ehb

Have just read an excellent blog post on “dumb databases” and the issue of read vs. write consistency.  My own mesh & churn for open money comes out of the same realizations that in a distributed environment the way to handle many many issues is to put the responsibility on the reader to verify the validity of the data.

I just realized that Behavior Driven Development is very similar to double entry book-keeping in accounting! 

Well, I’ve officially joined the git bandwagon.  I’ve put metaform up on github (the open money projects will come soon, but I think probably on gitorious); I’ve been reading tons of articles about git; I installed it on Tiger (use MacPorts) and Leopard (install from source with these instructions but use 1.5.5); and now I’m blogging about it.  The most interesting article so far on […]

Hey googlers looking for tech-support:
I was trying to install various packages (emacs, etc) from universe on Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10), and I kept getting weird segmentation faults (Setting up emacsen-common (1.4.17) Segmentation fault). Turns out that the problem was that my server was being hosted on a VPS running XEN for virtualization, and you have […]

Ok, so in a previous post I described the rabit-hole which is switching to rails. Below’s my capistrano deploy script which solves a number of problems:

The production server needs a mongrel cluster configuration file added.
Deployment requires restarting the mongrel cluster.
On Ubuntu the database.yaml spec has to be modified to because you need to specify […]

The last few days working on the openmoney.info website, I’ve had a major hassle dealing with what appears to be a bug in the html renderer in Firefox.
The issue is that in Firefox, text in a list item won’t wrap around a right floated image; like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit,
sed […]

The last month has been quite a trip down the rabbit hole into the new reality of ruby on rails! The promise of a powerful and well designed web application framework was just too much for me to resist, so I decided to leave my own yawaf framework behind (though it has certainly served […]

So marketing blogger Seth Godin has a mention of SnapMail in the same breath as File Maker Pro on his blog. It’s nice that my humble little program is in such august company, though the context is a bit sad. What’s so odd is how SnapMail was created before the Internet was at […]

In my on-going quest for good metaphors and ways of thinking about the community/multi-currency world, an excellent metaphor came to me that is useful when talking about all this with programmers:
federal currency = global variables
community currency = local variables
Writing software with only global variables is not impossible, but their “liquidity” (i.e. the fact that they […]

I learned about the Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a few years back from Kathryn Montgomery in discussions about her book How Doctors Think. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors […]

a networking protocol for generalized sharing of an abstract space