I disappeared for over two months and didn’t so much as call. There’s actually a reason. A good one, not just the old “well, I’ve been really busy…” You see, I’ve been talking to the good folks over at Pragmatic Programmers about the possibility of doing a Haskell book. All of my writing effort has been going into that book
Eric, Nub Games — I’m looking forward to this. I hope it comes out as a beta book.
Gibberish is a simple Rails localization plugin we developed for FamUpdate and have been slipping into other projects. We’ve got Globalize and we’ve got Localize, but come on. They’re great, and useful, but sometimes you just want something light weight. I know I do.
err.the_blog — This looks really interesting. Don’t know how I missed it when it first came out.
You are cordially invited to raise a glass with your fellow Rails developers in lovely Parkdale. … PubNite will witness the second annual RailsConf summary report.
Unspace — Even though Monday is a holiday… I hope to be there.
RSpec is a framework which provides programmers with a Domain Specific Language to describe the behaviour of Ruby code with readable, executable examples that guide you in the design process and serve well as both documentation and tests.
This is a very nice ‘behavioural’ testing package for Ruby (same thing as xUnit but what they say is better support for documentation and design (as in BDD vs TDD) — and I agree)
Exhibit #1 Why The Military Wants To Keep Our Boys Off YouTubeMichael Shaw, via Huffington Post — (video)
Mention Al Gore to any right wing spokesperson and on cue, they spit out:
The guy who claimed he invented the Internet!
They snicker, they chuckle, they high five themselves into happiness, but there’s one little problem.
Al Gore never said that.
James Boyce, via Huffington Post — Worth repeating, especially with Gore’s new book coming out in the next days.
And Don't Say A Single Goddamned Word
I don’t often write in the blunt and rude manner used in what follows. But at this point, I know of no other way to try to break through the impenetrable wall of resistance and denial on this subject.
Arthur Silber, in Once Upon a Time
It’s easy and tempting to rail against the way everything and its brother is a DSL now, but that ship has probably already sailed. We can hope that as the underlying idea of the DSL – the problem shapes the tool – gains wider currency people will incorporate it in their practice and become better at their craft as a result. We old farts will continue to chunter about the young folks of today not realising what it was like when we had to whittle our own bits and write a DSL to build the parser that would let us build the DSL we really wanted.
Piers Cawley, in Just a Summary
A guy from England rented his place.People were living there and went awayWhen the host returned he saw this
BoredStop.com — What a home coming
National Post hatchet job on Gore
I wrote earlier about William Broad’s many misrepresentations in his story that criticised Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Now Kevin Libin has produced an article for the National Post that makes Broad look like a paragon of virtue.
Deltoid — A very misleading presentation of a scientist’s views — one that a number of people are calling outright lies.
Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) is an evolution in the thinking behind TestDrivenDevelopment and AcceptanceTestDrivenPlanning.
It pulls together strands from TestDrivenDevelopment and DomainDrivenDesign into an integrated whole, making the relationship between these two powerful approaches to software development more evident.
behaviour-driven.org
Arguing For Infinite Copyright... Using Copied Ideas And A Near Total Misunderstanding Of Property
The key point here is that in pretending (or simply ignorantly claiming) that intellectual property is the same as tangible property, Helprin completely misunderstands what rights copyright law gives him. It is not the same right as he has over his own property – which, after he sells it, he no longer has control over it. Instead of “property rights,” copyright gives him a monopoly right (which is what Jefferson preferred to call it) to control how his output is used even after it’s sold. That’s completely different than a property right – and, again, the reasoning is simply as an incentive for creation, not to guarantee control.
Techdirt — The comments are worth reading.
In a New York Times article on May 20, 2007 (“A Great Idea Lives Forever. Shouldn’t Its Copyright?”), Mark Helprin suggests that copyrights, like physical property rights, should last forever. In fact, the two are vastly different, both inherently and in their effects on society. A closer look at the consequences of perpetual copyright shows Helprin’s suggestion to be based on faulty arguments.
Lessig Wiki — Pretty interesting page in Lawrence Lessig’s wiki.
IllegalSigns.ca is asking Councillor Kyle Rae, Chairman of the Economic Development Committee to investigate the Film and Television Office for violations of City policy that resulted in the Audi TT signs fiasco.
IllegalSigns.ca — Wow! Didn’t know this site existed, though I’ve heard of this Audi thing.
Full Atom support, including updating our Atom feeds to use the 1.0 standard spec and including an implementation of the Atom Publishing API to complement our XML-RPC interface.
WordPress — I missed the bit about the Atom Publishing API. This is really good!
Ten Top Reasons to Switch to Mellel
Mellel is the best word processor for Mac OS X. If you’re using a different word processor and want to know why Mellel is the best word processor for Mac OS X and why it is better than others, here are the ten top reasons for switching to Mellel now
Redlex — This is my favourite — version 2.2.5 is released.
The Definitive ANTLR Reference
ANTLR v3 is the most powerful, easy-to-use parser generator built to date, and represents the culmination of more than 15 years of research by Terence Parr. This book is the essential reference guide to using this completely rebuilt version of ANTLR, with its amazing new LL() parsing technology, tree construction facilities, StringTemplate code generation template engine, and sophisticated ANTLRWorks GUI development environment. Learn to use ANTLR directly from the author!
Pragmatic Programmers — Hmm. One more to read.
MPAA Trumpets Spiderman 3 Camcording Crackdown
Canadians will find the release interesting since it lists the various countries where Spiderman 3 camcording was stopped. Given the recent hysteria about Canadian camcording, one would expect a sizable percentage of the 31 incidents would be traced back to Canada. In actual fact, the industry says there were nine incidents in the U.S. (including theatres in California, Florida, Indiana, NY, and Texas) along with 22 other incidents in Argentina, Germany, Malaysia, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. Not one Canadian incident is mentioned in the release.
Michael Geist — Answer that MPAA
ClickTale: Revolutionary Web Analytics
ClickTale is a revolutionary approach to website usability testing and optimization. Unlike traditional web analytics that produce pure statistics, ClickTale gives website owners the ability to watch movies of users’ browsing sessions.
Erratic Wisdom — The blurb is what ClickTale has to say for itself. The link is to an overview article.
