BadBetterNews
My friend Paul "directs":http://www.giantpaul.com/wp-trackback.php?p=9 a really cool video podcast at "betterbadnews.com":http://www.betterbadnews.com. It's a sort of satirical news show kinda thing reflecting on the state of American media and politics. Check it out, it's good.
It's also the first video blog I've come across. It's cool that it works in iTunes. The video plays in the little iTunes window where CD covers would appear. Way easier than using a web page for some reason.
Nitro, Another Reason Ruby Is Worth Learning?
I was following the "Behavior":http://www.ripcord.co.nz/behaviour/ discussion on the "Rails":http://www.rubyonrails.com/ mailing list and this post about "Nitro":http://www.nitrohq.com/ caught my eye.
the ajax infrastructure in Nitro transparently uses "behaviour.js":http://www.ripcord.co.nz/behaviour/ along with "prototype":http://prototype.conio.net/ / "script.aculo.us":http://script.aculo.us to fully separate javascript and xhtml code. Have a look at "www.nitrohq.com":http://www.nitrohq.com/ and the included ajax (preview) example.
So I took a bit of time to read through Nitro's introduction. It does sound a little interesting. After only a brief introduction, it seems perhaps simpler and less structured than Rails, slightly more focused on "web sites" rather than "web applications". The idea is that web sites frequently start off as just HTML, but then you want to add little bits of functionality. Nitro allows you to work with the HTML files, creating controllers automatically based on the presence of XHTML files, then add bits of "Ruby":http://www.ruby-lang.com/ in for functionality as needed as it grows.
Sounds kinda like "how PHP got started":http://no2.php.net/history. Not sure if that's a good thing though. One thing I think really benefited Rails was being extracted from an already built and refined application.
Regarding the Behavior discussion, I can see the argument that the way Rails does it is fine, totally functional and less problematic as well as very quick to implement. But is seems the only argument for not moving the Javascript to something more like Behavior is just that somebody would have to the write code. And I do find stuff like this intriguing though, from their "release notes":http://www.nitrohq.com/view/Release_notes :
Nitro fully separates the behaviour from the template using the behaviour.js library and allowing for dynamic injection of ajax functionality. The generated code contains clean html and all the javascript organized in a single script block.
Anyway, there's "a lot of stuff going on":http://www.petercooper.co.uk/archives/000812.html with Ruby and Rails, more "hosts":http://planetargon.com/ "announcing":http://blogs.eng5.com/~agreenfield/2005/07/12/rolling-on-rails-at-site5/ support for Rails, people "switching":http://socialtwister.com/archives/000548.html from other platforms. I'd say if you're going to start learning a programming language today, all these things make Ruby a wise choice.
Need Some Web Space?
"Ourmedia.org":http://www.ourmedia.org/ is a non-profit web site that will let you upload your files and they'll host them on their web site and archive them, forever. And it's completely free.
There's some videos that looked kind of interesting actually. With today's technology even amateurs can put together something that looks have way decent. Some is very NOT interesting though. Still, I could see people putting together content that rivals, if not beats, content from "big":http://timewarner.com "American media":http://clearchannel.com/.
But why would they? How would those content creators turn that great content into cash? There's "an interesting interview":http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail303.html with Kurt Huang, founder of "BitPass":http://www.bitpass.com/ where he explains their plan to help content creators monetize on the content they create. They're trying to make it as easy as possible for buyers and content creators to automate the buying and selling processes. Kinda like "Skype":http://www.skype.com/, where you pay like $10 once and then spend it pennies at a time. But they add up for the content provider. Sounds interesting.
CSS Zen Garden Has Keyboard Shortcuts
"CSS Zen Garden":http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/146/146.css&page=4 is a great resource for ideas when coming up with a new web design. But I always found the interface a little hard to deal with. The link locations change with each new design, so you have to search for the link and remember which ones you've already looked at.
Well I just noticed they have keyboard shortcuts enabled. So you can browse through the entire current set by hitting Ctrl-a through Ctrl-h, then Ctrl-n for the next set. Cool. Even more useful.
Rails & Instiki vs. Dreamweaver
I know, silly comparison. They're entirely different tools. They both, however, are used to create web sites. And with both tools at my disposal, I'm surprising myself with ways I can use "Rails":http://rubyonrails.org/ to make my life easier.
Goodbye Apache, Hello Lighttpd
After migrating my home server from "Red Hat":http://www.redhat.com/ to "Gentoo":http://www.gentoo.org/, I was hoping I could just copy over my Apache config file and turn it on. After sorting out a few Gentoo specifics, I got Apache to load by virtual host file. As I feared, something was funky with my Red Had Apache installation, so the virtual host part of my config file barfed out all kinds of weird virtual hosting errors. Lots of log path issues which I sorted out, then it wanted the names, IP addresses and port numbers in some specific combination of *'s, VirutalHost, NamedVirtualHost, *:80, ServerName, ...
After about of hour of fiddling I decided to turn my search back to figuring out why "Lighttpd":http://lighttpd.net wasn't working with "PHP":http://php.net. I had set off a recompile as a _"I don't know, maybe that will work"_ try a few nights earlier and hadn't checked back to see how it turned out. I guess it worked. I started up the spawn_fcgi server, then lighttpd. Now PHP, MySQL databases, everything worked fine. Yea. Back online.
From there it was a very simple matter to add back the few virtual hosts that I'm still hosting at home. The configuration files just seem a lot easier to understand and manage, not to mention the Lighttpd config file is the size of just the first of Apache's many config files. The sites I'm hosting with on my old PIII 500Mhz server seem noticeably faster. I'm sold, if just for the config files.
I hope I never have to figure out that Apache config file.
The Mark of the Beast
"A sign":http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20050630FaceForAdSpaceOnEbay.html of the coming apocalypse.
!http://www.webpronews.com/images/foreheadad.gif!
My mom says maybe she'll get a tattoo on her chin that says "My kid went to private school."
Boys Be Ware
Here's an "interesting video":http://www.archive.org/details/boys_beware put out by the Inglewood Police Department in 1961. It's an attempt to try to educate young boys about child sex offenders, except they refer to the sex offenders as "homosexuals". Some of the scenes kinda reminded me of "Mysterious Skin":http://imdb.com/title/tt0370986/, the men picking up boys in the park. My favorite quote, "Jimmy didn't realize (he was).... riding in the shadow of death!".
So I'd like to pass it off with, yea, but that movie was 1961. But still today there's arguments like "this one":http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=IS02E3 from the good Christians at "Family Research Coucil":http://www.frc.org/ ("Family, Faith, and ... Freedom", cause, you know, it starts with an "F"). They say since (according to research they feel is more accurate) only 1% of men are gay, if more than 1% of child sex offenders are gay, then a disproportionate number of homosexuals are sex offenders, and that's why we shouldn't let gay people lead boy scout troops. Thank God for those Christians, always spreading the love of God everywhere.
I've heard widely varying statistics about the straight vs. gay percentages of child sex offenders. My poking around for something more concrete only yielded the "Findings from _National Juvenile Online Victimization Study_":http://www.missingkids.com/en_US/publications/NC144.pdf by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Its only indication to sexual preference:
Sixty-two percent of arrested [Child Pornography] possessors had pictures of mostly girls. Fourteen percent had pictures of mostly boys, and 15% had pictures showing girls and boys in about equal numbers. "
QWERTY Keyboard Designed To Be Inefficient
The typewriter keyboard was originally laid out alphabetically but, because the original typewriter was so crappy, the keys would stick if you typed too fast. Their solution was to put lots of effort in to rearranging the keys so that letters used together were farther apart, causing you to type slower. They succeeded when people typed so slow they keys didn't jam anymore. This is how we ended up with the keyboard layout we all use today. Huh. Who knew.
Not sure if I'm adventurous enough to try "the alternative":http://dvzine.org/zine/cover.html, but it is an interesting read. Pind is "trying it out":http://www.pinds.com/blog/one-entry?entry%5fid=40148. Maybe someday we'll look back and laugh at how silly our keyboards were.