It's the dollar, stupid.

Posted by Keith Thu, 22 May 2008 15:52:00 GMT

The Washington Post today proclaim that “Skyrocketing Oil Prices Stump Experts.”. Now I’m not an expert, so maybe I’m just being stupid, but this doesn’t seem that complicated.

First 3 graphs

What you see to the left is the dollar tracked over the last 12 months against The Euro, Oil and Gold and the British Pound. Focusing on the first three.. do ya see any similarities? The same amount of gold will buy the same amount of oil. The same amount of Euros will buy the same amount of oil.. so gas price hikes outside of the UK are a pretty disgusting gouging by someone.

Graph 4

This is the UK currency, the Pound against the dollar. This doesn’t match the other graphs at all, and that brings me to what prompted me to write this in the first place - an article by the BBC about the rising price of fuel in the UK.

The VALUE of crude oil is not rising

So. Either I’m stupid, or the media is stupid. It’s very very easy to see, that the amount of value you have to exchange for a barrel of crude oil has been static for a year, but that’s going to mean more in terms of Dollars, because the VALUE of the dollar is plumetting. How long is it going to take for this country as a whole to start dealing with that reality?

Crude oil as a currency is very stable

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Posted in Rants, Misc, Politics & Election2008
Tags dollar, euro, gold, inflation, oil, prices
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Looking for a good Rails blog app?

Posted by Keith Sun, 11 May 2008 18:34:00 GMT

Yeah, me too. This blog is typo, but to be honest, I’m not a big fan.

Here’s the problem.. I don’t really want a “rails application” at all - what I want is to be able to add blog features to my current applications.

With the need for mongrels et all, what I really think we need is either:

1) An application that you can point multiple domains to, e.g. blog.domain1.com, blog.domain2.com etc. that can be a single install / application with a single environment that is multi-purpose.

2) A blog plugin, that works off a single controller for admin, and a single controller for view that can be thrown into any rails application.

I’ve been working on 2, and it’s turning out pretty well, but at this point it’s too application specific to throw out to the open source community. The focus is on simple simple simple and seo seo seo.

What started off as a standalone project, has now been integrated into Billabill here.

Features include:

SEO: Independent control of stub, title, H1 and tags
SEO: Blog title displayed as H1 or H2 depending on context
SEO: Blog summary used as full article teaser reused as meta description
Full page caching with a very simple cache clearing mechanism
Routing setup so that categories become root directory for posting
Category stored with a post - no separate table. There’s really no need

It can do more than you can see at Billabill, but I’m not using everything, e.g. the ability for any post to be tagged as a header, footer or sidebar menu item.. Again, features on the front without any extra complexity.

What it would need to be great though is:

Simple THREADED comments with subscription.. why are blog comments linear!
RSS - 10 minute job, but I haven’t done it yet
A parsing engine to allow you to easily include links to other internal pages
A parsing engine to include flickr content etc.

Anyhoo. If I get a chance I’ll try to bundle this up and turn it into a plugin because I really think that is the answer.. just like you can add a WordPress blog to any php site, you should be able to add a rails blog alongside any rails app.

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Posted in Ruby on Rails, Misc, Productivity
Tags blog, rails, ROR, typo
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RadioShack don't know my mom.

Posted by Keith Fri, 09 May 2008 16:26:00 GMT

Is this for real? I’ve seen some dumb advertising in my time, but man, if RadioShack marketing department think that every mothers desire is a 1gig Flash Memory card RadioShack have some firing to do.

This follows Twitter sending out an email suggesting that people tweet their moms for Mothers Day? WHAT??? My mom would fly to the US and beat me over the head with something if that was my idea of a Mothers Day salute ( although having said that, it’s not mothers day in Ireland, and I always miss it when it is, so maybe a tweet would be better than nothing ).

Seriously though advertisers. If you think my mom wants a text string or a flash card as a sign of my eternal thanks to her then we you’re dumb as a post.

Here are some other suggestions for mothers day: