1. I can't use PayPal at Amazon.


2. I can use PayPal at Barnes and Nobles.


3. Barnes and Nobels has only private wishlists.


4. Amazon has public wishlists.


5. Back to step one.

AAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

Of course you can:

And if you say to me, “But you killed all those jobs!” - well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn - on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.

Even with industry support.

Several new frameworks to make life easier were announced today:

The Rails killer has been announced: Ruby on Crack makes it even easier to bring web apps online.

SQL on Rails aims to simplify the common Model-View-Controller pattern, and place the developer safely into the controller's seat again. An O'Reilly book has already been published.

Last, but not least, COBOL has been put on COGS, with full terminal emulation, and pre-Y2K backwards compatibility.

The Rails community is attempting to make the transation from ASP.NET to Ruby on Rails easier with acts_as_aspdotnet.

And after much ado about monkey patching, the ninjas have been dispatched to remove offensive methods.

If you have more Ruby-related announcements made today, leave a comment.

Update

Six new Ruby implementations have been announced:
Brobinius adds long missed functions, like Object#tase! and kittenuation.

RBXML has Gregory Brown all excited thanks to its unambiguous syntax.

John Barnette has announced a radical fork to slim down Ruby. Sadly, only for the *NIX environment, but Windows ports should be available, soon.

RazzleDazzle explicitly targets PHP followers, with its familiar syntax and OOP features, and provides a unique code to Podcast feature, so that your importance to the Ruby ecosystems shall never be forgot!

James Gray's SRuby is a cooperative effort with the JRuby team, to bring a heightened security to the safety conscious developer. Dangerous features, like networking or file system have been stripped to absolutely safe levels, for example.

Gregory Brown's Gobi Ruby fork brings the ease of Ruby to the ease of Go. And just like Go, Gobi will have you scrambling for space, if you aren't careful. Of course, Gobi development will continue in RBXML.

With all these forks, a spork is inevitable.

Update 2

The RailsEnvy guys are closing the Ruby shop, and move to JavaEnvy, citing Rails' scalability issues as the main reason.

Because that my video drivers decided to quit today has to be a joke, right? Right?

Upto 47% of software used by Sony BMG could be pirated.

Well, not really, but they got cought in the act of pirating software.

How did they get caught in that act? Well, stupidity, really: They called the support, and supplied a fake license key.

Well, at least Sony is consistent in the level of intelligence they exhibit.

A StarNow ad:

A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person.

Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it's something we like, we'll call you straight back.

Payment details: paid role

Created: 27 March 2008
Applications accepted for at least another month
Application criteria: Males & Females aged 0 to 60 from UK

Thanks to their retarded widgets on teh European side of the operation (behold the abomination that Amazon widgets are), I won't be able to put DVDs on my wish list, since I'll have to use amazon.com's Wish list to have it conveniently available.

Which means> No possible sale of the Babylon 5 series, Battlestar Galactica, nor Firefly, and loads of movie DVDs.

And why? Because JavaScript sucks. It is notoriously insecure (you cannot trust their party JavaScript. LiveJournal is doing the Right Thing by filtering that out). To add insult to injury, it doesn't provide a noscript-tag (as it should, given the gorram HTML definition).

This is abolutely retarded for a web company. Not only does it show ineptness in their natural habitat, but it does cost them possible sales (the series would net them about 40 Euros per box, and about 10 to 15 Euro per movie I would've put on my wish list). Of course, a wish lsit doesn't guarantee a sale. But this way, they lose a couple of potential sales.
Especailly, since I cannot even link to it from a website, thanks to stupid referral checking!


Not to mention the possible liability issues, since JavaScript is not known for its friendliness towards disabilities.

Morons.

Why, in God's name, do I have to maintain two wish lists on Amazon? One for .com and one for .de, even though I can log in with my amazon.de credentials on amazon.com?

There isn't even an option to import or merge them that is readily apparent. There is no reason for this. It's incredibly stupid, in fact (from the maintenance perspective alone!). The only issue I can see would be i18n, but Amazon uses Java for it's backend, which has rather good i18n features.



Before you ask: I'll be posting both wishlists (funny enough, the German titles are English one's, too :P) in the near future.

No, not the Space Shuttle flight; mine. ;)

I've bought all the Christmas presents needed (went even above and beyond the call of duty, and did as the Romans do: I bought a Christmas card) and requested.

In less than a day, I'll be leaving this country (and I wish it were for good; ah well, in due time).

My flight information:
Flight | Point of Departure | Take off |Arrival (local time)|
UA 9229 | Cologne/Bonn | 0850 | 0915
UA 949 | Heathrow | 1220 | 1512
UA 5886 | O'Hare | 1645 | 1831

I'll be in the US for dinner. :D

I have no clue which the terminals will be, but if you want to link up, you have the flight numbers, and the terminal should be announced. I think I'll hang around at the entry to the terminal for the general lobby-area for a while. I still look like that guy in my userpic (except my hair is not like that anymore).

My next post will be from the US.

As esbita hinted, I'm traveling to the US (This weekend, to be exact).

Alas, my MP3 player went out, so I had to get a new one. I'll be on the road for a day, and I cannot stand train rides or waiting times without music, so I had to get a new one. checking at various electronics stores, I went for the cheapest model I could find (a TrekStore i*Beat cerebrax). Nicely enough, I got more out of the deal than I expected:
It fills my requirements (battery driven, usable as USB stick), and even more, since it has an automatic rejoin capability for Music. And it is capable to play Audible's DRM'd audiobooks, and comes preloaded with one. Nifty.

Otherwise, I'm nervous as heck: Three flights, I'm gonna meet a lot of people, and I'll be stying until February..

Swiped from princess_luna

Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in with? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Serenity (Firefly) You like to live your own way and don't enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 100% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 88% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 88% Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) 81% Moya (Farscape) 81% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 75% SG-1 (Stargate) 56% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 50% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 50% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 44% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 31% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 25%

princess_luna princess_luna

I'm actually not a friend of social networking (ha, I'm such a punster), but I decided to give LinkedIn an whirl.

While I'm waiting for it to scan my email contacts (Note to self: Change password), I dutifully point to my LinkedIn button on the right hand side of your screen.

"code code code your boat, gently down the data stream...
merrily merrily merrily merrily life is but a digital dream..."

- A friend of mine

For the last three days, I've been Writing in Code, as my GTalk status says.

I've been writing a little quiz application (no, no details on what it really does), which uses Active Record, most commonly known as the glue between Ruby and a database in Rails, but perfectly workable outside of Ruby on Rails.

Let me tell you, AR makes working with Databases a breeze. It is an implementation of ORM, Object Relational Mapping, which essentially means that I can access table columns like a Ruby method call. AR does all the magic for me. Great stuff, if you can't be bothered to write SQL (it doesn't go out of its way to keep you away from SQL: If you want to, you can do SQL, too).

Another technology I've been using is YAML, which is intended to serialize objects, so that they can be passed around between Ruby and other languages supporting YAML.

And right now (well, once I got some sleep), I'm getting Ruby-GNOME2 to do my bidding. This is the GUI toolkit used by GNOME (surprise), or by GIMP.

Enough of the geeky stuff, for now (Code examples will come, though, especially for Ruby-GNOME2, which is lacking): Exercising my skills and learning new stuff in the process, too, has me pretty excited.


In other news: I've found a nice wiki, called The Business of Software, which deals with the software side of software devlopment. It looks like it has (currently) a focus on microISVs (independent software vendors with 10 employees or less), but it targets bigger shops, too. So, if you have something to contribute: Do. I added an entry on Source Control, in the hopes to get something started on that topic. ;)

Looking at the sheer mass of available stuff in that area, I am, frankly, overwhelmed by choice.

So, any recommendations on what I should listen to?

XAMPP has been installed, so has been UltraVNC. OS is not Ubuntu (it choked on something or other, and since Ubuntu 6.10 it is not readily apparent how to kill the boot screen hiding the boot messages on scroll), but meh: the thing is running, and that's enough.

A few stats:
intel Celeron MMX 333Mhz
224MB RAM
20GB IDE HD
IP 192.168.1.3
Name: Saruman

Next step: Move my local websites (SugarCRM, TikiWiki for notes and projects) to the server.

Wow. Signs of a somebody approaching genius level when making animated movies:

An old computer, which suffered from a broken video card (it' an ATX 1.0 based system, so it requires a video card for boot) is working now. Luckily, I found an old PCI card in another system. Right now, that thing is loading Ubuntu 6.10 (the only Ubuntu I currently have ready, so sue me).

And for those of you, who want to know the graphics card: an old S3 Trio 64.

Impossible? Not quite, since Sun built a data center in a shipping container. Yes, a shipping container.

It's called Project Blackbox.

The scenarios for use are quite interesting, too: From quick expansion of data centers to carry a complete data center in a shipping-ready container.

Awesome.