Addicted to Logs

I released my website just a week or two ago. Since then, I've probably checked and rechecked the server logs a hundred times a day. I'm totally addicted. I now check them more than email. When I'm away from my computer I get nervous thinking about the activity I'm missing.

What I love the most is sitting there refreshing the logs watching a user's every move. I see what pages they click on and how long they stay on a page. I try to imagine them sitting there, reading the different blurbs and thinking about where to click next. When they inevitably navigate away from my site I wonder in agony why they would leave. Was the price too high? Does the site look too unprofessional or do they think it's a scam? Or is there some random browser bug on their system that caused it to be displayed improperly? I may never know. But I always blame myself.

But I continue hitting refresh. The unrelenting self-doubt wont stop me from eavesdropping on the next person who comes on the site. I'll change some text here tweak the layout there. I keep wanting to slash and burn whole areas of the site but I'm also too scared to touch it because it works sort-of.

I think I'll just stay here and keep watching.

New Website

It can be difficult to keep your programming teeth sharp while studying in law school, but I've done just that. I'm happy to say that after learning a host of technologies (see previous post), my new website is largely complete.

The result is Resumé Launchpad. I got the idea for the website while applying to law firms during the end of my first year of law school. It's a tedious process. There are widely published databases containing the firm names, human resources representative names, and email addresses. So the process normally involves building a generic cover letter, copying and pasting the appropriate information into the cover letter, and blasting the email off.

When you first start, you try to customize the cover letter to each firm. It wouldn't be uncommon for me to spend a good twenty to forty minutes per cover letter. But after doing a dozen of these and receiving only form rejection letters, you begin to realize that quantity is more important that quality. Then you literally just modify the name of the firm and recipient and send the email blindly hoping for the best.

I ran into problems. I tried tracking everything in excel, but on several occasions I sent the my application to the same person twice. Worse than that, sometimes I would copy & paste incorrectly and get the firm's name, the recipient's name, or their gender wrong. After sending nearly a hundred cover letters like this, my programming instincts got the better of me and I decided to automate the process.

So I put together a database of legal employers from widely available sources (all legit). Then I wrote a python program which was kind of like a mail-merge on steroids; it could send hundreds of customized emails to various recipients stored in a local database.

Finally, the day of reckoning came. I put together my cover letter, resumé, and other attachments and let my program do its thing. I sent about three hundred emails in a couple of minutes. What would have taken me hours and days took only seconds.

It was successful. I got a number of interviews at some very prestigious firms. At the time, I didn't see it as a product, but more as a tool to make life easier for me. The idea to build a general-purpose web interface to my program started percolating.

The rest is programming history. I learned how to put together a modern complex site and two weeks ago I launched it to the world.

So if you're an attorney, law student, paralegal, or legal secretary and you're looking for legal work, check out www.resumelaunchpad.com.

Websites....

I consider myself a pretty competent programmer. I can pick up a new language / programming environment in a day and hammer out a cool prototype within three or four days. So when I had an idea for a website, I jumped right in.

Let me start of at the end... the website works! It's in private beta right now and I hope to release it to all in a month.

But it's been a long hard slog; far more work than I imagined. The last website I built was circa 2001. It was really advanced for its time: simple javascript and flash animations! Now, in this Web 2.0 world, "simple" anything won't cut it. It's not just that javascript has changed and flash has been dropped. Today, the list of technologies to choose from to build a site is staggering.

But even if you don't want to learn everything, say you just want to learn enough to put something decent together; well you're still in for a steep learning curve. Here's the list of mandatory technologies I've had to either know or learn to jump into the Web 2.0 world:

• Advanced Javascript - learning object oriented programming the javascript way is definitely something new. It isn't bad, there's a lot to like about javascript, just different.
  
• HTML - Remember the days when tags like "center" and "table" were your friend? Forget it, you're just using div and span now.
• CSS - I hate CSS. It isn't a programming language at all. It's fine for colors and sizes. But once you use it to do layout, your headaches will begin. It's an art more than a science and nothing feels deterministic:
  Do you use the "top" or "margin-top" attribute? Who knows, try both.
  Why do we have both inline and inline-block? Because we can.
  Unfortunately, CSS is the only thing out there that does what you want. You just have to swallow it.
• python - Admittedly, I was already pretty well versed in python (i luv python). If you don't want python, you're going to have to learn PHP or one of the other web-programming languages.

And those are just the languages you'll need to learn. The fun really begins when you include all the libraries:

• jQuery - Very cool, I must admit. But for the uninitiated, it's totally different from anything you've done before.
  
• jQuery Plugins - There's a jQuery plugin for everything. Great. Unfortunately, its a new API you have to learn to do anything.
  
• Django - The web-backend. Cool technology but pretty massive and you have to learn quite a bit of it to do anything. Oh, did I mention that to use Django you have to learn its own special html-markup language too? It can easily take a day of tutorials to get familiar with the system. I've been working with it for a month now and I've only started becoming comfortable.
• Google App Engine - It isn't necessary to learn google app engine. But they're a ridiculously cheap web-hosting solution... actually, for most cases it's totally free. But they do things so totally different, that there is a nice learning curve. To start with, there is no file system. Enjoy.

And perhaps I forgot the biggest pain: compatibility between different browsers. Just when you think you put the final touches on your beautiful site, you check it out on a different browser and it looks like crap. I'm not a Microsoft-hater, but this experience has definitely left a sour taste in my mouth for IE and I haven't even tried the mobile browsers.

Moral of the story is that making a website is pretty complicated involving nearly a dozen technologies. But websites are the future (ahem, present) and it feels pretty gratifying being able to put a real-life site online.

More Employed U.S. Engineers!

I saw this article about China's new UAV drones, some of which are superior in some ways than America's. Most patriots probably have a knot in their stomach, concerned that China just beat us in one more thing.

Don't fret! Rejoice!

This is the beginning of a new arms race! No U.S. chief of staff will let some other country have something that flies faster, harder, or longer than our overly expensive aircraft. They're going to have to make something better. That in turn, means more big expensive projects and more employed engineers. Looking forward to it!

Bloom Energy Hype

There has been quite a bit of hub-ub about Bloom energy. Probably overly hyped. People have been making SOFC fuel cells for years. I don't know why he thinks he can make them so cheap.

If you want to see Blooms patents, everything is online:

http://tinyurl.com/BloomEnergyPatent

Posner off his Rocker

I usually enjoy reading the Posner-Becker blog for its great analysis of current events. But a recent post has really amazed me in its stupidity. The article is generally ok, but Posner makes two extremely ridiculous arguments.

First, Posner rants about how American's health care system is a result of "a large 'underclass' (corresponding to the residents of our inner cities) that is poor and has a very high murder rate and high infant mortality and a high incidence of AIDS and other diseases." As a federal judge, you would think that Posner would support his argument with some facts. As it turns out less than a quarter of the United State's poor live in cities. Most live in rural areas. Look a bit harder before blaming America's health problems on the urban areas.

Posner's next argument is that Europeans expect worse medical care than Americans because they are more "fatalistic." Posner has no idea what he is talking about and is totally speculating. Well I thought I would add my own counter-speculation... American's are far more religious than Europeans and are much more likely to accept their "fate" and refuse further medical procedures than Europeans. Because Europeans are less devout they are are more likely to do a rational analysis of their medical situation. Also, Europeans are on average more educated and are probably more informed of their medical options. Of course my facts (at least pertaining to the second paragraph) are just as unsubstantiated as Posners.

Iqbal Strikes Orly Tatz!

Last May the Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision Ashcroft v. Iqbal. The case concerned Iqbal who was the unwitting victim of the post-9/11 round-up of suspected terrorists. Even though there was little evidence that Iqbal was a terrorist, the government used a variety harsh interrogation tactics on him and kept him in jail for many months. Iqbal sued the government and the case went to the supreme court. The court threw out Iqbal's case. What was special in this case is that they threw out the case at a very early stage of the litigation, at the pleading stage. Previously, it was very easy to get passed the pleading stage.

Now, the holding in Ashcroft v. Iqbal has now been used against Orly Tatz, who claimed that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and therefore is ineligible to be President. Citing Iqbal, the court said that "To state a claim upon which relief may be granted, Plaintiff must allege sufficient facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face."

It will be interesting to see if this holds up on appeal.