The between-season TV drought is ending, not that I miss watching TV regularly much. A few of the things coming on that I think friends are interested in:

“Weeds” returns tonight on Showtime, and this year it’s paired with “Nurse Jackie”, which looks interesting although isn’t getting great reviews

There’s no new season of “Top Chef” this summer; we’re getting “Top Chef Masters” (starting on Wednesday June 10th) instead, which is “Top Chef” with established chefs (some of whom have been judges on the regular show) and a different team.

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Um, excuse me, but when did it start?

[From CNN Political Ticker: All politics, all the time Blog Archive - Steele: GOP must focus on conservative principles « - Blogs from CNN.com]

…a new project.

For some reason when I’m away from home and sitting in a hotel, I often really want to code.

I enjoy the initial act of creating something much more than I enjoy the act of completing and deploying it. This has been the case pretty much since I started creating things. There’s a thrill for me in the initial exploration of an idea, the initial design of a piece of software or web site, and in learning how to use new tools or pieces of software to build the thing that I want to build.

I lose interest when it comes to polishing it and deploying it, though.

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Not having read any spoilers, I predict that they set off the nuke and that the entire cast is propelled 150,000 years into the past where they become the progenitors of humanity… wait, sorry, wrong show.

Just a footnote about the tax protests: the conservative group behind them has associated the name ‘Tea’ with them, and some people are referring to the protests as teabagging, which - if you don’t know what it means already - you might take a moment to check out, because it’s hilarious.

Even better is the Rachel Maddow report on it that Adam showed me:

There are tax protests going on today, because the government is spending a god-awful amount of money - more god-awful than usual. Or maybe they’re because a group of people who are accustomed to getting their way aren’t getting their way after 8 years. I’m not going to defend or attack what our government is doing at this point, but there is a sentiment going around these tax protests that I feel the need to say something about.

“You can’t spend your way out of debt”

Really? REALLY? Because last I checked, that’s exactly how most companies operated - most companies, at the start, have no cash flow and require a loan or investment - which they spend - in order to keep going until they can build up cash flow and start making money. If that cannot work then I guess we haven’t had any successful businesses in the last couple of hundred years.

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NBC’s new show ‘Kings’ has intrigued me… the biggest selling points of it for me are that it stars Ian McShane (Al Swearengen from ‘Deadwood’)… we spent part of the weekend trying to explain the appeal and charm of Al Swearengen to someone, and likely failed.

The show is an alternate-universe modern retelling of the biblical story of David (replete with Goliath tanks). While I don’t have much need in my life for retellings of bible stories, the pieces fell together to make this one look interesting to me.

The show has received critical acclaim while, unfortunately, not many people seem to have watched the premiere. It’s still sitting on our DVR as we haven’t had a chance to watch it yet either, but I’m looking forward to some high quality Ian McShane time, even if it will be weird that he’s not swearing up a storm.

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Yahoo seems to have changed the layout of Yahoo Movies recently. I was looking at what was playing locally and saw this:

It sounds ominous. If I don’t sign in are they going to close The Nugget?

Apple’s first security update of 2009 for MacOS X may solve some security issues in the OS but it also seriously breaks Perl by installing old versions of some modules along with Perl. It looks like Perl works okay for things that MacOS X uses it for, but if you do development using it or have installed other modules than what it came bundled with you may find that it no longer works.

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Do you ever turn on the television and think “Oh my, why hasn’t Fox TV adapted Ab Fab into a US sitcom?”

Me neither.

Unfortunately, it appears that Fox never got the memo, and are in the process of doing just that. Complicating matters is the fact that Jennifer Saunders is helping write the new version. Which means that I’ll probably try watching it at least once, damn it.

[From Ab Fab New Pilot For Fox TV]

BSG is coming back this week for its final batch of episodes.

I have mixed feelings about it, if only because I’m really going to miss it terribly when it’s over. I’m glad it’s limited; there’s a specific story to tell and end, and the fourth season has been tight. But I’ll miss looking forward to it every Friday night.

The new episode will apparently run 3.5 minutes long, so set make sure your DVRs are catching that because I suspect you’ll be very unhappy about missing the last few minutes of the new episode.

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Fox News is the most trusted TV news source, with 39.3% of respondents to an IFC survey saying they trusted it most.

[From Poll: Internet, Fox News Are Most Trusted News Sources | Epicenter from Wired.com]

sudo is a command-line UNIX utility that allows you to execute a command as another user (most likely, the superuser). Usually you’ll use it to execute a single command:

sudo dmesg

or to start a shell:

sudo -s

sudo is similar to the su command - the su command also allows you to become another user (most likely root). The difference is that su requires you to type the other user’s password. sudo allows you to use your own password. The file /etc/sudoers tells the system who is allowed to do what using the sudo command. In a multiuser environment, this has the benefit of allowing multiple users to become root (or other users) without giving them the root password. Then you can easily revoke root privileges from a user if you need to without affecting the other people who may need to become root.

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Where local restaurants are going to offer food. And someone emails you to ask what restaurants will be there. But the mail bounces after several days because the mailbox is full.

So - the day of the event - you get a call asking what restaurants will be there. And you don’t know. I guess it doesn’t really matter, does it? Or just nobody cares. The caller mentions to you that he tried to email quite a while ago but the mailbox was full. And you say “Oh, yes, it probably is.”.

Maybe it’s just a New Hampshire/Vermont thing. This is, after all, the land where plumbers and electricians rarely answer their phones, return calls, or show up when they say they will. It used to be that they were really busy, but now they just don’t get around to it.

And I don’t mean that sarcastically.

Today they have Queen’s album “News of the World” on sale as an MP3 download for $1.99.

That’s the album with “We Are the Champions” on it. I’m pretty sure they would have run the same special if McCain won yesterday. It’s a nice sentiment.

Back to the important things: Ben & Jerry’s is giving away free cones from 5PM to 8PM today (election day).

http://www.benjerry.com/features/i_voted/

“Futurama” unfortunately never got the love that “The Simpsons” gets, but I’m still grateful for the fact that Fox gave the show another chance in the form of four direct-to-DVD releases ("Futurama - Bender’s Big Score", "Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs", "Futurama: Bender’s Game", and the forth-coming “Into the Wild Green Yonder”).

All I really know about “Bender’s Game” is that it involves D&D, robots and Leela as a centaur. It being “Futurama” was enough to know that I wanted to see it; that’s all icing on the cake.

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I’m almost ready to update the production version of UVFood.com. I’ve been testing against Firefox during development, but I can’t possibly deploy the update without testing against other browsers. Safari turned up no surprises, and Opera has turned up a weird little problem that doesn’t make any sense.

But of course it was Internet Explorer that had the biggest issues.

Bookmarking is done via Ajax. When you bookmark a listing the icon changes from a heart with a plus sign to a heart with a minus sign, the count of the number of times the the listing was bookmarked is updated and a message is displayed that confirms the item was bookmarked. This works fine with Safari, Firefox and Opera. Internet Explorer, however, exhibits some truly erratic behavior. When you bookmark a listing in IE everything you expect happens. But when you click again to remove it from the bookmarks - everything that happened the last time happened again.

Entering a review worked, though. But clicking stars to rate a listing had a similar problem.

The problem was that jQuery on IE was caching the JSON results, something it wasn’t doing on Safari or Firefox.

The first thing I tried was to make sure that my server returned a header in the response to tell the client not to cache the results. It’s a simple header line:
Cache-Control: no-cache

Unfortunately this didn’t change anything. It’s still good practice to make sure that your server emits the correct cache control headers, though.

Then I remembered a discussion of jQuery and GET vs. POST methods. GET is meant to be idempotent, no ill effects if it’s repeated (a request to move to position 8 is idempotent; a request to move to the next position is not). And it may be okay to store the results of a GET. POST is meant to be used for other requests.

Unfortunately, the convenience function that jQuery offers for dealing with jSON Ajax requests is getJSON(), which uses a GET request. It’s easy to write a postJSON() convenience function, however. Just add this to your jQuery initialization code:
$.postJSON = function(url, data, callback) { $.post(url, data, callback, "json");

Changing my code to use postJSON() instead of getJSON() solved the problem.