common dream

Webbynatra

2009-06-06T16:08:00.000-07:00

I do a few development jobs on the side for friends. One such friend got in touch with me about a week ago wanting me to add a form emailer to his static html site (I developed it using Webby). My first thought was to set it up as a Rails app, but that seemed a little overkill for adding a single feature, especially when Webby gives me layouts for static pages and with Rails I'd have to put a solution for that together. Then I thought about using Widget Finger, but I really didn't want to push him to pay for it, especially not when I already had the site hosted on a virtual private server that we have for Hello Theory.

That's when it hit me. I could use Webby to generate an app that was mostly static, but that used Sinatra to handle the form emailer. Starting with my original Webby site, here's how I did it.

First, I added a folder to the project's content folder named public, and moved all of the existing content files into that folder.


mkdir content/public
mv content/* content/public

Next, I added a new Rackup file (config.ru) to the content folder based on these directions.'


require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

root_dir = File.dirname(__FILE__)

set :environment, ENV['RACK_ENV'].to_sym
set :root,        root_dir
set :app_file,    File.join(root_dir, 'simgins.rb')
disable :run

run Sinatra::Application

I set up my Sinatra script to send email using Pony and tested it. There's a great example of using Pony to send email with Sinatra in the Sinatra FAQ.

Finally, I deployed using Webby's deploy feature:


webby deploy

The combination seems to be working like a charm, and keeps things way simpler for static page development than Rails would have. One small issue that I have is that I haven't come up with a good way to touch the tmp/restart.txt file to get Passenger to reload the app each time I deploy, but I've got a few ideas on that.

2009-05-13T09:00:00.000-07:00

Personally I would like Microsoft to get more involved with HTML 5. They’ve sent very little feedback over the years, far less than the other browser vendors. Even when asking them about their opinion on features they are implementing I rarely get any feedback. It’s very sad.

Ian Hickson

What's Up With Rough Updates, Apple?

2009-05-12T23:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight I installed the new OS X 10.5.7 update, and it was horrible. First I tried to use the system updater, and it failed to download 4 or 5 times in a row. Then, I manually downloaded the update from their site and installed it. As my computer restarted, it got into a weird state where a blue screen with a spinner would display, and then a lot of noise would show, and then the whole thing would repeat. I let my computer sit about 20 minutes and then powered it off. Then, my computer restarted three times as I tried to power it back on. And, this thread on MacRumors looks like a lot of people had the same experience.
Last year Apple’s rollout of the iPhone 2 software and Mobile Me was horrible. Mobile Me didn’t work for weeks, and the iPhone 2 had to be restarted every week at first. These difficult upgrades are tarnishing the brand that Apple has built of great user experience.
I love Apple, don’t get me wrong. In fact, I’m one of the biggest Apple fans that I know, and I’m sure tomorrow I’ll be defending this update and Apple in general at work. That said, I’d love Apple even more if their updates were a little less painful. I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get things like that working, and I don’t have to jump through hoops if I’m using a Windows machine and I want to update my operating system, it just updates.
So Apple, I’d suggest one of two things. Either stick with the really bizarre upgrade process with multiple restarts and the crazy loop of blue and black screens, but tell me what’s about to happen, or fix the process so it’s a little more painless.
I’ve got to go get some rest so I can defend you in the morning.

Introducing Control Center

2009-05-11T15:23:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of years I’ve had a general way that I wrote admin interfaces in a lot of the web apps that I’ve written, and I finally took the time to release that as a project. So, this past Friday I released Control Center 1.0. It’s a base layout and stylesheet for Rails that helps you write admin interfaces amazingly quickly (install the gem, run script/generate control_center, and customize some links). It’s hopefully interesting to some folks, and if not, well, it being a gem makes it tons easier for me to use.

So go check out Control Center on Github.

Back To Using RSS

2008-11-12T21:08:00.001-08:00

Well, I've been experimenting with not using a feed reader anymore for
the past month or so, and while it worked pretty well to look at just
a handful of my favorite sites on a daily basis, I miss the sheer
quantity of information that I was used to seeing every day.

With that said, I really wish that there was a feed reader that would
prioritize my news a bit better for me. I would love to see my feeds
organized by online popularity (maybe based onumber of links to the
story) and by my favorite topics. Also, I would love a reader that
would group duplicate posts together and would follow stories back to
their source. That way I could go through and see most of the news
that I probably want to see and less of the stuff that I probably
don't care about.

Gotcha When Testing Formats

2008-11-12T03:31:00.000-08:00

It's always a little amazing to me in working with Ruby and Rails that sometimes using symbols works great and sometimes it doesn't. It's really something that should be used in moderation, because symbols are a sort of controlled memory leak. Anyway, the other day I was testing some csv generation code in Log for Life, and I ran into an instance where a symbol isn't acceptable and you might think it should be. I had a block something like this:


respond_to do |format|
  format.html { handle_html }
  format.csv { handle_csv }
end

And I was testing it something like this:


get :action, :format => :csv

My test kept failing because the application was using the html block instead of the csv one. Well, a bit of snooping around showed me that it was an issue of using a symbol versus a string, and changing :csv to "csv" fixed the problem:


get :action, :format => "csv"

Overall, I think Rails needs to be more consistent about taking in either symbols or strings, or at least tell us when they're going to accept which. In this case, it makes tons of sense to use a string, because you can't pass a symbol over http anyway, but still, it's annoying to have to search around and feel crazy because your simple test isn't working like you would expect it to.

Obama Flickr Photostream

2008-11-07T03:20:00.000-08:00

This set of photos from Election Night is awesome . It would really be awesome if he keeps the photos coming when he gets into the White House.

Netflix Watch Instantly for Mac Beta is Live

2008-11-02T15:43:00.000-08:00

You can watch instantly on netflix on your Mac or in Firefox (anywhere that you can run Silverlight) by opt-ing into the beta at http://www.netflix.com/silverlightoptin.

I just tried it out, and it seemed to work great.

Why Do Great Teams Still Lose?

2008-09-27T17:12:00.000-07:00

An interesting thing happened today. My Alma Mater, Clemson, lost to Maryland. We have more skilled players, better recruiting, better facilities - everything you need to win a game. But, we still lost.

It's interesting to me to see how sometimes great groups of people get together and fail. We see it in sports all of the time, but I've been in teams both in my academic and work careers that failed even though we had what we thought was a great team. Why does this happen?

I think there are tons of reasons. Work ethic, personality conflicts, attitudes, and even bad luck can have something to do with it. But, I think the biggest reason can be summed up as inevitability of failure. There just isn't anyone out there that doesn't fail. It's a part of the human condition that we fail, and that we fail frequently. Those who look incredibly great fail less frequently than others, but they still fail pretty frequently.

Good sports teams, and work teams, get the failure out, though, when it doesn't matter so much. They get rid of failure during practice. They get rid of bad ideas early on. They don't hold on to things that don't work, and they're constantly changing to ensure that they've adequately learned from their failures.

Apple's Being A Bit Too Aggressive

2008-09-25T03:34:00.000-07:00

You may or may not have heard about the drama relating to the Podcaster app and the iPhone. Simply put, Apple reviews every application made available for the iPhone. An application was developed by a company that allowed users to download podcasts directly to their iPhone, and Apple refused to let the application be distributed because they said it duplicated existing iPhone functionality.

There are several articles about it, but one of the more insightful ones was The App Store's Exclusionary Policies , written by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. In the article, John talks about the fact that the policy to exclude applications that compete with Apple applications on the iPhone limits the phone's potential by scaring developers from trying to write applications for the phone because those applications that they've invested time and money into may be rejected.

I'm in a bit of a conundrum with Log for Life because of this. We want to write a native iPhone application to make logging to Log for Life dead simple, but it's an investment in this flawed system to do so. I can't imagine that a Log for Life application would get rejected, and even if it were, we would probably help our product overall by the press we would receive, but what about the next application. I have about 20 iPhone application ideas hidden in the back of my brain, and I don't want to invest in a mobile platform that is so locked down that I have to review my application ideas thoroughly to ensure that they won't collide with the phone manufacturer's interests.

I'll conclude with a quote from John Gruber's article, because I think it's spot on:

The App Store concept has trade-offs. There are pros and cons to this model versus the wide-open nature of Mac OS X. There are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides. But blatantly anti-competitive exclusion of apps that compete with Apple’s own? There is no trade-off here. No one benefits from such a policy, not even Apple. If this is truly Apple’s policy, it’s a disaster for the platform. And if it’s not Apple’s policy, then Podcaster’s exclusion is proof that the approval process is completely broken.

Awesome Safari Detail

2008-09-24T03:31:00.000-07:00

I just noticed a really cool detail in Safari. If you come across a URL that isn't a link for some reason, and you highlight it, the right-click menu will add an entry that says "Go to Address." That came in really handy just a second ago.

On a side note, though, why would anyone have a URL on a web page that isn't a link? That's just annoying.

Palin?!?!?

2008-09-02T05:29:00.000-07:00

We're all witnessing a meltdown of epic proportions in the Republican Vice Presidential Nominee area. Here's a great quote by Palin about the Pledge of Allegiance: (read the full transcript here)

Question: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?

Palin: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

Our founding fathers had nothing to do with the Pledge of Allegiance. It was written by a socialist Baptist in 1892. Mix that fact in with her abstinence only education policy, her running of Ted Stevens' 529, and her total lack of experience, and this could lead to John McCain pulling a "Did I say Palin? I meant Mittens Romney."

Google's Browser: Google Chrome?

2008-09-01T11:59:00.000-07:00

There seem to be rumors flying around that Google will be releasing a browser, based on WebKit, called Google Chrome in the near future. It's odd to me, though, that Google is sending comics to the press before they have a web page up.

Read more at Google Blogoscoped

Single Purpose Devices Are On The Rise

2008-08-28T10:00:00.000-07:00

There's been a trend of late for everything to get crammed into our cell phones. My iPhone has a camera built in, I can of course make calls with it, I can email with it, and applications open up a full realm of possibilities. Other, more capable phones include the ability to capture video. But, in the background, there has also been a growing demand for simple, single purpose devices that delight their users with great experience and low prices.

There has been a lot of buzz today about the new Peek email device. It's a $100 device that lets users send email. That's all it does. Service costs $15 per month. There's one big problem with the device - you have to carry a phone around along with it if you want to make calls - but for a lot of people, I feel pretty certain that having email while out and about is more critical than having a phone. I never use my desk phone at work, and seldom use my cell phone (maybe 3 or 4 times a day), but I use my email all day long.

I bought another really simple device earlier this year when I bought a Flip video camera. It's dirt cheap (I got mine from Amazon for $150), and it's about as simple a camera as you can find. You hit the record button to start recording, and then you hit it again to stop. You can zoom, but that's about it as far as features. Simply plug the built in USB connector into your computer and the Flip shows up as a USB storage device so you can pull files off of it. Simplicity and low price have meant great success for the Flip. It held 13% of the camcorder market as of March 2008.

A local Greenville company, Aeronix, is in the mix of simple single purpose devices with their ZipIt Messenger. The device allows their target audience, teens and tweens, to chat on various instant messaging computers. That's all it does. It frees up family computers, and I know it would have reduced stress around my house when I was a teenager. It's a really cool device that does something that cell phones can already do, but at a fraction of the price - $49.95 for the device and $9.95/mo. for the service.

Overall, I'm not sure if these devices could really be classified as the way of the future, simply because we can buy cell phones that combine all of their features. But, these devices are all developed to provide a terrific user experience for their single task, whereas cell phones tend to do everything, but do nothing well. These single purpose devices are also all extremely inexpensive, which is a critical need for many gadget lovers. Low prices and great experience probably mean that these simple devices will continue to perform terrificly in their markets.

Pet Food Companies Spent More On Research Than Utilities Did?

2008-08-28T04:08:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article on Wired about Thomas Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, and came across this interesting tidbit of information.

"According to the book, US pet food companies spent more on R&D last year than US utilities did."

If that's true, it says a lot about why we're getting nowhere on the energy issue. I'd like to read the book, but I'm hoping it's a little less long and a lot less boring than The World Is Flat was.

Dexter and Business

2008-08-27T10:16:00.000-07:00

Adair and I have been totally addicted to Dexter, the Showtime series, lately. Addicted to the point of watching 4 hours of the show last night and staying up until 1:45 AM when I knew I had to get up at 5:45 AM the next morning. The show is really intriguing because it has a serial killer as it's main character, but you love the guy. I think the reason you love the guy is because you see a few critical things about him

He's totally loyal to his friends and family
His thoughts (which they make you privy to on the show) are pretty humorous
He has a background that makes you feel a little bit sorry for him

It's interesting to me because you can almost line those traits up to some of the companies that we all love to hate, like Apple or Google. Take Apple:

Apple creates products that their customers love, so customers forgive them for things like DRM and cost
Apple has a sense of humor in their advertising and in the keynotes that Steve Jobs gives
You want Apple to do well because they're the underdog... they're taking on Windows and the PC

Google has some similar traits:

Google may add ads to your email, but they create an awesome experience. They add ads to their search, but they keep the home page simple and clean.
Google treats their employees amazingly well and has young billionaire founders that are out to index every bit of content ever created and redirect the computing platform argument from various operating systems to the web
Google has employees that are total nerds and is experimenting (beta forever), so you forgive the occasional mistake

It's just interesting to me that we have this scenario... we take organizations or people that we would hate at face value, but we attach a bit of humanity to them and we grow to love them. I think it shows the importance of marketing to peoples' emotions rather than to their sense of logic, and the power of being open about what you're doing and where you stand.

Constraining The Startup

2008-08-26T18:30:00.000-07:00

At Gnoso, we're growing fast. We've gone from 3 full time employees last July when I started to 8 full time employees. We wrote NCover last summer, and this summer Log for Life, our online diabetes logbook went into beta. With all of this growth, we've started feeling some strain. Our offices are feeling a bit smaller than they were this time last year. People are having to work across applications, and we're in a crunch to get the full release of Log for Life out and the next version of NCover out.

Today, though, Peter brought some sanity to the office by bringing up the fact that we need to embrace and work inside of our constraints instead of getting rid of them. We have to find ways to work with the team we have. We have to find ways to write applications more efficiently, and to focus on the user and the features they need and want, not the ones that we think would be cool but have questionable benefit to our users.

I'm hoping that these constraints stick around for the foreseeable future. I hate the idea of us growing at an out of control pace, but would instead prefer to see us have a firm grip on who we become and the culture at Gnoso. It's been amazing how much I've learned at Gnoso since I started last year, and I can't wait to see where this ride takes us all.

Interesting Canvas Gotcha

2008-08-24T20:26:00.000-07:00

You can't just create a new canvas element in html with the DOM, because the new element will get a default size, and then any size you set after the fact will cause the canvas to be scaled.

Inserting the canvas using a string with innerHTML and the likes, though, works great.

So I've Got The Olympic Fever

2008-08-24T10:01:00.000-07:00

It seems like the most lasting side effect of the Olympics, besides the new anger that Shawn Johnson feels every time she sees a tiny Chinese girl and the discomfort we all feel when thinking about lifting weights after seeing that one guy blow his elbow out, will be the $45 that is now automatically drafted from my bank account every month because of my new gym membership.

I wasn't the first one in our family to get Olympic fever. Adair, my wife, was bitten first. She had been talking about getting a gym membership for quite some time, but once the Olympics started, she decided to take the plunge, inspired by all of the ultra fit athletes and their ultra small garments. My daughter, Lucy, started asking to run laps around the house before she went to bed. And then, one night, watching Phelps get a gold and the womens' marathon of all things, I was bitten. "I think I want to run a marathon," I told Adair after the womens' marathon finished. Where the heck did that come from? I want to run a marathon? I usually don't even want to walk downstairs at work to get myself another Diet Dr. Pepper, but now, all of the sudden, I want to run a marathon?

It's not just at my house that people are being inspired to become olympians. Several people at work have started running, or have at least said that they want to start running. A lot of us are saying that in 6 months when our new office opens downtown we'll start exercising, which is awesome because it avoids the short term pain of actually starting to exercise, while still holding the promise of fitness. People everywhere have seen these young people and thought, "That could be me." And, for a few short weeks, they'll think (and some will even try just a bit) to follow the examples given to us by NBC on 12 hour taped delay.

I haven't started actually exercising yet, but I have a physical evaluation at my new gym tomorrow night. I'm hoping the bug will stick around for a while, because I stay pretty tired these days and people say that exherting yourself by working out somehow makes you less exhausted. It would be wonderful if it does, and who knows, maybe in four years I'll be fit enough to compete in the womens' marathon. I'm pretty sure I'll never be fit enough to run in the mens.

Log for Life Feedback Overall Positive

2008-08-20T04:32:00.000-07:00

We launched Log for Life, an online diabetes logbook, last week, and overall the feedback has been very positive. When I got in this morning, I had this gem of a compliment in the support inbox:

"I have been anxiously awaiting something as sophisticated as this tool and really like a lot about it so far."

As the only developer on this project so far, it really makes me feel good to be able to help out people dealing with diabetes, and it's our goal that we can make their lives a little bit less painful (in a time and inconvenience sense) with Log for Life.