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I just found a new site in my referrer stats – someone trying to customize Mambo to have a Kubrick-based theme rather strongly inspired by my (and Cole’s) tweaks to it. That’s cool. Have at’er.

But, it’s not cool to just go ahead and use the images directly off of my server. Sorry for being a jerk about it, but I don’t feel the need to use part of my bandwidth allocation so you don’t have to bother copying my files to your server to use them in your site… It’s simple to do. I’m all for people exploring and experimenting with stuff, even/especially with my stuff – that’s why it’s online – but please host your own website rather than sneaking into my hosting package.

Not sure how I feel about seeing my banner images elsewhere, either… I mean, they’re nothing special or anything, and I certainly haven’t protected or copyrighted them or anything, but really… Grab a camera, take a photo that means something to you and use that. It’ll take all of 5 minutes, and you’ll be much happier with your banner.

Of course, I’m also very stressed out with the neverending crush of a project that has been in perpetual panic mode for the last month, so I’m a little pissier than normal.

I was just chatting with Josh, and was mentioning that the Pachyderm server would be getting additional bandwidth allocated through to the commercial internet, thanks to campus IT.

I was searching for the spelling of a word to describe the price we were quoted. Couldn’t remember if it had an “a” or an “o” in it, and Dictionary came through for me! The dictionary entry even included images that look like actual old-school dictionary woodcuts, likely directly from the Oxford dictionary (perhaps a live image linked from their website?). Regardless, it sure makes for a nice and polished dictionary/thesaurus app. It’s the little things.

Here’s what Dictionary provided me with:

I’m trying out Unison File Synchronizer as a way to keep my two machines at work in sync. Unison inherits many concepts from source code management tools like CVS and SVN, and can manage bidirectional updates (even merges). I’ve done a test sync, firing the contents of my Powerbook over on top of my deskop’s home directory. It took only about 20 minutes or so to copy stuff over, but a long, tedious process of approving or reconciling conflicts made the process last many times longer than that.

It would be cool if Unison could have a flag that said “hey, if there’s a conflict, trust the Powerbook, and blow away the desktop” or vice versa. So I didn’t have to hit “.” for each of 20,000 files…

There are precompiled binaries for MacOSX, including both a GUI and command-line app. I had zero luck with the GUI version, but the command-line app was trivial to use.

If this works out, it will replace the last function that I rely on my now doomed .Mac account for…

Update: Between having multiple sync profiles, and being able to set the -auto and/or -batch flags, this could be a very usable solution! I’ve tried disabling .Mac sync for a while to see if I miss it.

The Mavericks project is scheduled to wrap up in the next week (officially, but there will be some straggling updates over the next few weeks, I’d guess). We’ve been using the latest beta of Pachyderm to author the online version of the Glenbow Museum’s Mavericks exhibit. It’s a huuuuuge project. I just did a screen count, and while it’s lower than I estimated, it’s still a behemoth. 1254 screens are currently authored, with another 150+ coming online tonight (once Shawn finishes up).

That’s ~1400 screens, authored via the web interface, and compiled into a bunch of handy dandy flash websites for use as part of the Museum’s online exhibits. By the way, that’s the single largest test of Pachyderm 2.0, by several orders of magnitude. And, while authoring in a alpha/beta software package is a bit quirky at times, it actually worked surprisingly well. Boy, do I have some ideas for improvements though

That’s also a lot of picky little details that need to be cleaned up in the next few days. Stray images (over 1600 images were provided for the project), stray metadata, stray content, fun with MS Word “smart formatting” messing everything up (I’m going through a few of the published sections, and finding a LOT of those insipid MS Word formatting characters… Going to have to write some SQL to strip/convert them globally…). Template tweaks. Test. Review. Fix. Repeat

While it’s been an amazing test of Pachyderm, and a very cool project – I’ve learned a lot about Alberta history – I can’t wait until this thing is wrapped up. Keeping 1400 screens and their supporting bits in my head has been hurting for a while now…

Once it goes live, I’ll post links and stuff to share with the rest of the class.

I finally made time to install Rails, planning on taking it for a test drive by making a Ruby on Rails version of the lightweight asset manager database we put together to store assets for Pachyderm.

Initially, I guess my install of Rails didn’t have MySQL support (why on earth wouldn’t that be included right out of the box?), and it kept barfing when it tried to connect. So, I installed or updated my MySQL kit via gem install mysql and it was able to build a simple scaffolded app to let me create a single record via the dynamically generated interface. That was pretty cool – automatically figuring out which widgets should be used, etc… Very WebObjects D2W.

But, it barfed on a field name in the table – it didn’t like “type” at all. So, I renamed that field to “assettype” in my local copy of the database. Now I can create a record.

But, using the “list” action gives me an error:

too few arguments.

10: <% for entry in instance_variable_get("@#{@scaffold_plural_name}") %>
11:

12:   <% for column in @scaffold_class.content_columns %>
13:
<%= entry.send(column.name) %>

14:   <% end %>
15:
<%= link_to "Show", :action => "show#{@scaffold_suffix}", :id => entry %>

16:
<%= link_to "Edit", :action => "edit#{@scaffold_suffix}", :id => entry %>

So, I’m kinda stuck. Rails seems REALLY promising, and everything I’ve heard/read about it makes me want to do a lot of stuff in it. I love the develop/test/deploy distinctions built in from square one. I love the unit testing built in. I love Ruby (but haven’t really used it too much – it seems reminiscent of Lingo, but that’s because Lingo is another Smalltalk derivative, via Hypertalk). Also, Rails just celebrated its first birthday, and was apparently received extremely well at OSCon.

But, the magical “it will build a wonderful app with no code” hype fell a bit short for me, at least initially…

Update: Turns out it was choking on a field named “format” in my “assets” table. Renamed the field to “dc_format” and it appears to be happy… Now that the Rails setup seems to work, and I’ve debugged the database schema conflict, it’s actually very cool how it builds the dynamic app to manage records! Full “view”, “edit”, “add”, “list” and “delete” actions, with a totally usable (but rough) UI. Now to dig in to see how to customize the layout of the dynamic app…

So, for Google’s sake, Rails doesn’t like these field names for tables: type, format – there may be others, but these are the ones that tripped me up so far…

Also, it’s a bit odd that the default scaffolding app doesn’t appear to provide a search function… I can list all records and page through them, but can’t do a quick search? WebObjects D2W does that right out of the box, even generating “advanced search” forms at will. Looks like Rails has a plugin gem to do this (Search Generator Gem), but it’s apparently a bit rough, and not included with Rails as a stock feature.

Update: Added “Radio Memories”

On the way into the office this morning, I realized that something had changed about the way I’m listening to podcasts. When my iPod is fired up (which is every day), I find I still listen to podcasts about 90% of the time – the remaining 10% is spent in Shuffle mode randomly bopping around my various playlists of actual music.

What changed was the type of podcasts that I find myself listening to. Initially, I was 100% ITConversations. Drinking from the firehose of conferencecasts, and deep interviews, and whatnot.

Now, my favorite podcasts are:

• Caribbean Free Radio – from Trinidad
• SparkleTack – about San Francisco history/culture/life
• Battlestar Galactica – Executive producer Ronald D. Moore talks about each episode
• EarthCore – the first podcast-only novel
• CBC Radio 3 – Canadian independent music
• EdTechPosse – a handful of edtech geeks from Saskatchewan
• Radio Memories – old time radio shows!

Occasionally, I’ll dip into a few others

• Art Mobs MoMA Guides
• Beercasting.com
• and yes, occasionally, ITConversations

I’m not sure if my taste in podcasts has matured, or if I just burned out from the All Tech, All The Time push of a constant ITConversations feed…

Of course, when I’m coding or doing something that needs music, I usually have iTunes churn through my “My Top Rated” or “Good, Unplayed Recently” playlists at a volume that is way too loud for the continued health of my eardrums…

After a few month rest period, it feels like the “multiuser weblog software” arena is heating up again. Drupal keeps chugging along. ELGG is looking really sweet, and now WordPress Multiuser (WPMU) is firing back into the competition.

Might be time to take a step back and re-evaluate multiuser software platform before weblogs.ucalgary.ca hits the big time. It’s currently running as what might be described as a “limited test pool”, with several users dipping their toes, but no hardcore users piping up.

The majority of the feedback I’ve received from Actual Users™ about the Drupal software is that it is too complicated, and it doesn’t feel like it’s “theirs”. They don’t feel comfortable using it – even when stripped waaay down, there’s just so many dials and buttons and levers that newbies get intimidated. It just feels like a geek tool.

ELGG feels like a social weblog collaborative, and WPMU feels like a really good and easy to use personal blog system that can be more if it wants to.

If a user’s first reaction to the software is something like “GAH!” they are less likely to use it. If they’re less likely to use it, it becomes less valuable, eventually worthless to the community it’s trying to serve.

I think, in the long run, a less-than-perfect tool that facilitates contribution by users at the expense of lacking abstracted CMS features may be more powerful (more valuable to the community) than an überCMS that scares a portion of potential users away. Wow. That was one killer run-on sentence…

Over the next several weeks, I’m going to try to take/make the time to do a more thoughtful comparison of these three candidate platforms, hoping to figure out what the real requirements are (like, what will a user do, and what do they need/want), rather than worrying primarily about IT-related things (like LDAP (although that is nice) ).

I just took the drastic step of turning off the “autorenew” setting on my .Mac account.

The last 2 reasons I had for keeping it were iSync, and my Dad’s email account. He just emailed everyone saying he’s going to be using the account from his ISP, so that leaves iSync. Can’t justify the cost to keep my Safari bookmarks synced between 2 machines.

Why isn’t iSync capable of working without a mediating server? It’d be cool if I could set up one machine as “master” and the others would sync to/through it. But, that could cut into .Mac subscriptions…

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