Categories

• Blog
• Technology
  • Ruby
  • Widgets

Recent Posts

• I am a mac
• Donate Widget Example
• My latest Venture
• What did I get out of RailsConf? We will all live in the clouds
• When is php a better language than ruby?

Archives

• November 2008
• October 2008
• June 2008
• April 2008

Links

• KarenMoronski.org
• Marks Blog

I am a mac

November 1st, 2008   Filed Under Technology  

     I am a mac. Now don't get me wrong. I love John Hodgeman, and agree that the dude from that Jeepers Creepers movie is a bit overly self assured and sometimes blatantly incorrect in the I'm a mac / I'm a PC commercials but I still find them hilarious. I'm not really going to talk about the truthfulness or effectivity of Apple's ad campaign or the desperation in Microsoft's long overdue but exceedingly lame I'm a PC counter-attack. I just want to explain why I cringe whenever I have to touch a windows based machine.

     First I will say that as a person with more than one degree in mathematics, I am well aware that some of my reasons are quite irrational. For example, I can't explain it but I just enjoy using Mac OS. My first apple purchase refueled my interest in an industry that I was ready to walk away from. Yes, I am saying it, Apple software just "feels" better. I enjoy my experience. I really can't tell you exaclty why, but I do. I enjoy computing in a way I haven't felt since getting my first computer so many years ago. This is one of the reasons why the Apple versus Microsoft debate lingers on as it does. So many people just feel good about their Apple computers but they have a hard time explaining why. Maybe its something Steve Jobs is putting in the water, but I think its much simpler than that. Apple products are designed to make you feel good about them. They look good, they try to maintain simplicity and everything is clean and normally minimalistic compared to windows based experience. Apple creates an image so effective that in my small corner of the industry (Ruby Programming) Windows users are often the butt of jokes and any given conference speaker will look up to see a sea of glowing apple's. The average user is not really knowledgeable enough to choose the best platform for their needs but growth of apple hardware in the notebook computer market has to have an explanation. I think it has to do with people feeling good about their computers for the first time.
       An apple computer is not just a possession it is a statement. As their market share increases that statement will weaken but right now there is an overwhelming sense in many areas of computing and academia that owning an apple computer indicates that you care enough about what you do that you buy the best tools for the job. I have heard hiring managers wax anecdotally about passing on a candidate because they were a windows user. Well hell, I'm a windows user too, I just don't use it for anything important. When I want to feel good about my work I reach for my macbook.
       Now in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter how your computer makes you feel. At the end of the day it has to be able to do what you need to get the job done. Microsoft fans like to say things like Mac OS is an operating system for idiots or your grandparents. I'm not really sure what they mean. Do they mean that even an idiot can use it? Do they mean that I don't have to spend 10 hours teaching grandma how to check her email? This all sounds good to me. I think the problem is that they still see Mac OS under the veil of its non-Unix days before Next Step became Mac OS and before Steve Jobs took his company back and unfrakked its rapid path to irrelevance. I was an Apple Technician in the 90's and I hated the pre-Unix iterations of Mac OS. Software support was still horrible, games were almost non existent unless you wanted to play Myst another time through and the operating system just felt incomplete. I owned a Windows PC and didn't really see any problems with my operating system of choice. That is if you call a rotting sess pool of legacy code "Not a problem".
      I plan to revise this rant at a later time but in the interest of catching up on sleep I want to get to the beginning of my technical argument. I know its not yet very technical. There is one word that matters here, Unix. Stop comparing Windows and Mac OS and start comparing Windows and Unix. Having a polished and heavily third party supported end-user version of Unix is really the crux of why, at least in my industry, Mac OS just makes sense. Unix is a battle hardened platform that came from the enterprise. Colleges and universities ran large servers providing services to dumb terminals and thin clients all over campus. Microsoft did it the other way. Windows was a toy that showed up in the home with minimal networking facilities and it gained so much end user familiarity and a few spread sheet applications that it forced its way, guns a blazin' , in to the enterprise regardless of whether or not it belonged there. Now that high speed internet is becoming ubiquitous, the writing is on the wall and it says that windows was a wonderful stop gap measure, it provided a localized computing environment that allowed people to explore computing without being tethered to the network and it did it much better than early versions of Mac OS. I am writing this while traveling as a passenger in a car, on a thruway connected to a web based content management application via an EVDO card. I could just as easily be writing this over my iphone which also runs Unix by the way. But the content management app is running on a linux box somewhere in California. Windows was training wheels for industry. Now that the network follows us everywhere it is time to take them off.
       There is a reason why most web servers run linux. Linux emulates Unix so well that you'd barely know the difference in the most cases. Unix was made first and foremost to be part of a larger network and this is why it fits well into todays computing environments where just about every computer might as well be a paper weight if it is not on line.
       Furthermore the power of the *nix command line is unmatched by any tool available on the Windows platform. I prefer BASh personally and fortunately that is the default shell used in Mac OS. After seeing the efficiency with which I can command my profession via the command line it is undeniable to me that a person who masters the keyboard and the command line will always out perform a mouser. Windows promotes and sometimes requires existence of the mouser and his hunting and clicking ways. Apple gives you the choice and builds its user interface on top of an undeniably superior foundation. Windows versus Mac OS is irrelevant. Windows version *nix is the real argument. Why don't you call your web host and ask them which platform they prefer? If the webernet is truly the present and future of computing than large cloud computing environments running linux and unix are the future of operating systems. Microsoft can sit in denial for the time being but the only way to avoid its fate is to understand why those that have the knowledge and professional flexibility to choose a platform based on its overall merits and power seem to choose *nix.
 ..... more to come.....

Donate Widget Example

October 31st, 2008   Filed Under Widgets  

So I have been loving Sprout Builder lately. Call it a professional epiphany or just plain appreciation for the work of others but I have finally started to shed the last remnants of that not-invented-here attitude that permeates much of industry. I would look at a tool that builds widgets and say "Why would I use that?", "I'd rather build them myself". If you have that same attitude, do yourself a favor and stop that nonsense right now. There are others developers doing wonderful things on the web and if they want to let me make really cool widgets, really quickly then I say "Thank You". I don't care how much Actionscript experience I have or how much I do enjoy writing flash stuff to mix up my development tasks and get away from back end architecture. These guys have done some really cool work and using it is going to give me more time for doing things that other developers "haven't" already done instead of reinventing the wheel because it wasn't designed in my shop in the first place.
Below was a donation widget I did for a friend in about 5 minutes. its simple ,very useful and takes care of the paypal integration for you. Now think about what I just said, I got all of that in 5 minutes. Heres to finding more time for travel, reading, and strategy games.

My latest Venture

October 31st, 2008   Filed Under Technology  

Seems I can't leave the house these days without starting a company or helping someone else start a company. So when my best friend said "Lets start a skateboard company" I said "umm.. sure". What else could I say? I am now the Technical Director of bloskateboards at www.bloskateboards.com Think "b-lo" as is Western New York vernacular for Buffalo. We are trying to make it a board sports lifestyle brand. Our focus is on lifestyle and image and I think our Creative Director (Kevin Hassett) has an amazing vision. The third amigo and our founder and Marketing Director is Jeremy Wells. Jeremy could sell a raw hamburger to a vegan or a catsup popsicle to a woman wearing white gloves. Between the three of us we have a perfectly complimentary skill set for this type of business. We also grew up skateboarding together and I will admit I've been back on my board a few times since starting this and my knees, ankles and thighs are currently not speaking to me. There is rumor of a coup.

What did I get out of RailsConf? We will all live in the clouds

June 3rd, 2008   Filed Under Blog, Ruby, Technology  

This past weekend was my first RailsConf. Although I've been using Rails since before the first conference. I somehow managed to never register on time. Each year I would listen to what the rest of the community had to say about the conference and it seemed that there have always been one or two technologies, patterns, or practices that stood out or showed up in several talks. One year it seemed that all-of-a-sudden REST was all anyone could talk about and another year Mongrel was the big buzz. Its always a good bet that these few themes have and will shape the landscape for the next phase of the rails and ruby development evolution.

Of course I can only speak for the path I followed down the lecture grid but I heard a lot about distributed computing this weekend. I had discussions at lunch and between werewolf sessions about several implementations. I attended at least three lectures that mentioned different distributed frameworks and architectures and I know of at least one other talk that I am very unhappy about missing. Two of the more notable offerings were a talk on a very cool cloud computing framework called Vertebra given by Ezra at Engine Yard (aka. my new employer) and the other was about MagLev which is a distributed, and transactional data store for ruby that is based on the Gemstone VM (smalltalk).

You can read more about Vertebra here from Ezra's slides: http://brainspl.at/articles/2008/06/02/introducing-vertebra

And Maglev here: http://ruby.gemstone.com/

I'd like to hear what other themes people got out of the weekend. Normally I'd be eagerly expectant of some feedback here but my very young blog space only has four readers at the moment. So lets hope google gives me some love this week.

When is php a better language than ruby?

April 5th, 2008   Filed Under Blog, Ruby, Technology  

This post is not a comparison of two languages. If I had to categorize it I'd say its about pragmatic practices.

Ruby is my programming language of choice, and Rails, the framework that has popularized it has been a great tool in my professional arsenal. I have been able to rapidly develop and deploy web applications using these tools and in some ways it has kept me involved in an industry I was almost ready to leave a few years back. So I really like ruby, it is much too fun to use to be as powerful as it is. Not that ruby is necessarily more powerful than a language like php although many will argue that its meta programming capabilities  and niceties like blocks and closures make it far superior. I personally believe it is more well constructed than php but that is not the purpose of this post. The question here is when should you use php instead?

If you work in a certain web technology it stands to reason that your website should be implemented in some way via that technology. This website is a running wordpress which is a content management and blogging engine written in PHP. I have also worked as a php programmer so I can extend it easily and it is a very well thought out content management platform. So why did I not implement this website in ruby on rails? There are several reasons.

1:) With the number of powerful content management systems out there that give me a tested and actively developed platform for personal publishing it would be foolish for me to write my own.

2:) Sure there are some rails based systems like Mephisto and Radiant but Rails is a bear on shared hosting platforms. I have a lifetime shared hosting plan with Joyent. With shared hosting it becomes a simple matter of economy and I would have to sow up the entire resources of my plan trying to host a couple rails apps. I will get into the technical details of this in a later post. I have written specialized CMS platforms in Rails for my clients and although I could reuse some of those components these apps were written be run on dedicated servers and take advantage of the options you have when you control your own environment.

3:) Right now there are simply no Rails based CMS platforms available that are as mature as Wordpress, Drupal, or Textpattern and writing my own would only serve to show that I can spend a month of my free time doing trivial things with my language of choice. I have much more important things to do.

You might say there are more efficient ruby frameworks to use. I like Merb quite a bit and am using it for some projects but shared hosting does not always give you the flexibility you need in installing gems and dependencies. I will be exploring this point in a later post (How to get the most out of shared hosting). For those of you unfamiliar with Merb I suggest you check out www.merbivore.com for details.

While I am a geek and spend a great deal of my free time hacking away at some code base I have very little interest in reinventing the blog. It has been done and it has been done well in php. In this case a php platform is a better option. Work smarter not harder. Save your energy for doing really cool things in ruby and don't waste your time on things that have been done well already.

So I think you see my point. I love ruby but right now I have little time for trivial projects. We don't need another blog engine. The things I get paid to do are far more interesting.