Web 2.0.11562 beta

When it comes to my websites, the greater control I have the better. For third-party functionality like analytics or repos I need a high degree of control in order to NOT host the service myself. Same goes for serving ads.

I’ve been in a long, slow process of converting my sites to use Open-x software. It’s a resource hog, has had a few security issues, and the UI is anything but intuitive. However it does provide all the capabilities I want, and some I haven’t bothered to figure out. Like I said, not intuitive.

So I recently took a dozen Japanese language sites and set them up to use a competing hosted service called BittAds. As with most third-party replacements for your server software, they’ve pared down the feature set. The Ui is decent, and so far reliability is great. I’ll be sure to report back after some time has passed and I can fairly assess the results.

OK so maybe you noticed I only posted once in the past year. Yeah

Well now I’m up to date, I’m staying on 2.9.2 until the next stable release comes along. And I ditched my thoroughly, um, customized? theme files and I’m going with the defaults al the way baby.

I do that so I can try all the new whiz-bangy plugins. There are so many. 99% of them are crap, but those other 1% are really sweet. So in the coming weeks, usually at about 3am I’ll be playing around with a new plugin every time I get a chance.

My first plaything? WPtouch, a cool looking plugin for packaging the content very nicely for mobile devices. At least that’s what it looks like it’ll do quite nicely. As with all things like this, time will tell once the shiny new polish wears off a bit.

Yes others were ahead of me by a few years on this, but for some reason I never got around to fixing a major nuisance that has been bothering me. It has to do with using both SVN and Git.

I manage network of dozens of websites. Most are domains that I’ve developed over the years. Some are web dev customers’ sites. Some are very old, some are old-fashioned, some are trivial, some are quite involved, a few are modern, a few are old perl-script driven sites – an eclectic mix. Therein lies the problem.

When I work with others to develop a site, we make decisions quickly and one of those decisions is source control. The graphics diva I work with most pretty much refuses to do anything with a command line. It’s not a problem because if we use subversion there’s a gorgeous GIU client called Versions that is fully functional and drop-dead easy to use. If there are still any surviving graphics gurus out there using Windows, that would have been a mention for the not-so-beautiful but very usable TortoiseSVN client. Not an issue here, because subversion was where I learned version control.

But as time goes by more and more of the repos for these sites are git. That’s because the default preference for me for all new projects is git, and because I have occasionally switched repos, and if there’s not much maintenance activity I’ll usually switch it over, as the impact on people will be minimal.

OK you can probably see where I’m going with this eh? Because I’m an old-timer and know how to use SVn I never got around to using git even for those subversion repos. The answer that the rest of civilization already knew about is “git-svn” but I just never got around to it for whatever reasons. When I finally did, it was most anti-climactic! Basically for me, it boils down to a few simple items:

This guy takes minutes. That’s because it’s extracting the history from the svn repo, which those of you who know svn know is done one history at a time. Subversion goes through and recreates the current state of the repo from the initial state by applying all deltas, one by one. That’s just the nature of the RCS-CVS-SVN line of repos. Anyway, this is a one-time penalty you’ll pay.

This is basically your svn ci fro pushing your changes to the master repo. Like that last sentence? It has the git-svn flavor right? I feel like I’m (git) PUSHing the branch I (git) committed locally up to the (svn) central repo. But I’m still free to push it to a different git repo of course!

This is the svn update that lets me pull the changes my peers have committed (to the central repo – remember this is SVN repo) See the beauty here? I can keep the SVN repo and keep collaborators happy, and still get to choose to use git. Like I said, others knew this joy long ago, for some reason I never took the leap until recently.

And as a final aside, when is somebody gonna finally come up with a super-slick git UI? The non-programmers involved in projects don’t actually care what the underlying system is, they only care about how easy it is for them to use via a point and click interface.

OK so I tried a bunch of twitter clients for OSX 10.5, both desktop apps and dashboard widgets. Here’s my take on them.

• Beak – outstanding UI, but can only use one account at a time now (early beta) – this is the one to watch!
• Destroy Twitter – poor UI: dark theme w/ low contrast, small fonts, NO support for unicode even displaying tweets! Seemed to devour large amounts of system resources => not ready for primetime.
• Nambu – so nice, it’s plain vanilla look is misleading, it actually does all the important stuff including supporting multiple accounts and an organized UI that makes sense!
• Syrinx – nice UI, single account use only
• Tweetdeck – good UI, no support for multiple accounts, shameful lack of unicode support
• Tweetie – best UI of all, slick support for multiple accounts – the winner!
• Twhirl – fairly good UI, supports multiple accounts but gets annoying if more than a couple because you end up with lots of little windows open, shameful lack of unicode support
• Twidget – a dashboard widget that’s compact and reliable, nice choice if you want to use a widget for Twitter, supports one account
• Chirp – another widget, a little prettier UI but takes a lot of room, basic functionality to support a single account
• Twitterrific – not as exciting as the name implies
• BlueBird – not bad, this has the best icon of the bunch (nice blue egg in nest) but seems to only update when it feels like it, and actually displays new tweets BELOW old ones. Multi account support but it’s clunky.

Also I should mention I like splitweet in the web app category, and will need research to pick my faves in iPhone category.

Graeme Nelson shared a database wrapper class for sinatra that encapsulated Sequel so that he could run migrations and gracefully use it in different environments. It’s nice because then it just does the right thing in development, test and production (or whatever) and keeps your main code cleaner.

Here is a modification of that class that I’m using. I’m still using the old ORM – ActiveRecord, so the (minor) changes I made to his class are only to make it work for AR.

To use it be sure to create a .twitter directory, and place your tweetlist.yml file in there, formatted like so:

Well my first sinatra app and it took one day to write. It’s trivial and useless, but was just a joy to write nevertheless. If rails is an armored tank then sinatra is a dirt bike. Good watching: screencast by @bmizerany covering some of the main topics.

Anyway to share some joy, let me say I love that there are no controllers, no helpers, no routes file, etc. Rails has so much stuff I always feel like I’m spending a lot of time jumping around between files. Actually a lot of that is due to my trying to learn the latest edge rails feature, try a new plugin, install some new gem, refactor a bit of awfulness from last month, and oh yeah, actually try to add some new feature. So here it’s all straightforward and so there’s nothing to do but write code, no distractions. I learned a couple neat things, like using “pass” to mimic rails’ before_filter functionality.

I also decided to give HAML a try on this experiment as well, and it gets a rave review too. Drop dead easy to learn the basics in 5 minutes, and it puts out such clean markup compared to erb that I’m gonna use it in other projects. Who knew templating could be this good?

This video from MIT Media Lab, that eternal source of optimism and experimentation, shows a cool new wearables demo dubbed the sixth sense. Anyone who’s read Vernor Vinge recognizes this notion of overlaying contextual information onto the actual visual targets one encounters in daily life. Watch the video – really, it starts out slow but gets better.

In Vinge’s book “Rainbow’s End” people this capability is commonly embedded in contact lenses. I see something identifiable, and a processing system will fetch relevant data from the Internet to offer me more detail. If I’m lookijng at a landmark, for example, the system should fetch historical, architectural, and current visitor info about said landmark, and layer it onto my display in a semi-opaque manner.

Here they’ve taken a pragmatic approach to advancing toward this goal. They are projecting the detail onto nearby surfaces, which is much easier and cheaper. In sci-fi there are always going to be situations where mission-critical information will be retrieved, just in time, and displayed only to the hero or villian. But in more mundane day-to-day situations like shopping, this system wouls seem to be a great stride forward. Bravo MIT Media Lab!

Three cheers for the future of our technology policy. The clearest thinker I know of on these matters is headed to Pennsylvania Ave. Nothing official announced AFAIK but it’s widely speculated that she will hold the title of special assistant to the president for science, technology, and innovation policy.

She understands the complex world of technology policy like few do. Most experts understand only a very narrow swath of the tech-policy landscape, which includes managing spectrum allocation, setting national broadband policy, regulating telephone and cable companies’ oligarchy, furthering the discussions around nanotechnology policy & biotech policy, and my fave – Internet policy!

DNSSEC needs to happen ASAP, a coherent national Internet defense policy needs to be articulated ASAP, the barriers protecting the telcos that have accumulated in recent years need to be torn down ASAP, and more. I’m so tired of the complete lack of leadership from the executive branch in recent years. Let the market work has been the mantra, and the results have been:
1. we see degraded service and predatory activity from the big players (I’ll pick on Comcast slowing down Internet access for certain applications as my example)
2. we see the regulatory framework constructed by Congress (just recall those terrific “Internet is a series of tubes” videos from Ted Stevens if you think Congress is capable of doing a good job with this)

So in my view we obviously need policy leadership from the top of the house, otherwise it’s relegated to Congress, and we all know where that leads. Ms. Crawford can draw upon her experience at ICANN and her knowledge of regulatory issues from her teaching experience at Yale and Michigan law school courses about communications policy issues. Go Susan go!