Software Physics

Pretty cool.

http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix

I installed a trailer hitch on my car this weekend. I expected one thing to happen but the project didn’t quite work out that way. I made a classic Engineer’s mistake; the project, for me was about “The Hard Stuff”, bolting big metal things together. It turned out not to be about that;the bulk of the work was the “Boring Stuff”. The whole experience reminded me of mistakes I have made (and really, really try not to make anymore but sometimes still do…) with software development projects.
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So I finally got around to taking a look at Google App Engine and working through the tutorial. Once I had the basics down, I attempted to move a little crypto-key management app that I had been developing on Rails in EC2 over to App Engine. In the process I had some observations about how developing with App Engine compared to my experience using the AWS suite of tools.

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I don’t usually like to post things unless I have something to say (possibly why there are so few posts here…) but this writeup was way-too-funny.

Apple Product Life Cycle

I’ve recently done a bit of noodling with widgets. As a first test, I wrote the canonical/ubiquitous weather widget. If you’re interested in how to write a basic Konfabulator widget, check this out (all the standard disclaimers about code quality, comments, error handling, general programming aesthetics apply…).

To test the widget just unzip it, navigate to the .kon file in the basicweather/Contents sub folder and open it with the Yahoo! Widgets application (a.k.a, Konfabulator).

Even if you’re not interested in the widget bits, you might be interested in the site the example uses, geonames.org. They provide a REST webservice for retrieving place information. I used the following two services in my sample:

• http://ws.geonames.org/postalCodeSearchJSON?postalcode=01810&maxRows=1&country=US 
• http://ws.geonames.org/findNearByWeatherJSON?lat=42.647991&lng=-71.165685

The first retrieves lat/lon for a postal code. The second one uses the lat/lon to get the most recent METAR (weather observation) nearest that lat/lon.

It’s a really practical information source and having the REST/JSON interface is nice.

So I’m a failure as a blogger, I guess, as it’s been a long, lame time since I had anything interesting to say (Life was keeping me busy but, whatever…). Here’s the most interesting thing I’ve come across in a while. All the Cool Kids in the blogosphere have probably already seen this but, if you live under a rock like me, maybe you haven’t. Credits to Cool Kid Patrick at work who showed me this.

Check out this talk then (if you have a windows machine and IE) go here and install the tech preview of photosynth (5 meg activex control).

I’ve recently been trying to understand design better; not software design but the ability to build things (pages, machines, whatever…) that are easy (a joy?) to use. I’ve started reading about graphic design and, while I’ll never be any kind of artist, there’s not as much black art there as I had thought, just purposeful and disciplined application some fairly straightforward principles.

Anyway, I just bought an iMac at least in part because of Apple’s attention to design. One thing really impressed me the other day.

The iMac has a little remote control used to adjust the volume and navigate some of the out-of-the-box apps like iTunes. I had it sitting on my desk and thought “there should be a little holder for this on the side of the computer”. While I was thinking this, I was sliding the remote on the side of the machine visualizing that the holder should be somewhere about…here. The remote stuttered as I was moving it and I could feel a little magnet inside the device catch some hidden piece of metal under the plastic casing just where I thought the holder should be. I let go and it stuck right where I wanted it. Not only had they anticipated the need to stow the remote but they had done it in a way that didn’t add an ugly clip or extra clutter to the case and was so natural/right to use that I discovered — what’s arguably a fairly non-obvious feature — without instruction. Maybe I’m easily impressed/amused but I thought that was really great.

I want the stuff I build to be more like that.

FWIW: A book I’ve started with is “The Non-Designers Design Book, Second Edition“. It’s short and concise and has some really useful information.

Funny the things you suffer with. I’ve been using cygwin a lot on windows lately and decided to see if it had better support for cut and paste than the DOS shell does. Quick google seach shows that it’s been available for six years on windows in DOS shell. For anyone else not “in the know”…
If you want mouse select, copy, paste in a DOS shell you can on win2k and above by enabling “QuickEdit Mode” from the shell’s property menu.

I’ve been using the beta for Yahoo mail for about three months now and I really like it. Say what you will about web2.0/ajax/ria or whatever moniker you want to attach to what’s going on on the web; web clients are getting very nice (regardless of the Rube Goldbergness of how some of it’s achieved). Read more »

I remember not quite understanding the big deal about P2P until the first time I downloaded a song from Napster. At which point all the lights went on. Same thing is happening with EC2. I’ve been following the grid/utility computing thing for a while now struggling to keep from falling asleep with the “computing like electricity” analogies and the poorly framed value propositions from IBM (and from others but I’ve seen some really boring stuff from them…).

Now with computing at a dime an hour and with my own dedicated virtual machine (not some rented, pre-configured, job manager, one-size-fits-no-one, instance) connected to cheap on-demand storage and you have the ultimate swiss-army knife. Read more »