The iPhone is hot. Its a badass micro-computer-internet-having-app-installing-jizz-casting-awesome-machine that can also make phone calls, but I have to bitch about one major flaw in the entire thing, and that flaw is Mobile Safari. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of the mobile browser, it is leaps and bounds greater than anything else out on the market, but I ask you Apple, why not make it the greatest mobile browser on the market?

So what am I bitching about specifically? The iPhone has immense data harvesting capabilities, from geo-location, to the accelorometer, etc. But all of these fantastic API’s are available only to native, objective-c based applications, not Mobile Safari!? Explain this to my Apple, why is this not exposed through a JavaScript API? That is absolutely trivial to provide to the lowly web developer!

Apple and the iPhone are doing amazing things with the types of datasets it makes available to developers in the native context, all I am saying is, make it available to every context of applications! Libraries like PhoneGap are attempting to make this a reality, but again, the biggest limitation is the fact that PhoneGap still requires you to create a native application to act as a wrapper to your web application, this seems like a stop gap solution (heh) or an unfortunate hack.

Its also very apparent that Mozilla sees the future of location-based services being able to provide very personalized and exciting experiences to the web through their efforts in Mozilla Geode. Perhaps its true that at this point, that sort of data availability in a web browser could be seen as negative, but I am not sure I agree. I am willing to bet that within the next 6 years, Apple will be introducing GPS into their laptops, providing application developers with the same location-awareness capabilities on their computers that exist today on their phones.

Hopefully Apple will wise up in the future, but I highly doubt it. Something tells me this is a designed limitation, they are probably doing their best to keep control over what people are doing with that data through the app store vetting process. Oh well, one can dream!

I am absolutely excited about this news!! Yesterday, both the Merb and Rails camp have announced the news, so I won’t bother reiterating whats already been said. I’d rather talk about some of the major points that really get me excited about this announcement and how it is going to impact not only the history of Ruby on the web, but potentially web programming from this point on.

Fully Modular Core
I am happy that DHH and co have embraced the modularity concept that is one of the core ideals of the Merb project. Now, if you don’t want to Prototype as your JavaScript system, you can toss it and stick in jQuery, which will run 100% as well as the default. Although its 100% modular, the “Rails Way” is going to give you a smart set of defaults that you can completely customize to fit your needs!

I must admit, this is one of the sexiest things about Merb.

Speed is Quickly Becoming a Non-Issue
In the Ruby world, there is a ton of exciting innovation going on around building some amazing virtual machine technologies and really pushing the limits of what can be done with such an expressive and dynamic language. Also, we are seeing some fantastic developments on the deployment side of things that are making it not only extremely easy to deploy, but faster the serve requests as well.

So naturally, the next place to go for optimization is our framework. Merb has already made a ton of strides in making a thread-safe, and extremely fast framework. This development stack is going to scream in 2009!

Amazing  Base and Synergy
Between the Merb and Rails technologies and groups, there is going to be all kinds of new things to learn and all sorts of great people to work with and learn from. I am absolutely excited about what all of this means for the Ruby/Rails/Merb communities. We have got one of the fastest growing and fully-integrated technology stacks available for the internet today as an open source foundation.

With the emerging ecosystem of technology and thought that is occurring in this community, we are going to be seeing some amazing things in 2009.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, thinking about how technology and the internet have been applied in such fascinating and unbelievable ways, ways that have absolutely re-written the fabric of how we as citizens of earth interact with information, but also each other. When I think about all of this, the truly astounding thing is the passage of time that has elapsed. Companies like Apple, Google, and Wikipedia are doing their best to make sure that the way we interact today, is nothing like the way we will interact tomorrow.

These are visionary companies, ran by some of the best and brightest of our time, can you imagine a world without Google? (your children won’t be able to). The internet itself has been the biggest catalyst of our 21st century evolution, providing a platform and foundation for limitless connectivity, where our ideas and capabilities are the only limitation.

Its not often that I feel so inclined to be nostalgic about an industry that hasn’t even been around for 50 years, but lately, I’ve been evaluating my place in the scheme of things. I’ve been watching the innovations and “innovations” that have hit the market in 2008, and frankly, I think we can do better.

But this isn’t new, people have been inventing solutions to problems nobody has had forever. I guess you could say, this is my letter to myself to make sure I am actually doing things and working with people who want to make a difference in the world, rather than “minnovate”. People say that times like this (referring to our economy) are when people sit down and do the most amazing things, not because its the hip thing to do, but moreso out of necessity.

So here is to a world changing 2009.

Linkedin just minutes ago announced they’ve thrown their hat in the “social application platform” ring! This is exciting news for people who are poised to bring innovative and interesting applications to the business and professional network.

Read more about the press release here at TechCrunch. As of today, there is no documentation or word on how exactly one creates an application for the new platform, but you can contact them to recieve more information!

Listen to Dan Aykroyd discuss the importance of death and skulls in our world, and explain to you why he decided to embark on creating the “purest” vodka known to man. To be honest, this is actually a really really good vodka. I am no expert, but it tastes really good. Too bad you can’t get a full bottle of this stuff!

I have been rolling around the idea of starting up more freelancing to try to bolster my savings for the coming years, so I’ve decided to take on more consulting work. For an indepth look at my work experience and skills, please visit my linkedin profile, here are some highlights.

- 5 years relevant web development experience
I’ve worked a ton with the web, I’ve done everything from ColdFusion to my current favorite, Ruby (and Rails). I have a lot of experience working with JavaScript and XHTML/CSS, very comfortable doing frontend and backend development, as well as database work (although, I don’t want to use the term DBA). If you’d like to see my portfolio, contact me directly.

- Did I mention I love Ruby?
I have done a lot of work with Ruby in the past couple of years, I was highlighted on the RailsEnvy podcast a few weeks ago for a modest open source contribution I made called SmartMonth. I’ve worked on some medium-sized rails deployments, and am looking to grow my portfolio.

- Plays well with others
I love working on small, motivated teams. I always enjoy adding (and learning) from the synergy of a great team. I also test all of my code (quite thoroughly) and won’t break “the build”.

- UNIX Aficionado
I love UNIX, and its my deployment environment of choice, I’ve got a lot of experience working with Capistrano, and am very adamant about automating things wherever possible, and documenting things thoroughly.

- Entrepreneurial-Minded
I have a passion for growing things, I am a very dedicated team member, and am also very aware of the needs of startup-oriented businesses, I’ve worked with a few startups at this point, and have gathered a decent amount of relevant experience helping companies and products grow.

If I sound at all interesting to you, please don’t hesitate to drop me a line, or if you know someone who might be interested in hiring me, please forward my information along and I’ll send you a Christmas card.
Thanks everyone!

Today I was faced with an interesting dilemma, how does one programmatically define migrations into a plugin so you can essentially “plug-n-play”. I did a little bit of research into Rails Engines, and I wasn’t too terribly excited about the notion of having a dependency for such a small plugin, if this were something more integrated…I’d probably use it, but for this, I really only need to have these migrations run once you’ve installed the plugin, and be on my way.

So, I decided to do a little bit of research on the ActiveRecord::Migrator class to see how I could approach programmatically executing the migration outside of the standard rake task, so I could build my own custom migration rake task for my plugin.

It turns out, there are a bunch of functions you can utilize to build your own custom migration tasks for your plugin, that I wasn’t immediately aware of. Here is how I did it:

namespace :myplugin do
  desc "migrates my plugin's migration files into the database."
  task :migrate => :environment do
      ActiveRecord::Migrator.migrate(File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../db/migrate"))
      Rake::Task["db:schema:dump"].invoke if ActiveRecord::Base.schema_format == :ruby
  end
end

I simply saved that block of code into my plugin’s /tasks folder and named it custom_migration.rake. Next, I went to the root of my application and ran rake myplugin:migrate, and huzzah! it worked!

Nothing too amazing, and I actually based this entirely on the vanilla db:migrate function. The first line of the task essentially tells the ActiveRecord Migrator to search through my plugin’s db/migrate folder for any migration files it can find, and then brings all of them up! It would be nice if the vanilla db:migrate supported a MIGRATIONS_PATH constant so we could just use the same mechanics and build on top of them, rather than essentially re-write them just to do this.

OR better yet, wouldn’t it be nice if rails db:migrate actually scanned our plugins directory for migration files as well? That sounds like the best option to me.

Now, I am not sure if this is “the ruby way” to handle this problem, and as I stated earlier, Rails Engines is probably the way to go if you have a much larger plugin you are designing, but for me, this seemed to work just fine.

Limitations

There are some limitations to that custom task. For instance, if you were to run db:rollback, it would not be aware of the migration files that I have previously run that live within my plugin, you’d have to build another custom task to manage revoking the migrations you installed. Also, if they end up changing the way you actually migrate migrations, you might be screwed. But, alas, here is hoping for that MIGRATIONS_PATH constant!

December 8th, 2008, I will be attending a 1 day course lecture and workshop on “Presenting Data and Information” by Edward Tufte. If you don’t know a lot about Edward Tufte, he has written a series of fascinating books on unique and interesting ways to visualize and present data. The fee for the workshop is only $380 and includes a copy of 4 of his greatest books. He will be covering the following topics in his course:

• fundamental strategies of analytical design
  
• evaluating evidence used in presentations
  
• statistical data: tables, graphics, and semi-graphics
  
• business, scientific, research, and financial presentations
  
• complexity and clarity
  
• effective presentations: on paper and in person
  
• interface design
  
• use of PowerPoint, video, overheads, and handouts
  
• multi-media, internet, and websites
  
• credibility of presentations animation and scientific visualizations
  
• many practical examples

It should definitely be a day of fascinating study, and I encourage anyone who is invovled in user interface design and/or user experience design to sign up for one of his courses.

Ask yourself, why are we still supporting Internet Explorer 6? Not as developers, but as people who use the Internet. If you are a web developer, you are one of the first people who will scream “I F#$@ this browser!”

So I ask the question, why are we still supporting this browser, 7 years later?

Everyone who is still using IE6 does so because we allow them to. We still add “degraded” support for the browser, we still make alternate stylesheets, we still make a ton of hacks that only work for the redheaded step browser. I dare you, tell me one time you said the word “happy” and “IE6″ in the same sentence! Enough is enough.

The Line in the Sand

I am proposing we set a day to “turn off the lights” for IE6. Much like our government has decided that on a specific day, over-the-air analog broadcasting will go away. Why not do the same? That glorious day, everyone who supports the “lights out” concept, will actively limit IE6 users from accessing their sites and applications. Now, I am not saying lets just let things degrade and look unprofessional, I am saying turn it off completely. Its a rash move right? Does that potential user base you are shutting out scare you? Not really. It doesn’t scare me. Take a look at the global statistics for its use, we are talking about a very small minority of people. But it is still enough to count, and for some reason we still support this aged code.

How can we ever hope to as a community of engineers hope to better ourselves and the things people are using if we have to worry about this sort of legacy. There is nothing beautiful about what it takes to support even the simplest of CSS techniques in IE6, and it just doesn’t make sense for us to keep wasting important dollars on it.

Now, the irrational part of me says, as soon as I hit publish, I am going to block IE6 traffic from ever viewing my blog again. But lets face it, that is not a solution that is going to help people understand the reasons they need to move, nor is it going to make you as a person look very wise. I want to set a date far in advance for existing websites, and for all new and upcoming websites and services, already have it off. Lets say, 10 months from now? That gives us a long time to be able to warn and let people know that they need to upgrade or move to a different browser. I mean hell, by the time that 10 months is up, we should be seeing IE8 in the wild, isn’t that a good enough reason?

Ramifications

Okay, lets be more realistic, the only people who are really stuck with IE6 are the people suffering in cubicles run by IT departments that are either lazy, stuck with legacy issues, or just uneducated about the real reasons to upgrade their company.

Well to that I say, too bad. You have had 7 years to decide what to do about this problem, and I think its unfair for developers to have to pay the price. Why should be have to bastardize our software, and invest a large sum of our time and money into something that has not even been updated since 2004?

I am definitely impressed by companies like 37signals and Apple who are putting their foots down when it comes to their products. Don’t think of it as an exclusive, elitist club, but a very important reason to educate and explain to people (well in advance) why it actually hurts their experience of the web today to be stuck in the past. Going forward our company is going to be following this mantra, educate and upgrade. I am entering a market demographic that will most likely be stale and out of date, but I still say its unacceptable, we as the developers need to help people understand.

Am I crazy? How do you feel about it.

I am going to avoid using the word “stealth mode” for my startup and our product. Whenever I hear someone say their product is in “stealth mode” I interpret that as “I don’t have anything worth showing to anyone, therefore I pretend its more important….mode”. If you are involved in my extended network, you know what I have been doing, roughly. I have not been afraid to brainstorm and discuss this product with people I know and respect because that is how great products are born.

November marks an entire year of incorporated business for my company, Panoctagon. It has been an absolutely amazing ride, I wouldn’t trade any of the past experiences I’ve had for the world. I have worked with a lot of extremely talented people, I have learned and done a lot of things that have nothing to do with software engineering (which has been a lot of fun), and I can say we survived the first year.

We spent a lot of time honing our skills as a group, defining some pragmatic approaches to not only software but our business practices, and have become a pretty efficient group. I am happy about this.

So, what have we been doing? Today I am proud to announce the launch of our first software product, Happening. We have not officially released it into the wild yet, its still got some rough edges and polish that needs to be applied, but its nearly there. Happening is an event management and publishing solution for education. What do I mean by that? Technology in education often is crap. Talk to people who use it, they never have anything good to say about their tools. Ridiculous overhead, costs way too much, and requires a lot of hands on training.

We decided to build an affordable, easy to use, hosted service that attacks the age old problem of managing and communicating events for schools; event calendaring, if you will.

Happening is more than that, though. There are two very important markets for us, the first is the administrative people inside the institutions who have to do all the monotonous data entry, using the advances in technology that we in the consumer web take for granted, we hope to provide an unparalleled experience that is robust and intuitive. Might I also add, you won’t be needing weeks of training, that is our #1 goal. I spoke with a few different schools we are working with on this project and they all pretty much responded “how much training will you be offering us”, and I responded “I a product that hasn’t even been completed yet, is going to have a huge learning curve and weeks of training attached to it, we’ve failed”, and that has been our mantra, from day one.

Happening is not just about the administrators though, its also about the parents and students, and redefining how they interact with the event information that they care about. Happening is going to change the way parents and students consume event information through their schools, and I am excited to see how things changes things for them.

Lastly, I have to ask this, If you know someone who works for a school who might be interested in a service like ours, please feel free to contact me or forward me information to contact them. We are very excited about what we’ve been up to and want to get schools just as excited.

Also, I’d like to thank my team, our advisory board, and my family and friends for their continous support and advice. We would not have made it this far without you all, and I hope we can make this into something great for education.

Recently Written

• Why Does Apple Stifle Mobile Safari’s True Potential?
• Merb and Rails Come Together for Rails 3
• Changing The World, In Trivial Ways.
• Linkedin Announces Business Application Platform
• Crystal Head Vodka
• Need a Friendly, Experienced, Web Developer?
• Programmatic Migrations for Rails Plugins
• Edward Tufte Course In San Francisco
• Drop IE6 Support.
• Lifting The Cone of Secrecy

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