But the new DX . . . Greater contrast is a good thing. But where is the left-side button for turning the page? Every DX user I’ve talked to who has also used a regular Kindle has complained about this. It is really great to be able to turn the page with either the left hand or right hand. Meanwhile, the DX still has the crappy squeezed keyboard, which is a step back from the keyboard on the newer 6″ Kindle. Maybe in user testing the squeezed keyboard was more effective. But it sure isn’t for me.

And, still, the web browser is “experimental.”

I am a believer in separate reader devices (that is, separate from reading on your computer, phone, or tablet) but this device is not making headway.

It would be nice to have all of my gem documentation available locally. But I’m lazy. I don’t want to be typing “gem server” all the time.

So here’s what you do. Locate your appropriate gem command with “which gem”; I’m using rvm to run Ruby 1.9.1, so my answer is: /Users/jgn/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.1-p376/bin/gem

Then create a gemserver.plist file like so, replacing the path to my gem with the path to yours:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>localhost.gem.server</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>/Users/jgn/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.1-p376/bin/gem</string>
		<string>server</string>
	</array>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Now copy to /Library/LaunchDaemons

The next type you reboot, you’ll have your gem docs at http://localhost:8808/

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Gosh.

In the olden days, you paid for a land line connection, and could make all of the calls you wanted. The SLA was rather robust, allowing for you to “just make calls” whenever. The agony of the phone company then was in switching: Did they have enough capacity to manage enough calls from a particular zone, through other zones, and then on to the other end of the call? Your bill was paying for switching capacity, amortized over time.

But now, of course, they just sell bytes. If only they would just bill me per byte (e.g., for the 2GB/month plan, around $0.000000011641532 / byte).

But no, we have all of this craziness regarding how many bytes you get for how much money; that I have to pay extra for tethering (even though I get no extra bytes); and that if I’m using an ATT hotspot for iPhone Wifi, I can’t tether my laptop through that (tethering is only through 3G).

Inane.

I just want my bytes. Give me my bytes. And let me monitor my own behavior (and conserve bytes, if I want to). And bill talk time as bytes, too. I think if we paid for bytes, maybe our calls would be shorter because we’d realize the cost of our own breath.

Well, you might want to do the same thing to convert Floats to BigDecimals. But guess what? BigDecimal doesn’t include a .to_d method! Oops. The BigDecimal class must be so old that this idiom hadn’t evolved.

I wanted to call a class method on a subclass when the base class’s inherited callback is triggered.

But it doesn’t work, because the subclass isn’t loaded when this callback is triggered.

So the following doesn’t work (’boo’ prints instead of ‘foo’):

class Base
  def self.permalink
    'boo'
  end
  def self.inherited(c)
    puts "permalink: #{c.permalink}"
  end
end

class C < Base
  def self.permalink
    'foo'
  end
end

You may be able to get what you want by forcing the class to load with Class.new:

class Base
  def self.permalink
    'boo'
  end
  def self.inherited(c)
    puts "permalink: #{c.permalink}"
  end
end

C = Class.new(Base) do
  def self.permalink
    'foo'
  end
end

http://blog.geezeo.com/2009/03/beat-that/

On the “less” side, it is amazing what it can’t do. It can’t flip rapidly between pages. It isn’t super-easy to make notes or search (though you can do all of these things). . . . It is optimized for reading, that is, reading paragraphs of prose text, moving from page to page. Because of the small size of the screen, it wouldn’t be very good for reading computer manuals which frequently have important images or bits of code that shouldn’t wrap to the display. The fact that it is optimized for this particular kind of reading also means that it is really not a general tool for, say, students who want to conduct research. Apparently Amazon designed to do this one thing very very well (read prose, page by page); if you’re a student, you probably want your whole computer anyway, as you might have a PDF open in one window, a caculator or Excel or MATLAB open in another.

On the “more” side, the free network connectivity is going to be interesting. I’ll be taking a coast-to-coast train trip this summer, and I was wondering what I would do to rent an AirCard for the 10 days we’ll be traveling. Well, you can read your GMail just fine on the Kindle. And there are no charges for this connectivity — it’s included in the purchase price.

Another surprise is that there are quite a few Kindle books (4,000+) from Amazon that are free; most in the public domain. So I downloaded the Bible, Pope’s “Rape of the Lock,” and a few other goodies. Unfortunately, not all of these free editions have tables of contents, so my download of Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age isn’t so useful if you want to jump right to “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz.” Still, that’s pretty neat.

Apparently the reason people do round-robin DNS with multiple A records is because Internet Explorer retires a bad IP better when the A Record disappears vs. the TTL expiring (worse case for the latter: 28 minutes!).

http://www.netwidget.net/books/apress/dns/info/failover.html