RailsConf 2008: Friday Early Morning

30 May 2008

(notes from mostly Randy and a little from me)

Chad Fowler

• Reflecting on the history of Ruby/Rails conferences of old
• Lost Last Ep. apparently glitched last night, thus everyone downloading Lost

DHH

• actually saying something nice about Joel
• used to take Joel’s columns to meetings to say “this is what we should be doing”

Joel Spolsky

• slide of Angelina Jolie… the only slide… trying to get a higher evaluation score
• now showing a Brad Pitt picture… so he’s not a male chauvinist pig
• slide of ian somerhalder… another good looking guy, but brad beats him in a google fight
• he lies about the number slides
• brad is ipod, ian is a zune
• blue chip vs off brand
• blue chip chair is herman miller… lots of knockoffs… like the ones we have at work…
• Angelina is blue chip… Uma Thurman is off brand
• Brad is blue chip… Iam is off brand
• Great software
  • makes people happy
  • obsesses over aesthetics
  • observes the culture code
• Joel does lolcats
• goes through a scenario about how it sucks to install updates on windows…
• the ui sucks
• the progress bars are misleading
• the system now doesn’t recognize one of your devices.
  • You can’t unplug the device. Tell us First. Fuckhead.
  • this experience sucks… makes people unhappy
  • Learned helplessness is a book about how lack-of-control makes people unhappy
• just do something that makes you feel in control
  • Abercrombie & Fitch checkout example
• doesn’t give you a choice over how you checkout… it is a 4 stage process, and you have to do it in their order
  • Amazon example
• you can change your information, you can do whatever you want in any order… you are in control
  • Tips for making people happy
• Put the user in control
• Positive feedback
  • Tips for obsessing over aesthetics
• iphone is way more popular than samsung blackjack
  • but iphone is slower, has a smudge screen rather than a keyboard, doesn’t have exchange compatibility,
  • but the iphone is beautiful… “if you accidentally swallowed it, it would go right down”
• in paris, they don’t have fire escapes, because they are ugly… it’s more important to look good than to survive a fire
• it works… people prefer something that looks good over something that is better
  • Tips for observing the culture code
• the ford explorer has 88 deaths per year
• the toyota camry has 41 deaths per year… it’s not safer to be in an SUV, actually… even though people THINK they feel safer
• SUVs have soft corners, airbags everywhere, cupholders, and are up high. they trick us into feeling better and safer.
  • web 2.0 don’t have visions, they go to parties
  • Misattribution: when you have coffee, you enjoy the movie more… it’s not the movie, it’s the coffee!
  • ends the talk playing “Sweet Home Alabama”... that was a good talk!

(it was interesting, because he didn’t have a final point. At the end he compared some blog posts that DHH and _why wrote about ruby and it had all these good words (passion, love, ...). He swapped them to their antonym and labeled it Java. I expected him to follow with telling us that there was a common misattribution with rails and these feelings and that we could find the same else where)

#railsconf2008

The Webmasters Daemons

30 Nov 2007

I had this crazy idea back at the beginning of 2001. I wrote it down in a text file one morning and forgot most of it.

Musical Theme:

The music from “the Magician’s Appretiace” from Fantasia

Characters:

• apache – hard working httpd daemon, works at a Penguin booth (on linux). Maybe an indian with an apache feather in his hat?
• mysql – apache’s coworker, hands him the information that he hands to the user. Hands him a bucket of info, apache then gives it to the user.
• slashdot.org – you remember when the brooms became a thousand fold in “the Magician’s Appretiace”? * user (or rather the users packets) – come to apache to get info. (stick figures with buckets?)

Events:

We show the webmaster working at his computer (rl). click on his computer his packets are then shown handing info (buckets) to apache, who passes it on to mysql, who pours in to the feeding pool that then starts to drip down to the bucket pool. Then the webmaster at his computer nods off and goes to sleep….

you see a rack behind them… the lights that we can see on the rack go along with the tempo… back to virtual world… a users packets come buy every so often (with music and gets data), apache and mysql work on it and do it with great flourish. They start to get board waiting for users to come…. so the write something down and put it in a bucket and it turns to another color water. both the daemons pore the bucket into their feeding pool and the water turns that color.

the first user who comes along looks at the water when he gets it and drinks…. and is shocked, he starts carrying it to another booth (website) and the daemon there takes the bucket and emptys it into another pool…. (rw: you see rusty or someone look at the their screen and their jaw drops open). The other apache server gets an order and pours the water into their feeding pool… all of sudden all the users coming by start walking to our booth.

the daemons see the users coming and congratulate each other…. the happly fill the users buckets. and see more coming.

one of the users packets go to /. where the fill buckets at ten and a time with jetsprays, and soon as they have the info all the users start coming towards our two daemons.

eventually the webmaster is awoken by the rack lights which are going crazy … sees his bandwidth going thru the roof…. he makes the users stop some how.

#ideas

Why is so hard to find our neighbours?

30 Nov 2007

In Space Radio: More Static, Less Talk we learn how hard it would be to detect alien signals. Also about an formula to figure out how many intelligent lifeforms their might be in our galaxy.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier

27 Nov 2007

I’m about 1/4 of the way into League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier somewhere in the supposed play by Shakespeare revealing the first 007, oh what a trip. Strongly recommended.

Well, at least it's a good list of the other reasons I like him

12 Sep 2007

from reddit Ron Paul is Seriously Flawed as a Candidate; We’re Just So in Love With Him That We’re Not Paying Attention …. Except everything they list as reasons he’s flawed I agree with. It’s just more reasons to love the guy.

#politics