2006
371 posts under this date.
A pesar de sus terriblemente anacronistas definiciones y su interfaz decimononica, el diccionario de la Real Academia de la Lengua Española es utilisimo y le agradezco sinceramente a la Real Academia que lo tenga en linea gratuitamente. Aclarado eso, el pet peeve que me mueve hoy a escribir sobre ella es su extraña fijacion con los acentos. A pesar de que dispone, sensatamente, de una busqueda por aproximacion que me permite buscar palabras sin tener que escribir acentos, me restrega siempre en la cara el no haberlos escritos. Por ejemplo, si yo busco “redaccion”, me manda a una pagina de redireccionamiento en la que me dice que “La palabra redaccion no está registrada en el Diccionario.” y procede a darme una larga lista de un link, obviamente, “redacción”. Es decir, me fuerza a aceptar conscientemente una opcion que se da, de sobra, por entendido. Parecera poco y hasta me rei la primera que lo vi pero ya por la sexagesima vez que ocurre empieza a perder lo gracioso.
Claro que quizas todo sea solo pesimo usability design de su parte, pero conociendo a la Academia lo dudo, a mi me huele a pura mala leche linguistica, a esa sabida preferencia real-academica de la prescripcion sobre la descripcion.
Today I had decided I was finally taking Caja Negra—a political web app of mine—online after so many failed attempts (I’m so sleep deprived now that I get dizzy, really dizzy, just looking at the screen). At first I thought it was a problem with Rake and so I started by reading it’s online documentation. It proved a dead end but it turns out Rake is a pretty interesting thing (and so are Rails migrations).
I decided to read some more on the Login Engine itself, and I read, much belatedly, that it is bloated and hard to modify. That has been precisely my experience—and yet, it was very useful to me and after some friendly fisticuffs we learned to get along. Many thanks to James Adam for it.
I finally decided to start the deployment all over again, from scratch, carefully checking the tiniest step. It all narrowed down to a simple command, “rake engine_migrate ENGINE=login”, that just wouldn’t run. I found some people with the same problem but no working solution.
So I kept reading and trying all sorts of different versions of the command once in a while, like a kid magician who just can’t pronounce the incantation correctly.
Along the way, I finally found out why my blog was dead a couple of days ago. It turns out TextDrive rolled out the new version of Rails (1.1) but it was incompatible with Typo and so they rolled it back. They now advise people to freeze (new word for me) your Typo to Rails 1.0 or update to the new, compatible version of the blogging engine. Even DHH apologized in the name of the core team for all the trouble the upgrade caused. TextDrive’s Justin French, on the other hand, was as diplomatic as usual when someone expressed the caring hope that people get notified about what they should do:
The solution is not for us to provide warnings in the forums, or send out emails, or stand on top of a tall building and yell out some kind of warning and hope every one hears. The solution is for developers to take control of their own web application’s source code, rather than rely on shared server libraries that can (and should) be updated regularly.
That crankiness is actually one of the reasons I enjoy TextDrive. Masochism, they call it.
Anyway, I was definitely getting nearer. I was now sure that what I needed was to freeze my web-app to Rails 1.1. Blessed yerejm gave some instructions for how to do just that here. But the simple conjuration, “rake rails:freeze:edge REVISION=4091”, wasn’t working. I stared hopelessly at the screen for some 20 minutes, thinking about what could be the problem. Then it hit me, probably out of some small passage that I must have read in the realms of documentation I skimmed today, that last colon should probably be an underscore for me. And it all worked.
I’d never heard of Jerome Kern. Much less of The Platters, apparently a pretty popular “doo wop” (!) group from the 60s. But in 1933, it turns out, Jerome Kern wrote a purdy, small song called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, which The Platters in turn recorded and made famous in 1959.
And in 2006, today, serendipity brought me the song, played by Roxy Music (who are oh-so-very-cool), and it made me smile.
Yup, I am aware of it’s glaring cursileria, but it’s late at night and I’m strangely happy, so shut up and read the lyrics:
They asked me how I knew,
My true love was true,
Oo—oo—oh. I of course replied,
“Something here inside,
Can not be denied.”
They said, “Some day you’ll find,
All who love are blind,
Oo—oo—oh. When you heart’s on fire,
you must realize,
Smoke gets in your eyes.”
So I chaffed them, and I gaily laughed,
To think they would doubt our love,
And yet today, my love has gone away,
I am without my love.
Now laughing friends deride,
Tears I cannot hide,
So I smile and say, “When a lovely flame dies,
Smoke gets in your eyes”,
“Smoke gets in your eyes.”
What a wonderful surprise! Reading about Google’s Marissa Mayer —I have this obsession in which I obsess for days about certain people— I found out she got a BS in Symbolic Systems in Stanford. That’s right, there is such a thing! I’m shaking with excitement. I’m reading the career description online but my eyes just keep pushing ahead. It’s a weird mixture of “artificial intelligence, computer science, cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and symbolic logic.” Even “human-computer interaction” is thrown into the mix. I mean, a degree with symbol in its title! Could you possibly ask for more?
All the more reason to visit Stanford this May 13!
Goddamned Rails-Engines!
...
mmm… Ok, Ok… I take that back. They’re indeed very helpful but installing them locally was a true nightmare and now that I was finally ready to deploy to TextDrive they refuse to cooperate. I’ve no idea what’s going wrong. I was counting on having my (political) web-app online tonight but it seems it’ll have to wait until tomorrow, my eyes are too bleary.
And the worst thing is that it’s almost 5AM. Which means one more day I miss my yoga class. Oh well… :(
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
(I just found out there’s a pretty good song from The Beatles with the same title as this post. Heh. A nice surprise.)
I just noticed today that AT&T has a redesigned logo. I like the change —especially the sort of shadow inside the sphere— but of course there are those who disagree.
Will we (or rather, will our avatars) wear words when fully-immersive, massively multiplayer, 3d computer environments really start to take off?
Will it look like Matrix green code view? Will future fashionistas argue endlessly about the merits of serif vs. sans-serif? Bembo vs. Helvetica? Bodoni vs. Garamond? Will a future girl flaunting her sexuality wear a top bikini made of nothing but two rings out of the word “perky” barely concealing her nipples1? Will you wrap yourself in lyrics? In short stories? In emo text? Will I wear Borges’s while you wear Charlie Stross’s? While she wears Melville’s? Will you wear your favorite quotes as bracelets? As necklaces? As belts? Will HarperCollins be the new Gap?
Before you nonchalantly dismiss this idle rumination as the work of a feverishly formist mind, I ask you to pause for a moment and look around at today’s ubiquituous (and perpetually crammed) IM nick-names and personal messages, email and forum signatures, “witty” t-shirts, and the like.
Oh! I want to go to the Stanford Singularity Summit this May 13! I mean, Ray Kurzweil, Douglas Hofstadter, Cory Doctorow, Eric Drexler, Max More, and Eliezer Yudkowsky will be speaking! (Just imagine all the freaks1 that’ll be there…) It’s free for the public and I already RSVP-ed. Let’s see, if I stay in California with some friends, if I fly cheap, if I eat nothing but air, if…
1 Remember Tom Peters’s advise: Find a Fellow Freak Faraway.
Yay! I just got my invitation code to Google Analytics. What little I’ve been able to see is pretty amazing (mmm… make that very amazing), all the more so considering that it is free (it has always baffled me to no end that I’ve to pay more for stats than for hosting my website itself).
The best part was Google’s seemingly offhand notice (emphases mine):
If your site receives more than 5 million pageviews per month, you must have a linked AdWords account with at least one active campaign..
If your site receives more than 5 million pageviews per day, please contact us by replying to this message before signing up so that we can ensure proper capacity planning.
5 million pageviews? Per month? Per… day? That scale is one of the many things about Google that make geeks’s mouths (mine included) water. (I think it’s important to point out that StatCounter, my previous web stats provider, charged me $19 a month for 10,000 pageviews.)
I hope you are—just as I was—blissfully ignorant of the following quote and the game it portrays, for, if that’s the case, you’ll probably end up—just as I did1—with a day-long smile on your face. I mean, isn’t this something2?:
Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move. In that respect it differs from almost every other game. The primary activity of Nomic is proposing changes in the rules, debating the wisdom of changing them in that way, voting on the changes, deciding what can and cannot be done afterwards, and doing it. Even this core of the game, of course, can be changed.
Wikipedia, as usual, is a great intro to the topic.
1 I’m riffing the structure of this paragraph from Matrix’s Morpheus memorable quote: “Neo, sooner or later you’re going to realize, just as I did, that there’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” Did you got that before I told you? Is there someone out there as linguistically disturbed as I am?
2 That beat comes from this other article, interestingly, on luck.
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