Creepy Flash Demo
Very creepy - all in flash - amazing.
You can get a glimpse into the future with this.
As the Jamaican woman in Wild Palms used to say…
straight from Osaka
Archive for March, 2008
zero point energy snake oil
There seem to be quite a few of these videos on YouTube.
auctomatic - Y combinator co acquired - used Smalltalk
Just recently, auctomatic was acquired by another company for around $5 million. This is not a bad exit for a Y combinator startup. My bet is that they bought the technology team more than the site itself, but that is just a guess.
The interesting thing is the technology. One of the employees blogged about their technology.. They used seaside and smalltalk. That is a great win for the smalltalk/seaside community.
It’s nice to see…
that other people besides me feel that our government is a little out of hand in giving bankers, who took on enormous risks, free money, care of my tax dollars.
Imagine if people in this country started protesting things again… like the war. Wait. I haven’t protested anything in a while. I’m being a hypocrite. I’ll go do something civilly disobedient this Friday.
MVC - Post 1 - Rails Controller Reuse
I have too many posts queued up about MVC that I’ve been hoarding in my blog drafts. Rather than sit on these, I’m just going to post small ideas.
The main theme is this: people really don’t understand MVC, and I don’t blame them. It is one of those overloaded terms that has been mangled over many years.
For today’s post, though, I want to cover a small portion of this. The Rails community. Although, they made a lot of progress a year ago, it appears as if that progress has recently slowed. There is also some healthy fragmentation and ‘questioning of the authority’. I think people are comfortable with the framework now and are now learning how to make the next leap forward.
One movement that I find refreshing is the classic re-awakening to the idea that ‘hey, we need better component re-use’ in Rails.
This was attempted back in 2005 and knocked back by DHH here and here.
They are good arguments, but I think the most interesting and best counter-argument is Reusing Rails Controllers is A Good Thing.
Another blog, talking about Cells, a promising project, hits on the same issues with a different solution. This is by Ezra, so you know has some legs.
Finally, the Caboose guys have a proposal as well called Simple Presenters.
Essentially, people are like… “ok ok ok… we’ve tried the old way… lets get something here. We need components”. Of course, who likes to reimplement the same code… over and over again.
This really hit home with a friend of mine. He is working on a new blog engine called Micro and he had a bunch of questions when he got to the comments portion. This is actually really interesting. I mean, if DHH took the blog demo a little further and included comments, the complexity would really expose some issues with the Rails framework.
Here is the issue. You are writing a blog engine. You have posts. Posts can have comments. What if you want to allow a comment author to edit a comment for a post. Bam, big problem. Which controller does that code go into? The post controller or the comments controller? If you go ALL ajax and ALL Restful/Resourceful, then this is elegantly solved. AJAX means that the views on the page are composed and controlled by Javascript. Each separate view (Posts and Comments) can interact with their respective resources on the site. Again, though, this means you have to make the whole site controlled and composed by Javascript code.
Now, if you want to have a NORMAL non-ajax request cycle and your are showing a post, you will have to put the logic in the posts controller. Why? Because in Rails you cannot interact with other controllers while you are already in one. In this case, the Posts controller is the one you are in, so that is where all the code has to go.
My buddy didn’t want to build an all ajax blogging engine, so the ‘code generated’ for the ‘comments’ controller, was basically replicated by hand into the Posts controller. The view code got a little nasty as well.
Clearly, a simple way of having modularity in the framework would solve both scenarios just as well. The good news here is that… just like so many old ideas, people are ‘getting it’ and moving towards better solutions. I suspect that Cells, Engines, or something else will come along and get traction.
Anyways, more posts on MVC later… from other points of view (Cocoa, Win32, Actionscript, etc.)
What You Should Know About Image Scaling
If you go to Yahoo Finance, and look at their tech ticker.
The images look bad.
Why? Well, like so many sites that have thumbnails… they don’t use the correct algorithm for proper bitmap scaling.
The fix for this is easy and it is something that any programmer should know. Here is a link that is heavy on java, but translates easily to other languages:
The Perils of Image getScaledInstance
It has lots of pictures so you can easily visualize the differences.
If you want a longer read, read this great article It’s time for 2-d by Michael Herf of Picasa fame. It’s from 2000, but still very relevant.
IE7 Auto Update
giao mentioned last January that IE7 was a forced auto-update on
February 12, 2008. I found this microsoft support article describing the effect it would have on IT admins. I cannot get a sense of how this is going so far.
However, if this happens, it would be a big step up for anybody that has to develop for the web. I mean, they
finally got PNG support in IE7 
Broadband Speed in the Bay Area
When I first arrived in the Bay Area, special people here had insane connectivity. It was not uncommon to hear about some ‘key engineer’ or CTO with two T1 lines running to their house. There was a lot of money, and these people had to have great internet access. Everybody else still had dialup, but DSL and Cable modems were on the way. After a while, the little ISPs died and the ‘information superhighway’ was now prominently DSL and DOCSIS modems.
It is now 2008, though, and not much has changed in 5-7 years. The only difference is now that over 50% of american households have broadband as well as most businesses. The Bay Area, however, has not moved forward. I find it strange that the ‘hub’, the center of the internet in the US, is still using sketchy DSL and Cable modems.
Why aren’t the first deployments of any interesting, new high-speed access technologies happening here? Surely, there is a huge market of customers here?
