting that authentication, storage, database (which as of yet doesn't have a production ready alternative) would all be under their control. I have a feeling that a lot of companies that are trying to build the hugely trafficked websites that would fully need the scaling of BigTable and GFS would chafe under the Google collar with that (we certainly would.)
The ecology of AWS actually thrives from it's decoupled nature. Amazon just gives you the building blocks and the incentive (e.g. free bandwidth between EC2 and S3), to use them together, and ended up with community supported tools to get around it's lacks. For instance, in S3 you can't copy or move objects, voila, Mitch whips up an EC2 image to do just that. Last time I checked there were about 4 solutions (of varying prices and quality) to mount S3 buckets as a filesystem.
Depending on pricing, I do think it will be a boon to the long tail of Python web application developers, somewhat counter-intuitively, since it seems to be being sold on it's scaling. I'm sure I'll play around with it for simple projects, all the while bemoaning the fact that I can't be using Ruby.
Updated (9:21pm) - Wow, remind not to go to the bathroom, I was reloading the page till 9:05 with nothing up and it's already filled up 15 minutes later, sigh.
Update 2 (10:43pm) - Got a nice email from Google saying that my account was activated.
List a bigger this week, partly because I was able to catch up on some reading, and partly because the launch of new good titles, and partly because some of these titles didn't get published on January.
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/12242.html
107. Criminal 2
117. Checkmate
125. Ex Machina
128. Simon Dark
131. Shadowpact
137. Invincible
153. Grendel Behold The Devil
158. 100 Bullets
161. DMZ
163. Doktor Sleepless
170. Gravel
194. Deathblow
198. Scalped
200. Exterminators
205. Vinyl Underground
221. Crossing Midnight
240. Narcopolis
Giao sent this to me, and it's so good I had to throw it on the blog: The Subprime Primer
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/12096.html
Okay, small change of format, I'm just going to list all the comics above 100 that I'm digging on (instead of trying to filter them out by how long they've been around)
109. Fell
121. Checkmate
126. Simon Dark
129. Black Summer
131. Shadowpact
153. 100 Bullets
162. Docktor Sleepless
193. Exterminators - I admit I'm way late to the game on this one, but I gobbled up the last couple years over a weekend, and it's great.
195. Scalped
209. Vinyl Underground
228. Crossing Midnight
Recently I needed position:fixed, and learned like all fledgling HTML designers, that It doesn't work in IE6. I, of course, turned to the mighty Google for my solutions, and though there were many, and helpful none of them quite fit my situation. This is a piece of content that would be inserted into an arbitrary page using only javascript. (Think widget). This means that amongst other things, I couldn't use IE css expressions or IE conditional comments. I also couldn't control whether or not the browser was rendering in Quirks mode or not. I also ended up using various object detection techniques to avoid using any user agent sniffing. Anyway, here's what I came up with.
if (!window.XMLHttpRequest && target_document.compatMode=='CSS1Compat') {
// IE 6 strict
div.style.position='absolute';
div.style.height = target_document.documentElement.offsetHeight;
id = target.setInterval(function () {
div.style.top = target_document.documentElement.scrollTop;
div.style.height = target_document.documentElement.offsetHeight;
}, 100);
}
} else if(!window.XMLHttpRequest || (target_document.expando && target_document.compatMode=='BackCompat')) {
// IE 6/7 quirks
div.style.position='absolute';
div.style.height = '100%';
id = target.setInterval(function () {
div.style.top = target_document.body.scrollTop;
}, 100);
}
} else {
div.style.position='fixed';
div.style.height = '100%';
}
ok, I'm sold on unit testing.
Initially I didn't see the value in it - why build all these stupid little tests when integration is where we have our problems? Isn't it costly to maintain these things? Don't you test your code anyway, before committing it?
I don't think the benefit is so much in creating flawless systems, but in speeding up development time by forcing you to code better:
1. In order to test things, you've got to write your stuff to be as small and independent of other pieces of code as possible. One of the worst things I've seen people do these days is have a piece of code that just reaches out all over the entire codebase to perform some operation, and the dependencies are hardcoded in private methods or references. It's a nightmare to maintain all the little hidden dependencies, but if you code for unit tests, you tend to avoid that.
2. Having the unit test framework speeds up time to fix things, because it gives you a sort of pre-development environment where you can run little snippets of code before having to deploy somewhere. How much time have I wasted putting in a _tiny_ fix, then deploying it to my local app container, then realizing the app container isn't configured properly, then fixing that and redeploying, then trying to tweak the environment to make that one condition that'll trigger my fix occur, e.t.c. Being able to right click and run the unit tests makes little changes that much easier.
I haven't had experience with trying to maintain a big set of unit tests yet, nor have I run tools to monitor test coverage. I'll get there eventually. Baby steps.
Here's the upgrade my Tivo needs: the ability to record _everything all the time_.
Maybe one box can't do it, but what if my Tivo records one station all the time, and my buddy records another station all the time. Coordinate this through some social network API, and I could be part of a network of people that record all the TV stations I'd be interested in all the time.
If each of those Tivos ran a bittorrent server on them, all of us could watch just about any show any time.
.. and the network wouldn't have to be the size of, say, Pirate Bay, to be useful, so you wouldn't have the *AA'ss down your back.
neato.
