csummers.org

I'm using Vim more and more these days for coding. Below are some useful Vim links:

• The official Vim site
• Seven habits of effective text editing
• Best of VIM Tips, gVIM's Key Features
• Vim Cookbook

I've been building a Ruby on Rails application that is potentially going to be very large, and I need to choose an appropriate session store. Based on Scott Barron's article, I'm wavering between a Distributed Ruby (DRb) server and the ActiveRecord solution.

It looks like DRb can squeeze out a few more requests per second, but using it requires the extra maintenance of making sure one more daemon is always up. This isn't a huge problem, just one extra component to maintain. I also think DRb might get memory hungry with thousands of sessions. And, will it be faster than the DB when I need to sweep out older sessions?

For now I've decided on the ActiveRecord store as it seems a wee bit simpler, but I'll probably end up testing both. If DRb's performance is too good to pass up, I'll use it instead.

If you've been viewing this site with Firefox 1.0.x, then you may have noticed the flickering of the Google Adsense ads when mousing over links on the page. This is a bug in Firefox 1.0.x, and there are various HTML + CSS work-arounds that I could implement to prevent this for you. Instead, I recommend that you upgrade your browser to the recently-release Firefox 1.5, which has fixed this bug.

http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

Glow-in-the-dark green pigs.

Ok, so they're flourescent and you need a blue/black light, but still. Yikes. And now, the obligatory jokes:

Green Ham and Eggs

Pork, the other green meat

In celebrity news, Miss Piggy, in an effort to "blend in" with her long-time lover, Kermit the Frog, has undergone a controversial procedure in Taiwan…

In other news, "little green men" sightings are on the rise. Witnesses say the creatures appear to communicate in a strange language consisting of snorting and grunting.

Th..Th..Th..That's all folks!

Christians are up in arms about NBC's new show The Book of Daniel. You may have received one or more emails this past week from friends or family urging you to petition and boycott the show. I received more than one such email. And then I watched the premiere out of curiosity.

As a Christian, I expected to be appalled at the anti-Christian slant oozing from the show. At least, this is what I was led to believe. Except that's not what I felt at all. The show was so over the top that it was just goofy. If the writers' intention was to weave an anti-Christian agenda into the show, they failed with hyperbole overload. It was laughable: not in a "this is funny" way, but more on a "this is stupid" level. I wasn't offended any more than any of the other junk that's on television. Bottom line, the show just wasn't that good, and I won't be watching it again.

Real Live Preacher wrote a review for salon.com that sums up most of my feelings on the show. To read the whole thing you have to click through an ad, but it's worth it. Favorite quote from the article:

[Jesus] looks like one of the Doobie Brothers, and all he does is hand out Life Savers and say things like, "Life is hard, but that's why there's a nice reward at the end."