2007 Books A Talent for War, Jack McDevitt
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
Dr. Futurity, Philip K. Dick
The Scar, China Mieville
The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, Barbra Tuchman
A Little Java, A Few Patterns, Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Passage, Connie Willis
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Philip K. Dick
Getting Real, 37 Signals
Moneyball, Michael Lewis
Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising,
Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading,
Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show, Geoffry Nunberg
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Persian Expedition (Anabasis), Xenophon
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
Seabiscuit, Laura Hillenbrand
The Lobster Chronicles, Linda Greenlaw
Why We Run: A Natural History, Bernd Heinrich
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, Thad Carhart
Collapse, Jared Diamond
The Game-Players of Titan, Philip K. Dick
Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph E. Stiglitz
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
My Antonia, Willa Carter
Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, Isaac Asimov
Lucky Starr and the Moons of Jupiter, Isaac Asimov
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge
Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakaner
Sixty Days and Counting, Kim Stanley Robinson
Hell Bent for Leather, Seb Hunter
Europe: A History, Norman Davies
A Passage to India, E. M. Forester
The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy
The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Breakthrough: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of
Possiblity, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
The Children of Men, P.D. James
The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
Love is a Dog from Hell, Charles Bukowski
The Bridge over the River Kwai, Pierre Boulle
Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America, Stephen G. Bloom
The Dip, Seth Godin
The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
In 2006, inspired by Kevin Drum, I decided to write down all the books I
read during the year. I'm a slacker though so I never posted 2006's list.
Below is my list of books from 2007, in the order I read them. Appearance
on the list does not imply endorsement. Some of them were terrible!
Posted at 16:06
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Quick links 36 Startup Tips:
From Software Engineering to PR and More!
Obama Stump Speech Strategy Of Conciliation Considered Harmful. A short
history of the last 40 years of American politics and how Obama's "change"
message fits into it.
I'm finding the argument against Obama convincing. I'm getting pretty
annoyed by Obama's knocks on progressive politics lately. I'm also not
convinced that Obama can "change" Washington. Re-inventing politics seems
impossible to me. On the other hand, Mark Schmitt argues that Obama's
message is actually a
tactic aimed at undermining conservatives. Maybe so.
Instant Usability... How Freshbooks.Com Turns Learners into Users on Every
Page. Good look at how to do in-line help for a web app to enable user
exploration.
Posted at 20:31
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Code Freeze '08 registration is open Code Freeze is the U of M's annual software engineering conference. The
topic this year is innovation. It looks like there's some good speakers
lined up.
The event is 8 am - 5pm on January 17. The cost is $90 ($75 for UMN alumni).
Registration for Code Freeze
'08 is now open.
Posted at 18:31
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Bacon
Bacon flowchart.
Posted at 15:26
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Just Fucking Google It If that site had a search bar on it, it would be even better.
This is my new answer to all questions
asked of me.
Posted at 12:35
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Wii electronic whiteboard
This is totally sweet. For ~$50 (the cost of a Wiimote) you can build an
electronic whiteboard. The best part is that since the Wiimote's camera
can track 4 infrared sources at once, you can make it a multitouch
electronic whiteboard!
Posted at 16:23
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Girls and genocide
The Onion: Oh, Girls Are No
Good At Genocide by Alyssa Elver.
I was thinking about this even more in Social Studies class today. We learned all about what genocide is. And you know who's led, like, every single genocide ever? Yup, boys.
A lot of the girls in my class are smart, but most of them are too shy to say anything, so no one even notices they're smart. Even if they know the answer, Mrs. Culver has to call on them and ask them if they know it before they'll say it. So there's no way a girl would get up and make a big speech in front of thousands of Brownshirts. She'd be way too embarrassed.
Posted at 20:59
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Honored guests Yes, that's for real.
Gotta love this MinneDemo sign up:
167. Mayor Chris Coleman
Posted at 18:48
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Midnight movies Ridley Scott's Blade Runner: The Final Cut - Dec 1
Some good midnight movies coming up at the
Uptown Theater.
Original release version! Donnie Darko - Dec 8
From the creators of Super Troopers! Beerfest - Dec 15
Michael Keaton in Tim Burton's Batman - Dec 22
Alan Parker's film version of Pink Floyd The Wall - Dec 29
Posted at 16:20
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WANT The only place to get one in the US is
Scandivavian Grace in Brooklyn ($135) but my friend Garrick is
crocheting himself one:
More links:
Kitsune Noir,
Doobybrain,
Doobybrain 2, Vik_Prjonsdottir (the
designer)
The beardcap!
Posted at 13:28
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A wonderful place A group of guerilla restorationists
fixed the clock
at the Panthéon in Paris under the nose of the authorities.
The only downside to the story is that the Panthéon's administrator
was fired over the issue.
Obligitory photo:
This is one of those stories that just makes me realize that the world we
live in is a fantastic and wonderful place.
Four members of an underground "cultural guerrilla" movement known as the Untergunther, whose purpose is to restore France's cultural heritage, were cleared on Friday of breaking into the 18th-century monument in a plot worthy of Dan Brown or Umberto Eco.
For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves.
Posted at 13:12
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Programmer salaries
Joel
Spolsky: "You do have to pay competitively, but all said, of all the
things that programmers look at in deciding where to work, as long as the
salaries are basically fair, they will be surprisingly low on their list
of considerations, and offering high salaries is a surprisingly
ineffective tool in overcoming problems like the fact that programmers get
15" monitors and salespeople yell at them all the time and the job
involves making nuclear weapons out of baby seals."
Posted at 12:55
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MinneDemo 4: Cool demos + free drinks + food drive = holiday fun The 4th MinneDemo event is coming up next week! We've got five nice demos
lined up, plus some free drinks from our sponsors. Also, this time we are
organizing a food shelf drive to help out families in need.
The event goes down at O'Gara's Garage on
December 6, starting at 6:30. Hope to see you there.
RSVP on our web site.
Posted at 18:16
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Goodreads Goodreads is pretty cool. For the last two years, I've been keeping track
of the books I have read
(
inspired by Kevin Drum) so it's fun to rate them on Goodreads and see
what your friends thought of them as well.
However, I think the site could use a lot of work. After signing up, it's
very difficult to figure out how to add books to your list. Adding books
is easy (you just rate them) but it's not obvious at all that that's how
it works.
I don't really like social networking sites, but a friend invited me to
join Goodreads and since I love to read, I
signed up. You can see my
profile and add me as a friend if you want.
Posted at 12:08
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OpenCircuit I know just about every non-profit/community organization out there could
stand to benefit from some tech advice on how to use the net better to
connect with their members, so this is a welcome addition to the local
scene.
They're having their first event called
ShortCircuits on
December 1st at the Acadia. If you know a community organization,
recommend they attend.
This seems like a really good idea:
OpenCircuit a "knowledge-sharing network working to demystify computers
and information technology. We foster the free circulation of technical
knowledge to help community organizations increase their organizing
capacity and improve the common good."
Posted at 13:33
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Web Nerd Joke Well, I thought it was funny. Your milage may vary.
moar funny pictures
Posted at 19:30
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Krugman Heh.
I saw Paul Krugman speaking about his
new book, The Conscience of a Liberal today. Afterwards, I thanked him
for standing up to the Bush administration all these years, when it wasn't
popular. He told me he has a t-shirt that shows Bush's ever-declining
approval rating, which says "I disapproved before it was popular".
Posted at 21:33
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You call it RubyConf, I call it three days without breakfast Oh, you want to read about the conference? Check
Nick Sieger's blog or maybe
some
tags.
I'm really enjoying the content of RubyConf, but the timing is killing me.
Breakfast at 8:30 - 9:00am? (And the food is cleared very shortly
thereafter). Oof. If I ever organize a conference, it's going to start at
a civilized hour. :)
Posted at 07:05
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Babies! Congrats to my main man, Justin and his wife Natalie on the birth of their
daughter. Justin and Natalie are great friends and sure to be awesome
parents. They're also trailblazers: one of my first friends my age to have
kids.
Coincidentally, she was born on the same day as productivity expert
Merlin Mann's daughter, from whose birth I
take this photo.
It's totally unrelated, but I love the rock out aspect of childbirth.
Congratulations all around. w00t!
Posted at 22:34
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Sexuality and Harry Potter
Now that we know Dumbledore is gay, it's
time to re-run one of my favorite bash.org quotes:
Posted at 19:31
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RT Rybak on getting the RNC in Minneapolis
Heh. Wait for the punchline.
Posted at 17:47
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More gold farmers than real farmers
Whoa, there are now
more World of Warcraft players than farmers (4 million versus 2 million).
I expect the next "heartland values" segment to be about the rigors of
power leveling.
Posted at 10:15
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FanChatter: Success! We discovered some things that need fixing, but it looks like we'll be
back at the next home game.
The Gophers lost to the Bison, but FanChatter proved itself with the
crowd! Lots of people sent in
photos. It's pretty cool to get your stuff in front of 63,000 people,
have it work, and then turn around and put them up on the big screen.
Posted at 14:05
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FanChatter on the Jumbotron It's been exciting. I've worked on a couple mobile sites, contributed to
the open source MMS parsing library MMS2R,
helped extract code for the
Slantwise email fetcher (more on this later!), and presented on all this
at Ostrava on
Rails.
FanChatter is a product of all this. It's a
microblogging site targeted at sports fans. You can post on the web, or
from your phone or email.
And tomorrow, we're testing it at the Metrodome during the Bison-Gopher
game. People can send in photos during the game, and we'll be picking the
best to display up on the Metrodome.
Of course, we needed some examples to show off this "See Yourself Here" so
people will know how it works. So we're using
this photo of me and Jenny at the
Gopher/RPI hockey game last week.
So pretty cool. We're testing out a site I helped build, and I'm going to
be on the Jumbotron!
One of the things I've been learning a lot about at Slantwise is mobile
development (mostly sending and receiving MMS and SMS messages, but we're
starting to dabble in mobile web development).
Posted at 19:07
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MinneDemo 3 photos and links I had a great time, and then came home to read Paul Graham saying it's a
waste of time. So that was
fun.
There's
some photos on Flickr if you want to check 'em out.
Some blog reviews:
Graeme Thickins: "You could feel the energy, the entrepreneurial juices
flowing. You know we have something special going on here in Minnesota
when you experience one of these BarCamp events (which we call Minnebar
and Minnedemo) -- and when you see how we keep attracting more and more of
the important players from the community with every meeting."
Phil Crissman: "The common
wisdom, for tech startups, is to move to Silicon Valley ( 1 2 3 ). I can
understand the reasoning behind that, but I guess I'd have to put myself
in the camp that wants to believe that's not always necessary -- mostly
because I'm interested in startups, and I'm not looking to move right
away. From that perspective alone, it was cool to see the local tech
startups, and especially cool to see the dozens of others who signed up to
demo, but were cut off (only 6 demos due to time restrictions... 6 was
plenty for one evening, though)."
Bill McGuire: "The turnout at
MinneDemo was great! At 300+ geeks, in what could have been mistaken as
St. Paul's largest gay bar. Free beer tickets were given to the the first
100 guests and they did their best to talk over the speakers like they
were nothing more than a $25 warm up band."
Well, another MinneDemo has come and gone (the next
one is December 6, by the way). I thought it was largely successful. The
demos were more polished than in previous events and we had a couple of
companies demo'ing stuff publicly for the first time. However, it was
rather impossible to hear and I think we might need a bigger screen. The
social aspect of the event went well, though.
Posted at 15:47
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Some thoughts on taxes First of all, everyone ought to pay some taxes. It's important that
everyone be invested in the way government spends our money.
The tax system should be progressive. (Currently, the income tax is
progressive, but other taxes are regressive, leading to an
overall mostly flat tax rate, but with the very wealthy paying somewhat
less than the upper middle class.)
I believe this for a few reasons:
It should be government policy to prevent the establishment of an
American aristocracy. This goes along with my points about income
inequality (above). The estate tax is essential to prevent a permanent
class of ultra-rich who have done nothing for their money.
Tax credits only help people who pay lots of taxes. Tax credits for
buying the right kind of car, offsetting the cost of health care, and
other worthy things sound like great ideas, but they really only help
those who pay lots of income taxes. For the poor and lower middle class,
you can only reduce your income taxes to $0. If politicians were serious
about this, they'd make them grants.
Taxes can incentivize behaviors we want to encourage. A tax on gas helps
pay for roads, and discourages driving. A carbon tax would make all kinds
of environmental improvements cost effective and decrease the amount of
CO2 we produce. Consumption taxes are regressive, but I think that's OK as
long as the overall system is progressive.
Finally, the tax system is too complicated. It's mostly the fault of the
weird tax credits (see above). I really think the tax system should be
streamlined and made more progressive. There's no reason why the IRS can't
just send you a bill (or a rebate!) at the end of the year. You could do
your own taxes if you wanted, but most people don't need to.
I was talking with my friend Ben Moore today about
taxes and it inspired me to put down some thoughts on taxes. Ben's a
libertarian and I'm a liberal, so we have a friendly on-going debate on
the way things ought to be.
Posted at 10:43
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Office collar Maybe you need the office collar:
Or maybe you need a new job.
(Via Ben)
Bummed by your open plan office? Can't get anything done because of all the noise?
Posted at 08:06
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MinneDemo reminder: Oct 11 (tomorrow!) at 6:30pm Just a reminder: MinneDemo is TOMORROW, October 11.
It starts at 6:30pm at O'Gara's Garage, with the demos starting at 7:30.
The first 200 people in the door get two free drinks, so get there early.
Right now, there's 285 people RSVP'd, but there's still plenty of room, so
invite your friends.
Sign up at the site. See you there!
Posted at 19:05
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Zombie Pub Crawl: 18 hours later My deal was a biker that got hit by a car. I made some disgusting fake
scabs with gelatin and stuck real rocks in them. (Later in the night I
learned that pulling gravel out of fake scabs hurts almost as much as
pulling it out of real ones.)
Jenny got her wound on too:
I got a hair cut from my friend Garrick. He did a good job but I was itchy
all night long after that. Hair really sticks to blood.
Some other good pictures I took:
Impromptu Thriller dance:
Claudia as Zombie Abe Lincoln:
More photos at the
zombie pub crawl 2007 tag on Flickr.
Yesterday was the 3rd annual Zombie Pub
Crawl.
Posted at 11:57
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Pizza Nea Uptown has closed For my money Pizza Nea's Bianco is the best pizza in town. It's pure
simplicity: olive oil, salt, toasted mozzerella and basil. Every bite is
delicious. At $8, it feeds two people and was one of Jenny and my favorite
last-minute dinners, ready in 10 minutes within walking distance of our
place. But no longer!
Oh! This is a huge bummer. Pizza Nea has closed
their struggling Uptown location.
Posted at 19:26
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New Radiohead
In Rainbows. October 10. Sweet.
Posted at 18:50
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New MinneDemo site As an organizer, using a wiki has some great strengths: anyone can easily add their name or sign up to present, add photos or
links, and so on. But it has some downsides as well, namely that organizers can't get attendee's contact info unless they leave it
on the site (which many people are loath to do with their email addresses). This is especially bad for MinneDemo, where we need to
be able to contact presenters.
The final blow against PBWiki for us was that in the lead up to next month's MinneDemo, the barcamp.org
site has been extremely flakey. Almost every edit to the page resulted in a 500 error. This continued to happen for weeks at a
time. Finally, Dan Grigsby and I decided that enough was enough and wrote a simple sign up form in Rails.
Not only is the new site more reliable, but we were able to tailor it for our needs. We now collect email addresses for attendees
and presenters, and I'm adding niceties every day, like an RSS feed of attendees.
We'll still use barcamp.org to promote our events, but our new site will continue to evolve. I hope to develop it into a
full-fledged un-conference planning tool.
For a long time we've hosted MinneBar and MinneDemo on the
BarCamp wiki. The BarCamp wiki is hosted on a donation basis by the creators of PBWiki.
It's never been the greatest wiki software, but it's pretty easy to use and most of the BarCamp/DemoCamp community convenes
there.
Posted at 10:20
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WellStyled
WellStyled is a very nice CSS tutorial site in
English and Czech.
Posted at 11:58
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Ya R'lyeh
LOLTHULHU. Why didn't I think of this?
Posted at 00:42
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Loonies That's ok, I never wanted to travel abroad again, anyway.
No more jokes about Canadian play money: Canadian
dollar reaches parity with staggering U.S. greenback. And the Euro hit $1.40, too.
Posted at 16:07
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English Sucks
How can "traveled" and "travelled" both be correct spellings? English is
so frustrating sometimes.
Posted at 19:35
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MinneDemo ad Feel free to post it on your website!
I used a trial version of the new Acorn image editor. It's still a little rough but it is easier to
use than Seashore, especially in the font handling department.
I made this ad for MinneDemo, which is just around the corner!
Posted at 12:20
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Five hundred I've been riding my bike most every day to work this summer. It's about 13
miles round-trip. Undoubtedly, I'd have reached 500 miles sooner, but I
took 6 weeks off while I was in Europe this summer.
I'm not planning on riding in the snow during the winter, but I may be
able to crack 1000 miles before I hang it up. I need to get some
cold-weather gear, though. It's starting to get chilly!
Today marked a major milestone for me: I passed 500 miles this year on my
bike odometer.
Posted at 19:26
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MinneDemo 3 is happening Oct. 11 at O'Gara's! Announcement email is here. Send it to all your
friends in the Twin Cities tech community.
MinneDemo is ON! We've secured O'Gara's Garage ( 164 Snelling Avenue, St.
Paul) which should be plenty large enough for whoever wants to come.
Posted at 10:40
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Fixing Mac OS X's Terminal.app delete key
This is probably old news to everyone but me, but I finally found out how to make the Terminal's delete key delete forward like in
a civilized OS. Instructions are here.
Posted at 14:50
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LOL Cats Cartoonist Adam Koford, who has a thing for
drawing hoboes, has created -- or rather, claimed to find his great
grandfather's -- a comic strip from the 1910's called
Laugh Out Loud Cats.
Essentially, he's retconed the lolcats
genre as 1910's era hobo-cats, complete with the latest internet memes:
kthxbye, o hai, invisible x, want/do not want, halp, etc...
It's really pretty funny.
Now here's an interesting mashup of low internet memes, comics, and retro
charm.
Posted at 16:41
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Seven ways croquet is better than Second Life (and Croquet) Here are seven ways that croquet is
better than Second Life (and
Croquet)
Re:
7 Ways Croquet is Better than Second Life
Posted at 16:32
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Catfish the dog
Posted at 14:02
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Bookoo bucks Merci beaucoup!
Whoa, I had no idea that "bookoo" is actually
the French word beaucoup. Beaucoup = large + cut = a large part
Posted at 11:41
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Iceberg defense
TPM: "[H]ad the Captain
of the Titanic survived we probably wouldn't have feted him as the go-to
guy on iceberg defense."
Posted at 21:41
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Uh, no Hopeful woman: There's a waiting line for getting into prison, right?
Lawyer-looking guy: No, not really.
Overheard in Minneapolis St. Paul, Ramsey County Courthouse:
Posted at 21:48
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Old Time Relijun @ the Haunted House Dude, I was totally at this show! It was hot as hell in that basement but
the show was awesome.
Posted at 21:27
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Vietnamese Posters
My friend Tim Bewer saw my earlier post about Cuban
posters and pointed me to these
Vietnamese posters. He
saw some of them on a recent trip to Vietnam. Cool. What is it with
communists and graphic design?
Posted at 21:22
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Cuban Poster Art
Say what you will about their political system, but man do the Cubans know
how to illustrate. A few years ago I bought a fantastic book
Revolucion!: Cuban Poster Art by Lincoln
Cushing. Ever since I've thought owning one or two would be cool.
This eBay store sells
reproductions.
Posted at 21:39
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Raymond Thomas Rybak
Leave it to the BBC to
figure out what RT Rybak's name actually is. I did a double take --
I've never seen him referred to by his full name before.
Posted at 08:17
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More on I35W Minneapolis is only in the news
when bad things happen.
MNDOT's
traffic cameras captured the before and after images:
(Thanks to Dan Stone for sending me these)
CNN obtained
security camera footage of the collapse.
My former co-worker Bex Huff, who has a Masters in Civil Engineering (I
did not know that!) joins the call for
spending money to upgrade our nation's infrastructure. We've been riding
on the impressive investments of the 1950s and '60s. Since then, the money
that should go for keeping bridges, roads, and trains fully operational
has been shunted to other things. Like tax cuts.
We're still shocked that a major bridge like this could come down.
Posted at 17:36
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Cat says...
Posted at 12:44
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I35W bridge collapse I'd never considered the possibility of bridge collapse. I've driven over
that bridge hundreds of times. That's what really hits you -- it could
have been anyone. Surreal.
My heart goes out to the families of the victims.
I was riding the bus home from work at the time when the
I35W bridge collapsed. I
didn't find out until Jenny and I were in the car on our way to a party in
St. Paul.
Posted at 22:44
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Planned Parenthood comic Also, did you know Spidey was sexually abused?
Spiderman Has a Secret.
Escape from Fear (for
adults only): "Darling, it's so awful feeling this way! I love you--and I
want you, but I'm so afraid I'll get pregnant again, I freeze when you
just kiss me." (1956/1962)
Posted at 15:44
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Equity locusts
Learn something new every day. I just learned about the term
"equity locusts" which describes people from areas of high real estate
values who move into surrounding areas with lower prices, and use their
equity to drive up prices.
Posted at 14:55
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Will it blend? (iPhone edition)
(Check out the
glowstick
one, too)
(Spoiler: yes)
Posted at 14:40
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Build your own speakers
Via my co-worker Andy, this sweet video shows how to build your own
speakers with common materials. Fun with electromagnetics!
Posted at 14:48
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i believe in science
Posted at 14:33
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Hi from Prague Prague is cool. I've
posted some
pictures on Flickr. I'm on the way to
Ostrava on Rails to present on applications that talk to mobile phones.
Fun.
As my faithful readers (cough) may have noticed, I haven't been updating
this blog much. That's because, believe it or not, it's kind of hard to
find an internet cafe where you can use SSH. Yes, I update this blog the
old skool way, no web interface for me.
Posted at 01:59
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Belated honeymoon So, here we are. We're going to Europe for a little while. I'm not sure
how often I'll be able to blog as I'm not bringing a computer. But we'll
be uploading pictures to my Flickr
account every couple of days. Check 'em out.
When Jenny and I got married
( more
pictures) last year, we knew we would be able to take much time off for a
honeymoon (we did go to
Decorah on a whim). Jenny has to teach Fall and Spring, but she has some
time off in the summer and winter. We decided to postpone our "real"
honeymoon until the following summer.
Posted at 22:06
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Photo.net relaunches I used to spend a lot of time on the site back in the day.
I hadn't noticed this yet, but
photo.net has relaunched with Philip Greenspun back at the helm.
Posted at 14:06
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Thailand Songkran photos Tim just sent me a note to let me know that his
photos of
Songkran (the Thai New Year
festival held each April) are now being featured on the Lonely Planet
website. Cool!
Check 'em
out.
My friend Tim Bewer has one of the world's best
jobs: travel book author and fact-checker. He recently traveled to
Thailand on assignment for Lonely Planet
(he was there during
the coup).
Posted at 20:43
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What was the first e-commerce site? In the end, I couldn't find much about what the first web application was.
Now there's a
thread on
Joel on Software of people trying to figure out the first website to
offer internet purchases (closely related topics, I'd say). Some other
contenders: CDNOW (1994, but could
you buy things?) and
NetMarket (1994, first encrypted credit card transaction).
A while back, I was trying to research what the first web-based
application was (for a piece on putting Ruby on Rails in context of
previous web app development technology). Paul Graham
claims it was ViaWeb, but
Amazon.com (sometime in 1994) launched before ViaWeb. Maybe Graham means
first end user application, but I think Amazon still counts because it
was a dynamicly built site that users could interact with.
Posted at 16:41
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Ten soon to be extinct animals Incredibly fucking depressing.
Scientific American: 10 Animals That
May Go Extinct in the Next 10 Years (
gallery)
Posted at 17:51
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Twitter on Rockstars
Alex Payne, twitter: "We're hiring. So if you want to work on the biggest
Rails site in the world, and you're not a rock star and you're not a
dick, talk to us."
Posted at 11:16
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RailsConf too early RailsConf keynote at 9:00 AM: not cool.
Partying with the Extra Action Marching
Band until 2:30 AM: cool.
Posted at 11:03
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RailsConf 2007 so far (general impressions) There's security guards everywhere telling people don't go here, move away
from the door, the room is full, you're a fire hazard, and so on. They're
just doing their jobs but it is sort of harshing my mellow.
The premium paid sessions and keynotes for sponsors are lame.
Tom Preston-Werner's Fixture
Scenarios looks pretty cool.
Jon's talk on
video transcoding went over pretty well. There's actually quite a few
people here who are doing video transcoding. Also, he had clips from The
Office, which is always good.
Ze Frank was funny. What more can you say?
Avi Bryant had some interesting things to say but it was unconvincing to
me. The fundamental stumbling block I have with Smalltalk is the whole
"live image" thing. It just doesn't make sense to me that you'd want to
give up the advantages of text processing/editor choice, source control,
and ease of distribution that you get from having a file-based language.
David Heinemeier Hansson talked a bit about what's coming up in Rails 2.0
(no release date though). The good news is that it's mostly incremental
improvements. Active Resource is now fully-baked and ready to be part of
the framework. He showed an example of RESTful searching based on the
index method with query parameters (sort of like /people?q=foobar) which
gratified me because it's the way I've been doing it for a long time (I
often see people creating a separate search method, which I think
is totally unnecessary.)e
Tutorials were not as exciting as I had hoped. They were pretty basic, not
really the in-depth sessions I was expecting. The Joyent session on
scaling was good to know, but not as focused on what Rails developers can
do to scale their apps as I was hoping (that was kind of his point
though). But it ended up being was a 3 hour ad for Joyent: here's all the
things they do so you don't have to care about it.
Lunch has been OK. For $800 you would expect caviar, but it's pretty much
sandwiches.
Did some cool Portland stuff last night. The town is very walkable, which
is good because we were walking all over hell. I've gotten a couple local
beers. We went out for sushi last night at this place where everything was
$1-$3 which was incredible. It wasn't the best sushi I've ever had but it
was pretty good, and as cheap or cheaper than grocery store sushi.
The DoubleTree hotel bar sucks as it closes really early, and there is
surprisingly not too much stuff on this side of the river. All the
action's on the other side of the river from the convention center. I
kinda wish we were staying over there to make it easier to go out.
I'm finally figuring out screen. I never really felt the need to use it
before, but with all this jumping on and off line between sessions (and
the somewhat unreliable wifi) it's nice to be able to maintain my IRC and
mail sessions and get right back into them. It's killing me that I can't
use Ctrl-A as easily in my mail client, though.
The CDT to PDT transition is killing me. I keep waking up really early and
I'm super tired at night...going to Europe is going to be killer. Ugh.
There are a lot of people here. The wifi is better than last year,
though it's still slow.
Posted at 23:52
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BingD'OH! I wrote most of the code for this, and Norm
Orstad came up with the cool retro design.
It's already being used at RailsConf, for example the
DHH Keynote, and you can easily
create games for your own meetings.
BingD'OH! is another little app from
Slantwise Design. BingD'OH! is the
best-looking buzzword bingo app on the web.
Posted at 10:52
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Gore on attention spans
Al
Gore: "Trust me on this. If audiences had an unlimited attention span,
I'd be in my second term as President."
Posted at 14:32
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RailsConf 2007 It's exciting to be in Portland. I want to go to Powells's, grab some
quality west cost sushi, ride the trains, and have some of their awesome
microbrews...
I'm sitting in Jason Hoffman's tutorial about scaling Rails (hint: scaling
big mostly doesn't have anything to do with Rails) and finally learning
how to use screen.
Posted at 10:17
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Button I didn't even know there was a <button> element!
Kevin Hale:
Rediscovering the Button Element.
Posted at 10:17
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Kottke Wonder if they're related...
Kottke? Of the Buffalo Lake Kottkes?
Posted at 20:30
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Thus Spake Zarathustra
Posted at 20:13
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Backing up photos while traveling Apple makes an
iPod Camera Connector that I thought would be perfect, but
it got pretty negative reviews (it's slow and the camera can run out of
batteries while transfering) and it doesn't work with the iPod nano which
is what I have.
Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman write about the problem in Macworld:
Back up
photos on the road.
The Digital Foci Photo Safe
looks promising but at $149 for 40GB is kind of expensive (for more than I
need -- I anticipate needing no more than 4 or 5 GB) and it weighs .6 lb
which adds up when you consider the rest of the crap I'll be carrying
around.
If anyone has suggestions, email me: look@recursion.org
I'd like to find a good way to back up my photos off my camera while I'm
in Europe this summer. Ideally, I'd like to backup from the memory card
directly to a thumb drive without using a computer.
Posted at 16:51
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Lileks and Minnesota tech reporting Like other lefty bloggers, it's fun to engage in a little schadenfreude.
Poor Lileks, has to work a real job. And he's obviously not pleased with
it:
Ha ha.
But the sad thing is, the Twin Cities need someone working the local
tech beat at the Star Tribune.
We just organized one of the largest tech events thrown in Minnesota in
years: MinneBar. Around 350 people attended, making
it one of the largest BarCamps anywhere, ever.
This is news, people!
And yet I could not get a single reporter from the Star Tribune to come to
the event. They've never covered any of our events. We've been in the
Pioneer Press four times and the Business Journal at least once. The Strib
sucks for tech journalism.
Poor James Lileks
lost his humor
column at the Strib as part of the new owner's cost saving strategy. He's
been re-assigned to cover the local tech scene.
There's been some talk that I might leverage my mad web skillz into a tech beat, reporting on the Internet. But a local beat about the Internet? How many stories can do you about six guys in a loft coding a hot new start-up? And heaven forbid we have to illustrate them, because then you get the inevitable geek-by-the-screen shot. Look! He's customizing the drop-down location menu so it defaults to the United States instead of Afghanistan!
Posted at 21:59
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Finnegans Summerfest Here's some details about the event, from Chris:
Sounds like good fun for a good cause -- check it out.
My friend Chris Dykstra passes on word about the
Finnegans Summerfest June 9, raising
money to end homelessness in Hennepin County.
Finnegans is a socially-responsible beer brewed right here in Minnesota.
Jacquie Berglund is the owner of Finnegans Irish Ale. Jacquie started Finnegans in 2000 with the idea of donating all profits back to the community. The became profitable in 2003 and have raised over $60,000 for a slew of great causes.
This year, Jacquie is ratcheting up her efforts by creating Finnegan's Summerfest (http://www.finneganssummerfest.org), a music festival to be held on June 9, 2007 at the Cabooze in Minneapolis, MN. It will feature one of the best musical line ups to appear anywhere in Minnesota this year - 21 bands on three stages for 12 hours. All the profits will benefit Heading Home Hennepin (http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/homelessness/), an initiative to end homelessness in Minneapolis and Hennepin County by the year 2016. Tickets at the door will be $25.00.
Posted at 21:43
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May Day 2007 I took some
pictures from In The Heart of the
Beast Theatre's annual Minneapolis May Day Parade. The weather threatened
rain, but it turned out to be a beautiful day.
Posted at 19:15
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Back in the saddle The morning ride was great, but I got caught in a downpour on the way home
and ended up soaking wet! Ah well, it was fun anyway. I'm back at it today
(and the weather's nicer). I'm looking forward to riding my bike as much
as possible this summer.
Yesterday, I rode my bike to my new job at
Slantwise for the first time. Slantwise is
in downtown Hopkins with is right on the bike trail that streches from the
Mississippi to Lake Minnetonka (and right by my place). It's about 7 miles
each way.
Posted at 11:44
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Burritophile Here's the entries for
Minneapolis and
St.
Paul.
A website
entirely devoted to burrito reviews? Sign me up!
Posted at 11:32
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"Getting" Joins
Ligaya Turmelle:
"Getting" Joins. Good visual explanation of the different types of SQL
joins (inner, outer, left, right).
Posted at 09:45
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MinneBar 2007 in the Pioneer Press
This story ran yesterday:
MINING FOR WEB 2.0 GOLD IN LOWERTOWN
Tech entrepreneurs to convene at MinneBar
Dan Grigsby got rich during the first dot-com mania a decade ago when he built a successful e-commerce startup called Merchant Planet in St. Paul's Lowertown.
He'll return to Lowertown today, but this time he'll be joined at a convention he helped organize by more than 300 programmers, Web developers and general all-purpose geeks who hope to strike it rich themselves. They want to get in on the Internet's second gold rush, dubbed "Web 2.0," that has been epitomized by Google, YouTube and MySpace.
Grigsby is one of the co-organizers of MinneBar, a sort of Woodstock for geeks. The convention features workshops like "Translating Geek: Executable Documentation" and the business-oriented "Marketing Your Technology Startup."
Grigsby is hoping events like MinneBar will draw together tech types who will launch their own enterprises by taking advantages of Web programming tools that didn't exist when he built Merchant Planet.
"I've spent all this time talking about this because, more than any place I've ever known, Minnesotans are a people of side-projects," he said. "Most every developer seems to have a pet project that could just about become a business."
- Leslie Brooks Suzukamo
Posted at 10:48
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Web 2.0: In Business and Out of Beta Participants: Dan Grigsby (currently working on a new start up), Bruno
Bornsztein (co-founder of Curbly), Matt Thompson
(editor of Vita.mn), and Ben Moore (co-founder of
Curbly).
NOTE: This is not word-for-word (I can't type that fast). It is
paraphrased. Questions from the audience are marked "Q"
DG: What makes web 2.0 different web 1.0?
We can do big projects with less people (example: Curbly -- two guys, two
months, no office)
How do you get buzz?
BB: Can launch small, but how do we get noticed?
We hired writers to produce initial content, and then used social news
sites like Digg to promote that content.
Q: Do you mark paid content separately?
BB: No. Curbly is a "group magazine". Paid writers create articles, but
users can too. [Note: Bruno later added that Curbly's paid writers are
listed as "featured authors" -- they're not hiding the fact that they pay
people to write.]
DG: There is a difference between paid writers and "astroturfing".
Q: What is Curbly's traffic now? How to monetize/intend to monetize?
BB: Digg traffic is bursty. 50K hits one day, 0 the next. Doesn't affect
over-all growth.
Digg establishes your site. Helps with organic search. 70% of Curbly
traffic is from organic search
We have 350,000 page views/month and growing. [Bruno later mentioned that
the big ad sellers won't even talk to you if you have less than 1,000,000
page views a month.]
Q: Uniques?
BB: 100,000 unique.
MT: Steady growth seems to be a constant across sites. Vita.mn is not
talking to a global audience (so they can't promote it on Digg).
Our equivalent is when the Star Tribune (Vita.mn's parent site) links to
us. Flood of traffic. Some sticks.
BM: Digg doesn't provide a permanent hook. Lifehacker is a great traffic
generator for Curbly, because the audience is similar.
Finding similar blogs who will link to you is good cheap marketing.
BB: Find out what community exists already. There is a huge DIY
community already. It was sasy for us to tie into that.
MT: We're taking something you could do yourself (blog) and making it
stupid simple.
It's the distinsion between Application and Publication. The Star Tribune
is used to doing publications. Apps have a different investment horizon.
Publication achieves success by being entertaining, timely, andrelevant.
Application achieve success by having people put their stuff in your tool.
Your tool powers their publishing.
DG: Let's talk about monetization of a niche.
Example: Guy Kawasaki made $9/day with
Google Adwords, but he can charge $75 per job ad -- because he has a self
selected audience.
MT: The attention economy. Cliche but sort of true. Attention powers the
web 2.0 economy. Vita.mn tries to seize a different slice of attention
than the Star Tribune.
Q: What do you think of subscription based sites?
BB: 37 Signals succeeded because they have a ton of attention via their
blog. Before you can sell something, people have to find you.
Q: Are people willing to pay for content?
Justin Kruger (audience): MySpace (free) versus online dating sites (not
free) offer many of the same features. What are people paying for?
Filtering.
MT: You need two things for paid strategy
Another type of monopoly is a monopoly audience. Dating sites target
specific metro regions, for example.
Q: How did Curbly do word of mouth marketing?
BM: We researched top bloggers and contacted them individually. None
were interested until we launched.
BB: It was very time consuming. You can't send a bulk email. Gotta
personalize it, but it's slow.
BB: We didn't spend any money on marketing. We spend some on contests.
Q: Are you satisfied, or could have done more marketing?
BB: We could have done more, but we're developers.
BM: We maximized leverage. We used the things we didn't have to pay for.
Q: What would you do differently?
BM: I would want a partner with a huge email list (Home Depot for
example)
BB: I disagree with Ben. I would buy much more content right off the
bat. Content drives traffic. I would pay for more original content,
interesting stuff.
When you're just two people, where you spend your time is important.
Q: How important was monetizing Curbly?
BM: We had no monetized strategy at the start.
BB: If you have 50 people working for you, you gotta figure out how to
monetize quick. There's less pressure when you're just two people.
BM: We knew we didn't know how to monetize. But we wanted to get it out
there. Fail fast. Got first version out in a month.
DG: Development process?
BM: We did the least number of features we thought we could get away
with. We knew the site wasn't done. My dad checked out the site a week
after we launched in IE and it was all messed up -- we didn't do any
cross-browser testing! (before launching)
BB: I wanted to wait longer. But it was good to get it out there. Unless
you're 37 Signals, no one is watching you. No one knows when you launch an
application.
Below is a (very) rough transcript of what was discussed at the
MinneBar 2007 panel Web 2.0: In Business and
Out of Beta. The panel was supposed to be lead by Aaron Mentele of
Electric Pulp, but he had to turn around en
route from Sioux Falls, South Dakota because his wife went into labor! Dan
Grigsby took over the responsibility for guiding the discussion.
Posted at 10:00
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DHH at MinneBar Ben Edwards, Dan Grigsby and I got news today that
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of
Ruby on Rails, will be
attending.
Pretty cool news, and a nice bit of validation for the little
un-conference we've managed to build up here.
Need another reason to attend MinneBar?
Besides geeking out with 250 of your closest friends, that is.
Posted at 21:46
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Work -- Jerome K. Jerome,
Three Men in a Boat, 1889
It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me; the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
Posted at 08:00
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Cutest Corgi Ever On the cutest website ever: The Daily Puppy.
( Cute Overload, eat your heart out.)
Posted at 18:38
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MinneBar ad Here it is:
If you'd like to advertise MinneBar on your blog feel free to use it.
Graeme Thickins asked me to create an
ad for MinneBar to run on
Get Go MN.
Posted at 12:03
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Words to live by -- Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, 1889
Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need--a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
Posted at 18:58
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Lingon
Lingo is a GUI for Mac OS X's
Launchd. Hurray, no
editing XML config files.
Posted at 08:10
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Moleskine plagiarism? I gotta take issue with the inclusion of the Moleskine knockoff, though.
While it is rue that the Moleskine "is said" to have been used by Matisse
and Picasso, there's no
evidence that they did. Furthermore, today's Moleskine is not a
direct descendant of the original moleskin-type notebooks. According to
Wikipedia:
In other words, the Moleskine brand notebook is a re-creation of a generic
type of notebook based on Bruce Chatwin's description.
So I don't really sympathise that some one else ripped off the design and
claims famous artists used it.
Business Week:
The
World's Greatest Knock-offs (via
Daring Fireball)
The original Moleskine notebook is said to have been used by legendary artists and writers such as Matisse, Picasso, and Hemingway. The plagiarist had no qualms in saying their notebooks were, too.
"Don't forget you can copy the romance behind a product," says Christine Lacroix, the museum's curator.
Moleskine's most famous endorsement comes from Bruce Chatwin, who used similar notebooks constantly throughout his travels, and wrote about them glowingly. Chatwin's original source of notebooks dried up in 1986, when his Paris stationer informed him that the last moleskine manufacturer, a small family-run firm of Tours, had discontinued production in 1986 after the death of the owner. The modern moleskine is fashioned after Chatwin's descriptions of the notebooks he used and is not a direct descendant.
Posted at 15:02
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Epic 2014 I totally missed the local connection until tonight.
Why did I not realize that Epic 2014 was
co-created by local boy Matt Thompson? (Also known
as the brains behind
vita.mn.)
Posted at 20:53
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MinneBar 2007 I love it. It looks super sweet and totally captures the feeling of what
BarCamp is all about. Mad props to designer
Bill Ferenc for creating it.
The only way to get one of these babies is attend
MinneBar on April 21st. Sign up on the wiki.
Instead of a lame conference shirt, we commissioned one that you won't be
ashmaed to wear again. Check it out!
Posted at 17:43
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Whoosh, Boom, Splat
(Remember, kids, always wear your safety glasses!)
Bill's one of those guys that it's cool to have in your area. I found his
blog Notes from the Technology
Underground when I was scouting around for
Central Standard Tech. He's also written
for techie mags like Wired and Make.
Bill Gurstelle wrote to tell me about his
new book, Whoosh Boom Splat
(
Amazon), which tells you how to make awesomely dangerous projectile toys
at home. But I'll let his video do the talking:
Posted at 11:16
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Star Wars Stamps I don't know whether to be blown away by the commercialization of the Post
Office, or childhood nostalgia. But I'm lovin' the R2D2 mail box.
Wow. Just
wow.
Posted at 21:21
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Onion News Network
Heh:
Posted at 19:16
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How to get TextMate highlighting into Apple's Keynote All the Rails luminaries use very nicely syntax highlighted code in their
presentations. This is how they do that.
Thanks to Tony Collen for finding this for me.
For future reference: Copying
syntax-highlighted code from TextMate into Keynote.
Posted at 15:38
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Spring I took advantage of it to get my bike out of the basement for a little
test ride around Lake Calhoun. Refreshing! If all goes well, I will ride
my bike to work next week.
There's still a few stubborn patches of snow on the ground, and the lakes
still have a crust of ice on them, but with a high in the 60s today,
Spring has definately arrived in Minneapolis.
Posted at 17:57
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Wooden Wall
This wall decoration is awesome! It's just cordwood. I'm totally going to
do this some day (birch would look cool) when I have my own office.
Posted at 16:23
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MinneBar 2007 is on We're also looking for session presenters, so don't be shy!
Head on over to the wiki and sign up for
MinneBar 2007, being held in St. Paul, April 21. Last year's MinneBar was
a revelation for the Twin Cities tech community, and this year's event
promises to be even better.
Posted at 19:17
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How to move a Subversion repository First, back up the repository with svn dump:
Copy the repos.dump file to the new machine.
Log into the new machine and create the repository as your svn user.
Restore the data with svnadmin load:
IMPORTANT: Set the permissions. If you don't do this, it's unlikely you
will be able to use the repository as you would like.
Test the new repository by commiting a change. You should not get any
permission errors.
Resources:
Tecnical Bits:
A Simple Way to Backup and Restore a Subversion Repository (but note the
missing permission step)
ArchWiki:
Subversion backup and restore (includes stuff you don't need if
Subversion is already installed)
Here is a simple technique to move a Subversion repository from one
machine to another.
svnadmin dump /path/to/repos > repos.dump
svnadmin create /path/to/new/repos
svnadmin load /path/to/new/repos < repos.dump
chown -R svn:svnusers /path/to/new/repos ; chmod -R g+w /path/to/new/repos/db/
Posted at 09:48
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Happy π Day Unfortunately, I always forget until the last minute that it's Pi Day, so
I'm not doing anything special.
Happy π Day: March 14 (3/14)
Posted at 11:49
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Why ESR sucks
ThomasPtacek on reddit has done a service to humanity by creating a
concise list of
why Eric S. Raymond sucks. All ESR's greatest hits are there.
Posted at 07:34
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Chuck the foodie They picked my friend Chuck as the sterotypical Whole Foods shopper.
Nice duds, Chuck!
Inside an otherwise interesting article on the
origin and
evolution of the grocery store, the City Pages did some photo
illustrations of "typical" shoppers of various stores.
Posted at 11:41
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Firebug Lite
Firebug rules for debugging web apps
in Firefox, but for lessor browsers,
there's Firebug Lite. Thanks to
Dan Grigsby for pointing this out.
Posted at 09:26
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Slantwise's new website It's the work of our talented designer, Norm Orstad.
Speaking of Slantwise, our new website is
finally up!
Posted at 14:46
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Better Together Jenny and I have been thinking of these perfect pairings for years.
Last week, I realized that the idea would make a fun little website. And
today, Slantwise Design is proud to announce
Better Together.
Now there's a taggable, web 2.0, mashup-driven social networking site
where you can keep track of those perfect pairings!
OK, not really. But it really does keep track of things that go better
together. And it's pretty fun. So give it a try
and tell your friends.
Nerds only section below
We really saw the benefits of rapid development with
Ruby on Rails on this project. This was a fun
snow day(s) side-project. We went from idea last Tuesday to deployment
today with less than 70 hours of total development, design, and QA time.
Plugins used:
acts_as_commentable * Slantwise plugin. Look for release soon.
Some stats:
You know how there are certain combinations that just go better together?
Like pizza and beer and
tomato and basil?
acts_as_invitation*
acts_as_sanitized
attachment_fu
exception_notification
restful_authentication
url_key*
yaml_mail_config*
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Name | Lines | LOC | Classes | Methods | M/C | LOC/M |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Controllers | 265 | 205 | 10 | 22 | 2 | 7 |
| Helpers | 48 | 42 | 0 | 4 | 0 | 8 |
| Models | 299 | 213 | 9 | 34 | 3 | 4 |
| Libraries | 293 | 200 | 4 | 34 | 8 | 3 |
| Components | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Integration tests | 129 | 92 | 2 | 11 | 5 | 6 |
| Functional tests | 605 | 502 | 18 | 73 | 4 | 4 |
| Unit tests | 443 | 332 | 9 | 51 | 5 | 4 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
| Total | 2082 | 1586 | 52 | 229 | 4 | 4 |
+----------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+-----+-------+
Code LOC: 660 Test LOC: 926 Code to Test Ratio: 1:1.4
Posted at 18:06
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'Open Source' is a meaningless term In short, EnterpriseDB is a company that
provides a proprietary version of PostgreSQL
that is a drop-in replacement for Oracle. EnterpriseDB contributes a lot
of work back to the PostgreSQL project, but its own project is not open
source.
'Open source' was coined as a business-friendly alternative to the term
'free software' by
Eric Raymond.
People conflate 'open source' and 'Free Software', but Free Software has
always meant something else.
By the Free Software definition, EnterpriseDB is not a 'free software'
company, because it fails to provide freedoms 1, 2, and 3. The fact that
they contribute back to the project is irrelevant.
However, open source is not so clear-cut. Yet some people perist in
claiming that EnterpriseDB is not an 'open source' company...seemingly on
the grounds that they don't release their work as open source. I'm afraid
that's the definition of Free Software, not open source. The term 'open
source' was crafted to be business-friendly, and it succeeded at that. But
it also muddied the waters, leading to confusions like this.
The recent
debate
over whether EnterpriseDB is an 'open source' company proves that the
term 'open source' is now completely meaningless.
Posted at 08:07
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Smoking Ban Poll
The Legislature is having a poll on the state-wide smoking ban.
Add your thoughts.
Posted at 11:20
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Beatbox Flute
Jenny being a flutist and all, we really dug this crazy video:
Posted at 11:49
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Twin Cities Traffic Map widget updated I wrote the widget after I got Tiger, and began ignoring it shortly
thereafter.
The first nagging urge to fix it was when I found out one of my new
co-workers at Slantwise actually used it. That was rather a shock. Then
today I got an email from another user asking me to fix it, so I figured I
might as well learn how to do it.
What's next? Fixing Word
Unmunger to work with Python 2.5? You never know.
I've finally been shamed into updating my simple little
Twin Cities Traffic Map
widget so it auto-updates when you load the dashboard (and every five
minutes while you're on the dashboard).
Posted at 21:15
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See this movie: "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" It's an expose on the secret MPAA ratings board, with some detours to talk
about the power that the MPAA wields in Washington through their lobbists.
There's a number of interviews with directors about the trouble they've
had with the board and how it is virtually impossible to challenge a
rating. Indie directors especially get the shaft, because the system
favors the big studios.
The film is dead serious, but often hilarious -- especially when director
Kirby Dick sends in This Film Is Not Yet Rated...to be rated.
Watch the DVD extras, too. There's some really funny war stories from
directors about sending in their movies to be rated, an interview with the
EFF's Fred von
Lohmann about the MPAA and their influence on Washington, and the whole
story about the MPAA -- scourge of pirates --
making an
unauthorized copy of the film (even after Kirby Dick explicity sought an
assurance that this would not be done).
If you haven't yet, I highly recommend seeing
This Film Is Not Yet Rated
( IMDB,
Amazon,
Wikipedia).
Posted at 10:09
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Mac colors and Safari ArsTechnica has more on
chosing a good
color profile for yourself and Safari developer
Dave Hyatt has a response.
I remember hearing that Macs used a gamma value of 1.8 while PCs used 2.2.
But that was years ago, and I've never seen a demonstratioin of its
effects.
Chris MacAskill of SmugMug put together a cool demonstration of how Safari
and Mac OS X conspire to
wack your colors.
Posted at 08:31
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Broken Politics
I Drew This, June 19, 2006:
Posted at 16:29
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Bullet graph article I started an article on bullet
graphs on Wikipedia. Bullet graphs are an effective little chart
developed by Stephen Few in his book
Information Dashboard
Design.
I figured I'd spread the word with an article about it.
This is my second Wikipedia article. I also started the
PL/SQL article so long ago that it
is not in the page history. :)
Posted at 21:58
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Thoughts on DRM This is really about DRM, as
John Gruber
points out.
It's not promising, but it would be nice if the music labels would take
Jobs up on his offer to support unencumbered music in the iTunes store.
I have never purchased anything from the iTunes store, and I never will as
long as the songs have any kind of DRM. I don't have time to search out
songs on BitTorrent or what have you, so I either buy CDs, listen to the
radio, or go without. Call me old fashioned.
But the convience of the iTunes store, plus a standard, open format...that
would be tempting.
Steve Jobs: Thoughts on
Music.
Posted at 20:45
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Multiple IE
Multiple IE looks like a god-send for
web developers who need to test their design against multiple versions of
Internet Explorer. There are some bugs, but it lets you run multiple
versions of IE on the same PC. This is especially relevant now with the
on-going upgrade to IE 7, because most developers have to support at
least IE 6 and 7.
Posted at 09:56
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Copilot 2.0 supports Macs That's cool, I may have to give it a try next time I'm giving my mom
remote tech support.
Joel's Fog Creek Software has shipped
Copilot 2.0, which
now supports Mac OS X.
Posted at 14:07
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Dream Office Someday, it will be mine. It will be mine.
OK, Jeff Atwood officially has my
dream office.
Posted at 20:19
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Get a First Life
Now this is what I'm talking about: Get a
First Life.
Posted at 09:06
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Skiing with the Mayor We were taking the kind of
self-photos couples
get good at improvising when no one else is around -- you know, get close
together, arm out straight, hope you're both in the picture -- when a man
skiing up the hill asked us if we'd like him to take our photo.
It was Mayor Rybak! Hah! That guy's everywhere. Plus, he took a pretty
decent shot.
Photo by RT Rybak
Jenny and I went cross-country skiing today at lovely
Theodore
Wirth park. Minneapolis finally got some proper snow last week so we
decided to take advantage of it. I brought my camera to take some pictures
while we were skiing.
Posted at 18:18
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New Job: Ruby on Rails developer I'm still a Ruby Nuby, so it's been an interesting month.
Rails's documentation is as challengingly sparse as it's made
out to be. Fortunately, I'm getting better and I've got the collective
brains of the Ruby Users of Minnesota at my disposal.
This is a month overdue, but as of December 11th, I have a new job as a
Ruby on Rails developer at
Slantwise Design. After five years at
Ancept I thought it was time for some new
challenges.
Posted at 17:26
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Stopping Comment Spam with hashes and honeypots (and not CAPTCHAs) Very nice write up of some effective (for now) techniques to stop the
two main types of spam bots.
Hashes prevent replay attacks, and honeypots pevent form-filling bots.
Fun aside: Ned is the guy with instructions on how to make a
cube out of six business
cards. I did this a couple years ago and it was pretty cool.
Ned Batchelder: Stopping
spambots with hashes and honeypots.
Posted at 16:24
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Twelve Basic CSS Templates Via Digg.
Mitch Bryson has created a
library of
twelve bare-bones CSS templates. This looks great for customizing!
Posted at 18:44
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Prototype Documentation - Finally!
The Prototype Javascript library finally has
documentation. And there was much rejoicing.
Posted at 18:39
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Pre-Guy Kawasaki Meetup I'll be there!
Graeme Thickins is organizing a meetup event before Guy Kawaski's (sold
out) talk on "The Art of the Start" at the U of M on Friday.
Anyone who has a ticket to the Guy Kawasaki talk at the U on Friday --or even those who don't (you might still be able to get in) -- isinvited for a Pre-Guy Schmooze in the lobby of the auditorium at the McNamara Alumni Center. For details, see http://graemethickins.typepad.com/graeme_blogs_here/2007/01/meetup_before_g.html and http://graemethickins.typepad.com/graeme_blogs_here/2006/12/guy_kawasaki_is.html
Also, if you're interested in seeing him play hockey, he told me his two games on Friday are at 8:30 and 3:30 (the Pond Hockey tournament isat Lake Nokomis). Don't know the name of his team, but there can't betoo many from Mountain View or Cupertino... :-) And the tournamentcontinues Sat, so he should be playing then, too.
cheers,
Graeme Thickins
www.Tech-Surf-Blog.com
Posted at 09:14
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Tickle me Elmo burns to death (via jwz)
Truly
distrubing.
Posted at 13:32
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