I have no idea how to categorize this post from longnow.org about Richard Feynman, a fascinting and personal look at one of the giants of modern physics. Find yourself 20 minutes of pressure-free time and read it, then read it again.
Well, as you’ve stated, we believe that experienced Ruby on Rails developers don’t consider deployment to be a problem; probably annoying at most. They’ve automated/standardized the deployment process for a great deal with Capistrano scripts. Newcomers however see deployment as an insurmountable problem. Consequently, we end up having a situation in which the people who can solve the problem either don’t see a problem or aren’t motivated enough to fix the problem, while the people who do see the problem cannot solve it.
Furthermore, from our personal experiences, newcomers usually want to see immediate results. It’s very demotivating for those people to continue using Ruby on Rails if they have to manage tons of obscure configurations and clusters to ‘just successfully deploy an application’. This leads to very intelligent conclusions, such as that “Ruby on Rails sucks”.
This is exactly what killed my nascent interest in ruby-on-the-web. I continue to love ruby-as-intelligent-shell-script. I may have to give ruby-on-the-web another go.
These are the slides from a presentation I gave to about 80 developers at work at a recent day-long training event.
Yesterday the news came out that Chris Messina, my DiSo co-conspirator, and Will Norris, author of the WP-OpenID plugin, are joining Vidoop to work on DiSo full time. This is excellent news, for Chris and Will obviously, but also for the ideas and ideals that DiSo represents.
DiSo’s stated goal is to be: “an umbrella project for a group of open source implementations of these distributed social networking concepts.” At the core, DiSo represents an ideal where online “social networking” is not limited to silo sites, where you can enjoy rich interactions with others in that silo at the expense of interacting with those outside. It also means that your online social identity is not a game of tetherball - where your idenity can follow you around some, but it’s still tied to that one provider (I’m looking at you, Google).
No, in the ideal that Chris, Will, Stephen Weber, myself, and many others envision, your identity, your friends/contacts, your interactions can be managed from a space that you control - your own site. This may be a weblog - WordPress is the DiSo Project’s first platform - or some other type of site, but it’s your site. And by building components on common internet standards (Microformats, OpenID, Oauth, XMPP, etc) your home on the web can join a larger network of people, regardless of platform, including but not limited to those users in the silos.
This is a large goal - a grand scheme if you will - and it’s being built in the open, piece by piece, by a group of developers who see the larger picture and are contributing their time, knowledge, and skills. Scott Kveton is someone who has been around the Open Web block and is excited about DiSo; by bringing Chris and Scott on board, he and Vidoop are investing in an open future that is looking bright for all of us.
A few of you might be interested in my (frustratingly slow) progress on a Friends/Blogroll plugin for MT. You can watch it take shape in my Flickr set: MT plugin 101.
Apparently some readers have been having problems logging in with OpenID on the site (apparently related to this bug). I think I’ve fixed the problem - if you’ve been trying to login, please give it another shot and let me know if it works.
18 years ago today, in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit on the Space Shuttle Discovery.
the most sophisticated optical observatory ever placed into orbit around the Earth… After the U.S. Congress had authorized its construction in 1977, the Hubble Space Telescope was built under the supervision of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States and was named after Edwin Hubble, the foremost American astronomer of the 20th century. The HST was placed into orbit about 600 km (370 miles) above the Earth by the crew of the space shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990.
Of course, it then nearly immediately needed corrective surgery:
About one month after launch, it became apparent that the HST’s large primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape owing to faulty testing procedures by the mirror’s manufacturer.
(Via The Encyclopedia Britannica’s new free-to-bloggers-and-their-readers program, Image courtesy of HubbleSite)
Read an early draft of my Personal Platform.
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