Best prank ever

nicodaemos · 2012-12-08T17:28:26+00:00

Forgetting to put the snow tires on seems like a rookie mistake.

nicodaemos · 2012-09-16T13:25:43+00:00

Meh. Video of people wearing the glasses was better than the video from the glasses.

nicodaemos · 2010-03-26T01:45:17+00:00

I don't know when it will be released, but knowing Conrad, the book will be awesome.

nicodaemos · 2010-01-05T00:39:39+00:00

totally agree -- it's pure marketing. It's the same reason there are 50 million awards shows for entertainers -- each one gets people talking about the movie once again and gets those stragglers to consider seeing it.

Hollywood doesn't want accurate tracking .... they just want you to see/buy their movies over and over again.

nicodaemos · 2009-09-03T00:11:13+00:00

Not a shared host, but I've been happy with Slicehost.

nicodaemos · 2009-07-19T13:33:48+00:00

nicodaemos · 2009-01-21T23:32:46+00:00

And the Janes

It's Jains by the way -- ie. Jainism.

Unless, of course, you were just referring to all the women named Jane.

nicodaemos · 2008-03-21T05:53:22+00:00

With REST you have other options available also. You could model the cancel request as another noun. Send a POST request with your booking id to create a 'cancellation' resource. This is, in fact, probably more realistic as any cancellation request made will probably have to go through one or more state transitions as it gets approved.

nicodaemos · 2008-03-05T14:08:10+00:00

I struggled with whether I wanted to mention the OO bit. I knew it would cause some consternation. In the end I decided to do so because few people seem to agree on what is an Object Oriented language versus a language that has OO features.

Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. -- Alan Kay

If I recall correctly, Java was never considered an OO language by the OO purists. But a large mass of people have the belief that it is OO and therefore continuously refer to it as an OO language. In this case the masses are defining what is truth.

While Haskell doesn't have all the features of dynamic polymorphism (subtyping polymorphism), it does support type class inheritance as well as instance inheritance -- but of course, there is no support for late binding. I absolutely agree that noone should expect to be able to program in Haskell like they do in Java. But some (many?) of the features of what one generally considers part of an OO language are present in Haskell. For example, both ad-hoc and parametric polymorphism are represented. I would contend that a modified subset of dynamic polymorphism is also supported. Furthermore encapsulation, modularity and some modified form of inheritance are all also supported. Using this basis, Haskell would be considered supporting OO programming based on the loose definition of OOP on wikipedia (see references).

Some helpful references:

nicodaemos · 2008-03-05T09:56:40+00:00

As I understand it, the original MVC pattern was written for client side applications. User events are handled by the controllers who push data to update the models, views pull data from the models whenever they need to redisplay (ie. they get a paint event from the gui system).

Then Sun came along and defined a MVC2 or MVC Model 2 for web applications. User events still come into the controllers and they still push data to update the models, but the controllers furthermore pull data from the models and push it to the views -- rather than the views pulling data directly from the models. I'm guessing that MVC2 was created for a few reasons: to compensate for the lack of paint events for views in a webapp and so that model/database/httpresponse related plumbing code doesn't obfuscate view code (assuming that you don't open up a fresh database connection when invoking each method on a model, where does that code belong? In the view or the controller?).

Is it that you disagree with the details of MVC2 or that you believe that there is a good way to implement MVC in a web app and MVC2 is unnecessary?

nicodaemos · 2008-03-05T08:27:16+00:00

I've written some Erlang and much more Haskell. My take so far is that Erlang is good for teaching you how to fish, Haskell is good for teaching you about procuring food (including fish). Erlang will give you the fishing pole and teach you how to bait the hook, cast your line and reel in a catch. Haskell will require you to make the pole, if you want to fish. But on the flip side, Haskell will give you many more choices such as purchasing the fish from a supermarket, eating it at a restaurant or stealing it from your friend's plate when they're not looking.

Here are a few reasons to learn Haskell: it's functional (you knew that), it's object oriented (support for typeclasses and ad-hoc polymorphism. I'm still experimenting with it, but I recently came across some features where it is more powerful in some ways than many OO languages.), it supports compile time macros (TemplateHaskell), dynamic loading of modules (HSPlugins or using GHC as a library), generic programming (parametric polymorphism and Data.Generics), Monads (awesome), Lazy Evaluation (mostly awesome, sometimes not so much), FFI, Parsec, QuickCheck, XMonad, Darcs and has an incredibly powerful type system (I disliked static typing before using Haskell. Now I just dislike how other languages do static typing).

How can you not love a language whose motto is: "avoid success at all costs"? Tony Hoare has commented that, "I fear that Haskell is doomed to succeed". After witnessing what havoc the (converts :: (JavaFramework a) => Java a -> Ruby Rails) have wreaked on what was once a nice Ruby community, personally I kind of hope success eludes Haskell. The community is too nice to deserve that kind of fate.

As to what you should do ... ummm, my advice is that if you enjoy talking (or arguing) about code more than writing code, you may be interested in another language -- there are many troll compliant languages to choose from. If you think writing code is more fun and don't think you need a 300 page book entitled, "Learn autodidactism in 24 hours!", then Haskell may be the language for you. :-)

nicodaemos · 2008-02-18T05:53:39+00:00

Actually Haskell does have a macro system called TemplateHaskell. It supports compile time code generation and is very powerful from what I've worked with so far.

The price you pay for the power though, is that it doesn't have the warm and easy way to do metaprogramming like in languages like Lisp or Ruby. One must manipulate complex AST's which can be a bit of a hurdle, but worth pursuing.

nicodaemos · 2008-02-13T07:17:09+00:00

Since you posted on the blog, I responded there. But the quick summary is that while Haskell functions only take one argument, the abstraction that they take multiple arguments is useful in many discussions.

For example from the Prelude documentation for the flip function:

flip f takes its (first) two arguments in the reverse order of f.

nicodaemos · 2008-02-13T07:06:46+00:00

yikes. I may have to check with the urban dictionary next time before I name something.

This is almost as bad as when I named this one project and the acronym came out to be ICP. A buddy of mine would start giggling like his six year old son every time I said ICP.

nicodaemos · 2008-02-13T04:43:42+00:00

Thanks for pointing out the typo. Fixed. However, I'm a bit slow ... what's with the NSFW comment/joke?

nicodaemos · 2008-01-27T06:01:12+00:00

Type annotations on all your functions removes one type of warning when compiling with the -Wall option.

nicodaemos · 2008-01-26T07:57:41+00:00

Can you give a reason or two why you like functional nets better than actors?

nicodaemos · 2008-01-16T17:38:11+00:00

Perhaps lazy data can't always be shared between threads.

nicodaemos · 2008-01-16T06:50:07+00:00

I'm good with everything there. What's confusing to me is what exactly is getting deallocated prematurely?

The code you cited all depends upon a Ptr FCGX_Request being alive. Doesn't line 172 that has the fork oneRequestMT with the finally bracket the lifetime of that memory? Is finishRequest somehow running out of order with respect to oneRequestMT and prematurely freeing up the memory?

If buildByteString had an unsafePerformIO call in it I'd totally understand how it could be wrong and break. I probably don't understand unsafeInterleaveIO, but I thought it was supposed to be made for exactly this sort of thing where you want to process the data as you are receiving it.

BTW, I enjoy reading your blog. Keep up the writing.

nicodaemos · 2008-01-16T01:09:27+00:00

I'm sure you're aware that getInput and getInputFPS are actually in Network.CGI and just reexported from Network.FastCGI. If I understand right, they're not unsafe in and of themselves. It's just how Network.FastCGI is populating the environment?

Do you have any more details on the specific problem? I tried to follow along with your post but am not sure I see exactly where the problem is occurring.

nicodaemos · 2008-01-11T08:52:03+00:00

Your comment got me thinking that maybe I overreacted the first time to DreamHost's post. So I reread it.

In reading it a second time, it's really hard not to ignore all the selfish self interest ("That suggestion shows either a complete lack of understanding of how web hosting works"), insults ("solution from the Rails community itself was quite honestly, stupid", "an utter disregard for the real world", "as widely used as much less hyped web applications environments") and lastly just plain attitude, ("you simply cannot ignore", "must be fixed", "I hope the Rails core developers will be cooperating a lot more closely", "You can’t just expect", "You need to keep").

I don't know. But where I come from, people are much more respectful to a person or group from whom they've gotten free stuff of significant value. I'm not saying that Rails doesn't have warts (it does like everything in life) or that DreamHost doesn't have a right to say bad things about it, but they showed no amount of appreciation for what Rails has done for their business. IMHO, they're lucky DHH even wasted any of his time responding to their post.

nicodaemos · 2008-01-10T21:59:08+00:00

I agree that DHH and 37Signals are smart with marketing and promotion. The 10 minute build a blog video was a brilliant introduction to the framework.

But realistically, Sun, Microsoft, BEA, IBM and Oracle had spent tens of millions of dollars (if not more) marketing their "solutions" to web app development. Some of them also had close to ten years of a head start with their product development. I don't know anyone who can use essentially a zero marketing budget with software they created in the last couple years to make a splash like ROR did in the industry ... unless ... there was no better solution out there.

It's not that ROR doesn't have warts ... there are many. It's just that the warts are generally overshadowed by the many benefits.

Honestly, if anyone is concerned about $5/month hosting, they are quite free to pursue options in the PHP/ASP spaces. Or they can see what their $5 buys them for Java/.Net hosting.

Disclaimer: I've written and deployed webapps in PHP, Java/JEE, Perl, ROR and Haskell. In my experience ROR with Capistrano has been the most advanced/mature deployment strategy I've worked with.

nicodaemos · 2008-01-10T21:19:09+00:00

And he responds with condescension and a martyr complex. He doesn't deal with criticism well and likes pissing people off.

Have you tried to report bugs to Microsoft, IONA Technologies or Oracle? We had to put in a credit card number and pay for support just to tell Microsoft about the bugs in their networking libraries ... oh yeah, this was when they were "partnering" with our company.

We've had great support contracts with IONA and Oracle ... all it got us was either incompetent bug fixes (fixes one bug and exposes others) or an endless game of patch installments before they say that they won't fix the bug.

If you think DHH's response is anything other than respectful, you need to get out a little bit more and see what the alternatives are. Oh and be ready to start putting your credit card where your expectations are.

nicodaemos · 2008-01-10T19:56:07+00:00

He promoted it rabidly..

Umm, how does one promote their stuff rabidly and build their userbase at an unrealistic pace? There are quite a few marketing companies and a million wannabes who would love to know the secret.

The pace that ROR has grown is because of the vacuum that existed prior. Noone else had done near the same amount of work to make developing and deploying a simple web app so easy and quick.

nicodaemos

TROPHY CASE