John Herren’s Blog

I’ve seen several instances where folks have criticized others for not “eating his own dog food,” or in other words, not using one’s own technology to show its viability. A couple examples of this rant that I’ve caught on the blogoweb:

• http://www.37signals.com/index.php <- not Ruby on Rails
• The Zend Framework wiki/issue tracker/source browser is JAVA, not PHP.

These are easily debunked: best tool for the job, Rails is harder to deploy than PHP, yadda yadda.  Most times the old saying is true, “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.”

Case in point:

Lucene: A Tacit Admission of Fail? : ob.blog

I won’t spoil it for you, but the first comment made me giggle.

In my head, I suffer with NIH Syndrome quite a bit; It’s easy to mentally find flaws in other peoples’ work and think of improvements.  The key phrases are “in my head”, “mentally”, and “think”, because at the end of the day I’m more often than not using existing open source software.

There’s a practicality component: there’s only so much time in the day, and I’m not that good of a coder.

I remap Caps Lock to be Ctrl because I cut ‘n’ paste so damn much.

I enjoy mashups because fitting the pieces together to make a new use case is usually more fun to me than building the pieces.

I believe lazy programming can be a good thing.

I once argued with an interviewer about writing a search algorithm that the language provided out of the box, even though I knew that wasn’t the point of the exercise.

It takes a little humility to realize someone else’s way is better or faster, and I’m super fine with that.

When not fighting off Microsoft ninjas with his GPL katana, Richard Stallman likes to supaman dat ho.

Also, the Youtube ID for this video is ‘Pube5Aynsls’, which would be a great name for a punk/prog rock band.

dotfiles.org | community for sharing dotfiles like .bashrc, .vimrc, and .bash_profile

Some excellent ideas in here for tools I use all day, every day:

• Make your prompt red when logged in as root
• vim tweaks galore
• pretty tabs for screen+ term compatibility
• launch man pages and vim terminals in new screens

This site would be awesome with rating functionality.

List Of The Day: Great Olan Mills photos

made me funny-cry

SQLite Manager :: Firefox Add-ons

Cuz I always end up searching for an sqlite manager on mah boxen.

(via)

…we’ve ported our entire campaign platform from PHP to Ruby on Rails. The thing about ROR is that you essentially save yourself all of the time writing database interaction code and we haven’t written a line of Javascript, which appeals to me because getting it to run across every browser is where we end up doing most of the debugging. Also, our beta cycles have been cut in half simply because it’s so much easier to put multiple coders onto a Ruby project. We switched from Apache to Lighty and from what our customers tell us, the lag is pretty much unnoticable now. All of this time saving is key, because since 9/11 we just don’t know when we’re going to need to put emergency websites into place to inform the people about new terror threats or to give them the resources to tell us about suspicious activity. I think using ROR is going to save a lot of lives. I hear Obama’s site runs on Perl…

I’ve got an idea for a new mashup, but I need some help. I usually get my Politik fix on Reddit, so I’m looking for a list of political blogs. General criteria:

1. Should be original content, not aggregators
2. RSS/Atom required, with full posts
3. popular is better
4. opinionated is better
5. Group ‘em by left wing/right wing/centrist (does that exist?) if possible

waiterrant.net » Blog Archive » Seduction

But seduction, to me, isn’t making someone do what they don’t want to do. Seduction is enticing someone into doing what they secretly want to do already.

Utility Mill - Makes Utilities

Utility Mill looks like a kick ass hosted service for mashup development. It lets you create hosted web services that run your custom Python code, handling input and output in an easy way. This service fills a hole in the “mashup stack” by adding custom scripting functionality without the need for a server side scripting language. So, if you need to perform any kind of filtering or munging of your mashed up data, and you aren’t exactly a Javascript guru, you can still keep everything client side by passing your data through Utility Mill first.

Other really nice features include commentary, revision control,  and mandatory GPL licensing. It’s also not a bad way to pick up some Python knowledge–especially when you see contributors named “guido.” Here are a couple fun/interesting/useful ones I found:

• Markov_Chain_Parody_Text_Generator Give it a body of text and get some random yet sensical text back
• Porter_Stemming_Algorithm Strip endings of words to get to their root e.g., running -> run
• Create_Thumbnail Create a Thumbnail from an Image File
• Google_Chart_API_URL_Generator GUI for Google Chart API to create simple charts

and of course:

• MetaUtility Enter some Python. Run it. See the output.

I was able to register on the site and write a silly little UUID Generator in about three minutes

I’d really like to see this done for PHP or Ruby too.

Shimmy Mehta is the founder and CEO of Angelwish.org, a non profit public charity that helps children with HIV/AIDS. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Shimmy at a couple Mashup Camps. Today Shimmy was on local New York news for sponsoring a toy shopping spree. Congrats and cheers to Shimmy for all he does to make the world a nicer place for children.

MyFox New York | Anne About Town: Toy Shopping Spree

Also, if you’re a PHP/MySQL developer and have a few hours free from time to time, and I know you and can vouch for you, shoot me an email. Angelwish is looking for and is happy to accept volunteer development help.