Monthly Archive for December, 2007

A (Possibly Permanent) Change Of URL

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on December 10, 2007
in Blogging
. 2 Comments

New: blog.philcrissman.com

So, having thrown my lot in with Ruby & Rails, I thought maybe it was time I switched to a blog engine that runs on Rails. Mephisto looked interesting, so I’m trying it out for a bit.

I may return to Wordpress; I may try a different Ruby or Rails blog engine; I may just stay with Mephisto. That’s what’s so exciting! Who knows what I’ll do? Will I stick with it, overcoming the learning curve? Will I succumb to the lure of the familiar and easy, returning once again to the ubiquitous Wordpress? Feel free to engage in wild speculation; it’s all right. I’m okay with that.

So I have set up Mephisto in the subdomain blog.philcrissman.com, and got it all up and running. It’s quite minimal, the default Simpla-based theme, with my trusty TV image added, just to make everyone feel at home. Go visit me there; I promise to try to be interesting.

Alternatively, if you view actually visiting blogs as so three years ago, the feed for the new blog will be blog.philcrissman.com/feed/atom.xml. Subscribe to it: you know you want to.

Flying With Python

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on December 5, 2007
in Asides
. 1 Comment

Choosing to link to xkcd is sort of an exercise in futility, as I presume anyone who loves this sort of thing already reads it religiously. One of the best.

Another interesting thing about the ease of web publishing having lowered barriers to entry; outside the internet, a comic like xkcd would have a small audience and little chance to grow, as most people probably wouldn’t look past the crude artwork to see that it’s brilliant. That, and I guess the “advanced math, computer science, and heartbreak” genre doesn’t have a clear marketing strategy.

Everything Is Changing

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on December 5, 2007
in Advertising
. Comments

When I look at the stats for this site, people seem much more interested in Shoes and in anything with the word “Rails” in it than in anything I speculate about advertising. That’s okay — don’t listen to me, listen to Dave Winer.

Wait, you’re saying, Dave’s talking about the Writer’s strike, not about advertising. That’s correct; he’s not saying a word about advertising. He is, however, talking about who gets paid.

Read it again. Think about advertising; think about content creation; think about everything changing.

Or, you know, don’t. We could always put all our eggs in the “advertising will pay for everything forever” basket and just wait until the system falls apart. Then we can complain that no one wants to buy our buggy whips anymore.

More On Advertising And Ad-blocking

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on December 4, 2007
in Advertising
. 1 Comment

I’ve talked about this before, but I think that it bears a continuing discussion.

Peter Cooper, author of Beginning Ruby and the Ruby Inside blog (which you should all read), levels some objections to ad-blocking here:

I’ve never used adblocking, and will never use adblocking unless ads become /so/ obnoxious that I can’t productively experience whatever it is the advertising is plasted to.

Why? Because advertising is part of our lives, our culture, and a serious part of how our economy continues to function. Actively opting out of advertising exposure, without doing something yourself, is removing one side of the bargain in commercial situations. It’s like shoplifting. If you want something from the other party, you gotta do your own part.

If TV companies want to keep running shows like The Simpsons, Doctor Who, or whatever, they either need to make money with advertising, taxes (like the BBC does), or charge a premium subscription (a la HBO). If enough people fail to watch the ads, their efficiency drops, and then suddenly you’ve gotta pay more to watch the TV you like. It’s a bit like not voting.. if everyone stopped voting, control is in the hands of the few.

Same goes for radio, Web sites, and other forms of media. If you actively censor advertising, media providers will have to resort to other ways to balance out the implicit transaction between themselves and their consumers. Those “balances” are, I feel, unacceptable.. do we really want more annoying interstital pages, lower quality content, or sites shutting down because they couldn’t make a subscription model stick? It’s no for me, although perhaps you’d like that idea.

I understand his argument, I just don’t buy it 100%.

If taken to extremes, it approaches absurdity. For example, if I mute the television during advertisements, or get up to use the toilet, make a snack, or check my email, am I “shoplifting”? If I install a pop-up blocker, am I shoplifting? If I walk into the cinema 20 minutes late and miss the ads and the previews, am I shoplifting? More importantly, if someone’s business model isn’t working, is that the consumer’s fault? I don’t think so, and I don’t think that’s what Peter intended to say, but I do think it’s the logical conclusion to that argument.

My personal view is that the point is moot; whether people agree or disagree that blocking or skipping ads (Tivo) is ethical, it is going to happen anyways: more, and more, and more. I think it will become common-place, to the point of ubiquity.

I don’t think the answer is to not use Tivo/other DVRs or not block ads, the answer is for websites and advertisers to not annoy people, not insult their intelligence, and not be obnoxious.

We all know of the ads that are so entertaining/funny/viral that they get spread around by word of mouth, and people willingly watch them and then tell all their friends to do the same.

I think advertising will have no choice but to attempt to practice that pattern; become more creative, entertaining, informative, or whatever.

We all like to laugh, to be entertained, to be informed. Nobody likes to be sold. We don’t mind being an audience, but we aren’t so taken with being a target market, a demographic unit, or a line-item in a marketing plan.

But What About The Children?

That aside, what about the ad-based business model? Good question. Well, what about the buggy-whip manufacturers? Before someone says that obsolete technology is not analogous to blocking ads, well — I don’t know about that. Technology is what makes blocking or skipping advertisements possible, and it’s no coincidence that as soon as most people are able to skip advertisements, they do.

If a business model starts to fail, do we halt what we’re doing and alter our behavior to suit that business model? By that logic, we all should have ordered stuff from Pets.com in 2000, just out of the kindness of our hearts, so they didn’t go out of business. The dot-com bust shouldn’t have happened, because we shouldn’t have let it happen, darn it! Why weren’t we there for their business model? How could we fail to support them?

No; I don’t think we should adapt to a business model. The business model adapts to the consumer, period.

If I start a business and fail to make money, I can’t go to my investors and try to tell them that my business model is fine, it’s just that the customers are not cooperating.

Again, my examples are approaching absurdity. But I think we’ve become so used to an advertising-based model that we may not see that it’s basically a one-sided contract. We never agreed, in the early days of radio and television, to watch advertisements in exchange for consuming news and entertainment — that was(is) just how it worked. To a large extent, that is still how it works, and I’m not against advertising, or that business model: not at all! In many/most cases, I think the model still works, and works well.

What I see, and what I’ve said before, is that as ad blocking/skipping becomes ubiquitous (and I still think that it will become ubiquitous), the business model will be forced to change. That’s not bad, wrong, unethical, immoral, or anything like that. It’s just change.

It may be disruptive, but, don’t we claim to like disruptive? Isn’t all innovation disruptive? Maybe not everyone sees a change in the advertising business model as “innovation”, but I’m not sure what else you’d call a change as large as the one I think is going to happen in the next ten years.

What do you think?

Firefox 3.0b1 Is Incredible

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on December 3, 2007
in Asides
. 2 Comments

I’m going to leap into the abyss here, and declare my unabashed affection for Firefox 3 after having only used the beta for about 20 minutes. Will that be okay? We’ll see.

Some context: I’ve been noticing more and more font-rendering issues in Firefox on Mac OS X. I don’t know the cause, nor why it only seems to affect certain web pages — the image in the first post of this forum thread shows exactly what I’m referring to.

At some point this evening, I became determined to fix this. There must be a fix — a solution, I reasoned. I found a similar issue and resolution, but it didn’t resolve my issue. This wasn’t too surprising as the page I found it on was over a year old. So, kept searching, and noted in the aforementioned thread that font rendering in the Firefox 3 beta was, apparently, flawless.

I figured I would check it out, but I wasn’t too enthused because Greasemonkey will not currently install in Firefox 3.0b1. A few minutes after using FF3, though, it became clear that:

  • Firefox 3 is incredibly fast.
  • Font rendering is perfect.
  • There is no way I’m going back.

I didn’t really want to do without Greasemonkey, so I started searching, which brought me to a thread in the greasemonkey-dev group, which has a link to a FF3-compatible version of Greasemonkey:

http://www.youngpup.net/z_dropbox/greasemonkey-0.7.20071121.0.xpi

Calloo, callay, O frabjous day, I said to myself. I may have chortled, I can’t recollect precisely.

It works perfectly (so far, at least). Shiftspace does not seem to work perfectly, but I’ll have to look into that some more after tomorrow’s final exam.

For which I should probably study, now.

What’s Wrong With Whitespace?

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on December 3, 2007
in Asides and Code
. 2 Comments

More and more I’m seeing people disparage Python over the whitespace issue. What’s most disconcerting is when the same group embraces YAML, Haml, and Sass, because for some reason it’s okay if they have significant whitespace.

I don’t buy it. Yes, when you’re new to it, it’s frustrating to have bugs that are only the result of whitespace, or lack thereof. But if you’re new to a language, syntax errors are just something you learn by making them; I daresay that everyone learned to end lines with a semi-colon in [insert appropriate language here] just by forgetting it a few times.

On top of that, I’ve yet to see anyone who doesn’t prefer clear, well indented code, to sloppy hard-to-read code.

I like to use a variety of languages, and even though Python’s not something I use very much right now, I fully expect to use it in the future, and would do so happily. It’s a great language.

So what’s the big deal with whitespace?

(I almost called this post “All Whitespace Is Significant”, planning to point out you at least need to put a single space between tokens so that your code can be parsed, but I figured the flames telling me I didn’t understand “significant whitespace” wouldn’t be worth it… ;) )

Perl On Rails; everything on Rails?

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on December 1, 2007
in Code and www
. 1 Comment

The BBC Interactive department writes about how they’re using what amounts to Perl On Rails.

For a short while, Rails seemed like it might be a lot of hype over something new, for the sake of something new. Then it started to seem like it might be a bit of a fad, then it became clear that it was a Good Thing that Many People wanted to use. Now I’m thinking we’ll look back on development in this first decade of the 21st century, and Rails will be among the highlights that looms the largest.

I suppose when we start porting Rails to other languages and environments, continuing to call it “Rails” is more of a convenience than anything else. We could just say “Rails-like code generation and MVC” and I think that, for the most part, we’d be saying the same thing. Not all the following are deliberate “Rails Clones” per se, but we have:

  • Django: Of all the alternatives to Ruby on Rails, this seems the most popular. Uses Python, a popular language with hackers and early adopters.
  • TurboGears: Another Python project. I haven’t heard much about this one, but it seems to still be active.
  • PHP On Trax: As the name suggests, this seems to be a deliberate port of Rails to PHP. Seeing the traction that PHP has, this is worth looking into. If you wind up in an environment where PHP is the prescribed platform, this might be a good framework.
  • Symfony: Not a Rails clone (I don’t think), but it advertises as having “simple templating and helpers, smart URLs, scaffolding, object model and MVC separation, and Ajax support”, so I’d say it seems to fall into the same family of modern frameworks. Also PHP.
  • Junction is apparently Rails for… Javascript? I know very little about this, so you’d best just follow the link if you’re interested.
  • Steve Yegge’s Port of Rails to Javascript: I don’t know if this project has a name, or if it’s available outside of Google, but this made some headlines awhile back.
  • Groovy on Grails: Yes, couldn’t forget Groovy on Grails. Groovy is a scripting language based on Ruby that runs on the Java Runtime Environment. Grails is… Rails for Groovy. If I’ve oversimplified this description, feel free to correct me in the comments.
  • JRuby On Rails: I don’t thinks there’s an official site for this; my understanding is that JRuby is compatible enough with Ruby that Rails is essentially still Rails… just running on JRuby instead.

And, of course, the aforementioned Perl on Rails. Wow! Quite a list, and I’m sure I missed some frameworks, both Rails-inspired and otherwise. I’m not interested in listing all frameworks, though, but specifically those with Rails-like features.

So, yes. Whether people choose Ruby or not, it seems pretty clear that Rails-like frameworks have caught on in a big way. Suits me fine; the more I learn about the framework, the more I like it, and it’s great to know that similar frameworks exist should I have the need to use an alternate language.

New Habit: Subscribing To The Blogs Of People I Follow On Twitter

Published
by
Phil Crissman
on December 1, 2007
in Asides and Blogging
. 2 Comments

I jumped into Twitter by starting to follow about 1400+ people right away. Obviously, I did not know all those people; I found them by following someone, and then seeing who that person was following, and adding them, and so forth.

Too random? Maybe. The thing is: people on Twitter, in general, seem to neither care nor mind that you don’t know them. In fact, soon after I joined, I had someone start following me. I didn’t quite “get” why at first. At any rate, that’s Twitter.

The fallout from that is, I’m following a heck of a lot of people. I haven’t tried to run any tests (and I probably won’t any time soon), but I’m pretty sure that a lot of the folks I’ve followed are not Twittering regularly. I see the same few hundred names over and over, for the most part.

Due to the nature of Twitter, it’s pretty much a given that people using regularly are also bloggers. Maybe not all, but the majority. So, I’m starting to try and make it a point to also subscribe to these blogs. Main reason: I figure if someone can say something interesting in 140 characters, they can probably do so in a longer format as well.

Obviously I can’t read all that many feeds every day; I barely read the few hundred I have already. But I like to skim the headlines, and I think I catch the gist of what’s going on over a fairly large spectrum of blogs. I use Google reader, which has the nice feature of letting you read everything at once, if you want, so you can see the latest posts of everything you subscribe to aggregated into on big river of feeds. I’m not religious about it, but I try to add things that stand out to my Google shared items, which you can find linked in the sidebar of this blog.