The Casimir Effect: v. 2.0

Has anyone else heard of this?

College professors are now converting their lectures to podcasts and posting them for students to pick up at their leisure.

What a great idea! Sure, I can hear the skeptics saying, “Students are going to skip class even more now,” but my theory is that the set of students who miss class will remain exactly the same, while those who show up will now have a reinforcing tool to take with them when they’re not in class.

Walking around campus, the number of students with trendy white earbuds is truly astounding. I’m certain that given the opportunity, some of these students would review the previous lecture while walking to class, or catch up on material they may have missed the first time.

I love programming languages. It’s almost obscene, but there are few languages that I won’t pick up and find some use for. The possible exception being COBOL.

Anyway, loving languages as I do, I find myself reading a lot of language documentation. Every so often a language (and it’s documentation) will stand out. Ruby is one of those languages that promises to make your life better.

Is it true? Well, if you’re a programmer, you can compare to Python and decide for yourself.

If you’re not a programmer, and I mean you never wrote a fragment of code in your life, you might want to read Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. It will change the way you think about languages and about language manuals. And it has cartoon foxes. Anything is better with cartoon foxes.

Did you ever notice that when you open up your Trash folder in GMail, it gives you “Recycling Facts” where your “Web Clips would normally be?

I did today, and clicked through to see a few more, after a while this came up.

You can make a lovely hat out of previously-used aluminum foil.

Good to know they still have a sense of humor.

It’s been said that the definition of beta-testing is as follows:

Beta Testing — The act of placing your mission critical data into the safekeeping of completely untested and unproven software systems. In olden days, virgins were used to beta test volcanoes.

If you feel like taking such a risk, I have a GMail contact retrieval script that I hacked together this afternoon. It’s not especially pretty but it works for me. I’m actually playing with this with a legitimate purpose in mind down the road.

Before you ask, my legitimate purpose doesn’t involve harvesting GMail passwords, spamming, stalking your roommate, or anything else nefarious. Would I do something like that? The passwords are encrypted before they’re sent to Google, but they travel to my web server in cleartext, so you might not want to try this out on a wireless connection. Enjoy!

I promised that I’d post pictures from my recent sailfishing trip to Isla Mujeres, even though they’re not tech, politics, or USF buzz. PETA members should beware: I took pictures of these fish without asking their permission.

On the streets of Isla Mujeres.

Looking hip while touring the island via scooter.

This fish took some time to get close enough to photograph. Well worth it though.

The line keeps coming off the reel long after you want it to stop.

This fish should be an Olympic athlete; photo credit is all mine.

Getting them to pose like this is never as easy as it looks.

Click any of the above images to enbiggen. Prints are available through flickr for family.

Those who read here frequently know that I’m not often political in nature, though as part of my 15 minutes, slate.com once quoted me in a post about Kofi Annan.

Some things are just too good to ignore though. Like GWB in all this hot water about domestic spying. Back in the old days, when the GOP was the new kid on the political block, suspending civil liberties and holding prisoners without trial was par for the course. Arlen Specter is one of my favorite Republicans, a small and exclusive club, partially because you never really have any idea what he’ll say next. I’ve read this quote, diced up and taken out of context in at least ten different places. Here it is in its entirety for your reading enjoyment. Giggles are allowed.

Well, the remedy could be a variety of things. A president — and I’m not suggesting remotely that there’s any basis, but you’re asking, really, theory, what’s the remedy? Impeachment is a remedy. After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution, but the principal remedy, George, under our society is to pay a political price.

Normally I’m against what I see as the excessive spending that tends to follow behind independent counsels. However, due to pure morbid curiosity, I’d be giddy if we brought in the Democratic version of Kenn Starr for another second-term orgy of government spending.

In 1938, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman accidentally ingested a chemical while studying fungus on wheat grains. The chemical was lysergic acid diethylamide-25 and the rest, as they say, is history. He turns 100 today in good health, and continues to advocate the legalization of his invention for its “medicinal purposes.”

If you’re ever up for a SCOTUS confirmation hearing and you really want a Senator on your side of the field, quote him or her as part of a joke. Trust me, it works:

Do you agree that Casey is a super-precedent or a super stare decisis, as Judge Luttig said?

ALITO: Well, I personally would not get into categorizing precedents as super-precedents or super-duper precedents or any…

SPECTER: Did you say super-duper?

ALITO: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

SPECTER: Good. I like that.

(LAUGHTER)

ALITO: Any sort of categorization like that sort of reminds me of the size of the laundry detergent in the supermarket.

(LAUGHTER)

After one of the longest held oppositions in the GNOME community, Fedora Core 5 will ship with Mono included.

Could this be the end to the longstanding debate between the opposing views of “Mono is the self-actualization of the Linux desktop” and “Mono is the Beast of Novell, sent to destroy us.”

In the interest of disclosure, I have a bit of a halo effect regarding Novell, not in small part due to their stock’s recent performance. However, I’ve used a few Mono apps, Beagle, F-Spot, and Tomboy, and here’s the thing: they’re useful apps. Moreover, aside from something like Apple’s Spotlight, Beagle doesn’t really have a clear competitor in the proprietary software world. This makes Mono a clear selling point for the unwashed masses of PC users looking for a new way to think about computing.

So where does the truth lie? Well, Mono is based on Microsoft technology, which makes me more than a little uneasy, but if a company like Novell will stay behind it, it certainly makes writing quality apps a little more rapid.

I’m a little late to this party, but SOAP rocks. I’ve dabbled in PHP and database-driven websites before, and running a blog kind of assumes you know more than a rudimentary XML-RPC.

But SOAP means that my PHP code can interface with a database on another machine via an ASP script with no worries about bits flipping or handling connections or sockets or anything technical. Implementing one of these “come-one-come-all” web application servers has the feel of a security nightmare but using them from the outside is really cool. Maybe there’s something to this Web 2.0 thing after all.