Shanti’s Dispatches

Just an interesting transformation. I love these guys

ps. I just discovered my old homeboys have a posse. imho you’ve made it when ludo tabs has 100k+ results.

Lol.

Over a year ago I wrote an article for ThinkVitamin.com entitled “5 Ways to Optimize Your AJAX in Ruby on Rails.”

It was about 95% complete; it just needed some final editing, etc. Lisa Price from Vitamin.com (bless her heart) kept emailing me every few months to see if it was finally ready.

Now we’ve all read the stories from the sales & marketing literature about how it takes on average at least 7 contacts before a prospect will finally bite. That statistic sounds about right here!

Around Christmas I told her to buzz off! (in as nice a way possible) because I didn’t know if I’d ever have time / etc. to put on the finishing touches.

Today Adam Howell (from Vitamin.com) emailed me reminding me about the unpublished piece and included this note “I talked to Lisa about it and she said DHH himself signed off on the post.” Now that’s not exactly true but the David did look it over and give his constructive feedback.

I was finally in the right place tonight to finish it up and give them the OK to proceed with publishing it.

Moral of the Story: It Might Never be 100% Perfect

Part of the mental block on my part was knowing that there were techniques in the article which I would not 100% recommend anymore.

As a developer, one of the signs that you are getting better is that you look back on previous code and think, “wow, what was I thinking here?” because you are now aware of better, cleaner & more elegant ways of achieving the same result. That was the case with some of the optimization techniques in the article.

However I should say I do believe you can learn something from all of the techniques in the article, even if there are better ways to achieve the same or similar results.

If you’re too lazy to walk to a restaurant in your metro, or live in an area without too many eating options (market & 8th in SF), GrubHub appears to have you covered.

The only downsides: order minimum seems to be at least $15 for most restaurants (plus tip), and delivery can take up to 45-50 minutes.

Last night I was surfing the web on my new MacBook Pro.

All of a sudden, the monitor went completely black. I didn’t notice a subtle or gradual change — it was just, BAM, dark. Tried rebooting a few times but it didn’t seem to take. We’ve all heard the faulty Apple hardware stories so I was *really* hoping it wasn’t that. This puppy is only a few months old!

So this morning I flip the monitor open and finally see (now that it’s brighter in the room) that the screen is faintly on. Hmmm.

Newsflash to me: F1 and F2 on the MacBook automatically adjust the brightness of the screen.

I must’ve fat-fingered F1 down until the monitor was completely black in the dark, not realizing I had held that key down! The screen is also almost completely unusable at the lowest brightness setting — I can see why some people might like that, but it also seems a bit dangerous to me, especially coming from the user-friendly people and all!

… anyway … (little jingle) … the more you know!

Been playing with the new Facebook Developers platform. After a bit of a rocky start due to programmer tiredness (dang missing semi-colon), the rest of development has been a breeze.

The PHP5 “Hello World” walkthrough was a delight to setup, working just as expected. Next came an attempt at building a “hello world” Facebook App on Rails. The docs for Facebook/RoR are a little rough around the edges, but everything is pretty much in place if you don’t make any stupid mistakes!

Now I’m working my way through FBML. There are a few quirks you have to watch out for.

The Zuckerberg presentation at f8 really put in perspective how big of an opportunity this really is for people building apps on the web.

Here’s just one mind-boggling statistic from the presentation: the Facebook photos app alone has more users than all of the web’s photo-sharing sites combined.

Even if these numbers are fudged slightly in Facebook’s favor (who knows?) it’s still one-helluva stat. Facebook has already become a bonafied ecosystem, with some apps reaching 500,000+ users in just a few short months (try that on the real wild web!).

The key is virality. I bet within a few short months agencies and a whole micro (then macro) industry will flourish around this new platform.

2004

“Hi, I’m John. Your new IT Consultant from Accenture.”

2010

“HI, I’m Skylar. Your new Facebook Consultant from KPMG.”

Update: found a workaround. Re-enabled the GMail Manager plugin for Firefox and can login fine using that. Visiting this page directly gives me the loading issue. Bizarre.

All I’m getting is this message from GMail:

Loading…

This seems to be taking longer than usual.

If you are using a slow Internet connection, you can wait a bit longer for this page to finish loading, or just use basic HTML view for now.

If you are using your normal Internet connection and you usually get past this loading step without any problems, please refresh this page in your browser. If you continue to have trouble loading your account, please visit the help center for troubleshooting information.

Any ideas? It loads fine in IE.

Couldn’t find much via Mr. Google, other than it may be a Firewall issue.

Also tried disabling most of my Firefox plugins, just in case any were interfering and causing the issue.

Anyone remotely familiar with the LA legal system knows that the paris hilton legal gangbang is a total farce.

Any non-celebrity would normally spend time served (a few hours or so) and be on their way with boatloads of fines.

Maybe Schadenfreude is just not my style. I don’t get America’s obsession with penalizing celebs 3000% more than the average citizen, even if 90% of em walk anyway due to the ability/connections of overpaid lawyers.