@madpilot makes

… and it rocked.

Just to test our sanity, AWIA decided to pull together Ideas4 in two weeks, (minus a couple of days because of public holidays) and not only did we do it, we managed to hit our attendance target and managed to have the show run smoothly!

We had 84 attendees (one all the way from America!), and two lovely presenters who did a terrific job.

A big, huge thanks to Rachel Cook, who despite being 8 months pregnant, told us about her time in Silicon Valley as an Angel Investor, and to Lisa Herrod who flew all the way from Sydney (on her birthday no less) to remind us that standards-based code and semantic markup aren’t enough to make a site accessible.

Jordan recorded both talks, and has uploaded them to Vimeo, and there is an Ideas 4 Flickr set. If you took photos, remember to tag them as ideas4.

Ideas 4 – Rachel Cook at Ideas4 on Vimeo.

Ideas 4 – Lisa Herrod at Ideas4 on Vimeo.

I was an awesome night – can’t wait for the next one!

For the past couple of months, I’ve been slaving away prepping the next version of 88 Miles, my simple time tracking application and now, I can happily announce it is alive! There are heaps of new features, and bug fixes, including a migration to Rails 2, a migration to a new server as well some dabbling in the wonderful world of Rails plugins. Some of the features are below:

Saasu.com integration

Many people have been asking for invoicing from 88 Miles, but since it is really outside of where I’d like to see 88 Miles go (The strap line is Simple time tracking for a reason) so Saasu | The web finance engine to the rescue! I wrote the the Rails plugin that talks to Saasu.com, and I’ll be releasing it shortly after making a few cleanups (There are some parts of the API I’m not using in 88 Miles that are still a little rough around the edges). The plugin will allow users to sync companies and contacts as will as create invoices straight from their timesheets. I’m pretty excited by this feature.

OpenID support

88 Miles is now OpenID aware, so you can use your third-party OpenID to login to 88 Miles. Just between you and me, OAuth will be coming soon (as soon as the rails plugin and ruby library settle).

New REST endpoints

There has been quite a bit of work on the REST API — it should now be much more consistent (i.e the data that the server sends and the data that the server expects is the same). I’ve also removed the /api in the endpoint URL, as it was becoming a nightmare to maintain.

New Server

Finally, the biggest change is our new server! We have moved over to a Joyent accelerator, which are specifically tuned to the Ruby on Rails platform. This means everything will be quicker. The old Media Temple server, whilst great didn’t really allow for much customisation, and with the Christmas special of two years for the price of one, it was kind of hard to pass up.

It’s been a fun ride – this project is always a great learning experience for me – and it helps that there are others out there that like it. Go and try it out if you haven’t before (or even if you have) :)

I have just finished reading the two A List Apart articles (by Aaron Gustafsen and Eric Meyer) on the concept of using browser meta tags to specifically target browsers. Go and read the articles to get the full story, but the basic premise it to devise a meta tag that stipulates which browser version the site is targeted at, eg:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=8" />

It’s an interesting concept to say the least, and I’m quite torn – the standards-nazi in me wants to yell from the roof tops how stupid an idea it is. The time-poor developer in me is jumping for joy, because I could target a specific set of browsers and KNOW that is would forever more work in said browsers.

The biggest problem I see is that browser vendors will need to ship multiple layout engines with each release – the number of which grows at a rate of n. So after a couple of releases, imagine how big the binary installs (and source code) would be? Just as an example, Firefox 2.0.x is currently up to point release 12 – that is 12 difference rendering engines since mid-last year.

Couldn’t the browser developers use a decision tree approach to minimise the codebase? No, not really, as this would potentially add bugs into previous versions – that is programming 101. This would break the previous renderer, defeating the purpose of this idea.

I really see this as THE show stopper. Why are the browser makers going to add to their work load? They are stuggling to build to the standards specification as it is. Programming is hard, this just makes it harder.

Having said that, if the browser makes can work a way around this issue, it does fix the problem, which is one that I’ve been piping up about for ages (I thought I’d written a blog post about it, but apparently not). When IE 7 came out, the goal posts moved – sure IE 6 was broken, but at least we had had 5 years of understanding HOW it was broken. Now all of a sudden, this new browser comes out and things change (exactly the issue causing this kafuffle). Firefox releases a new browser every couple of months – sure they are point releases, but there are still rendering bug fixes in there – so the goal posts are just moving they are being flung at a rate of knots.

I’m not saying that the browser developers should go dormant as Microsoft did, but maybe, just maybe being able to lock down a target to work against would make our lives a little more pleasant? I know the open source world has issues with the concept of “stable” code, but this effectively gives us web developers a “stable” baseline to work with – yes there will be bugs, but at least, if we work around the bugs, the hacks won’t break in future versions.

To those that argue this would encourage lazy programmers, maybe, but there are still a lot of people out there that are using tables and spacer gifs to mark up their websites – there will always be slackers, but there will also be those who strive for more. Why should those that are pushing the envelope be punished by a browser upgrade?

Will there still be a problem after February 12?

According to this article, a forced IE 7.0 rollout will occurring about three weeks. So the only people using IE 6.0 will be places that forcibly deny the update (it’s opt-out, not opt-in as it was before). One could argue that such a mechanism, as meta tag switch would have meant that the long suffering IT staff charged with blocking Windows update would have been able to strike that task off their list, as IE 7.0 would drop back to IE 6.0 mode for these users. Therefore, the question should be would this technique ALLEVIATE the problem?

Things the need to happen to make it work:

1. We need to still be able to use standard mode. If we don’t specify a meta tag, it should default to the latest and greatest rendering engine
2. The browser vendors need to work out a good way of serving up multiple version of their engines that don’t conflict with each other – maybe some sort of download on demand thing?
3. If a browser finds a site targeted at a newer version it doesn’t know about, it should try to render it anyway – it is up to the web developers to make sure it degrades nicely (they have to at the moment).
4. The browser vendors still need to care about standards – they still have to play nice, because this fix doesn’t improved CROSS-BROWSER compatibility.

As long as we, as web developers and they, as browser developers still strive for the holy grail, and they can work out how to have multiple rendering engines coincide with out out having to maintain a separate 500Gb harddrive just to contain them, it might not be as bad an idea as everyone initially thinks it is…

For those of you who don’t remember, AWIA (and back in the day: Port80) has been running a series of talks, deemed “the Ideas series”, and I’m proud to announce the next one in the franchise: Ideas4!

We are lucky enough to have Lisa Herrod, a User Experience expert (and all-round nice gal) flying over from Sydney and local girl, Rachel Cook talking on startups. We might even have a special international guest, if everything falls into place ;)

Ideas 1,2 and 3 were awesome, and I’m expecting nothing less from Ideas 4, so make sure you mark 30 January 2008 in your diary. Tickets are $25 for AWIA members and $35 for non-members.

Head over to http://www.webindustry.asn.au/ideas4 for the rest of the details and to get your tickets.

Hurry though, they’ll sell out. They always do…

I can’t believe we are almost 0.083333% of the way through the year. By now everyone should be back at work – those of us at the Silicon Beach House are. Well as a result, Freelancer Fridays are back! Keeping with the “Last friday of the month” timeline, the next Freelancer Friday is on 25 January at the Silicon Beach House – Level 2, 90 King St, Perth WA. Turn up anytime between 9am and 5pm.

If you are interested in turning up (as always) add your name to the Work@Jelly wiki.

Today, I was discussing with one of the housemates, Angela about the problems in finding other freelancers when you need to do something outside of your skill set. We discussed what I called Company-as-a-Service and came to the conclusion that Freelancer co-ops were definitely plausible. Well, to facilitate some better communication between us freelancers, I’ve created a Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/australian-freelancers. If your are a freelancer, please sign up, that way we can all support each other, and find experts when we need them!

Anyone in the Rails community would have read Zed Shaw’s rant about Rails. For those of you who don’t know Zed, he wrote Mongrel, which is the default web server library used in Rails. It has blown up and been discussed on just about every list, including Rails Oceania. I’m not going to discuss what he said, or his tone, as it has been done to death, and he seems like the type of guy that you need to know to understand where he is coming from.

What did hit home from me was what he said out enterprise Rails. To frame this correctly, have a listen to the first half of this podcast from RailsConf.

As a rubyist, I could never understand why projects like JRuby or IronRuby existed. Why would you want to run another language in a different virtual machine? After reading and listening to Zed, the answer is obvious – integration for enterprise. If you look at existing enterprise systems they will run on technologies such as Java and ASP.NET and with good reason: Support. You can go to certified training courses and become a certified engineer, which makes hiring for these large corporates easy. There is also a a large number of consultants that have based their business models on these technologies. These guys know things like Tomcat and IIS – they don’t know (or care) about Mongrel or Lighttpd or even Apache.

Web 2.0 is not going to be around forever – regardless of whether you think the web-o-sphere is in a bubble at the moment, it will cycle at some point, and there is going to be a hell of a lot Rails developers out of jobs. Software-as-a-Service† will alleviate some of this, but there is one BIG area that has been ignored – and that is corporate and government applications. The beauty of targeting this audience is that it is big and constant – their will always be big business that need IT systems. There is a number of reasons why this segment has been ignored by Rails coders that Zed rattles off – issues with connecting to legacy databases, lack of LDAP/central login system access – but these are technical issues, which are easy for programmers to fix.

I think the bigger issue is the complexity culture of enterprise systems – DRY isn’t something is in their vocabularies, so we don’t like to talk to them, because it makes our lives harder, and they don’t want to talk to us, because they don’t think the systems we build will do what they are asking. Having said that, I’ve seen enough hacked up Access databases in government and the education system to realise that this is complexity, for complexity’s sake.

Things like JRuby and IronRuby are going to make the the integration side of things easier – now we need to start getting back in to the corporate space.

†SaaS is basically the same thing as ASP – ASP is what it was called during the last dot-com boom.

Call it lazy blogging, but the beginning of a new year is a perfect opportunity to write a list post. I’m not going to call the list below predictions for 2008 as there is absolutely no scientific basis for any of this, so I’m calling it Hot or Not – stuff that I think/want to be hot in 2008 and stuff that I would love to see head to the big TCP/IP stack in the sky.

OAuth: Hot. Anything that brings some sort of order to the big bad world of web APIs is a good thing. If you haven’t seen it yet, it is a specification that describes a method for token-based access to third party applications. So now there is really no excuse for that confounding social network to ask for your usernames and passwords to all of your other confounding social networking sites, just so it can spam have access to all of your friends.

Confounding Social Network sites: Not. OK. That is enough. I am over been bamboozed at the sight of another social network that has no direction, meaning or business model. The concept behind a social network is cool – we used to call them forums, remember – but it is now officially out of control. To the “entrepreneurs” behind them – stop trying to kill Facebook, they have more money than you and careless less about their users than you ever could (Exception: Spock – You are still Satan’s spawn).

Software as a Service: Hot. It’s kinda like Web2.0 but this time with meaning. Bring back computing to what it was meant for – helping humans to do what they do. The web is the perfect delivery method for a lot of the desktop software we use everyday. Google has already shown us what can be done with apps like GMail and Google Docs and there is a myriad of web applications that have made the leap (If I can build one, anyone can). Pay for what you use, don’t worry about license fees any more, don’t worry about what happens when you hard drive crashes, or about deploying to all 500 machines in your organisation.

Advertising as a Business Mode: Not. The darling child of Web2.0/New Media/Social Networks. Unless your site is already doing the traffic of Google/YouTube/Facebook or your are a porn site, go and erase the “we will pay for our hosting via advertising” line from you business plan. Seconds thoughts, if you are Facebook, you should probably do the same (Nice work on beacon – at what point did that actually seem like a good idea?). Advertising only works if there is eyeballs a LOT of eyeballs on pages and if your target audience is the type that clicks on ads. And since every man and his dog has released a social network this week, you aren’t a unique snowflake. Get a real business plan first.

Mashups: Hot. Yeah, I know – these have been around since the first beta of Web 2.0 but it has never really extended much beyond adding a Google Map to your site. I think 2008 and will see some really cool productivity apps built leveraging the webservices of other web sites. I think that it may even spill over in to the corporate world – I’d love to see company intranets using webservices to customise workflows.

Getting VC funding then hoping to sell to : Not. Now, I have no problem with the concept of funding, or the hopes and dreams of having a large company with a bank balanace bigger than your phone number (including country and area code) throw you some bones, per se. Where I do draw the line, however is pitching with a business plan that can’t really pay back a return to the investor unless the business get bought out. Mind you, the investors really should know better – or maybe they are just much smarter than I am, who knows. Regardless, when this whole thing collapses in on it’s self, I’ll be dancing like it is on sale for $19.99…

Mobile: Hot. This is the next frontier for the web. Everyone has a mobile (some people two or three) and they are generally on their person at all times. Extend the SaaS idea to these small devices and you really will be able to get your stuff done when it suits. Again, this isn’t new, but there have been some advancements in technology and some new players who understand the web much better (that’s Google if you were wondering). I think 2008 is the year that see the mobile platform as a first-class netizen rather than something that the work experience kid gets to work on.

Using user data with out permission: Not: You would have by now seen my (MANY) rants about Spock and Facebook. Those playing in the dirty, back alleyways of social networking really need to take a long hard look at themselves. It’s my data, and I’d prefer it if you didn’t sell my browsing habits to the highest bigger. And don’t even think about scraping my data from other sites without my permission – they asked nicely, you didn’t.

Company-as-a-Service: Hot. Haven’t heard of this? That’s because I just made it up. We have seen Software-as-a-Service, Hardware-as-a-Service (eg Amazon EC2), so why not have have companies that can shrink, grow and churn as required? There are so many freelancers and consultants out there, as well as a huge number of micro businesses. If they all grouped together, they would be able to work on sites ranging from the very-very big to the very-very small. Many places kind of do this already (this is why contracting was invented) but I can see this working in a more peer-to-peer sort of way – you aren’t contracting for someone, you are contracting with someone (there is a remarkable difference).

New years lists: Not.

Leave a comment – Is this Hot or Not ;)

I love the Internet – I live and breathe it everyday. It is arguably the biggest triumph of this century – never before has so much information been so readily available, no to mention the ability to contact and converse with people from all over the world with in just a few mouse clicks.

So why is this current “social networking” trend pissing me off so much?

I realise that when you spend so much time on the ‘net, your life is basically out there for all to see – google my name and there is a shit load of stuff out there. THIS DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN USE IT FOR OWN DEVIOUS PURPOSES. Today, someone added my to their “trust” network on a site called Spock. From what I can gather (and I’m not sure – the details of the site are pretty thin) it scrapes the Internet for information about you and tries to build a profile of who you are associated with, what you do and how many porn sites you visit. What the fuck? If I wanted to all of my information on one site I would create some sort of webpage- Oh hang on, I ALREADY HAVE ONE. And guess what? The information on my website (let’s call it a blog) is the information that I WANT TO RELEASE. I mean seriously. So some muppet on a website makes a comment about you at some point and all of a sudden it is on an aggregation site for all of your other (probably legitimate) friends to see.

Of course, Spock isn’t the first website to try to cash in on utilising your information for their obvious financial gain (C’mon, you think they are doing this for fun? Web 2.0 isn’t about bringing people together anymore) – Facebook managed to see the dollar signs embedded in your personal information with Beacon. Why does Facebook or Spock think that have the right to analyse my shopping habits from other sites? Look, my hatred for Facebook is pretty well known – it does a brilliant job of allowing you to contact long lost school buddies, but that isn’t what it is being used for anymore, which brings my to the guts of this rant.

Take your mind back 18 months – blogs started to take off, flickr was starting become mainstream, Facebook was still limited to people at Harvard, people on the web, knew about the web – they were happier times. People were hungry for knowledge, there was exciting stuff happening, because a lot of the stuff that the average web developer uses everyday was bleeding edge. AJAX was impressive, we would marvel at the tech behind Meebo and would boggle our minds at Google ability to find us stuff and Techcrunch was actually relevent.

Now, it is all about how much angel funding you get on your second round of VC. Oh, what’s that? You’ve burnt the GDP of a small country on a free social network site that takes websites and translates them in to an ancient Hindu language? Oh, now your investors are asking for a return – advertising not working for you? Well go and sell some user data. Your users won’t mind, especially if they don’t know about it. For fuck’s sake. I’m not an economist, but last time I checked, you need a freaking revenue stream to make money. And if I have to hear about another startup that is counting on click-throughs to cover their $10,000 a month hosting bill, I’m going to hit someone – probably the person that is asking for it to be developed.

However! These leeches aren’t the solely responsible promoting the stereotype that skinning some tables based forums package, adding a rounded corner and gradient will make you a bazillion dollars – if people didn’t get sucked in to these sites, then these people would be pumping their business-plan creating time into something else – probably spam. Which brings me to the awful realisation that we, much like the way Viagra emails are an everyday part of ourlives, will just have to put up with this crap until the Internet self-implodes under the bloat of another loser posting a video diary to Seesmic under the misconception that anyone cares.

I for one, will be quite happy to un-subscribe from all this bullshit and get back to making sites that help people to makes their lives easier. Let’s bring the web back to the people, not to the wallets of fly-by-nighters that are just out to make a quick buck.

If Gary’s latest blog post is anything to go by (and I’m living it, so I know he is right), we are all still cranking along at an insane rate of knots, even with the silly season looming. Well, I lucky enough to be heading over to Sydney for a couple of weeks of R & R – sure I’ve managed to setup a couple of business meeting to ensure the trip is a tax write-off, but beyond that I will be trying with all my might to revive my exhausted mind.

Next year is promising to be just as nuts, with a couple of super secret projects on the boil as well as a number of client jobs in the pipeline. Watch this space for a couple of new Rails plugins that I’ve been working on, as well as some crazy experiments that are nearly ready for the world to see.

So on that less-than-descriptive note – have a happy and a rocking new year!

Oh, and if you are in Sydney and want to catch up, drop me an email! See you on the flip side.

You see this is what happens you take up challenges from Twitter. It was suggested by Laural and Gary that it would be handy to have a map of all the Australian Meraki nodes – of course being a stickler for a challenge, I duly accepted. Unbeknownst to me, the challenge was also being accepted on the other side of the Nullabor, but Ajay. Although an interstate game of “Who can build a Google Map mash-up in the fastest time” sounded like fun, we decided to combine our powers for good and not evil.

And so http://icanhazmerki.net was born.

Using the Public API that the Merkai website has we have been able to know up a quick mashup. So some instructions:

Ingredients

1. You need a Meraki (Go figure)
2. You need an OpenID account

Method

1. Go to http://account.meraki.com and login using the email address and password you used when you set the merakis up
2. Click the Configure tab
3. Click the Advanced Link
4. Find the Public API section – select either Most or All from the Radio buttons.
5. Click “What is this?” – make note of the API URL (Looks like http://public.meraki.com/network/[username]/api)
6. Click Save Changes
7. Go to http://icanhazmeraki.net and click login
8. Enter your OpenID URL – then register
9. Click “Add/Edit network”
10. Paste in the API URL
11. Hit Save
12. Add salt to taste

Enjoy! A big thanks to Ajay for his front-end wizardy and hosting donation – was much fun working with him – the man needs to sleep :)