Broken Rails 2.3.3 Tests

Fixtures are loaded differently in Rails 2.3.3+. If you are using FooBar.first instead of foo_bars(:one) in your tests, you may experience breakage. Hope this helps!

–DT

My jQuery Tutorial

As part of my school’s “DriveBy” program, where students teach other students about various topics, I wrote a tutorial for the awesome jQuery library for Javascript. Check it out!

Rest In Peace, Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch, the professor famous for his “Last Lecture”, which inspired so many people, including myself, has passed away at the age of 47.  My thoughts are with his family at this difficult time.

(The link I provided is down, for now.  Here is a video of Professor Pausch’s famous lecture).

Talking About TED

I’ve been really into TED lately – it’s an annual conference featuring a series of talks by a variety of thinkers.  There are all sorts of topics covered, like “The amazing intelligence of crows”, by Joshua Klein, or “Why we know less than ever about the world” by Alisa Miller, or “A journey to the center of your mind” by Vilayanur Ramachandran.  It’s really amazing stuff.  I was thinking of making a DVD of my favorite talks so I could share them with others, which I can do legally because the TED talks are both downloadable and shareable under the Creative Commons license.  In terms of “bandwidth” (i.e. information per second), it’s one of the best resources out there to expand your mind.

Science Fraud

Scary article on BoingBoing: scientists are using Photoshop to manipulate their results.

–DT

If It Ain’t Broke…

I made the mistake of upgrading my Ubuntu installation to the newest version last week, despite the fact that I was quite happy with my existing installation.  In fact, I had a fairly complex setup fine-tuned to my needs.  For example, I had two copies of Firefox: one with all my fancy-shmancy extensions, and one “clean” version with Flash disabled and no extensions installed (I don’t trust FF extensions entirely – some of them may be spyware). Upgrading consolidated them into one version (not to mention that I had two sets of bookmarks – one in each version).

Also, there were some serious problems with my video card, and my resolution dropped from 1900 pixels wide to 640.  That means I lost about two thirds of my screen space.  By now I’ve come to a, ahem, resolution to the problem (sorry), but it took several hours and many reboots.  I have a fairly generic video card, so I was surprised it was such an ordeal.

The main thing I’m missing right now is The Daily Show’s website.  Something broke, and I simply can’t watch the content anymore.  I can watch the ads, which run several times in a row, but not the actual show. They’re in beta, so it might be something they changed that happens to coincide with my upgrade, but I doubt it.  Ubuntu installed Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5, which is weird because Ubuntu is usually very conservative about stability.  Anyway, it stinks because that’s the one show I try to watch on a regular basis.

Anyway, besides venting, the point of this post is to revisit a good rule of thumb – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.  That “get the latest version” button is nice and shiny and tempting, but before you press it, ask if it’s really necessary.  Read about what the changes are.  Ask yourself if it’s worth the risk.  And yes, there is risk.  Even the super-user-friendly iTunes exposed users to growing pains, without giving them much in return for their pain.  If there’s a security issue, it probably is worth the risk, but otherwise, give it some thought before you press that “Update Now” button.

–DT

Charity – Good and Bad

I went to a fundraiser earlier today for a group dedicated to feeding the hungry in Israel. The organizers gave a brief speech and included some statistics about poverty there. Here are some from 2007 cited in Haaretz:

1.6 million Israelis (almost 25%) live below the poverty line.

“The number of children living in poverty reached 804,000; or 35.9% of all Israeli children.”

“40% of the families living under the poverty line are working.”

With devastating numbers like these, there’s clearly something fundamentally wrong. The key sentence is the first one in the Haaretz article: “Despite the improvement in all of Israel’s economic indicators in 2007, a rise in the minimum wage, increased employment and higher real salaries; the country’s poverty level remained almost unchanged in 2007.” The Israeli economy is doing very well, so why are so many people so poor?

The fundraiser I supported today seeks to address this issue by going to restaurants, caterers, and military bases, and bringing leftover food to people who don’t have any. This is a wonderful idea, and I’m all for it, but it’s a bandage on a much bigger problem. The poor people who don’t have food need fundamental policy changes, not scraps from the tables of rich people. I’m happy to have helped via this organization, but I would be much happier if there was no need for this group (among many other private groups dedicated towards helping Israel’s poor). Poverty in Israel should be on the extreme fringe, as it used to be.

UPDATE: The charity is Table to Table. I didn’t originally post the name of the group because I didn’t want it to seem like I was singling them out (since the point of my post is that the people benefiting from T2T and similar organizations need reform much more than they need charity).

–YY

Double-Clicking The Grey Lady

A friend of mine showed me that if you double-click on a word on The New York Times’ website, it will open up a dictionary definition of that word. I find that a bit pretentious, but it’s also a smart idea, especially if it frees the Times writers to use bigger words!

–YY

p.s. Yes, I enjoyed coming up with the title of this post…

Punished For Pennies

This story brought a smile to my face: twenty-nine middle school students in Readington, NJ were given detention for using pennies as lunch money, as part of a prank, CBS reports. Not a few pennies, of course – each student involved brought in 200 pennies, resulting in almost 6,000 pennies that the cashiers had to count. Students say that they were protesting the lunch period being too short.

Punishing the kids was probably not necessary, especially since many of the students rolled their pennies up (where does one get 200 pennies anyway? This must have taken some planning). I understand the school’s position, but the students came up with a creative and (admit it) funny way to express themselves. Instead of throwing them in detention, why not have an assembly and discuss why the lunch period is so short, and what the kids could have done to protest it?

Anyway, the kids aren’t done. They continued their protest the next day by bringing their lunch from home (always a sensible option anyway) and are wearing t-shirts that say “Got Pennies?”.

Hopefully the school will realize they’ve got some pretty smart kids there, and try to find a way to work with that instead of alienating and fighting them.

Via Consumerist.

–YY

Obama For President

Now that John Edwards is out of the race, I am endorsing Barack Obama for president (I had been deciding between the two). While of course I don’t agree with Obama on every issue, I like his candidacy, and the more I see, the more I like.

The smear campaigns against Obama, which unfortunately seems to be working, are astonishing. One otherwise highly intelligent friend of mine told me that terrorists would want Obama to win. Nothing he has said or done makes me feel that he would be sympathetic to or supportive of terrorists.

I recently had the privilege of hearing Alan Dershowitz speak, and he said that he had had Obama as a student, and “there isn’t an anti-semitic bone in [Obama's] body”, and also that pro-Israel candidates could vote for Obama with a clear conscience (Dershowitz himself supports Clinton).

There’s also the rest of the candidates to consider. While policy-wise, I could probably live with Clinton (her voting record is almost identical to Obama’s), I feel like her campaign has been much more cynical and divisive, and that she, McCain, and Romney represent the American incumbency: the entrenched power structure that has allowed so many Americans to go voiceless and powerless (Huckabee does not, but he’s nuts**). Obama really does seem to represent something new: his so-called “lack of experience” (my favorite line is that the person in Washington with the most experience is Dick Cheney) is an asset in my opinion. He will bring fresh ideas and perspective into a Washington that desperately needs it.

–YY

* JFK himself came from a power family, his father being a Senator.
** Huckabee completely lost me when he said he wanted to rewrite the Constitution in God’s image.

p.s. I wrote earlier about how, of all the candidates, Obama is the most Kennedy-esque*. And if you’ll indulge me to toot my own horn a bit, this was weeks before Obama actually received the Kennedy clan’s endorsements. Ok, done bragging ;-)