Charles Bowden’s has definitely opened my eyes and gave me a new perspective on NAFTA and it’s connection with the War on Drugs and how eventually these two failed policies ended up creating one huge clusterfuck in Mexico.
(A lot of bullshit nailed in less than 9 minutes.)
Jun 12
As always I’m pretty late in writing my book reviews. This time it’s been well over 6 months since I finished reading the book “Beginning Ruby” (first edition) by Peter Cooper. I have to say is this by far the best Ruby book that I’ve read so far. (This is out of a 13 book collection that I own on Ruby programming.) I’ve always been a fan of Apress “Beginning” title’s, and this book is definitely not the exception. Although this book is technically considered for beginning/intermediate programmers wanting to dive to the wonderful world of Ruby, I feel this book is perfect for all levels of programming expertise. The authors does a wonderful job explain the concepts of each chapter and slowly building you to what will be the next chapter. Like Apress’ “Beginning Perl” book help me tremendously in learning the language, I have to say this book taught how to program in Ruby.
I’ll definitely come back to this book and use as a reference. Anyone new or already experienced using Ruby, will definitely benefit from reading this book. I hope this book (all editions) gets the high praise from the Ruby community, which it deserves, as in my eyes this is a classic programming book and I see this title as the Llama/Camel book for the Ruby World.
Chapter 1: Let’s Get it Started: Installing Ruby
Chapter 2: Programming == Joy: A Whistle-Stop Tour of Ruby and Object Orientation
Chapter 3: Ruby’s Building Blocks: Data, Expressions and Flow Control
Chapter 4: Developing a Basic Ruby Application
Chapter 5: The Ruby Ecosystem
Chapter 6: Classes, Objects, and Modules
Chapter 7: Projects and Libraries
Chapter 8: Documentation, Error Handling, Debugging, and Testing
Chapter 9: Files and Databases
Chapter 10: Deploying Ruby Applications and Libraries
Chapter 11: Advance Ruby Features
Chapter 12: Tying it Together: Developing a Larger Ruby Application
Chapter 13: Ruby on Rails: Ruby’s Killer App
Chapter 14: Ruby and the Internet
Chapter 15: Networking, Sockets, and Daemons
Chapter 16: Useful Ruby Libraries and Gems
When I was in school at least once per year we had to do “duck and cover” earthquake emergency drills.
Now, to think kids in Mexico are using “duck and cover” to dodge bullets.
It is absolutely amazing to see a kindergarten teacher preventing all children from panicking and turning this situation into a normal class activity, such so that the kids are all singing, while just outside their school five people are being executed.
Translation:
Yes, sweetie, everyone on the floor. Little ones… what? What, sweetheart? No, nothing’s happening love, just put your little faces on the floor… with your… sweeties, put your little faces on the floor. Nothing is the matter, nothing is going to happen to us, just don’t get up please. We are going to sing a song! We’re going to sing… I know which one! Yes! If rain drops were made of chocolate, I would love to be there… Who wants chocolate!?
Reference: http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2011/05/monterrey-pre-schoolers-sing-through.html
In an effort to stop giving my hard earn money to an endangered species animal killer like GoDaddy’s founder and CEO, Bob Parson, I’ve decided to move most of my domains to a different registrar.
The only thing that attracted me to GoDaddy in the first place was because of their competive hosting and domain prices in addition of being a sponsored of The Linux Action show, which is one of my favorite podcasts (even though Bryan acts like a cunt at times). As for my new registrar, lucky I’ve had good experience using NameCheap for really really really really cheap SSL certificates; Since they also do offer really cheap domain registration, I’m glad to say that NameCheap is my new registrar for most of my domains and hopefully in the near future they’ll be my registrar for all of my domains and hosting provider for this blog.
This is a small example that I hope many people will follow.
After yet another flawless Ubuntu upgrade, I am finally seeing why there is a big hype regarding Unity. Prior to this upgrade I was hesitant in upgrading to Ubuntu 11.04 because of the negative reviews Unity was getting from different podcasts, however after a full day after the upgrade and a few hours using Unity, I have to say that I completely love the new Unity UI. As a joint Mac OS X and Linux user, I feel that the new Unity User Interface is a perfect combination of both worlds. Though I might say that I’m somewhat concern that Apple (given the record they have) will end up suing the Ubuntu project given some similarities Unity has to OS X.
Overall I think the new Unity Ubuntu desktop change is well worth it, and unlike the KDE4 upgrade from KDE 3.5 a few years ago, Unity seems to be rock solid.
The only problem that I had with Ubuntu 11.4 was getting my wireless card to work on the new version, lucky I stumble across a German forum board where somebody successully got it to work.
sudo rfkill unblock all
echo 'options acer_wmi wireless=1' | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/acer_wmi.conf
reboot and wireless should start working!!!
http://www.ubuntu-forum.de/artikel/56410/wlan-problem-broadcom-bcm4312.html
Apr 20
According to iTunes the following are my top 10 most listened to artists:
Apr 14
I’ve been using the Ruby 1.8.6 on my CentOS box and Ruby 1.8.7 on my Ubuntu and OS X computers, for a couple of years now; I’ve never payed much attention on continuing to hack Ruby code using these versions of Ruby.
However, in reading DHH’s tweet stating that Ruby 1.8X series is now considered legacy and should be avoided and in reading through some of the Metasploit Framework initial documentation, I’ve decided to migrate to the latest Ruby 1.9 build (Ruby 1.9.2 patch level 180, at the time of this writing).
Upgrading was really easy, essentially on both CentOS and on Ubuntu I installed Ruby 1.9 directly from source, while I was able to install Ruby 1.9 on the Mac using Mac Ports.
The only thing that problem that I noticed in doing this, is that my existing Rubygems installation crapped out, which really isn’t a problem since I was able to successfully install a new version of Rubygems. So far the only incompatibilty that I have noticed so far is the Crypt gem which is not yet been updated to work with Ruby 1.9. There is an unofficial port called Crypt19, buts it’s such horribly undocumented (giving the library implementation is not helpful) that I couldn’t get my existing scripts to work using this library.
Now hopefully I’ll find more features on Ruby 1.9 that are worth doing the upgrade.
It’s hard to believe that it is been exactly one year since the videoed massacre in Creel, Chihuahua. What’s even more amazing is that during the time this massacred occurred, there were about 20,000 deaths in President’s Felipe Calderon war on drugs. While now exactly one year later, the deaths have almost doubled to about 35,000 deaths.
Mar 11
As always, Charles Bowden slaps everyone in the face with logic and common sense.
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