After some recent contemplation, I’ve completely rethought my approach to photography. I decided to write about this after reading Khoi Vinh’s post about a digital photography class that he’s taking and the kinds of pictures he aspires to take. For many years, I’d say that my taste in photography has been pretentious and that my aspirations matched. I wanted to take the kinds of photos that people look at and think, “How artful and interesting.” ...
A few months ago I signed up for an emusic.com subscription. For about $10 a month, you get the right to download 40 MP3s a month that are yours to keep. At 25 cents a track, it’s a great deal as long as the site has enough music that interests you to keep your queue full. So far, so good. The one catch is that the 40 downloads are “use them or lose them”. When your account rolls over, you lose any downloads that you didn’t consume. I’ve been good about using all of my downloads every month, so that hasn’t been a problem, but if you’re the kind of person who loses track of this sort of thing, emusic is a good way to spend money without getting any value in return. ...
I was trying to add my name to the list of attendees on the BarCampRDU Web site yesterday, and I found that regardless of the time of day, I couldn’t get in, because the wiki software that is used to manage the site grants an exclusive lock to the person editing the page for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, the lock remains but someone else can steal it. Using exclusive locks to avoid the lost update problem is painful, especially in Web applications, because users can easily navigate away from a page without providing any kind of signal to the Web application that the lock should be released. For example, if I go to the BarCampRDU page, click on edit, and close my browser window, I’ll keep my exclusive lock on the page for 15 minutes even though I’m not really editing it any more. This may seem like irresponsible behavior, but most people don’t expect clicking on a link to give them an exclusive lock on a resource. That’s not the Web way. ...
I just got my blog set up at Vox. The posting tools are pretty nice. Nicer than my Movable 3.2 installation anyway, although not as nice as MarsEdit. Don’t expect the name of the new weblog to last. The emergence of Vox has led me to lots of thoughts about the evolution of online communities, but I’ll get to them some other time. I should also note that the two levels of membership at Vox are “standard” and “starter”. A standard member can invite as many starter members as they like, starter members don’t get any invitations at all. I’m not sure who gets “standard” invitations. Obviously Mena Trott has them, but she’s the boss. I’m not sure who else does. ...
I was able to obtain an invitation to Vox yesterday, and after using the invitation I got my first surprise – when you sign up for Vox, you don’t start out with all of the toys that everybody else has. You are initially inducted at Starter level. What’s that mean? You don’t get your own weblog. Or really any opportunity to publish anything except for comments on other people’s weblogs. In the meantime you’re supposed to build your neighborhood (add existing users as contacts) and post comments. I guess at some point you get promoted to being a Standard user, and at that point you can start adding your own content to Vox, and invite other people to become Starters themselves. ...
I’m anxious to see Google’s spreadsheet product, because I strongly suspect that it will do 99% of the things that I actually use Excel for, which represents about 2% of its overall capabilities. Excel is an interesting product to me, in that it’s as close as you can get to being an application development platform without actually being one. I’ve known plenty of people whose job consisted mostly of writing Excel macros. I don’t think anybody’s Web application is going to take the place of that. ...
One question I’m still puzzling through with Ruby on Rails is the logical unit of reuse for Web actions. This is a key question regardless of which Web application platform you use. Since everybody has been exposed to PHP, let me use it to explain what I’m talking about. Let’s say you’re writing an application that enables a user to manage a weblog. Obviously, there’s going to be some shared code that you put in include files, but what I’m talking about is the top level interface to the Web site, the URLs. You could have one URL, index.php, and then put all of the verbs for your site in parameters, so you’d have URLs like: ...
I didn’t think I needed a Vox invitation, but now I think I do. Anyone care to oblige?
This is a sort of lazyweb request. Anybody know of a tool like Mozilla Tinderbox for Ruby on Rails applications? What I’m looking for is an application that will periodically check out a Ruby on Rails application from version control, run all of the tests, and publish the results of those tests and a test coverage report on a Web page. At work we have three or four Ruby on Rails projects under development currently, and it would be great to have a single page where anybody could quickly assess whether we’re testing everything that needs tests and that those tests are actually working. ...
I’m testing out MarsEdit for posting to my weblog. Lately I’ve had a few incidents where I was composing something and closed the browser window before realizing that I was getting rid of something I couldn’t get back. The worst incident involved 2,000 words or so that I composed for our wiki at work. Normally I save compulsively every few minutes, but I worked on this article for a long time without saving, and then I threw it all away by mistake. ...