I closed the door on Merecal tonight. I've already posted about what Merecal is before, and I recently posted the details of its demise over at the Merecal blog. However, I'm reposting that goodbye letter here for posterity's sake, since I'm pretty sure this blog will stick around longer than Merecal's will:

We released Merecal back in 2009 for very selfish reasons. First and foremost, we wanted to build a service that would make our personal tastes in music, books, movies and video games work for us rather than against us. Rather than worrying about whether one of our favorite bands had a new album out, or one of our favorite actors' movies was coming to DVD, we wanted to rest easy, knowing that Merecal would do the hard work for us and let us know when one of those releases was coming.

Second, we were hopeful that our little entrepreneurial adventure would prove profitable so that we could justify spending more time on the site (we both have full-time jobs outside of Merecal), adding features that would make it even easier for users to count on Merecal to keep them up-to-date on all kinds of new releases -- and not just releases in the currently supported categories.

Typically, selfishness doesn't pan out in the end, but in the case of Merecal, it did. We are proud of the service we built, and we've continued to rely on it as our one-and-only source for new release information. Furthermore, we were profitable, and remain confident that our users saw the same benefits from the service that we did.

Unfortunately, the bulk of this post has been written in past tense. That is because we are faced with the hard-to-swallow task of shutting down Merecal on October 25th, 2011.

When we started developing Merecal in 2008, we made the decision to build it on the backbone of Amazon's Product Advertising API. Amazon's extensive and dependable service gave us the data we needed to cover a very wide range of new releases across the many categories and subcategories that Merecal supports today. Sadly, as of October 25th, Amazon's Product Advertising API will become far less extensive in terms of the sheer amount of new release information we will be able to access. This change strikes at the heart of Merecal, since we lose the ability to offer the deep content so closely tied to our users' specific interests.

We can imagine that your reaction might be similar to our own -- a selfish one. Where will we now go to get new release information in the formats we prefer, e.g. email, web feeds, calendar updates and/or tweets? Right now, we don't know the answer to that question. We just know that Merecal won't be that place.

That is a hard reality to accept, but it is the reality, so we apologize not only for the inconvenience of Merecal's demise, but also for the lack of apparent alternatives.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or even recommendations of good Merecal alternatives, we're all ears. Hit us up in comments, on Twitter @Merecal or via email at info@merecal.com.

And finally, we just want to thank all of our users who helped confirm that there was demand for a service like Merecal, and for making Merecal such a fun product to work on.

Sincerely,

The Merecal founders,
Matt Jackson and Bernie Zimmermann

R.I.P. Merecal

I wanted my C# application to mimick behavior I'm used to in other applications, where single-clicking the mouse is the same as "browsing" the node with the arrow keys. You can go from one node to the next without firing off any selections. On a double-click, you are explicitly choosing that node, either to expand its children, see its associated contents (e.g. in another pane), or both. I implemented that behavior by handling the typical NodeMouseClick and NodeMouseDoubleClick events.

However, also mimicking behavior I'm used to in other applications, I wished to have the Enter (or Return) key behave the same as a double-click. To do so, I had to handle KeyPress events on the TreeView control itself, making sure to check that a node actually was selected prior to triggering my subsequent behavior. The code ended up looking something like the following:

// handling for when a key is pressed when the treeview is active
private void treeView_KeyPress(object sender, KeyPressEventArgs e)
{
  // if there is a currently selected node
  if (null != treeView.SelectedNode)
  {
    // if the Enter key was pressed
    if ((char)Keys.Return == e.KeyChar)
    {
      // do stuff
    }
  }
}

Since presumably one could hit Enter before any node was selected in the TreeView, it's a good idea to make sure there is a selected node before doing anything else. Checking for the Enter key input is as simple as converting the Keys.Return constant to a char and then comparing it to the key the user pressed, e.KeyChar.

This is pretty straightforward stuff once you figure it out, but I didn't see many existing examples online and kinda had to figure it out on my own (often the best way to learn), so I figured I'd post it here in case it saves someone a few minutes of their time.

Whenever we're bathing in the afterglow of an election -- or the sorrow of an election -- I feel that you're kind of susceptible to extreme emotions. In 2004 when George Bush was re-elected, I was convinced the world was going to end in the next four years. I really did. I was terrified of what was going to happen in this country over the next four years. And every day -- after the next day, after the next day -- the sun came up and the world didn't end.

CNN: Death Cab for Cutie gets personal, political

As covered in my recap of 2008, I was also directly affected by the widespread changes to the economy when the company I've worked for since college ended up cutting half its employees in October of that year. Again, I was fortunate enough to retain my employment through that rough period, but as I said back then, it was nevertheless an experience I hope I never have to go through again.

Since the economy's downturn, mostly through religiously watching The Daily Show, but also by attempting to soak in some understanding via nifty infographics, I've tried my best to learn how and why the economy tanked the way it did. However, up until today, I really didn't fully grasp the details and certainly didn't appreciate the vast corruption that took place to get us where we've been the past few years.

Enter Inside Job, a documentary by Charles Ferguson that succeeds in clearly outlining the roots of the economic crisis. Having watched the film today, I not only understand how we got where we are, but I have a newfound disappointment in our country's past and present failings in terms of financial regulation.

What I liked about the film is that it hears from all sides (at least those who didn't decline to comment), including members of oversight committees (using the term very, very lightly), politicians, economists and other academic experts in an attempt to uncover how things got out of control so quickly. Without a whole lot of extraneous commentary, it's easy to see the scumbags for what they are. I also liked that the film didn't take sides politically, but instead outlined how each of the presidents since Ronald Reagan -- and yes, Barack Obama is included -- has played an integral part as an enabler of the corruption and conflicts of interest that have caused our economy to collapse.

After watching the film, I feel both disgusted and deflated; the former mostly because I'm a believer in learning from past mistakes, and it is painfully clear that none of that is happening at present, and the latter because it doesn't appear that there is anything a middle class American can really do to reverse the direction of these dangerous cogs that have been steadily turning for decades. I do, at least, feel like I have a firmer grasp on the overall problem, and that is precisely why I wholeheartedly recommend Inside Job to anyone who wishes to understand how America got into the financial mess it is in today.

In what would become the theme for the next several hours, everything seemed to fall into place and we arrived at the hospital around 11:35pm that night, just as my wife's contractions were getting debilitating. After the typical poking and prodding of nurses, my wife received an epidural at around 1am from a very interesting anesthesiologist who sounded like a Kiwi but is apparently from South Africa. Her water broke at around 3am, after which we were told to kick back for a bit and wait for our forthcoming baby to work his way toward the outer world. Of course, kicking back was a bit easier for me to do than my wife. ;)

Although we were hoping for a relatively quick labor (because of our opposite experience the first time around), things slowed down a bit and it wasn't until after a new team of nurses had arrived (around 7:30am) that the idea of pushing entered the discussion. In fact, it wasn't until around 9:15am that my wife really started to push. On the positive side, though, the delay gave our doctor, who technically was still on vacation, enough time to make it in to the hospital to deliver our baby. Better still, once the pushing did start, it only took around 40 minutes before our newborn son, Nathan Matthew Zimmermann, was lying on my wife's chest and crying loudly. It was a very happy and relieving moment, particularly since Heidi's entrance into the world was so much more dramatic.

Nathan was born at 10:05am on the morning of February 26th (Johnny Cash's birthday!). He weighed in at 9 lbs. 10 1/2 ounces and was 19 1/2 inches long. His physique certainly matched that weight, as he arrived barrel-chested and well-built all around. He also had very light blond hair, which totally threw my wife and me for a loop, especially considering that Heidi's hair had been jet black when she was born (it's since turned dark blonde).

A week later, having had time to reflect on the whole experience, I feel very fortunate that the labor and delivery went down the way it did. As I mentioned earlier, everything seemed to go about as smoothly as it could, my wife was an absolute all star through it all, and we ended up with a very healthy baby boy who has had us smiling since the moment he arrived.

Just as I've started to get the hang of being the dad of an amazing daughter, I go back to the drawing board to find out what being the father of a son is all about. :)

For me, though, all of the visual changes are welcome, even if they do take a little getting used to. I definitely feel like there's more room to work with now that the tabs have been moved up to the titlebar area. Even with the clutter reduction in the main toolbars, I still think there's room for more cleanup. Removing the "Feedback" button in the upper-right corner would give me more room for the address bar and the search bar, but for all I know that might (and probably will) go away when version 4 is no longer in beta.

The first thing that struck me as a negative was the missing status bar, with no apparent way of making it reappear. From the looks of the Firefox support site, the status bar has been removed with no intention of supporting it at all in the stock version of the browser. Apparently one has the option of installing add-ons that restore some of that functionality. The main reason I like the status bar is that I tend to hover over links before visiting them to see where the link is going to take me. From reading that aforementioned support link, I realized that the URLs of hovered-over links are now displayed in the right-most half of the address bar. That works for me, so I won't be installing any additional add-ons to restore the status bar.

I've heard lots about how fast Firefox 4 is, but I've yet to experience anything that blew me away in terms of speed. I'm still only a few hours in, though, so maybe once I get to my usual tasks like reading feeds in Google Reader, I'll form a different opinion on that front.

All-in-all, though, even after a few hours of using the new browser, I can comfortably say that I'm not even considering moving back to version 3.x. It's onward and upward from here.

tail -f /var/log/apache2/access_log

On one of my web servers, Googlebot is a bit like a moth to a flame, constantly making requests that far out-measure requests coming from any other consumer of my web server's files. Because of this, I wanted to figure out how I could run tail but filter out all Googlebot-related requests in an attempt to increase the likelihood of me spotting real requests coming from real users.

In a post titled Using grep to find and not find strings, I learned that the feat can be accomplished simply by combining the tail call with a call to grep, being sure to include the latter's -v option. That option tells grep to match any line that doesn't match the given string or regular expression.

Therefore, to watch my web server log while ignoring all Googlebot-related requests, all I needed to do was use a command like the following:

tail -f /var/log/apache2/access_log | grep -v 'Googlebot'

By replacing "Googlebot" with other strings like "bingbot" or "Firefox," one could easily change the output of the live view to meet his or her needs.

After watching her pretend to cook a meal for about a half hour, I got ready for work and took off. Since it's her special day, though, I left work early and drove over to Trophy Cupcakes at The Bravern (a place at which a man of my financial status doesn't really belong) to pick up some fancy cupcakes for her. When I got home, we went next door and the neighbors threw a nice mini-party for her, with tiny cupcakes (you can't really ever get enough, can you?), balloons and a couple presents. She got to play with the other kids that are babysat (is that a word?) over there, and then we left to head to Party City.

Since Heidi's birthday falls on a Thursday, we'll be throwing an official party at our place on the 11th. At Party City, we showed her some of the different birthday party themes to see if she'd like one over the others. My wife and I weren't overly impressed by the selection, but we ended up deciding on a theme that Heidi should enjoy.

After that, we walked over to Red Robin, since in our opinion it's Heidi's favorite restaurant. It certainly didn't disappoint. She got a pink balloon right when she walked in the door, and we were sat down right next to a big Red Robin statue and within view of paintings of a cat and a monkey on the wall. Since some of Heidi's favorite things right now are "kitties," "monkeys" and "birdies," it couldn't have played out much better. She enjoyed her pizza and Mandarin oranges (she calls them "munges") and was all smiles throughout.

After dinner, we played her voicemails from all our family members wishing her a happy birthday. Once we got home, she went back to playing with her new kitchen and eventually got to see and talk to her nana via webcam. We then surprised her with the box of Trophy Cupcakes, and she chose one of the chocolate peppermint cupcakes. She seemed to enjoy it, if diving face-first into it was any indication, and then, despite the resulting sugar high, it was time for the normal bedtime routine.

Yesterday and today, my wife and I have been reflecting on how quickly the past two years have flown by. As expecting parent newbies, everyone told us to cherish every minute because it would breeze by. They couldn't have been more accurate. Nevertheless, we already have tons of great memories to look back on, and we're still just getting started. I'm both proud and grateful that I've been a part of watching my daughter grow, and today seemed like a perfect tribute to her for making every day feel like a birthday for me.