Disqus - Latest Comments for hogganbeck

Re: Polling Medicare - Business - The Atlantic

hogganbeck — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:16:40 -0000

Why do we have to go back to the 1960's to talk about this stuff? Yes, I get the point that yesterday's mild controversies are today's settled policy. But today's settled policy is the scary part. The thinking of 1962 did not include everything we now know about these kind of programs. We have had a long time to witness a build up of various fairness adjustments and unanticipated costs undermine the viability of the program itself. What the participants in those polls didn't know about Medicare has filled shelves of books. I don't read Klein unless pointed to him, but if the last couple of days are any indication, debating health care with him must be like debating science fiction with a Star Trek geek. That is, filled with arcane musings over things that don't exist.

Re: Commonwealth: If We Had Lowered Costs, Costs Would Be Lower - Business - The Atlantic

hogganbeck — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:15:22 -0000

I'm not sure how the slight mitigation of a disaster accumulates as an actual benefit. Does the mitigation compound over time to result in something only mostly disastrous? Is that like mostly dead?

Re: Worst sentence ever written in journalism?

hogganbeck — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 14:14:58 -0000

It's all a great big clause salad, but this bothers me particularly:

'...House Democrats basically told administration officials, “I told you so.”'

It feels exactly like the kind of blog-writing that an editorial standards advocate would hate.

Re: Cooler

hogganbeck — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:52:29 -0000

Ran across an interesting talk about memcached here: http://www.facebook.com/not...

This gets a bit in-depth, but it is a description of how Facebook is making use of, and modifying, memcached and the considerations in scaling Web 2.0 applications. There seem to be a lot of people out there using ROR to build applications for Facebook.

Re: Final Project: Tips for the Writeup and Features

hogganbeck — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 22:28:49 -0000

Wow. That must be some of that fancy Rails magic I keep hearing about.

Re: Final Project: Tips for the Writeup and Features

hogganbeck — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 19:58:10 -0000

"If you are adapting Assignment 5 for the final project, you may only use one self-defined feature."

I'm guessing that's from last year?

Re: Cooler

hogganbeck — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 17:51:37 -0000

Fantastic. It works! Thx.

Re: Cooler

hogganbeck — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 16:58:52 -0000

John:

At one point, you used a button in your GUI file window that brought up Terminal already cd'd to that particular directory. What was that? My wrists hurt.

Re: Syllabus

hogganbeck — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:44:34 -0000

Good enough(I just reread that and it sounded kind-of not nice when it was intended just as conversational...sorry).

I just used './', but that's just Unix-specific, right?

Re: Syllabus

hogganbeck — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:03:18 -0000

Reading for Sept 24. Going through the code in the Ruby text...p 78 in the pdf version. The code calls on the method 'require_relative', which is not part of the base until 1.9(I'm running 1.86). I get an 'undefined method' error. My guess is that just using 'require' and the full path to the file will make it work.

Re: Cooler

hogganbeck — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:32:50 -0000

Python:

print "Hello, world. " * 10

Re: Assignment 0

hogganbeck — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:37:54 -0000

It's Dave, actually.
I may be off the map for what the book says. I haven't bought it yet, and I don't want to mislead anyone. But I think a pretty solid overall point to make is that Gems gets updated first.

Step 1 is actually making sure that XCode is installed on your system. That sets you up with Rails 1.2.6 and Gems 1.0.

I didn't realize that Gems had a flag for self-updating. What I did was per the ruby on rails download page.. Instead of updating Rails first, I went to the link for downloading Gems

Then I used Gems to update Rails. In Terminal type "gem update rails". Gems is pretty key because its the package manager.

Re: Assignment 0

hogganbeck — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 18:03:35 -0000

For those who are doing this in OSX 10.5, make sure you update Gems before you use it to update Rails. If you don't use the updated version of Gems to execute 'gem update rails', it doesn't seem to know which version it has and you will end up with two versions of rails and some broken links in whatever system variables Rails is using to know which version it is. The rails website leads you to believe that you should run 'gem update rails' as the first step then run the setup.rb script to update gems.

If you do go down this path, run 'gem uninstall rails' and pick the latest version. Then use the newly installed Gems to re-run 'gem update rails'. After that, everything should work OK.

At least, that has been my experience.

Re: The vapidity of cable news, part 1 in an ongoing series

hogganbeck — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:07:15 -0000

Do not attempt to replace the beer with Zima or wine coolers, however. These are known to cause your IQ to drop by 30 points.

I always secretly liked Zima. This explains a lot.