I want a [http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_4240000/newsid_4245900/4245983.stm friendly fox]…

Who does the plumbing work in the women’s locker room of a 24 Hour Fitness?

“Writely”:http://www.writely.com is incredible. I’m not sure if I’m doing myself a tiny disservice by posting this here, because the servers can’t possibly remain as fast as they are after the site catches on like wildfire and their userbase (all your userbase are belong to us) explodes. This is combined with the fact that while editing a document, it auto-saves itself back to the server every ten seconds, which must generate a gazillion (not quite a googol, although note that Google recently bought Writely) hits. Anyway, in the span of a couple days, I’m now keeping track of almost everything in Writely documents. For work, I can create a document for each project we’re working on and type notes related to the project; my coworkers can read and maintain their own notes simultaneously. Finding and opening documents is also much faster than doing so within the operating system, since they’re all just right there in one place and there’s no Word-like startup time; a document just loads in a new window/tab right away. There’s no Word-like concept of a printed page or page-width forced on you; the default typing mode is much like opening a blank Notepad.exe instance and typing in it. Although unlike Notepad, Writely saves often and makes it easy to manage files. I haven’t relied much on the automatic revision tracking feature yet, but I’m sure that’ll come in handy down the line, too.

Incidentally, I just noticed something interesting. I’m typing this, you might imagine, in Writely itself. I’m using Firefox and happen to have Firebug enabled. So I see the periodic POST requests being sent to the server to support the ten-second autosave. Instead of saving my whole document, each request sends just the text I’ve added or changed since last autosave. Of course you know it has to work that way when you think about it, but I wouldn’t have thought to think about something like that in the first place.

Did you know it’s easy to tell whether someone wearing glasses is nearsighted or farsighted? Amazed someone with the observation she was farsighted, yesterday, but myself coming from a family where once upon a time every one of us wore glasses, you might not have been so surprised I knew this. Glases to correct nearsightedness make a person’s eyes/face/anything beneath appear smaller, and when one looks back through the lens at the edge of the face, it’s discontinuous and pulled in at that point. Glasses for farsightedness are the opposite (each lens is like a magnifying glass, though not as strong the typical item you’d find a kid frying ants with) and the edge of the face appears pushed out.

Someone ought to manufacture a remote control which is shaped like a piece of pizza. The buttons could be the slices of pepperoni and mushrooms. Slap a Cartoon Network logo on it, and there you go, instant brand-recognition promotion tool, let alone cute and appealing product that can be sold for profit!

Why aren’t there any libraries with coffee shops?

Maybe they’re afraid people are going to spill coffee in the books.

Although, the earnings from selling the coffee would probably more than make up for lost books due to coffee damage.

You know?

No coffee allowed in the Reference Section, though. Those Britannicas are probably worth a lot.

How are gun sights tuned? With one weapon, I aimed at the center of the target but consistently hit a point about 3/4 of the way up and to the right. So I had precision, but not accuracy. Or, well, accuracy considering that once I knew after the first shot that aiming at the middle of the target would get me the upper-right corner, conceivably I would have only aimed at the center if I had _wanted_ to hit that corner. But it was only circumstancial accuracy, given that I didn’t know what corresponding spot to aim at in the lower-left corner in order to hit the center. So if one wants to become a sharp-shooter with great accuracy, one should probably own a gun and practice with that same weapon to learn its firing characteristics. I have a feeling that I’ve just stated something completely obvious and known to anyone who knows anything about guns, but that was my observation, anyway. On the other hand, perhaps gun owners, or, I should say, afficionadoes (since one can (as is probably often the case) own a gun for self-defense and (despite advice to the contrary) not be particularly proficient or experienced in its use) are able to tune the sights to visual accuracy along the line of sight. Or just mount a laser pointer on the thing. Or get a shotgun.

I was finally able to get Rails mostly working by downloading InstantRails and pulling bits and pieces out of it. The philosophy of InstantRails seems to be “throw in everything including the kitchen sink”, because it includes a full installation of Apache 2, MySQL, PHP, phpmyadmin, Ruby, _two_ IDEs for Ruby and more. In my first little test program I discovered that Rails calls a plural “person” “people”, but to nitpick, “persons” is not only simpler but grammatically correct. You use “people” when talking about a coherent group of persons, like “a people”, or as Moses said, “let my people go”. Of course he wasn’t talking about a bunch of individuals, as in “let my persons go”, and you can’t say “my person”, anyway. (That implies ownership — though perhaps an Egyptian could have referred to his personal slaves as “my persons”.) But you can say “my nation” or “my tribe” or “my class” meaning the group to which you belong, and of course that’s what Moses meant. Let my people go. So when you have multiple instances of something you’re calling “person” in your database, and you like pluralizing table names, “people” is flat out the wrong usage. So this proves that Ruby on Rails sucks.

Just kidding, of course. As I keep saying it seems like a nice framework. As long as everything is customizable and over-rideable, I could transition over to using it. Ruby keywords are strange to me, but these can come with time. A couple things were off-putting, though. The first was that at the end of the “Four Days on Rails”:http://rails.homelinux.org/ tutorial, the author points out that using the ActiveRecord ORM, you can’t sort by any column. Just to do a simple sort, he had to revert to SQL. Which is okay, but that makes me wonder what other slightly more complex than basic operations might require the same. The second was that the CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) scaffold for database operations rendered what I call the “postback” page directly. This is when you fill out a form, press “Submit”, and the Web server replies with a page explaining which fields you missed or entered wrong and need to fill out. Generally I like using a redirect to get to this page, so that the partially-filled-out form comes back to you on a “fresh” Web page where you can press “reload” in your browser without the annoying “Resubmit form data?” pop-up box that comes up otherwise. Also, some browsers (IE) will cause the previous page to appear as “expired” when you press the “back” button — making it annoying or difficult to go back to where you came. This behavior requires sticking all the form information into the user’s session. Nothing wrong with that. I’m sure this can be accomplished with RoR, but strange that the scaffold wasn’t set up this way by default. I realize these both may seem minor, though. I’ll be able to speak to the framework better in a while.

Someday when I’m old and gray and I look back on my days of spry youthfulness I’m going to miss working at the office ’til 2 A.M.

7.1 mph for 45 minutes = 5.3 miles. Got some new running shoes the other day, so this was a break-in/test — results are that my left foot hurts now when I walk. I’ll probably end up returning ‘em and trying something else…