I've lived in Santa Barbara for more than five years. But yesterday I had my first legitimately exciting celebrity sighting. Sure, sure, I've been at the movies with Dennis Franz (3x). I've gone to a concert with Perry Ferrell. (Does he count as a celebrity any more?)
But this is the first time I cared enough to call someone to say, "Oh my God, you will absolutely not believe who I just saw."
Let me give you a hint. If you saw this cruising down the 101 in front of you, what would you think?
Well, what I thought was, "What kind of lame bastard would actually pay to have his car rip off Kill Bill like that?" I rolled my eyes and pulled up beside him, because I wanted to see who would have the gall to ride around in that truck. Well, you wanna know who would do that? Quentin freakin' Tarantino, that's who.
Just after I figured out it was him, he pulled off the highway. I thought about doubling back to chase him down — after all, how hard could it be to spot The Pussywagon — but I had places to be, so I didn't.
Of course, I've got nothing on this girl. [Note, this is not the original posting, but the original is gone and this is the only reprint I could find.]
I've been playing around with pbWiki, a relatively new entrant in the lineup of free wiki hosts. I mentioned them briefly in this post about Jason looking for a wiki. So far, I'm very impressed with the service. Others seem to be as well — the front page brags of almost 6,000 other wikis created. [Aside: I would love to compare some real stats on signups and usage from all of these free wiki services.]
pbWiki is the brainchild of David Weekly, (also known for IMSmarter, and SuperHappyDevHouse.*) Actually, the first cut of pbWiki was built in less than 24 hours at the first SuperHappyDevHouse on May 28th. He started with the code from TipiWiki2 (which apparently has fallen to wiki-spam) and expanded from there.
My new iPod came yesterday. I got a refurb 4th generation 20gb. It's doesn't have the nice color screens that the brand new ones have, but it was a really good deal.
My old, 1st generation 10gb iPod finally gave up the ghost. I had been thinking about a getting a new one because the battery was down to about 2 hours' life and it could only manage to sync through one particular firewire cable — the other 3 cables I have tried end up causing the Finder to lock up. Strange, eh? Anyway, on Saturday when I went to unplug my iPod from charging, I found the dreaded Sad iPod icon.
I googled, but found no useful information beyond "take it in for service." And since my iPod is long out of warranty, I decided to suck it up and get a new one. I get more storage, longer battery life and a smaller form-factor. And, happily, there was a good sale on, and they had plenty in stock, and it arrived last night. So now I just need to get my music on it.
Rails version 0.13.1, which came out on Sunday fixes the problem I complained about.
Thanks to the commenter who pointed out the bug, and thanks to the Rails team for getting it fixed so quickly. It comes at an excellent time, as David and I are going to be doing some serious hacking this weekend.
something you've never heard of.
It's frustrating me to no end that I have new records I want to list on my Currently Listening sidebar that Amazon doesn't know about. The way Typelists are set up, if Amazon doesn't know about it, there is no way to get a cover image in there.
For example, I tried to post the new John Vanderslice album, Pixel Revolt, but got no love. And I tried to list another recent discovery, Limbeck's Hi, Everything's Great. Amazon at least knew about that one, but had no cover image. Same with Clap Your Hands, Say Yeah. I put that one in anyway because it's that brilliant and more people need to know about it.
At least I got The Jealous Sound up there.
I greatly appreciate the convenience of skimming cover images from Amazon most of the time, but there should really be a way to override them.
Ok, rant done. In any case, those are four recent discoveries that are worth your time.
OK, Rails folk, I need some help. We upgraded to Rails 0.13 yesterday and have run into some problems.
Prior to the uprade, we had URLs that looked like this: http://localhost.example.com:3000/MyAccount/login and they worked correctly. After the upgrade, these URLs return an error ("Routing Error. Recognition failed for ./MyAccount/login'"). However, the URL http://localhost.example.com:3000/my_account/login now works.
Anyone have an idea what happened? My best guess is that has something to do with the new routing features, but I don't understand enough to go dig into it. Any help would be most appreciated.
Another unexpected and horrific occurrence demonstrates how our information environment has changed.
Wikipedia entry on the London bombings
London-tagged posts from Technorati
London-tagged photos from Flickr
London-tagged del.icio.us links
In particular, the Wikipedia entry on this rapidly unfolding event is amazingly thorough and useful.
My friend Jason is teaching a class at UCSB and he decided to set up a wiki for his students — mostly as place to collect links to the reading material that he's assigning. I'm sure he'd love for his students to actually use the wiki to communicate back to him, but we'll have to wait and see if that actually happens.
In any case, Jason asked me to recommend a free wiki host that he could use. I told him to check out Wikispaces, Schtuff, pbWiki (a relatively new vendor that I intend to review in more detail later), XWiki and WikiCities. I thought it might be useful to go through his decision-making process as a bit of real-world customer research. [Jason, if I misrepresent any of your opinions, please let me know in the comments.]
OK, so it's more like the fifth day on Rails. But after several weekends of travel (1, 2), David and I got back in the Rails saddle this weekend and made great progress. We were able to implement the core bit of functionality for our application. (I know I'm being vague, but we're not nearly ready to launch yet.)
But this was the only bit of functionality that was more complicated than plain-old web framework stuff. It took me a full weekend and many lines of code to implement it in Java when I half-built this a few months ago. We did it today in 120 lines and about 2.5 hours. Unfortunately, I had to leave before we could finish writing all the tests. (Ack, XP-foul!) But I promise we'll get to those soon.
Anyway, I just wanted to say again how much fun this is, and how easy Ruby and Rails makes things. For example, we needed an XML parser and a little bit of googling found REXML, which installed easily and worked like a charm. I'm a little worried that we may hit performance problems down the road with REXML, but I suppose that would be a nice problem to have. But it was the simplest thing that could possibly work at the time. And we reminded ourselves of the rule: don't optimize prematurely. When you have no users, there are no performance problems. Though if any of you Rails folk have advice on the matter, I'd love to hear it.
You may remember a post I did a while back comparing the diff features of several wiki vendors. I did it mostly because I was frustrated by the lack of functionality provided and I thought it could be done better. I put together a quick demonstration of the functionality I was imagining.
Atlassian recently released Confluence 1.4 (demo site here) and they made several improvements that I want to point out.
Jonathan Nolen 