Archive for September, 2005

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Evolving Best of 2005, continued

Friday, September 30th, 2005

So in the two months that I posted my Best of 2005 I’ve come across a handful of albums that have worked their way in. Added to the the list are:

Now, there is one possible contender to the list that I recently discovered but I’ve been listening to their back catalog and have not made it to their most recent release, Coheed & Cambria. After several listens I can say with certainty that I am looking forward to their show at The Palladium in Worcester, MA this November.

The rest of the list is as follows:

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Banned Books Week: What Are You Reading?

Tuesday, September 27th, 2005

It is that time of the year to get your subversive on and the ALA is doing their part in promoting Banned Books Week. Here’s the Top Ten (I’ve starred what I’ve read):

  1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
  2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
  3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou*
  4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier*
  5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain*
  6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck*
  7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
  8. Forever by Judy Blume*
  9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson*
  10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Six out of ten isn’t back especially considering that they were required reading when I was a kid. So what are you waiting for? Thumb your nose at those nogoodnicks and read something literate that’ll make them squirm.

via Boing Boing

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Derailed – Ruby on Rails

Tuesday, September 27th, 2005

So yesterday I had all the good intentions of getting a mail daemon working on my server that is until the buzz over Ajax finally reached a pitch that I couldn’t ignore so I did what any ADD rattled person would do and drop the original task and look into the bright shiny new one. Well, that isn’t entirely true. At work we are continuing to feel the budgetary squeeze and we have been developing fairly limp applications using classic ASP and a god-awful amount of code; .NET is fiscally out of reach even though we are a 100% Microsoft shop so the last several months have seen the grumbling, “There has to be an easier way.” So enter the buzz about Ajax which gives me a kick towards Ruby on Rails, which bills itself as:

Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups.

My entire experience with Ruby has centered around troubleshooting my installs of Alexandria and this is the first mention I have seen of Rails; let’s just say that I live under a rock and cannot hang out with the cool developers. However, setting it up was a snap. Using VMWare, I built another image of Ubuntu and configured MySQL, PHP4, Apache2, Ruby 1.8, and Rails all within an hour and was knee-deep in the introductory tutorial shortly thereafter. So far I am impressed with the API and how quick it is to bang together a working application. Once I wrap up the tutorial today I’m going to look at porting some of our simpler applications, like time management, to get a feel for development time and code complexity.

Posted in Linux, Programming | Comments Off

Ubuntu ISP Setup

Monday, September 26th, 2005

One of the things that has plagued my server configuration at home has been my inability to get a mail daemon working. It isn’t that I need a full featured service running so that I can act as a host, it’s more that I want to be able to send mail from the websites I host–password recovery, site updates, and all that. Six months into hosting my own site out of the house and I am still unable to send mail so I’m hopeful that the Howto Forge, ISP-Server Setup – Ubuntu 5.0.4, will help me out. Granted my box is already built and deployed but maybe it will give me enough insight on who to retrofit a mail service and ensure that it is operational.

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My Inner Geek Child Just Squealed

Friday, September 23rd, 2005

Oh, the return of my IBM 8088 childhood in handheld form! Wizardry 4 color rebellion’s latest link dump included the website for a game called Wizardry and the screen shot contained therein left me squirming in my seat. Could it be that Wizardry? Well, Advanced Media Network confirms that yes it is that Wizardry and it is for the Nintendo DS. Now, the long wait of hoping that it is translated into English.

Another couple of great games that would make the transition to the DS well would be Bard’s Tale, Might and Magic, and the SSI Dungeons and Dragons Gold Box games. Since I grew up sans console much of my childhood gaming centered around PCs and anything RPG related, don’t get me wrong I love Mario but the theme music to Bard’s Tale really gets me nostalgic. I wonder how many old-time PC gamers would pick up a DS if there was the chance to play through some of those old adventures?

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I’m late to your party, Nintendo DS

Wednesday, September 21st, 2005

So I’ve been making a little scratch–very little– on the side doing these Click IQ surveys and I’ve finally made about $50 so I figured it was time to bankroll another handheld from Nintendo using my earnings. I had done this last year for a GBA SP so I figured why not continue to fuel my ADHD rattled psyche by picking up a DS.

So here’s the titles that I’m thinking about, though I’m thinking it’ll be hard to get Management to approve them all in a short timeframe.

Animal Crossing, no doubt, will be purchased the day it hits the streets. The Gamecube version was pure crack so the concept of making it portable and wireless enabled will only serve to drive me deeper into a fossil digging, bug chasing, fish catching, tree shaking madness. Electroplankton also looks like it has the potential to be just as addictive even if just for the novelty of it.

Between the DS and the impending Revolution the Big N has my attention and likely most of my entertainment dollars.

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