How sad is it when the number one hit for your website is a cyber squatter loitering around your domain? I'm definitely doing something wrong.
A few posts back I complained about Ruby on Rails in general, partially because its got the buzz and I just don't see why. In a comment in one of the Ruby stories over on DotNetKicks I said
I must be a complete loser, because I can't see where Ruby is such hot shit. I'd love to read a story, "What you're not getting about Ruby and why its the tits."Well, my eloquent cries for help were heard. Scott Hanselman posted what he thought I was looking for: Programmer Intent or what you're not getting and why its the tits.
Scott's post is good, but I'm afraid that it doesn't exactly answer my question. He does answer two different questions, both of which are entirely valid: Is it important to learn new programming languages, and is expressiveness in a programming language important?
The first question is an obvious yes. In our profession, technology is always advancing. It cannot hurt to explore new ways of doing things. In fact, if you don't, you'd better find a new job 'cause yours will be obscelete (and deprecated) within five years. So I don't think there is anything wrong with expanding your horizons. As long as balls don't touch.
The second question I'd answer with a maybe. Expressiveness in a language may seem like a good thing at first, and Ruby is definitely expressive, but there are some hidden costs that need to be accounted for. Almost every post I've read about Ruby by its fanboys is about its "Syntactic Sugar", or expressiveness. I've commented on the sugar of Ruby before here and in other places. While it does allow you to do cool stuff that is pretty clear in intent such as:
you_are_fubar if @you.screwed? && @you.lackey?is it worth the costs that come with such expressiveness? With Ruby, those costs seem to be the speed penalty and harder maintainability.
Ruby on Rails, being an interpreted language, incurs a speed penalty during execution. This is because the program is interpreted, which means the execution engine of Ruby must read high level code and translate it into machine instructions at the time of execution, every time it is executed. This is in contrast to compiled languages, which are interpreted once and translated into a low (or lower level) machine language which executes much faster. Of course, this depends on the particular implementation of Ruby you're using. I'm definitely no expert on the subject, but I believe there is no reason why this must be true. Certainly the various Rails implementations in the .NET platform will be compiled into IL like any other language run on the CLR. But until Ruby is compiled this fact is going to be the turd in the punchbowl for developers seeking to make scalable web applications.
The second cost is that Ruby appears to be harder to maintain due to the complexity of the language. K, I'm stretching on this one a little; I have to add the disclaimer that I have not used RoR to create a web app, nor have I attempted to maintain a RoR app written by another developer. I'm probably talking out of my ass, but the issue of maintainability has been concerning me, as a .NET developer, for awhile now. Microsoft is throwing a lot of new shit into the .NET platform, if you haven't noticed. While some of it is awesome (LINQ), other bits are friggin scary (lambda expressions, anonymous types). I dread coming behind a developer who has written his entire application using lambdas and anon types. While you can certainly do some amazing stuff with them and reduce cyclomatic complexity, at the same time your code actually becomes less expressive. Writing code that can be easily read and understood by others is almost as important as writing code that does what it is designed to do without error.. This becomes harder as the complexity of a language increases. By complexity, I mean how many different ways can you do the same thing. And, it appears to me at least, Ruby is one of those languages that is chock full of complexity. Again, its not necessarily a bad thing to have the option to perform a task ten different ways, but when you use each one of them in your program you've made the task of maintaining it exponentially harder.
Is it worth it? I still don't know. Rail's bandwagon is nice and shiny and looks like its chock-a-block full of hot chicks. But you know how some chicks look hot from a distance, but when you get up close to them you see that they're busted. Kinda like Lindsay Lohan at 3am on a Saturday. I get the feeling that a lot of people are tagging it just so they can tell their friends they did afterwards...
Just found an interesting website called Slideshare. The idea is simple--share your slides like you share your video (like YouPorn etal).
You can embed slideshows just like embedding video. For example, here's a slide presentation on the scalability issues with Twitter
(Protip: Check slide 17. Also, MEMCACHE.)
A real simple idea, yet very useful. I'll definitely be using this in the future.
There's only one problem with it, which is that the code they supply to embed the player doesn't work for me. Flash players can be embedded by using an EMBED tag or an OBJECT tag. Embedded objects don't load correctly on my work machine and laptop. Not sure what the issue is. But if you want to switch from object to embed, use this template:
<embed name="movie" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="[MOVIE URL]" width="450" height="370" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/>
All you have to do is pull the movie URL out of the object tag and place it in the marked attribute. You can, of course, change the size of the player if you want. Small text in the slides is pretty hard to view, so you might want to bump it up as wide as your site's formatting allows. Alternatively, you can click on the "on SlideShare" logo to go to the SlideShare website where you can view it full screen. Coolness.
Catching fuckers with their pants down since 1990
K, its not that I know the guy. 'Cause I've only seen him a couple times. A lot of people are talking him up, saying how he's cool and fast and sweet. But I just don't get it. Seriously, from what I've seen, he just looks like another dork.
Anthropomorphism aside, I have yet to see anything about Ruby on Rails that makes me do anything other than yawn. I haven't spent much time on it other than reading people's glowing reviews. I have seen some code examples, which have done more to turn me off Ruby more than anything. That and the fact that Ruby scales for shit due to the fact that it's a purely interpreted language.
This morning I just read a post over at FrankFi's blog "FrankFi's view of the world" about how Ruby differentiates between functions and variables. I won't repost the code here--his entry is short and sweet so go over and read it. What I will say is that the Ruby language doesn't require that functions without parameters be terminated with empty brackets--(). So the language can't tell the difference between a variable and a function without parameters.
This is fail. Sorry, lovers of Ruby, you can't say that this won't result in freakish, hard to repro bugs that only show up on production servers. And, if a developer was stupid enough to specifically use this "feautre", it would also result in hard to maintain, if not near impossible to maintain, code.
This behavior is another black mark on Ruby in my books. But still, I'm not saying that Ruby on Rails is 100% shit. I'm just saying that if I'm ever going to be convinced that it isn't, somebody is gonna have to write an article called "What you're not getting about Ruby and why its the tits."
Just a funny thing I came across while desperately trying to avoid working on some busted ass queries: Kitty authentication.
What is Kitty Authentication? Its a form of captcha that, instead of using funked text, uses images of cats and dogs and asks the user to discriminate between the two. Its an example of complex pattern matching, something that is easy for humans and horribly difficult for computer programs.
The idea is that the limitations of standard captchas ensure that they will be useless within the next few years. These limitations are nonexistant when asking users to match complex patterns. Current captchas suffer primarily from two limitations. First, there is a limit as to how obscured an image can be. In order to make text-based captcha work, you have to severely beat the fuck outta it. However, if you maul the text too much, people can't figure out what the text says. Because of this, it is pretty much guaranteed that OCR technologies will eventually catch and surpass humans in identifying obscured text. That's because OCR technologies are geared twoards distinguishing text within a badly scanned image. Second, the number of possible characters that make up a captcha is relatively low (most captchas only use the 26 letters of the alphabet; some add 2-9 as well). This means that there is a very limited set of possibilities of which a captcha character must be a member, thus reducing the complexity of identifying what a captcha is. Break a captcha image down into individual letters and it almost becomes a trivial task to crack.
By asking people to differentiate between two different, yet very similar, types of items, both of these limitations are avoided. Firstly, there is no need to obscure the image, making it easy for humans to identify. It is very simple for humans to look at a picture of a cat and a dog and tell the difference; it is virtually impossible, however, for a computer to do this reliably. Second, instead of there being a limited set of items to choose from, there is almost no theoretical limit to the number of pictures you can choose from. You could, like in the examples here, ask users to choose the difference between cats and dogs. Or, you could ask people to choose vegetables from among pictures of fruit. The choices are virtually limitless.
The single real limitation to this type of authentication is that there is a practical limit to the number of pictures you can use. This means computers could be trained to identify each image and what that image holds. The simple way around this would be to obfuscate the image. But doing that brings you back to the problem with captchas where you end up making them unidentifiable to humans.
In order to get around this issue, a group at Microsoft Research has partnered with petfinder.com in order to supply the images. Since Pet Finder has a gigantic (over a million) database of images of cats and dogs that are constantly being replaced, you avoid the issue of computers remembering a particular image and learning what it contains. Its a sweet idea. Not only do you get your captcha, but Pet Finder also gets free advertising. Each picture has a link to that animal's page on their site. So while you're answering a captcha challenge, you might also be adopting a pet!
Via Terry Zink's Anti-Spam blarg.
Sad news last month that I just heard recently. Apparently Dell is leaving the handheld market. If you have never held one, Dell's Axim line of handhelds was definitely the best in the market.
The reason for leaving the market is that handheld sales have been pretty damn pitiful for the last year. Q1 sales are down an average of 30% across all manufacturers relative to Q1 sales in 2006.
Its pretty obvious that the rise of advanced cellphones has completely crushed the PPC market. You pretty much have to carry a phone. Carrying a PPC is a convenience for most people. And now that you can purchase a phone that either provides the functionality that you need your PPC for or is in fact a PPC itself (like a smartphone or soon the iPhone), why would you want to carry both?
I carried a PPC when I went back to complete my bachelor's. During the two years I had one, I carried an Axim. The first model I had was the X5, and after going through two of those I carried an X30. I still have that one, but the screen died on it a while ago.
The X5 was a chunky monster, but so were all of the PPCs back when it came out. Dell was just one of the boy's in the market. It was when they released the X3 that they started to pull ahead. My X30 definitely rocked. It was slim, fast, had wifi and bluetooth built in, and had a Secure Digital memory slot. I could take class notes on it, cruise the interweb, and play games to burn some time between classes.
But those days have come to an end. Dell's out of the market, which will give the other players some breathing space. But unless they start developing handhelds with cellphone capabilities, they will either go the way of Dell or start catering to specialty markets.
Another disappointing thing about Dell's leaving the market is that they aren't dumping their current stock of Axim handhelds! I think they have sold all their current stock to other companies for sale. You can find X50/X51s from 2nd party vendors, but not at Dell's site. They're still selling Palms, but no Axims. I did a cursory check and I can't even find any refurb'd Axims at Dell's outlet store. Even though Dell is out of the market, X51's are still going for $500. If they were selling their remaining stock for 50% off I'd snap one up with the quickness. RIP, Axim.
Just a small update--I added an awards section to the sidebar. Check it out! I'm so proud. *sniff*
Sigh. Why do people insist on using ridiculous jargon?
As I reflect on my role as a developer evangelist, I aspire to be a force for developer empowerment.
Please, don't fucking empower me. Give me the tools to do my job efficiently. I don't want or need your "progressive" help in order to be "empowered."
I bust my girlfriend's (metaphorical) balls all the time about jargon. Her field is very closely tied to academia where the ability to say absolutely nothing while using jargon is extremely important. In order to sound educated or professional these people believe they need to use words that are either completely inappropriate in the context or that have been made up out of whole cloth. Whenever I read any of her work, I'm always pointing out jargon and asking why she couldn't say the same thing in simpler language. I guess it sounds like I'm sabotaging her, now that I think about it!
In computing, there is only one jargony word that you'll see used often: Deprecated. That means obscelete, btw. Hell, 90% of the people who use it say "depreciated", anyhow. Depreciated can mean obscelete, so why not just use that? Well, its too understandable. And in order to sound like a professional programmer you have to talk highly of your efforts to refactor your code base to implement the Gang of Four Memento pattern, thus deprecating existing assemblies which do not implement that functionality. Or you could say you're adding undo capability to your program, which will make some of your existing code obscelete. But that would be muuuuch too easy to understand.
So, the question comes to me as to what the main thrust of this blarg will be. Is it a mainly political blarg , a mainly programming blarg , or a mainly bullshit blarg ?
I'm more interested in programming than politics. Obviously, since I'm an employed programmer and just a regular voter. But politics is definitely an important part of my life. How can it not be, since the government has the power to shoot me in the face if I don't agree with any of its laws? Okay, that seems a little overstated, but try not paying your taxes. They'll send guys with guns to come get your shit. And if you resist, guess where the bullets go?
The problem with blargs that concentrate on programming only is that they are boring as hell. There may be some that don't follow this rule, but they're few and far between. And if they aren't boring, it usually because they actually are more about politics. Not that /. is interesting, because it rarely is.
The alternative to one or the other is just a general bullshit blarg . You know, the bastard child of the E/N* website. Whatever comes across that's interesting to the owner gets posted. I like these kinds of websites, but they suffer from the fact that there are ten million other general bullshit blargs that post all the same crap. So the personal aspect, or rather original content that is highly relevant to my interests, is important.
My dilema is that I only have time for bullshit now. I have some great programming posts brewing in my intestines that I want to pinch off, but I'm short on time needed to properly craft and edit these kinds of posts. I also don't have enough time to fully keep abreast of the current state of politics in order to write anything more deep than "Lol, democrats suck" on the subject.
Hell, the Republicans are here in my city tonight for a national debate. Its an amazing opportunity for me to grab my camera and go shoot some pictures outside the Kroger Center** (in case any hippies show up), or get in to watch it, or even ask some questions of the candidates. A good article on it might get me a link on Ace or LGF. So, what AM I doing tonight? I'm going to State St. tonight and drinking. That, and planning for the Carolina/NC State game in October. Obviously, my priorities lay elsewhere.
So, here I am in bullshit land. And I broke searching when I overhauled navigation in my program. So, back to work I go. See you in a few days...
