JabberCon Doc is asking for another JabberCon. That would be great.

Wes and I were coding in the room the night before the last conference -- we won't be doing that again. At the time, we were starving students and after some pleading, Jabber Inc graciously allowed us to showcase for free. That was the first time that we demoed Gush (it wasn't called that back then). People seemed really interested and keen to touch, but Gush was pretty finicky so we handled the controls exclusively. Anyway, there's more to our sad little story, but I'll spare you the details.

I vote for NYC as the next location for JabberCon.

Photogenic cat Frankly, I like dogs better than cats. However, our adopted cat is pretty likable, and she's often willing to indulge me while I'm taking pictures. Here's the cat relaxing outside, but still keeping an eye on me.

BW

Flash: Short circuit evaluation After seeing Darron Schall's white space revelation the other day, I thought I would share something else common to most programming languages. In Actionscript logical expressions are evaluated executing the least amount of comparisons necessary to evaluate the expression. For example

if(true || complexFunction()) ...
if(false && complexFunction()) ...

In both examples complexFunction() will never be executed since it is unnecessary to evaluate the expression. So if your looking for that extra bit of performance, it's always good practice when forming potentially intensive logical comparisons, to put the least complicated comparisons first.

Beta 2 Managed to squeeze out yet another beta for Gush 1.1. It'll probably be the last beta before finalizing 1.1 The beta has taken a bit longer than most betas partly because we continued to add new features after the first beta. As a rule of thumb, this is generally not a good idea, but we wanted to get the 1.1 to the stage where Gush is stable and most of the smaller requested features were added.

With this out of the way, we can finally move onto more exciting things like file transfer, file sharing, group discussions (Multi User Chat), and much more.

Gush is finally Atom Enabled. I've been meaning to add Atom support for a long time now, but other things kept cropping up. As expected, adding Atom support was trivial since I've are developed all the bag of tricks to deal with all the variations of RSS, and not to mention all the crap feeds out there.

As of right now, we haven't finished the OS X version. The OS X version has been quite troublesome. Most of the problems are related to using WebKit to house the Flash SWF. WebKit/Safari interaction with Flash SWFs is not nearly as good as Firefox's interaction with SWFs under OS X. First, the cursor doesn't reliably change into the cursor hand over links in Flash HTML textfields. Second, when Gush is minimized to the Dockbar, WebKit seems to pause Flash. This behavior may be fine for most web-based SWF files, but it's not the expected behavior for an application.

We've been trying on and off to compile Mozilla's CHBrowserView so that we may embedded that instead of WebKit. Hopefully, over the next couple of days I can get that compiled and integrated followed by the OS X release.

You call these search results? Apparently Google thinks Going Nowhere has some relevance to the following search terms:

• stick it to them [ Rank # 1 ]
• broadband sucks [ Rank # 1 ]
• this aggression will not stand [Rank # 2 ]
• family guy michael eisner bring money [Rank # 3 ]
• beautiful flash [Rank # 4]
• RFID sushi [Rank # 5 ]
• definition emotionally unavailable [Rank # 6 ]
• vmware esx keygen [Rank # 13]
• pederast [Rank # 18 ]
• overpaid jobs [Rank # 20 ]
• enemyster beta code [Rank # 31 ]

I'm sorry to say that I don't think these people found what they were looking for with the exception of one or two of the terms. I also wish our ranking for pederast was a lot lower.

Come on, Sony
Almost three years ago, after having dinner with some friends in Shibuya, I was going towards the JR station to head back to the homestead when I decided to pop into BicBic. Low and behold there was the Sony D-EJ1000. It made all other CD-Players look like absolute junk in comparison. Heck, most of the CD Player still sold in the US weight 3 times as much, are 3 times as thick, and still use AA batteries. The sound quality on the D-EJ1000 is amazing and it's shock protection is superb. I know I don't use my adjectives sparingly, but the Sony D-EJ1000 deserves it all. It's the impulse purchase that I've been most proud of since I discovered coke vending machines.

Over the years, I've bought a lot of Sony merchandise. I know they have reliability issues, but their stuff just looks too good. However, since Wes bought his first Sony MediaStick MP3 player, I've been completely unimpressed by their MP3 players. Let's just put it this way, they suck.

Gizmodo shares some of their thoughts on the Sony VAIO pocket. They basically hit the nail on the head about what's going to be the main problem with the Pocket VAIO and what has been wrong with all of their MP3 players up until now. Basically, someone at Sony refuses to license the MP3 codec so all the media has to be converted into the ATRAC format. The problem is that the software that used to come along with the MP3 players for converting all the MP3s into ATRAC3 is absolutely terrible.

Anyway, the Pocket VAIO looks great, but there's absolutely no way that I'd use it for my MP3 player. For now, I'll just keep burning my music to CD to listen on my wonderful D-EJ1000.

Update: BoingBoing goes into detail why Sony is slowly screwing up their electronics.

RFID Sushi I'm busy catching up with all the blogs I've neglected reading over the week.

I came across a post about calculating your tab the RFID way. It turns out that the sushi / sashimi plates have the RFID tag attached so that the staff can just scan the stack of plates to tally up the total.

I think this is pretty cool. However, I think it would work better if the RFID tag was actually in the sushi itself. That way you just scan the person's stomach as they're leaving the store. This way you can prevent some dirty gaijin sitting next to you from slipping in plates into your stack.

Come to think of it, it's quite amazing that Japan has been able to live without this technology for so long. How did they ever do business back in the good, old bubble days?

Scrumptious wallpaper Semafore Calendars gives you one amazing background every month. It's time to drop a couple of these into Gush.

(via HotLinks)

Speak to the Blog Mark Cuban's blog, Blog Maverick, is only a couple of days old, but already very entertaining. I think the man has way too much money (I'm envious), but too his credit he is pushing around the media so you've got to like him.

By the way Mark, if you're reading this, how about one of those nice digital movie theaters here in Providence, RI?

May it please the court... No, it may not! I have a bit of junk mail news of my own. I recently registered for BloggerCon and next thing you know, the Williams Law Firm takes it upon themselves to spam the registrant list with some crap about their weblog. I wonder what side of the spam debate these guys are on. Thankfully, thunderbird automatically filtered their junk. Don't ask why I was rummaging through my junk mail, weird I know.

Bad track record Anyone who has been reading this blog (and we know you're few and far between), knows how random the category of posts can be. So since we've added Google ads to the top of Going Nowhere, it's been interesting to watch what gets selected. Initially it was just other Jabber and blogging related topics because were busy prattling about Gush and other Jabber stuff at the time. However, Wes' "What it really takes to give more than 100%" and my post about Rhode Island threw some kinks into Google's ad oracle. For a while there were ads about hotels in Rhode Island, and now we have this:

It's at this point in time that I would like to emphasize that the above ad most certainly does not reflect our opinions. To prove my point, I'm now going to watch TV.

We need more entropy, Scotty! There was one small problem with the JEP-25 code for producing key sequences: the mechanism for producing the seed is pathetically weak. The length for the sequence is typically 256 in other clients such as Exodus. So if all the sequences were only 256 in length, you would only have to enumerate 256 * 2 ^ 15 hash values to be able to crack the sequence if you're using random.randint(1,2**15) to generate the seed. A better solution would be to use this function for generating the seed.

    def generateCNONCE():
        """http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2831.html requires at least
           64bits of entropy for the cnonce."""

        # Each character [A-Za-z0-9] character has ~5.95 bits 
        # (log(2) 62) of entropy and so we need a string of at 
        # least 11 characters to have 64bits of entropy. We're 
        # using 128bits of entropy.

        cnonceLength = 22
        
        cnonceList = [None] * cnonceLength
        for i in xrange(cnonceLength):
            randValue = random.randint(0,61)
            if randValue < 26:
                cnonceList[i] = chr(ord('A') + randValue)
            elif randValue < 52:
                cnonceList[i] = chr(ord('a') + randValue - 26)
            else:
                cnonceList[i] = chr(ord('0') + randValue - 52)

        return "".join(cnonceList)

Macromedia Breeze Live Now Available It's limited to the first 500 users in the US who register for a free full month trial. Macromedia is not the first to offer these services, WebEx and recently Convoq have joined the fray, but MM stands to deliver a knock out product. A quick run down of features includes, AV and text chat, screen sharing, meeting scheduler, real-time polls, and white board collaboration. I'm on my way to try it out right now.

What it really takes to give more than 100%

From a strictly mathematical viewpoint it goes like this...

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%?

So what makes up 100% in life?

Here's a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Then...

H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But...

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And..

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND look how far ass kissing will take you...

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 127%

So, one can then conclude with mathematical certainty that while Hard Work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, Bullshit and Ass Kissing will put you over the top.