Xblog

May is “Bike Month”. Next week is Bike to Work Week. Actually, every week is Bike to Work Week for me, but I thought I ought to point out that everyone is supposed to make an extra effort this week. The LA Times has surprisingly good coverage. Apparently, Bike to Work Day is this coming Friday, although I’ve seen some confusion as to whether it is Friday or Thursday. Either way, I encourage everyone to give it a go. I assure you, it isn’t nearly as hard as it seems, and there are all kinds nice little benefits to the whole thing. That said, I *do* recommend not making the mistake I did earlier this week: doing Pilates for the first time, for an hour, before biking home for another hour. Ouchy.

One of the fun things to play with is the MTA’s “Bike to Work Calculator” which gives you an idea of the impact you can have by cycling to work. Apparently I’m saving close to $10/week, or ~$500/year in gas (not to mention LA’s insane insurance prices) by biking to work, not to mention 45lbs of CO2 emission reduction. This week I did more cycling than normal, so I actually saved 50% more than that. I expect the CO2 calculation in particular is missing some of the subtleties of the whole thing, but it is still fun.

I can’t believe anyone in the tech community is still covering the events at JavaOne, but sure enough, we-troll-for-hitsValleyWag was there to capture Neil Young’s appearance yesterday. Now, I remember when Douglas Adams showed up for the Keynote on the last day of the conference, and that made sense. It was the last day of the conference and everyone is fried if they haven’t left town already. Douglas, true to form, provided some great entertainment and geek cred to start of the last day push. But Neil Young is to Java as the Smurfs are to the Iraq War. Could Sun make a more profound statement about how JavaOne jumped the shark long ago than to have an aging rocker whose seminal moments occurred before Java was ever invented keynote on the second day of the event? Best quote from the whole experience goes to Dan Farber’s blog entry, where after carefully promoting BluRay, Java, the PS3, and most importantly his Archive project, we read: “…As an artist I try to remove myself from the business,” Young said. “I steer myself away from that…”.

The previous article captures how Mark Kirk has skillfully managed to create controversy in order to get media attention during an election year. “Online porn” doesn’t quite drag voters attention away from all the other election year theatrics, and “online child predator” is so yesterday’s news, but “rape rooms” is a sure fire hit. Is there any trick from Hussein’s regime that politicians won’t copy and/or trivialize?

NOTE: Several of the links in this article point to the original Javascript of this exploit or transformations of the original Javascript. If you actually execute the Javascript you will be performing the exploit. I suggest readers download the links and then look at the source in an editor, rather than clicking on the link and risking their browser attempting to execute the Javascript. I’ve set the content types of these links to “text” in order to minimize the risk of this, and I’m sorry if that creates an inconvenience.

One of the user groups I participate in is the UUASC. Recently, one of the BOFHSysAdmins in the group posted a rather cryptic bit of Javascript that they saw flowing over their network. Their question was pretty simple. What does this do?

While truly great rants are mostly entertaining, some rants can be enlightening for the insight they provide during rare moments of candor about things that aren’t obvious to those who don’t share the ranter’s paradigm. Such is the case with Design patterns are from hell!. I’ve seen a lot of critiques of Design Patterns, and I’ve seen a lot of misuse of Design Patterns, but I totally didn’t grok what the real problem was until reading this rant. Now I finally get it.

ArsTechnica was there to catch CEO SCO describing an interesting variant of reality. Highlights include objectively verifiable claims that books on how to program Linux don’t exist, that there is no difference between Linux and Unix, and directly contracting his own SVP’s earlier testimony that they have evidence that System V Unix is in Linux. Don’t be shocked if he later claims Shakespeare copied System V, that Linus assassinated JFK, and that Poland was never dominated by the Soviet Union.

Really, when you think about it, how can a company called Gemstone NOT get involved with a language called Ruby. So, Gemstone, of Gemstone and GLASS fame, have apparently decided to get the traditionally lackadaisical Ruby runtime running on their VM. From the first time I dabbled with Ruby it seemed like “file-based Smalltalk with some ugly Perl-isms and a crappy VM” (and yes, in fairness, the ugly Perl-isms are also part of its strength), so this makes a lot of sense, and may yet drag Ruby in to the real world. Gemstone gets bonus points for providing yet another example of confusing efficiency with scalability.

BTW: Mike came up with a great acronym for Gemstone to use: GLARE: “Gemstone Linux Apache and Ruby Emulation”.

UPDATE: Avi caught me red handed for not reading the entire interview. Upon further reading of the interview and Avi’s excellent blog posting comparing Gemstone to Rails, it appears the Gemstone folks are very much talking about scalability as opposed to efficiency. In fact, it seems they are expecting the primary advantage of MagLev to be through Gemstone’s persistence architecture (here’s hoping it is also a lot more efficient).

All the discussion of economics today led me to this page.

”..the start of a depression is characterized by unusual increases in unemployment, restriction of credit, shrinking output and investment, price deflation and/or hyperinflation, numerous bankruptcies, reduced amounts of trade and commerce, as well as violent currency devaluations…”

Wow, that sounds terrible. Good to know there aren’t any signs of one of those coming. Have a nice day.

Here’s a shocker for you…. according to this article in Wired, we’re going to run out of helium in 9 years. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a far more pressing, immediate and undenyable problem than concerns about running out of petrochemicals in decades to come. Here’s a question for those of us who think market forces can go a long way towards addressing resource shortages: given that we’ve only got a 9 year supply left.. why isn’t helium already ridiculously expensive?

Man, I so wanted to say something when ComScore’s initial report came out, but my insider status (barely insider really) makes it dangerous. So, it is with great joy that I let c|net do the talking for me.