How To Understand American Politics In One Easy, But Time-Consuming Step

Read Thomas Frank. Start here.

Google Investing Hundreds Of Millions In Green Power

Sometimes that company really is pretty cool.

Put This In Your ApplicationController And Smoke It

def instance(conditions = :all)
  i_var = instance_variable_get "@#{model_name.pluralize}"
  i_var = model_name.camelize.constantize.find(conditions)
end

before_filter :instance

The idea comes from Dan Yoder.


Update: I am a crackhead. That should use ivar_set, not _get.

And Now, A Unicorn Chaser

My last post was pretty horrific, so:

Censoring Violent Images: A Weird Pattern

The video game Manhunt 2 uses very violent imagery and themes and had to be edited extensively in order to be released in the United States. Selling the game at all is illegal in the United Kingdom. There's a censorship controversy around Manhunt 2 in the video game world, which, thankfully, did not spill over the way the controversy around Grand Theft Auto 3 (from the same game studio) did.



Someone else recently saw a small censorship controversy which did not spill over into the mainstream either. Hollywood director Brian De Palma made a "docudrama" about Iraq called Redacted. The final moments of Redacted feature a montage of photographs of dead Iraqis. These are photographs which you cannot see in the news, due to the American military's control over the American press. The military restricts the movement and presence of journalists in Iraq by "embedding" them among military units - a practice pioneered by Joseph Goebbels, of the Nazi regime - and has shot at journalists who were not "embedded", including the British journalist Terry Lloyd, whom the American military killed. (The British Government conducted an investigation and found the killing unlawful).



On that level, these are photographs which are already heavily censored. However, there is a further level of censorship. I've read conflicting reports. Some state that Redacted's distributor, Magnolia Pictures, placed black bars over the eyes of the deceased Iraqis; others say that the images were removed entirely. I've seen several of these conflicting reports so my belief is that both things happened; Magnolia altered some pictures and removed others entirely.



The first thing to realize is that neither Manhunt 2 nor Redacted have gotten great reviews, as far as their merits as a video game or as a movie are concerned. This might be the reason the controversies didn't spill over into the mainstream; the Grand Theft Auto controversy, after all, revolved around an utterly fantastic game. The second thing, just as a disclaimer, I've personally always found it weird that American movies haven't censored violence much in the past, given how much sex is censored in American movies and TV. However, the violence removed from Redacted is nothing compared to what you'll see in Hostel or movies like it, and in fact one of the sequences removed from Manhunt 2 to enable its release was very, very similar to a scene in Hostel 2, which was R-rated.

But those are just caveats. Here's the interesting question. Lots of people say violent movies encourage violent behavior; but violent crime in the US as a whole has diminished in parallel with the rise in violent subject matter in entertainment. (For example, Los Angeles is on track to finish 2007 with the lowest murder rate in four decades.) Likewise, the violent subject matter in Redacted was explicitly and deliberately compiled and presented for the purpose of halting violence. Before Redacted's release, Brian De Palma was quoted in several places saying it would be the images in his movie - the same images which Magnolia removed - which would finally end the war. (Everybody knows it was similar images on national TV which ended Vietnam.)

I took out a really horrifying picture here.

Obviously, these are provocative issues, which is one reason I'm so glad I banned comments. Every question raised or implied here is interesting, but the one thing I want to draw attention to here is the possibility that maybe showing people violent images actually discourages violence. I'm not sure if it's true or not. But all the video game press touches on Grand Theft Auto, and I used to play GTA a lot. Me and my brother would spend hours on this game, and a lot of the time we wouldn't even do the missions. Nine times out of ten we'd just kill innocent people and blow up cars at random until the cops showed up, and then kill as many cops as we could - ideally with the flamethrower or the rocket launcher - until they sent in the FBI. Then the game was to see if you could outlast the FBI in a car chase, and then, if you won that "level", they brought in the National Guard. Then the game was to see how long you could stay alive with the National Guard after you.

I'm sure this sounds like an anarchist's fantasy playground, but that's the point - that's exactly what it was. It was a fantasy playground. All these video game censorship monkeys need to remember that video games aren't real. And what really makes this all relevant is that I used to drive really fast, and these days I don't. Every time I'd leave my brother's house after playing Grand Theft Auto, I'd notice myself driving the way I did in the game. These days I drive slowly and carefully and I always get guys in sportscars who aren't old enough to drink legally going insane with frustration behind me. I don't even break the speed limit.

Just something to think about.

My Mindstorms-Fu Is Rusty

Below, a robot which can drive around a table without falling off. Took me hours.

You Must Fight The Power

Lego Mindstorms Robotics On OS X: Hello World

Here's the dead-stupid overview of how to get your Mindstorms kit running on OS X.

Getting Stuff

First, build a robot with wheels powered by motors on B and C, and with the ultrasonic sensor plugged into sensor port 4.

Then download and install NXTBrowser.

Next download and install NBC/NXC. Give the NBC compiler exec permissions:

chmod a+x nbc

Coding

Then copy the code near the middle of this nice walkthrough, where it says "NXC Sample Code." Put it in a file in the same directory as your NXC install, and call it wander.nxc. Compile it into something the Mindstorms brain can handle with this command:

nbc -O=wander.rxe wander.nxc

Transmission

Turn on your Mindstorms brain; go to Bluetooth and choose On. You should see the words "Turn On?". When you do, hit the orange button. Boom.

Now go to your Bluetooth settings in System Preferences. A "wizard" will walk you through the steps of connecting to the Mindstorms brain. You may have to input a simple passkey on the Mindstorms brain. You do this just by using the arrow keys and orange button. (It may be possible to skip this step; I don't know.)

Now open NXTBrowser.



Choose "Software." There's an "Upload" button at the bottom of the UI; click it and you'll get a file browser. Choose the NBC file you created, wander.rxe, and NXTBrowser will put it on your Mindstorms brain. Go to the Mindstorms brain and choose "Software Files" - you'll see "wander", which is the program you just added. Hit Run and place robot on floor; you're done!

Alternatives

I'm using NXC; it's a C derivative. There's a Java derivative which looks pretty great, but for me personally the frustration of attempting to build it on OS X was too much. A few people have been successful with it, however. There's also a Ruby library, ruby-nxt; although I'm big into Ruby, and I definitely enjoy it more than C, the Ruby version is based on a remote-control model, as opposed to actually putting a program in the robot's brain. If you're building arm robots I would say go with ruby-nxt instead, but for robots that run around on the kitchen floor, NXC is my weapon of choice.

Dice? Physical Dice?

In 2007?!

The Job I Want Next

For a very long time I've been easy to hire and hard to keep. This was a deliberate thing. I chose it for particular reasons, to accomplish specific goals. It did that. But I've decided to change my system entirely, and become hard to hire, but easy to keep.

As a programmer, I've worked for around 30 different companies, almost always in a short-term capacity, as a consultant or a contractor. If you include my time as a graphic design freelancer and my work as an office temp during my late teens and early twenties - yes, I was working full-time and living in my own apartment at 19 - the number of companies is probably more like 60. There are disadvantages to this, which is why I'm changing my approach, but there are advantages as well.

The primary advantage for me was that short-term work always gives you periods of downtime in-between. I used this downtime to write screenplays and novels, to make music, to read very extensively on a very wide range of subjects, and so on and so forth. A secondary advantage is that practical immersion in a very large number of working environments over the course of several years gives you a very good feel for corporate culture. I can spot signs of trouble in a company the way old sea dogs can smell a storm in the air three days before it happens.



Greek sailor on Flickr

However, during the dot-com downturn, I had a lot more downtime. I had been doing some work I really didn't enjoy - maintaining legacy Perl for an investment bank. I was extremely bored there. I had contacted a recruiter to see if she could get me a better job, and she told me I should be grateful I had a job at all - 200,000 people had just been fired in the city of San Francisco alone. Faced with the realization that I would have to either stay with the job I had or be unemployed, I chose unemployment. I packed up my things and went far away.



A camper I used to live in; my dog and my dad's dog

I figured the downturn would blow over and I'd be able to find a new job easy enough. I was right; I just massively misjudged the scale of time on which this rhythm would operate. The downturn did blow over and finding jobs did become effortless again, but it didn't happen half as quick as I thought it would. So I had a lot more downtime than I had anticipated.

During this downtime, I was able to spend a lot more time on writing and art, although there were also significant downsides - I ate less food, bought less clothes, and owned less cool electronic toys. Eventually I came back to technology, partly because I enjoy it, and partly because I enjoy owning toys and eating food. But I definitely came back with a different perspective. Learning to draw is a good example.



I painted this in 2003 or 2004

Firstly, learning to draw changed my perspective on programming because learning to draw will change your perspective on anything. If we're talking about realistic drawing, depicting actual objects, the primary skill - really the only skill - is accurate, detailed observation. That's really all there is to it. When you draw, you make tons of observations, and you only keep the accurate ones. If you practice this mode of thinking, and then apply it to code, you're going to find your code getting more succinct - more powerful, and easier to understand.

Secondly, I took several art classes simultaneously for half a year, struggling with it, then locked myself in my place for a week over winter break with a copy of Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain and nailed it. One lesson here is that Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain is a hell of a book, but the most relevant lesson is that working hard at something for half a year and then obsessing over it for a week is probably a lot more productive than working a short-term job for half a year and then obsessing over something else for a week.

If you need a practical experience to cement this lesson for you, ask yourself what's more productive: a marathon coding session before you work for half a year on the problem? Or a marathon coding session after you work for half a year on the problem?

When I look back on that experience today, I realize, not only had I been shortchanging myself in my artistic interests, by sandwiching them in between short-term work, I had been shortchanging myself at work as well, because none of my marathon coding sessions ever took place after half a year's work on the problem. Actually, I say none - in fact, one company, my favorite job, I stuck around for about a year - a whole year - and only left after they managed to convince me to stay a few extra months. I left, get this madness, because I was bored. But during the time at that company, I wrote the code that I'm still proudest of, to this day. I spent a long time maintaining a legacy system, and then I managed to convince my primary customer to let me rewrite it, and the rewrite was such an improvement that people started calling me a Perl guru. (It was years before I encountered the work of real Perl gurus, so for a time I even believed it about myself, but that's another story.)

To produce genuinely excellent work requires consistent, dedicated effort over time. So my theory - that alternating short-term work with artistic "vacations" would give me the best of both worlds - actually just made me a jack of all trades and master of none.

Consequently, the job I want next is not some highly lucrative, short-term consulting, nor a permanent, full-time job. I want a permanent, part-time job as a senior Rubyist. Alternating between work and art was a mistake. I want to address my artistic interests in a consistent, dedicated way, and that includes programming.

I've been looking for this in a tentative, maybe-ish way for a while now, but I've only recently figured out why it really is a good idea. If anybody out there's been wondering, gosh, how do I hire somebody like Giles Bowkett? - now's your chance. Or more accurately, up until now, every moment was your chance, because I was easy to hire but hard to keep, but this period now might be your last chance for several years. If you're a programmer with other interests, like music, art, etc., maybe you should look for the same thing. One very excellent programmer I know gets "fuck programming" phases where all he wants to do is make drum & bass. Maybe he should. Interesting things happen when programmers make music.

Anyway, I'm not going to tell other people they should do what I want to do, especially when I haven't even proven that it's possible yet, but that's the job I want next, and I will say that I'm probably not the only programmer in the world who would enjoy that kind of thing. Why would an excellent programmer get "fuck programming" phases? It's not because they don't love programming. You really can't be an excellent programmer without loving it. It's because they love other things too, and it's good to do the things you love - all of them.

Update: I got an e-mail asking, "Why not just start your own business?" Other people have asked me that as well. So, I guess it's a FAQ. My answer, from the mail:

The thing is, I'm serving two masters either way. If I do programming and art (or actually acting), I've got to think about both programming and acting. If I start my own business, I've got to think about both programming and business. In either case I'm thinking about two things. I think I'll do better if I think about two things I'm interested in, rather than one thing I'm interested in and one thing I'm not interested in.

(I am actually interested in some aspects of business, but more the management stuff than the business stuff - i.e., more healthy development practices than accounting and planning and sales.)

Psychological Neoteny: Prolonged Immaturity As An Evolutionary Adaptation In Science (And Technology)

I have a tattoo of the Decepticon logo.



I spent at least $400 on Legos this year. And there are Lego guys who put me to shame.



The mid-twentieth century saw the rise of the boy-genius, probably because a personality type characterized by prolonged youthfulness is advantageous both in science and modern life generally. This is the evolution of ‘psychological-neoteny’, in which ever-more people retain for ever-longer the characteristic behaviours and attitudes of earlier developmental stages. Whereas traditional societies are characterized by initiation ceremonies marking the advent of adulthood, these have now dwindled and disappeared. In a psychological sense, some contemporary individuals never actually become adults.

Fascinating analysis from a UK psychiatrist.

Seaside/Smalltalk Job In Vancouver

For Deepcove Labs. Posted on ruby-talk by Boris Popov.

The Long Tail (Backwards) In Blog Readership

As usual, the spike is a result of posting something that I figured nobody would ever find interesting.

I guess the moral of the story is post a lot, even if it seems random.

A Threat Decoded (Hollywood Tangent)

(This one has no high-tech content at all - sorry.)

Here's the first in a series of videos featuring speechless actors supporting the writers' strike:



The secret decoder ring, for people outside entertainment, is that the actors' union has an upcoming contract negotiation, similar to the one which caused the writers' strike, and the actors' union has had a presence at many picket lines during the writers' strike, and a very strong presence at the more high-profile events (which is kind of how it works with actors).

What this really means is that if the writers' strike doesn't end before the negotiation date for the contract with the actors' union, the actors' union will go on strike too.

It's kind of interesting, because this video appears to be a fuzzy warm "we like you guys" thing, but it's actually a multi-billion-dollar threat.

Already, the networks are hearing from angry ad-spot customers who want their money back. Companies who buy ad time from networks tend to pay in millions. Returning millions of dollars to a customer is something companies like to avoid.

Get This Book

Have you ever noticed how, instead of computers becoming smarter and smarter, like in Star Trek, more and more people have become programmers? I don't mean professionally - I mean in the sense that you can program a toaster, or a microwave, or "program" the timer on an old-school VCR.

The explanation is in here:



Also the most interesting observations on screenwriting I've ever read, and the only cogent explanation of video games. If you've got a friend who doesn't understand why you spend hours playing video games, get them this book in the upcoming holidays. It's fantastic.

How To Customize Safari Beyond All Reason

Here's a screenshot of Safari plus my desktop:



If you use Safari, either on Tiger or Leopard, you'll notice some differences. If you're reading this in Safari right now, you'll definitely see some differences. I had to go into Safari's innards to fix an interface annoyance, and while I was there, I decided to have some fun.

To change your windows so they don't have that "oh look it's high-tech" brushed-steel texture thing going on, do this:

sudo open /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Browser.nib/

And then go to Tools > Show Inspector and do this:





Voila - the "cool" brushed silver is gone and the "awesome" drop shadow is gone too.

You can take it further than that. Do this:

ls -laF /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/*.tif*

...to get a list of all the TIFF-format images used in Safari, the app. If you change all of these images and keep them at the correct size and color depth, you can probably create an entirely new visual theme for Safari if you want. I say "probably" because these edits don't always work. One thing I absolutely hate about OS X is the Help menus, so I tried to remove Safari's Help menu, and unfortunately this destroyed something important, somehow, because after that Safari refused to boot. (Luckily Interface Builder backs up your interface files when you edit them.)

However, this does bring us to the other thing you need if you're going to edit Safari: a backup Web browser.



I like Shiira the best. Geoff Grosenbach used it in a Peepcode screencast, and it's got a happy whale. The UI is also pretty cool, and smart, and comfortable, and there's even a Dashboard Widget version, but honestly, it's all about the whale. Or maybe the fish. Looking at the tail, I think it's actually a fish. Either way, it's definitely happy.

Camino is also good. I use Firefox for dev, of course, but its cursor behavior truly annoys me, so I avoid it for anything but dev. Before I figured out how to fix the interface annoyance that started this all off, I thought I was going to have to give up on Safari entirely, so I checked out some other browsers as well - Opera, OmniWeb, and Sunrise. Sunrise has the most original thinking and the least stability. I didn't really dig Opera. OmniWeb's marketing annoyed me so much that I never really spent much time on it.

How To Fix Safari's Silly New Textarea Alert

Safari 3 improves over Safari 2 in many ways, but it totally sucks ASS in one way: if you fill out a text area field on a form and then navigate away from the page or close the window, it pops up an aggravating little alert to make sure you really wanted to do that. Apple added this because they were apparently unaware that adults use OS X too.

Just kidding. I don't know why they did it. I do know it makes using nifty auto-submitting Ajax apps a pain in the ass in Safari, where before life was good. Luckily this is really easy to fix.

First you do this:

sudo mate /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Resources/Defaults.plist

(Assuming you use TextMate.)

And then you do this:



And then, if Safari works like any sane person would expect it to, you have me to thank.

(However, if your computer suddenly explodes, it was all your fault. I am not an Apple developer, or a lawyer. Or a tuna casserole, but hopefully you knew that.)

Update: Jack Nutting told me that there's a pretty good chance you can do it an easier way:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugConfirmTossingUnsubmittedFormText false

and adds that "the advantage of using the defaults command (if it works) is that the setting will stick in your user account even when new versions of Safari are released." As far as I can tell, it worked, although I guess we'll have to wait til the next Safari upgrade to be sure.

Facebook Apps: The Facebook Trap

Facebook would like you to believe they are giving you a new platform. Anybody who's been on the Web for a while knows that Facebook is selling old wine in new bottles. And yet building Facebook apps can still make sense.

People like to talk about leveraging social networks, but here's what they leave out. Joining a social network takes five minutes (if that). Staying active in a social network is a full-time job. I know exactly what that's like, because I used to organize and promote nightclubs and raves. Going to a club takes five dollars. Being a clubber or a raver takes time. In fact it eats up your life (but in a good way).



Social networking Web sites aren't platforms. They're not circles of friends, either. They're nightclubs. Some people spend all their time at these things. Some people never go once. A new social network becomes hot, everybody who's everybody is there, and one day, suddenly, without warning, everyone is somewhere else. At most of them all you have to do to get in is show your ID.



There's a lot of money in nightclubs. You go to the Winter Music Conference in South Beach, FL, you can easily spend a hundred dollars just to get into one particular club one particular night. And it won't be the only club you go to that night. There's a lot of money in club music, club clothes, expensive vodka, designer drugs, laser lights, and really big speakers. The people who work that system successfully do very well by it.



But if you're building a Facebook app, you're building a sound system you can never take out of the club. Spending money on something which won't work anywhere else only makes sense if the payoff is immediate. It's not really an investment, because assuming any given social network will persist for any given amount of time defies history. These things have been growing first hip and then stale on a cyclical basis for five years. A New York Times article blamed various executives when Friendster went from hot to not, but fashion features a great deal of randomness. Criticizing upper management for being unable to predict effectively random phenomena is like criticizing them for being unable to defy gravity. It might make a lot of sense to leverage social networking applications for business purposes, but it definitely doesn't make a lot of sense to do so in a way that locks you into any one particular social network.

Some companies think building customized social networks is the answer. Some developers think OpenID is the answer. Personally, I think the smartest thing is to do what nightclub and rave promoters do. They go to other people's raves and other people's nightclubs and they pass out flyers for their own events. If you're building a Facebook app, you want to make sure it directs people to your own site, because one day Facebook won't be fashionable and nobody will be there. Like Myspace - nobody goes there, because it's too crowded.

First They Came For The Moths

And I did not object, because I was not a moth. THEN THEY FED MY BRAINS TO A FUCKING ROBOT!

Wow. Fuck That.

Don't be evil? If this is true, then good luck.

Why I Program In Ruby (And Maybe Why You Shouldn't)

Neal Ford recorded an interesting podcast recently, and it's definitely worth a listen, but there's one point I want to raise - it could be a point of actual disagreement, or "violent agreement", but whatever kind of point it is, I think it matters.

Neal brings up the fact that the same programs can be written in any language which is Turing-complete, so the choice then becomes not "which language can I write this program in?" - because you can write it in any language - but "which language gives me the best options in terms of power and efficiency?"



This question overlooks one of the fundamental design principles of Ruby. First and foremost, Ruby was designed to be enjoyable to program in. In one of many Web interviews, Matz said:

Because of the Turing completeness theory, everything one Turing-complete language can do can theoretically be done by another Turing-complete language, but at a different cost. You can do everything in assembler, but no one wants to program in assembler anymore. From the viewpoint of what you can do, therefore, languages do differ—but the differences are limited. For example, Python and Ruby provide almost the same power to the programmer.

Instead of emphasizing the what, I want to emphasize the how part: how we feel while programming. That's Ruby's main difference from other language designs. I emphasize the feeling, in particular, how I feel using Ruby. I didn't work hard to make Ruby perfect for everyone, because you feel differently from me. No language can be perfect for everyone. I tried to make Ruby perfect for me, but maybe it's not perfect for you. The perfect language for Guido van Rossum is probably Python.

The question of "which language gives me the best options in terms of power and efficiency?" is deemed less important in this set of design principles than the question of "which language gives me the best feeling while I program?"



In Japan, the distinction between craft and art is blurred at most, possibly nonexistent. Japanese theories of art (and craft) often involve principles of harmony and balance. We might debate in America whether programming is an art or a craft, but if you've got one word for the same thing, you're asking whether programming is an artcraft or an artcraft, and the answer, obviously, is "Yes, you idiot." So to say harmony and balance matter in programming might seem esoteric or self-indulgent in America, but it's as obvious in Japan as saying that the sky is blue.

Harmony and balance make you feel good. American Rubyists frequently take up all the points of Ruby's power, expressiveness, and efficiency, but they don't seem to register the point that Ruby was designed to make you feel good. Even Rubyists who want to explain why Ruby makes them feel good often fail to mention that it was expressly designed for that exact purpose. Neal does this in his podcast.

Neal's podcast is mainly about JRuby. JRuby is a first-generation American - a child born here of one foreign parent, Ruby itself. I'm a first-generation American too, and even though I have two human, English parents, rather than one Japanese parent made of code, I think I feel JRuby's pain here. So I'm just going to tell you - every first-generation American sees this happen all the time. Some idea from another country or culture disappears like mist scattered by winds unless Americans already have a synonym for it. If they don't have a word for it, they don't have a box to put it in, and the idea just falls through the cracks.



It's not even an American thing. Everyone who really learns a new spoken or written language - a regular human language - discovers new ideas they didn't previously have words for. Conversely, anyone who tries to tell somebody about an idea, when that person has no word for it, faces an uphill struggle at best.



The idea that a language should be designed from the ground up for the purpose of providing you with an experience of harmony, calm, and enjoyment is fundamentally alien to American programming culture, and when American programmers discuss why they prefer Ruby, the fact that it was designed for their enjoyment vanishes from their own vision even when it's right in front of their eyes. The closest equivalent we have in this country is an idea that the language was designed to be fun - which is similar, but not the same thing. It implies toys, rather than Zen gardens.



David Heinemeier Hansson is one programmer who understands this aspect of Ruby. Maybe it's a Danish thing. In Rails' early days, he made an effort to publicize it, although that's fast becoming obscured in history as Rails turns into the thing everybody uses.



The thing that everybody uses is always a hot topic in techniology. People like arguing about "why you should program in Language X." But it's not really about why you should program in X. It's about why I'm going to program in X, and why I think you might enjoy it too. If the number one principle behind designing Ruby is enjoyment, then the number one principle behind using Ruby should be enjoyment too.

Don't program in Ruby because you want power or efficiency. Don't program in Ruby because you think you "should", either. Program in Ruby because you like it. And if you don't like it, don't program in it. Religious wars over programming languages are just silly. The messianic zeal of Christianity's shameful Crusades a thousand years ago still lingers on in Western culture, and one glaring example is the ludicrous idea that there should be one true language or one true editor, or one ring to rule them all. It's much better when programmers can work in multiple languages, multiple editors, and multiple environments. Diversity is healthy for ecologies. This is a point Neal makes in his podcast - he calls it polyglot programming, which is to say multilingual programming. He calls it a positive trend, and I agree.

Gmail: Now Even More Beta! (It's True, I'm Grumpy Again)

Update: This link has proven a lot more effective than complaining:

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1

Rails Is A Honda, Not An iPod

Apple embraces open-source software, and yet - bizarrely - the company takes a notoriously hostile attitude to users who want to modify Apple products they buy. It took a class-action lawsuit and general outrage to get Steve Jobs to open up the iPhone to developers. If you want to change the battery on your iPod, you're out of luck. It's Steve's way or the highway.



By contrast, the Honda enthusiast community has come up with more options, add-ons, and hacks - for lack of a better word - than anyone besides Ramanujan could ever count.



Based on my own completely unscientific survey of the Rails community, I'm basically certain that more of us own iPhones than heavily customized Hondas. But we ultimately have more in common with the Honda custom community than we do with the community Apple thought they were selling the iPhone to. The disparity between the community Apple thought they were selling to and the community they really were selling to is part of the set of misperceptions which led Apple to think shutting developers and users out of their iPhones wouldn't be a big deal. An interesting topic - but the main thing here is what Rails users have in common with people who want their cars to glow in the dark.



Exhibit A is jRails, a Rails plugin which allows you to swap out all your Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript and replace it seamlessly with jQuery JavaScript instead. All your Rails JavaScript helpers remain intact, which means you can migrate from Prototype and Scriptaculous without changing a single line of Ruby code. All you have to change is your custom JavaScript - and that's the whole point of the exercise, because some people prefer to write their custom JavaScript using jQuery.

Exhibit B is auto_migrations, a fantastic Rails plugin which hijacks the entire migrations system and, while keeping it intact, replaces the developer's interface to it - a potentially sprawling mess of individual migration files - with one single, infinitely more elegant, self-migrating schema file. Exhibit C is the discussion in Pat Maddox's blog about how to make ActiveRecord's implementation of Active Record the pattern more consistent with good OOP principles.

The most important piece of evidence is Rails' plugin architecture itself. The whole thing is designed so you can rebuild any piece of it any way you want to. Because he missed this fundamental idea, one Microsoft programmer wrote a post dissing Rails which seemed to almost dip into sheer insanity:

The Rails Team needs to accept that they are now a VENDOR, not radical mavericks.

I responded that Rails core isn't a vendor because nobody's giving them vendor money, and that if you want to change the framework, you've got a flexible plugin architecture and a powerful dynamic language which each make it very easy to do. He replied:

The core point of what you’re addressing here is that "just because people use it, doesn’t mean Rails has any responsibility to people" - I say that’s not so. But we could wave our arms all day about this, and really it comes down to what you’re willing to tolerate as a software provider.

Just think on it for a bit. Your livelihood (if you’re a Rails guy) is resting on this platform... you cool with that?

My opinion, of course, is that my livelihood rests on me, and always will, irrespective of Rails' future, but that's another question. I bring this up because what really caused the disagreement here was a fundamental difference of opinion on what the word "platform" means. Specifically, what kind of responsibility do you have to your users when you provide a platform? Is the way the user uses the platform your decision, or theirs? If you're Apple, you believe that by providing a platform, you take responsibility for pretty much every aspect of the user's experience on that platform. If you're Honda, you take the attitude that if some wacko wants to make their car look like a spaceship, who are you to stop them?



Rails is a platform which is designed to be easy for newbies to get started with and easy for experts to transform, adapt, and bend to their wills. This is something it shares with Ruby - if Ruby lacks a language feature you want, it's often (though not always) pretty easy to add it on somewhere. It's almost even possible to write Ruby in Python. If you want Rails to do something that Rails doesn't do, you have two options: use something else, or make like Tim Allen back when he was funny and rewire that sucker. See what you can make it do.

Add UNIX Whatnot To OS X Contextual Menus

More, please!

1951; 2007

validates_presence_of: Ironic Little Rails Gotcha

validates_presence_of doesn't validate itself. If for some lunatic reason you're up and writing code at 8:26 AM, and you make a standard brain-lacks-coffee error like asking a model to validate the presence of some attribute it doesn't actually even have, the model will go ahead and validate against that missing attribute - preventing you from saving anything.

Crazy Science Shit

Molecular 'amplifier' boosts DNA computing

DNA-based computing just got a big boost. A method of amplifying weak chemical signals in a way that can be tailored to specific molecules has brought DNA-based circuits closer to practical applications.

Machine made of electricity and microbes

MECs are modified versions of microbial fuel cells, which are used to harvest electrons produced by metabolising microbes as they feed to generate electricity. The electrochemical reactions are balanced when the used electrons are combined oxygen and hydrogen ions also released by the microbes to form water.

Logan's MECs are like microbial fuel cells in reverse. Instead of charge being drawn out, it is pumped in, and the hydrogen ions combine with electrons alone to form hydrogen gas. Applying roughly 0.5 volts provides enough energy to drive thermodynamically unlikely chemical reactions that break down the dead-end products that limited previous attempts to ferment hydrogen.

Water-gathering machine based on spider webs

A portable dew-harvesting kit inspired by a spider's web is being developed by Israeli architects for use in areas where clean and safe water is scarce.

Reading mind of paralyzed guy

Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has been "locked in" - conscious but paralysed - since a car crash eight years ago.

These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in speech.

Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he generates to drive speech software.

Scientists designing reality wormholes

[They] came up with the idea by building on the mathematical theory that gave us the invisibility cloak - a device that was realized for microwaves last year. Whereas in an invisibility cloak rays of light are guided around a cylindrical or spherical volume like water flowing around a stone, a wormhole would have light guided around a more elaborate, tubular shape.

From I&T

Modern-Day Labor-Saving Goo!

Who Needs Designers?

What Is Threequals (===)?

There was a post on ruby-talk recently, demanding to know why these statements don't display the associative property you would normally expect of equality:

(1..5) === 3 # => true
3 === (1..5) # => false

The answer is simple: ===, aka threequals, isn't an equality operator - it's a method, and it's used for weird corner cases connected to but not exactly corresponding to equality. Module#=== tests whether an object is an instance of self or any of self's subclasses. Object#=== is a synonym for Object#==. Likewise String#=== is a synonym for String#==, while Regexp#=== is a synonym for Regexp#=~.

Range#=== tests for inclusion; range === some_object returns true when that object falls within the range. For example:

>> ('a'..'c') == 'b'
=> false
>> ('a'..'c') === 'b'
=> true

So (1..5) === 3 is true because 3 is in that range, but 3 isn't equal to that range, so 3 === (1..5) doesn't return true. Logical enough. If you're wondering how you're supposed to remember all this, you aren't. You don't really even need to know it. The === method exists for controlling how a case/when block will evaluate an object. It should never be used by humans. It is code written to be consumed by other code, specifically, by case and when.

Delving into the inner workings of Ruby is lots of fun if you know what you're doing and a recipe for trouble if you don't. (If you sort of know what you're doing, but not totally, then it's a recipe for fun trouble.)

Just to illustrate what can go wrong, here's one of many ways to drive IRB insane:

>> def ==(object)
>> puts "asdf"
>> end
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
=> nil
asdf
>> true == false
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
asdf
=> nil

California Hustling

As regular readers of my blog know, I'm very interested in entertainment, as well as programming. I've definitely met some skepticism from people who tell me you can't serve two masters, but I think having only one career is as foolish as having only one girlfriend: it misses the whole point.



Anyway - the funny thing about the entertainment industry is that anybody who writes a book on the business or talks to a camera about it will tell you that the creative people and the business people differ immensely, especially when it comes to integrity. This much appears to be true. But they go on to tell you that this makes entertainment different from any other business, and that, sadly, is patently false. If you're sniffing around the fringes of the entertainment industry, and you have your home in technology, the dynamic of creative "superstars" brokered to large corporations by sleazy, unprofessional hustlers is unbelievably familiar. It feels just like home.

I do a lot of contracts. They give me the flexibility to take time off between projects and write novels, or screenplays, or whatever. This puts me in contact with a lot of technical recruiters. You would never believe some of the bullshit technical recruiters will pull. Indian guys with fake "American" names are normal, and nowhere near an extreme example. As a tangent, I have to say, if you're an Indian dude wondering if you should do that, DON'T. For two reasons. One, I correct Americans on the pronunciation of my name several times a day, every day. I don't want you giving them any excuses. Two, and I wish this was obvious, it's a lot easier to respect somebody when that person tells you their real name.



One time I got a call from a guy with an incredibly strong Indian accent, so much so I could barely understand a word he said. After several attempts I realized he was trying to tell me his name was Sheldon. This was hard to believe, but the two of us had expended so much effort to get that sentence from him to me in an understandable form that I decided to go with it anyway. I said, "How are you, Sheldon?" I even said it with a straight face. The conversation continued, he decided I looked like a good fit for whatever requirement he was trying to fill, and pretty soon he put me on the line with this other dude who had an equally strong, equally incomprehensible Brooklyn accent, who referred to the Indian fake-namer as "my man Sheldon," which you really had to hear to believe.

Here's an attempt at recreating the sound of it. If anything, he was more cartoonish in real life.

These guys ultimately failed to set me up with a gig, and given how shady they were, I have to say I'm glad.

The funny thing is, all this actually really reinforces the idea that programming is an art, and programmers are working artists. It's circumstantial evidence, but it's very interesting circumstantial evidence. With Hollywood hustlers and tech recruiter hustlers, we basically have a case of parallel evolution. The term comes from biology, of course; the dolphin and the shark look similar not because they're related, but because they've adapted in similar ways to the same environment.



For both a technical recruiter and a Hollywood producer, the only real professional requirement is that you know somebody who has talent and skill. Meeting people is a job skill with a very low barrier to entry, which is why Hollywood hustlers are legendary and the tech industry overflows with similar characters every time there's a boom. It's pretty easy to do, especially since, in practical terms, all you really have to do is know somebody who seems to have talent and skill.



I should end all this by pointing out that every indication I have of the "unprofessional" nature of Hollywood comes from Hollywood itself, which means at the very least that you should take it with a grain of salt. Certainly there are people in Hollywood who say the most important things are integrity and good manners. I'm not trying to propagate stereotypes. (And for the record I've met tech recruiters who were totally cool people also.) I just think the parallel evolution thing is very interesting.

Functional Programming In Rails Templates

The use case: you've got a Widget which has_many Things. You want a partial which allows you to include form fragments for several Things the user might want to attach to the Widget. You may or may not already have existing Things. If you do, you want to display them; either way, you want to display three blank form fragments, because even a user who's already got Things attached to their Widget might want to add on a few more. You also need unique div ids on the fragments, so that you can add simple JavaScript to display any necessary new form fragments instantly - without an Ajax round-trip to the server and back.

Vividly picturing the PHP or Java to fulfill that use case could result in an image so frightening it disturbs your sleep for weeks. The Rails way is gorgeous:

Further map.resources Skepticism

I think map.resources is the devil. This:

<%= link_to 'New widget's thing', new_widget_thing_path(@widget) %>

is nifty. Explicit hrefs are the modern goto, after all. But it's not nifty enough to justify this:

def new
end

def create
end

which bothers me so much I can't even stand it. (map.resources won't let you post to a new.)

YouTube vs. Hollywood

The last writer's stike, the corporations owned the media, but not as much as they do today. You look in the mainstream media, you find very little representation of what's actually going on. 69% of people in Los Angeles support the writers; the media, however, misrepresents them and consequently outside of LA support isn't as strong. (Update: I was wrong about that last part.)

But the writers have YouTube, which they didn't have 20 years ago.



The corporations derive their control over content from their control over distribution. But the Internet creates entirely new methods of distribution; the only remaining resource for corporate control is therefore copyright on legacy content, and the (questionable) usefulness of existing content creation systems. The last writer's strike, the media corporations lost ground to cable. If they lose ground to the Internet, they may lose that ground forever.

UI Designers: Time To Rethink Some Assumptions

Because dual monitors are becoming common. It might be a traditional no-brainer that when the user resizes the window and moves it somewhere else, you should open all subsequent windows in that location at that size. But not if the user has two monitors, and especially not if each monitor is a different size or is set to different resolutions.

Folklore

A story about magic.