Shlrm.org Blag

San Antonio absolutely sucks for technology.

It is just about impossible to find hard copies of references or tech books.  I know that the internet is a widely available source, but sometimes you just have to have the paper copies of things. Especially when it comes to older languages like C. ANSI C. Not C#. Not Visual C.net. Not C++. Searching the internet for ANSI C tutorials (or help or examples or whatever) doesn’t net very much. (OMG PUN)

So I looked up a couple books based on reccomendations. There’s an 840 page ‘For Dummies’ book that is supposed to be quite good regarding getting into ANSI C especially coming from other languages. And then a C Reference book that would be useful. Especially when getting into the more in-depth usage of C (since there’s no “javadoc” for the C libraries online, at least that I’ve been able to find.) Of course these are only available in one store up in Austin. Even the library doesn’t know anything about these books.

San Antonio only exists for the Spurs, the Alamo, and the Riverwalk. Oh and the Government/Military and the Medical Center. If you’re not employed in one of those things, you might be mowing the grass (and then blowing the trimmings out into the street for someone else to deal with!!! [but that's a rant for another time])

San Antonio Sucks.

It seems the Obama Administration has come up with a great idea. Lets artificially set limits on the amount of compensation that financial workers can make. That’s going to give them a great deal of motivation to work hard and do a good job. This isn’t going to fix anything at all. In fact, it’s more likely to produce corrupt individuals.

A truly free market will appropriately set salaries for people. The shareholders and the board of directors will pay the people what they belive they’re worth. The people working for these companies will believe they’re getting paid well for the work they do. Failures such as the one that has occured recently are a wake up call for the industry. They realize that they’ve been paying people too much, and agreeing to contract terms that result in CEOs leaving with a huge bonus regardless of failure, or success, of the company.  That will be remedied, but not by artificially setting limits on compensation. Artificially set limits will only drive people away from the industry, or encourage them to find “creative” ways to make enough money. Some of those “creative” ways may have questionable legality.

This is another example of the government meddling in things they shouldn’t touch at all. They should only deal with enforcing private contracts. They should be ensuring that the contract that the company and the CEO is held up. Even if that means the company hurts badly, potentially failing. It will serve as an example to not form contracts this way anymore. It will cause pain to the shareholders that have agreed to the terms of the contract.

It will force the appropriate people to be responsible for their actions. Something that is severly lacking in the United States of America these days…

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.