狂った!

I’ve moved the blog to WordPress, and it can now be found here.

After much discussion about how to backup your mac10 incase of disaster on the mac10 list recently, i decided to write my own script that takes advantage of rsync’s “don’t copy the file unless it changed feature”.

You can download mrbackup.sh here. It includes the script, a readme and an example crontab file.

Larry Osterman has a nice, short piece on his blog explaining why DOS used (and subsequently Windows uses) the backslash as the file separator in a path. The answer is actually pretty simple: in DOS 1.0, there was no support for directories, and the normal file separator, /, was already reserved as the switch character (- in *nix). When it came time to support directories, they deprecated / as the switch character, but they couldn’t go straight to using it for directories, so they made it \ (which is pretty similar to /, after all. It wouldn’t drive me so crazy if \ weren’t also the escape character in most programming languages), with the goal of making them interchangeable at some point. As a result, you can get away with using / in most of your DOS/Windows commands.

Oil doesn’t conduct electricity. This property has allowed Frank Völkel and his team over at Tom’s Hardware to seal their PC and fill it with cooking oil without damaging it. One special modification was necessary: the CPU had to be sealed off, because the oil increases the resistance between the CPU pins and the motherboard.

There are precisely two things about this that I find remarkable: (1) that it can be done and (2) that I’ve never heard of anyone doing it before.

Apparently they tried the same trick with distilled water and the system ran for about five minutes before it failed.

Ruby on Rails, after only 15 months of availability to the public, feels that they are ready for prime time: they have released 1.0. Clearly to some people, Rails has been robust and stable enough for production for some time now. This blog is a modified version of Typo, which is a Rails application that is being used for numerous other blogs and is even being offered by some hosting services as a blog package.

For me, the single most compelling aspect of Rails is the support from members of the Agile community. Secondly, it is built on the Ruby programming language, which I’ve never really worked in, but seen enough of to recognize its intuitiveness and the way it facilitates concision. On top of this, Rails adds a very intuitive framework that makes it easy to develop a well-designed and powerful application with very little effort.

I’ve set myself the task of learning how to develop in Rails without reading any manuals on the subject. I’m limiting myself to articles, existing code, and the APIs. Coming from a J2EE (and now Spring) background, I feel right at home with the basic architecture, and had no substantial difficulty modifying Typo to allow for satellite blogs off of a single master database.

In spite of all of the excellent points that I see in Rails, I think there are a few aspects that will trump all others as Rails starts to bit out large chunks of the Perl CGI/PHP/mod_python/Tomcat market: (1) It is extremely easy to set up (Ruby and Apache are available on almost all out-of-the box Linux distros, and via Ruby Gems, Rails and its dependencies installs much like a Debian package). (2) The framework, while somewhat intrusive, is essentially the basic framework that all web applications should have (and most of them have probably built from scratch), and by building it into the application server itself, Rails “standardizes” the development of its applications so that getting up to speed on someone else’s codebase could hardly be easier (the architecture is far more intuitive than WEB-INF, web.xml, weblogic.xml, and friends, though I guess part of that’s the difference between an application server and an application server standard with many implementations). (3) Unlike the others, Rails has been born amidst a particularly vocal, visible, and active community (as opposed to developing a large number of isolated visible, vocal, and active communities over time as the product matures) that will encourage fast learning, a good feedback loop, and plenty of cross-pollination (on a side note, this last point is something that sets Ubuntu apart from other Linux distros that I’ve looked into).

It doesn’t hurt a bit that Rails seems to be built from the ground up with good programming practices being the primary concern. I hope that more people will learn to program confidently and effectively (in a team, especially) while learning Rails than have done so in the years of J2EE and PHP combined. Internally, it’s quite easy to see that Rails is something of a revolution in Web programming, but the real effect on Web programming in general has yet to be seen (to their credit, Spring and .NET have accomplished many of the same goals in somewhat more compromised ways).

My all time favorite ad campaign ever.

In the dark hours of Apple Computings long and embattled history, the Steve Jobs headless giant, still wheeling from the release of windows95, shot itself in the other foot by opening up it’s hardware market to… (Que. scary music) the clones.

The clones, of course, were smaller, faster and smarter, and quickly began to gobble up Apple’s already shrinking hardware market. The Macintosh had been boxed even further into it’s corner: it was nothing but the expensive toy of artists. Weirdos. Freaks. It was a time when it was largely considered that it was just a matter of time before Apple withered up and died.

And then along came Power Computing.

Power Computings message was simple: The all-out-war against wintel would be won by selling zillions of faster, way faster macs. This is not the subtext, this actually was the message. “Let’s kick wintels ass”, “Join the mac resistance”, “The counter assault begins!”, and so on. All of this done in a not-so-subtle half Maoist Communist Propaganda, half comic book drawing style. They were very loud, and really fast. They held the exact opposite image of the wintel axis. Where wintel was gray, blue and cool, power computing was red hot and angry. I always felt that more than selling clones, perhaps they were selling attitude.

If nothing else it was certainly pure marketing genious. Their imagery is both inspiring and unforgettable. My longtime friend, and Macadvocate (even during the dark hours) STILL HAS this poster hanging in his bedroom behind his desk.

“You can take my mac… …when you pry my cold dead fingers off the mouse.” says a blond with a smoking .45 in her hand and an American Flag as the backdrop. A quick look at the “Seybold, San Francisco 1996” copy at the top and you realize that it turns ten next year.

Jobs wiped out the clones, all of them, in one swift blow when he re-took the helm at Apple. And then from there here turned things around, just like he always does. In fact, at least financially, things have never been better than the are today for Apple.

But at the same time something has been lost. The end of the dark ages also seems to co-inside with the end of the “think different” movement. The loyalists who would never give in to a wintel empire. Wouldn’t dare think about using IDE when there was SCSI. That unique group of artist elites seemed to have quietly been absorbed into some sort of larger faceless cloud that makes up the industry today.

I sometimes wonder if perhaps the greatest creativity in rise of the personal computer movement is already behind us. And whether or not that can be attributed to the death of the clone, and the dark ages at Apple Computing.

Apparently the Japanese Postal Service provides its postal code database in CSV (comma separated values) format free of charge. So, i decided to implement a PHP class that stores that data into a MySQL database and provides a number of methods for address validation, searching, and the like.

Included in the package are several usage examples including one that has mixi style dropdown lists for towns.

You can download Japan_PostalCode.tgz here. And here are the referenced MySQL library and searchpath file as well.