Shanti’s Dispatches

I’ve been meaning to post about Ruby on Rails for a while now.

There was a flurry of buzz over Rails a few weeks ago. I’ve been reading up on it and trying to cut through all the hype and see where its sweet spot may lie. One thing that impressed me was that Rails is being used to develop the fabulous Basecamp, as well as 43 Things, and now Evan Williams’ latest project, ODEO.

There is definitely something sexy going on with Rails. It reminds me too much of Paul Graham’s Beating the Averages essay, about his experiences using Lisp in his startup (Viaweb) which went on to be acquired by Yahoo (becoming Yahoo Store).

I’ll be posting my progress with Rails as I go along. I’m sure there are plenty of PHP hackers out there who are curious about all this Rails buzz, and whether it can really live up to the hype.

This latest release of Ruby on Rails features:

• Routing: Pretty URLs of all flavors and fashions can now be specified using an easy to understand Routing syntax made in Ruby. This means no more wrestling with mod_rewrite in Apache to get custom URL schemes.
• Web Services: Action Web Service is a whole new add-on framework for Action Pack that enables SOAP with WSDL and XML-RPC web services to be made with Rails ease.
• Components: With components it?s possible to call other actions and controllers for their rendered response while executing another action.
• And more…

Apparently I was MIA when Mark Pilgrim got fired for blogging way back in the day.

He posted an incredibly moving essay titled “Addiction Is” on his weblog. The essay is now online over at AddictionIs.org.

Courtesy of those wacky Italians.

Heck, they’ve already done it with search, mail and maps - why not calendaring?

One blogger has noted some heavy traffic on his Church’s calendar website.

Apparently, the iCal calendaring standard really makes Googlebot horny baby, YEAH!

Mark Cuban:

I’ve never lost a billion dollars.

It’s not easy to lose a billion dollars. It’s even harder for an individual to lose $1,000,000,000.00

Sure, there have been moves made by individuals that have cost more than a billion in stockmarket value, but how many can actually stand up and shout to the world that they let a BILLION DOLLARS in cash disappear into thin air?

I couldn’t name one off the top of my head that has lost cash money of 1 billion dollars or more, until today.

Congratulations Bob Goodenow, President of the NHL Players Association. You turned down 30 teams paying what would probably average out to 35mm dollars in salary per team for this year. That’s more than $ 1,000,000,000.00 in cash that would have been paid to NHL players this year.

That’s 1 Billion dollars that NHL players will never, ever, ever collect. Because of you. That puts you in rarified air. All you had to do was come off your high and mighty no salary cap horse in July rather than February.

What’s ironic is that a Billion dollars is more than NHL teams will earn collectively over the next 25 years, under any deal.

Full post over at Blog Maverick.

What you’re missing at Wondercon 2005 in San Francisco.

Adaptive Path has coined a term for the JavaScript + XMLHttpRequest + CSS technology used by Google Maps, Gmail, and Goolge Suggest.

They’ve written up an excellent article on what they’re calling Ajax: a new approach to web applications.

Adaptive path:

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what?s possible on the Web.

You could tell just by watching del.icio.us/popular that people started going (pardon my french) - ape shit - when these services (Gmail, Gmaps, etc) were launched.

Now, with a name, that seems like it’ll stick, I believe we’ve entered…. Web 3.0 ?

That’s probably too drastic of a statement, but the web-world definitely hasn’t seen something like this since CSS first went big time.

And CSS was more of something magical and sexy to web designers, not actual end-users.

Ajax, on the other hand, is very user-centric. It’s all about providing the ultimate user experience. And if necessary… saying “sorry, guys” to the non IE or Firefox browser users.

Stay tuned for an Ajax Resources roundup - coming soon.

From the holy-crap-I-need-to-learn-Chinese department:

Eco-Economy Update 2005-1
For Immediate Release
February 16, 2005
CHINA REPLACING THE UNITED STATES AS WORLD’S LEADING CONSUMER

By Lester R. Brown

Although the United States has long consumed the lion’s share of the world’s resources, this situation is changing fast as the Chinese economy surges ahead, overtaking the United States in the consumption of one resource after another.

Among the five basic food, energy, and industrial commodities–grain and meat, oil and coal, and steel–consumption in China has already eclipsed that of the United States in all but oil. China has opened a wide lead with grain: 382 million tons to 278 million tons for the United States last year. Among the big three grains, the world’s most populous country leads in the consumption of both wheat and rice, and trails the United States only in corn use.

Full article here.

You end up getting emails like this one:

From: M. Corum (mcorum @lisco.net)
To: shantibraford@my gmail.com
Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2005 00:36:48 -0600

MSC

My reply:

> How about a cup of coffee?

Thanks - I accept.

Shanti

The closest thing to saying something political on here would be to say, something along the lines of - fuck the co-conspirators.

Wait… that just pisses everyone off. That’s why I don’t like blogging about politics.

Just a few daily links for 2/18/2005:

Matt blogs about the improvements to the new WordPress 1.5 that was just released.

Guerilla improvisation artists, Improv Everywhere, upped the service standard at the Times Square McDonald’s, by becoming bathroom attendants for a while.

Do Christians have a neurological disorder? Maybe the ones who actually believe in a physical, literal “Devil” - with pointy horns and everything.

Get your SUVs & Hummers while you can, folks. Looks like Global warming might be real. The real question is - what percentage of that is caused by man, and what is “natural” warming.

From the “what were they thinking” deptartment: former employees sue gorilla foundation because they were forced to expose their breasts, in front of the apes. Jeez… Gorillas need love too!! (utterly just kidding, btw)

J.D. Lasica tackles ethics in the blogosphere

Ecstascy trials to begin for soldiers traumatized by combat stress. Studies like these could have started a long time ago, were it not for our byzantine drug policy. See drug war facts for some sensible drug war info, or the excellent Reefer Madness by Eric Schlosser.