In Depth Review of The Dark Knight

posted by pope on July 18, 2008 at 3:06 pm

I AM VERY TIRED. Midnight showings of almost 3 hour movies and work early in the morning do not go well.

But now I have a new one to add to my list of favorite movies ever. Go see The Dark Knight. Amazing.

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tags: The Dark Knight, movies, reviews, all tags
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Working at Endeca: I Dig It

posted by pope on July 7, 2008 at 4:57 pm

After passing through my first week of co-op fairly well (I'd say), I finally have some idea of what I'm actually doing here at Endeca. I'm in the Applications group of IT, meaning I work on the software that helps people get work done here. In some cases, I'll be working on the wiki used in the company's intranet, and in others I'll even be writing my own scripts or apps that people can use to do whatever it is they do for Endeca. Eventually, at the end of the month, I'll be having the new hire training and learn about the Endeca product, and all of its "knowledge management" powers.

In general, this place is great. The people are ridiculously friendly and helpful, and it seems like everyone loves the job they do, which is not exactly a common thing to find out in the "real world." All the free snacks and drinks don't hurt either. I've made it a personal mission to try every item in the free coffee machine just because I have to know what they taste like.

While I'm still in the "what the hell is going on right now?" stage of my learning process here, I've got a project, small as it is, that I am already working on (something along the lines of automating a very time-consuming and unpleasant task involving 1700 rows of data in Excel), and I'm starting to get somewhere with it. It's not a very tasking project, and shouldn't take very long at all, but it's a great way to get into how work gets done around here and how everything is set up.

All in all, this is a great work environment, and I know that I am going to learn a lot about both working in the professional world and about programming and IT in general. Endeca is a winner.

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tags: personal, Endeca, co-op, Northeastern University, all tags
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Things Are Great

posted by pope on July 2, 2008 at 4:55 pm

It's true. They are. After roughly a week of packing and unpacking basically everything I own repeatedly, I'm moved into my new room in West Village A. Being about twice as big and 150% more air conditioned than my old room in WIllis, (the extra 30% is based on the suspicion that Willis used heat in the summer in some kind of miserable attempt to say "well, we're trying, honest.") my new home is absolutely fantastic. On top of that, starting work at Endeca was nothing less than a great success. It's a really great place, and everyone I met today was absurdly friendly and helpful in getting me started. I haven't actually started a real project yet, other than getting Firefox and Eclipse installed on my workstation, but it looks like it will actually be a lot of fun. In other news, I'm tired. So for now I'm done, but expect more updates regularly. I've got a lot to talk about these days.

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tags: personal, Endeca, co-op, Northeastern University, all tags
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Are you really MrBabyMan? That's pretty cool if you are. I have never gotten such attention before...

And the questions about Endeca will be answered in a post coming soon.
posted by pope on July 6, 2008 at 4:05 am
Also, you may want to remove WNV from the friends section.
posted by MrBabyMan on July 3, 2008 at 1:25 pm
What are they going to have you doing at Endeca?
posted by MrBabyMan on July 3, 2008 at 1:17 pm

Reading The Whole Article Helps

posted by pope on June 28, 2008 at 8:55 am

Back from my week on Cape Cod, today is the day I get to unpack. And then pack again. I'll be moving into my new suite/apartment/on-campus housing in West Village A South tomorrow (Sunday). This isn't exactly where I'm living, but the same building, so close enough.


West Village A at Northeastern University


It's all leading up to my impending co-op start on the 2nd, this Wednesday. My adventures at Endeca will be well-documented here. As far as the company privacy policy lets me, anyway.

In other news, I saw on ReadWriteWeb an article about Google adopting something called OAuth for all the Google Data APIs. Obviously this is a big deal for the people behind OAuth, to be not only backed, but implemented in some of the most important services offered by someone like Google.

But then that brings up a question in my mind. OAuth and OpenID. Same difference? At first I was pretty unhappy with what I was reading. I mean, OpenID has been making progress in unifying logins across the web, and here comes a new system pressing for the same goal? That only defeats the whole purpose of unified logins if we have multiple services providing this system. I suppose two logins is better than 3000, but what happens when every programmer decides he doesn't like the available options and throws together another new "unifying service." The whole idea dies, that's what.

But then I realized that sometimes I should read before I think such things.

The About OAuth site explains that OAuth's goal is to be the valet key that you hand out to let people access a specific part of your password-protected life, but still restrict everything they don't need, the same way a valet key will open the car door and start the engine, but not open the trunk or unlock the glove box. However, OpenID is a master skeleton key, that would allow you to open all your car doors and trunks and glove boxes and everything else, with just a single key. OAuth is for developers to allow easy access only to certain features (like a service provider or data) and OpenID is for anyone to have easy authentication on any site.

Well, now that makes perfect sense.

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tags: personal, co-op, Endeca, development, OAuth, OpenID, all tags
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Personally, I don't want things I do in certain far corners of the web to be related or lead back to any other part of my online life. I'd rather have hundreds of separate accounts.
posted by MrBabyMan on July 3, 2008 at 1:21 pm

Shooting Stars

posted by pope on June 17, 2008 at 2:59 pm

Unlike the characters in your favorite sci-fi movies and TV shows, like Star Wars and Star Trek and Walker: Texas Ranger, we need bathrooms. People have to poop sometimes, and that's just the way things work, whether we're here on Earth or up in a multi-billion dollar tin can floating in space.

So how do our brave astronauts do it? Thanks to this wonderfully educational lecture, we now know!

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tags: science, space, poop, all tags
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and they say I dupe other people's Digg submissions. Hurrah for original content!
posted by MrBabyMan on July 3, 2008 at 1:23 pm

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