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December 24, 2007

Merry Christmas, Nerds

Robin says,

Peter's right -- we're all nerds here. So here is a late-night Christmas Eve post brimming over with nerd-osity. (Like the White House, I try to sneak the embarrassing stuff out while everybody's on vacation.)

  • The New York Times is developing and releasing Ruby libraries on the side. That is such a great sign. Bravo.

  • Slicehost is the hosting company of my dreams: $20 a month for a virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux and that's it. You have full root access and can do absolutely anything you want with it.

  • I went ahead and learned Ruby on Rails a while ago, and liked the idea, but couldn't shake this sense that it was just way too big and complex for everything I wanted to do. Enter Merb, which is like Rails lite: Same approach, same access to awesome Ruby resources (like the NYT's new gem), but much smaller and faster. It's like carrying around a wallet instead of one of those huge camping backpacks.

  • Merb lets you plug in the ORM of your choice, and I found DataMapper a lot more intuitive and "right-seeming" than ActiveRecord (the Rails default).

Okay, I think I actually blew out my own nerd-fuse on that last one. See you in 2008!

Comments (0) | Permasnark | Posted: 8:47 PM

December 23, 2007

Uncle Zip Is Leaving the Building

Robin says,

Without question, the blogroll I'm happiest Snarkmarket is on is M. John Harrison's. He's the author of Light, one of the weirdest and most wonderful books I've ever read.

Now it looks like his blog is winding down; go enjoy it while you still can, and poke around in the archives. I liked his posts on worldbuilding in fantasy and science fiction. But best of all is this, which has a bit of commencement in it, you know?

Comments (1) | Permasnark | Posted: 9:14 PM

December 21, 2007

Following Up

Matt says,

This Ask MetaFilter post from two years ago is like a short story unfolding in real time. I found the whole thing oddly moving -- the initial account of what happened, the swelling chorus of encouragement from other users (each ostensibly nursing a silent grief of her own), and the resolution. For me, it echoed again this passage from Roth. Getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It