Posts

Really great article from the creator of Gmail on how important it is to be experimenting constantly with live code to drive innovation and how much more strongly is speaks than a fat PPT deck.

Two great gems here, the first on time for unapproved ideas:

The other point is that it’s important to make prototyping new ideas, especially bad ideas, as fast and easy as possible… This is also where Google’s “20% time” comes in – if you want innovation, it’s critical that people are able to work on ideas that are unapproved and generally thought to be stupid. The real value of “20%” is not the time, but rather the “license” it gives to work on things that “aren’t important”.

I’m noticing an interesting trend amongst geeks in the last year. A lot of them are rolling their own CMSs as a learning exercise and for their own personal sites. And most of them have a few things in common :

1. They publish to static html or minimally, build static files and don’t have a database
2. The source files are straight up text, markdown, textile or they’re using an editor like MarsEdit, Ecto or TextMate through XML-RPC to post
3. It then deploys or rsync’s for them from a local copy (a la capistrano or rake)
4. It’s all source code version controlled with rollbacks (a la git)
5. Backups are a snap
6. Portable (as in, copy or deploy files over to a new hoster)

Now I can respect and totally understand this since, I do dev and have to admit before I put my migrated wordpress installation under git and capistrano deploy it would have been an utter pain to manage.

I had one of those weird little sinking feelings this morning as I looked at my friends’ facebook feeds. One of my friends, AG had been keeping his bookmarking on magnolia, which apparently suffered a major outage today and took some of his precious bookmarking with him. When I checked at time of posting the service was still down and they say they’ve got data corruption and loss. Not good.

Little uh-oh moment right then, realizing that I had no backups of my delicious bookmarks which, ever since Yahoo released the fantastic Firefox delicious add-on , I’ve been using in-the-cloud bookmarking exclusively. I was suddenly recalling someone’s Stallman-esque blog rant about how the cloud was all fine provided :

I figured someone was going to do it before long, because I’d already thought this would make a great business (provided Amazon don’t just do it and eat your lunch):

Put an easy to use console over Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Services (S3) for people who don’t want to mess with infrastructure so you can focus on the dev side.

So, Scalr’s web service is fundamentally a management, deployment and monitoring web console that sits on top of Amazon’s EC2, EBS and S3 services to let you roll your own automatically scalable server farm with failover via web interface at just $50/m over the Amazon charges.

If you’ve been keeping up with the blog, it’s probably not hard to figure out that I really, really like git and capistrano. They’ve made my development and deployment better and much less painful. I’ve also been using github quite a bit lately (as well as pondering here on the ranch how we need to redesign our set of development and deployment tools in order to gain some consistency over our php, java and rails development as well as make them as painless and easy as possible).

Just pointed out to me that the latest Skype beta includes a iChat-like screensharing feature for users so that collaboration between OSX users is possible. Very cool. Haven’t had a chance to test it yet, and probably not as polished at iChat’s but still have to say this will be a killer feature when it works between OSX, Windows and Linux. It is definitely needed.

Apparently video and audio quality are also improved (great for my parents to worry about how I’m not taking care of myself).

I recently reinstalled mysql on my Macbook under OSX 10.5 Leopard and used the 64 bit MySQL (hey, Leopard is 64 bit! Why not?).

Anyhow, when I went to using rails again, mongrel_rails start kept throwing a whine on the fact that the old mysql gem (2.7) was 32 bit.

Found this after removing the old gem to get it working with 64 bit. Definitely not trivial to figure out:

There are a lot of things to really love about Rails apps. One of them is not deployment. Rails boffins, regardless of what they say, do look with longing envy over at those php kids with their simple copy of files up to a server and having it run on apache.

Admittedly, I’d rather deploy via capistrano anyway (cause even php boffins should be doing it that way) since it is fabulous and does deployment like it should be done, but there is something to be said for the wonderful mod_php under apache. Configuring proxying and mongrels under either apache or nginx is simply not fun. It feels like work.

I’m pondering whether I could pull off National Novel Writing Month this year and pen a novel in the month of November as the nights get longer and the days colder.

50k words by the end of the month ? That does seem a little daunting. Say 2000 words a day over 25 days ?

Ok, maybe it wouldn’t be a good novel, but…

One of the (few) things I actually do always admire about the US around election time, is the incredible number of people and creativity willing to work on getting people out to vote. Considering the Canadian election that sadly has Harper and the Conservatives back in a minority, had historically low turnout, I do think when I get back that I need to work on something like this.

And you have to respect moveon.org . Consistently, these guys are amazing with their ability to leverage web actions to get fundraising and mobilize support.