Graham Glass is still hacking away at Ruby on Rails

Graham Glass was co-founder of Object Space and founder of The Mind Electric. He was CTO of WebMethods, before he left to form a startup. Graham Glass's educational software startup company is using Ruby on Rails for the implementation. Ruby is the "hot new thing". Graham is a heavy-duty hacker, and digs into things. He writes about his latest go round with Rails:

One feature I needed for my education product is a "remember me" option so that frequent users don't have to sign in every time they visit the site.

What Graham ran into when trying to implement this was something that seemed very bug-like:

After about 6 hours of work that involved reading through the source of CGI, CGI::Session, ActionController::CgiRequest and ActionController::CgiResponse, as well as utilizing an HTTP sniffer to see cookies passing between a browser and a server, I finally got it working. And now I know why there are no examples on the web for a straightforward "remember me" implementation; because there is a bug in the Ruby 1.8 CGI::Session implementation that prevents such a thing from being coded.

Graham had to modify the code to change this behavior to something more malleable and reasonable.

Robert Kiyosaki thinks that we should be watching what Warren Buffet does

Robert Kiyosaki's latest piece at Yahoo Finance advocats watching what Warren Buffet does and ignoring other advice ("When Investing, Listen to the Right Experts"). Robert Kiyosaki says that Warren Buffet wants to cut his dollar holdinds and put money overseas. Robert explains this by saying that the United States is not being run well, and that cash would drop in value too quickly. I don't know that I agree with that, but our Government is doing a lot to sabotage our economy, through over-regulation, and wrong-headed regulation. I thought that Jeffrey Allen Miron's piece at Tech Central Station was thinking along the same lines: "How to Avoid More Enrons: Legalize Fraud". To some degree, the Enron collapse was percipitated by the Government and the press. Ken Lay might have been able to salvage the company, if events had been allowed to proceed differently.

How about remembering the young guys who enlisted after Pearl Harbour?

In a burst of patriotism, my father enlisted in the Navy on 8 December 1941, when he was 19 years old. He was sent to Great Lakes for boot camp, and contracted Catharral Fever. He recovered and was sent to "Radio School" at Indianapolis. He met his ship on the East coast, PC-470, and they spent the rest of 1942 and up to 1944 running between Key West and Cuba, Panama, and South America. The PC's were not named until much later. The page about the PC-470 says that she was commissioned on 31 July 1942 and that she was on convoy duty until June 1944. My Dad left the ship at that point.

Both of my uncles (husbands of my mother's sisters) served in WWII, as well. One uncle was a "tech-sergeant" in the Army and did typing. My other uncle was a Marine and was wounded at Guadalcanal. He spent much of the time on landing craft, ferrying dead bodies off the island (so I hear).

A feature of WWII was that military service was almost universal. My present late father-in-law was 38 in 1941 and had a family. He was also working on his inlaws' chicken ranch. My late former father-in-law was 41 in 1941, and he spent the war as a farmer in Michigan. Everyone younger served, if they were able-bodied, and that was a unifying experience. Large numbers of them went to college, "after the war", and that was another unifying experience. My parents' friends at the "veterans' project" in Willow Run (for the University of Michigan) all were veterans. One was a B-29 pilot. He eventually saw his plane destroyed on the ground on a Pacific island by a Japanese raid, which he saw on the television series "Air Power". My father would meet other veterans. One of the salesmen he had worked with had been a P-51 pilot. Later, he met a PT boat crewmember. Even my mother had worked at "the Ford bomber plant" at Willow Run, doing radio-related drafting.

The Viet Nam experience ruined the possibility of universal military service in any case short of all-out hot war. We can "thank" our "leftist buddies" for that.

We have never seen such an assault on our government, from within

The closest that I have personally observed to the assault on the government and armed forces what we are currently seeing was in the Viet Nam War period. I was in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, from about August 1965 until December 1968. That was a period of great unrest, and you would read about the Voice Political Party and SNCC doing things like take over the administration building. There were already free-lance drug dealers and they were thought of as cult heroes, of sorts at the time. The combination of Walter Cronkite and the rest of the media coverage of protests succeeded in causing us to give up the war when we were winning. President Johnson came close to losing the war, but Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon had turned that around, with the aid of our armed forces. But Walter Cronkite painted the Tet Offensive as a loss for us, when in fact, the North Vietnamese were handed a costly defeat. They never again attempted such an operation.

Now, when we are close to beating Zargawi and al-Qaeda in Iraq, our leftist buddies and the MSM are depicting a story that we are losing and that we should bail out as quickly as possible. The worst of the Democrats in Congress are trying to use this story line to gain power. The MSM is trying to help them, as best that they can. It is laughable that the MoveOn crowd thinks that the MSM is giving the Bush administration a free ride.

Lost in Amarillo

I was in a meeting this morning where the group leader talked about being "lost in Amarillo". She told the story about how their favorite place in the world is in Colorado. They own land there and frequently drive up there from the Dallas area. To get there, the most direct route is to drive through Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle. On one trip north, the highway was closed, with no detour signs. They were left to drive around, looking for a way in the right general direction, without knowing the way.

She used "Lost in Amarillo" as a metaphor for being in "collapse". This is when you did something that was off your plan, and in reaction, stop following the plan at all. The state of "collapse" is where you screwed up and in reaction, throw up your hands and figure that you blew it, and might as well "do the wrong thing". The better approach is to recognize when you have deviated from your plan, and get back on it, since you know where you are going. Our leader spoke of driving to Colorado, again, and having a flat tire in Amarillo. You aren't going to give up on your desire to get to Colorado. Instead, you fix the flat and start driving for Colorado.

I sense that our country is "lost in Amarillo". The leftists in the Mainstream Media have succeeded in getting most people to believe a negative story line, after Hurricane Katrina, and the ongoing fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. The MSM conveniently ignores the fact that we have been clobbering the Taliban, in recent fighting, and are beating "al Qaeda in Iraq" to the point that they are feeling very negative and are running out of men. The Bush administration seems to have lost whatever ability they have had to communicate (they definitely needed new blood in the Whitehouse, which they now have).

The oldline Conservatives, who are isolationists at heart, have gone really negative, and they are feeding into the MSM negative story line. Peter Beinart, writing in The New Republic, has a story about how what he calls "Night Conservatism" is on the rise. These are the oldline, William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater, Bob Dole, and Robert Taft conservatives. They also seem to include many of a certain part of the Conservative blogosphere (such as Mark Tapscott). He calls Reagan and President Bush "Day Conservatives", as he equates them with a more inclusive, positive Conservatism. The "Night Conservatives" would rather be right than win, and that is a losing proposition. They can go into the night and brood, and good riddance, I say.

Greg Costikyan has a piece: Spam I'd Like to Receive

I enjoyed Greg Costikyan's fun piece about "Spam I'd Like to Receive", at Games * Design * Art * Culture. He has four spam emails that follow four different spam patterns. Greg is currently involved with a startup company called Manifesto Games. He has made a career out of game development and writing over his adult life.

The biggest open news story is the gunshots at the Rayburn office building in DC: UPDATED-it probably was not shots that were heard

We are still waiting to hear the latest news, but police tactical units seem to be still searching the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC, after reports of gunfire in the parking garage. WTOP reports that "schools in the area are locked down".

UPDATE: CNN is now reporting that it was probably a pneumatic hammer being used on an elevator that was heard by a female staffer.

Vonage

I work with several former Vonage customers. A striking feature of their experience was the difficulty that they had quitting Vonage! As soon as I heard that, Vonage sounded like a losing proposition. At least in the past, voice quality was an issue, as well.

More about dieting

Back in May of 1999, when I was working at Nortel, in the Dallas area, I saw a friend of mine. He had been following a low-carb diet and in two months had lost 25 pounds. I immediately bought one of Dr. Atkins' books and started dieting. We did almost no cooking at home and ate out practically 100%. I could arrive at work early and have breakfast at the Sodexo Marriot cafeteria and have lunch there, as well. In six months, I lost 55 pounds and got down to where I had been in the latter 1970's. I almost immediately started to gain weight, though, when I started to eat more normal food. I floated up about 25 pounds and then was able to sustain that weight for 2-1/2 years. As the economy deteriorated further, I started to gain weight, until finally a year ago, I weighed more than I had ever weighed before.

In late February 2006, I started Weight Watchers. I struggled for a while, as it turns out that I was not following the "Core Plan" very well. I switched to the "Flex Plan", where you count points for everything, and started to make faster progress. I already knew that Weight Watchers was the only way my Dad had been able to lose weight and keep it off. When he stopped, it got bad. The group facilitator where I go on Saturday morning had lost her weight and kept it off, over the last 21 years, so that is sort of an "existence proof" that it can be done. I am liking the program because I can eat food I like, and can "splurge". You just end up compensating for that "splurging" in a reasonable way. So far, I am down almost 20 lbs, once I corrected what I was doing, so I know it works. Once I find anything that works for me, I tend to want to keep doing it.

Car blogging, again

In the Dallas area, Ford finally seems to be selling Five Hundreds. I have seen a lot more the last week. This morning, I was coming in to work late, and saw a metallic maroon Five Hundred from the side, and didn't realize what it was until I passed in front. Perhaps I am starting to get used to the car, as that particular color and view looked as good as the cars it is trying to be like.