I’m finally back from my long vacation. The start of the new year brings the start of new episodes for three shows that I watch.

The first one is the critically acclaimed show, Battlestar Galactica, which begins airing new episodes tomorrow at 10 PM on the SciFi channel.

Next up is 24 which sees Keifer Sutherland reprising his role as uber-agent Jack Bauer. The 4 hour (!) season premiere starts on Sunday the 15th (2 hours) and then again on the 16th (2 hours) at 8 PM on FOX.

Last but not least, there is Lost on ABC. That airs on January 11th. at 8/7c.

Well, I’m not sure that it’s actually David writing in it, but David Gilmour’s site has a blog on it.

Most of the content on the blog site deals with recording sessions of his new album On An Island which is scheduled to drop on March 6th of 2006. This will be his first solo album since the 1984 release of About Face.

Honestly, I’m a bit apprehensive about this album. According to a news source, the title track teams Gilmour with David Crosby and Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills and Nash).

I’m not sure if they play on other songs but I’ve never been a fan of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Let’s hope that this album is not a stinker.

No, I’m not referring to the electronic kind of bookmarks, I’m referring to the things that you put in…well…books.

For the longest time, I’ve been without a real bookmark. I’ve generally used scraps of whatever paper I had lying around at the time. I wasn’t really happy with this but I could never find bookmarks that weren’t made for girls/kids/over the top ugly.

I managed to buy one at Barnes and Noble, but now that I’ve used it for a while I don’t really like it as much as I though I would. The main problem with the bookmark is that there is only one of them and if you look at my list of stuff that I’m reading, you’ll see that I’m reading lots of books at a time. One bookmark, a dozen books; doesn’t add up. The other problem that I have with the bookmark, is that it’s too thick. While being quite neutral (not too girly – apparently only girls read books) and stylish (it’s black leather with the kanji for wisdom on it in red metallic ink), it’s a bit too thick for my tastes.

Now normally, I’m not really an arts and crafts type of dude, but somehow I made my way to fabiosirna.com and checked out the post DIY – Paper Bookmarks. As soon as I saw them, I dug them. The bookmarks are really simple to make and basically free (all you need is paper and a printer (having a color printer is better but it’s not needed)).

Once you print them out, just cut and fold and you have yourself functional and cool bookmarks.

Now I can have a bookmark for each book without looking like a slob.

There has been a proliferation of online articles and blog posts about how less is more. One of the more popular advocates of this methodology is 37Signals’ blog Signal vs. Noise.

In the blog, they consistently make points where having less of something is actually better than having an overabundance. For example; smaller teams make better software, having less money means that teams have to be creative instead of sloppy to produce good products.

Lately, I’ve started seeing an example of this from surprising sources.

I first noticed this when I watched the extras on the Serenity DVD. In one of the extras, Joss Whedon mentioned that because they didn’t have a huge budget for the movie, it caused them to be more creative in making special effects (e.g. using models instead of pure CGI).

When I saw this, I was instantly reminded of a scene from a Star Wars documentary where I saw some dude on his hands and knees making R2D2 “walk.” Back then, George had very little money for (at the time) CGI, costumes, and sets. Because he didn’t have a lot of money, he had to use creativity as a counterbalance.

Contrast this to the second trilogy (Episode 1-3), where he has a huge amount of money at his disposal. Personally I think (and a lot of critics do as well) that this has hurt the creativity of the films. If there is a problem, just throw more and more CGI or money on it, until it’s gone.

My other example comes from, suprisingly enough, the Capcom video game, Resident Evil 4. Stay with me on this one. I recently purchased this game and played it feverishly for days. The first time through the game I was very cautious; using only the ammo that I needed to kill the enemies, making sure that my shots counted, etc.

The second time through the game (you get to keep your equipment and ammo from the first time), I was less cautious and more prone to laying waste to everything in my path using a machine gun.

What happened? Well, I got my goal accomplished but it was very, very sloppy. A lot of ammo wasted and my hit percentage dropped way down. Instead of being in the 80% to 90% range, I was consistently in the 50% to 60% range.

The moral of the story is that more of something can actually make you sloppy. More programmers doesn’t necessarily mean better software, more money doesn’t necessarily mean a better product, and more ammo doesn’t increase your hit ratio. :)

I was reading Nathan’s Smith blog post, January Randomness, and noticed something very refreshing about his web host, Dreamhost.

In the post, Nathan writes that when Dreamhost offers “promotional deals, they give the same benefits to all their existing customers free of charge.”

This is really refreshing thinking. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen promotional deals from a company that only apply to new customers. I can only imagine the consternation of existing, loyal customers when they see promotional offers that aren’t offered to them.

Making your current customers happy is just as important as bringing in new customers, period.

I have a related example of this. Note: Before I go into my example, I’ll be honest, I have no idea of the econonimcs of rental properties, so it’s probably easy for me to be “armchair quarterback.” Anyone that has actual in-depth knowledge of the industry can comment or make a rebuttal.

Currently, I don’t own a home and I rent an apartment. For the past 3 years, I’ve been a loyal customer of my apartment complex and yet they make almost no effort in retaining me as a customer.

Every year, like clockwork, when my lease is up all they do is raise the rates on me and never give me any sort of deal (like the deal that I got when I moved in). What’s my incentive for staying?

What’s the outcome? I’m looking at other places seriously and if everything goes according to plan, I will not renew my lease.

I’m sure that this happens with other industries as well. In other words, what are you doing to retain your customers?

I hate taking the time to clean my apartment. It’s mind-numbing, boring work and takes time away from working on “important projects.”

To a Type-C procrastinator (read Good and Bad Procrastination by Paul Graham) like myself, cleaning and doing menial tasks is akin to torture. Unfortunately, if you procrastinate too much, you’ll pay for it later.

I’m always on the look out for tips and tricks to make this task quicker and more efficient.

Common knowledge dictates that the trick to keeping your house clean is to mini-cleaning in between deep cleaning, regardless of this, the article, The Keep-It-Clean-Plan, on the Real Simple web site, outlines the steps necessary for you to accomplish this goal.

Although the article says that you can have “a sparkling house in just 19 minutes a day,” your actual cleaning time may vary depending on the size of your home.

Quick link here. Don’t have a Mac but wanna test your site in Safari (Apple’s web browser)? Well, now you can. This site will load your page in Safari and then render it to you as a graphic image.

I’ve been a fan of Guy Kawasaki since I read his book The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything.

When I read that he started a blog, I instantly subscribed to the RSS feed. As expected, it has yet to disappoint.

His latest post, titled Hindsights, is an excellent must-read. Call it a top ten of things that he has learned in his life. Good stuff.

It’s been a weekend of deals and good prices.

On Friday morning, I checked the RSS feed for the pro-consumer website consumerist.com and found my way to Amazon’s weekly Friday deals. I’ve been an Amazon.com shopper for years and never knew about their Friday sales.

Browsing the items, I managed to get a Hoover Windtunnel Vacuum for 79.99 (originally 329.99 and a Calphalon Saucepan for 16.99 (originally 119.00) and another Calphalon pan for 20.99 (originally 168.00).

The prices have come up a little bit on Amazon, but you can still get them for good prices.

If that wasn’t enough, my girlfriend and I stopped by Copeland Sports and managed to get a good snowboarding jacket for ~27.00 (originally 170.00).

I’ve been working on updating this site to what I call “version 3” for a while. “Version 3” has been set to include a whole new look and design as well as some programming additions to make it…well, better.

At first I was committed to using ASP.NET as my programming platform of choice (this site currently runs under ASP.NET 1.1), but somewhere along the line, I lost enthusiasm for using it.

Along the way, I’ve discovered Ruby on Rails and I’ve become determined to use it for the new site. Unfortunately, using Ruby on Rails on the preferred platform (Linux or Mac OS X) makes the learning curve quite steep.

As I thought more and more about what I’ve learned and what I’ve still yet to learn, I decided to make a set of articles that went from the first step of building a blog to the final steps of deployment and rolling it out live.

It’s helpful for me to document my progress and it might be helpful for other people out there as well.

Some people might say that I’m re-inventing the wheel considering the amount of great blogging packages out there (Typo, Das Blog, .Text, Wordpress, Movable Type, etc). I don’t see it like that at all. Since my goal is to learn Ruby on Rails on an Open Source platform, I see as “figuring out how the wheel works; by itself and in conjunction with other systems.”

The technologies that I’m going to be using will help me build my skills by learning basic skills in Ruby on Rails like CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete), as well as more advanced skills like XML-RPC and AJAX.

Hopefully, whoever reads these can pull something useful out of them.

Next up: Buildin’ the Blog: Part 1 – Design Web Standards and Design Inspiration.

Although this is part one of this series, there is a preface article to this. That article can be found here.

When I first gave serious consideration to making large-scale revisions to my homegrown blog software, I knew that I wanted to attempt to do things “the right way” instead of just writing code and uploading it.

Wanting a deeper understanding of web standards, I started reading countless blogs by the people that understood them best. In addition, I also started reading books voraciously on the subject (links to blogs and books are at the end of the article).

I’ve taken some traditional classes in print design way back when, but it’s been so long that I wanted some inspiration on choosing my new design.

In addition to looking at the design on the blogs that I liked I did some searches on google and quickly found a number of CSS gallery sites that I could pull design inspiration from. I didn’t want my blog to be too heavily influenced by one blog (at the risk of copying it subconciously), so I employed a little trick that I read on a blog (unfortunately, I can’t remember where I read it) which I call an inspiration collage or a design collage.

Making an inspiration collage is simple. I start with a new Photoshop document. This document will hold all of my “scraps” that I’ve culled from sites. When I visit a site with design elements that I like, I do a screen capture of the site and then trim it down to the specific elements. Remember, my goal here is inspiration not copying entire designs.

Part 2 of this series is around the corner. Stay tuned!

Here are some links to books, blogs, and design inspiration sites:

Books:

• The Non-Designer’s Design Book (Second Edition)
• Defensive Design for the Web – How to Improve Error Messages, Help, Forms, and Other Crisis Points
• Web Standards Solutions – The Markup and Style Guide Handbook
  
• Cascading Style Sheets – Separating Content from Presentation (Second Edition)
  
• Web Designer’s Reference
• Don’t Make Me Thing (Second Edition)
• The Zen of CSS Design : Visual Enlightenment for the Web
  

Blogs:

• Simplebits.com
• Molly.com
• SonSpring
• Signal Vs. Noise
• Stopdesign
• Jeffery Zeldman
• A List Apart
  

CSS Design Sites

• CSS Zen Garden
  
• CSSLiquid
• DarkEye
• DesignShack
• StyleGala
• CSS Drive
• Unmatched Style
• CSSVault
• CSSBeauty
• CSSImport

I’ve been an advocate of RSS for a while now and while I can’t imagine giving up my RSS aggregator (SharpReader), I’ve found myself unsubscribing from several feeds.

I took me two days to unsubscribe from the CNN RSS feed and one week to unsubscribe from the Lifehacker feed. Why? Too much information. Reading blogs was beginning to become a chore, much like taming the constant flow of email at work. I would find myself looking at 100+ blog posts and just marking all of them as read.

I’m not the only one that thinks this way. Paul Kedrosky, in his post RSS Sucks, says the same thing. He writes “…Faced with feeds regularly containing more
than six or seven unread articles I, with rare friend-driven
exceptions, usually nuke the whole list.”

I’m starting to wonder if too many feeds, especially big feeds like digg, memeorandum, slashdot and delicious/popular are just too much. Eventually there is a saturation point and that point is the human attention span.

Here is a somewhat mathematically inaccurate example (but you’ll get the point):

In the last 7 hours on digg there have been 16 articles posted. Let’s pretend that I have a life on the weekend and I don’t read any blogs from 5 PM on Friday until 8 AM on Monday morning. A total of 61 hours away from the blogosphere.

If people post 16 articles every 7 hours, by the end of the weekend you’d have 139 unread posts waiting for you and that’s only from one big feed. Including Slashdot, Memeorandum, and others and you’ll probably be looking at over 400 posts that are unread.

Now just like your email, some of the items are fluff and you’ll just junk it by looking at the subject, but you’re still taking time to wade through 400 posts.

This is starting to sound like a job and I’m not even getting paid for it.

Is RSS too much of a good thing?

Computerworld is running yet another article on a company losing their backup tapes.

This case caught my eye immediately because it has happened in “my own backyard.” According to the article a set of disks and tapes was stolen from the car of a Providence employee while the car was at his home in Portland, Oregon.

A spokesman for Providence said that the data on the tapes was encrypted but the data on the disks was not. Walker, the spokesman, mentioned however that the data on the disks was is stored in a way that would make it difficult, if not impossible, for someone to access it, then make any sense out of it.“

This is another black eye for IT departments everywhere and a call to review their offsite tape policies.

If you are concerned that your information might be at risk, you should read the ”http://www.providence.org/oregon/hcs/newsrelease.htm">Providence press release and if necessary call their hotline number at 1-888-284-8997.

I was thinking about the problem with RSS that I wrote about earlier tonight.

The basic problem is too much information too quickly without a way to filter it into the stuff that you want to read.

So I started thinking, as I usually do, about system that filters these articles or posts based on existing technology, tags. In my head, I was thinking about digg.com in specific but I’m sure that it could apply to other sites as well.

Basically, here is how it would work: When people upload their content they would have to tag their posts. Then you would have your own personalized login page where you could define the tags that you are interested in. Using the tags that you are interested in, it generates a custom RSS feed with only the content that you want to read.

Hrrm…not a bad idea. Personalization and tags? Slap a web 2.0 sticker on this sucker and ship it!

/me makes a telephone hand signal and mouths the words “Kevin Rose, call me.”

I think that everyone has heard mention of the lawsuit for patent infringement filed against the BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) by NTP.

Even if you have heard of it, you might not know the exact details of the case (I know that I didn’t).

This article, breaks it down bit by bit and exposes the details of the case.

Driving is hard. I sympathize with you.

To begin with, the automatic automobile is a complex machine and learning to make it move and stop is akin to wizardry.

I mean, not only do you have a pedal for stop and go but I’ve found that you can actually slow down by taking your foot off the gas pedal! Who knew, right? I always assumed that I had to press down on the “stop” pedal to make the machine slow down. It’s actually quite amazing.

As if it weren’t hard enough to learn how to use such a complex machine, the weather conspires against us to make it harder. As you know, Portland is a very arid place to live. We rarely ever see a drop of rain, so I can understand how when it does rain, Oregon drivers aren’t used to it.

So, it’s perfectly ok then to drive 10 miles per hour on the highway when such an event from the heavens known as “rain” happens. It’s also understandable that when it does rain you might crash into inanimate objects…a lot.

It’s ok that your accident has clogged the freeways and the streets, we know how tough it is. When we drive by and see this, we think to ourselves, “Driving is hard, struggle on my friend, struggle on.”

Last but not least, turning a car (either left or right) should really be left to immortal powers. It’s really beyond the understanding of normal mortal humans like you and I. Because I know that it’s an impossible task, it’s ok for you to slow down to a snail’s pace to make a right turn. After all, we wouldn’t want you to fly out of control, would we?

It’s also ok for you to bolt and turn left the second the light turns green even though there are still pedestrians and other automobiles in the intersection. Everyone that scampers out of your way, like roaches exposed to light, understands how hard it is to make a legal left turn.

So with that in mind, I sympathize with each and every one of you…God help us all.

Part 1 of this series is here.

I originally was going to have this part come later in this series, but I wanted to install Ruby on Rails a bit before I started writing my blog application so that I could become more familiar with the programming language and the web framework. Add to that, the fact that I installed it last night makes it fresh in my head.

I picked Kubuntu to be my development platform for a few reasons. I’d really like to use a Mac along with TextMate, but I don’t have the capital for a new Mac. Oh sweet, MacBook, I will have you one day…

But I digress, it’s probably best to use Kubuntu at first anyway. One of the reasons why I chose this distribution of Linux is because, well, I wanted to learn Linux. I chose this specific distribution because I plan on using Debian as my production platform and since Kubuntu is based on Debian it seemed to make sense. I should note that I don’t use Ubuntu because it comes with the terrible GUI, GNOME (although I’m perfectly aware that I can switch to KDE using Ubuntu, I just wanted it all in one package).

Anyway, it’s time to get to the good stuff.

With modern Linux distributions, you can install software using a package manager and Kubuntu (and Debian) is no different. I could have easily downloaded Ruby with the apt program and then installed Rails on top of it but the latest version avaliable to the apt program is Ruby 1.8.3 while the latest version of Ruby is 1.8.4. I should note that Ruby 1.8.3 is not recommended for use with Rails.

So I had two choices, install an old (and incompatible) version with apt or install from source.

I decided on installing from source. First thing is first, I gotta install Firefox in order to browse the web (I don’t really like Konqueror – the web browser that comes with KDE) and download the source.

I run this command to get Firefox:

This installs Firefox 1.0.7 and displays a warning message when loading, but that’s fine for now – it’s not critical. It’s time to get Ruby and then Rails. The Ruby on Rails site has very simplistic instructions on how to install both Ruby and Rails. They are deceptively simple and as I’ve found with all things Linux, it’s actually much harder than adverstised.

I created a directory in /home/carlos called work where I could download packages and compile the programs. I download both Ruby 1.8.4 and Ruby gems into these folders.

You have to install Ruby first, so I run this command in the directory where I’ve download Ruby:


This creates a directory called ruby-1.8.4. Moving into that directory, I attempt to run this command:


And it gives and error stating that “no acceptable C compile was found in $PATH.”

I guess I have to install a C compiler so I run this command:


It does its thing and I try the ./configure command again. This time it’s another error. C compiler cannot create executables. Hrrm, it’s turning out that it’s not as easy as “download and go” after all.

After doing some Google searches, I found out that I need to install some development packages first, so I run the following commands (the second command is used for later when attempting to get RubyGems working):



BAM. That got it working. It does it’s thing and makes a make file. I go to make the…uh…make file and when typing in the command “make”, I get the error: bash: make: command not found. Unbelievable. I then run the following commands (which run without error):


I’m not sure why a base install of Kubuntu doesn’t have gcc, make, libc6-dev, and zlib1g-dev but I’ll leave that to smarter people to figure out.

I first have to unpack Ruby Gems. The command (to be run where I downloaded Ruby Gems) is


That creates a rubygems-0.8.11 directory. The following commands are to be run in that directory:


Note if you get an error here that reads: The error is no such file to load - zlib (LoadError), it means that you have to install zlib1g-dev first. Unfortunately you also have to go back and run the .configure, make, make install commands in the Ruby directory again.

In theory, Ruby and Rails should now be installed. Let’s test it out by running the commands:


You should see WEBrick 1.3.1 startup and at this time, I’m satisfied that Ruby on Rails has successfully been installed.

All in all, it was way more complicated than it needed to be and if I wasn’t so determined to get it working I would have quit and just double-clicked the installer for Visual Studio.NET 2005.

I haven’t seen the movie Syriana yet but I thought that the review by Roger Ebert pretty much sums up the oil crisis.

Ebert writes, “…there is less oil than the world requires, and that will make some rich and others dead, unless we all die first.”

He also writes, [Syriana suggests] “that all of the players in the oil game are corrupt and
compromised, and in some bleak sense must be, in order to defend their
interests — and ours.”

And finally, “no one in this movie understands the big picture because there isn’t one, just a series of tactical skirmishes. Syriana argues that in the short run, every society must struggle for oil, and in the long run, it will be gone.”

The vision of the world that he describes when reviewing the movie is a bit bleak, but in my opinion (and I’m no political analyst – probably a good thing), I think that it pretty much hits the nail on the head.

You can read the entire review here.

I read a lot of technology focused blogs and news sources. Recently, there has been some disturbing news coming to light about what the big telecommunications giants (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc.) have in mind for the future.

Jeff Chester, in this thenation.com article, writes, "Under the plans they are considering, all of us—from content
providers to individual users—would pay more to surf online, stream
videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new
subscription plans that would further limit the online experience,
establishing “platinum,” “gold” and “silver” levels of Internet access
that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even
e-mail messages that could be sent or received."

Even if you aren’t technical, you owe it to yourself to read these articles and find out what these large corporations are planning as I write this.

Articles:

The End of the Internet?
The History of Neutrality
Whither the Fiber-Optic Future?
Fat Pipe, Always On, Get Out of the Way

Update: You can read Google’s Vint Cerf address to the committee hearing on Net Neutrality in this PDF.

Some of you may have read that a team of scientists found hundreds of new species of animals in a remote area of New Guinea.

According to most of the articles all of the animals were completely unafraid of humans suggesting that they have never had contact with us…yet. Check out the close up photo of the kangaroo. Is it me or are its feet bound?

It’s cool that we get into a new area and immediately start tying up the animals. I wonder how long it’ll take the animals to wisen up and figure out that they should probably run we are around.

Anyway, some more photos of the animals are here.

The Man wants you to be in debt up to your eyeballs. He wants you to have tons of credit cards and carry balances on them. He loves it when you pay interest only on those credit cards so that you never get out of the hole.

With The Man in mind, I alluded to some big news in a comment and now I’m ready to fess up. As of today, I’m sticking it to The Man. I am officially out of debt. No car payment, no credit cards, no black marks hanging over my head from The Dark Times.

There were times where I didn’t think I would ever get here and it’s been a long road, but it’s finally done.

Read part 1 and part 2.

This probably should have been part 1, but oh well.

I should make a disclaimer. Although I know some about requirements, I’m no PMP (Project Management Professional) nor do I play one on TV (although I do know a real one – hopefully I won’t do her a disservice with this). This article isn’t meant to be the be-all, end-all of the requirements gathering process. The process is quite detailed and whole books can and have been written on the subject. More information on requirements can be found at the bottom of this article.

In general, requirements define the what the software project does and doesn’t do. All software projects should have some form of requirements to define what it is that you are building.

In a situation where you have been contracted by someone else to build them software, the user or group of users should be involved in the requirements process. They probably have an idea of what they want built for them and using this idea(s), you’ll help them define the requirements of their project (although it’s really not as easy as that since sometimes they don’t even know what they want).

In my case, the requirements gathering process was simple. With the exception of the public interface (reading posts and making comments), I’m going to be the only user.

If I’m the only user, why couldn’t I just start designing and coding? Well, if I had starting working right away, I would have been making myself susceptible to “feature creep.” Feature creep can be defined as features which tend to be requested for inclusion into a project when it’s already in motion. This can stall and delay the project or worse, it cause the project to fail outright. In a case where someone has contracted you, this can cost them real money.

Even a single developer working on a project can fall prey to feature creep and it can actually deter you from finishing the project.

Requirements can be complicated or they can be simple. Complicated requirements can contain interviews, use cases, prototypes and more. The 37Signals guys write a one page story about what the application can do. I chose to just list, in a summary form what the application can do. Using these simple requirements, I can easily build onto them by defining Use Cases for each action.

By defining a loose set of requirements, I was able to see what I
wanted to do and what I could release in the first iteration and what
could wait for further iterations. I solidified my vision for my application and reduced my susceptibility to feature creep.

Further reading:

• Requirements Gathering Essentials
• Gathering Requirements: The Crux of the Matter
  
• Recommended Requirements Gathering Process
• Software Requirements, Second Edition
  
• Mastering the Requirements Process
• Writing Effective Use Cases
• Managing Software Requirements: A Use Case Approach, Second Edition
• Software Requirements: Styles and Techniques
• The Requirements Engineering Handbook
• Project Management Institute
  

An idea that started when I saw the cool communities of web professionals in Dallas and Phoenix is starting to take shape. Now there is an entire community of cities that are “refreshing”.

I’m still in the planning stages and the site is not up yet, but keep your eye on refreshportland.org.

If you want to lend a hand you can email refresh@refreshportland.org in the meantime.

Time to get back to work!

What happens when you drive cross country from Tampa, Florida to Portland, Oregon? Well as someone that’s never done it, I wouldn’t have the foggiest, but my friends are doing it and they are blogging about it.

The timeline seems to be a bit off (from a normal blog) but Rick is one of the most unique individuals I’ve ever met, so I know that it’s a good read.

I read a lot of books, but I rarely, if ever, write reviews for them. Why? Well, honesty, it’s because I don’t really have the time to do so. Because of this, only the best of the best of what I’m reading gets mentioned on the posts of my blog (although you can see what I’m currently reading on the right of the site or if you like you can subscribe to the RSS feed).

Currently, one of the books that I’m reading is Paul Graham’s Hackers and Painters – Big Ideas from the Computer Age. I’m still only in the first chapter and it is so profoundly insightful that I had to stop and blog about it.

The chapter, titled Why Nerds are Unpopular, sums up what’s wrong with American public school systems to a tee. I wish I had this as a guide when I was in middle and high school.

If you haven’t read this book already, get it and dig in. You won’t be disappointed.

In the current incarnation of this blog I use ASP.NET and for creating the posts I use a WYSIWYG server control called FreeTextBox. For a free server control in an ASP.NET application, it works great; highly recommended.

When I entertained the idea of porting this blog to Ruby on Rails, I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to find a free WYSIWYG tool for authoring posts. From the small research that I’ve done, I know that the DojoToolkit does some of this, but I really haven’t looked into it.

Well, there may be (yet) another alternative out there, this one espcially for Rails. It uses FCKEditor. If you’re interested, take a look at these two blog posts; FCKEditor (with spellcheck!) On Rails and Integrate FCKEditor with your Ruby on Rails Application.

I’ll definitely be re-visiting these articles when I sit down and code the input post portion.

Today was the North American release of David Gilmour’s solo CD On An Island.

I picked up my CD at Best Buy because, well, I’m impatient, but also because the Best Buy CD has an extra track bundled in with it.

The extra track (all instrumental) is on its own separate promotional CD and is 6 minutes and 37 seconds long. For the sale price of $9.99, it’s worth a trip to Best Buy.

Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Building a user interface is hard. This is especially true for programmers that do not have a lot of experience or background in design, usability, human-computer interaction. Linux is a perfect example of this; solid in function, poor design in the user interface.

On the web, design and usability critically important. A recent article suggests that web users judge the quality of a web page within seconds of viewing it.

Some teams might comprise of programmers and designers, but some teams are small enough that the programmer is the designer. If this is the case then you’ll want to employ some techniques that designers use. One of those is sketching.

One of the hardest things to start with is a blank piece of paper. The blank piece of paper can lead to procrastination and even worse, it can cause people to just give up entirely.

This is where sketching comes into play. Sketches are rough drafts. They don’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) perfect. Just get some stuff on paper and work from there. Whip out a couple of sketches and start defining the details from your favorite ones.

I’ve whipped up some small, quick and rough sketches on what my new blog might look like. Since these are just sketches, it’s easy to throw away ones that I don’t like or to erase and start over.

• Sketch 1
• Sketch 2
• Sketch 3
• Sketch 4

I would suggest getting a sketch pad and sketching out any ideas that come to mind even if it doesn’t have anything to do with a project that you are currently working on. Inspiration can come at any time.

Here is a perfect example of a sketch book from Jason Santa Maria’s site.

The guys at 37Signals have a great article on sketching screen and how it can evolve into the final design.

My girlfriend and I watched the 90 minute season two finale of Battlestar Galactica titled Lay Down Your Burdens [Part II].

If you haven’t seen it, don’t read the rest of this post as I’ll include spoilers all over the place.
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Still with me? Good. I’m not sure how I feel about the episode. In terms of acting, sets, and atmosphere, it was top notch as always.

Maybe I’m still adjusting to all of the changes, but I was completely caught off guard by the events that happened after Baltar won the election. It almost doesn’t feel like the same show anymore.

Things that I’m not sure that I like:

• Kara Thrace marrying Samuel Anders
• Lee Adama marrying Dualla (not sure if they are married, but I think that they are)
• Admiral Adama mustache
• Tent city on “New Caprica”
• The mothballing of the military

There are lot of questions that are left unanswered too. I’m sure Ronald Moore and gang will cover them all but the ones that come to mind are:

• After finding out that the Cylons ended their occupation on Caprica and then finding out that they weren’t going to follow the fleet anymore, did the fleet go looking for more humans on the other 11 colonies?
  
• Did “Abused Six” blow up use the nuke to create a signal?
• What happened to “Caprica Eight” (the Sharon that gave birth)?
• What happened to the Cylons played by Dean Stockwell?
• What happened to Roslyn’s aide?
• What happened to Tom Zarek?
• After all this time about preaching about the One True God, did they just abandon that and not believe anymore?

After watching the show, I wanted more information about it so I downloaded the podcast for the show. In the podcast, the writers for the show drop a huge bomb…I think. I can’t tell if they are trying to be funny or not, but I believe that they are serious. This is a major spoiler too, so you’ve been warned.
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About 25 minutes into the podcast, they say “…Eddie however won’t be [back next year]. We should point out at this point in the show. No Eddie won’t be with us. There will be no more Edward James Olmos.”

So there you have it. If it’s true, then Admiral Adama won’t be in season 3. If this is true, then the questions come to mind, what happens to him and why didn’t he chose to reprise his role?

Update: Most of the people on the message boards are saying that Olmos not returning is a joke. Bastards!

Come October, the new season will debut and I’ll be watching it as normal but instead of excitement to see what’s coming, I have more of a sense of dread.

I’m in the middle of the final phase of our Exchange 2003 Server migration at work. Unfortunately, this is very boring. Select some mailboxes to move over and then wait while it completes.

In order to entertain myself, I decided to install Debian on our penetration testing server (I knew I should have brought my PSP). The workstation/server has a GeForce4 MX440-T card in it and it wouldn’t start X. Probably the worst thing that can happen when setting up Linux.

Checking on the Internet, I found this thread with no answer. I would answer the poor soul and anyone else looking for the answer, but I’m not going to register for that garbage. So I’ll just post the answer here instead.

Here is what I did:

• vi /etc/X11/XF86Config-4
• Find the section titled Section “Device”
• Change Identifier to read “G4 MX440-T”
  
• Change Driver to read “nv”
• If missing add section for “VideoRAM” and make that value 6400

After saving the file, I was able to start X.

This is my first post from the iMac. Well it’s actually my second.

I was halfway through this post in Firefox but I mistyped a keystroke (I’ll leave my rant about the keystroke for a later post) and the browser went back so I lost the post.

I can’t wait to get my new blogging engine in place. It’ll have an AJAX auto save so that won’t happen to me anymore, but I digress.

Also, I’ve noticed that Firefox, when typing into the FreeTextBox WYSIWYG interface was really slow. I think it has something to do with Rosetta, so hopefully Mozilla can come up with a Universal Binary soon. Typing the markup by hand is killing me.

Anyway, I’ve gotten way off track, back to the post at hand. A week ago, my girlfriend and I were watching a DVR’d show (Survivorman) and I saw a commercial promo for new seasons of the Discovery Shows I Shouldn’t Be Alive and Deadliest Catch.

The spot had an awesome (if not a bit pop-y) song playing in the background over the visual and I immediately knew that I wanted to download it. We wrote down some lyrics and I tried to Google them the next morning. No luck.

What I did find was a message board with other song seekers that had been searching for weeks without an answer. Finally, after emails and phone calls to The Discovery Channel, someone (Kristen from Program Development) from the network vowed to check into it.

Hold on — I just came across this strand. I’m checking in with our marketing folks to ask.

A day later, came her disappointing response.

So, my colleague tells me that we had a group called CUE11 Music score that song (it’s not, as some people speculated, Evanescence).

Unfortunately it only lives as a one-minute and a 30-second cut, though.

But it’s great feedback for us to know people like it, and we’ve made note of that.

Thanks for posting

The news was disappointing for sure, but I think that everyone was grateful to Kristen for trying.

Then two days ago, Kristen posted another message:

After we saw all your posts, we went back to CUE11 and asked them to bring back Amanda, the singer, to record the full version of the song.

We’ll make it available online in the coming weeks.

Thanks for the feedback.

Now, that is what I call good customer relations! After listening to what their customers wanted, they actually took action. It’s rare in this day and age to find this act from a company, so it’s refreshing to see The Discovery Channel step up to the plate.

By the way, you can download the WMV file for the commercial here.

If I met Steve Jobs on the street, I would probably want to shake his hand for making one of the coolest PCs on the planet…then I would promptly kick him in the nuts for making Safari shitty.

First of all, Safari has an annoying “feature” which should really be considered a “bug.” Safari, which is a tabbed browser, doesn’t warn you if you attempt to quit the program with tabs still open.

Come on! It’s 2006, we’ve had tabbed browsers for a while, so I’m mystified as to why this horrible, awful bug exists.

Apparently this bug has been around for approximately a year without an official resolution from Apple (I know that there is a plugin that will warn you if you attempt to close the browser with tabs open but for some reason, it doesn’t work on my iMac).

Microsoft, which has been lambasted over their lack of development on Internet Explorer figured out that not warning a user when closing a browser with tabs open was a bad idea.

Their first outing with IE7 Beta had the same bug in it. Close your browser and whoosh, there go all of your tabs. Somehow, they figured out that this was a bad idea and fixed it…quickly.

Second, Safari seems to have a real problem with me opening lots of tabs.

I have one of those newer fancy Intel iMacs. In the “performance” department it should be the equivalent of a virile 18 year old boy (for the geeks out there this means a dual-core 2.0 with 2 GB RAM). Yet for some reason, Safari is a choad and chokes on itself when I open “too many” tabs. If I open “too many” Safari displays that blasted spinning beachball while it ponders things like the meaning of life and if 42 is really the answer to everything.

I wish Safari would pop up a dialog that said “Hey Carlos, I’m about to shit myself so can you not open anymore tabs for a while?” That would be helpful.

I’m not sure why this is. Safari should scream like a Ferrari with the hardware that I have in this thing, yet it seems to suffer from performance issues.

Here’s to hoping that 1) Apple fixes Safari or 2) Mozilla releases a stable universal binary of Firefox.

By the way, I wrote this on Firefox….

I do quite a bit of online shopping. I’ve been doing it for a while now. I think that I would consider myself a pro at it.

Most online shopping goes something like this:

1. Add items to some sort of “cart” or “bag”
2. Create an account with the store
3. Fill in billing and shipping information
4. Enter in online payment information
5. Confirm order

Can you see where the current model is broken?

If you guessed option 2, you’re right. Back in the day when online shopping was new, it was feasible to create an account on the handful of stores that did business online.

Nowadays, everyone that sells something has an online store. Is it really realistic for us to create an account for every single store that we want to buy something from? In my opinion, no.

I recently did some online shopping for clothes and I was pleasantly surprised by one online retailer, American Eagle. Instead of the tired, old busted steps theirs went like this:

1. Add items to “bag”
2. Choose to create an account or just checkout
3. Fill in billing and shipping information
4. Enter in online payment information
5. Confirm order

That’s right you read it correctly. I didn’t have to create an account to send my order through although I certainly could have if I wanted to.

This is the RIGHT way to run your online store. Sometimes it makes sense to create an account for an online store; usually when you order from that retailer a lot.

Treat your customers with respect and they’ll respect you. If they shop at your store a lot, they’ll probably just create an account and they won’t be put out by doing so.

If someone just wants to buy a few T-shirts for themselves or some items as a gift make the process as painless as possible. Don’t bug them with silly account creation nonsense.

The online retailer is there to make a sale not to collect information for some massive data warehouse; let the users give you their money. If they want to come back they will and they might create an account to boot.

If online shoppers are pestered, they might not even complete the transaction and you’ve just lost the sale.

We’re all criminals. That’s how the music industry thinks of us. Us, their loyal and paying customers! Guilty until…well, we’re always guilty.

Instead of giving us more choices and competitively priced music, the fat cats in the music industry are trying to give us less choices while still keeping their never ending revenue stream coming.

In the beginning (of online music stores), there was iTunes and it was good, but iTunes has a little gremlin in it. Come on say it with me, it’s the three letters that I love to hate; DRM.

As someone that is staunchly opposed to DRM the inclusion of it in iTunes music files bugs me to no end. I like iTunes, I really do, but is there a better way?

Yes. The model that AllofMP3 has created. After reading a post on Techcrunch about them releasing a music store applications, titled AllTunes, I decided to take a look at their website. I was floored (in a good way) by what I found.

The online music retailer, which is headquarted in Russia, claims to be able to distribute music legally because a loophole in Russian law concerning copyrighted materials.

Not only do they distribute music online but they completely undercut iTunes or any other online store out there. The songs on there vary, but they usually range for 9-15 cents per song. An entire album can cost about a buck thirty.

What’s probably the most innovative thing about their model is consumer choice without DRM. You pick a song that you want to download, pay for it and then choose what encoding you want (sound quality; low, medium and high) and what type of file that you want to download (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, AAC, FLAC, etc.)

This is the way it should be! Give customers choice and don’t treat them like criminals by lacing the files with DRM.

Even if their pricing model does seem a bit extreme, I would glady and gleefully pay a higher price (let’s say iTunes’ 99 cents fee) for the flexibility to download in whatever format I want without DRM.

This next piece doesn’t have to do with music, but it’s related to DRM, so I wanted to throw it up here. It’s a blog post on Bink.nu’s site titled Microsoft Announces Investments in DRM to Drive New Multimedia Commerce Solutions for the Wireless Industry.

There is a quote from Kevin Johnson, co-presidenct of the Platforms & Services Division of Microsoft that makes me want to scream:

We want to give consumers what they want seamless experiences with premium content on a wide range of mobile devices.

Um…people please be honest with yourselves and with us. Consumers DON’T want DRM, you do.

Enough consumer advocacy for the night, I’m gonna get some shut eye.

The two part “Cartoon Wars” episodes of South Park airs again tonight back to back on Comedy Central.

These two episodes are probably the best Matt and Trey have ever done. If you value free speech (laced with humor) this is a must watch.

CNN has a little write up about it here.

I often times look back and lament my early student career.

It’s not that I was stupid or I didn’t understand the material, it was more of a feeling of not fitting in with the institution.

High school was probably the worst of the worst. If there was ever a place where I felt that the teachers just punched the “9 to 5” clock, it was this place.

A while ago I started thinking that perhaps it wasn’t me that was broken, but it was the institution itself that was broken, after all, I’ve probably learned more from reading and doing research on my own than I ever did in school.

After reading Paul Graham’s book Hackers and Painters, where he lists the ways in which the American school system is failing, I started to believe the idea more and more.

Recently, I read an online dissertation by John Tayler Gatto on the American public education system and its faults. The article, Against School, is interesting to say the least. I wish I had access to the Internet and this material when I was in school.

Now, I’m not saying that everything Gatto says is right, but it’s certainly an eye opening article that will get you thinking.

I recently returned from vacation where on my downtime I read Packt Publishing’s Building Telephony Systems with Asterisk (I know, I’m sick).

The book, which weighs in at around 150 pages, is a good primer on the Open Source PBX system but I was still unsure of how to accomplish some goals; specifically how to connect Asterisk to the PSTN without using POTS lines (I know that you can do it with a BRI/PRI or a T1 line just didn’t know the specifics).

The book is also light on the workings of VoIP which is one of the primary draws of the Asterisk system. With that in mind, I decided to beef up my knowledge of VoIP and Asterisk picked up the following books:

• O’Reilly’s Asterisk The Future of Telephony
• O’Reilly’s Switching to VoIP
• Cisco Press’ Voice over IP First-Step

Although the first two books arrived first, I decided to wait to read them. I’m glad I did.

Cisco’s book is advertised a great stepping stone into the world of VoIP withour prior telephony experience required.

I’m almost done with the book and found it to be a surprisingly quick read despite the amount of material covered in the book. I definitely feel more comfortable reading the other two books now with such a great VoIP primer under my belt.

The only drawback, if any, of Cisco’s book is (as one would expect) that it covers the VoIP world from only Cisco’s perspective therefore Asterisk and other solutions are not covered.

You can find links to all of the books covered here in my sidebar section, under “Read.”

I just read a blog post written by Greg Knauss that nails it right on the head. “It” being the information overload that we are constantly receiving from our email inboxes, feed readers, voicemails, Blackberrys, etc.

Does this sound familiar?

My entire life has devolved into an endless, grinding slog through my back-log. Everything I do is about catching up, doing the stuff I didn’t get done the day before, plowing through some other goddamned thing that needs my attention. Ending the day without actually adding to the total aggregate is a victory. There are times when it piles up faster than I can shovel it away.

If that sounded like someone you know (namely you), you might want to heed Greg’s advice.

Information has one week to grab his attention, if he doesn’t get to it in a week, it’s gone. Seems a bit extreme, but it just might be crazy enough to work. I mean how much peace can one person possibly attain by being worried about unread items and tasks that need completion?

All that stuff in the back of our heads is eventually going to get to us.

Now excuse me while I add two more feeds to my NetNewsWire.

I hate being wrong. Even when I know I’m wrong I still hate to admit it. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not the only one who feels this way.

So imagine what it must be like for someone to publicly apologize for voting for President Bush. It takes balls to do that but that’s exactly what Doug McIntyre did.

Here’s a choice quote:

So, Im saying today, I was wrong to have voted for George W. Bush. In historic terms, I believe George W. Bush is the worst two-term President in the history of the country. Worse than Grant. I also believe a case can be made that hes the worst President, period.

He doesn’t let Democrats get away unscathed either:

None of this, by the way, should be interpreted as an endorsement of the opposition party. The Democrats are equally bankrupt

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Doug goes on to offer this gem of insight:

I believe, as I have said countless times, the two party system is on the brink of a second collapse. Its currently running on spin, anger, revenge, and pots and pots and pots of money.

This is something that’s been going through my head often ever since I saw an interview with Lou Dobbs where he said that the only difference between the Republicans and the Democrats was “a skosh.”

I wonder if we’re ever going to look back at our two party system and say, “We were wrong.”

No, I didn’t get a new job although it probably wouldn’t be bad money if I did.

So what do I mean by drivin’ a cab? Well, two days in a row now while I’ve been getting ready for work I’ve turned on HBO and caught the same part of the movie Collateral.

The scene, which is my favorite part of the movie, speaks volumes to me. In the movie, Max (Jamie Foxx’s character) drives a cab but always talks about starting his own limo company someday.

Towards the end of the movie, Vincent (Tom Cruise’s character) berates Max by saying:

Someday, someday my dream will come. One night you’ll wake up and you’ll discover it never happened. It’s all turned around on you and it never will. Suddenly you are old. It didn’t happen, and it never will because you were never going to do it anyway. You’ll push it into memory, then zone out in your barcalounger, being hypnotized by daytime TV for the rest of your life. Don’t you talk to me about murder. All it ever took was a down payment on a Lincoln Town Car, and that girl…you can’t even call that girl. What the fuck are you still doing driving a cab?

How many of us are still driving a cab? How many of us are not doing something we want to because we’re afraid of risk? Are we gonna wake up one day and wonder what the hell happened? Why didn’t I do that when I could have? Calling that girl, starting that company, writing that book, what is it that we’re so afraid of?

I know I don’t want to live like that. So every once and a while when I feel like I’m slipping into status quo, I pop in the movie and remind myself that I should be “driving a Town car instead of a cab.”

After months of steady forward progress on Linux and Ruby on Rails as well as a good dose of insecurity about the page design, I’ve released Refresh Portland live.

For now, it’s just a splash/registration page but hopefully it’ll expand into something more later on down the road.

Launching the site was the easy part. The more challenging task is finding a good location for meetings that is amenable to hosting our little soiree.

Although Portland (Oregon) is famous for its abundance of great pubs and watering holes, I’d rather not alienate any young designers and developers that are under 21.

Anyone know of a cool place that might be a good candidate? You can partake in the conversation at the Google Group or send me a message.

One more thing. You may be asking yourself, “Why a cherry?” When I first started toying around with the idea of putting a Refresh together, I noticed that a lot of the other sites (at the time only Dallas and Phoenix) had a fruit motif going. I liked the idea and contiuned the trend. So, why a cherry? Oregon is one of the largest cherry exporters in the world.

When I first started with the notion of doing Ruby on Rails, I had it in my head that I wanted to do it the “right” way. The “right” way, in my head, was to use it on the platform that it was written for; Linux.

I’ve always been a Windows guy, but I’ve never shied away from a challenge, so I took the bull by the horns and sat down to write a Ruby on Rails app. I got gored…and trampled…and mauled…and, well you get the idea.

Call me a sissy, but I was used to point and click installers. So, something that I thought would be easy wound up being significantly more difficult that I had expected.

I guess I underestimated it, after all, I had to learn everything from scratch; the operating system (although I’ve had some UNIX training in the past), the database, the web server, the programming language, and finally the web application framework.

I wanted to compile a set of notes for myself for when I have to do it again, so I wrote up some steps to get Ruby on Rails installed on Debian Sarge with a MySQL database, Lighttpd. This includes integration with the version control software, Subversion and walks through how to create a database and a simple lighttpd.conf file.

It should really detail the deployment application Capistrano, but I wanted to do the stuff hands on before learning a system with a level of abstraction. Maybe I’ll write up those notes when I get there.

The notes are just a simple text file and I’m always amenable to updating it in case I’m doing something horribly inefficient. Hopefully, they’ll save a newbie some time and anguish.

I was skimming Garr Reynolds’ blog, Presentation Zen, the other day and a few posts caught my eye. You are creative (who the %$#@! says you’re not?) and You are creative (part 2) detail quotes and excerpts from Brenda Ueland’s book, If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit.

At under 10 bucks on Amazon, it was no-brainer so I picked it up. I started reading it last night and I’m amazed. Although the book is written for authors in mind, I find that it speaks to all people that have let the voice of self-doubt and insecurity cloud them from trying to do anything creative.

Looking at the back cover, I was surprised to find a quote from Guy Kawasaki about the book, he writes, “Run, do not walk, to your nearest bookstore and buy If You Want To Write. It is one of the few books I have read more than five times. I have so much faith in Ueland’s book that if you buy it and it doesn’t help you, I will give you your money back. I won’t even say that about my books.”

Take a peek and unleash the creative person inside you.

I love the new Battlestar Galactica and I like soundtracks, so it was a no brainer for me to pick up the new soundtrack for season 2.

The composer, Bear McCreary, really outdoes himself and easily tops the season 1 CD.

While I was watching season 2 on TV, I heard two songs that I had to have. After listening to the samples of the soundtrack on Bear’s website and not hearing the two songs I started to worry that they weren’t going to be included. That’s one of my pet peeves with soundtracks; when a song is included in the movie or show but is not on the soundtrack.

I turns out that I had nothing to fear. The two songs (Pegasus (from Pegasus) and Something Dark is Coming (from Lay Down Your Burdens Part One)) are indeed on the soundtrack.

I definitely recommend this to anyone that is a Battlestar fan or a fan of soundtrack music.

Two films have recently been making headlines lately with important messages about the environment and American politics.

The first, is the environment wakeup movie An Inconvenient Truth featuring Al Gore. The second is Aaron Russo’s political documentary, America: Freedom to Fascism.

Both of these movies claim to have important messages for all Americans. Certainly, we Americans, should use this knowledge for the betterment of our country (and in the case of “the Al Gore” movie the betterment of the world). As such, you would think that it would be important for as many Americans to view these movies as possible, right?

Let me let you in on a little secret. The people behind these films care about their cause but they don’t really, really care. What’s the difference? The first cares more about potential revenue and possible Oscar nominations than the actual message.

I know, those are pretty harsh words, but bear with me. If the message of these movies are so important why do we have to pay to see them? Why not distribute them for free on the website, BitTorrent, or YouTube?

Think of it like this. The red sun that Krypton revolves around is about to go nova yet Jor-El and a handful of scientists are the only ones that know about it. Instead of delivering the message freely to everyone they make a movie and charge 9 bucks to see it.

It just doesn’t feel right that anyone should pay money for a message that is so important. Sure, I can pay the 9 bucks or what not, but what about people that can’t (and there are millions of them)? Are they not important? Do they not deserve to understand the plight that we are all facing?

With those thoughts in mind, the message starts looking more and more hollow.

I wasn’t able to go to RailsConf2006 primarily because it was in Chicago but I can imagine that I’m going next year.

I’m listening to David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote and at the beginning, they announced that the next RailsConf will be held in Portland, OR (May 17th-20th – at the convention center).

My girlfriend just called me because she was woken up by “something that shook the whole house.”

She surmised that it was an earthquake, but had no way to verify it. Remember the days before the Internet when you had to see if your local news (BTW, I beat all the news stations to the punch. Think bloggers don’t matter?) had something about it or you had to ask the people at work the next day if they felt something?

In a few minutes, I was on the USGS website and I found the culprit. A 3.3 earthquake about 12 miles from her.

The detail of the information is down right astonishing.

Not only do you get accurate information about the quake itself, but you get tons of maps as well (and they seem to be adding maps as time goes on).

One map reveals that 20 minutes after the quake 467 people have reported the intensity of it to the USGS website.

Damned impressive for a government outfit.

I came across two sites the other day (I think I got the links from delicious popular) with some interesting financial advice.

The first, titled The Real Tragedy of Student Debt, covers, as you can imagine, the perils of student debt. Anyone that knows a student that is in college or about to go into college should read this.

The second is a blog by Ramit Sethi, titled I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Considering that ~40% of Americans have a credit rating below 650, I think it’s safe to say that a lot of people can learn something from Ramit’s blog.

Choice articles from his blog are It Never Gets Easier Than Now, Why Don’t Schools Teach Personal Finance – Part 1, and Here’s How I Setup My Financial Accounts.

While I’m linking stuff about finance, I should re-link the Frontline special The Secret History the Credit Card. I think I’ve said before, but I’ll say it again. Everyone in America needs to watch this special (It’s free! What are you waiting for?)

For those readers that aren’t wired into Digg, I just want to mention some cool stuff that Apple released today.

Apple kicked off WWDC 2006 and showed off some great stuff.

First off, the replacement for the G5 desktop workstation is here. It’s called the Mac Pro and the hardware that they’ve put in it is phenomenal. 64 bit dual-core dual-processor Intel Xeon chips with support for 2 Terabytes of storage and 16 GB of memory.

In addition to that, they bumped up their Xserve server platform as well.

There’s more too. They previewed 10 features that are going to ship in the next release of OS X, called Leopard.

If that wasn’t enough, people coming to the Apple platform with the intent on developing Ruby on Rails applications are in for a treat. Leopard, will ship with Ruby on Rails (on the developer DVD) on both server and client platforms.

If you want to watch the entire keynote, it’s here (but it’s long).

On the blog front, I’m pretty close to completing my first iteration of this blog in Ruby on Rails. With all of the great blogging platforms out there (Mephisto just released today (another Ruby on Rails blogging application)) one might think that I’m wasting my time reinventing the wheel.

I don’t look at it like that. By working on a real application instead of some mock applications in books, I’ve learned tons in short amount of time. To me, that’s the only way to learn.

Read this comic and repeat after me: Fuck. That. Shit.

Kevin Clark recently wrote an article titled Guide: Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing in Rails.  As the title suggests, the article outlines code that shouldn’t be used in Ruby on Rails applications.

The article was well intentioned and written a bit tongue-in-cheek but it sparked quite a debate in the comments. While I’m glad that Kevin pointed out some bad coding behavior, I think the article may have aroused such strong emotion because, for the most part, he didn’t list alternatives to the bad behavior.

For example; he advises that people should not to access instance variables that they didn’t create but he doesn’t give an example of how to fix this. This is going to light the fire under some people; especially people that are trying to learn this stuff for the first time.

An underlying theme in the comments has been the frustration with out of date and deprecated information all across the board. Even “The Book” (Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide) will lead you astray with crufty code.

Obviously Rails is going through some growing pains and accurate documentation and tutorials are in heavy demand.

As a relative newcomer to Rails, I understand frustration with poor documentation quite well. If “The Book” is wrong, what’s the alternative?

Well, right now there aren’t many books available for Ruby on Rails. but I’ve managed to compile a list.

Here’s a list of published books and e-books that might help newcomers on their way.

• Agile Web Development with Rails, Second Edition
• I would suggest that you DO NOT buy the first edition. You can buy the second edition as a beta book (PDF) now (with regular updates) or wait until it’s printed in October of this year.
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition
  
• Not a Rails specific book, but since Rails uses Ruby everywhere, then you should know how the programming language works.
• Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers
• If you’re new to Ruby on Rails, don’t jump into this book headfirst. It’ll hurt. You should probably do some tutorials online and then read the first book before doing this one. It’s good, but I wouldn’t recommend it for rank beginners.
• Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
• This book is on the way, so I don’t know if it’s any good. I’ll let you know more once I know more.
  
• Rails Recipes
• Definitely a good book to have. Lists sample code in recipe style.
• Ruby Cookbook
• Weighing in at 873 pages, this book is definitely good to have. Again, not specifically a Rails book, but this book will probably help you out of a jam at least a dozen times.
• RJS Templates for Rails
• A PDF e-book that teaches RJS stuff released in Rails 1.1. Handy if you want to spend the 10 bucks.
• Web Services on Rails
• Another PDF e-book that covers all things web services in Rails. Pretty good stuff for 10 bucks.
• The Money Train – Building e-commerce sites using Ruby on Rails
• PDF e-book covering, as you guessed, e-commerce. 12 bucks. I don’t own it, so I don’t know if it’s any good. (Update: this book isn’t finished yet)
  
• Mr. Neighborly’s Ruby & Rails
• Another PDF e-book. Don’t have it, so I don’t know if it’s any good. (Update: this book isn’t finished yet.)
  

If I missed one that you know of, let me know and I’ll be glad to throw it in the list.

More books are coming but the majority of them won’t hit the shelves until November or December of this year.

Update: Nuby on Rails, lists all of the deprecated code that shouldn’t be used in a new plugin. It’s good to know.

A couple of political links have caught my eye recently.

The first is a commentary by Keith Olbermann which was sparked by a speech given by Donald Rumsfeld to the American Legion. It’s a good watch.

The second is a long look at the misinformation and faulty intelligence about the Iraq war. Whether or not all of the information is correct, if only 1% of it is true, then I believe that there should be a commission to find out the truth about the material similiar to the 9/11 Commission. It’s a very long read (as it covers about 13 years of information) but I think it’s worth reading.

Late last month I completed our transition from our jabberd server to JiveSoftware’s Wildfire EIM Server for the the company that I work for.

Wildfire, which is free and open source, is extremely robust in its capabilities. The server, which uses Java, runs on Linux, Windows, and OS X.

Some of the things that initially drew me to the product was its use of LDAP for authentication integration and roster information, the use of SSL between client and server, and it’s growing user community.

If you think that you might be interested in deploying an EIM server at your company, you should definitely take a look at Wildfire.

I’ll cover some configuration gotchas and solutions that I ran into next time around.

The Unofficial Ruby on Rails blog has a list of 8 upcoming Ruby on Rails books. It’s a good list but unfortunately the list is incomplete.

I’ve compiled a list of all the Ruby and Ruby on Rails books that I know of. If there is a second edition of a version of the way, I’ll only list that in the upcoming section (with the exception of the book co-authored by DHH). There is no need to get books that are on their way out.

NOTE: None of the links below are Amazon affiliate links.

Ruby – Released

• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide, Second Edition
• Learn to Program
• Enterprise Integration with Ruby
• Best of Ruby Quiz Volume 1
• Ruby Cookbook
• Rapid GUI Development with QtRuby (e-book)
• Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book
• The Ruby Way: The Solutions and Techniques in Ruby Programming
• Everyday Scripting with Ruby: For Technologists, Testers, and You
• Beginning Ruby
• Practical Ruby Gems
• Learning Ruby
• Ruby by Example: Using Ruby to Solve Different Problems
• Practical Ruby for System Administration
• Ruby Pocket Reference
• Ruby Phrasebook
• Design Patterns in Ruby
• Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer

Ruby – Upcoming

• Ruby in a Nutshell
• Ruby in Practice

Ruby on Rails – Released

• Agile Web Development with Rails: Second Edition
• Ruby for Rails: Ruby Techniques for Rails Developers
• Rails Recipes
• Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
• Rails for Java Developers
• From Java to Ruby: Things Every Manager Should Know (Note: Written for managers not for programmers)
• Web Services on Rails (Mini e-book)
• RJS Templates for Rails (Mini e-book)
• Payment Processing with Paypal and Ruby (Mini e-book)
• Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce
• Rails Plugins: Extending Rails Beyond Core (Mini e-book)
• Rubyisms in Rails (Mini e-book)
• Mongrel: Serving, Deploying, and Extending Your Ruby Applications (Mini e-book)
• Beginning Ruby on Rails
• Ajax on Rails
• Ruby on Rails for Dummies
• Capistrano and the Rails Application Lifecycle (Mini e-book)
• Mongrel (Mini e-book)
• Rails Solutions: Ruby on Rails Made Easy
• Rails Cookbook
• Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Application
• Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax: From Novice to Professional
• Ruby on Rails for Dummies
• Ruby on Rails Power!: The Comprehensive Guide
• Practical Rails Social Networking Sites
• Railsspace: Building a Social Networking Website with Ruby on Rails
• Beginning Ruby on Rails: From Novice to Professional
• Pro ActiveRecord for Ruby – Databases with Ruby on Rails
• Ruby on Rails for PHP and Java Developers
• Practical JRuby on Rails Web 2.0 Projects: Bridging Ruby on Rails to Java
• Ruby on Rails Enterprise Application Development
• The Rails Way, Professional Ruby on Rails – Building Enterprise Solutions
• Practical Rails Projects
• Advanced Rails

Ruby on Rails – Upcoming

• More Rails Recipes: 72 New Ways to Build Stunning Rails Apps
• Rails Deployment: Production Configuration and Advanced Rails Tactics
• The Money Train: Building E-Commerce Sites Using Ruby on Rails
• Agile Testing with Ruby and Rails
• Foundations of RSpec: Behavior-Driven Development with Ruby and Rails
• Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails
• Professional Ruby on Rails
• Rails for PHP Developers: Refining Web Applications
• Scaling Rails: Building Giant Websites
• Professional Ruby on Rails

These are all of the ones that I know. If you think that I’ve missed some, let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

Slate is offering Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon’s book, The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, for free on the eve of the 5 year anniversary of 9/11.

This graphic novel distills the 568 page 9/11 Commission Report down to 128 pages and as one Amazon reviewer so succinctly put it, “…Will help you understand the 9/11 Report more clearly than the text alone.”

Every American should understand the details of what happened 9/11 and the events leading up to it. Go read Slate’s release of the adaptation.

I’m really close to deploying my new blog on Ruby on Rails. While I’ll be working to do some mod_redirect work, you’re better off at pointing your feed reader to http://eddorre.com/rss.

I expect that the change will be live on Wednesday (October 4th).

I seem to have lost my post “Ups and Downs” in my data migration. Oops. Oh well, I’ll try to re-iterate some of those thoughts here.

I’ve finally, after much cursing and swearing, managed to migrate the posts and comments from MSSQL to MySQL. My first attempt was through MSSQL’s DTS.

DTS to MySQL has some known bugs when dealing with fields that are BLOBs. If you’re attempting to move data using the CopyColumn method in DTS, it will fail even if you cast your column to another type. For example;

SELECT CAST) as body).

My next step was to try DTSing the file to a plain text file and then using MySQL’s Load Data command. Unfortunately, I encountered issues with this as well as it wouldn’t import my date fields correctly (it would import them as all zeros).

From there, in between the cursing, I tried various combinations of DTS and Load Data, and even some distributed queries using Linked Servers. I finally found a nugget of information on the web that allowed me to import all the data in one fell swoop.

The trick is to use DTS to export the data to a CSV file. Then using Excel, select the columns that are dates and go to Format —> Cells. Select a Custom format and then enter in yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss. Re-save the CSV file and then run your Load Data command on your MySQL server.

Using this method, I was able to import all my data including dates and text fields.

Some of you might remember that I picked up an Intel iMac earlier this year and so far it’s been wonderful.

However, I really missed having my laptop and my desktop on the same platform so I picked up a 13 inch MacBook way back in June to go along with my desktop.

I’ve slowly been gathering up my essential gear for my MacBook and I just got the last piece a few weeks ago.

Here’s my list:

• Microsoft Wireless Notebook Laser Mouse 6000
  • The touchpad works just fine, but there is no way that I would want to use it for daily heavy duty use. This mouse is made for notebooks but it’s not too small for my hand. Works like a charm and has great range.
• RadTech Notebook ScreenSavrz
  • Made of OptexFabric, this sits in between your keyboard and the screen when you close the lid. Also doubles as a cleaning cloth.
• RadTech Sleevz for Notebooks
  • Covers your notebook like a glove so that your notebook doesn’t get all torn up during its journey. Although it’s a good product, I’ve opted to use something else for day to day use (see below).
• Booq Vyper XS2
  • Protects your notebook from getting all torn up. According to the website, they “sandwiched durable, semi-rigid high density foam between a layer of 1682D cross-weave ballistic nylon on the exterior and a super non-scratch lining on the interior”. Why did this replace RadTech Sleevz? One word; zipper.
• Rain Design iLap
  • Laptops are running hotter all the time as manufacturers try to squeeze the fastest mobile chips into their products. Apple has actually said that their mobile computers should be referred to as notebooks and not laptops since you shouldn’t put them on your lap. I agree with them. The MacBook gets really hot at times. That’s why I chose the iLap. It works great to keep your lap from disintegrating and the foam makes it really comfortable to have in your lap while you’re out and about. One minus, I wish it had a plate that slid out so that you could use an external mouse on it. Oh well.

This morning, I noticed that there was an email in my inbox from info@newegg.com. I’ve ordered stuff from Newegg in the past and that’s always the email address that they use to send out emails.

The email referenced an order ID (37679041) in the subject line. I thought that this was strange, since I hadn’t ordered anything lately from them. The rest of the message was a bit startling.

The message, in its entirety reads:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for ordering from our internet shop. 

If you paid with a credit card, the charge on your statement will be from name of our shop.
This email is to confirm the receipt of your order. 

Please do not reply as this email was sent from our automated confirmation system.
Date : 08 Oct 2006 – 12:40

Order ID : 37679041
Payment by Credit card
Product : Quantity : Price

WJM-PSP – Sony VAIO SZ370 C2D T7200 : 1 : 2,449.99
Subtotal : 2,449.99

Shipping : 32.88

TOTAL : 2,482.87
Your Order Summary located in the attachment file ( self-extracting archive with “37679041.pdf” file ).
PDF (Portable Document Format) files are created by Adobe Acrobat software and can be viewed with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

If you do not already have this viewer configured on a local drive, you may download it for free from Adobe’s Web site.
We will ship your order from the warehouse nearest to you that has your items in stock (NY, TN, UT & CA). We strive to ship all orders the same day, but please allow 24hrs for processing.
You will receive another email with tracking information soon.
We hope you enjoy your order!  Thank you for shopping with us!

I’m sure that the zip file doesn’t contain a PDF, but I never opened it.

As you can tell, the email is worded quite well and mimics an order receipt closely. I’ve contacted newegg.com and they are aware of the issue.

When I first heard about NBC’s Heroes series, I rolled my eyes thinking that it was at worst a weak attempt to cash in on the popularity of “the super hero craze” and at best a rip off of the excellent series The 4400.

Regardless of my initial impressions and because of my geek upbringing, I felt that I should at least give the show a chance. If I hated it, then I wouldn’t have to watch any more of it.

So I asked my girlfriend to set her DVR to record the show but unfortunately I asked her too late to record the premiere episode titled Genesis. I figured that I would download the first episode or something and we kept the timer in place.

With the geek community giving rave reviews about the series, I finally got around to downloading the first episode and I was somewhat irked by the episode.

Primarily, I was irked by the storyline of Niki Sanders. I know that it’s stereotypical to believe that single moms that strip or camwhore for a living all live in Las Vegas, but come on. Above and beyond that anyone that has actually lived in Las Vegas (as I have) cringed whenever they tried to pass off shots of suburban California as places in Las Vegas. Here’s a tip guys; Las Vegas is not that green no matter how many shots of the strip you Photoshop into it.

I realized that this was nitpicking so I gave the show another try and boy am I glad that I did.

The Niki Sanders’ plot line is still paper thin (she drives her son out to the middle of the desert, buries two guys and her son never wakes up. Please spare me.) and hopefully it’s going to make a change for the better or it’s discarded entirely, but where the series shines is with the other characters.

The story lines of Peter, Nathan, Isaac, and Mohinder are a joy to watch but the gem of the show is Masi Oka as Hiro Nakamura. He absolutely shines as a geek with temporal and spatial manipulation powers. He’s also a true geek in real life as he works for ILM as a special effects programmer. Masi Oka is just plain cool.

I’m definitely going to continue watching the show and have high hopes for it.

It’s definitely something to watch if you’ve ever been interested in the whole super hero thing.

I’m sure that everyone has seen an episode of 24 where the infamous Jack Bauer interrogates someone by shooting them in the leg, shocking them with the exposed wires of lamp or any other number of means.

This makes for great action drama but it’s not real life. I think we all understand that, right? Right?

Well, some people don’t seem to understand it. The clip below is frankly frightening. To summarize the clip, Stephen Moore (Wall Street Journal) was responding to Bill Maher’s claim that people could disappear from America with no trial, never to be heard of again because of the law that’s called the Military Commissions Act.

Everything that comes out of Stephen’s mouth on the show is preposterous, but it comes to a head in this segment. Here is a small transcript of the video:

Stephen: “You know what this is really? It’s Jack Bauer Justice. It means that if we have a terrorist and we’ve apprehended him…”

Maher: “TV Series, 24?”

Stephen: “Yes, Jack Bauer – Kiefer Sutherland…this is the one…he should run the CIA. I love this guy and most Americans…”

Maher: “You do realize that it’s a TV show?”

Watch the entire 5 minute clip:

Not sure when the original programming aired on PBS, but I’ve been slowly digesting the interview videos by Bill Moyer on the PBS site.

I’m about halfway through the interview with Salman Rushdie and I have to say that I’m very impressed with the award winning writer.

For those that don’t know, Rushdie is most famous for the fatwa that was placed on him by Ruhollah Khomeini for his novel The Satanic Verses.

For people that like to challenge their thinking, the interview is a must watch. Some choice quotes:

On the Danish cartoon controversy:
What kind of a god is it that’s upset by a cartoon in Danish?

On secularism in politics:
BILL MOYERS: So do you think the rise of conservative fundamentalist religion is in response to the failure of politics?

BILL MOYERS: And in a time of crisis such as 9/11 people will send an SOS. They will cry out for some absolute power to rescue them from the calamity, the chaos, the terror that’s around them. Right?

SALMAN RUSHDIE: I think that’s right. And I think that’s something to explain what’s happening here. And I think, as we were saying, other failures, other calamities in other parts of the world explain it there.

I just finished watching the tail end of HBO’s documentary, Hacking Democracy. Having not watched the beginning of the program, I can’t comment on the entire program but what I can comment on is the end where they show, live on camera, a way to flip an election winner without compromising the total number of votes.

In the documentary, they took a random Diebold voting machine and had 8 people cast a ballot (written – they had to mark yes or no). The ballot asked a simple question, somewhere along the lines of “Do you think that this can be hacked?” 6 people marked that it could not be hacked and 2 people marked that it could be hacked.

The election official put in a card, that was previously hacked by a infosec guru to flip votes, and ran the ballots through. The first thing the machine does is to do a self test to make sure that it can do a zero vote count, which it does properly; 0 for yes and 0 for no.

The official then ran the ballots through and then a piece of paper that signifies the end of voting. The Diebold machine printed out the results. They were no less than astounding. According to the machine, 7 people voted that it could be hacked and 1 person voted that it could not be hacked. 8 total votes, yet completely false information.

The next step was to check the actual record on the card, so they took the card out and fed the information into the tabulating program GEMS. Same result. 7 said that it could be hacked and 1 said that it could not be hacked.

Of course, Diebold has called for HBO to pull the documentary and called and said that the information was inaccurate.

Look, I’ll be honest with all y’all. The documentary seems to have a left-leaning air about it and I don’t believe everything that I see on TV (hell I saw Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear. Ask me if I believe that one.) but this documentary should make everyone stop and think.

After watching the program, a few questions were left in my mind.

Should electronic voting machines be closed source or should it be open source? Closed source meaning that only the manufacturer knows how it works and open source meaning that the guts of the system would be available for all to see so that no one can try to pull a fast one. Of course “all to see” is a bit of a misnomer. Only technically minded people would be able to actually interpret and understand the source code and technical schematics of the hardware, but I’d feel more comfortable if hundreds of thousands of eyes were looking at something like this rather than trusting a company to do it.

Should candidates from any party be able to select which machines are used for any electronic voting or should the company be selected by an independent council?

Should candidates of any party be able to buy stock or support companies that make voting machines?

The ’net has been blogging for about 10 years and comments have been around ever since Open Diary added the feature to their system in 1998. Sometimes I wonder if the commenting system has outlived its usefulness.

Comments seem to have stopped adding value to the conversation. Instead, a comments section, especially one that is particularly busy, starts looking less and less like a civilized discourse and more and more like an Internet version of The Stanford Prison Experiment (meaning people start behaving in contradiction to how they behave normally).

Certainly, Digg’s commenting system (which allows registered users to hide useless and trollish comments) deserves some praise for attempting to cut down on the drivel, but even then I’m still not convinced that the good comments are adding any value.

I’ve taken a sampling of some Digg articles that I came across today as well as the first 5 comments (that aren’t marked down/hidden). I’ll let you take a look (remember if the comments don’t seem to make sense it’s probably because it’s a response to a hidden comment that has been marked down). It makes me wonder how useful a good comment is if it’s in response to a hidden bad comment…

Which Vista Edition is Right for You?

• I bet all you fanbois just love the chance to say “My Favoirte OS! ROFLZ” Seriously kids, chill out with the wastes of space.

• gah, I was afraid to go to this post, because this is something i am interested in, the various version of windows, but I knew I would find 4 answers:
  “linux”
  “mac”
  “nothing”
  “steal it”

seriously how about some good, real discussion on the topic

• Windows XP with Vista Transformation Pack of course. I used Vista Ultimate for a week and then deleted it. The system/kernel stuff uses too much ram & cpu, the "GPU Accelerated UI uses too much CPU, the save as dialog sucks, the new explorer blows when you’re using long paths, you can’t run OpenGL apps with Aero on as it counts as a DX app. Arghhh! Vista sucks, i’ll get it again in a years time when the bugs are ironed out.

• I find that more than two version of a commercial operating system (home and pro, generally) to be somewhat confusing to the end user.

  I’m not sure how this increases the value of the product – I mean, it seems to just clutter the decision for large license holder to upgrade and worse, breaks the continuity Windows users often have between work and home (eg. "hey, this worked on my Dell laptop… where’s $FEATURE_X program on my workstation?).

  Haven’t used the OS, assume its decent or better, but five versions (six counting the Starter) aimed at users? Weird.

• Whatever working versions are up on PirateBay.org :)

6 ways to make php scripts lighting fast!

• Yeah, then I can have the mighty Java Runtime Environment start up and eat 50megs of my memory to speed up your 1mb program by 5%.

  Here comes the java mod control in 3… 2… 1…

• Absolutely. Java is inherently faster than PHP at serving web pages.

  Oh wait, no it’s not. In fact, the raw speed difference between PHP and Java is meaningless considering code execution is almost never the bottleneck for a web site. Nine times out of ten the database is the bottleneck and you can use either PHP or Java to cache results, pool connections, etc (that is, when your table is already properly indexed).

  The meaningful differences between PHP and Java are development time, scalability, execution environment, libraries, and deployment management. Sometimes PHP is better and sometimes Java is better, depending on your needs.

  FWIW, the slowest web site I’ve ever seen (pre-caching) was Java-based and the second slowest (pre-caching) was PHP based. After caching content both were lightning-quick

• blog spam, but i guess ok with all the links

• gharding:
  
  It was a joke… I just like poking fun at the java fundamentalists from time to time ;)

  I should’ve wrote.. or you could use javascript to document.write every line – woulda made the joke more apparent.

  My apologies if it seemed like I was endorsing cold fusion in any manner ;)

• I had hoped.. but at least my joke WOULD have improved performance ;)

  (I bash all languages.. I work with about a dozen of them daily)

---

Out of those comments how many added value to the original conversation? Ok, maybe I’m being unfair to Digg. It’s massive in size; perhaps it doesn’t have the best sampling of users to generate insightful comments (see the South Park 1/4th rule).

Let’s take a look at a random blog that I stumbled upon recently.

How My File System Is Organized

• Wow that’s neat. I recently changed over to the Amora icons with are crazy and wacky but this post has persuaded me to go back over to my Aqua Neue icons. All done through CandyBar of course

• Interesting file structure you have, Glenn. I’ll try and get mine organised and show it you all tomorrow.

  The basics are a lot like yours.

• Josh, it’s a great icon set isn’t it? I love it.

  Smaran, thanks. Good luck on getting it all sorted

• @Josh: CandyBar’s great. I recently zapped it because I didn’t want to spend money buying it. It seems like an unnecessary expense.

  Hey Glenn, how about creating a set of forums where we can discuss all this kind of stuff? I think we’ve got us a little community here. It’s great that we’re all commenting so much but don’t you think the threads are getting a bit too long? And the posts a bit too general? I mean, maybe we can move ’the social (LOL!) to another place and keep your blog more clean and qualitative, somehow.

• I will seriously take that into consideration Smaran. Give it some weeks and you’ll probably see that feature implemented.

---

Well, that’s certainly more useful than Digg was. So it might be safe to say that smaller, less diluted blogs generate better comments. Even so, a smaller blog site might not be immune to useless comments.

I know of several bloggers that have temporarily or permanently disabled comments on their articles. Two come to mind immediately: Andy Rutledge (which incidentally has a similar write-up on social networking) and Patrick Haney.

Certainly my “research” can be viewed as anectdotal and more intensive research can be done to reach a more scientific conclusion about commenting systems and their validity.

I think it would be interesting to see an experiment where you took several blog authors and asked them to write some articles and then took a random sampling of people and asked them to reply anonymously to the article using a standard current commenting system. Then take the same people, strip them of their anonymity (place them in the same room with all the other people and the blog author) and ask them to comment on the piece.

So perhaps it’s time that we take a step back and look at the beast that we’ve created and ask ourselves, “Can we build a better commenting system?”

You know the commercial where the dad calls Dell about getting his daughter a PC and then whirls around town in his Barcalounger while in his pajamas? As I found out, that’s pretty much bullshit. If only things were that simple with Dell.

My trip down Dell Hell Lane started out with a trip to their website to buy a flat-screen monitor for my folks. I pictured myself taking my own little trip around town in my PJs with a smug look on my face as I whizzed by unhappy Christmas shoppers.

Unfortunately what actually transpired was nothing like that. If I were to sum up my experience, it could have been something like this: Barcalounger takes off, after going on and endless number of dead end streets, I get deposited on some train tracks and then I get run over by train. Let me explain.

I went to Dell’s website, added the monitor to my shopping cart and clicked the button to purchase what was in my cart. I get prompted with a pop-up window (usability warning 1) that wants me sign in {{sigh}} (usability warning 2).

This is to be expected, but seriously? How many passwords and accounts are consumers going to have in the world, one for every store? I wish every retailer that does business on the web would take a page out of American Eagle’s book. Their system allows you to buy stuff from them without being nagged about creating an account.

I go through the garbage motions of making an account to buy one monitor and then go through the entire process again (usability warning 3); go to main page, navigate to monitor page, add to cart, sign in, proceed to check out. Here is where the Barcalounger takes the first of many dead end turns.

The next page that I’m presented with reads “You have no items in your cart.” WTF? I just added it to my stinking cart. Repeat process. Same result. I think for a second that perhaps Dell’s website doesn’t like Apple’s Safari browser, so I crack open Firefox and give it a try. Same thing. Is this for real?

I imagine that most of Dell’s sales come from their website and for it to be failing in a consistent manner means hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars in lost sales. I imagine people getting fired left and right for this and look to see if there is some other way that I can order the monitor.

As if my prayers were answered (I didn’t really pray, unless you consider the stream of curses that came out of my mouth a prayer to some dark god) I saw the following text: Need Help? Chat with a Product Advisor from 7am to 10pm. I looked at the clock, 9:30 PM. Hrrrmmmm, perhaps my Barcalounger and I were going to get off “Dear God Help Me Street” and get to “Why Worry Lane” after all.

Nope. I clicked on the link and another popup window (usability warning 4) came up that reads “Get live answers from a Dell Product Advisor.” Underneath that there is a drop down box with some answers but no submit button or anything. I look beyond the dropdown box and I see this:

“Thank you for your interest in Dell Chat. All product advisors are currently assisting other customers and have become temporarily unavailable. Please close this window and check back in a few minutes to see if an Advisor has become available. Product advisors are available from 7am to 10pm…blah blah blah.”

Are you frackin’ kidding me? Let’s see how many usability warnings/atrocities they’ve managed to rack up here.

• If all of the people are busy and I’m in between the available times then put me in a queue like thousands of other customers that are using IM to connect with their customers. DO NOT tell me to check back. I won’t and most people won’t either.

• If I’m outside the available times, then DON’T SHOW THE LINK AT ALL.

• 7am to 10pm. PST, MST, CST, EST, UTC, R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to me. What time zone are we talking about, geniuses?

3 warnings. Not bad. We’re up to 6.

So I pick up the phone. Dial the number and somehow I don’t get a nice lady like in the commercial. I get one of those stupid machines that makes you talk to it (usability warning numero 7). Please stop making us embarrass ourselves by talking to a recording.

Going through the automated menu system, I finally think that I’m making progress. Unfortunately, I’m wrong yet again. My poor Barcalounger and I are deposited on the train tracks with a train barreling towards me.

After I hear a couple of rings, I get a recording that basically says that Dell Sales are closed from starting at 10PM CST (Central Standard Time not Carlos Slacking Time). WTF!?, Dell actually closes and at 9 PM PST during holiday season to boot?! Why make me talk to a machine if no one is going to answer later? Just tell me up front; “Dell Sales is closed at this time.” I should mention that this is the only way that I figured out that the times on their website actually mean Central Time. If I had not made that call, I might not have ever figured it out. Let’s double-ding them for that. That’s a terrible rookie mistake for a big operation like Dell.

That makes 9 usability warnings.

Nine is way too many times to be disappointing your customers. Most customers would have given up by number 4. If there is a company that desperately needs to read Steve Krugs’ Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability it’s definitely Dell.

Oh well, maybe I’ll just get ’em a Mac instead. At least they are open 24 hours.