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No. What I find ironic is the cultural mismatch. PHP seems an unlikely language for technological idealists.

They're using PHP and Smarty, from looking at comments in the source code.

I find it highly ironic that the people in charge of web standards and consistency use the programming language with least consistent syntax.

compayon Jekyll, the blog engine of kings

I played around with Jekyll a bit and while it's cool, there were a few things I didn't like, such as the fact that you're limited to one "posts" feed, rather than being able to easily publish arbitrary content and have multiple feeds. I also wanted to be able to use Haml instead of Liquid, and dump the configuration into my primary layout rather than in a separate file.

So I grabbed my yak-shaving kit, and rolled my own library in Lua. It's not entirely done, but I'm using it and it may be interesting to you if you like to work with Lua.

http://github.com/norman/grackle

compayon IPhone users are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome

No, the giant bunny sitting next to me says you're the delusional one.

compayon Recursive Regular Expressions

It's a neat trick but as the author says, it's probably too cryptic to use for "real" code.

Lua's LPeg lets you create simple recursive grammars to solve problems that are often hard with regular expressions (e.g., matching balanced parentheses). It's the one library from Lua I find myself seriously missing when programming in other languages.

http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html#grammar

compayon I'll sue you if you use my common-sense JavaScript tests

The worst kind of trolls are the ones that are knowledgeable and articulate, but arrogant, dogmatic crusaders.

Many programming mailing lists I've been on ended up acquiring somebody like this, at which point I usually have to unsubscribe in order to resist the temptation to get into pointless flamewars.

compayon IPhone users are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome

I liked the iPhone because the features that were lacking at the time were not very important to me, and the features that were implemented are for the most part extremely well done; not because I'm some delusional fanboy.

My needs have changed a bit and so I'm using an Android phone now. But I was pretty happy with the iPhone for quite a while, despite its limitations.

compayon Google: A friend or the "new Evil Empire"?

I worry more about Google's future than present - benevolent dictators are great until they decide to stop being benevolent.

compayon Google Dictionary

I hope an Android client is in the works.

compayon Google Dictionary

English <-> Spanish has it too.

compayon The 37signals Manifesto (original site from 1999)

Part of me deeply admires 37 Signals for their success, their people, and the quality of the work they do. Yet another part of me detests how they've always tried to sell themselves as some sort of movement, when in fact they're a business trying to make a buck, just like any other. Not that there's anything wrong with making a buck... let's just leave the "manifestos" to Marx and Engels.

compayon Ask HN: What country would you lend money to?

Sounds like Chile.

compayon Tell HN: Buenos Aires Meetup on Wednesday

I'll try to make it too.

compayon Adobe Launches Photoshop Android Application

In English, you can verb any noun.

compayon LuaJIT 2.0 Beta released, making Lua the fastest interpreted language

Link goes to the benchmark shootout, the actual announcement it here:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lua.general/58814

Congrats to Mike Pall on an impressive solo achievement.

compayon Facebook's Memcached Multiget Hole: More machines = More Capacity

Yes, as in - this is not sarcasm; the actual article title is: "Facebook's Memcached Multiget Hole: More machines != More Capacity"

compayon Gemcutter to become default gem host

One of the nice things about Rip is that it supports RubyGems so, to an extent, you can have your cake and eat it too. The collective investment Ruby developers have in Rubygems is pretty large, so if it gets replaced by something else, it's not going to happen overnight.

compayon Why the sudden interest in FXRuby?

Perhaps in part because it's now working with MinGW for Windows and Snow Leopard, though the official release for these platforms is yet to come out.

http://lylejohnson.name/blog/2009/10/20/newly-supported-buil...

Many Ruby developers are so Mac-centric that they don't realize how popular Ruby is on Windows. The Ruby One-click installer is the single most downloaded archive on RubyForge, with more than twice the number of downloads than even Ruby Gems.

If FXRuby works with the Ruby provided by the One-click Installer, then it's going to get a lot of downloads, because while Windows may not be the ideal platform for Ruby server apps, it's a good platform for desktop apps, at least if you want to have a lot of users.

compayon How Google Maps deals with border disputes: Two Countries, Three Maps

You're wrong. The claim over the islands was laid out in Argentina's constitution in 1985, which you can read here (on page 22):

http://docs.google.com/gview?a=v&q=cache:RZIivRFbg_8J:ww...

Additionally, the president of Argentina raised the issue with the UK Prime Minister in their meeting in Chile earlier this year.

So anyway, Argentina claims the Falklands/Malvinas as their territory, but your or my opinion on the claim is irrelevant to the discussion. My point is, that maps.google.com.ar, the Argentine version of Google maps, shows a map supporting the British side of the claim, which is inconsistent with the policy described by the article.

compayon How Google Maps deals with border disputes: Two Countries, Three Maps

They're inconsistent with this in Argentina; the Falkand/Malvinas islands disputed by Argentina and the UK are not shown as part of Argentina, and the English names of all the landmarks are used rather than the Spanish ones.

http://maps.google.com.ar/?ie=UTF8&ll=-51.76104,-59.8178...

compayon Psystar releases the software they use to install MacOS on non-Apple hardware

It would be hard for them to "sneak" a gigabyte of software onto someone's machine, nor would it be ethical or sensible.

compayon Lua makes accessing REST APIs from the iPhone dead simple

I believe Apple's primary concern is disallowing the installation of a VM such as Flash that could be used to host applications unauthorized by Apple.

In the case of Wax, Lua is embedded in the application itself and doesn't provide a VM which can host other applications.

compayon Are Software Developers Naturally Weird?

I have always thought the fact that software has so many "weird" people is due to the fact that we're one of the most meritocratic fields out there. In software, if you can code well then people will generally accept you, whether you have a degree or not, and yes; even if you're strange. This is one of the things I love the most about our profession, and I hope it never changes.

compayon Best Programming Language for Startups

Because of sarcasm.

compayon Poll: What is your primary *nix distro on your home machine?

I love Arch. They've done a great job straddling the line between minimalistic and easy to use. It reminds me (in a good way) of how Linux distros tended to work many years ago.

compayon GitHub discontinues building gems

I think it was far easier for them to achieve consistency through subtraction rather than addition.

compayon GitHub discontinues building gems

I liked this feature, but I think it makes sense for them to remove it. To me it highlights the fact the Github has grown way beyond just hosting Ruby projects.

I'm currently in Rio for the Lua Workshop and many people here have said they'll be moving their projects from CVS or SVN over to Git and Github. I am guessing that within a few months Github will be the defacto standard place to host Lua projects just like it is for Ruby. Hopefully they have at least 50 megabytes of free space to accommodate all of us. ;-)

compayon Making WiFi work at large conferences

I tend to agree, though being on the #railsconf channel was the only way to make it through Tim Ferris's awful Railsconf keynote this year. Without Wifi there might have been violence.

compayon MySQL 6.0 Nixed?

Mysql has great replication support which everyone who does webapps requires

Not everybody who does web apps needs replication.

compayon Why Dynamic Languages are a Startup's Secret Weapon

As someone who used to program mostly in Java, but now works mostly in Ruby and Lua, I can say that I enjoy programming in Ruby and Lua more than Java. But I think I was still a fairly productive programmer before I made the switch.

I'm not sure how much of this is due to the languages themselves or the sort of overall culture of how software is developed in each one. You can have 500 character class names and factories that make factories that make factories in both Ruby and Java, but you only see people doing that in Java.

Since many projects end up using a lot of preexisting code in the form of open source or commercial libraries, if the language you're using has a culture of convoluted hierarchies like Java developers often seem to create, then you're going to inherit that pain if you use that software, and it will likely slow you down.