Archive for March, 2007

Problems relying on network time

Posted in Technology, Transhumanism, Travel on March 10th, 2007 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

Tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM I’m flying to Mexico to enjoy spring break. And tonight, according to congress, Daylight Savings Time begins, which means the clocks should move ahead an hour. The real question is if the computers which are running the clocks are going to listen to congress or not. Normally I preach that network time is so much more reliable than manual, independent clocks that drift. But today is totally different. I’m trying to figure out what alarm I can set to wake up in time to get to the airport. I can’t trust my “smart” cell phone….

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Ignite Video on Geeks & Hippies

Posted in Humor, Seattle, Transhuman Morality, Transhumanism, Uploading on March 10th, 2007 by leodirac – Be the first to comment

The nice folks at Ignite posted videos for the rest of our talks from the second Ignite night, including my presentation on Why only Geeks and Hippies can save the world. Watching it, I see that it’s a lot rougher than I remember. The text as I intended to deliver it is available here, which might be a bit more coherent. Anyway, here’s the video: Enjoy!

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Problems Scaling Ruby to Complex Systems

Posted in Personal Growth, Ruby on Rails, Software Engineering on March 4th, 2007 by leodirac – 8 Comments

I’m pretty annoyed with Ruby right now. At least I feel that way. Looking a little deeper I realize the source of the annoyance is, like usual, my own shortcomings. My friends and I embarked on a software project a while back. I helped talked the group into using Ruby on Rails as the framework over choices like Java or .net because I was excited about it. Many had reservations. Today I’m annoyed at myself for not listening to them more. The biggest problem with an uncompiled language is that there’s no compiler to tell you when you’ve screwed something…

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