MAGIC || MADNESS
It sometimes bothers me that sci-fi aliens are almost always depicted as humanoid with slight variations in shape and color, or perhaps with lots of sharp teeth.  One of the things I enjoyed about Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris is the idea that we might encounter an alien and not even recognize it as sentient life.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but there’s a similar deal going on with magic in fantasy books - magical protagonist characters learn neat stuff at magic school and have fun adventures, and the only real downside to being magic is that if they’re good enough at it someone else might come after them because they’re jealous or consider them a threat. This issue bothered Justine Larbalestier and she applied her mad author skills to the problem. I just finished reading the first two books in her trilogy - Magic or Madness and Magic Lessons - in which magical characters are presented with two options: use magic and die young (most likely in your teens or 20s) or don’t use it and go insane. This makes for some interesting plot development.  I enjoyed the first two books and need to go find the third one now.

MAGIC == MADNESS

I spent last weekend losing a little sanity to getting a particular Rails app running on my Macbook. One of the reasons I switched to OSX from my dual-boot Linux/XP system was that “things just work.” While that’s largely been true, I did not find it to be the case for a Rails app that needs RMagick to process images. Given the percentage of Rails developers that use OSX and that RMagick seems to be the standard way of dealing with images in Rails apps not to mention all the fantastic Mac eye candy, I would have expected installation to look something like this:

macrails:~ fanboy$ gem install rmagick
Holy crap, you’ve got a Mac!!! I know *exactly* what to do for you, your apps will look fabulous!!!!!!
Successfully installed rmagick-1.15.11

Instead, I got to spend time running down a series of rabbit holes that all involved installing prebuilt versions of what I needed along with a bunch of dependencies.  I suppose that’s not too different than the RPM package management that I’ve come to know and love on Linux distributions, but if that sort of thing is necessary to get a development environment working on an OSX system I’d prefer that it was based on a standard packaging system that Apple baked into the OS.  Oh well.  I eventually got things working with Locomotive and an RMagick bundle, although it took a bit to figure out how to install/update gems in the bundle’s ruby installation.