Random Rambling - Fantastic! Or, a test.

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?