Ideal Nintendo Revolution price

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata let it slipped that Nintendo’s next generation gaming console, the Revolution, would cost less than $300 USD. What would be an ideal price for that console? I say that around $199 USD ($235 CAD), I wouldn’t think twice about it a just get it.

More on DVD’s

This article was linked on Digg.

Disney is one of the worst offenders, so much so that I have actually returned a Disney disc after finding out that there was no way my kids could watch the movie until seven, SEVEN ads played first.

And the MPAA wonders why people get their movies on BitTorrent in DivX format? Let me explain: you double click on the file and the movie immediatly starts. That’s it! The people who rip DVD’s and put them online, even though they are breaking the law, have more respect for me than the movie industry does!

Can we go back to VHS now?

For Christmas, I recieved season 4 of 24. Can anyone explain why I can’t fast forward the Interpol and FBI messages? Or the “this does not reflect the views of Fox” screen? And why do I have to listen to an animation before I can select what I want to do with the DVD? Why do they block the very useful Menu button?

Technology is supposed to make things faster and more enjoyable for us, not force us to watch what the MPAA decides we need to watch.

Update: I found this nice quote on a website:

“True greatness is measured by how much freedom you give to others, not by how much you can coerce others to do what you want.” –Larry Wall, Creator of Perl

I think it’s perfect for the DVD situation.

Google doesn’t work anymore here

I wonder if it’s related to me previous post, but for the last 12 hours, maybe even more, I haven’t been able to access Google or Gmail. I asked a few people on IRC, and they have no problem. What’s going on? Is Videotron broken on Christmas?

In the mean time, if you want to send me an email, post a comment below until this situation is fixed.

Update: seems fixed. Must’ve been a DNS issue.

Gmail’s spam filter is broken?

Is Gmail’s spam filter broken or downgraded? Before this week, one or maybe two spam got into my inbox per week, the rest was correctly classified as spam, with no false positives. However, this week I’ve had 5-6 spam per day in my inbox. What’s up with that?

Rubygems installation

Just a quick tip to people installing RubyGems: make sure you don’t have a .gemrc nor $GEM_PATH or $GEM_HOME defined. I was trying to install it on my new Ubuntu installation last night, and I kept having problems. Finally, I renamed .gemrc to gemrc and unset $GEM_PATH and the installation worked flawlessly afterwards. I don’t know if it’s a know issue, but that’s how I fixed the problem.

Building a Digg clone in 100 lines of Common Lisp

When Reddit, a Digg-like social news site, announced that it was migrating from Common Lisp to Python, there was a bit of an uproar on comp.lang.lisp. People did not understand why they were moving away from a better language (I won’t cite the reasons here, you can find that yourself.) Creating a Reddit-like site has since become a hobby for Common Lispers who are convinced of the superiority of their language.

Here is a screencast of a guy writing a Reddit clone in about 20 minutes and 100 lines of code. Very interesting. It would’ve been even more interesting if he’d used an actual database, but that could easily be the subject of a subsequent screencast. Lispers often talk about CLSQL, this might be a chance to see what that project is about.

Also, it seems a lot of Lisp developers are Mac coders: all the Lisp screencasts I’ve seen have been on Macs, and two of them are using LispWorks.

color or colour in Ruby? Both!

My friend Theo has a small rant regarding methods with the word “color” in them: because he is so used to writing colour, he needs to backspace to correct himself:

Every time I’m forced to type “color” I wince. It’s spelled “colour”. Just because it isn’t explicitly pronounced does not make it right to drop it. Sadly though color will probably eventually kill out colour and posts like these will be laughed at for looking ridiculous. Maybe I am. But at least I’m not ridiculos or ridiculis.

Well, fear not Theo, for Ruby is an extremely reflective and introspective language! Here is a method to alias instance and class methods so that you can use either “color” or “colour”:

def alias_color_to_colour
  classes = []
  ObjectSpace.each_object { |o| classes << o if o.class == Class }
  classes.each { |c|
    c.instance_methods(false).each { |im|
      c.class_eval("alias #{im.gsub("color", "colour")} #{im}") if im =~ /color/i
    }

    c.methods(false).each { |cm|
      c.instance_eval("alias #{cm.gsub("color", "colour")} #{cm}") if cm =~ /color/i
    }
  }
end

Si if you have a class with a random_color method, you can now use random_colour. Not entirely tested, so the code may have bugs and I wouldn’t recommend using it in production code, but how cool is it that you can do that? Ask a Java programmer to accomplish the same thing just for fun!

Quick comment by the way: why does ObjectSpace only support each_object? Why aren’t #select, #collect, #reject, #detect implemented too?

Weak vs strong typing

Read this nice article for a nice comparaison of weak and strong typing. He seems to freely interchange static and strong typing and dynamic and weak typing, but I can forgive that, because the article is pretty good.

Summary: dynamic typing makes most tasks faster and easier to code, but being able to optionally declare types for variables and/or functions would be a nice addition. He mentions that Common Lisp does it, and Perl 6 will too.

Why RoR instead of ASP.Net?

Scobble asks:

One question, though. Have you checked out the latest ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2005? If so, what about it turns you to Rails?

I can’t answer for Phil, but my reasons would be: cost, productivity, open source and fun.