In the distant past, I was a certified parliamentarian. On occasion, I still do chair meetings, or all called upon to provide some training on parliamentary procedure. Most recently, last weekend I was asked to prepare some training notes for a group of folks, so I started refreshing myself on Robert’s Rules of Order. That led me to thinking, “how can I visualize all these rules, in a simple flow?” The result is this diagram, below the fold.
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The City of Houston Planning Committee is considering changes to our parking ordinances. Some notable changes include increasing the parking ratio for restaurants (from 8 to 10 spaces per 1000 square feet) and bars (from 10 to 14 spaces per 1000). These rules come on top of an already increasingly “suburbanized” parking and building rules. In general, not good. I’ll try to make it to the hearings on these changes, and below are some of my talking notes

I speak for myself, but some credentials:
- Inside-the-Loop resident for many years
- office in Rice Village
- board of directors of a non-profit shop in Rice Village
- married to a Montrose-area cafe owner

In summary, what I want to present here is “one size does not fit all”. Houston is a very diverse city, don’t define a cookie-cutter ordinance to meet a very varied problem – instead, more local dialogue and collaboration required.
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Had a need recently to make some translucent (semi-opaque) elements on a Web page. CSS3 supports an “alpha” channel, the “a” in rgba, to provide color opaqueness, but IE 7 and 8 do not support this attribute.  So, most web developers resort to using a translucent background-image.  However, there is a pure CSS way that is compatible with all modern browsers today (IE6 ignored, of course).  This takes advantage, though, of some CSS parsing bugs, so may not satisfy the CSS purists out there, but it works for me

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As Rick Perry has joined the Republican Party presidential fray, there will be questions about his prowess at bringing jobs to Texas.  Of course, a governor can only directly “create” jobs by increasing payroll of government employment, but he does have a limited role in creating a more or less positive environment for businesses in the state, an that may have an impact on private employment as well.

The 2008-2011 recession has hit private employment in Texas just has it has in ogther ; however, it is worth noting that federal, state, and local employment figures have continued to rise through this same period.  Rise in state employment figures roughly matches the growth in the state government budget, and of course, the state budget deficit.  Some of these deficits have masked by federal ARRA “stimulus” funds, but that will be the subject of another post.

These stats drawn from the Texas Workforce Commission:

May 2008 – 8,857,500
May 2011 – 8,704,800

2011, though, has seen some job growth – not to pre-recession figures, but growing nonetheless.  These stats may change, though, as often past month figures are re-adjusted:

Jan 2011 - 8,483,200
Feb           – 8,514,400
Mar          - 8,612,000
Apr           – 8,674,200

State Government employment has gone up through the recession, which matches (approximately) the growth in our state budget through this same period:

May 2008 – 364,200
May 2011 – 378,700

May 2011 reflects an interesting decrease, perhaps due to the current budget battles at the state level.  We’ll see if that drop remains:

Jan           - 374,500
Feb           – 385,000
Mar          - 385,300
Apr          - 385,300

Local government employment has also been growing through this period – this is partially state budget-driven, so is worth reflecting:

May 2008 – 1,244,600
May 2011 – 1,303,000

Egads, it’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post. Yes, let’s blame Twitter for this!! Pithy, short, and easy, tweeting has become the easy way to share thoughts. Of course, not all can be written in just 140 characters, so I need to maintain a blog for deeper, yes, deeper thoughts.

But for now, let me just say one word: Django! Yes, I’ve been doing a lot of Django development over the past year. Enjoying it too. Python is concise, is nice. Not as nice as Smalltalk, of course, but nice enough. And, as a framework, Django delivers a lot of excellent functionality right out of the box. Been very pleased. I’ll have to write up some of my Django apps … when I have time, of cours.e

Introduction

Over the past year or so, I have been helping a small cafe in Houston, a tea house, enter into the world of social media marketing, mostly employing Twitter, and recently making use of Facebook. In fact, we were perhaps the first retail establishment in Houston to enter the brave new world of Twitter, and now boast over 1500 followers, making it the 2nd largest restaurant following in Houston. This cafe’s experience with social media has been quite successful, with results far better than advertising in traditional newspapers or magazines, and will continue to be a major participant in social networking space.

Follower count was never the strategy when we entered the Twitter world. I did have a strategy in mind when I first participated, and it was been refined through customer feedback and a few lessons-learned. I think our experiences can be useful to other retail stores, so just wanted to take some time here to share my insights. They can be organized as the 3 Ps of Social Media Marketing:

Passion Personality Place

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On a recent project, had to deal with searching of tens of thousands of product descriptions, with a need to find substring matches quickly.  The select: statement in Smalltalk works like a SQL table scan – okay for small collections, but becomes seconds+ response time with larger lists.

An effective solution to this is an nGram Dictionary.  Strings of words can be broken up into sets of tri-grams, quad-grams, quint-grams, and so on.

My approach to this is a Dictionary indexed by nGram length, each element containing dictionaries of nGram strings of collections of the string objects to be searched.  Thus, indexing results as such:

3 -> ana -> ('banana')
ban -> ('banana', 'band')
4 -> bana -> ('banana')
band -> ('band')
anan -> ('banana')
5 -> banan -> ('banana')
...

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I’m exploring a new pattern – I’m sure it’s been done before, but it’s new to me, and a useful exercise to get to the next stage with an application I’m envisioning.  The pattern is using Seaside Decorators as security guards.

So, last night, finally squeezed in enough time to my decorator guards into action.  Happy to report they’re working fine.  You can review the demo app yourself at agoric.seasidehosting.st/seaside/ibis .  Login as bob@test.com, password bob, or alice@test.com, password alice. More »

It’s oft repeated that health care costs continue to rise at a crazy pace.  While most costs of most products and services have been decreasing, in terms of “real”, inflation-adjusted dollars, health care, like education, have been increasing at record paces.  And, unlike the housing/real estate “bubble”, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.  What’s going on?

Most commentators talk about health care cost increases.  However, the evidence I see suggests something different.  Yes, we’re seeing health care price increases.  But cost increases? There’s a difference.

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This is a simple application I wrote, just to learn more about Seaside, and specifically to figure out onChange: actions, which makes use of Scriptaculous to create an AJAXy web application without much effort.

You can see the application at work at:

agoric.seasidehosting.st/cashdrawer

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