The Rationalist Manifesto

Work mates of mine just released A Good Ride, it is a Rails 2.0-based motorbike riding site with some killer features. Check out the ride video feature.

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I should have a category for that…

What type of Fae are you?

Time wasted thanks to Fa11ing Away…

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Some of you may have heard about Amie St, the online DRM-free music store that recently signed major artists (such as Barenaked Ladies, Avril Lavigne, Sarah McLachlan, Paul Van Dyk and others) to sell their music without any of the foolish DRM restrictions that the iTunes Music Store imposes on music bought there.

Following the coverage on Digg, I’ve decided to try out the store. I was pleasantly surprised with the selection and quality of music there, but I was encountering some trouble listening to samples because of the high loads the site experienced following the news coverage. Frustrated, I wrote to their customer service about my hardship–

Not even twenty five minutes later, I got a response from an actual person, Elias Roman, who apologized for the issues, offered credit to my account and indicated what Amie St was doing to resolve the issue:

“What is your user name, I’ll add some credit to it so you can
enjoy it when the samples are working (We are actively adding more
servers to our grid to get rid of that issue).” - (Partial Quote)

One eMail from me later (with my user name), and no longer than fifty minutes from the time of my initial contact with them, the following message landed in my inbox:

“Hey Tal, I added some credit to your account. The site should be
running alright by now, I would definitely check out Au Revoir Simone,
the Shake, Waterlog (definitely check out The Onion by waterlog).”

While I am still having issues at time listening to the samples (which might be related to my own Internet connectivity) they are less prevalent than before and I’ll definitely check out and purchase music from Amie St, if only because of their remarkable customer service.

From my short time at the site, I already found some songs I like– allow me to recommend the song Unravel from the group Drawing Down the Sun.

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Luckily it is just a product design and not an available product. Because anyone who buys it should not be allowed to reproduce…

via Gizmodo.

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Interesting piece describing Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s life, from a slightly Jewish perspective. via Digg.

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The “No blogging allowed at “consumer generated media” conference” reported over at Boing Boing via Greg Verdino’s Marketing Blog, really struck a nerve with me. The name itself of course shows that the conference organizers just don’t get it: “Generating Media” makes you a producer, not a consumer…

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While I understand the need for adding the left-right arrows on the tab-strip when there are many tabs open, I reckon Firefox 2.0 switches to this solution too quickly which bugged me to bits.

Luckily, there’s a fix for that:

1. Go to the Firefox’s ‘behind-the-scenes’ configuration screen by typing ‘about:config’ in the URL bar.
2. Search for the property ‘browser.tabs.tabMinWidth’
3. Change its value from the default to 80 (you can experiment with this value and see what fits your comfort).
4. Restart Firefox
5. You should now have tab-strip that will fit in more tabs before reverting to the left-right arrow trick
6. If you want to revert to the default value, simply right-click on the property and click on the ‘reset’ option.

On my 1280×1024 screen the visible tab count increased from twelve tabs to fifteen, yet enough of the title of the page is visible. A lower ‘browser.tabs.tabMinWidth’ value means more tabs visible but less of the title for you to see.

If you want to read more about this property, this mozillaZine knowledge-base article will tell you all you need to know.

Technorati tags: mozilla, firefox, usability

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My father is now flying to the states and we had just finished speaking over Skype just as he was flying over Iceland.

He had a chance to try out using the “Connexion by Boeing” Wi-Fi service on his Lufthansa flight. The service is unfortunately being terminated at the end of the year, so this is probably going to be his last chance to have a go.

There’s a small bright side which is that use of this service has been made free until it is terminated.

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What seems to be a new ‘viral’ campaign just launched with a Google ad that leads to this site.

It seems to be a promotion for “The Observation Room“, a film by Shep Salusky that pretends to be an educational film by “Western States Continuing Education” supposedly to be “viewed only by mental health professionals including lawyers, physicians, psychologists and certain mental health professionals”. It is referred to as “The Greenan Tapes” on all the other sites, but if you note the cast (?) member named “Terisa Greenan” you start to get the picture.

The film is supposedly ‘real footage’ of therapy session at a therapy clinic showing the therapist ‘ruining the life’ of a patient. It is obviously not a real tape.

The whole marketing ploy around it is a bit lame IMHO… As the login form to view the tapes doesn’t even really submit anywhere, it just executes a JavaScript function which ’shakes’ the browser window as if to indicate denied access.

I’m writing this post despite this obvious marketing ploy, just because I like independent cinema. But maybe this film’s listing on IMDb is just the first part of a bigger viral campaign? Who knows? ;)

Technorati tags: greenan, the greenan tapes, the observation room, Shep Salusky

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Ruby on Rails is rightfully gaining traction and respect right along with a rapidly growing developer community. This, due to its being the near-perfect match for developing its `home-turf’ software: database backed web site. However, as pleased as I am with RoR’s success, I’m beginning to note with apprehension as it is increasingly being used for writing the kind of software it is not meant for.

It is not unlike the early Java-rush years in which every tiny in-house web-application seemed to some misguided souls like a nail aching for the punch of the overweight EJB hammer.

Rails development scales very well, so if you are developing a web-site, you’re in for a pleasant surprise using it. Whether you develop alone or with many team members, whether you deploy for ten concurrent users or ten-thousand, Rails is definitely the right tool for the job. But if you are developing something more state heavy, such as a web-application, then you are in for a nasty headache when your code goes O(spaghetti^2).

Rails is a great tool for what it does, but when you’re writing software that translates to a different architecture than a thin-state web-site (as rich an experience as it may be!) using Rails will be like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole (when the cliche fits…)

Web site/app, what’s the difference?
The difference between the two boils down to the number and complexity of the states of the software… …Huh?

Let us demonstrate: A good example for a web-site is IMDb, it aggregates information about movies from various sources including other users. Another example for a web-site is OkCupid.com which allow online matchmaking and interactions between users. Contrast this with a web-application such as Google Spreadsheets which is pretty much a hosted version of Excel + collaboration. Another example for a web-application (although one that is smaller in scale) is an application which allows you to control your home automation remotely via a web browser.

What is a web site?
A classic web-site is a thin view layer unto an expansive schema which is modeled and stored in a database. The use-cases it implements are shallow on their own right but their aggregate creates an experience which is much larger than the sum of its flows.

The main draw of a web-site are the users– you are not interacting with the software alone, you are part of a grander ‘community’ (as much as this word brings a bitter taste to my mouth at times)– While using a web-site you become part of the network and as a user you give value back to the site by interacting. This is the ‘Web 2.0′ vision, a painful buzzword on its own.

Web 2.0-type sites are absolutely ideal candidates for Ruby on Rails and as such there are many success stories to be observed. I’ll skip the bother of listing them, go to RubyOnRails.org and scroll down, I’m sure you’ll recognize some of the leading neuvo-web sites.

Now, seeing these successes described in IT Weakly (ha-ha) your average Joe IT Manager figures, ‘Hey! This Rails thing does web sites good! We have an in-house application to plan our customers’ parties which we need to upgrade, so let us rewrite it as a web-application using Rails!’

Gulp! Ding! Big Whoop! No good!

Why?

Because web applications and web sites are not the same thing… Joe IT is going to use Rails for something it is not meant for and actually quite weak for.

Web-Applications, a primer
To understand what web-applications in a deeper sense, consider the expression itself– it is naught but the well worn word ‘application’ with ‘web’ tacked in front. So a web application is simply an application that runs on the web as its platform of choice.

A desktop application’s experience is one of the user vs. The Software. Perhaps a limited remote resource is utilized, such as a query to the Party Supplies Database for the benefit of the purchase order printing screen but other then that– it is the user alone who calls the shots.

You can create deep, stateful use-cases that involve selecting a venue for the party and setting up the table locations and seating arrangements. It doesn’t matter if the experience of using this piece of software is immersive or merely tangential but the main point is that does not involve anyone else but the user himself along with the rich client experience (ah… Buzzwords). There’s a heavy statefulness to applications that doesn’t exist in web-sites.

The Thin Line
AJAX, another aspect of the Web 2.0 paradigm, is bridging the gap between the richness of a desktop application and that of one set on the web. It is also bringing more modal interaction to web-sites. But as thin as the line is, it is still there. And where it is most noticeable is the amount of statefulness of the software.

In a web site the state is maintained in these locations: The URL, the session and the database. You can consider them the short-term, mid-term and long-term memory of the software. For brevity, I’ll refer to any information which is kept client-side and travels back from the user as the URL, although it may be sent to the server in other parts of the HTTP request (such as forms).

To scale a web-site well, as little state as possible should be maintained in the session (for clustering purposes) and yet the cost of a DB call is also prohibitive so it is best for UI state to be contained in the URL as much as can possibly be managed, while taking care to never trust the user-sent data and to avoid assuming that he will ever traverse the flow chain as expected.

This leaves very, very little place for statefulness in web sites and it is the main reasons why web sites have shorter, shallower flows than do applications.

Don’t get me wrong– web-sites may have a rich UI. We are all immersed in the latest trend of enriching web-sites’ UI by creating a more responsive UI using AJAX.

The list that updates without a page refresh, a popup dialog for selecting your state or the modal window which display the clicked-upon photograph, these are just a few of the examples we see daily– but all this adds nothing to the statefulness of the site — it doesn’t turn it into an application and it shouldn’t!

Rails is ideal for developing web-sites because it deals very well with interpreting the current state from both sources (URL –> ActionPack, database -> ActiveRecord) and churning out a view for it. The second you add more statefulness, it gets painful.

Words of Wisdom
I speak from experience— I learned this painful truth about Rails the hard way by trying (and actually succeeding, through painfully so) to create a rich-flow application with Rails. This application should have been a desktop application by all rights, but seeing as I had recently acquired a hammer, I just had to use it to beat the screw in…

This application’s model was simple enough, but the user flow involved the use of resources on the PC itself (the DVD drive, in this case) making it utterly befitting a desktop application, and less so for a web-app… Blinded as I was by the ease of writing web-sites with Rails, I ignored my own red-lights flashing and went ahead anyway. It turned out well enough, but taught me hard lessons about what Rails makes easy and what it makes hard.

Statefulness…Blissfulness?
There are frameworks out there which fit a state-rich AJAX web-application much more than Rails. There are many examples and I would not want to mention one for fear of the flames, but feel free to suggest yours in the comments below.

Technorati tags: Ruby on Rails, Development, Software, Web 2.0

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