Shlrm.org Blag

Whilst waiting on my laptop to restructure it’s harddrive, I noticed my thing of legos. I started building something. Eventually this ended up and I felt that it was completed.

Here it is from a different angle:

After much searching on the internet, I figured out how to deal with the suspend and resume software, pm-utils, that’s on Kubuntu 8.10. Suspend, hibernating, and resuming all worked great. I was quite thrilled with that, however, the Atheros AR242x wifi was not working after suspend. I forget, I had to install madwifi to make that work from the beginning just to make the wifi work at all, but that’s a different story. This howto assumes that you’ve already got a working wifi, probably through the madwifi module. (But it’s very likely that it’ll work for any wifi module that’s misbehaving after resume, or any module of any sort, for that fact.)

(continue reading…)

Hong Kong named world’s freest economy – Yahoo! News.

Ouch.

So much for the land of the free. We’re drowning in a mire of big government. The solution: knowledge, vigilance, and a desire for real change.

Reading about groovy. It’s got some really interesting things. It brings the magic of dynamic typing and such (like ruby and python have) to java. But it doesn’t replace java, it simply adds it to java. So when you’re writing a groovy script, you can actually just write pure java and it’ll still work. That’s a very interesting (and potentially evil) feature. Imagine code with groovy and java intermingled. Yikes.

Anyway, there’s also something called grails. It’s groovy’s rails application framework. I’m hoping that it’ll be more useful to me than ruby on rails was. Whilst I was able to get some stuff done in rails, I wasn’t able to do quite what I wanted to do. Things didn’t interoperate the way I wanted them to. Building things to be completely REST-ful was a pain. It may simply be that I don’t know enough to do fully RESTful applications.

Also, testing was a pain in rails. I found several testing frameworks, but none quite fit what I wanted to do. That may have had something to do with my insistence upon using constraints in my database. Rails isn’t built to handle constraints, it wants your database to be dumb. I don’t really think that’s a good thing; having constraints in your database allows the database to make more intelligent optimizations regarding the data. Since rails assumes there aren’t any constraints on the database, it generates tests that break databases that use constraints. There are a few work-arounds, but none that exist well enough to actually run all my tests at once. I can piecemeal them and if I do them in the correct order, everything works just fine.

Regarding ruby itself, I miss the ability to create threads. I’ve finally understood threading in java, and how to efficiently and effectively use threads to handle things. Lacking a similar threading operation in ruby (at least an obvious one) I had a lot of trouble trying to implement some of the things I wanted to do. I love the dynamic-ness of ruby, and I like the ability to just write code and it does mostly what I think it should. There is probably a good way to do threading in ruby, I mean, people have written webservers entirely in ruby, I just haven’t figured it out. I’ll probably still use ruby for things, I’ve got a project or two churning around in the back of my mind to use ruby on, but for now, I think I’ll stick with Java.

This has turned more into a rant about what I don’t like about ruby and rails. I guess I’m hoping that grails will live up to my expectations more than rails did, and that groovy will give me the dynamic fun that I enjoyed with ruby.

It is time for Source Mage’s annual server fundraiser again. We’re raising enough to pay for our dedicated server that hosts our git repositories, and provides the master for our mirrors. We own that server entirely (well actually our current Project Lead does, since Source Mage isn’t a “real” organization) and it’s hosted in a co-location facility with an SLA and all that good stuff. Our costs are only about $100 a month, which isn’t too bad. This fundable should cover it in its entirety and ensure that Source Mage remains up and operational on the internet.

Incidentally, it’s also time for the Project Lead to be reelected, or a new Project Lead voted in. So if you’re a Source Mage developer and, for some strange reason, you’re reading my blog, go make a nomination if you feel like it.