Random Rambling - Love you, love your ham

Updates on the way

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

This is hand-coded, as I don't use emacs anymore, but I'm working on updating the webswite a bit. Not that anyone will notice. *wink*

Love you, love your ham

# Tuesday, March 15, 2005

# I'm an asparagus! Whee! Been a little over a month since the last update. Well, here goes: My wife looks more pregnant, and that's about the only thing new.

I'm going to start learning about Ruby on Rails in earnest. I'm no longer quite sure why I decided to store all my data in YAML; it seemed like a good idea at the time, though.

Anyway.

Despite the hype, Rails looks really nice, from what little I've done so far. And fortunately, it's not that difficult to deal with the old YAML files, since Syck is part of Ruby now.

Rawk.

The millionth test post this month

# Wednesday, February 16, 2005

I am cornholio!

Yeah.

Auto-wrap is totally ticking me off, because it wants to auto-wrap text, including macros. When those macros are broken, they simply don't work. Fortunately it's easy to disable, so I don't have to worry whole oodles and bunches about it. A little annoying, though. Oh, well; I guess I shouldn't complain.

Happy birthday, Jené!

# Tuesday, February 15, 2005

My wife's birthday today. Happy birthday, sweetie!

# Blah blah blah I'm a moose! Anyone have any idea why Sage uses rss guid tags as links? I'm going to try uncommenting some code, and see what happens...sure enough. Bill St. Clair had commented out code that inserted the <link> tags from items in the RSS feed. It seems to work fine, though; I have to wonder why it was scratched out. I'm not an avid blogger type, though, so maybe someone knows why.

Just noticed that I've managed to fill up 4 MB so far. I get a grand total of 15MB. 40%! Eek! Time to start cleaning.

UPDATE: I've deleted some old cruft, which will mean that some old links will break. Also, I've gzip'ed text and HTML files that are older than 30 days. That should make some more headroom. I'm taking up less than half the space I was before. I rule.

Yes, I realize that I've just written the most boring, most banal blog entry ever. If you think this is bad, start reading blogger.com entries.

Fantastic! Or, a test.

# Saturday, February 12, 2005

# Yeah, it's just a test I wish I could say otherwise, but it's just a test.

Really, it is. Just seeing what doing *shudder* two line breaks in place of a new paragraph tag would do to Bill's RSS feed code. Placing a blank line between paragraphs starts a new paragraph, and therefore a new entry. Placing a paragraph tag in does the same thing. But two line breaks does what I want. Sort of.

# On to bigger things... I've been playing with Ruby a bit lately. Interesting language. In my mind, it combines the best bits of Perl and Python. It seems that good.

On the other hand, learning more about it means picking up yet another language, and I'm not exactly working as a coder right now. Far from it, in fact. If it hadn't been for reading about Ruby on Rails, I probably wouldn't have picked up an interest in Ruby in the first place.

I've been hearing that a lot lately, too. Some people see Ruby on Rails as the thing that helps Ruby go mainstream. After looking at Ruby a little, I have to wonder why it hasn't. Is there something, as a newbie, that I'm missing? Some fundamental thing that would send me back, kicking and screaming, to Python? Something that'd make me devote myself to a lifetime of Objective-C?

After going through the Ruby on Rails tutorials, I have to wonder if it really is all that easy. And I've been running into random problems. Would you believe that Ruby's default MySQL bindings only work with the newest password scheme? And would you believe that nearly no hand-holding utilities can deal with it? Seriously. I also find it hard to believe that CocoaMySQL hasn't been updated since 2003. Yeah.

# Constitution goes too far? Thanks to one of the guys at work for pointing me in the general direction of this one; apparently an estimated one in three kids in high school thinks the First Amendment goes too far. Worse, apparently we're too free to speak our minds:

When asked whether people should be allowed to express unpopular views, 97 percent of teachers and 99 percent of school principals said yes. Only 83 percent of students did.

What the hell kind of Kool-Aid are they feeding these kids? I graduated from high school 12 years ago, and I recall one of our big gripes being that we didn't feel we had enough freedom. Now there are kids who want to lose freedom?

How did we arrive at this point that people want to lose their freedom?

This sort of thinking goes way beyond conservatism. This is Un-American thinking. Thank God I went through school at the tail end of the Cold War; otherwise, I might be one of these kids who want the jack-booted thugs, national passports, and a press that has to ask pretty-please before they publish Double-Plus-Ungood Think (yes, I'm guilty of reading too much into this. I don't care.)

I wish it weren't hypocritical to want these idiots deported for their lack of respect for all things American. In my mind, this sort of thinking is equivalent to going to Arlington Cemetery and spitting on the graves of the war dead. After all, those people fought and died for freedoms these idiots want to throw away.

On the other hand, the study also suggested that it's not the students' fault, but rather the schools' fault. My blood pressure can drop a little now! Or can it? What's going on here? I had to learn about the Constitution in school. When did that change? Did that change after Communism fell in Russia? Or is it more recent, as in when "No Teacher Left Standing" went into effect? I don't know about other districts, but at my wife's school, school administrators are wanting to take classes for the arts and turn them into math tutoring sessions. I'm all for improving math scores, but at the expense of everything else?

Is it too late to emigrate to Canada?

Back from the dead

# Tuesday, February 8, 2005

Well, it's been a slow couple of weeks. Sorry for the lack of updates (though as far as I know, nobody reads this.)

# Ubuntu on PPC I'm attempting a Ubuntu Linux install at work. What I'm hoping for is to be able to do without either OS X Server or an older, more crotchety install. So far, I've managed to install Ubuntu and get the old server software running under MacOnLinux. Aside from some complaints about speed (I've not really noticed a slowdown) there haven't been any major complaints. I'm slowly transferring files from MacOS to Linux via AppleTalk (probably the reason for the slowdown ) and once that's done, I'll run psync to synchronize the folders and quietly shut down Maconlinux, and rename the Netatalk system to the current system's name. I'm sure there will be more to it than that, but as far as I can tell so far, Netatalk is being less "quirky" than either OS X or (especially) OS 9 + ASIP. Hooray. Overall Ubuntu seems to be more sane "out of the box" than most Linux distributions these days. And if I have a filesystem problem that's bad enough that I can't boot, there's a PPC LiveCD available. Sweetness.

# Ubuntu on x86 Speaking of Ubuntu, that's the Linux distribution I use at home. I'm not the biggest GNOME fan ever, but it's better than a kick in the teeth, to be sure. I spent far less time setting up the system and far more time doing fun stuff like creating and burning DVDs, CDs, doing page layouts in Scribus, and all sorts of things that are more the realm of a desktop system, not a general-purpose Linux system. It rocks. It doesn't hurt that the Ubuntu project seems to want to adhere as closely to standards as possible.

Now, having said that, I'm getting more and more irritated at developer-types. First they didn't want to do anything other than bugfix releases, and when I first started using it, a big mistake was to ask about software in the Universe repository in #ubuntu on irc.freenode.net.

Want to piss off a developer in #ubuntu? Asking for help with Universe software will do it, yeah. Mentioning problems with upgrades if you've installed stuff from Ubuntu Backports will do it, too. Mentioning anything WINE-related seems to do the trick as well. Suggesting that maybe there should have been packages available other than bugfixes, thereby making ubuntu-bp pointless, is another good way to raise ire. I'd chalk it up to immature questions, but many times I've seen devs fly off the handle when a simple question has been asked.

The project seems to be very mature; real shame not all the devs can do the same.

The best advice I can give: Ask about nonstandard setups on Ubuntu Forums if you don't want a lecture about how you can't be "supported" if you're not willing to use the approved software.

Baby pictures!

# Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Well, sort of.

Oh, happy dreary Tuesday

# Tuesday, January 11, 2005

# My first Fark Photoshop submission

You fail it, it being cool

My first Fark Photoshop submission ever. Take a looksee here for the contest. To see a full-size copy of my submission, click here.

Heh. Hope Earthlink doesn't charge me for the bandwidth use.