Dangerous Ideas

I’ve had troubles with Typo (which I’ve been using for my blog) for a while and kept thinking to myself that I’d move to WordPress at one point. Then Mephisto came out and made quite a splash, with the Rails Weblog switching to Mephisto from Typo. So I figured when I got enough free time I’d look into Mephisto instead of moving to WordPress. Of course, I still haven’t gotten to try migrating to Mephisto and now Typo 4.0 has been released. Which just goes to show that if you ignore a problem long enough, sometimes it’ll solve itself. ;-) Hopefully that’s the case this time, and comments and trackbacks work like they should. If not, then I’ll go back to looking at Mephisto or WordPress.

For any other Typo users out there, the upgrade went smoothly. I backed everything up and switched to the default theme (since I figured Origami, which was written for Typo 2.6.0, would break), and upgraded Typo and Rails using svn. After the files had updated and the tables migrated, everything worked. Now I’ve switched to a lighter-weight theme called Scribbish, and the blog seems much snappier.

Wow, that was the most fun I’ve ever had deciding not to go to a conference! Thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in trading me their time for an all-expenses paid trip to RailsConf. I’ve met a lot of people I think I’ll be working with in the near future, including Sarah Mei, the person I’m sending to RailsConf.

It’s funny … just the other day I was talking with Jason Wong about recruiting strategies. I was actually offering to sell him by RailsConf ticket. I knew he had been interested in going but was too busy to really think about it during his run for a position on the local Democratic Central Committee. Turns out Jason couldn’t go, either, but after the conversation with him, I thought, hey, why not try to combine transferring the ticket with trying to find some cool Ruby and Rails programmers to work with?

Some of the people who can benefit the most from the inspiration and knowledge exchange that takes place at conferences or seminars often can’t afford to go to them. Either they’re starting out as programmers or, like Sarah, they’re seasoned developers who are relatively new to Ruby and don’t work for a company that will sponsor them to go to something like RailsConf. Many people in this situation are women, who I’m especially sympathetic to since seeing our numbers decline so much in programming (for the curious, I didn’t choose Sarah based on gender; I chose her because she has great skills, works with non-profits, could take the time off, can work legally in the U.S., lives in San Francisco – a perfect combination!).

It was especially great how many people were attracted to the social justice parts of my post. That was so cool! There were several people that were actually more interested in just working with me than RailsConf itself.

It was all serendipity this time, but the experience was so good that I’m thinking of offering one or more all expenses trip(s) to RubyConf in exchange for programming hours, too, assuming there’s interest.

If the logistics work out, I’d also like to combine the offer with mentoring by an experienced Ruby programmer. Again, the offer will be open to everyone, but I’ll of course be making an extra effort to let women and other underrepresented programmers know about the offer.

I posted my original offer on Ruby mailing lists plus also on Systers (where Sarah saw it) and LinuxChix. Any suggestions for other places to post offers like this that will reach women programmers and programmers of color?

Ajax was really cool before it got named ‘Ajax’ – Google Maps and Gmail, for example, had wonderful features that other Web-based mapping and e-mail services didn’t. Back then, I loved Ajax (before it became Ajax). I also liked some of the early applications that became well known at about the time Ajax started taking off, like Basecamp and Odeo. There are times when it just made adding an item to a to do list, for example, really easy – no need to reload the page! That was the Golden Age of Ajax (scary to think of an age that lasted such a short period of time), when Ajax made me feel like I could do more quicker.

Now, though, Ajax-y things (I’m using Ajax broadly, since it’s applied so broadly) are everywhere. And when Firefox hits 95 perecent CPU utilization I feel pretty far from productive. And this can happen several times a day – that’s crazy! JavaScript libraries like Prototype, Mochikit, and Scriptaculous are great, but maybe they make things too easy.

I guess it wouldn’t be as much of a problem if I only opened up a few Web sites at once, but my usage of Firefox is to have several windows with multiple tabs open in them. I guess this problem could be alleviated if Firefox had the option to suppress JavaScript processing for pages other than the current top page. I hope they add that feature at one point, but in the meantime, here’s my plea to the “Web 2.0” crowd: please apply common sense! Why do people write JavaScript that polls a Web site every 5 seconds? What could possibly possess someone to think that was a good idea?

Here’s a book idea – maybe someone should write a tale of warning to the Web 2.0 developers. Maybe call it “Crash 2.0” …

Update: The ticket has been traded! Thanks to all who wrote to me!

I have a ticket to RailsConf in Chicago, but I think I’m going to have to give it up. I’d be happy to sell my ticket to someone else for the original price ($400).

Of course, that’d be boring (but totally acceptable), so in the interest of getting to work with more people in the Ruby and Rails community I thought I’d also offer an option for a trade … If you don’t have the dough (or would prefer a warmer fuzzier alternative to paying with cold hard cash) I’d be willing to pay for your ticket (or even for the ticket plus airfare, hotel, and car) in exchange for your time. The requirements for this are:

• You need to be a good programmer. By good programmer, I don’t mean the look-at-me-I-can-do-super-fancy-metaprogramming-while-chewing-gum-backwards type. After all, only about 20 percent of programming requires mad skillz (and I think we have that covered) It’s the other 80 percent I need help with, and that just requires someone with a good foundation in programming, common sense, and the ability to get stuff done without much direction. And programmers who have a great foundation in other languages (e.g. Smalltalk, Python) but who are relatively new to Ruby and Rails are welcome to try to convince me.

• You think you’d enjoy working with me and my company. To get an idea of the sort of person I am, you might want to check out my blog (well, if you’re seeing this, you’re reading it now). Also, some info about my company. It’s called Colorful Expressions (to evoke the feeling some people feel with their computers). We’re a consulting company (we don’t have a fancy money-generating Web application – yet, anyway) that works mostly with small businesses and non-profits. We have an interest in working for social justice organizations and often end up charging a lot less than your typical programming shop would as a result.

• You’d be willing to negotiate a favorable rate of exchange and be willing to work (paid) for time in addition to the trade if necessary. After all, I have no idea who you are and I’m going to be making more or less a snap judgment, and it’s also hard to just stick a nearly random person into a project for a few hours and expect something great to happen.

It might be that no one will want to take me up on a trade – heck, even I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea or just silly – and I’ll just end up selling the ticket. But at least I tried to be creative … ;-)

If you are interested in either buying the ticket or working out a trade, please e-mail me at jennyw@dangerousideas.com with “RailsConf” in the subject (this address gets huge amounts of spam), or, if you want to share your reasons with the world, feel free to post a comment here (but either e-mail me separately or include your contact info).

P.S. Chicago a really fun city to visit. For vegetarians, Soul Vegetarian East and The Chicago Diner are two great restaurants not to be missed. Also, since RailsConf overlaps with Chicago’s 2006 Pride Weekend, there are tons of once-a-year events happening. I hope that people going to the conference get a chance to explore the city.

Having an account on TextDrive, I’m used to setting up Rails applications on Lighttpd, and setting up Apache as a reverse proxy. Turns out it’s a bit harder when you throw two additional requirements in the mix: having the Rails application live in a sub-directory (instead of its own virtual host), and using SSL.

After a lot of false starts, I came across this article on setting up Typo in a sub-directory, which works great (after I recompiled lighttpd w/ PCRE support). However, that article talks about a setup without SSL. Under SSL, the links work fine, but whenever there’s a redirect, Rails would use http:// instead of https://. A bit more searching later, and I found an article with a fix and another article explaining the redirect problem in more depth.

I asked nicely, and Avi Bryant was kind enough to give me access to Dabble recently! It’s a really amazing application, and I’m really looking forward to giving it a run through. For those who don’t know, Dabble is a Web-based service that makes it easy to create database applications – without code. Here’s an example of a public Dabble application for Smalltalk jobs – it includes RSS feeds generated by Dabble, and HTML views.

My first application will probably be a version of the humble to do list. The to do list applications I use most often these days are the ones in my Treo/Palm Desktop and the ones in Basecamp. Both are relatively simple, and work fine as far as they go, but I find that I almost always revert to a text format for to do lists because to do list applications invariably are less flexible than I’d like.

This may all change, though. Dabble seems flexible enough that I can setup my to do lists to track any information I want, and even allows me to change my mind about what I want to track and takes care of backend changes magically.

As someone who makes her living partly as a programmer (I’m a Jill of all trades, really), I wish I could get my hands on the Dabble code – it would make things so much easier. And I mostly program in Ruby on Rails these days. That said, I really like Smallthought’s effort to keep Dabble code-free (from the users’ standpoint) – I can’t remember seeing anything as powerful as Dabble that didn’t involve coding before.

Of course, Dabble is written in Avi’s Seaside framework, so at least part of the power is available to programmers.

Unlike most Rails programmers, I chose to use Rails after already choosing to use Ruby, and I chose Ruby almost completely because it closely resembled Smalltalk. The main reasons that I’m not using Squeak and Seaside right now instead of Ruby and Rails are:

• The libaries I find myself needing a lot exist more often in the Ruby world than in Smalltalk (well, at least Open Source Smalltalk; I bet I could find most of what I need in VisualWorks). Things like regular expressions are not common in the world of Squeak (with Squeak, you can use a C plug-in, but it’d be nicer if it there were a native way to do regexes). Another library I’ve been using recently is Ferret, which is a Ruby port of the Lucene search engine.
• Smalltalk isn’t exactly the best when it comes to integrating with non-Smalltalk libaries (again, this might be different with the commercial Smalltalks).
• Squeak’s license. I’m not sure this is a big deal – there are some who think SqueakL is freer than many open source licenses – but it’s a recurring issue, if only because Debian won’t include it in their distribution.
• Believe it or not, but … Rails’ larger marketshare makes it easier to sell to customers.

Maybe when Dabble leaves beta and becomes a killer app. Seaside will get a lot more attention, and then the last of the issues above will go away. As for the others … at one point, the benefits of using Squeak an Seaside could outweigh the cons. There are plenty of times I’ve hunted down bugs in a Rails application where I wished I had something even remotely approximating Seaside’s debugging support. The breakpointer script is certainly better than nothing, and better than what some other frameworks offer, but it still has nothing on Seaside/Squeak. And, of course, there’s the fact that Seaside is a stateful framework. This means that you can set an instance variable in one method and expect that it’ll still be set when you call the next method, even if that’s in between a couple of page loads. And, of course, being a continuation-based framework (maybe the reference continuation based framework), there’s support for the back button.

If you haven’t seen Dabble in action, read through the Smallthought blog and check out the videos:

• Dabble video clip 1: Migration.
• Dabble video clip 2: Column Menus.
• The a video demonstration of Dabble given at a Vancouver Lisp User’s Group (LispVan) meeting/.

Also, if you’re curious about Seaside and when you might use it instead of Rails, check out the Ruby on Rails Podcast inteview with Avi Bryant. The sound quality starts off poorly, but it gets (somewhat) better later on.