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Archive for November, 2007

Links on a more serene thursday

November 29th, 2007

Mainly Ruby links today: for some reason, they’ve been piling up lately.

I’d never heard the expression ‘Holy Schmoly’ before. Now in two days i’ve read it twice, and both times in the context of computing languages performance. Two times too often, if you ask me. But the posts themselves are interesting (second one doesn’t try Ruby 1.9 though).

To go on in the Ruby vein: Rails 2.0 RC2 is out ! I’ll admit i wait for a proper release before giving it a whirl (from atog).

I’m an admirer of Martin Fowler (and his books). And it appears he likes Ruby: in this post he talks about JRuby and Groovy (a colleague has tried to talk me into trying Groovy, but i’ve never really fancied it somehow: what’s in a name ?)

And an interesting, nearly philosophical article about Ruby: according to Giles Bowkett, Ruby should be approached as an object of beauty. Programming as esthetic enjoyment (through my cousin).

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Posted in RoR

Personal rules for a good life

November 28th, 2007

there is always a positive side to the situation. Always.
corollary: if you make a choice, you do everything it takes to make it the right choice. There are no real bad choices (apart from a few, like the first shot of heroin, or other obvious ones)
the surest way to be liked, is to like.
the surest way to be loved, is to love.
all people are interesting, if you can ask the right questions. A game in itself.
getting along is the best way to get things done.
If you manage to always remain calm, you will be on top of the situation.

Unfortunately that last one is a difficult one for me. I’m the gunpowder type: if you rub me wrong, i’ll blow up in your face. And that is a bad, bad thing. Not to say something you will regret later. I’m working on it. Seriously. By the time i’m fourty i want to be a true diplomat.

(breathe in, breathe out. breathe in, breathe out. count to ten, and then backwards. And then the alphabet)

5 comments »

Posted in life

Links on this fresh yet friendly saturday

November 24th, 2007

Leap seconds: yes, they exist. Our measure of time (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour etc) doesn’t correspond to our solar cycle. Apparently there is a proposal to abolish leap seconds: you’d have atomic clock seconds, and UT1 (solar time) seconds, and they would not be the same. Confusion ahead.

Serguey Brin’s wife has her own startup : 23andMe. For the mere sum of 1000 – 1$, you can have your DNA mapped. Sound reasonable for a Google spin-off: processing power and math heads galore.
Is Gattaca around the corner ? these are the kind of amounts any large company could afford, if they wanted a prospective employee checked.

A not-so-positive review for Firefox 2 and 3. I’ll give it a try anyway.

Strangely, i seem to have landed in the Metatale top 100 of influential flemish blogs. I’m flattered, but also surprised: does my blog qualify as flemish ? I’m writing in english, and i’m reading and sometimes commenting on flemish, french-speaking, UK, US blogs. And influential ? Maybe it’s because i’m active on some other top 100 blogs. The algorithm moves in mysterious ways.

One thing is clear: they how to play the crowd. Hats off to their marketing strategist.

2 comments »

Posted in science, software, web2.0

Cocoon

November 21st, 2007

Cocoon is a fair on design and decoration in Brussels. Interior decoration is (yet another) pet interest of mine.

There was a whole lot of very average stuff. Also present: nouveau-riche kitch, eighties glitter, grandmother style pseudo-retro, beige dullness. But here and there, some nice pieces.

There were four large halls. I must admit that seeing sofa after sofa and not being able to sit, for fear of being sold something, was a bit wearying. So i ended up ‘testing’ a massage seat.

Well, I think the thing wasn’t properly calibrated for my height, because it hurt like hell. Like being kneaded by wooden paddles. I asked the price (out of curiosity): the lady told me that this ugly torture implement can be acquired for a starting price of 2900€. Tempting.

Another curiosity this year: infrared cabins. These are basically cupboards studded with lamps. You can sit in the cupboard and bathe yourself in infrared (wavelength 7.08µm) which is supposed to make you more relaxed, solve all kind of skin problems, and generally guarantee you eternal life. Or something.

Other pics here.

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Posted in Entertainment

ING Home’bank HOWTO for Ubuntu

November 21st, 2007

When you start using the ING homebank on Xubuntu, they obligingly tell you this.

But this is not near enough to make it work. Here’s wat you need for Ubuntu.
Normally, you’ve got libtiff installed, but if you don’t, do this:
sudo apt-get install libtiff4
It turns out they need libtiff.so.3. The current (and only) version provided with (X)Ubuntu is 4(.2.1). But that’s OK, libtiff4 seems to be backwards compatible, so in /usr/lib:
sudo ln -s libtiff.so.4.2.1 libtiff.so.3
(thanks to Jesus for the correction)
Then:sudo apt-get install libstdc++2.10-dev

You then load your profile, say
. /home/elise/.homebank

This will get HBSecurity to start up.

5 comments »

Posted in Linux

Law Street

November 19th, 2007

Been watching some old West Wing episodes. Witty government officials on speed, saving the world and putting out four fires an episode.

I think this is how the screen writers would like their government to be: the country in hands of smart, principled people with a sense of humor.

Translating this to Belgian government could be fun. Picture the settings: way less luxurious than the West Wing, but still not bad. I’ve seen the inside of a ministry not long ago, and it was not the seventies beige i pictured – rather utilitarian business-like.

Two ministry clerks in their office, bespectacled and in their fifties.
A: “Have you seen the folder on the European Directive concerning polish sausages ?”
B: “That’s for the Ministry of Health, is it not ?”
A: “Well, we sent it to them, but it came back this morning.”
B: “That ministry’s in the hand of the center-democrats, isn’t it ?- maybe we can leak this to the press to make them look bad.”
A: “Maybe so, but it’ll have to be tomorrow. It’s five pm.”
B (packing up): “So it is ! See you tomorrow”
A (taking his coat): “See you tomorrow”

Mmmh. A bit lacking in glamour, sex and violence, somehow.

2 comments »

Posted in movies, politics

Theory of everything

November 19th, 2007

For years now, physicists have been trying to get out a coherent theory that encompasses both visible scale objects (relativity) and teensy particles (quantum physics). Both those theories predict phenomena on their respective scale very well, but are incompatible when put together. Large-scale objects exist only in one place at a time, for instance.

There is a contender, String theory, but i’m told it’s unproveable for now, and there are as many people against as in favour of it.

Well, seems there’s a new claim to the title: Garret Lisi, 39, not affiliated to any university, published a paper saying he did it.

It would be quite funny if this was true (got it from Slashdot after all): Lisi is a surfer dude. A mile apart from frumpy Albert Einstein and dignified Planck: a hawaiian shirt in the physics hall of fame.

You can imagine a bunch of surfers sitting on the beach, around the campfire, beers in attendance. A toke is being passed round. It comes to this one guy, who inhales, coughs a bit, and then says: “guys, i just had this mad idea …”

1 comment »

Posted in science

Widget test

November 18th, 2007

I’ve spoken about Quintura before: they’re not a search engine themselves, but rather a new interface for search engines.

To put it simply, a search generates a result list, but also a tag cloud. You can surf related terms to enhance your search. Touch of semantic web there.

Apparently back then my post got their attention, because I received a mail recently saying that they now have a widget for blogs and sites: so i’m giving it a test: if it’s any good i might put it in the sidebar. Judge for yourself.

Yeeeeesss, well, either there’s a maintenance going on, or there are some performance issues with it. I’ll keep an eye on it.

2 comments »

Posted in search engine, web2.0

Aha

November 16th, 2007

And i’m not referring to an eighties band, but to the lightning moment where everything comes together and you get it.

Happened to me today: issue i had been worrying at all week, and suddenly , as i was looking at a cookie (of the internet kind), it clicked. Two seemingly unrelated things fit into a coherent explanation. Little moment of Satori.

Funny how your subconscious mind can process things in the background, and then pop up the result. Great feeling too.

To balance the overall scheme of things, I managed to pour green tea on one keyboard and pumpkin soup on another. Can’t have everything.

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Posted in developer

Books

November 13th, 2007

I just finished Programming Ruby from the pragmatic bunch. It must be one of the first times that i read a computing book and was sad that it was finished.
Usually i plod through a few chapters, give up and start experimenting. Programming ruby was getting better and better, especially the end had a high concentration of cool – a good read.

For pleasure i’m reading Exit Ghost, the latest one of Philip Roth. He’s one of my favourite non-SF authors – very dense stories, full of the essence of real life. This one is proving excellent once again.

In the tram i read Selling for Dummies. Yes, i know. But someday it might come in handy.

I’m about to seriously start on Small treaty (essay ?) on manipulation for the use of honest people (in french). Good title. It’s a quite academic book, actually, with lots of references to psychology and cognitive science.
It always pays to know when you’re being manipulated. I might report on the more juicy chapters on this blog sometime, if it’s interesting enough.

When i’m not reading at least three books at the same time, you know there’s something wrong with me.