Archive for December, 2005
A New World, Only a Torrent Away…
- Mohammad Benabderahim, paraphrasing a famous Simpsons quote.
In all honesty, Momo is absolutely right. However, the shift in viewing patterns online and around the world are too large for us to not notice. Take note of the fans of Ainori, a Japanese reality show which has fans world-wide. How could a show broadcast only in Japan have a world-wide fan base? One word: Bittorrent. As a result, many people visit informative sites like that of Sylvain Bouchard (A fellow Quebecer!) who writes up a loose outline of the story, which is consulted by the non-Japanese speakers as they try to follow along.
Why do people watch these foreign shows anyway? Hollywood stagnation? Curiousity about a foreign culture? Linguistic practice? All of the above, and maybe even more. It is a tired cliche, but the world is getting smaller. We can have adventures from our desktops, sharing cultural experiences from places our forefathers couldn’t have even dreamed of visiting. The thrill of viewing something that was not meant for you, from seeing things through another cultural lens is undeniable. Sadly, the complex legal tangle of author’s rights, production rights, and broadcast rights, on top of the relative lack of demand for non-whites on TV, has made it virtually impossible for a series like Ainori to wind up being broadcast in Canada. If this is the case, then what harm is it for someone to download it via Bittorrent?
The answer is, probably, the fact that no one in Japan would buy the DVDs if they could get the torrented copies. However, the same people could probably download these files anyways, through Winny or Share or one of many other almost exclusively Japanese file transfer programs. (Oh and under the suppressing glare of the Japanese law, these programs have become more and more anonymous, with packet routing technologies that leave the sender not knowing exactly what he has leaving and the receiver not knowing who the file is meant for.)
Slashdot minions who whine about the “New Economy” and “New Paradigms” irritates me to no end. However, in this case they are probably right. And as long as Saiyaman keeps posting his torrents, and Mr. Bouchard keeps writing his reviews, hundreds of people will keep reading just to find out what happens next.
Plural names & Database Tables in Ruby on Rails
I was wondering why the database “Category” wasn’t opening for a controller called “Category”. I remembered that Ruby automatically checked for the Plural version of a controller name for the database name. (Or was it of the model name? Doesn’t matter, both are supposed to be the same anyway).
Oh, and Rails DOES figure it out when you have a “y” -> “ies” conversion for some irregular English plurals. Hence, Category gets “categories” for its databse.
Ruby Programming – Without Rails
With all the hype about Ruby on Rails, it is easy to forget it is its own language too.
SOEN Principles of Ruby on Rails
After installing Instantrails and going through a few of the tutorials that are available on the main rails website, the first thing to strike me as odd was the way the program arranged itself into “Models”, “Controllers” and “Views”. Although it didn’t take much to blunder my way through it, I seem to have understood some of it thanks to the excellent “Agile Web Development on Rails” book. (Thank God for PDF books, I don’t have to wait a month for the damn thing to arrive from Texas)
The MVC (Model – View – Controller) is actually a form of software archetecture in which you have one section dictate the interaction with data (Model), one section that decides what action to undertake (Controller) and one section which shows the results to the user (View). I can’t do it justice like this article, however. Definitely fascinating – web programming has come a long way.
Interesting Google-related stat.
I hesitate to take anything from this site seriously, but this is something I have heard elsewhere.
So far this year alone the top 13 executives at Google have sold over 4.3 billion dollars worth of shares, while the gang at Microsoft only sold 2.2 billion in the same time period. As a comparison Apple insiders were downright frugal- with only 275 million bucks worth of sales. Think about it- Googlers sold nearly twice as much stock as Microsofties, even though GOOG has less than 10% of the revenue/profit MSFT does!
To me, at a purely gut level, it does make me wonder what is going on at GOOG. $4.3 Billion in shares sold doesn’t really show that much faith in the future of their company. Whether this is related to all of the clickfraud problems with AdSense or what have you, I don’t know. Maybe the numbers are manipulated on the site. Still, it is food for thought if you are thinking about investing.