February 2006 Archives

Just to brake the constant ImageNow happings. Hereis a post with the new features in Rails 1.1

Our IC from the ImageNow installation ,Dusty, gave us a tour of the building. He also told us about more of the perks at ImageNow.

1. First person on their floor gets to connect their ITunes library with sound system for the day.
2. Software developers are off limits to everyone else. They choose their own cubicles which have doors made of glass and they can shut them. The Software devs are also fed, I think daily, lunch.
3. Keg frige filled every friday.
4. Workout room
5. Dodge ball court with scoreboard, and bleachers.
6. Free coke and vending machines.
7. Many small conference rooms.
8. The company is paying to send employees to go see the final four. ImageNow is covering ALL EXPENSES!
9. BEST PLACES TO WORK 2004

Thats all I can think of now. But man, I don't want to go back.

I hoped that this class would have more information on the fundamentals of iScript/Javascript. Thats not the way this class is going to work. We jumped right in on the imagenow objects. I guess I should have expected this.

These's people have an awesome company. They have a slide. It starts on the second floor and goes to the first. They was a news article with a quote from the CEO that said, "I hate turnover". What a novel idea. They get bonuses like $500 gift certificates. I would like to work here...

UPDATE:
They have seqways and xboxes on 50 inch screen tv's for brake. That sure beats a trip to the JBK. I am so depressed. :(

Well, Wes and I have made to Shawnee, Kansas. And we are bright and early for our first day. The instuctor isn't here yet but we helped ourselves to the class manual. The content look pretty complete. I was afraid the class would be mostly about the their added objects to ECMAScript, but it appears to cover more the basics. Just looking at the table of contents it doesn't seem to cover building your own objects. That is a little disappointing but to be expected. I think it could be a good week.

UPDATE:
Looking more at the manual, there will be one chapter on objects.

UPDATE:
The instuctor seems to have an anti-unix bias. So much for this being a good week.

Campfire is one of the best rails apps I have seen so far. I seems pretty feature complete. To bad you have to pay to keep a chat channel. But this this give me hope.

Slow dulcimer, gavotte and bow, in autumn,
Bashõ and his friends go out to view the moon;
In summer, gasoline rainbow in the gutter,

The secret courtesy that courses like ichor
Through the old form of the rude, full-scale joke,
Impossible to tell in writing.  "Bashõ"

He named himself, "Banana Tree":  banana
After the plant some grateful students gave him,
Maybe in appreciation of his guidance

Threading a long night through the rules and channels
Of their collaborative linking-poem
Scored in their teacher's heart:  live, rigid, fluid

Like passages etched in a microscopic cicuit.
Elliot had in his memory so many jokes
They seemed to breed like microbes in a culture

Inside his brain, one so much making another
It was impossible to tell them all:
In the court-culture of jokes, a top banana.

Imagine a court of one:  the queen a young mother,
Unhappy, alone all day with her firstborn child
And her new baby in a squalid apartment

Of too few rooms, a different race from her neighbors.
She tells the child she's going to kill herself.
She broods, she rages.  Hoping to distract her,

The child cuts capers, he sings, he does imitations
Of different people in the building, he jokes,
He feels if he keeps her alive until the father

Gets home from work, they'll be okay till morning.
It's laughter versus the bedroom and the pills.
What is he in his efforts but a courtier?

Impossible to tell his whole delusion.
In the first months when I had moved back East
From California and had to leave a message

On Bob's machine, I used to make a habit
Of telling the tape a joke; and part-way through,
I would pretend that I forgot the punchline,

Or make believe that I was interrupted--
As though he'd be so eager to hear the end
He'd have to call me back.  The joke was Elliot's,

More often than not.  The doctors made the blunder
That killed him some time later that same year.
One day when I got home I found a message

On my machine from Bob.  He had a story
About two rabbis, one of them tall, one short,
One day while walking along the street together

They see the corpse of a Chinese man before them,
And Bob said, sorry, he forgot the rest.
Of course he thought that his joke was a dummy,

Impossible to tell--a dead-end challenge.
But here it is, as Elliot told it to me:
The dead man's widow came to the rabbis weeping,

Begging them, if they could, to resurrect him.
Shocked, the tall rabbi said absolutely not.
But the short rabbi told her to bring the body

Into the study house, and ordered the shutters
Closed so the room was night-dark.  Then he prayed
Over the body, chanting a secret blessing

Out of Kabala.  "Arise and breathe," he shouted;
But nothing happened.  The body lay still.  So then
The little rabbi called for hundreds of candles

And danced around the body, chanting and praying
In Hebrew, then Yiddish, then Aramaic.  He prayed
In Turkish and Egyptian and Old Galician

For nearly three hours, leaping about the coffin
In the candlelight so that his tiny black shoes
Seemed not to touch the floor.  With one last prayer

Sobbed in the Spanish of before the Inquisition
He stopped, exhausted, and looked in the dead man's face.
Panting, he raised both arms in a mystic gesture

And said, "Arise and breathe!"  And still the body
Lay as before.  Impossible to tell
In words how Elliot's eyebrows flailed and snorted

Like shaggy mammoths as--the Chinese widow
Granting permission--the little rabbi sang
The blessing for performing a circumcision

And removed the dead man's foreskin, chanting blessings
In Finnish and Swahili, and bathed the corpse
From head to foot, and with a final prayer

In Babylonian, gasping with exhaustion,
He seized the dead man's head and kissed the lips
And dropped it again and leaping back commanded,

"Arise and breathe!"  The corpse lay still as ever.
At this, as when Bashõ's disciples wind
Along the curving spine that links the renga

Across the different voices, each one adding
A transformation according to the rules
Of stasis and repetition, all in order

And yet impossible to tell beforehand,
Elliot changes for the punchline:  the wee
Rabbi, still panting, like a startled boxer,

Looks at the dead one, then up at all those watching,
A kind of Mel Brooks gesture:  "Hoo boy!" he says,
"Now that's what I call really dead."  O mortal

Powers and princes of earth, and you immortal
Lords of the underground and afterlife,
Jehovah, Raa, Bol-Morah, Hecate, Pluto,

What has a brilliant, living soul to do with
Your harps and fires and boats, your bric-a-brac
And troughs of smoking blood?  Provincial stinkers,

Our languages don't touch you, you're like that mother
Whose small child entertained her to beg her life.
Possibly he grew up to be the tall rabbi,

The one who washed his hands of all those capers
Right at the outset.  Or maybe he became
The author of these lines, a one-man renga

The one for whom it seems to be impossible
To tell a story straight.  It was a routine
Procedure.  When it was finished the physicians

Told Sandra and the kids it had succeeded,
But Elliot wouldn't wake up for maybe an hour,
They should go eat.  The two of them loved to bicker

In a way that on his side went back to Yiddish,
On Sandra's to some Sicilian dialect.
He used to scold her endlessly for smoking.

When she got back from dinner with their children
The doctors had to tell them about the mistake.
Oh swirling petals, falling leaves!  The movement

Of linking renga coursing from moment to moment
Is meaning, Bob says in his Haiku book.
Oh swirling petals, all living things are contingent,

Falling leaves, and transient, and they suffer.
But the Universal is the goal of jokes,
Especially certain ethnic jokes, which taper

Down through the swirling funnel of tongues and gestures
Toward their preposterous Ithaca.  There's one
A journalist told me.  He heard it while a hero

Of the South African freedom movement was speaking
To elderly Jews.  The speaker's own right arm
Had been blown off by right-wing letter-bombers.

He told his listeners they had to cast their ballots
For the ANC--a group the old Jews feared
As "in with the Arabs."  But they started weeping

As the old one-armed fighter told them their country
Needed them to vote for what was right, their vote
Could make a country their children could return to

From London and Chicago.  The moved old people
Applauded wildly, and the speaker's friend
Whispered to the journalist, "It's the Belgian Army

Joke come to life."  I wish I could tell it
To Elliot.  In the Belgian Army, the feud
Between the Flemings and Walloons grew vicious,

So out of hand the army could barely function.
Finally one commander assembled his men
In one great room, to deal with things directly.

They stood before him at attention.  "All Flemings,"
He ordered, "to the left wall."  Half the men
Clustered to the left.  "Now all Walloons," he ordered,

"Move to the right."  An equal number crowded
Against the right wall.  Only one man remained
At attention in the middle:  "What are you, soldier?"

Saluting, the man said, "Sir, I am a Belgian."
"Why, that's astonishing, Corporal--what's your name?"
Saluting again, "Rabinowitz," he answered:

A joke that seems at first to be a story
About the Jews.  But as the renga describes
Religious meaning by moving in drifting petals

And brittle leaves that touch and die and suffer
The changing winds that riffle the gutter swirl,
So in the joke, just under the raucous music

Of Fleming, Jew, Walloon, a courtly allegiance
Moves to the dulcimer, gavotte and bow,
Over the banana tree the moon in autumn--

Allegiance to a state impossible to tell.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

Here is a list of reason to switch to linux. Most of these are ovious but I guess its good spell them out somewhere.

I was thinking about writing something like this for rails. I guess these guys beat me too it.

Here is an article that is about functional programming's most mis-understood feature.