news

It’s love people, love.

Today a lot of people are aware of race issues because it’s the 40th anniversary of the assasination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But one of the things that I don’t think is being remembered as much(I was 4 at the time so have no memory of the event) is that one of the things he preached was love.

I’ve often used the golden rule as a means of gauging my own behavior. Sure, treat others as you wish to be treated goes a long, long way. And there’s no doubt, it’s a personal work in progress. Still, if more people practiced the ethics of reciprocity routinely the world would be a nicer place. But on this day, when people are already discussing the measure of the King Dream, I’m asking that you love others as you wish to be loved.

It’s harder, it requires more thought and greater commitment. You have to reach deeper and do more, you have to not just say, “hmmm how would I want to be treated” but what would I truly wish for myself and how can I extend that to everyone else.

And if we extend that to more of what we do, our interactions with others, a ever deepening desire to seek that level of love for all people, the world will in fact be better place, and where without further effort, people will be judged by the content of their character.

Go Easy…

Go Easy…: 3.  To the family in the silver Camry: it’s not cool, nor funny, to drive beside me and my daughter-matching our speed-for 6 blocks while you and your wife snap cell phone pics and point at us.

4.   To the two police officers who turned on your lights and siren, and then pulled over the car that was going thru the intersection of Grand Ave. & 36th St. at 4mph while they pointed at Chloe & me and took photos, Thank You. [Heh.]
Source: Large Fella on a Bike

Cyclists are remembered by friends and teammates.

Cyclists are remembered by friends and teammates.: Gough and Peterson were on a training ride with about 8 other riders in Cupertino. A third cyclist hit by the patrol car, 20-year-old Christopher Knapp of Germany, was in stable condition Monday at Stanford University Medical Center, according to the San Francisco Chronicle Web site.

The California Highway Patrol is investigating why Santa Clara County Deputy James Council, 27, crossed the centerline on a right turn and hit the cyclists head on at about 10:30 a.m. Council, who had been with the department for 18 months, was put on administrative leave. He had started his 12 1/2-hour shift at 6 a.m.

Two witnesses said Council told them he had fallen asleep at the wheel, the Chronicle reported. [RIP. Peace to the families and to everyone who was involved.]
Source: The Journal of Competitive Cycling –

A year before the tragedy, Austin Miller wrote “Please Do Not Run Me Over”

A year before the tragedy, Austin Miller wrote “Please Do Not Run Me Over”: A year before a tragic fate befell Austin Miller, the 15 year-old Beaverton student wrote an opinion article on bike safety for his school newspaper titled, “Please Do Not Run Me Over.”

Writing under the pseudonym “Charlie Elsewhere”, the article (full text below) was published in The Savant, the school newspaper at the Art and Communication Magnet Academy in Beaverton, where Miller was a sophomore.

Reading through it, I had mixed emotions. As a father, I found it chilling and immensely sad. As a bike advocate, I found it frustrating. [It is to weep.]

The Great Mojo bar Taste Test!

So a while back I mentioned that I came across new flavors of Mojo bar, one of my favorite treats, and couldn’t believe that there was no information on the web, and no adverts that I had seen about the new flavors. C’mon! In this day and age?

So I’m now organizing The Great Mojo bar Taste Test. They’ve sent me a box of each flavor including the new ones, and I’m in the midst of distributing the stuff to my friends who blog and ride and eat energy bars, with a request that they in turn write about their likes and dislikes, comments, notes, what-have-you. Ya know, blog stuff.

If you think you should be included in the Great Mojo bar Taste Test feel free to write me daniel at circumtech dot com and we’ll discuss it.

More as I think of it!

What’s This Crap About a Ruby Backlash?

What’s This Crap About a Ruby Backlash?: Zed’s rant triggered some patently false anti-Ruby memes that have now been bouncing around the programming blogsphere echo chamber for a few weeks. Disturbingly so. It’s time to put a bullet to the head of the idea that Ruby is experiencing a widespread backlash, that it was just a fad, or that it is inferior to competing technologies such as Groovy. As far as I can tell, the originators of these ideas are people that betray agendas against the success of Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails. Specifically, I’m calling one of them out by name: [It’s never dull ’round these parts.]
Source: Obie Fernandez

Washington Post Flubs Story On RIAA — RIAA Still Not Going After Personal Copies (Yet)

Washington Post Flubs Story On RIAA — RIAA Still Not Going After Personal Copies (Yet): Back at the beginning of December, we helped debunk a story making the rounds claiming that the RIAA was going after a guy named Jeffrey Howell for ripping his own CDs to his computer. That story was misleading, at best. While we know that the RIAA is constantly pushing to extend both the meaning and scope of copyright law, in this case the details were pretty clear that they were not going after Howell for just ripping his CDs, but for putting those ripped files into a shared Kazaa folder. Now you can (and we do!) disagree that simply putting files into a shared folder are infringement, but that’s different than just claiming that ripping the CDs is illegal or that he was being targeted just for ripping the CDs. Unfortunately (and for reasons unclear to me), the Washington Post has revived the story, again repeating that Howell is being targeted for ripping his own CDs. That’s simply not true, and it’s nice to see a true copyright expert like William Patry question the Washington Post on this as well.[An important distinction. A really big ooops.]
Source: Techdirt

js-spec

js-spec: Want to do BDD in Javascript? This aims to clone rspec (http://rspec.rubyforge.org) in javascript.

For now it's very basic, but stuff like the following works.

describe("A newly created Tic-Tac-Toe", function() {
  with (this) {
    before("each", function() {
      this.game = new TicTacToe();
    });
	
    it("should have 9 empty cells", function() {
      game.cells.should( have(9, "items") );
      game.cells.each(function(cell) {
        cell.should( be(undefined) );
      });
    });
	
    it("should have 0 players", function() {
      game.should( have(0, "players") );
    });
  }
});

Stay tuned for more :)
Ask questions, make suggestions and post bugs at http://code.google.com/p/js-spec/issues/ [Nice to see BDD spreading…]
Source: Scripteka