Author: Joey deVilla

Last night, I helped Bryce “Zooko” Wilcox-O’Hearn — Python hacker, computer language and security aficionado and all-round sweet guy — purchase a Mac. Like me, he was hoping to get one of the 15″ G4 PowerBooks, and like me, he found out that everyone’s been out of stock for the past few months. He purchased one like mine — a 12″ G4 Powerbook with the RAM maxed out to 640 MB. I walked him through the non-UNIXy stuff over dinner at Mel’s Montreal Deli.

Zooko feels a little odd about Mac OS X, coming from the Debian world. I showed him the Terminal app and said “Here go you, BSD with tcsh as the default shell. Zooko checked for the presence of bash and was pleased to find it there.

“I’d feel safer if I installed Linux on this thing,” he said. “Maybe I can have the best of both worlds by installing Linux, and then running Mac-on-Linux to get at the cool OS X stuff.”

I kept my own counsel, deciding to let him try it out over the next couple of weeks. A lot of the hardcore end up liking using OS X as their desktop UNIX. It’s the pleasant UI, the way the hardware the integrates so well with the software and most of all, the way things just work on the Mac that inspires such loyalty. try it. You’ll like it.

My own personal take, Zooko: buying a PowerBook and putting Linux on it is like winning a gold medal and then having it bronzed.

(Hmmm. Perhaps I’d better don the flame-proof accordion. Really guys, I run Linux too.)

Welcome to the club! Your Steve Jobs idol, to be worshipped several times a day, is in the mail.

(Tyler informs me that there’s a 1GB SODIMM now available, which would put my Mac at the 1.1 GB RAM mark. I checked the price, and it’s 5 times as much as the 512MB SODIMM’s. Really maxing out the RAM would be cool, but I can wait. I need new pants and dress shirts more.)

Hey, longtime readers: remember the guy who sent me time travel spam, and my response?

Wired has a story on him! It turns out that he’s the same spammer who sent me spam last month. It would appear that he’s not a prankster, but a guy who actually believes that the technology exists.

I will have to send him a fetching tinfoil chapeau for Christmas.

(Thanks to Boss Ross for the link!)

There are many changes in the law going on here in the province of Ontario, Canada. Perhaps you’ve heard of the effective decriminalization of marijuana possession or perhaps of the legalization of gay marriage, both issue where there’s been a lot of gnashing of teeth from the right of the political spectrum (and filling of bongs from the left).

However, I predict that these two controversies will pale next to these two:

• The government of Canada has banned smiles on all new passport photos. And as luck would have it, just before I have to go an renew mine. Yes, I’m smiling in my last one, and yes, I think it looks good.
• An Ontario MPP (that’s “Member of Provincial Parliament” to those of you outside Canada) tried to pass a member’s bill banning dwarf-tossing. This, in spite of the fact that the dwarf whose tossing the bill was drafted at the 11th hour to stop says that he wants to be tossed. I suspect some of my more granola-headed hookah-addled associates from Crazy Go Nuts University might say that he’s got a case of self-hatred from living in a heightist society, an altocracy, if you will. The full text of the bill is here.

I get such a kick out of living in interesting times.

And welcome to The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. Thanks for dropping by, and double-thanks to Moxie for linking to me as “the hot accordian [sic] guy”. It’s an honour to be linked to by my dream date blogger.

If you’ve never been here before, you might want to check out this list of what I feel are some of my better postings. (A more complete list is in the sidebar of my old blog).

Some random facts about me:

• I live in Accordion City, Canada
• Born in Manila, Philippines but often mistaken for Hawaiian (bonus photo here!)
• I was the most notorious perma-student at Crazy Go Nuts University. I can honestly use the John Belushi line from Animal House: “Seven years of college, down the drain!”
• You will often see me walk around with an accordion slung on my back (if I’m not playing it, that is); here’s the back story.
• I am also a computer programmer, which is why this blog is peppered with technical entries.
• Movie that changed my life: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
• Concert that changed my life: GWAR, New Year’s Eve 1991, Montreal
• Instrument that changed my life: Duh. Perhaps you should read about how the accordion protected my anal sovereignty from US Customs or why I have the number one Google entry for the word “stagette”.

Once again, welcome to my blog!

In a blog entry titled Liquid Charm Is On Backorder, And I’m #918 On The Waitlist, Andy Ihnatko has this paragraph on the problem of trying to emulate charming rogues:

But does the general male populace appreciate that Colin Farrell arrived at Charm Island only after successfully navigating some desperately long odds? Of course not. So off they go, pointedly not shaving. They start cursing during wedding receptions, appearing in public wearing a crusty vintage Harlem Globetrotters tee shirt, smoking plastic-tipped fruit-flavored cigars in restaurants and stabbing them out in the desserts of nearby patrons. Through miracle or accident, they may find themselves speaking to women; on these occasions they eagerly speak of how much time they spend vomiting during any given day. They are serenely certain that the giggles and phone numbers they receive as a result are all completely genuine.

There is a fine line that divides the rogues from the jackasses, and if you’re on the jackass side of this line, charm will obscure this fact for only so long. Charm, like any other power bestowed upon you by Fate or radioactive spider bites, should be used only for good, or perhaps to extricate yourself from sticky situations. With great charisma should come great responsibility.

1. A Mind Forever Voyaging

I played this very engaging text adventure game, one of the best pieces of interactive sci-fi I’ve seen, on a friend’s Amiga in my first year at Crazy Go Nuts University, but never actually finished it.

Does anyone know where I can buy or download a copy of this game?

(Bonus reading: Check out Grand Text Auto, a blog about “computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms, including interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, and shared virtual environments.”)

2. A copy of the MAD anthology with the scooter story

You might be able to tell from my stories that MAD magazine, which I read voraciously as a kid, is one of my influences. I remember one specific anthology of 1960s MAD which had a story about the rising popularity of scooters and how they’d be an indispensable part of our lives in the future. The story predicted that in the future, Americans would end up shaped like Weebles, with their legs reduced to vestigial nubbins. The last panel shows a buck-toothed caricature of a Vietnamese solider pushing an American around as if he were one of the those inflatable clown puching bags that bounce back after you punch them. I wanted to post some scans of this comic when the Segway was announced.

Does anyone know whch MAD anthology contains this story?

(Special bonus irony: Jack Kamen, father of Segway inventor Dean Kamen, was an illustrator who helped redesign MAD magazine in the 1950s.)

Boss Ross has declared that we are far enough out of stealth mode for me to use my powers as Tucows’ TC/DC (Technical Community Development Coordinator) and actually say what language the developers are using to write this pretty cool blogging tool called Blogware…

Ruby!

Some of you might right now be cocking your head to one side. Ru-what? If you’re one of these people, Ruby is:

• A complete, full, pure object oriented language. Even the number 1 is an instance of class Fixnum.
• Flexible and dynamic. It’s both dynamic (no need to declare variables) and strongly typed (types are checked at runtime). What to add methods to a class at runtime? No prob. Want to add methods to an instance at runtime? Once again, No prob.
• A language with a nice clean, consistent syntax
• Open source

For more detailed information, check out the following:

• What’s Ruby? from the Ruby language web site
• Ruby author Yukihiro Mastumoto’s foreword to Programming Ruby
• The Wikipedia entry for Ruby

Ruby is on the list of languages I’m actively learning, and I’ll be documenting my experiences and other Ruby-related news here.