Lars Pind

The first appcast I saw was from TextMate, and today I noticed that the FlickrExport plugin also has one. TextMate has since then been improved even further, to the point where it automatically downloads the new version, and then offers to upgrade itself and restart.

It’s quite the Christmas every day, when the tool I probably use the most has a new version with new fixes and features almost every day. After the reinstall, it’ll open up the Release Notes showing what’s new.

It shows a confidence on the part of Allan, the developer, that he knows it works well enough for us all to use (automated testing, anyone?), but it’s quite a paradigm shift from the old world of shrink-wrap software, with a release only every two years.

It’s great to see the continuous releases of the web world sneak into desktop software. It’s certainly challenged some assumptions I had about how that world works.

I just had this happen to me with Rails and MySQL 4.1, and I wanted to share the solution.

It turns out that, despite ostensibly having a maximum size of 4 TB on Linux 2.4 with ext3, there’s still by default a limit of 4GB, because MySQL defaults to using 4 byte pointers. By issuing the following ALTER TABLE statement, we changed that to 5 bytes, and thus the maximum size of that table to 1TB:

ALTER TABLE foo AVG_ROW_LENGTH = 1048576 MAX_ROWS = 65536;

This fixed it, and we’re now back in business. You can read the gory details in tho MySQL manual.

Oh, I forgot, before we could get the REPAIR TABLE to work, we had to supply a “-max-record-length” switch to it, as described here.

Why don’t the blog desktop clients support custom CSS for the preview? That way, I could make my preview look pretty much exactly like it’s going to look after it’s been published. Beats me.

UPDATE: You can.

The coolest thing about wikipedia is how their pages are updated live, as the story develops. And it covers really new stuff as well. I spent the day reading about the Plame affair, Huffington Post, Lawrence Wilkerson, New America Foundation, radcial centrism, MoveOn.org, DailyKos, and a ton of other entries that I’m not so sure the Britannica would include.

An encyclopedia that covers current events and very recent stuff is not just a better encyclopedia, it’s a whole new ball game.

There’s something for you to grok, Nicolas Carr.

[Dave Winer] said “If you are going to build a new company, go to the trouble of actually researching what other companies have already done.” He was referring to the fact that new companies are launching literally every day, and evolution is occuring so fast that people are largely unable to know what else is going on around them as they build their products. He gave a specific example – RSS readers – noting that there were so many and they were all re-inventing the same features over and over again.

It’s true. The pace of new apps showing up is breathtaking. Just keeping up with TechCrunch, eHub, and other lists of web apps can be a full-time job. I was also supposed to develop some software, you know?

My friend Pollas has done a brilliant video recording of himself as he drives his car to Flyvergrillen next to the Copenhagen Airport. It’s stunning. It’s very close up and intimate. And the production quality works remarkably well, despite it obviously being ridiculously low cost.

I totally love the outdoor scene at the airport, with the music and all. And the scene after that, where he tapes the video camera to the dashboard again is phenomenal.

For you non-Danish speakers, just fast-forward through all the talk until we get to the food joint just before 4 minutes into the thing.

I could see how this could get to be pretty time-consuming, since you can’t easily do something at the same time, like you can with audio, but it’s a great medium, I hope to see tons more like this from people I know and people I’d like to know. Thanks for checking your vanity at the door and showing us, Anders!

It’s been a week, and it’s a thumbs-up. At first I was sad to see Stephen leave the Daily Show, but now it turns out that this just means a doubling of good television availability.

My only gripe is with his interviews: They are too much comedy.

One thing I really love about Jon Stewart’s shows is that the questions he asks in his political interviews are probably the smartest, best informed I ever see asked on TV. Sure, he may not always get a straight answer, but his questions reveal a deeper insight than any other interviewer out there.

Colbert has opted to make the interviews more of a joke, and that’s fine, but it reminds me how refreshing it is to see a comedian who has the guts to take his interviewees seriously and not be funny all the time.

When developing with Rails, I often find myself wanting to use the truncate or pluralize text helpers from a controller when I’m setting the flash notice to something like “Post #{truncate(@post.title)} was successfully saved” or “Updated #{pluralize(@posts.size, “post”)}”.

The methods are instance methods, not module methods, which means they can only be called after they’ve been included in a class. But there’s another way, which is to open up the module and make them also be module methods, like so:

module ActionView
  module Helpers
    module TextHelper
      module_function :pluralize, :truncate
    end
  end
end

Require this in your environment.rb, restart your server, and now you can call them with ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper.truncate and ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper.pluralize.

Btw, I like to have a file lib/actionpack_ext.rb for this and all my other mods to vanilla Rails ActionPack, and just require that file from my environment.rb.

Jason Calacanis:

That’s why we didn’t launch an RSS reader or blog search engine, and that’s why we told everyone who wanted to do “business development” that there were only three ways to work with us: 1. read our blogs, 2. write our blogs, or 3. support our blogs with advertising.   

This is excellent. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of chasing any potential source of revenue that comes your way and might be important, or the tons of well-meaning (or not so well-meaning) offers of partnerships that come your way when you have a business. Focus can be hard, because it means you have to say no to a lot of folks and opportunities, but it’s so refreshing.

I just updated the wikipedia entry for Jørgen Leth with the fact that he’s no longer going to be doing the Tour de France for Danish TV2. Someone beat me to his renunciation of the consulship.

It’s a sad day. Trine Sick on DR1 asked whether his view on human nature is is backwards. How about the view that says we should all disguise our faults even though we all know we have them. I we’re all just flawed human beings, so what’s the fuss about? As far as I know, he’s not convicted of breaking any laws. Even if he were, one of the goals of the judicial system is that once you’ve served your time, you’re excused, and supposedly welcomed back to participate in society. Well, not in this case, everybody’s busy passing moral judgments.

I have a deep respect for Jørgen, and I appreciate the fact that someone has the guts to stand up to hypocrisy, while taking the blows as they’re dealt him. Hard. It reminds me of Søren Ulrik Thomsens great essay “Parcelhuskvarter på højkant” from Politken August 4th 2002, where he describes how the Copenhagen courtyards have been deprived of all hiding places, so there’s no longer a place for 13-year old kids to jerk off or try a fag in secrecy. Not everything in life is pretty to look at, and that’s just how it is. Sorry.

Back to Jørgen. Is there a paypal button somewhere that I can click to donate money? What does it take to help the guy out? He’s given us so much, it’s time for us to give some back. I can’t believe that TV2 didn’t have more of a spine on this.

Congratulations to Dave Winer on selling weblogs.com to Verisign. Unlike those other deals, this one has pretty good potential for the users. It’s a central piece of infrastructure, and Verisign does have a lot of experience running those.

Dave is an authentic, honest voice in the tech industry, calling it the way he sees it, contributing the core concepts, protocols and infrastructure that are going to bring this medium forward and give us the change in the media and other industries that we are longing for.

Dave, I appreciate your hard work, you really deserve some payment for this. Keep it up, as I know you will.

Another acquisition, and though not nearly as big as that other one, it leaves me asking that same question:

What’s in it for me?

I’m a frequent reader of many of Jason’s blogs, and I’m not convinced that they’re going to keep their edge. I’m certainly going to start looking for alternatives.

I completely understand why Jason chose to take the money—after all, he made a promise, and it sure must be nice to see a 7 or 8 figure balance on your bank account.

But it’s way too early. We need the media industry to be disrupted real bad, and it’s just not going to happen from within. So this crosses another potential disruptor off the list, and we’ll have to rely on others to do the job. Nick, I’m looking at you.

The Economist: (behind a paywall – and, whoa, they updated their site to a new design as I was writing this)

This is what Bill Gross has recently started offering at SNAP, a search engine that he founded. United Airlines, for instance, places text links on SNAP’s search pages, but it pays (about $10) not when somebody clicks or calls, but only when somebody actually buys a ticket. Eventually, argues Mr Gross, 100% of advertising will follow such a pay-per-sale approach—although he won’t guess how soon—because this is “the holy grail of advertising.”

Now, why do I have this infatuation with online advertising? Because I want quality online reporting, and I don’t want it to be behind a paywall, I want it to be free and open so I can read from as many different sources as I want, and so I and others can link to it and have conversations about it in our blogs.

For this to happen, publishers have to be able to make a living from ads. Now we’re just waiting for The Economist to join the conversation and drop the paywall.