Posts

The other day I was reading a web page about Jane Jacobs’ theories of cities. There was something on it that made me think about immigration: Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions. One of the great advantages of this point of view, in fact, is that we become aware of the backward regions in the First World, and realize that they follow the same dynamics as the Third World. These days they may be comfortable enough due to transfer payments from richer regions, but they are economically passive nonetheless. ...

Tom Coates has posted about how he wants to stop wanting to play World of Warcraft. The game is fun, but it’s a huge time sink. The time I spend playing could be spent reading books I’m interested in, or watching movies, or working on any number of projects I have on the back burner. I’ve seen a huge percentage of the content in the game, most everything but the stuff that requires 20 or more people to do. Why keep playing? ...

I’ve been carrying a Tide To Go instant stain remover in my bag for months, and I finally got a chance to break it in today after a run-in with a drippy hamburger. Tide To Go works. Buy yourself a Tide To Go. On a related note, Red Robin is mediocre at best.

Next week I have to give a couple of presentations in front of audiences of people I don’t know. I have 45 minutes allotted for each, and I’m trying to create 30-35 minute presentations, both to give myself some extra space if I start running behind and to allow time for discussion at the end. The thing is, I almost never give presentations, so I’m a bit at a loss in terms of preparation. ...

There are two places I should have looked before complaining about the ActiveRecord docs. The first is Rails Weenie. The second is the Ruby on Rails Wiki. I haven’t found a canned answer to my question yet, but in both places you can post your questions and your progress toward answering them, leaving a trail of documentation for other people to use when they run into the same problems as well.

To me, the most painful part of working with Ruby on Rails has been the immaturity of the supporting documentation, specifically as regards ActiveRecord. I know there are boatloads of Ruby on Rails books on the way, and to me, the one that’s most needed is an in depth explanation of how ActiveRecord works and what you can do with it. I’m also beginning to wonder if ActiveRecord isn’t perhaps a bit thinner than I originally gave it credit for. It works brilliantly for all of the simple stuff I was doing initially, but now that I’m moving to the next level of complexity, I find myself a bit lost in the wilderness. ...

I confess that I have not paid much attention to all of the stories about network neutrality and AT&T’s attempts to start charging content providers a toll to take full advantage of the bandwidth they provide to residential customers because my mind has been made up from the beginning. As a customer, I buy a certain amount of bandwidth from a telco (in my case, Time Warner), and I expect to be able to use all of it to download whatever I like. Content providers buy their own bandwidth. They can use it for whatever they like. This is the status quo I expect will be preserved. ...

I’m a licensed NetNewsWire owner, so why does the latest beta require me to register for a NewsGator account? That kind of irritates me.

Yesterday, I was at Target and I needed to buy some cold medication. I already knew that the pharmacies don’t keep any medicine that has pseudoephedrine on the shelf any more, in order to prevent people from buying it in bulk and using it in meth labs or something. Instead of just tossing the box of pills in your cart, now you have to bring a little card for the medicine you want up to the pharmacy counter. Easy enough, I thought. So I get there and they ask for my driver’s license. Then they type the name and address from my driver’s license into the computer. Now I’m mad. Then they drag out this log book and make me sign for the pills. What could possibly be the point of all of this? If people are so afraid of bulk purchases of pseudoephedrine, I can see the store asking people why they’re buying, oh, ten boxes of generic cold medication. I was buying ten pills. Is all of this data uploaded to some centralized system? Are they worried that people are going to hit every drug store in town buying one box of pills at each? How much does crystal meth sell for anyway? ...

David of Ruby on Rails fame has a blog post about the ongoing difficulties in avoiding using top replies when you’re emailing. As an old school geek, I have similar urges. To me, you should trim the email you’re replying to and write your answers beneath the specific lines in your reply. Unfortunately, only old school geeks adhere to that custom these days, and as he points out, the people who make email software don’t want to cooperate. Not only do nearly all email clients default to the “top reply” style, but it seems like most email clients expect incoming email to be structured that way as well. Heck, Gmail generally wants to hide quoted parts of emails entirely so that you don’t have to look at them. That makes sense if people are replying and just keeping the full test of the old email at the bottom, but not if the quoted text is carefully selected by the person replying to the email. ...