Zach Copley

This is a great grassroots video that pretty much sums up my reasons for supporting Ron Paul…

Song I figured out tonight…

Shackles On Me
by Jimmie Vaughan
E-A-B7 (Capo 1)

Don’t want no shackles
Don’t want no shackles on me
Don’t want no shackles
Don’t want no shackles on me
I say down with Big Brother
Don’t like those RFIDs

I say down with Big Brother
Down with Big Brother
Down with Big Brother
Down with Big Brother
Down with Big Brother
It’s all about Liberty

Alex Jones got me laughing again today… he makes really good sound effects, so I had to make this YouTube vid. But make no mistake: Taser Saucers attacking innocent people is no laughing matter. Earlier this week Jones’ new website, TruthNews.us, broke the story about a French company developing a “mini-flying saucer” drone able to fire Taser stun rounds into rioting crowds.

Another good article: They Live Taser Saucer To Become A Reality on the “Jones Report” website.

Ritual Aprons, originally uploaded by zcopley.

Wendy recently got this neato apron for joining her secret scrapbooking society. Compare to George Washington’s Masonic apron.

Wish I could get in on this whole apron business… maybe I’ll have to bake some cookies.

Last night in New York City, a big monster cop raced into a crowd of demonstrators during an early street action for the 9/11 anniversary, specifically singling out documentary filmmaker and popular talk show host, Alex Jones, and handcuffed him with extreme prejudice and excessive grunting, nearly chopping the media activist’s hands off. The entire incident was broadcast on the Times Square “Jumbotron,” which happened to be displaying a Fox News segment covering the arrest hosted by mustachioed anchor man and consummate slimeball, Heraldo Rivera, who chortled and mocked the protesters, while the NYPD flagrantly violated their First Amendment rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.

read more | digg story

Update 10/05/2007

The new “official” trailer is out, much slicker…

One of my pet peeves: receipt and bag checks upon leaving big-box retail stores. Here’s yet another story of a guy unlawfully detained for refusing to kowtow to a rent-a-cop. Worse, when he called the real police for help he was unlawfully arrested for refusing to show his drivers license to the responding officer (something he was not legally required to do). Definitely a guy trying to make a point. He should sue the responding officer personally for violating his civil rights. I’m glad there are people out there willing to do this, while most of the rest of us meekly obey “the authorities.”

read more | digg story

Update 9/21/07

Yay! All charges were dropped against this guy!

IMG_3756.png, originally uploaded by ebird.

My sister has the most awesome hairdo ever! It’s got rats!

Another month, another Ruby Meetup. The first half was a presentation on Haml (XHTML Abstraction Markup Language), which is a programmer-efficient, meta-language for describing XHTML that sits in for the normal Embedded Ruby (ERB/.rhtml) templating in a Rails app. It looks good. For complex pages using lots of CSS and tables and stuff, it’s way more readable and elegant. I might use it if I end up making tons of templates in a Rails app. Like Python (and YAML), Haml is whitespace sensitive and you have to be real careful to get things just so. In exchange, you end up with something more maintainable and much more human-readable and easier to debug than the usual template deal where you mix code and HTML. I’m a big fan of abstraction and code generation. So, yay: Haml. But right now the “cognitive load” of learning it, as the presenter, Ed Allan, described it makes me want to put it off for another day.

After the break we got a presentation by a couple of guys (MIT brothers?), Zack and Ben Skolnik, who are trying to implement IRC as a Web application via Rails. Their app is called, Netwirc. It’s not an IRC client in Rails — no, they are reinventing the IRC wheel completely and putting as much Web 2.0 spin on it as they can, although I think they are mostly in the flailing around faze for what they might be able to do with it and how they might monetize it. Newirc is a nice little Web app, and a testament to the RAD qualities of Rails that they could put it together so quickly. They launched last September. It seemed like they have implemented a lot of the key functionality of IRC. They said they did it in their spare time, and have recently been trying to make a go of it as a real startup business. It’s rough around the edges, but it works. I had a hard time getting too excited, tho; I’m too busy to even use real IRC. But I wish them luck. The Q/A session focused on how in the world they would scale their app. Good question.

Frankly, I have started questioning the scalability of Rails. I mean, I’m sure you can scale Rails. But Rails people seem especially sensitive and defensive about this question. I’ve been to whole meetings on the subject and so far I haven’t been impressed. A few servers behind a round-robin Apache-based software load balancer is not a big system. As sort of a refugee from the enterprise software world, I’m pretty familiar with building Web applications that have a lot of users. The reality is that nothing seems to scale well. Managing user load is scary even when you have tons of hardware, money and engineering to throw at it. every time your user-base grows significantly, something breaks despite planning. Ruby stuff is not inherently inefficient, it’s just young and the answers and best solutions to everything aren’t apparent yet. Ruby people need to stop acting so defensive and just bust out some load testing and figure it out. The consensus tonight seemed to be, “We’ll worry about that later! And hey it worked for Twitter, right?” No, it didn’t. Prepare for the worst, Rubyists. Assume your apps will explode.

It was also suggested tonight by one of the organizers that instead of just presentations all the time, it might be nice to have some less formal East Bay Ruby Meetups focused on coding and problem solving. Sounds good to me.

Alex Jones had a good time yelling at the Queen yesterday for “staring” down Bush.
Later he said:

….[I'm sorry?] if I got a little bit angry in the last hour about the Queen of England humiliating the presidency in public… looking at our President with hatred… the whole government worshiping her and calling her Her Majesty, and our leaders bowing to a monarch. But it’s the antithesis of what our nation is. ….

mp3 sound clip