Author Archives: dru

The field name type is a dangerous name for a field. The ‘type’ method in Ruby became deprecated. It is also considered a “Magic Field” name. Specifically, it is used for Single Table Inheritance. So save 15 minutes of your … Continue reading →

Over the last year or so, I’ve been using Ruby on Rails. For my latest gig, we have a shipping a Ruby on Rails app that is critical to the success of our service. Although I could expound on the … Continue reading →

Here is a neat video about an old SGI computer. The interesting part was the hardware breakdown of the computer. They really had a great design for the hardware back then. You can see apple definitely moving in this direction, … Continue reading →

I was thinking about optimization today, and I remembered the old posting about a guy at Cray using an evolutionary process to evolve the best keyboard layout. The gist was that dvorak was still good. I think I’ll switch one … Continue reading →

IMHO, Wikipedia is the most interesting thing to happen to mathematics in a long long time. I’m sure this can apply to other fields as well, but I feel that it is especially true for mathematics.

For the last 5 minutes, I was thinking about personal submarines. How much would one of those cost? Who makes them? What is the latest technology in the personal submarine business? So, after a little searching, here is what I … Continue reading →

Today I was thinking about something about programs. In most languages, you have to literally declare stuff before it can be used. This is true in C, Python, and a bunch of other languages. The annoying example that I’m thinking … Continue reading →

VMS The other day, I was thinking about the old debate. Worse is better. Just good enough. One of the classic examples in those texts is the way that BSD was designed vs. the MIT operating systems. (The other big … Continue reading →