Lonely Lion

Jacob Kaplan-Moss is peering into the future. Just five years into the future, but the future nonetheless.

I totally agree with his predictions. Especially the offline-apps and iPhone-clone-as-platform predictions. Teenagers drive markets. That’s my new mantra. Myspace, SMS, all this twitter-hoo-ha. That’s stuff I don’t get, until I see that kid on the train doing it, then I look into it, then I end up with 150 Myspace friends (including Ghostface Killah and Django: the webframework.)

I’m going to add a prediction to the pile, based on a pile of 7 inch records my Hozac friend Brett gave me this week, it isn’t for online journalism, it’s for online media:

* Digital can’t buy you an experience. The guys that are going to survive the death of copyright will be the guys that can sell you an experience. Hozac is a perfect example. They do very limited releases, each with super special extras, like fake fur dust jackets or spider arm bands. One of their artists refuses to say who he really is, he just sends in tapes. When you buy a Hozac record, you’re buying an experience. If someone rips it and distributes it on oink, it’s not going to compare to owning the original thing. Because the original thing is really the experience of buying it.

Google jumped into the crowdening [sic] arena of ways-to-make-your-web-app-work-offline with Google Gears. I’m pretty excited about the whole concept. Just last night, me and Mrs. McAvoy were heard to exclaim, “I really like Google Docs, I wish it worked offline.”

Clearly, the Google bugging of my home has finally paid off for the Googineers. Glad the McAvoy’s could help you out guys. Good luck with your Gears.

I want to start messing with this offline stuff. Lots of fun ideas come to mind.

Edited to add: O’Reilly Radar explains the whole thing a lot better than me. We live in the future folks. This is really neat stuff.

Edited (again) to add: Holy cow! Dojo offline is now built on top of Gears! This is the greatest!

From what I’ve gathered, deployment was a big theme at this year’s Railsconf. There’s a handful of groups targeting different virtualization platforms for easy-instant Rails deployments. DHH started a mailing list for the discussion, kicking it off with a succinct explanation of the goals.

It’s a great idea. Virtualization allowed me to work around a lot of rules as $last_job, and has the potential for easy deployment and at $new_job. Given the ease of use of a variety of virtualization options out there in the world, the idea of deploying your Rails / Django / Whatever app to a pre-built container is a really good one. It’s not a trivial exercise to get a nice LAMP stack approved by a stodgy sysadmin infrastructure. It’s way easier to say, “let me drop this vmware instance into your great big awesome vmware machine.”

Good idea Railsconf attendees. Attention everyone else: begin stealing this idea immediately.

We had a good meeting last night, a handful of good talks. The Skinnycorp offices were pretty cool. Just a great big warehouse with some really impressive decoration. Neat stuff. Presentations were good, Peter Fein gave a talk on setuptools, Atul Varma talked about ZVM, and Johhhhhn Melesky gave an overview of Bayes Theorem. All in all, good talks. We had a quick rap session about scheduling the first chicago-olpc hack-a-thon, and decided June 2nd at Skinnycorp works for everyone.

_why opened up the Hackety Blog, apparently shutting down his redhanded blog. So far, he’s taken a look at a handful of potential programming as education tools. I’m glad that talented programmers are evaluating education tools. We have a little boy due this August, so programming as education is on my mind.

In other news, Ian came up with a good first olpc-chicago project.

I’ve been pleasantly watching the releases of Apollo and Silverlight over the past few days, and just sort of thinking, “oh, nice, new things to play around with.” Then comes Mark Pilgrim with a dose of cranky, yet wildly accurate ranting.

Meanwhile, I’m really enjoying my new found need of Javascript. I’m doing lots of neat AJAX’y things, the sorts of stuff that everyone else was doing months ago, so I’m sort of primed for the argument of, “don’t buy into these corporate re-do’s of the web, stick with the open web…stick…with…the…open…web.”

Sounds good to me, I guess. Yet, at the same time, everytime M$ & Company say the words Ruby or Python, it gets that much easier to say the same words in front of a somewhat backwards potential tech customer and not get booted out the door. So, the tally so far: big companies reinventing the web –, big companies putting good words in press releases ++.

As an aside, please never trim your fingernails at your desk during work hours within earshot of me. It’s really goddamn gross.

Just some eye candy. This is the very easy to use Redhat livecd version of Sugar:

And this is a terminal session ssh’d into the running image:

Based on this working pretty well, any fiddling I do with Sugar, for the time being, will most likely be done with this livecd image. I’m going to burn it and boot off of it to see if that works as easily. For now though, I got it up on Vmware, with networking working right away. After that, I alt-zero’d into the developer console, found my ip with ‘ifconfig’, changed the root passwd with ‘passwd’ and ssh’d into the image as root from my terminal. I’m not sure what I need to do to get a nfs share exported on OSX, so I haven’t tried that yet.

Once that’s working, I think a good easy way to work would be to edit files in a local filesystem, and share it to the olpc image for testing.

Ian Bicking announced a OLPC Chicago Interest List a few days ago. If you’re interested in the OLPC project, and want to chat at some like-minded people in Chicago, it’s a good place to do so.

So, Vista is languishing (no links provided, seriously you’ve heard this as well as I have). At the same time, Microsoft just released some really cool sounding stuff for dynamic language enthusiasts in the form of some sort of mysterious “Dynamic Language Runtime.” Jon Udell interviewed John Lam about it, as well as how it will integrate with Silverlight.

So, on the one hand, you’ve got the Microsoft that’s sort of doing big dumb things, and on the other hand, you’ve got some really bright types putting out neat stuff that has a lot of potential. Recent neat stuff by Microsoft list: Xbox 360, XNA game dev framework, Robot dev tools, Iron Python, RubyCLR, Silverlight. Nice work good part of Microsoft.