Spam Surrealist Poetry

Oxford Debate is on Thursday

He could see the barnacles which encrusted them,
could see pale drowned things lying limply in the clefts of the wood,
He had time to realize the apartment was too dark,
Hanging from the lowest branch of this tree
an old-fashioned pair of
blued...
steel...
handcuffs.


-- The above taken from a recent piece of spam e-mail. Only minor changes to the punctuation and line spacing made.

Beauty comes in many forms I guess.

A rush of codd to the hand

(Yes you read that right. "codd" as in Codd in Edgar F.Codd.)

"Some of the best managed content I have ever seen sits on a Unix file system and some of the worst managed content I have ever seen sits in a big honking, breathtakingly expensive, relational database."-- A rush of codd to the hand

Double post

I'm going to leave this double post for posterity.

Next time I get asked why transactional web-apps (apps that send stuff and generally do things rather than just pull stuff together) cannot be built using all that cool, simple, mashup stuff?

The two posts referenced above is basically the why. For mashing up, you ask me stuff, you don't get it, you just ask again. Simple. If I then respond to your first request some time later, no harm done. Just throw it away.

but if I *send* you stuff and I'm not sure if you got it...

RuPy

rupy is a Ruby *and* Python conference. Interesting. I'm trying to think of an example of something like this in the past...I'm drawing a blank. This is interesting new territory I think.

Are we seeing the emergence of a community that is not-so-much rabidy Python or rabidly Ruby but rather rabidly anti-something else. United by a common itch. What is the itch exactly?

Dynamic Typing or something more concrete like super-fast database web app dev (Rails/DJango/TurboGears)...I dunno but it sure is interesting.

RuPy

rupy is a Ruby *and* Python conference. Interesting. I'm trying to think of an example of something like this in the past...I'm drawing a blank. This is interesting new territory I think.

Are we seeing the emergence of a community that is not-so-much rabidy Python or rabidly Ruby but rather rabidly anti-something else. United by a common itch. What is the itch exactly?

Dynamic Typing or something more concrete like super-fast database web app dev (Rails/DJango/TurboGears)...I dunno but it sure is interesting.

Newbie geek strums # 2

This is a follow on from (Newbie geek strums # 1)

Well. Some interesting blog comments and also some interesting e-mail.

Some more observations and remarks

• It seems beyond coincidence that so many markup people (dare I say "doc heads") are musicians of various types. Lessee : Steve Newcombe, Eliot Kimber, Eve Maler, Bob Du Charme, Len Bullard, Tony Coates...
  
• On Jarrod Robertson's recommendation, I got Fretboard Logic Special Edition by Bill Edwards. I have only flicked it so far but I'm more enthusiastic about it than anything else I have seen on the "music theory"/learn-your-scales-they-are-good-for-you/here-are-the-most-important-25-million-chords genre. A book that seems to use 3-4 core ideas/patterns as combinatoric algorithms for navigating around the fretboard. That fits my brain very nicely than you very much. Besides, who can resist a learn-the-guitar-book that quotes Claude Shannon? ("Information is anything that reduces uncertainty").
  
• There seems to be an entire Guitar culture/community that venerates guitars as, um, Object d'Art. Things to be crafted (luthiered?), decorated, polished, mounted, sensuously rubbed...even if they never play a note. Maybe the same is true for other instruments like the piano or the saxophone and I'm just not being exposed to it on my current travels.
  
• Lots of folk talk about making sure you get a "good" guitar but of course, newbies are lambs to the slaughter here because we haven't a clue what we are looking at. Sure we can pick up a dozen guitars and strum the strings and go all pensive and earful but we are basically kicking tyres. Thanfully, my mate Pat stepped into the breach and picked a decent guitar to get me going. If you are a newbie too, get someone you trust to do the first round of buying for you. (Hi Pat:-) Starting with a bad guitar (a finger slicing, impossible to tune, bent-knecked dog of a thing you got for fifty bucks appears to be the fasted route to the dreaded "I cannot do this. I've no talent like *they* all have." confidence tailspin.
  
• As a newbie, I cannot discern the difference between pitches terribly well and my confiedence in my own ability to tune a guitar by ear (using the relative method - having latched onto a Low E from somewhere) is, um, zero. I bought an electric tuner. What a great gadget! Highly recommended.
  
• If you have an electric tuner, make sure it is set to "guitar" and not "bass" or "chroma" when you try to tune. I baffled myself for a good hour on that one. Thought my gadget was busted.
  

Thats it for now. Some time soon : You must be F...ing joking chords, guitar as a sure-fire road to RSI flareup. Oh, and musical texts as a proper subset of the all the hermeneutic circles in the world.

Jython for Red Hat

Congrats to Frank Wierzbicki Jython's dev lead, who know works full time at Red Hat. Frank is hoping to get Jython into Fedora and perhaps RHEL.