Obscene Sports Salaries

July 26th, 2008

Great article from the NYTimes this morning about ridiculous sports salaries juxtaposed against recent layoffs at GM. Depressing stuff and one of the reasons I sorta hate professional sports as I get older. Of course, athletes and franchise owners aren’t the folks guilty of nonsensical greed. It just seems more ridiculous when you work for 3 months playing a game I guess.

But the tick of obscene salaries just keeps on ticking in professional sports, the one sector of the economy I know of, except for maybe Internet pornography, that still dances merrily along in the bubble of its isolation from the real world.

Interestingly, looks like CrookedTimber has a somewhat related post

Update: Harper’s has a somewhat similar article.

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I don’t get spam

July 15th, 2008

But I sure do get a ton of it on this site.  Not sure which of my updates irked Messieurs bobeCoila, sadaamozy and gepedgerm the most, but they’re posting an annoying amount of comments that makes even coming to my sites admin page a depressing venture.  The terrorists win again.

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Acts_as_Chimp Updates

June 10th, 2008

Fixed a sorta obvious bug and added a new feature to acts_as_chimp today. You can now specify a list of merge tags in your acts_as_chimp model declaration like so:
[sourcecode language='ruby']
acts_as_chimp :mailing_list_id => 'your_list_id', :mail_merge => {"EMAIL" => :email, "FNAME" => :first_name, "LNAME" => :last_name }
[/sourcecode]

The plugin will read the method values corresponding to the symbols above when posting to MailChimp.

As an aside, the kind folks at MailChimp recently added acts_as_chimp to
their plugin page.

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Braintree and ActiveResource

June 4th, 2008

Been playing around with accessing Braintree transactions from ActiveResource, using the Query API in particular. Thanks to the folks over at QuarkRuby, getting started was quite easy, so I figured I might as well post what I have for the uninitiated.

pastie

To get started using the API, use commands like the following:


t = Braintree.find(:all, :params => {:username => 'btdemo', :password => 'btdemo123', :last_name => 'Lin'})


t.each do |transaction|
transaction.gimme_my_money
end

Pretty straightforward stuff if you want to incorporate this into your Rails app, either for integration test verification or some admin pages.

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Overrated, May 2008

June 2nd, 2008

Arguments about multiple Ruby VMs
Discussions about Twitter’s demise
Clueless clients
Every self-important blog posting I’ve read this month
Everything I said in April and May

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Recurring billing with Braintree and ActiveMerchant

June 2nd, 2008

If you’re using ActiveMerchant and want to setup recurring billing support for Braintree, you should be able to just modify the post parameters being sent across to include your recurring plan name in the following method in the Braintree gateway:

Braintree pastie

If you want to know more about ActiveMerchant, check out the Peepcode PDF. Should prove helpful.

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Another Ruby VM

May 31st, 2008

Excellent news from RailsConf regarging GemStone’s new Ruby VM. Although, with all this work, I do sorta wonder why can’t we just push Smalltalk more into the mainstream? Or is it already secretly mainstream?

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Designing Web Forms

May 28th, 2008

If you do anything web design or development related or just have some free time on your hands and feel like contributing to an interesting independent publisher, I highly recommend checking out Luke Wroblewski’s book on web form design. While somewhere in my subconscious I’ve definitely been annoyed by filling out forms, I hadn’t really realized how pervasive, disruptive and generally poorly designed most web forms are until I started digging into this book. The sidebar stories in the book are really interesting as well.

web form design

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Harpers is Priceless

May 26th, 2008

If you don’t already know about it, check my blogroll for Harper’s weekly updates. They’re just too damn good (and often depressing). From this past week:

House Republicans began using a new slogan, “the change you deserve,” which turned out to be the slogan of the antidepressant Effexor.11

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There’s an Emacs Command for That

May 26th, 2008

emacs butterfly command

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