Recently in interweb Category

i do like that via youtube, i can relive middle school.

or was that high school?

anyhow, i miss the sc2 universe. i never should have left.

i can taste the microwave burritos while listening to the hyperspace theme.

UPDATE: Oh my.

okay, so someone linked to a youtube video of a godaddy commercial where danika patrick takes off her clothes, so naturally i clicked through.

but then youtube wanted me to watch a 30 second commercial -- before i could watch the commercial.

fuck that. youtube is dead to me.

truly, your URL guessing skills are beyond compare.

In the messages, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Landis accused other top American cyclists on the Postal Service team, including Armstrong, of using performance-enhancing drugs and methods.

Hold on now, are you saying that Lance Armstrong used performance enhancing methods to enhance his performance?!

Stop the press!

so i've kept my word to more or less quit facebook, and posted no new status updates there (though i still, as promised, make snide remarks on the statuses of my pals).

The furor lately has been about facebook's attempt to steal the web out from under us, and indeed, there is a real danger of that, and it will suck if it happens. There's also the problem of facebook selling us out and invading our privacy. That's a real concern as well.

But for me, the most insidious effect of facebook was that I stopped writing. Now, you may say, and I'll agree, that blogging doesn't count as writing. But like a pea sized nugget after a week of constipation, I'll take what I can get, thank you very much (and you're welcome!).

Facebook taught me to compress my thoughts into their 480 character limit, or whatever it is. And if I couldn't compress, truncate. If I had something to say that was serious, it didn't belong on facebook, since folks there were more interested in jokes. Well, there's nobody here, so I can say whatever I like. At least, I can say what I like and pretend there's nobody here.

fb brought me in contact with some folks I haven't heard from in ages, and that was cool, for a while. After a bit, though, I see my own banality reflected back at me as I'm deluged with reports on what's for dinner, what song everyone's enjoying, how many hours of sleep we all had last night, and on and on -- in other words, exactly the same crap I was posting to facebook. Enough already.

There might be people out there posting useful stuff to facebook, and in truth, some of my friends there would post funny videos, interesting links, or just interesting personality-related stuff. But for the most part, facebook is a wasteland, and its attempt to turn the rest of the internet into a wasteland of "likes" and "checked-in"s is doomed to failure.

But more importantly to my own life, whether facebook lives or dies, I'm writing again, and it's good to be back, even if I have only as much to say here as I did on facebook.

so i did some stumbling about and encountered this:

http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2006/10/27/mining-activesupport-object-returning

i understand ruby, which is great, because the linked "explanation" of the K combinator really doesn't do it for me.

but ruby's 'returning' is now the coolest thing i've learned all day.

tea bagger is injured protesting government health plans.

okay.... but then:

Brown told the crowd that Gladney is accepting donations toward his medical expenses. Gladney told reporters he was laid off recently and has no health insurance.

heh.

heh heh!

HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR!!!!

i just realized, i have two languishing facebook friend requests that i'm not going to accept. they've been stewing there for months because i don't know how to delete them. that's not the funny part.

this is: one's from avi, the other's from ravi.

har de har de haw har!

i was with you, dude, right up until you talked about scanning a hash table.

that's a mighty poor hash table you've got there if you're doing any sort of scanning.

a couple of weeks ago i decided to give ruby on rails another chance. http://beans.sainttoad.com is the result of that.

at the time, i was seriously impressed at how easy it was to get my app up and running. in one week of part-timing it, i went from 0 experience with rails/ruby to a full, non-trivial deployment (reverse proxy, url-rewriting, url-prefixed deployment, har). at the end of the week i'd whipped up 90% of the features i wanted in my app, a decent (or at least consistent) style, and am now happily using the app with no problems.

except one problem: when i go back to polish off those remaining 10%, i'm left wondering: wtf am i doing this in ruby? i mean, really?

the problem with ruby on rails: ruby. i've been told that ruby makes much more sense if you're japanese. well shucks, i'm not japanese. is that why i think that "" == 0 == [] == true is a stupid idea?

rails makes it incredibly simple to get a useful app up and running with breathtaking speed. but then, in the real world (and not in the world of my tiny-dataset app), you'd go back and refactor and optimize your database access and so forth. that looks to be a pain in rails, where the ORM makes it difficult to do things well. or, perhaps the problem is that the ORM documentation makes it difficult to make the ORM do things well. that's a difference without a distinction.

at work, i use pylons. it's got a lot of the sugar of rails, but it's got a different philosophy: too much magic is bad. rails is all about the magic. in pylons, there's much less magic, and when i need to fix something, because i'm not relying on magic, i know how to fix it. rails? not so much (although i did find and fix a bug in the auth package: but to merge it back? i have to learn git? no thanks).

anyhow: i'm not making any sense. here i am saying rails is great and ruby sucks, then telling you why rails sucks. i've had minor exposure to each and this is the end result:

ruby: i get it, it's like python, only there's the bizarre 0 == true thing, and the block thing which is kinda cool but really a very complicated route to doing simple things, and less emphasis on functional programming, and not enough haskell influence (:D).

rails: super easy to get working. encourages some pretty bad design choices and also encourages beginners to think they know what they're doing, which leads to pretty bad design choices. this is a tough problem for framework designers to address, and i can't say i blame rails for making the choice they made. after two weeks of not using rails, when i went back to look at it, i wondered: wait, why am i using rails? maintenance is maybe not so enjoyable as the thrill of getting the app whipped up. and since maintenance is what app development is all about, maybe i picked a poor framework.