What diseconomies of scale?
Using attachment_fu with :storage => :db_file
So I recently got to use Rick Olson's attachment_fu in a Rails application I'm working on, and it is pretty awesome. It takes a lot of the hassle out of managing files that you might need to upload such as images, and even has the capability of doing thumbnails on the fly. Attachment_fu has three methods for storing uploads: the file system, Amazon S3 storage, and the database. You can find ample articles on the 'net for using the first two methods, but the last one is poorly documented - both in the attachment_fu docs and on the web (that's not to say it isn't documented at all - I owe everything to Ron Evans' crucially helpful post). But I'd like to provide a streamlined - or at least personalized - tutorial for getting this to work.
The first step is figuring out which image manipulation library to use. I used RMagick just because I had the directions for compiling it handy, but ImageScience and minimagick are also supported. Installation instructions abound, so google around to find something that works for you (it may or may not be painful, and I take no responsibility for it either way).
Next, download and install attachment_fu. From your application root:
script/plugin install https://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/attachment_fu/
But there's more to do in vendor/plugins. Since attachment_fu doesn't have any ready-made helpers for pulling images out of the database, I rolled my own. This a hack, and I follow err's discipline of hacking plugins. Read his post for details, but essentially you create a directory called "attachment_fu_hacks" in vendor/plugins with a single file called "init.rb" In that file, paste the following:
Technoweenie::AttachmentFu::Backends::DbFileBackend.module_eval do
def image_data(thumb_flag = false)
if thumb_flag and the_thumb = thumbnails.first
the_thumb.current_data
else
current_data
end
end
endThis is a tweaked version of Ron's method. Essentially, it gives you a way to pull the binary data directly, which we'll need (since we don't have a "file" to serve).
The Invisible Depression
Holy shit, did any of you honestly know this was going on right now? I mean, while over 60 thousand foreclosures is a pretty big number, perhaps it's not cause for a total panic. But I think confidence in the economy would plummet utterly if people actually knew what was going on right now. I found this via John Médaille and it is pretty grim:
Maybe I am just another guy with his head in the sand, I dunno. But I honestly did not know that there were camps of these evicted people cropping up. I think this economy is going to get worse before it gets better, and it's just a matter of time until people realize that. And it's not going to be pretty when they do.
Statesmen and Patriots
I don't think Obama is the answer to all our prayers. But I do appreciate a speech that has the courage to state uncomfortable truths and actually sounds like it was written for a literate people. It doesn't make Obama fit for office, of course - but I don't think any man is fit to rule others. Given that, I can acknowledge a statement that is worthy of the problems we face. It's good to hear somebody talk frankly and eloquently about our situation; I have no problem using the word "statesman", either.
And I don't see what the big deal with his pastor's words is, anyway. The government has not lived up to its promise; why should we pretend it has? I'm more offended that people aren't more angry about our mess. Sure, not everything is dark and grim as Obama reminds us. But successes don't require further effort - problems do. It is appropriate to focus on that which is the subject of our future work, rather than to sit around waving a flag and patting each other on the back.
Spam for spammers
This little nugget in my spam queue kind of blew my mind:
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Just wow.
Open Thread
Name one thing we can do right now to advance the concept of the voluntary society; anything that's concrete. I'm just curious what others think about this - I brought it up on a discussion list and only got one good response. What do you think? We have to start somewhere before we can actually start.
If you lurk, please weigh in with your two cents - just this once! We need your input.
Quote of the day
This one comes from Keith Preston at the Attack the System list:
There was some Arizona politician some years ago who said that libertarians have a 24 carat gold idea (freedom) but can't give it away and they should ask themselves why.
Great quote; read his whole post.
Creative destruction is for the little guy
Over at the Agonist, Sean Paul-Kelley laments socialism for Big Finance. Calling it what it is, especially for such a normally liberal blogger, is a welcome shift in the blogospheric consensus:
What ever happened to creative destruction? It really is socialism for the big boys but cutthroat capitalism for the little people in this country. In my opinion, Bear Stearns, more than any other firm on Wall Street should be allowed to fail. No handouts, or bailouts from the Fed. If this were 1998, well, we all know what happened when Bear declined to aid in the bailout package of LTCM. So, that's one reason. But the other is this: the more the Feds prolong a real shakeout the worse it will be when it finally comes.
What I want to know is, why are we even asking whether or not any business should be "allowed" to fail? This is only an extreme example of the kind of malinvestment that government intervention creates. But this malinvestment has been occuring to a lesser degree day after day due to the privileges associated with the toxic mix of finance and government that has laid the foundation for this modern day Tower of Babel.
The bailouts also demonstrate what left libertarians have been saying for decades: that creative destruction is only desirable when it creates new opportunities for the investment class. Unemployment (lowering the bargaining power of labor), asset liquidation (quickly putting misallocated wealth to new purposes), the debasement of the currency - all of this is fine when it strengthens the hand of the elite. But when banks and investment houses start failing, God help us - the "economic infrastructure" is collapsing! Considering what the corporate state has given us for the past decades - war, oppression, surveillance, environmental damage, crony capitalism, all dutifully financed by these very institutions - what exactly is the infrastructure designed to support if not the very privileged elites who trade in our slavery?
When the only tool you have is force, everything looks like a threat
Over at The Sisyphus Comments, a blog that deals with law enforcement issues from the perspective of a professional, the author criticizes Berkeley's ban on tasers, which the government is reconsidering:
Unfortunately, when non-criminal justice leaders attempt to assume responsibility for choosing intermediate weapons for the police department, bad things can happen. Without a range of intermediate force weapons, officers are often left with few options in their use of force continuum.
This is a good point, but it's not the whole story. The outcry over tasers is not, in the end, about increasing the range of options available to officers. I'm all for giving officers discretion - and the personal accountability that goes along with that, rather than hiding behind "policy" constantly - but the tasering debate really isn't about giving them "tools". Instead, it really boils down to the "cult of officer safety" that prescribes excessive force when any encounter with a citizen doesn't go the officer's way.
The Wire in the real world
Not exactly Lester Freamon and Jimmy McNulty, are they?
Speaking of which, The Wire is, hands down, the best drama on television - ever. I hope to write more about the series now that it has ended. In the meantime, if you've never seen it, start at the beginning. It makes the counterinstitutionalist case better than I could ever hope to.
GitHub: Anarchy for Programmers
I'm at the CVREG meeting watching Jon give his presentation on GitHub, the new awesomeness that everybody (nerdy) is talking about. I'm still learning about it and figuring out how / why it's different than Subversion, but look for a personal project on there soon.
git is a source code management system designed to make branching easy. It doesn't enforce a "HEAD" like CVS and Subversion, so you can organize your project (or not) any way you want and fork to your heart's content. It was written by Linus Torvalds and company to help them develop the linux kernel, so it's all about lots of people hacking on code and figuring out a way to diff between versions without making full copies of the source. GitHub tracks, hosts, and manages all the distributed goodness: think MySpace for programmers. It also has profiles, update feeds, requests, and more. It's perfect for starting your own, decentralized, self-organizing coding community.
Let me know if you want a beta invite. I'm jeremy6d if you want to find me.
But over the long run, the critics' opinions will tend towards smugness equilibrium
Because, with enough imagination, you can pretend it has mutualist relevance:
In other news, the guy who draws that comic is releasing the entire archive for free in ten volumes. Some call it free culture; others call it good business. Mutualists just call it common sense.
30 different flavors of collectivism, part two
Look, nobody would be able to convince me that Sicko is a completely even-handed review of the health care situation in America. Moore certainly has an agenda, and he's as free to make his opinion into a feature film as any of us. But take a look at this film and see if you can't see some merit in simply comparing our system to the health care received by other countries:
I don't buy all of Moore's arguments. He clearly does cherry pick data. And given all the corporatist propaganda having been parrotted over the years, I'd say he's in damn good company. It's kind of insulting when supposed free market types breathlessly warn us about Moore's blind spots when the other side of the debate has been trafficking in it for so long. Earth to socialized health care opponents and proponents: we're not stupid; we know you both have a horse in this race; we know we can't count on any of you to educate us completely (even if we get sick of the whole matter and fail to educate ourselves properly).
You are the monkey wrench
Students at Readington Middle School got uppity last week and taught all of us trapped in the system a lesson:
...7th- and 8th-graders reportedly decided that 30 minutes was not enough time to line up, purchase and eat their lunch. So on Thursday morning, these students trudged into the lunch line, weighed down by the coins pilfered from the crevices of couches, car ashtrays and piggy banks, and paid for their $2 lunch with hundreds of pennies. By the time lunch was over, the registers where filled with about 5,800 pennies. Delays in counting the money meant many students went hungry.
School officials were not impressed and began doling out detention like sloppy Joe's. In all, 29 students received punishment. Administrators told them that what they had done was "disrespectful" not only to cafeteria staff but also to fellow students. (Yet on Friday, many of them brought bag lunches to protest on behalf of the so-called "Readington 29.")
You can't always escape prison. You can't always defeat your captors. You can't always knock down the walls and release your fellow prisoners.
But you're not powerless. Their need for us to behave in an orderly, predictable manner is a vulnerability of theirs; it can be exploited. You have the ability to transform from a replaceable part into a monkey wrench. If kids can do it on a small scale, we can do it on a large scale.
Ye shall know them by their works
I am disappointed, outraged, and deeply saddened that the Cato Institute fired Don Armentano. David Boaz admits that the sudden dumping of the twenty year adjunct scholar, who specialized in antitrust matters, was prompted at least in part by an article he wrote calling for an end to the UFO cover-up. It should go without saying that this action by Cato is manifestly unlibertarian. Why would they want to distance themselves further from this issue of government secrecy than from support for warrantless wiretaps?
Because Cato is part of that God damn D.C. establishment where they need to be able to rub elbows with the cool kids. Cato has done good work in the past, but I've long been convinced that they're in it for the wrong reasons. While I thought Radley Balko's work on paramilitary police raids was great, a lot of what they produce seems so timid or concerned with the right kinds of government rather than shrinking government.
And too often it seems like Cato is determined to always deliver the watered down, establishment friendly version of libertarianism. A lot of the time the civil liberties and free market stuff seems specifically designed as cover for a pro-corporatist agenda. It's a kind of libertarianism that asks the government very nicely for a bit bigger prison cell and little bit more room in the straightjacket. And since it is not radical, it serves the interests of the establishment.
