November 2008
14 posts
There’s been a lot of ugliness going on in the ruby community lately.
Way back when Zed Shaw went on a rampage about the ruby community when he transferred over to python.
Then some people struck back.
Then David Heinemeier Hansson wrote some pieces about Rails/Ruby myths. In it he responded to some things Shaw had said.
Shaw said some things back.
Then Why said a bunch of things...
Processing Videos →
To waste your friday: a selection of videos from Vimeo marked as well liked using the Processing language.
“all reality is virtual.”
– NewScientist
“Any Tool is a Weapon if You Hold it Right” →
spiraltwist over at grinding.be has written a great breakdown of the concept of Ontological Violence and how it relates to us (you know, humans) in the future.
The Quantum Zeno effect →
This is awesome. If you measure something, say a decaying particle, your measurements can keep the decay from happening indefinitely, since they directly effect the probability of decay.
Quantum information theory is weird.
I sometimes wonder if it might be possible to control my weight by recasting the act of eating food into anticonsumerist ideals.
I’m relatively good these days about not buying shiny junk b/c it’s shiny junk; about looking for local providers before going to cheap imports; about finding expensive long-term goods rather than cheap disposable.
Might recasting the way I eat into those...
OCLC Power Grab
OCLC was once a great service, but it’s gone a little too far.
From Aaronsw’s blog:
[OCLC is] demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give the copyright to all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC copyright notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library.
This is ludicrous. Go read his post, and go...
“…everything is broken, and everyone knows it, and we perpetually postpone...”
– Zeldman
Every now and again it occurs to me that I’m still trying to figure out just what the hell I’m going to use this thing for.
An experiment for you:
Open cmd.exe, and do the following:
C:>cd C:\some\path\you\can\delete
C:\some\path\you\can\delete>explorer ..
C:\some\path\you\can\delete>exit
Now, in the explorer window that’s opened, delete the folder you were in that you exited from cmd.exe in.
It won’t let you. The explorer window you opened, despite not being opened on the folder...
YES WE DID
Thank you, America.
Now don’t forget: we got our country back. Now we have to do the right things with it.
Vote
We Democrats have trouble closing the deal. We have trouble continuing the push to the very last moment. We have repeatedly been blindsided by the fact that the other side votes regardless of the expected result, while we’re more contingent — making the effort if it seems necessary, relaxing when it doesn’t.
—Lessig
This is the greatest failing of the Democratic party. That when...