Dear United States of America: an amazing oportunity is coming your way this november. So please, take a look at the immediate past. It’s been eight years. So, do yourselves and us, the rest of the world, a big big favor. Vote for Obama. Don’t vote for McCain.
I’ve just published BerryUnitConverter’s source code. It’s GPL-licensed so grab it while it’s hot. Oh, and I also have a git repository, so feel free to contribute patches, preferrably in git format.
Okay, I usually know Microsoft people live in a different world and it’s usually OK. However this guy here is completely delusional.
This Microsoft VP slams Wii Fit and calls the entire Wii ecosystem a “gimmick”. He argues that it’s solid, rewarding gameplay and control schemes that bring players back, and that by pushing gimmicky add-ons and controllers such as Wii Fit or the Wii Remote is not a sustainable scheme.
Whatever, I bet this guy hasn’t played some of the great Wii games like Okami, No More Heroes or even Wii Sports; the Wii’s control scheme works beautifully with those games and there’s definitely nothing as rewarding in the XBox world, compared to slashing foes with your remote on No More Heroes, or using it as a brush in Okami, easily one of the most beautiful, best thought-out videogames I’ve ever seen. As for Wii Sports, there’s nothing gimmicky about a game that has the entire family playing and having fun within five minutes; as opposed to most Xbox games that you can barely start to play after 5 minutes of fidgeting with all the options, choices, wizards, menus, and so on.
But wait, there’s more. At some point in the article this MSFT cronie actually talks about how THEY are about to introduce a new game with a peripheral for … get this… wireless karaoke. And they tell me *that* is not a gimmick and it promotes deep, engrossing gameplay. Pfft.
Sorry, I just had to laugh at this guy and point out that, whatever, the Wii is outselling the Xbox anyway, so, i guess it is sour grapes after all.
I just released a prefixed_attributes plugin for Rails.
Rails has a handy number_to_human_size method, but in order to use it, all
your quantities need to be in non-scaled units, and it’s cumbersome to have
your users typing 100 gigabyte amounts by hand. You’d normally have a
“bytes” column in your records and add virtual attributes to your models.
This plugin adds those attributes for you.
The plugin adds a prefixed_attribute method to all your classes. Use it to mark an
existing attribute on your class (even a non-AR one) like this:
prefixed_attribute :bytes, :type => :binary
prefixed_attribute :hertz, :type => :si
More information here.
So Wii Fit has launched worldwide and stirred a plethora of reactions. The thing appears to be selling like pancakes, altough as usual, here in Mexico it’s so damn expensive that most of the stores have piles of Wii Fit boxes awaiting their turn.
Also it has received some pretty harsh reviews. The one that struck me the most was the gamespot review , from a site I usually trust for their quality reviews, which punished the game with a mere 7.0 score and some strange criticism. And general opinion is mixed, altough a good amount of reviews focus on how it’s easy to cheat, how the excercises aren’t all that good, how the game is limited and shallow, and how you should just buy a set of dumbbells or running shoes and get doing some real sports.
These people are missing the point, and misunderstanding Wii Fit’s target demographic. Despite the images of fit, athletic people in Wii Fit’s box, the game is really not aimed at them. Wii Fit’s audience is the at-large population of couch potatoes, of people who need two things in order to move even a finger: someone or something to tell them what to do and how to do it, and a large amount of motivation. These people would indeed rather spend their free time playing games than exercising.
So for these people Wii Fit is a great tool to get moving. The game is so cute and cheery, you can’t help but follow the exercises to your best. The game is encouraging without being patronizing, and it rarely feels like it’s punishing you for not working hard enough. I can see plenty of positive reinforcement here, and it really makes a difference in users wanting to keep up with the exercises.
Another complaint was that the exercises are too simple and with too few repetitions, and tougher workouts need to be “unlocked”. I can see this complaint coming from someone who is already somewhat fit and wants to go straight into doing 100 jacknives or run in-place for 45 minutes. However, again, Wii Fit aims to hold the user’s hand from the beginning, and it does this by not overwhelming the user with too many activities, or giving the choice for a too-difficult workout. I’d be discouraged if I was given the choice of 5,20,50 and 100 repetitions and I could only complete 5. By unlocking the harder choices as I make progress, Wii Fit rewards my improvement by opening up more choices. It’s not about limitation, it’s about motivation and taking it easy.
Analysis about the shallowness of Wii Fit’s balance games and aeerobic activities totally misses the mark. Wii Fit’s point is moving, not engaging in a lengthy videogame. And indeed, most activities are short, a few minutes at most. This keeps you changing pace and by chopping the workout into smaller pieces, gives you short-term goals to work towards. Indeed, I see a lot of behavior shaping here, and it really helps you working towards your goal which is, surprise, not completing an involved videogame, but rather to exercise for 30 minutes daily.
Also, some people complain that the game makes it easy to cheat. I pity the fools. In this case you would be cheating nobody but yourself. After all, the only tools the game has to monitor you are the wii remote and the balance board. So if you want to cheat by wiggling the remote through the running sequence or stand on the board when you should be doing pushups, then go ahead. But it’s just like being an alcoholic: you bought the thing because you wanted to be helped. If you’re not going to take the help, then there’s nothing Wii Fit, or anybody else for that matter, can do for you.
However once you make a determination to follow through with exercising, Wii Fit proves to be a fun, encouraging and rather helpful tool. After your first session, when you feel sore in muscles you didn’t even know you had, you’ll realize that, while Wii Fit won’t turn you into Charles Atlas, it will indeed help you be at least a bit fitter.
I think Wii Fit’s largest merit is its motivational strength, followed by its low entry barrier. An exercise video will show you how to do the exercises, but it lacks all the tracking tools and has absolutely no interactivity. Tougher exercises like mountain biking or trail running reward you with gorgeous scenery and tons of adrenaline, but are beyond most couch potatos’ reach. And gym work is so boring! Wii Fit is accessible to just about everyone and helps you through your first baby steps in order to get you moving. And the one thing we liked the most about Wii Fit is that it’s loads of fun, even if you’re just watching 
What’s the point? even studies in the USA find out that DST actually costs more money than it saves. If it’s so ineffectual in northern latitudes, what the freaking hell are we doing following DST here in Mexico?
A study performed in the state of Indiana found out that DST costs upwards of 7 million dollars, money that wouldn’t be spent if there was no DST. Here in Mexico the benefits have always been marginal at best; particularly since as consumers, we see no benefit at all; my electricity bill hasn’t shown a reduction due to DST. I’ve always held that a measure with such a high social cost absolutely needs to carry a tangible benefit for the average person; I don’t care if the government were able to defer infrastructure investments or the state-controlled electricity companies saved a huge amount of money; I care about my power bill not decreasing, while at the same time I have to suffer having my bio-clock all messed up for 6 months at a time. Yes, there are those of us who don’t adjust after a week or a month; I’m still having trouble getting up in september and days seem to last less while under DST.
And I mean, if all of Mexico is more southern than Arizona, and Arizona doesn’t observe DST, why the goddamn hell do we? huh?
After only 1 day, I made 2 releases of BerryUnitConverter. We’re now at version 1.1.1 and along with a few new units, it can quickly swap origin and destination units. More info at BerryUnitConverter’s page.
So I’ve released version 1.0 of my Blackberry Unit Converter, aptly named BerryUnitConverter, upon the world. If you’re looking for a handy unit converter for your Java-based Blackberry smartphone, I’d love for you to give this little program a try. It can be installed over-the-air, see the instructions on the BerryUnitConverter page.
So, I bought a cheap-ass (115 pesos) bluetooth adapter, thinking I might use it to establish a PAN between my macbook and my desk computer; this is due to a) no CAT5 cable and no IP address for my laptop on the lan, b) no WLAN coverage up here. I know Bluetooth will be kind of slow but it beats having the macbook with no connection at all.
I followed the excellent HOWTO written by Zdenek Bouresh and things didn’t seem to work; the macbook wouldn’t find the Linux PC and so couldn’t pair to it.
It turns out that having ISCAN (whatever the hell that is) on your bluetooth device is imperative for it to be found. You can check if you have it by running hciconfig and you get something like this (look for ISCAN and INQUIRY on the third line; if like in this example you don’t have it, then something’s still wrong):
hci0: Type: USB BD Address: 00:11:67:88:06:17 ACL MTU: 1021:8 SCO MTU: 48:10 UP RUNNING PSCAN RX bytes:1377 acl:0 sco:0 events:46 errors:0 TX bytes:672 acl:0 sco:0 commands:39 errors:0
So how to enable ISCAN? Oddly, /etc/bluetooth/hcid.conf already contains a line that says:
iscan enable; pscan enable;
However it looks like it doesn’t work. So what I did (quick & dirty) is add this command to /etc/rc.local:
hciconfig hci0 piscan
Also, it appears as though the default startup script starts pand too quickly, and hcid hasn’t had a chance to initialize yet; as a result, your log file will show :
pand[5218]: Failed to connect to the local SDP server. Connection refused(111)
What I did was insert a 5-second sleep in /etc/init.d/bluetooth, at the beginning of the pan_start function.
Voilá, now my macbook sees the linux computer, a passkey exchange is initiated (and managed on the linux box via kbluetooth, I highly recommend it). The Mac gives a list of “services you want to use with your device”. If you enable PAN only, it will probably say “there were no supported services found on your device”. I guess if you also enable Bluetooth DUN you’ll see this service. Regardless, when you click “continue” a cheery message says “congratulations” and states “your computer and device were configured with the following services” and “use as a personal area network” will be shown.
As you dismiss this dialog, the bluetooth icon on the status bar will sprout a new option, “join network on whatever”. Clicking this will initiate a connection attempt.
Again, the HOWTO refers to creation of a dev-up script but I found I also needed a dev-down. so in /etc/defaults/bluetooth:
PAND_OPTIONS=” –listen –role nap -u /etc/bluetooth/pan/dev-up -o /etc/bluetooth/pan/dev-down”
/dev-down contains:
#!/bin/sh
ifdown bnep0
sleep 2
/etc/init.d/dhcp3-server stop
and it looks to be working now 
So the IAAF has ruled Oscar Pistorius can’t run in the Olympics. They argue that Oscar’s prosthetics actually give him an advantage over other runners, making him faster and more efficient.
IAAF: Give me a freaking break. This is just finding excuses to not let the man run. Why? because of the fear he might upset the status quo. It’s actually because they’re afraid he might be faster than the competition. And the main excuse is that he is aided by his prosthetics. This is just lame; it’s not like he has an entire country’s financial and scientific might behind him. He bought his blades from a sports company, this means it’s widely available equipment; from this perspective, cyclists who have custom-made high-tech bikes should also be banned from competing against those who can’t afford anything but a production bike.
The man is fast enough that he might be a match for “able” runners, and there’s concern that the blades give him an unfair advantage; plenty of talk about how the blades “waste” less energy than a runner’s feet. The interesting part is that they know *exactly* how much more efficient Oscar’s blades are. So what the heck? build him a set of blades that give him *no* efficiency advantage, and see how he performs. That would level the playing field, and it would be fair.
Disqualifying Oscar because he’s more efficient would be like rejecting a taller runner, because his longer stride makes him more “efficient”. Or how about implementing weight categories in distance running? after all, lighter runners have an advantage over heavier, larger ones. Yes, you don’t see that happening, do you?
Oh, so the complaint now is that he’s the only one of all the participants who could use his blades, and this gives him an advantage nobody else could have. Yes, we wouldn’t want to have all our best sprinters cutting off their feet and trading them for blades, would we?
Guess what: it’s happened before. An athlete being so gifted, he could use a custom-made sporting implement; one that actually gave him an advantage, and one that nobody else could use.
Sergei Bubka used a special pole for his jumps. His strength and agility meant that nobody else could use the sort of pole he did. And indeed, he is the *only* pole vaulter to ever surpass 6.10m; his 6.15m record will *not* be broken unless someone who can also leverage the tool, the pole, comes along.
And yes, he was allowed to compete only because he was *not* disabled.
How’s that discrimination for you?
Oscar, they’re afraid of you. So what you need to do is stop fighting the system; enter the paralympics, where all the other double amputees who also have an advantage will run as fast as you; a level playing field. Or wait; actually they won’t, because Oscar’s merit is not only about his blades; it’s about his prowess and hard training. Because the fact remains, you can buy the blades in a freaking store. Yet you don’t see double-amputees outrunning cars on the street. It’s about the man, not the artificial feet he wears.
What Oscar Pistorius needs to do is break the 100m world record. That will be fun to see; a double amputee with no actual feet running *faster* than “able” men. Yep, that’d be fun to watch.
everyone’s first vi session. ^C^C^X^X^X^XquitqQ!qdammit[esc]qwertyuiopasdfghjkl;:xwhat
Sucks or rocks? googleometer gives us a parameter.
20,900,000 pages mention ruby on rails, while 1,560,000 mention django AND python.
These are our baselines. Now for the rocks:
714 pages think Django rocks. 1,000 pages think ruby on rails rocks.
The sucks are as follows:
541 pages think ruby on rails sucks. 147 think Django sucks.
Of course since I can’t grok Python I still think Ruby rocks most.
I tried to deploy to a remote debian (etch/testing) server running dropbear instead of openssh. Rake blew up (Vlad impaled it?) with an error such as this:
Writing configuration file to /***/mongrel_cluster.conf. rake aborted! execution failed with status 255: ssh www.****.com mongrel_rails cluster::configure -N 2 -p 8000 -e production
-a 127.0.0.1 -c /****/current -C ****/shared/mongrel_cluster.conf
This was strange because when I checked on the server, all of the tasks were being executed correctly, and dirs and files were created.
I switched to OpenSSH and the problem went away.
It looks like, even if the command executed is successful, dropbear sometimes ignores the return code and exits with 255, which confuses rake. This doesn’t happen with OpenSSH.
It looks as if the problem is with dropbear, as I had the same issue when trying to deploy with capistrano (crapistrano?). So I guess I’m back to plain old openssh…
rich: n. Laden with useless features and incredibly difficult to use in real life.
Example:
“ZK is a Web framework designed to enable Web applications to have both rich user experiences and a simple programming model. ZK includes an AJAX-based event-driven engine to automate interactivity, a rich set of XUL and XHTML components to enrich usability”
Translation: ZK has a boatload of components which you will never use; those you do, will be incredibly hard to program even though they include basically text fields, buttons and checkboxes; and all this will result in a molasses-slow experience for your end-user.
Durante la debacle del año 2000 muchos programadores cayeron en cuenta de que era mejor utilizar 4 dígitos para almacenar el año. Muchos, por sistema, lo hacemos incluso desde antes. Sin embargo es curioso que una vez pasada la crisis, en muchos lugares se comienzan a utilizar nuevamente cantidades de 2 dígitos para representar el año. Esto es MUY TONTO! El argumento clásico es “bueno, en el año 2100 el sistema ya no va a estar en uso”. Es EXACTAMENTE lo que dijeron en los 70’s con “bueno, en el año 2000 el sistema ya no va a estar en uso”. Quizá se requerirá una crisis como la próxima del año 2032 para zarandearles el tapete a todos y que agarren la onda. A mi por lo menos me dan calambres mentales cada vez que veo un “75″ para representar una fecha. Gente, faltan apenas 69 años para el 2075 y entonces este caso concreto del que hablo va a empezar a dar problemas. Juar juar.
The eighties called… but I AIN’T GIVING THE MUSIC BACK!! HAHAHA
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