Frequency

Some ads crack me up.

Sun Jul 17th 22:03:26 2005 *

Ads that aren't meant to make me laugh actually do make me laugh. I don't know why.



I opened a MySpace account so I could meet some people here in the El Paso area since I'm sick of sitting in my barracks room during all my off time. That ad is all over the damn site.

Comments [ 1 ]  |  Add a comment

Rails rocks.

Tue Jul 5th 21:33:39 2005 *

I've been developing my personal website using Ruby on Rails, and it's coming along quite nicely. The only problem I'm having is that I can't get the hang of creating new objects. I can't get it to work. The display part was really simple, though.

One of the coolest parts -- the part that makes it easiest, actually -- is that you simply use database objects just as if they were regular Ruby objects. Let's say you were implementing a blog (been thinking about putting one on there, just to compare Rails to Zope), and wanted to get all the entries for a user. Check this out:

class Entry < ActiveRecord::Base
belongs_to :category
belongs_to :user
has_many :comments
end

That defines the Entry model and tells the system how it relates to the Category, User and Comment models. This way, if you want to get the name of the user that posted a certain entry, rather than getting the user object associated with the numeric user id, the call to entry.user gets all the information about the user. Same with the category. If you want to get the name of the category this entry belongs to, you call entry.category.title.

Then, to display the comments, calling entry.comments returns an array of Comment objects, which you can iterate through to like so (in the template -- called the "view" in keeping with the Model-View-Controller paradigm):

<% @entry.comments.each do |comment| %>
<%= comment.user.name %>:<br/>
<hr><i><%= comment.title %></i><br/>
<%= comment.body %>
<% end %>

It wasn't even this easy in Zope. You had to write SQL methods for everything the database did. I have yet to write a single line of SQL code for this. I am very impressed.

Comments [ 1 ]  |  Add a comment

I can't read GNU web pages without getting frustrated.

Mon Jul 4th 17:06:44 2005 *

This is old news, but a link posted on a forum in someone's signature reminded me that RMS can be quite a jealous dweeb (yeah, I said dweeb). He wrote this gigantic page all about why we should say "GNU/Linux" instead of just "Linux" when referring to the entire operating system. You've got to be frickin' kidding me. His justification is that Linux is just a kernel, "GNU/Linux" is the entire operating system with all the tools.

First off, even if I did feel like making the name of my favorite operating system longer by adding three letters, a punctuation character and an extra syllable, I would certainly put the kernel first. It gets loaded first, so why not?

Second, you never hear him trying to claim GNU/Solaris even though a lot of the tools on Solaris are GNU. Besides, it's each distro's choice whether or not to put GNU tools into the mix. They could just as easily develop something on their own. If I include some unheard-of GNU tool in a software package I release, am I supposed to call it GNU/Whatever?

And what's next? X/GNU/Linux? X is one of the biggest reasons -- maybe one of the only -- Linux or any Unix is so popular with systems other than servers these days. And why stop there? How about X/GNU/Mozilla/OpenOffice/SSH/Linux? These are all very important tools. But let the distro makers call it what they want.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of GNU and what they stand for. Open-source (not "free" -- I dislike ambiguous adjectives unless I'm trying to be funny, and I'm not) software is important and will strengthen the Computer Science field overall. But, honestly, I feel that he's just pissing on the wheel of progress. Just concentrate on the code.

Comments [ 1 ]  |  Add a comment

Website coming soon.

Sat Jul 2nd 17:02:13 2005 *

I'm in the process of creating a personal website using Rails. I'm still pretty new to it, but it's really nice to work with. Turns out it's just about as easy as Zope. I'll post a link when it's up. I've gotta switch hosts. I'd bought some "bargain hosting service" which is really just a euphemism for garbage and horrible customer service.

GrokThis offers a decent package for only $5 more than I'm paying right now and has a choice of webservers to use. Even better, if you don't like the webservers they offer, you can install one of your own. I think I'll give them a shot. I'll just have to downgrade my hosting package with my current service to domain names only.

Not much else to report. I'll write more as things happen.

Comments [ 3 ]  |  Add a comment

Anybody need a new GUID?

Thu Jun 30th 21:55:20 2005 *

If you were really in dire need of a GUID, you can purchase one here.

If it weren't for the fact that we're just about into the month of July, I'd say this could be an April Fool's joke. What's worse is there were 20 bids for this! Twenty! I sincerely hope the winning bidder didn't actually pay for this.

Some old, probably dead, guy (I think it was P.T. Barnum, but I can't be sure) once said that it is immoral to allow a sucker to keep his money. I mean, honestly, if the winning retardbidder didn't lose his money here, he'd have just been screwed by someone else.

Comments [ 1 ]  |  Add a comment

Zope

Mon Jun 27th 21:59:20 2005 *

Zope, a web-application framework that Tyler wanted to use for Blogotomy for v1 last year, is pretty damn impressive. DTML pages, Python scripts, and SQL methods all work together seamlessly. It makes development so easy and pretty much emphasizes code reuse. Tyler and I were getting code knocked out much more quickly than we could have had we used any other platform (that I know of).

Here's the problem: I've become an even bigger fan of Ruby than I was of Python. I'm more comfortable with Ruby and, in my opinion, the code is much easier to read and maintain. I've looked into web-application frameworks for Ruby and come across Ruby on Rails, which looks to be pretty slick, but it's not the same. I want Zope's UI, DTML (or something like it), database functionality and ease of use, and the list goes on and on. Basically, I want the ability to use Ruby from Zope. Even in DTML methods and documents, you can inline a single line of Python code if that's all you need. I want to be able to do the same with Ruby.

A Zope product called ZShellScripts has been released that allows you to write scripts in Perl, PHP, Ruby, Bash and even Lisp to include in Zope. I have a feeling, though, that integrating those scripts into the mix will not be as seamless as using a standard Python method. With Zope's Python methods, you could call DTML, SQL and other Python methods from your Zope instance as if they were functions written right into that very script. I don't know if ZShellScripts can do that, and I'd be pretty amazed if it could, seeing as it can't just use Python's eval statement to execute. I have yet to try it, but I'll be skeptical until I do.

Comments [ 3 ]  |  Add a comment

My horoscope

Fri Jun 24th 21:27:11 2005 *

Virgo - Your lack of knowledge on soccer will be demonstrated this week as your random score generator for guessing the results of the World Cup ends with Saudi Arabia beating China 37-25 in the finals.

Check it out: BBspot Geek Horoscopes

Some of them are pretty hilarious!

Comments [ 0 ]  |  Add a comment

The Force is strong in New Zealand.

Wed Jun 22nd 11:33:45 2005 *

Star Wars fanaticism may have gone too far.

"The BBC reported three years ago, timed with the release of the last film in the Star Wars series, that at least 70,000 people in Australia declared themselves as followers of the Jedi “faith” in the last Australian census. They wrote-in “Jedi” as their response under the category of religion on the census form. Hard-core fans of the films have been trying to have Jedi declared an official religion around the English-speaking world for years now.

The same situation occurred in New Zealand in their census taking of 2001. Similarly, more than 390,000 people in England declared themselves Jedi in their census of the same year—a shocking number when you consider that only 260,000 people in England declared themselves to be Jewish. There are various Internet campaigns going on now that encourage voters in the U.S. to petition for Jedi as an official religion on the next U.S. census form."

That had to be my favorite part of the entire article. I cracked up about there being more Jedi than Jewish in New Zealand. Now don't get me wrong, Sci-Fi has gotten me interested in a lot of things, but religion has never been one of them. I like the whole Jedi deal with the lightsabers and the Force -- telekinesis and ESP seem like a lot of fun -- but I wouldn't change my religion based on fiction written by an ordinary geek like myself. :-)

Comments [ 1 ]  |  Add a comment

Upgraded

Mon Jun 20th 17:56:55 2005 *

I got my computer parts today! I had to hunt down one of the mailroom workers because today is an XVIII Airborne Corps holiday so we all had the day off ... including the mail clerks. I happened to bump into one of them and asked if he could check to see if my stuff had arrived, because the Sergeant at the CQ desk told me that FedEx had been there just minutes before I got back from lunch. Grr..

So he opens the door (his barracks room is right next to the mailroom -- he doesn't have to go far to go to work) and, lo and behold, we find two gigantic boxes with my name on them. I signed them out and ran giddily up to my room with them. I tore them open and proceeded to put everything together. I'd never put one together from scratch before. Well, at least not one so new. About 12 years or so ago, sure. But there wasn't so much crap in them before! :-)

Anyway, read the diagram on what goes where (oh crap, I just realized, I think I left the two headers for the front USB ports disconnected) and put all (heh, well not all -- oops) the wires where the drawing said to put them, installed the graphics card and popped the hard drive and DVD and CD drives in and booted the thing up.

First thing I noticed was that even though there are 6 fans in this thing (3 case fans, 2 power supply fans and one on the processor) it generates less than 10% of the sound of my old machine. And, to let you know how old the other one was, I looked at the power supply and it was -- no shit -- 100W. Never really noticed that before. I'm surprised the thing even powered the hard drive and CD burner. This new one's got 450W.

Everything went fast. I popped in the Ubuntu for AMD-64 install CD and ran the install program. With the exception of the fact that it couldn't find the network (I, er, wasn't connected) it all went super quick. I'm just totally amazed at how much faster the whole thing runs. Programs pop up instantly instead of letting me watch individual buttons and labels appear in the GUI (not really that bad, but you get the picture).

*sigh* Still having a few problems, though. I dunno what to do at the moment. I have to go do laundry, though. I'll update again later.

Comments [ 3 ]  |  Add a comment

New machinery on its way.

Fri Jun 17th 22:41:47 2005 *

I am fed up with this slow computer I have. I've been meaning to upgrade it for a few years now. So far, I've put in a new hard drive, doubled the RAM and installed a CD-RW. This was still two years ago.

I'm not going to tell you the current specs because I don't want everybody laughing at me (no, seriously :-)) but here's what's coming:

• AMD Athlon 64 3200
• ASUS Motherboard with Gigabit Ethernet
• 1GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM
• nVidia Geforce MX4000 128MB 64-bit AGP video card
• Pretty new case to put all the goodies in

Comments [ 1 ]  |  Add a comment