Read this book. All of you. It’s the most accessible and enlightening expression of a personal philosophy I’ve ever read, and good words to live by. The more people who read this book, the nicer place we’ll all live in. A wonder on two wheels. I like D Byrne even more now.
Defining a good education
Posted by science
on December 07, 2009
Science has been working with the Federal government for the last six months, which has been an education in itself. I ran across the following quote recently which I think is worth sharing. There’s a lot of talk in DC about a “high quality education” but often those comments are ill-informed as to what a student looks like after they have gone through such an experience. The following quotation is as good a description as I’ve seen as to what a quality education can offer:
“At school you are engaged not so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism… You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness.”
– William Johnson Cory, 19th Century Headmaster at Eton
Speakeasy to Close Unless New Owner Found
Posted by science
on May 14, 2009
The Speakeasy in El Cerrito is now facing the same fate as the now closed Parkway. From Kyle and Catherine:
“As many of you know, Speakeasy Theaters has been experiencing extreme financial difficulty since opening the Cerrito Theater. We learned much from the closing of the Parkway. Of most importance, we learned that our patrons would have preferred more warning of its impending closure. The El Cerrito City Council is meeting on Monday, May 18th to discuss the fate of the Cerrito Theater. Speakeasy Theaters has already agreed to leave as operators and we have offered to locate and train a new operator.
If any of this is of interest to you, I suggest that you attend the meeting.“
Reloading Classes in Rails
Posted by science
on May 08, 2009
Sometimes you just read a blog post that’s so good, there’s no need to clarify it or anything. I just suggest that you read Witold Rugowski’s post on how to force classes to reload in development in Rails. At the very least you’ll learn something about how Rails works:
Fixing Ruby Rake on Windows
Posted by science
on March 25, 2009
I found a nice article recently which lets you remove the batch files from Ruby when running on Windows, so you don’t get those annoying, redundant cmd messages “Terminate Batch Job (y/n)” whenever you press ctrl-c within Ruby. My version (1.8.6) exits cleanly now – thanks Ruby Rambler!
http://rubyrambler.blogspot.com/2007/10/terminate-batch-job-yn-y.html
My specific steps for fixing Rake are:
- rename “rake.bat” to “rake.bat.orig” (or whatever)
- rename “rake” to “rake.rb”
Continuous Testing and Testing Single Methods in Ruby on Rails 5
Posted by science
on March 25, 2009
Testing in Rails is crucial to effective development. Many people have opted for rspec over Test::Unit for this, but I find that Test::Unit meets all my needs. It’s simple and reliable, which is all I want in a test framework.
I do want two pretty simple features for Rails tests though. I want to manually run a single test easily, and sometimes even just run a single method inside a test. I also want to automatically re-run a test, whenever that test file is edited.
I’ve written some rake tasks to accomplish these basic activities – hopefully you’ll find them as useful as I do.
Continue reading…
Science
Posted by science
on March 06, 2009
Science is simply the process of approximating observed complexity.
China: The New Sleeping Giant 1
Posted by science
on February 24, 2009
These data just in from Netcraft, Chinese site qq.com goes from 3 sites to the third largest webserver provider in a month simply by enabling blogging for its users. Bigger than Goggle’s blogger, bigger than Microsoft’s Live Spaces and bigger than MySpace. In a month.
| Developer | January 2009 | Percent | February 2009 | Percent | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apache | 96,947,298 | 52.26% | 104,796,820 | 48.59% | -3.67 |
| Microsoft | 61,038,371 | 32.91% | 62,935,449 | 29.18% | -3.72 |
| qq.com | 3 | 0.00% | 20,021,763 | 9.28% | 9.28 |
| 9,868,819 | 5.32% | 8,157,546 | 3.78% | -1.54 | |
| nginx | 3,462,551 | 1.87% | 3,447,596 | 1.60% | -0.27 |
Source: Netcraft Web Survey Survery Feb 2009
Continue reading…
Real time Bart schedules for your cell phone
Posted by science
on December 18, 2008
Science knocked out a little Bart train application a couple of nights ago for your pleasure. Bart, for those foreigners, is the inter-city train system which services San Francisco and the surrounding areas.
The application provides you with real time arrival data for any station in the Bart system. It returns data in a format suitable for reading on most web-enabled cell phones.
To use this new application, simply point your phone (or computer) web browser to:
MapQuest’s New API: MQ loses its mind? 2
Posted by science
on December 17, 2008
Readers may be familiar with this site’s GeoX application, which integrates Yahoo, Google, and until the end of January, MapQuest. At that time, MapQuest is switching over to an alternative API system and decommissioning their old api. This seems to be getting a lot of good blog press, but Science is skeptical by nature. As we’ll see, not everything is as it appears.