ben's shared items

trawlr is a web-based RSS aggregator that offers a tonne of features, and, best of all, has PostRank built in! You can use trawlr as an RSS reader to manage your existing feeds; it offers OPML importing and plenty of subscription management options. You can also create a lifestream, bringing many of your online activities [...]

Gregg Pollack has made a great video with interviews of speakers and attendants at RailsConf as a way of giving people who weren’t there a taste of what it was like. The result is 36 minutes of video and really worth watching. Check it out.

Rails 2.1 is now available for general consumption with all the features and fixes we’ve been putting in over the last six months since 2.0. This has been a huge effort by a very wide range of contributors helping to make it happen.

Over the past six months, we’ve had 1,400 contributors creating patches and vetting them. This has resulted in 1,600+ patches. A truly staggering number. And lots of that has made it into this release.

New features
The new major features are:

• Time zones (by Geoff Buesing): Tutorial | Introdction | Railscast
• Dirty tracking: Introduction (partial updates) | Railscast
• Gem Dependencies: Introduction | Railscast
• Named scope (by Nick Kallen): Introduction | Railscast
• UTC-based migrations: Introduction | Railscast
• Better caching: Introduction

Thanks to Ryan Daigle for the feature introductions and Ryan Bates for the Railscasts. It makes writing the release notes so much easier :).

As always, you can install with:

gem install rails

...or you can use the Git tag for 2.1.0.

Enjoy!

It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft's bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that "Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control."

What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away.

I tried to coin a term for the kind of people who invented Hailstorm: architecture astronauts. "That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!"

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization.

Follow the story, here. I started picking on one company that appeared to be particularly astronautish: Groove, which was trying to rebuild Lotus Notes (a giant synchronization machine) in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Groove had some early success selling secure networks to the military-industrial complex, but didn't make much of a ripple outside that niche. Their real success was in getting bought by Microsoft, which brought Groove's designer and chief architecture-astronaut Ray Ozzie to the role of "Chief Software Architect" at Microsoft, supposedly the technical guy that would keep inventing the future after BillG left so that Steve Ballmer would have some new territory on which to build his next illegal monopoly.

And now Ray Ozzie's big achievement arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) Microsoft Live Mesh. The future of everything. Microsoft is "moving into the cloud."

What's Microsoft Live Mesh?

Hmm, let's see.

"Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."

Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn't that exactly what Hailstorm was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It's a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.

But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.

It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.

How on earth does Microsoft continue to pour massive resources into building the same frigging synchronization platforms again and again? Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven't exactly noticed a stampede to that. I'll bet you've never even heard of it. The 3,398nd web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the Internet. I'm so excited I might just die.

I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want in Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

Not loving your job? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

Rails 2.1 is not far off the horizon and we’ve been adding a ton of extra deliciously nice goodies in preparation of its release lately. As always, the good Ryan Daigle has been keeping a watchful eye on the changelog and has been documenting some of the new features. The latest stars are:

• Gem Dependencies
• Dirty tracking with partial updates
• has_finder in the form of named_scope
• Built-in timezone support
• Better caching infrastructure

Now that we have the big Rails 2.0 release out the door, it’s a lot easier to push out smaller updates more frequently. So that’s what we’re going to do. Rails 2.0.2 contains a bunch of smaller fixes to various bugs, no show-stopping action, just further polish. But it also contains a few new defaults.

After two successful release candidate releases, Ruby on Rails™, a popular Ruby-based Web application development framework in a similar vein to Merb or Nitro, has successfully made it to the final release of version 2.0. Previously called an "evolutionary rather than revolutionary" step, Rails™ 2.0 nonetheless packs a whole ton of new features that make [...]

Multi-view development is a big deal in Rails 2.0. We’ve made it much simpler to allow the same action to serve many different formats. From HTML to XML to JSON to RSS and ATOM to CSV to whatever.

But did you know that you can use the same multi-view system to trout out different flavors of the same basic types? Say, give iPhone users a custom HTML interface while serving regular HTML users with the standard feast.

Slash Dot Dash teaches you how to do exactly that: Give a Rails 2.0 application an iPhone UI.

This weekend Jason and I had the pleasure of attending the Lone Star Ruby Conference where we decided to premiere the video below:

View on YouTube.com

Thanks again to Jason Hawkins from MakeFilmWork.com for the video production and Erika Greco for the Rails Envy logo.

Spoiler Alert! - After taking a good look at Django and weighing all the pros/cons, I didn't really think we should make fun of it. Django is a great framework for building web applications, one that employs many of the same techniques that Ruby on Rails does. If it wasn't for Rails I'd probably be programming Django right now. Amongst a sea of mediocre web frameworks it's definitely close to the top.

We have two more videos to release during Railsconf Europe (although we won't be in attendance), so stay tuned. We were going to save this one for last because, as you'll see, it's rather out there. We hope you like it.

During the last round of videos, we got quite a few emails about the unfair comparisons we were doing between PHP and Ruby on Rails. You know, PHP is a language and Ruby on Rails is a framework. Don't worry, everyone, we're listening. Here we are with ad #6 in the series: Ruby on Rails vs PHP. Enjoy.

Click here to view on YouTube.

Just like all of the others, this video was produced by Jason Hawkins and that beautiful Rails Envy logo was done by Erika Greco.

Jason and I are currently in Chicago for Rails Edge where today we just premiered a new Rails commercial produced by Jason Hawkins. We will be releasing 5 commercials over the next month, 2 .NET, 1 PHP, 1 Cold Fusion, and 1 DJango. Don't worry, after these few we're all done, so don't spam us about how you're sick of mac ad parodies.

Click to view on YouTube

Feel free to post this to your blog using the snippet below.
<textarea rows="4" cols="80" onclick="this.select();"></textarea>

If you don't get the "OOPS" reference you should really watch Creating a Weblog in 15 minutes, a screencast by DHH which will give you a glimpse at the power of Ruby on Rails. Stay tuned, we'll be releasing one more during RailsEdge tomorrow.

I recently got an email from someone asking for a quick list of features that, in my opinion, make Rails great. I thought I'd copy and paste my answer here.

I actually get this question quite a bit, so you'd think by now I'd have a brilliant, prepared answer... but I don't. :-)

So here's my lame answer that I'm rattling off the top of my head - of course these are just my opinions, and I'm not implying that other frameworks don't have similar great features; but these are simply the top features of Rails that come to mind.

Ruby. The language is just awesome for object-oriented development. Remember, I was a longtime C++ developer, and C# after that, so I've always loved statically-typed OO languages. But I usually get more done with Ruby in less time. ActiveRecord. The easiest ORM I've ever used (again, it's mainly because of Ruby's language features that make this possible) Forced MVC design. There are other great architectures for the web, but for database-backed apps, MVC is fine 80% of the time; so for that sweetspot, Rails makes it easy. TDD support. To call it "support" is to understate it. Rails expects TDD, and so it's a first-class citizen in the application skeleton. The best Rails developers I know all use TDD. It's the only framework I know that doesn't just "allow" you to do TDD, it assumes you ARE doing TDD, and makes it easy to do so. Ajax support out of the box. And in a clean way that again leverages Ruby to its fullest. There's almost no mental context switch between writing Ajax and non-Ajax code - it's all Ruby, same idioms, same "feel" of where your code should go. Agile development baked in. Like TDD, everything about a Rails app skeleton screams for best practices, and it goes out of its way to induce you to keep your code DRY, refactor often (this is why the TDD aspect is so important), and build incrementally. Limited choices coerce you into following Rails' best practices. Some people call it the "opinionated" side of Rails. I call it standing on the shoulders of giants who've already figured out good ways to stitch together the various tiers of a web app. The REST support in Rails is a great example of how average developers become good developers if they follow Rails opinion on how you should think about your application. Database agnosticism. There's built-in support for, I don't know, about eight popular databases, and it's almost 100% transparent. OS agnosticism. I develop Rails sites on Windows as easily as I do an a Mac or Linux (ok, I sort of take that back; the tool support isn't quite there on Windows, and the refusal of Microsoft to include a gnu-compatible C compliler with Windows keeps guys like me behind the rest of the pack). It's fun. Sounds weird, I know. But it's not just me saying that. The ease with which I can start building an app and see results, with tests from the start, make it more fun to work on Rails apps. It's all free. The Rails core is kept to a minimum. There's more power with a lot less API "surface area" than any other framework I know. Most Rails developers don't need intellisense, because it's much easier to just know what to do; and when you're not sure, everything is so consistent between classes, it's much easier to just guess the right thing to do. Plugins from the community. Awesome.

Agree with any of these in particular? Have a question about any of them? Think I'm off my rocker? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Today, bowing to customer demand, Dell launched a new series of desktops featuring the free, open-source Ubuntu operating system.

To my knowledge, this is the first time Dell has ever offered any non-Microsoft operating system on their desktops. Until today, it was quite literally impossible to decline the Windows license when you bought a desktop from Dell. If you bought a desktop PC from Dell, you got -- and paid for -- a copy of Windows, whether you wanted it or not. This is commonly referred to as "The Microsoft Tax". Offering a free desktop operating system is effectively the same thing as selling hardware without any operating system.

Whether you're a fan of the latest open source operating systems, or just a fan of plain old-fashioned consumer choice, the end of the Microsoft tax is a win for customers. I was a little worried that Dell would charge extra for the privilege, but it looks like they played fair and square:

Dell Dimension E520 Dell Dimension E520N CPU Core 2 Duo E4300 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo E4300 1.86 GHz RAM 1 GB DDR2 1 GB DDR2 Hard Drive 250 GB 250 GB Media CD-RW/DVD CD-RW/DVD Video Integrated Intel GMA X3000 Integrated Intel GMA 950 OS Windows Vista Home Premium Ubuntu Desktop Edition 7.04 $679 $599

The hardware is essentially identical. We can infer that Dell's price for a Windows Vista Home Premium license is $80. An OEM copy of Home Premium runs about $129, so it's cheaper to buy the license from Dell than it is to buy one yourself. But if you have no intention of running Windows, you just saved eighty bucks.

Kudos to Dell for doing the right thing and ending the Microsoft Tax. It's also quite possible today will be looked back on as an important turning point in the history of desktop computing.

And lastly, here is the 4th and final commercial in the series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy present:

Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Changing Database - ad #4 of 4

Click here to view on YouTube

Thanks to all of those we met at Railsconf, and thanks again to Jason over at Make. Film. Work. for the great video work.

We are planning on filming a few more "Mac vs PC" Parodies before we put it to rest, so be sure to Subscribe to our RSS feed if you haven't. Also, if you have any ideas on what you'd like to see in these new Ads, definitely send us a line (Suggestions at Railsenvy.com).

P.S. Yes, we know PHP has tools that will allow it to do Relational Database Mapping. It's just too bad not all PHP applications start with this built in (as Rails does).

Here we are with the third commercial in the series(Part 1, Part 2) where we continue with the PHP guy. Apologies to all 3 of you who were hoping for Fortan.

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy present:

Ruby on Rails vs PHP - Organization - ad #3 of 4
Click here to view on YouTube

We just wanted to say thanks again to Jason over at Make. Film. Work. for the great video work.

We're also really sorry but we had to turn on moderation for comments because of all the trolling. We're just having fun, guys, try not to take it too seriously. Except for the part where we say that Ruby on Rails can beat up your dad, because it can.

On a serious note, though, we're not trying to bash any frameworks or languages... We know PHP has frameworks that allow for organization like Rails as well as database abstraction and OR mapping. We believe in using the best tool for the job, what ever that may be. These videos are for FUN and are not intended to start language or framework wars. Which is why our next ones are going to be vi vs emacs. Totally kidding.