http://rcoder.net paraliteracy has its perks Fri, 10 Oct 2008 23:57:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've twittered about this already, but I think that it's worth repeating: collecting redundant and invalid voter registration cards is not the same thing as fraudulent voting. I repeat: by registering people multiple times, or even submitting invalid registration cards, ACORN (and every other voter reg group) is not committing ... http://rcoder.net/content/registration-acorn-and-fraud <political-rant> I had surgery to repair my broken ankle this sumer. I also have fairly good health insurance through my employer. So, when the pre-billing statements from the hospital, surgeon, and anasthesiologist started showing up, I didn't panic, even though the total bill (>$15K) would have been pretty tough for me ... http://rcoder.net/content/why-we-need-universal-health-coverage Since the Android phone announcement on Tuesday, there has been a decent amount of wild speculation going around the 'tubes about the differences in "developer experience" between the iPhone and Android platforms. While my opinions on Apple's legal and business restrictions on iPhone developers are pretty clear, I haven't really ... http://rcoder.net/content/contrasting-the-iphone-and-android-development-kits We rocked it. Oh yes we did. http://rcoder.net/content/tpc-xxi You wanna know how lame I am? I didn't even take this picture. That's how much I've been slacking on the blogging and photographic fronts. http://rcoder.net/content/gone-coding-2 After more than a year of complaining about the syntax, I'm forcing myself to finally sit down and learn some Erlang. Between CouchDB, EjabberD, and all the other interesting projects people are implementing in Erlang, I would be remiss as a systems engineer to not at least pick up the ... http://rcoder.net/content/erlang-warts ...for voting! (Well, for trying to convince people to vote, anyway.) http://rcoder.net/content/tis-the-season I just go a slick new work machine: a Lenovo ThinkPad X300. It's got loads of RAM (4GB), a 60GB solid-state disk in place of a hard drive, and it all weighs in at just under 3 lbs. It's the best laptop I've ever used, and if it's anything like ... http://rcoder.net/content/new-hardware For those who don't already know, Steven Frank (a.k.a. stevenf on many sites) is a developer at Panic, Inc., a multiple-award-winning Mac software shop here in Portland. He (and his firm) are unapologetic Mac boosters, and have based their entire business around producing applications which appeal in large part to ... http://rcoder.net/content/thank-you-steven-frank Anyone who's done much Ruby metaprogramming (or even just skimmed the source code to Rails) should be intimately familiar with the following idiom: klass = Foo::Bar # ... klass.extend(Some::Module) This is a programmatic mixin -- it adds the methods defined in Some::Module to the class Foo::Bar for the duration of the current Ruby process. ... http://rcoder.net/content/mixins-without-monkeypatching