This is what happens when you catch a cold (*sniffle*)
I’ve been here before - the last time I hit this spot I simply hit the big “Mark All As Read” button, but for some reason I can’t just bring myself to do that this time…sigh…
The venerable creator of Ruby fights without fighting. This is in response to all the back and forth about Joel’s spot on language wars which seems to have the bulk of the Rails proverbial knickers in a twist, including DHH. I *love* matz’s response to this (from the ruby-talk mailing list):
|On Sep 1, 2006, at 9:20 AM, Rob Sanheim wrote:
|
|> I find it amusing that he says Rails is too risky and new, yadda
|> yadda, but then he goes on to talk about their in-house language,
|> “Wasabi”:
|
|I too found that beyond ironic.That indicates that he trusts himself, and not me (Ruby). And I think
he’s right.matz.
This gem (pun completely intended) was found via RedHanded.
Yup, An Event Apart is coming to Austin. It’s actually coming to the Alamo Draft House downtown location (which is a stone’s throw from one of our client’s offices). If only it weren’t for the $500 registration fee (for one day? I love you guys, but…). I do have to say that it’s nice for these gents (Meyer, Zeldman, and Santa Maria) to grace our beloved city with their presence.
I hope that by Nov. 6th (the date of the event) this crazy ass heat will be long gone. Guys, one tip - check the weather before you come - it might be likely you’ll be wearing a sweater in the morning and a tank by the afternoon (that’s what is kindly referred to as “Texas weather” ’round these parts)…use this local station to check it out before you head this way (links to News 8 Austin weather).
I’ve been continually looking at Amazon’s S3 service as a means to provide cheap, reliable storage for personal use (archiving) but have been wondering how other folks have been using it for their business. Seems many companies are finding S3 to be an honest-to-goodness alternative for backing data up instead of the run-of-the-mill terabyte hard disk setups found in so many places. (It’s lots of hardware, lots of human resources - and I’ve seen how bad of a problem big storage units can be first hand and it’s not pretty…S3 looks great simply because you’re no longer the one babysitting.)
But now, there’s this - EC2.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
Basically, you can create a virtual machine in their computing environment for you to use as you need and on-demand. Think virtual hosting (e.g. Linode) - but on steriods - it’s the on-demand aspect that’s interesting - not only that - but the cost can’t be beat.
Here’s an interesting run through of setting up an image. I would *love* to see the man behind the curtain on this one, how they are accomplishing this feat and what’s the strategy for ensuring high-reliability while keeping a commitment to low pricing.
Why would we really need a dedicated server anymore? And why couldn’t we provide reliable hosting to our customers on our terms (and not through some third-party hosting entity who’s either oversold or doesn’t have the features to stack up)? I’m certain someone is trying this out right now and we’ll be seeing the results here shortly somewhere on a blog near you. I can’t wait for this thing to come out of it’s current limited beta…
Brilliant!
Tracy muses on the balance of learning from others while still taking the time to understand how something works - reinventing the wheel, so to speak, is not something I’m a fan of. But I think there’s context to be had here (and this is speaking completely in terms of web development). For example, how useful is it for anyone to rewrite database code (since we have all the nice frameworks now) or build a javascript framework (e.g. for ajax work or dom manip) from scratch?
Given the constant revolution taking place around the web it seems counter-intuitive to “roll your own”, especially when there are a number of open source projects that would be more than happy to let you feed your need through their own efforts to make their software better. I, personally, don’t have a problem with “not built here” at all as long as the software/code in question is from a community supported, open source project. (Big business support matters not and certainly is no indication of the quality of the project.) Why not focus on making the product/project better instead of worrying about nuts and bolts? Perhaps this is why the frameworks of today (TurboGears, Rails, Django, Catalyst…to name a few) are real winners. They provide a quick path to *real* development and don’t allow the coder to settle in to a set of worries that are not directly correlated with their project’s focus. I wonder if I’m more lenient on such an issue because I’ve done it so many times before. Perhaps to the uniniatiated this is considered fun or edifying in some way? Although I’d argue that if you want to learn about this stuff just start picking apart the code in the open source frameworks that are already out there.
I am the first one to say that the work we do is first about learning from others. But I will also quickly follow up with the practical assessment that we often don’t have time to sweat the details. On the brighter side of brilliance, leveraging the collective of open source minds/communities, we certainly no longer have to…
Well, after two extremely pleasing deliveries from Austin Organic Delivery, I’m happy to recommend them to everyone. Both orders have been fantastic. Fresh produce, tasty and plentiful. Here’s a pic of this week’s delivery:
Look at this massive list:
All for $46. Delivered to my doorstep. I don’t think I can beat that.
After posting the mandatory Rails upgrade yesterday, the team turned around and rolled out 1.1.6. The comments thread, again, is awash in, erm, comments. Given the interesting issues with each upgrade in the 1.1.x series (check out the work from 1.1.2 and 1.1.3) everyone now seems a little upgrade shy. Stuff happens, the team is working hard, let’s move along…nothing to see here…
One more for the road…Get your upgrade on!
Mandatory Security Release (and more). If you’ve never read the comments thread on these release pages, give ‘er a go as there are some interesting comments and DHH is always very active in these threads.
On another note, I really like how insistent the guys are about everyone performing this upgrade:
This is a MANDATORY upgrade for anyone not running on a very recent edge (which isn’t affected by this). If you have a public Rails site, you MUST upgrade to Rails 1.1.5. The security issue is severe and you do not want to be caught unpatched.
You heard the man, get your upgrade on!
There’s nothing like having some nice, yet useful eyecandy on the mac (good ol’ quicksilver comes to mind). Well, the folks behind Shiira are taking on the big boys and out-safari-ing safari. The new Shiira beta (now Universal!) has some nice features, including the Shelf, tab expose (beautiful!) and transparent history and bookmark popups (which I like better than having them in a sidebar). What I really dig about shiira though is the Page Dock - a thumbnail image of all your current tabs at the bottom of the browser so you can see from afar what’s in each. Superb! I know some of these features might exist as plugins (or soon to be features) in Firefox (at least), but Shiira has one more thing going for it - it’s blazing fast! Currently, this beta is Tiger-only (sorry, you 10.3 folks) and is well worth the download. I am definitely going to keep track of this one as the work they are doing, especially interface-wise, is outstanding. Keep up the excellent work, Shiira team!
Just wanted to put out the word about KUT’s Tower repair issues. They are soliciting donations as the price has run over 100k (wow!). I listen to KUT a lot so this is an easy do for me. If you listen to KUT in town (NPR, natural gardener, Eklektikos, etc) at all, please consider donating.