about to bust a knowledge nut up in your gray matter

When you’re trying to build grails for a CI server (I’m using Hudson), it’s recommended that you don’t check certain things into subversion. To restore those things properly in the environment, you should run “grails upgrade.” The problem, of course, is that grails upgrade requires some interactive input asking if you’re willing to overwrite files.

Apparently, you can just go grails upgrade -force and it will do it without interactive input. So, your ant task looks like this:

    <!-- =================================
          target: upgrade
         ================================= -->
    <target name="upgrade" description="--> Runs grails upgrade to restore stuff after svn checkout">
        <exec executable="${grails}" failonerror="true">
            <arg value="upgrade -force" />
        </exec>
    </target>

You’ve all probably seen this little email come by you at one point or another:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

Well, I thought, “that’s a load of crap.”

And to prove it, I wrote this little program called Switcharoo!. You feed it a URL (preferably something with a lot of text, like a blog or news article) and it’ll do this little switchy thing to the text. Because of the way English works, we have a lot of 3 and 4 letter words, and you won’t see much difference in those. The big problem comes when it’s something like a 9 letter word. For example, what does this say:

Bhagrna wuokort is a swetay ftsnies coeeitlabrn

Not so easy now, is it? You can probably pick out workout, and sweaty by contextuality. but the rest of it? Does that last word really look anything close to celebration? The whole sentence is “Bhangra workout is a sweaty fitness celebration.”

So, go play with Switcharoo! and see what you find.

Here’s what I’m pissed about today: The It-Sucks-To-Be-Me Generation.

Here’s why we “can’t stop whining about how the economy is screwing them.” YOU FUCKING ARE SCREWING US. Every generation that’s alive has got more out of society and money than we have. Social Security is no longer a safety net. It’s future existence is uncertain. Pensions don’t really exist anymore. Now it’s all “save your own damn money for retirement” from the older genrations. Why is it a freaking miracle now when we have health insurance, instead of part of the expected compensation package?

Baby boomers (I assume the author of the article is one as well) are a generation of fucking retarded hypocritical leeching pricks.
Continue reading →

I think the original grand design was something along the lines of: All people can’t possibly understand all the complex issues involved in government decisions. They can’t be asked to vote on every little issue, especially ones that they don’t care about. Worse, they’d vote while being uninformed, and really screw things up. To this end, we “hire” people, whose job it is to stay current on the issues, and vote on policies and laws. Our only voting responsibility is to hire these people. We try to choose someone who agrees with us, as closely as possible, and vote for that person.

Somewhere, it all went horribly, horribly wrong. Continue reading →