A Newbie’s Frustration

Ryan Tomayko made a post outlining a newbies frustration about trying to get into the world of Blueprint/Compass. What Ryan pointed out struck me in a couple ways, and in the most significant way it encouraged me to take pride in how much I know. It encouraged me to try to get YOU to appreciate how much you know as well. Before I leave you too much in the dark, take a look at what Ryan quoted and then his comment.

The newbies post

… one way or another it seems I need something called EMACS.. WTF..!!!!! I dare you to install it and see how many WTFsss you will say…. it’s like some text editor that is so smart that you dont use the mouse dont even use the cursor keys..if you want to go back one character you hit control then B!!! Brilliant!!! two random keys instead of one with an arrow!!!! WWWTTTFFFF!! ok I might not need this crap…. lost a day learning to use the Rubik cube of text editors.

Ryan’s thoughts:

It’s easy to pfft and blow off this kind of … criticism, but if you can look past the make believe grammar and punctuation you really do get a sense for how hard it is for newbies to wrap their heads around even very basic set of tools needed to build things on the web. Maybe what we do is just hard and complex and there’s nothing we can do to make it simpler. I’m just always surprised when I get to peek through someone else’s eyes and see just how fucked up everything must seem.

My Thoughts

Now, to iterate on his thoughts a little further – we’ve gone through so much as developers to get to the point where we can pick up the ideologies of new frameworks and ideas at a rapid pace. I encourage all of you to take credit for that; give yourself a pat on the back – you’ve accomplished a lot.

Perspective of Wisdom

I think Bradley Grzesiak (how do you pronounce that?) summed this journey up rather perfectly later in that google group thread:

The professor wrote L’ = -ρVΓ on the board. We all marveled at the
simplicity when he told us that it defines the lift of a 2-D wing.

“What? That can’t be,” someone said.

“It is. In fact, it describes the lift of any 2-D body in an incompressible
fluid,” he stated.

Span-wise lift equals the negative fluid density times the free-flow velocity times the circulation.

We then spent the next few classes of this aerodynamics class learning the proof behind this incredibly simple equation. We dove into Taylor expansions, Green’s Theorem, and (if I recall correctly) Laplacian Transforms. Once we got done, we each had a number of pages that fully decomposed this simple equation into something that was finally intuitively provable. We then spent another couple weeks applying the formula to various shapes as point vortices and finally panel vortices.

I bring this all up because it took me a long time in school to get to the point where I could even keep up with the professor. Even though the equation looked simple, showing that it actually meant something took a ton of effort.

Blueprint is great. Compass is awesome. Haml, as far as I’m concerned, absolutely rocks. But I say this as someone who has spent years making my way to the point where I can read the “quick start” guide and simply go. When I found out about Haml, Sass, Compass, and Blueprint, I had already
made it 95% of the way there. I already knew linux, os x, ruby, rails, etc. I had, in effect, taken all of the pre-requisites for something like an Aerodynamics class.

DogBot, you’re not there yet, but I wish you the best. When you get stuck, ask for help from friends, IRC, mailing lists… whatever is at your disposal. If you stay positive and open your mind like a sponge, you’ll get there with the help of your persistence and various communities.

In Closing

The way that Bradley expresses the significance of a journey for knowledge is just perfect to me and eye-opening at the same time.

I hope you got an interesting perspective on knowledge and the journey that we all have to go through to get to the point we are all at right now. Kudos to you. Kudos to the community.

The Problem

For a small side project I needed to point my domain at GoDaddy to the Heroku servers so my domain would be properly mapped. The usual way to go about this is to delete all DNS information in your GoDaddy DNS Panel and then add a cname record for “www” that points to “proxy.heroku.com” - great! Now what about the top level domain? A records only point to ip addresses so you can’t point it to proxy.heroku.com - DOH!

The First Solution

The solution to this in the past was to type “example.com.” (note the period at the end) and then point it to proxy.heroku.com; however this no longer works. GoDaddy strips the period at the end of any value for a cname record. So what’s the official solution? Forwarding. You can setup forwarding so that example.com points to www.example.com.

This may not be the best solution. I’m not a DNS expert by any means but it will get you the above functionality described. If there’s a bad reason to do this can anyone shed some light?

The Other Solution

The other solution is typing “host proxy.heroku.com” and grabbing the 3 ip addresses that it outputs and then creating an A Record for each ip. This works but then you don’t get the benefit of the ip addresses being provided for you through a proxy (which is damn cool).

First Impressions

Today I picked up the Verizon Droid that debuted in a lackluster but second to best glory of the iPhone debut(s). There was a line… but only for the preview unit, unlike the first day at the Apple Store for an iPhone where you see a line around the corner. No complaints though, it just means I got my phone earlier than expected!

First impressions of the Verizon Droid phone: It’s sleek, it’s solid, and it reminds me of batman. That was more than enough to keep me intrigued. It has all the functionality you would expect from a comparible iPhone device and then some… one feature that really struck out at me that no one has really mentioned: vibrating feedback. I find it really cool that the phone vibrates on certain types of touch. It makes the phone feel like it’s responding in a way that my iPhone never responded to me… It’s like a new sensation of love washed over me in awe. Ok… I’ll stop geeking out about it, either way, first impressions were great!

One more thing I’ll add to the first impressions based off other reviews that came out before the release: there was mention of sluggishness in the UI. I experienced and still have not experienced any sluggish behavior with my Droid.

Geek Bonus

The phone speaks a really awesome “Droid” noise on certain events (like new e-mail.) It’s an awesome sound and make me want to hi-5 the closest geek around me.

Time to Compare

Let’s compare the iPhone now to the Droid now. Oh, and I also want to mention that I still own an iPhone. I used to have the 3GS iPhone but I lost it in Ibiza, so now I’m stuck with my back up. Either way… as a current iPhone user I just want to point out that the Droid satisfies me just as much as the iPhone does. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything except… the camera of the 3GS. We’ll get to that in a second though.

Let’s go over the network quality first:

Network Quality

Coming from AT&T I never knew what was “better” in terms of audio/cell quality. Now I know… Verizon has an amazing network.

Size:

They’re roughly the same size. The Droid is a tiny bit bigger because of the slide-out keyboard, it’s not a huge difference though.

Weight:

They feel pretty much the same.

Marketplace:

You’ll find what you need with the droid. Of course the iPhone has a wider selection but there’s only so many purposes an application can fulfill. I’d say the types of applications you’d actually use on a day-to-day basis are available for both the Droid and iPhone. Oh, and installing the apps is a breeze. I’d say even easier than on the iPhone.

Browser:

It works great on the Droid and the iPhone. No complaints for either.

Maps:

This is where the Droid wins flat out. Holy moly is the GPS Navigation freaking sweet! I’d say the phone is worth it just to take advantage of this feature. It’s perfect… and free! I’m a little pissed off at how amazing this is though because it killed me in my Garmin stock… :(

Camera:

The reviews were true on the camera. The camera does suck on the Droid. However I don’t know if it’s the hardware or the software. Compared to the 3GS it truly sucks, but compared to the 1ST Gen… well you be the judge:

iPhone Shot | Droid Shot

iPhone Gallery | Droid Gallery

To my eyes… they’re roughly the same quality once taken. And if I’m not mistaken the 1st gen iphone is a 2.0 megapixel camera and the droid is 5 megapixels. Yeesh that’s embarrassing. However megapixels isn’t everything about a camera. There’s the sensors and other stuff that I don’t know about. Either way, Droid camera sucks! The videos are decent though.

Contact / Social / Media Integration:

This is another area where the Droid really excels at over the iPhone – the way that all your contacts are synced with Facebook, Google, and other services is really damn cool. As soon as I bought my phone I already had 95% of my contacts in my phone just because it was already in Google Voice (oh, and that’s another amazing feature on its own that the Android platform obviously supports). As soon as I added my Facebook details as well, all those contacts synced with my Facebook contacts and a majority of my contacts now have profile photos, e-mail addresses and phone numbers I didn’t know about… overall a really cool experience.

I know I didn’t write this post very well. I’m not trying to write up an impressive professional blog post. I just want to share a couple feelings I had and my experience with the Droid as well as a comparison to an iPhone.

In Conclusion

The Verizon Droid is a damn good phone. I’d say it is definitely the second best phone on the market but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be your primary phone. I’d settle for the Droid over the iPhone just because it’s a breath of new air, and as a geek I like new toys. I’m not missing any of the features on my iPhone, so what’s the loss? I see only gains with the Droid only features.

How’s everyone doing in the Ruby world? How about the Rails world? Great I hope. I’ve been so busy the past couple months with work that I have not been able to give any attention to this blog at all. However, that may change as I have project availability opening up as of November.

If you’re interested in any Design, User Experience, Auditing, Ruby on Rails Development and or other Ruby work let me know. Also take notice that I can put up to 2 other Ruby Programmers on the project. I now run a 3 person team ruby web-development agency: http://www.abigfisch.com

Give me a call at 323-708-3664 or e-mail me at daniel@abigfisch.com

I was looking around Downtown Los Angeles recently for purchasing a loft and after doing a lot of research I see an immense future for this location. Which led me to the following idea: shared office space in Downtown L.A. I’d love to have an amazing office in the heart of it; however I like to stay independent and this idea is not entirely feasible or even fun on my own.

I’m throwing this idea out there to see if anyone would be interested in building a really modern, inspiring, web-development/graphic-design office in Downtown L.A.

If you’d like to have a meeting about this feel free to send me an e-mail to (daniel [at] abigfisch.com), tweet me, or give me a call: +1 323.708.3664