Cool

James Lileks on the election ...

I’ve been sitting here bopping to Brian Setzer while I write this, and it’s more fun than thinking about politics. I still think we should take a big poll and find one band that satisfies everyone, and the day after the election we have a big grand beer bash to celebrate the fact that everyone loves “Rock Around the Clock” and tanks won’t roll when the baton passes, and that’s no small thing. Because if you can’t find yourself at 1 AM laughing and arguing about the glories of American popular culture with someone who’s on the absolute opposite site of the political aisle, well, here: one big ticket redeemable for a quart of pity. I don’t want unity about the secondary issues; I want constant conflict and tension and friction and argument and eventual compromises, even if it's a decade after the argument faded. About the great glorious uniqueness of this country and the things we can do, yes: at least we can agree on that. So let’s elect a president and fix some stuff and screw up the things we can’t help but screw up and go to Mars. We can argue about what the flag meant and what it will mean tomorrow, but can’t you see a day where everyone’s leaning forward on the sofa, in the bars, in Times Square, watching the pole drive down into red soil? Wouldn’t there be a grand nationwide huzzah, and wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t that be cool?

That would be very cool indeed.

Spaceships and Poetry

Spaceships. And poetry. Any species that can create both spaceships and poetry is worth saving.

~ Solomon Short

Nanoc

What's Nanoc? It says on the tin

nanoc is a Ruby content management system for building static web sites.

Calling it a CMS might be a bit grandiose. You run it locally, compile markup documents into static webpages, then copy those to the server. It appears to be one of those deals that Just Works.

I redid the rammro.net page with it. Total time was 30 minutes, 20 of that installing and running through the tutorial.

The 'meh' content of that page is my fault, not Nanoc's of course.

Kenneth Culver

Seen this guy? He's a wanted man ...

Kenneth Culver walked into the locker room Jan. 4. A student saw Culver's reflection in the mirror and made a lot of noise. Culver then left school property.

Culver may have entered the locker room on five different occasions. He had no verbal or physical contact with anyone.

Culver is wanted for five counts of invasion of privacy and two counts of bail jumping from outstanding cases in both Winnebago and Outagamie counties. He ignored law enforcement requests through family members to turn himself in.

Culver is 6-feet,1-inch tall, weighs 250 pounds, and is bald with a goatee. He was driving a black 1994 Ford Tempo with the plate number 916-GWN.

If you have any information about Culver, contact the Neenah Police Department at (920) 886-6000.

A fifty-year old guy in the girls locker room ... innocent until proven guilty of course but the sooner this guy is located the better, I think.

A good rant is a thing of beauty

And this one is good and long ... Rails Is A Ghetto

After Mongrel I couldn’t get a gang of monkeys to rape me, so forget any jobs. Sure people would contact me for their tiny little start-ups, but I’d eventually catch on that they just want to use me to implement their ideas. Their ideas were horrendously lame. I swear if someone says they’re starting a social network I’m gonna beat them with the heel of my shoe.

Oh my

Wow.

The new Mac Pro combines two of Intel’s new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon 5400 processors running up to 3.2 GHz, new graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage. Prices start at $2,799.12MB of L2 cache per processor, dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses and up to 32GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM memorystandard with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory. The systems also include a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slotFor storage, the Mac Pro has four internal drive bays allowing up to 4TB. The systems also have five USB 2.0, two FireWire 400, two FireWire 800, optical and analog audio in and out, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports and a headphone jack.

My, my my.

The new Mac Pro is available immediately.

Well that's good - not that I'm buying one but I'm sure someone can, and will be. Immediate graftification rocks.

Alien thoughts

Alien in the sense of 'other', in the sense that I don't want to understand someone who can think this way.

You are invited to read the entire editorial; it won't take you long.

There must be violence against women

This title may sound strange, but it’s actually not just a way to attract readers to the topic because I really do mean what it indicates. Violence is a broad term, especially when used regarding women. In this piece, I want to shed light on those instances where violence against women is a must.
.....
Relationships between fathers and daughters or sisters and brothers also provoke argument from human rights organizations, which propose the suggested solutions for all relationships. Personally, I don’t think fathers or brothers would undertake such behavior unless there was a reason for it.
.....
Dear readers – especially women – don’t think that I hate or am against women; rather, I simply mean to preserve the morals and principles with which Islam has honored us.

I hope my message is clear, since it’s really quite relevant to the future of our societies, which must be protected from any kind of cultural invasion.

Good luck, back there in the 13th century Mr. Al-Kholidy. I'll take the 21st century anyday; I'll bet most of your sisters and daughters in faith will, too.

Rails Metaphor - Pipes

I've been teaching myself Ruby on Rails. Not for any particular reason*, but to learn something new. Now, I am not a programmer, I'm a system administrator. I was, for a few months, employed by the US Marines as a programer (Clipper '87**) where I specialized in writing programs that consumed more memory than a PC had before crashing.

The Marine Corps quickly found me employment as a LAN Admin; at least there, in 1990, we were all new and not knowing what you were doing was not so much a liability as SOP.


So I'm not coming at this as a coder learning a new skill but a stranger from another country learning a new language and a new culture.

So it's all kind of slow going.

In reply to this post Travis wrote

Once you internalize these, and realize that they are - effectively - unix command line pipes, or filters, you stop thinking about itterating, and instead start thinking about piping large blocks of data through filters, or tools.

(insert sound of needle skidding on a record)

realize that they are - effectively - unix command line pipes, or filters,

One is studying something - and it's a bit of a slog - and LO someone comes out of left field comes a comment and it all becomes clear. Not a choir celestial but a certain 'hunh' that turns your viewpoint around a few degrees.

You gain a useful metaphor that enables one to lurch along in the right direction.

I've been using pipes (and filters and tools) to sort large blocks of data for years, in shell scripts. I don't think this is going to make it actually easy but I've got a metaphor now to use that will make plowing through this bit easier on the ol' noggin.

That and thinking about a programming language as a series of tools and filters - just groovier and more complicated versions of awk, sed and the like - makes me want to do a Snoopy Dance.

*Or at least not one I'm willing to talk about yet.
** Which was an extension language and compiler for dBase III.

Epicurians Rule!

http://rantsand.blogspot.com/2008/01/intellectual-sports-teams.html

…So I said that we ought to have intellectual names for sports teams. The anti-intellectualism of jock culture is an embarrassment to this country. (My wife’s country doesn’t have academic athletic teams.) How about “the Norman Nihilists”?My wife was captivated by the idea and wouldn’t let it go. We played the game in the restaurant, and that evening she took all the ideas we’d come up with and added bunches of new ones with the help of an Oklahoma map.Guidelines: it has to use the name of a state town, should ideally be alliterative (or rhyme) and represent a philosophical/religious position. So how about…

The Ardmore Atheists

The Ada Aristotelians

The Edmond Epistemologists

.....

Neenah Gnostics
Appleton Arianisists
Delafield Docetisists
Exeter Epicurians
Menasha Montanists
Kaukauna Kabbalists
Oshkosh Ophites

Inspiration from TJIC

For Loops considered obsolete

From my point of view one of the odder things about Ruby is that 'for loops' are obsolete . . .

If you're still writing for loops, stop; there's a better way. Exactly why merits some examples.

[1, 2, 3].each { |number| puts number }

That's a pretty straightforward one. It says: with each element in this array, execute the given block.




That's just darn weird. I'm sure I'll get used to it.

Hello Kitty - with BLAM

California legal 'AR-15' for the Hello Kitty fan in your life.

A Bad Day

Evidence that a rabbit had a bad day.



From Soni, who got it from Scalzi.

A Reason to vote for Obama

I wish I'd thought of this slogan . .

Der Spiegel says there's no freakin' way Obama's going to get the Presidential nomination for of all the usual reasons: he's too young, his message is too vague, and candidates who win in Iowa don't usually win elsewhere. And then there's this: "and for many Americans, too black." I hear this all the time from Europeans- it's impossible that those bigoted Americans would ever vote for a black man. I think the Obama people should use it in their campaign.

"Vote for Obama and tell Europe to suck it!"

FM 3-0 Operations (SAMS Edition)

FM 3-0 Operations (SAMS Edition)
Doctrine for Dummies
Illustrated by Mrs. Finklestien's Third Grade Class

Introduction

You are students. This means you are supposed to learn things. Read this and learn it.

There will be a test. There are only two grades…”win”, or “lose”.

Come back with your shield, or on it.


I.M. Mean
General
Soldier in Chief

Excerpt

2. Whacking bad people is dangerous. It’s also hard. It’s easier and safer to whack the bad people if you do it from the air or the ocean. That’s because the bad people can’t afford the super weapons that do stuff from there. That’s why we have to be nice to the Navy and Air Force; so they will whack bad people with great enthusiasm.

Full text is here, includes a link to a PDF file.

Condensed version, with multimedia is here.

No one has produced an ultra condensed version in comic book 'graphic novel' format written at the 1st grade level for Marines. No doubt some very bright field-grade officers are working on that at Quantico.

Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.

Iowa

My wife's reaction on hearing that Huckabee won in Iowa was interesting but not repeatable* in a family blog. This pretty much sums it up, however

Iowa has given its seal of approval to (1) a one-term Senator who stands for "hope" and "change" and (2) a tacky, big spending governor who doesn't know much about foreign policy but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express. The common demoninator here, other than a patent lack of qualifications for the presidency, is likeability.

For another detailed look see Jeff Harrell's blog.


*nor was it that bad, either - I'm just trying to mind the swears.

Cautionary Tale

Coyote had a corrupted Excel file;

I tried to open a complicated Excel file today and Excel told me that it was corrupted and that it would try to rebuild it.

That happened to me, once. It not a complicated file, but it was terribly important; it contained all of the IP addresses for nearly 1800 client desktops* at the site I was contracting at.

All of these machines were manually assigned their address.** So knowing what these were was a pretty big deal.

No problem - a file that important must be backed up on the server. Except this one .. wasn't. That volume had never been backed up.

"I knew that was going to get us, one of these days," said a company system admin in a very resigned tone.***

After a week for the magnitude of the catastrophe to sink in, and with various schemes tried to recover the data, my company had no problem selling them on a project to convert the entire facility to DHCP.

* I inherited the spreadsheet - I did not create it.
** Yes, for this many machines in 1999 assigning addresses by hand made no sense. It was that kind of a place.
*** It was that kind of a place, which was why I was glad to be a contractor there and not an employee.

I'm the King of Legacy!

... and baby it's good to be king.

We have a rather old and poorly understood system for document management. This week I helped to fix it and setup correct documentation. Thus, by the unwritten rules of IT, I now own a rather old and poorly understood system for document management.

All I need to do now is slap a token-ring network up between my legacy server and the world and I'm set.

Jay R. Grodner - now in wiki format

Jay R. Grodner has a wikipedia page now.

Seems like a notable bloke to me.

Don't be an ass - the internet never forgets: Follow Up

In response to this, Jim K. commented

He could have made the whole thing go away by simply agreeing that what he had done was wrong and offering to pay for the damage. Instead he tried to weasel his way out of it. Public shaming is appropriate and today public means on the internet.

Yet . . . what of redemption?

The point here is that this shame goes on .. and on. Eternal finger waving and cries of 'shame' without pause.

Harassment without a chance for redemption is not shaming; it's bullying.

Don't be an ass - the internet never forgets

Get caught doing the dumbs and you will never, ever live it down - the internet has a long memory.

Guy is caught keying a car - $2400 worth of damage. Guy has words with the car owner. Seems the guy keyed the car because the car owner has military tags and plates. The police are called. More words are tossed around. A citation is issued.

The details are at Blackfive.

A moment of ill-considered vandalism, a lifetime of crap.

The problem is, Google is good at finding stuff but not so good for measuring repentance. He could have a Come to Jesus moment a year from now, he could find himself a changed man a decade from now but Google will likely always pull this incident up, first.

It will also find the hatred and bile piled on by blogs and blog comments.


I have some sympathy.

A long time ago I made a foolish choice and screwed up. If I'd been a civilian I might have gotten fired and moved along to the next job.

I was enlisted in the Marine Corps. I got Non Judicial Punishment; docked a few months pay, reduced in rank.




Yes, it sucked.


Every service member has a record book. Your new commanding officer opens that sucker up and just about the first thing his eyeballs fall upon is Page 11; the list of all the Bad Things you've done. Later there is another page with all of the good things but by then it's way too late.

If it you were a bad kid five minutes ago, or five years ago it's all the same thing - condensed into neat tidy paragraphs for their reading displeasure. You know what's coming ..

- We going to have any problems like this?

A small part of you may want to roll your eyes: I've heard this before. You want to say "That was five years ago and I regretted it about five seconds after the fact and long, long before the The Man had me standing tall in his office and oh boy have I changed, hey look at last quarter's pro/con marks .." but you don't because all you can do is suck it up and demonstrate you've changed because Marines Don't Whine.

You say 'No Sir' and get on with it. Because that's what you do.


Five Navy Crosses. Not a whiner.


At the risk of beating this into the ground .... this is a problem in the Real World where everyone is looking at your Page 11 and no one is going to be around to see what a good guy you actually are. First impressions are last and final ones.

Google is great for finding information. It's not so hot at measuring reputation capital - for telling people who you are now or how an otherwise 'ok' person had a bad day and fucked up his google rep for the next few years.

Cross Posted to The Daily Brief.