Zen and the Art of Programming

Antonio Cangiano January 30th, 2008

Zenbits are posts which include a variety of interesting subjects that I’d like to talk about briefly, without writing a post for each of them.

Ruby and Rails Videos

Blip.TV is now hosting the videos of RailsConf 2007. The audio and video quality is very good even though no slides are shown (but you can always google them). While on the subject, you can also watch the videos for RubyConf 2007 (including slides), Mountain West Ruby Conference, Ruby Hoedown last August, and the fourth edition of RejectConf. If you are in the mood for video learning, also check out Railscasts, RubyPlus, and Rails Envy.

RailsConf ‘08

David has announced that the registration for RailsConf ‘08 is now open. The conference will be in Portland, Oregon from May 26th till June 1st. It’s going to sell out very quickly, so book your spot while they last. I’m almost sure I won’t be able to participate since I’m still dealing with the process of getting my Canadian permanent residency (but we are finally getting really close, and then I’ll be able to travel freely).

Qtrax is a disaster

I’ve been following the (mis)adventures of Qtrax closely. It’s a disaster, the perfect example of how not to launch a product even if they had amazing PR skills and where able to get coverage in the MSM worldwide. The premise was good: share the ad revenue with the artist, and allow users to get music for free. Something that SpiralFrog has been doing for a while. The problem is that SpiralFrog’s catalog is rather limited as far as mainstream music goes. Qtrax claimed to have an agreement with the four major recording labels and a catalog of more than 25 million songs. That was what set them apart and what made the announcement attention worthy. The reality was much harsher. They didn’t have any agreement in place (they essentially lied), they didn’t make the download available when they declared it would be, and the site was unreachable or intermittent all the time. Not only this, but their software is nothing more than a skin on top of Songbird. Downloading songs is basically impossible and the software is unusable at this stage. Don’t even bother getting it. It’s a festival of connection timeouts, 404s and “welcome to Oracle Application Server 10g” messages. A real shame.

Arc: too little, too late?

Paul Graham has finally announced the release of Arc. Graham and Morris have made a forum, a tutorial and installation instructions available on their official ArcLanguage.org site. While Paul clearly states that Arc is still incomplete and requires a lot of refinement, at least it’s out and people can start using it (Paul’s Hacker News has already been adopting it for a while). It’s not vaporware anymore, it’s here. However, amongst the enthusiasm that met this release from curious and early adopters, there are also a great number of people disappointed by Arc’s first (pre)alpha. Keep in mind that many people talked about Arc for several years and had great expectations, perhaps even something close to the mythical hundred year language. What they found is that Arc is currently a skin on top of MzScheme (but not the latest version) that adopts a more concise syntax compared to Scheme or Common Lisp. There isn’t anything too revolutionary, it doesn’t support packages or modules, or Unicode. It uses tables for HTML libraries, and so on and so forth. Paul Graham has a strong influence on the community and I’ve no doubt that many people will put time and effort into learning Arc and will in turn improve it. Heck, even I’m going to give it a shot for fun. However right now it’s not really convincing as an alternative to CL or Scheme itself. Don’t construe this as a harsh criticism towards Arc, it is not. We are talking about a language that it’s in its infancy and that as I said, I plan to experiment with myself. I hope to see it grow rapidly and I congratulate Graham and his team for finally making it available. That said, right now I think it’s a weak release and therefore, in my opinion, the disappointment of many is justified. In any case, good luck Paul, we’ll watch this one closely.

Share your DB2 success stories

ChannelDB2 is looking for DB2 success stories. If you appreciated that great piece of software that is DB2, please share your experience here. If your story gets published, you will receive one of the tokens available in the loot bag: DB2 “paraphernalia”, books, Amazon.com certificates, and so on. If you have a company or a startup, it’s also a good way to get your name out there.

Apple’s quote for $1348.09

A while ago (a couple of months, perhaps) my MacBook Pro was accidentally dropped. It was an accident due to there being far too many cables in my room. It upset me of course, but it’s not the end of the world. It could happen to anyone. Thank Science, the screen is intact and the computer works perfectly. I was lucky. There are a couple of things that bug me though. Aside from a tiny dent in a corner of the top case, when closed down on the base the lid has a slightly wider gap on the left side, than it does on the right side. Also, the the latch on the bottom case must be somewhat damaged because when touched even minimally the lid pops open. These things in no way affect my usage of the laptop, and that’s part of the reason why I didn’t even bother trying to fix it for a long time.

Then a few days ago, for unrelated reasons, I began to question my choice of getting a Mac instead of just buying a top of the line Lenovo T series to be run with Ubuntu. I love Ubuntu and it’s becoming increasingly better with each release. With the exception of Textmate, I started to think that Ubuntu (that I currently use a lot) could easily replace Mac OS X for me. Also, the ergonomic qualities of Lenovo’s notebooks is so nice and as an IBM employee I get a decent discount on them. Okay, perhaps I made a mistake when I reached my purchase decision 7 months ago. I’d never owned a Mac before and I really wanted to. Truth be told, I think that Mac OS X is a very polished operating system and I can’t emphasize my appreciation for it enough. It’s eye-candy on top of Unix. But there are other factors to be considered, especially as a developer, and I feel that Ubuntu could have been just as good as my end choice.

Not only that, but I must also say that my old T42p was a much more comfortable laptop, despite costing half the price. Anyways, it came to my mind that I could either run Ubuntu as my main operating system on the MacBook Pro, or fix the cosmetic issues on the laptop and sell it to buy a nice Lenovo T61p. Cosmetic issues can usually be ignored or easily fixed, but on the second hand market they often impede the possibility of selling it for a good price.

Just out of curiosity I decided to call Apple and ask how much it would cost to get it fixed. The laptop is still under warranty (only 7 months old), but I caused the damage, so I pay, no issues there. The agent on the phone understood the problem very well and quoted me about $200. I specifically asked him if the lid could be replaced independently from the screen (which is in perfect shape) and he confirmed this. So Apple booked an appointment at the Genius Bar at an Apple Store downtown Toronto. I went there on Saturday, by public transportation it took me almost two hours each way. The “genius” confirmed that the latch on the base is somewhat broken and that the upper lid may or may not be slightly warped (hard to tell with the latch issue in place). After a long wait he came back with a quote… $1,348.09. I kid you not. It turns out that the lid is sold as one piece with the screen and the whole display assembly can be replaced for $809. The guy at the genius bar agreed that it’s probably only the base that needs to be replaced. But it’s still $214 dollars for the part, $170 for labour plus taxes. A whopping $437 for a little latch that is not behaving. I wasn’t too happy with being quoted $1350 given the price of the laptop and the fact that I was previously quoted an all-inclusive $200 on the phone. I wasted 4 hours of my Saturday. I’m not repairing an Aston-Martin here for Darwin’s sake.

If you drop an Apple laptop and you break the screen (not my case) you may as well just get a new laptop because it’s going to be cheaper. This is sort of true for any laptop, but I feel that just like Apple makes you pay a premium to get their hardware, they still charge you plenty for any minimal repair. To change the lid they wanted to replace the whole screen. To change a broken latch, they needed to replace the entire base. And $170 plus tax for carrying out the repair!? I’m aware of sites that sell parts and instructions on how to perform the replacement myself and may consider it in the future (changing only the base assembly). For now I’m fine, given that the latch issue doesn’t cause too many problems for me. I must say though that my experience at the yuppie Apple Store made me even more convinced that my choice of getting a Mac in the first place may have been the wrong one. I wonder how long it will take before I’ll follow Mark and Cory and switch back to Ubuntu full-time. The thought both excites and saddens me. Time will tell.

• DB2 , General , Mac , Ruby , Ruby on Rails , Zenbits
• Comments(2)

Antonio Cangiano January 15th, 2008

Benchmark Capital is one of the major VC in Silicon Valley, with a solid track record of successful investments, including giants such as eBay, MySQL and Second Life. A few days ago, Benchmark announced the financing of the Californian company Engine Yard, with an initial investment of 3.5 million dollars. In a climate of hype and easy financing (as long as one is buzz compliant and located in a startup hub in the States) this event could be seen as irrelevant or just the n-th investment, like all the others we’ve seen so far. Here’s why that’s not the case.

Those who hypothesize about the imminent collapse of the web economy are really worried about millions of dollars going towards web sites and small startups that haven’t, to be fair, a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding. The main problem with some of these startups is that they lack both a solid business plan and the ability to attract users en masse, despite being covered with Benjamins from VC and angel investors. They are lottery tickets and nothing more.

A perfect example of this phenomenon is Edgeio, a website that didn’t have anything revolutionary to offer, but which was still able to gather a great deal of cash from Intel Capital. One has to wonder though, how did Michael Arrington and his crew manage to burn $5 Million in only 12 months on a website that could have easily been handled by a few kids in their garage. Just to put this into perspective, if you were to cut a one dollar bill into small pieces with scissors, and were able to do so in 10 seconds, and did nothing else but this for a whole year, you’d just barely be able to destroy 3 million dollars (and that would be working around the clock non-stop). There is nothing wrong with trying (I don’t mean destroying money) and Micheal openly admitted his defeat, which was the right thing to do. I just don’t think you need to spend millions of bucks in the span of a few months, when you can clearly see already that your site is not making any money or serious progress, in return.

When we see this type of hopeless venture obtaining such large funds, a small doubt naturally arises that perhaps someone was in a bit of a rush to participate in the great circus which is Web 2.0, and attempt to get their piece of the pie without the proper understanding of what’s really going on.

Benchmark’s financing for Engine Yard doesn’t belong in the same category of rushed and shortsighted choices. Engine Yard can easily be considered the best Ruby on Rails managed hosting provider available today. They came along in 2006 to fill the need for extreme reliability and scalability when deploying and hosting Rails applications. If you think that they are pricey, it’s just because you are looking at it from the wrong angle. Any company with a mission critical application simply can’t afford to go live without a company like EY backing them up.

In a time when there are plenty of discussions about the deployability of Rails applications, Engine Yard puts business-owner’s minds at ease with a proven, technologically excellent solution that won’t introduce problems of any sort. Try to put a price tag on that and you’ll realize that the cost of a slice from Engine Yard is rather affordable. It’s also a welcome addition that can be used to promote the Ruby on Rails story within the enterprise world. They didn’t bet on being the cheapest, they bet on being the best, and that approach is now paying off. In fact, Engine Yard already had hundreds of customers before Benchmark’s announcement.

The company was doing great even without the help of external funds. They demonstrated their worth by having a very respectable volume of work and had shown, once again, the earning potential of providing business services based on open source technologies. They started small and grew organically without any substantial economic help from VC.

Engine Yard is a geek’s dream, one of those companies where the people who have the skills and do the work, get the money. It’s a hacker company all around. They provided a solution for Rails’ biggest weakness and rightfully so, used this to their economical advantage, while offering a great service. But they have never been shy when it comes to giving back to the community. One of the founders is Ezra Zygmuntowicz, who is very popular in the Ruby/Rails community and the author of the web framework Merb, which is receiving a lot of attention as a possible “lighter and faster” alternative to Rails. A while ago they also hired Evan Phoenix to work full-time on Rubinius, a promising alternative Ruby implementation and a rigorous spec for the language.

What then will they use those millions for? It will enable Engine Yard to expand their worldwide infrastructure and support at a faster pace and at the same time guarantee the future of a rock solid stack for Ruby on the web. In fact, Engine Yard has announced that 5 hackers will be dedicated full-time to the development of Rubinius, while one person plus several part-timers will take care of Merb.

Benchmark Capital’s A series investment is not simply the financing of a Rails related company, it’s an investment in the Ruby community. It will be a big boost for two projects that may very well change the face of web development in Ruby land over the coming years. I always thought that Rubinius and Merb mattered, but with this announcement I really think that they’ve a shot at writing the history of Ruby in indelible ink.

What many people who reported about this news story failed to mention is that it isn’t just a VC financing a hosting company. They are literally financing the research and development of Ruby’s future like, to a certain extent, Sun has been trying to do with JRuby on the Java stack.

Not only that, but Benchmark Capital already invests in many Rails based ventures. Having Engine Yard in their portfolio also means protecting some of their other investments, by facilitating the creation of an ever-stable, reliable and standard deployment stack for Ruby and for Rails applications, which other startups can benefit from.

• Ruby , Ruby on Rails
• Comments(8)

Antonio Cangiano January 15th, 2008

I finally got around to updating my recommended Ruby book page. I decided to split it and create two new pages, one for Ruby and the other for Rails. These include new gems (pardon the pun) such as Obie’s The Rails Way (best book on Rails currently in print) and the fantastic Design Patterns in Ruby.

By the way, the picture on the side is a quick snapshot I took to show some of the Ruby/Rails books I own. In fact, I only recommend books that I own, have borrowed or otherwise thoroughly analyzed. I hope you’ll find my suggestions useful.

Recommended Ruby books

Recommended Rails books

• Books , Ruby , Ruby on Rails
• Comments(6)