Tokyo's Muslim

LOL: Implementing “Margins” on an old Docomo phone.

Jawaad — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 04:40:00 +0000

Docomo phones don’t recognize margins and are irritating as hell to program for.

The odd thing is that they do recognize table widths. As a result, you can make the following horrible code (that “DOEZ THE JOB”)

(whatever)

Hey don’t look at me; I haven’t used Tables since y2k.

Email Validation in Google App Engine

Jawaad — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:20:26 +0000

My current project is building a mobile website for Japanese cellphones that can stand about 10-20k hits within an hour without getting completely trashed. Admittedly, this isn’t exactly the easiest thing in the world to do, but Google App engine makes it a lot easier. In the process, I had to brush up on my Python, and in particular, email validation.

The obvious way to deal with email validation is to use google’s “mail.is_email_valid” function. Unfortunately, this seems to return true as long as you have a string, as it mentions on Aral Balkan’s helpful post on the subject. I had to dig a little more to find out how to use mail_re; here’s the code for anyone curious.

from django.core.validators import email_re

print (email_re.match(‘test_email@fakedomain.com’) != None)

print (email_re.match(‘bademail’) != None)

Seems to work properly.

N00b problems with Appengine

Jawaad — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:43:21 +0000

This problem was stupid, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who is going to run into it

Status: 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: no-cache
Expires: Fri, 01 Jan 1990 00:00:00 GMT
Content-Length: 3

If you are getting the above message after the output you intended, it is because you are using “print” instead of “self.response.out.write”.

The C10k problem.

Jawaad — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 07:19:04 +0000

Dealing with a new class of problem :/ How to deal with 10k connections simultaneously? (Google app engine is looking more and more attractive.)

Logorama kicks ass.

Jawaad — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:58:40 +0000

I’ve been reading too much.

Jawaad — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:09:20 +0000

I was out bicycling around 1 AM to return a video before paying a late fee, and the only thing I could think was about how I could use the half crooked smile appearance of the moon as a literary allusion. I blame the books I’ve been reading lately. Ever since the “Classics” application on the iPhone was made free, I’ve read 4 books; this is in less than a week, and despite me being overwhelmed with work.

For record’s sake, the four were “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” by Edwin Abbott Abbott, “The Jungle Book” by Rudyard Kipling and “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll. I gave up on Alice half way through, since it was too irritating to read it on the iPhone screen, but the other three were fantastic. I think The Art of War worked quite well with the iphone, since the small parables seemed to flow well from page to page.

Not impressed by the iPad

Jawaad — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:09:00 +0000

The iPad is the horrible Nintendo “Total lockdown” theory brought to proper computers.

I don’t look forward to a future where I can’t play around with my own machine. Is it too much to ask for?

–

After some more thinking, the device suddenly becomes far more interesting. 10 hours of constant use? With a decent RSS reader app, it would be the perfect device to keep me up to date on the train. Sign me up – potentially.

Saw Avatar Yesterday

Jawaad — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 07:02:15 +0000

Watched Avatar yesterday with the gf in Shinjuku. A few thoughts ran through my mind.

Hayao Miyazaki is a hack. I’ve never seen any of the later’s movies that came close in any sense; any of his movies that are conceptually similar (Mononoke Hime, Nausicaa) suffer from muddled vision and the incapability of forming an opinion. None of Miyazaki’s movies have ever been entertaining AND thought-provoking – it’s usually one or the other. (I think the difference between Mononoke Hime and Avatar represent the difference between Japan and America, but that’s another story). Maybe it is just the fact that Miyazaki has never done anything but create, while Cameroon was a truck driver and a working man before he started his career.
2000 yen (24-25$) for a ticket? Ouch. My friend Usmaan reminded me that I could have purchased the tickets from one of those ticket re-sellers around Shinjuku, but what can you do?
Being able to walk home from a late show in Shinjuku is one of the coolest benefits to living in Tokyo.
The next 10 years will see movie producers concentrating on gimmicks like 3D to keep people coming to theaters. That’s depressing.
Isn’t the reasoning used for stripping Pandora the same as outsourcing manufacturing to countries without environmental laws?
“Sent back to their dying world” – ouch.

Glad I saw it, too bad I had to pay almost 55$ (if we include popcorn, 2 tickets and a coke)

Transformers: War for Cybertron for PS3?

Jawaad — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:35:35 +0000

Looks like a new wargame for PS3 coming out next year by Activision. This actually looks quite good; I wonder if Hasbro is being influenced by Halo, whose toys apparently sold quite well? That’s what the speculation is like at the source (TFW2005.com).

It might be the end of terrible TF games if true; video gaming as an equal of animation (whereas it has been an afterthought until now).

The Optimus design is a nice break from those awful/busy movie designs. It seems (at least somewhat) based on TF: War Within Optimus Prime.

Array_walk and the userdata variable.

Jawaad — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 06:25:36 +0000

I have a horrible issue with the userdata variable. As it is defined, it does not accept something by reference, leaving me only capable of modifying the original array that I pass to it.

Previously you could have done this:

array_walk($owners, 'OwnerOutput::generate_owner_list', &$output)

array_walk($owners, 'OwnerOutput::generate_owner_list', array(&array_walk($owners, 'OwnerOutput::generate_owner_list', array(&$output));

Unfortunately, this does not work anymore. I understand that I can simply modify owners if I wanted to, but I’d much rather keep the text output in $output and owners in $owners.

The solution to this is absurd, but it works:

array_walk($owners, 'OwnerOutput::generate_owner_list', array(&$output));

You need to modify the generate_owner_list function, but otherwise this works and the output is all in the right place.