"Frederick Bodmer's "The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages", an oldie but goodie from 1944. Douglas Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies"."
- Olifante
"I love GitX and use the commit view all the time. The visual diff makes it so simple to see what you have changed. I don't bother teaching coworkers that much about command-line git now, I just point them to GitX, which suffises for 90% of their interactions with git. One simple thing I'd like to have is the ability to just click a button and pull or push from a remote branch."
- Olifante
olifante on Downtown Phoenix, AZ some citizens decide to exercise their 2nd Amendment Rights : A man, who decided not to give his name, was walking around the pro-health care reform rally at 3rd and Washington streets, with a pistol on his hip, and an AR-15 (a semi-automatic assault rifle) - http://www.reddit.com/r...
olifante on Numerous people with assault rifles attend Obama speech. Police said they didn't need permits and were breaking no laws. Does anyone think this would have been the response if the ones carrying the guns had been, say black? - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"A million threads? Hardly. A search for "rifle" posts this week gives me 10 reddit posts connected with Obama, and half of them of them are dupes (same poster, same title), e.g. http://www.reddit.com/r...http://www.reddit.com/r..."
- Olifante
olifante on Numerous people with assault rifles attend Obama speech. Police said they didn't need permits and were breaking no laws. Does anyone think this would have been the response if the ones carrying the guns had been, say black? - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"there are people carrying assault rifles to public events and you guys are debating trivialities like the race of the gun owners? You guys are insane."
- Olifante
olifante on Numerous people with assault rifles attend Obama speech. Police said they didn't need permits and were breaking no laws. Does anyone think this would have been the response if the ones carrying the guns had been, say black? - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"Watch the video. They say there was a white person in the anti-Obama camp that was carrying an assault weapon. The reporters state that it's not clear whether the second person with an assault gun (the black guy apparently being interviewed) was anti-Obama, pro-Obama or something else altogether."
- Olifante
olifante on Ask Reddit: Google Code, Sourceforge, GitHub, etc. or in-house (public) trac/svn. Which is best for commercial code about to be released under GPL? - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"Unfuddle offers an Issue Tracker AND Git and Subversion hosting. AFAIK, their the only ones offering free private hosting plans (maximum 2 developers, 200MB). Check it out: http://unfuddle.com/"
- Olifante
olifante on The most powerful magnets in the universe - quakes on their surfaces cause massive gamma bursts so powerful that one in 2004 was the equivalent to a dental X-ray for the ISS astronauts, even at a range of over 50,000 light years - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"What the hell are you talking about? This is ONE article written by ONE person and suddenly it's the Python community's fault for allowing it to exist? Spare me. This victimization technique should added to the list of Logical Fallacies, if it isn't already there."
- Olifante
"That piece Carr wrote about Le Web was a hack job -- yet another manifestation of the undying British national habit of badmouthing the French on every possible occasion. Done by professional comedians once in a while it's fun. Done by an entire nation it's disgusting. Compared to Carr's, Michael Arrington's article on Le Web seemed like a balanced critique, and that's saying something."
- Olifante
"As a pythonista who likes ruby, I think your "Perl's ugly sister" comments were a shot in the foot and detracted from the rest of your argument, which concentrates on rails and has little to do with Ruby itself."
- Olifante
olifante on Rich Hickey interview on Clojure, STM, Agents, Multimethods & More - Plus: exclusive info on a new 5th concurrency primitive in Clojure - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"InfoQ offers a transcript of the interview, but as costumary it's inside an impossibly small text box. I've posted to the full transcript in a more readable format to my blog: [http://olifante.blogs.com/covil..."
- Olifante
olifante on Rich Hickey interview on Clojure, STM, Agents, Multimethods & More - Plus: exclusive info on a new 5th concurrency primitive in Clojure - http://www.reddit.com/r...
"I disagree, I found the interview quite interesting. Hadn't heard about the possibly forthcoming 5th concurrency primitive, ClojureScript or ClojureCLR, among other things."
- Olifante
"Actually line 32 of the default.rb recipe already has group "admin". Turns out I just needed to add the "admin" group: # sudo groupadd admin Unfortunately the run_chef script got stuck at a later point after fixing this. I got the following error: ERROR: service[openvpn] (/var/chef/cookbooks/openvpn/recipes/default.rb line 85) had an error: /etc/init.d/openvpn start returned 1, expected 0 [ommited some hard to read errors, basically the same as follows but not as well formatted] ---- Begin output of /etc/init.d/openvpn start ---- STDOUT: STDERR: ---- End output of /etc/init.d/openvpn start ---- from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.6.2/lib/chef/mixin/command.rb:133:in `chdir' from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.6.2/lib/chef/mixin/command.rb:133:in `run_command' from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.6.2/lib/chef/provider/service/init.rb:91:in `start_service' from /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/chef-0.6.2/lib/chef/provider/service.rb:60:in `action_start' from..."
- Olifante
"Installing capistrano didn't put anything in the path, had to execute cap directly from /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/cap I also had to install these additional dependencies, otherwise cap would complain: sudo apt-get install libopenssl-ruby ruby1.8-dev make sudo gem install echoe activesupport Even then I couldn't get the recipe to work in my Linode Ubuntu 8.10 slice. I get this error INFO: Starting Chef Solo Run ERROR: directory[/etc/openvpn/easy-rsa] (/var/chef/cookbooks/openvpn/recipes/default.rb line 29) had an error: can't find group for admin"
- Olifante
"You're wrong about Komodo Edit, it's one of the few free editors that does multi-language highlighting. From the [feature list](http://www.activestate.com/komodo_...): > Multi-language file support > Correct syntax coloring of multi-language files and templated files, common in many web programming frameworks. Add custom language support (User-Defined Languages or UDL, used to provide support for RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Mason, Smarty and Django)."
- Olifante
"Very interesting presentation on Dejavu, an ORM similar to SQLAlchemy and Django Models. It has a lovely pythonic syntax for doing queries with lambda expressions, e.g.: box.recall(Comic, lambda c: 'Hob' in c.Title or '#' in c.Title) Instead of for instance Django's Comic.objects.filter(Title__contains='Hob') | Comic.objects.filter(Title__contains='#') I also loved the approach to converting the python queries to SQL code: Dejavu converts the python queries into an AST, which is then deparsed into the desired SQL dialect, an approach that apparently was used long ago by Glorp, a Smalltalk ORM. Dejavu can also work with non-relational backends, such as flatfiles, LDAP stores, memcache, RAM and even the Python shelve. In the question round, Robert also showed a very simple syntax for joins: Table1 & Table2 represents an inner join. Table1 | Table2 represents an outer join. Table1 << Table2 represents a left join. One question that was left unanswered was whether Dejavu supports the..."
- Olifante
"So the 1st president of the EU would be a war criminal? What a way to credibilize the post. If this comes to pass, it'll be blatant proof that European public opinion is completely irrelevant and disregarded on the matter of who rules the EU. I guess the Americans are right, we are turning into a mammoth bureaucracy ruled by an old boy's club, unanswerable to the voters."
- Olifante
"Why is mdipierro so disliked here in Reddit? Whenever he writes a comment, it seems to attract downvotes like a magnet, even when he's saying pretty neutral things or even helpful things. Yes, he's always evangelizing web2py, but he does it by always arguing from a features/technical perspective. For the record, I'm using Django and happy with it. I tried web2py and it seemed pretty slick, but in the end I decided that Django had the greater momentum, community and ecosystem."
- Olifante
"* Native Portuguese; * Fluent Danish after living 2 years there; * Fluent French comprehension (oral and written), oral production currently a bit rusty; * Good Spanish comprehension, reasonable oral production; * Reasonable comprehension of Italian and German, moderate oral production; * Moderate to reasonable reading comprehension of Swedish and Catalan; * Some Russian, Hungarian and Czech; * A little Greek, Arabic and Turkish; * Currently learning spoken Mandarin with the Pimsleur audio courses and loving it!"
- Olifante
"I shudder every time I hear some news article mention the possibility of Blair becoming the EU President. If they really try to make this happen, I'll be demonstrating on the street against it."
- Olifante
"So "peace" is "war", doublespeak is alive and well. George Orwell would feel vindicated. Tony Blair is a war criminal, like George Bush and the mentors of the criminal and ill-conceived rape of Iraq. I don't suppose they'll ever be tried for war crimes, but it doesn't change the fact that any decent person should never cease to remind them of what they are."
- Olifante
"Domains are becoming less relevant as more and more users just google the name instead of typing in the address. Choose any non-obscure domain name with one of the common TLDs (.com, .org, .net, .me, .eu) and you should be fine."
- Olifante