Every year since I’ve been able to, I’ve grown a beard for the winter. Having grown up in Maine, and having spent a few years in Colorado, it was the natural thing to do. Keep it tidy during the warmer months, and when the leaves started to fall, make sure I started on my personal protection from the cold.

This year, however, was a bit different. I had grown a fairly sizable beard this past winter when a request was placed. My good friend Jake’s lovely fiance (at the time) couldn’t bear the thought of the whiskers not making an appearance at the wedding.  So, she asked if I’d keep the beard. Not wanting to raise the ire of a bride to be, I said I would do my best. Keeping the beard wasn’t much of a stretch, as I really take pride in my facial hair. As the wedding approached, the temperatures began to rise. People began to doubt whether I’d be able to make it.

Such little faith.

Then came July 31st, the day Jake and Allie were to marry. Before the ceremony, I took a little good-natured ribbing for having such a ZZ Top-esque face at a wedding. It was easy to brush off, “The bride requested it,” I said.

That was a couple of days ago.  During these last few days, I’ve been hemming and hawing about keeping the beard. Should I cut it off? Should I keep it? I couldn’t make up my mind. But, then it dawned on me, fall was approaching rather quickly. If I didn’t cut it now, I’d have to keep it into next winter.

Alas, the bearded jig was up.

Using the jQuery function $.getJSON, I had it running in no time. Now, keep in mind I was testing in Firefox. More often then not, when I put something together in javascript or jQuery it seems to work flawlessly in Firefox. But when I come to check it in Chrome or Safari, something is amuck.

Have spent a good twenty minutes on the Google tubes searching for what could be the matter, I came up empty handed. After some debugging in the ten line jQuery script, I realized that data from my JSON response wasn’t being passed along. To the JSON I went! And that’s where I found the issue:

[{"key0": "value0", "key1": "value1"},{"key0": "value2, "key1": "value3"},]

Hanging out at the tail end of the string was the wayward ‘,’! No doubt the result of some careless output from the database. It worked like a charm in Chrome after cleaning it up with a simple line of PHP before adding the final ‘]’:

$output = substr($output,'',-1);

So, as you can see, it wasn’t a case of ajax not working in Chrome, but rather a case of invalid JSON working in Firefox. While I appreciate Firefox’s leniency, this isn’t the first time it has bit me the ass. But, in the end, a great lesson learned regarding the output of valid JSON.

But, really, I digress. The motivation for today’s posts comes from the fact that I recently realized I have yet to write anything about fermentation. Here I am touting my site as a resource for fermentors and there’s not a word regarding the topic.

In the last two years, I’ve really gotten into fermenting. Depending on what crops are coming from the earth locally, you can find in my apartment an assortment of bubbling crocks, jars, growlers and carboys. I’ve been experimenting in beer, mead, kimchi, sour pickles, sauerkraut and sour beets. Miraculously, almost every experiment has gone very well. The exceptions range from exploding beer bottles, a bursting mead bottle and, recently, some very, very, very funky sour pickles. If I had to pick my favorite fermentation so far, it would have to be the Traditional Napa Cabbage Kimchi. And though I strayed pretty far from the recipe, it worked excellently as a reference point. My other go to reference for all things fermentation is Sandor Katz’s book, Wild Fermentation. If you know anything about fermentation, you’ve heard of this book, but if you’re looking to get into fermentation for the first time, I would highly recommend his book.

My friend, Jake, and I have been having some very good luck brewing beer in the last few batches. Our most recent, a summer blond, came out better than I could have hoped. And our previously beer, a double chocolate oatmeal stout was a real crowd-pleaser. I’m looking forward to our next brew, even though I’m not entirely sure what it will be.

I’d like to wrap this post up by talking about my first-ever experience pickling. I realize it’s not technically fermentation, but vinegar is a product of fermentation, so I’m going with it. I decided, having already done a few batches of sour pickles, that I wasn’t going to start with cucumbers. Instead, I chose a seasonal favorite, Fiddleheads. As the linked Wikipedia page explains, they are essentially baby ferns. And while they are an acquired taste, I could help but think, how would these little fellas taste pickled? I ordered two pounds through my local coop and pickled half of them. Based loosely off of this recipe, I used water, vinegar (duh!), garlic, ginger and dill. In one of the jars, I added lemon zest, and in the other I added three thai chili peppers. To say that I’m excited to try them in several weeks time is an understatement.

So, now that I’ve started sharing my fermentation stories with you, I’ll be sure to continue in the future. If you have any questions, or would like to share a story of your own, feel free to contact me at mhokie@thehokie.com or on twitter.

This quick post is to give a little shout out to TJS over at dewpoint.snagdata.com.  In particular, their post titled, Drawing a Grid in a UITableView.  I had a similar experience to the author when I started trying to figure out how to display tabular data within a UITableView.  It seemed like a grid system should be built in, but alas, it was not.  I tried inserting tabs, messing with alignments but nothing really worked.  I considered inserting individual labels into the cell, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it.

After searching for what seemed like an hour, I couldn’t find anything.  Finally, I happened upon TJS’s solution and immediately knew I had found what I was looking for.  After tweaking the label’s size, font color and setting the background color to ‘clear’, I was in business.

So, besides keeping the authors info intact in the file headers, I wanted to give an internet high five and maybe in doing so, help the post get a better positioning in the Googles.  If anyone is having any issues with their Objective C code, feel free to hit me up on Twitter, @mhokie.  I’m by no means an expert, but I’ve learned a few things in the last year or so.

Basically, the new plan is to reroute requests for google.cn to google.hk.  The Hong Kong version of Google has simple Chinese implemented and, most importantly, is uncensored.  If you’ve followed any of the news surrounding Google’s relationship with the Chinese government, you know it has focused almost solely on censorship.  Google wants the Chinese traffic and business, but the not-so-democratic Chinese government isn’t cool with an open internet.

I, personally, applaud the efforts of Google in working with China.  While I realize it isn’t entirely altruistic (ad revenue, etc.), I can only imagine how hard it must be to censor what is already a highly complex database. Furthermore, they’ve taken a ton of flack for bending to the demands of the Chinese government.  But really, I think it’s better that the Chinese people have censored access to Google than no access at all.

As a side note, Google has created a page to allow everyone to see what services are currently allowed in China. Check it out here.

What are your thoughts?  Please let me know in the comments!

The code, in a nutshell, allows for the real time testing of variations on aspects of a website.  These aspects range from html elements to css styles to javascript variables.  With a few small lines of javascript and a several variations in the code, you can let ‘genetics’ take care of the rest.  For more information on how the software works, check out the usage section of the Github page.

I first read of this code being used on shoemoney.com.  In the post titled, ‘Split Testing with a Genetic Algorithm’, the company’s CTO explained how he used Genetify to split test several lines of text, colors of buttons and various call to action arrow configurations.  Over several thousand page views, the algorithms eventually determined which combination of elements resulted in the highest success rate.  Read more about how the use of genetic algorithms increased their sales figures in the article.

After poking around a bit, I learned that the software has been around in some form for a while now.  It was set to the back burner for some time while the creators explored a more lucrative version of the concept, SnapAds.  In a November 2008 post, John Resig talks about being very excited about the rumor of the Genetify code being open sourced.  A quick look in the Github history of the project shows that less than one month later, author gregdingle committed the first version.  A year later, we have the most current commit, which is what I’ve been experimenting with.

The most obvious use for this code seems to be for advertisement landing pages and product sales pages.  That being said, I’d love to find a use for it in my freelancing.  Being a web developer first, and barely a designer second, it’s a very intriguing to think that I could allow a site’s user base to determine a very important design decision.  I’d be very interested to know what web designers think of this use of genetic algorithms.

I’ve mentioned this product to a few people, and their initial reaction is generally bordering on disgust.  When I ask what caused their face to turn sour, they almost always describe some sort of assumed purity in their Twitter feed.  This, as a developer, has a tendency to irk me in several ways.  After taking a few nerd breaths, I recompose myself and ask one simple question:

“How much are you paying to use Twitter?”

This is the exact same question I pose to folks who complain about design and policy changes on Facebook.  Or those who are still pouting about the inclusion of Buzz in Google’s *ahem* free e-mail service, GMail.  I am continually perplexed by the vast amount of entitlement assumed by the citizens of the internet. The last I checked, no one forced you to sign up for these services.  Nor did anyone ask you to disregard the respective services’ legal terms.

My other point of contention is the assumption that some phantom benefactor is paying for these services’ operational fees.  Server space, employee wages and legal fees are not paid with pictures of your dog, Snookie, or your tweet regarding a hot new bar in town.  They are, however, paid by allowing advertisers to target their ads in a very direct manner.

So, as a developer, I have no issue what so ever with seeing ads in my twitter feed, nor tweeting the occasional ad.  Do I want to see an ad every other tweet, not really. But if while Twitter takes its time figuring out how to monetize their system, far be it from me to not make a little extra cash while I tweet.

With all that being said, I’m interested in what you have to say.  So please,  developers and non-developers alike, chime in with your thoughts on the topics discussed above.

I’ve been getting into many new things since I last posted on this site.  I’ve started developing applications for the iPhone.  I have been doing some freelance web work.  Most recently, I’ve been working on a larger project, creating online shopping software for buying clubs.

Off of the computer, I’ve been spending a lot of time fermenting many things.  My friend Jake and I have been homebrewing now for about a year.  I’ve had several successful batches of sauerkraut and kimchi.  Throw in some exploding mead, a few tasty sour pickles and about two quarts of pickled beets and there have been a lot of things bubbling in my apartment.

The one thing that unifies everything above is that, for the first time in my life, I’ve continually ran into a lack of resources on the web.  If I Googled, “fermentation with whey”, I’d get a few sites, but nothing very specific.  Changing the color of several elements in a view-based navigation style iPhone app?  Again, nothing very useful.

Through stringing information from a few random websites, coupled with trial and error, I’ve figured out most of the things I was searching for.  But then I realized I should probably be writing this stuff down, lest someone else is searching for the same things to no avail.

And there you have it.  As the title indicates, I hope to make this website a resource for all things web development, programming and fermentation.  We’ll see how it goes!