Author: Eric F. Savage

Cy Young 2007

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Being a sports fan doesn’t end when the season does, you need to analyze, reflect, and debate things like awards, so let’s get started:

National League Cy Young: Jake Peavy. No real debate here. Led the league in strikeouts, strikouts per inning, wins, WHIP, and ERA, and came just short of the playoffs. Runner Up: Brandon Webb.

American League Cy Young: C. C. Sabathia. On the surface, it looks like a real close race here with Beckett and maybe even Lackey, and the press seems to think Beckett is a lock because he got 20 wins. However, Sabathia beats Beckett in WHIP, IP, K, GS, CG, SHO, K/BB ratio, which are all key ace/stopper stats. Runner Up: Josh Beckett.

Note: Expect a surge in baseball-related posts over the next couple of weeks 🙂

Baseball Manglers

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

One of the key differences (beyond the rules of the game) between the 4 major professional American sports is the role of the managers. In football a team wins or loses largely based on the cleverness of the coach. Basketball and hockey teams use styles and plans that the coach comes up with, even if the action itself is largely tactical.

Baseball calls the position a manager, not a coach, and is also the only sport where the manager wears a completely unnecessary uniform. The term manager is probably more accurate, since most of what the manager does is done off-field, keeping two dozen or more alpha jocks in line every day for 6 months. During the actual game, the manager rarely moves, typically waddling out of the dugout only a few times per game. Sometimes a bad call is made and a show must be put on, but the decisions largely make themselves, and the limited number of options often makes them rather easy.

I devote a blog post (the first of several, most likely) to poking a stick at the 30 guys that often make more than a million dollars a year because one of my pet peeves came to light in tonight’s exciting one-game-playoff between the Padres and Rockies.

Why do managers never pull pitchers in the middle of a count?

It was obvious to anyone watching the game that Jorge Julio had nothing. He walked Giles, throwing pitches anywhere but over the plate. His first pitch to Hairston was just as bad, and I said to my roommate, “they need to get this guy out of there”. The cameras showed the manager pacing, not looking happy. The poor pitcher had no control at all, the manager is sitting on a 40 man roster, and this is the most important game of the year. Julio has pitched well this season, but when every pitch counts this much, you have to mitigate the risk. Needless to say, the next pitch left the park.

I have never seen a pitcher pulled in the middle of facing a batter. It’s apparently one of the unwritten rules that makes no sense like not switching sides when you bat (or pitch). There are probably hitters out there who would do well to switch sides when they get ahead or behind in the count, but they don’t do it. Short of an injury or ejection, a manager would sooner watch his team lose while he’s posed on the top step of the dugout than just run out and tell a guy he’s done and he’s not going to get a chance to throw two more balls or lob the meatball the batter is obviously sitting on.

September Roundup

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

  • This is just plain creepy, who would want that done to their kid’s picture?
  • Lies that are true – Fiction blog, I really like Mr. Harrell’s style. I also love the design and tagline on his blog.
  • The next time I’m in need of some prints, I’ll be hitting Plan 59
  • I’m a pretty honest person, and while I haven’t gone this far, I think I’m headed in that direction.
  • Groan My IP is hilarious, NSFW if you W with a bunch of prudes
  • I was surprised by how many these programming quotations I hadn’t heard before.
  • I’m familiar with Fibonacci, but I’d never heard of, or completely forgot about, the Golden Ratio. Turns out the columns widths I picked (before I found that page) for the new StyleFeeder design just happen to be 1.6:1.

Baseball Playoffs 2007, Part 1

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Well, the Boston Red Sox are the American League Eastern Division champs for the first time since 1995. They’re tied with the Indians for top seed, and Boston holds the tie-breaker. As it stands now, the Red Sox will host the Angels and the Indians will host the Yankees. Unlike most years, all 4 of these teams could pull it off, so it should be exciting.

What’s interesting is that none of the National League teams have clinched, with only 2 or 3 games left. There are 7 teams in contention on the final weekend of the year. I don’t remember one league being clinched and almost done seeding while the other league has nothing.

Baseball Prospectus, one of the more popular sabermetric, websites, has a Red Sox/Cubs World Series in this prediction, based on power pitching, defense, and closer stature. This doesn’t have the apocalyptic feeling that such a series would have had before 2004, but I think that would be a fantastic series. Both teams have a huge national fanbase, and could drive the highest World Series ratings in recent memory.

The Apple … Store?

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

What do I do with this pretty green paper?The Natick Mall was a big mall, and now it’s a really big mall (and called the Natick Collection). One of the new stores is an Apple Store. I’ve been in Apple stores before, but not since they added the “Genius Bar” which is where the checkout lines used to be. When I went to pick up my new keyboard, I found it easily enough, the store is small and has an open layout. The first part of my mision complete, I looked around for where I’m supposed to pay for my item.

I wandered to the middle of the store, and saw another man looking around with an iPod box in his hand. It was obvious we were both trying, and failing, to do the same thing, which was to give someone money. I then walked to the back of the store, where there was a line of people, and waited in line. When my turn came I presented the product I wished to purchase, as well as my credit card. The “Genius” told me that the “Bar” was only for help and not for sales. “Who will take my money?,” I asked. “Anyone else,” said the Genius. Everyone else that had a nametag and a black shirt, Genius or not, was busy.

I was very tempted to place the keyboard in the middle of the floor and leave, go home, and order it online. However, I did really want it, so I waited for someone to finish explaining that all the software the person assumed was on the $2000 laptop they were about to buy (Word, Excel, and Photoshop) was extra, but “don’t worry, all the cool stuff is free,” quoth the Genius. After a few more minutes hovering behind the tentative victim, who reconsidered and left the store, I was able to get the black-shirted employee’s attention and he sold me my device from a handheld contraption.

Much like bad engineering is often identified by excessive cleverness, bad design, whether it’s a website or the layout of your store, is often identified by being excessively reductive. If you have a store, and want people to buy stuff, don’t feel offended that you need to stoop to having a sign that says “Pay Here”.

Usernames

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Usernames for most websites are based on UNIX conventions/standards. They are lowercase, usually begin with letters, and have no whitespace. Many sites offer a “display name” which is more flexible.

While discussing requirements for a new project, my first inclination was to do something similar, simply because “that’s how it’s done”, but someone suggested this method might be antiquated. After giving it a few days of thought, I tend to agree. “Old” user domains like AOL, Windows, and Slashdot have logins that have allowed spaces for years, yet most of even the latest, shiniest Web 2.0 sites go back to the 1970s for their guidelines.

We’ve even taken it a little further and not only can users use spaces, underscores, and dashes, these characters are ignored for purposes of uniqueness, because I’m guessing people’s brains will tend to stem these characters when it comes to memorizing them. So “Eric Savage” and “ericsavage” and “Eric_Savage” and even something like “Eri__c-SAVA g-_E” would all be the same.

When appearing in a URL or other machine-readable context, these characters are all changed to underscore and consecutive duplicates are eliminated, so the previous username would be “eric_savage”. Also, leading and trailing non-alphanumerics are stripped, otherwise we’d likely find users all naming themselves __alphadog so they appear first alphabetically. We could expand the list of which extra characters are allowed, but we’ll start off easy.

Questions:

    Can anyone think of good reasons for why you should stick to UNIX-style usernames?
  • Should users on a community site be able to change usernames? [I’m currently in the “no” camp]
  • If changeable, should the change history be public?
  • Most people like short usernames, some people prefer long ones. What do you think should be the limit? [I’m currently thinking 20]
  • Is a short limit too ethnocentric?

21st Century Game Changers

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

A post on the Freakonomics blog got me thinking. What inventions have genuinely improved, or even affected, my life. I drew up a list, and decided to constrain it to the 21st century, so things like the cellphone, the VCR, the CD, the ATM, instant messaging, and online banking aren’t on the list. Here they are, and where possible I put the approximate year I adopted them.

Major Improvement to Daily Life

  • Tivo (2000) – Definitely #1 on the list. I don’t consider myself a couch potato, but this completely unshackled me from the network’s arbitrary scheduling. It also make more shows enjoyable, or even watchable, by cutting out commercials.
  • RSS/Google Reader (2002, 2005) – RSS enabled me to keep track of a much broader set of sources, and Google Reader took RSS to the next level by making my subscriptions and unread articles available anywhere (including my phone).
  • Smartphone (2006) – I’m far more organized now that I have my full contact list and calendar on me at all times, as well as being backed up, plus last-resort internet access is a nice bonus.
  • TV shows on DVD (2003) – There’s now a new category of TV show, the ones I don’t even bother to Tivo and just wait for the DVD.

Minor Quality-of-Life Improvement

  • Netflix (2002) – Like they say, no more late fees.
  • Wifi (2004) – Adopted later than most geeks, has proven useful in many ways.
  • Wikipedia (2003?) – Coming from someone who used to read the encyclopedia for fun, Wikipedia is like crack.
  • Text Messaging (2006) – Late to the game here. Enables a new layer of communcation and makes me both more responsive and more proactive.
  • GPS (2007) – I waited a while for the price dip, and now consider GPS a mandatory item for my car.
  • mp3 player/iPod (2002/2004) – No more discman and CD cases is a good thing.
  • Digital Camera/DSLR (2001, 2004, 2007) – I’m too lazy to deal with film. I got my first digital in 2001, my first nice one in 2004, and my first digital SLR in 2007, each a vast improvement over the previous.
  • Firefox (2004) – Firefox has gone from lightweight security-minded browser to bloated, customizable security-minded browser, both of which I’ve found value in.
  • Eclipse (2002) – Java wins in my book because of Eclipse. Having a program that thinks for you enables you to think about the real problems.
  • Launchcast (now Yahoo! Music) (2002) – One of the earliest and still one of the best customized music services. If you’re not sold on Pandora and Last.fm it might be because they are are inferior versions of Launch.

(supposedly) Major Advances, Adopted by Me, Negligible Impact

  • Social Networks (2004) – I use LinkedIn as a sort of resume-light, and myspace to keep up with my sisters, and facebook as the site du jour, but they are all just curious diversions.
  • OS X (2005) – Scores high on sexiness. Scores low on stability & usability
  • XP/Vista (2003) – Windows 2000 made computers better and more useful. XP and Vista seem to just make them slower.

Major Advances, Unadopted by Me

  • VoIP/Skype – I don’t use landlines.
  • Fastlane/Speedpass – I still find the ease with which someone can track me disturbing, plus the lines these days are usually shorter at the cash lines.

There’s probably some that I missed, or just weren’t important enough to remember. My main question is, what’s next to get on the list, and where on the list will it end up?

Wish List: Session Moratorium

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

DetourA feature that the major open-source/free servlet containers (Tomcat, Jetty, Resin) lack, AFAIK, is the ability to tell the container to stop issuing new sessions, and more importantly, make this flag known to the HTTP server connector. One or more of Websphere, Weblogic, and ATG Dynamo (I forget which) has this ability, and it’s extremely useful for higher-volume websites.

How it works: Server Bank A is running, Server Bank B is dormant. When you have a new release, you push it to B. Once B is up and running (this can take a while with some advanced applications), you tell A to stop issuing new sessions, and the load balancers send all new traffic to B. Once traffic has bled off of A entirely, A becomes dormant, and is ready for the next release.

Why it’s valuable: You can do a release without interrupting any sessions. This was particularly valuable on the project we used it on, because there was plenty of time to pre-compile pages, and the transactions were relatively high-value ones, so it was worth the price of the commercial license to ensure that none were lost or interrupted.

Considering all of the containers are relatively close performance-wise, and feature-wise, I think this would be a “killer feature” for any OSS container that had it.

Enabling Buttons on Apple Keyboard in Windows

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

I recently picked up, and am liking, the new “wafer thin” aluminum keyboard from Apple. Its very small, I like the key action and it’s very solid considering it’s size and thickness. But, I use it on Windows, and there’s no driver available other than the standard keyboard one, so the extra keys like media controls aren’t enabled. I came across a freeware macro program called AutoHotKey that works very nicely, and wrote up a few little scripts for it. You can download AutoHotKey and run the scripts yourself, or you can download the compiled version here [enable_mac_aluminum.zip, 193KB] and just pop it into your Startup folder.

Commands:
Shift-F3: Print Screen
Shift-F4: Task Manager
Shift-F7: Previous Track (in Winamp or Yahoo! Music Jukebox)
Shift-F8: Pause/Play (in Winamp or Yahoo! Music Jukebox)
Shift-F9: Next Track (in Winamp or Yahoo! Music Jukebox)
Shift-F10: Mute/Unmute
Shift-F11: Volume Down
Shift-F12: Volume Up
Windows-s: Open http://www.efsavage.com 🙂

Here’s the entire script:

#s::Run www.efsavage.com
+F3::Send {PrintScreen}
+F4::Send, {SHIFTDOWN}{CTRLDOWN}{ESC}{SHIFTUP}{CTRLUP}
+F7::
IfWinExist ahk_class Winamp v1.x
{
ControlSend, ahk_parent, z ; Pause/Unpause
return
}
IfWinExist ahk_class YMPFrame
{
SetTitleMatchMode 2
IfWinNotActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
WinActivate
WinWaitActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
MouseClick, left, 29, 107
Sleep, 100
MouseClick, left, 112, 76
WinMinimize
return
}
return
+F8::
IfWinExist ahk_class Winamp v1.x
{
ControlSend, ahk_parent, c ; Pause/Unpause
return
}
IfWinExist ahk_class YMPFrame
{
SetTitleMatchMode 2
IfWinNotActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
WinActivate
WinWaitActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
MouseClick, left, 29, 107
Sleep, 100
MouseClick, left, 30, 77
WinMinimize
return
}
return
+F9::
IfWinExist ahk_class Winamp v1.x
{
ControlSend, ahk_parent, b ; Pause/Unpause
return
}
IfWinExist ahk_class YMPFrame
{
SetTitleMatchMode 2
IfWinNotActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
WinActivate
WinWaitActive, Yahoo! Music Jukebox
MouseClick, left, 29, 107
Sleep, 100
MouseClick, left, 148, 79
WinMinimize
return
}
return
+F10::Send {Volume_Mute}
+F11::Send {Volume_Down 3}
+F12::Send {Volume_Up}

Update: Reader Svolte points us to SharpKeys, which (by default) maps F13 to print screen. The advantage of doing this is that alt-print-screen (capture just active window) works, while I was unable to replicate with the AutoHotKey script.