Chris Mueller's Web Home

24 Hour Comic

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

24 hours, 21 pages. Enjoy!

Bulk Transit Times in Google Maps

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Over the weekend I was working on a map to help with a massive convention that is bringing together tens of thousands of people this summer. The convention organizers are working to produce clean logistical arrangements from all the points of interest in the city to all the various hotels and meeting points used by the group. Since most attendees will be flying in, buses and foot travel are the expected transportation modes. Organizers were looking to publish common transit times (on foot) from each of the various hotels and meeting points to other common points of interest.

I opened up Google Maps, intending to use the recently launched "walking" directions mode, but quickly realized that typing 75 addresses * N points of interest was going to be a headache. Luckily, the Google Maps API provides access to the directions service of Google Maps. I put together a little Javascript app that allows you to collect in bulk transit times from one address to a set of other addresses. This made my life a lot easier.

You can take a look at a the functional Bulk Transit Times app. Feel free to View Source.

New Photos

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

I updated the Biking in Marin gallery with about 20 new photos from my rides around San Francisco and Marin. These photos were all captured with my phone, and the quality isn't quite what it could be, but I hope you'll enjoy them nevertheless.

Rules for Five Person 500 (card game)

Mon, 29 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

500 is a classic trick-based card game that is simple to learn but can require years to master. The basic rules and history of this game are well-described at Wikipedia.

Here's one way to adjust gameplay to support 5 hands at the table:

There are no partners. Every player is competing against every other player.
Add the 2's and 3's back into the deck so the total is 53 cards. A trump suit will now contain 15 cards (Joker, Jick, and 2 through Ace).
Deal 10 cards to each player, leaving 3 in the blind.
Bidding starts to the left of the dealer, as usual.
When a bid is won, the winning bidder selects one partner from among the other four players. If the bid is 8 or higher, the winning bidder selects two partners. The remaining players form a team against the winning bidder.
When the hand is over, all players on a given team receive the traditional allotment of points, and then the teams reset.

That's it! Gameplay is otherwise identical to other versions of 500. The first player to 500 wins.

Playing 5-handed 500 is much different from the usual version of 500. Often you are able to predict who will become partners during the bidding cycle (say two players are both bidding in Clubs), but often it is a coin flip as to who will become the third partner since the other players will have been bidding in competing suits. All players must pay constant attention to the scoreboard and position themselves appropriately. With only three cards in the blind, and the additional low cards (2's and 3's), it can be difficult to make your bid, even with additional partners. This means that aggressive players might go set often if they are not used to this alternative mode of play, and the winner of the game might be those players who rarely bid but who are pulling in a few points per hand.

Sunrise

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

After working all night at a 24 coffee house, I took a ride around the Headlands loop.

Server Migration

Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The uuorld.com server used to be hosted on a standard dedicated box at a datacenter in Los Angeles. In an effort to consolidate resources, enable flexibility for future efforts, and save money, it made sense to move all of our servers to Amazon's EC2 cloud infrastructure.

The old server had been running CentOS. I opted to go with CentOS because it was considered a secure, well-supported standard. The hosting provider's sales team convinced me that I would be a lot better off if I also had CPanel installed, so I paid a little extra for that too. (CPanel provides a web interface for common administrative tasks on the server.) There were many problems with the whole setup.

I have a strong background in Debian and Ubuntu platforms, but lack the experience with RedHat based distros. This often made troubleshooting more complicated than it should have been.
The default installation of CPanel and CentOS included a lot of things we didn't need, including a full up DNS server, IP logging programs, phpMyAdmin, FrontPage extensions, etc.
The CentOS repositories contained old versions of a lot of software packages, and we were depending on some bleeding edge packages to provide the functionality we wanted. It was not just once that I was forced to uninstall the default packages and compile from source.
We were paying a lot of money.

The move to Amazon has proved remarkably painless. After spending a day getting acquainted with the EC2 concepts and terminology, installing the Firefox extension to manage my instances, and running the setup/teardown cycle a few times, it made sense to dive in. I launched a default instance of Ubuntu 8.04 and started poking around. A few apt-get calls later, and I had the core of the site replicated. Since the Ubuntu repositories had the latest versions of all the software I needed, this was a blissfully painless process. I loaded up database backups from the old server, pulled down all the code that runs our site, modified a couple lines in the Apache config files, and the new site was working great.

I'm convinced the Ubuntu guys are saints.

The Current

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

After a hiatus of several months, I've been listening to the Current (part of Minnesota Public Radio) again today. It has been great, and I've found myself really enjoying some artists I hadn't encountered before, including Santogold and Stars.

Especially helpful for me is that MPR publishes the list of songs they play.

I had been feeling unhappy with Pandora lately. The stations I've configured with Pandora quickly get stuck in a rut. I read once that top 40 stations are so popular because people tend to carry ~40 songs in their reserve memory. It's hubristic to think I'm better than average, but at the very least I like a diversity. The Current hasn't repeated any songs all day, which is much more than I could say for Pandora.

For today the Current has my vote. Two thumbs up.

This

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

% python

>>> import this