"Citizen Correspondence" - KUAM's new UGC initiative

It's been a pretty crazy week development-wise here at Camp Happy. After furiously hacking all weekend, we launched Guam's first-ever user-generated content initiative, "Citizen Correspondence". It's our means to motivate the community to embrace citizen reporting, and short of giving out gear, we're providing all the technical facilities would-be newshounds need to get their stuff out to and considered by the public.

Here's our spot:



Josie also gave us some street cred, noting that inexorably at some point an event is going to happen that needs documenting, and the mainstream media may not always be there to catch on the spot. This is the point: the average Joe/Jane deserves to have their thoughts, voice opinions heard through a well-respected theater. Empowering people with the storage and venue to exhibit their work is critical to making this work.

As we get submissions, they'll be available in an online gallery, and there's a TV segment we'll feature each week, too. At the risk of tooting my own horn, it's freakin' cool.

Who knows? We may discover the next Marie Digby (remember this?). In addition to spot news, I'm hoping we'll get some creative pieces, too.

More to come...stay tuned!

Book review: The Definitive Guide to Django

I've been messing with Django for some time, and I've long awaited the release of APress' The Definitive Guide to Django: Web Development Done Right. This is one of the few times I've painstakingly gone through all the code samples and replicated as many of the examples as I could. The book's chapters are laid out logically and the material is presented intelligently by the creators of the framework.

The authors don't waste time and energy exhaustingly spewing rhetoric about how Django came to be, how they developed it and what their mindset is/was/will be. They just let you get to work, quickly be productive, and have fun developing cool stuff for the web. Which is the whole point of Django to begin with.

It's not written with a total newbie audience in mind, so some experience with web work, databases and Python programming is helpful, maybe even necessary. But, with some elbow grease, an open mind and a little persistence, you'll catch on. Although the authors are partial to Linux and Mac environments, the book gives more path and settings examples in those OSes, as well as Windows.

However, in criticism a scant few of the examples rely on a slightly older build of the framework, so some of the namespaces might be inconsistent with the book, and code snafus are spotty. I found myself hungry for more screenshots, which is a minor, but still desired shortcoming of the text.

Nonetheless, the book is chock full of little tidbits and tricks to help you write less code that's more reusable. Best practices are enforced as far as maintaining the "MTV" application architecture, including heavy doses of refactoring. As far as topics, Simon Willison's demo of building an intra-site search utility was what I found to be the book's coolest example. Other great chapters are working with non-HTML content, internationalization and working with Django's templates. The appendices are also phenomenal, making for excellent books-within-a-book reference guides.

In future editions of the book I'd hope to see more pragmatic app examples, more APIs and their capabilities cited, more "one-off" utilities built, and perhaps even an app developed consistently across chapters to bring the whole thing together and reinforce the concepts.

This book is without doubt essential reading for getting down with Django.

FAVICON.ico requests when toggling Mozilla tabs

I was just noodling with an app I'm building in Django, so I've got that framework's development web server open and running locally. To pass the time while debugging, I vapidly started hammering CTRL+TAB, forcing Firefox 2's open tabs to quickly swap between windows.

I've got different pages within the same app, each of which share a HEAD section that references, among other things, JavaScript libraries, stylesheets, RSS feeds, and custom icons. Interestingly, I noticed the server logging GET requests for each page's FAVICON.ico file - not when pages were normally reloaded, but when their tabs were toggled.

I tried the same example in MSIE 7, and it didn't replicate. Interesting.

Might this be a security flaw that could lead to a hacker being able to overload a server with requests by pre-loading a bunch of dummy pages into Firefox at startup and then infinitely looping through the tabs?

KUAM's Top 10 Stories of 2007

Ahh...another year, another retrospective special. In contrast to our 2006 countdown (video) of the top stories from that year, I had a lot of help writing, researching, producing and editing this year's 30-minute special. It came our really nice and our audiences have dug it so far.


Watch our special at Google Video

Enjoy!

It's the (other) most wonderful time of the year...

Snappy New Year, everyone! I'm enjoying the annual giggles I always get on January 1, as the dynamic date/time code printing the current year I'd written in the footer on KUAM.com did it's annual changeover to reflect another 12 months gone by:

What can I say - I'm pretty easy to please. Have a good one...and stay safe!

Call off the dogs...

One of my nieces came to visit me at work yesterday, and by a stroke of circuitous karma a co-worker brought in one of those $200 Yamaha starter electric guitar rigs - a strip-mall strat with a 15-watt amp with on-board overdrive. I also had a nice new pick in my wallet that I'd just purchased. Can you see where this is heading?

I was mindlessly noodling through a tapping run when suddenly out of the shadows and high above the distortion rang a shrill, "Uncle Jas...teach me THAT!" I gave the little one, who's never picked up the instrument before, a quick lesson on how to look like a rocker in 4 notes: an e-minor palm muted/pull-off/whammy divebomb/pick rake combo lick. She spent the better part of 45 minutes sussing it out, especially enjoying the noise produced by the raking bit. I made the mistake of informing her that you can tell when you've done a mean rake the right way by the indentation it makes in the pick. My bad.

Behold the casualty of war:

The plectrum is totally destroyed...much like I wrecked mine the first time I wanted to play. I've seen (and owned) picks with less damage after weeks of intense use. I guess I forgot that at the tender age of 10 you really take 'if some is good, more is better' concept to heart.

Rock on, Tyler.

Play the 80's (and other stuff, too)!

I've been working on developing the format for a new YouTube-based instructional video series to help people play hard rock electric guitar. I'm going to write, edit, host and star in the damn things, so if for whatever reason I'm not your cup of tea, you're screwed. Just kidding! :-)

It's basically me sitting in the KUAM Studios waxing nostalgic about the music, touching on gear and effects, telling some bad jokes, and then showing you how to shred.

Since I'm a big 80's hair metal buff, naturally a lot of the songs and techniques I'll be covering have to do what that time period; but I'll also cover the blues, some neoclassical work and some Jimi Hendrix. (Hint: I hope you dig Dokken.) I've got a playlist that I've been working on of about 7 songs and about 15 crowd-wowing tricks so far, but if you'd like to see anything in particular, just leave me a comment and I'll do my best.

As soon as my friends and I can shoot, edit and release the first few lessons, I'll be posting about it. Stay frosty!

I'm not that pixelated in real life

What's equally hilarious and shocking about me is that despite having been on the air all these years, I never once took the time to compile a resume tape of my best work. (Or at least that which survived digital migration and the numerous natural disasters we've had.) This is surprisingly in stark contrast to how I've meticulously revised my resume on an almost monthly basis since I started working.

I've spent a couple hours on weekends the last few weeks cobbling together choice clips from KUAM's archive of some of the more memorable moments I've logged on the air. So this couples nicely with all the other writing, development and stuff I've placed as my little nest egg to prove to future generations that I actually did exist.



Kindly forgive the lack in quality, as the version that's on YouTube and Google Video got washed through S-VHS from its initial DV state before making it online. Let me know if you'd like a high-res DVD copy and consider it done.

KUAM's 2007 'Survivors' special

I finally got our Liberation Day special up on Google Video. This was the production for which we shot standups in the scorching heat last week. Some of the funnier feedback we're getting notes how KUAM's most guarded secret is now out: Bri's really short and I'm pretty tall (at least by Guam standards).

While we try and disguise the height differentiation between Bri and I while on the set while in-studio, out in the field her 5'1" frame is noticeably more diminutive than me standing 6'3". In every shot when we made eye contact, she almost had to look straight up.

The hour-long special came out really nicely and was a fitting tribute to the brave people we featured in the segments who honestly and painfully shared their stories with us. We're beyond grateful for their contributions.

(Also, skip ahead to 52:14 in the video to Clynt's segment with former Merizo mayor Buck Cruz to see something really eerie. I swear this wasn't staged.)

I'm still getting the 3.5-hour, 670MB Liberation Day Parade that we broadcast live yesterday encoded & uploaded, so stay frosty. It'll be online soon!

Great writing by my g-g-g-generation

I've often wondered what the great literary works have been, are, or will be during my lifetime. The last great book I can think of is likely Catcher in the Rye, but that's before my time. Even more so for Jane Austen. So what will our contribution be to the great symphony of life? Where's the Shakespeare for Gen X?

Is there anything that even remotely qualifies as a great accomplishment of literature, or has society degraded so much that we've got to consider the following titles from recent history, which are known more for attaining pop culture notoriety than for having a profound impact?

- Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus
- Chicken Soup for the Soul (and its derivatives)
- The Satanic Verses
- The DaVinci Code
- Dianetics
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Almost everyone my age (33) has read Pet Sematary, and it wasn't required reading at any school I know of. Most frightening thing I've ever read. I was a member of the Stephen King Book Club, so I've got all his works on hardcover.

Anyone got any ideas? 'Cause I sure don't.