April 19th, 2007

Religion in the UK
Posted to General (Leave a Comment)

This is the best video I have ever seen on YouTube so far. So true!

April 2nd, 2007

Various Ideas
Posted to General, Programming (4 Comments)

I don’t have time to do all / any of these, but a few ideas that have been floating around in my head lately:

mod_mongrel: An Apache module to make configuration of Mongrel / Rails apps easier. It starts up the instances, manages the cluster, chooses available ports, does the proxying automatically, etc. Deploying Mongrel/Rails apps at the moment is too “sysadminny”.

RubyScript: A Firefox plugin to allow Ruby to be used in a Javascript-esque fashion in Web pages. Would be good for off-line / intranet / specialist use. This kinda exists in Microsoft world.

Single text box journalling, notes, etc: A single page with a single text box. You type, it stores. If you type with a ? at the start, it then automatically searches for items matching your query and shows them to you. The ultimate simple note taking system. Just a single text box. Like Twitter, but not public. I’ve 90% developed this already but haven’t been bothered to finish it yet.

Web RAD tool with open source runtime environment: Think along the lines of Coghead, but with an open source runtime environment that anyone can use to run their apps. Imagine Delphi or Visual Basic, but simplified, and browser-based with an open source runtime.

There’s probably more, but these are the ones that I keep thinking about for five minutes each day.. so I figured I should note them down.

March 26th, 2007

Beginning Ruby is released!
Posted to General, Programming (6 Comments)

My book, Beginning Ruby, was published today. Learn more about it (and how to get a copy!) in this short article I’ve written.

March 24th, 2007

Why I’d Leave the Web Industry: It’s ephemeral
Posted to General (9 Comments)

Nigel Powell e-mailed me about my first “Why I’d Leave the Web Industry” post:

I’m going to disagree with your current post about leaving the web biz. I don’t think that excelling at something automatically means that it has to be ‘massively’ successful. It just has to have a loyal and passionate community who love what you do. This is what the record industry is having to come to terms with, as we move towards the end of the megastar era. And let’s not forget that most ‘tech superstars’ started out from a garage somewhere with nothing more than a cool idea and a stack of leftover pizzas. Or is that cliche?

I see the web business following the shareware/freeware model rather than the games model. There’s a huge shareware market out there which is thriving, nevermind Microsoft and the rest. Cool, agile web dev will never go away, and every now and then an awesome product will pop up out of the soup from around the world. Which is pretty neat.

I agree that coolness will never go away. There will always be something great to look at, things to enjoy, and people to admire. I think my concerns go deeper than that.

In the last couple of days I think I’ve worked out what my real fear is. I think it’s all about breaking free of a phase that we’re stuck in that I’ll call culture hunting. This goes deeper than the Web industry, although the Web industry is one industry that particularly engages in it.

We’ve become chickens. Peck, peck, peck..

15,000 years ago agriculture didn’t exist and people spent a lot of their time merely pecking around and hunting for things to eat. A lot of animals still live the same way. Feeding, sleeping, and breeding. That’s life. Approximately 10,000 years ago, though, people in various parts of the world developed agriculture and found that by pooling resources, farming, and having a group of the population focus on that, more could be achieved by people freed up from continuous hunting. Without this development the civilizations of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans wouldn’t have come into being, and we’d still be a retarded species operating at only a few steps above the rest of the animal kingdom. Once agriculture was ‘cracked’ a lot of development took place and we got a lot of scientific, artistic, and philosophical progress over the following 10,000 years.

I’m convinced that in the 20th and 21st centuries we’ve reached another plateau, much like the humans in 15,000 BC, and I’m calling it culture hunting. Powerful developments in science, art, and philosophy are now watered down by the world’s endless clamor for ephemeral culture to digest, regurgitate, and forget. Indeed, this is a major part of the Web industry. Since the mid 90s we’ve seen a lot of good ideas come and go, only to crop up again years later. There’s little permanence, little legacy, and almost nothing that can stand strong for the future. Compare this to, say, Vincent Van Gogh or Picasso’s paintings.. they’re still valuable decades (or centuries) later and they still inspire people and have an effect. Modern culture, however, is often ephemeral and focuses on satisfying people now and then just disappears.

Who, and what, will we remember?

There are tens of thousands of people from the past we still recognize and respect for their contributions to the world. But are the people of 2200 going to think the same of, say, Kevin Rose, Caterina Fake, or Guido van Rossum? It’s possible, but not likely. Yet even the works of reasonably unimportant people like Dale Carnegie are remembered by us today. Why? Because timeless work is.. well.. timeless. Web work is not timeless. Books, paintings, philosophical ideas, and religions can all become obsolete in one way or another, but more often than not they can be timeless. Bits and bytes floating around on a dynamic and ephemeral network, such as the Internet, are not timeless, and 99% of Web work barely matters next year, let alone in a hundred years. John Dowland’s music still has a relevant 500 years on. Will Digg have a relevance in 2506? That’s not a rhetorical question.

That’s why my ego suddenly doesn’t like this industry very much. Having a kid would have more effect on the future of the world than building some web app. That’s how it is, and if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t like the endless roundabout of cultural crap going on right now, there are probably better ways to contribute to the future of the world than being in the Web industry. Of course, this is not a good / bad argument.. a lot of people love being in this industry and aren’t too concerned if their work all gets wiped out in a year’s time. Those people should continue to love it and enjoy their work. Anyone who has children gets to propagate their genes for thousands of years into the future, so why worry about work? My answer, and my opinion, is that working to produce yet more ephemeral culture (what I tend to call crap) doesn’t help us as a species, and if we focused more on advance the species, the world will be a lot better in future.

Someone I think who will be remembered fondly in 100 years is Edward Tufte. He’s not particularly famous, but he’s incredibly well respected in his field, and his work is very timeless. The principles he raises are rarely entirely new, but the way he produces his work ensures the work he produces will certainly outlive him. He’s a Vincent Van Gogh, Picasso, or Dale Carnegie of our age, and his works will live on because they’re finely crafted and aren’t limited in scope to our current time. Tufte’s sense of craftsmanship and production of timeless materials is not unique to non-technical fields. Donald Knuth is one of the world’s most famous computer scientists, and his name and work will also live on for quite some time beyond his death. Both of these people’s ideas will inspire people in the future, and continue to contribute to their respective fields for years.

There’s a certain something that people Edward Tufte and Donald Knuth do that ensures the timelessness of their ideas. They both think of the big picture, they both communicate well, and they both don’t focus on immediate gains. They’re craftsmen who have a knack for getting their ideas and knowledge recorded in such an artful way that their work has a relevance beyond the era of when it was published. They’re both artists with bold ideas, and well-recorded bold ideas are usually timeless. (Added: They’re also different. The power of difference is hard to quantify, but consider how revolutionary the Macintosh seemed in 1984 compared to all the copy-cat machines of the time. The 1984 Macintosh lives on as an icon. The other brands were ephemeral. This a clear demonstration of how artistry, bold ideas, and originality create timeless works.)

There’s nothing wrong with producing things that are ephemeral, but it doesn’t satisfy everyone, and a lot of people seem to have an unrealized yearning for creating things that have an element of permanence. I’ve realized I’m on that list and this industry alone doesn’t provide those opportunities (although it can in combination with others, which is the subject of my next post).

March 21st, 2007

Why I’d Leave the Web Industry: It’s hard to excel
Posted to General, Personal (9 Comments)

It’s been brewing a while, but I’m really dissatisfied with the Web industry at a personal level. Don’t read this post as saying that I’m going to quit all my work in this field. I’m not.. as such.

The Web industry has become a crap shoot

Once upon a time, hardly anyone cared about software development, or even the Internet. In those times, both software and the Internet had almost as many capabilities and benefits as now, but the number of developers and companies producing solutions was small. It was easy to excel. It was much harder to develop products and services, but it was easier to profit once you’d climbed the learning curve. In 2007 it’s too easy to come up with an idea and immediately find several good implementations, and if there’s no competition.. then you have to seriously wonder if there’s a business behind that idea because inventing new markets is a crap shoot best left to those with the resources (but a very lucrative crap shoot none-the-less).

I see the current technology (and especially Web) industry heading rapidly toward the model popularized by the gaming industry recently. Studios of geniuses with good funding pumping out high value products of varying quality, with a small ‘indie’ underclass making slim pickings on the side. The Web industry, in particular, has reached a point of saturation where soft benefits override technology benefits. It’s becoming about the marketing, support, the experience, and the connections rather than the technology. This is a sign of a maturing industry, but one where technology is becoming a form of commodity. It’s still exciting to mess around with commodities if you work at Google or in Yahoo’s new Brickhouse thinktank backed with a healthy cushion in case of a hard landing, but the tide is rapidly heading out at the fringes of the market.

Don’t get me wrong. There will be lots more ’small’ successes to come, but it’s definitely a crap shoot now. Pure determination and skill could win 9 times out of 10 in this industry once, but no longer.

If you can’t excel in an industry, should you leave it?

I suffer from what I have only recently discovered is a problem.. the bright child syndrome. This is where a child who’s reasonably smart is praised to a point where they put themselves on a pedestal and expect to be able to master and be a success in everything they turn their hand to. When they don’t, rather than accept failure, they merely shift into areas where they can excel. I acknowledge this, and have learned to be humble in the areas I suck. That said, I’ve come to realize that I can’t be anywhere near the top of this industry, so perhaps I should be looking for somewhere I can excel. I’d rather excel at what I do rather than get rich at it.

Of course, not everyone can excel, and it’d be pure idiocy to think that everyone should change careers because they’re not in the 95th percentile. If they did, industry would disappear and we’d be living in Idiocracy. However, we’re all different and many of us are happy enough to be happy in what we do. Many even hate their jobs but enjoy a great life out of work. Whatever. After some deliberation, I’ve realized I’m not any of those people and I can’t get joy out of merely being good or financially successful, and would rather be able to retire one day as a respected expert in my field even if my lifestyle is modest. This is not going to happen in the Web industry. So.. where?

That’s the subject of the next post.

March 9th, 2007

Another Amazing Beryl + Linux Video
Posted to General (10 Comments)

I’m definitely not in a position where I’d want to switch away from the Mac, but some of the latest work going on with Linux is extremely tempting. All they need are native Adobe apps (Wine powered doesn’t count), and someone needs to build a PC that even remotely approaches the iMac in terms of form factor and quietness (I have a reasonably quiet Shuttle PC I almost never use because even though it’s very quiet in PC terms, it’s not SILENT like my iMac).

March 2nd, 2007

List of public DNS servers you can use
Posted to General, Programming (3 Comments)

Your ISP’s DNS servers acting crappy and not resolving for you? Or do you just want to check out if your DNS changes are propagating properly? These DNS resolvers should be usable from almost anywhere..

67.138.54.100 = provided by ScrubIt
207.225.209.66 = provided by ScrubIt
208.67.222.222 = provided by OpenDNS
208.67.220.220 = provided by OpenDNS
4.2.2.1 = vnsc-pri.sys.gtei.net
4.2.2.2 = vnsc-bak.sys.gtei.net
65.74.140.3 = noc.arpa.org
206.111.255.123 = nic.arpa.org
216.185.111.10 = ns1.servermatrix.com
69.56.222.10 = ns2.servermatrix.com
67.19.0.10 = ns3.servermatrix.com
67.19.1.10 = ns4.servermatrix.com
70.84.160.11 = ns5.servermatrix.com
4.2.2.3
4.2.2.4
4.2.2.5
4.2.2.6

Thanks goes to Zeeshan Muhammad and Max Powers for several of these.

March 2nd, 2007

New FeedDigest.com Design & Logo
Posted to FeedDigest (Leave a Comment)

I’m proud to announce that Feed Digest is now up and running (just) with a new design, coupled with a new logo. The back-end system is still the same, but this new site is in anticipation of the roll out of “Feed Digest 2007″ in the coming months. This is another pile of boxes all taken off of my To Do list, allowing me to focus more on the technical hokery-pokery.

The new Feed Digest site has been a bit of a wrestle technology wise. It’s powered by some ad-hoc PHP, WordPress 2.1, and bbPress among other things. I initially redeveloped it all in Drupal but a few weeks ago I decided I found it too generic and wanted something lighter and easier to tweak, and.. et voila.

February 26th, 2007

Blogger outputting bad Atom feeds with invalid MIME types
Posted to General, Programming (Leave a Comment)

This is annoying me enough that I have to post. Mostly so I can rank for the terms related to this problem, because I’ve tried searching for references to it and no-one else seems to have noticed the problem! At Feed Digest, however, it’s impossible to avoid as customers are complaining their feeds aren’t being processed properly.. but the reason is that Blogger.com has fscked up a lot of its customers feeds.

The problem seems to be that they’re throwing random crap into the “type” attribute, which is meant to be used for MIME types.. like so:

<link rel=’related’ type=’How to setup a 301 Redirect’ href=’http://www.dailyblogtips.com/how-to-setup-a-301-redirect/’></link>

“How to setup a 301 Redirect” is not a valid MIME type, so it’s not a valid Atom feed.

Another problem is that they’re not encoding apostrophes in many places, so the code is becoming totally invalid in the eyes of XML parsers. Check this out:

<link rel=’related’ type=’53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without | Smashing Magazine’ href=’http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/01/19/53-css-techniques-you-couldnt-live-without/’></link>

Blogger have decided to use single quotes for text encapsulation, which would be okay if they didn’t also allow apostrophes in the attribute data unescaped! The apostrophe on “Couldn’t” totally freaks out XML parsers.

(Update.. they’re also mixing single and double quotes..

<link rel=’alternate” type=”text/html” href=”http://www.cocc-blogs.com/2007/01/tutorial-on-installing-gaim.html”></link>

Check out the rel attribute.)

(Update 2.. I have word from Google that they’re looking into the problem. Result!)

February 18th, 2007

Editorial from 1996 by Ed Ricketts dismissing network applications
Posted to General (Leave a Comment)

This is only funny because up to four years ago I agreed with this article. This is from Ed Ricketts in late 1996. He says that no-one would want to use a network application for calculator tasks or for storing personal information. Now in 2007 I use Google’s calculator features more than the built-in Calculator app on OS X, and I use GMail and all sorts of online apps for storing data (Note: The article below is thumbnailed. Click to get a full sized version.)