All Converted
The BabyBlog is now on Typo. That’s everyone!
Two Down, One To Go
After being completely unstyled for, well, ever, I’ve migrated Holly’s Blog over to Typo as well, and installed a new theme for her.
Next up, the BabyBlog.
An Offer We Can’t Refuse
I came in Hayley’s room the other night to find she’d done this:
I’m wondering if I should be worried about saying “no” the next time she asks for something…
We Should Be So Lucky
According to an article linked from Slashdot, among other places, has a reaction from voting software maker Diebold on the recent court ruling that yes, they were included in the set of “everyone” when everyone who sells voting machines in North Carolina must put their source code into escrow. This after an electronic voting machine in Carteret County silently lost several thousand votes in the 2004 election.
Diebold is of course threatening to take their ball and go home if they have to comply with the ruling, which can only mean good things for North Carolina. They’re a slimy, slimy company whose electronic voting machines, like most electronic voting systems, are scary. They keep the code under lock and key, and your only record of who you voted for is what the machine says it did. There’s no audit trail at all except to ask the computer “Is it right?”
Code escrow is used for many other software projects, so I don’t know why Diebold thinks that they’re too good for it. But if they don’t like the rules, by all means, they and their shady dealings are welcome to go to other states. Don’t let the door hit you in your Ohio electoral votes on the way out.
To Be The Man, You Gotta Book The Man
Ric Flair gets arrested for a road rage incident in Charlotte. The Smoking Gun is there with his mug shot.
Whooooo!
A Change Will Do You Good
After looking around and playing for a while, I’ve decided to switch blogging engines, away from MovableType and to Typo.
Part of the reason is just a desire for change, part of the reason is a chance to do some more playing with Rails, and part of the reason is that there are some neat features, like live searching and other AJAXy morsels.
The theme is a great one from the Typo Theme Contest called Lush. It may change as I do some more tweaking.
Old links will probably not work, so I’ve set up some redirects to hopefully get people to my more popular articles, reduce RSS feed breakage, etc.
If you notice any problems, let me know!
Ha Ha!
NFL Arbitrator Rules In Favor Of Eagles
I’ll admit to being petty enough to enjoy watching punk-ass Terrell Owens getting told “no” for probably the first time in his professional career. Now he gets to waste a year of his career sitting at home. Nice. The only bad part is that the Eagles can only suspend him for four games, and have to pay him to sit at home the rest of the season. But this example of what (should) happen when a player thinks they’re bigger than the team is refreshing.
Hope your family can still eat, though, T.O.
MemeTunes
As seen over at Rob Hoffmann’s blog…
What’s In Your iTunes
How many songs?
3865
Sort by song title:
First- ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas (Fred Waring & The Pennsylvanians)
Last- Zoot Suit Riot (Cherry Poppin’ Daddies)
Sort by time:
First – And That’s The End Of The Ballgame (Jock Rock) (0:03)
Last – Tweezer (Phish) (30:55)
Sort by album:
First – Party Up (Up In Here) (DMX) (…And Then There Was X)
Last – Bows (You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown Broadway Soundtrack)
Sort by artist:
First – Hold On Loosely (.38 Special)
Last – Sharp Dressed Man (ZZ Top)
Top Five Most Played Songs:
1) Spare Change (Virginia Coalition)
2) Slam (Onyx)
3) Bad Day (REM)
4) Daydream Believer (The Monkees)
5) In Da Club (50 Cent) / Return Of The Mack (Mark Morrison) / Baby Girl (Sugarland)
First song that comes up on Shuffle:
“The Day The Niggaz Took Over” – Dr. Dre (The Chronic)
Find “sex”, How many songs come up?
10
Find “death”, How many songs come up?
6
Find “love”, How many songs come up?
142
O’Baby
It looks like, after enduring more pain, false hope, and runaround in an adoption process than any two people should have to, Jen and Pete O’Bryan are on their way to Chicago to pick up their new baby. The papers are signed and the girl is here, so it looks like this one might be the one.
Jen and Pete are great people, and will be great parents, so it’s a relief to see the process finally work for them. Between them and Randy, I’ve been able to see some of what prospective adoptive parents have to go through, and it’s not pretty. You have to have a big heart and ton of patience to go through that process.
Hopefully Vivienne Jane O’Bryan will be here in North Carolina soon, with her new family.
Update: She’s here!
Pragmatism
I spent Friday and Saturday up in beautiful Reston, VA (beautiful if you like miles and miles of office parks, parking lots, and crawling traffic, that is). I braved the wilds of Northern Virginia to particpate in the very first Pragmatic Rails Studio class – two days of learning about Ruby on Rails from the guys who wrote the book on it.
I haven’t done any work with Ruby, and don’t really know much about MVC concepts in general, so I went into the class with that perspective. It seemed like 2/3 of the attendees were Java developers, which was kind of weird. I guess since Java is so irrelevant in the circles that I move through, I assume that nobody uses it for anything. Perspective, I guess. I was joined on this quest by #void Godfather and all-around great guy Mark Cornick, who was nice enough to provide a place for me to crash in Greenbelt, MD.
The class was structured so that you could follow along with or without a laptop – I’d say nearly everyone in the class had a laptop. I was running the Locomotive package on my PowerBook. The presenters ran Macs as well. The first day was spent going from a bare Rails install through steps to get a simple shopping cart application up and running. The setup was designed from a real-world perspective – you started with something basic, got it working, and then revised the design and code accordingly. I found that approach easy to work with, as you tended to move in smaller chunks. The day ended with some examples of AJAX, which was fun to do.
The second day went into things like unit and performance testing, allowed a long lunch for us to develop our own basic “To-Do” application, and ended with a kind of grab-bag approach to various topics such as load balancing and application distribution.
Of course, this being the first class, there were a few rough spots. The biggest one was that while they encouraged you to develop along with them, a great approach, there were times when they’d “magically” jump ahead, which really screwed with the people trying to code along and led to most of the “come help me!” code problems that popped up. I think they’re planning on using a “code checkpointing” system in future classes, which should remove that problem.
Aside from that, though, the class was well worth the money. Dave and Mike did a great job as presenters, keeping the pace quick and the information flowing. I feel like I have a better understanding of the concepts that I read about in the Rails book now, which should help if I start developing applications. And it’s fun to be a member of the “Golden Spike” club as the first people to ever participate in a Pragmatic Studios Rails class. And if you weren’t there, you can pretend you were by checking out the pictures on Flickr. You can’t have my T-shirt or bumper sticker, though.
So the class is highly recommended on this end – if they come near you, it’s worth the money to go attend.