mikhail panchenko / blog

After looking at this design for a while, I’ve decided it sucks. The biggest hint was my utter lack of motivation to convert the rest of the site to the theme. Taking that train of thought a little further, I asked myself: why the fuck do I even have multiple parts to this website? Whenever WordPress 2.7 goes stable, I’m hitting this baby with a complete overhaul. There will no longer be a website separate from the blog. However, there will be more integration with various services I use to get a complete snapshot of what I do with my life on a single page.

The 2008 election has come to a conclusion, and we know that Barack Obama will be the next President. I don’t want to write too much about it, as this isn’t a political blog (let’s face the facts: I can’t even vote yet…) However, what is a blog for, if not to write something pompous on historic occasions.

I’d like to congratulate Barack Obama on getting what he deserves. He has run a classy, warm, inspiring campaign, and he has achieved something incredibly special. His victory is a symbol of so many things that I believe to be American. The amount of blue I see on the electoral map as more and more states come through for Obama reassures me that the values, the strength, and the prosperity that I saw diminish over the 10 years I have spent in this country have not gone away and have returned with renewed strength.

I’d like to commend John McCain on making a classy concession speech. I hope that his supporters honor his request and come together behind our new leader.

I’d like to express how optimistic and proud I feel tonight, and to remind everyone that the nature of a democratic government is that one side always has to lose. Being bitter about not having your candidate win an election is equivalent to being bitter about core principles of democracy.

I truly hope that Barack Obama can accomplish even a fraction of what he has outlined during his campaign.

Finally, I am just excited to have an articulate President. Finally, some real presidential addresses.

It’s been so long since I’ve made a website “for myself” that actually creating the content has become a huge chore. I’m so used to working on what Crowley so aptly calls the “plumbing” that creating a simple layout for a joke website and filling in some bullshit content is the thing I’m putting off – even though the “hard parts” have been done for weeks!

Like I said before, I’m redoing the look. I’ve decided to start with the wordpress theme, as I’ve discovered it’s more of a bitch to go from a working design to making the wordpress markup play nice than the other way around. I’ll update the rest of the site when I have time/give a shit.

I was never that happy with this color scheme, so my new mind-numbing, end of the day task will be re-styling it, as well as actually adding content to it. I’ve been digging up old websites I had done work on and taking some screenshots, so hopefully sometime soon the site will be blessed with real content. In the mean time, I’ve been trying to hack less on the shuttle as it absolutely kills my wrists, so that little side project I’ve been working on is taking a bit longer. I’ve also been spending some time reading Django docs/source and now the develpers mailing list, hoping to contribute to the ORM in the department of scaling. Then I can have my cake and eat it too – develop on a kick ass framework AND have it scale better than a fat whale on some swallows. Stay tuned for the redesign, I’m quite pleased with what I have so far.

As I had previously indicated, I’ve gotten a bit tired of just hacking PHP all the time – one can only handle so much PHP array notation. Since I get to do a ton of that at Yahoo!, I’ve decided to try to do as little of it as possible outside. This means I won’t be touching my PHP projects very much.

Wheel and mihasya_libs, are both in a state where they can be used and certainly extended. The source can be found here and here respectively. I’ll gladly answer questions if someone actually wants to use it. I know one guy has already branched an older version, so I guess my blog posts and source publications weren’t as futile as they seemed at first.

What am I up to now? Python, and particularly Django. I know this seems ironic after all the shit talking I’ve done about frameworks, but let’s get real here – nothing I’m writing right now is going to scale very much any time soon. As a bit of good news, if it does, I have a pretty clear idea of how I would hack Django in a way that would keep the same pattern. In fact, I think that a lot of the features Cal requested in his keynote can be worked into the Django model quite nicely.

In case you’re wondering, I’m not just writing bullshit “hello world” apps in Django. Last week over the course of a few shuttle rides (oh commute, how I love you), I’ve quickly put together a little joke app. The back end is just about done (~6-8 hours of work, counting me poking around the django docs, examples and source at almost every step of the way, granted it doesn’t do much), so after I sprinkle some CSS magic and make some graphics in my VMWare’d copy of Photoshop (OH JOY!), I’ll unleash this beast. If it’s not launched tomorrow, it’s probably Gabe’s fault. Seriously, who the fuck still runs Gentoo?

Girltalk@Hackday 2008
Originally uploaded by mike.panchenko

The hackday concert this year did not disappoint. Gregg Gillis rocked the house. See my flickr stream for more photos/vids (click the picture).

Even if these commercials weren’t total bullshit… well… they’d still be total bullshit. Not a single one of those people is actually using the computer. Of COURSE it looks nice while somebody else is going through scripted bullshit interactions while you’re just watching the flashy moron-geared graphics and animations.

I wanna see one of those suckers plug in an inkjet printer. That is reality show material right there.

I highly recommend this book to anyone working with JavaScripts, particularly novices. I have very little ambition about the size of my javascript nuts, but I know I’ve grown a pretty decent pair over the years. I did, however, learn a whole lot from this quick, easy read.

If you are just starting to write JavaScript, READ THIS FIRST. In fact, this is probably the only book on JavaScript as a language in and of itself (outside the idiosyncratic world of browser DOM models and proprietary javascript engines) you should even bother reading.

Ironically, the part of the book that might be the most useful to a slightly more seasoned hacker are the appendices in which Crockford talks about the shitty parts of JavaScript. I actually do believe what Crockford says – if you only use the “good” parts and avoid the shitty parts, your code will be more reliable, more maintainable and easier to read.

The section on functions and closures opened my eyes.

In my opinion, a must buy for any serious frontend programmer. It helps that it’s also pretty cheap.

I know it totally sounds like I’m just trying to get in Crockford’s pants, but seriously, it’s a really helpful book.

On a side note, Open Hack Day is coming up. Stop by and show off.