Oh Firefox, why aren’t thou working?

Oh Firefox, why aren’t thou working?
Once in a while, you stop responding.
My keyboard types, my fingers stomping…
But you’re ignoring our bonding.

We’ve had so many joyful years
Together – sharing laughter, tears
Despise for impotent Explorer
The fear, the weakness and the horror.

And now look at what you’ve done
You’ve turned yourself into a pun
A joke on browsers and alike
I can’t go on with this last strike.

And so I am leaving for another
Her name’s Safari, and she’d rather
Be there, when I need her most.
I am sorry. Our love is lost.

Ruby on Rails: How to load session objects into console

This posting has MOVED!

Please follow the following link:

How to load session objects into console

Wanted: 11.3Tb flash drive to move house to a new location

Isn’t it just great that these days you do not need a truck to move stuff? As long as the stuff you are moving is digital.

I was thinking that in a pretty near future each house may include a giant mass storage that holds everything we own which can be digitized. Such are the books, photos, personal documents, bills, music, etc. All of those things are already available in a digital form, but what about furniture, kitchen counters, decorations, paintings, or the super-heavy piano for god’s sake?

What if… the house of the future is a completely configurable and intelligent hardware device that can reconfigure itself to it’s owner’s liking and create those items entirely from it’s own supply of materials? What if the paintings can be built into walls and show digitized image, books are digital single-page fold-out with downloadable content, furniture can be created from built-in modules…

Then – instead of moving your stuff you just have to download your existing house to the new house – and vola! It looks the same! Wouldn’t that make moving easier?

Well, until the house is so intelligent that it can reconstruct itself to fit my personal furniture and layout needs, the digital move is limited to less extravagant things, such as music, documents, books and media. But that’s already lots of really important stuff!

Which is why I think that the house of today should come with a built-in storage, that’s remotely backed up and fully redundant. A built-in file server, just like a built-in washing machine. That’s because just like everyone needs to wash dishes, everyone in this day and age also needs to backup their crap, and there’s lots of crap to backup.

Go! – the digital movers revolution, just don’t forget you can’t microwave your hard drive.

More sound bites: “Anything You Want”

Just wanted to quickly post a new track composed in October for the Halloween party. It’s called “Anything You Want” and is punchy as it’s groovy. Please star the odeo podcast if you like it!

Married!

Yes, the rumors were true – Telene and I are now married! Holy cow!

We both seem to have an afterglow following the wedding, together with a strong sense of how incredibly right and timely this is for both of us.

The ceremony happened outside on the terrace at the Cliff House – a beautiful venue atop of San Francisco’s never ending ocean beach. Our dear friend Donna conducted the ceremony with a graceful touch and purity. Even San Francisco’s world famous fog was welcome (this may be a bit selfish – try wearing a three-garment tuxedo under the sun; I bet girls in open dresses had other things to say about the fog).

The band performance was phenomenal, and the wedding reception lasted well over our original estimate. Which is a good thing, because we also managed to have a lot of fun along the way. Add the 2-night stay at the spectacular W hotel in SOMA that followed, with a pool and spa and unbelievable room service, and it’s certainly going to be the weekend to remember.

Next step to celebrate – is our honeymoon month in Thailand, but that’s not until March 2007… Meanwhile, I am back at the Blurb’s office, Telene’s back at school and so it’s back to life as we know it. Although I may have to stress test BookSmart software building our very own wedding book.

And very special thanks to the relatives and friends, who made it out, often from far overseas, to witness our vows and the drinking that followed…

New sound bites

Everything is quiet on the music front. Or maybe not completely quiet.

Over this weekend I got close to finishing second track for the 2nd PolyGroovers downtempo album we are working on. The new R0DE NT2000 mic is unbelievable… The song is called “Out or In” and has lyrics by our new lyricist Maria and voice by Telene.

And this other track is “The Big Bouncey Remix” of a groovy house track “Can U Feel It”, written with the help of my Soulaire partner in crime Fil.

Off for now….

Don’t get StubHubbed… It hurts.

If you haven’t heard about StubHub, that’s probably good for your wallet and sanity. This internet startup allows all kinds of people sell their tickets to you. Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? Except that it’s makes for a hell of a crappy trip to a concert, after you are told your tickets have been illegally resold for profit, and are not actually valid, and that you are essentially a victim of scam. Subsequent interaction with StubHub support leaves a whole lot of room for improvement… So let’s just say that:

DO NOT BUY YOUR TICKETS FROM STUBHUB.COM…

Seriously, just don’t.

For more details… read on. So this is what happend to me while attending recent Manu Chao concert in Greek Theater, Berkeley. Searching on the internet for tickets to the event showed at the top of the search the shubhub link (those guys obiviously know how to screw Google), with tickets seemingly available at a high $75 per ticket (compare this to $30 actual ticket cost). I bought two, paid an additional $26 “service” charge, and was happy that “I was in”.

Once we got to the concert, we got turned away at the door and sent to the ticketing booth, where a gentleman from the production company told us that:

1. The tickets we have on hand were given to a sponsor, which then resold them for profit
2. The tickets have since been cancelled and are no longer valid
3. We should never ever buy tickets from unauthorized reseller (such as StubHub)
4. He can’t let us in.

This totally sucks! All that after paying $176.95 for this pleasure.

We ended up making it to the concert after all, only because the gentleman finally conceded and let us in, without the ticket… But all this ensured a not-so pleasant concert going experience, to say the least.

Turns out StubHub has a 2 day policy – that if you don’t call them right away they don’t refund anything. This was not obvious when I bought tickets, and without reading the small print on another page this information is not available anywhere.

I was tied up with my work, so I just happened to have called on a third day to report that we’ve been scammed, and received a firm “1 day too late” notice. After a lot of deliberation I received a crappy $15 coupon for the future use of StubHub’s services…

Here is a quick quiz: How many times will I use StubHub in the future?

1. Zero
2. Zero
3. Zero

Correct! You got it!

Thanks (not!) StubHub for a very unpleasant concert going experience, and just as unpleasant customer service experience. Funny, considering those guys “guarantee” that, among other things: “…Your tickets will be authentic and valid for entry.”

Meanwhile, I am back to using another dark star – Ticketmaster…

References:

1. Ticket Reselling article on WikiPedia
   
2. Misleading StubHub Guarantee blurb, that does not mention the 2 day limit

June Ruby Meetup – San Francisco

Listened with interest to the July presentations at Ruby meetup in San Francisco. This is my fourth meetup and the group has more than doubled.

Here is a review of actual presentations…

The Danger of the Hype

The hype is not receeding, in fact it is only increasing. People are reluctant to discuss shortcomings, and are all about hyping each other up. This is a dangerous ground to be on. I am surprised that at all meetups I’ve been to, and at the Canada on Rails conference there were exceedingly few mentions of issues, problems, pains. Sure Ruby solves some, but nothing’s for free. What’s the cost then?

As I am coding through my third month in Ruby, I am starting to appreciate both the power and the weaknesses of the language, as well as the framework. It must be the non-conformist in me: I just can’t follow the herd without questioning. The J2EE herd is all too fresh in my mind from only a few years ago, so a healthy doze of scepticism is what it is – healthy.

Ruby

So I finally came across the first bug due to languge flexibility in Ruby. My model in our Rails project is a Book. Part of the book meta data is binding. Believe it or not, you really can’t use attribute called “binding”, because under some conditions it silently overrides method Proc.binding(). The symptoms were really obscure errors upon saving the model, something about type mismatch of block parameters.

Sometimes it’s nice to know explicitly what you are overriding, just in case it may bite you in the ass later. This was 3+ hours spent debugging the issue (between myself and several others)… Of course have to counter it to the productivity gains achieved with Rails development, which everyone is talking about. Well, I am not quite sure I am ready to make this judgement, I think more time will tell.

Off for tonight…

Finally… I am blogged.

The answer is – absolutely, and the question is – “do I have stuff to write about?”… That realization alone is worth a free blogger account, I figured.