Ruby on... Gemstone? 2
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).
Wikipedia article of the day
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.
Running Out Of Gas (not what you think)
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?
In Your Face ComScore
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.
Was That George and Charlie, or Was That Barbara Wawa?
What can I say that Michael Grunwald hasn’t said? I think the silver lining on all this is that someone may lose their job, or at least their journalistic credibility over this. Sad yes, but perhaps that’ll start to shift where this boat is heading (and let’s face it, the American public has had a huge hand in steering it that way). Maybe, just for once, we’ll take our responsibilities seriously.
The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day 1
The title is probably overstating it, as it’s not like anyone died or is terminally ill, but the last 24 hours haven’t been the best. I think part of it is how it started off as just mildly bad and then grew progressively worse, so the trajectory just made it feel worse and worse.
So, 24 hours ago, I was sitting at my computer, trying to finish up my taxes. Unlike last year, circumstances and my own procrastination had left things up until nearly the last minute. While I contemplated some of the more bizarre elements of the California Tax forms, and yes we really did pass a law providing tax exemptions for victims of the Armenian genocide, fate’s hand was at work in more than one mysterious way.
First there was the realization that the tax man got me good this past year. Despite truly impressive amounts of money handed his way over the course of the year, I still owed him more, Bush tax cuts be damned. Nearly enough to wipe out the ol’ checking account balance. Not that bad really, but not exactly a great way to get you in a good frame of mind, particularly when you are exhausted and ready to crash.
I woke up in the morning to my son’s usual antics, although he was particularly fixated on a pair of his shoes that had been misplaced over the weekend. He’s a clothes horse (yeah, definitely didn’t get that from me), so not being able to wear the preferred pair of shoes to school is a crisis roughly as significant as when the Soviets tried to sneak some missiles in to Cuba. Fortunately, I managed to find the shoes hiding in the last place I’d ever have thought to look for them, so we didn’t have to nuke Russia. That crisis had put me behind schedule, but I’d almost made it out the door when the phone rang. Stupidly, I answered it. That’s when it became clear that this was not going to be a good day….
It was the collections department for the Pottery Barn. Apparently I’d applied for a Pottery Barn credit card this past October, and then promptly ordered over $3,000 worth of Pottery Barn merchandise to be delivered to some place in Gardena. Now, I have never ordered anything from Pottery Barn. My wife certainly has, but frankly she is more than frugal enough that she’d probably have a fit before ordering that much stuff from them. Beyond that, the Gardena address was the dead give away that this was a case of fraud. The nerve racking bit was that whoever ordered the card clearly had some personal information, so this wasn’t a case of mistaken identity, but rather a case of identity theft. The rest of my afternoon was spent unravelling the Kafkaesque world of identity management, which I’ll write about in more detail once I’ve got my head fully wrapped around it.
My wife was tied up in meetings today, so she came home late and exhausted, and my son was in a fussy mood too. While he’s mostly over the horrid period that was our mid-year crisis (terrible twos be damned, as far as I’m concerned it’s a cake walk compared to 3.5), he does seem to be regressing on a few points, the end result being me having to get him to clean up his mess while trying to cook dinner, feed the dogs, and a few other tasks. I can’t complain too much about this part of my day, because I’m all but certain this is what my wife typically experiences during the hour or more before I get home each day.
After surviving dinner, we slogged through the nighttime routine, and all of us were starting to drift off to sleep… Then my son woke up, and promptly vomitted all over his bed. We scrambled him in to the bathroom as quickly as we could. There was enough stuff in his stomach that despite getting a lot on the bed there was more to spread all over the bathtub. Lovely. “Daddy, I don’t like throwing up.” Yeah, me too kid, me too.
So much for getting to sleep early.
The good news is the day is over, and we survived it almost entirely intact. Here’s to a new day, with less drama.
Nah... America isn't sexually repressed/obsessed.
You know you have problems when any part of Dick Cheney can be mistaken for a naked woman, even if distorted by a reflection in his sunglasses.
Free Trees
Your tax dollars at work.
Apparently, you can get free trees through the LA DWP. It is all part of the Million Trees LA initiative. I feel like an idiot for paying a gardener for the trees he installed on my property…
The Money Squeeze Comes Home To Roost
I got one of these “nice” little notices from WaMu as well. I had some extra cash that I’d need at a later date, but in the meantime was sitting around earning interest at some pathetic rate, so I thought I’d put it in to my HELOC and then grab the money when I needed it. In retrospect this was kind of stupid, as HELOCs specifically have provisions for lowering their limits if housing prices decline and well…. housing prices have been declining if you haven’t noticed. I guess I should consider myself lucky for not getting an overlimit fee.
Anyway, I’m posting this as a public service announcement.
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