Alan Gutierrez

There was this advertisement for a pain reliever that tried to invent a new pain to treat, the pain of holding your children close, and it would be a laugh out loud failure, if it didn’t hit the brown note.

Do You Suffer from Babies?

When you watch the Motrin Moms ad, at first it is annoying, but there is this magic that happens as you replay it. For some reason, it is easy to watch again and again. It bounces along at nice clip, it is well animated, well narrated, and each time, it reaches out and insults your intelligence with a gentle plucking of a cord.

With the all the digital fervor of the online mob that mistakes their pursuit of customer service complaints for political action, a subset of the Twitter community has minted a bold new hashtag, and is pressing their message through Twitter search trends. On Monday, when whoever has the Motrin account arrives at their desk, there is a good chance that the advertisement will be pulled, a mea cupla issued, and the outraged Twitter users will squee triumphant. We’ll have to hear about the power of social media to effect social change for the remainder of the week.

The advertisement is indeed tone deaf. It is a reminder that you can’t always manufacture a problem for your product to solve, a la Don Draper and Mad Men. People won’t always cover their mouths, scrunch up their arms, put on extra baggy clothes and scurry off the pharmacy for the suggested chemical perfumes.

Sometimes they’ll just say, “who the hell are you to call me ugly?”
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I am a Democrat. I am a supporter of Barack Obama. I want Barack Obama to win the election and become President of the United States.

Which is why I’m so happy to see Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live. When I watched the clip above, I was able to laugh out loud at Sarah Palin for the first time. Much needed.

It was a fun and clever satire of the accusations of sexism that have been bandied about in the two weeks since Sarah Palin’s debut.

What I like most of all about the SNL skit is that it completely deflated Sarah Palin. For two weeks, Sarah Palin, marched forward with a message of wide-eyed denial about every aspect of her record, defended by a phalanx of operatives who labeled all inquiries into her abilities as sexist. As it seemed that she would get away with, there were the early stages of Bush Derangement Syndrome setting in among the Democratic faithful, a condition that is often fatal for Democratic political campaigns.
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Billy Welliver just wrapped up the Wedding Journal on Cox 10. I’m watching public access tonight. Interviews with Entergy executives, videos of weddings, a Cox representative touring the town asking people questions and buying their dinner. I’m listening to a fellow tell me about Cox Plugged In and the History Art Contest. Deadline has passed for submissions. Confusing, yet fun.

• Bernd Sailer verabschiedet sich für heute vom business und geht jetzt nach Hause / Took leave from work today and went straight home.
• Johannes Kleske hamburch ist ja immer noch die schönste stadt, die ich kenne. nur schade, dass ich sie ausschließlich vom taxi aus sehe :-/ / Hamburch is still always the most beutiful town that I know. Pity that I exclusively see it from a taxi.
• Ute Moritz wer ist denn heute abend so spontan unterwegs??? (berlin) / Who is spontaneously under way this afternoon?

I’m working in New Orleans on the recovery of lovely, yet troubled neighborhood called Hollygrove. One of the projects that I’ve been working on is creating an interactive map of the neighborhood, simply by uploading geocoded photographs to nifty applications like Picassa and Flickr, that can create a map of the neighborhood.

Which is why I’d so dearly appreciate the donation of Josh Hallett’s Helio Ocean toward this effort.

Hollygrove is not the most digital place in the world. In fact, a lot of people have not come back. Those who have come back are still in their FEMA trailers. What surprises me though, is how often people who never had a use for computers or the Internet before, go out of there way to get online. The problem is always that there is never enough information specific to this lesser known neighborhood.

I ride my bike through the neighborhood everyday. I would love to be able to take pictures and put them online. It’s my understanding that the Helio could put those photographs straight online and directly into maps at Picassa or Flickr. This would make it much easier to create the reports we need to track the redevelopment. I’d love to find that the ability to create a quick geocoded photo record is the sort of think that other neighborhoods could imitate. I want to do something to get them thinking about clever uses of social media. City hacks.

Working with a fancy device like the Helio Ocean would make it easier to implement, but it might also capture the imagination of the people I meet each day. We’re implementing a block captain program, where one family on the a block will great people as they return, and keep track of the houses that are still empty. After I pilot, I could imagine a program to put a Helio Ocean in the hands of the block captains.

Helio Oceans with Picassa or Flickr, and people watching from afar will be able to track the recovery of their neighborhood, with new photographs springing up every day like a garden in bloom.

I hate Ant.

I’ve been thinking about what a real build system for Java will be.

It will be dependency management system. One that does not execute a task unless necessary. One that maintains it’s own tree of dependencies. It knows how to check the expiration of file dependencies and networked dependencies.

Targets are not names of procedures, but artifacts that are constructed. This is how it is done in dependency management systems such as Make. Targets are represented by actual artifacts, such as object files produced by a C compiler, or an executable produced by a linker.

There will be imaginary targets, as well. Imaginary targets will force a build. Programmatic targets are imaginary targets that expire based on application specific logic.

Targets are built using rules. There are specific rules and generic rules. Specific rules might create a specific jar from a collection of class files. A generic rule might describe how to turn a C file into an object file.

It will be Java, all Java. You will invoke it using Java.

java -jar mix.jar compile

A Mix project is expressed in the Java programming language. No XML. No external languages. No property files, except those managed by Mix itself.

Mix will depend on a JDK 1.4 solution at every turn, forgoing the en vogue library, the shinny objects of the moment, in order to reduce the footprint of the build system. (You won’t have to download Commons Logging.)

Mix will be a client/server application. It will create a process that will listen on a port for commands. Commands are sent as serialized objects. Startup times are greatly reduced.

Reporting will be done with standards compliant XHTML that follows a strict set of formatting rules, for the application of the CSS stylesheet of your choice. No XML data dump. No transforms. Direct to something that you can read. Each build will create a website with a dashboard index and reports from each task.

Dependency management extends to external dependencies; libraries. Your build can use a local cache of any remote repository. To add a resource, you fire off Mix at the command line with a name and URL. A checksum will be generated and you will be prompted to add the resource and checksum pair to your build.

The resource now is available to your Mix project as an InputStream that can be read and written to file anywhere you like or you can reference the file in the local cache.

When you deploy the application and someone else builds your project on their machine, the resource manager will pull the resource and perform the checksum automatically.

As noted above, the tasks are written in Java. You can use a default task as the action to take for a target. You can use a chain of tasks that will be performed one after another. You can build write your own task in Java, it will get compiled an executed the next time you invoke Mix.

Thus, Mix is a dependency system for your command line Java applications.

A placeholder post, for notes on how to setup a web store lickity split.