Powdered Non Sequitur Man

For my own future reference: Performing a Clean Restart or Shutdown from the Terminal
osascript -e ‘tell application “System Events” to restart’

My recent post to the Portland Ruby Brigade’s email list, asking if anyone knew Rails contractors in the Sacramento area, elicited replies from three Rubyists in Sacramento — each of whom plans to move to Oregon this year.

Check out Vegetarian is the New Prius. I’ve only skimmed it, since I have to get back to work now, but here’s the upshot: the impact you can make on greenhouse gas emissions by eliminating meat from your diet is ten times the impact you’d make by switching to a Prius.
Plus, with the [...]

American Science & Surplus. I held out for as long as I could, but finally succumbed while shanamadele’s kid was sleeping for an uncharacteristically long time.
Fortunately, you can order a bunch of little items and still spend less than $20, even with shipping. Highly recommended for retail therapy.

I’m officially an old fogey now: upgrading to Rails 1.2 broke 92 of 197 unit tests. I spotted one or two deprecation warnings, but the vast majority seem to have to do with changes to the way fixtures are handled — thus further reinforcing my opinion of the evilness of Rails fixtures in [...]

When I was first learning Ruby on Rails, I thought fixtures were pretty cool, even if you did have to manually maintain foreign keys for related object. Then I got tired of it, and thought fixtures were just kind of annoying… and, of course, using the database for every single test is a bit [...]

I’ve already tooted this particular horn to a few fellow programmers, but I just ran across this in some code I wrote about two months ago. Perhaps I’m easily impressed… actually, no. If I were easily impressed, I’d be a .NET developer. So perhaps I’m just easily impressed by my own bad [...]

A few items of interest in the few minutes before I go to bed:

The Scifi Channel has a 6-hour miniseries ‘in development’ based on Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age.” Here’s hoping it’s more interesting than the Dune miniseries.
In my former hometown of Sacramento, ten radio station employees have been fired after a woman died [...]

Frustrated at working in Squeak Smalltalk this morning, I wandered outside in search of an alternative medium…

Tattle is a quick census intended to give Ruby gem developers more information about the kinds of systems Rubyists are using. The results are rather interesting: as I write this, 46% of respondents are using a PC, and 43% are using an Apple. Which is more or less what I’ve seen at [...]

Just downloaded 170 photos from our camera that we’d taken since Thanksgiving. We may post more, but here are two of my favorites.
I woke up yesterday to find the snow still falling:

And, last weekend we got to hang out with a little guy who’s working on the concept of “object permanence.” And “hats.”

Paul Graham sometimes comes across a pompous ass, but he’s also got some fun lenses for looking at the world:
It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you’re impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how [...]

Call me a big fat geek, but the samples from this Rails plugin to generate Flash charts have me all hot and bothered. At least from the user end, this thing makes the purdy Gruff Graphs look like Excel. The code samples look pretty slick, too…

It’s not the most attractive car I’ve ever seen, but if the Chevy Volt concept car hits the market, I might actually consider paying money for a Chevrolet. This thing has a range of 40 miles on its battery, with a 1-liter engine to keep that battery charged for up to 640 miles on [...]