Yesterday evening Ruby on Rails came up while talking to my mom, and I decided to try to explain what a framework was. I wound up comparing a framework to a sonnet.
If you’re writing a poem, and you decide to write a sonnet, you have a lot of little things decided for you right away. You now know the length of the poem, and the general structure. You know how long each line will be, and you even have some criteria for the content (iambic pentameter and a certain rhyming scheme). Other than that, you can do whatever you want.
It’s by no means a direct analogy, but because my mom knows what a sonnet is, the concept of a framework made sense to her right away.
I may have overreached just a little to use sonnets as the example. Maybe frameworks are more like limericks. Same idea, though.
I was in Microcenter the other day, and they had some ASUS eee PCs sitting on the shelf. Very cheap, very small, very cool.
They come with Linux installed by default, but after playing it, I learned quickly that I would want to re-install with something like Ubuntu. Whatever custom version they have on there is extremely crippled compared to what I’m used to.
Another negative was the RAM — comes with 512MB, but is not upgradeable. Fail.
Still; it’s so small, and 512MB RAM is not that bad. It’s not as though I’d be playing Halflife2 on the little thing, after all.
In case you have ever lain awake at night, burning to know whether the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song says that Splinter taught them to be ninja teens or ninja teams, perhaps help has arrived.
This was all started by everyone’s favorite revisionist pre-historian, Ryan North, right here.
Dan Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind, which I still have not read (I should probably remedy that), but which is high up on the “Titles I Wish I Had Thought Of” list.
He also has a new book; “America’s first business book in manga”. Does this imply there are whole series of magna business guides in Japan? I don’t know. Maybe.
I’m not there yet, of course, but it all came together.
Here’s the backstory: I saw the startupschool.org pitch, and always assumed I couldn’t go. After all, I’m in Minneapolis — it’s at Stanford. Besides which, you need to apply and be accepted… well, I thought, I could apply. What could that hurt? I probably wouldn’t be accepted anyways.
So I applied. And then forgot about it, like you buy a lottery ticket or a sweepstakes ticket, and realism makes you compartmentalize the possibility of “winning” in the “that’d be nice but isn’t going to happen” part of your brain.
reposted from blog.philcrissman.com. Since I’m moving back here, I may repost a few of my last few months blog posts, just so they are all in one place.
There was a lot of discussion awhile back about Facebook and its limit of 5,000 friends. The discussion, in case you (mercifully) missed it, was largely driven by social networking power users like Scoble.
I didn’t think too much about it at the time. Between now and then, I’ve thought a few times about social networks, and how they are implemented. Not the front end, but the back matter; the model. The database; users and connections.
A social network is fundamentally a graph. Most social networks are analogous to non-directed graphs – that is, there is no distinction which “direction” a connection goes. If you are friends with someone in Facebook or MySpace, they are also friends with you. Pownce and Twitter have taken a directed-graph approach, in which friendship (following) is not automatically mutual. I could follow you, but you might not follow me. And so on. Continue reading ‘Social Networking and the handshake problem’
Wow. The campaign already is at 50%. I may get to Stanford yet.
Of course, when I do, now I’ll be the guy who panhandled his way to Startup School, but I guess I can live that down. I really appreciate the help, I had pretty much given up on going. It may yet work out!
