http://www.boingboing.net/2004/10/29/transcript_of_google.html
A friend who went to business school once told me the only rule you need to know is DNROOC. Do not run out of cash.
I’ve always felt like I was missing something running my business that way, but maybe it isn’t such a stupid idea. Richard Branson says the same thing in his book.
http://www.collaboraid.biz/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=40987
I’m quite thrilled to announce our first project based on Ruby on Rails.And it’s not a small project, either. We will develop an intranet for our client, a large NGO whose identity we cannot reveal.
I first heard of Rails back in March, and I liked what I saw, particularly the ActiveRecord part. My initial gut reaction was to try and reimplement ActiveRecord in OpenACS, but then after thinking it over a bit, I realized it made more sense to use the “real thing” rather than try and copy it.
So when the first official release came out in July, I started playing with it. Learning Ruby was quite easy – we were able to get started just by looking at the existing code, and the Ruby book by the Pragmatic Programmers is excellent. Rails has been similarly easy to learn, what with plenty of support from the Rails community on #rubyonrails, good introduction materials on the site, and a visit by David.
At this point, we can’t wait to get started on our first real project. It’ll be fun.
(Reposted from collaboraid.biz)
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000335.html
David Heinemeier Hansson says:Neil Weber seems to think that the world of tomorrow will be one where we shop for finished components, sprinkle them with business-specific attributes, and off we go with a done system in no time at all. This future has had industry-wide fascination since the beginning of time. I believe it is a false hope.
I concur. It matches my own experience, even though I’ve been in denial for a while.
What made me realize the intractability of this goal was Fact 16 in Robert Glass’ article Facts of Software Engineering Management, which reads:
Reuse-in-the-large (components) remains a mostly unsolved problem, even though everyone agrees it is important and desirable.
Details on why in the article.
What my experience tells me is this: If your requirements for a given component for any particular project are generally simple, but they’re different from project to project, it’s less work to build simple solutions that do just what you need and nothing else, than to try and build the general component that can just be configured to match your project-specific requirements from project to project. As a rule of thumb, the general component cannot be done, and so you end up with a complex component that still doesn’t do what you need it to do for your next project, and then, because of the complexity of it, it’s more expensive to modify the component than to write something from scratch that does just what you need.
See also facts 17 and 19 in the article above.
http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/000932.html
My favorites …2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to change the world.
9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.
13. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.
14. Dying young is overrated.
15. The most important thing a creative person can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.
What are yours?
We’d done our homework – watched the intro video and the 2-hour presentation, and played around with Ruby and Rails a bit before he came, and had prepared a list of questions. It felt more like a discussion, based on his experience with PHP, Java and other frameworks, and our experience, particularly with OpenACS. And we got all of our questions answered in full.
But what ended up having the biggest impact was that David had brought in his 17” Powerbook, and we had a chance to watch David work in his native environment, running everything locally, using TextMate, quickly modifying the data model using CocoaMySQL, running Rake to dump the data model and run unit tests.
Watching David demonstrated to me directly, visually, personally, a very productive way of working that broke with a number of traditions we’ve held for years, like Ye Shall Name Thy Constraints (just an example). It demonstrated in a powerful way that you can achieve pretty amazing things despite not naming your constraints. (Or even having the constraints in the first place—if they’re dealt with in the layer that interfaces with the database, the Model, why replicate that in the RDBMS layer? DRY!) Anyway, it obviously goes much deeper than just naming constraints, but meeting with David finally tipped me over to something I’d been drifting towards for years. It was way more than worth what we paid.
So that very same night, I went online and ordered a Powerbook (12” – I now realize that I should’ve probably gotten the 17” since I’ve pretty much stopped using both my Windows desktop at the office and my Thinkpad laptop – and yes, David told me to get the 17” ...).
A when Dalager a few days later pointed me to the Alistair Cockburn interview on IT Conversations, things just seemed to click.
These are exciting times. Get David to show you just how :)
http://www.betavote.com/results/
It would only be fair if the whole world was allowed to vote in the US election … the world at large seems to favor Kerry over Bush by a margin of 77% – 88% for Kerry, 11% for Bush.Interestingly, both Afghanistan and Iraq are tied on this list.
Of course, in this exercise, anybody can manipulate the results of any country …
Still good fun.
http://pinds.com/files/OpenACS.tmbundle.zip
Far from perfect, but a first step on the way, here’s syntax highlighting for OpenACS Tcl and ADP files for use with TextMate for the Mac. Let’s just say it’s GPL, so enjoy, make it better, and share back. Still no snippets, commands, or any of the other stuff you can do, but it’s a start.Update: OpenACS for TextMate, not for OpenACS.
UPDATE2: It’s gone, lost in the server move. Sorry.
UPDATE3: Mike Naberezny tells me it can be found here.
UPDATE4: Jarkko sent it to me, so the link at the top works again now.
http://www.blognewsnetwork.com/members/0000001/2004/10/08.html#a6737
So Thursday’s Daily Source Code from Adam Curry just cracked me up laughing. He’s driving his car, recording the source code, when someone starts honking his horn, holding up his iPod (16 minutes 45 seconds into the show – check it out—update: Dave Winer has made a smaller clip with just that part). This podcasting thing really seems to be taking off, and it’s great fun watching and (mostly) listening.Btw, did I mention that I iPod-enabled my Volvo 240 GL as the first thing after buying it a few months ago? I got a Pinoeer DEH-P4500R car stereo, which was the cheapest one I could find with an RCA connector, so I could hook up my iPod via the Belkin Auto Charger w/Audio for iPod. Works perfectly, though I’ve only used it once so far for a podcast – I dont’ use my car for commuting.
Anyway, one thing I miss is something that’ll help me pick the songs I listen to, when I’m in the mood for music. Here’s the situation: If I’m in the mood for a particular prince song, I’ll pick that. No problem. If I’m not particular about what I want to listen to, the iTunes Party Shuffle feature is great. But then, it’ll play stuff I decidedly don’t want to listen right now to, like an IT conversation – not appropriate for background entertainment music – or it’ll play something stupid that I just have in my library for the occasional fun, like the corporate anthems (my brother-in-law works for KPMG, we once sang that one for him, and he was—stunned). Ok, so what to do. Yes, I could create my own playlists. But just like photo albums, it’s the kind of organization I rarely get around to doing. I just don’t care that much.
So what I’m looking for is some kind of playlist feed. Say I like Adam Curry’s taste in music. He puts together a playlist of stuff he likes. And I subscribe to his playlist feed, and a bunch of others. Now I might not have all or even most of his music in my library, of course, but the songs I do have, it would play. And the others, well, they could show up as links to the music store (or, gasp, Acquisition). I’m sure I’d enjoy that kind of service, and I have friends (Jonas) who I’m sure would love to publish a feed of music that he thinks all the rest of us should listen to :)
Adam, Jonas, I hope you pick up on this one …
-dumpstream under “Additional parameters” at the bottom of the preferences, and open the following URL: rtsp://cspanrm.fplive.net/cspan/project/c04/c04100804_debate3podium.rm?start=:04:41.0&mode=compact. It’ll save a file /stream.dump (yes, at the root), which you move and rename debate.rm. It’s 96 Mb. And it’s a much better experience than the streaming version.
Caroline’s going to California next week, and I’m thinking about asking her to bring back a TiVo box. But … would it work? From what I can tell from the forums, you need the subscription, or you might as well stick with your old-fashioned VCR. But the subscription wouldn’t know about the programs on most of the channels available to us here, now would it?
It seems like TiVo isn’t officially available in Denmark yet. Neither is ReplayTV. Any tricks, experiences?
After having discovered Podcasting, and experienced the freedom of timeshifing – being able to listing to or watch stuff on radio/TV when you want it, not when the TV/radio station wants to air it, it’s really hard to wait for TiVo …
I'm a coach and entrepreneur in Copenhagen, Denmark. Read more…
