BillSaysThis

From Post Secrets: gifts. Really amazing, revealing postcard.

Four things:

Four jobs I’ve had:

• midnight-shift bridal magazine magazine proofreader
• local newspaper gofer
• freelance computer journalist
• user experience maven

Four movies I can watch over and over:

• Lord of the Rings trilogy
• The Great Escape
• On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
• Love, Actually

Four places I’ve lived:

• Livingston, NJ
• Pittsburgh, PA
• Los Angeles, CA
• Mountain View, CA

Four TV shows I love:

• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
• Homicide: Life on the Streets/The Wire (same production crew, very similar overall)
• Law & Order
• The Simpsons/South Park (tie)

Four places I’ve vacationed:

• Israel, 1974 for my Bar Mitzvah at the Wall
• Aruba, five or six times
• Australia, 2000
• Italy, 2001

Four of my favorite dishes:

• Lasagna, not that I eat it ever
• Brocolli
• Bagels
• Anything TS1 makes for dinner!

Four sites I visit daily (not via RSS):

• RawSugar
• dangerousmeta
• Google News
• My Yahoo

Four places I’d rather be right now:

• On a vacation with TS1 in Australia or Italy
• Visiting my nephew Jake, his parents and my parents
• Home relaxing–hey, I am here now!
• Hey… can we do time travel? (cribbed from Karl)

Four bloggers I’m tagging:

• Rob Fahrni
• Guy Tavor
• Goddess Dawn
• Rogers “The Pope Squatter” Cadenhead

Last day of the studio was pretty good though there was a bit of a rush to get through and finish on time. Credit to Dave and Mike, though, because they did despite Dave nearly hacking up his lungs coughing so much. Room was dead air because the HVAC was shut down per standard office building practice on a weekend. Didn’t help but not too bad. Don’t want to forget Nicole Clark (yes, Mike’s wife), the woman behind the throne so to speak, who made sure we had all the necessities including personal printed certificates of completion before departure.

James Duncan Davidson, a Java guru converted to Rails, was also in class most of yesterday and all of today which came in very handy when we got to discussing deployment and production issues. Most of the sentiment is behind using LightTPD (which has FastCGI built in) rather than Apache if possible was the web server. And no doubt at all about using SwitchTower; I’d be surprised if it was integrated into the core Rails release package soon enough; its so powerful and decoupled from Rails that plenty of people in other language camps including Java, Python and PHP are starting to use it too.

One subject covered that’s newer than the Rails book but profoundly useful is Migrations. I’ve programmed in plenty of languages before but I don’t recall a single one which has a similar facility, so another big plus for RoR. Migrations are a semi-automated means to manage changes in an application’s database structure as the development cycle rolls on. Change a field type, add a new column, table or index? Just generate a new migration file and fill out up and down methods (the down are used to rollback to previous versions). Need to move to a different database, server or send your code to another programmer, they just run Rake migrate and their database is equal to yours.

Easy drive to the airport, good company from Dan Shafer, and arrived two hours before boarding. Literally no line at the security checkpoint for a change, the checkers were waiting on me to open my laptop bag and get my shoes off! Plenty of time to chow down on a Wolfgang Puck mushroom and and basil pizza and enjoy soething cold from Starbucks. One fly in this ointment, though: No Verizon cell signal in the LAX terminal, which I don’t understand since 16 people sitting around me are yapping on theirs! No Wi-Fi LittleSteven can see either.

Can’t wait to start using all the Rails goodness that are now mashed into my brain!

Short version: I’m thrilled at being here because Mike Clark and Dave Thomas really know how to:

• teach a class,
• Ruby On Rails works from the inside out,
• work together, and,
• make the class fun and exciting.

Longer: I’m learning a lot and we haven’t even gotten to the advanced stuff which will take most of tomorrow. If you think that reading their book and some of the web tutorials and blogs is sufficient yet haven’t been able to build or deploy an application more complicated than a single table CRUDer, and the schedule and money is right, then you ought to jump on the first available class.

Flickr photo group for Rails Studio Pasadena

Making the time even more enjoyable and educational are the other guys in the class; yes, sad to say, there are 39 men and zero women in attendance. I’m actually carpooling with Dan Shafer, yes the one who used to be one of the high editorial dudgeons at CNet and who’s written 62 (mostly computer) books. The two of us, Kelly Felkins, Mike Hartl and Arnie G had dinner together last night at the Panda Inn. Only about a quarter of the people are local, or at least live close enough to drive from home each day, several are from the Bay Area, Dan’s from Monterey, others are here from Atlanta, Hawaii (Arnie, who works at the Fujitsu Observatory there), Portland, Seattle and Utah.

Earthlink is providing the classroom, presumably in exchange for a few of their staff’s tuition, and it’s a nice facility with plenty of space for each student and two big wall screens so the projected material (presentation, code, sample apps) are very easy to see. Not surprisingly, about half the laptops are Macs.

Some more or less random remarks and observations, mainly from Mike and Dave:

• History: Why do programming languages almost uniformly require parentheses, brackets and semi-colons in source code? Fortan strips white space, requiring parenthesis and brackets, and everyone followed suit; Ruby doesn’t require them but supports their use.
• The Home Depot rule: buy four feet of rubber and beat the guy senseless (this is for programmers who do something stupid like redefining arithmetic, just because they can in Ruby)
• Ruby exceptions are the way God intended exceptions to be
• Eight million ways something can go wrong but it doesn’t because nobody would reasonably do it (see the Home Depot rule)
• It’s ruby, nothing can go wrong
• Ajax is now a marketing term, not an acronym: Making browsers suck less. Interact for humans, not computers.

Enough, I have homework for tomorrow’s session.

I get a reference to an article about a tool to tranform files with XML, something that I do from time to time. Reading it, I see it is showing off a seemingly commercial product. So I click to the website. Sure enough there’s a free downloadable trial but otherwise it costs cash to use. Still, if this can simplify my life I might spend money. But you go to the GoXML site and tell me, without registering, how much it costs. Really, I dare you.

From Dan Gillmor: A Letter to the Bayosphere Community. In this entry Dan explains why his vision for local media failed. Some people will lead off a remark with “I hate to say I told you so but…” Me, on the other hand, I have no problem with it. Although I wrote a mildly positive blog entry back in May with the public launch, I never quite understood how the company planned to attract the ‘citizen journalists’ it expected to provide the bulk of the site’s material. I never read of any incentives offered other than a free publishing platform, but there are plenty of those and most offer a good deal more functionality than Bayospere. Good try, worth doing, but I just don’t see evidence that Gillmor, his partners and backers ever thought this all the way through.

These days you can hardly refresh your aggregator without hitting another new network and when I saw the Money Blog Network this afternoon I realized the time had come when the bill:network needs to expand. Unlike all the others, though, my new network is not about creating an advertising platform or any other kind of platform. Instead, it’s about making fun of all these blatant attempts to cash in.

Hence the name: The Sick From Lunch Network. Do you want to join? The requirements are simple: be willing to put the still-to-be-designed logo on your page, linked to a master page which will list the members and our motto. “Advertising is so 20th Century–we’d rather be sick from lunch and blog about it.” Also, membership is at my discretion, though you can resign at any time. Snarky applications are preferred. Feel free to send logo suggestions too.

So the Reds send out Anthony le Tallec and Neil Mellor on loan to Sutherland and Wigan and both score goals today (West Brom 0-1 Sunderland, Middlesbro 2-3 Wigan). I can understand sending away a player surplus to requirements (as they say in the Premiership) to bottomdwelling Sutherland but a player I don’t see as surplus at all to the team just a few places beneath you in the standings? That doesn’t make as much sense to me. Oh well, I’m still looking forward to tomorrow’s clash at Old Trafford.

Although How Benítez built Liverpool by Kevin McKarra is a good explanation as to why these deals were done and that someone like me should not be second guessing Rafa.

Sometimes I can be so obtuse. Iain Banks with an M has been writing highly regarded science fiction since the late ’80s, and this has been known to me for most of that time, yet I always left his books on the store or library shelf. On the one hand this makes me sorry yet on the other happy since I now have nine SF novels to read in a burst and possibly even some of his non-genre efforts as well (he uses the middle initial M as the author credit for science fiction and none for ‘straight’ works).

Look to Windward, published in 2000, is a terrific piece of work. Set in his common far-future milieu where Humanity are one member of a Galactic-level post-Singularity society named The Culture, the story is fairly simple. A few years before the opening, another multi-stellar race based on the planet Chel had a terribly destructive civil war; several billion Chelgrians were killed and though life has returned almost to normal their most treasured composer, Ziller, has fled to a Culture world in disgust and one officer, Quilan, lost the will to live after his beloved wife and army squadmate was killed in a battle after he himself almost perished in an earlier action.

In this future, most races develop the ability to transcend to another level of existence fairly soon after creating FTL drives and nanotechnology though not all races or all members of a race choose to Sublime, as Banks calls it. For the most part those who remain in our plane of existence cannot communicate with those who doÂ?but there are exceptions and the Chelgrian-Pruen, the Chel Sublime, are one. Quilan is sent to Masaq Orbital, the constructed ringworld where Ziller lives, ostensibly to ask him to return home but this is just a cover for his real mission. Banks takes his time revealing it, though Ziller and other several characters suspect the officer plans to assassinate the composer.

Another widely-available technology in this future is the ability to back up one’s mind in case of accidental death (though has other uses too) and we learn at the start that Quilan’s backup device has been altered to host a second person, a higher ranking Chel officer named Huyler who will advise, comfort and in the event he cannot complete his mission, take control and substitute for him. Plus prevent Quilan from betraying the plot of course.

Some 800 years in the past, The Culture fought a vast, decades-long war against the Idirans and at the end caused two Suns to go nova. Those solar systems were not uninhabited. The light from those twin novae is now reaching Masaq Orbital and the tragedy will be memorialized with a massive concert and light show featuring a new symphony composed by Ziller.

Look to Windward, though suspenseful, is not a thriller where some members of The Culture are digging for clues to uncover or prevent the Chelgrian plot. Indeed, the biggest question actually surfaced in the story is whether Ziller or Quilan will attend the performance. While Ziller doubts the other intends to assassinate him, he obstinantly refuses to meet the Major and firmly states that only one of them can be present at it.

Banks is simply masterful at delivering a tangle of personalities and creating wondrous environs for them to be in. The book is over 400 pages and I felt like I was chewing them up as if on a woodland hike on a beautiful early Autumn afternoon. The author sometimes seemed to throw in entire scenes to showcase a constructed landscape as a favor to his fans, if that makes sense given this is the seventh or eigth Culture novel, but count me as one of them if he did.

Banks does appear, to my perhaps less than sophisticated eyes, to be drawing The Culture as a proxy for the foreign policy–and military might–of America and its Western European allies. Reading John Robb’s post Contra Barnett just before finishing this review made that clear for me, especially this bit he quoted from Bill Lind: “there is no surer way of making someone your enemy than to announce you will remake him in your image for his own good.” That’s precisely what The Culture did to the Chel.

definitely recommended

Bill will be one of the lucky students at Pragmatic Rails Studio in Pasadena next week. Aren’t you jealous? If so, don’t be, go and check out new RoR training events listings site Ruby on Rails Workshops to find one that fits your schedule and geography.

I can’t recall what made me look this up but I never realized that while the United Kingdom has a population 50% higher the State of California is 40% larger (411,015 square kilometers compared to 242,514). Strange but true.

Peter F. Hamilton, who I think is one of the top science fiction authors working today, collected six short stories and a novella set in the same Confederation Universe as the hugely successful Night’s Dawn trilogy and published them as A Second Chance At Eden. The tales preceed the time of the trilogy, focusing on the affinity technology—genetic engineering which connects human minds directly to other geneered animals and technology—and offering some of the history leading up the trilogy including one, Escape Route, which might have originally been intended to be part of it.

Escape Route and the novella A Second Chance At Eden are my favorites. The former is an episode from the life of Marcus Calvert who owns the starship Lady Macbeth and is the father of trilogy leading character Joshua Calvert set just a few years before it and the latter is a lengthy murder mystery set hundreds of years earlier in bitek habitat Eden, orbiting Jupiter, the birthplace of those humans who invent and then choose to use affinity.

The reason I enjoy Hamilton’s writing so much is that he’s got a terrific imagination that results in epic, simply massive plots with both strikingly original technological developments and well-drawn, grabbing characters. A couple of the stories in this volume, Sonnie’s Edge and Candy Buds, are prime example, being essentially character studies that a less capable author would have left in the notebook but here are delightful short reads with unforeseen plot twists.

New Days, Old Times makes clear that amazing technology can’t compensate for our communal emotional immaturity. The Lives And Loves Of Tiarella Rosa is enjoyable, the one love story in the bunch, though it seems built as a way for Hamilton to deliver a neat punchline; Deathday is the only one that truly didn’t work for me as I couldn’t get into the story’s only character and the key conflict.

recommended

• In this world of six billion, being first at anything is difficult so I’m pleased and amused to be the top result on MSN Search for ip:207.7.108.201, which is the shared server billsaysthis.com lives on at TextDrive. Props of a similar, though more significant, result to Scoble Senior as his new Naked Conversations corporate blogging book reaches 2,160 on the Amazon sales chart.
• With the final line Arsenal 7-0 Middlesbrough, I seem to have picked the wrong week to switch skippers on my EPL fantasy squad. Though Chelsea doesn’t play until tomorrow so Frank Lampard can pull my soy bacon out fo the fire justify my confidence by rampaging through sadsack Sunderland. Max Bretos, on today’s debut of Super Saturday, says Mick Macarthy’s bottomdwellers intrigue him and have nothing to lose though even a draw, to say nothing of what would be only their second win of the season, seems as likely as me making the US national side. In any sport.
• Staying with football, I watched the Manchester derby this morning on FSC and really, where the heck have the big stars of Manchester United gone? Losing 3-1 to City, first time in six years they dropped all three points in the league, and naming one stretch other than van Nistlerooy’s pretty goal where they seriously troubled the host’s defense would be difficult. Instead the players seemed to spend most of their energy arguing with the referee over fouls. Didn’t see it but this result combined with a 1-0 win over Tottenham brings Liverpool to within one point of the Red Devils and second place having played two fewer games. Guess who travels to Old Trafford next Sunday? Oh yeah!
• Steve Hannaford uses the Guidant/Johnson & Johnson/Boston Scientific biotech love triangle to proffer a plain English translation of mergerspeak. Oligopoly Watch, his blog, is good reading for those of you interested in tracking the increasingly smaller world of corporate ownership.
• Finally, don’t miss the latest lovely astronomy photos, the Cartwheel galaxy as seen by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer’s Far Ultraviolet detector; the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera; the Spitzer Space Telescope’s Infrared Array Camera; and the Chandra X-ray Observatory’s Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer-S.

I’ve been wearing contact lenses for about seven months now, probably my fourth or fifth try over the years beginning in high school. Each previous time I had an allergic reaction on the inside of my eyelids—nothing serious, little bumps just uncomfortable enough to make me go back to glasses. Knock on wood but I’m finally confident that the material used in Bausch & Lomb’s brand new as of last Fall Pure Vision line won’t cause the same problem.

Wearing them isn’t a matter of vanity for me (I don’t think) but better vision and convenience. Having to clean them overnight once a week offers a good comparison on sight quality, each pair lasts for at least a month and, for example, wearing them out in the rain is an entirely difference. Though they’re not perfect as the allergy is still troubling me a bit and producing excessive amounts of… um… eye goo all day long.

Big thanks to my opthamologist, Dr. Ken Schwaderer, for taking terrific care of me, trying different lenses and approaches over quite a few appointments to get the right solution. Definitely consider Mountain View Optometry if you’re in the area and need a new doctor, nothing in it for me but do tell them I referred you.

I found out from a message on the TxD forums this afternoon that SpamAssassin is enabled by default on all their servers. I’ve been wondering about not getting answers or other emails over the last couple of months since switching to TextDrive and this could be the explanation. Uggh. Anyway, if there are any messages you sent me (and still have) to which you thought I would or should have responded but didn’t, I’ve now disabled SA, so please resend them.

A friend asked a few weeks back how I’d do this. There are four good options (at least):

1. Download and install Open Office, which is a reasonably complete open source office suite that can read an write the corresponding Microsoft Office file formats. This is actually a Sun-led project but works well enough especially for your limited needs. Handy if you have other productivity tool needs (like PowerPoint, Excel, Access) too.
2. Use an already installed, compatible tool:
   • Many PCs come with either Microsoft Works (the word processing component can save files in Word format).
   • All Windows PCs since Windows 98 (I think) have WordPad, which saves files in Word-compatible RTF format. Look for it in Start Menu | Programs | Accessories.
3. Download and install CutePDF and GhostView, both freeware, which gives you the ability to ‘print’ to PDF format from any Windows app–everybody can read PDF files and they retain the formatting.
4. Send the non-Word version to a friend who has Word.

Since I decided I mouthed off just a tad too much last week month on the Blogger Dev mailing list, I assigned myself a little punishment: Write a PHP script which can generate a backup for any blog, comments included, without using the API. Instead of the API you use a specific template, regenerate the entire blog and then the script processes the new archive files.

My work has ready for a little testing and I need volunteers; I asked for some on the mailing list but got–unbelievably–not a single response, so I’m posting this publicly. If you’d like to be an alpha tester, fill in the contact form.

To run the script you must have access to a server on which you can run a PHP script; probably the one on which the blog archives are stored, so I guess Blog*Spot blogs are out (but maybe not if you have PHP and the permissions are set a certain way, I haven’t looked at Blog*Spot for awhile). My blog doesn’t use comments so that part–he typed nervously–is essentially untested and so I’d love a couple of you with decent amount of posts with comments to raise your hands.

The script is fairly simple, just change a couple of variables at the top of the file to meet your setup, and the output is an XML file. It’s not ATOM format but I believe that part would be simple to change if desirable; for now I just want to see if it works for someone besides me.

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Deed.

Scoble does stand up against the Microsoft Machine on the censorship of Michael Anti though his response in the comments is underwhelming. Unlike apparent official blog spokesperson Michael Connolly, product unit manager for MSN Spaces, who gives a mealymouthed explanation of Microsoft’s position of why the company took down this pro-China democracy blog.

This is a tough issue which both Google and Yahoo have previously faced and also handled poorly, not to point the finger only at MSFT. It’s one which we need to find a better answer as a culture; as one of Scoble’s commenters said, why are we fighting for democracy in the Middle East but allowing US-flagged corporations to toss it aside as they like elswhere?

[cross–posted]

I predict a close finish tonight with my alma mater coming out on top by between 5-10 points. One way or another this man will be a major factor in our victory:

6:12 PM: Reggie, how could you be so foolish and greedy? You had a huge run and got tackled at the Texas 15!!!

8:50 PM: Email to the Big Guy, “USC is pulling away from Texas, looks like our 3rd national title in a row is coming soon. Now that’s a storm!”

9:15 PM: Email to the Big Guy, “Me and my big mouth. Texas scored, stopped us and is driving again, a touchdown will likely win the game for them. It’s 2nd and 10 from the USC 14! Fuck!!!!”

Final score: Texas 41- USC 38. (a) Bush’s fumble (b) Referee gives Vince Young the first Texas touchdown when his knee was down on the nine yard line (c) Can I have a tackle on Mr. Young, puh-leeze?