Vikings, I Could Quit You
It's mornings like this when I wonder whether it's even worth it. Why do I bother with this -- or any -- football team? Because clearly my beloved Vikings are going to squander the best shot they have had in a decade for a Super Bowl. At this point, they will be lucky not to end up playing a Wild Card game, when just a few weeks ago we were looking at cruising to 14 or 15 wins and a first-round bye.
How many times can I keep hitting myself with a 2x4?
How Not to Choose a Web Framework (And Django Sucks!)
A journalism professor friend of mine wanted to start teaching her students to program using a web framework, and quickly narrowed her options to the two obvious choices: Rails and Django. Faced with two fairly similar, can't-go-wrong options, she turned to her technical friends, and asked a simple question: Which should she choose?
Anyone who's spent any time at all in the company of nerds (present company included) knows what happened. For those who have not, let's put it this way: she might have gotten less vitriolic, less doctrinaire, less jingoistic responses had she asked about Middle East peace or global warming.
Some ill-considered thoughts about The Texas Tribune
The much-anticipated launch of The Texas Tribune took place Tuesday, and I thought I'd scribble down a few thoughts about the site. I know it's hardly fair to critique an enterprise that is merely hours old. And as of yesterday morning, they were clearly still working out some bugs... doh!
But this is the internet era, after all. And if the web is tailor made for anything it's precisely this sort of half-baked, half-thought-through, ill-considered commentary written by someone who has no real expertise per se, but plenty opinions. Welcome to the web Texas Tribune!
Snow Leopard Ugrade Nightmare
I dumped my last Windows box well over two years ago, which means the pain and suffering of OS upgrades were, unfortunately, a distant memory when I pulled Snow Leopard out of its plastic sheath last Friday. If I had flashed back to those horrible days of endless backups, clean reinstalls and upgrade utilities that did nothing like what they were supposed to, maybe I would have thought twice.
But every upgrade of OSX to this point had been painless, or nearly so. Stuff broke, certainly. But fixes were easy. And I thought that's where things were headed when I tweeted the following Friday night:
Went to Snow Leopard, and so far so good. New VPN support is killer (goodbye flaky Cisco client). Also, +30 GB of space. Nice work Apple.
What I didn't know at the time was how badly my dev environment was hosed. MySQL was working, but wouldn't talk to Ruby. My Ruby gems were completely messed up. Rails was throwing completely bizarre errors, and lots of things that should have gotten upgraded seemingly didn't.
Nginx gotcha
Yesterday morning I noticed some odd behavior: Nginx was serving pages with the wrong mime type. All of a sudden, links to cached pages were interpreted as octet-stream, when instead they were just straight-up html.
I suspected immediately that it had something to do with Rails page caching with Passenger plus Nginx, but what? Rails caches pages with the correct file extension, so shouldn't Nginx pick up on that and serve the page correctly? Turns out it's more complicated than that.
Trying something new
Yep, trying out the new version of Typo, which seems to a big improvement, actually. Seems to have fixed all the things that annoyed me about it before.
