The Washington Post has scored big by hiring Adrian Holovaty away from the Lawrence Journal-World. He’s looking for someone to replace him at his old job to build cool features for newspaper Web sites. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the new things that Adrian brings to the WaPo.

Well, after flirting with the idea of learning Ruby on Rails for months, I’ve finally found a reason to actually dig into it. There’s an application I had in mind for personal use that involves recording data and presenting it in various reports, and I have some ideas of how it could be expanded to be useful to many users. Rather than write it in PHP or Java, I’m writing it in Rails.

Despite some silly mistakes, I got a very basic skeleton working in just a few hours of work. The data model right now consists of three tables, all of which are related, and I can now enter data and view it using the basic scaffold pages. I had to customize them to get the relationships working (for data entry), and the next step is to incorporate the relationships into reporting.

My first impressions are very good. I’m not sure how I’d describe Rails to a PHP user. To a Java user, I’d say that Rails is a combination of Struts, Hibernate, XDoclet, and AppFuse. Code generation is a huge part of Rails, as is reflection of the database structure through ActiveRecord.

The other most important feature of Rails is abstraction of most things that you’d use configuration files for in a Java framework. As long as you follow the conventions, you can skip configuration. I’m eager to find out what happens when those abstractions start to leak.

I once had a conversation with a coworker who had once done some kind of forestry work in Montana. He indicated that one nice thing about living in Montana was that you were at the top of the pecking order when it comes to western states, with the exception of Alaska. Alaskans were considered more manly than Montanans, but Montanans looked down on everybody else.

What I’m looking for is the Alaska of programming languages. I’ve done projects in Java, Perl, PHP, ColdFusion, TCL, and probably some other languages I’ve forgotten, and at this point in my career, I’m looking for a language that will cement my status at the top of the programming heap. I just can’t figure out which one it is.

I could take the advice of James Robertson and program in Smalltalk. Or I could be like Paul Graham and program in Lisp. I could follow the advice of the guys at lesscode.org and give up on Java since it’s not Web-centric enough, but I’m not sure where they’d have me turn instead. PHP, Perl, and Python clearly don’t have what it takes because they’re not obscure enough. Visual Basic is utterly disqualified for obvious reasons, and C#, its fans not withstanding, is from Microsoft and too much like Java. Ruby is the flavor of the month, and its unusual type system certainly gives it credibility, but I’m not sure what kind of legs it has. It’s earning a lot of notoriety for making it really easy to write Web applications. Does that sound macho to you? To me it sounds like the original use case for ColdFusion, a language which nobody respects.

Maybe the key to really getting the respect I deserve is getting closer to the machine. There are plenty of C dead-enders out there, but I think the answer has to be assembly. At least that’s what Steve Gibson would tell you.

Slate’s Timothy Noah has an article on the bill in the Senate that would bar the National Weather Service from providing the weather data it collects to the public.

Here’s how Santorum would like things to work:

Santorum has tried to argue that his bill would actually lead to more dissemination of weather information, not less, but of course if that were true in any meaningful sense then AccuWeather and the Commercial Weather Services Association wouldn’t be pushing Santorum’s bill. What the bill actually says is that the NWS must issue all its data “in real time, and without delay for internal use.” This means that the NWS must issue data in raw form that will be incomprehensible to the general public—thereby providing private weather companies with a government-guaranteed opportunity to massage that information into something the public can actually comprehend. That the intended recipient of the NWS’s raw data is the private weather industry, rather than the inexpert consumer, is made plain in the bill’s very next sentence, which states, “Data, information, guidance, forecasts, and warnings shall be issued … through a set of data portals designed for volume access by commercial providers [italics mine] of products or services.” The envisioned “data portals” (whatever they turn out to be) are quite obviously not intended to get all that weather information to you and me.

Just more evidence that Republicans only believe in capitalism when it’s convenient. They’re more than happy to use the government to economically benefit their friends and supporters. (Libertarians take heed.)

Cory Doctorow has an editorial at BoingBiong about what it will mean if Apple adopts Intel’s Trusted Computing hardware in new Macs. As consumers, it’s vitally important that we reject any operating system that provides application developers with access to these features, and indeed, reject hardware that provides these features as well. The copyright industry hates the idea of the general purpose PC existing under the control of the user. Trusted Computing is an attempt to take that away.

Christopher Diggins warns us not to trust computer science articles on Wikipedia. Here’s his admonition:

This is not the first time a Wikipedia computer-science definition has made me want to pull my hair out. In the end I don’t care, as long as people don’t make the mistake of taking Wikipedia definitions seriously. Just remember that in Wikipedia the definitions are written by random people, and edited by random people, not experts.

My question to Diggins would be, “Did you fix the definition that offended you?” He took the trouble to write up what’s wrong with the definition on his own weblog, but didn’t bother to update the article in question. Instead, someone else who probably read his weblog entry has done so.

The article has also been the subject of much thoughtful discussion, contrary to the impression that Diggins gives that it was written by some “random person”.

I would further challenge Diggins to point me to a better definition of type safety that’s readily available on the Web. It’s better to work to improve the imperfect resource we have rather than to bash it without offering any alternative.

Al Gore’s television project, Current, launched today. Of course I, like pretty much everyone else, can’t watch it because it’s not carried by my cable provider. Current has segments rather than shows, which means that it will be difficult to Tivo things. There’s no broadcast schedule on the Web site beyond what’s coming up for the next hour or so. There’s no way to watch any of it on the Web, making it nearly impossible to know what the channel will even be like unless you’re one of the households that receives it. At least Current doesn’t seem to be centered around professional blatherers “discussing” the issues of the day.

According to this Washington Post article on the network, they’re going to be focused on participatory media, but it’s hard to get that from the Web site (aside from this preview). Current’s blog doesn’t support comments, which is kind of odd considering the network’s emphasis on public participation. They probably don’t want to be inundated with comments from Al Gore-hating right-wing trolls.

Overall, I get a sort of pre-dot-com bust vibe from the Web site. It’s high on style and low on usability, verging on being brochureware. How about an RSS feed of upcoming segments? Or anything that says Web 2.0 in any way? It strikes me a strange to launch something brand new without any of the trappings of the participatory Web as it exists today.