Headed down to Tweed Heads with SWHO (she who is happily obeyed) and took some nice photos, here’s my favorite.  Click for a bigger version – give me a yell if for some reason you want the full 2048×1536 version.

Most people have probably already worked this out but if you’re new to rails or new to rails login components, you probably want to use Login Generator and avoid Salted Login Generator like the plague.

Login Generator is extremely quick and easy to get up and running with, is made up of a small amount of clean code, has no dependencies and works with Ruby on Rails 0.13.

Salted Login Generator on the other hand is crap.  Sorry to the author of Salted Login Generator for putting it so harshly but it really is a mess and has caused me a huge number of headaches.  The feature creep seems to be what killed it – the localization is particularly problematic and makes all the code horrendously messy but depending on a firstname and lastname field in the database is bad too (should have just had login and let each application decide how and if to store the user’s real name).  If it were trimmed back so it just focussed on handling authentication it would probably be a lot better for it.

So Sam Ruby is pandering for links in a vain effort to tell Apple that iTunes’s RSS support is horribly non-standards compliant.  Of course this effort will fail horrible because Apple doesn’t do anything unless there’s a Radar issue created and Radar issues created by internal staff carry far less weight and get far less priority than Radar issues created by external parties.

That’s right, you can create Radar issues yourself.  Apple has a bug reporter which is the official and the only official way to tell Apple anything.  Don’t like the fact that Apple only acts on things that have a Radar issue?  Log a Radar issue telling them so!  Don’t like the bug reporter? Log a Radar issue telling them so!  Don’t like the way iTunes works with RSS?  Log a radar issue telling them so!

Compatibility Matters

Funny, funny, funny.

Feedster seem to have improved their indexing times recently – they now find every new entry on this blog immediately when I publish it – the Feedster item (for my vanity search on “Adrian Sutton”) actually appears before the actual entry for this blog (I subscribe to my own feed to make sure it’s working correctly).  Good stuff.  I’ve probably managed to set up WordPress to ping something whenever I post (I seem to recall seeing something in that box) and Feedster has linked into that somehow (that or I’m pinging Feedster directly but I don’t think so).

As an early 24th birthday present (and late 21st birthday present since I never actually got around to taking up their offer for my 21st present – it’s only flaw was requiring a modicum of effort on my part) my parents gave me a new digital camera.  It’s a Pentax Optio MX with 3.2 megapixels and a 10x optical zoom (also a 10x digital zoom but digital zoom is generally pretty worthless).  Having that much zoom is much, much more useful than I had thought it would be.  Instead of importing my photos from the camera and spending hours cropping each photo to get rid of useless stuff around the edges, most of my photos are framed exactly how I want them and I leave them as is.  The down side is that I’m still learning how to hold the camera still enough when zoomed in and have quite a few fuzzy photos because the camera shook.

So David’s relicensing his blog content – good for him.  One thing struck me:

doesn’t allow any derivative works (I don’t really see the relevance of it in this context, but I’m happy to be persuaded).

In the context of Australian law, with our whole not having fair use like the US, what implications does this have for quoting from your blog?  What if I quote the whole entry and comment on each paragraph?  What if I have ads on my blog – does that make it commercial?  How is the average Joe supposed to work out all this?

Dori Smith brought the case of Merkey vs Everyone to my attention and for some reason, despite the fact that I have 4 days worth of reading to catch up on I thought I’d read it.  I don’t see this as a case that should be dismissed entirely without thought as Dori’s quotes from the complaint would make out.  Certainly there’s a lot of rhetoric that should just be dismissed and the complaint is biased in favor of Merkey (isn’t a complaint supposed to be?) but it does point out quite accurately that there is a very distasteful undercurrent within open source communities that does cause harm to people and should be actively discouraged.  Often we’re too caught up in the belief that every forum must allow anyone to say anything they want and don’t focus on building positive communities, encouraging professional behavior and generally behaving like adults.

Ah Scoble, when are you going to learn?  Everytime you mention Mac and anything Microsoft related in the same sentance, a whole bunch of Mac users are going to flame you something savage.  In this case of course their completely right – Windows Media Player for Mac sucks and I don’t bother watching any Channel 9 videos because it sucks so much.  I could probably use VLC which I use for anything else that Quicktime can’t play but it just seems like too much hassle just to listen to a bunch of people prattle on and on instead of just reading a quick text based blog entry.

So iTunes 4.9 is out and the podcasting support is pretty cool.  It does pretty much what you’d expect – podcasts appear in a new “Podcasts” “special playlist” just under the “Library” icon.  It does keep track of whether or not you’ve listen to a particular podcast or not so you can keep track of where you’re up to and has a bunch of configuration options for how to handle incoming feed entries and how long to keep stuff.

Ken Arnold talks about the complexities of generics and how he doesn’t feel they provide enough benefit for the complexity they add.  I have to agree, most people probably only understand the basics of generics and not the full spec which is a recipe for great confusion and the number and type of bugs that generics prevents really doesn’t give much benefit.

It’s odd that there’s such a push towards scripting languages with no compile time type checking at the same time the Java crowd are pushing for stricter compile time type checking.  I can honestly say that in all the perl, PHP and Ruby scripting I’ve done that not once have I ever had a bug caused by having the wrong type of data in a variable.  Not once.  You never should if you have clearly defined what each variable’s purpose is and if you haven’t done that you’ve got problems that extend way beyond what a compiler can help you with.

The Worst Mistake In The History Of The Human Race

To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.