Synergising your ideagora wiki-Alexandrians

October 2nd, 2008


I grabbed a copy of Wikinomics from the bookstore a few weeks ago while looking for another book. It’s been on my radar since I heard all the buzz around it when it was published a couple of years ago.

Expectation: a survey of how the (relatively) new tools of online collaboration impact society and business.

Actual outcome: I don’t really know, the book was so badly written that I kinda lost the point of what they were saying around page 3…

So, is the book really that bad?

Well I have to admit they do have some interesting stories and anecdotes in there (let me summarize some of them here so that you don’t have to read the book):

  • GoldCorp used an online competition to find gold
  • Proctor & Gamble used InnoCentive to outsource much of their R&D (with great success)
  • Nettwerk – an innovative Canadian music label that actually embraces the digital age
  • Novartis publishes a free dataset from years of research into the genetic foundations of type 2 diabetes

There’s a bunch of other interesting case studies like the above, but you can get a sense for most of them from the notes at the end of the book. My question is: why is the book 319 pages?

Sure, maybe the book wouldn’t have sold at the 60 pages that the content actually deserves. But then again maybe the authors should have stuck to their principles that they’re advocating and published it on a Wiki! (where it would have quickly been edited down to a remove the 300x repetition).

In short, if you woke up today after a 20-year coma and you’re looking to find out what this whole web thing is about, maybe you should  buy the book. Otherwise, just google for the above stories for some interesting reading and don’t bother. I’m going to try and sell mine, it’s just taking up useful space.

And don’t forget to paradigm shift your synergies going forward! *

* Paraphrasing of said book

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Posted in Book Reviews | 1 Comment »

Living in a modern pyramid

August 27th, 2008

Heard about this in the news a couple of days ago. A Dubai-based environmental design firm, TimeLinks, is planning to unveil it’s newest “structure”, which is really a city-within-a-pyramid, called the Ziggurat:

Behold, the Ziggurat

Behold, the Ziggurat

This thing will supposedly be able to house up to 1 million people and have no cars. You may ask, how will they live without cars?

Fear not! They’ll have  modern transportation system within the structure that runs both vertically and horizontally. I’m envisioning the Futurama tube system…

This city is supposed to be carbon neutral, using only natural energy from the wind, water, sun and so on.

I think I’m going to start saving today for a chance of saving my soul in the city of the future!

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Utah is the new Nigeria

August 26th, 2008
Spamming (CC image)

I was selling some stuff on craigslist when and got a very generic email response from a potential buyer that said something along the lines of “I’d like to buy your item. Is the item available? Please respond urgently!!” That sounded a bit strange and spammy, so I responded from a special “Just for spam” email address saying it was available. Here’s what I got back in response:

Thanks for your prompt response,My name is Mike larry  located in Utah, i am currently out of the state on a pastoral mission.

I am buying the item for our pastor who is recently getting married to a California woman that is working in West Africa Embassy as a wedding present.

So you will be sending it to them once you receive the confirmation of my payment. I would have love to pick it up by my self, but i am out of the state now on a pastoral mission And i don’t want to disappointed them.

Please send me a paypal request to enable me to make the payment right away. through paypal,or the information that i will use to send you a u.s postal money order,I will like this item to get to them before the wedding. i will add additional extra $180 USD during payment for the shipment cost, Because you will be required to ship it express through u.p.s to them.thanks

Mr Mike larry

Now I’m just eagerly waiting for that wonderful extra $180!!1!1!!

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Learning to read

August 18th, 2008
Image licensed under Creative Commons

Image licensed under Creative Commons

No, this is not a post about illiteracy.

OK, now that I got that off my shoulders…

I’ve been learning Ruby on Rails for the past few weeks, and I’ve encountered an interesting question that I’ve faced a few times before and never really found a good answer to.

How do you read code?

And I don’t mean that in a metaphysical sense. I mean when you’re learning a new framework, language or technology you usually look at some code written in it to try and see how real world applications use it. These days you can pretty easily find Open Source code written in almost anything. What I find difficult is figuring how to read the code of these applications.

I’ve read a book about Ruby on Rails, so I understand the basics decently well. I’ve created a toy application just to see how to do it. But the jump from that to digging through source code for a full fledged real application is pretty huge. Where do you start? Initally I started looking at the models to try and understand the objects that the application dealt with. But I found that to be a bit confusing. Then I looked at some of the key controllers (like user authentication and those that handle the main pages) and also found that a bit confusing.

Finally I sort of settled on looking at a specific page in the app, looking through the view that generated it, then going to the controller that was invoked, and maybe looking at some helper methods and model code that I found there. I found that to be a reasonably understandable strategy. But I’m not really sure if it would have worked as well if I didn’t already have looked at some model/controller code before hand.

This is not specific to RoR. If you learn a new development environment, how do you figure out where to learn the code?

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Posted in Hacking, rails, Work | 38 Comments »

Googled

August 8th, 2008


View Larger Map

Click View Larger Map to see more…

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Posted in Personal, Photo, Random, Work | 1 Comment »

Recent Readings

August 5th, 2008

I’ve been asked a few times in the past few weeks about books that I’m reading, mostly because I tend to carry them around with me a lot. So I decided to write a bit about them. Maybe I’ll inspire a new generation of wonderful, socially-outcast bookworms. Or maybe I’m just bored. Here goes.

The Jungle
This is a story describing the horrors of the Chicago meat packing industry at the turn of the 20th century. The story follows a large fictional family of immigrants from Lithuania coming to the land of opportunities, and hoping for a better life. Instead they end up being enslaved by the Chicago meat packers, and starved to death one by one. This a very heart-wrenching story, and definitely not for those with a weak stomach. When the book was published in 1906, it was heavily censored and most of the worst details of human suffering were removed. What remained were the countless examples of unsanitary and plain dirty conditions in which America’s meat was prepared. The final outcome was that the book caused an uproar that culminated in the creation of the Pure Foods and Drugs Act (1906) and the eventually FDA.

The last third of the book is full of idealistic social propaganda, which makes you cringe a bit when you read it. This is why the last 100 pages took me longer to read than the rest of the book taken together. Still, the book is a very read, from both a historical and a personal perspective. More than once I’d finish reading a few chapters of the book and I was pretty depressed for the rest of the day. But overall reading it makes me appreciate much more all the little luxuries that we take for granted. Like, oh I dont know, not working from 6am till 9pm in a dirty, stinky, scorching room.

Agile Web Development with Rails
I’ve started learning Ruby on Rails a few weeks ago, and was recommended this book by a few people, and I’ve found it to be just excellent, so I’m forwarding the recommendation here. It starts out with a tutorial that covers many of the features of Rails by building a shopping cart application. The second half of the book covers most of the features in pretty excruciating details. Along the way they manage to cram in a whole lot of best practices, as well as good writing. I haven’t gone much further than reading the book yet, so we’ll see how well it prepares me for actually writing Rails applications, but it’s definitely a smooth and easy to read introduction.

More recommendations to come shortly.

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Posted in Book Reviews, Personal, Work | 3 Comments »

Running ‘ri’ with colors under Mac OS X

July 29th, 2008

Ruby has a command line utility called ri for looking up documentation, and ri has a nice feature of displaying its output with pretty colors. Unfortunately, when I tried to run it (ri -f ansi) what I got was:

After tinkering about a bit I gave up. But today I decided that I’ll have my damned pretty colors even if I have to spend a lifetime getting them! Thankfully it only took 10 minutes. ri uses less to display its output in a scrollable form, if you make it not use less you get what you want by giving it the -T option:

“But…but…but… I like scrollable output!”, says you, whimpering softly.

Well, stop your cryin’, so do I.

less itself takes an option to treat escape characters as escape characters (duh!) instead of just printing them. So you want to make it use it. Here’s what you want to add to your Bash profile file to make the magic happen:

# I likes pretty colors!!!1!!
export RI="-f ansi"
export LESS="-R"

And the result is:

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Posted in Hacking, rails, Work | 1 Comment »

DemoCamp 18

July 16th, 2008

I attended DemoCamp 18 yesterday, which was the first demo camp for me in about half a year. I was really excited about it, because I was looking forward to seeing awesome demos and socializing with people. Unfortunately it was a pretty big disappointment. The venue was way too small for the event, and it got really loud, so talking with people was difficult. Also because of the size and layout of the venue a lot of people ended up seating around tables with their cliques and didn’t really socialize much.

I’m not going to rehash all the demos that were presented because several people already mentioned them. Some were pretty nice and I think overall the quality of the demos was relatively good.

So why was I disappointed with the event if the demos were relatively good?

First of all lets start with the “barely legal” jokes that Joey was trying to crack all night. No one was laughing at them Joey. Maybe a few cackled for the first few times, uneasily. But after that people mostly looked at each other and shook their heads. Even the other people who were on the stage looked uneasy. It might be cool to crack these kinda jokes with your best buds, but it’s not cool when there’s 300 other people in the room and you’re supposed to be the representative of some sort of “community”.

The other big problem I have with the demo camp is the consistent lack of understanding of what a demo is. There’s always some people who just don’t get it. Last night two presentations failed in this way, one was from Refresh Partners and the other from Screed.

The Refresh Partners presentation was about 4 minutes of “wer’re awesome and better than X, Y and Z” and then 1 minute of flipping through some opened browser tabs. I’ve seen these guys at DemoCamp as far back as half a year ago so there’s no claiming that they just didn’t know what was expected.

The Screed presentation was a few minutes of “We’re so awesome” followed by “We know this crowd doesn’t like pre-canned commercial videos, but here’s OUR infomercial!”, the assumption being that because they’re awesome theirs will somehow be different. I don’t mean to pick on these guys because I’m sure they mean well, but really, just demo!

I think there needs to be a bit more work from the organizers in filtering proposed demos to make sure there’s some demoing involved. I don’t mean any decision on how good your product is. But just talking with each proposed demoer for 10 minutes (whether by phone, skype, or in person) would work. Ask one simple question: “tell me in less then 2 minutes what you will be demoing”. The point is just to see that people have given this just a tiny bit of thought. If someone says “I’ll go through my product and show what it does”, ask “Well what are the specific things you’ll be showing?”, and if they say “I don’t know, just something”, tell them to try again when they know.

end rant

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Posted in Work | 2 Comments »

Fame

May 21st, 2008

Finally, after years of misery, I get the fame that I deserve.

I knew the day will come!

Posted in Funny, Personal, Random, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Mountain Sunset

May 20th, 2008

In Lassen Volcanic National Park, California.

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Posted in Photo | 1 Comment »

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