I have been struggling with trying to integrate Google calendar into a rails app for an embarrassing amount of time. I have been using the ruby gem "google-api-ruby-client" to attempt to do this.

My own ignorance aside, there is enough going on with this that I have never used, and the logging of errors was scarce enough, that this was really a perfect storm of Coding Horror.

Rails handling of params seems inconsistent to me. Here's why:

I hang with the Hawk once in a while. Sometimes he get's a little juiced, and we crank the D.

So here is a recording of Stephen Hawking singing The D's "Kielbasa"!

http://pauldac.us/sites/pauldac.us/files/kielbasa.wav

There is a great book called The Art of Scalability by Abbott and Fisher. It has quite a bit of tech-oriented advice about how to build scalability, but surprisingly much of the book is about counter-scalable organizational behavior. Here is a fantastic excerpt, pg 71:

Checking Your Ego at the Door

Short post today. Found a piece with the top HTML validation errors by W3CLove.com.

Here's the summarized version of the top offenders:

I've always had this idea that if I had the data modeling done right for a program, and I mean exactly Dead Right, then and only then could the program acting on that data reach some sort of minimalism in complexity while achieving it's functional requirements.

For example, say I wanted to write a CMS. Its primary "output" is ostensibly some HTML. And a cursory look at most CMS's indicates that the vast majority are backed by a RDBMS like mySQL or Postgres. This seems to be a choice more supported by historical precendent than by the requirements.

Zucky Gives the Market a Facial on IPO Day

I played the other side of the Facebook hysteria. I am not sure I was alone, but it sure felt like it. No one I know stated anything to the contrary.

But Facebook is Not a company with any real defensible borders, other than a gigantic user base, something held fleetingly by other social sites. And that's the real problem. The only real revenue model for social seems to be:

The most unpopular topic on Earth is Narcissism. Here is the wikipedia definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder:

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder in which the individual is described as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity. This condition affects one percent of the population. First formulated in 1968, it was historically called megalomania, and it is closely linked to egocentrism.