richard t. brant

TUAWi(Pad) of the Tiger originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

  Posted by Annie Colbert

Classic sitcom “Seinfeld” gets sliced, diced, and set to eerie music for an action thriller movie trailer. Who ever doubted Newman harbored a psychotic streak?

Previously on TV-comedies-turned-action-flicks: Arrested Development.

Via TheHighDefinite.

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American McNuggets (190 calories, 12 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain the chemical preservative tBHQ, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum-based product. They also contain dimethylpolysiloxane, "an anti-foaming agent" also used in Silly Putty.

All McNuggets not created equal [CNN's The Chart]

A lot of people were naturally PO’d at James for turning coat and leaving his hometown team, but the most peeved was Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, who penned a long epistle on the team website tearing into James. The contents of the letter were certainly worthy of going viral — there were a lot of all-caps sentiments and more than a little ill will — but the font Gilbert chose was, for lack of a better word, awesome. Comic-freaking-sans. You know, that font we all thought was rad when we were, like, 12 years old.

The use of said font has sparked discussions across the web — it was a trending topic this morning on Twitter and The Washington Post even made mention of it — which leads us to wonder if it will make a true comeback sometime soon.

Since its inception in 1994 — it was created Vincent Connare — people have had mixed feelings about the child-like font. Apparently, there’s even been a “Ban Comic Sans” campaign going since 1999.

Still, we’ve seen the font coming back into the public eye rather whimsically of late — Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency even recently featured a short, imagined monologue titled “I’m Comic Sans, A**hole.”

I’ll admit that I’m a bit biased here, as I have a strange predilection for the goofy typeface — call it “I love the ugly puppy” syndrome — but it’s interesting to see it thrust into the public eye hand-in-hand with a sports-related incident. What do you think? They may have lost the King, but can the Cavs save Sans?

[img credit: keith allison]

More About: font, humor, popular-culture, social media, sports

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Every four years the planet comes together to celebrate the World Cup and since white people make up a portion the world, they are not immune to the excitement.

However, before you start planning out long watching sessions with white people you should be aware of exactly why white people get so excited about the World Cup. Though you may be waiting on bated breath for your favorite sport on a global scale, white people like the World Cup because it allows them to pretend they are European for a few weeks, and more importantly, it allows them to get drunk at odd hours.

Virtually every white person you speak to about the World Cup is incapable of remembering any actual event that took place during a game but can, with near total recall, remember how they got very drunk on Sangria during a Spain-Paraguay match at five in the morning.

From reading the above paragraph, the sharper ones among you have likely noticed that clever white people also adore the World Cup because it allows them to pair countries with their respective alcoholic drink.

“England is playing Argentina? Dude we gotta get some Newcastle then like, I don’t know, like some wine I guess?”

This plan will be consummated with a high five, a trip to Trader Joes, and the purchase of a soccer jersey that will be worn, on average, twice a decade.

It’s also worth noting the amazing interest shown by white women in the World Cup. While they generally find most professional sporting events to be boring, the atmosphere at a World Cup match is much more amenable. Mostly because they don’t have to drink light beer and there is a good chance that they might meet a European man, or, at least someone who might be planning a trip there. This is far superior to a hockey game where, at best, they might meet a Canadian. It goes without saying that for white women, the World Cup can’t come soon enough.

Of course, hosting a themed party around one of the games is a sure fire way to increase your popularity with white people, but at the end of the day it does not increase your bottom line. No, during the World Cup, the most profit to be made will come from betting on the games with white people. Not only will they have plenty of disposable income, they will follow the following betting patterns:

• England is good
• Brazil is good
• Italy is good
• Teams from Africa are cute underdogs and thus always worth a bet.

When it comes to talking about the event, it goes without saying that you should probably avoid trying to talk to white people about any of the actual players in the World Cup aside from the biggest stars. Most white people cobble their soccer knowledge together from UK celebrity gossip and a few games of FIFA on the Wii.

But if you do find yourself talking to a white person who actually knows a lot about soccer you are probably talking to a European, or worse, a white guy who tries too hard.

The latter is especially dangerous, as they have likely been waiting for years to meet someone to converse with about “football” and with soccer’s year round schedule, they will never leave you alone.

Photo Credit: LisaLouise

I frequently meet a friend for lunch and we talk. Usually I'll blab on and on about music, or some weirdo project I have going on. He'll tell me about jobs he's had or trips he might take now that he's sold a company and can chill out for a while. After one such meeting he said, "It's so refreshing to meet up with a geek who doesn't talk about VCs and term sheets the whole time."

VCs and term sheets? Really? Well shit, tomorrow I get a x0xb0x and tonight I was hacking on a cool new web server now that I'm done with MulletDB. And these guys just think about VCs and term sheets? That's kind of sad really.

Let me tell you about this cool new web server. I figured out how to merge the ZeroMQ event polling system with the libtask coroutine library so that you can use libtask to handle tons of TCP/UDP and ZeroMQ sockets in a single thread. I then took this very cool hack, and started building a web server using my Mongrel HTTP parser, but I modified the parser so that the same server on the same port can handle HTTP or Flash XMLSockets transparently. The next step is to get this server to route HTTP and XMLSocket JSON messages to arbitrary ZeroMQ backends. I was inspired by this so much that I registered utu.im and may try to bring it back. Not sure how or when though.

Sounds cool right? Totally doesn't matter one bit. I could hack on projects like this and nobody would care at all because I'm a famous programmer, and there is no such thing as famous programmers. I don't exist. I'm an enigma.

Many people with jobs have a fantasy about all the amazing things they would do if they didn’t need to work. In reality, if they had the drive and commitment to do actually do those things, they wouldn’t let a job get in the way.

—Paul Buchheit of Gmail fame on What to do with your millions.

We’ve released Ruby on Rails 2.3.6: six months of bug fixes, a handful of new features, and a strong bridge to Rails 3.

We deprecated some obscure and ancient features in Rails 2.3.6 so we could cut them entirely from Rails 3. If your app runs on Rails 2.3.6 without deprecation warnings, you’re in good shape for a smooth sail onward.

This slow-cooked dish is brought to you some 87 committers from our all-volunteer kitchen.

Now, let’s open the goodie bag!

Action Pack

• Upgrade Rack from 1.0.1 to 1.1.0.
• XSS prevention: update to match Rails 3 and move to the official plugin at http://github.com/rails/rails_xss.
• Cookies: convenient cookie jar add-ons to set permanent or signed cookies, or both at once: cookies.permanent.signed[:remember_me] = current_user.id. Read more.
• Flash: promote alert and notice, the most common flash keys in many apps, to self.alert = '...' and self.notice = '...'. Add redirect_to url, :alert => '...' and :notice => '...'. Read more.
• i18n: localize the label helper.

Active Record

• Namespacing: support optional table name prefixes on modules by defining self.table_name_prefix. Read more.
• Destroy uses optimistic locking.
• Counter cache: use Post.reset_counters(1234, :comments) to count the number of comments for post 1234 and reset its comments_count cache.
• PostgreSQL: always use standard-conforming strings, if supported.
• MySQL: add index length support. Read more.
• MySQL: add_ and change_column support column positioning using :first => true and :after => :other_column.

Active Support

• Upgrade i18n from 1.3.3 to 1.3.7.
• Upgrade TZInfo from 0.3.12 to 0.3.16.
• Multibyte: speed up string verification and cleaning.
• JSON: use YAJL for JSON decoding, if available. gem install yajl-ruby
• Testing: add assert_blank and assert_present. Read more.
• Core: backport Object#singleton_class from Ruby 1.8.8, deprecating our Object#metaclass.
• Core: add Object#presence that returns the object if it’s #present? otherwise returns nil. Example: region = params[:state].presence || params[:country].presence || 'US'
• Core: add Enumerable#exclude? to match include?.
• Core: rename Array#rand to Array#random_element to avoid collision with Kernel#rand.
• Core: rename Date# and Time#last_(month|year) to #prev_(month|year) for Ruby 1.9 forward compatibility.

Active Resource

• JSON: set ActiveResource::Base.include_root_in_json = true to serialize as a hash of model name -> attributes instead of a bare attributes hash. Defaults to false.

Action Mailer

• Upgrade TMail from 1.2.3 to 1.2.7.

Railties

• Silence RubyGems 1.3.6 deprecation warnings.

Peruse the commit log for the full story.

Dropbox is a popular file hosting service (4m+ users) that provides synced backup and file hosting to OS X, Windows, and Linux users. You get up to 2GB of space for free. RDropbox is a library by Tim Morgan (of Autumn fame) that takes advantage of the official Dropbox API from Ruby.

With RDropbox you can log into a Dropbox account using OAuth and then upload and download files. A requirement, however, is that you apply for Dropbox API access and are approved, as the API is not fully open to the public without going through the approval process (this appears to be in order to avoid overloading their service). The API was, notably, worked on by notable Ruby alumnus, Zed Shaw.

Once you've made it into the Dropbox API program, RDropbox gives you the benefit of writing code as simple as:

# STEP 1: Authorize the user
session = Dropbox::Session.new('your_consumer_key', 'your_consumer_secret')
puts "Visit #{session.authorize_url} to log in to Dropbox. Hit enter when you have done this."
gets
session.authorize
session.sandbox = true

# STEP 2: Play!
session.upload('testfile.txt')
uploaded_file = session.file('testfile.txt')
puts uploaded_file.metadata.size

uploaded_file.move 'new_name.txt'
uploaded_file.delete

An alternative, unofficial route: tvongaza's DropBox

If you want to be using Dropbox from Ruby right now, there's an alternative: tvongaza/DropBox. This alternative library predates the official Dropbox API and uses the same techniques as the official Dropbox clients instead. For this you'll need to use your Dropbox e-mail username and password to log in (this could be a problem if you want to use third party Dropbox accounts!) and you can then create, delete and rename folders and files, as well as check usage statistics.

What do you do when you're late to a trend? Mock yourself! Watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show writers, one of whom only started using the banal messaging service on Oscars night, try to catch up.