At work today, I had to figure out how to display someone’s AIM status on a web page (ideally with minimal programming involved). After having a hard time finding simple solutions via google, I asked my coworker Rich if knew of any. Indeed he did, and it was a simple programming free solution.
I had never heard of Mata Hari before. I was looking up the new X-files movie and stumbled into her on the Wikipedia. Quite possibly one of the first femme fatals – exotic dancer turned spy and executed for her services. I am starting to think I need to forget about my ideas for the Cold War version of steam punk and start thinking up some stories of Art Nouveau era craziness. Word.
Ever heard of this? Me neither. Wierd. I wish I knew more about the cold war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Debate
Ghandi is one of the most revered characters in history for his now immortalized plights against the British’s occupation of India. Without knowing a lot about Ghandi, I would otherwise assume that he was assassinated by a British aligned shooter – perhaps a political puppet trying to help maintain the crumbling British Empire or a businessmen that made his fortuned by being supported by the British.
Matrix masters podcast 118 features an hour lecture with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran MD, PhD, a professor of Neurosciences at UC SanDiago. He focuses half of the talk on one my personal favorite fringe topics, synesthesia and the other on art. He essentially gives a scientific explanation for humans’ desire for visual art and also sticks it to Western Art History. Installments like this are one of the reasons I love Matrix Masters! Give it a hear. Vilayanur is quite engaging as well as humorous and there isn’t a lot of scientific jargon to turn off the less scientifically inclined.
I’m starting a segment called – peeps you should (maybe) know of the day. There are a lot of people if have heard names of stumbled upon on Wikipedia that seem interesting in my mind.
I was using Google as spell check again for steple.. err… steepl… er “Did you mean steeple?” YES.
The other night while riding bike I was watching some more Charlie Rose vids. This one was vastly interesting.
Firstly, it was the start of the 2007-2008 PPL Youth Mentoring program with PPL (project for pride in living). Jayme, Carolyn, and I took the kids to visit the studio of local contemporary artist Stephan Capiz and the Northrup King Building in NE Minneapolis. We had a great time and the kids really enjoyed it. The session started off with Stephan talking a little about himself and his work. The kids all had a chance to ask questions including how Stephan starts his paintings and how they can start theirs. All the kids then got to pick their favorite artwork in the studio and talk about why the liked it. In the end, the kids had a chance to make their own artwork using some of the ideas they had learned. The sessions was really cool because the kids were able to meet a real professional artist and learn how he works. Stephen was very inspiring and fun to listen to. All in all, I think it was a great way to kick things off for this year’s mentoring program!
Continuing to fight the good fight against Rails’ slowness and processor intensive handicap, I have been working a lot with page caching over the last day. I think I finally have a decent setup now. This write up talks about the Rails side of caching. This assumes that apache is serving up cached pages just fine. This also assumes you are using sub domains and have somewhat advanced caching needs. Finally, it assumes you know what caching is and how to make rails cache and serve cached pages in the first place. Check out this article for some basics (and some advanced things too). A lot of what I have done is based on things there.