Still no iPhones for the fido faithful

Fido continues to reward their contract-holders and long-term customers (I've been with them, maybe 8 years???) by refusing to sell us iPhones.

Maybe I was wrong when I said Roger's didn't mess up Fido yet.....

Free music downloads

Some artists that get it...

Nine Inch Nails: http://tyntapp.tynt.com/go/0LQk93iZ40j

Kristin Hersh: http://kristinhersh.cashmusic.org/

When are the music companies going to figure out that people who love music will support musicians without being forced to?

Memcache flushing/restarting after deploy--the easy way

Thanks to WillJ for an easy trick to flush out memcache as an alternative to restarting the process every time you deploy.

$ echo "flush_all" | nc localhost 11211

He also has an interesting article on how to connect to MySQL on engineyard.... 

Don't C++ Javascript!

After reading Douglas Crockford's latest book Javascript, the Good Parts, I came to appreciate more the small elegant language hidden inside Javascript.

However, I'm worried it's going to go the way of C++ with the new EMCAScript standard.  I don't think we need to turn it into a class-based language.  What I think should be fixed, though:

1. Block scoping--I just can't get used to the function scoping of Javascript when it looks so much like C.

2. Getting rid of globals--default globals are just wrong.

3. A simple namespace mechanism.

4. How about generating an error if you use a variable before it's set? 

5. Fix == and !=

6. Get rid of needless keywords, add missing ones (like undefined) 

Maybe instead of bloating up javascript, people should focus on a re-write of the browser DOM API.

An injustice of galactic proportions

This is probably old news to my astronomer friends, but I can't believe that even as you read this post, our "galaxy", the Milky Way, is cannibalizing an innocent bystander, the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy.  

Here I thought our galaxy was pretty amazing in its own right, but it's really just a space hog. 

What would you do with Half a Trillion Dollars?

I'm surprised I haven't come across this in the mainstream or alternative media yet.  It's from February 2008. Gwynne Dyer is suggesting that military-industrial complex is actually gearing up for a much more extensive and expensive cold war with China.

Just think of the goodwill that could be "bought" around the world with that kind of money.   Ugh.

Fido doesn't want my business

I found it quite frustrating to learn that, according to Fido customer service, I am not eligible to upgrade to an iPhone for six months.  I was told there was no way to get one sooner, even after asking if I would have to cancel my two current plan (half-way through) and pay the cancellation fee.

This is seriously making me think of canceling my plan altogether and going with the cheapest available pre-paid provider of the moment.

The mind boggles.

P.S.  What are Fido customers going to do if they want to upgrade their iPhone before 3 years is up?  Will everybody else have to wait until their contract is complete?

Toluu is pretty cool

I've been trying out toluu.com lately.  It lets you upload your RSS feeds and then matches you to other Toluu members and see what they are reading.  It's nicely integrated with the bloglines feed reader (the only one I tried)--if I add a new feed to toluu it pops me out to bloglines and lets me add it there too.

However, there was one problem getting going with toluu--after finally sending an e-mail to them, I learned that I needed to add more than 8 feeds before it could match me to other members and suggest feeds.

I'm always on the lookout for stuff that makes it possible to find resources from people with similar interests.  That's what made Usenet so great in the pre-WWW days, before it got saturated.