Started stepping through OnLAMP’s Ruby on Rails tutorial this evening. A lot of foreign concepts — brave new world compared to PHP development. Then, suddenly, on page 3, I added a field to my database and wham! — that field was added to all relevant pages of my application. A text entry field for the edit, create, and update pages, and an appropriate column on the display pages. Number of lines of code added to the application: Zero the Hero. Change that field’s position in the database table, and its placement throughout the application changes automatically. The application automagically models itself after the form of the database. The dataset is the model for the application.

Granted, we’re just talking about the scaffolding here, but when I stopped to think of the number of files I need to modify in a PHP application to get the same effect (and how many times I’ve needed to wheedle through exactly that kind of repetitive work), just had to roll my chair back from the desk and take a deep breath. This has some pretty stunning ramifications.

Also amazing how much mileage Rails gets out of simple naming conventions. Name a model class Recipe and it will automatically map to a corresponding database “recipes” (the pluralization translation happens automatically). Stick to the conventions, and the need to write database CRUD (create, read, update, delete) code goes away. And elegant URLs are totally automatic too.

Newbie steps, but all of a sudden I’m “getting” what all the fuss is about.

May all of you enjoy the most brilliant and squinchy year possible (for a humanoid). We here at Birdhouse certainly intend to! Thanks to everyone for continuing to read despite my frequent lapses and misfires. You guys make it fun.

Pictured: Variant of this year’s holiday card. Technological marvel: We shot the image, photoshopped it in, uploaded to Snapfish, selected a “frame,” and had our cards ready for pickup at a local Walgreen’s an hour later. Soup to nuts. And for cheap.

Another techno marvel: In interminable checkout line for a small purchase at the Apple store yesterday. Attractive techno-hippy employee walks up with what appears to be a souped-up Newton and asks if anyone is paying by credit. I am. Dude uses the device (wireless) to scan my item, charge my card, and record my email address. Says my receipt is waiting in my inbox and “Good day, sir.” I walk out, dodging the rest of the line. Life is good.

Except that the cosmonaut pictured above is very, very sick right now, and it’s been a sad and fretful couple of days. Here’s to most-excellent Miles getting his health back very soon. Miles minus vital energy isn’t very fun.

Conceptualized initially as an alternate support avenue for Birdhouse users, but also serving as a multi-function water cooler, we’ve launched our own IRC channel! Accessible via the Live Chat option on the hosting pages, or through any standard IRC client. Come idle a while in #birdhouse on GIMPnet. No guarantees at any given time that anyone will be around, but we’ll see what grows.

Many thanks to IRC superfreak and Birdhouse backup sysadmin mneptok for all the IRC plumbing and text — I just plugged it in.

Just back from 21 Grand to hear Dos (Watt, ex-Minutemen and Kira, ex-Black Flag) jamming bass duets. They’ve been at this for 20+ years, through thick and thin, and play like it. Kind of humorous to watch Kira scamper and pogo as if drummer were present, and she’s a very good bass player, but stoic Watt is the amazing, fluid virtuoso. Not quite like anything you’ve heard before (if you’re thinking punk rock, stop). Watt:

dos (spanish for two, as in uno, dos, tres…) is kira … on bass/singing and watt on bass. that’s it - just two basses and her voice. sometimes watt’s voice too but not much. we’ve been together since the fall of 1985, this is my longest running band. I really dig playing w/dos. it started as an experiment w/making what’s commonly believed a backup instrument up front and paired off w/a twin, using pingpong-like arrangements to create a special space which is pretty much close to the deck but not smothered by competition. what we try to do is develop converstations between our two basses and create a landscape of low-end dynamic. in dos there is no hiding. this is both the challenge and the reward.

Standing room only, short show. Someone called nina put up a Flickr set of the evening.

“Daddy, guess what? I made Plato* a web-site dinner.”

“Really? What does it taste like?”

“Butter.”

“What did you make it out of?”

“Flour.”

* Our cat.

Lebkowsky posts about his mostly-rosy transition from Outlook to Thunderbird, but wonders why the spam controls aren’t more robust. “… and though the junk mail filters are clearly catching a large percentage of the umpty hundreds of spams that fall into my mail bucket every day, there’s a bunch more that the filters miss.”

What I don’t get is why people are still dealing with daily buckets of spam on the client side at all. It’s been years since most mail hosts began offering excellent server-side spam handling (Birdhouse included). I’ve found the combination of SpamAssassin + ClamAV + RulesDuJour to be tremendously effective. And don’t forget to disable your “catch-all address — probably the most powerful single spam magnet you can have. After months of not landing a single false positive, I finally stopped using a server-side “Junk box” for monitoring at all - now I just set my spam threshold to 2.5 and let the systems delete spam before it ever hits my server-side mailbox.

Result: About 90% of the mail bound for my addresses is discarded without ever being seen by a human or handled by a mail client. What finally slips through the net is a grand total of about 3-5 spams a day.

On the TWiT podcast, John Dvorak gets teased regularly — by industry experts, no less — for his claim “I get no spam.” What’s so outlandish about that? If you’re still getting spam in your mail client, you probably just need to turn on the controls your mail host probably already has set up for you. And if your mail host doesn’t offer server-side spam controls, find one that does.

Nate Harrison discusses the history of the legendary “Amen Break” - probably the most-used drum sample in all of hip-hop, jungle… and advertising. An entire subculture based on a 6-second loop from an obscure 1969 R&B record.

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drums beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

Fascinating (relatively speaking) to watch how the progression of the needle across the LP inversely tracks the progression of your own QuickTime slider.

Lessig: “Culture is impossible without a rich public domain.”

Thanks Sean Graham

For The Huffington Post, David Rees, author of the Rolling Stone comic Get Your War On, posts an over-the-top tribute to the Minutemen’s D. Boon on the 20th anniversary of his death. “… my career as a political cartoonist literally began the night I asked myself “What would D. Boon do?” before clumsily trying to make the comic-strip equivalent of a Minutemen song.”

The tribute is way hyperbolic, but all true. The Minutemen changed lives, mine included. Happy birthday Boon. Let the products sell themselves!

Planning to dig up our 30-40 year-old Super 8 home movies to watch with family this Christmas, and Dad’s projector’s gone belly up. Craigslist to the rescue. Every time I deal with Craigslist, I’m amazed by the sheer number of flakes and false starts — people who say they have what you need and then never respond again, or who say they’re interested in what you have to sell, make an appointment, and never show up. But amongst the clowns, some kind soul generally comes through. Scored this 1960s vintage Sears Super Automatic for a song (though the replacement bulb is going to cost more than I paid for the projector).

The machine itself is a work of art. Loved the manual that came with, full of golden lines like “It’s easy to splice 50-foot rolls of 8mm film together on Sears 400-foot reels for full half-hour shows.” Easy-peasy! Can’t imagine why this wonderful technology died…

Update: Jim Strickland pointed out a great source for old bulbs and lamps : ETE Tubes — they found me a working bulb for 1/3 the price of other bulb vendors, and shipped it 2nd Day Air. Wonderful.

Caught this amazing rap on SNL last weekend (Lazy Sunday) with Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell mackin’ on cupcakes, Google Maps, and “The Chronic.” “What?” “Culls, of Narnia.” Tip of the Kanga to Beasties, Matthew Perry, and Mr. Pibb. Amy and I have been riffing on this all week. Miles gets in on the act too. “Pass the chronic!” he yells, loud as he can, and we all fall down laughing.

Thanks selenevomer

Went for it last night, and Birdhouse Hosting is now in its new home. Four hours to securely transfer 65 accounts totaling ~20GBs of data between two cPanel servers. Considering that there’s a lot more to transferring an account than copying a home dir around*, the cPanel-to-cPanel transfer mechanisms are pretty good at getting it right. DNS propagated overnight, and we’re live with a VPS in a quad-CPU, 8GB, hot-swap setup.

Only two small glitches to mop up this morning - the alternate SMTP port wasn’t open, and apache was configured to choose index.html before index.php when both present. Other than that, the migration was flawless and I can start thinking about making a Christmas shopping list. Let’s see, shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a tally of naughty and nice Birdhouse users…

* Users databases are off in /var/lib/mysql, mail forwarders and aliases are in /etc/valiases/*, mailing list archives are kept deep in the bowels, crontabs are here, quota settings are there, service plan features and packages somewhere else entirely, foobar is behind my left ear, and it all has to be packaged up neatly and restored on the other end inside an accompanying account with all passwords intact — not a fun job to do manually (I’ve been down that road) but pretty much effortless with the cPanel transfer mechanisms.

Birdhouse is moving! We’re about to undertake a migration of customers from our current dedicated server setup into a managed reseller environment, where we’ll be setting up shop on a beefy quad-CPU box under the watchful eye of a dedicated management team. As some of our sites get more and more popular, we’re seeing increasingly frequent load issues on the current single-CPU server that we can’t manage effectively. The goal is to free myself up from server performance considerations, so I can focus more on development and implementation.

To celebrate the move, we’ve just raised virtually all of the limits on all of our hosting plans — more email accounts, more databases, more add-on domains, more everything. It’s nearly impossible to stay competitive in an industry that puts the airline biz to shame when it comes to overselling, but we think these new plans bring us quite a bit closer.

The actual move may not happen for another day or two, but we’ve got nearly all our ducks in a row now. We’re not anticipating any downtime, crossing fingers. See you on the other side!

First foray into Google Video begins with a documentary on Japanse Sushi, with less emphasis on the food than on the customs and etiquette of the sushi-ya. Equal parts educational and comic-surreal. You’ll even learn why some Japanese people’s feet smell of vinegar.

“Maa maa maa maa.” “Oh toh toh toh.”

Thanks baald

No response from iTMS affiliates program on the POST problem. Total brick wall trying to contact a human there, but I’m not ready to give up on being an iTMS partner while iPod is king. Finally solved it with a workaround (which I hate): If user voted on the previous lyric, the vote is processed, then, rather than displaying the rest of the output immediately, the browser is invisibly directed to the next page through a location header rather than POST. User still gets the same page she would otherwise, but links to iTMS now work without throwing a confusing “Re-POST?” dialog in the browser.

Also signed up as a Rhapsody affiliate, so non-iTunes peeps are not locked out. Most lyrics now have dual iTunes/Rhapsody artist links. Thanks to mneptok for kicking my butt on that.

Love how trivial it is to create links to artists in Rhapsody, e.g.: http://www.rhapsody.com/PatsyCline — which means I can auto-generate the URLs. So what was a 10-hour database population job for iTMS was a 5-minute job with Rhapsody. Hey Apple: Cluetrain!

Refreshing, after recent high-profile controversies about the accuracy of Wikipedia, to see the results of Nature’s blind side-by-side comparison of 42 Encyclopedia Brittanica and Wikipedia articles by dozens of scientists. Wikipedia fared only slightly worse relative to Brittanica’s accepted standard of accuracy. But how good is the standard?

Only eight serious errors, such as misinterpretations of important concepts, were detected in the pairs of articles reviewed, four from each encyclopaedia [emphasis mine]. But reviewers also found many factual errors, omissions or misleading statements: 162 and 123 in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively. … “People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica,” Twidale adds. “Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one.”

Thanks Paul

The demand for biodiesel is up so sharply that world-wide industries are ramping up non-petro oil production. Soy bean oil predominates in the U.S., but palm oil is cheaper to produce. So the last remaining vestiges of rain forests in Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are being razed to make way for palm oil production. Salon:

Biodiesel activists have responded to the latest depressing news by calling for biodiesel labeling. For those of us in Berkeley, already carefully distinguishing between farm-raised and wild salmon, and searching for our free-range chickens certified to have passed away happily in their sleep, it will be one more thing to pay attention to. Biodiesel from used French fry oil: good. Biodiesel from Thailand: bad.

Better way: Use less oil.

Labels courtesy the Acme Label Maker.

ORA blog: Technical details on my many frustrations in dealing with Apple’s iTunes Music Store affiliate program.

Miles visited the Discovery Science museum in Sausalito today, at the foot of the Golden Gate bridge. Outside, found himself a hollow log to play in. He’s looking like such a big boy to me lately. The baby in him is starting to seem like a distant memory — one I find myself not ready to let go of just yet, as much as we enjoy every step in his personal evolution.

How much new information is created each year? According to a 2003 study by UC Berkeley’s School of Information Management, the world produced five exabytes (one quintillion bytes) of content in 2002 — the same amount of data poot forth by all of humanity between 25,000 B.C. and A.D. 2000. “Five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress…”

For years, one of the most common complaints about The Archive was that the layout was frames based. I’ve always been aware of the problems that frames present, but felt that the nature of the data being presented lent itself so well to a frames layout that I was willing to accept the consequences, even though advertisers pay less for impressions on a framed site. Still, getting rid of them was one of the big design goals of the new site, and I felt I had accomplished that pretty well.

Now that I’ve finally gotten that particular monkey off my back, guess what the most common complaint about the new site is? “Where did the frames go?” “I hate the new layout!” “This is much harder to navigate than the old site!” Sigh.

Now, to be fair, these commenters have raised a valid point: It’s no longer possible to quickly access all of the mishearances of a particular song, or all by a particular artist. Without the frames, you have to click your back button to return to the listing. And the javascript list collapser I’m using doesn’t remember which sublist you had open when you left the previous page. So these recent comments, in a way, are validation of the very reasons I used a frames layout to begin with.

During development of the new site, I was so focused on the voting system that I did almost all of my test browsing via the Vote button. Had not even considered trying to consume the site in such an orderly fashion. But one commenter had a great suggestion: Why not include a mini-list on every lyrics page containing all related songs and artists? </me smacks forehead>. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that eight years ago? Hey, that’s why it’s called a public beta. Will work on that next week.

For the past few months, I’ve been spending nearly every free late-night minute working (finally) to rebuild The Archive of Misheard Lyrics from the ground up. The site had become very long in the tooth, and a total design embarrassment. Not to mention the fact that I’ve done virtually zero work to maintain the database itself over the past five years (and am now sitting on more than 60,000 unprocessed submissions!)

The idea was not to mention a word before the site was baked and ready to come out of the oven. Then, last night, received email from an old friend saying that kissthisguy had been linked to in a story on Slashdot. Argh! Why couldn’t they have waited two more weeks? Timing couldn’t have been worse: Had to teach a class in five minutes, then race home, wolf dinner, and attend a 2-hour meeting at the pre-school. Think fast.
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Would you send a Christmas card to a Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Zoroastrian friend? The thing that strikes me about the movement to boycott stores that promote generic holiday messages rather than specific Christmas greetings is not just that it’s ignorant, but that it’s so willfully mean, so intentionally and obviously anti-American (anti-freedom).

Now the same groups are tweaked that the White House is sending out non-religion-specific holiday cards. I’d like to get a list of addresses for these groups and send them some lovely Kwanzaa cards. These fundamentalist minds are so twisted up in knots, they end up defying everything Christ stood for:

“I think it’s more important to put Christ back into our war planning than into our Christmas cards,” said the [council general secretary of the National Council of Churches.]

Oh yeah, I’m sure Christ would be on the front lines in Iraq. His message always pro-war and anti-inclusive. Cripes.

Update: Looking back on the piece, it appears that the quote above was placed in a weird context, and that the secretary was saying that our war planning is missing Christ’s message. I stand corrected. Thanks Gilbert.

Inspired by a recent post at Weblogsky on the re-publication of Winsor McKay’s original Little Nemo in Slumberland comic, which ran from around 1902-1911. For nearly a century, virtually no one has seen these dreamy, highly detailed, deco/surreal strips at the full “broadsheet” (newspaper) size in which they originally ran. Checked out the book at Cody’s today and was floored — these are so gorgeous, so unlike anything you’ve ever seen, coming from another time and seeming to come from another people… Suddenly you’re seeing what your grandparents or great grandparents were reading in the Sunday comic pages a century ago, and realizing there was some pretty avant-garde stuff going down back then.

Reproducing the strips at their original size results in a book so large it presents a real storage problem — but one well worth overcoming. Couldn’t help getting a copy for Amy’s 40th birthday. She’s swimming in it now.

We’ve always bought free-range poultry and eggs, both for ethical/environmental reasons, and because it tastes better (set me loose with a grill and a pile of Rocky Range legs and thighs and your belly will be a happy place by night’s end). But the cover story in this week’s East Bay Express casts a shadow on the growing movement to get battery-caged poultry and eggs out of stores. Turns out the best way to encourage the spread of avian flu is to let birds wander around outside as nature intended. Containing a potential avian flu epidemic means keeping birds strictly confined.

Factory farming may be cruel to animals and environmentally ugly, but weighed against the prospect of millions of human deaths, the free-range farming movement suddenly faces a painful dilemma. Frickin’ reality.

Of course, one can imagine ways to confine chickens indoors without cooping them up in battery cages. It’s harder to imagine factory farmers making that happen without financial incentives.