Republican: The Pill

A Lisp Talk by Peter Seibel

Pretty Sweet.

This is funny. Not work safe

I love Xah Lee

I've always kinda lurked in usenet but for the last 6-7 months or so I've been lurking in comp.lang.lisp (it's a programming language). A frequent poster is this nutjob named Xah Lee.

His posts are horrible. They add nothing to the discussion, they are filled with the most insane boasting, and they make no sense whatsoever. But I love them. They are usenet car wrecks.

Here is Xah Lee's site. It's fucking insane.

Fuck you Dave Thomas

Ruby on Rails Dave Thomas(not Wendy's Dave Thomas):

The fact that you don't have have any of the options for date formatting in your Programming Ruby is a fucking letdown. Sort of like your book. You treat Ruby like a glorified version of Perl, ignoring most of the closure goodness.

So fuck you. And for good measure, fuck you David Heinemeier Hansson. I hate your fauxhawk and your framework still sucks. The only reason it's been adapted at all is that it sucks less than other action-based frameworks out there.

Update:

The date formatting stuff is at the back of Programming Ruby....doh!

American Gladiators is back on TV?

Oh my God is it 1990 all over again does this mean I have to listen to Vanilla Ice? Has TV really gotten that bad? Don't people have anything better to do than watch this crap, they're all fat but watching 'roid freaks on TV? I can't wait to see the XXL sized Halloween costumes for your fat spawn.

I've got a little brother's girlfriend staying at my house the next couple of weeks....she had the local Fox station's 9:00 news on when I got home last night. Shit. It's almost worse than the 'Roiders back on TV. The local news is one big advertisement for American Idol and MySpace....meanwhile, on PBS at least, there was a Frontline episode discussing the role of Dick Cheney in expanding the power of the executive branch. Interesting. Why isn't this on the news?

I never watch TV anymore('cept sometimes when I find stuff like that Frontline episode). No wonder why. Fucking TRASH.

The government should take away their broadcast license.

Interesting blog post from the Luddite at wired.com, on Ron Paul.

Strict Libertarians are neat in concept, not neat in the White House.

Paul Krugman has the best fucking blog.

The economist/columnist's blog is a gem when it comes to interpreting the economy.

Oh my God....

You JUST KNOW this will be awesome.

I KNOW I don't know how to do anything...

But I really wish I could.

Enter TechShop. I wish there was a place where I could learn how to do stuff as well as do stuff like this; maybe someday they'll open a facility here in Minneapolis.

Petra Haden

I have a record she did a couple of years ago where she covered The Who's "The Who Sell Out"
. Here's a version she and her band did of Journey's Don't Stop Believing.

I'm posting from the future....

Yes, as you can see I've joined the smartphone revolution.
--
Sent from my T-Mobile Sidekick®

JBoss Seam is a s(t)eam(ing) pile

For the last 6 months at work, I've been using JBoss Seam. It's a framework that integrates JSF with EJB. Stateful session beans serve as controllers and JPA entities or hibernate entities serve as domain objects.

What attracted me to the platform was that it (appeared) to solve a number of problems:

The Object-Form element problem. That is, if you had a drop down in a page where a user had to select a product, the framework itself would generate the code necessary to tie the value of the dropdown in the HTML form to the live Java object representing that product, sitting on the server. This, based on past experience, would be a huge time saver.

The variable length field or set of formfields. This is where a user can essensially "grow" a form. One example at my last place was an application where a user had to provide a list of schools they had attended in the past. For each school, they had to provide a bunch of data: dates of attendance, city, and state. Within the framework I was using at that time(Struts) this was a VERY difficult task. Seam and JSF in general seemed to provide an easier way to accomplish this.

Ease of offering many different functions on the same page. Sometimes on a page, you'll want to present a user with multiple functions based on the same data: "Save and Continue" and "Save and Exit." While you can get Struts to do this, it's very ad hoc and repetitive(thus error prone). You've got to build a little controller into each action you want to do this in. With Seam and JSF in general, this is cake. It's just a different button with it's action attribute set to that other method.

In all but the last case, Seam was a failure. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, Object-Form stuff would break..and was not debuggable. Because there was no way to define a smaller "validation area" within a subset of the form, the variable length formfield really didn't work. On every submission, JSF forces the validation of every field on the page thus making shit weird.

In summary, Seam is like a 3 legged Greyhound: It looks good from far away and the right angles, but once you need it to run, it's simply lame.

So today I bought my second and third Ruby book.

Judging us by our medical system, we're third world.

Patients Without Borders, NYT

This article talks about how charity medical groups (Remote Area Medical in particular) that used to operate internationally are beginning to see a huge need in America for their services.

We're a rich country. Something is going wrong when the American health care system is grouped with Guyana's, India's, and Tanzania's.

I might have posted this before, but in case not: