Slashdot, cuteness, etc.
Meanwhile, in perhaps-related news, Slashdot has discovered Cute Overload.
And Slashdot itself has decided on an all-pink look, to appeal more to women (or rather, to 13-year-old ditzy girls, the joke presumably being that the Slashdot people are supposedly so clueless they think all women are 13-year-old ditzes). Sadly, the makeover has provided more of an opportunity for misogyny and homophobia (in the comments on postings) than for entertainment. Oh, well.
Though I did like this comment:
You guys are totally invited to my sleepover.
We're gonna talk about servers, and soldering irons, and building your own computer, and cameraphones, and open source software[...]
(I suspect that some of you are gearing up to chastise me for complaining about Slashdot's woman- and queer-bashing but not complaining about Cute Overload's geek-bashing. That's mainly because I'm assuming, given the details they used, that the person who wrote the CO geek-bashing post is a Slashdot-reader geek who's affectionately poking fun at peers. (...I initially wanted to say "is themself a geek," but boy does that look wrong.) Also because majority of the comments on that CO posting seem to me to be fun, entertaining, and friendly (they even combine the two groups' interests by linking to a very cute baby penguin and a whole site full of other cute penguin photos), while the comments threads on today's Slashdot postings seem to me largely hostile and mean-spirited--I'm really complaining about some of the Slashdot commenters, not about the people who run Slashdot.)
In much geekier news, SQL on Rails version 4.1 has been released. If you like Ruby on Rails, or you found the RoR screencast impressive, then you may be entertained by the SQL on Rails screencast [link corrected later], which shows you how to create the "Bajillion" search engine in just a few lines of code. (Even if you don't want to watch the whole thing, it's worth watching the sequence about 3/4 of the way through where they write the SQL code to do the actual search (featuring the best line of SQL evar), leading up to the line "No results were found[....] That's probably because we haven't loaded the Internet yet into our database.") But if you haven't seen the RoR screencast, then the SoR screencast will probably be incomprehensible.
