The Olympics are over. How­ever dur­ing, it annoyed me how the media out­lets ranked the medal totals either count­ing total medals or count­ing total golds. Nei­ther option accounts for the rel­a­tive val­ues of the medals. The for­mer treats all medals as equal, whereas the for­mer dis­re­gards the value of the other two medal col­ors. As oth­ers have pro­posed, a weighted medal count makes the most sense, the sim­plest being gold = 3, sil­ver = 2, and bronze = 1. With that the top five rank­ings are as follows:

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I like to use my iPhone for view­ing pod­casts. How­ever, man­ag­ing them through iTunes leaves much to be desired because some pod­casts I like to view and then trash them, while oth­ers I like to archive and have synced at all times. iTunes does not have an obvi­ous way to set this up.

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I like Ruby, but I don’t like its per­for­mance, so I’m really antic­i­pat­ing Ruby 2.0. Mean­while, I’ve been dab­bling in Python. Learn­ing a new lan­guage and com­par­ing and con­trast­ing them, really helps with deter­min­ing each language’s strengths and weak­nesses. For exam­ple, you can eas­ily update all your Ruby gems. Unfor­tu­nately, python doesn’t have a direct way of doing this using easy_install. Very odd. I tried using the shell script method, but for what­ever rea­son it just didn’t work as adver­tised. So I wrote a bash alias to take care of it.

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