meme

Shub-Internet says I am, indeed, a precious, unique snowflake.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 2 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

Of course, their page on accuracy says that (a) this is a ballpark estimate and (b) it's using data from 1990 to make this estimate. Back then I was still Paul. Which this toy guesses there are 3 of. So either way, I'm pretty special. According to this random web widget some anonymous person wrote.

a geek moment

Ruby On Rails may be the current darling of the interactive web developer crowd, but man is it oblique to get started. Also heavy, what with tending to want to run its very own web server behind Apache - a functioning install of Typo under the theoretical 'easy Ruby install' of Locomotive clocks in at eleven bloody megs. Plus however much database space it uses. Did I do something wrong or is it normally this flipping huge? I have no clue.

I was kinda interested in poking around with Ruby just to stretch my brain a little, maybe adapt some of the existing apps in it for my own purposes, but this is kinda ridiculous. It's a royal pain to get an existing RoR app running by unpacking a zip file distribution, and doing it the "Proper Way" of going into a shell and using the Ruby package manager brings back painful memories of the time I tried to get a local installation of Livejournal running*. Yeah, it's supposed to be dead easy to start building an app from scratch, but that's not what I wanna do right now. I want to take something semi-mature and dig around in it.

RoR may accelerate developer creativalization and greatly reduce the development cycle of agile gradient-filled comm.uni.ty applications that leverage the collective wisdom of Web 2.0, but I think I'll steer clear.

Meanwhile, John K seems to have just finished his new Tenacious D. video. And I am realizing that I need to find some pirate ship reference, as I start diverting into general vampirate ship design doodles instead of more composition/gag-oriented boards.

* Perl's package manager insisted on getting the latest version of Perl and compiling it, and then didn't want to ever actually install the packages I was asking for. 'gem install typo' actually did what I was expecting it to, install Typo and its dependencies, but I'm still leery of package managers after losing a fight with CPAN a year or so ago. And I'm also annoyed that I could only get Typo to run by downloading it a second time this way, when I had a perfectly good archive fresh off its homepage...