Rails, what were you thinking? You went and wrote your own ridiculous JSON serializer in pure Ruby, when a perfectly good C-extension gem already does the job 20 times faster. What’s worse, you gave your to_json method (which clobbers every innocent object it can get its grubby little hands on) a completely incompatible method signature from the standard gem version. You just can’t mix the two, which is ALL KINDS OF FUN for those of us who need to push more than 10 reqs/sec.
Then there’s awesome behavior like this:
<cr:code lang=“ruby”> puts {:rails => /fail/x}.to_json #=> {“rails” => /fail/x} </cr:code>
Reading the PHP documentation has convinced me (again) of what a mind-bogglingly broken language this is. Quickly, see if you can predict this behavior:
<cr:code lang=“php”>
It’s midnight, and the car is almost packed. All our stuff in one little minivan, moving back to the west coast! Oh man it’s exciting! Should be there in a little over a week.
I love hard science fiction. Actually all science fiction–Grace and I bonded over our love of the ridiculously cheesy Sarah Connor Chronicles this past year–but I remain fascinated by the darkened, measured futurism of Clarke and Asimov. I remember spending hours pouring over my dad’s copies of 2001, Rendezvous with Rama, The Caves of Steel and Ringworld. Phrases from these books formed the literary substructure for my whole life–and there’s something about the phrasing of those books, and the science fiction movies from the late seventies to early eighties, which remains poignant. The last survivor of a far-orbit spacecraft punctured by micrometeoroids, in the long months until rescue, turning as all listeners do, to Bach.
That’s why I enjoyed Moon so much. One man, serving out a three-year contract on a lunar mining facility, alone. No one to talk with save recorded messages from his wife and newly born daughter, and the company of a vapid, invariably rational finite-state automaton. If you haven’t seen the film, I strongly recommend it. It is best, however, to go in as blind as possible.
The film is visually astounding, reveling in the early-80s glory of space engineering. Hard bulkheads, rounded-corner insignia for which the interpretation must be immediately obvious to trained astronauts. There’s the slow drama of the moon itself, with massive harvesters stripping the surface and casting the tailings slowly behind. The modelwork is exquisite, enhanced by careful VFX, and retains the feeling of 2001’s massive spaceborne constructions. Even the Eurostile typography dates the film in a strange way–simultaneously classic and contemporary.
I released version 0.1.3 of Construct today. It incorporates a few bugfixes for nested schemas, and should be fit for general use.
I got tired of writing configuration classes for everything I do, and packaged it all up in a tiny gem: Construct.
Highlights
OpenStruct-style access to key-value pairs. <cr:code lang=“ruby”>config.offices = [‘Sydney’, ‘Tacoma’]</cr:code>
My life recently has been an object lesson in extreme deviations from the norm. I got my teeth knocked out in broomball, but also landed an outstanding job in an arguably abominable economy where most of my peers have been struggling to find work and make ends meet. I’m now a software engineer at Vodpod, a web site oriented towards video aggregation and publishing. I love what I do, but how I got the job in the first place is also an interesting story.
Carleton College just started this new program called Engagement Wanted. As a graduating senior, you write a short “elevator speech” and post it on their web site. Here’s mine, in its entirety:
Looking for a year-long job while I apply to physics grad school. Physics research would be great, but I also have six years experience in IT, ops, and web development. Photographer, graphic designer, *nix admin, network guy, and open source software developer. If you know anyone who's hiring (especially using Ruby), I'd love to hear from you!
Here’s what I did to get the Macbook Pro (rev 3,1) running smoothly under Ubuntu 9.04.
Turn on the nvidia drivers with jockey-gtk (the hardware drivers manager).
Add the keys for the mactel PPA: cr:code sudo apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 0x8db7f87a2b97b7b8 </cr:code>
I recently got a MacBook for work, and thought, “Hey, here’s a chance to finally stop mucking about with all the inconvenient things about Linux! Flash won’t be broken half the time, I can use things like VMWare Fusion and Adobe Lightroom… it’ll be great!” So I installed 10.4, and started trying to get some work done. Here’s my thoughts for that day.
Bad stuff
Spaces is a total joke. Every time you open an application it switches workspaces to wherever the application was last. You can enter spaces to drag apps around, but that means that if you want, say, a new firefox window on the current workspace, you need to switch to another workspace, fire up a new window, enter spaces, drag the new window back to the space you want, and exit spaces to the new workspace. It’s completely broken.
I just finished my last undergrad assignment—Hector’s E&M test. Got an A in the course, actually, which really surprised me. I’m now done with Carleton, and graduate in a week. I’ll be living in Madison for a few weeks, and then moving out to San Francisco for my new job. Should be exciting!
Also, I ported Cortex Reaver to Innate and Sequel 3.0.0. It works, but things are a bit shaky still.
If you haven’t seen the 2019 video, you should definitely take a look at Microsoft’s ideas about where we might be headed with computer interface design. It’s bold, slick, and leaves out a really big question.
Watch the video, and ask yourself: “how much work are people getting done?”