Jason and Peter talk about JRuby, the id of nil, JBuilder, Devise 2.0, and more.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Dan Lynch

We talk about Autotest, the testing framework used by the Linux kernel itself, and more.

Guest: Meneghel Rodrigues and Cleber Rosa

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Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 1:04:58

Kevin White and Tom Winship were the odd couple that taught my generation ground-up politics and what passed for journalism in 1960s Boston. Kevin, in a backroom of his Secretary of State’s office, was both school-master and high gossip monger for young State House reporters like Bryant Rollins, Tim Leland and me from the Globe, Frank Tivnan of the Herald and out-of-towners like Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal. Tom was the quirky, hard-driving “reform” editor of the Globe who directed our fire at his targets.

Even then we knew that this dear, dizzy pair were curiously linked — rivals more than pals, co-dependents now inseparable in memory who together defined the times. Both owed everything to a mix (puzzling especially to themselves, I think) of rank nepotism and huge talent. Tom’s father, Laurence Winship, had been the Globe editor before him. Old Joe White of the Boston City Council had conspired with Johnny Powers, the state senate president, to put his untested son Kevin on the all-green (meaning, in those days, all-Irish) Democratic state ticket in 1960, the Kennedy year. We could imagine Kevin and Tom both muttering dismissively that the other was just “his father’s son.” But they both turned out to be energetic originals, bold and brilliant talent-pickers, far the most creative forces the town had seen in either of their jobs. Winship got the truss adds off the Globe’s page one, put heart and sizzle in political endorsements, oppposed the war in Vietnam and hired the nonpareil local, daily columnist George Frazier. White brought drama and flair to City Hall even as he decentralized city government. Through the busing turmoil of the 1970s, White never let the exaggerated racial divide define what the city was about.

With Councillor Tom Atkins and the legend James Brown, negotiating the concert that calmed Boston after the M. L. King Jr. assassination, 1968

Not the least of what White and Winship shared, I came to think, was a secret hang-up that afflicted me too, growing up. It was the puzzle of Boston’s provincial scale. Was it really a smaller version of New York? Or a bigger version of Quincy, or maybe Worcester? Could Tom Winship pretend see himself in the same league as Abe Rosenthal at the Times, or his friend Ben Bradlee at the Post? Was Kevin White, for all his gifts, in the same game as John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Dick Daley? I made a cheeky remark to Bradlee on the radio once that the problem with his paper, in the halcyon days of the Style section, was that it made Washington seem more fun, more human than it really was; and that the Globe’s problem was that it made Boston less interesting than it’s always been. But it seems to me now that Kevin White’s vision of the “world-class city” was a wistful evocation of what this Boston-Cambridge core of New England has in fact become: the best big college town in the country, arguably the intellectual capital of the world — a tolerant and cosmopolitan old address with durable Brahmin and Irish inlaid veneers, an endlessly charged, stimulating place to live. Kevin White’s sort of city, in short, and still today a work of his fervid imagination.

He had glimpses of bigger domains — the governor’s office in 1970, a vice-presidential run with George McGovern in 1972. But in truth he’d grown up in the view — from James Michael Curley, and then from John Collins in the early 60s and his redevelopment chief Ed Logue — that the Mayor’s office in Boston was the perfect stage for an imaginative and halfway imperial politician. (Why did you suppose I ran for the job in 1993?) Overnight and without consulting anyone Mayor White could turn the main drag of his Beacon Hill neighborhood, Charles Street, one-way the other way, to keep truck traffic out. Presidents can’t do that. In his Frank Lloyd White persona, he could second-guess the designs of developers like Mort Zuckerman and architects as eminent as Moshe Safdie and I. M. Pei. He had no legislature to contend with, and no restraint on his own famously idiosyncratic eye for personnel — for ingenues like Barney Frank, Micho Spring and Fred Salvucci, but also for professionals older than he, like Hale Champion, who’d been finance director of California, and Jeep Jones, a street worker in Roxbury who became a deputy mayor. The mayor freed himself to run an improvisational lab school of city politics, a version of jazz world’s University of Art Blakey.

With the same gambler’s panache he had picked a wife for me and ordered me to marry a girl I’d never met, never heard of. “Well maybe you’ll introduce me,” I said. He did, and with Cindy Arkelyan it was love at first sight and for 42 years afterwards. I returned the favor by introducing him to Barney Frank, then a law student, at a moment when Kevin White had just won a runoff slot in the 1967 mayor’s race with only precinct pols in his retinue. Barney showed up for his interview at Kevin’s house, took Joseph Dinneen’s Boston novel Ward Eight off the shelf, then read for three hours waiting for the would-be mayor. Finally Barney left the empty house, with the book. Two days later he returned Ward Eight, met the candidate, took over Kevin White’s public life and founded a big biography of his own.

There are buildings, schools, parks and careers to point to as Kevin White’s monument but I think it was the charm and spectacle, sometimes the effrontery of his performance that he expected us to remember. Himself on stage with James Brown, if you can believe it, looking good, and comfortable in his own pale skin! At the end of one of the long free-range gabs we recorded every year for the Ten O’Clock News on WGBH-TV, he congratulated himself on a heroic talking jag. “Christ-ah-pha,” he said, “that was a helluvan interview!” His press agent George Regan piled on: “A great interview, boss.” Breaking a stunned silence, I said: “But Kevin, it was ragtime!” He paused half a second. “But Christ-ah-pha, it was quality ragtime!”

“Quality ragtime” has stuck in our family phrase book, whenever people run on. So have a lot of other Kevin coinages. “Hey, I’ll talk to ya,” meant that the conversation was flagging, that you (or Kevin, in the old days) were ready to hang up the phone or leave the room. “And I like Eddie McCormack…” was Kevinese that meant you were about to lower the boom on someone. “How aah ya, dahlin’?” we all began to greet men or women alike, “I’m the mayah.” “Mother ‘a gawd!” we’d say in outrage. Of rough diamonds, or characters considered dubious, like Kevin’s friend Bob Crane, the State Treasurer, he and we would say, “there’s quality thay-uh.” He was a commentator like none other on politics elsewhere. He called Jimmy Carter, who was my assignment at the Times in 1975-76, “a three-legged hoss.” I can hear it now. “Christapha! Politicians are like dogs. They smell each other! Jimmy Cahtah is the only politician I ever met who has no scent at all.” He had good general rules, too. “Christapha, politics is not about where you are; it’s about the direction you’re moving in!”

The best conversation we ever recorded was inadvertent — a strange coda to a TV interview in the mayor’s office in 1978. The formal Q and A was over. Bobby Wilson, the WGBH cameraman, was shooting wide-shots and cutaways, but our mikes were still on when I asked Kevin White about Bill Bulger‘s rise toward the presidency of the Massachusetts State Senate in 1978. “You’re the guys that have no guts,” he erupted at me, for the general news silence around Bulger’s gangster brother and FBI informer James, the infamous “Whitey.” “If my brother were a licensed killer, you’d be nothing but nice to me,” he shouted. And then the anecdote that for years I left off the record. “In the ’75 fight,” meaning his run for a third term, “everybody knew the mob was out to get me.” Kevin had come out of the South Boston Tennis Club on the Waterfront one night at 11 o’clock, he said, when he realized in a flash that Whitey Bulger was going to shoot him on the way to his car. He could see it clearly: “Whitey takes me out, and they win all the marbles.” Better, he decided, to stay in the tennis club overnight and drive home in daylight. Call it a fantasy, a waking nightmare, but Kevin White was articulating an unvoiceable dread of Bulgerism that preyed on a whole class of Boston and Massachusetts politicians for almost 30 years. And he was talking straight, even if the assumption was that his story would never be aired.

His fascination with power could sound Nixonian but it was never uninteresting. When I moved back from the New York Times Washington Bureau to lead the Ten O’Clock News on WGBH, he asked me one day: “Who do you think you’re working for over there?” I ran through the masthead of managers, from David O. Ives on down and the institutional trustees until he cut me off. “No, no, who has the power in that place?” I barely knew what he was driving at, but months later it was explained to me that the Lowell Institute (which holds the WGBH license) had been founded in 1836 by Judge John Lowell of the textile barons and the city of the same name, with the strict proviso that executive authority would rest forever with the line of his male heirs — down to the banker Ralph Lowell, at the moment of WGBH’s birth, and his son John. And then one day I got around to asking Kevin White: “Is that what you meant?” Yes, he said, I’d figured it out: that public broadcasting in Boston was a family heirloom. “Christapha,” he added impatiently, “it’s your job to know that kind of thing.”

It was distressing these last three years and more to see Kevin White wandering in the daze of dementia around the flat of Beacon Hill, always with one of his five stalwart kids, or his exquisite wife Kathryn, or a dedicated attendant. But it wasn’t so sad after all. I discovered that if I shouted “Mistah Mayah” as soon as I saw him, the years and the Alzheimers seemed to roll right off him. For a few moments at least he brightened and beamed. “How aah ya?” he’d begin, before drifting off into the wilderness. He didn’t know me, or maybe anyone, “from a cawd o’ wood,” as he would have said years ago. But the last several times I saw him, his last words came from the heart of the man: to me, to all of us, to the world. “I love you,” he said.

Jason and Peter talk about the new Rails 3.2.0 and 3.2.1 releases, upcoming conferences, project updates, and more.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Aaron Newcomb

We talk to David Skoll about Remind, old school command line stuff that lets you get messages about what's coming up, and more.

Guests: David Skoll

Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/floss.

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Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 52:26

Jason and Peter talk about Git Heroes, Ruby Heroes, and the usual round up of projects, blog posts, and gems.

Hosts: Dan Lynch and Simon Phipps

We talk with James Nixon from the FreeNAS project which lets you have a disk storage system on your network at home.

Guest: James T. Nixon III

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Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 1:03:55

Jason and Peter talk about the new releases of RSpec, Rack, and go over interesting projects and blog posts. They go over Ruby strings, accessing the application session in Capybara, and some interesting new posts and projects.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Dan Lynch

We talk about the Overtone package which lets you create music and sounds just by writing in programs.

Guest: Sam Aaron

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Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 1:02:28

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Aaron Newcomb

We talk about the Village Telco project which is bringing low cost data and VoIP to developing countries.

Guests: Steve Song and Terry Gillett

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Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 1:01:12

Jason and Peter talk about the new location for RailsConf, JRuby Conf, more on the new version of JRuby, and the usual round up of interesting projects.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Aaron Newcomb

We're at the Brick Twithouse in Petaluma with Pieter Hintjens where we talk about ZeroMQ, which makes socketing and messaging easier.

Guest: Pieter Hintjens

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Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 1:02:07

Jason and Peter talk about learning rails, profiling Rails startup times, and Josh Susser weighs in on files.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Simon Phipps

We talk to the creator of MySQL And MariaDB.

Guest: Michael Widenius

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Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 1:07:12

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Steven Pinker (57 min, 28 meg)

Steven Pinker has written a game-changer on the little matter of how quickly humanity is headed for hell or redemption. The short form of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is that we’re on the verge of Liebniz‘s (and Candide‘s) “best of all possible worlds.” Much more than that, Better Angels is a tour de force in 700 pages of dense, witty prose, distilling and explaining the ever-steeper downward trends in battle-deaths, state executions, murder, rape, wife-beating and child-spanking, among others things. “Interesting if true” was my instinctive newspaper-guy response. After a month’s immersion, and this conversation, I’m staggered and stunned, avid for the new Enlightenment.

In William James Hall, high above Harvard Yard, Steve Pinker is setting his own conclusions in the context of intellectual forbears and peers in this field of violence and human progress.

Among them:

” …the survivors of one successful massacre after another are the beings from whose loins we and all our contemporary races spring… Man is once for all a fighting animal; centuries of peaceful history could not breed the battle-instinct out of us.”
William James: Oration at the unveiling of the Robert Gould Shaw memorial in Boston to the all-black 54th Regiment of the Union Army. May 31, 1897.

“History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed… Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism — war for war’s sake, all the citizen’s being warriors. It is horrible reading — because of the irrationality of it all — save for the purpose of making “history” — and the history is that of the utter ruin of a civilization in intellectual respects perhaps the highest the earth has ever seen…

Having said thus much in preparation, I will now confess my own utopia. I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense, for I know that war-making is due to definite motives and subject to prudential checks and reasonable criticisms, just like any other form of enterprise. And when whole nations are the armies, and the science of destruction vies in intellectual refinement with the science of production, I see that war becomes absurd and impossible from its own monstrosity…
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War. 1906

I like to think that William James would appreciate the argument of the book, which is, despite the fact that there is such a thing as human nature, despite the fact that we have plenty of ugly, violent impulses inside us, it is perfectly possible to set up a world in which those impulses don’t actually emerge as violent behavior. This is because human nature is a complex system, it has many parts, and among them are a faculty of empathy, a faculty of reason, a faculty of self-control.

I call William James the first evolutionary psychologist. He was indebted to Darwin and he made no bones about the fact that we come from ancestors who had to prevail in constant contests of bloodshed, and so we have violent urges. Nonetheless, James was certainly an optimist in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” arguing that it is certainly possible to set up institutions that would minimize war. And I like to think that a hundred years after his death he is being vindicated. Now of course, if he had lived ten years longer, if he had lived 35 years longer, he would have found this hard to believe, because the two world wars are a rude interruption in humanity’s movement towards non-violence. But if he had held on just a little bit longer, he would see that we are living through an era now in which it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that war is going out of style.
Steven Pinker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 2, 2011

“… the ultimate symbols of the [20th] Century are not space probes and computers but gas chambers and Hiroshima. The slaughter in the two world wars, the pogroms, the various holocausts starting with the Armenian and Jewish ones and ending with the Cambodian and the Rwandan, the Stalinist terror, the carpet bombings and the fire bombings in various wars — they all constitute a rather impressive performance. Twentieth-century science may have produced many wonderful discoveries and miracles, but the gas chambers and the mushroom clouds remain its most resilient symbols.”

“… change is now infecting the cultures of societies eager to mimic the societies they consider more wealthy, powerful and successful, possessing the ‘normal’ pathologies that go with success, including high levels of everyday violence. The rise in violence in a number of Indian cities has in recent years been spectacular. The South Asian euphoria over the nuclear tests, however short-lived and however limited in geographical spread, can also be read as an example of the same story of brutalisation and necrophilia. It reflects not merely deep feelings of inferiority, masculinity-striving and parity-seeking, but also a certain nihilism and vague, almost free-floating genocidal rage.”
Ashis Nandy, “Violence and Creativity in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Time Warps, 2002.

Among my questions here: How are we to categorize the violence of poverty in a half-hungry world? How do we calculate the risk of a single nuclear attack that could smash the conceit of better living through science? In American popular culture, what does Steve Pinker make of the rise of Mixed Martial Arts and the decline of boxing? In George Carlin’s sainted name, what about the rise of TV football and the decline of daylight baseball — where the object of the game is to “be safe, at home!”?

Has Steve Pinker been watching the Republican presidential debates — the whooping and hollering for the death penalty, Texas-style, and the Get Your War On rhetoric pointed at Iran, the Arab world, even Hugo Chavez and Venezuela? Of course he’s been watching — “I share the revulsion” — because he watches everything. “The crazies have all crashed and burned and probably the survivor, Mitt Romney, hell, he was our governor in Massachusetts. A lot of the sound and the fury coming out of the right, I think, is in part a reaction to the fact that they keep losing. Go back to the sixties; what the liberals were in favor of then, the conservatives take for granted now: racial integration, women in the workforce, women in the military, no spanking of children, toleration of gay people.”

Does robot warfare by predator drones fit a pattern of progress? “It’s a great advance. I can’t say I’m a fan exactly, but compared to carpet bombing, it’s a fraction of the deaths, a great advance.”

How, on this steep downward slope of human violence, do we explain that the United States — in one of those imperial fits of absent-mindedness — slipped into an immeasurably destructive $5-trillion war in Iraq, then Afghanistan and — who knows? — maybe tomorrow Pakistan?

By a lot of these measures, the United States is not at the vanguard of enlightenment. The United States is a bit of a laggard, and of course the Iraq war was famously opposed by France and Germany, some of our closest allies, and there was some considerable opposition in this country. It’s a little misleading to concentrate on the United States, because the United States is a bit in the rearguard of this.

Even then, the actual Iraq war itself, was by historical standards a far less destructive war than earlier wars — like Vietnam, Korea, Iran/Iraq, Russians in Afghanistan — in terms of the number of people that it killed. Interestingly, it’s now been eight-and-a-half years, and it might be the last of the old-fashioned wars, where two national armies fight each other on the battlefield. There’s a sense in which it didn’t lead to permanent war; this may have been the last gasp.
Steven Pinker, in conversation with Chris Lydon, December 2, 2011

It’s a main premise of Steve Pinker’s science that, as he says, “You have to have a quantitative mindset to understand history.” My last question: what if not all our critical measures are quantitative?

Peter and Jason talk about jBuilder, the new project for JSON creation, creating an API in Rails, and the usual round up of projects and gems.

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Anatol Lieven (35 min, 17 meg)

Anatol Lieven is explaining how the so-called allies in the so-called War on Terror have come to pot-shotting each other on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. In the Financial Times last May (“How American folly could destroy Pakistan“) Lieven was warning of the perverse logic of confrontation in US policy. The killing last weekend of 24 Pakistani soldiers in a NATO air strike for which President Obama is refusing to apologize can be taken as confirmation of the hazard. Ever since the US Navy swoop on OBL early in May, the risk in Lieven’s eyes was that the US would overplay its hand with demands on the thoroughly alienated Pakistani Army. The American demand-too-far (Lieven is saying emphatically today) is that the Pakistani Army go to war on the Taliban home bases in the Pashtun tribal wilderness. That demand cannot, will not, be met: (a) because the Taliban is a big part of the network that Pakistan counts on to protect and project its interest in Afghanistan when the US forces shrivel, then leave; and (b) because the big majority of Pakistanis — army, elite and masses — see the Taliban in Afghanistan as a legitimate resistance force fighting foreign occupation, like the mujahedeen who fought the Soviets, or Communist guerillas who fought Nazis in Europe. When Pakistan under Pres / Gen Musharraf undertook a half-way offensive against the Taliban in the border wilderness, “they set off an Islamist rebellion inside Pakistan which continues to this day… The Pakistanis do have a case: thanks to the U.S., they have a civil war inside Pakistan which has claimed far more Pakistani lives than Americans killed on 9.11. … We keep talking about wanting to support democracy. Well, the democratic majority in Pakistan wants us to go to hell.”

Anatol Lieven — among the earliest, clearest, scathingest dissenters on the “profoundly reckless” Iraq War — is by now the author of the solid new manual on Pakistan: A Hard Country, from which he’s been reporting for the London press since 1988. He is walking us around a few of the paradoxes that abound around Pakistan: the “strong society” with the “weak state,” for starters; the corruptions of feudal political culture and power that block all the obvious routes to economic reform and growth; the risk in American policy of “losing” Pakistan (6th largest population in the world) to save the unsaveable in Afghanistan; and always the missing page in the story: India. Anatol Lieven is confirming my guess that “Af-Pak” is a deceptive mis-”branding” of the mess we’re in. As we kept hearing in our travels last summer, “Indo-Pak,” embracing the Kashmir nettle and the tragedy of Partition in 1947, more nearly suggests the sub-continental shape of the problem.

Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Aaron Newcomb

We talk about Pinax, a web framework that gives you building blocks for your websites.

Guest: James Tauber

Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/floss.

We invite you to read, add to, and amend our show notes.

Here's what's coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at merlyn@stonehenge.com.

Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot's Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.

Running time: 1:04:30

Click to listen to Chris’ conversation with Ha Jin (33 min, 16 meg)

Ha Jin‘s darkest fear about China is that the control-freak regime he fled 25 years ago has enough cash on hand to buy a lease on life — in Washington and the West, at the expense of its own people. The “myth” of an imperial rivalry with the US seems laughable to him, still moreso to sophisticated Chinese visitors who tell him “one good American museum is worth a few Chinese cities.” At the core, China is still a poor country, a very difficult place to live, without the social structure to guarantee safety or rights. Even at the top there’s no fun in being the world-record creditor when China waits more anxiously on American orders than we do on Chinese credit to pay for them. China’s second-worst fear must be that a bad tumble in the US economy would collapse theirs. The primal panic in the rich ruling circle, he’s saying, is about losing their one-party monopoly on power.

In the context of Brown University’s Year of China, I am scrambling to catch up, to get past the numbers, to imagine “reading” China. Ha Jin reads bloggers for news and outrage — over the wreck last week, for example, of a country school bus: 69 kids on a 9-seat vehicle, at the same moment the official press was crowing about the sale of luxury buses in Europe. He reads the published writers more and more available in the U.S. like Su Tong and Yu Hua; and the multi-media star Murong — exploding everywhere now in the New York Times and in his latest post, “Caging a Monster,” as he heads home from Oslo. Ha Jin endorses the steady clarity of the husband-wife reporting of Peter Hessler in the New Yorker and Leslie Chang in the Wall Street Journal — specially on the point that China’s boom has been bad for happiness and sanity. And of course he reads his friend the Nobel Peace Prize poet Liu Xiaobo, under house arrest in China but more and more widely read for his exquisite Tienanmen elegies.

We’re talking too about Ha Jin’s new novel, Nanjing Requiem, a book to be taken to heart on opposite faces of the earth. The re-creation of the vicious Japanese occupation of Nanjing after 1937, focused on the fate of a college campus for women, is bathed in sympathy for China’s suffering at a low-point of humiliation. But the heroic role in this reality-based fiction goes to an American teacher, Minnie Vautrin, for her fortitude and indomitable purpose. Official culture long buried the Nanjing chapter of China’s helplessness and shame as well as the history of faithful foreign friends (Germans, Brits, Americans and others) who stood tall under the same abuse and, after World War Two, drove the war-crimes trials of many Japanese officers in Nanjing. Ha Jin has brought alive a moral drama of suffering and solidarity — of decency transcending difference, as he says, “that should be remembered even today. People are human beings. Their sufferings are the same.”

Jason and Peter talk about new Rails releases, Learn Ruby the hard way, subdomains in Rails 3, and more.