Conversations with Chat Bots

This is the log of a chat I had a few days ago and thought I should share it.  I didn't know people still chat botted.

shannon edwards:  heya!

jdodson:  hi.  im not sure i know a shannon edwards.

shannon edwards:  hey whats up? 22/F here. you?

jdodson:  86/M

shannon edwards:  hmm. have we chatted before?

jdodson:  of course we havent sweet chat bot.

shannon edwards:  NO i am not a bot

jdodson:  thats just what a bot would say.

shannon edwards:  Im not a freaking bot

jdodson:  again, more bot talk.  next you will tell me you dont love skynet.

shannon edwards:  A bot? not hardly babe. Are you?
shannon edwards disconnected


I want to warn everyone, it seemed to get angry when I mentioned skynet.  

It Is Time

After a few years of considering which smartphone to buy I have finally settled on which on would work best for me.  Avoiding all the unpleasantries of a flame war, ill list out my use cases for a phone and what I eventually decided on.

1.  It didn't want to pay for internet twice.  Yeah, this is the single area I compromised on.  I absolutely loathe the idea of paying for data, but I can't seem to find an American phone company willing to deal me a smartphone that comes with no data plan.  Yes I do have Wifi every where.  No I don't need to surf the web in the forest.  Isn't wifi around you 99.99% of the time too?  Plus Verizon charges $30 a month for 2G of bandwidth!  If you go $20 a month you get 300 Megs.  This is absofuckinglutley crazy-shit pricing.  I don't care if its mobile internet, its way too expensive. This is one of the reasons why when the current telcos get disrupted I will have a party in their dishonor.

2.  The phone should be fast.  Yep.  And I don't mean "sort of speedy after I sluggard through the menu and wait as an app loads."  I don't mean "quick as in it barely made it to the web browser and now its fast."   I mean "when I want to take a picture I can take it, not wait 45 seconds."  You know, like when I turn on my camera and its ready to go.  Like that fast.

I don't care if it has the ability to run 50,000 things in the background.  Seriously, I don't care.  I just want it to do what I want quickly.  The fact that the phone has 50 cores is irrelevant, if its sluggish its a waste of silicon.

3.  It has to have more than 8G of storage.    I think anything less is silly.  I know, its all cloud these days but its not all ubiquitous yet.  Someday sure, but until then, I need to store higher fidelity mp3, videocasts and pictures.  Sorry, I don't store everything in the cloud quite yet, perhaps not for quite sometimes as I want things to settle down first before choosing a provider to store my data.  For now storage is a cheaper and easier solution for me.

4.  Apps don't matter.  Netflix does, but if the phone didn't run it I would still be happy.  I know this is a huge smartphone marketing point, but 5 billion apps don't matter to me.  Having a few kicking around for fun, sure, but as a first class use case?  I don't really care.

5.  The Mobile Browser Has To Be World Class!

I like using the web.  Its in my DNA now, its just how I think.  Its odd to me you can't bookmark or link to apps.  I like sharing things.  I think the web is amazing and I love developing for it.  I love using it.  The mobile web is awesome and I require that any smartphone I get has to have a top notch browser.  I mean that if I start using the phone and the browser ain't great I will not purchase it.

6.  The Camera Must Be Fantastic.  One of the coolest creative elements of a smartphone is the camera.  Id like to take a ton of pictures on it so it needs to look good.  Bonus points for great HD video.

Without further ado, the winner of the 2011 year end "What smartphone will I buy challenge is?"

The iPhone 4S.

I know, sort of anti-climactic but in tech its like saying you are a Red Sox fan(sort of).  I mean... already certain tech people are applauding and some think I sold my soul to Uncle Joe.   In a way its sort of an odd choice as my primary desktop at home is Ubuntu.

It does seem like with my history of being pro Free Software Android is the best choice.  That is, until I tried them.  I mean its Free Software and its Google!  I think you can like even install whatever App you want on it!   And I run Ubuntu so its a match made in heaven!  The unfortunate reality is that I don't like using Android phones.  They seem sluggish.  The browser doesn't seem first class to me.  Some of them take way too long to load the camera.  Plus, and this is only of the last year or so, all the top line phones are way too big for my taste.  Its possible there is a great Android out there for me, I just haven't seen it yet.

All that said, its about time I got a smart phone and I am excited to own it.

Ruby 2011 Restrospective

I am a Development Lead that uses Ruby on Rails to do awesome things.  I really love the Ruby language and find Rails to be a great way to build web applications.  Its fun to learn about the edge of Rails and what new gems people are writing.

Ruby Inside recently posted an article about notable Ruby news in 2011.

A few things I found interesting from the article:

"Ruby Turns 18 - Matz had previously said Ruby was "born" on February 24, 1993, so "she" turned 18 years old in February. Yes, I'm sad enough to have had that in my calendar ever since I read about it ;-)"

"Netbeans Drops Ruby Support (And JRuby Picks It Up) - The Netbeans IDE team announced they were dropping support for the Ruby and Rails specific features in their popular IDE. Separately, though, Thomas Enebo of the JRuby core team said that they had spoken to the Netbeans team and they would be adopting the project."

I know this might seem odd, but I <3 Netbeans.  I think its a great IDE and I like using something that works on any platform.  I know VIM really well, I just don't find it satisfying enough to use full time.  

"DHH Offended by RSpec, Says Test::Unit is Just Great - Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson inadvertently kicked off a relatively interesting discussion about testing tools."

I totally agree that Test::Unit is just fine.  Ive seen RSpec, Ive heard people make some interesting points in favor of RSpec.  I just don't see any benefit based on the tests people write to RSpec.  

I use Cucumber and it is painful.  I'm not sure what is much better for BDD testing.  Thoughts?

"LivingSocial Acquires Ruby/Rails Consultancy InfoEther - This wasn't your typical boring acquisition. LivingSocial, a daily deals site, purchased InfoEther, the US's first significant Ruby consultancy and home to Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, Tom Copeland, and others. Ruby recruitment in overdrive!"

Awesome to see great people in the Ruby community doing well.  I went to Rails Conf and met Chad many moons ago.  I also bought his Rails Recipes book WAY back in the day.  

"Cucumber 1.0.0 Released - Continuing with the testing theme, Cucumber also hit a significant milestone in 2011."

Boy was that one difficult upgrade.

"Ruby's Creator, Matz, Joins Heroku - Surprise in the Ruby community as Yukihiro 'matz' Matsumoto took up a Chief Architect position with Heroku, the Salesforce-owned Ruby application hosting company."

<3 Heroku.  Its good to have a cloud company understand that a certain amount of service should be free and when you realize the value of it you pay for it.  Its a very equatable model.

"Rails 3.1.0 Released - A full year after Rails 3.0, Rails 3.1 was released to much fanfare, adding key features like the asset pipeline, roles, reversible migrations, jQuery as the new default JavaScript library, and a new focus on CoffeeScript. I explained the controversy behind some of the changes when they were announced back in April."

Using for some personal projects.  Its a really cool upgrade.  I don't find it too odd bouncing between Rails 3.0 and 3.1 at all.  

"Ryan Bates Unveils RailsCasts Pro - Ruby's most popular screencasting legend (other than Geoffrey Grosenbach, of course!) 'went pro' and started to charge for extra episodes of his popular weekly screencast series."

This was met with some un-positive vibes from some people that I work with.  I am happy Ryan is trying to get a few coins for RailsCasts.   Ive shown so many in meetings to convey a topic I really understand the value of them.  I hope he makes a mountain of diamonds off RailsCasts. 

Zelda with a Portal Gun

Been a bit since the last update.  Enjoy!

Portal 2 Thoughts

Its been quite some time since I last pre-ordered a game.  Portal was one of those special games where the idea of a sequel really intrigued me.  So I pre-ordered it on Amazon and when it came I popped it in my PS3.  

First off, I want to say this review will be mostly spoiler free.  At least, nothing I mention should ruin the game for you.  That said, if you want a totally fresh first experience come back when your done with the game.

I bought the game on the PS3 because it came with a free PC/Mac Steam copy voucher.  Due to the PS3 network outage I couldn't redeem it for a few weeks, but after that cleared up I downloaded it to my Mac. I mention this because I want games to be released this way.  I want the console version to come with a voucher to get a copy on my PC and Mac.  This focus on rewarding paying customers in treating them like first class citizens is a really good idea.  Hoping this idea takes off with future games, that said its the first one I know of to offer this.   

From the start of the game to the end Portal 2 is an imaginatively fun game.  It doesn't have the most jaw dropping visuals ive ever seen but that doesn't mean the game doesn't look fantastic.  It just means Valve focused on a great game and not the most bleeding edge visuals.

A few times I thought the pacing wasn't perfect.  For instance a few times I didn't really feel like going through yet another test chamber.  I took those times to save the game and come back later.  With that game play style I beat the game in about 2.5 weeks.  Ive heard people say the game takes only 8 hours but I didn't spend my time rushing to beat it.  I spent my time enjoying the game and its environment.  Think looking around and trying strange stuff.  Occasionally the game rewarded me with a hidden area or special trophy for finding it.  The puzzles were not that hard either.  A few times it took me 15 minutes to figure it out, but that wasn't too often.  Having fairly easy puzzles didn't mean the game wasn't fun, I don't care how hard something is I care if its fun.  Portal 2 is fun.

My wife really enjoyed the game too.  She didn't play it, but she enjoyed watching me play it as well as the story and characters.   Like Halflife 2, she didn't want me to play the game when she wasn't present.  Especially at the end when the story really gets interesting.

Overall I would highly recommend Portal 2.  I payed about $35 dollars for it and I would totally recommend it at that price.  

Bonus Thoughts:  I am making my way through the game again and it seems to replay well.  I am looking forward to doing co-op with one of my friends as well.  Hoping that is as much fun as the single player.

Songs to Test By

If you loved Portal 2 as much as I did and thought the music was pretty darn cool.  Or maybe you just like free electronica music, in either case you need to download the free Portal 2 soundtrack.

It has some songs im not entirely fond of outside the context of the game, but generally its a fun listen.  Brought me back to a few game points while I was listening to it at work.

Borderlands++

I picked up Borderlands Game of the Year Edition last month on the PS3.  A friend and I immediately started playing the co-op that day and loved every minute.   If you need a more in-depth review, check out metacritic as I don't want to break it down to the last detail, just go over the more interesting points.

My main character is the Siren and I like her phasewalk ability and ability to cause extra elemental damage with weapons.  Nothing says cool like dropping a room of badguys when you come out of phasewalk to corrosive damage.

The game has a seemingly infinite amount of guns and each on is a little different than the others.  Some bosses drop the same loot, which is nice because you can always know you can get something expected.  I havent found that the boss loot is all that useful as the random guns nearly always seem more useful.

This is also one of the rare games ive really enjoy playing online.  I haven't played an online game this much since Counterstrike.  Ive only played Borderlands online a handful of times but thats much much more than any other modern game ive owned.  Its cool to join up a game of low level players to help them out or start a game as a level 1 player and have other people help you out.  If someone gets really annoying or spends too long in a menu when you are trying to go to a new zone you can always kick them out of the game.  I find that there are 25 or so games going on the PSN at any given time in the evening so its not hard to find people to play with.

I nabbed the game for $20 on sale at GameStop with all the DLC included on the game disc.  The game is a steal of that price and if you have the ability, you should pick it up.