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Yesterday, Ingy came at Six Apart offices in San Francisco to hack (with the help of (Xantus, Miyagawa-san and myself) on Jemplate. Jemplate is a full Template-Toolkit port in Javascript (Template-Toolkit compiles your template into Perl code, Jemplate reuses the same engine to compile it to Javascript code). It was really fun :
Checkout the pictures on flickr
What's pretty amazing is the quality of Template-Toolkit module, everything remains the same except for Directive.pm and Grammar.pm (and the later didn't change a lot for now -- wich also means than weirdly Perl and Javascript are quite the same), two modules that you don't have to worry about in your day to day life with Template::Toolkit. Kudos to Andy !
Ok, ok, this is not really fair, because it happens to every web service.
But I couldn't resist to take a screenshot of the error I just got on mesuremap site. I guess this is due to a lot more traffic that ruby on rail (ROR) could handle (erm. for this setup, sure)
“Rails application failed to start properly”
Vegas really impressed me.
Everything is huge: the desert, the town, the hotels, hotels' lobbies, shows, casinos, amount of money exchanged.
I think everyone knows that (I knew that before I went there too) but I really realized it when I was there. I was amazed and a bit afraid in the same time.
In the last picture you can a small part of one of the many casinos, and you can also notice the security cameras. You can be sure than everything is under control. Really.
Ok. So, did I play ? I did. Did I win ? I did. Oh not much, because I lost too. I was cool enough to control myself and stop the game after a very interesting serie of lucky deals (I played blackjack).
Funnily enough, the guy who controlled many blackjack tables came, and told me :
Easy, heh ? You wonder how we stay in business, don't you ?
He knew that it was my first time at a table. I don't know if he was cynical or if he really considered me like a fool : Everything is so big, there's so many people employed here, the casinos spent a such amount of money... this is because most players loose. I thought about the famous (in France at least) quote (well it's a bit more than that since it's a fondamental chemical principle) of A. Lavoisier :
Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme
(Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed)
All this money to attract people, is money lost by people! That should prevent people to play ;)
Even if you win, the first thing you do is to spend the money (better hotels services, drinks and more) or play it again. You can put that differently : Players are buying fun anyhow. (If they stay in moderated bounds).
One more thing... Don't trust machines. Personnaly, I don't (I'm a software enginneer), and I don't like them (It's not even fun).
