Where’s Lou

So it’s finally time to learn Ruby on Rails. As a software arch I’ve always made it a point to be able to work with all of the tools and technology in the company we could consider using. That hasn’t always been fun, some technologies are more painful to work with than others, but I won’t name names. And now it’s time to learn RoR.

I figured I may as well keep a blog journal of how it goes in case it’s helpful to anybody else. Like there’s not enough material out there already! :)

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Just watched Colbert Report with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales as a guest. There were a few spots where Stephen mentioned, as if in passing, certain articles that could be changed in certain ways. Often with a sidelong glance to the camera.

So I grab the PC and sure enough - by the time you can pull up the page the battle has already been fought and won by the defenders of truth. :) For example the article about Oxygen was saying it’s a poison, and the article about Librarians was sharing with us the fact they’re hiding something.

Big day for fake news though. That interview was right on the heels of Al Gore on Jon Stewart’s show.

For the past seven days or so we’ve had an Ethernet cable running from Alex’s room, down the laundry chute, and over to the Xbox. That was clearly a temporary situation, and this Sunday was phase 1 of the DeJardin data center. I’m having WAY too much fun doing this for some reason.

The first thing that had to change was the location of the cable modem and wireless router. There’s no reason for it to be in Alex’s room, especially since there’s only one thing in there that needs network. The back of the Comcast device has several of the hole-and-slot hangers so it was easy to hang securely from a stud on a pair of screws. The wireless router I was thinking of mounting above the cable modem, but it has no native way of securing it. Then I saw some of that two-sided foam tape in the utility room. Problem solved - now the two devices are one with a very short Ethernet cable linking them.

I’m very happy how cable management turned out. Since it’s in the basement now I strung it all up in the rafters. The power supply I had available also had mounting slots on it, so I put it on the stud off the floor. This also made for a great location for the Trixbox Asterisk PBX server I’d installed recently. It’s on an ancient PC (400MHz 128Mb) that only needs power and network.

Phase 2 should be even more fun. If I can get my hands on a Sipura 3000 or similar device it’s going to be time to rewire all of the phones; at the moment they’re as bad as you would expect in a hundred year old house. So the first step there will be to get a patch panel where the snarl comes together, cut all the wires, punch them down, and see what’s coming from where. Depending on how close that turns out I might take a look at getting some more telephony hardware to have each room in the house have a dedicated extension.

Phase 3 is probably even less likely… But… It sure would be nice if we could pull some cat-5 through the house and get voice/data jacks in each bedroom and the living room. Even if we won’t be in this house forever that aught to be a nice selling point. Fully wired you know? Or maybe it’s just me.

Just the other day I was sitting next to Brenda on a laptop and we were planning on going to the Original Pancake House. Not a bad place by the way. The girls love it. So to avoid another 411 connect charge (Brenda kills me! I can’t train her off of 411!) I went to Google maps to find the business and it’s phone number.

Really simple of course and I find the result on the first try. But next to the number is an innocent looking “call” link.

Now I’m thinking this is a little odd. On the Blackberry I wouldn’t bat an eye - all phone numbers on the hand-held are linked and they’ll place the call from the browser. It’s a phone after all. But here I’m on a laptop. Will it really place the call maybe and use some google talk magic with laptop mic? So I click it.

And the most amazing thing happens. It asks me for my phone number, I provide our land line, and it informs me it’s calling my phone to complete the call. Brenda answers the phone and I tell her she’s going to be connected to the pancake house. (The browser has in fact told me that’s what it’s doing next.) And then it’s done! In as quickly as it took two phones to be answered I had used a web page to place a call between two parties.

Now this is right on the heels of GOOG-411 directory assistance and free call connection. Add to that mix the Google Talk client which implements computer based voice calls in addition to the simple instant messaging.

Now I’m just speculating but this small handful of tricks could be the tip of the iceberg. Who knows if they’ll ever connect the dots, you know? That said you could be looking at a company here that could shake a few paradigms if they step into the personal telephony market in any significant way.

The Xbox is hooked up to the big tv via component cables at 1080i now. That’s the native resolution which is the way to go, based on a tip from Rotzen. Looks good! I also installed a rss video extension to the media center pc that also works great on the xbox media center extender.

So Alex and I can watch stuff like Control-Alt-Chicken together. We both like to cook, and since it’s a cooking show for people who can’t cook it’s perfect for cooking with kids.

For games though I have to say Alex is the one that’s really jumped in head-first. I had no idea the thing was built with such a “live” mindset, but as you can see on this post’s picture from day one Alex was totally plugged in. Here he’s going through some levels on a multi-player fantasy/action game with a friend he’s talking to on the headset plugged into the wireless controller.

I mean seriously. I walked to a friend’s house to play Atari 2600 when I was eleven.

A while ago we needed a new PC. On the previous one the integrated hard drive controllers decided they had done all of the work they needed to do, and with the age of the thing there wasn’t anything worth saving. As long as we were going to be buying a PC to last as long as possible - and I wanted something to work out of the box - we got a fairly powerful Dell. And as long as we were doing that we opted for getting one with a few tuner cards and Windows Media Center.

The reason I start with that story is to explain how this isn’t an impulse buy. Part of the research going into the Media Center was how it would be used in other parts of the house. And as you all know the Xbox 360 comes with the ability to act as a high-def Media Center Extender. So it was always in the cards to have one of those at some time.

And it turns out that “at some time” was last weekend.

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There are a few video podcasts I like to follow. One of them I’ve mentioned before - PixelPerfect - but a few of the others are Diggnation with Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht and GeekBrief.TV with Cali Lewis (pictured here).

Wow. That’s a lot of links. Moving on…

In GeekBrief Cali just aired a segment Digg the Code; “a song to commemorate this moment in Digg history.” It references Kevin’s Post that Brent had provided earlier. I like how they mixed the footage of her with Kevin and Alex. A modern day protest song.

And she’s just so darn cute dancing around like nobodies business.

It looks like the Digg site is being buried by an irate crowd of their own creation. There’s a large hexadecimal number you need to backup your HD-DVD’s - I won’t include it here - but they were pressed to remove some postings from Digg which contained that information. Turns out it can be considered intellectual property. (It’s also been said they get advertising from an HD DVD interested party.) Digg describes their reasoning, quoted briefly below.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg’s Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Sounds fair to me but the Digg crowd didn’t like it. There seems to be a crowd digging everything they can find with the number on it. Just now for example third item in the list on their front page is a post entitled EVERY SINGLE story on front page is the key.

Poor Digg. Poor compainies clinging to DRM based business models, too. They’re keeping busy this week.

Any thoughts on this one, people?

Myself I don’t mind buying music and movies, especially since I’m not a big collector. One of the things I’ve tried to teach Brenda too is: don’t keep the original cd’s in the car! She’s lost a number of them that way. That’s why I really like the clear legal drm free digital license you get with a CD. In fact the DRM on iTunes is something that stops me from investing a lot in buying singles there.

Why is the CD the only format which has those qualities? It’s not like the piracy problems are coming from the people who go out and buy the original media, and it’s not like DRM on digital media is stopping the distribution of ripped content. The industry needs a huge reality check.