Global Nerdy

If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer, there are a couple of events you might be interested in…

Tonight: Rails Pub Nite at The Rhino

The fine folks at local development company Unspace have hosted the monthly Rails Pub Nite for nearly two years now, and the event is going strong. It’s a meet-and-greet event where you can hang out with all sorts of people from those who develop in Rails for food to the curious ones wondering what all the fuss is about. It happens tonight at 7 p.m. at The Rhino (1249 Queen Street West, just west of Dufferin).

Ruby/Rails Project Night – Tuesday, February 12th

In a couple of weeks, TSOT — the company for whom I work — will be hosting its second Ruby/Rails Project Night at its offices (151 Bloor Street West, Suite 1130 — that’s just east of Avenue Road), where various Ruby and Rails developers do presentations on their current project or some aspect of Ruby or Rails. The first was a hit, and if you want to see some pictures, they’re here. As usual, I’ll be doing the opening monologue at Project Night, and I promise it’ll be entertaining.

(By the bye, if you missed it and are interested, I’ll show you the slides from the my Project Night monologue, Rant Said Zed, at Rails Pub Nite tonight. Just ask!)

Based on an item from the game Portal, it’s the casemod of the moment: The Weighted Companion PC! “The pink heart melts the frozen soul of the lonely modder!”

Registration for PyCon 2008, the 6th annual Python community conference, is now open. PyCon 2008 takes place in Chicago (at the Crowne Plaza Chiago O’Hare hotel) from Friday, March 14th through Sunday, March 16th (with tutorials on Thursday, March 13th and sprints running from Monday, March 17th through Thursday, March 20th).

The event has some interesting talks scheduled, and the admissions fees are quite reasonable — before February 20th, it’s $400 if your company is paying, $220 for the “hobbyist” (that is, if you’re paying out of your own pocket). As an old Pythonista (I even did Python coding to pay the rent), I’m intrigued and even thinking about going.

Really, the article is this out of touch with reality.

If you’re looking to both laugh and cry at the same time, looking no farther than an article written by Robert Graham in the Errata Security blog titled Why the OLPC Promotes Terrorism, which should be a contender for the most insane tech article of the year. It’s so filled with the type of over-the-top pronouncements that one normally sees on extreme right-wing blogs that I had to reread to make sure that it wasn’t parody, and even now I’m not 100% sure. (Next to this article, Zed’s rant sounds rather restrained.)

The article’s two main points is that the OLPC is evil because:

• The design of the OLPC reflects the needs of its creators rather than its users, which to rob third-world children of their dignity.
• It’s a tool to indoctrinate third-world children into the preferred ideology of its designers, which is rabidly communist.

The article has:

• Bizarro statements: “The processor is more than fast enough to run software written in capitalistic programming languages like C++, but the majority of the user interface is written in slow left-wing languages like Python.”
• Reasoning that would make Bill O’Reilly proud: Graham states that features like mesh networking feature are meant to reinforce the notion that individualism is bad and socialism is good.
• A pointless conclusion: “Yet, at its core, it’s still a computer than people can use to hack the United States. It is a weapon that can attack our nation’s infrastructure much more effectively than a gun would. Here is a picture of us installing Metasploit on it” — as if Metasploit only ran on the OLPC.

Graham’s preferred machine for the third world? Intel’s Classmate PC: “[It] runs the same Windows or Linux desktops that everyone else in the world uses. Intel’s computer has no enforced educational agenda. It doesn’t have communist software on it, yet the children collaborate with each other anyway without software forcing them to.”

Graham’s article has a couple of things I agree with:

• The OLPC is not without its problems and is not above criticism
• I don’t see anything wrong with Intel releasing a competing machine, in spite of Negroponte’s huffing and puffing to the contrary

…but for the most part, it’s FOX News-style insanity. If you’re a techie looking for a laugh, Graham’s article is the place to go today.

75 words every sci-fi fan should know: a list of terms that science fiction has invented or popularized. Among these is Whuffie, a key word at Cory Doctorow’s start-up, OpenCola, where I worked and had my “bubble” experience, including to move to and away from San Francisco.