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.

It’s a neocon must-read! WaPo rightly calls it ‘dim, dishonorable’, so it’s a perfect match for the O’Reilly Factor crowd.

Dinesh D’Souza blames America first for 9/11. He really does, and does so in a 333 page book that’s as devoid of intelligence as the decision to go to war in Iraq. I’ve read D’Souza’s stuff and he seems too intelligent to actually believe any of the crap he spouts in this frankly shitty volume, so I must conclude that he’s written this book dishonestly and with the purpose of increasing sales by creating a false ‘debate’ where none should exist… like the ‘global warming debate’ or basically anything Ann Coulter writes. Shame on him.

Good news for potential iPhone customers. I guess.

Cingular changes its name to at&t. This means that to have an iPhone you no longer need to be a cingular customer, but an at&t customer. Which is the same thing because it’s only a name change, but it’s supposed to inspire confidence, because really as the video explains cingular customers have been at&t customers all along. If this happened in the streets you’d call it a three-card monte or “find the red lady” and it would be highly illegal; however since it happens at the corporate level it’s called business.