http://www.johnbaylor.org but with a nefarious purpose Thu, 02 Oct 2008 05:02:43 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en My aunt Barbara passed away yesterday. We were never close, but she was the last of her siblings to pass on, even though she was the oldest. I know that was hard on her. Now its finally her turn. May she find rest. She played a pivotal role in my life, ... http://www.johnbaylor.org/2008/10/01/last-of-a-generation/ [aside: Why write an email that will be read by just one or two people when you can instead write a blog post that will be seen by... uh... one or two people?] I was recently discussing the problem of tracing program execution through code that doesn't exist.  Sometimes, usually to ... http://www.johnbaylor.org/2008/04/20/self-modifying-code-or-self-creating-code/ Pay By Touch To Shut Down All Biometric Services Immediately Biometric authentication transactions to cease at 11:59:59PM March 19, 2008 SAN FRANCISCO - (March 19, 2008) - Solidus Networks, Inc., dba Pay By Touch, regretfully announced today that it will no longer process biometric transactions on behalf of its merchant customers ... http://www.johnbaylor.org/2008/03/20/its-official-my-old-product-is-dead/  [Update: presentation from the 4/15/2008 Ruby Meetup is now available here.] I like reading code. Its like a novel and I want to read it cover-to-cover. Some, such as Why's Camping framework, I struggle to comprehend. But most code that I read comes up slightly short. Like a novel with some ... http://www.johnbaylor.org/2008/02/27/u/ The Rails Way is a Ruby on Rails reference book that I bought on Josh Susser's recommendation.  I've actually, to my family's dismay, been reading the darn thing instead of just referring to it like one would a, well, reference book.  A lot of Rails'isms that I had a vague ... http://www.johnbaylor.org/2008/01/29/book-recommendation-the-rails-way/ I've heard that dual-booting Ubuntu linux was easy but its really true. I'm now running Ubuntu and it was as easy as various blog posts have said. The longest step in the process was defragmenting the drive before repartitioning with Ubuntu. There are a few ... http://www.johnbaylor.org/2008/01/25/using-ubuntu/ I've just noticed the geekily hilarious xkcd comic and one of the funniest aspects is that each comic has a 'title' attribute (the text that pops up when you hover your mouse over the image) that is often as funny as the comic itself. However, the length of the ... http://www.johnbaylor.org/2008/01/14/xkcd-titles/ I just have to wonder: who were the first two people to have "died in a blogging accident"? http://www.johnbaylor.org/2008/01/12/jumping-on-the-bandwagon/ Its getting a lot of traffic and seems pretty snappy: http://www.catalogchoice.org/ So yes, Virginia, Ruby and Rails do scale. http://www.johnbaylor.org/2007/12/17/another-high-traffic-rails-site-catalogchoiceorg/ I was playing Blokus today, where competition is driven by the scarcity of space on the game board, and realized that the perception of scarcity is often more prevalent than actual scarcity - and thus we needlessly hobble ourselves by limiting things that are abundant. Similarly, our fear that ... http://www.johnbaylor.org/2007/11/28/the-perception-of-scarcity-in-a-climate-of-fear/