While I was driving to pick up a larva, a man crossed my path. A man who—if you substituted Booker’s, 70% cocoa chocolate, and espresso for Steel Reserve, Marlboros, and Methamphetamines—could be my stunt double. Same hair, same beard, same skin, same eyes. He looked me right in the face. Had a shit eating, ear-connecting grin. A look of total ridicule. A look obviously sparked by the mini-van under me.

The look stung. I knew where it was from though so it only hurt for a moment. He saw my slow, wrong smile in recognition. His smile shrank to a smirk and then disappeared. I do believe that in a moment of actual telepathy he read my mind as I had read his. He saw in my mind his own rather remarkable changes in expression when I gut shot him with my .357.

It is truly mysterious how I forget about PostSecret for a year at a time.

Read Rails Is a Ghetto. You’ll love it. It’s Guilty Pleasure of the Year for web devs.

This is the kind of post that gets latched onto for many reasons. Some are cheering, “Yeah, fuck yeah! Tell those motherfuckers off! Down with Rails! Ruby is the sux0r!” Some pass it around with, “Whoah! Check out this guy harshing on Rails.” And there’s still, “I always knew that dipshit was a rat. When he left, Rails lost its major defect. Good riddance.”

No one likes the f-word more than I [well, except for Matt Trout but my hair is longer; take that, subspace]; and I didn’t invent the ad hominem but I get a free license for consistently promoting it. When you write an ostensibly professional essay—in this case implicitly so because it’s entirely concerned with paid software development—the f-word doesn’t really belong. Zed clearly identifies it as a rant. In Internet parlance the term rant has steadily been losing its foaming-at-the-mouth, put-a-bullet-in-that-mongrel connotations. It’s being replaced with self-righteousness. It’s also the kind of bullshit qualifier that lets people do things they know to be wrong. “This is a rant, okay? So I don’t have to be held to any standard. No tag backs.”

Let’s start with what he basically started with–

Remember that I’ve studied enough martial arts to be deadly even though I’m old, and I don’t give a fuck if I kick your mother fucking ass or you kick mine.

There are few studios, dojos, or dojangs where that sentence would get you anything but asked not to return to study. Maybe for a week, maybe forever. I’d like to call it profoundly moronic, but as you know, regarding online life, it’s entirely trite. Nothing screams loser—or 15 year-old, or wife beater, or gonna bring a gun to work someday, or…—like opening an essay with the threat of physical violence.¹

Zed progresses to discuss what every SDE with half a kilo of gray matter already knows: the tech world is full of half-assed pseudo-hackers who can get away with selling awful services and worse code because the CEOs who hire the managers think MBA is short for Must Be Awesome!

Zed does hit many high, clear notes.

Where I work the company is willing to blow huge amounts of money on a consulting firm or hardware, but ends up firing people when times get tight. It’s a universal mass hysteria that paying $100 – $200 per hour for a group of consultants is preferable to simply hiring good employees. At the rates companies pay these consultants they could hire 4 full time employees.

Stuff like this makes me want to cheer because I saw Amazon do the same thing and it hurt like hell. So, he gets an olé or two out of me. The rest, innards of Rails kind of stuff, is interesting from a nerd-view, which I take. Several Perl hackers I really respect more or less left Perl for Ruby. I considered following.

Whatever you think, or don’t,² about this site, I wrote the code, and in 2007 it served well over 2 million human session pages plus, and this is just a guess from past ratios, another 10-15 million or more pages to robots. A few bugs now and then but it just served a 50,000 page day a couple weeks ago with barely a groan. It’s written in Perl and run on a budget host. It’s the third version of the site software. The first two were custom and a lot like Blosxom before (the first, just barely) there was a Blosxom. The last was in Catalyst. Ain’t never going back.

I didn’t start rewriting it in Perl and Catalyst. I started with Ruby and Rails. Why? Almost an even split between these: the hackers I admire who love Ruby; the hype behind Rails was enormous; I like learning brand new stuff.

A few downloads and installation builds later I was following the QuickTime movie tutorial for starting a new Rails application. And failing. It wouldn’t work right. I had Ruby in correctly. I had all the code. My plain old Ruby test scripts were running. I started over repeatedly to make sure I was following the demo correctly. All of the sudden I started to remember things like the fact that Perl is much faster than Ruby and it has native utf-8 and Ruby doesn’t. Perl has the CPAN and while Ruby has gems, I can think of a dozen little packages, at least two I wrote, gems doesn’t cover and I don’t have time to learn to rewrite.

I didn’t want an app out of the box doing autocompletes with a huge JS library, I just wanted to see “Hello World!” feel some satisfaction and dig in. I wanted to have fun. Which is what Perl hacking almost always is. I found Catalyst after some searching. It was brand new. I had it completely installed in 2 minutes³ and I was running a demo application 30 seconds later.

Not to bag on Rails. I’m not. I’ve never written a stick with it and its hype is still strong; though so is Java’s but that’s another horse of color. Just to put Catalyst out there. It is a lovely framework and I’m grateful I found it which led to being paid really quite a lot of money to hack with it today. But still… I’m curious about Ruby and Rails. So…

…back to the rant. We learn that Zed wrote some nice software and tried to stop some dicks from foisting some obviously bad software on others. Great. We learn that he was barred from employment via the bureaucratic machinations of the tech world. Mmmmm. Yeah, maybe.

The problem with this style—in spite of some obviously adroit points and insider info—is what comes across strongest is the wounds, not the injustice. You can admire someone who takes it like a man, as it were. Someone who starts swinging and squealing like an ADHD kid at a piñata, expecting it will burst open with the sweet candies of revenge, just ends up looking kinda sorry and finding out revenge gives you a bad stomach. It isn’t that it’s wrong to get even. Getting even is great. It’s wrong because pursuing it cripples you inside in ways that become more and more visible and harder to escape the deeper you get.

You want to root for him. You can’t. You want to seek him out for a beer and maybe discuss a coding project. You can’t. You can’t because you might say or do something wrong someday and end up immortalized online as a “pilsner fresh fat fuck who eats donut hamburgers and only gets exercise when he plays World of Warcraft on a DDR pad.” And while that might be an apt description of so-and-so, most of us don’t know Zed from Adam and I’d wager that fewer of us have any desire to get to now.⁴

They are luminarias. Only Santa Fe honkeys call them farolitos.

We do requests.

We now throw our considerable influence to the only candidate who has a chance of saving this country: George Washington.

Oh, just a moment… It seems the 22nd Amendment is in play. Well, all right. We’re back with Ron Paul. Please wake us if anything changes on the Amendment front. Roll ’em all back we say. Why stop with the 10th, 5th, 2nd, 1st, 6th… Say, are any still in force? Ah, it’ll all be okay as soon as we can just get another Democrat in the White House.¹

The Great Day

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar upon foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.

Sedition·com resolves to remain on the cutting edge for 2008. Here are just a few of the many queries for which we are currently the #1 result on Google. We will not rest until we are #1 for all queries.

Why some people are smarter than others.

Love your country hate your government.

Nuclear weapons for dummies.

Hollywood Hell.

How much does sex cost in Bangkok?

Best writing on a blog in 2007

None. In your compulsion to post more often than bimonthly even the best of you waters down your material to a tepid mixture no one can admire; not even you yourself. Most considered tops are consummate hasbeens; more at Bloggies.

Best cartoon in 2007

None. They’re all one trick ponies. Honoring a single golden molehill would be an endorsement of the mountains of feces.

Best political post in 2007

None. You’re all pussy inversions; unable to conceive; blood thirsty; raving, 26 days a month, that your tears are righteous.

Best humor post of 2007

None. None of you is funny. Few of you are even smart enough to know that grammar to be correct. Those that do are mostly such pedantic cockwads that you are entirely—and will be while you live—unable to achieve anything creative which does not deserve the three word review: derivative, dull, uninspiring.

Best hate post of 2007

None. Especially not this one; it doesn’t name names; it’s far too short.

Best advice post of 2007

IOZ’zes FAQ.

Please everyone, get with me on this. From here on out, I beg you, only refer to “The Force” as acute midichlorian syndrome.

Dear __________,

A hydrophobic noman suggested that you shot me down over something and seemed to be certain that this should cause me to roll over and capitulate. Admit everything. I can see why this might be assumed. Everyone knows I compliment you frequently. I admire your writing, incisiveness, and clarity. That is not a stand-in for saying you are better, more correct, more valuable, more clairvoyant… You know the drill — you reinvented it nicely.

Your writing is 6 out of 10 falls stronger than mine of late. I often look to you for opinion on topics in which I haven’t had time or exposure. On a particular point, though, you could hardly be more wrong and it’s trivial enough to show that I’m a bit embarrassed to have to do it.

Firearms, through misuse, kill 10,000-15,000 Americans a year. Leaving aside for the moment that the majority of that violence is in noways random, that’s still not fun. We have the right to own guns anyway. There is some state control over this industry. In the places where there is less there is generally less homicide by gun along with it.¹

Doctors and hospitals, through malpractice, kill an estimated 100,000² Americans a year. Bad prescriptions alone kill around 80 a day; more than twice as many as guns. There is near total state control over the aspects of this industry which are not, as the hipsters say, OTC. I’m speaking as the son of a former member of a State Board of Examiners who only ever told one story about it which amounted to, Jesus Fucking Christ is it hard to take away a license from a doctor everyone knows to be irretrievably incompetent and a mortal threat to his patients.

I acknowledge this to be mele ed aranci but as the apples’ mission statement is Death and the oranges’ is Healing those are some pretty fucking suggestive fruit.

Acknowledging that government is an evil, of varying degrees, in every aspect of life except medical care and coverage is illustration B in the Universal Picture Book’s definition of “cognitive dissonance.”³ Boosterism for state controlled medical care amounts to cheerleading for manslaughter. B-E A-G-G R-E-S-S-I-V-E.