Where’s Lou

The Ansi factory at Where’s Lou has been pretty quiet lately, so here’s a brief multi post to keep up.

Today is of course the day after the world entered the iPhone event horizon. People have been unusually chatty, then unusually quiet, but appear to be happy.

Alexzander had his 12th b-day party, and has two friends staying over. They’re downstars now playing the Guitar Hero 2 for the 360.

The other day Brenda went upstairs with a yoga dvd. I asked what she was planning on doing, since she didn’t have a way of playing it, and she said she just needed to hear it so that didn’t matter. Turns out since they look the same she was assuming you would get the audio if you put a dvd into a cd player. I thought that was an interesting insight into her perspective on technology.

Lastly we saw the show once. If you make music or like to see people perform I’d recommend it.

Pictured here is a Sipura SPA-3000. The company was acquired by LinkSys at some point, but I’m not certain how long ago. It’s a very simple device with two phone connections, an ethernet connection, and a browser based configuration designed to make you hate everything about the device over the span of several days.

But once you have it configured properly it will act as a “hop-on hop-off” adapter to convert plain copper phone service to SIP and back again. One of the phone jacks is connected to the line bringing dial-tone into your home, and the other is connected to your house wiring, and the Ethernet brings the VoIP via SIP to your Asterisk PBX and back.

And why would you do such a thing? One reason you may be thinking of would be the old mountain climbing adage: “because I’m a masochist.” But that would be wrong.

With Brenda’s mother in law Rebecca staying with us at the house, and Alex now receiving more phone calls from his school friends, the real reason is this:

I’m sick of answering the phone.

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Hello all. Two quick things:

This blog is now available on whereslou.com whereslou.net and whereslou.org. So enjoy.

Also I took the blog aggregation widget off the sidebar. Which leaves me with a problem - that’s actually what I was using as an rss reader. Very low tech. But now I need one. Please leave a comment if there’s one you use that you’d recommend.

Thanks in advance!

A cornerstone of any development is the development environment you’re working in. If you’re plumbing you don’t just walk in and start twisting pipes together with your hands - you’ve got a tool belt and box and more stuff in the truck. So a big step on the learning Ruby project has been to figure out what that’s going to be.

Started first by looking online. Some things here and here lead me to believe it’s going to be jEdit with it’s Ruby plugin or Eclipse with RadRails. I’ve used Eclipse before with a colleague when we were learning Java, and in spite of that experience it looked like that was the one to try first. Here’s what it took to get running on Ubuntu Feisty desktop 7.04

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The first claim I’ve made on Jyte was inspired by my exercise in learning Ruby on Rails.

http://jyte.com/cl/at-some-point-we-have-to-stop-making-new-programming-languages

Oddly enough, it wasn’t a claim that had a lot of backers. :)

It did though unfold into an interesting discussion in the comments area. That discussion shows two things. First: don’t assume terms which have a specific meaning as well as one or more general meanings can be used “cold” in a discussion. This guy used the very specific terms yield and generator which both have several meanings - even in the programming languages context - other than the exact one he intended to convey. Generator for example is a very specific and well known term in Ruby, but that’s not what he was talking about.

In other words - you need to sync up your glossary before you can have a meaningful discussion. I’ve seen tons of disagreements in technology between people talking face to face that turned out to be a difference in what each person was understanding a specific term in their positions means.

Second: I believe this shows the debating cred is not misplaced.