License 2 Code

Seriously, I had a dream last night and Nearbie.com was in it. Things are a little fuzzy, but I think (in my dream) I was giving a speech on social software and referenced Nearbie.

Am I losing it? Have I gone over the deep end where techies lie broken and twisted at the bottom?

An interesting take on categorizing popular web frameworks - I’d love to see this represented graphically - Tufte disciples - get crackin’!

The Twin Cities has a strong and active developer community for its size, so its no surprise that the Rails and Ruby community is strong. A solid Ruby user’s group, JRuby leads, and now, a raft of rails rockstars riffing on ruby (and rails).

Local Rubists have joined together to blog on Ruby and Rails at railspikes.com - “a group blog with a mix of how-tos, plugins, and posts about the business of Rails.”

Oh I was all set for an agilisto tirade when I saw a reference to Jeff Patton’s Requirements Considered Harmful… Especially given the title - I mean really - requirements… harmful? That’s like saying apple pie is harmful, sweet kisses from a baby are harmful… your mom’s hugs are harmful! I needed to read this just to get riled up! Read more »

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Wired magazine, you are so friggin deep

So Steve Dowling, one of our PR guys, just brought me my stack of pre-read magazines with stickies attached to the articles I should check out[…]

April edition of Wired - “You missed the biggest unanswered question: Why is there anything at all? Or to put it another way, Why isn’t there nothing — no matter, no energy, no universe, no space, no dimensions, no branes — no anything? We will have little fundamental understanding of our universe until we can begin to answer this question with anything other than superstition.”

Steve says this letter just blew him away with its profundity and I have to agree with him. This is deep stuff. […] As Steve puts it, “Here’s a magazine that’s basically about gadgets, but dressed up with all sorts of pseudo-intellectual stuff about man’s search for meaning. Isn’t that just like us? Perfect fit.”

I was recently introduced to this blog and absolutely love it. Such charm, such charisma, such wit! I wonder if this is another of Black Spy’s anonymous publications. I’ll know for sure when I see “Steve” blog about nerd cache.

Grails vs. Rails performance smackdown - round 1 goes to Grails. Sure there’s chatter about the preliminary nature of these results, admission that the tester really didn’t know how to tweak Rails, even an honest request for any help in improving the test. Well my one suggestion is - drop Rails. Read more »

In another sign that the end of the world is nigh - Linked List has been patented. I must admit part of me was jealous — talk about nerd-cache! “Oh, you wrote Rails… and you got an award for Tapestry… and the whole world is turned on to your Spring framework… well I’m the guy that patented Linked List.”

Put THAT in your slide rule and calculate it!

Consistent content rate is one key to a successful (read by more than your mother) blog. I have trouble sometimes remembering all sorts of things. Sometimes that I haven’t blogged in over a week. Three young kids can provide a neuron sink that can sometimes spell disaster for memory and focus. In my busy life I come across all sorts of things I’d like to retain for future retrieval. But my wetware is full!

Lately I’ve been wondering if I should consider externalizing that memory - getting it out of my wetware and on to physical storage… Read more »

Is it necessary to remind people that they can’t run a successful business by giving everything away? This reminds me of the old joke about the company losing money on each product it sells. Their retort is, “We’ll make it up in volume.”

Every few months I see an article extolling the need to make a profit as a business model. This seems so obvious that I keep reading each of these articles thinking I’m going to find genius that’s obscured by the obvious title. I leave disappointed. It’s clear that free isn’t a business model.

Here’s my obvious statement for the day for which I hope TechMeme picks me up, “Writing a tech blog that has no way for customers or advertisers to pay you is not a business model.” =)

GigaOM » Free: a Tactic, not a Business Model

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007 | PBS

Now comes the rumor I have heard, that I believe to be a fact, that has simply yet to be confirmed. I have heard that Apple plans to add hardware video decoding to ALL of its new computers beginning fairly soon, certainly this year.

So what’s in it for Apple? Potentially a lot, because the chip Apple has chosen doesn’t cost $7, it costs more like $50, and it doesn’t just do hardware H.264 decoding, it does hardware H.264 ENCODING, too.

In a YouTube world, the new Macs will be a boon to user-produced video, which will, in turn, promote the H.264 standard. By being able to encode in real time, the new Macs will have that American Idol clip up and running faster than could be done on almost any other machine. Add in Slingbox-like capability to throw your home cable signal around the world and it gets even better. Add faster video performance to the already best-of-league iChat audio/video chat client, and every new Mac becomes a webcam or a video phone.

I hope this is true. I don’t have experience with this type of technology, but it seems like a simple and cool idea. It’s as simple as the idea of using flash memory so that you never have to hibernate or power down.

Please note that some comments were of contrary opinion, see:

The PowerBook G3 (Lombard) models from 1999 offered optional an DVD drive with hardware decoding. I believe there was a special version of the Mac OS 9 DVD player which used the hardware decoder as opposed to software decoding. When Mac OS X shipped the OS X DVD Player only used software decoding, however those 400MHz PowerBook models had no problem with the software and the MPEG-2 decoding hardware went unused. There was a class action lawsuit related to older Macs which supported DVD playing in OS 9 but not OS X. [snip]

So you’re telling us that after all that trouble Apple went through with the original DVD decoding hardware, they’re going to back to it? [snip]

and:

[T]here has been hardware decoding on graphics cards for years. I think Cringely may have heard something coming down the line and misinterpretted it.

Now, if Apple is going to make sure that the onboard decoding is good enough for full res HD content across the entire product line, AND going to make sure the drivers are all in line and that QuickTime calls on it to use that instead of CPU, THAT is news. But onboard hardware decoding isn’t.

And as the other poster said, hardware acceleration of encoding at the consumer level is poor quality. Realtime, yes, and that’s signficant, but poor quality.

Anyhow, hardware decoding and encoding does sound like a gateway to something cool. But maybe I’m just an excited layman getting caught up in yet another Cringely “prediction”. Maybe.

Interesting short little ditty on the creator and creation of the MP3 file format. Good for a short read, but what really caught my eye was the end:

“Brandenburg continues to be involved in the cutting edge of digital music. Researchers under his supervision are working on technology that would, for example, analyze a user’s tastes based on music he or she has already downloaded, search the Internet for other tunes in the same genre, and automatically assemble a playlist.”

Because as I read, I was listening to my Chemical Brothers station on Pandora. Well, perhaps you are only allotted one extremely cool music-tech invention in a lifetime (I don’t think Brandenburg is involved in Pandora or the Music Genome Project).

The lean post reminded me of a great fast company article on Snapper - who turned down WalMart, and employs lean principles in their American-based mower manufacturing process. Its hard to get too sentimental about a mower, but I spent a LOT of time behind a Snapper as a kid and it was a great product.

A colleague recently asked about Lean software development, spawning a brief but interesting discussion on the topic. I browsed the first few chapters of the Poppendieck’s latest book on lean a month ago, and it seemed compelling (chapters available free online here and here). Being back in the land of 20 minute builds makes me think again that it might be worth exploring the topic further. Because hey - I just might have time to read the book, and wouldn’t reducing build time be a great lean practice?

InfoQ did a nice review of the new book, but we’re still left to wonder how much this version differs from their previous lean book (a 2004 jolt award winner).

I’m reading Good to Great right now. Yup - a business book. Not even about software or technology. Before you fret about my slide to the dark side (need I remind you I’m BLACK spy) recall that in corporate software, rarely do we write software in a vacuum. We are situated in a business environment. I recall the day back in a software process class at the U of MN where I realized that my design and coding was situated within a larger context that could have a great impact on my success or failure. Reading a business book is like taking that to a macro-level.

The book focuses on the difference between good and great companies, and how greatness often results from organizational aspects that respect the long-term corporeal benefits. Its by one of the authors of Built to Last - another book about long-term greatness in companies. I’m interested in getting others to read, or hearing from other readers, because I’m curious about the ‘trickle-down’ applicability of the concepts in the book. The book is aimed at mid-upper management, but often the concepts - leadership, rigor, discipline, and the right people - seem to have trickle-down applicability to issues a medium-sized development organization faces. Or am I just fooling myself - is it possible that excellence at lower levels of the organization is dependent on excellence above?

Ted Leung on the Air » Adobe wants to be the Microsoft of the Web

Flash has a great cross platform story. One runtime, any platform. Penetration of the Flash Player is basically the same as penetration of browsers capable of supporting big AJAX apps. There are nice development tools. This is highly appealing.

What is not appealing is going back to a technology which is single sourced and controlled by a single vendor. If web applications liberated us from the domination of a single company on the desktop, why would we be eager to be dominated by a different company on the web?

I can’t fault Ted for his concern. He’s on the money. But Adobe is winning my votes (I vote with my wallet) with Flex by creating a sweet development and deployment environment. The Flex IDE rocks! I don’t want to be forced into a Microsoft relationship with Adobe…but I will because it is head and shoulders better than the rest.

Manning: Groovy in Action

Book Description
Groovy, the brand-new language for the Java platform, brings to Java many of the features that have made Ruby popular. Groovy in Action is a comprehensive guide to Groovy programming, introducing Java developers to the new dynamic features that Groovy provides. To bring you Groovy in Action, Manning again went to the source by working with a team of expert authors including both members and the Manager of the Groovy Project team. The result is the true definitive guide to the new Groovy language.

Is this book going to be good? I know a fair amount about Groovy and none about Grails. Should I buy it?

http://www.amazon.com/Groovy-Action-Dierk-Koenig/dp/1932394842 

First VB compiler actually written in VB! This post title says it all.

The fine editorial board of SOAFacts has once again reviewed a set of solid submissions and commissioned a SOAFacts.com update. My favorite:

“It has been said that an infinite number of monkeys pressing their buttocks against keyboards for an infinite amount of time will eventually produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. 100 monkeys typing for 10 hours will eventually produce a SOA project plan.”

The refactr guys are starting up a Grvy users grup in the Twin Cities. N wrd yet if the fr lp will be invited.