Older blog entries for prla (starting at number 117)

Spent some time this morning looking into the new major version of Wordpress and despite not having upgraded this very blog into it (yet), I think it’s a pretty decent overhaul. Perhaps not as ground-shattering as you’ve probably have to come to expect from a software’s new major version, but still very much worth to upgrade. I understand from the website that upgrading from version 1 to this one shouldn’t be much of a problem, but still I haven’t tried it yet.

What I did do was giving a shot to the Mac provided Apache server (1.3.33) and installing a fresh copy of WP2 in my iBook’s localhost. The first (and pretty much only) problem I bumped into was that PHP was non-existent, so I just grabbed this nice Apple Developer HOWTO and installation was a breeze. I did notice however that compiling stuff from source with gcc in Darwin is a bit slow, at least on my system.

Once I got WP up and running, I did a quick survey of the administration interface, so here’s some thoughts on it:

• The admin interface got a face lift, not much a departure but it’s now more blue and generally pleasant to the eye.
• There’s Javascript goodness all round, the kind that is actually useful and doesn’t get in the way. And it’s cute to boot.
• The themes section is better presented and there’s now support to edit the Kubrick’s theme header colors from within the admin interface. Only changing the title and description font colors did work, though, which is OK by me considering I prefer to use background pictures in it. But changing the text color easily still comes in handy. This is all part of the Current Theme Options feature, which I assume are different for each installed theme.
• Of special interest to me and Tiago is the fact that his DokuWiki markup plugin works like a charm under WP2. All it took was simply copying the doku/ folder from my current WP1 installation to WP2’s plugins folder, et voila.
• RSS feeds seem to be working fine despite Russell's reports on the contrary. I do wonder why Safari’s RSS icon in the address bar looks for the Atom feed instead of the RSS2 one I provide in the links within the blog itself.
• There’s now a nice feature of importing posts and comments from other blog systems (namely Blogger, Movable Type, TextPattern and plain RSS) into WP2. This is good because now I can actually import all those dozens of entries I got in my old Blogger blog.

And that’s pretty much what I could gather. When I have more time, I will make a complete backup of my current WP installation and proceed to upgrade it to version 2.

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Cringely:

The classic example is Microsoft, where hiring smart people fresh from school and working them 60 hours or more per week – in an environment where they don’t even leave the building to eat – leads to a state of corporate delusion, where lying and cheating suddenly begin to make sense.

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I was just lazily going through my feeds and bumped into this. According to KernelTrap, there is now a “Linux Device Driver Kit”. Cool!

The better way to introduce is letting Greg Kroah-Hartmann, Linux kernel hacker extraordinaire, do it for me:

“It is a cd image that contains everything that a Linux device driver author would need in order to create Linux drivers, including a full copy of the O’Reilly book, ‘Linux Device Drivers, third edition’ and pre-built copies of all of the in-kernel docbook documentation for easy browsing. It even has a copy of the Linux source code that you can directly build external kernel modules against.”

This really goes a long way to lower the barrier to entry for wannabe Linux device driver writers. I used to be quite into OS stuff some years ago and for whatever reasons that’s no longer the case, but this is a really nice thing and hopefully it will further enhance Linux kernel development.

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[ I always keep my reviews someplace else but I decided to repost this one here because it’s both a) related to technology and b) it’s a red alert. So to speak. ]

Boy, what can I tell you?

“Aardvark'd” is supposed to be a movie documenting how four intern developers at a New York based software company create a new application in twelve weeks. In itself, this is probably already uninteresting for anyone who’s not tech-inclined and has no idea how software is actually developed in the real world. Problem is, even if you fit this bill but were in fact interested in learning about it, it’s certainly not in “Aardvark’d” you’ll find out how it goes. Producing a movie like this, you not only alienate about 95% of the world population from the get-go. You go the whole distance and simply alienate everyone.

For this is a terrible, terrible documentary. I can’t even begin to tell you how much this stuff sucks. Rarely in the past I’ve been so disgusted with something I see on the screen, even moreso when I spend real cash having it shipped all the way from New York. Because what we actually get to see is four dudes, some of which look like it’s the first time they’re getting out of their respective houses, doing just about everything except for coding and getting an application off the ground: one plants tomatoes, another covers his windows with alluminium paper because he thinks some end-of-the-world type thing outside is targetting him (incidentally this is the same guy who seems to be conditioned into saying the word “like” every couple of seconds. Go figure.), another speaks so slow he’s either stoned or retarded. I could go on, but you get the idea. And don’t even get me started on the soundtrack. I want a puff of whatever these guys have been smoking.

This is a real shame simply because the potential for this to have been a great innovative documentary was enormous. Instead we’re left with an incredible waste of our time. I feel like Joel Spolsky - the company owner, mentor of this project and the one who’s pitched so much about this DVD that he tricked me into buying it - literally sucked 80 minutes out of my life for nothing. I should be reimbursed for this.

Not even the short appearance of Paul Graham, one of the most proeminent advocates of creating your own company, makes up for it despite those incredibly short five minutes truly being the highlight of the feature.

I hate the concept of censorship, but this one shouldn’t have been allowed off the press. This movie is just wrong. Just wrong. Avoid at all costs.

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After a wonderful weekend spent in Madrid to attend Riverside’s gig (write-up and pictures) and feeling like crap for the entirety of yesterday with a sinusitis attack, I’m now back on my feet. Meanwhile, some things that have crossed my radar and incidentally are now crossing yours:

• Ryan Freitas, of Adaptive Path has a very interesting article describing how they teamed up with upcoming startup Sphere tackling the challenge of ruling the weblog search arena. The emphasis is on simplicity while delivering a host of decisive features, focusing on improved result presentation and the accompanying screenshots are tremendously cool.

• Dave Crane, author of Ajax in Action posted his thoughts on the use of closures in Javascript. Remembers, lads, closures bind references, not values!.

• Still on the design theme (I’ve been reading quite a few articles on that subject lately, you see), with so many blogs out there, one issue that tends to be overlooked is how comments are styled. Granted, most of the time people probably don’t even read the comments following an article but still the issue is relevant. SmileyCat features a Blog Comment Design Showcase and there’s plenty of great examples to go around. Here are my favorites, one for a white-based design and the other for a dark-based design:

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It’s been a while but for a good reason. We’ve been giving a lot of love lately to the shiny new web app we’ve been developing on and off for the past few months. And today I’m proud to have open its doors, albeit just a little bit, so a little of sunshine can go through. Suffice it to say, for now, that we’re still far from production mode and the next few weeks will be spent on some testing in our inner circles, desperately trying to iron the most obvious and silly bugs. More on this later, as I plan to write a series of articles documenting our experience while developing this app. I just couldn’t imagine this could be so much work, even if the tools available these days take a lot of the burden out of it.

Other than that, I guess I finally choked long enough in my own delirium and decided it was time to hit the books and actually get down to work, university-wise. The semester is quickly drawing to an end and there are still so many loose ends, it’s unbelievable. A lot of project works, at least one of them a bit, shall I say, tricky (writing a Prolog interpreter in Python, in this case) and others just plain boring. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do or so the saying goes. Come July, if all goes to plan, I’ll be able to catch my breath. Or not.

And into the title of this post, which pretty much boils down to this: these days, when I want to learn how to do something - say, the syntax to checkout a specific SVN repository revision - my first (and pretty much only) thought is simply hitting Google with the plain question. More often that not, I get the right answer right away. No thinking involved. What happened to the days when you actually had to read the manual or, God forbid, look into the source?

I leave that question hanging in the air.

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Ryan Singer:

Hereâ€[TM]s the most important thing about paper sketches: If they arenâ€[TM]t borderline indecipherable to anyone who wasnâ€[TM]t present while they were drawn, you wasted your time. As long as you know what the elements mean, thatâ€[TM]s enough. Youâ€[TM]ll be making the real screen in five minutes anyway.

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I couldn’t go on without writing down this amazing piece on the ThoughtFix blog, entitled The Google Life Dream:

I am in New York on vacation. I’ve never been there before and don’t know where to go or what to do. I’m in the mood for a cup of coffee now, fine Italian meal tonight, and a concert tomorrow. I fire up my Nokia 770 tablet. It peers with my cell phone and pocket GPS receiver over Bluetooth, finds my location, and loads the Google Life site. I quickly tap in “coffee shop” and it suggests several coffee shops within walking distance. One is tagged with free WiFi access and has good reviews from other visitors, so I walk over. Once settled in, I disconnect the cell phone connection and attach to the free WiFi. While sipping my triple-shot Mocha, I look over concerts playing this weekend. It seems that there are tickets still available for one of my favorite musicians. I book the tickets and add the information to my calendar, then confirm my hotel reservations, decide on a restaurant for tonight, and see if there’s anything else interesting nearby. It’s my lucky day: there’s going to be a free Shakespeare play in the park a half mile away in about an hour. This mocha is REALLY good. I have some time to kill: I think I’ll write a positive review of this cafe.

Breathtaking. While there’s some 770 sales pitch going on aswell, I think the real lesson here is that if Google pulls off something like this - which is entirely not too hard to believe, many pieces are already in place - they’ll pretty much steal the proverbial show.

Thoughtfix says he would pay up to $50/month for this kind of convenience. How much would you pay for it?

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Many reasons are behind Ruby on Rails’ rise to the top of web app construction frameworks, not the least of them being the thoughts, beliefs and points of view of its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson. Something which gets reflected not only on Rails itself but also on 37 Signals entire set of products. Incidentally, they went on and squeezed their own fruit. The resulting juice is fortunately available for all to see (or read) in the form of the Getting Real book (available for $19 in online format, sample chapters on the website).

What led me to write about this (which isn’t exactly news, many have blogged about the book release a couple of weeks back) was one of David’s latest blog posts, entitled Distinguishing Power from Versatility, following a short critique he himself wrote about recent James Gosling's declarations. One quote I believe is revealing of particular enlightenment:

The greater the versatility, the higher the abstraction, the less useful for the specifics. Saying you’ll be everything to everyone, from “web presentations” to “interplanetary navigation” as Gosling puts it, is not free. You have to give up other desirable attributes to get that. Which is fine, of course. If your model of the world is that you’re stranded on a dessert island and you can only bring one tool. Or if your model of programmers are that they’re too busy/uninterested/dumb to to ever learn more than one platform.

Interesting how the views of a single developer can instil in me the desire of trying out different products of his labour. In particular, I think it’s high time I take a serious look at Ruby on Rails (no matter how much I’ve been loving TurboGears lately).

I know. I’m a year late.

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More work than I can muster, getting kind of overwhelmed around here but probably my organizational skills - as usual - are to blame. I should really make good on my TODO and check out some tools for GTD. But considering others blog every other day about how difficult it gets, I should probably not think too much about it and generally hope for the best. In Portuguese we have an expression that roughly describes what I feel like right now and it literally reads something like “everyone on a heap and faith in God”. And as with every literally translated expression, it just reads and sounds so foolish, especially to those who understand the original phrase. Feel free to write in the comments if you know the proper translation for this.

But anyway, there’s some degree of help provided by iCal and I’m generally getting by. Enough with the whining, already!

Great Reads

Despite the freak schedule I’m still trying hard to neatly separate days from nights, so I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading around the web most evenings leaving real work to earlier in the day when my brain fires up most cylinders, I find the web is burgeoning with really interesting insights from different necks of the woods and this new so-called Web 2.0 is just so damn innovative and exciting (I sound like it’s a completely new thing that has just come about. I know that’s not the deal, but if you’ve been following you know what I mean). So, that said, if you also feel these are exciting times, that we’re actually living through the dawn of an amazing new era and adding to that you have the entrepeneur in you, I suggest you take a look at these…

• Five Things I May or May Not Know - excellent post by fellow Planet Tao poster, Daniel Jalkut in which he lets us in on a few insights he gathered from his own experiences in the technology business. Instead of feeling diminished by those who are so much better than ourselves, I believe we should be thrilled to have the chance to learn with them and we have the web to thank for it being so easy and accessible these days.

• Entrepreneurial Proverbs - straight from O'Reilly's Radar yet again, Marc echoes some points he’s made on his “Entrepreneuring for Geeks” talk on this year’s ETech. Great quotes abound, but I found this one especially thought-provoking:

entrepreneurs too often worry about keeping their brilliant secrets locked away; we should all worry much more about springing a surprise on a disinterested market (anyone remember the Segway?). To quote Howard Aiken: “Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.”

This is something I’ve always been particular wary of, but deep down have always tried to think otherwise. I’m still not convinced, though. How long should you keep your shiny new app (regardless of its real value) secret? Too long and you’re wasting time you could be using to gather users. Too little and it’ll be too simplistic allowing others to easily build a better app on top of the exact same idea (assuming it’s a good one). Am I making sense here or am I just delusional?

• Pattern Languages - thinking in patterns is not a new thing but it’s being rehashed quite a lot. This website is particularly interesting and provides dozens of patterns and common solutions to commom problems when developing web apps (again via Marc at the Radar).

• The Art of the Start - by Guy Kawasaki. I haven’t read this one yet but I’ll surely get around to it sooner or later (if someone wants to buy it for me, don’t think twice, always on the lookout for gifts, ya know). Sure it’s self promotion on the author’s website but this particular quote struck me:

This book is a weapon of mass construction.

Awww. Sexy.

That’s it for now. Quick note to state that the app is coming along nicely and we’re soon opening it up to some testers. Currently there are some layout bugs that need to be ironed out, especially where it concerns IE and Safari (the first is the mess everyone knows about and the second is surprisingly broken when it comes to Javascript and Ajax requests).

There’s some discussion I’d like to ignite about real world web apps development - as my meager blog audience allows - but a quick glance at the clock tells me it’ll have to be left for tomorrow or some other time.

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