Yepp, you’ve guessed it: My Life Is Average…

Take this post for an example

Today, while I was at work I saw a man walk into the bathroom and come out with a huge fish in his hand. I’m still confused. MLIA

I don’t know about you, but I laughed my ass off; my point being that something average can be surprisingly funny. Like this guy, rapping about his average life.

So if you ever think that your average life is just a tad too average, then just remember, average can be pretty damn funny

I believe that a blog post should be either very interesting or in cases where it is bound to be less interesting it should at least make you smile once or twice, or even better, make you burst out in a very real and involuntary laughter. So just in case I fail to fulfil my own blog requirements on my own I’ve decided to use Monthy Python as my safety net, so… here you go:

Ok, so with a few smiles out of the way (you did watch the clip right?) I can carry on with the somewhat more boring stuff (btw, a teacher of mine once told me that I should never use the word boring in an essay cause that would automatically make the essay boring. Come to think of it she must have been high on dope or something cause I just don’t see how it would work. I mean, does the word “boring” have some kind magical powers or something, or does it make the reader fall into some kind of trance just because of the way the letters are put together? Of well, what to I know, maybe she was right after all… So if right now you find this whole post pretty freakin’ boring, please let me know.).

In any case, WADE has been the most interesting subject this semester, by far, so I’d like to say thank you to Michael Rees, Facebook and Penguin Tower Defence (and yepp, they were penguins, cute little penguins flying planes and driving tanks while bombing the shit out of you. I’m telling you, in a couple of decades when the pandas have gotten some serious rabbit libido on it’s going to be World War 3 and Star Wars all at once, look out for Darth Bambooeater, Bono and Celin Dion!).

I regret to inform you that I just finished my glass of cordial, and with it this post, hey o.

What I’m actually going to talk about here is good old Duckburg. Well, maybe not as much the city in itself, as some of the people within it. Let’s take Daisy Duck as an example; apparently she’s having a hard time deciding between Donald and Gladstone Gander, or is she? It seems every time she needs a partner for something, like a ball or a picnic she turns it in to a competition where, quite basically, the one who can offer the best “thing” gets to go with her. If Gladstone wins a fancy car, she goes with him, if Donald gives her the better present she goes with him, it’s really just a matter of money and stuff. Which would make her, by today’s standards, a gold digger if I’m nice, or the closest thing to a hooker you can be without catching an STD (hmm, think about that last part for a bit and let me know if it was clever or just plain stupid). Anyway, moving on to Donald, you’ve got a guy whom, in the real world would have been sent strait to an institution for the mentally ill. Why? Well, here’s the thing; he blows up over pretty much any nuisance no matter how minute and whenever he goes swimming he does what in our world would be the same as taking off our pants and putting on a t-shirt… The we’ve got mice owning dogs and rich people hiring slaves, but lets leave that for my next post…

All of a sudden you have a revelation, not the bible kind of revelation (the one I learned of from Discovery Channel or Nation Geographic or whatever it was) but a revelation non the less. Come to think of it, it might actually just be a discovery. Not any kind of discovery mind you, I mean, we’re talking a “discovering the sunken city of Atlantis” kind of discovery here. And after all, I would like to believe that the line between such a discovery and a revelation is quite thin, maybe not “The Thin Red Line” kind of thin, cause I’m pretty sure Nick Nolte would disagree with that, but thin non the less.

In any case, The Collection is actually a really good album, not the best ever or anything like that, but still a really good album. I just thought you should know…

Core

The YAHOO Global Object (base requirement for all YUI components)
DOM Collection (convenience methods for DOM interactions)
Event Utility (event normalization and custom events)

Utilities

Animation Utility
Browser History Manager
Connection Manager (for XHR/Ajax)
Cookie Utility
DataSource Utility
Drag and Drop Utility
Element Utility
Get Utility (dynamic script/css loading)
ImageLoader Utility
JSON Utility
Resize Utility
Selector Utility
Storage Utility
SWFStore Utility
SWF Utility
StyleSheet Utility
The YUI Loader Utility

Widgets

AutoComplete
Button
Calendar
Carousel
Charts
Color Picker
Container (including Module, Overlay, Panel, Tooltip, Dialog, SimpleDialog)
DataTable
ImageCropper
Layout Manager
Menu
Paginator
Progress Bar
Rich Text Editor
Slider
TabView
TreeView
Uploader

YUI is considered to have more “visual effects” and animations, jQuery on the other hand is a bit shorter or more compact to write. But in any case, the differenses in features doesn’t really matter seeing as there are so many plugins available for both libraries all in all giving them pretty much the same functionalities…

Not really sure if I should write this as a list or as, I don’t know, something else so I’ll just go ahead and see how it goes. Ok, so you just married an electronic video game character, now what?

Problem number 1: Physical relations

I do realise that cyber/something/something-sex seems to be the big thing in “Demolition Man”, but any movie starring Rambo/Rocky and Sandra Bullock as cops isn’t much to go by, so I’m going to say that this is a no go. Yeah, he had himself displayed live on the one DS while she was on the other one, but is doesn’t really help. After all the whole “put Barbie and Ken on top of each other and pretend something magical is happening” doesn’t really bring about much pleasure and putting do Nintendo DS’s together would be pretty much the same thing, you know, without Barbie’s anatomical impossibilities and Ken’s androgynous issues… The only possibility here would be that instead of it being a metaphor, sparks could actually fly when they touch.

Problem number 2: Any non-programmed responses and actions

Would be utterly impossible. And while that might make her a bit more predictable than a “regular” wife juggling 3 kids, a job and after school/work activities while having serious PMS issues, it would also make her that much more boring in the “any longer than the tip of your nose” run.

Problem number 3: Having her actually do ANYTHING at all

It’s one thing that in the modern society household duties are shared and all that, but that does not necessarily mean that I wouldn’t like to have a wife that could cook the occasional meal, and do the laundry and a bit of cleaning every now and then. As for the cooking part, is suppose that in a “Fifth Element” kind of world, she could probably manage to make a meal, but even the Nintento DS which I guess would be her body, were to grow legs and arms letting her/it anywhere near a washing machine or a bucket of water could potentially be as lethal The Worlds Funniest Joke (ref: Monthy Python).

Problem number 4: SHE’s A FREAKIN’ VIDEO GAME CHARACTER

But then again, there’s always a bright side, or at least there’s usually a bright side and in this case it is the fact that there’s a 0% chance of this:

happening…

OLDEST PERSON TO LOOP THE LOOP: In 1998, Adeline Ablitt, 95, did a glider loop over Leicestershire.  

So I’d say that “most commas used in a sentence” is a record that should exist, and if it doesn’t then, well, before long it will (note to self: set Guinness record for “most commas used in a sentence”). After all, I do love commas, see: ,,,,,,,,,,, that just makes me so happy, but I digress. Here’s the thing; a few days ago I read about a Japanese man who married a game character. Now (ref: first sentence) I do realise there’s some weird stuff coming from Japan (no offense), like the thing with the fat, mostly naked guys in diapers bumping each other around in a tiny ring, oh, and also people climbing out of TV’s (I mean, what’s that all about? ref: The Ring, and no not the Sumo ring) so I should probably not be all that surprised should I? But alas, I am…

There’s actually so many things wrong with marrying a video game character that I will dedicate a whole blog post to just that. Don’t hold your breath though, it’s going to take a couple of hours, or days, I don’t know, but I’ll get there. Btw, did you see all those commas just there, not too shabby hey…

Features

You can run your apllication from your “own” domain, such as http://www.whatchamacallit.funnylaughter.com (yeah, go ahead and click that link, I know you want to )using Google Apps. Or, you can use Googles appspot.com domain.

Google Apps allows for the use of quite a few different languages including the JVM, Java servlets, Java, JavaScript, Ruby ad Python.

A few other things;

• dynamic web serving, with full support for common web technologies
• persistent storage with queries, sorting and transactions
• automatic scaling and load balancing
• APIs for authenticating users and sending email using Google Accounts
• a fully featured local development environment that simulates Google App Engine on your computer
• task queues for performing work outside of the scope of a web request
• scheduled tasks for triggering events at specified times and regular intervals

• URL Fetch

  Applications can access resources on the Internet, such as web services or other data, using App Engine’s URL fetch service. The URL fetch service retrieves web resources using the same high-speed Google infrastructure that retrieves web pages for many other Google products.

• Mail

  Applications can send email messages using App Engine’s mail service. The mail service uses Google infrastructure to send email messages.

• Memcache

  The Memcache service provides your application with a high performance in-memory key-value cache that is accessible by multiple instances of your application. Memcache is useful for data that does not need the persistence and transactional features of the datastore, such as temporary data or data copied from the datastore to the cache for high speed access.

• Image Manipulation

  The Image service lets your application manipulate images. With this API, you can resize, crop, rotate and flip images in JPEG and PNG formats.

App Engine costs nothing to get started. All applications can use up to 500 MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth to support an efficient app serving around 5 million page views a month, absolutely free. When you enable billing for your application, your free limits are raised, and you only pay for resources you use above the free levels.

What would I choose

I guess the main difference is that with Google Apps you build what you want up from the bottom, while with RoR you sort of deduct what you don’t want. As for what I would choose, well, seeing as Google will eventually take over the whole world (I am really just waiting for Darth Vader or the Emperor to become the Google CEO and everyone, and I do mean everyone will use gMail and Google Earth will have a whole new meaning) I would definetly go for RoR. Oh, sh%$^$t did someone just use the Jedi mind trick on me…?

Ruby on Rails, often shortened to Rails or RoR, is an open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language. It is intended to be used with an Agile development methodology that is used by web developers for rapid development.^[1]

^wikipedia

A pretty important aspect of the “Ruby universe” is the whole  ”Convention over Configuration” thing. This basically means that a developer only needs to specify the unconventional aspects of the application. Now if there’s a class called “Ticket” in the model (i.e. the “M” part of the MVC paradigm) then the corresponding table in the database will be called ”Tickets” by default. What you get from all of this is that you won’t actually have to specify these sort of things anywhere unless you plan on deviating from the standard or default, which again means less code for you to write, and most importantly less code for you to repeat. The sort of behaviour mentioned in my little example is obtaines through the use of the ActiveRecord module of Rails, which is an object-relational mapping system for database access.

MVC

MVC, or Model – View – Controller is a way to structure a program or application so as to separate the code into logical sections.

Model

Is the domain-specific representation of the data upon which the application operates. Domain logic adds meaning to raw data (for example, calculating whether today is the user’s birthday, or the totals, taxes, and shipping charges for shopping cart items). When a model changes its state, it notifies its associated views so they can refresh.

Many applications use a persistent storage mechanism (such as a database) to store data. MVC does not specifically mention the data access layer because it is understood to be underneath or encapsulated by the model. Models are not data access objects; however, in very simple apps that have little domain logic there is no real distinction to be made. Also, the ActiveRecord is an accepted design pattern which merges domain logic and data access code – a model which knows how to persist itself.

View

Renders the model into a form suitable for interaction, typically a user interface element. Multiple views can exist for a single model for different purposes.

Controller

Receives input and initiates a response by making calls on model objects.

Writing 80-90% of my blogs on the same day that they are due isn’t the best thing to do, especially if you’ve also been procrastinating your CILS assignment to that very same day and they’re both due the day after. A wise man once told me that, well, I’ve actually forgotten what he said (Chris, if you’re reading this and you can figure out what I’ve forgotten, please let me know). Anyway, my point is that Sunday nights should be reserved for nice things like going to the cinema or lying on the couch listening to music and tending the mandatory weekend hang-over. Not that I should be complaining seeing as I, as always, only have myself to thank but it does make me wonder why it’s the same every time…

I never have been good at getting started, but as it turns out, I’m quite quick and effective once I do get started(ok, that might also be debatable, but oh well). Take today for an instance, this is the fifth blog post of about 200 words that I’ve written in about 2.5 hours, and that mind you, is on top of the better part of a 2500 word CILS assignment and some beach volleyball. All managed in a more or less, still getting less(er) hung over state, so just imagine what I could have accomplished if it didn’t take me a decade of procrastinating every time I’m about to start on something.

Who knows, I might have been able to solve the climate crisis all by myself, or maybe not…