Labnotes

I was wondering why it’s so quiet here!

Somehow, I suspect this happened during the last WordPress upgrade, this blog decided to moderate all, as in each and every one, comment. I’m not sure why. Also, somehow during that time, and I suspect from accidentally hitting the wrong key, I disabled e-mail notification for the moderation queue. So today I opened up the admin console to find out over 60 comments waiting in moderation.

Half were spam, the other half are your comments. Which I didn’t delete, or ignore, just didn’t get to see until today. So I’m accepting them all and will do my best to reply over the weekend.

Vim-nation. Unscientific but who cares, when Vi tops the non-framework category. (For the record, I only voted once)

Could it be? I have this vision of Verizon no longer forcing craplocked phones down our throat. I’m also a Verizon customer, so just jaded enough to not expect much.

Collected. Full write up on the Beacon and how to avoid it. Contrary to what Om gleamed from their well crafted press release, Facebook still collects the data. Every time you hit a partner site. That’s the nature of their Beacon protocol: collect first, ask for forgiveness later.What they let you opt-out of is presenting that data in your mini-feed. You don’t have to share it with friends, but you do have to share it with Facebook.

Logged out. With great power comes .. the ability to do many stupid things. Robert Fischer on how not to do mixins, straight from the Rails codebase:

If you’re adding things to a rails app that expect Logger to behave as documented, you’ll configure your logging date formats all day long and never have any impact. Worse, the code is flagged :nodoc:, so after screwing around with expected behavior, we’re left with no indication as to why a Logger instance created from the Rails console will behave different than a Logger created from IRB.

Hot wired. It’s a GUI! No, it’s a command line! No, it’s … I’m not quite sure yet but hotwire-shell is worth checking out.

_{Above, screenshot by Giles Bowkett illustrates one creative way to use XML. Here’s another one for giggles.}

Test this. Engtech pointed me to Agile Web Development Rails (2nd ed) which mentions me by name. That makes me half as proud as the context in which it appears: TDD with assert_select.

Collateral damage. If you’re following Bill de hÓra and Jean-Jacques Dubray, debating REST vs What?Simplicity?, you will also want to read this. It’s an earlier (2005) research paper on the topic, called Developing Web Services Choreography Standards - The Case of REST vs. SOAP. And it comes to this topic looking at the social dynamics and the collateral damage of resulting specs:

We also have shown that the standards process involves a social dimension. So the technical arguments may not be the only driving force behind standards participants’ behavior. Our decision analysis supports this. At the present time, the decision to adopt one or the other of the standards may be partially based on technical merit. But it is also based on an anticipation of which standard will dominate.

It’s like that. (Via Tammo van Lessen)

Money quote. This time, from Jim Downing:

How do you know when you’re solving the wrong problem? When your solution involves a 133 page standard with a section entitled “Human Task Behavior and State Transitions”, just to allow a system to give tasks to people.

Luddite. Tim Bray is running a Ruby tool survey. Head over there and cast your vote for the one true IDE. Meanwhile, for the sake of prosperity, here’s my development environment circa 2007:

Editing: vim

Searching: ack

Testing: spec

Debugging: p

Executing: bash

Automating: rake

Social anything. So it comes to this. You can’t even build an under construction Web site without first implementing the social network aspects, that way at least your users can rate the construction sign while waiting for the site to come live. Which is why I’m so thrilled BofA has added user reviews on their online service.

All talk. I won’t name any names, but some people claim REST is all talk. Hype. Buzz. Theories. This picture is for them. In this week’s webservices.org weekly, REST takes over the content, but the advertising is still exclusively SOAP and Enterprise Silver Bullets.

The Department of the Patently Obvious. Today’s DoPO bulletin brings not one, but two(!) items:

While technology and the setting of policies often are cited as critical to SOA governance, an HP official Thursday emphasized another key factor: Having the right personnel.

And:

The biggest challenge with SOA is around politics and control.

Be careful out there. Today’s Web 2.0 spammer: Shelfari. Another Web 2.0 social-something-something site with so little confidence in their own stuff, they need to spam the world about it. Sad, because it does look nice and useful. I guess it’s part of the growing corps of if you build it, they will buy you sites that need to expand at whatever cost. First, they ask you to join, then they expect you to send apology e-mails to everyone in your address book.

Avoid.

Staple. Scott Watermasysk’s 7 of the Hardest Things I Learned About Writing Software is worth stapling on your cubicle wall:

Realize that to more than 99.9% of the worlds population, code/technology are simply a means to an end. Software solves problems. The world really doesn’t care how or why it works.

Re-discovered. Pandora. Now that I can run it inside Prism without fear of crashing Firefox, it just plays and plays and plays.

Kevin Rathbun Steak Fancy place in a conversion-loft area, 2 miles outside of downtown, still we got in wearing conference-casual attire. Whichever steak you chose, thou shalt pair it with their creamed corn side dish. Corn will never taste the same. Oh, and the steaks are amazing as well.

Sotto Sotto Best Italian I had this side of the Atlantic. Be advised, the dishes are small. As they should be. Stuff yourself cheap somewhere else, this place is about small courses, and spending the rest of the night reliving the taste.

Dailey’s Nice cigar bar, a block away from the Westin and most other downtown hotels. Nothing special, but worth extracting yourself from the confines of “charge this to my room”.

TAP Fits nicely in the gastro-pub category. Better food than your typical pub, better beer than your typical bar, and $2 shorties for the experimental-minded. Pretentious as they come, but worth a trip down Peachtree st.

Official ApacheCon beer this year, the Sweetwater 420. Brewed in Atlanta.

OpenSocial at Apache. It was bound to happen. I know most people will be interested in the open (?) and social (?) part of this proposal. I’m excited by something entirely different. It’s a JavaScript container with a PHP back-end. That brings the dynamic languages project count at Apache to three (along with Buildr and Log4PHP). I have it on good sources, that we’ll be seeing the first Rails app at Apache soon. And … Python anyone?

Eclipse gets REST. No, seriously. (Via Antoine Toulme)

Speaking of. The ApacheCon organizers were smart enough to schedule Fielding and Sanjiva back-to-back for the Ultimate wRESTling Match of 2007.

Money quote comes from James Snell (via Dare), and this one actually showed up in my feed reader as Sanjiva was talking smack about HTTPR (and rightfully so):

However, over the last two years I haven’t written a single line of code that has anything to do with WS-*. The reason for this change is simple: when I was working on WS-*, I never once worked on an application that solved a real business need. Everything I wrote back then were demos. Now that I’m working for IBM’s WebAhead group, building and supporting applications that are being used by tens of thousands of my fellow IBMers, I haven’t come across a single use case where WS-* would be a suitable fit.

Functional is the new Java. Or something to that effect.

And now, your moment of Zen. Dilbert responds to Andy Rubin’s ‘this time will be different‘:

Tech consortia for decades have been notorious for failing to live up to their promise. Google Director of Mobile Platforms Andy Rubin acknowledged the troubled history of previous consortia, but said that Android was different because “we’re actually releasing in one week this software.”

Quick update. Last week, yes I am that behind on my posts, Buildr was voted for incubation under Apache. Kudos to InfoQ for reporting the news even before we got to count the votes. We expect the movers to come in next week and help move the site, SVN and mailing list to our new digs.

As you can read from the comments, some people think it’s a daft idea (my words) to write a build system in Ruby for building Java (and Scala) code. And some are still holding on to the ideal of programming in XML. And as much as I’d hate to admit it, even more mistake the F5 key for a build process.

Either way, a lot of developers out there don’t mind language plurality, and judging from the mailing list responses, love what they see. And it’s always a pleasant surprise when you see a high quality patch coming from a developer who just picked up Ruby by hacking away some Buildr code. It is, that easy.

Couple of challenges remaining. There are some unresolved issues regarding licensing and releases, but we’ll figure those out as we go along, and hopefully get to present what we learned at a future ApacheCon.

And two things are still bothering me. The Buildr mailing list is hosted on Google Groups, and now I’m spoiled and hate having to go back to the 90’s (Apache uses ezmlm). Also, as we go through incubation the site URL will change twice. Say goodbye to PageRank and hello to broken links.

Maybe it’s time to start discussing a more modern infrastructure at Apache.

So the first full-on Ruby project at Apache. I hope it’s the sign of things to come. Apache is still known for Java/C hegemony, not a conscious decision, just a fact, but it does affect perception, so let’s change that.

And before I forget. I will be attending ApacheCon next week in Atlanta, if you have some time come and say hi.

While everybody, self included, was busy punning about Google and their axis of telcos this week, this almost slid by my feed reader without notice. It has finally happened, and it’s looking good. We tech geeks are now served to our very own Sartorialist.

Even if you don’t get the reference, you might want to head over to Dedicated Followers of Fashion. I suggest you start by finding out which Laptop will look best with your Chucks:

Now, there’s the chance to go retro here with 12? PowerBooks. They don’t make tiny MacBook Pro’s, so you if you’re the kind of person who likes to talk about Joust and how awesome Atari was - ugh - you can complete your whole “pop-culture stopped for me in 1987″ thing with a 12-incher. This is respectable until Apple comes out with a similar offering in the Pro line. Milk it while you can if you need something edit your Gobots en Legos reenactments with.

Good sense of personal style won’t add new cores to your CPU, but at least you can roam around looking less like this Steve and more like this Steve.

It’s like that. Requirements specification for writing a requirements specification (excerpt).

Culture clash. LiveJournal gets their very own Snap Shots. You know, those annoying Web 2.0 popups for ad-sponsored content sites. Turns out, it bugs some people, which is understandable. We geeks are snotty:

But here’s the thing: Regular people on the web *love* Snap previews. I know you don’t believe it — I didn’t want to believe it. But it’s completely true. In the testing and feedback I’ve seen, it’s some emotional pull about the fact that links “do something” now, instead of just being on the page. I know we all feel these people are idiots, but it’s our own geek cultural imperialism that makes us think we know better than non-techy folks.

Or just less prone to infectious diseases:

I’m not shocked how many people delight in them. But these are the very same people who download Gator and ‘free’ screensavers onto our computers here at my job, and think they’re wonderful, you know, until they start wondering why their computer is so effing SLOW, and then call IT because they don’t believe me when I tell them their computer will work just fine if they will get rid of that crap with a dose of Ad-Aware and Spybot. There are lots of things advertising partners will want to give these people that they will love that I don’t want on any machine I have to use.

Snap.

Speaking of ivory towers. While we’re busy discussing if Ruby is a better or worse Lisp, what Erlang does right, and what we can all learn from Haskell, the world keeps cranking out one application after another in more practical languages like Visual Basic, ABAP and rumor has it even MUMPS (the language, not the disease). Just a friendly reminder:

• Visual Basic is the #1 .NET language (as reported by Forrester Research)
• Visual Basic is the #1 downloaded and #1 registered Express Edition (topping the #2 position by 20%)
• Visual Basic is the #1 MSDN language dev center and blog in terms of traffic
• The Visual Basic Team blog is in the top 1% in readership of all MS bloggers (I don’t know where I fall in that since I host independently.)

But then again. An XKCD moment, played in real life.

The bug that time forgot. Ever wondered why only root can listen on ports below 1024? Turns out it’s a security feature inherited from a different era. And what was once about enforcing security, is not a big gaping security hole.

_{Above, Ward Cunningham illustrates what went wrong.}