I got the idea for this post when Jeff and I were reading a recent discussion on programming reddit.  In summary, the poster was asking readers to help him convince his boss not to use Adobe Dreamweaver to develop their web application.

Back in the bad old days (by which I mean the 90’s of course) HTML largely pandered to visual designers who wanted to make good on the promise that visual web browsers like Mosaic and Netscape were making.  Browsers were even competing to create their own proprietary tags to offer more whiz-bang features — I’m sure most of you remember “Best Viewed In” buttons.  But no matter how many special tags were added to HTML to influence the visual layout and rendering of the page, the fact remained that to design a website you still had to fire up your favourite text editor and write code. Read the rest of this entry »

I got back from my trip to Japan just over a week ago and I seem to have finally readjusted to sleeping in Eastern Time again.   While the long vacation was quite nice and I was incredibly excited to be in Japan for the first time in my life, I’m glad to be back to my work, crafting content and identity management solutions for our clients.

I’m still catching up on technology news; things move so quickly in this industry that a little time away can mean missing a lot.  So, I want to take a moment to introduce a new personal project of mine that I’ve just made live after months of planning and work.

I’m currently producing a podcast called The Japanese Learner.  While there are more than a few podcasts out there that offer Japanese lessons, this podcast has a different aim: the goal of this show is to be host to deep and interesting discussions on how to go about learning Japanese, including study tips and tricks, books and other materials, long-term learning strategies, and tidbits of Japanese culture to keep learners motivated.  Episodes are released every two weeks, though I’m currently trying to put everything back on schedule after being away for so long.

If you’re thinking of learning Japanese or have already taken the plunge and are learning it, I highly recommend that you listen to The Japanese Learner.  I hope that you will all enjoy listening to it as much as I’ve enjoyed producing it.

My identity management work has been keeping me on my toes but since early August, I’ve been planning a trip to Japan.  And that day is drawing closer and closer.  This Sunday, I’m flying out to Vancouver for a couple of days on business and then on September 18, I’m flying to Tokyo.  I’ll be there for about 2 1/2 weeks, flying back to Canada on October 6.

These past few days have been pretty stressful; the business trip came up all of a sudden and I had to accelerate the preparations I’d been making for my Japan trip in order to accommodate it.  It has been a bit more stressful than I’d like, but I do what I have to do.

One neat little thing that came out of all of this is my new laptop.  I now own an Asus Eee PC.  I bought it because I thought it’d be very convenient for staying in touch while traveling.  With some Skype credit, it becomes a great alternative for telephony as well!  I’ll let you all know how it goes, maybe give a bit of a mini-review, even.

Wow.  It has been a while since I’ve written here.

I’ve been busy with an identity management project which is transitioning from development to testing.  For this transition, I needed to deploy my work to a test environment which more closely matches what the client is running.  Now, this is a standard Java web application with a database repository, so one might figure that this would be a smooth transition.  It wasn’t quite that smooth.  There were quite a few things that worked on my development machine but didn’t work in the test environment, which often left me puzzled.

This is one of the things I find most frustrating about being a web and Java developer.  In both web and Java, the advertised ideal is “write once, run everywhere,” but that ultimately becomes “write once, debug everywhere.”  Having to deal with idiosyncrasies of different OS’s, different software (application servers, databases, etc.), and different network configurations is sometimes an unwelcome distraction from delivering the core functionality of the solution.

This is particularly bad for CSS and client-side Javascript.  Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari are all web browsers that one must take into account when designing the look and feel of websites but they all cannot quite agree on their implementation of the CSS specification or the Document Object Model.  Sometimes I’ve even run into interoperability problems where it seems the only solution is to target particular browsers with particular code by using some very ugly hacks.  So guys, what happened to “write once, view everywhere?”  =P

But no standard is perfect and even if we could have a perfect standard, a perfect implementation of it would be even more unlikely.  So integration and interoperability problems seem to be a fact of life for software developers.  The feeling of accomplishment when everything finally works together seems to offset the frustration enough that I’m happy to keep doing this work.  I think this might be a fundamental requirement for a software developer.  =)

There is a story that has been making the rounds on tech sites about Rogers, one of the two major ISPs in Canada (the other, of course, is Bell).  Apparently, they’ve begun hijacking DNS in order to provide a “helpful” search for domain names that don’t resolve…  which is, of course, filled with their advertisements.  The major problem is that this also applies to subdomains that don’t resolve, meaning that it is possible for Rogers to be putting advertisements on domains that do actually exist.

Some might wonder what is so sinister about this.  As an example, it means that Rogers is putting the Yahoo! logo on Google subdomains.  Personally, I think that’s in bad taste.  Also, I strongly believe in net neutrality and hijacking common Internet protocols like DNS and HTTP (see here) to inject your own content flies in the face of everything that net neutrality stands for.

While I would like to write something provocative and/or witty about this, the Computer Science Canada blog has already done it for me.  They detail the slippery slope we could be in for if we accept this kind of behaviour from ISPs.  The screenshots are very well made, too.

This is one of the many reasons why it is important that we have a neutral Internet.  We are not just consumers of the Internet and the Internet is not just a series of tubes; it is the most important communication tool of our time.  It is the catalyst and enabler of the Information Age.  And there are those who would want to restrict or corrupt this communication tool so that they can line their pockets with some extra money.

And don’t believe the FUD about there not being enough bandwidth to go around — why, then, can the Japanese get fiber-optic cable to the home, 100Mbps best-effort service, for about $30/month?  We “happily” pay approximately that much for a tenth of that bandwidth.  No, we are victims of a lack of competition in last-mile ISPs, the ISPs who directly provide Internet service to our homes.  If Bell and/or Rogers are the only game in most towns, what incentive is there to provide better service?  Even the smaller ISPs are usually just resellers for one of these two.

I am thankful to find that I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

We’re back from Ruby Fringe.  Everyone who was there declared it the best conference they have ever attended.  There were a huge number of highlights, the speakers were awesome, and I can honestly say I walked away both educated and inspired.

The spirit of the conference was very positive.  There was no official back channel, because the people running the con felt that it promoted cynicism.  There was, however, an unofficial back channel, and it was filled with positive comments and constructive criticism.

The difference was, absolutely, in the speeches.  With a few exceptions, very few people talked about their products, and those that did managed to make it interesting.  I walked away with a download list a mile long.

Those people who didn’t talk about products, but instead talked about their business and their life and their interests, really did a good job of it.  Even those people pitching a product managed to do so without sounding like they were shilling.

Really, though, so much of it was “you had to be there.”  I mean, how many other conferences have people whipped out their backlit cell phones and waved them in sync while the presenter did a musical performance with some software he had hacked together?

Yeah.  That’s how a conference should be run.

I found a really cool story here.

Turns out that the Fedora Project is rolling out a new system called “Fedora Talk” that allows contributors to sign in using standard VoIP hardware and software to talk to other Fedora contributors.  I think this is a really cool idea and a great application of VoIP technologies.  While I don’t mind exchanging e-mails or using forums and wikis, sometimes it is great to just be able to talk things over when trying to collaborate on programming projects.

If this little experiment is a success, maybe we will see systems like these in other open source projects.  I could also see systems like these becoming a staple for agile development.  While many would argue that people can just use Skype, opening up the floor to any standard VoIP software and hardware makes the service that much easier to use and therefore encourages even better communication.

Enrico and I will be going to RubyFringe, an “avant-garde” conference.  The major thing I like about the idea is that it’s Ruby off the Rails; they’ll be talking about a lot of things which aren’t the web framework.  Personally, I can hardly way to hear more about merb.

This is the first conference I’ll be going to as a Tenthline employee, so I’m not sure what to expect.  It’s supposed to be the opposite of normal conferences, which is about as useful to me as telling a blind man that the light is red because it’s not blue.

Nevertheless, it looks like fun, and its in Toronto!  The thought of networking with other Ruby geeks is enticing.  As Tenthline’s token ruby dynamic language evangelist, this is a great opportunity.

I brushed up on some Ruby skills by writing a short applet which creates random firing sound samples to make an ambient effect which doesn’t sound like it’s looped.  It’s a nice little toy, but it could have potential if I give it a decent GUI.  Times like this I wish I knew RubyCocoa better.  I’ve been trying to study it, but Objective C is really weird.  I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, but seriously.

Will blog more once RubyFringe is over.

Just caught this article as I was reading technology news this morning.  Apparently, Best Buy will soon be selling Ubuntu Linux 8.04 in a retail box, with manual, quick start guide, and 2 months of support, all for $19.99.  It certainly beats the pants off of the pricing for Vista.

Ubuntu has made some excellent progress as a Linux distro and the development team has worked very hard to bring down the barriers to entry for non-geeks, especially with regard to drivers, software packages, and X Windows.  For example, Ubuntu releases rely less and less on editing of the X Windows configuration file for simple display changes.

This is promising, though the author of the article has an interesting thought:

Yes, it brings Ubuntu to a whole new audience, but I wonder whether the audience that needs to have Ubuntu sold to them on a CD is actually ready for Linux.

Maybe Ubuntu is ready and maybe it isn’t, but I find it admirable that they’re willing to go this far.  And if Ubuntu still isn’t ready for the average end-user desktop, I can imagine it will be in the very near future.  In the best case, sales of Linux in retail could cause a reaction from software vendors and hardware manufacturers and we’ll (finally) see a lot more ubiquitous support for Linux in the computing marketplace.  I, for one, am hopeful.

The fine folks behind TOJam have finally posted all of the games from this year’s jam. Among them is the game we created that weekend: “Mousetrap Mania“. We’re quite proud of how it turned out.

The game was semi-inspired by “ChuChu Rocket!“, a quirky puzzle game for the Sega Dreamcast that was developed by Sonic Team. The player places arrows on the grid but instead of directing the mice, the arrows direct the car, which is strapped to a large wheel of cheese. The player needs to use the car to lure the mice into the traps but avoid allowing the mice hit the car. If the mice hit the car, they eat some of the cheese. If all of the cheese is eaten, the player loses. To win, the player must survive the mouse onslaught for 3 minutes. The victory screen shows both the number of mice caught and the number of slices of cheese left on the car — feel free to use both of these for bragging purposes. =)

You might also want to try “a game about bouncing“. Voted the best game at the jam, it sports a simple-but-fun gameplay mechanic centered around grabbing and bouncing off of bumpers and avoiding missiles. The visual and aural style are quite cool as well and, most amazing of all, it was all made by just one guy. He didn’t even need any graphics or sound “floaters” like we did. Graphics, audio, programming, all were done by him and him alone.  That’s some awesome talent right there.