buffington

Across the street from my home there's a house where the yard backs up to the street (normally houses tend to face the streets on both sides, but not this one).

Living at the house is a yippy dog and the yippy dog's owner. I'm not sure what kind of dog it is, but it's very excitable. It'll explode into barking and frantic dog like behavior at the slightest sort of noise - cars passing by, people walking, leaves blowing, eyes blinking. It's the most annoying kind of behavior a dog can exhibit aside from leg humping, which I'd bet it probably does a lot of.

The owner of this dog is huge. I say this not to be rude - I have no bigotry towards huge people (nor for little people, nor medium people), but her hugeness factors into the dog's behavior. The huge owner of this yappy dog sits in a chair in the yard and screams and yells at the dog when the dog barks at anything (her own volume louder and more annoying than the dog), rather than get up and strangle it. While part of me is tickled that, if even just indirectly, a huge woman screams and yells at the sound of grass growing, it gets old fast.

To me it's obvious that the dog explodes into barking fits because of the woman launching into screams of "Tiger NO! Tiger come here! Tiger bad dog!". Tiger thinks he's doing a good job of defending his yard - it must be so because at the sign of any threat the boss dog barks and froths just like Tiger. Eventually Tiger finishes what he believes to be his purpose for living and the owner congratulates him for his work, Tiger not knowing that she's delighted that he's stopped yapping (and the owner not knowing that he stopped just so he could be congratulated).

One of the owner's trademark noises while foaming at the mouth can only be described by instruction. The way it works is this: scream and yell for a moment to work up your froth and to get into the spirit of things, then exhale as deeply as you can, and when you're nearly passed out, gasp as dramatically as you can. This is the noise that motivates me to write about my neighbor with such poison. I don't even feel guilty hoping that the dog might get caught in the vortex while going to be congratulated, taking both dog and owner out in one silent event.

Hell hath no fury like an easily distracted programmer with his office windows open annoyed by a pack of yappy dogs while trying desperately to get back into flow.

So this is a pure out and out rant against Ruby, and it's short, and when it comes down to it it's the kind of rant that gets hard core developers to say "so just do it the right way yourself". To them, I say "do it the right way yourself" preemptively and launch into my rant.

The Ruby Time class sucks. If I do Time.now, I get back a time object tied to my current time zone, which it determines by looking at what time zone my computer is set to. Not that big of a deal.


>> Time.now
=> Wed Oct 11 00:01:43 PDT 2006


The problem is, I can't adjust that time zone at all, not without some pretty serious hacks, and that's stupid. I can't even create a UTC time (essentially Greenwich Mean Time) and say "Hey, this time here, let's convert it to Mountain Standard Time", or even GMT-7 for that matter. Once it's UTC, always UTC. Once it's PDT, always PDT.

Of course there are hacks (and truthfully, I've already come up with a not so elegant solution which I won't yet share [can't effectively rant and foam at the mouth with a solution in hand]) but Ruby should just make this easy. I should be able to do:


>>t = Time.now
=> Wed Oct 11 00:01:43 PDT 2006
>>t.convert("GMT-6")
=> Wed Oct 11 01:01:43 MDT 2006


But I can't. I can't even extend the Time class by making a Time#convert that will return the time as MDT without converting the original time to a string, individually poking at it's parts, messing with system internals that may break other stuff, and hope that it'll go quickly.

Ruby, why do you hurt me so?

Also, I know about TZinfo and it's giganté sized pile of international time zones. It's a good library, but not very fast, and converting one time to another time when you don't know exactly what zone you're converting too or from is nigh impossible.

Perhaps when Ruby is back in my good graces (tomorrow morning after a vigorous night of sleeping) I'll write up my solution.

Today was full of ambition, full of failure. To start:

Went to get the truck's crunchy feeling brake pads replaced. Had an appointment and everything, and after the mechanic looked at if for two hours, he came back out and said "All set, we made some adjustments and replaced your wiper blades. And oh, the only way to fix that crunchy feeling is to replace your brake pads, otherwise the rotor will get messed up."

I asked if he could just do that now, and, seriously, he said "Oh, well, we're all booked up now, you'll have to make an appointment."

Later on I figured I'd have a better hand at making some code work for a client project I'm finishing up. In this case, I needed to get ImageMagick and Ruby to work nicely with each other on my machine.

Let me just say this - if the journey to get that combo working starts in say, Los Angeles, then the destination is, I don't know, somewhere at the core of Jupiter. I have never in my life seen such a brittle installation of software. One part requires another part, which requires another part of a certain version, which in turn needs all parts to be Capricorns unless they were born in a leap year at which point they need be Sagitarius, and you must make sure you already have a natural gas dryer, fourteen boa constrictors, three of them female, an Audi Quattro balancing on two wheels, a Pygmy who can speak Mandarin while feeding narcaleptic goats with his belly button, and a bathtub full of nachos, cats, and silent children.

And so, I spent nearly my entire day working feverishly, but getting absolutely nothing accomplished.

This sort of thing grinds me up because it's hard enough to get deeply into flow in the first place to solve these kinds of problems - when it's fruitless is seems like all the more the waste, and especially so when you're working on a Saturday so that when Monday comes you can work on the good stuff without feeling swamped.

Remember the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise? He played a detective that would arrest people for murder who were innocent, but were declared guilty by some clairvoyant triplets floating in a pool of milk who could see the future. Scary sort of science fiction right? I mean, who knows if the milk pool floaters are really right (because you never can prove that someone would have done something, especially when you've locked them up) and I mean really, how can you eliminate people who are susceptible of becoming killers?

Even if you were innocent, it'd be pretty frightening to think that your government was trying to figure out how determine if you, Joe Citizen, were susceptible of becoming a killer, especially if your government makes mistakes.

I present you this:

"Clearly at the end of the day, we've got to eliminate that pool of people who are susceptible to becoming killers." —United States Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, when asked how to prevent terrorism while talking in the context of psychological profiling.

Right, so the authorities thwarted a terrorist plot where said terrorists were planning on using liquid explosives to blow up some airplanes, and now all liquids are banned from being carried on the plane.

A couple of things spring to mind.

* My eye doctor insists I use eye drops while flying, once an hour.
* Considering all the security measures thus far, and considering the ease at which security measures are breached, my being able to see is about the only thing banning all liquids from airplanes is going to stop.
* Please, universe, let's all at once describe every possible method in which an airplane can be evaporated midflight. Not because terrorists haven't already thought of it, but because if it happens to be that I'm on that flight, I'd like it to be a clever surprise.
* Solution: full gastrointestinal cleansing via wheat grass shots prior to flying, everyone flies nude, serious mouth inspections and a thrashing with reeds. Judges determine your level of nudeness acceptability and seat you with those of similar acceptability. No alarms, no surprises.
* Thinking more about the nudity and gel (which is a new thought entirely), everyone should just get cozy pods filled with some explosive proof gel. Don't ask how it'd work, this should be plenty to get your mind figuring it out (take note, also, of the nudity acceptability class I'd be sitting in):