WELCOME TO DELTA’S WEEKLY FARE SPECIALS
Weekly Fare Specials for September 24-27, 2005
All fares require a Saturday departure and return travel on either Monday or Tuesday.
Atlanta, GA (ATL) to:
— Houston-Intercntl, TX (IAH) – $138
Houston-Intercntl, TX (IAH) to:
— Cincinnati, OH (CVG) – $148
That Saturday departure to or from Houston should be exciting: 
I used to use Brief way back when, and when my project team decided to use CodeWright (which can emulate Brief) I was looking forward to it. But I had a really serious problem with CodeWright: all fonts looked ugly in it.
Google newgroups to the rescue. I created a new registry DWORD value (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Borland\CodeWright\Customize\FontQuality) and set it to 0.
Now fonts in CodeWright look beautiful (at least in Windows XP using ClearType).
I never thought it was possible! But an article in today’s Washington Post (registration or bugmenot required) shows them apparently thinking about actual security instead of security theater. The new TSA head (Edmund S. “Kip” Hawley) told his staff to review air security screening procedures, and on August 5, they responsed very sensibly:
The staff’s first set of recommendations, detailed in an Aug. 5 document, includes proposals to lift the ban on various carry-on items such as scissors, razor blades and knives less than five inches long. It also proposes that passengers no longer routinely be required to remove their shoes at security checkpoints.
Hawley still has to approve it, and might fall back on the typical bureaucratic impulse to never change anything because that way you can’t be blamed. But there seems to be a chance he’ll stick his neck out to make security screening less obnoxious and more effective.
More effective? But you’re reducing screening, so how can that be? Simple: all those resources now spent looking for scissors and Swiss Army knives that can’t actually threaten a plane in any way aren’t looking for the real threats. Now that cockpit doors are closed and strong, that means bombs, not knives.
Now that I’m home, I want to write up some of my notes from OSCON. I stopped blogging after Tuesday because the mechanics of doing it live weren’t good (no tables in the rooms for a laptop, very flaky Wi-Fi connections), and I was too wiped out by the end of the day to do it then.
But there’s another reason I didn’t blog after Tuesday: I was getting depressed about the quality of the conference, especially as compared to previous years. Things got a lot better on Thursday, but I probably won’t go back next year. That’s a big change for me; I’ve attended every O’Reilly Perl Conference (starting with the two in San Jose) and every American O’Reilly OSCON.
Niel Bornstein and Edd Dumbill are presenting this tutorial, and it’s looking good. The start is clear and structured, so we have a good idea of what we are going to do. And, it starts at the beginning: getting and installing Mono.
Mono is an open-source .Net environment that runs under various flavors of Unix and under Windows. If you have an Intel machine you can even boot from a live CD to try Mono out; download the image at mono-live.org.
Okay, I bailed out of Learning Ajax, and I’ll attend Damian Conway’s session for the rest of the morning. I’ve heard some of this from him before, and I’m getting his new book on the subject, so I don’t know that this will cover much new. But he’s such a good speaker that it’s still worth attending.
Alex Russell is giving this tutorial, and he’s made his slides available on-line. I’m excited about this talk, but a bit worried. The projector is awful; very, very low contrast, and extremely hard to read. And the sound system is boomy, which makes it hard to make out everything he’s saying, even though it’s loud enough.
Rails is an MVC framework for web development with Ruby. Our speaker, David Heinemeier Hansson, created it and has just written a book on it, and he was one of the team that built Basecamp with it.
Again, though, probably few notes during the session. He’s building a blogging application from scratch, and it’s a very impressive framework. Of course, samples always look easy when demonstrated. Still, look at all you need to get a core application:
Now you have a web application. Start it up under Ruby’s built-in web server (command line: ruby scripts\server)
There’s now an apps subdirectory with directories for your models, views, and controllers. Rails will even create skeletons of those for you (e.g., command line ruby script\generate controllername).
By following conventions, you can create a database driven web application really, really easily.
There’s (almost) no tea here! Each refreshment table has 7 huge urns or coffee, and one of hot water. And dozens of “tea” bags. None of which are tea. They’re “calming”, and “soothing”, and all sorts of horticultural byproducts, but NOT TEA!
This morning there were a small number of real tea bags (labeled “Awake”), but they went quickly. I’ve asked the conference staff to see if they can get the Starbucks folks who run the tables to put some real tea out.
After all, what if all but one of those “coffee” urns actually had cocoa and Postum, instead of real coffee? They’d have a riot on their hands.
My first tutorial is “Introduction to Ruby” given by Dave Thomas. I’m not sure I’ll actually blog much, because it may interfere with my paying attention, but we’ll see…
In the Make magazine blog, Phillip Torrone talks about Claude Shannon’s “most beautiful machine” that has one function only. When you turn it on, it turns itself off.
When I was a kid, there was a mass-produced toy that did this. Flip the on switch, and a hand came out of the toy and flipped the switch off. I think it was based on “Thing” from the Addams Family. I couldn’t find any pictures of it via Google, but here’s a similar toy that’s a bank. Instead of turning it on with a switch, you put a penny in a cradle, and the hand comes out and snatches it.
Back in the late 80’s I often rented Fords with something similar to this machine. There was a lever in the center console. When you pulled the lever, a light flashed to tell you to push it back. (Imagine my disappointment to discover that the lever actually had another function, releasing automatic shoulder belts after a crash.)
When I’m traveling, especially when in airports, I often want to
quickly check my e-mail or find something on the web. Actually
dialing up for this has become impossible, as data-port enabled
phones are pretty much gone from public spaces, and Wi-Fi is usually
either not available, or outrageously expensive.
The AP reports that a “Swedish woman who photographed a swan in
the river outside the royal palace in Stockholm made a grim
discovery when the film was developed: a hand sticking out of the ice.”
If you aren’t already using Firefox
instead of Internet Explorer, it’s time to start. We’ve had some
problems with Spyware here, and we know for sure that
most of it came in through vulnerabilities in IE. If you’re using
Windows XP with automatic updates on, your copy of IE isn’t as
vulnerable as it used to be, but (in my opinion) it’s still not
nearly as safe a browser to use as Firefox.
Sure, our products are (primarily) made of software, but they’re
still products. And, though software development is a pretty new
field, product development has been around for a while. We should
learn from how products have been developed in other domains, not
just software.
I attended SD West in Santa Clara a couple of weeks ago. For my
own memory down the road, here are the sessions I attended:
Are you sick and tired of having to run Internet Explorer just to
enter your timesheet, because the remarks page
seems to freeze in Firefox? Well, I think I’ve figured out how
to make that page work right in Firefox, thanks in large part to a
great new book called
FireFox Hacks
(which you can probably get at almost any bookstore, or online at
Amazon
or Barnes & Noble).
I always hated Javascript, because it seemed like web pages that
made heavy use of it never worked. And they did things in
Javascript that could be done in straight HTML, more easily,
more portably, and more reliably.
So how come I’m so happy with Appia,
when it currently has 5826 lines of Javascript in it? (Compare that to
the only 22,611 lines of Perl in today’s Appia source for what I
always call a “Perl application”!)
Some time ago, I posted a note about malicious
code, with lots of details on how to detect and avoid it. That
note is still accurate, but the biggest threat now is a bit different
from back then: spyware. So this note focuses
exactly on that, and how to deal with it. (Also, that note was
very long and detailed; this note is short.)
Charles Engelke's Blog 