Simon Wex

Dial Tone Nostalgia

Simon — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:53:00 -0600

Luke and I were having an in-depth conversation about the UI for our Zeep Media product. We’re doing some really cool work with geographic targeting and report visualization on top of Google Maps. I’m sure that there will be subsequent blog posts about the technical challenges here.

I was trying to explain the NANP (North American Numbering Plan) and exactly what the NXX in NPA-NXX meant. NPA is a set of three numbers ([2-9][0-8][0-9]) that you will probably know as “Area Code” and NXX is just the next three digits.

So if we pick apart my number:

+1 (778) 227-3859

+ means we’re using E164
1 means we’re dialing in NANP
778 is the NPA or area code
227 is the NXX or exchange
3859 is the station code

Unimportant as they may seem, the NXX digits used to prominently have a real, practical use.

Before cell phones, before digital-electronic switching, in fact before digital-mechanical switching there was the operator. The operator’s job was to manually connect wires running to people’s phones.

A telephone operator manually connecting calls with patch cables at a telephone switchboard.

As everyone knows, the best of systems can be ruined when you introduce human error, greed or incompetence. That brings us to an undertaker, Almon Brown Strowger. Almon was convinced that the local manual telephone exchange operators were sending calls to a competing undertaker business and thus set out to invent the automatic telephone exchange.

The exchange existed of a collection of Strowger Switches that would allow a phone connected to a wire pair on one side to dial using a set of pulses to connect a wire pair at the end, making another phone ring. Each switch would move the the corresponding index based on the number of pulses it received.

Dialing 3-8-5-9 a switch would take the first three pulses and place the initiating pair on the “3” circuit, the switch connected on that circuit there would then select the “8” circuit. As you can imagine, when you add a lot of numbers, say 10,000 of them, you need a lot of these switches. A lot of these switches would take up a lot of space. So, for every 10,000 numbers (0000-9999) there would be one building that housed all of these switches, the exchange. This is why old phones pulsed, they were actually moving a mechanical piece every time a pulse went over the wire.

Eventmachine HTTP Client

Simon — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:38:00 -0500

For some reason, this simple example has eluded me for some time. “EventMachine is a library for Ruby, C++, and Java programs. It provides event-driven I/O using the Reactor pattern.” When using Eventmachine, as I often do, asynchronous network calls are key. And often in the word of web services, crawling and scraping most useful clients I write these days deal with HTTP. So here is the most basic example of an HTTP client written using eventmachine:

require 'rubygems'
require 'eventmachine'

EM.run do
  include EM::Protocols
  conn = HttpClient2.connect('simonwex.com', 80)

  req = conn.get('/')
  req.callback do
    p(req.content)
    EM.stop
  end
end

Nested Hashes Fuck Me Up

Simon — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:35:00 -0500

Mr. Anonymous
12:29
had to play dumb

Simon Wex
12:29
hehe
bettter than playing smart
You know…

Mr. Anonymous
12:31
...

Simon Wex
12:31
I can’t get over it, I think people to speak to themselves are stupid.
Maybe an unfair bias…
but if you actually have to vocalize something to understand it, what sorts of limitations does that put on your understandings?

Mr. Anonymous
12:32
probably none
fuck you

Simon Wex
12:32
hehe
You you talk to yourself?

Mr. Anonymous
12:32
I’ve caught myself doing it

Simon Wex
12:32
is that part of your “playing dumb”?

Mr. Anonymous
12:32
and yes, I have trouble with certain levels of abstraction

12:33
Mr. Anonymous has left the conversation.

Mr. Anonymous
12:33
nested hashes fuck me up

Simon Wex
12:34
Easy killer.

My Girlfriend Loves The X-Files

Simon — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 10:58:00 -0500

Karilyn is also very excited to see the movie. All I have to say is this:

Chop Shop (2007)

Simon — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:21:00 -0500

I was trying to sleep last night just outside of Portland Oregon and, to be honest, I wasn’t doing a great job of it. So instead of shutting my eyes and ignoring the strange sounds coming from the woods, I watched Chop Shop [IMDB]

It was real to the point of feeling voyeuristic. It didn’t have a rocketing trajectory to a massive climax, but instead depressingly trudged on like the main characters’ lives. – Though my description doesn’t sell it, it was a very enjoyable watch and I highly recommend it.

Something funny I just noticed...

Simon — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 01:29:00 -0500

So here’s something sort of funny that I just noticed. When on my mac clicking on “Get Info” for my friend’s desktop (‘doze), you get this appropriate little preview…

Good old windows blue screen. It has been a while and I don’t miss you.

Contentment

Simon — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 22:24:00 -0500

I’m a happy kinda guy. I think a lot of this comes from generally being happy with what I have, not lusting after what I don’t. I think this explains my stance on things like plastic surgery and suicide bombings.

Around a month ago I blew out my back. I was well on my way to recovery – something you measure differently when you’re unable to put on your own socks – when I tweaked it and I’m now pretty much back to square one. So there I was, teetering on my rickety legs reaching down to the second shelf for a yogurt in one of those big multipacks. I was hoping for a strawberry as my hand touched a pack. I realized it didn’t matter. I was going to get what I got and the pain was not worth going back for a replacement. Mmnnn tasty yogurt.

Resurrecting the Electric Car

Simon — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:48:00 -0500

I suppose today I'm playing the optimist. I was playing with Google Trends this morning and noticed something I found promising. There are no brilliant insights I have to contribute, I'll let this graph representing the popularity of search terms related to "oil prices" and "electric car" speak for itself:

Scale is based on the average traffic of electric car from United States in the last 12 months. Learn more

oil prices

1.32

electric car

1.00

(Source: http://www.google.com/trends...)

Your Right to Make Decisions about Medical Treatment

Simon — Sat, 17 May 2008 21:11:00 -0500

I’m sitting in a hospital in Southern California. I found myself here after a good friend of mine passed out for no apparent reason and hit the pavement head-first. Fast-forward a few firemen, and ambulance and a few hours later and here we are in Los Alamitos Medical center. We’re both Canadian. He may, or may not be covered for travel insurance stateside, this plays heavily in the mind.

He was given a three page document to read. It describes his rights to make medical decisions. Here’s a little excerpt:

“Your doctors will give you information and advice about treatment. You have the right to choose. You can say ‘Yes’ to treatments you want. You can say ‘No’ to any treatments you don’t want-even if the treatment might keep you alive longer.”

I agree with the right to choose the best path for personal care. I definitely agree with the right to choose to pull your own plug to maintain your dignity and quality of life that’s left. But the reality of this situation is that the major concern with making any decision is cost. How on earth can one of the most wealthy countries on earth allow their citizens to live like this?

“We’re going to run a few tests to see what’s going on”

“Is that going to be expensive?”

“Yes”

Of all the times I’ve been admitted to the hospital, the cost has never been an issue. The number one concern of everyone involved is always getting better. It seems secondary right now, and that is wrong.

The Email Inquisition

Simon — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:47:00 -0600

I am, and have for some time been, a Thunderbird user. And while it has met most of my needs for an email client, I have been relying less and less on it for communicating. Instead, IM clients and things like Facebook messaging have been taking over for me. I thought it was a problem with the set of standards and protocols that make up email itself, but after a few conversations with David Ascher and spending some time thinking of messaging in general, I think I’ve changed my mind.

In the past decade and a half of using email, I can’t think of any feature other than spam filtering that has made a significant impact on my experience. This is probably why web-based email clients continue to grow in popularity as they close the functionality gap with the rich-client variety. Some people might think that rich clients such as Microsoft Outlook and Mozilla Thunderbird should see the writing on the wall. I don’t—I think that Thunderbird should fight back and do some of the things that a server-side solution just can’t reasonably scale to.

I was out for lunch with David the other day. Succinctly, David is the man who has been tasked with “fixing email”. I often like to ask David questions about what he’s got in mind for Thunderbird. He always has some very interesting and insightful things to say, which is probably how he found himself in his current position at Mozilla. One thing that came up was a sort of question parser for messages. If done correctly, when replying to an email it could find all of the questions asked. This could serve as a to-do list when replying. You could also be presented with things like “all unanswered questions from your boss”.

I took a little crack at it as sort of a proof of concept. The code written in ruby isn’t worth examining too closely, but it is available here. My approach is very crude, especially when you consider that Thunderbird is localized to 34 different locales, but I still find the results interesting. My girlfriend and I had our first exchanges through email, so I pointed it at an IMAP folder with the first eleven emails she sent me and here are the results:

Do you do lots of fun writing?
What do you do at work?
Where in Ontario are you from?
What brought you to Van?
Are you home watching movies today?
Are you a downtown kid too?
And you skate in from kits?
I'm off at 4:30 most days, so how about Monday?
Do you have a plan?
You're somewhere near Hastings & Granville, aren't you?