Drew Yates

Today while walking from the store I found three working desktop computer minis by the sidewalk with a sign that said “Free: working.”

I took them home and lo-and-behold, they did! They’re pretty old, but they’re good for a distributed processing environment that I’ve always wanted to try in Erlang.

Check out my sweet new character at a dance party. (I’m in the center)

John, thank you for your interest and your response.

My problem is the astrology of programming. Astrology existed much longer than any modern science, so it’s not unreasonable to be wary of the same intellectual flaws.

Astrology flourished because people were comfortable to merely work, live, and teach within a reputable system. Whatever theories with the first mote of plausibility became the discipline as they aged. Over time, the discipline grew impenetrable as career scholars published derivative work. These explanations wove themselves into “common knowledge,” and to question them meant to assault authority itself.

And what professional scorns employment?

Regardless of your personal feelings of religion, theology has a similar problem. If it makes you more comfortable, choose whatever feuding sect of whatever religion you prefer to demean to confirm this analogy.

Today, well-taught scientific, mathematic, and engineering educations are vigilant, at least, in theory, against such incest. Science classes have corresponding labs. Math classes have puzzles and proofs. Engineering classes have construction projects. In each of these instances, the students must derive for themselves the “known laws” of the discipline from reality, if even with some guidance.

Yet, how many programming curriculums actually require reading and writing non-trivial software? Do we learn to write by learning about writing? Do we learn to write well at prompts in ten pages? If writing is thinking, what are we learning?

The most important goal of education is to instill intellectual curiosity and empirical rigor in students. Disciplines will change, but the value of these virtues will not. I would trust the opinions about software of my friend who wrote testriffic.com as a 100MB ball of embedded-PHP in click-and-drag-production over most professors. Ends and means are for textbooks. I believe reality —even if the lessons are uncomfortable.

Ironically, without virtues like critical thought and egalitarian dissent, the discipline will NOT change, and in stagnation, these virtues are treated as vices. Historically, the latter has been the rule. So, I do not feel my concern is without merit.

I know that you mean well with your “aerospace reliability” analogy argument, but retreating to an emotionally unassailable exclamation like “what if planes fell out of the sky” is too common —almost as common as the moral argument “so you believe in murder?” and the political argument “that’s what Hilter did.”

Extend these ideas to all of life, and that’s what it means to be a leukocyte.

I’m reposting this information because it took me days to get this stupid install done right until I found this walkthru on Google…

Copied from Rails on Ubuntu at http://ruphus.com/

Installing Rails (with readline and console support) on Ubuntu LTS

Here’s what I had to do to get Ruby on Rails to run on Ubuntu LTS with a functioning console (and irb).

It comes down to:

1. Random packages
2. Ruby (from source)
3. Mysql packages
4. Rubygems (from source)
5. Rails (from a gem)

Building on posts by:

• Paul Ingles
• Richard Crowley
• Ed Howland

Thanks guys.

Preliminaries

Mostly via Ed Howland’s post (I believe termcap-compat, which he lists, is no longer necessary, since libc is up to 6 or uh erm… well I don’t rightly know, but that package wasn’t in the repos and everything seems to work for me without it! ☻).

sudo apt-get install gcc
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install bison byacc gperf
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
sudo apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev
sudo apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev

Build Ruby

Download the Ruby source:

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz
tar xzf ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz

And build it. Make some coffee, this takes a while. ☻

cd ruby-1.8.5-p12
./configure
make
sudo make install

Not sure why this is necessary (ActionMailer?)

apt-get install postfix

You’ll also want Ruby’s documentation stuff:

sudo apt-get install  rdoc ri irb

Mysql packages

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client
apt-get libmysqlclient15-dev libmysqlclient15off
apt-get install libmysql-ruby1.8

Build Ruby Gems

We’ll be using this to install Rails:

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
tar xzf rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.0
sudo ruby setup.rb

Build Rails

Actually the easiest part, I’ve never had trouble with this (knock wood).

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies
sudo gem install mysql

Note that the mysql gem is really the DB connector for Ruby; it’s not Mysql itself. (We already did that.)

This is something that’s difficult to explain for people who haven’t experienced this, but try going on a media diet and then come back and try watching the evening news. Granted, increasingly since a year or so ago, watching TV and listening to the radio have become increasingly more difficult for me to tolerate. Ever stand up too quickly and feel disoriented for a few moments? I don’t feel physically dizzy, but about that same level of mental discomfort. It’s like that same tired, confused feeling you get when you stare at snow on a TV screen too long and you try to find patterns but nothing quite makes sense.

You know why? Because it’s the same thing. There is no meaning. Just constant noise explicitly designed to keep your attention and inhibit critical thought.

Yah yah, I know that Dr. Internet says “stuff” about sensitivities like this, but “Dr. Internet” says a lot of “stuff.” Hey, if being “this way” means that I have to wonder why a movie like Spiderman 3 blathers on about the consequences of carelessly hurting people… and then casually ignores the slew of civilian causalities (let alone property damage, for goodness sake) as “irrelevant collateral damage…” whatever. Go ahead and enjoy your stupid simple nerd-hero soap opera you chimps. I even enjoyed it. I’m just saying that every one of those cars, those buildings, those lives belong to people with stories and families and friends of their own. So go ahead, soak up the stories you like and believe whatever you want, if it makes you “feel better.” Ooo ooo ooo!

Thank you Spiderman 3, for yet again, teaching us all that “One death is a tragedy…” But wait! Isn’t there a second part to that quote?

…And it’s all very true, and you know it, or you’re lying. I don’t give a shit about “hypothetical off-screen new yorker guy’s smashed new car and his daughter’s broken arm from falling concrete” or whatever… and neither do you. I just notice these things and you don’t.

What was I writing about again?

Oh right, war coverage.

Check out Russia’s eXile newspaper. A couple War Nerd essays say more about what’s really going on in the world than a season of the Daily Show. Yes, I’m such a snob now-a-days that I can’t even watch the Daily Show anymore. It’s that bad. I used to love that show.

I also like the odd article like this pleasant expose on Afgani culture. Huh, I didn’t know that the Afgans were in contention for the Most Misogynistic Pedo Homoerotic civilization since Sparta (who were, by the way, institutional boy-rapers and woman-haters and ran a martial slave state). Somehow, that little detail slips past the American media as they report all that nice “democracy” we’re spreading. You know, like Sparta did in 300. It’s funny, because “democracy” means “rule of the people,” not “Coca-cola and McDonalds.”

And guess what: the rule of the people in the Middle East means screaming about Allah, good-old tribal slaughter, and maybe even a wife to beat and a boy to rape.

No wait, I just had a sweet idea: instead of spending our money building schools and fixing our aging infrastructure (hint: blackout last year? Katrina?) let’s piss a trillion dollars of borrowed Chinese money to send Americans to stand around in the desert to get shot at!

Yah, a trillion dollars. That’s a million million. Just think about that number the next time your public school district tries to pass a levy or you want to buy a house.

So much for writing a coherent essay.