Author: James Kebinger

Rails Development – Tracks

I’ve resolved to learn Ruby on Rails this spring in lieu of the grad school class that I would normally be taking (rather than letting any free time slide by playing Wii Sports). I think the best way to learn is by doing, and since I don’t have any containable project ideas, I’ve been tinkering with an open source project called Tracks, which is a web based organization application in the mold of the getting things done philosophy.

Even though I’m still painfully slow as a ruby developer, I’m really amazed how easy to work with and powerful some of the frameworks in rails are compared to the (clunky and slow to work with by comparison) Java/JSP/Struts stack I’m accustomed to. One of the features I love so far is the ability to reuse page chunks (“partials”, which could roughly be compared to tag-files in JSP land) in rails javascript templates which make it really simple togenerate javascript that will update multiple sections of a web page (as opposed to one container, which is easy to do with prototype alone from the client). I figured out enough in no time at all to submit a patch to enhance the project pages. Pretty cool.

Arcade Fire

There was a good article about The Arcade Fire in last Sunday’s New York Times magazine. It made me sign up for a trial eMusic account to get their old and new album (though I later realized I had acquired “Funeral” some time ago). It turns out its actually quite good. I wonder what kind of sales bump a band would get from being profiled in the times these days?

I hadn’t used eMusic before – I went there to get some DRM-free mp3s before I knew there was a free trial option. I don’t know what to think of their subscription model – pay $10 a month to get 30 mp3 downloads, which works out to just 33 cents, but I don’t think I would want to commit to another subscription somewhere.

Speaking of subscriptions, some months I weigh the value of subscribing to the Times – its about $22/mo for just the Sunday issue. No wonder no one takes a paper anymore! There’s something lost in reading on the internet though – harder to lay in bed and read with a significant other and not as portable for reading on the go. I guess its worth it for now – until someone comes up with a fantastic e-Reader.

I think the publisher of the Times said in an interview recently that he wouldn’t be surprised if they stopped printing at all within 5 years. That’s a bit alarming to me from a historical point of view – one can go to the library and look at Times articles from the civil war etc – surely the format issues involved in making digital copies of a paper available to readers 150 years from now are nontrivial compared to keeping paper dry and in the dark.

Jet Blue’s woes, and the rights of travelers.

I was dismayed to hear about Jetblue’s recent mistakes leading to people spending 11 hours trapped in unmoving planes. It seems even with TV’s and leather seats, they don’t treat their passengers as any more than human cargo.

They sent me an email today about their new bill of rights. It’s impressive at first, especially the $1000 for being bumped, but littered throughout the document is the (intentionally?) vague term “controllable irregularity”. We’ve all heard or read about instances where airlines blame the weather for delays, even as passengers can see people working on some problem with a plane, so what’s to stop Jetblue from doing the same thing?

As far as being trapped on a plane goes, they still thing five hours is a reasonable time to be on a plane without motion, which is ridiculous. I can’t really understand why nobody on those planes snapped and popped an emergency slide to get out of there after five hours, let alone eleven.

This debacle, and the case of American airlines doing the same thing to passengers diverted to Austin during a thunderstorm show that voluntary corporate promises aren’t enough to protect passengers. Moreover, from what I’ve read American airlines defended their actions in Austin by saying that if they deplaned the passengers, they’d lose their takeoff “slot” and might not get out of there for three days. This tells me we need a directive covering not just airlines, but the airport authorities and the FAA as well. The airport should be required to make a gate available to deplane passengers after two to three hours, and the FAA should be required to let that plane leave as soon as everyone has returned to the plane and is ready to go, not make it go to the back of the queue as is apparently the case now.

MSNBC has a roundup of some of the recent incidents here. The coalition for an airline passenger’s bill of rights has a site with more information.

Hopefully people will (for once) have the attention span to see that something concrete happens here, rather than be distracted by some BS corporate policy changes or some celebrity car crash or new dress or haircut and let the issue fade away, as with so many other important things.

Wireless Net Neutrality

I saw a great paper on wireless net neutrality referenced on boing boing a day or two ago. It has a good outline of how the current state of the wireless industry mirrors the wired industry circa 1950s when it was all firmly under the thumb AT&T.;

By being greedy (demanding HALF of mobile revenue) and controlling (censoring and stifling information) the industry is getting a big slice of a small pie, but surely if they let up, they could get a small slice of a much bigger pie as the mobile information market expands and new, unexpected uses of their mobile infrastructure.

Given that wired net neutrality isn’t even a sure thing, I don’t think anyone can hold their breath on wireless net neutrality. Then again, the wireless carriers are using public radio spectrum to deliver their half assed service, so perhaps there is more leverage there than over wired carriers?

Clearly the US is lagging further and further behind Europe and Asia on the wireless front. If that remains the case surely the google or yahoo of mobile won’t spring up in silicon valley…

Cingular phones rss feed

I’ve been waiting months for Cingular to release the Nokia N75; it is a bit annoying checking their product page over and over again so I’ve been thinking about creating an RSS feed for their offerings for some time. Now its done – and here it is: Cingular RSS Feed. There’s a yaml data file here too. Updated nightly.

Now we can easily watch as Cingular keeps adding crappy RAZRs in assorted colors instead of actually adding new phones.

I tried a number of ruby and python screen scraping utilities along the way, ultimately I’ve been quite pleased with Hpricot, so if you’re doing some scraping and can use Ruby, I’d give that a whirl.

24 Intuit support hours

To make a long story short, I’m on hold with Intuit (turbotax) support. I would have used their instant message support, but apparently their idea of 24 hours a day, monday – sunday is different than most people’s, because its closed.

intuitsupport.png

I’m using support because I’m trying to get started with my taxes, but I can’t get into turbotax online because I’m unable to reset my password. Their process ends with mailing a link AFTER you’ve already chosen a new password to confirm it was you. The email has a link to a form where I can enter my new password again- only every time I do this it says my time has expired (you only get 28 hours to confirm).

Beautiful Evidence

Kristi gave me Edward Tufte’s latest book for Christmas, Beautiful Evidence. It was quite good as usual, but probably not as good as the previous three, which were all excellent. A lot of examples are repeats from previous book, like the excellent infographic describing Napoleon’s march on Moscow- it would have been nice to see some new artifacts.

The ending of the book is strange; there are several pages of Tufte’s outdoor scupltures, apropos of nothing and without introduction. I guess you can do that when you are your own publisher!

Wii At Last

I finally got my hands on a Nintento Wii! While I haven’t been trying nearly as hard as many, Ive had a couple of frustrating close calls until now. I was in New York city so on the way to my hotel I stopped in to Toys R Us in Time’s Square, and there they were! They were being handed out at the register one by one, so I got to wait in a long long line without knowing if there would be any left when I got to the front. I lucked out and there was (only 10ish at that point, if I’d been much later I would have missed out). Apparently they sold about 200 in an hour or so that day. There were about 20 ps3s there, but there didn’t seem to be any takers; there were a few sitting there still hours later when I stopped in to look for an extra nunchuk attachment.

Wii Sports is really fun.

Sitting in the library all day…

I’ve been at the library for almost six hours writing the final paper for Man-Machine System Design. I’m opposite a south-facing window so when I look up I’m reminded just how long I’ve been here by the position of the sun in the sky. When I got here it was at the left side of the big window, now its at the right side, and low enough that I have to duck a bit inside the “carell” so I’m not blinded.

The last time I was somewhere with a good view of the sun moving across that sky was probably on a beach. That’s definitely more fun than this, and a good reminder of all the things about the world one can miss for all the day’s hustle and bustle.

Back to work…