Tyler Vann-Campbell's Weblog

Set up this Rails thing after hearing so much about it.

I really have to hand it to it, time to getting some bits under my fingernails from blank console is under 5 minutes.

Looking forward to playing around. For fun, check out the Rails screencasts where the developer creates a weblog engine with comments and all in under 15 minutes, or the “Flickr interface in 5 minutes.” It’s even AJAX-y, to use the buzzword of the year.

If you’re near a television in the Tampa Bay area tomorrow around 12 pm, be sure to flip over to Bay News 9.

The Suncoast Tiger Bay Club, a non-partisan political group, plans to have a politician for lunch tomorrow. Their website says they “carve up” politicians for lunch. It should be pretty lively with a 20 minute free-form Q & A session.

If you haven’t been to Scott’s website recently, you might want to check back over the coming days. Let’s just say there might be some significant changes in the near future.

In the interest of full disclosure: I work for Scott, but I certainly don’t receive any compensation or creative oversight with regard to my blog. “The Casimir Effect” is still independent and I always reserve the right to promote and annoy public figures at will.

Okay, blogs are all about public ego-stroking, so you’ll excuse me if I engage in some right about now.

Open up this PDF, scroll down to page 6 and read the bit about NuSOAP, then read a bit more about who NGP software is.

It’s not much, but poor college students work for recognition almost exclusively, so this is kind of a surprise bonus for me.

In a recent poll by GlobeScan, Inc., public opinion on several of the more influential countries in global politics was surveyed. The results?

Well, as far as negative opinion goes, the world doesn’t seem to hate us as much as it hates Iran. Iran bumped us out of first place, where we were in last year’s poll.

The polling agency goes into surprising detail about who specifically doesn’t like our policies. The breakdown is this: African countries love us like the rich uncle that never colonized them. Middle eastern countries for the most part don’t like us, with the exception of Saudi Arabia, which can’t make up its mind either way, and Afghanistan, who loves us in a way that should be illegal.

I’m guessing that when the polling agency made its composite numbers, they were weighted by the nation’s percent of the global population. I guess this since the agency conducting the poll meets international standards, whatever that means.

Their polling methodology is listed in a pretty obvious location, where you can see who was asked what questions, where, how, as well as what the weather was like. Most of the countries surveyed had sample sizes of around 1000 represented. The notable outliers are South Africa with 3497 people surveyed, Afghanistan with 2098 people surveyed, and Iraq with 2200 people surveyed. To someone who knows more about statistics, my question is this: does this constitute a sampling error and if so, would such an error provide a significant bump in either direction, positive or negative?

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.