P(failure | big_shot_present) = .9

I read a blog post today.

I applaud the young man for caring enough about the democratic process.  I’m pretty sure I don’t agree with him politically, but the fact that we can disagree without killing one another is 1 reason why I love America.

I do NOT, however, applaud all who were posting comments.  They want to dramatically LOWER the voting age.  1 poster even went so far as to see that the age should be lowered to when children enter 9th grade.

Now, I know that comments on blogs are not, how shall I say, flames to the moths we call good ideas.  Yet, I feel compelled to engage such an argument on my un-read blog.  Because this is the venue from which Change will flow.

It is not a ploy of Conservatives or the ultra-right, but rather it is a documented medical fact that the long-term consequence processing centers (the, uh, technical term for it) do not develop until around age 21 or so.  I read this in the book Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters by Meg Meeker, M.D.  This is why STDs run rampant among youth, as does teen pregnancy.  No logical though process leads a teen to engage in the sorts of risky behaviors that teens are drawn to.

And that commenter wants to hand the keys of the nation’s future over to children of that age.  Good thinking.

The 2nd argument against it that I’ll present is more of a question.  Why stop at 9th grade?  I mean, 5-year-olds are affected by the political process, so why can’t they vote?  What about the unborn?  It’s legal to murder them, and they don’t really have a voice.

Children are children for a reason.  It is a time to observe and learn and make little failures to prepare for adulthood.  Children can’t even support themselves, so they should not be allowed to vote.  If one doesn’t have a stake in the system, they should not be able to cast a ballot.

Another poster suggested RAISING the age to 21 unless the person is in the military.  I kind of like that.  Folks in the military understand what it means to not have freedom over one’s day to day life.

Perhaps that might influence the sort of candidate they vote for.

I hope it’s a new one anyway.

So yeah, Mac OSX provides a screen capture utility that makes a cute little camera sound when a user takes a “snapshot.”  How sweet and usability-enhancing that is.

Well, it appears that Mac OSX makes the sound and then tries to take the screen grab.  Often I’ll take a screenshot to attach to a bug report at work.  I hit the buttons for the screenshot and then immediately go to look at the resulting file to make sure it was correct.  The problem though is that since it makes the sound BEFORE it has actually taken the screenshot, when I hit F11 to see my desktop, the resulting picture shows my windows on their way out to being hidden.

Apple, USE CONFIRMATION NOISES ONCE THE PROCESS IS COMPLETE!  It’s little things like this that are so frustrating with Apple because of how obnoxious the devotion of its acolytes are.

I’ll have some other topics to post after this one, but I just wanted to address 1 issue quickly– the debate moderator.  I’ve seen a fair share of debates, what with the primaries and all, but I just have to say I have never been so impressed with the moderator.

I was fearful like I’m sure many conservatives were that Ms. Ifill would favor Biden, seeing how she has The Book coming out on Innauguration Day.  I saw no bias.  And above and beyond that, I liked her style of asking questions.  I’ll have to edit this post with more details once I’ve rewatched the debate.

So hats off to you Gwen.  The questions were informative, fair, and kept the debate lively.

Yesterday I was listening to Bill O’Reilly.  I like to listen to/read a variety of opinions– part of being informed.  And yes, I realize radio is superficial.  I don’t really have the time to read articles during my work hours.

I digress.  Anyway, a few weeks ago O’Reilly proposed that the Oil Companies donate 2% of their net profits to a fund that they manage to help people who are having trouble paying for energy.  I think that’s a great idea.

A caller posed a a question along the lines of, “How is that any different than windfall profit taxes and redistribution?”  O’Reilly’s answer was, “Because it’s voluntary.”

And therein lies everything!  O’Reilly doesn’t bill (ha) himself as a “conservative.”  Yet what he says sums up my attitude towards charitable giving.  I’m a staunch supporter, nigh unto religious-zealot-adherent, of individual liberty.  I interpret my faith in such a way that this is a theological issue.  Forcing someone to do the right thing really doesn’t have a place in my view of the world.

But something that DOES have a place in my view of the world is people helping people.  That is a right thing to do, and I consider myself conservative.

I was speaking with my grandmother a few months ago, and she quoted part of Atlas Shrugged in which John Galt (sp?) delivers a monologue about how he won’t help another or expect another to let him live of off them.  The vibe I get from the staunch libertarians that I’ve spoken to is basically “screw you,” if you’re on hard times.  As much as I disagree with that viewpoint, holding it is a right given by the free society in which we live.

It’s completely based on faulty logic though.  Hardcore libertarianism (again, as I’ve observed it) seems to forget that a person can of their own free will be inclined towards charity.  And doing so in no way denies individual freedom, either of the giver or the receiver.  While I’d never force another person to do the right thing, I would labor day and night to persuade them to believe that the right thing is the right thing, motivating them to then make the same choice.  I call that sort of thing debate and letting the market place of ideas have its place.

But windfall profit taxes?  Redistribution of wealth?  Tithes and “offerings” as practiced in the Middle Ages?  No, no, and no.

It has been 7 years since 9/11.  I remember walking into church in France for a choir practice when I got the news.  We weren’t sure if it had been an accident or not.  Turns out it wasn’t.

Anyway, not that anyone reads this, I want to send my sympathies to those who lost loved ones that day and who have lost loved ones as result of the chain of events that followed that terrible day.

One of the purposes of this blog is a place where I can catalogue stuff and find it again later.  That is one of the purposes of this post.

I have multiple versions of Rails on my computer, and I wanted to create a new sandbox application with one of the older ones.  I didn’t know who to do it, until I found this post.

That post is more in-depth.  The quick and dirty is the command:

rails _<railsversion>_ <app name>

Example: rails _1.2.3_ test

Note that there is a space between “rails” and the first underscore, as well as one between the last underscore and “<app name>.”

Hat is off to you SIDDHARTH.

I’m listening to the radio this morning, and in a news segment there was a little blurb about John McCain choosing a so-called pro-choice running mate.  The announcer then made a mention of abortion “rights.”

Being one who chooses to err on the side of life, I have a big issue when someone talks about abortion “rights.”  America has a duty to protect her citizens, and the unborn certainly don’t have the capability to speak up for themselves.  Just as I feel we should reinstitute usury laws to help protect the financially weak (the lack of such laws unfairly harming minorities), I feel we should protect a child who happens to reside within his/her mother’s womb.  Where do their rights factor into abortion “rights?”  But that really isn’t the issue of this post.

I’ve read so-called pro-choice advocates argument that a mother is here now, and a child is only a possiblity in the future, so society must err on the mother’s side when making this choice.  That is certainly a sound argument (sound = the conclusion follows the premise, regardless of whether or not the premise is flawed;  it’s a logically consistent position).

So let’s take that sound argument to another issue of the day.  Global Warming.  The proselytes of the Church of Global Warming warn us of a Vengeful God that will strike at us if we don’t do “something.”  They propose policies that would bankrupt our nation and cost lives now all for the sake of some future possibility.

So which is it?  Does a certain present automatically override possible futures?  Or is just that progressive folk have chosen certain issues about which they feel passionate?

Look, as a conservative, I actually do respect the sound arguments of others.  I’m just asking for some consistency here.

A blog post isn’t quite the format in which to go into the length details of why, so it sufficeth me to say that Git is great source control software. Local commits. 1 command to initialize a repo.  Branching and merging isn’t so ridiculous that you never do it.

GitHub also seems pretty neat, though I confess to be a GitHub newb (or noob– I forget which is derogatory. I don’t mean that one). GitHub allows free hosting of open-source Git repositories. I don’t really plan on making the project I’m working on open source– and for no particular reason– so that’ll get changed when I want to close things down. It does cost money to host closed-source projects. Point being, off-site backup is a Good Thing, a quality especially noticeable when one accidental rm -Rf’s their repository. Oops. Good thing I had basically only clicked New Project in Visual Studio.

So, this post is supposed to matter because you get some useful information and not just some narcissism. If you’re a Windows user at least part of the time, it’s readily apparent that Git wasn’t written for Windows users. Do the author check. It’s slightly confusing to get Git working, and rather than re-invent the wheel– though I’m not afraid of beating dead clichés– checkout the work of some dude named Kyle Cordes.

His post works as advertised. I did skip all the bit about being added to his repository, as I wanted to do my own. Also, I stopped the whole thing at “Approach 1: GUI.” It was pretty easy getting the repo into git-hub by following git-hub’s instructions.

I can’t contain the excitement. Though it has been done before, I just finished implementing a ratings system for the real site. I’d like to do an article about how I did it to submit that to the world, but for now, just be prepared. Content can start flowing now!

I wish I had some cool screenshots for this one, but hopefully a text-based description will suffice.

So I fixed a bug at work, where certain AJAX calls were failing.  It turns out that our view templates were making some assumptions that they ought not to have been making.  I fixed that error, and our QA team pushed that code out to our test servers (along with other things– I wasn’t that important).  Well, the error, or at least its symptoms, showed up again.  Now, it only showed up sometimes, and only on the test server.  “It works on my machine,” not being much of a solution to a bug, I started investigating.

I looked into the error logs that were being generated, and saw what looked like the sort of error you get when you call a helper method which doesn’t exist.  As part of the bug fix, I added a helper method.  We checked manually the code that was running on the server, and it had the helper method and the full new version of the code.  At this point I began suspecting the work of some foul dark wizard– or at least a gremlin.  I mean, why else would a view template not be able to find a helper method that is there after the server has been restarted?

I’ll tell you why.  We have a cluster configuration, and Capistrano or something else, hadn’t shut down every process running the old code.  Since AJAX calls are full-blown server requests that just happen not to refresh the whole browser page, some of those calls were directed to server processes that hadn’t actually been restarted.  Rails doesn’t auto-refresh code in production mode (Good Thing), so those old processes quite naturally didn’t find the new code.  We killed the old processes and, presto!  The world is right again.

So, if you ever find yourself wondering why your view template can’t find your helper method, check to make sure that your server restart restarted ALL instances of your application. We’re still not entirely sure why all instances didn’t restart though.

So, Dark Wizards may still be involved.