Geekularity

As part of the “One Last Thing” portion of his keynote this morning, Steve Jobs announced that developers wishing to create applications for the iPhone are relegated to creating Web 2.0 style web applications for use inside of the iPhone’s implementation of Safari. While Safari is supposed to be fully functional on the iPhone, including Javascript, which will allow for AJAX driven user interaction, the only access to the internal workings of the iPhone will marshalled through URLs and possibly Microformats.This begs two questions:

1. Will developers be able to take advantage of any offline persistence frameworks inside of the iPhone like Google Gears?
2. Can AT&T’s EDGE network handle the extra bandwidth burden that AJAX user interaction often adds?

It’s Sunday night, and I thought that I would post a brief recap of my experience here at the 2007 RailsConf in Portland, Oregon.

I arrived in Portland on Wednesday night after a brief stop over at my alma mater, Oregon State University. I had not seen the campus since I graduated 10 years ago. Several areas of the campus have been completely renovated, but its character is still there including the smell; the pleasant aroma of the spring flower blooms, followed by the stench of the evening breeze that drifts into campus from the agricultural research areas to the West. It took me back to senior year. After two hours of touring the campus, it was time to head on to Portland.

When I got to Portland, I realized that I went a little too far in my effort to save money on my hotel. It was in an industrial area of Northeast Portland, sandwiched in between the horse track, the motor speedway and a shipping container storage yard. It was scenic Portland at its finest. Next year I will dollar up and stay at one of the hotels near the convention center. The only saving grace was the burrito place just up the street. I had one of the best chile verde burritos ever!

On Thursday, Friday, and Saturday I spent most of the daylight hours at the convention center where I, and 1600 fellow geeks collectively drank from the fire hose of Ruby on Rails cool-aid. It was yummy! As a rails newbie, many of the sessions were over my head, but I took fast and furious notes, hoping to revisit them soon once I have some projects under my belt and can put some of the finer technical details into context.

Aside from the keynotes and technical sessions, one of the highlights came at lunch on Saturday when the Extra Action Marching Band of San Francisco serenaded the crowd with several burlesque numbers. Apparently they were so loud and raunchy that the convention center got complaints from attendees at the AsiaFest conference next door and promptly shut the show down.

On Sunday, I attended the keynote in the morning and several of the sessions. At lunch however, I got a new toy work tool and proceeded to forget all about the afternoon sessions and the closing keynote. When I finally came to my senses, I packed up my stuff and spent a few hours exploring Portland between the rain showers.

Before I left, I had to make at least one pilgrimage to a geek mecca, Powell’s Technical Bookstore. I frequented the city block sized main store several times while I lived in Oregon, but I had never explored the technical satellite store until today. It was a religious experience and I can’t believe that I waited for so long! I spent an hour there just walking the stacks. Check out the photo above of old computers. The entire store is littered with collections of goodies like this. I didn’t want to leave!

Back at my hotel tonight, I spent some time reviewing my photos and was sorely disappointed in my collection. Sadly, the pictures that I have posted here were the best of what I had. The rest were blurry or just bad composition. I was a yearbook photographer for goodness sake, and this is the best I could do. I am SOOOOOO out of practice. I’d love to blame my equipment, but that would be foolish. I need to take a photography reboot course at my local community college or something. Anyway, I had a lovely time here in Portland. I’m going to get on the road at 0-DARK-00 hours tomorrow morning to drive home. So Long Portland and fellow railies, it’s been fun!

Jack Dorsey and Alex Payne stated that Twitter is working on adopting OpenID, however they still see some significant hurdles. In an interview with Geoffrey Grosenbach for the Ruby on Rails Podcast, Dorsey and Payne state that they believe that OpenID is a bad fit for developer APIs that require a unique key or a username and password to authenticate with the web service. Can OpenID be adopted in such a case? Could an asymmetric relationship be created between an artifact, in this case a program, and its author? Can this relationship then be authenticated by a third party, in this case, Twitter, the web service provider? I’m still very green when it comes to OpenID, but I’m wondering if there are any provisions for asymmetric links, one-offs, third party authentication, or whatever it should be called in the OpenID standard? I’m hoping to start a discussion here, so please hit the comments section as hard as you can!

Here’s what I’ve found so far:

1. Les Orchard has an open discussion about using OpenID in a blog comment proxy.
2. Obviously the current OpenID specification

This is an impressive bit of ASCII art, and it appears to be composed of part of the GNU/Linux kernel code. Way Cool! [Link]

UPDATE: Please see this safety recall for important information on some of the components related to this project!

In September, I read a post on one of my favorite blogs about these Triklits programmable LED light strings and I instantly fell in love with them. I ordered two strands as well as the USB interface card and had a ball making these things come to life. After fiddling with them for a couple of weeks, I began to build this automated statusboard to help me monitor systems for me and my clients. The board updates every 60 seconds and displays information from several different sources including my Nagios installation, my source code repository, a bug tracking database, and a soon-to-be-implemented build server. I’m still working on the Perl scripts that I use to query the different sources, but when I’m done, I’ll post the source code here. This was a fun one to hack at last weekend!

2 X 24 light Triklit strands with 2 lights in each cell.

Birch plywood and masonite/hardboard

1/8″ white, opaque signage acrylic

total size 37 1/2″ X 19 1/2″

This is pretty cool, and I hope it catches on. The Associated Press (link: SF Chronicle) reports that Apple Computer has embedded a few poems in its operating system that it displays when computer enthusiasts (hackers) attempt to move Mac OS X onto non-apple hardware. One poem reads as follows:

“Your karma check for today:
There once was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind
he’d do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don’t steal Mac OS!

Really, that’s way uncool.
© Apple Computer, Inc.”

That’s one of the best examples of if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em philosophy I’ve seen in a while. Apple realizes that it’s ultimately impossible to thwart those who are determined. So rather than trying to put overly broad copy protection schemes in place that hurt everyone who’s trying to use their products for legitimate reasons, try to appeal to the conscience through one of the most direct routes… humor. Keep up the good work Mr. Jobs et al.

Paul Radenmacher, a real smarty pants over at Dreamworks Animation, came up with this really cool marriage between Craigslist and Google Maps. The cool part is that two completely separate services are interconnecting on a third party’s website. And they’re interopping quite well I might add! For those who feel that SOA’s place is merely in the corporate intranet, I say phhhheee!

Craiglist on Google Maps

According to Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders as quoted in the Wall Street Journal, they can’t hire qualified people fast enough to keep up with demand. Never fear Mr. Brin! I just sent you my resume this morning! No need to give me a corner office just yet, I’ll settle for a cubicle and a decent health plan!

WSJ Article

You realize that you are deep (perhaps too deep) in the world of information technology when an acquaintance calls you asking if you remember the subnet and router address of a network that you setup but have not touched in three years, and you can recall that information, including passwords, immediately from memory; yet, you have trouble remembering what’s on your calendar for tomorrow.

I need a function where I can regularly purge that semi-useless crap out of my brain so that I can remember the important stuff like birthdays, anniversaries and the TV schedule for the Discovery Channel’s “Great Biker Build-Off!” What’s sad is that as I am writing this, I am imagining how this function would be built. What’s worse is that I can actually picture the Transact-SQL code in my head!

BEGIN TRAN ‘purgeUselessCrap’
SELECT * INTO tempBrain FROM realBrain WHERE relevenceFactor > 50 AND dateLastUsed <= DATEADD(year, -1, GETDATE());
GO
TRUNCATE TABLE realBrain;
GO
SELECT * INTO realBrain FROM tempBrain;
GO
TRUNCATE TABLE tempBrain
GO
COMMIT TRAN ‘purgeUselessCrap’