Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed that all Ruby podcasters and screencasters sound like they’ve been neutered and reprogrammed by aliens to be void of all but the most mildly pleasant Xanax-laced emotions?  Very even keel and NPR-sounding, as you drift… off… into… Roooooooby…..

It always helps to have a real application when learning something like a new programming language, and having recently completed an upgrade to my Perl Module for the QRZ Callbook API, it seemed that porting it to a Ruby Gem might be the perfect goal.  Armed with “The Ruby Cookbook” and “The Ruby Programming Language” in my Safari Books account, and some free time during the holidays, I began.

The first problem encountered was trying to use Ruby on Debian, the epitome of stability in my opinion, and my server environment of choice for that very reason.  The Ruby package for Debian had already been installed on the system in order to use s3sync.  But when trying to do something as simple as listing the remote Ruby Gems, it produced a fairly cryptic error.  Researching the error eventually led to this post from one of the Debian package maintainers. The reputation of Ruby’s instability was immediately showing itself.

Compiling Ruby from source seemed the only realistic way to move on.  I installed the latest version, 1.9.2.  It seemed like a good idea at this point to make sure s3sync and s3cmd were still working, only now they were producing fatal errors.  Research confirmed that the s3sync tools simply do not work with Ruby version 1.9.2.  So I installed Ruby version 1.8.7 from source instead, and thought very seriously about abandoning the project.

Eventually I did finish and publish my new Ruby Gem and felt a little less behind the programming curve afterward.  (Read: keeping up with the youngstahs)  I do like the language a lot – it feels like you can accomplish many things in fewer lines than other languages, and that the code is very clean and legible.  And it does seem that there’s something just plain fun about it, similar to the way OS X feels good in a can’t-necessarily-put-your-finger-on-it way.  And RVM (Ruby Version Manager) appears to be a slick (and fun) way to manage an otherwise unstable version environment.

Fluency in both Perl and jQuery seemed helpful since most concepts in Perl translate fairly well to Ruby – such as the array and control structures – and the endlessly chained object oriented methods feel a lot like jQuery.

Time and energy-allowing, I’ll probably take a more serious pass at Rails; I have an application in mind.  I abandoned Rails the first time when it became clear that incorporating it into our Apache-based server environment at work wasn’t realistic.  This time the approach will be with an application that’s more standalone in nature.  And after learning about Passenger, I have at least some confidence that maybe Rails and Apache can co-exist better than used to be the case – and it might not even be slow!  We shall see…

I’ve been using Google Apps for both work and personal Email for several years, and I love it for many reasons. The web-based interface does come in handy from time to time – it’s the only way to search for messages and administer the account – but, there are a few pieces of functionality implemented oddly enough that I can’t use it as my main interface for mail. So I continue to just use it as a back-end via IMAP with a mail client native to whichever operating system I’m using at the time.

Until last year, threaded messages was one of these stoppers. Thankfully, Google finally offered the option to turn that off. Google’s products often remind me of 37 Signals in that they believe they know more about what you need than you do. The result is that they offer limited configuration options; forced message threading was a glaring example of that.

But, that still leaves two annoyances I’m unable to move beyond…

1. The date on the message listing shows only the date, and not the time of day – unless the message was received on the current day. Further, if you want to know the time the message was received, it’s two clicks away. After viewing the message, you must click “show details”, as though the time of day the message was received is of little value. When trying to switch, I was amazed at how often I needed to know that, and how annoying it was when it wasn’t immediately visible in the message list. I would like the option of having something brief like “2011-01-01 2:37p” on each and every listing.

2. When replying or forwarding a message, instead of including the basic header info listed above the quoted original message, it only says, “On Jan 01 2011, Bob Smith wrote:”. The million dollar question this leaves is: who was copied on the original message? Am I really the only person who finds it highly useful to know who was copied on the original message? (Apparently so.) This really makes it feel like a toy rather than an enterprise level interface. And this isn’t just a problem with Google. Most free email clients, like Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple’s Mail client for OS X, have this same problem to one degree or another. Some will use the full header info with forwarded messages, but not replies.

Oddly, Microsoft seems to be the only maker of email clients that understands this. So in the meantime, I continue use Outlook on Windows, and Entourage on OS X. And there’s no decent equivalent for the Linux desktop the last time I checked – same problems.

There’s also the bigger issue of any web-based interface with not being able to just arrow down through each message in the list and see a full preview of the message, but I think I could get past that.

It’s definitely possible that Twitter, or Facebook, or some new service will figure out a different way to format article links and titles embedded in updates in a predictable way that some new type of aggregator will be able to save for you.  But why would anybody do that when RSS is already ubiquitous.  Until these social networking feeds become strictly channelized, it’s tough to pull out every article from all your favorite news sources.  Even then, it still feels very kludgy to try and form the output of a Twitter feed into something as useful as RSS already is.

On a larger scale, I’m not convinced that the Twitter model will last in its current form anyway.  I’ve heard people whose opinions I respect say that Twitter will soon be the “new dial tone.”  It would be fun to think so, and I believe its style of communication will carve out a permanent place on the Internet, I just don’t think people will find it useful for everything.  Like so many technologies before Twitter – blogs, push, frames, chatrooms, and even RSS comes to mind – they’ve all found a their uses within the big picture, but they haven’t overtaken as some completely new and dominant paradigm like these writers would seem to imply.  They also say that the new attention-scattered generation is why Twitter will eventually take over, but it doesn’t appear that teens really care about these services more than their older counterparts.

Honestly, I’m not sure they know the scope of what they’re saying when they flippantly mention that RSS is becoming irrelevant.  Based on past experience, I wouldn’t look for the little orange RSS icons to go away any time soon.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

Multiple IM Clients

Then there are the multiple IM clients that have been popular for a few years. The most popular of these are the Pidgin open source project, formerly known as Gaim, and Trillian, an application that comes in both free and paid versions. Pidgin has a vanilla interface but handles all the popular IM protocols in one IM client. They recently came out with a plug-in for Facebook chat, as well. By comparison, Trillian is a very slick and skinnable application that also handles many IM protocols in one spot. Both of them also offer an interface to IRC (Internet Relay Chat). I used the Pidgin client as my only multiple IM client for many years.

The Best of Both Worlds

Then I discovered Digsby. Digsby aims to do the best of both types of applications. You get the multiple IM goodness of Pidgin and Trillian, along with lightweight interfaces for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace. You can have it notify you on varying and configurable levels any time there’s a new update in any of the feeds, as well as post your own updates. It will also notify of you new email for any email accounts that you specify.

Surely different people have different needs, and there may be those who still prefer to run each IM client and Social Network interface individually. But I’ve found that Digsby handles the perfect combination of what I do every day, and has made for a great everyday IM/Social Networking client.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

• Microsoft is billing Bing as a “decision engine.”
• It uses attractive and lightweight graphics. For people who want an interesting design on their search engine interface, this may be a plus.
• They’re experimenting with Real Time Search. For now, this just means they’re including recently posted Twitter content from a few celebrities and tech industry personalities. But real-time search is a hot topic at the moment and they’re actually doing something with it.
• For developers and webmasters, Bing provides an API (Application Programming Interface) and some basic tools.

It’s also worth noting that Bing has taken one percent of the search market share from Google since their announcement. From April to June, Google’s market share fell from 79.1% to 78.5%. Yahoo remained consistent at 11%, and Microsoft went from 7.2% to 8.2%.

It seems hard to imagine anybody dethroning Google as the king of search, but with a Yahoo redesign/rebranding also due in the fall, it will be interesting to see how the search engine space race continues to develop!

In the meantime, here are a few links to some of the more lively news stories Bing has been creating:

Kayak to Bing: Stop Copying Us! (wired.com)

Google mocks Bing and the stuff behind it (The Register)

Google Does Not Mock Bing (Vijay Gill)

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/10/gmail-autoresponder.html

Basically, it allows you to take the “canned response” feature available in Google Labs, which is pretty useful itself, and set up a filter to have it automatically send an email response if an incoming message meets a certain criteria. This makes for a very flexible email responder. It means you could set up an email alias to have people send messages, and then use a particular canned response to automatically return an email reply only to them. Or you could set up a particular reply in response to certain key words in an incoming message. Anything you can use a filter for in Gmail can also be used to send back a canned response.

The only drawback I found was that you can’t set it to send from any specific email address even though you may have other accounts associated with your Gmail account. It will only send the automatic message as being from the main account associated with that mailbox. But if you can live with that, then it’s a great solution.

(syndicated from blog.netcrafters.com)

Now, I’m skeptical about almost everything. I don’t generally buy into anything without considerable time and thought. But by the time I’d read through the free sample chapters, I realized that they were saying many things I’d been thinking for years. Things I’d already learned from experience on my own. Things I thought were just me being lazy. Many things that our company already does inherently, but often fights against because they seem to go against conventional wisdom. This ended up being true all the way through the book.

Admittedly, so far, this kinda sounds like the rebellious outcast kid who finds comfort and refuge in a cult leader who finally identifies with him, who “speaks her language”, who “knows exactly what he’s thinking”. That’s okay; I’m wearing the black Nikes and purple shroud for now.

I’m certain their philosophy doesn’t apply directly to every situation, but their business is close enough in concept to our’s that I think it’s just about dead on. The only glaring difference I see is that 37signals often has a lot of public attitude about knowing what’s best for the customer, and not letting a product stray from it in anyway. While I do believe in that idea, the owner of our company has had a lot of business success with a more cordial approach to customers. I’m betting the same steadfast ideas can be done without being thrown so directly in customers’ faces.

By sheer coincidence, I’d recently been looking into some kind of new programming framework to standardize our tools on. Ruby on Rails has been making a lot of noise, but I had seen recent articles comparing Ruby to perl, and bought into the idea that Ruby is becoming popular simply because it has better-than-average marketing for an open source product. Since perl has been our environment of choice for 10 years, my first reaction was to try one of several perl frameworks that seem to be popular at the moment. After a couple hours wrestling with a large number of perl module installations and still not having anything to show for it, I decided to move on.

Ruby on Rails was the next test. Several tutorials on Ruby made it seem like a good enough language. Strong regular expression support? Check. Object oriented approach? Check. Easy code to read and learn? Check. Then I ran across a video demo of a “15 minute blog” done in Rails. Very impressive. Even without understanding every little detail, it was clear why the approach was fast and good. I figured installing Ruby and Rails would probably be a bear, but it went surprisingly smoothly and quickly. Not long after, I had the RadRails IDE installed and was working through the “Ruby on Rails: Up and Running” book. I simply didn’t encounter any of the usual “stoppers” that one runs into during this sort of thing.

It was about this time that I discovered Rails was created by 37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson, and that it’s the framework for all their products. Wow, this just all seems to be coming together at the same time.

Certainly the verdict is still out on whether it will eventually become practical to make a full switch to Ruby on Rails for our products, but I’m very encouraged by what I’ve experienced so far.

I only hope that there’s not an alien ruler named Xenu at the end of this philosophy…

I’m using the Mailman mailing list package in Debian Sarge (now at version 2.1.5-8sarge2). When trying to solve the problem of Mailman attaching the mailing list standard footer to HTML formatted messages, rather than putting it inline with the message, the Mailman FAQ led me to a handy MIME/HTML patch by Adrian Bye. Very cool.

When trying to apply the patch to the Debian Mailman package, the Decorate.py changes failed. The only way I could get it to patch was to replace Decorate.py with the version from the Mailman 2.1.5 source code, and then to apply the patch.

I suppose undoing a Debian update isn’t the best thing one could do, but it didn’t break anything, and having the standard footer placed inline for HTML messages, rather than in an attachment, is pretty important IMO.