The Middle

Seriously funny: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith - 133t trailer. And I'm not looking forward to this movie. It's going to be terrible.

Ruby Golf!

What better time than a 4-hour flight to Vegas to play with the new Ajax helpers in everyone's favorite web application framework?

Yeah, ok, I'm sure there are tons of better times.

The good news is, it really is as simple as promised. I really thought, even as clean as Rails has been, that this would have been a lot uglier. Happy to be proven wrong, it fits in beautifully with the framework, and is an absolute breeze to use.

This stuff can't keep getting better, can it?

As others have noted, there is a lack of how-to documentation for this stuff. I managed to put it together in about ten minutes with a downloaded copy of the Rails 0.11 rubydocs at my side (is that what those are called? The stuff that looks like javadoc on crack?). Then again, I'm really just whining at this point, the feature was released yesterday for crying out loud, I'm sure the tutorials will come.

On that note, I'm dying for the announced Rails books from Dave Thomas et all (sorry, only links from memory on net-less airplanes). I manage to read through the reference docs when I have something to figure out, but there's still way too much of this stuff that I view as magic at this point. If it's working for now, I don't bother digging into the how or why, only really diving deep when I hit a brick wall.

Heading to Vegas in a few hours with good friends, expecting the typical bad behavior to commence shortly after landing.

Can't wait to dig into David's new Ajax helpers: new Ruby on Rails v 0.11.0

If you're the sneaky devil who bought this house, mere moments before I could make my move...

Then shame on you. Back to searching.

This is beautiful, Johansen Creates DRM-Free Interface to iTunes.

I had no idea the downloaded songs were DRM free, and that was all added by iTunes after the fact. Makes sense, though.

Grab this while it's hot, this is likely to disappear from the net faster than DeCSS.

The boys at Forever Geek are talking about the Slashdot Effect Weakening, and ask why this is.

Personally, everything I read on /. I've already seen hours or even days before somewhere else.

/. is fun for the comments (assuming you're reading at something like +2), but the number of times I see something actually "new" there in a given day is rapidly approaching zero. Granted, once in a while they link to some novel thing like a nutjob who's ported Apache to his wristwatch and then hosted the HowTo from it, and those still tank within minutes. But more often than not, it's old news with a bunch of people rabidly arguing in the comments. So I skip the link, having already read it, and read the comments once in a while. It's a geek message board now.

So I've been playing with Google Maps like a good boy, but I have to say, those maps desparately need a scale on them.

The UI is great, the interaction with local searches and directions is great, but I'm constantly glancing around the map pane, frantically wondering, "Could I walk from this place over here to that place over there?", or "Man, how long would that drive be?". Yahoo! does it, you know. So do most other sane map-providers in the world.

I don't want to have to go through the orderal of getting directions from one place to the other, I just want a stick in the corner that will let me eyeball a quick 'yes' or 'no'.

Seriously fellas, stop goofing off

Tuesday tomorrow, time for another Raleigh/Cary meetup. Location Info:

Cafe Cyclo 2020 Cameron St Raleigh, NC 27605 (map) (919) 829-3773

But apparently, one with quick email reflexes.

Dear Andy,

Congratulations on being one of the first 200 people to email Ask Jeeves about receiving a free "I love Bloglines t-shirt." We will send your t-shirt to the address that you have provided on March 14, so you should be receiving it in the near future.

If you have any questions/comments, feel free to let us know.

Kind regards,

Paul Loeffler (Fellow Bloglines Enthusiast) Ask Jeeves, Inc.

Reading this mainly just reminded me I do in fact have a blog, even if I'm totally without anything interesting to post.

And to make J$ and gnubbs jealous.

J$, mark yourself in 43T with a location already, give the hometown some love.No Cleveland?

In the excellent book Editing Line-Items Efficiently, Dave Goodlad goes through his develpment process for using some XMLHttpRequest elements to streamline a Rails application.

Having done the same exercise some time ago, I have to say I was highly impressed with Dave's methodology and the 'clean-ness' of his design. I wrote up a little app to perform almost exactly the same function (editing users) with almost exactly the same UI (table view, click an edit button to replace text with form fields, and a save button), but I was far too heavily reliant on Javascript.

The JS was all nice and abstracted, but relied on some form naming conventions to properly munge the DOM objects, obviously less than ideal. Dave's example drives home the following points:

• You already have an excellent framework available in Rails
• Said framework is really nice at templating and HTML generation
• The JS to perform the request calls should be as simple as possible

XMLHttpRequest (in theory) returns XML. Imagine this as XHTML, and all of a sudden your request just grabs a string and sets that string as the id.innerHTML of a parent object. Beautiful! No convoluted iterations over JS elements, and you get the power of Rails to generate the HTML for you.

Of course, this is only one way to do it, but I found it to be far superior to my initial foray in the same direction. Time to go download it and implement his methods myself, maybe throw in some error checking & timeout handling, just in case.

Don't try to do the heavy lifting in JavaScript, or even light lifting, keep it is an intermediary transport. Let the far superior middleware handle your lifting needs.

From now on, I will release all work-related stress by watching this:Watch it shred!

Chilling in gorgeous San Diego for the week, learning about stuff and hanging out with a bunch of smart people.

I just feel bad for all the folks in their hotel rooms tethered to the internet.

The Airport Express is a wonderful device. Mobile, wireless internet in a package smaller than your fist. A worthy addition the the Digital Lifestyle Bag.

Do you watch it?

For the ESPN karma? For the poker? Or for the pretty girls?

From the blog of Bobby Woolf:

This adds up to what IBM is calling Service Oriented Modeling and Architecture (SOMA).

Please, please make the IBM approved acronym for the end-all, be-all solution to enterprise software woes be 'SOMA'.

Someone should really send them an email about that.

For my own reference: What's Special About This Number?

I never knew there was a Grateful Dead Closet, but I was certainly in it. On more than one occasion, upon telling people that my parents started taking me to Dead shows once I hit the ripe old age of 12 or so, I've received the obligatory "Oh, that's why ..." mumbled statements and accompanying weird looks.

And Ed Cone! Who knew? Although the writing (speaking?) was certainly on the wall. He seemed like such a fine, upstanding member of society. Could it be that fans of this great band actually aren't all roaming, homeless hippies earning a living selling veggie burritos and bead necklaces in parking lots? I suppose it could just mean that some of them have moved on...or jumped onto the Phish tour, although even that has now come to a close. I guess I'll just hold out hope that a meaningful life can still be had, even with a frightening addiction to the song "Black Peter".

So I'm outed. iTunes tells me I'm currently at 252 songs, 25 albums, 30.2 hours, and 2.02 GB of music, far and away my largest single band collection. That's not even counting all the various concerts I've downloaded and burned over the years...

The initial Raleigh/CaryMeetup went down last night, and it was nice to get out and meet some of the faces behind the text I'm used to seeing. Some interesting discussions were had, and it was general perceived that a good time was had by all.

Sadly, I'll be in sunny San Diego next week, therefore unable to attend, but I'll be back the week after, promise.

And just for Grace, we should really call it the Raleigh/Cary/Apex blogger meetup. Not that I see her coming back for more of a "couple of pretty little well-dressed, well-pressed guys with engineering degrees (or something) who wanted to talk about engineering (or something)." I was kinda hoping it'd be more than that myself, but wasn't disappointed with it. At the very least, it was a nice break from opressing the poor and uneducated.

I just got this for the first time tonight, and hadn't heard any news of it elsewhere:

Is this google's way of eliminating the various alternative ways to use their storage system?

They'll promise you a gigabyte, as long as they can assume 98% of you will never use more than 50 megabytes anyway. Giving everyone a gigabyte of web storage, however, seems like a much less lucrative proposition.

Don't be evil, my ass.

(Yes, I know there are all those "Terms of Service" type things, but this is very anti-google. Interesting uses of web services are cool.)