Mood: Frozen (brrrr!)

Weather here in Montreal is roughly -20c with high winds. Basically it feels like about -40 degrees (c OR f). What better day for a bus to be 30 minutes late than this morning? Especially when a light dusting of snow yesterday caused the bus to take over 1 hour to cover the 5 km (~3 miles) between the office and the subway station.
This is fucking ridiculous. If you don’t have a car, don’t take a job in Montreal’s Techno-Parc. In winter you’ll freeze your balls off. Or die of boredom in traffic. Or both.

An interesting issue with Rails

Ruby on Rails (or RoR) is a framework that prides itself on being really easy to get started with, and it is… to an extent. Here’s the message I got when I had finished installing it and tried to access it…

"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

Not a particularly useful error message. You have to dig through application logs and decipher the issue yourself. But the kicker is that this is the response to a basic permission error with the [project]/tmp directory created by the rails command, which I diagnosed and fixed. Still, shouldn’t RoR have been able to detect or maybe not cause the problem?

How much more blatant does it get?

Microsoft steals feature from an independent developer… then patents it. No really, this is the patent claim filed by Microsoft. As you can clearly see from the main article, Redmond is claiming to have invented this feature several months after having admitted that the feature was taken from the other developer. This means that they are out-and-out lying in their patent application. In fact some may claim that the patent application itself is fraudulent. I’m curious to see how that turns out.