Aaron Sumner

How would you roll your own data science course?

2013-05-24T00:00:00-05:00

Last week I mentioned I was taking an online data science course. This week I made the difficult decision to drop it and look for a solution better suited to me, my learning habits, and what I’m looking to do. Based on the syllabus for the course and the work I did so far, I’ve put together this list of topics I’d like to improve upon and the resources I’ve found (so far) to help with that. What should I add?

Databases

Seven Databases in Seven Weeks: A Guide to Modern Databases and the NoSQL Movement: I’m hoping this book will provide a solid survey of database technologies available, and help me find the best next steps for each as needed.
SQL refresher: One thing I realized in the course is I’ve gotten a little too reliant, sometimes, on a good object-relational mapper. What’s a good resource for getting my hands dirty again with plain old SQL? What about O’Reilly’s Learning SQL or Zed’s Learn SQL the Hard Way?

Python

I knew enough Python prior to starting the class to get through the homework. I did take advantage of the Python track on Codecademy to refresh my memory just enough. Is Python the scripting language for data science, or just the language of choice for the teaching staff? Whither Ruby? Or, if you wanted to get from beginner Pythonista to advanced beginner, what would you read next?

R

I read Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby last year; may need to revisit it.
There’s An Introduction to R, available for free online, which I haven’t yet read.
Code School has a free Try R course I also need to review.

Math and statistics

I’ll admit it. I haven’t taken a math class in 20 years. I had to revisit matrices on Khan Academy. Are there other resources for old dudes who suddenly find themselves having to do algebra (or more) again?
I’ve got a copy of Think Stats ready to read at some point.

What else?

I’m sure this list is missing things; what should I add?

3 picks for May 17, 2013

2013-05-17T00:00:00-05:00

Copy

I’m a fan of Dropbox, but competing service Copy’s got a couple of nice things going for it: First, 15 gigabytes of storage, free, out of the box. Second, when someone in a group posts a giant file in a shared folder, it’s doesn’t ding your quota. I’m eager to try this out with others–sign up from this link and we’ll both get additional storage space.

Merrell Proterra

I’ve pretty much only bought Merrell shoes for the past six years or so. Bought these last weekend and love them. Lightweight, good traction; great day-to-day shoe. I’m told they’re also excellent trail hikers; I plan to put them up to that in a few weeks.

Pencils

Plain old wood number two pencils, just like you used in grade school. I rediscovered them this week and found I prefer them to pens. In fact, give me a pencil and a Sharpie and I should be set.

3 picks for May 10, 2013

2013-05-10T00:00:00-05:00

I inadvertently took a break from sharing picks last week, as I was having too much fun in Portland at Railsconf. Here are this week’s selections.

Codecademy

Codecademy started as an online JavaScript tutor; it’s since expanded to other languages and technologies including Ruby, PHP and Python. Although it’s targeted toward the beginner end of the spectrum, I like working through their tutorials if I need to quickly get up to speed with the basics of a language–in this case, I took a couple of days last week to learn some Python-related nuts and bolts. While I’m nowhere close to calling myself a Pythonista now, I’m able to complete the tasks I need to take care of, and understand enough to look find answers to the things I haven’t learned yet. Take a look at Codecademy’s free services before paying for competing options.

Coursera

Why am I working with Python? I’ve just begun taking an online course through Coursera, one of a handful of companies providing free access to higher education coursework. The course in question is “Introduction to Data Science” from the University of Washington, and it’s proving so far to be at least as every bit of a challenge as anything I had to do in graduate school. (Oh, the assigned work is to be completed in Python.)

Ruby Central

Back in Ruby land, I would like to publicly thank the fine people at Ruby Central for all the work they did to put together a great Railsconf this year. I’ll be writing more about it as session videos begin appearing on Confreaks, but all in all it was a top-notch event. Thank you to Even Phoenix, Ben Scofield, Marty Haught, and all the volunteers for making it happen. See you in Chicago next year.

5 of my favorite presentations from Ruby Midwest 2013

2013-05-07T00:00:00-05:00

I know Ruby Midwest 2013 was a month ago, but now that Confreaks has all the presentations online I thought I’d share a few of my very favorites. I plan to do something similar for Railsconf once those are available. In the order they’re listed on Confreaks:

Failure for Fun and Profit!

Note to self: Don’t include the word failure in a talk’s title unless you, yourself, are ready to handle glitches. Kerri Miller did so like a champ. It’s hard to present without slides these days. I’m glad to see more developers thinking about how we learn, and recognizing that it’s cool to not be right all the time.

Rails Application Security in Practice

If Bryan Helmkamp’s talk on the ways a would-be bad guy can break into your Rails application doesn’t scare the shit out of you, I should either congratulate you on a well-secured app or suggest you watch the talk a second time. I love practical talks like this that give you a clear to-do list of things to do.

Functional Principles for OO Development

I’ll admit, I need to go back and watch Jessica Kerr’s talk another time or twelve to better grasp the content. But that won’t be a problem–Jessica’s presentation style is a joy to watch and a much-needed respite from some of the dry, monotone deliveries you’ll no doubt see at a given conference. I believe Jessica is giving this presentation elsewhere; I recommend checking it out if you see her name on a schedule.

Lightweight Business Intelligence

This was probably my favorite technical-leaning talk of the event. Corey Ehmke did a great job of dispelling some of the murkiness of business intelligence, particularly by providing starting points without diving headfirst into NoSQL, Hadoop, and the like. (Hint: Denormalize!)

The Most Important Optimization: Happiness

I said this much on Twitter just after this session: Ernie Miller’s talk on what really matters could have been a keynote. Great message, well-executed delivery. Even if you’re not a developer-type, please take the time to watch this talk.

Lawrence Rubyists unite? Lawrence Rubyists unite!

2013-04-26T00:00:00-05:00

A public service announcement to any Ruby developers in the Lawrence, Kansas area who may not already be members of the Lawrence Coders Meetup group: A subset of us with an interest in Ruby are going to start getting together soon for focused meetups, and/or to carpool to the larger Kansas City Ruby meetups once a month.

Interested? Check out the following:

Join Lawrence Coders, if you haven’t already
Fill out this quick survey to let us know when, where, and how often you’d be interested in talking about Ruby
Join in on the discussion with other area Rubyists

I’m hoping to really get rolling on this after Railsconf, but no need to wait on that for planning and discussing.

3 picks for April 26, 2013

2013-04-26T00:00:00-05:00

DirecTV

It may not be cool to love your satellite provider when cutting your television provider is all the rage, but when you live in the country and put up with slow, capped Internet service, cable-cutting may be several years down the road. I’ve liked everything about DirecTV since signing up with them a couple of years ago. This week I had a tech come out to recalibrate the dish after we got a new roof; both the customer support rep and the technician who did the work were great to deal with–much better than a certain Lawrence-serving cable provider I used when I lived in town. On top of that, DirecTV’s technology actually looks like it came out of this century and not like there’s a Super Nintendo secretly running my DVR.

Anyway, if you happen to see this and sign up for DirecTV, let me know your plans–I think we both get a break on our bill if I refer you.

Public libraries

I don’t think the cool, cable-cutting kids like their public libraries, and that’s a damn shame. I’ll admit that I seldom considered the Lawrence Public Library before my country move, preferring the instantaneousness of Netflix–but again, that slow, capped Internet forced my hand. As it turns out, the LPL is a great resource to our community. In addition to being my first place to check for books and movies, they provide great meeting space for my local Meetups.

They’ve relocated to an abandoned Borders Bookstore during a massive remodeling, and I can honestly say I don’t think I ever saw the place nearly as energetic as a Borders as I see it every time I walk into the “Free Borders” version currently housed there. I hope that when they move back to their regular location a new tenant can enter with the same energy.

Railscasts

Any Rails developer knows Railscasts, Ryan Bates’ long-running screencast series demonstrating how to do just about anything you’d ever need to do in my favorite framework. I can’t think of a bigger influence on my own work than Railscasts. When Ryan began a subscription-based pro level I signed right up, and I’ll happily pay him nine bucks a month for as long as he’ll take my money.

3 picks for April 19, 2013

2013-04-19T00:00:00-05:00

Downcast

I’ve been a Downcast user for a couple of years now–it’s the podcatcher app I never knew I needed. Easily subscribe to and sort your favorite podcasts. My favorite feature is the ability to create playlists. Great for anyone with a commute.

Alfred v2

Downloaded it a few weeks ago, but have only just begun digging into what makes it a substantial upgrade to version 1. There are little things, like making the preferences manager a standalone app. And then there’s the slick new workflow system, and gems like Forecast and fast user switching and battery info.

Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz

Started it last fall but got sidelined. Finally getting back into it and love it. A great next book for anyone who’s read Russ Olsen’s Eloquent Ruby and/or who wants to tackle object-oriented design from a Ruby frame of mind.

3 picks for April 12, 2013

2013-04-12T00:00:00-05:00

Hacker Newsletter

Love Hacker News for the news, but hate the commentary and drama that comes with it? Kale Davis curates the best content from the past week and shares it with you in a convenient email newsletter format.

Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots

I moved to the country almost two years ago, and as such now have a daily, roundtrip commute of about 40 minutes. I try to spend this time productively, listening to podcasts to increase particular skills or my general overall awareness of things. This is my favorite Ruby-related program, produced weekly by Ben Orenstein at thoughtbot.

Guided By Voices: The Bears for Lunch

The latest album from a resurgent GBV came out last fall, but I didn’t begin listening to it in earnest until a few weeks ago. My favorite so far from the reformed classic lineup, especially “She Lives in an Airport” and “The Challenge Is Much More.”

Jump Start Sinatra: A book report

2013-03-20T00:00:00-05:00

Looking for a quick, but thorough, introduction to the Sinatra web application library? Jump Start Sinatra by Darren Jones is just that. The book’s cover offers to help readers “get up to speed with Sinatra in a weekend,” so last weekend I spent some time re-familiarizing myself to this increasingly popular alternative to Rails. I’ve messed around with it a few times in the past, but never went through a proper tutorial to build and deploy something from scratch. That’s what Jump Start Sinatra is all about.

While some knowledge of Ruby is helpful to complete the book, it’s not necessary. (I would, though, suggest experience with some kind of web programming first.) The book covers everything from installing Ruby and Sinatra on your development computer to configuring gems to deploying for the world to see on Heroku. Rails developers will also benefit–those whose primary experience with Ruby consists of the “omakase” stack may like the introduction to alternative libraries like DataMapper and Slim, and seeing how unfamiliar solutions accomplish unfamiliar tasks is always a great way to learn.

One thing I was kind of surprised to not see in the book was any mention of automated testing. Testing is such a prominent part of the Ruby community that I felt it deserved a couple of pages. I also thought the practice of installing gems from the command line, then requiring them in a Bundler gemfile for deployment purposes, was kind of odd–I’d stick to using Bundler for everything in this case.

Otherwise, Jump Start Sinatra is a solid introduction to the library, and is recommended for anyone interested in getting started with this lightweight, flexible approach to creating powerful web applications.

Note: I wrote this review for O’Reilly’s Blogger Review Program. It’s a pretty nice deal: Get a free e-book to read, share a review in your blog, get another free book to read. Sign up for yourself to take advantage of this deal, and watch for more book reports in my blog.

Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec book updates: February 2013's Project a Month Project

2013-03-01T00:00:00-06:00

Keeping up with the Project a Month Project, I took time in February to complete a much-needed round of updates to my self-published book Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec. If you have already purchased the book and weren’t aware, you can head over to Leanpub and download an updated copy. Here’s a rundown of what was addressed in this update:

Throughout the book, I replaced the older .should syntax with the preferred expect().to syntax–in other words, some_known_truth.should be_true becomes expect(some_known_truth).to be_true. Even though there are still books and tutorials out there using the older syntax, I wanted to get things moving in the right direction–it was also a good way to get myself to quit memory-typing .should all the time in my tests.
I updated the chapter on Capybara to cover changes in version 2.0. This means that what were formerly request specs are now feature specs, complete with feature and scenario blocks, along with gotchas from Capybara’s dislike of ambiguous matching.
The early chapters have been reworked. Instead of jumping right into factories, I start things off by using basic Ruby objects to build up test data. Factories get their own chapter following that, and are used throughout the remainder of the book.
I made copy edits throughout the book; if I didn’t like how something read I updated it to hopefully make it better. (Some of the content in the book is almost a year old by now!)
Code samples for the affected chapters have been updated to reflect a more recent version of Rails 3.2, the latest versions of RSpec, Capybara, and FactoryGirl, the aforementioned change from .should to expect().to, and other dependencies.

A couple of things still in progress:

I’m still ironing out a few things in the Speeding Up Specs chapter–primarily an expansion on the previous content.
Testing the Rest also has some new content; right now I’m still reviewing the older stuff to make sure it still applies.

The plan is to get these knocked out in the next few days, then it’s on to the last edit: Updating the Rails 3.2-based application with a 4.0-base. I think I’m going to start with a fresh code base and build up the new application. The good news is I’ve been playing with the beta of Rails 4.0 and so far haven’t found any major issues with my existing approach. Look for the final edits around the time Rails 4.0 goes final.

Snow days

2013-02-26T00:00:00-06:00

Last winter was our first in the country. I bought an all-wheel drive to prepare and everything. As it turned out, it wasn’t necessary–I think we barely got a foot of snow total by the end of the season.

This year’s another story. Well, really, this past week is another story. Big snows last week closed my work last Thursday and Friday, then a bigger batch shut it down again today. I went out and snapped a couple of photos to mark the occasion. This was before the wind really picked up and started knocking the snow off of everything.

It’s not really a secret that I hate winter, hate snow, hate cold weather–but last Saturday it warmed up quite a bit, so I started rolling up giant snowballs. They became a snow sculpture I called SnoJo in homage to JoJo the dog.

Sales visualizations for Leanpub authors: January 2013's Project a Month Project

2013-01-30T00:00:00-06:00

This month’s Project a Month Project was a small one, with a very small intended audience: Me. As you may know, I began selling a self-published book last May, via a publishing service called Leanpub. Leanpub offers a CSV of sales data for authors, updated upon every new sale. I wanted to look at this data graphically as opposed to tabularly–and since Rails is my hammer and this problem was a nail, I wrote a dirty little Rails app to create some basic charts of my sales and royalty data.

Standard disclaimer: This is not a Leanpub product! I’m only using the name Leanpub since this application is useless without a Leanpub sales data file. Leanpub is a service of Ruboss Technology Corporation, a corporation incorporated in British Columbia, Canada. I self-publish a book using this service, but am otherwise not affiliated with them in any way.

I run the application locally on my computer, so there was no need to fret about authentication or other security measures. Once data are updated via a basic file upload, then parsed with Ruby’s CSV library, the convenient Highcharts Javascript library (via the Lazy Highcharts gem) display data month-over-month. I also break things down day-over-day within a selected month.

The code is ugly with no test suite. The user interface is spartan at best. But I didn’t write this to show off any software development prowess. I wrote it because I needed it. I open sourced it in case someone else might need it.

Docent: December 2012's Project a Month Project

2012-12-31T00:00:00-06:00

For December’s Project a Month Project I decided to tackle an idea I’ve been meaning to work on for a few years now. Back in 2008 I built a contextual help system into a Rails 2-point-something application. The idea was a simple one–I created an external knowledge base of tutorials for the application. My application assigned a URL for a specific tutorial to a Rails controller-action combination. Finally, the Help link present in the application’s layout file intelligently linked to a context-specific tutorial based on where the user was within the application. It worked well, and since then I’ve had other uses for such a technique. I just never got around to doing anything with it until now.

Rather than just embedding such an approach in future applications, I can now use Docent. To build Docent I took advantage of mountable engines in Rails, meaning that it technically runs as a small, separate application within a main Rails app. I hadn’t yet done much with mountable engines, so this was a good opportunity to learn more about them.

As it turns out, mountable engines are easy to get started with. I’m going to write some more technical information in an upcoming Everyday Rails post. I also took the opportunity to publish my first gem–which means it’s easy for anyone to install Docent into their own Rails 3.2 applications. Not suggesting that anyone should–I’ve still got more real-world testing to do, but hopefully making it accessible will help others make improvements on the concept.

My big takeaways:

Engines–mountable or otherwise–are an excellent way to extract functionality from medium-to-larger Rails applications and make for more manageable codebases.
Engines are also great opportunities to contribute your work to open source.

I do have a couple of things I’d like to keep messing around with in Docent:

I’d like to figure out how to replace the HTTP basic authentication I’m using with the host application’s authentication. Still looking around for different approaches to this–the challenge is the separation inherent between the mounted and host applications.
Big ticket: I’d someday like to be able to post directly from the likes of ScreenSteps into a knowledge base contained within Docent itself. I figure this involves fun stuff like XMLRPC (as ScreenSteps supports it), handling file uploads in the process.

My first two days with the OWC Data Doubler and Mercury Electra 3G solid state drive

2012-12-19T00:00:00-06:00

I just replaced my MacBook Pro’s original 350 GB hard drive with a 240 GB solid state drive from Other World Computing, installed with the Data Doubler bracket. While I was at it I figured I’d go ahead and install a fresh copy of Mountain Lion on the new drive (upgrading from Lion on the old drive). I’m almost two days into the upgrade and wanted to share my experiences so far.

First off, some rationale: Why upgrade my drive instead of my computer, and why go with a Data Doubler instead of just swapping the drives? First off, while I admittedly covet the 13-inch Retina Display, I was hoping to get at least another year out of my old Core 2 Duo-based model. I’ve had the RAM maxed out since the day I bought it, so the next feasible update was a faster and/or larger hard drive. I’d initially thought about swapping the stock drive with a solid state drive and putting the stock into an external enclosure, but realized that would mean having to tote an external drive around whenever I wanted access to my photos or music. Not ideal. I also thought about just dropping as large of a hard drive as I could buy into the laptop, but figured that wouldn’t get me anywhere in terms of speed.

The Data Doubler, coupled with an external optical drive enclosure, turned out to be ideal. I’ve now got 590 GB of total space. My operating system, apps, and day-to-day files are on a fast SSD, and my media have plenty of room on a drive that’s now media-only.

One more note on justification: I went with OWC’s base-level Mercury Electra 3G line of SSDs, for two reasons: First, the optical bay in my laptop won’t support faster speeds (read the fine print on the OWC site); and second, I didn’t want to throw too much money into an aging Apple device. I am, though, fine with spending around $300 to boost both speed and overall storage, while keeping an optical option in the process. As a longtime fan of Otherworld Computing (they did help me keep a Sawtooth-based G4 tower going well beyond its prime, after all), I trust them to have quality products designed to work with Macs out of the box. This experience has been no exception.

Installation

Hardware installation was smooth–in under 30 minutes I had my optical drive removed, replaced with the Data Doubler bracket and a 240 GB solid state drive, and said optical drive installed in an external case. That said, if you’ve never cracked open a computer before this probably isn’t the best way to get your feet wet–I would recommend getting some help. If you’ve ever swapped out a hard drive before, though, this is in your wheelhouse. The package itself includes a detailed, step-by-step guide. I also found it helpful to watch the video provided by OWC.

Mountain Lion

So far the only issue I’ve had has nothing to do with the hardware but with how the Mac App Store saw my new configuration. Since I hadn’t yet erased the old hard drive while I was getting up and running, the App Store thought I’d already had my purchased apps installed. To work around this I had to add the old drive to Spotlight’s privacy settings (System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy), reboot, and unmount the drive. After I did that and fired the Mac App Store back up I was able to install my apps fresh.

I have to say it was nice having my old data on a drive already mounted and in the actual laptop–it was simple to grab the data I needed and move it over to the new drive.

Media disk

I’m now using my factory-installed drive as a media disk. It houses my iTunes library, my iPhoto library, a few disk images I want to hold onto, and videos I intend to watch someday. (Note: To tell iTunes and iPhoto where your media files are located, hold down the option key as you open them.)

While these files along with my system and regular document and code-like files were crowding the drive, when the non-media have been moved over to another drive I’ve got room to spare. This is the real beauty of the Data Doubler, in my opinion–I’ve got my media, and I’ve got it right here–no regretting that I didn’t bring that external drive along when I want to listen to a certain album or show off some certain photos. And yeah, I’ve got hundreds of CDs yet to rip–but thanks to the optical drive enclosure I added to my order it’s just a matter of plugging in the drive.

Results

I’ll admit to running a speed test app, but it didn’t tell me a whole lot–and I’m more interested in real-world results, anyway. So here are a few:

My Mac boots in about four seconds now. Not that I have to reboot all that often, but seriously, four seconds.
Keynote starts in under a second. Ditto Pages, Numbers.
iTunes goes from zero to ready to rock in under two seconds.
An automated test suite for a Rails application, written in RSpec and hitting the database rather heavily, went from upwards of seven minutes down to two minutes, ten seconds. Believe it or not, those four-plus minutes of saved time alone made the purchase worth it for me, as I run that suite several times per day.

All in all, I’m incredibly pleased so far with my $300 investment. While I’m sure I could have gotten a 240 GB SSD drive for less money if I’d shopped around, the fact that OWC focuses on Mac-based upgrades (and has for so long) I’m confident that I won’t have any problems with this drive running in my Mac. If you’ve got an aging MacBook (or any Mac, for that matter) I strongly recommend checking out Other World Computing’s offerings. They may just have a product to help you eke a little more time out of your old computer.

Sound Refound: November 2012's Project a Month Project

2012-12-14T00:00:00-06:00

As mentioned separately, I have initiated a Project a Month Project to help kickstart myself into getting more ideas and side projects out into the wild. The inaugural project was a total rebuild of Sound Refound, my online gallery of concert flyers I collected from the streets and venue walls of Lawrence and Seattle back when I used to go to a lot of shows.

The rest of this post is mostly technical detail of the project. Be forewarned.

I’d been meaning to do a rewrite of the application for awhile now. The original work happened awhile back–maybe three or four years ago? I wrote the original in Rails 2.3 and hosted it on Heroku and it quietly did its thing all that time. However, the behind-the-scenes infrastructure was kind of messy. I was using Heroku for parts of it, a Dreamhost-hosted MySQL database for part (this was before Heroku offered its own SQL support, as memory serves), and Amazon S3 for storing and serving the actual images. And when Heroku announced they were discontinuing the Aspen stack, I determined it to be a sign to get the ball rolling on something new.

So here we are:

The new application is written in Rails 3.2.9 and ready to bump to 4.0 when the time comes.
I’m now using a Linode-hosted VPS to serve the application, data, and images instead of spreading things around–honestly, I don’t need to worry about scale for this and am not a fan of premature optimization.
Front-end web developers will no doubt recognize a barely-tweaked Bootstrap interface. I don’t normally use Devise for authentication, but did in this case since I could install it and be done.
I used my usual testing stack of RSpec, Capybara, and Factory Girl.

Want to see the source? Head on over to the GitHub repository and poke around.

There are a few things I’d still like to do when time allows:

Do some form of pagination so you’re not loading every flyer, every time.
Add some SEO-friendly metadata.
Maybe figure out a clever way to hook this into my Amazon Associates account to refer business and get a small cut.

Speaking of getting a cut, and speaking of Linode, if you’re in the market for a Linux virtual server I strongly, strongly recommend them. I use them for both day job and free time activities and have been thoroughly pleased. Use my referral link and I’ll get a small kick-back (and use it to buy you a beer the next time I see you).

Announcing the Project a Month Project

2012-12-14T00:00:00-06:00

Last month I made a deal with myself. Instead of letting little projects and ideas pile up I’d commit to knocking one of them off per month. I call this initiative the Project a Month Project. The goal is to get a minimum viable product out the door by the end of the month. November’s entry was a little late due to holidays and a decision to scrap it and start over with a couple of days left in the month, but it’s out the door. You can read about Sound Refound in a separate post.

I’m not interested in announcing up-front what each month’s project will be. Sometimes it will be code, sometimes not. I reserve the right to build a piece of furniture or plant a garden or write a poem on any given month. At the end of the month, though, I’ll reveal and detail what I’ve been up to.

That’s my plan. How do you keep your stream of ideas from building up?

Some thoughts on 2.5 years of technical blogging

2012-11-02T00:00:00-05:00

In May of 2012 I started Everyday Rails, a technical blog about pragmatic use of Ruby on Rails for web application development. I began writing after I realized that questions I was answering at work, at users groups, and elsewhere might be worth answering to a larger audience. I started with a bang, writing ten posts in the first month. Now I have a hard time writing once a month (my last post was published on September11), and really since that first summer I’ve been lucky to get a post a month up there. I’ve been thinking about why I’ve struggled to keep going, and have some off-the-cuff thoughts (and some ideas on what I need to start doing).

First and foremost, if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t have started the Everyday Rails brand. At the time it seemed best to keep my work-related writing and my personal writing in separate containers. Nobody was going to be interested in reading about how I use Rails and looking at my amateur photography, right? In hindsight, though, this split has hurt my all-important personal brand–while Everyday Rails isn’t held in the same regard as other Rails-specific online products, at least more people are familiar with it than they are Aaron Sumner. And as someone with no interest in speaking at conference, and for whom attending a lot of conferences is problematic, I need to get my name out there any way I can.

My second beef with how I branded Everyday Rails is the whole Rails part. Don’t get me wrong, I still love Rails as much as I can love a web framework; I still live in it more than any part of my technology stack; and I believe it continues to have a long and bright future. That said, it limits what I can write about in a blog called Everyday Rails, both in terms of scope and the sheer fact that we may have reached critical mass of Rails-related blogs and screencasts. Given that my day-to-day (everyday) work often limits how cutting edge I can get–and, honestly, that many of the folks producing Rails tutorials are more advanced than I am–coming up with content that’s new and/or unique is a challenge.

Finally, I have to say that writing to a specific audience’s skill level for a sustained amount of time is more difficult than I would have imagined, had I given it more thought. Everyday Rails was always geared toward the Rails developer who’d completed Agile Rails or Rails Tutorial but didn’t know where to head next. This wasn’t bad when I started. I had lots to share to this audience, and most tutorials aimed for beginner-beginners or more advanced developers. If you consider blogging as a learning exercise (which I do), though, you need to grow while taking as much of your audience with you on the ride. (I think Stack Overflow has cornered the audience I was writing for, anyway.)

With all that in mind it’s all the more impressive that bloggers and screencasters like Ryan Bates keep it going for as long as they have (in Bates’ case, more than five years now), keeping content fresh and relevant on a consistent basis. I’m here to tell you, it’s hard work that they make look easy.

So how do I make things right?

First, I need to be much more realistic about my output. Multiple times a week is completely nuts. These days cranking out new material once a week isn’t realistic, either–so I’m going to work to get to a twice-monthly schedule. I might have to build up to that. Second, I’m going to have to start writing for myself first. Sorry, but there are plenty of resources these days for folks on the front-end of the Rails spectrum. And I’m going to be a little more loose with the Rails part–Rails will still be my base, but I’m giving myself license to write about what I use when Rails isn’t the best fit.

Fluent Conference video compilation: A book report

2012-10-19T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve spent time this year revisiting JavaScript. To be honest, I’m one of those old school web guys who played around with it when it was a brand new offering from Netscape, found it a cute but unreliable way to do cute but unnecessary things in the browser, and moved on. Its resurgence admittedly caught me off guard, and I found myself playing catch-up with a lot of great developers who are doing interesting things with the language.

So, in addition to a number of books and other video resources, I recently checked out some of the talks from the 2012 Fluent Conference, available in a massive, 55-hour video compilation from O’Reilly. The offerings in this collection are vast and varied. Three days’ worth of talks are included, ranging from 20-minute big picture talks geared more toward managers to more lengthy sessions on the nitty-gritty of software and library development. Use of JavaScript for frontend and backend, desktop and mobile are all covered. As can be expected, some talks are better than others: My favorite of the ones I’ve watched so far is from Nicholas Zakas on writing clean, maintainable JavaScript code. When browsing the offerings I found it handy to refer to the original conference schedule. Not only can you read a more complete description of any given talk, you can also see how conference attendees rated the original talk.

Video and audio quality are excellent. My only knock here is that at times I felt like I was missing something being referred to in a slide, but this may just be a perception thing on my end. Otherwise I think I prefer the videographers’ focus on the speaker as opposed to a picture-in-picture or dual screen format.

Some might wince at the $399 price tag, but keep in mind that a plane ticket to San Francisco to attend in person may well have cost that much (never mind hotel, conference registration, etc.). That said, JavaScript is a fast-moving beast–so the further removed you are from the original conference date (May 2012), the more likely you may be to find that portions of this collection are no longer relevant. Just something to keep in mind before taking the plunge–at some point these videos will be more time capsule material than useful references for developers.

All in all, the Fluent Conference video compilation is a solid alternative for those who couldn’t attend in person, who want a broad overview of the state of JavaScript (as it was in mid-2012), and/or old developers like me who are still learning the many ways bright minds are putting the language to work.

Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby: A book report

2012-08-07T00:00:00-05:00

The field of analytics is garnering a lot of buzz right now. Whether you’re collecting data for scientific purposes or to determine whether to pivot your lean startup, you need to know how to collect, aggregate, and make meaning of the trail of digital information we leave behind every day.

In Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby, Sau Sheong Chang takes a fun approach to teaching readers the fundamentals of analytics and of two increasingly popular languages: Ruby for harvesting data, and R for analyzing that data with interesting results. The sample projects are among the better ones I’ve seen in any programming book, ranging from using data modeling to determine the appropriate number of restrooms in an office building to monitoring your health to harvesting connections and meaning from your email. It’s easy to spend a few hours with each exercise exploring data and experimenting with different ways to interpret data.

You won’t become an expert in Ruby or R after reading this book, but you should have a good foundation for future study. One note of advice: You’ll probably not get a whole lot out of this book if you don’t have any programming experience. While the first few chapters do a good job orienting the reader to the language, they’re targeted to an intermediate-to-advanced level.

Getting Started with D3: A book report

2012-07-15T00:00:00-05:00

I recently inherited some code at work that makes good use of the D3 visualization library for Javascript. I’m admittedly not the biggest Javascript fan, but I also recognize that it’s now the de facto language of the web. And D3 is the library for people who want to do heavy-duty visualizations–in other words, not just bar and pie charts.

Getting Started with D3 by Mike Dewar is a short but sweet introduction to D3. In about 90 pages, you’ll have a solid understanding of how to use D3 to create pretty visuals of your data. As it turns out, it’s not as difficult as I was fretting–in fact, I’ve already picked up some ideas on how to make the code I inherited work a bit better.

My hands-down favorite thing about this book is its use of actual data to create visualizations of real-world situations–in this case, data provided by New York City’s public transit system. I also like that the book doesn’t require its readers to be Javascript experts–but then, that might be a selling point of D3, too. If you understand the basics of jQuery, you can pick up D3’s style of chaining methods together to build rich data visualizations. Dewar clearly outlines each step of the process to show how any given visualization is built from a series of D3-related functions. That said, you may want to find some supplemental information on SVG to get the most out of D3–you can create some visuals using just Javascript and CSS, but SVG awareness will help your visualizations really shine.

All in all, I strongly recommend Getting Started with D3 for anyone looking to create high-quality data visualizations for the modern web. It’s a quick read that will bring you up to speed quickly on a well-done Javascript library with lots of potential.

A retrospective on my first lean publishing experience

2012-07-14T00:00:00-05:00

I only mentioned it briefly here, but this spring I wrote and released the book Everyday Rails with RSpec. You can buy it right now, if you’d like, for only nine bucks through Leanpub. This post isn’t about marketing the book, though; it’s about the experience I had (or have had, I should say; it’s ongoing) with putting together the book, getting it out the door, things I think went well, and things I’d do differently next time.

The idea for the book sprouted from a few places. Coming into Rails from a very unstructured form of programming, it took me a little time to fully appreciate automated testing. The resources I originally learned from didn’t help. They either glossed over the subject or focused so much on testing ideologies that the practicality was lost in the theory. In the meantime I’d cobbled together my own system from what I’d picked up and internalized, but I didn’t get the whole picture until I got a better handle on a couple of specific tools (first, Factory Girl; later, Capybara). Noel Rappin’s Rails Test Prescriptions remains a favorite book on the topic. Of course, the Railscasts series also taught me a great deal, especially the episode in which Ryan Bates walks through his approach to test-driven development. Watching over an expert’s shoulder, albeit virtually, was a great help.

I began writing a series of blog posts in Everyday Rails on how I learned to test. The one sentence summary of these posts may be learn to test your models, learn to test your controllers, learn to test integration, then flip it all around. A couple of posts into the series I realized they were getting some pretty good traction, even though I hadn’t done much to promote the posts. I decided to expand the original blog posts into an actual book, and actually see if I could make a buck or two on the exercise.

I started out using Scrivener to convert the blog content (currently in Textile format) into something more nicely formatted. I quickly realized that Scrivener, while very powerful, wasn’t a good fit for what I wanted to do. I was getting bogged down in formatting and organization way too early. At the same time, I hadn’t yet decided how I was going to actually sell the book. My original plan was to deal with all the rendering myself, set up an online storefront somewhere, and make it available that way. I wasn’t crazy about that plan, but it seemed like that’s how most of the self-published authors I’d read in the past handled it. Then I stumbled across Leanpub.

For the unfamiliar, Leanpub is a small operation out of Vancouver, BC, that makes it easy for writers to get content out the door and get paid for it, adopting the Lean Startup approach to publishing. The basic idea is if you can get content into the hands of readers early you’ll get a better sense of the book you need to write (this was definitely the case for me; more on that in a few moments). Leanpub has a very generous royalty mechanism and will even facilitate getting finished books into the likes of Amazon and Apple’s iBookstore. I was and am more than happy to pay someone else to take care of this infrastructure stuff for me, so I signed up.

Going with Leanpub also solved my writing tool dilemma. Leanpub uses an automated Dropbox-based mechanism to receive content from authors and return the formatted results in ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats. Authors may use whatever writing tool they’d like, but the system expects content to eventually be in Markdown format. This was perfect for me–since I was writing a programming book, this meant I could put it together using the same tools I use to write code. In my case, that’s Textmate with a Markdown bundle. After some conversion from Textile to Markdown I was up and running pretty quickly. I already had about 30 pages of content from the original blog posts and some additional stuff I’d already written, but I still needed to come up with a cover and price.

I spent a lot of time agonizing over a cover. Too much, probably. That process could probably be a blog post of its own, but eventually I narrowed my focus to red vehicles—not to pun on test-driven, but to play off of the red of Ruby and to have something to use as a theme for possible future books. After multiple scours of iStockphoto I found a shot of an old-but-reliable red pickup. It was perfect for what I wanted to espouse in my book–a test you can trust is far more important than a test that runs fast but breaks down regularly.

I wish I’d spent a little more time thinking about pricing. At the time I wasn’t sure how long the book would be, but I was shooting for about 100 pages. I also didn’t know what the market would be for a book written by a very minor Rails blogger, based on content that was already available for free. I set it at nine bucks, figuring I might adjust it when the book was done. In retrospect I might have been able to go for 12 dollars; maybe even 15. Using Leanpub’s sliding pay system, I’ve had a few people pay as much as $25. If and when the book hits non-Leanpub shelves I will likely adjust the price.

Whatever the dollar amount, I wanted readers to get their money’s worth. That meant doing something I don’t do in the blog: Providing a complete code sample. The original plan was to provide a single final version, but as I wrote and revised I realized that an incremental approach was a better way to go. This didn’t turn out to be a whole lot more work, but I did have to keep an eye on some additional detail. Git helped out a great deal here–I built up an untested Rails application in my master branch, then incrementally tested it in branches. To generate the code for download I then just made a copy of the code base for each chapter, switched each to its respective branch, and deleted the git internals from that copy. I made a conscious decision to not publicly post the link to the code. It’s only in the book. It’s against convention, but since this is an exercise in good ol’ capitalism and I’d already shared a great deal in the blog, I figured I would try this approach.

I also stated up front that I would release a free update of the book when Rails 4 hits the streets and RSpec and company are all compatible. To be honest I regret making this decision, for a few reasons. First, I think Rails 4 may not be released as soon as I was thinking then. Second, it will be a lot of work and I’m not sure how much it will be appreciated (see the pricing paragraph above). Finally, it leaves the sense in me that the book still isn’t done. It’s at 1.0, so to speak, but I know that 1.1 is coming. This also hampers getting it listed outside of Leanpub, since Amazon and Apple aren’t suited for releasing updates like Leanpub is. So I wait.

As I write this, the book has 540 readers. (You can do the math yourself to figure out roughly how much I’ve made in royalties.) I did very little marketing myself to get to this point. In fact, I can point to one thing I did to drive the most interest: A quick post on Rubyflow, which led to a mention in the very popular Ruby Weekly email newsletter, which led to some viral traffic. To be honest, aside from a little Twittering and some extra linking from the blog itself, I’ve done nothing more to promote it. I know I should; I just haven’t had the time for the additional customer support it might lead to.

Not to say customer support has been too difficult. For the most part the messages I’ve gotten have been in the form of useful feedback or intelligent questions which, in the spirit of lean, helped me pivot (cough) the book. The aforementioned approach to code samples resulted from a conversation I had over email with one reader. How the chapters on controller specs wound up being broken down and essentially rewritten from the original blog content was also based on processing reader feedback. In fact, I think I only had one person come out and say he (or she; anonymous) didn’t like the book. I’m sure there are others who may have taken issue with something in it, but I haven’t heard from them. The general challenge was doing my best to accommodate a relatively wide spectrum of Rails developers. I’ve been pretty straightforward from the start that the book is not for total beginners, and it’s not for people who already know how to test, but that didn’t keep people from either end of that spectrum from buying it anyway. To accommodate I tried to provide a lot of references to other works. I’ll tell you what you need to have in your Gemfile to get everything up and running, but I’m not going to give you a Bundler tutorial. And I’ll mention that it’s possible to run an RSpec test suite without waiting for your Rails application to load, but I’m not going to go into detail because it’s really advanced and it’s not a practice I follow (it deviates too far from Rails convention in my opinion).

I guess one other customer support issue that came up a few times centered around the notion of lean publishing itself, and confusion about buying something before it was done. The question becomes how lean is too lean? I released the first version with entire chapters missing, and the chapters that did exist were mostly reprints of existing blog material. The end product, though, had roughly three times the amount of content I started with, and was almost entirely rewritten–all for the better, in my opinion. If I’d written the whole thing and released it as a final product it would have been a different book. And it wouldn’t have been as good. For the most part I think people are getting more comfortable with buying something on faith, but I understand the position of those who chose to wait (and hopefully aren’t still waiting).

So will I do it again? I need a break from writing about code. I’ve got plans for another book, but it’s on a decidedly different topic. If I ever do another book on programming I’m going to take a different approach, and ideally select a more focused topic. Writing about RSpec meant dealing with a lot of moving parts–the Factory Girl API changed between the original blog post and the first release of the book, and about a week after I went on record as saying the book was finished some pretty big changes to RSpec syntax were announced. I updated the former but have made the decision to hold off on the latter for version 1.1 of the book. I had to demarcate between book-style writing and blog-style writing, you know? I will also do more to market the next book, and will likely charge a little more for it.

So should you do it? Yes. (Notice the lack of hesitation in saying that.) Chances are you know something others would like to know, or have a unique perspective on a topic, or have experienced something fantastic, or all of the above. You don’t need a publisher’s approval or a fancy setup–just an idea and an audience. The tools are all in place. Spend a few minutes to learn Markdown syntax, set up an account with Leanpub, and get your message out there.

A Little Book on CoffeeScript: A book report

2012-05-29T00:00:00-05:00

It’s not a secret that I think JavaScript is ugly. Maybe it’s because I’ve been developing almost solely in Ruby for the past several years. If you’re in the same boat (or if you’re a Python developer who feels the same way I do about JavaScript) you’ve likely heard of of CoffeeScript, an alternative language that compiles neatly into JavaScript. Alex MacCaw’s A Little Book on CoffeeScript is a solid introduction to the little language.

A Little Book on CoffeeScript is indeed little (checking in at six chapters in about 60 pages in PDF form), but offers a thorough introduction to the language and how it can make your life with JavaScript simpler. The book dives right into syntax, then on through classes, idiomatic usage, a little big picture stuff (creating and deploying apps written in CoffeeScript), and closes with a look at what CoffeeScript fixes (and doesn’t fix) in JavaScript. I’ve viewed a few screencasts on CoffeeScript and even written a little in the language, but I still learned some new things from this book. In particular, the chapters on idioms and “the good parts” will be of use to anyone making the switch, so you won’t try to apply JavaScript’s ugliness to what is actually a pretty little language. These chapters alone should make the book worth buying for many developers.

With that said, this book is not for someone with no JavaScript experience, and definitely not for someone with zero programming experience. It’s not a tutorial; it’s more like a guided tour of CoffeeScript’s feature set. There are plenty of examples, and I recommend using the interactive console on the CoffeeScript website to experiment with these examples as you read through the book. If nothing else, you’ll get an appreciation of just how much typing CoffeeScript is saving you.

While perhaps not a definitive reference on the topic, A Little Book on CoffeeScript is a solid overview of what makes CoffeeScript so promising. It’s got just enough in terms of examples for developers with a little experience, and delivers lots of practical advice for succeeding with the language. All that in a book you can read in an hour or so.

What I'm up to, the spring 2012 edition

2012-05-03T00:00:00-05:00

I recently wrapped up a way-too-long-running freelance project, which means I’ve been able to turn my attention back to things of more personal interest. They are many, because apparently I don’t know how to sit still.

In no particular order:

My Rails Testing with RSpec book, as mentioned briefly in Everyday Rails (my blog on practical problem solving in Ruby on Rails, for those not in the know). I’m using Leanpub to self-publish it—and, in the spirit of the Lean Startup, you’ll be able to purchase my minimum viable product for a cool nine bucks starting very, very soon. I just need to settle on a cover and press the publish button. A few of the chapters come from the RSpec series I did in Everyday Rails, so you can get a taste ahead of time.
A second book, but I’m not ready to spill the beans on it yet other than to say I’m working on it with fellow Stratepedian Amber Nutt and it will be for a more general audience than the RSpec book is.
A cool Lawrence history project of sorts that I’ve been looking forward to actually starting since the beginning of the year, along with a couple of other guys in town. Part of me is disappointed I haven’t gotten it started sooner, but another part is glad that I’ve had a few months to reflect on it and change my thinking a bit. I’m even thinking that it—gasp—might not be in Ruby.
Resident photographer and web person for a Kansas travel blog I started with my wife, called Kansas Road Trips . We just took a trip through the southeastern corner of the state last weekend, if you’re interested in seeing and reading.

Spring is springing in Jefferson County

2012-03-04T00:00:00-06:00

The mildest winter I can ever remember means flowers are sprouting and trees are budding in northeast Kansas. Actually, they started a couple of weeks ago; they’re good and photographable now. See:

I’m no good with tree identification just yet; I keep meaning to pick something up at the library next time I’m downtown. All I can tell you that the above buds are on this tree I photographed last fall in its autumnal glory.

Yeah, I don’t know what this one is, either. It’s a smaller tree positioned behind the house.

Some little crocuses are already blooming on the sunny side of the house.

JoJo the Dog has enjoyed the mild winter. Here he is fresh from an outside romp—just tired enough to stop and pose for a photograph.

Returing to Redmine: Suggestions for better workflows and productivity

2012-02-15T00:00:00-06:00

After experimenting with a number of issue tracking methods (some I’d label antimethods) and products I’ve returned to Redmine for both team-oriented and solo projects. Out of the box, Redmine is a good fit for me in a number of ways:

I can host it myself (there is a hosting service available; I’ve never tried it). And since it’s written in Ruby I can deploy it on existing hardware without worrying about a lot of new dependencies.
Redmine’s interface isn’t overloaded with Javascript for the sake of Javascript. So what if I see the page refresh every now and then—I know what Redmine’s doing.
Redmine doesn’t try to become my daily to-do list (in spite of my attempts to make it so in the past).
It doesn’t enforce any ideology on me—Pivotal Tracker is great for capital-A Agile teams, but if you work in an environment that doesn’t quite do Agile by the letter you may get lost in the lingo. (And let the hate mail commence.)
Redmine makes it easy to collect the good kinds of documentation—conversations, lessons learned, procedures to inevitably replicate. This is my chief complaint about upstart Asana, which unless I’m missing something isn’t much more than a glorified group to-do list. Its note-taking features are lacking.

That said, a fresh installation of Redmine is likely going to need some tweaks before it can help you effectively track issues and products. In my case, I wanted it to be as easy as possible to record an issue (more likely than not a feature request) and get back to whatever is the task at hand. As anyone who’s installed Redmine and poked around its settings can tell, the software itself is pretty flexible. The trick is knowing how to make those settings work with your workflow.

To do this, I strongly recommend Eric Davis’ e-book Redmine Tips. As both a core Redmine developer and daily user of the software, Eric does a good job walking through not just how to adjust Redmine’s settings, but also good reasons why to adjust them in certain ways.

After going through the tips in the book I did the following:

Feature is the default tracker: As I mentioned, the bulk of what shows up in my inbox are feature requests. Some are good ideas, some not so much, some are intriguing but not feasible (at least for the moment). My other trackers are Bug, Support, and Technical Debt (more on that in a moment).
Proposed is the default status: This makes more sense in my workflow than New. My other status options are Approved, In Progress, Resolved, Feedback, Closed, and Declined.
Wish List is the default priority: Again, since most of what I get are feature requests, I don’t want to assign them a regular priority by default. Unless something is a bug it most likely goes in as a wish list feature. I also reduced the other priorities to Low, Normal, and High—everything beyond that was redundant.
Remove unnecessary defaults: Current date as issue start date comes to mind. I prefer to have it blank until an issue gets approved and assigned. Note: If your Redmine installation is out of date you may not have the option to change this setting.
Workflow setting adjustments: Don’t forget, if you make changes to Redmine’s default trackers and issue statuses you’ll need to update workflows accordingly.

A few more suggestions:

I’ve implied this already, but don’t try to make Redmine (or any issue tracker) serve as a to-do list. It’s not intended for things like recurring tasks, for example, and breaking things down to GTD-level minutiae is a sure-fire way to an overwhelming issues list. Use Redmine for the big picture and your task list of choice for the details. (And managers, don’t try to dictate task list software on employees; as long as things are getting done people should use whatever system works for them. Again, hate mail welcome.)
Make good use of Redmine’s other modules, when it makes sense to do so. Project wikis are an easy way to collect random scraps of information under one roof, for example.
Turn off the modules your project doesn’t use. Otherwise they’re just interface noise. You can always activate them later.
Be as open as possible. In our case, that means requiring login to access Redmine—but all projects are set to public, so non-project members can see what’s going on.

Redmine for non-technical projects?

My next step is to explore Redmine’s possibilities as a management tool for non-software projects—specifically, proposal writing and instructional design. If you have experience with using Redmine or a similar product outside of typical technical products I’d love to hear from you.

Breaking the Page: A Book Report

2012-02-11T00:00:00-06:00

How can e-book technology change what it means to read? Peter Meyer’s Breaking the Page explores that question and proposes a number of ways e-book designers can leverage the best of the new technology—and avoid some overused antipatterns—to make the e-book experience more enjoyable to the reader. This 100-page preview edition of the book is full of examples from a number of apps, including cookbooks, Bibles apps, textbooks, and even the Kindle and iBooks apps. While the general focus is on tablet-based reading, though, many of the information design patterns shared in Breaking the Page apply to large amounts of content on the web, and even traditional, desktop-based software.

Meyer’s writing style is also worth noting. Breaking the Page is not a technical book; you won’t find code snippets or file downloads to go along with the examples he shares—rather, the book reads more like a conversational brainstorming session with Meyer, and a productive one that. He’s clearly put a lot of thought into the future of reading—so much so that his ideas make the likes of Apple’s new iBooks Textbook format seem dated.

One thing I’d like to see in the book is a discussion on the benefits and drawbacks the e-book format has for people with reading disabilities. So far most of what I’ve seen on this front has amounted to little more than a rehash of the 1990s CD-ROM multimedia titles that inundated schools—it seems to me that with the advances we’ve seen in web services and APIs today’s e-book can provide a much more robust experience to all readers, without adding a lot of extra overhead to the e-book software itself.

The preview edition of Breaking the Page is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in writing, developing, publishing, or teaching with e-books. I look forward to reading the finished product when it’s available.

More information about Breaking the Page is available from O’Reilly.

Ten Photo Assignments: A Book Report

2011-12-17T00:00:00-06:00

A number of years ago I took a photography class at my local arts center. I quit after a few sessions because it was unorganized and tried to appeal to too many levels. As an alternative I decided that the best study for me would be to read more books on the topic and practice. Ten Photo Assignments by Amanda Quintenz-Fielder looked to be the best of both worlds: Ten advanced exercises in photographic technique and principles, in a book format. One important note to take care of right off the bat: If you don’t have a digital SLR camera, this book probably isn’t for you. If you’re a raw beginner, this book probably isn’t for you either. You’ll need some gear, a little bit of understanding of that gear, and some patience to work through the assignments in the book.

The first six assignments deal with the technical aspects of these cameras, focusing on features your point-and-shoot or camera phone don’t have. You might also need to get ready to spend money on equipment you don’t have, such as a light meter or extra lenses. I believe the Quintenz-Fielder’s intent is to have you master the technical matters first so they don’t impede your artistic eye as your skills develop. I can understand that but admit I had to improvise a bit due to lack of equipment.

The remaining chapters address composition and light, and provide a good introduction to working with both to create great photographs. There are lots of resources online and elsewhere on composition (think: rule of thirds), but the two lessons on light are more unique based on what I’ve seen.

In my opinion there are better books and resources on photography than Ten Photo Assignments, though perhaps not as thorough. If you’ve got the gear and want to learn how to use it better, then working through this book may be a good exercise for you. If your interest in photography aren’t great enough to invest that kind of money or time, look toward other sources.

More information about Ten Photo Assignments is available from O’Reilly.

December 2011 reading list

2011-12-01T00:00:00-06:00

I’m planning to read these books this month, if you’d like to join me in discussion.

Networking for People Who Hate Networking by Devora Zack

I picked up Networking for People Who Hate Networking last spring when Lawrence’s Borders store liquidated. I’m finally getting around to it—I need all the help I can get when it comes to networking. I’m already a couple of chapters into it, but it’s not so long that you couldn’t catch up if you’d like to join me.

Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds by Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun’s latest book Mindfire looks to be a quick read. It’s a collection of essays he’s shared over the past few years on his website. If you’re not familiar with his work, Berkun has studied and written about the creative process for the past several years. I also recommend The Myths of Innovation.

The Cucumber Book: Behavior-Driven Development for Testers and Developers by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesøy

Still in beta but just about finished—you can pick up a digital version of the book now from the good folks at Pragmatic Programmers. I’m finally coming around to Behavior-Driven Development in Rails with Cucumber. I’ve got the very basics down but know I can get better at it—especially if I’m going to talk about Cucumber at a small local developers get-together next month.

Note: Except for The Cucumber Book, links to these titles point to Amazon. I get a small referral fee if you choose to buy the books through these links.

Reflections on Ruby Midwest 2011

2011-11-07T00:00:00-06:00

Ruby’s enumerable methods are incredibly useful; learn them all and use them or else you’re probably duplicating logic. (Plus lots of other stuff I still haven’t thoroughly processed from Ruby Safari by Ola Bini)
Use a personal assets gem to add frequently-used Javascript libraries, CSS, etc. to your asset pipeline in Rails 3.1. I’m going to try this clever approach. I’ve used an assets server in the past—good when you’ve got applications using a variety of languages and frameworks, but can be difficult to maintain. (From Rails Is the New Rails by Michael Bleigh)
find_each and find_in_batches can speed up large queries; use them. (Note to self: Stop forgetting about them.) (From Ethan Gunderson’s ActiveRecord Anti-Patterns for Fun and Profit; reinforced by James Edward Gray II in Life on the Edge)
query_reviewer and consistency_fail are useful gems for finding database issues in Rails code. (Gunderson)
Observation: It’s sometimes hard to feel like you’re a part of the Ruby community when you’re not working for a startup.
GitHub is probably all the project management I need. (From How GitHub Uses GitHub to Build GitHub by Zach Holman)
Slides for tech talks don’t have to suck. (Holman)
Observation: I probably need to just get over my dislike of Cucumber.
I’m sorry, but getting berated about how I’m doing it wrong (and so is everyone else) for an hour was not a pleasant way to close out a long first day. Or maybe I’m just not a computer scientist. I did, however, appreciate the bit about a good architecture allowing major decisions to be deferred and maximizing the number of decisions not made. (Bob Martin’s keynote)
Observation: Lawrence has enough people using Ruby for us to start doing something locally every now and then, or at least do a better job coordinating rides to KC Ruby.
The Ruby Debugger is actually very useful, especially when run within specs! This would have saved me an hour or two last week. (From Jim Weirich’s Mastering the Ruby Debugger)
Observation: If you’re a Ruby developer and you’re not writing code from tests/specs, you really are in the minority.
Don’t treat scripts like throwaways; be kind to “future you” and make them first class applications with real UIs; good design, documentation, and distribution systems; and careful planning. (From Use Ruby to Start Making Awesome Command Line Applications by Dave Copeland; I’m really looking forward to this book)
Apply a consistent structure to your code. In order: Gather input, Perform work, Deliver results, Handle failure. This is not about being concise; it’s about being expressive—so it may wind up being longer. (Along with other stuff to think about from Avdi Grimm’s Confident Code)
nil is best avoided as a return value; avoid it as much as possible and return Array(Enumerable) instead. (James Edward Gray II; covered previously by Avdi Grimm)
Make sure your usual tests are close to the edge cases, and make edge cases impossible when you can. Don’t add extra edge tests if they’re not necessary. (Gray)
Andy Hunt’s keynote provided excellent closure to the event. It was good to hear him remind the room that Agile isn’t a slogan or a set of tools; it’s an ever-shifting, ever-changing, ever-responding approach. Generating continuous, meaningful feedback, evaluating it appropriately, and making the appropriate changes are what matter in the end.
Observation: It kind of seems like Rails is catching flak for becoming bloated. Wasn’t adding features and flexibility the big drive behind Rails 3, though? Regardless, if you’re a Rails developer, remember there are a lot of other things you could be doing with Ruby—web apps or otherwise.
Observation: For all the talk about safaris, it looked like pretty much everybody was using Chrome.

O'Reilly Master Class: Leading and Managing Breakthrough Projects Video (a book report)

2011-10-26T00:00:00-05:00

I’m a big fan of Scott Berkun’s work. His book The Myths of Innovation, was a favorite read of mine from last year. If you’ve read that book and want reinforcement of the practices it suggests, or are looking for a video alternative, this O’Reilly Master class video may be a good pick. It’s a recording of Berkun leading a workshop on the topic of innovation, I’m guessing from around the time of the book’s first edition’s release. While being in the actual room the day of the workshop is likely the ideal, this high-quality video recording is the next best thing.

Like the book, Leading and Managing Breakthrough Projects pulls heavily from Berkun’s thorough research on history’s great innovators and his own experience as a project manager at Microsoft. It’s a dense video, packing a day’s worth of material into four hours. His presentation style works well in this situation—it’s a little bit of storytelling, a little bit of sharing his own reflections on those stories, and a lot of drawing out reflections from participants (and viewers). Along the way Berkun shares a number of exercises, metrics, and general advice for the would-be innovator, whether that person is leading a team at a large organization or going it alone in the garage at nights.

The video itself is high enough quality that I wasn’t distracted by technical issues, but it is apparent that O’Reilly has honed their approach to the Master Class series since producing Leading and Managing Breakthrough Projects. More recent videos I’ve seen from this series were produced in a controlled environment with a small group of participants and multiple camera angles, and ultimately for the sole purpose of producing online. This video uses a more traditional approach by capturing a standard workshop—single-camera-in-the-back, focused on the presenter, occasional sounds and minor distractions as workshop participants move chairs. The drawback is that it’s difficult to hear what participants are saying at times. Headphones helped for me.

Is this video strictly necessary if you’ve already read The Myths of Innovation? While the two cover similar ground, I found the video to be good reinforcement to the lessons learned that Berkun shares in the book. The inclusion of exercises to lead yourself and/or your team through to generate ideas, assess the risk associated with them, and identify and manage the resources necessary to make them real is a great addition to your inventor’s or project manager’s library.

More information about O’Reilly Master Class: Leading and Managing Breakthrough Projects Video is available from O’Reilly.

Living in the Sunflower State

2011-09-12T00:00:00-05:00

If you live in Lawrence, and seldom leave town save for an occasional trip to Kansas City or Topeka via I-70 or K-10, you may sometimes forget why our state’s nickname is the Sunflower State. Do yourself a favor in the next few days and head north up US-59/24 (that’s over the bridge; keep driving north past the Turnpike exchange). You can get to Topeka that way if you’d like, but you don’t really have to go that far—even by turning around at Midland Junction you can get a sense of the scenery the rest of northeast Kansas gets to see.

Flowers like the ones above grow wild along my street now. Below is a photo of my nearest “neighbor”—a working farm with no actual residents.

Next-closest are the cattle and occasional horse I hear during the day, and the coyotes I hear at night.

Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef: A Book Report

2011-08-16T00:00:00-05:00

Virtualization has made it incredibly easy for web software developers to quickly and relatively cheaply scale their products, but what happens when a virtual infrastructure becomes too much to manage? Enter virtualization management tools like the popular, open source Chef, which makes deploying services as simple as editing configuration files. And if you want to rest assured that your deployments will work as planned, you’d be well-served to leverage one of the many test-driven development frameworks available for Ruby. In Test-Driven Development with Chef, author Stephen Nelson-Smith shows how to leverage Cucumber to do just this, using the cucumber-chef gem.

Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef is a short, relatively quick read—the print version checks in at 88 pages. The majority of the book presents the task of test-driven infrastructure deployment via a basic example that mirrors real-world needs—in this case, allowing developers to connect to a server, via SSH, using a private key mechanism. Each step of the example is well-explained and easy to follow. With that said, though, it’s worth noting that it’s probably not well-suited for a general reference for Chef. In fact, the author has a more authoritative book on the topic coming out sometime in the future. If you’re already familiar with Chef, though, and want to learn more about using TDD to make your deployments more rock-solid, this may not be an issue.

Overall, I found Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef to be a solid overview of the concepts presented. While it may not be the end-to-end reference on using TDD to drive software-based infrastructure projects, it’s a good orientation to the concepts and potential issues involved with using Chef and Cucumber in deploying your next virtual server.

More information about Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef is available from O’Reilly.

jQuery Mobile by Jon Reid: A Book Report

2011-07-08T00:00:00-05:00

Last August, the cover of Wired magazine famously proclaimed that “the Web is dead” and that native apps have taken over how we interact with the Internet. Whether that bold statement is accurate or not is a discussion outside the scope of this review, but what do you do if (a) you have solid web design skills, (b) you’d like to use those skills to develop great-looking mobile applications, and © you don’t have a large development team (or a lot of time)? Or maybe you would just prefer to avoid app stores and fragmentation and just give your customers a solid mobile experience. jQuery Mobile (the Javascript framework) may be your answer—and jQuery Mobile (the book) from O’Reilly Media is a great way to get started using this framework.

In jQuery Mobile, author Jon Reid does a top-notch job of introducing readers to the jQuery Mobile framework—first through some basic examples of page creation and navigation, then on to solid documentation on the framework itself, and finally by walking readers through a basic, though functional, jQuery Mobile-based Twitter client that incorporates multiple pages and UI components. The book is a quick read and easy to walk through—Reid’s style is well-suited for this style of tutorial/documentation combo.

Two words of caution: If you don’t already know jQuery (or, for that matter, Javascript), this book might be a little out-of-reach once Reid’s tutorials get more in-depth. If you’re already familiar with jQuery, you should have no problem working through the Twitter client tutorial and then on your own jQuery Mobile projects. Second, if you’re looking for a reference to help you integrate jQuery Mobile with your application’s server-side technology, this book will not help you—jQuery Mobile focuses strictly on client-side technology and does not provide detail on any back-end language (nor does it cover HTML5 concepts like offline caching). A few quick online searches should help you find more information in that regard.

All in all, jQuery Mobile (the book) is a solid introduction and reference to using modern web technologies to develop your next mobile-optimized web app—and jQuery Mobile (the framework) is an excellent combination of these technologies to help put mobile app development within the reach of developers who aren’t quite ready to write the Web off just yet.

More information about jQuery Mobile is available from O’Reilly.

My summer 2011 reading list

2011-06-15T00:00:00-05:00

I saw a little while ago that Seth Godin has a summer reading list posted. Just for the sake of discussion, here’s what I’m hoping to plow through this summer:

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge

Perhaps this is outdated and/or discredited by now, as most business books become over time, but I find the notion of “learning organizations” pretty fascinating and figured I’d learn more from the source. I bought a used copy from the early 90s, written in a pre-Internet era, but it’s an interesting read. Amazon

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

I’m reading this to prepare for a presentation I’m giving at SIDLIT later this summer on the topic of gamification. So far it’s more big picture than some of the other things I’ve read, and less about schmaltzy markety stuff. So I like it. See her TED talk for a primer. Amazon

Crafting Rails Applications: Expert Practices for Everyday Rails Development by José Valim

I picked this up during a recent Pragmatic Programmers deal and have been looking forward to it for a few reasons. I like the idea of looking at core Rails code to become a better Rails and Ruby developer, and I’m curious to see what a book that totally co-opted the name of my insanely popular Rails blog in its name has to say. (I kid.) Amazon

Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-pop Pioneers who Launched Modern Rock by Andrew Earles

Just because they’re the greatest band ever. Amazon

. . .

I should mention that I don’t have any Amazon affiliate accounts set up or anything; the links are just for reference. Buy these from wherever you’d like. If you have or would like to read any of these, I’d love to talk about them with you sometime.

TextMate snippets for CanCan (and other Ruby things)

2011-06-11T00:00:00-05:00

In the interest of keeping my TextMate snippets synced better between my work and home computers, I decided to share a couple of bundles on GitHub this week. The first is a bundle of several random snippets I use with Haml, Jekyll, and Factory Girl. See the README for details. Nothing fancy, but definitely timesaving for me.

I split out my snippets for the CanCan authorization gem, rounded them out a bit, and put them in a bundle of their own. Here’s the list of tab-complete shortcuts as it currently stands:

Defining abilities in `ability.rb`:

can :manage	cm
can :read	cr
can :index	ci
can :create	cc
can :update	cu
can :destroy	cd
can (array)	c
can (block)	cb
cannot :manage	ctm
cannot :read	ctr
cannot :index	cti
cannot :create	ctc
cannot :update	ctu
cannot :destroy	ctd
cannot (array)	ct
cannot (block)	ctb

Checking abilities in views and controllers:

if can? :manage	cm
if can? :create	cc
if can? :update	cu
if can? :destroy	cd
if can? :index	ci

Protecting controllers and actions:

load_and_authorize_resource	lar
skip_load_and_authorize_resource	slar
load_resource	lr
skip_load_resource	slr
authorize_resource	ar
skip_authorize_resource	sar

If you try them out please let me know what you think.

My 10-year Seattle anniversary (and belated love for LiveJournal)

2011-05-13T00:00:00-05:00

I was just looking over my long-ago-friends-only-ized LiveJournal archives and realized that the ten-year anniversary of my big move to Seattle is afoot (I hit the road west on May 25, 2001). Reading through my entries, a few things have stood out as interests: First, I talked more than I probably should have then, and definitely would have now—saying way more than I would now. Second, I didn’t give a damn when an “entry” (something that would be called a “post” nowadays in social media parlance) didn’t get a comment; I was used to that sort of thing. And finally, it’s been nice to see how honest I was back then—I didn’t hold much back, and I reported what was what way more often that I do now, even with the relative ease that the social media explosion gives the world.

Reading about my first arrival to Seattle as a resident, my first trip to the Crocodile (to see Kristin Hersh, realizing that we lived in the same town!), my first visit to Ballard (which would go on to be my favorite neighborhood-slash-home for a good chunk of my time in Seattle), having to choose between awesome shows (in my case, Blake Babies versus the Aislers Set; I chose the latter), my first-as-a-resident (and possibly only) Seattle earthquake. And Jennifer Lopez was filming a movie in Seattle! And my first visit to Fremont! (Hint: Don’t make your first visit to Fremont the Fremont Fair, assuming they still do that.)

So here’s to you, LiveJournal. In my mind, social media wouldn’t exist without you. I wouldn’t have made a single friend in Seattle, I don’t think, without you. And I definitely don’t remember as much about my life in the time I’ve ignored you as I do when I obsessed over you and refreshed you a million times a day so I didn’t miss a word.

And Seattle, I love you too and miss you every day—especially the great friends I made there. You’re probably not reading this, but if you are, thank you as well. I’ll be visiting this fall. See you all at Sunset Bowl. Oh wait.

Gamification Master Class with Gabe Zichermann (a Book Report)

2011-05-09T00:00:00-05:00

Gamification is a hot topic right now, as designers, marketers, and educators look to game theory to increase engagement. Gabe Zichermann is at the forefront of gamification, with a couple of books under his belt and now an excellent addition to the O’Reilly Master Class video series. I’ve just begun my own exploration into gamification and am glad I started it with this three-hour set.

In Gamification Master Class, you get a seat at the table with Zichermann and six representatives of large companies and startups alike looking to gamification to increase users’ engagement with their products (which, if I recall correctly, are pretty much all web-based). Like all of O’Reilly’s Master Class videos, this series maintains high production values. Zichermann’s presentation style, though, puts it at another level from other videos I’ve watched from this series. He keeps his audience (both in-studio and those of us watching from home) engaged with great information and hands-on activities throughout. These activities are provided to us home viewers as a PDF as soon as we complete our first “challenge”—a clever use of gamification to keep us hooked, and a valuable tool for our own gamification efforts moving forward. It’s not a lecture; it’s a conversation about gamification and how to make it work for a variety of marketing or learning goals.

To summarize, Gamification Master Class is a top-notch, three-hour introduction to an exciting movement in software design and marketing. You probably won’t walk away from it with all the resources you need to develop world class gamification implementations of your own, but you’ll be well-equipped with the important concepts, tools, and next steps necessary to make those implementations happen.

More information about Gamification Master Class with Gabe Zichermann is available from O’Reilly.

Kansas Relays 2011: A few photos

2011-04-24T00:00:00-05:00

I brought my camera to the 84th Kansas Relays yesterday. Here are a few of the shots I got.

According to my schedule and EXIF data this was from the men’s 800 meter.

I believe this was the women’s 100 meter Hurdles.

The Para Olympic Men’s 100 meter—the first time this has been at the Relays to my recollection, though I did miss last year—was neat to see, but the announcer’s insistence that we all stand for these “very special athletes” bordered on condescending, I thought. I mean, the winner, Blake Leeper, ran a 100 meter dash in 11.32 seconds.

From the women’s pole vault invitational. This is April Steiner Bennett, who it turns out was also on Fear Factor. I’ve always been fascinated by the pole vault because it was banned in my conference in high school, so I didn’t get to see it on a day-to-day basis back when I was involved in track and field.

Finally, my favorite of the bunch. That’s KU’s Donny Wasinger in front—he turned it on at the end to overtake Stanley Kubenei of Iowa Central in the final corner. The looks on their faces tell the story.

You can see a few more shots from the 2011 Kansas Relays in my Flickr photostream.

Recent web work: Kansas Project Success

2011-04-15T00:00:00-05:00

What it is: Project Success is a new joint initiative between the Beach Center on Disability and the Center for Research on Learning (both housed at the University of Kansas) to improving school performance for kids in special education. The website collects and promotes learning resources identified by project staff to assist these students, their parents, teachers, and school administrators.

What I did: For this site, I developed the end-user interface for browsing and searching resources, and for registering to attend live events hosted by Project Success (though implemented, this feature is not yet being used as of this writing). I designed the layout and chose a basic color scheme based on a logo provided to me. A backend interface is in place for project staff to add new resources, with a simple approval system in place to allow staff to OK resources for sharing. Underneath that I did the application and database work and set up a dedicated virtual private server for the project.

Tools I used: Rails 3 for a web application framework. Devise and CanCan for authentication and authorization. RSpec 2 with Factory Girl, Webrat, and Autotest for testing. MetaSearch for search. Ancestry for hierarchical browsing. FriendlyId for pretty URLs. Transitions for resource state (pending, approved, rejected). Paperclip for image uploads. A little bit of JQuery. Haml and Sass for markup. The 1Kb CSS Grid. Capistrano for deployment.

Strata Conference Real World Applications Panel: Education and Government (a Book Report)

2011-03-22T00:00:00-05:00

O’Reilly Media has recently released videos from last February’s Strata Conference, a three-day forum on big data and data-driven decision making. While I’ll admit that I don’t live and breathe data, most people in my field do. Thanks to the release of these conference videos, you can get timely access to the sessions held by Strata, either by purchasing the entire set of videos or individually. Given my work in education research, I was eager to check out the session Real World Applications Panel: Education and Government, which consists of two presentations.

In the first presentation, Peter Clark from the University of Minnesota discusses the challenges and benefits of harmonizing microdata for big picture analysis. This is a little outside my field of interest or expertise, but Clark’s demonstrations of pulling global census data from multiple sources, then doing interesting comparisons with that data, should compel researchers in other fields to think about ways to mine data from multiple sources and harmonize those data to tell new, interesting stories. As Clark suggests in a slide, this ability to collect so many cases makes it “easy to get statistical significance when you find a real effect.” If you’re the data-minded sort, take note.

Steve Midgley’s presentation on using big data to identify relevant educational resources was of more interest to me. Representing the U.S. Department of Education, Midgley advocates a “learning layer” for Web 2.0 which provides a mechanism for these educators to locate existing, relevant instructional materials by context. This layer, dubbed the Learning Registry, helps knowledge creators and knowledge distributors work together to get these materials into the hands of educators—who, in turn, provide contextual data on usage and effectiveness. This is all done via a “common metadata timeline,” meaning that educators aren’t required to buy into yet another portal or social network to access these resources. Neat stuff, and Midgley’s concrete example makes an otherwise academic topic real, understandable—and hopefully exciting for anyone creating, distributing, or consuming instructional content. If you make a living pitching ideas about education to the federal government, it’s worth a watch.

I really like what O’Reilly is doing with conference videos. The quick turnaround, making them available either as a set or a la carte, and the high quality of the videos themselves make them ideal for anyone from big-time data nerds to people like me with relatively small overlaps in interest. While it appears the presenters had a few technical issues with slides not displaying, these matters didn’t adversely affect the overall quality of the video.

More information about Real World Applications Panel: Education and Government is available from O’Reilly.

Offline Mobile Web Applications in HTML5 (a Book Report)

2011-03-12T00:00:00-06:00

If you’re a web developer who’s holding off on HTML5, it’s time to take the plunge. Luckily there are plenty of books, videos, online tutorials, and other resources to help you get started. Add Offline Mobile Web Applications in HTML5 to your list.

In this video, developer David Griffiths walks you through an important part of HTML5 that often gets overlooked in much of the hoopla and Adobe versus Apple battles: The “blue collar part” consisting of form enhancements (without Javascript) and client-side application technology. Anyone who does database-driven web application development should get excited as Griffiths explains the process of making an offline-ready application using only web technologies. Even if you’re not planning on developing for the mobile web, you’ll glean plenty of good techniques on form building, offline caching, and remote caching that will come in handy in your future web application development.

Will this video make you an expert in HTML5? No, but it will get you well on your way, and in a relatively short amount of time. Offline Mobile Web Applications in HTML5 is a solid introduction to a core technology you’ll be using every day in the coming years—and now’s a great time to get started.

More information about Offline Mobile Web Applications in HTML5 is available from O’Reilly.

How to restore a Macintosh hard drive to its factory settings

2011-02-02T00:00:00-06:00

Last week I needed to restore six MacBooks to their factory default settings, deleting all data, accounts, network settings, and so on. Here’s the procedure I used. It results in a pristine Mac hard drive, right down to the multilingual welcome message and setup assistant to get started. If you’re getting ready to sell an old Mac, I recommend following these steps to give the buyer as much of a new Mac experience as possible, while also protecting your personal data from strangers.

None of this is new information necessarily, but unfortunately many of the support discussion boards that will be among the first results in a search provide a great deal of misinformation, and some steps will vary depending on whether you’re restoring to Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6. This is an attempt to bring everything to one page (and document for my own future reference).

What you’ll need:

A Mac in need of hard drive resetting.
A little bit of Mac know-how—we’ll be digging into Disk Utility to erase the hard drive, single user mode, and root access. If any of this scares you, stop now and ask somebody for help.
Installer discs for the software you wish to restore. I had Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and the included Applications installer for these MacBooks. These laptops actually shipped right as 10.6 (Snow Leopard) hit the shelves, so an extra installer disc for that was included. I wound up installing it, too.
A second Mac, an external hard drive, a Firewire cable, and disk cloning software, if you wish to image the pristine hard drive for use with other restorations (optional)
A wired Internet connection, to speed up large downloads a bit (optional)
Time. Depending on how securely you’re reformatting the hard drive, and how many updates you need to download, resetting a single computer can take several hours.

The steps:

Boot the Mac from the installer disc. To do this, start your Mac while holding down the C key on your keyboard. Insert the disc to boot. In a few minutes you should see the language selection screen for the Mac OS X installer. Select your preferred language to continue.

Erase your hard drive. Select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu and select your hard drive. Note that secure reformatting techniques can be very time-intensive. I went with the Zero Out Data option, which took about 40 minutes to complete on a 160 GB hard drive.

Install your operating system. If you’ve ever installed a fresh copy of your operating system, this step should feel pretty straightforward. Complete the steps to install Mac OS on the computer, using default settings. I skipped the disc installer validation step because I knew my disc did not have any problems, but if you want the extra sense of security plan on letting this step run for awhile.

Enable the root user. When the operating system installer is done, restart your computer, but boot it again from the installer disc by holding down the C key on your keyboard during startup. If you accidentally boot from the hard drive, wait for the welcome video to play through, then press command-Q to quit the installer and shut down your computer. Start up again while holding down the C key to retry booting from the installer.

Select your language again, then under Utilities choose the Reset Password tool. Select the System Administrator (root) account and assign it a temporary password. You’ll just be using this during setup, and this password will be removed before you’re done. Write the password down, if necessary; you’ll need to enter it several times as you install updates to the operating system and any other software you install. Click Save, then quit the Reset Password tool.

Reboot in single user mode. At this point you should still be booted from the installer disc. Restart your computer, and this time hold down command-S to boot into single user mode. If you’re not used to seeing your Mac’s Unix guts, this step can feel daunting. You’re going to enter a few commands here to trick the Mac into thinking it’s all set up, and thus not try to walk you through the setup assistant each time.

When you see the % prompt followed by a cursor, begin typing the following. Do not type the % that starts each line—I’ve included it for context. Press return after carefully typing each line to process that command.

% /sbin/fsck -fy
% /sbin/mount -uw /
% touch /private/var/db/.AppleSetupDone
% exit

After typing the last command, your computer should begin booting in a more familiar fashion. In a moment you’ll see a login screen. Use the System Administrator account. The username will be root, and the password will be what you set in the Reset Password utility a few moments ago.

Make any network connections you’ll need to download software updates at this time. Again, these are just temporary and will be removed by the end of the procedure. (If I had this to do over, I would have moved my operation next to my router and plug in directly to an Ethernet port for a bit of a speed boost over my 802.11n wireless connection.)

Install software from the Applications Installer disc. If you haven’t done so already, you can eject your operating system installer disc (don’t put it away yet; you’ll use it again in a bit). Insert the Applications Installer disc that was included with your Mac. This disc probably includes at least the iLife software bundle, which is included on new Macs but does not get installed with the regular operating system. Run the installer as normal. You probably will not need to reboot afterward, but if you do let the computer boot to the login screen and log in again as root to continue. You can eject the Applications Installer disc when done with this step.

Run software updates. Strictly speaking, this is an optional step. You can skip it if you want to leave the hard drive as it was when you first opened your Mac. I opted to bring everything up-to-speed, including the operating system itself and the bundled iLife software. (Specifically, I updated the version of iLife that came with the computer; I didn’t install the paid upgrade to iLife ’11.)

Run Software Update (under the Apple menu) to download and install available updates for the computer. You’ll probably need to do this several times, as some updates are dependent on others. You’ll also need to restart your computer at least a couple of times, logging in each time using the root user. This will probably be the most time-intensive step of the process. On my high-speed cable Internet connection, I spent at least an hour downloading and installing update packages.

Once Software Update tells you your computer has no updates at this time, you’re in the home stretch.

Re-enable the setup assistant and welcome video. You’ll need to get back into your Mac’s command line one more time, but this time you can just use Terminal. It’s located in Applications > Utilities. Open Terminal and carefully type everything following the #:

# rm /private/var/db/.AppleSetupDone

Press return to process. What you’ve done is remove a file that your Mac looks for to see whether you’ve completed the Setup Assistant or not. You can quit out of Terminal now.

Re-disable the root user. Launch Directory Utility. This utility has been moved from its old home in Applications > Utilities; now you’ll need to open the top level of your hard drive and navigate to System > Library > Core Services > Directory Utility (this directory is not searchable in Spotlight). If necessary, click the padlock and enter your temporary root password to make changes. Under the Edit menu, select Disable Root User. Quit out of Directory Utility.

Reset the root user. Insert the Mac OS X installer disc, if necessary, and boot from it once more. Under the Utilities menu, select Reset Password. Select the root user and press the Reset button to remove network settings, among other things that are no longer needed.

Check your work. Restart the computer from the hard drive you’ve just reset. Hold down the mouse button to eject the installer media and boot from the hard drive. If all went according to plan, you should see the Mac OS X welcome video, followed by the first step of the setup assistant. Press command-Q to quit the assistant and shut down your Mac. Congratulations, your Mac’s hard drive looks brand new!

Cloning (optional)

If you need to restore several computers, as I did, I strongly recommend cloning the hard drive in the computer you just restored to the other computers. I did this using a second Mac (not one I was restoring), an external hard drive, and SuperDuper! backup software, connecting the restored MacBook to my second Mac via a Firewire cable and starting the restored Mac in target disk mode. I’m sure there are countless other ways I could have done this. Cloning and other backup techniques are beyond the scope of this article, though I’ve included a few links in the references section below.

References:

Building the Perfect PC by Thompson and Thompson (a Book Report)

2011-01-22T00:00:00-06:00

Building the Perfect PC, Third Edition by Robert Bruce Thompson and Barbara Fritchman Thompson is written for anyone who’s tired of buying off-the-shelf computers and is ready to go the DIY route. I think that’s great—building a computer is educational, gratifying, and, with the right guidance, can even be fun. Unfortunately, I don’t know if this book provides that kind of guidance.

I’m not a newcomer to building and maintaining computer hardware. I’ve built big servers, little servers and desktop PCs; and for years kept an old Macintosh G4 plugging along well after its prime through systematic upgrades to pretty much every component except its motherboard and power supply. I’d been thinking about a home server to handle backups and a little file sharing, and figured I’d give Building the Perfect PC a shot before buying something off-the-shelf. I purchased the recommended components for a home server and sat down to assemble it last week. More on my results in a moment.

In the book, Thompson and Thompson cover building a budget PC, a mainstream PC, a high-end PC, a media center, an Internet PC, and the aforementioned home server. Each project is documented with a list of components (with rationale) followed by step-by-step instructions. The projects are well-documented with photographs, checklists, and potential gotchas. The photographs are high quality and should, in theory, be sufficient to walk readers through the process from start to finish.

However, I have three major issues with Building the Perfect PC. First, I feel like if you read this book any later than a few months after its November 2010 publication date, the recommended components lists are going to be out of date. Second, although the building procedures for each type of computer are thoroughly documented, due to variations in the same components they recommend, some of the steps and corresponding photos aren’t correct. If you’re a newcomer to building PCs, and just spent a few hundred dollars on parts, and have read in multiple places that connecting a power supply or fan incorrectly can damage your investment, this might be disconcerting. Finally, the authors spend way too much time preaching the merits of DIY PC building, to the point that much of their proselytization is repeated in just the first couple of chapters. The why could have been covered in much less space to give more room for content for readers new to PC building.

Long story short: I still don’t have a server. I had to order more cables. My theory is that Thompson and Thompson got some of their existing inventory of extra parts and cables mixed up with what came with the components purchased for the project. I’m hopeful that sometime next week I’ll be up and running, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that right now I’m feeling some buyer’s remorse on this whole project. To be fair, my experiences are based on just one of the six projects offered in the book, but that doesn’t make them any less frustrating.

Ultimately, I’m not sure for whom Building the Perfect PC is intended—it’s probably too basic for anyone who’s built a computer before, and might make too many assumptions for first-timers. For the former, reading up on the latest components through industry blogs or periodicals would do the trick (the components in this book are apt to be last year’s options by the time you pick it up), and for the latter, a book with some kind of glossary or primer up front might be a better way to go.

More information about Building the Perfect PC is available from O’Reilly.

Scott and Neil's Designing Web Interfaces Master Class (a Book Report)

2010-12-27T00:00:00-06:00

In the last few years, web-based software have become more and more like their desktop counterparts thanks to Rich Internet Application (RIA) frameworks. In Scott and Neil’s Designing Web Interfaces Master Class, a video series from O’Reilly, you’ll learn about what works in modern web application interfaces, what anti-patterns to stay away from, and how to combine structure, layouts, and controls into user-friendly software.

This Master Class is presented by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil, who also penned the book version of O’Reilly’s Designing Web Interfaces. (The book is not required to learn from the videos; I’ve not read the book myself.) And, as the title suggests, these videos are about design, not engineering, so if you’re looking for the CSS, Javascript, or backend code required to develop these interfaces, you’ll need to look elsewhere. If you are a developer, though, you should note that the patterns outlined in this presentation are achievable in just about every major front-end web development framework (jQuery, Flex, etc.), so you’ll be able to put these designs to use in the framework of your choice. Videos may be streamed from O’Reilly or downloaded to your computer.

The Designing Web Interfaces Master Class has a lot going for it. In about four hours, you’ll get a good rundown of patterns for good web interface design. The videos are broken into four main components: Application structure, screen layout, UI controls, and “meaningful moments,” or principles for putting those structures, layouts, and controls into good practice. The real strength in Scott and Neil’s presentation is their use of real-world examples, many of which come from web applications you probably use yourself. The important takeaway here for designers and developers/engineers alike is that, in all likelihood, someone has already solved an interface problem very similar (if not identical) to yours, so do what you can to follow good patterns.

The presentation is well-structured and well-paced, making it easy to follow along and take your own notes if you’d like. And, being video-based, it’s easy to rewind and replay if you want to see an example again (or you can go over to a site they talk about and experiment with it for yourself).

I have three minor criticisms about this video series. First, the audience setup is kind of odd. This might seem superficial, but hear me out. I figure the producers were trying to strike a balance between having Scott and Neil talk directly to the camera (which would have looked canned) and taping a presentation to an auditorium full of people (which would have compromised videography). The setup they chose was to have a small audience—of four people. Two of them didn’t say anything, and two of them asked questions that sometimes took the presenters off-topic. I liked that this gave the presenters someone real to talk to, but I got distracted at times by these four anonymous audience members for some reason—it felt a little staged. Maybe a slightly larger group of 10 or so would seem more realistic, while still allowing for studio-like video settings.

My second suggestion is a technical one, having to do with the downloaded videos themselves. I loaded the individual clips, as opposed to just streaming them from O’Reilly, but by default they got lost alongside other videos in my collection. My solution was to tag this series as a TV show and add other meta information for ordering. Just a suggestion for others downloading these clips and saving them for future reference. (I also wouldn’t mind chapter markers, as Peepcode does in their commercial screencasts.)

Finally, on a content note, Scott and Neil don’t address the potential impact on accessibility when focusing on how your application works with a RIA framework at the top. Perhaps this is covered in the book, but I surmise that sometimes some user experience designers may get caught up in the glitz of modern frameworks and forget that graceful fallbacks to interfaces that just work aren’t just for users who haven’t upgraded from Internet Explorer 6. Keep in mind that folks with limited sight or motor skills may not be able to use those bells and whistles your favorite jQuery plugin provides; in fact, they might not be able to use your site at all.

These quirks aside, this Master Class is an excellent resource for anyone developing web applications. While I said that the book isn’t required to get everything out of these videos, I may wind up investing in it anyway for easier reference to specific use cases.

More information about Scott and Neil’s Designing Web Interfaces Master Class is available from O’Reilly.

Make iPad e-books with Baker and Jekyll

2010-12-05T00:00:00-06:00

A few weeks ago I started looking into Baker, a new open source, HTML5-based framework for creating e-books. Baker takes HTML files and compiles them into native iPad applications, ready for you to sell through the iTunes App Store. (We’re talking apps here, not ePub-formatted books you’d read in iBooks) If you know HTML, and want to get started with self-publishing for the iPad, Baker is worth looking into. You’ll need a Mac with XCode and the iOS installed—you can download these tools for free from Apple, but to make your e-book available to customers in the App Store you’ll need to pony up $99 to join the iOS Developer Program.

Since you’ll be using HTML and CSS to format your content, putting together an e-book with Baker isn’t much more complex than making a static website (that is, one without something dynamic going on server-side). So, given that, why not make things even simpler by using a static site generator? I experimented with this using Jekyll, the same static site generator I use to manage this blog and Everyday Rails.

The nice thing about this approach is you can let Jekyll handle things like headers and footers, so you can concentrate on your book’s content. You can also use an alternate markup language like Textile or Markdown to make it easier to put content together, as Jekyll converts these formats into HTML for you.

In theory, you might be able to use a commercial HTML editor like Dreamweaver to accomplish this, but before investing too much money give Jekyll a try.

The Myths of Innovation, Second Edition, by Scott Berkun (a book report)

2010-11-27T00:00:00-06:00

Words are cheap. So says Scott Berkun in The Myths of Innovation, Second Edition, published by O’Reilly. It’s easy to call yourself, your product, or your organization innovative, but it takes more than calling something innovative to make it so. In this book, Berkun outlines and dispels ten common misconceptions about innovation. The second edition adds four additional chapters with advice for would-be innovators and entrepreneurs, moving from theory to practice.

The first ten chapters, carried over from the first edition, each delve into one “myth” commonly believed about innovation. Berkun’s research is fantastic. He breaks down each misconception using examples as we’ve come to know them and the realities behind each innovation. Along the way, we come to learn that many of our romantic notions about how new ideas become indispensable products are, in fact, embellished by history. It’s a fascinating read, especially for anyone who is familiar with the likes of Malcolm Gladwell or Seth Godin. Berkun’s perspective, style, and copious research are at least as thought-provoking as the writings of these other authors.

As I mentioned, Berkun has made the second edition worthwhile by adding four new chapters, building off of the concepts presented in the first ten chapters and giving real-world, no-nonsense advice on how to apply those concepts to the reader’s own ideas. These chapters propose a “simple plan” for becoming someone who could one day be known as an innovator. Note here that simple does not mean easy, as Berkun points out frequently that developing ideas, thinking creatively, pitching your idea to would-be supporters, and staying motivated can be challenging—and the ability to repeatedly rise to those challenges is what separates the innovators from the also-rans. Berkun’s get-to-the-point writing style is perfectly fitted for The Myths of Innovation across the board, but it shines in these chapters. If you’ve read Gladwell and Godin and are ready to move from getting inspired by the stories of others to being the one being written about and inspiring others one day, these chapters provide an excellent launch pad.

For those who are interested in further reading on the topic of innovation, Berkun provides an annotated, prioritized list of additional books that he read during his own research. But be warned—as the author notes, those famous innovators history tells us about did not become well-known by reading about innovation theory. If you’re not ready to put some real effort behind your ideas, they are probably not going to come to fruition.

More information about The Myths of Innovation, Second Edition is available from O’Reilly.

Finally, a Mac launcher for me: Getting to know Alfred

2010-11-03T00:00:00-05:00

I don’t like using mice and I don’t like having to remember (too many) keyboard shortcuts. That’s why I like Alfred, a newish Mac launcher that’s based more on keywords than shortcuts, and is just customizable enough that I can make it do what I want without having to spend way too time tweaking (that’s why I never could buy into Quicksilver). Thanks to Nate for showing this to me yesterday.

I like that I can quickly fire up an e-mail message to someone (with or without an attachment). I like that I can browse the file system really quickly now using tabs and arrow keys. And I like that I can create custom web searches to quickly pull up results from websites I hit on a regular basis.

After a little bit of time getting Alfred installed and configured this evening, here are a few custom searches I’ve added for my own use.

The rundown:

KU’s People Search
GitHub
Netflix
Post to Tweetie (from the Alfred documentation; not sure if I’ll use it)
Flickr Creative Commons
Lawrence Marketplace
Go to URL (thanks to Jean-Philippe Sirois for sharing this idea)

If you use Alfred and have some custom handy custom searches, please share. I’d be particularly interested to hear from people using it to access Ruby and Rails-related references.

The Inner Game and software development

2010-09-28T00:00:00-05:00

A few years ago I heard a story on ESPN about Pete Carroll, when he was still the head coach at USC. The reporter talked about a book Coach Carroll had his players read. What interested me about this was that the book, W. Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance, isn’t even about football. Intrigued by that, and the fact that USC’s success at the time indicated that maybe it at least couldn’t hurt to check this book out sometime, I picked up a used copy (so used that my copy doesn’t include the word classic in the title yet). I finally got around to reading it this past month.

I don’t play tennis. The only sport I even dabble in anymore is bowling, and I haven’t done that in a month. However, as Coach Carroll found, The Inner Game of Tennis transcends tennis. It transcends sport (indeed, Gallwey also offers The Inner Game of Work; I haven’t read it yet). There are some good pearls for software developers in the book, if you allow yourself to read between the lines a bit. Here are few takeaways I got:

Set your subconscious free: The crux of The Inner Game is that we have two “selfs;” one conscious and one subconscious. The conscious self, often, serves as critic, when it would do better as an observer of the subconscious self, which is responsible for learning, creativity, and productivity. By acknowledging this, and working with the conscious self to not be judgmental, can the code we write as developers become art?

Observe (video) and report: Gallwey suggests the utility of video in learning to observe. He wrote this in a day before video cameras were as ubiquitous as they’ve become. I wonder if there’s something to be said for developers recording screencasts of their work, talking through their thought processes; then reviewing the recording later, to practice the skill of impartial observation. Has anybody tried this?

Learn from the pros: I found Gallwey’s assertion that watching elite tennis players do their thing on television will improve one’s game especially interesting. When he wrote the book, tennis fans had roughly one day a week to sit down and watch tennis from the couch; now there are multiple 24-hour sports channels that may show tennis at any given time. There’s even a channel dedicated to tennis.

Bringing this back to software development: I’ve always been a big proponent of watching quality screencasts like Railscasts, even if you’ll never have a need for the topic covered in a given week’s episode. The fact is Ryan Bates, the developer behind Railscasts, is a top-notch Rails developer, and his everyday coding habits are the kinds of best practices all Rails developers should follow. I’m not talking about the old learning through osmosis joke. You still have to watch, and you still have to pay attention. But again, our video-everywhere society makes it easier to access these pros and learn from the best.

Know the game: What is the reason one picks up a tennis racket? Or plays any game, for that matter? Gallwey’s list of inner motivations is fascinating, especially when you realize that your actual motivation may not be what you think. To be honest, I’m still sorting this out how this applies outside of sports, particularly to software development. I hope to gain more insight after reading The Inner Game of Work, but I think one could eventually write a list of “inner games” that differentiate the programming theorists, the script kiddies, and the people who want to turn in a quality project as efficiently as possible.

The Inner Game of Tennis may get a little too metaphysical in spots for some people, and some may gloss over the chapters that are heavier on tennis technique than discussion of the Inner Game. It’s a quick read, however, and a good opportunity to take a break from books about coding or management. I should note that some follow-up research revealed that at least one other developer has read and reported on the book; you may find his notes to be useful as well; they’re a little more thorough than mine.

Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun (a book report)

2010-08-18T00:00:00-05:00

Summer’s coming to an end. It seems like only yesterday that the school year ended, KU’s student population cleared out of Lawrence, and I cracked open Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management by Scott Berkun (O’Reilly and Associates, 2008). Now it’s August, the students are back in full force, and I’ve spent my entire summer with this book. Why so much time with one book, especially when my summer reading list was supposed to be much longer? Making Things Happen is very dense (my notes for about 80% of the book currently check in at 41 pages). It’s a summary of Berkun’s experience managing software development projects at Microsoft; in particular a few iterations of Internet Explorer during the original browser wars. It makes for an interesting perspective, especially at a time when Agile methodologies have overtaken most web-oriented projects. I’ll talk about that more in a minute.

If you’re like me and sort of fell into a managerial role for whatever reason (for me, I think it was because I was never afraid to speak up at work) but never had either the proper schooling or a solid manager to look up to at some point in your career, this book can answer a lot of questions you might have about how your job as a project manager is, at least in theory, supposed to be done. All of the stages of traditional software development are explained in detail, along with tips for documenting the planning process, making tough decisions, communicating, managing personalities, and damage control. The style is direct—blunt, even—with a good issue-to-example ratio (in my opinion, writers like Godin and Gladwell can really milk an idea by citing example after example after example, when one or two concrete case studies would suffice). Like I said, the content is geared toward software development, but I think if you’re able to think about it within other contexts you can glean some good information from it. In particular, instructional designers who use an ADDIE-style approach to instructional development can learn a lot.

That brings me to Agile within the context of Making Things Happen. Berkun espouses a traditional, planning-heavy approach to software development—think waterfall, though it’s not labeled as such, probably because it’s become such a derogatory term in software development. He acknowledges Agile (again, not by name), framed within the discussion of explaining the importance of planning to developers who think they don’t need to plan. Berkun’s high-ground takeaway is that all methodologies have their time and place; and from what I learned reading this book his projects at Microsoft would not have fit that approach for whatever reason. You may agree with him; you may not. Personally, I think there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of homework up front, provided you don’t spend all your time planning and not leave much time for doing. I also liked the overall tone of his explanation of his methodology, without resorting to some of the big talk (“software that matters”) and zealotry that always turns me off when reading about Agile (as much as I otherwise agree with it as a methodology).

One feature of this book I wish I’d taken more advantage of throughout is the activities section at the end of each chapter. I think if I’d read this book as a part of a group these summaries would have been useful learning and processing exercises. A reader might also be best served by treating Making Things Happen more as a reference than a textbook, to be called upon during specific tasks or situations. That said, I think it’s a good addition to a project manager’s bookshelf.

Image: O’Reilly and Associates

Where I've been: Recent writings elsewhere

2010-07-04T00:00:00-05:00

I haven’t posted here in awhile, but it’s not because I haven’t been writing. As you may know, I do most of my work in two other blogs: the Stratepedia Blog is work-sponsored and focuses on my take on education technology and its effects on instruction, literacy, professional development and school reform; more recently, I started Everyday Rails to help beginning Rails developers hone their skills through tutorials and general commentary on the state of Rails development. Here is a sampler of recent writings you might find interesting from each:

From the Stratepedia Blog:

5 ways to start using Safari extensions

Safari finally supports extensions, or plugin-like functionality using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (think Greasemonky or Jetpack for Firefox, or Chrome Extensions in Google Chrome). I wrote this post a few days after Safari 5’s release and included five extensions to get started with. Even if the only extension you install is Shut Up, this feature is worth its weight in gold.

5 ways to make online text more readable

Another post inspired by a new feature in Safari 5: If you’re not using the new Reader function to cut out the clutter and get a nice, clean, readable page, then you should. If you don’t use Safari, there are four other options for doing this. Why would you want to? By removing the navigation, ads, poor design choices, and other irritants that make up a good chunk of most web pages you can focus on the content you’re interested in reading (seriously, have you tried to read a newspaper online lately? It’s like their last gasp at saving their industry is making the online experience so bad that people will go back to print subscriptions).

5 uses for Dropbox

I was at a conference last week, and in a small breakout session the presenter had some files she wanted to share with participants. Her method? She copied the files onto two portable USB hard drives (not the little USB flash drives like you’ve got on your keychain; actual hard drives) and had participants pass them around. This inspired me to write a post on Dropbox, an online service I use almost daily for keeping my own devices in sync and sharing files with others without e-mail attachments or the passed-around-hard-drive method outlined above.

From Everyday Rails:

Hacking Restful Authentication

Restful Authentication isn’t the login system of choice these days for most Rails development—I’m not even sure if it’s compatible with Rails 3—but if you’ve got a legacy Rails application using Restful Authentication, this post may be of use to you. In particular, it suggests additional code to allow your users to update their accounts in a secure manner.

Adding authorization to your Rails app with RESTful_ACL

This series of posts (to be concluded, eventually) is about an alternative to role-based authorization systems that garner most of the attention when it comes to needing to set permissions within your Rails applications (defining who can do what in your app). Part one walked through the setup process, part two covered the basics of adding ACL (access control layer) information to your models, and part three got a little more advanced with using parent-child model relationships in ACL settings.

Stop procrastinating and install Rails 3 now with RVM

I hadn’t seen a start-to-finish tutorial for installing RVM (Ruby Version Manager) with a Rails 3 gemset and configuring Passenger and MySQL to work with it, so I wrote one. I got some good suggestions in the comments and positive feedback in the form of a link on the Rails Prescription Blog (by Noel Rappin, author of the forthcoming book on Rails testing that I called the best book on Rails testing when I read the first beta version) and a mention in the Ruby5 podcast on June 29 (by Gregg Pollack and Nathaniel Bibler, a couple of guys known for Ruby and Rails tutorials and just all around knowing their stuff in general). So that was nice.

One nobody's solution to Flash on the iPad

2010-05-26T00:00:00-05:00

Not that anyone asked, or that this is at all timely, but here’s how I would approach the whole no-Flash-on-the-iPad (or iPhone) thing:

Apple should stick to its guns on the development tool requirements for native applications. Aside from what Steve Jobs has said about third party layers, as a long-time Mac user I take offense to this approach to software development. Products like the Mac version of Word 6.0, which tried to paste a vaguely Macintosh interface on top of a Windows code base, should serve as a reminder of what can happen when developers get lazy and try to reuse code across platforms. To throw in a more modern software example, I quit using TweetDeck because Air is such a resource hog. (I’m also not crazy about its kitchen sink approach to features, which I’ll admit may or may not attribute to its resource hogging.) Write once, run anywhere should be limited to web-based applications.
Apple needs to enable Flash-formatted content via plugins through anything that uses Mobile Safari. I think everyone knows this is technically possible; it just doesn’t meet Apple’s standards. My solution? Instead of enabling all by default, Apple should invest in ClickToFlash (or just hire the people responsible for it) and port it to the iPad/iPhone/iPod touch variants of OS X. I’ve been using ClickToFlash for several months now, from the standpoint that I find most Flash-formatted content to be obtrusive, and it’s been great in a standard Safari-in-Snow-Leopard environment. With some tweaking it could be made a seamless part of Mobile Safari (“tap to play”), but this would take Apple’s blessing.
Adobe needs to stop being lazy. This doesn’t just apply to Jobs’ implication that Adobe is being lazy; this goes back to their acquisition of Macromedia in general and Flash in particular. Ever since that point (the last time they had real competition in the field of applications for creative types) Adobe has taken more and more shortcuts to deliver new products with minimal enhancements. Any given Adobe app’s overall user experience was almost always several notches above its Macromedia counterpart; since the merger I’ve observed Adobe’s suite slide more and more toward the Macromedia end of the quality spectrum (and going back to my bagging on write once, run anywhere, Macromedia was very guilty of pushing Windows-like software on us Mac users). Now, Adobe has its first real challenge since the merger with Macromedia, only this time it’s coming from Apple. How about we see some real innovation instead of calling this some sort of civil rights issue for developers?
Apple needs a wake-up call. I thought last week’s slaps at Apple by Google’s Vic Gundotra were petty at best, but if Steve Jobs and company think Gundotra (or Google) is alone in actively pursuing the next iPhone killer or iPad killer, they should think again. Google alone can keep throwing engineers at a problem until it’s solved (though, in the case of Android, I contend that the problem is they’re not throwing enough designers at the problem). I am legitimately concerned of three things: One, that Apple will take the App Store, approved content only model to its desktop operating system; two, that said desktop operating system will cease to exist as we know it (and kill web development as I know it); and/or three, that Apple’s hubris will hurt the Mac platform as much (or more) as it did when an inferior Windows operating system took the world. This time around, it will be Google. And while I’ve joked that Google is still better than Facebook, the fact of the matter is still that one company is still one company, regardless of what the company is. I tried switching to Linux for Rails development, and frankly, I think the current crop of text editors suck when stacked against TextMate or BBEdit, but if a Linux environment is all we’ve got, then I would bet the small companies that have done just fine supporting us would do just as fine supporting us on a new operating system.

Ranting aside, I think points 1 and 2 have merit as practical things the people at Apple and Adobe could be doing to resolve this issue.

Updates from Everyday Rails: App templates and Nifty Generators

2010-05-26T00:00:00-05:00

For those of you who might be interested: I’ve added some more posts to my nascent Everyday Rails blog project, the purpose of which is to share how I get things done on a day-to-day basis with Ruby on Rails. I’m still trying to get comfortable with my voice on that site, but I’ve added content for:

Using Rails app templates

Using Nifty Generators to create starter layouts and CSS

Creating application-wide variables using Nifty Generators’ nifty_config generator

I’ve also created a Twitter account for the project; it will be updated whenever there’s new content. An Atom feed for the site is working now, too.

Preview my new project: Everyday Rails

2010-05-20T00:00:00-05:00

Just a quick note to let those of you who read this blog know about a new project I’m about to kick off, called Everyday Rails. My goal is to provide some insight and guidance for people who, like me, need to get stuff done with Rails and don’t have time to wade through the debates that sometimes seem to take over the Rails community. I’ll explain my attempts to

make things,
make them fast, and
hopefully make them as right as possible.

There’s one post up right now; my goal is to get at least one or two new items up per week moving forward, with a gradual rollout to other Ruby-minded communities in the days to come.

If you’re interested, behind the scenes I’m using Jekyll and Blueprint for quick design and deployment and may tweak over time, but right now I’m digging my no-image (besides what Disqus may spit out) design.

I’d be interested in hearing what you think, regardless of whether you’re a Rails developer. I’ve got some edits I’d like to make to the introductory article and the About page before expanding awareness, so if you have thoughts on how I can make things more clear please share them.

Come see me at SIDLIT 2010 to talk academic social networks and web development

2010-05-10T00:00:00-05:00

My talk about do-it-yourself web application development using open source framworks must not have scared off enough people last year at the annual SIDLIT conference in Overland Park, Kansas. I got word today that my proposal for this year, entitled Beyond Ning: Rolling Your Own Social Network, has been accepted. Here’s the abstract:

Ning has recently announced plans to discontinue its free service, requiring network creators to pay for service or leave Ning altogether. In this session we’ll look at how this decision affects educational users of Ning, as well as alternative, DIY social networking software packages such as Elgg, Buddypress, and Community Engine.

I don’t think this will be quite as technical as my session from last year, and I’m going to work hard to allow for more time for questions. (I’ll also provide a handout this year, I promise!) If you are more technically inclined, though, it’s possible that my pitch for a Special Interest Group session for in-house web developers also got approved. I’m hoping to meet with those of you who are doing web application programming for universities or university departments, so we can all share tricks of the trade. If this SIG didn’t get approved, no worries—just track me down at lunchtime on either of the two days of SIDLIT. I’ll be the one not wearing a name tag.

What’s SIDLIT? SIDLIT is an annual distance education and educational technology conference in Overland Park, Kansas, for technologists in the surrounding area. It’s free to attend, and registration is now open. I will mention that it’s not a web development conference, even though that’s what I tend to focus on—but if you’re interested in seeing how universities, community colleges, and other nearby institutions are leveraging technology to address their unique needs, it’s worth a visit.

Rails Test Prescriptions is going to be the best book on Rails testing

2010-05-06T00:00:00-05:00

This week I went through Rails Test Prescriptions: Keeping Your Application Healthy by Noel Rappin, from Pragmatic Programmers. It’s still a beta book, and has only been out for a couple of weeks, but I think I’ve finally found a book that will help me write and maintain tests for my Rails app (and, dare I say, get closer to the holy grail of test-driven design).

For starters, it may be helpful to me that I already understand the basic philosophies behind TDD. Outside-in design, red-green-refactor, I get all that. However, it always seemed to me that those approaches didn’t always (or often) reflect real-world development. At least, they didn’t reflect my real world of development. As much as I wanted to test my code, it didn’t happen at the rate I wanted—either because I got sick of helping Cucumber understand English, or working around Webrat’s finickiness, or waiting for The RSpec Book to get done. So I put together test suites as best as I could, using tools I understood, testing the things I knew how to test while fully acknowledging that there were other things that should be tested, but writing possibly flawed tests would be worse than writing no tests. That’s been my system for the past year.

Imagine my delight, then, when Rappin admits that while outside-in and red-green-refactor may be the gold standards, in real life they don’t always work out. As long as your feedback loop between test and code is relatively tight, you’re probably doing OK. I don’t know why, but seeing this in electronic print was a huge relief to me—not that I needed validation from other developers, but mainly for my own sanity as I continue to chip away at a couple of years’ worth of code that needs testing. I think I’m going to get this all figured out. The explanation of mocks versus stubs alone is worth the price of the e-book.

The book, by my estimation, is probably about half done, with chapters specific to RSpec, Shoulda, Selenium, Cucumber, and legacy testing still to be written. What’s in place now may not be for the reader who wants to follow along as the author codes—there are code samples, but it’s not structured in a set-and-app-up-from-scratch way like other computer texts are. I don’t know if the book will be in this same format once it’s out of beta, but as-is it lends itself more to a read-and-refresh than a tutorial or reference book. However, I’ve yet to see anything better for explaining Rails testing from a high level, and look forward to subsequent updates to the beta book.

Hey baseball fans, MLB.tv on Roku looks great!

2010-04-28T00:00:00-05:00

Last weekend, MLB.tv, Major League Baseball’s subscription streaming video service, went live for Roku owners. This, along with Netflix support, were the two big reasons Roku interested me in the first place when I bought one a few months ago. It’s not easy being a fan of an out-of-market team, you know?

Live game footage (which is delayed, though I’m not sure how much so) looks good on my 37" LCD. If you’re familiar with MLB.tv on other devices, you may know that live video performance can be sporadic at times. I had some issues with buffering last Sunday, but otherwise it’s almost like watching the game on cable. There is something just a little off—I think the compression makes things look just a tad soft—but it’s definitely watchable. Better by far than, say, watching a standard def signal on a high def display.

It’s an investment, or course—a high def Roku box will set you back about $100, and a season-long subscription to MLB.tv runs starts at $100 (you can also go month-to-month for $20). Last year, though, my subscription paid for itself as I got to watch almost every Cardinals game I could make time for. Most of those games I watched on a small laptop screen, but watching on a regular screen is much nicer.

Say what you want about Major League Baseball. They make some decisions I don’t like, but their embracing of streaming audio and video has been great. I’d like to see other sports follow suit—if I ever find myself away from regular coverage of the Kansas Jayhawks it’d be nice to know I’d still never have to miss a game.

Documentaries, storytelling, and The Endless Summer

2010-04-25T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve been watching movies like a fiend this weekend, catching some titles that are at the end of their run on Netflix’s instant streaming option. Nothing cleans out a Netflix queue like an impending expiration. While I will admit to watching (and enjoying) my fair share of mainstream crap, I’ve come to actually, genuinely prefer documentaries. I’ve begun paying more attention to the styles used to tell real stories, and thought about what compels documentarians to choose their subjects. In an age when pretty much anyone can have their story told in an hour on an A&E Biography or VH1 Behind the Music (not even sure if that’s on anymore), I think being a genuinely good documentarian takes a little more than pointing a camera at your subject and letting them speak and hoping the story tells itself from there, through the voices of the people being followed, with the filmmaker playing the role of impartial observer, however well or poorly (Michael Moore, cough cough).

I’m no filmmaker, and aside from a couple of film studies classes I took at KU, really have no grounds to stand on when it comes to dissecting movies. I just know what I like. And this weekend, I took a shine to The Endless Summer, Bruce Brown’s 1966 documentary about two young Californian surfers who travel around the world seeking “the perfect wave.” They hit the beach in Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii; interact with the locals; and generally go on an adventure that most who love world travel could only envy even today (or maybe especially today).

The format of the movie is probably what fascinates me the most. Being from 1966, it is much more like the educational reel-to-reel films I’d see in school as a kid, with no interviews from primary sources of Ken Burns-style image panning. The subject matter, and Brown’s easy-going, fun way of explaining it, set The Endless Summer apart from its contemporaries discussing the smelting process or the like. (I would have loved watching this film in school, 15 years or so after its initial release, for what it’s worth.) The words are all Brown’s, as he narrates the footage in a general style not unlike a 1960s wildlife documentary—that pack of wildebeests can’t speak for itself, so the filmmaker uses his own words to explain the situation and even put a splash of humanity in these wild animals. Brown shows his subjects on the waves and among the natives, but never asks them about their thoughts (at least, not on camera). Rather, his words mix with his visuals to tell the story from his point of view.

And how about those visuals? Again, I don’t really know anything about making movies, especially historically, but I imagine that much of this film was done on a budget and required highly portable gear. I don’t know if those factors lent themselves to this, or it was just the shots that Brown chose, but it’s almost like you’re in Brown’s living room and he gets out some video he shot with his home movie camera and projects it on a sheet he’s hung from the ceiling and talks about what is happening, all while a cool surf rock band plays in the corner of the room. No special effects; probably not even any color correction in post-production. Very authentic.

Could this movie be made today? My guess is no, at least not in this format. For starters, surfing is not the hot new thing it was 45 years ago—but besides that, it would take a gusty documentarian to hold him or herself accountable for what’s said, and not just craft and edit interviews together to convey a message. I also think the budget for a 2010 remake would be astronomical, with the equipment and crews necessary for professional, screenable, marketable, profitable results driving costs through the roof. I’d be more apt to imagine this as a scripted work, with a couple of up-and-coming young actors playing the roles of Mike and Robert. Sprinkle in a foreign, possibly forbidden love interest and maybe some sort of conflict threatening to rip their friendship apart (only for them to resolve in the last 15 minutes so they can team up to conquer the awesome, CGI-generated killer wave and/or rival surf gang), and I smell a hit!

If you’ve got a Netflix account, you’ve got through this week to catch The Endless Summer via streaming; otherwise, you can watch it the old-fashioned way and rent the DVD. Do you know of other documentaries like this? Are there rules or formulas taught to aspiring documentarians about the right way to tell a story, or am I being too critical? Or just overly appreciative of a filmmaking style long past its prime?

Quick take: Netflix streaming on Wii vs. Roku

2010-03-26T00:00:00-05:00

I got my Netflix for Wii disc in the mail today and figured I’d put it to a quick test to see how it compares to the Roku HD Player also connected to my television. I’ve only played with it for a few minutes (I watched a few minutes of an episode of The Office). Here’s my takeaway so far:

Setup is as easy as the Roku. Netflix activation is browser-based, so you don’t have to mess with an on-screen keyboard. This process was seamless and took well under a minute. Advantage: Push.
As to be expected, Netflix video quality on the Wii is not as nice as on the Roku. It’s definitely decent, though—closer to upscaled DVD than a standard definition TV signal. If I hadn’t already hooked the Roku up to my TV and seen what it can do I probably wouldn’t be commenting on this (and it’s probably not fair that I’m comparing the decidedly non-HD Wii to a HD Roku model). Advantage: Roku.
The Netflix interface on both devices is fine—nothing fancy; they just work. Advantage: Push.
On the Wii, you’re not limited to your instant streaming queue, as you are on the Roku. You can also select from new streamable releases in all of your preferred Netflix categories. I like this. Advantage: Wii.
The Wii isn’t compatible with my Logitech Harmony remote, so I have to wield the remote and a Wiimote to control playback and audio. Advantage: Roku.

To sum: If you’ve already got a Wii and a Netflix account, and you don’t already have something connected to stream movies, the Wii option is a fine way to go (especially because it’s free). If you’ve got room on your entertainment unit for another (small) device, and don’t mind shelling out 100 bucks to get it, and want better quality (and a bit more convenience, remote-wise) pick up a Roku player.

Roku: Initial impressions

2010-03-12T00:00:00-06:00

After a little bit of thinking about media centers last week following the death of my Apple TV, I wound up buying a Roku HD Player. It can do the three things I was most interested in (stream Netflix, stream MLB.TV, stream music)—and is 100 bucks, compared to the 300 I was looking at spending on a Playstation 3 or 700-ish a Mac mini would have set me back. So far, I’ve been pretty pleased with the purchase. Here are a few first takes.

Setup

Setup really is as easy as they say. It helped, I’m sure, that I was able to use the same cabling that my Apple TV used, minus the power cable, to hook the Roku into my system—I’m using HDMI for video, digital optical for audio, and ethernet for networking. It connected to my network right away, ran a system update, and rebooted without a hitch.

The Channel Store is easy to skim (there are only a handful of channels), and for the most part channels are easy to install. I like the account linking mechanism used by apps like Netflix, Pandora, and Mediafly to hook a Roku box to a given account—major typing is done on a computer as opposed to a clunky on-screen keyboard. Flickr was the exception and required way too much typing on both sides.

I’m using a Logitech Harmony 550 universal remote with my Roku HD. Setup for this is a little weird. The key is to set up your Roku as a PVR.

Netflix

Netflix streaming is probably Roku’s strongest suit. It works as advertised—browse your instant queue, select a movie, and begin watching it within 10 seconds. I’m on a theoretical 50Mb connection and have yet to have any problems with buffering (which was sometimes a problem with streaming on my Mac) or pixelation. I haven’t tried any high-def movies, but standard definition videos look at least as good as upsampled DVDs on my system.

I found enough movies available for streaming on Netflix that I’ll probably drop my plan to one DVD at a time. As convenient as Netflix’s mailing service is, their streaming service is even more so. The streaming library isn’t as gigantic as the physical DVD one is, of course, but I’m taking the opportunity to add some movies I would have overlooked given a larger selection (classics, mainly).

Pandora

Pandora streaming works fine. Stations are easy to create and navigate. You can like and not like songs just as you’d suspect. No complaints here.

MLB.TV

To be determined. I’ve bought my subscription for the year and downloaded the app, but it doesn’t kick in until opening day. I’m really hoping this one works out—MLB.TV was a big hit in my house last year, and I’m looking forward to seeing games on a regular TV screen instead of a laptop.

Everything else

Honestly, though, I’ve been a little underwhelmed by the remaining channels. I’ve yet to have any luck with Mediafly. The Blip.tv and Flickr channels come off as half-realized. I don’t know enough about the Roku API to guess what might be up or to try to create my own channel (or if it’s even possible) but podcast consumption is one area where the Apple TV beats out Roku.

Wish list

My only request is probably a common one: I want to stream media from local servers. I’d love to have access to my iTunes Library or videos on a shared drive on my local network. That might be too much to expect from a $100 box. Other than that, I’d like to see more content providers creating Roku channels.

Summary

I’m very happy with the Roku HD. It’s probably not the geek chic device to get, but I like the simplicity and the fact that it just works. That’s not to say it’s going to be my end-all, be-all—as Boxee makes its way toward being a finalized product, I may wind up with a more full-featured home media center sitting under my television yet. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot of Netflix titles to catch up on in my intant queue, and baseball season starts in like a month.

The Facebook Imperative and organizational learning

2010-03-10T00:00:00-06:00

If you’re interested in organizational learning, or how a company or group improves its capacity to do great things through training, informal learning, or other mechanisms, check out this piece on the need for social networking technology in enterprise software, written by Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. This is something I’ve believed in strongly for years. For my capstone project in my master’s program I even wrote some basic software to tie social networking elements into a closed network geared around organizational learning. I wish my explanation of the need for such software at the time would have been as nicely written as Mr. Benioff’s argument. The key point for me:

For years we’ve been reading about the potential for institutional memory to transform a corporation into a learning organization. But, have we seen it happen beyond very few unique organizations? A true paradigm shift occurs when the barriers of entry are removed for everyone. That is changing fast. With these new social models, there is a way to immediately leverage the knowledge of an organization. People with expertise and relevance are instantly looped in, can participate in the conversation, collaborate, and make contributions more simply than ever before. That will be the catalyst of this new productivity revolution—delivered through these new social enterprise platforms.

I’m curious to know more about how organizations who already get it are doing this sort of thing now. If you work at a socially-wired company or organization, or if you’ve used the social gears to drive a grassroots cause, and you happen to stumble upon this post, I’d like to know more about what you did.

Requiem for an Apple TV

2010-03-01T00:00:00-06:00

Sometime last week, while I was out of town, my Apple TV bit the dust. The status light blinks amber; some online searching suggests that the hard drive and/or logic board went kaput. Either way I don’t think I’m going to mess with trying to get it fixed, and I don’t see myself shelling out $230 for a new one given some of its general inconveniences.

I’ve had Apple TV since January, 2008; enough time to see it through a couple of major software revisions. There’s been a lot to like about Apple TV—streaming from iTunes on other computers and watching video podcasts in particular—but when all was said and done I think I had more frustrations than successes with it. Sometimes it was just minor frustrations that left me scratching my head, like podcasts I could never remove from favorites. Other issues were more major, like the fact I had to register my Apple TV with my iMac (which houses all of my music and a lot of video) three times for proper syncing.

Installing Boxee helped. I liked being able to play just about any video format I could throw at it, and I streamed hours upon hours of music from Pandora. The Apple TV hardware just never quite had enough juice for Boxee, though. I couldn’t stream Netflix, and streaming baseball via MLB.tv never quite worked as advertised. I won’t knock Boxee for their issues with Hulu. That’s just a case of short-sighted TV network execs who don’t understand where media is heading. (Not that I fully understand, myself; but I do know that some of us still want to watch TV on demand and on a regular TV screen, not a laptop. That and Jay Leno isn’t funny.)

I know Apple calls this product their “hobby,” but if they don’t give it more attention than it’s been getting then I don’t see it ever becoming a viable player in the set top device market (which I think it set to explode). I wish Apple would open up their hobby to others through an app store for the device. Casual games are a hit on the iPhone (not to mention the Nintendo Wii) and could explode on the Apple TV as well. How about an Apple TV port of iChat? Just plug in your USB webcam and participate in video chats from the comfort of your couch.

Knowing Apple, I don’t see this happening. That’s why I’m moving on.

So what’s next?

At this point I’m leaning toward replacing my dead Apple TV with a Playstation 3. I like the idea of streaming Netflix, and I guess I like the idea of having a Blu-ray player (though I think that movies over physical media will look antiquated in a few years). It would work with my Logitech Harmony remote with an adapter. The PS2 had a great game library, and I imagine the PS3 has a good one as well (make your recommendations in the comments). I could plop it into the entertainment unit right where the Apple TV’s been and be ready to go. To my knowledge, the only media I could stream to it would be Netflix—no Boxee or similar media wrapper that I know of means no MLB.tv and no podcasts. Probably no iTunes streaming, either. And this whole deal with being seemingly overly reliant on Sony’s network to even work can’t be a good thing, right? And anyway, nobody’s got the thing in stock and may not for a few months. That could be a good thing—it’s keeping me from making an impulse purchase.

Is the Xbox 360 an option? No Blu-ray player, and I really don’t care about online gaming. I think I’d be using it as a straight-up media center. I know I can stream Netflix to an Xbox 360, but does it play standard DVDs? Works with a Harmony remote, right? Again, no Boxee-type support, but on the plus side I could walk into just about any store and pick one up today.

My third option is to build one myself. I don’t know that I’d have the patience to make this work on an ongoing basis—I can’t even tolerate desktop Linux interfaces for more than a few hours before giving up on them for another decade. I don’t know that Windows Media Center would treat me much better. This option would probably be relatively cheap, though, at the end of the day.

Maybe a Mac mini? Or would that require too many audio/video adapters to make it worth the trouble? Would the direct integration with my existing iTunes setups negate that hassle? The benefits of this option and the BYO option would be as much hard drive space as I care to attach and Boxee for the general media browsing experience. It would be nice to be able stream MLB games to my television, too. Not cheap, though—600 bucks for the basic hardware, plus the cost of a digital audio-to-Toslink converter. And I could just control it with VNC, I figure, though the Harmony remote should be able to control Boxee and/or Front Row, right?

Hmm, decisions, decisions.

Sound Refound: My new music flyers database

2010-02-25T00:00:00-06:00

Last week I rolled out a new version of an old project. Over the years I’ve collected a number of promotional flyers from local concert venues in and around Lawrence, Kansas and Seattle, Washington. Since 2002 or so I’ve gone through a few attempts at sharing these online.

First was a pretty basic gallery of static HTML files generated by iPhoto and hosted on a .Mac account (now MobileMe, of course). This was fine for starters, but didn’t give me much control in terms of look-and-feel and definitely didn’t give me any ability to cross-index by band or venue. In 2005 moved things to a MovableType installation on DreamHost. To be honest, I only have vague recollections of this iteration, and remember more about the tedious uploading process than I do the end result. By backdating “posts” to the show dates, though, I was able to create a basic, searchable database of my flyers.

Next, in early 2008, I reworked everything into a WordPress-powered site. The addition of tags helped me index by band and venue, albeit in a slightly forced fashion. I also tried some design ideas I later regretted (specifically, a gigantic banner graphic that hid content from non-scroller-downers). At the end of the day, though, it was WordPress, and I don’t like WordPress, and it didn’t work exactly the way I wanted it to work, and as a seasoned web developer I should make something work exactly the way I want it to, right?

Enter Sound Refound. Nothing fancy, just a basic means of displaying a collection of media (in this case, images) and cross-indexing on some specific data fields (versus my generic tags approach in WordPress). The collection is small enough that I don’t think it warrants a keyword search; talk to me again if and when I have more than 200 artifacts in the database.

The application itself is pretty basic—just a straightforward Rails application with three models (flyer, band, and venue). The new thing for me with this app was the deployment—after realizing that running a Rails 2.3.x application on DreamHost was going to pretty much require installing my own copy of Ruby in my account I decided to finally take a look at Heroku for application hosting service. What can I say, other than Heroku just works. I’m really impressed with the deployment interface—just git push heroku master and you’re done, pretty much. The only snag I ran into was getting Bundler to work with Rails 2.3.x, so for now I’ve got my couple of gems I’m using installed as plugins. It’s working fine, but will be something to address eventually. I’m also using Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service to serve the actual flyer images, another first for me technology-wise. Just like Heroku, everything just works.

Since Sound Refound isn’t much more than a vanity project, anyway, I’m guessing S3 is going to set me back a few pennies a month (I’m also going with Heroku’s free level at the moment). It’s nice to be able to experiment with these technologies without being set back much cash, and it’s nice to have a little vanity project with which to experiment while I craft plans for thing(s) of a little more use to people besides me. Stay tuned?

Upcoming conferences of potential interest (and not called SXSW)

2010-02-20T00:00:00-06:00

I loved my experience at SXSW Interactive last year, but unfortunately a week in Austin isn’t something my work can afford to send me to every spring. Luckily the Great Plains are apparently becoming a hotbed of conference activity. Here are a few upcoming events I know about in the greater Kansas area:

Free State Social, Lawrence KS, April 29-30

I personally have heard about all I care to hear about from quote-unquote social media gurus, but if you haven’t then you could do a lot worse than attend Free State Social in my hometown of Lawrence, Kansas. Chris Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, Ellyn Angelotti, Shawna Coronado, Sarah Evans, and Scott Raymond are the all-star lineup of featured speakers. Regular tickets are $295; $395 will get you a VIP ticket and extra access to said all-stars.

Red Dirt Ruby Conference, Oklahoma City OK, May 6-7

I just found out about Red Dirt Ruby Conference this morning. Looks interesting if you’re into Ruby and/or Rails, and they’ve lined up some decent speakers to talk about Rails 3, the NoSQL movement, server stuff, and Ruby stuff. I’m waiting to hear what it costs, but Oklahoma City’s a neat town and worth a visit. (As an aside, I’ve also heard rumblings about a potential Ruby conference in Kansas City. Stay tuned.)

Big Omaha, Omaha NE, May 13-15

I love Omaha, and I love the work being done there to promote creativity, entrepreneurship, and the blending of the two (when in Omaha, check out The Kaneko). The second installment of Big Omaha is coming this May. I have mixed feelings on the speaker selection. I’m a big fan of Scott Belsky’s work; not so much that of Matt Mullenweg. I’ll have to see a more defined agenda (and a price tag) before I decide whether to make the drive north.

Rails testing in the real world

2010-02-07T00:00:00-06:00

I’ve been in the web development racket since the mid-90s, but I’m really not a programmer (even if I’ve held jobs that state otherwise). I know how to at least do many things expected of a programmer, but it’s not something I do at my job for more than, say, eight hours a week. There are just too many things to do. That said, I have been doing this for more than 15 years now, and I know a thing or two about how things should work. It took time and experience and learning the hard way at times, but these days I’m solidly convinced that if you’re not using—and embracing—a framework of some kind you’re making life more difficult than it has to be. And part of that embracing is writing tests for your code to pass.

Everyone knows test-driven development (TDD) is the way to go, right? Like all the other big player web frameworks, Rails has built-in support for tests (Test::Unit) and a bevy of third-party test frameworks (Rspec, Shoulda, Cucumber). TDD evangelists preach TDD as the way to go about your business. I’ve read their statements and worked through the tutorials, but whenever a new project came along, I’d start the same way as always: Draft a data model, write some code, check it out in my browser, and hope I didn’t miss anything.

I attribute this behavior to two things. First, I’d become set in my ways as a slapdash, spaghetti code developer; and second, the demos and tutorials intended to get you hooked on Rails—be it the 15-minute blog in Rails demonstration that got everyone excited in the first place or the book Agile Web Development in Rails that was the first hands-on exposure to Rails for many of us—testing is either not done or is an add-on. Even Ryan Bates’ essential Railscasts series omits testing unless the week’s topic is about a testing framework. I know why this is so—people don’t come to Railscasts to see Ryan write a bunch of tests and make them pass; they come to see him implement a useful controller feature or neat drag-and-drop interface. At the end of the day I got it, but I didn’t get it, and so I didn’t do it. A whole book on the subject of testing in Ruby, “The RSpec Book”,http://pragprog.com/titles/achbd/the-rspec-book, couldn’t convince me, but I knew I needed convincing, so I kept trying to find testing enlightenment.

Everything clicked for me after watching a few episodes of BDDCasts, an ongoing screencast series that gives you the opportunity to look over the shoulders of two seasoned, test-driven Rails developers as they put together an application, feature by feature. It’s not always pretty, but watching and listening to the two talk through implementation decisions, leading off with defining features through tests, helped me realize that the only way I was going to really put tests to use on my own was to make the process work for me—not the other way around.

Here’s the development process I’ve come up with for myself to test Rails code. Your mileage may vary.

Create a new Rails app and prepare it for the testing frameworks of your choice. I’m currently using Cucumber, Webrat, and Pickle for behavior tests, RSpec to spec out and test the particulars of my models, and Factory Girl to create my test data. At this time I don’t do a whole lot of controller testing, as I’m still figuring how to work that into my system, but at this point Cucumber has kept things afloat on that end for me.
Draft a data model. I know this is probably against many TDDers’ rules, but I need a general lay of the land before I get started. I do this on paper, with lines between tables to mark relationships.
Begin writing feature files using Cucumber. I’ve been fuzzy on the preferred way of organizing behavior tests are—should I use a few files with several features each, or many files with a handful of features per? I’ve gone the latter route. This lets me focus on features in more manageable bundles, and also makes it easier for me to take advantage of Cucumber’s useful Background feature. I don’t know if this is the right way to do it, but it’s the way that works for me.
Crank out the required scaffolds. Scaffolds? Aren’t those just for beginners? Maybe they are, but scaffolds do a lot of grunt work I’d prefer not to do. This might be my biggest veering-off point from what the demos and tutorials say you’re supposed to do. Instead of writing a test and then writing the code to make it pass, I write a test, create a scaffold using Bates’ awesome Nifty Generators gem, then peel back what I don’t need. At this point I create my factories, write the code need to write to make my Cucumber tests pass, remove the rest, and do a round of refactoring.
Clean up my models. I use RSpec to verify that things like validations and after_create calls are working as intended. I could do this in Cucumber, but these tests make more sense to me within RSpec. Another important thing to note here is that I don’t test things that I can safely assume have been tested thoroughly by the Rails framework itself, such as ActiveRecord-specific calls, and ideally if a plugin or gem is well-tested I trust those tests as well. Another round of refactoring follows, as needed.
Move on to the next bundle of features—it’s back to Cucumber, writing another set of related features, and making them pass.

That’s my process, in a nutshell. I don’t obsess over coverage statistics, but I still think by and large this process is covering the parts of my Rails code that need to be covered pretty well. Since I still use scaffolding, I don’t think testing adds a whole lot of time to my development cycle, and if anything I see it saving time down the road when tracking down errors that might not be found with old school browser-side testing. I know I’ve got some things to improve upon, particularly in user interface testing, but I feel like I can continue down that road once I’m sure that my applications’ underpinnings are sound.

Retrofitting old applications

Over the last few months I’ve been revisiting projects I still support but didn’t necessarily do a great job of testing, putting my system to use to check my work by writing tests and seeing if they actually pass the way I expect they should. I work backwards in these cases, testing my models with RSpec and then writing behavior tests. Interestingly, I do find things that I’ve missed from time to time that I’m surprised haven’t already come back to bite me in implementation, but it’s better that they’re found here than by an end user.

Retrofitting your existing applications is also a good way to learn the syntaxes and nuances of your chosen testing frameworks, since you should have a pretty good idea of how they’re currently working—that way when a test doesn’t pass, and you know it’s supposed to, you can focus more of your attention on the test you’ve written as opposed to the code you’ve written that should make it pass.

Try to dedicate a portion of your day or week to revisiting old projects and bolstering them through tests. It’s a good learning exercise and can save you a lot of time and embarrassment down the road.

How do you test?

Like I said, I think the best way to embrace testing is to find a method that works best for you—so what’s yours? Are you by the book? If not, what parts of the workflow have you customized? If you’re not testing, what’s stopping you?

My initial impressions of the iPad

2010-01-28T00:00:00-06:00

Hey, did you hear? Apple announced the iPad yesterday, a 10-inch, super-thin tablet computer with a surprisingly decent starting price of $499 (waiting to hear if they’ll have academic price breaks). Every technology pundit worth his or her blog has already chipped in two cents (or at least made fun of the name), so why not add my own?

First off, let me go ahead and state, for the record, as soon as Apple makes them available for sale I’m ordering a 32 GB, no 3G model for work. I’m going to put it through its paces as best as possible, even trying to use the built-in Notes app to replace my need for pen and paper when I go to meetings. I am not optimistic that the iPad, with the features as demonstrated yesterday, will be anywhere close to what I want in that regard. In a perfect world I’d have the option of a nice stylus for input (in addition to all the multitouch goodness), a freeform sketch pad for note-taking, and maybe some cloud-based, highly reliable OCR for making my notes searchable in the future. Maybe this is a job for an iPad-optimized version of Evernote?

Second, I’m floored at the thinness of the iPad. Even with the add-on case, it looks like it will easily slide into a backpack or satchel. I think the makers of this video are onto something when they suggest how the iPad could transform the textbook industry:

The big drawbacks of this hypothetical model, of course, is that it would put the used textbook industry in a world of hurt and rob millions of college students of end-of-term beer money. On the other hand, you might see it as two ills of higher education the iPad might help cure.

I don’t know that the iPad will be the tablet computer used in higher education. Copycats running Android, WebOS, and whatever Microsoft calls Windows Mobile these days will appear at similar or better price points. But I do think that we’re going to see a lot of students toting these things around in the coming few years, in lieu of the laptops that replaced desktop computers. iWork and the keyboard dock are what sold it for me in that regard—a device with a good word processor, presentation tool, YouTube browser, and Facebook client is going to be perfect for just about any kid not in engineering school.

That brings me to my last point. Early on during the iPad introduction, I made the comment that it was built for consumption, not creation. This was before Phil Schiller showed iWork, and the keyboard dock add-on was shown, so I’ll soften my stance to a degree. I haven’t watched video specific to Keynote yet, but I can imagine that creating slides with a multitouch interface will be highly intuitive. Heck, even the finger painting app looks pretty neat. However, given the current specs and software, the iPad won’t be adequate for the part of my job that has me waist-deep in Ruby, Sass, and Haml. Maybe the answer is to set up a development environment on a separate computer and connect to it from the iPad via VNC? Ah, one of the many things to experiment with in 60 days or so.

My college basketball arena tour wish list

2010-01-27T00:00:00-06:00

I got a lot of hits on my post about McArthur Court a couple of days ago, thanks to it being picked up by an Oregon Ducks fan site. Like I said, visiting Mac Court was a real treat and I hope to continue visiting historic basketball courts in the next several years. It’s occurred to me that one day we might look back at arenas being built today with the same disdain as we came to look at the cookie cutter stadia like the Vet, Riverfront, Busch Stadium II, and the Metrodome. In 25 years or so will we see a revival of retro arena designs, modeled after the likes of Allen Fieldhouse and Mac Court?

So with that said, I’m hoping to hear from other college basketball fans to get input on the must-visit arenas at which I should catch a game. Here’s my list—not in any particular order, though precedence will given to gyms due for replacement:

The Palestra at the University of Pennsylvania
Hinkle Fieldhouse at Butler University
Assembly Hall at Indiana University (due for replacement sooner rather than later)
Rupp Arena at the University of Kentucky (a replacement in the works)
Pauley Pavilion at UCLA (scheduled for rehab after this season)
Freedom Hall at the University of Louisville
Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke University
Williams Arena at the University of Minnesota
University Arena (The Pit), University of New Mexico
Gallagher-Iba Arena, Oklahoma State University

Keeping in mind that I’ve seen plenty of games at Allen Fieldhouse at the University of Kansas, where else should I be heading and why?

My visit to McArthur Court

2010-01-25T00:00:00-06:00

It’s hard to imagine that, in the year 2010, there’s a BCS school playing in an old gym like McArthur Court, home of the Oregon Ducks basketball program until this coming December. At that time McArthur will be replaced by Matthew Knight Arena. With a combined sense of nostalgia and urgency, I made my way to Eugene during the gloomiest time of the year to visit the Pacific Northwest to take in a game at the 83-year-old court—my first stop in what I hope becomes an ongoing series of visits to historic college basketball facilities.

I’d seen lots of photos of the inside of McArthur Court, but not too many outdoor shots. It’s easy to see why—the building is not exactly photogenic; just a large, nondescript concrete building next to newer, fancier athletics facilities. You might think it’s just an old warehouse if not for the small, simple signs bearing its name, along with the current time and temperature. It may also be the only college basketball arena located next to a cemetery.

Walking inside Mac Court was possibly the closest I’ve ever come to walking into a time machine. Watching a college basketball game there is like watching a college basketball game in the 1930s: The narrow, tiled concourses are crammed with incoming fans and makeshift vending areas. Finding your seat requires winding your way up stairs, down wooded floor hallways, and through tiny, nondescript tunnels.

As we approached the entryway to our section, I remembered that Oregon won the 1939 National Championship—notable because that year’s championship was decided by the very first post-season NCAA tournament. And sure enough, as we walked through the tunnel and into “The Pit” proper, we were greeted by the large banner commemorating the occasion (along with others touting championships in volleyball, wrestling, and women’s basketball).

The scoreboards might be the newest features in Mac Court, having probably been installed in the late sixties by my guess. I’ve taken for granted the ability to glance up at a scoreboard and see how many points the current hot hand on the court has tallied. This is not possible at Mac Court. If you want to know how many points or fouls a player has, you’d better keep track of that yourself. I bet the guy selling scorecards cleans up on game day. And at least from our seats, the public address announcer was not of much help, as the voice coming over the antiquated sound system was muffled and mostly inaudible.

The lack of a sound system puts the job of supplying music squarely on the collective shoulders of the pep band. In fact, the only instance of piped-in music I recall was during a halftime performance of local grade school unicycle enthusiasts. Luckily, Oregon has a great pep band—their rendition of “Roller Coaster of Love” is the best pep band rendition of the Ohio Players’ classic you’ll ever hear, I guarantee.

During pre-game warmups I was pretty sure I’d spotted former Arizona head coach Lute Olson, and I was right. As part of the ceremonial final year of Pac-10 basketball at Mac Court, each team was represented by an honorary captain. Coach Olson, pictured here, served as the Wildcats’ captain and received a nice ovation. (I stood and clapped myself, even if I am still a bit bitter of his 1997 Arizona team knocking my Jayhawks out of the tournament.) “Admiral” John Dick, a member of the 1939 championship team, did the honors for the Ducks.

Teams don’t have tunnels to enter the court through so much as they have doorways. Prior to the Ducks’ entrance from the basement locker room, some yellow-clad students are ushered from their designated section to the entryway. These students and cheerleaders line the way from point to point to welcome the home team.

The student section with the prime seats is small by other gyms’ standards. Students stand immediately behind the announcing crews and, for the most part, do a great job of keeping up with and being part of the game. The “USA! USA!” chant whenever Kyryl Natyazhko (an Arizona player hailing from the Ukraine) touched the ball was a little dumb, though, reminding me more of pro wrestling than college basketball.

When McArthur Court was built, press row didn’t need to accommodate laptops or a gaggle of local and national newsmen. Now, reporters and their computers crowd a narrow ledge with power cables drooping toward the fans below.

The only modern element of a basketball game at Mac Court is the uniform. Oregon is Nike’s flagship school (notable in particular for the seemingly endless possible combinations of football uniforms the company supplies for the school) and Arizona is a Nike school as well, meaning the young men on the court wear tight tank tops and odd, baggy bottoms that are less like shorts and more like bloomers.

McArthur Court is known for its vertical seating arrangement. Tiers of seats go up and up. And up. From the top deck, sitting in old wooden bleachers, you can get an eye level view of the Ducks’ collection of banners. Look down for a bird’s eye view of the action on the floor.

The game itself was nothing memorable. The visiting Arizona Wildcats started off strong and, for the most part, stayed in charge the whole time. Oregon fans, including much of the student section, made a mass exodus from the arena when the old clock showed two minutes remaining in the game and the Wildcats’ victory well in-hand. The Ducks, mired in a weeks-long slump (a fan behind me made the comment that an ensuing play was for the first lead they’d hold in two weeks; that lead didn’t happen), made a couple of runs, though. They even stormed back to tie a few times—and on these runs I got brief glimpses of what it might be like to really see a game at Mac Court, with wood floors creaking and ceiling fixtures swaying and a raucous, packed crowd of 9,000 fans looming over the court. I hope the old building gets a few more games like that before its curtain call this December. Matthew Knight Arena will no doubt pack all the amenities, but it will be hard-pressed to match McArthur Court’s simple charm and dignity.

Want to see more? Check out more photos from my visit to McArthur Court on my Flickr account.

How I migrated my blog to Jekyll

2010-01-11T00:00:00-06:00

As I mentioned last night, I’ve moved this blog from using WordPress on the backend to Jekyll, my new favorite way to publish on the web. Jekyll’s made web publishing fun for me again. It’s a throwback in many ways to the ways we used to do things back in the early days of the web—lots of command line and text editors—while providing modern conveniences like an intelligent templating system and local server for development. If you’re frustrated with WordPress security or performance issues, or think that other content management system offerings are more complex than they need to be (or at least more complex than you need them to be) I recommend giving Jekyll a shot.

I’ve been using Jekyll to publish some sites for work for a month or two now, but those were fresh sites that didn’t have content to carry into a new system. For this blog, I had posts and comments to move over, ideally in a way that would preserve as much content as possible. Henrik Nyh wrote a good post on migrating from WordPress to Jekyll that provided much of the detail of the migration process for me, but I learned a few things on my own:

Markdown oddities after import

After importing content from the WordPress database, my posts with images or other embedded media in them caused Jekyll to error out when trying to generate my site. I was able to resolve these, at least in the short term, by changing a given post’s markup to HTML. I’m not religious about my markup/markdown methods so I doubt I’ll change this unless necessary.

Permalinks

This one wasn’t a big deal—the default permalink structure for Jekyll is different than how I had my permalinks set up in WordPress. This conflicted with the comments I’d transferred over to Disqus (and, theoretically, any standings I had on the search engines). Easy fix: Make a note of your WordPress permalink settings, and edit the permalink value in your Jekyll _config.yml file accordingly. In my case this was just a matter of setting it to

/:year/:month/:title

I’m not sure what you need to do if you’re not using search-friendly URLs in your blog, though.

To do

I still have things to sort out as I have the time:

Implement site search. Is Google’s service work 100 bucks a year for such a small traffic site? I don’t know; in the meantime you can check out my archives.
Add some sort of comments form, I guess, though I’d rather people leave comments or contact me on Twitter. It’s easier.
Add code to GitHub. It’ll happen eventually.

Anything else you think I should do?

Making the Jekyll switch

2010-01-10T00:00:00-06:00

I’ve ditched WordPress in favor of Jekyll, a static-site generator I’ve been having fun with for the past few weeks. What you see here is a new design I started messing with, with all content rendered by Jekyll. I’ve got some bugs to work out but should have everything at a happy place in the next few days. I’m also going to get back on a regular blogging schedule, starting this week.

In the meantime, comments should be working if you want to let me know what you think.

My issues with Google Wave

2009-11-13T00:00:00-06:00

So I’ve had my Google Wave account for at least a month now. So far I’m underwhelmed. Part of me thinks it’s just me, and that I’ve reached that point in my life when new technology confuses and frightens me; but the other part of me thinks I’m just the only one who’s willing to admit there are a lot of features in this application that are either half-baked or flat-out don’t make sense. So here’s my list of gripes:

Lack of invites. I got my Wave invite (for which I'm grateful) from a first-round invitee; as a result I get no invitations of my own to hand out. I know the Wave team has their reasons, but this does little to help me use this new tool in my day-to-day life. My contacts list in Wave is cool and all, but they're not the people with whom I need to find a better way to collaborate. Google, if you could give me even two invitations to hand out, I could really put Wave through its paces.
Jumping from account to account. This is mildly petty, I'll admit--but I have multiple Google accounts. I'm sure I'm not the only one. One's for work (for Analytics usage) and one's for personal/extracurricular use. If I'm logged in with my work account, though, Wave redirects me to a page telling me that I can't use Wave because it's a closed beta or whatever. No option to log out and log back in--I need to go to the Google homepage or some other Google property, log out from there, and then head back to Wave. I was hoping that using Wave through a site-specific browser via Fluid would take care of this, but apparently they use the same cookie information.
No notifications. Sorry, but in this early adoption phase I'm going to go days--or weeks--without new activity on my Wave account, I'm not going to keep a window open at all times. (I don't even keep an e-mail client open more than a few minutes per hour these days.) Google, I know you're trying to replace e-mail here, but it ain't happened yet. I'd like to get some notification via e-mail, Twitter, SMS, or something. If I can add this kind of thing to a web app in a few minutes, by myself, it shouldn't be too tough for Google to add to Wave. Should it?
It's slow. OK, it's not slow for a web-based, Javascript-enabled application. Hell, maybe it's not that slow at all from a technical standpoint, but watching collaborators' responses in real time borderlines on painful. I want to complete peoples' sentences because I can type so much faster than they can (and I can't type that fast). Google, I know the real-time typing is a cool whiz-bang feature, but is it practical? I read something the other day that this feature was axed from the original iChat-over-Bonjour feature because it drove people nuts. Can we turn it off, or something?

I think some of these issues might be overcome by a native (non-web) client. Any word on that?

Recreating The White Album, Every Nine Days

2009-10-07T00:00:00-05:00

This is neat! Every Nine Days is a one-woman attempt to recreate the Beatles’ White Album entirely by herself, start to finish, a la Julie & Julia (which I haven’t seen). I’m jealous I didn’t have this idea, though I might have done Alien Lanes or Zen Arcade instead. But that’s just me. Also just me: My attempts would sound extremely horrible by any comparison.

(via Pop Candy)

Seth Godin on "the problem with non"

2009-09-16T00:00:00-05:00

Seth Godin’s blog isn’t always my favorite read, but yesterday’s post on the fear of change inherent within non-profit organizations is spot-on. As someone who’s helped start non-profits, donates time and/or money to a few non-profits, and gets at least his share of direct mail and phone calls asking for more money and more time, I can attest. (It could also be said that I’m employed by a non-profit, though the university is not a non-profit in the legal sense.) I guess I’m glad to know that people who think about this much more than I do and have accomplished far more noteworthy things than I have are also frustrated by this–I just wish the right people were listening. (See also: Service organizations are turning to online social networks for the sake of survival. It’s always made me a little sad that Lawrence’s Masonic lodge left their downtown temple a few years ago and have set up shop in a strip mall behind Arby’s.)

Awesome tweets from _why

2009-08-20T00:00:00-05:00

OK, I don’t want to canonize the dude too much, but these tweets from _why are too great to not share, especially the first two.

trying to reading dhh’s articles on himself, but his website is so drenched in axe body spray that it has more of a tear gas effect.

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

if you program and want any longevity to your work, make a game. all else recycles, but people rewrite architectures to keep games alive.

(via A Cup Full of Why: 32 Why The Lucky Stiff Links at Ruby Inside)

Bye bye, _why.

2009-08-19T00:00:00-05:00

If you code Ruby, you probably know who why the lucky stiff is, and by now you've probably heard that _why has abruptly disappeared from the web--his prolific art/programming projects have all been deleted, just like that. John Resig has posted a nice "eulogy" to _why. I just have a couple of thoughts.

The first two Ruby-related titles I read were Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and Agile Development with Rails (first edition). Say what you want about the former, but it was a refreshing change from pretty much every other software-related book ever. It encapsulated the whole "make programming fun again" ethos espoused by the Ruby community, and _why's focus on writing quality code made my near-clean break from PHP all but inevitable at that point. (For the most part, my PHP work now involves Moodle, WordPress, or one-page sites with just enough of a server-side requirement to make it worth my time. But that's neither here nor there.) In that regard--and I say this at the risk of public exaggeration--_why was a large part of what made Ruby what it is. On top of that, he wrote a ton of useful, educational frameworks and applications to help make the language and its community of developers more vibrant.

Anyway, my real point is this: There's speculation as to why _why did what he did, or if he was merely a hacking victim. Assuming it was of his own volition, which I think it was, then I tip my hat to him--no overtly public, profanity-laced name-callings; no "I'm taking my ball and going home"-style hissy fits. Class.

Replacing my Apple TV; some questions

2009-08-09T00:00:00-05:00

I think it’s almost time to replace my Apple TV–it’s great for streaming audio, and Boxee is a nice touch, but it just doesn’t have the horsepower for things like streaming live baseball or Netflix. I’ve long thought I’d replace it with a Mac mini–one of the most underrated Macs ever, in my opinion–but I’ve got a couple of issues to investigate:

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<ul>
<li><strike>Are there any Mac-compatible USB-to-optical audio converters? My receiver tends to work better with optical audio. <strike>I'd like <a href="http://www.cablestogo.com/product.asp?cat_id=3103&sku=22327#">something like this</a> but it doesn't appear to have Mac drivers.</strike> Anybody used the <a href="http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/Transit.html">M-Audio Transit</a> with a Mac?</strike> I just realized I'm overcomplicating this issue; the mini's already got digital audio built-in and I just need to convert it to Toslink.</li>
<li>I'm guessing DVI-to-HDMI has been sorted out, <strike>but I want to do a little homework there as well</strike> and I actually have one of that adapters; it came with my HD video kit I bought awhile back.</li>
<li>Are there any good wireless keyboard/trackpad-type combinations? Or maybe I should just go with VNC, huh?</li>
</ul>

I’m also not ruling out a Boxee/Ubuntu combo, as I figure I could get some refurbished hardware to support that setup for not a whole lot of money.

If anyone happens to read this and has any insights, I’d love to hear them.

Slides for my Friday presentation at SIDLIT: An intro to web application frameworks

2009-07-28T00:00:00-05:00

As I've mentioned repeatedly, I'll be presenting at this year's SIDLIT ed tech conference in the Kansas City area. My topic is an introduction to the merits of web application frameworks. Here are my slides--note that they cover only part of the talk; the remainder will be a live demonstration of building a basic web app using Ruby on Rails.

Quick Application Development with Web Frameworks

View more documents from Stratepedia .

If you've got experience with web frameworks there won't really be anything new for you here, but I welcome your feedback. If you want to know more, but can't make it to my talk, these slides alone probably won't suffice--but I recommend checking out any of the "build a blog in 15 minutes"-type videos that seem to be out there for just about any framework you might be interested in.

Hope to see you on Friday!

How I use Twitter at conferences (or, don't just read about it; do it)

2009-07-24T00:00:00-05:00

Kansas City's SIDLIT conference is next week, and conference organizers are promoting Twitter use this year with numerous links to guides on "how" to use it. I'm not going to forward these links any further; most of them are academic and show little to no evidence that the people who wrote them have actually used Twitter in conference environments.

Academics think too much, if you ask me. The best way to figure this out is to do it. Rather than write a multi-page outline, backed by cited references and academic jargon, I'm going to distill what you need to do in as few steps as possible:

Get a Twitter account, if you don't have one already. It's free and takes like two minutes to start; four minutes to add a photo and fill in a short bio.
Get a Twitter client with built-in search. I was using TweetDeck at SXSW this past spring--it's feature-rich and cross-platform (Adobe AIR required). I've since moved to the Mac-only client Tweetie because I like its simplicity. You can also use Twitter's web client to search, but I like having a standalone app.
Find out what your conference's hash tag is. You know those words you see in people's posts like #sxsw or #followfriday or #SIDLIT? Those are hash tags. Most conferences these days have one identified early on--they are key to making Twitter a usable, social tool for any event. If your conference doesn't have a hash tag identified, take charge and make one. There aren't any rules, other than it should start with a # and be as short as possible, to provide more room for your message.
Add the hash tag to your stored Twitter searches. In TweetDeck, create a new column for the search. In Tweetie you can do this by clicking the magnifying glass icon. Again, you can use Twitter's web interface if necessary. Do this before the conference starts to begin to get a feel for who else is using Twitter at the event.
Start tweeting. If your post is related to the conference, make sure the conference hash tag is included. In spite of what some of the academics say, there aren't any strict rules about this. At SXSW I used Twitter as a notepad, recording anything I wanted to remember at any given talk. Did that annoy people who were following me prior to the conference? Perhaps, but I don't care, and neither should you--use Twitter for yourself, not for everyone else. Chances are you're going to find more people who find what you're saying interesting than people you annoy. Now, all that said, if you feel more comfortable posting one salient takeaway from each session, or each day, go for it.
Keep up with what others are saying. This part takes some getting used to, especially if you're not used to multitasking, but once you get the hang of it you won't see how you got along at a conference without Twitter. This is one nice thing about TweetDeck's multi-column display; you can keep one eye on the event's hash tag search and one eye on everything else. With Tweetie I'll probably spend most of my time focused on the #SIDLIT search results and ignore the rest of my life, catching up on the latter during breaks. What might you see? Depending on who else is using Twitter, you might be able to get a glimpse at what's being discussed at other sessions, or grab a good point from someone sitting in the same room as you (hint: retweet it to add it to your own stream).
Decompress, then recapture. Within 24 hours, take a few minutes to review what you posted, and ideally recapture it in some way. For SXSW, I posted blog entries summarizing each session, using my Twitter activity as notes. As John Medina says in Brain Rules, "repeat to remember" and "remember to repeat." Even if you feel like this isn't necessary for memorization purposes, keep in mind that Twitter's built-in memory is fleeting. Your tweets' lifespan is relatively limited, so if you have any interest in posterity whatsoever, record a backup somewhere.

As for me, I plan on tweeting like heck during SIDLIT, at least when I'm not presenting. If you're interested, feel free to follow me at @ruralocity. See you Thursday!

See me at SIDLIT: Web application frameworks

2009-07-20T00:00:00-05:00

Don’t forget! I’m presenting at SIDLIT this year. Come see my presentation on the virtues of web application frameworks. There will be a very basic Ruby on Rails demonstration, though I’m not preaching one framework over any other–Rails is just the framework I use in my professional work.

The registration deadline was last Friday, but if you’re already registered and are deciding on your schedule it’d be great to see you. My time slot is Friday, 1:30. I’m hoping to have some slides online ahead of time, in case you’re on the fence.

I love one-page websites.

2009-07-10T00:00:00-05:00

Here's a site redesign I put together over the course of a couple of hours between yesterday and today: A new look for Stratepedia's hub site. I do this about once a year (here's last year's model). One page, with a focus on moving people on to the tools they actually want to use. It's also going to afford more room for growth than the last one did, in terms of having room to link to major new products and initiatives. Now it's just a matter of adding another <div> to the grid.

I took the opportunity as an excuse to mess with Blueprint in a productional sense, in part because the new KU template (which I admittedly seldom use) uses Blueprint, and because I was curious about how much time I might really save with it. I probably did save some time with the grid--especially in the uniform boxes near the center of the page--but it felt kind of dirty, like I was using tables for layouts.

For larger projects, I may give Compass another look--I do really like Sass, and Haml's growing on me, and I guess there's nothing saying I have to use a CSS framework to use any of them.

A couple more photos from my trip

2009-07-09T00:00:00-05:00

As I get back into the swing of things, I figured I’d take a break to share a few more photos with you. These are from Piers Gorge in Michigan. A trail winds its way uphill along the Menominee River, past a number of rapids.

Here’s a placid area along the way.

No, I’m not one of these rafters. We happened to be looking down at a section of rapids just as two rafts made their way toward them.

A couple of belated July 4th pictures

2009-07-08T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve been away for a week and have let my Delicious activity do my talking both here and on the work blog. I’ve got 700 photos to root through but here are a few teasers, from a Slice-of-America July 4th parade in Iron Mountain, Michigan.

I really like this one, if I may say so myself.

And I have nightmares about this one. I believe he was advertising an upcoming pig roast. A pig is going to be a chef at a pig roast, how screwed up is that?

The Bing ads are right. Search still isn't done. Or maybe it's just the Internet.

2009-07-02T00:00:00-05:00

I have to hand it to Microsoft–or, more appropriately, the folks behind the ads for their new search engine Bing. You know, the ads displaying the results of “search overload:”

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Isn’t it rich that Microsoft uses YouTube, a Google-owned channel, to market this service? But I digress. Google results have gotten to the point that some of my more esoteric search queries (say, an obtuse, copied-and-pasted error message from a Rails app in development) yield increasingly fewer useful pages and increasingly more pages that may share a couple of keywords with my request, but little if any relevant information. I get:

Links to message forum posts about problems that are sort of like mine, but in reality not at all like mine;
Links to message forum posts by quote-unquote Rails "experts" either chiding the original posters for something or other but not actually answering their questions; or
These same posts duplicated across a half-dozen different sites, given the rampant cross-polination and gatewaying of online Rails/development communities.

Sure, I’m talking about specific, less-than-mainstream searches, but I would bet that nine times out of ten if you’re looking for something more generic–say, an actor’s name–two out of your top three returns will be the Wikipedia entry and the IMDb entry. If I wanted to search Wikipedia and IMDb, why not just go straight to those sites? This is just nitpicking, though; I’m sure for most searchers these pages yield exactly what they’re looking for, because at least half the time they tell me what I need to know. It just smacks of laziness.

I kind of wonder if this isn’t a job for some real, live, human eyeballs. I read an article the other day about search–I forget where–that mocked the notion of Yahoo’s antiquated, human-indexed directory. I haven’t used it myself in years, and building such indices of the web at large probably isn’t the best way to spend content experts’ time. Maybe Mahalo is closer to what I’m talking about, but I don’t see it gaining any considerable traction unless it’s bought out by one of the new Big Three of search (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). Maybe communities such as the Rails developers of the world (I’m sure this isn’t an issue specific to this relatively small group) should identify and encourage individuals with the knowledge and grace and humility to identify unanswered questions and help find answers to them. Or maybe someone can figure out a way to make an honest living by doing that, and everybody wins.

Call me altruistic, or even naive, but back in simpler times before SEO (or even LOL or OMG) where everyday lingo, these were the kinds of things we tried to do on the web–help people out, build trust and trust others’ answers, advance the greater cause. We just didn’t have to scour as many outlets to find the questions, or shake our heads at the levels of smugness (or laziness, or downright rudeness) of our fellow Internet users, or palm our foreheads as often from reading as much flat-out misinformation.

Maybe my growing disdain for what the Internet’s becoming is starting to leak. Maybe I’m just getting older and crankier. Or maybe I’ve found something to keep me busy for a Ph.D. in library science/information management. Most likely it’s one of the former.

Using technology to cheat in the classroom: An historical perspective

2009-06-24T00:00:00-05:00

Last week I watched Doubt. I don’t necessarily recommend the movie, but I observed something related to the notion that students’ use of technology in the classroom must always amount to cheating. In the movie, Sister Aloysius (played by Meryl Streep) is touring the classroom of Sister Jones (Amy Adams), a young nun teaching in a Catholic school in 1964. Sister Aloysius notices that a student has dropped a ballpoint pen and berates Sister James for allowing students to use such devices, noting that they make kids lazy and destroy penmanship.

You might think a ballpoint pen isn’t “technology,” but I argue that, once upon a time, it was. A colleague of mine once noted that something’s only “technology” if it came about after you completed your formative years–so for Sister Aloysius, the Bic on the floor was just like a cell phone or iPod today’s teacher might spy a student sneaking into class. The challenge shouldn’t be keeping kids from using these tools–because they will always find new ways to skirt the system–it’s helping them leverage the practical ways these devices can be used for learning and exploration.

My whirlwind tour of Kansas: A slideshow

2009-06-19T00:00:00-05:00

Last weekend I took a tour of some of the landmarks of Kansas. If you're from here you've probably heard of most of these places, but if your impression of Kansas is that it's just farms, tornados and Toto, you're in for a surprise.

Here's the complete slideshow, with 70-some photos. Included are photos from Kanopolis (Mushroom Rock State Park); Lucas (Garden of Eden, Deeble House, Grassroots Arts Center); Hays; Oakley (Fick Museum, Monument Rocks) and Colby (Prairie Museum of Art and History).

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If the embedded slideshow isn't your thing, you can also check out the images on my Flickr account. They're all licensed pretty liberally with Creative Commons if you're interested in using them for anything; just no commercial uses please.

Springtime in southern Illinois

2009-06-09T00:00:00-05:00

I caught this little guy hanging out in my grandparents' back yard this past weekend. He lives in on of my grandma's many flower patches. Here are a few more photos from the small batch I took. I tend to kill off most things I try to plant, so I have no idea what kinds of flowers these are.

There are a few more on my Flickr account, if you enjoy looking at pictures of flowers.

Easily run Lynx on a Mac with Lynxlet

2009-06-09T00:00:00-05:00

Who needs Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5?Besides Wilt Chamberlain and Paul Rudd, my alma mater's greatest contribution to the world is probably Lynx, a text-only web browser from the days before Flash and AJAX. Believe it or not, I still use Lynx. It's useful for testing HTTP connections from remote servers, downloading software onto said remote servers, or just good old retro web browsing. I'm kind of proud that, with a few exceptions, most of my current online projects still look pretty good in Lynx.

I've always installed Lynx via MacPorts, but that requires some extra steps you probably don't want to take if you're just interested in using the browser. Now, there's a "termlet" called Lynxlet that takes care of the dirty work--namely, installing Lynx, opening your terminal and typing "lynx"--for you. Download, drop in your Applications folder (or even better, your Dock!) and relive 1993.

(via A Fresh Cup)

My current obsession: Ugly things on the grill

2009-06-03T00:00:00-05:00

Of late, I'm obsessed with cooking somewhat ugly, but incredibly delicious, things on the grill. Turns out grilling pizzas isn't as hard as some would have you believe--I'm not a pro at it yet, but you can put together some dang good dinners with some Pillsbury pizza dough, spaghetti sauce, and the toppings of your choice. Now if I could just get them to not stretch out in such odd shapes when I put them on the grill--

Design techniques explained: Chuck Jones and storyboarding

2009-06-02T00:00:00-05:00

Allow me to put on my (information/instructional) designer hat for a moment. Tonight I watched an excellent film called Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens, a Life in Animation, from PBS's Great Performances series. In case you don't recognize the name, Jones was the mind and pencil behind the Looney Tunes cartoons we all grew up watching--you know, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, and so on. He also directed the animated version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas!

The film came out in 2000, two years before his death, and it was interesting to hear him discuss these works and the work that went into them behind the scenes. In particular, I thought his explanation of using storyboards to create and capture story was excellent. Mr. Jones, as director, drew each key frame by hand, then turned things over to a series of animators and background artists to put their touches on the final product. The results, more often than not, were masterpieces of American popular culture, and everything started with those storyboards.

I bring this up because in all my design-related classes I've never seen a really good example of the storyboard's role in crafting a message, particularly in instructional design. In Extremes and In-Betweens you get to see real-world storyboards and real-world examples you already know, not made-up training modules or mock advertisements. It might also be a nice reinforcement for anyone developing presentation materials in the Presentation Zen style (see PZ's post on storyboarding from last January for more).

If you teach storyboarding in any sort of visual communication course, I recommend tracking down a copy of this film (I got it through Netflix) and sharing it with your students. If you're interested in becoming a better designer (whether "design" is in your job title or not) and want to see an example of top-notch storyboards, check it out. I can't think of a better example of this crucial tool for information and instructional design.

It's happening: Hash tag spam in Twitter

2009-05-08T00:00:00-05:00

Looking at my #bigomaha filter in Nambu, I see this posted about 20 times in the last few minutes:

It was just a matter of time, right? Or for all I know it has been going on for awhile and I don’t follow interesting enough hash tags.

RailsBridge: Making Rails inclusive and friendly

2009-05-05T00:00:00-05:00

Now this is awesome. In light of the negative publicity hit Rails recently took, a band of developers who would rather accentuate the positive things happening in the community--and show what kinds of positive things a community is capable of doing--have launched the RailsBridge effort. The RailsBridge community will educate, mentor, and inspire while keeping things friendly and inclusive.

Ever since I started using Rails I've believed it would be perfect for teaching newcomers to software development multiple facets of the game, from database modeling to scripting to user interface design (not to mention newer facets I need to work on myself like behavior-driven design). And as I've mentioned in the past, my Rails projects aren't going to win any awards for the traffic they generate, but they are testament to the fact that you can write quality applications quickly using the framework. With that in mind, I hope I can contribute by helping others who are in a similar boat, while also learning from those who've achieved greater things using Rails.

Want to get involved? Most of the activity appears to be happening on the RailsBridge Google Group right now. Pick a project or two and do what you can to help!

A big thank you to Mike Gundleroy for the idea, and to everyone else who helped get this off the ground so quickly.

One nobody's thoughts on the GoGaRuCo mess

2009-05-02T00:00:00-05:00

If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer and have been paying half attention over the last several days you’ve no doubt heard about the controversial presentation given recently at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference (GoGoRuCo). If you need to catch up, read Martin Fowler's take–it includes references to most other commentary so far. Issues of sexism aside, what bothers me about what I’ve learned about some of the individuals making statements on this matter is their apparent disregard for the potential of Rails in “professional” environments.

Just a little background: You’ll likely never meet me at a Ruby or Rails conference. (I was at FiveRuns’ Rails party at SXSW and talked to like three people–that’s about as social as I get.) I use Rails to develop relatively tiny apps for an incredibly niche market. You’ll probably never use any of them. And I’m pretty lucky: I work at an organization in which I get to call my own shots when it comes to the platforms I use to do my work. Nobody has to give me the OK to wholeheartedly adopt a non-mainstream application framework, and nobody second-guesses my methods as long as what I’m doing works. And, for me, Rails is like magic. Projects that used to take months now take days, and I’ve got time to dip into development work while also paying attention to all the other things I have on my plate on any given day.

However, I’ve been putting myself in the shoes of a developer working in such an environment who learns about Rails, finds it compelling as a platform, and suggests it to his (or her!) boss. Said boss, being savvy enough to Google this “Ruby on Rails” thing, comes across the inevitable–like “Rails doesn’t scale,” it uses some “obscure” language called Ruby, and, apparently, its advocates use porn to make their points. Boss says thanks, but no thanks–we’ll stick with our tried-and-true Java/.NET/PHP.

The way I see it, the stigma Rails faces is big enough. Now, the first two issues can be overcome with data–dig a little deeper and learn that Rails does scale, thank you very much, and learning Ruby isn’t bad at all–dare I say, it’s even a little fun. But I worry that this matter won’t be as easy for some to talk their way through. This negative perception of the little framework that could may be more than a project manager/CTO/”suit” who, like it or not, has to answer to someone else, cares to take a risk on, especially in our current economy and job climate.

The moral of the story is that happened at GoGaRuCo didn’t stay at GoGaRuCo. It’s kind of like the kid who loses out on a job because of those spring break photos mindlessly posted on a Facebook profile. The next time you’re considering your audience for a presentation, remember that audience extends beyond the four walls of a conference room, and the things you say can affect people in ways you never imagined. And think about this: The opposite of professional is amateur, and I would imagine that many of those who find nothing wrong with this style of presentation, who suggest that those who do take issue need to grow a thicker skin or stop sucking up to the boss, wouldn’t be too happy to be labeled as amateurs at what they do.

In other words: Grow up, please, for the sake of Rails.

A few of the sights in North Lawrence

2009-04-29T00:00:00-05:00

After getting home from work today, I hopped on my bike and rode over to the levee to take a few photos of water from our recent heavy rains take it to Bowersock Dam. Here are a few of the pictures I got on my jaunt.

There's a couple more at my Flickr account.

13 gets me 10 (years of service at KU)

2009-04-22T00:00:00-05:00

Today I got a form letter from Chancellor Bob telling me that my five-year service award will be given to me next month. It’s actually taken 13 years due to my six-month stint at KU Med and two-and-a-half years at the University of Washington.

The big takeaway is I’ve been working at this racket for a long time now. (Like, I remember when you could finally include inline images in web pages and how that was going to be a game changer.) Also, I’m trying to figure out why I never got a five-year award. Would that have come up while I was working for KU from Seattle? And do you think someone still has it sitting in a drawer somewhere?

Ruby on Rails: What a difference three years make.

2009-04-20T00:00:00-05:00

I've been working on a major update of a project I originally completed in 2006--same basic interface, same basic functionality; new version of Rails. Specifically, I'm going from version 1.2.6 to 2.2.2.

So what's happened since then that's so useful? Two immediate things come to mind:

REST: It's amazing how many things just happen like magic when you're developing Rails apps and you've accepted a REST-based architecture into your workflow, especially when using gems I've mentioned in the past like restful_acl and nifty_generators. Before Rails, work I did in PHP that took a day now took a couple of hours in 2006. Now it takes about 30 minutes. If you still haven't quite figured out why REST is a big deal, spend a little time viewing a Railscast or two or reviewing this (slightly dated) PDF tutorial, which is what really hammered the whole thing home for me. Seriously, if you're using Rails (or any framework) and you're not RESTful, you're doing it wrong.
named_scope: Perhaps the greatest thing to come to ActiveRecord since, well, ever. named_scope was introduced in Rails 2.1 and covered nicely in Railscast no. 108. What makes named_scope extra-awesome is how you can string them together to create rather complex SQL queries without resorting to any sort of custom code. named_scope has saved me with plugins/gems that don't have key features I need (like being able to scope a user's timeline events with timeline_fu) a few times, not to mention making it easier to DRY up quite a bit of ActiveRecord/database-related custom code.

And keep in mind: I'm still developing productional apps for Rails 2.2.2; I've barely even scratched what 2.3 does (or what Rails 3 will do).

Stay interested--and interesting

2009-04-14T00:00:00-05:00

Here’s a short set of bullet-y slides I just presented to a group of researchers at KU about how thinking like entrepreneurs can help us accomplish the work we set out to do. It earned mixed reviews, but I like to share anyway.

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2009 Wheat State mini-tour

2009-04-13T00:00:00-05:00

Today I hopped a bus with a bunch of KU unclassified staff for this year's Wheat State mini-tour. Focusing on sustainability efforts in our great state, we visited the Smoky Hills Wind Farm (pictured) and the Land Institute (interesting, but not pictured).

For lunch we grabbed food from Salina's historic Cozy Inn--White Castle-like sliders at a tiny restaurant with indoor seating for four.

A few outtakes may be found on my Flickr site.

Lawrence on Rails is rolling

2009-04-07T00:00:00-05:00

Lawrence on Rails is a go, thanks to Eric Gruber. Want to meet up with us? Check out the site for upcoming meetings (the next one will be April 14, 6:30, location TBD) or participate in our Google Group.

How I learn (hint: by doing)

2009-04-06T00:00:00-05:00

Last Thursday, the first ever meeting of the Lawrence Ruby on Rails group (or whatever it’ll be called) was held at Zen Zero. It was fun to hear about what other folks are doing with Rails, and it made me decide to share one of my projects with a larger audience. In my head, this project’s called Dash but I know it can never technically be called that since FiveRuns already has a project called that, though the two don’t overlap in function.

Basically, my Dash is yet-another-project-management-application (see also: Basecamp, My Kahuna, etc.) for the workgroup I manage at KU. I didn’t need anything fancy–just a way to create projects and tasks, assign them to people to get done, and watch them get done. After a couple of weeks, Dash is working like a champ (in my opinion, anyway). I can easily see what’s on the table and what gets done without having to look over two other people’s shoulders. Dash serves another purpose, though–it’s a live testing ground for new things I want (or need) to learn in web application development. I’ve found it’s much more fulfilling to create something and then use it rather than have a folder on my local drive full of tutorials from books, websites, and podcasts (not to devalue them by any means–I’m just telling you what works for me).

Here are a few screen shots of Dash, running in a SSB (I use Fluid). First up is the dashboard: It provides everything I have to do in the next two weeks, links to my current projects, and an activity stream (more on that in a minute).

The navigation bar at the top is a floating div and features dropdown CSS menus (a first for me; I’m generally not a fan). Red tasks mean they’re due today (or are late). Aside from getting me to try some different things with CSS, nothing new here.

Here’s a little form for quickly adding new tasks; it appears and disappears via Prototype Javascript fun. On the back end, I’m using the Chronic gem so you can type in a friendly date format (“4/7/09,” “Tuesday,” “tomorrow,” etc.) instead of being stuck with the rather inconvenient default Rails date selector.

Here’s the aforementioned activity feed. This one is heavy on my activity in the interest of not incriminating my coworkers, though most of you know who they are. I’d cobbled together something similar by hand last fall for my master’s project, and then in February stumbled across a plugin/gem called timeline_fu. After streams of micro-content (Twitter, FriendFeed, the new-look Facebook, etc.) being all the rage at SXSW last month, I wanted to give it another try. So now Dash is “social.” Most actions render a timeline event, which is posted on relevant pages in the application, as well as a relevant Atom feed. I figured out a few ways to really trick out timeline_fu to do what I wanted; I’m going to try to write up a brief tutorial later this week to share what I learned.

So that’s it, pretty much, so far. It’s got some other stuff that’s pretty old hat, like polymorphic comments for projects and tasks and a complete login system. I’ve got more work to do, though, like continuing to hone the user interface (with the goal of using it as a new standardized UI for my work applications), cleaning up some of my code by implementing a state machine, incorporating the authlogic authentication system, making a mobile version (because hey, why not?), and so on.

It’s my project and I’ll do what I want to, right?

If you have the means, I recommend thinking of a need of yours and start writing an application with you as the client. (And if it’s just for you, you can maybe even run it from localhost, so no server required.) Who knows, it might turn into something bigger, but in the meantime you’ve got a great sandbox to try things out, use them, and then see what sticks. Just be sure to share what you learn!

Audio recordings from SXSW Interactive panels now available via podcast

2009-03-26T00:00:00-05:00

Couldn’t make it to this year’s SXSW Interactive? Good news: Audio recordings of panels are cropping up at the SXSW Interactive 2009 podcasts site. It’s nice for me because I’m getting to hear panels I couldn’t attend, and getting a refresher on the ones I did. RSS is available, but I can’t get it to work in iTunes–works great in NetNewsWire, though.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Takeaways: "Free"

2009-03-20T00:00:00-05:00

I closed out my first SXSW Interactive with two sessions featuring Chris Anderson of Wired and The Long Tail fame. In this year’s final festival, Anderson was interviewed by Guy Kawasaki with questions about his forthcoming book on the concept of free being the way to come out ahead in today’s economy.

The duo vowed from the get-go to outdo last year’s infamous Sarah Lacy interview of Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook). There were more than a couple of cheap shots taken at last year’s debacle–all deserved, in my opinion. I didn’t take many notes from this session, or from the followup panel on using “free” to rebuild the world, but here are a few takeaways for the two:

The freemium model, in which there's a free version that's perfectly useful but a for-pay version that allows power users to do more, is good--but you need to know where to draw the line between different versions, lest you cripple your product and test your customers' loyalty. The economy has driven demand toward free, but now you have to have a business model to support it.
Paper still matters, and some paper versions still add value to Internet content. That's why people still buy magazines--long-form stories and high resolution imagery still works better on paper.
Free is the best way to maximize reach, by lowering barriers to zero. Don't put up barriers that keep people from recommending you.
Anderson suggests that it's easier to achieve popularity than it is to monetize it. The way you convert popularity to money depends on your particular situation and goals.
Publishers (and record labels) and authors (and musicians) have misaligned goals. Publishers (record labels) need to get over selling books (albums) and focus on selling "360," or the whole experience.
Worry about establishing a fan base, then figure out how to make money based on that.
The meaning of "free" has changed over the years. The 20th century "free" model was along the lines of the razor and the blade--give away the razor; charge for the blades. Now, "free" means really free because costs are so low. Now, if you can convert 5 percent of your users to paying users, you've covered your costs. Anything beyond that is profit. Differentiate your user classes like Microsoft BizSpark and 37signals do to reach (and surpass) that 5 percent.
"The Chinese are going to teach us capitalism." China is the future of free. If your product isn't free, piracy will do it for you. Use this as marketing.
When using free to sell things, use its good connotations (freedom, "free as in beer"). It draws attention either way.
The moment you put a cost on something, an "is it worth it?" flag gets applied. This is why micropayments never took off. Free never raises this flag.
Nobody thinks less of Google because it's free. "Too cheap to meter, too cheap to matter."
Anderson surmised that New York City is feeling the pressure of the current economic climate more than, say, San Francisco because institutions are being hit more than individuals. Individuals have more power now.
"We think in terms of utility, not price." Free wants to be the natural price.
"Some information wants to be free; other information wants to be very expensive." High quality content is not always cheap--smart humans cost money.
Companies that use the freemium model have low startup costs. No bailouts are needed in a free economy.
As media, being free makes it easier for you to be in the conversation. Create the medium first, then figure out who it's for, then figure out how to monetize it. Build your community first. Build trust and a natural constituency.
Not everything needs to be a profit center--some things can be loss centers designed to support revenue.

It should be noted that Guy Kawasaki, ever the entrepreneur, began charging audience members twenty dollars a pop for questions. Proceeds went to a non-profit aimed at ending hunger. At the end of the day, I think that’s the best lesson any would-be successful entrepreneur should have taken from this session (and SXSW Interactive as a whole): You need to be able to recognize an opportunity when you see it.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Five Takeaways: Building Strong Online Communities

2009-03-20T00:00:00-05:00

I’ve been going non-stop back in Lawrence since returning from Austin late Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning. I’ve still got some South by Southwest-related reflections to share. I’ll start with one of the better ones I attended, Building Strong Online Communities. The panel, made up of Ken Fisher of Ars Technica, Alexis Ohanian of Reddit, Drew Curtis of FARK, and Erin Kotecki West of BlogHer shared several lessons learned on how to manage online communities (and when to let them do their own thing). There was some overlap from an earlier session on community management, but here are some takeaways:

Community-oriented functions like comments can be effective crowd sourcing tools. Comments on Ars Technica features started out via a desire to reduce the amount of e-mail received by the site founders, hoping community members could begin answering others' questions.
Watch for the "tyranny of well-organized minorities:" Balance complaints by considering the number of complaints to overall community activity. Don't forget the silent majority, though--you can reach out to them, but ultimately, trust your gut. After all, it's your site.
E-mail doesn't scale well as a feedback mechanism. Twitter may prove to scale better.
Give users the tools to take the community where they want. Use transparent feedback mechanism. Give people a place to criticize outside of general discussion areas. Use transparent feedback mechanisms.
I liked this (paraphrased) version of FARK's terms of service: "It's my house, and I want you to have a good time at my party, but if you start tearing things up, get out."
When making changes that affect your community, ask, don't tell. Give people a heads-up and involve them in decisions--but don't listen to them too much. You may need to tell people to "get over it," or at least suggest they'll get used to it. (The frequent backlashes every time Facebook unveils a change come to mind.) If people are still up-in-arms about a change after two weeks, then do something about it.
The panel had mixed feelings about using surveys to gauge community reactions, but either way you look at it, be transparent and share the results of your survey with the community--even if those results show that you were wrong.
Start small. Start with focused communities; don't create "ghost towns" by over-planning up front.
Learn to take criticism; don't get sucked into flame wars. Community managers need to remain as neutral as possible and handle arguments with grace and calm. Multitasking is required.
Own the conversation by having it on your own site, but watch for conversations happening elsewhere (Twitter, etc.).

Coda: Barbecue I ate in Austin, Texas

2009-03-20T00:00:00-05:00

To close out my notes from my trip to Austin for South by Southwest Interactive 2009, I'd like to touch on my other objective for the week: To sample as much barbecue as possible. I made it to three local smokehouses (or two smokehouses, and one auxiliary location):

First up: My first meal upon arriving in Austin was at the Iron Works, conveniently located downtown, next to the convention center. Good beef ribs. Great sausage. Good sides. Good sauce, Good ambiance. This place had a line out the door every day during the actual conference.

A few nights later: Rudy's, located in a convenience story-type building somewhere at the south end of town. Best. Brisket. Ever. And super-friendly service, quick with the samples--I've never really had creamed corn until the other night. Good sauce, too, and an ice-cold Lone Star washed everything down real nice. In sum: Awesome. This was my best Texas barbecue experience.

Heading out, I stopped at the Salt Lick location at the Austin airport. Yeah, it was at the airport--and I had it on authority from locals that you can't tell the difference between this one and the original, several miles out of town. The brisket and sausage platter I ordered was nothing to write home about. I'm hoping the airport version is just a poor representation.

At the end of the day, though, I'll take Bryant's in Kansas City (or Biemer's or Vermont Street in Lawrence) any day.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Four Takeways: Entrepreneurship

2009-03-17T00:00:00-05:00

With one exception, the sessions I attended on day four all had to do with starting up and, generally, lessons learned from entrepreneurs.

I started off by attending one of the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator sessions–essentially an American Idol for startups pitching their ideas to a panel of experts, including tech journalist Brad King and serial entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki. Two minute pitch, then about ten minutes of defending. The panel didn’t hold any punches. I won’t get into details on the four pitches I saw, but I will say those four presenters had guts. I guess you need that when pitching ideas to investors.

Later in the day I attended two sessions: Quitters: How to Leave Your Perfectly Good Day Job and Building a Web Business After Hours. There was quite a bit of overlap in these two sessions. Here are some collective takeaways:

When quitting, make sure you go through the formal channels and resign properly. Nixon did it; so can you. Basically, don’t burn your bridges. Keep a positive relationship with your former company, and leave everybody happy despite the circumstances. Get copies of any agreements you signed along the way, and grab your stuff in advance (contacts, stuff from your cubicle, whatever). You may get escorted to the door the moment you turn in that resignation letter, so be prepared.

Finish strong: Don’t leave mid-project, or on a generally down note.

Don’t use your day job equipment, e-mail, or time when working on a side project or preparing to strike out on your own–in almost all circumstances, that gives ownership of your work to your employer.

Go on offense.

Have a plan in place–savings, backup plans, etc. Maximize your fluidity in decision-making by reducing your burdens. If you don’t need your car, sell it. If you can downsize your home, do it.

People tend to spend too much time thinking about vision, and not enough about what it takes to get to that vision, when preparing business plans and mission statements. There’s a price to inaction–too much talking, not enough doing. Don't write a document; write your code. An advisory board can help you focus on goals. Listen to your user community, and write a business model around what they say.

Creating an entity for your work isn’t completely necessary, but positively affects the way in which people interact with you. It can also protect you in legal and tax situations. Patent issues for web-based projects aren’t the same as physical products. If a patent dispute comes down to who had the idea versus who put in the sweat, the sweat equity wins. Check out Nolo for a series of useful legal books for startups and small businesses.

You, your friends, and your family need to know that this will be hard work, and will take great time and energy. Make sure to separate work time from personal time. Treat yourself as a client and take time for yourself–you’re not earning money, but you are paying yourself back. Don’t forget, if you’re starting out while keeping a day job–your side project will be a full-time job, too.

Find a partner. Look for people with complementary skills to yours. This also gives you someone with whom to commiserate, and helps carve up lengthy task lists. Partners should have similar goals from the project in terms of career and income.

Be careful about accepting money from investors. The second you accept money, your side project becomes full-time. Your investors will expect you to put in more effort than you may have to get a return on their investment. If you can bootstrap, do it, and stretch it as long as possible. This can relieve pressure to reach a critical point too soon. (Personally, I think some of the presentations I saw in Accelerator could have used this advice.) There are certain types of business that lend themselves to bootstrapping more than others–web-based projects are perfect. Tap into your network to get as much help as possible, and do as much as you can yourself. Get your hands dirty! You may need to develop your network and skills before starting your project. Use existing tools as much as possible to reduce overhead work.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Three Takeaways: New Thinking for Old Publishing

2009-03-16T00:00:00-05:00

The moral of New Thinking for Old Publishing is this: If you host a panel to get feedback from your audience, and not really impart any new wisdom to them, make that damn clear in your description and introduction. And maybe don’t just include a popular author like Clay Shirky for no apparent reason (other than to maybe draw a crowd).

To be fair, the audience did provide quite a bit of feedback in the 30 minutes they were given to do so. And, for the most part, they handled quite a bit of negativity pretty well. But I think most of the audience was there to see Clay.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Three Takeaways: Lessons in Community Management

2009-03-16T00:00:00-05:00

Can you believe that Flickr users upload 3,000-5,000 new photos per minute, and YouTube users upload 13 hours of new video in that same time? How do you manage that amount of content? That was the focus of Lessons in Community Management, paneled by representatives of Flickr, YouTube, MetaFilter, Current.tv, and Etsy. This was a frank, open discussion about what’s worked for them, and what hasn’t worked.

Lots of takeaways:

As you move from early adopters to the mainstream, you'll need to adapt your rules of engagement and create new flag mechanisms along the way.
It's harder to perceive trends in your community as it grows. You'll need to get smarter about sampling and data.
It's important to communicate with the community at large, without losing the one-on-one dialogue. Above all, maintain transparency. This is especially important when dealing with censorship-related issues. Answer honestly, even if it's not a popular answer. Explain your answers and don't resort to "because I'm the mom"-type answers.
The challenge is to "grow big but stay small"--people become less forgiving as you grow.
When defining your community guidelines, make them as human-readable as possible. Avoid the legalese.
Online communities don't replace your real-life communities!
Critics makes us honest. We must learn which ones to filter and which ones merit listening. Remind yourself of the amazing things happening on your site instead of focusing on negative comments. Learn when not to respond (a la the advice during "Making Things Happen" on Day Two).
Don't forget internal communications with your team--make sure everyone knows what's going on.
Be flexible with your community! There is no way to anticipate what your users will do over time. Be willing to adapt, and empower your community to do good things with your tools. You get what you give.

SXSW 2009 Interactive Day Three Takeaways: Nate Silver Keynote Interview

2009-03-16T00:00:00-05:00

I’m not a big statistics or measurement nerd, but like many others I became nigh obsessed with fivethirtyeight.com during last year’s presidential campaign. It was a real tread to get to hear Nate Silver talk about the impetus behind the site and, in general, his view of things. It’s funny how the Internet can make a celebrity out of people who are actually intelligent these days.

Just a few quick takeaways:

fivethirtyeight.com was born out of frustration--news channels have a tendency to put their own spin on data, to focus on data that may be poorly conducted, poorly interpreted, or outright skewed. Nate saw a need to distill these data and present them in a plain English style. Takeaway: If you don't like something, or don't like that something doesn't exist, do something about it.
"A poorly-executed objective study is worse than a well-executed subjective one."

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Two Takeaways: Designing the Future of the NY Times

2009-03-15T00:00:00-05:00

This one was a dud, I’m sad to say. During Designing the Future of the New York Times, Tom Bodkin and Khoi Vinh showed off their respective work in print and online (again, respectively) and then debated which one was better. The only real takeaways are that:

Content should be platform-agnostic: Print, web, e-readers, mobile phones, etc.
"The need for quality journalism has never been higher." (As opposed to citizen journalism.)
They use micro-sites for in-depth stories. This made me think of things we could do with our project-specific sites, to tell meaningful stories to funders as opposed to regurgitating content to them, but with a different theme/template/skin.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Two Takeaways: Curating the Crowd-sourced World

2009-03-15T00:00:00-05:00

My notes on Curating the Crowd-sourced World aren’t as in-depth as others I’ve taken. The panelists, by and large, came from the arts, so I’m trying to apply what they discussed to my world (focusing more on education). Here are my takeaways, this time in bullet form for convenience:

Crowd-sourcing helps reduce the divide set up by the "old guard"-slash-elites.
Use the crowd to get out of the bubble and influence your ideas. find others who will profit by helping you pursue your interests. Engage with that community to find out what they want.
Gina Trapani of Lifehacker fame noted that passionate audience can yield an "echo chamber" in which everyone is just agreeing--if you ask the crowd "what's good" you can end up with mediocre results.
The role of the curator (expert) is to inspire the crowd, not necessarily dictate it. A good curator doesn't let the crowd push him around, though--as in an open source software project, any project is only as good as its leader/curator/expert.
Understand social media by participating in it. Best takeaway from this session, though it's not exclusive to crowd-sourcing.
Tools are not as important to crowd-sourcing, as is location--know where to watch to find out what your audience is interested in. Sometimes your questions get answered without you specifically asking. (It seems to me that you'll get more genuine answers this way, too, when people don't know they're on the spot.) You may need to teach the crowd how to give a meaningful response, a la the "teach a man to fish" parable.
One audience member suggested a weighting system that balances the crowd's responses to those of experts. If crowd-sourcing is to be used in our world (SIM) this will probably need to happen.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Two Takeaways: Making Ideas Happen

2009-03-15T00:00:00-05:00

I’m a little bit behind on my synthesis of tweets from SXSW Interactive 2009. Here is the first of a series from my Saturday sessions–I’ll type up the others as I find pockets of time throughout the day.

My first session, Tips for Making Ideas Happen, was perhaps the best session I’ve attended so far. Scott Belsky of Behance shared results from his interviews of not just noted creative-types, but creative-types who are also insanely productive in what they do. Simply put, organization is just as important as creativity for ideas to come to fruition. Lack of accountability, leadership, quality networks, and feedback also keep ideas from happening.

Based on their research, Behance has developed a Getting Things Done-like approach to productive creativity called the Action Method. The basic formula it attempts to fill is making ideas happen = creativity + organization + community + leadership. A few tips:

Use the creative juices sparingly. Have a "Debbie Downer" on-hand to help kill lesser ideas. Learn to compromise. Later in the talk he suggested a "week of cynicism," after which an idea is discussed and evaluated. On extreme issues, identify experts and trust their opinions rather than settling on a compromise.
Distinguish "urgent" tasks from "important" tasks and understand whose job it is to do what. Learn how to delegate.
Employ "windows of non-stimulation," which I took to mean periods during which ideas are less-likely to spring to mind.
"Organize with bias into action"--this is the crux of the Action Method, which focuses on action steps, backburner items, and reference items (again, very GTD).

To quantify it again, another formula: creativity X organization = impact. In other words, 5 X 0 = 0, 100 X 0 = 0, but 3 X 2 = 6 … . The old adage about 1% inspiration and 99% inspiration applies.

Note: I omitted the remainder of my tweets on this topic--here are the rest of my notes. Sorry, I'm coming close to information overload now. Apparently, I took a lot of notes at this session!

Belsky is, like me, against the notion of holding meetings for the sake of holding meetings. He proposes measuring meetings in action steps, and asking “could this have been done another way?” such as e-mail or another communication mechanism. If there's nothing to meet about, don't meet.

Publicize productivity and relish progress. Belsky’s visual here was a wall covered with giant post-its of notes, action items, and so on that had been generated during the group. From my own experience, this seems like the point at which a group has the most energy–we’ve jotted down our ideas, decided who’s going to do what, and then go on our separate ways. I’ve been thinking about this in terms of general project management–if everyone can see everyone else’s progress, and we celebrate those reached milestones, things might keep happening more fluidly than they do in our current models.

Belsky had several tips for creating and capturing action steps, including holding each other accountable for the capture process (see previous paragraph). An “energy line” can help visually balance high-energy and low-energy tasks so we don’t overload ourselves. An “action area” is a useful space for tasks that can be completed by anybody with a spare minute or for whom it’s convenient.

One thing I wanted to focus on is Belsky’s mention of roles in making ideas happen. There are dreamers, there are doers, and then there are “incrementalists”–people who are a little bit dreamer, a little bit doer. Generally speaking, it’s good to match dreamers to doers, but it’s also good to match the incrementalists up with someone who can keep their work in-check. I found this idea of incrementalism interesting–what type of role do you see yourself fitting?

To make ideas happen, seek cross-pollination–don’t just seek feedback from your closed circle. Look for advice and commentary from people outside your comfort zone. Along these lines, stop focusing on input from the visionaries–get perspectives from others, too.

Share your ideas liberally, even if they’re half-baked. Don’t worry about idea theft–any idea that’s easy to steal probably isn’t that great of an idea, anyway (this one is hard for me). Don’t become burdened by consensus–this yields the lowest common denominator. Get respect for yourself and get over the stigma of self-marketing (another one that’s hard for me). Leaders should engage emergents by “talking last”–or not talking at all.

Reduce your “insecurity work:” Analytics, measurements, etc. Value your team’s “immune system” by knowing when to kill off deadly projects (great advice). Seek restraints to help define your work. Timelines, budgets, etc. are positive forces. Seek them if they’re not given to you.

When building a team: Judge on initiative over experience, and bring in people more likely to show initiative in the future. Value chemistry over people: Hiring a group of all-stars doesn’t guarantee success (some of the USA Olympic basketball teams, or the New York Yankees, come to mind here). Build teams that sync well.

Gain confidence when you are shunned! Nothing extraordinary is achieved through ordinary means. Finally, find competitors and use them as a catalyst for your own ideas and work.

And now I’m done with my notes on Making Ideas Happen. Again, excellent session.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Two Takeaways: Feed Me: Bite-size Info for a Hungry Internet

2009-03-15T00:00:00-05:00

An interesting panel of rivals: Feed Me: Bite-size Info for a Hungry Internet featured employees of Microsoft, FriendFeed (and the creator of Gmail), Yammer, and Microsoft. The crux: Social networks have evolved from centering around profiles and are now about activity feeds--the status messages, photo uploads, and so on--that tell the story about those profiles. Just a few takeaways to share on this one:

It was interesting to hear Microsoft's take on the issue, considering they're coming into social media late in the game. Further, they're introducing activity feeds to people who otherwise likely have no exposure to social media; namely, Hotmail and MSN Messenger users. Later in the talk, though, the panelist (Dare Obsanjo) reminded me why Microsoft is playing catchup in the first place: When asked by an audience member why these services don't just make it easier to use established standards like RSS to follow friends' online activities, Obsanjo vehemently came back with, essentially, the market has spoken. RSS may work for you, but you aren't the market. Is Microsoft targeting an increasingly smaller audience in its tools?
"RSS as a concept is sound, but the interface has failed." That was my understanding of one thing the panel suggested. So, rather than fix the interface, we just build something entirely different? Hmmm.
Facebook is to 2009 what Microsoft was to 1999. The other panelists'--and audience's--general distaste for what Facebook has become was palatable. Sour grapes? Perhaps, but Facebook's representatives had better begin girding themselves for even more retaliation than they've seen so far.
Twitter was notably absent, but a hot topic. They do two things right, according to one panelist: First, they make it clear from whom you're receiving content when you choose to follow someone. It's opt-in. Second, it's not a mutual agreement--you can follow me, but I don't have to follow you in return. Much discussion about privacy and Facebook's mutual handshake approach came from this, with no real solution I could tell.
Finally, I think they're right about the general importance of feeds. The Stratepedia apps need to allow people to follow activities and not just settle on browsing/searching content.

SXSW Interactive 2009 Day Three Takeaways: Edupunk: Open Source Education

2009-03-15T00:00:00-05:00

“Edupunk is about how teaching and learning technologies can transform education.” It was pretty much all downhill from there for Edupunk: Open Source Education. The long and short of it: Existing, corporately-created learning management systems make it too easy to shovel content online and institutionalize education. These systems make education transactional, not relational–the current model is “oppressive.”

From there, this panel devolved into an academic debate over whether universities are still relevant, whether or not it’s OK to use Twitter, Google, etc. in education, and what we mean by the “public good” and schools’ role in working toward it.

I don’t want to exert any more energy recapping this panel. What I would like to share is the back channel commentary that erupted. The panel, being the “punks” they claim to be, developed their own chat mechanism through which to share messages with the audience. (Aside: This mechanism had a horrible user interface in that the URL was too long and included too much non-English. Who still enters .cgi in URLs they hand out? That’s worse than included index.html in your address, almost.) It got what, maybe 10 messages? Twitter, meanwhile, with its #sxswed hashtag, was lighting up with criticism of the panel, its lack of real-world credibility, and overall academic, ivory tower snobbery. The money shot was when someone used the “punk” chat mechanism to share with everyone that the Twitter-based chatter was for more voluminous and engaging. Presenters, be ready: The back channel is talking about you whether you like it or not.

In closing, here’s my general rule of thumb: If you have to use your clothes, or the music you listen to, or the actual work “punk” to help others identify you as “punk” (edupunk, Rob Curley, cough cough), you ain’t punk.

SXSW Interactive 2009: Day One Takeaways

2009-03-14T00:00:00-05:00

For me, anyway, Day One of SXSW Interactive 2009 is in the books. This was kind of a light day since most of the attendees were still checking in, but I’m already wiped out. I’ve been posting very frequently throughout the day on Twitter, but here’s a distilled version of what I’m taking away from the Friday sessions.

I kicked off the afternoon with a session on “selling social media to The Man.” Many decision-makers at my workplace are only beginning to grasp the power and importance of social media, and I was hoping to glean a few nuggets of wisdom to help me make my case. I got a few ideas to take back to Lawrence–such as befriending the curmudgeons, listen to the problems they are looking to address, and offer solutions to those problems (hopefully, I can presume, involving social media). By and large, though, it was evident that profit is the bottom line. Show how your company can profit from social media and you’ll convince The Man. As someone who doesn’t work for The Man, I left this session feeling like the only way to do the work I want to do is to become corporate.

At the end of the day I attended “Consider Making Yourself More Interesting,” a panel discussion between five entrepreneurs who have found ways to make money doing things they enjoy. The gist: What would happen if your brand or product went away? If the answer is “nothing”–that is, nobody would notice or care–you’ve got problems. The big way to work past this is to Do Epic Shit: Think about sustainability and long-term goals. Some other advice from this session: Cherish the work done by others and learn from it; give your side projects plenty of “front and center time” (a practice I’ve been advocating at CRL for a few years); share what you learn and create and generate more value than you consume; and, ultimately, do what you enjoy. Share it, and you’ll find like minds with whom to collaborate. (This echoes the comments of Sir Ken Robinson in Omaha a few weeks ago.) Be brave. Measure metrics that matter to you–this was a welcome departure from the earlier session, in which dollars were ultimately the only measure of success. “Quantify love” was the advice of a few panelists who, while perhaps not zillionaires, have found a way to make a good living (and gain a little fame, if that matters to you) by doing things they find interesting and sharing those things with the world.

I’m hoping for more sessions like the second than the first from here on out–I’ve become jaded and disillusioned enough and could use more breaths of fresh air like this one.

Anyway, the most interesting thing I observed this afternoon was the pervasiveness of Twitter. Almost everyone had Twitter clients open before, during, and between sessions. It was the live blogging platform of choice, with hundreds (if not thousands) of posts marked with #sxswi throughout the afternoon. What’s more, Twitter was used by panel moderators to solicit questions from the audience, via a pre-defined hash tag. (Hint: Tweetdeck makes this much easier to track.) I’ve probably been newly followed by 20 people from my tweets today. Anyone who tells you Twitter isn’t a viable communication tool hasn’t been paying attention.

SXSW Interactive: Day One

2009-03-13T00:00:00-05:00

Reporting in from Austin, Texas, and South by Southwest Interactive 2009. Sessions start in a little over an hour and I’ll do what I can to write here about what I see, but you can get more real-time information from me on Twitter.

I’ve been in Austin since yesterday afternoon. In that time I’ve walked at least five miles around downtown, having toured the state capitol building, 6th Street, Red River Street, and parts in between. For whatever reason I always picture Austin being smaller than it really is. Also, I’ve yet to run into any of the gang from Austin Stories.

So far, I’ve been marveling at what it takes to pull off an event of this magnitude. There’s something like 3,000 participants at Interactive, and it’s the smallest of the three annual SXSW events. They’ve got pretty good processes in place to get people signed in, loaded with goody bags (I’ll break down the schwag later), and on their way to sessions. I got here early-ish today and was all taken care of within 15 minutes (though now it looks like lines span up and down floors).

Going up an escalator, I was able to see down into a little walled-off area with at least 20 desks and computers set up with printers, a fax machine, etc. An entire portable office for the folks who make this happen. Pretty amazing. I’ve been keeping up with the sessions I’d like to see on my iPhone via the SXSW mobile interface. There are so many cool things you can to with a conference, technologically, with the right database.

I twittered, half-jokingly, that CRL needs to start a merchandise table at our conferences in the future. You can choose from no fewer than 10 t-shirt designs, courier bags, posters, and other souvenirs from SXSW. I wonder how much of a conference’s costs we could recoup that way?

5 Rails-related blogs (and one podcast) to follow

2009-03-09T00:00:00-05:00

As a part of my ongoing series about how I work with Ruby on Rails, I'd like to share with you my top Rails-related feeds. Unfortunately, Ruby on Rails blogs tend to not always last long. Here are five I find useful--as well as a podcast anyone serious about getting into RoR development shouldn't miss.

Riding Rails: The official Rails blog--important for keeping track of general Rails-related news like upcoming releases, conferences, etc.
Rails Envy: An excellent source for news about emerging Rails and Ruby projects such as frameworks, engines, and plugins. Yes, I know it's also a podcast, but I have trouble focusing on audio-only podcasts, so I just follow the text-based RSS feed. It gives me all the relevant notes and links.
Ruby Inside: Less news, I'd say, and more feature-type stories and how-tos. Less Rails-specific than the others.
Ruby on Rails Plugins: OK, it's not a blog, but it is a useful RSS feed for Agile Web Development's directory of Rails plugins.
Jim Neath: Sporadically updated but always useful--Jim's Rails tutorials (and work on projects like Bort) are excellent resources for anyone looking to use Rails for social networking applications or media sites (or sneaking in some social features to an otherwise drab online service).
Railscasts: Ryan Bates' weekly podcast is a highlight of my Monday mornings. Each week, Ryan explains a Rails technique. His presentation style should be modeled by anyone doing how-to screencasts, and the show notes and associated comments are invaluable as after-the-fact references.

There are a few others in my OPML file, but they're either not updated much or there's so much overlap with other blogs I don't feel the need to read them both. Unfortunately, for the most part they look to be abandoned.

I know there are plenty more out there, so speak up--what am I missing?

Wednesday night basketball at Allen Fieldhouse

2009-03-05T00:00:00-06:00

Wednesday night was the last regular season home game for the Kansas women's basketball team, so I finally remembered to tote along my camera.

Allen Fieldhouse is known more for the heroics and tradition of its five-time national champion men's basketball program. The 2008 banner was hoisted earlier in the season, beneath the famous warning, Pay Heed, All Who Enter: Beware of "The Phog."

Prior to the game, the cheerleaders and Rock Chalk Dancers lead the crowd through renditions of "Crimson and Blue," our alma mater; followed by the Rock Chalk chant. It's similar to how things are done at men's games, just on a bit smaller scale.

Big Jay and Baby Jay are both present for women's games. It seems like they're a little more accessible to kids during these games as opposed to the always sold-out men's games.

It was senior night, marking the final home game for Ivana Catic, Marija Zinic, Katie Smith, and junior Rebecca Feikert, who's graduating early and moving on to a career in business.

The underdog Jayhawks jumped on fifth-ranked Baylor early. Sophomore Krysten Boogaard had a big game after slumping earlier in the season.

Junior Lachelda Jacobs came off the bench to run the point.

That's not a misprint on the scoreboard: When all was said and done, Kansas had beaten Baylor by 24 points. Granted, the Lady Bears were without their top player, but if you'd told me a month ago that such a score was even remotely possible I wouldn't have believed you. The Jayhawks have really turned a corner over the last few weeks.

Rock Chalk Jayhawk! You can see a few more shots from the evening on my Flickr account. This weekend I'm going to go back through my shots and possibly add a few others there, hopefully including one of Danielle McCray, who led the Jayhawks with a career high 35 points.

5 useful Ruby gems for Ruby on Rails

2009-03-05T00:00:00-06:00

To follow up on my list of useful plugins for Ruby on Rails, I'd like to share a few gems that make my Rails development work much easier.

nifty-generators: The first thing I do in a project (after version control and the database) is run nifty-generators' useful duo of nifty_layouts, which yields a clean, ready-to-roll application.html.erb and corresponding CSS; and nifty_config, a simple way to control constants in the application. Then I use nifty_scaffold to create all my models/views/controllers. This gem was created by Ryan Bates of Railscasts fame; I can't rave about it enough.
mdarby-restful_acl: My method of choice for adding access control layers (ACL) to my applications. I generally try to avoid roles-based mechanisms, in favor of a simpler "admins, users, and everyone else" approach. restful_acl, formerly a plugin and now a gem, handles this wonderfully. Version 2.0.2 is even easier to use. It works great with the restful-authentication plugin I mentioned the other day.
will_paginate: The best way to paginate returned results in your #index views so they span over multiple pages; the defacto standard after pagination support was removed from Rails' core.
chronic: A natural language parser for Ruby. I've only used this one a few times but it will eventually make its way into other applications as I work my way through keeping them updated and current.
starling: The simplest way I've found to run background processes in your apps, such as converting media files. I admit that I have a love-hate relationship with Starling, particularly running in tandem with the Workling plugin in production on an Ubuntu server, but once everything is set up properly it's just magic.

Those are my current five--I use others here and there to help with the likes of Atom parsing, CSV generation, and so on, but the five above make their way into my apps more than any other.

5 useful Ruby on Rails plugins

2009-03-03T00:00:00-06:00

I've been using Ruby on Rails since 2005. I honestly don't know how I survived the first decade-plus of the web developer part of my career without it. Rails handles at least 80% of the humdrum routine of application development and, by enforcing constraints, makes you a better coder (in my opinion--honestly, the core Rails contributors are better programmers than I'll ever be, so I try to emulate their styles and decisions rather than question them).

Over my next few posts I'm going to share some useful resources for web developers either new to Rails or folks who've worked with other platforms who'd like to know more. First, I'm going to share a few plugins I've noticed being installed in most of my Rails apps. Remember: There's no shame in using plugins!

restful-authentication: This has become the default user account creation utility for most of the Rails community. After installation, you can have a fully-functional username/password system working in your application within two minutes. I usually extend it a bit to make it possible for users to edit their account settings (in tandem with the restful_acl plugin I'll talk about in my next Rails post). restful-authentication has been around for awhile (previously known as acts_as_authenticated) and is in active development.
forgot_password: Pretty much every restful-authentication tutorial out there includes a section on how to help your users reset forgotten passwords. This plugin takes care of it for you, generating the required controller, views, model, and migration to handle the magic. forgot_password should work with any authentication system, in theory, but I've only tried it with restful-authentication.
paperclip: Inevitably, you'll want to allow users to upload files to your application. Paperclip makes this incredibly easy. If you've got ImageMagick installed, you can use paperclip to automatically resize images. I usually veer from the default settings and store files outside of the public folder, in such a way that I can protect the files with restful-authentication and restful_acl--perhaps I'll write a tutorial on how to do this sometime.
has_many_polymorphs: Polymorphs are a semi-advanced topic in Rails development, but has_many_polymorphs simplifies the process. If you need to use tags in your app, this plugin could be invaluable. I usually tweak some settings, and I've come across a few bits of weirdness, but for my apps this plugin has worked pretty well.
google_analytics: If you're using Google Analytics to track site usage, install this plugin. I forgot, this is a handy gem now.

If you found this at all useful, be sure to tell others via your favorite social applications.

Recap of Sir Ken Robinson's talk in Omaha

2009-03-02T00:00:00-06:00

I’m back after a weekend flurry of travels that saw me in five states in two days. (OK, four days in all, but I hit them all in the first two.) Sir Ken Robinson’s talk at the Kaneko in Omaha kicked off my long weekend, and I’d like to share a few things about it now.

I was lucky enough to be able to take part in an early session with Sir Ken, exclusive to area educators. He made a few points in this session that he repeated at the main event, so I’m able to remember them better, but in some cases I don’t recall when he shared a particular nugget. These highlights are thus pulled from both sessions and are in no particular order:

Creativity isn't just for the arts--it's required to excel in math, science, business, and other fields. Sir Ken defines creativity as "the process of having original ideas of value." Everyone is born creative, and anyone can be creative--just as you can learn to read, you can learn to think creatively.
The framers of No Child Left Behind meant well, but created a flawed system that focuses on assessment and curriculum over teaching. Teaching is akin to acting. In acting, you can strip everything down to the core of an actor and an audience. Anything else you add to that mix--lighting, a stage, a building, etc.--should only be added if it improves the product. With teaching, the core is the teacher and the pupil--not assessment and curriculum.
Education currently follows the fast food chain model--it's standardized, so you know what you're going to get regardless of which restaurant you visit. But none of it's very good. The Zagat's model is what education should be like. A restaurant is given a set of criteria to meet, but reviewers don't give a restaurant any specifics in terms of what kind of food to serve, who to hire, or when to be open. As a result, every restaurant in a Zagat's guide is excellent, but no two are alike.
Being in your "element," the subject of Sir Ken's latest book, is being at the point where your passion meets your talents. He shared a number of stories about people who arrived at their element, often in spite of--but sometimes because of--the educational system.
Encouraging students to find their own "elements" can help increase literacy by encouraging learners to read and write about their passions.
"The enemy of innovation is common sense," though it's difficult to see past common sense.

There was much more, but it’s starting to get fuzzy in my head without some prompting. Perhaps after I start reading The Element I’ll remember some more. As an aside, I really need to get up to Omaha more. I always forget that it’s only a few hours away and is a very nice town. And the Kaneko looks to be shaping up to be a wonderful resource to nurture all kind of creativity there. Thanks to the staff there for putting together a wonderful event, well worth my drive.

Sir Ken Robinson in Omaha today!

2009-02-26T00:00:00-06:00

It used to be I’d take road trips to Omaha to see Guided by Voices or Bob Mould. Nowadays I drive up there to see Sir Ken Robinson, he of possibly the all-time best TED presentation, lecture on his newest book The Element.

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Here’s his presentation from TED a few years ago. If you’re frustrated with what happens in schools–and will continue to happen without real reform–give it a watch. It’s about 20 minutes long, give or take, per the TED norms.

To me, this seems like a no-brainer. We don’t need rote memorization in an age when any fact in the world can be found in a matter of seconds. We need thinkers and problem-solvers who are wiling to express themselves and take chances–and a solid background in the arts nurtures these traits.

Apple TV 2.3.1 disables boxee

2009-02-25T00:00:00-06:00

What a rough week for boxee, at least as it pertains to Apple TV. First, NBC and Fox force their and Hulu’s hand and require them to disable AppleTV from the list of supported devices. Now it looks like the latest AppleTV update (2.3.1) has disabled boxee entirely. Hopefully I remembered to switch off automatic updates the last time this happened (and hopefully the boxee team is quick with an update, as they’ve been in the past).

Update:

(SlashGear, via Gizmodo)

Valleywag on the end of Second Life

2009-02-23T00:00:00-06:00

Valleywag’s report on the state of Second Life is nothing earth-shattering, but my favorite part is the quote toward the end: “Only compared to the life of a university professor might Second Life actually seem exciting.” Ouch!

(Valleywag, via Digg)

Stimulus-funded projects must be Web 2.0

2009-02-22T00:00:00-06:00

This afternoon, I read that projects funded through economic stimulus dollars will be required to provide information about spending in a reusable data format--that is, Atom or RSS. They even provide a specific data structure. I ask my colleagues--as people who rely on government funding to do our work, do you think it's reasonable to think that maybe all federally-funded projects, in the future, will require this level of transparency and data reusability?

I think we need to be ready.

Update: I see that ReadWriteWeb has some more commentary on this topic. I still think the writing's on the wall--trying to figure out how to bring this up at work and be taken seriously.

(Aaron Swartz, via Daring Fireball)

Hulu blocks boxee. Blame old media.

2009-02-18T00:00:00-06:00

I love boxee. I love Hulu. Together, they were totally awesome--my girlfriend and I could watch shows on an actual TV, not squinting at a laptop screen. Unfortunately, Hulu is now being blocked on boxee. Hulu's not to blame here--it's the content providers (NBC and Fox) who complained. As many of the blogs covering this situation have noted, boxee didn't block ads--so my guess is the only reason the providers made this decision is because boxee isn't something they directly control.

Hopefully we can get a little bit of an uproar about this and convince the content providers that boxee is providing them a valuable service. I hate it when consumers get left out in the cold because old ways of thinking win out.

(via boxee blog)

New project: Flyers archive 2009

2009-02-16T00:00:00-06:00

Even though Google Analytics tells me I'm the only one interested in it, I keep tinkering away with my flyers collection website. For the uninitiated, I've been collecting those throwaway, mass-photocopied handbills promoting upcoming "concerts" or other events since college. I digitized them awhile back and have put them online first as static HTML pages, then with Movable Type, and currently with WordPress.

The current version is OK, I guess, but my idea of relying on WordPress' built-in fields (and half-ass tags implementation) have never quite set right with me. Deep down I knew I needed a data model designed specifically for what I'm trying to share. And as of last weekend, I've begun this project anew. This is going to be my new project to keep me off the streets and out of the bowling alleys (the former, at least). The current, WordPress-backed version will stay up in the meantime--but I've already got a primitive, Ruby on Rails-built application for the next iteration.

No screen shots yet, but stay tuned. I hope to have some fun with this and learn some things my normal work projects don't let me do every day.

Norm Stewart on Kansas-Missouri vs. Duke-Carolina

2009-02-15T00:00:00-06:00

“If Duke and Carolina played another 25 years, they might get up to our level.” I’m a Jayhawk through and through, but I’ve always respected the hell out of Norm Stewart. Quin Snyder turned the rivalry into a joke for a few years, and Mike Anderson is just too dang likable to be a Mizzou coach (though he is making the actual games competitive again).

(via Rivals.com)

Kristin Hersh on CASH music

2009-02-13T00:00:00-06:00

Kristin Hersh is publishing music on CASH Music, a “non-profit-organization dedicated to improving the music experience for artists and listeners alike.” Music is released under a Creative Commons license and freely streamable and downloadable in a variety of formats. Donations are accepted. This is a neat idea–I hope it takes off.

Apple TV + Boxee = AWESOME

2008-11-11T00:00:00-06:00

Yeah, yeah, long time no write–but I wanted to point out that today’s post about hacking Apple TV to support Boxee on Gizmodo inspired me to actually use that alpha Boxee account I’ve had for a few weeks and hack my Apple TV. Two words: Awe. Some. I tested it by watching the 2008 Orange Bowl on Hulu, right through Aqib Talib’s pick-6 (and the ensuing unsportsmanlike conduct penalty). Video quality wasn’t spectacular, but definitely watchable–especially for those times when something screws up on my DVR or cable provider and I need to watch one of the few shows I still follow online.

I’m going out to Costco tomorrow and wondering if I shouldn’t just go ahead and buy a big fat hard drive to set up as a NAS for media sharing to this thing now–

Problems with importing Canon RAW photos after installing Apple's Raw compatibility updater 2.2

2008-10-01T00:00:00-05:00

I’m adding a new category to share things I’ve had to hunt and dig for, in hopes it makes it easier for others who run into similar problems.

Long story short: My Canon Rebel XTi wouldn’t connect with iPhoto or Image Capture. Turns out Apple’s Raw Compatibility Updater 2.2 totally messed with the camera’s ability to connect to my computer. It took some major digging, but here’s what I wound up doing:

Locate the 2.2 version of Apple's Raw drivers at /System/Library/CoreServices/RawCamera.bundle and trash it. You may need to restart at this point.
Download the older, 2.1 version of the Raw compatibility updater and install it. The first few times I tried I got an error message saying I already had a newer version installed. Eventually, though, it worked.
See if iPhoto and/or Image Capture (or whatever utility you use) works now.

I hope this helps somebody–seriously, it took a lot of searching before I finally found a discussion post on Apple's support site explaining what was going on. I’ve already re-lost the link to it, but thanks to the person who posted this suggestion somewhere on that site.

Why I'm no longer excited about BuddyPress (or Elgg, or MT 4.2)

2008-09-28T00:00:00-05:00

I know, I know: A few weeks back I was all jazzed up about the BuddyPress project. Well, I’m not anymore. I’m also not too enthused about the new socially-aware MovableType, or Elgg, or PhpFox, or any of the off-the-shelf, “white label” social network platforms. (I’m also not too hot on Ning.)

Want to know why?

If you’re dealing with people who know their ways around social media and Web 2.0, the above-listed packages might work for you. On the other hand, if you’re like me and most of your user base has no exposure to Facebook or blogging or wikis (other than thinking Wikipedia is the root of all evil!), then you’ve got problems.

If you’ve read Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, you know that, essentially, younger audiences tend to be your heavy users of most social networks’ core functions (your Creators, Critics, and Joiners). But you know what? Building yet-another-tool for those folks is the proverbial fish-in-a-barrel situation. What do you want to do if you want to ~~trick~~ convince your core audience to share their materials, comments, and expertise?

That’s why I decided to forego what’s out there now and write my own thing. (OK, also, none of those above are Ruby and/or Rails in nature.) Over the last couple of weeks, in pockets, I’ve been developing a social network for people who don’t think social networks can be useful. (Screenshots pending.) It’s got groups, discussions, user profiles, and rudimentary social functionality (interested in a particular topic? Click it to see who else in your workplace might be a good resource on that subject). It’s still rough, and I’m having to bone up on some Rails techniques I’ve been ignoring/avoiding to make it work the way it should. I’ve gone out of my way to take as much of a plugins-first approach–if someone else has written great code, why do I need to duplicate?–and thus have been inspired greatly by Jim Neath's excellent blog.

We’re going to start rolling out my work gradually in the coming week. I don’t know if I’ll release this code on a larger scale, since I’m sure most seasoned Rails developers could do the same thing in their sleep. At this point I’m more interested to see whether it can make any difference in individuals’ use of and/or attitudes about social media and its applicability to real, professional or academic uses.

Oh, and also, I’m theoretically trying to finish up my master’s degree with this project. So hopefully it goes according to my roughly-hewn plan.

A few shots from my neighborhood

2008-09-14T00:00:00-05:00

This afternoon I walked down to the river to see how the dam was handling the rush of rain water (we got at least four inches of rain Friday night). I brought my camera along.

For those of you who don’t know, I live in North Lawrence, just across the bridge from downtown. A lot of people like to not officially recognize us as part of Lawrence, but I like it. I can walk to downtown in ten minutes, property is affordable, and it’s one of those parts of town that have still got a little character.

Along with the far east part of town, just off of K-10, North Lawrence is much more rural than the rest of town. For example, the city’s grain elevators are a few blocks south from my house.

A few train tracks run alongside the elevators. I’ve talked to one person who couldn’t take the noise and left North Lawrence because of it, but I’ve never found it to be that bad. The downside is getting caught at the intersection waiting for a long, slow train to move past.

The Union Pacific Depot has been restored and now is available for public and private functions. I’ve yet to go inside. This statue is out front. I’m not sure what it’s called, but I believe it’s a tribute to people in various service roles. If you know more, let me know.

OK, let’s get to why I went to the river. Here’s a shot of the dam. Note the large trees trying to make it over–I wonder whose job it is to clear them out. And yes, the Kansas River really is that dirty.

Here’s water that’s just gone over the dam. You’d think these were rapids. Suffice to say, you don’t see anyone boating around this part of the river (though there are landings just up and downstream).

Yesterday's project: New look for Stratepedia.org

2008-08-30T00:00:00-05:00

Amazing what I’ll do when I’m putting off other work. A little background: Stratepedia, the hub for pretty much all of my projects at work, got off to a rough start a couple of years ago. The plan was to make a big splash as we migrated away from a long, somewhat confining domain name. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out–due to a domain registration issue, Stratepedia was kind of forced to make its debut earlier than planned. As a result, I didn’t get much time for logos, visual identities, and all that.

My first pass at it looked bad. I don’t even have any screen shots of the first incarnation of the site. Then, for that last year-plus or so, we’ve fun a site with a nice corkboard design that Amber put together. It did the job, but recently I came to realize that it was time for Stratepedia to have more of an identity of its own, starting with a logo and moving on to my attempts to bring a Kansas flair to our work (see Depot, etc. to get a feel for my general take on ed-tech website design; it’s kind of my reaction to overuse of silly “high tech” designs like Matrix-y letters, Star Trek fonts and green grids, and/or little red schoolhouses and apples). Enough setting it up–here it is:

That’s it–one page, linking out to everything we do. Cranked out over the course of about five hours yesterday, including an hour or so of browser fine-turning (if you’re looking at it in IE it won’t quite look like the screen shot; I had to make adjustments due to how that lame browser handles overlapping <div> elements and PNG files). At the moment I still think it’s the prettiest thing I’ve ever put on the web.

The logo is kind of, sort of a reaction to the greenification of the world–I’ve been wondering if it’s a fad or here to stay. I hope it’s the latter, but the cynic in me has doubts. Anyway, what started as me trying to come up with a Web 2.0-ish wheat shock turned into something much more simple; a pair of wings. I know it’s not the most original thing in the world, but I like it and think I have something I can use standalone (like, the Stratepedia Twitter account uses just the wings as a user picture) when needed.

In theory, I’m going to start rotating out the photograph. The sunflower shot currently online is a purchased stock photo; I’d like to solicit my photograph-taking friends to help build a rotating gallery of original, Kansas-themed pictures as a little value-added service (again, did I mention how much I dislike ed-tech web design?). This one will do in the meantime.

A few shots from the first (annual?) Lawrence Buskerfest

2008-08-22T00:00:00-05:00

North vs. South moved to Kansas City after an initial four-year run in Kansas. As a result, I didn’t go see The Meat Purveyors tonight. They’re one of my all-time favorite bands, especially live, but technically they’re broken up. They get back together every year for North vs. South. I couldn’t get myself to drive to Kansas City for the show, though, especially given the festival’s history of poor scheduling and the fact that this year’s venues are all spread out halfway across a much larger town. (I’m OK with, say, moving a band across the street from the Replay to the Jackpot, but I’d hate to get parked at Davey’s and find out the band I wanted to see got moved at the last minute to the Record Bar.) Also, no smoking ban? What century do you live in, Kansas City? I kind of feel like I need to be peeking out my window in case Quantrill makes a repeat visit.

Enough bagging on North vs. South, though. I’ll probably break down and go tomorrow night to see Grant Hart, the much-unappreciated other half of the Husker Du songwriting dynamic and crafter of many an excellent post-Husker song on top of that. And hopefully the festival will move back to where it belongs, on the banks of the Kaw, this time next year.

That’s not what this post is about, though. Instead of hosting North vs. South, our town is playing host to Lawrence Buskerfest, a cavalcade of street performances stationed at various spots along Mass Street. We caught a few of the acts after we ate dinner. Unfortunately most of the acts were of the blink-and-you’ll-miss-them type; the fire-eating/sword-swallowing act everyone was so excited about was over and done with by the time we left La Parilla.

I got a few good shots of a zydeco band set up at 8th and Mass, though. It was three dudes (guitar, accordion, washboard/vocals, papier mache fellow). This girl came along and I’m not sure if she’s a formal member of the band or not, but she played tambourine like she’d been practicing with them for years. Here’s a slideshow of my photos from the event, if you’d like, with better shots of the other band members. If you know who these guys are, please let me know.

The fire-eaters perform again Sunday afternoon. I’ll try to get down there in time.

Why I'm excited about BuddyPress

2008-08-16T00:00:00-05:00

I’d heard about Automattic’s plan for a WordPress-derived social network app called BuddyPress a little while back, then promptly forgot about it until a few days ago. Sarah Perez's ReadWriteWeb article on social engines from Automattic and Six Apart gave me reason to revisit the project. It’s still raw, but it shows promise. For one thing, I like the notion that, in theory, I could move content from existing WordPress blogs over into BuddyPress when the time came. But the big reason? It’s plugin-based. If you use it to power your social site, you can pick and choose the functions you want, and hypothetically add more as they’re developed. It’s also based on a relatively widespread platform–as much as WordPress annoys me at times, nine times out of ten when I’ve wanted to make it do something it doesn’t do out of the box I’ve found either a decent plugin or a workaround.

An aside: Why are there developers who are so anti-plugin, and have to write everything themselves? I run into this from time to time in the Rails community and have seen it elsewhere. Frankly, I’m no longer that conceited to think that I can write stuff as good as or better than the next guy, especially when the next guy (or girl) lives and breathes this stuff while I always have at least six hats I’m juggling. If I can write an app in a quarter of the time using plugins, I’m going to use plugins!

Anyway, Sarah makes a generally valid point about lack of data portability in BuddyPress (and Movable Type 4.2, which I doubt I’ll much consider at all). However, I’m not too concerned about that for my needs. What I want is something like IBM’s much-ballyhooed Beehive internal social network for project management and communication. As the CRL, like many organizations, becomes more disparate in location, focus of work, and time, I see tools like this becoming vital to keeping everybody up-to-date and on-track.

What about Elgg? A few comments in Sarah’s article mention it. Last time I looked at Elgg there were installation issues and a general sense of not-quite-doneness. Anybody using version 1.0? Has it made progress? Next week is looking busy but maybe I’ll have an hour or so to try it out. There are some projects afoot at work right now that could put an internal social network to good use.

Dissing Delicious 2.0

2008-08-03T00:00:00-05:00

del.icio.us is dead. Long live Delicious.

Last week, as you may know, the long-awaited update to the social bookmarking site Delicious was released to much fanfare and overwhelmingly positive reviews. I’ve been away at a conference and letting my feeds slide, so aside from glancing at my own list of bookmarks, I hadn’t really had a chance to dig into the new-look site until this weekend.

Overall, the updated look-and-feel is nice, I guess. There was something to be said about del.icio.us’s somewhat unassuming, old-school look–remember when a site didn’t have to have a shiny interface to be useful? Not to say Delicious goes over the top–I don’t see any glassy logos or “beta” warnings here–maybe I just miss what I was used to. Oh well.

My big issue with the new-look Delicious has more to do with day-to-day usefulness. First off, if you’re a long-time user and have stuck with bookmarklets rather than a plugin or third-party app, you’ll want to update them for better use with Delicious. Maybe this was part of my problem–I’ve probably been using the same save bookmark method for more than a year. The default option now looks like this:

Not bad, I know–until you get into tagging. I liked having all my tags on one page as reference for how I might tag a new bookmark. I have a feeling this change was put in place to accommodate those who apply a zillion tags to any given item, as opposed to folks like me who can usually label a bookmark in two to four words.

Sure, those two to four words are probably going to be present under “Recommended” or “Popular”–but what if they’re not? Do I just need to break down and bundle all those currently unbundled tags I still have floating around? And why should I have to click a separate tab to share a link in my network? There’s a lot of clicking going on to accomplish things that were just right there originally.

If you dig around in Delicious’s Help section, you’ll come across the Bookmarklets page. This is where I went to update the basic, default bookmarklet. If you scroll to the bottom you’ll find the “Save to Delicious (Full-Save)” bookmarklet, which might be better than the basic, but still requires a lot of extra clicking in my opinion:

Maybe it’s too early for me to start complaining–maybe I’ll like it more after a few more days of use.

Why can't I figure out gardening?

2008-07-27T00:00:00-05:00

I live on top of some of the most fertile soil in Lawrence, if not all of Kansas. (Sure, it floods every 500 years, but what are the odds this is one of those years?) The former owner of my little homestead was a master gardener, and every square inch of this place was once covered with colorful blooms and broad, green leaves.

And I can’t grow a thing here.

I’ve tried. I spent an entire day turning over soil in what was her “vegetable patch” last year and figured I’d start small–a few tomato plants. To be fair, they grew. And grew. Within a few weeks I had a tangled mess of plants with fruit that was bitter and barely edible. (I say “barely” because I did eat some of them, but probably out of some sort of spite for the plants or myself.)

That vegetable patch is now almost all grass, in part because this year I decided to plant vegetables inside our nice little courtyard, outside the front door. My reasoning was it would make it easier to tend to the plants and grab delicious ripe vegetables on the way inside.

This time I went with a few tomatoes, a red bell pepper, and cucumbers. The cucumbers died within a few weeks. The red bell pepper might wind up growing little tiny one-inch red bell peppers. The tomatoes did pretty much what they did last year. I’ve got fruit starting to ripen, but it’s the same deal–the ones that haven’t been claimed by critters aren’t anything I really want to eat.

Then, last night, a storm whipped through, poured rain straight down, and knocked everything over. I think tomorrow evening I’m going to go ahead and rip everything out and call it a wash for this year (pun slightly intended).

Oh, and the shrubs I tried planting earlier this year shriveled up months ago. That was forty bucks poorly spent.

Why can’t I figure this out? I’ve given up reading books on the subject, or going online, because they always start with “first, determine which zone you live in.” Why does my local nursery or greenhouse sell plants that aren't intended for my zone? Asking seasoned gardeners for tips is even worse. The standard answer is I don't really do anything--I just plant things and they grow! I’m sorry, but that approach hasn’t worked for me.

I’m starting to think gardening is actually some sort of elite, secret society. There are ways to gardeners’ magic, but they throw you off the trail by throwing out zone numbers at you, or make you feel bad by telling you that they don’t have to do anything to make their plants grow!

Seriously, you gardeners out there: If one of you writes a book that honest-to-goodness explains how to make things grow, in plain English, step-by-step and foolproof as possible, I will buy it. So will a lot of other people. It shouldn’t be this hard.

My next-to-last visit to Jerry's farm

2008-07-24T00:00:00-05:00

After writing my sort-of bio, I’m a little worded out–so I’ll kick off this new project with some photos I took last April in Columbia, Missouri, at my uncle’s farm. My grandparents finally sold the place and all the paperwork was finished up last week. Every time I visited I found some new interesting thing. Some of those interesting things have wound up in my house; others were just photographed.

Here are some of those things–the general Flickr community never seemed to latch onto them, but I liked them all the same. And when your domain name is the same as your real name you should be able to post whatever you want, right?

This old bass drum was in the barn Jerry was converting to a recording studio at the time he died. It would have been a neat place, but it wound up being crammed with goodies like this.

It stayed cold in the central states a long time this year–I mean, this was from late April. Back home in Kansas it was another good month before things started to bloom for real. And now, once again, my yard is totally overgrown–but that’s another story.

A neighbor’s fence was compromised, making for a good opportunity to tinker with my new-at-the-time Sigma 70-300mm telephoto lens. Betsy didn’t have the luxury of such super-duper telephoto power and got a little closer.

What can I say, I like rusty things. Jerry didn’t even really farm so I’m not sure why he had this stuff.

You have no idea how tempted I was to take this one home. I mean, THAT’S ONE TALENTED DOG, right?

Aaron Sumner

How would you roll your own data science course?

Databases

Python

R

Math and statistics

What else?

3 picks for May 17, 2013

Pencils

3 picks for May 10, 2013

5 of my favorite presentations from Ruby Midwest 2013

Lawrence Rubyists unite? Lawrence Rubyists unite!

3 picks for April 26, 2013

Public libraries

3 picks for April 19, 2013

3 picks for April 12, 2013

Jump Start Sinatra: A book report

Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec book updates: February 2013's Project a Month Project

Snow days

Sales visualizations for Leanpub authors: January 2013's Project a Month Project

Docent: December 2012's Project a Month Project

My first two days with the OWC Data Doubler and Mercury Electra 3G solid state drive

Installation

Mountain Lion

Media disk

Results

Sound Refound: November 2012's Project a Month Project

Announcing the Project a Month Project

Some thoughts on 2.5 years of technical blogging

Fluent Conference video compilation: A book report

Exploring Everyday Things with R and Ruby: A book report

Getting Started with D3: A book report

A retrospective on my first lean publishing experience

A Little Book on CoffeeScript: A book report

What I'm up to, the spring 2012 edition

Spring is springing in Jefferson County

Returing to Redmine: Suggestions for better workflows and productivity

Redmine for non-technical projects?

Breaking the Page: A Book Report

Ten Photo Assignments: A Book Report

December 2011 reading list

Networking for People Who Hate Networking by Devora Zack

Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds by Scott Berkun

The Cucumber Book: Behavior-Driven Development for Testers and Developers by Matt Wynne and Aslak Hellesøy

Reflections on Ruby Midwest 2011

O'Reilly Master Class: Leading and Managing Breakthrough Projects Video (a book report)

Living in the Sunflower State

Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef: A Book Report

jQuery Mobile by Jon Reid: A Book Report

My summer 2011 reading list

The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge

Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal

Crafting Rails Applications: Expert Practices for Everyday Rails Development by José Valim

Hüsker Dü: The Story of the Noise-pop Pioneers who Launched Modern Rock by Andrew Earles

TextMate snippets for CanCan (and other Ruby things)

Defining abilities in ability.rb:

Checking abilities in views and controllers:

Protecting controllers and actions:

My 10-year Seattle anniversary (and belated love for LiveJournal)

Gamification Master Class with Gabe Zichermann (a Book Report)

Kansas Relays 2011: A few photos

Recent web work: Kansas Project Success

Strata Conference Real World Applications Panel: Education and Government (a Book Report)

Offline Mobile Web Applications in HTML5 (a Book Report)

How to restore a Macintosh hard drive to its factory settings

What you’ll need:

The steps:

Cloning (optional)

References:

Building the Perfect PC by Thompson and Thompson (a Book Report)

Scott and Neil's Designing Web Interfaces Master Class (a Book Report)

Make iPad e-books with Baker and Jekyll

The Myths of Innovation, Second Edition, by Scott Berkun (a book report)

Finally, a Mac launcher for me: Getting to know Alfred

The Inner Game and software development

Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun (a book report)

Where I've been: Recent writings elsewhere

From the Stratepedia Blog:

From Everyday Rails:

One nobody's solution to Flash on the iPad

Defining abilities in `ability.rb`: