Followup: Mimosa

I've never made a mimosa before. It would have been easy to get snacks or beers. Some chose to take the next level, making desserts or fruit salad. Indeed, getting the ingredients for a mimosa should have been simple.

But, no.

I had to go up to Corridor Fine Wines and Spirits, which Google Maps gave incorrect directions for (it's possible Corridor has their directions wrong), adding twenty minutes to a twenty minute trip (then I ate, then looked around). I left at about 11:30, and thought I'd be back by 12:30, but it was more like 1:00. I ended up staying at my house for another half hour, then off to Ikea to get cups.

I still needed orange juice, and I wanted to get these pour spout things that bartenders have. That was a bit of a mistake. I knew a liquor store in Rockville that I thought would have it. Alas, they only served liquor and beer. No knick-knacks. They suggested I go to Target. There's a huge Target there, but again, no real luck.

So I went to Giant to get the juice, and again, no luck in finding the spout thingy.

As I was driving on Rockville Pike, I saw Whole Foods, so I tried looking in there. Nope. Then, I eyed The Container Store. Surely, they had it. Right now, the time is around 4:10. The party started at 3:30. I have champagne and raspberry liqeur in the freezer at work. I'm a little concerned it will freeze and shatter, though I figured it was alcohol, which has a lower freezing temperature than water, and so it shouldn't really freeze. Even so, an hour and a half might get there.

I get back to the office, and fortunately, the drinks are chilled, and dragged it to my car, and headed to the event, which was only 10 minutes away. I arrived a little after 4:30, about an hour after it started.

I ended up drinking about four glasses of mimosa, and three other people drank three more glasses, which means I didn't use up even one of the two bottles of cheap champagne I had.

But I'll say, there's something nicely elegant about the entire set up. Mimosas are easy to make, and the YouTube video at The Art Of The Drink was really quite convenient, because I had a visualization of what to do. It looks far cooler making it, given the ease of making it. Of course, I spent nearly 5 hours running to and fro trying to get all the stuff, and spent a pretty penny too, given all of that.

So for those of you who have a bunch of guests, and don't mind the effort, I highly recommend trying to make mimosas.

I note that I could have made it "fresher" by using freshly squeezed orange juice. I figured it wasn't worth that much effort. I also decided that good champagne wasn't necessary, given the juice would take up much of the flavor. The raspberry was a nice visual touch, though I'm not sure I could easily taste it.

Give it a try if you have the time.

Followup: Lebron

Given Lebron's 48 points in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals, which lead Cleveland to a 3-2 lead, with one more win to take them to the Finals, Detroit's plan was simple. Stop Lebron. Double-team him. Triple-team him. Usually, if there's no other good player on the team, you can stop one team's best player.

Normally, a guy like Larry Hughes would be the number two choice. Or maybe Ilgauskas? The names don't roll off the tongue. These aren't the Celtics of the 80s, nor the Lakers of the 80s. It's not the bad boys of Detroit from the late 80s. Even the Spurs, now the odds-on favorites to win, have at least three weapons in Duncan, Ginobli, and Parker.

But the guy who came though in Game 4, when Hughes was hurt, one Daniel Gibson, nicknamed Boobie, who had a 21 point outburst, topped himself, when Detroit made it their mission to shut down King James.

Gibson poured in 31 points, on a night when James was held to 20 points. And it wasn't a Iverson-like 31 points where he misses more shots than he made. Boobie was in the zone, eerily efficient in his scoring. 12 of 15 free throws. 5 of 5 on three point shots. 7 of 9 field goals made. When making 50% of your shots is a pretty efficient night, Gibson was stratospheric, making 70% of his shots.

Lebron knew that Detroit would try to shut him down, and looked to Gibson to bail him out. He told him to have no fear, to take the shots when he had them. Lebron had been mentoring Gibson this season, and his faith paid off in Lebron's first trip to the finals. The NBA, fearing the blah Pistons and against the blah Spurs, were understandably relieved when Cleveland made it through. Flip Saunders now has to fear for his job, a guy who has his team play great in the regular season, but unable to take the step that Larry Brown did, that is, giving the Pistons the title.

Instead, King James and, as importantly, Boobie Gibson, have put the Cavaliers in the finals. No one expects the Cavaliers to put up much of a fight to the Spurs. The Spurs have so many weapons and play suffocating defense. The Cavaliers, one might say, is just Lebron James. But maybe no longer.

Stockton and Malone. Jordan and Pippen. Shaq and Kobe. Is it time for Lebron and Gibson? Will we look back years from now and say it wasn't Lebron that was the real steal, but Gibson?

Portland Natively

You know who Brokeback Mountain was directed by? That's right, Ang Lee. Ang Lee started off with films made in Taiwan, most notably, The Wedding Banquet and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. Emma Thompson gave him his first opportunity to do a picture in English, Sense and Sensibility, which she both starred in and wrote the screenplay adaptation for.

But do you know who was supposed to have directed it? Gay director, Gus Van Sant. One has to imagine that would have been a completely different film.

Gus Van Sant has completed a film called Paranoid Park written by Blake Nelson, who sets the story in Portland. Van Sant has cast local Portland natives in this film adaptation.

That made me think that Nelson's thinking of what makes Portland Portland is completely different from my perception. After all, I wasn't even there an entire week, and have no idea about what makes a certain place the way it is.

Indeed, if a city's effect isn't purely based on landmarks, and on local sports team, and perhaps a dance club, or an eating establishment, or a music scene, then what exactly makes a city a city? There's always the people themselves.

In any case, I'm curious to see Van Sant's film, at the very least to get a sense of what one director's vision of Portland is.

Kid's Play

A fairly common trivia question asks what the first video on MTV was. The answer is Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, a perhaps appropriate title for a new network that would lead to a burst of creativity for visual mediums, even as America wasn't ready to actually watch music being played.

The band above consists of a harpist, a mandolin player, and a bassist, singing, rather impressively the same song. The call themselves, The Wrong Trousers, after the best of the four Wallace and Gromit films/

Give it a listen.

By the way, it's a bit odd when the same performers are filmed and YouTubed by two different people, so here they are again, at a different angle.

King James

Four years ago, people wondered if he was over-hyped. Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, heck, even Moses Malone, were players that skipped the formality of college, and jumped directly to the pros, much like their European brethren. Not every high school students who makes the leap is successful, but no NBA team wanted to be the one that missed the opportunity to get next Kobe or Kevin.

Four years ago, Lebron James was anointed The Chosen One. In a league filled with superstars, the NBA was looking for one to replace Michael Jordan, and they said Lebron was the one. Despite the comparisons to Michael Jordan, people saw him more like Magic Johnson, a guy who was just as willing to pass it as he was to take it to the hole.

Most pundits warned not to expect much from Lebron that first year. Yao Ming didn't exactly wow them right away. The less said about Kwame Brown, the better. No one would have been surprised if Lebron had a slow start, or even failed to live up to the promise, even as a few felt certain that Lebron was different.

Lebron was drafted by Cleveland. Being an Ohio boy, staying at home was seen as a boon for the local team, which had not seen much glory since Jordan himself was regularly beating Cleveland. The first two years, Cleveland came close to making the playoffs, but not quite.

Last year, Cleveland made it to the playoffs, where they were facing the resurgent Washington Wizards, making its second consecutive playoff appearance. The previous year, the Wizards had beaten a Chicago team that was also trying to rebuild its fortunes, ever since Jordan, then Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen, and the rest of the original Bulls left. They were young, with Kirk Hinrich replacing Jay Williams who had himself a bit of a biking accident, leaving Chicago short of a point guard.

The Wizards were looking to take the next step, but Cleveland, in its first playoffs with Lebron had other ideas, and eventually eliminated the Wizards. The Wizards, poised to make a decent playoff run, was hurt when not one, but two of its leading scorers (Gilbert Arenas and Caron Butler) went down with season ending injuries, and though they crawled into the playoffs, they were swept in four by Cleveland.

Cleveland then knocked out the Nets, recent finalists themselves, in 6 games. They were expected to lose to Pistons, although they had pushed them to 7 games last year. Detroit had a bit of an edge, taking the first two games by identical scores of 79-76. In game 1, Lebron passed up the last shot, and was chastised by the media for not playing the superstar. In game 2, Lebron had an opportunity to tie the game, and took, but missed the last shot.

Cleveland won the next game, which was close, too, but Larry Hughes, former Washington Wizard, got hurt, and it seemed James would have to look to the next year to try again. Although, Hughes pulled a Willis Reed and came out for a few minutes, but was largely ineffective. Due to the surprising play of rookie, Daniel Gibson, who scored 21 points in the game, Cleveland won game 4, and they tied up the series.

The NBA, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to make deals with TNT, making it impossible for those without cable or satellite to watch the games until the final. I had resigned myself to watching it on the web, where the ebb and flow seemed to go back and forth, and it seemed, near the end, that Detroit would win it, after all.

With three minutes to go, Detroit had an 88-81 lead. Lebron would score 2 points, get fouled, miss the free throw, and have his team recover the rebound, then they would get fouled, and Gooden (of Cleveland) would make 2 more free throws to bring the game to 4 points with 2:49 to go.

Lebron would score 3 to make it a one point game, then he'd score 2 to give Cleveland a lead of 1, then Billips would get 3 to give Detroit a 2 point lead, then Lebron would score 2 more points to tie it again, and it would go to overtime.

He would score every Cleveland point in the double overtime win, and scored 29 of his team's last 30 points.

Most pundits saw it more than simply a gutty win, one where Lebron had a signature moment. They were thinking that he may be on the verge of greatness, and this would be one of many moments like it in the future. People want to say they saw the next Michael Jordan and realized it while it was happening.

Will it happen? People had thought that Carmelo Anthony and Dwyane Wade were better than Lebron, two players that entered the league when Lebron did. Is Lebron ready to take this team to the finals?

Are we all witnesses to Lebron's coming of age in the NBA?

Liquor's Quicker

Last October, I went to Seattle to watch Sufjan Stevens in concert. This was the last leg of a US tour before he would head to Europe and perform there. When I arrived, I wanted to try some of the restaurants in Seattle, and settled on a breakfast place whose name escapes me.

The place seems a bit like a hangout for art types. I had to wait about twenty minutes to get seated because there was limited seating.

On the menu, there was a drink called a mimosa, which sounds like a make of porcelain. I asked what it was, and was told it was a mix of champagne and orange juice. Since then, I've learned it's sort of like a Bloody Mary, a drink people often drink on Sundays, presumably after a night of drinking. But unlike a Bloody Mary, which always seemed like an odd, hardcore drink remedy (to avoid a hangover, drink more!), a mimosa seemed more elegant, more refined.

Recently, I was invited to a party (more of a get-together). I was trying to figure out what to bring. Beer's a common choice. Simple, no fuss. I wanted to try something fancier. Originally, I thought I'd try to make sangria. Sangria is a drink made from wine, sugar, and a lot of fruits that sit in the drink. Often, you add ginger ale to it. It's kind of a cross between wine and fruit punch, and people think of summer.

But it does require a few ingredients, fruit being the minimum. That seemed a bit complex, and I wanted something simple. I then recalled my Seattle trip and my first experience with a mimosa and figured that couldn't be too hard.

Of course, being the geek that I am, I use the resource everyone seems to use, which is the Internet, more specifically, Wikipedia. In particular, this entry on mimosa, which conveniently had a link to The Art of the Drink's take on mimosa.

In particular, they suggested a mimosa royale, that uses a black raspberry liquer to kick it up a notch, as it were. Ah, that meant finding a raspberry liquer. Heck, I wasn't sure I knew what that was. Yesterday, I was at a liquor store, and saw the fruity concoctions, such as that, were put in the cordials section of the store.

I wanted to find a good liquor store, and hoped that the local Washingtonian would offer advice. Alas, while they do a good job of ranking restaurants (or at least pointing out good restaurants), they don't bother with liquor stores. Most liquor stores really rely on customers wanting beer, and not being too particularly picky about it. They aren't trying to have an eclectic selection. A few American beers, a few Japanese, a few European, and most people will be happy.

I eventually stumbled upon a place that I had been to about two years ago, but had forgotten about. This was the Corridor (Fine) Wine and Spirits. As liquor places go, this is like the Mecca of liquor. I'm sure there's some irony in saying that. Perhaps, I should say it's the IKEA of liquor stores or the Costco of liquor stores, mostly in that it's frickin' huge. Not IKEA huge, but huge nonetheless.

I mentioned this to Vasile, saying that this was perhaps the best liquor store. Of course, I was wrong in that sense. He mentioned that Rob had been in Germany, and visited a wine store where there were different rooms set at different controlled temperatures, where various wines sat. In Germany, they care enough to have multiple rooms, climate controlled, for certain kinds of wine.

Corridor's not like that, and therefore, it's closer to IKEA or Costco. Volume of choices is what they are about.

And it's stuck in what seems like redneck Maryland, built into the kind of suburban sprawl that afflicts much of the US. Nearby is a Kohl's and a Target thus leading to the truism "Thou shalt not build a strip mall in Maryland without a Kohl's and a Target". I ate at a nearby Panera, getting coffee and soup. You'd think you'd find such a place closer to a bigger city, but it was fine. I got a little lost finding it, thus adding about twenty minutes to my trip.

Then, I came back and realized I should get wine glasses, but this time, I would go to IKEA. One thing they make cheaply is wine glasses.

Now, I'm out to find an attachment you put on top of a liquor bottle to pour something out of.

Oh, did I mention? I've never made a mimosa, let alone a mimosa royale. We'll see how that goes.

Kitty Ha-Ha

Ever go to the grocery store and see those tabloids? Or even the classy Hollywood rags like People? Ever wonder who buys them? Are they teeny-bopper girls trying to figure out who's hot in Hollywood or not? (Is Ashton Kutcher no longer hot?). Are the middle-aged, soap-opera watching blue-haired ladies?

Why on Oprah's (and Al Gore's) green Earth would they waste their time trying to keep up with these pointless trends? Don't the have real lives?

But sadly, we in geekdom have our own dirty laundry, our own fetish. What it is depends on whatever moves the geek community.

Lately, it's been cats. Cats that are semi-illiterate. They get into everything! They're watching us from everywhere! And with such bad English!

As with any such trend, we geeks must give it a name, and indeed, we have. These cats are called lolcats, which puts two words together that only a geek could love. There's cats, of course. And there's lol.

Lol, for the IM/chat/messageboard deprived is short for "laughing out loud". When someone writes something funny, they type "lol".

Thus, these cats are "lolcats" although it's difficult to tell whether we are the ones laughing at the cats or whether, in their infinite curiosity, and plans to take over the world (or at least our hard drives) are the ones lol-ing at us.

Indeed, it must be so, because Wikipedia says it's so.

Here's one of the top blogs devoted to lolcats.

If you pay attention, you can begin to construct the grammar used in lol cat postings, and while most of us lack the geek chops or desire to do this, one Anil Dash has spared you the effort.

Lolcats appears to be a few months old, say, since the end of last year. Perhaps they were around longer, but needed time before enough of geekdom embraced these wily kitties.

The rest of us can worry about who adopted whom, why LiLo's life is down the toiler, why David Hasselhoff prefers to dine on the floor, why Alec Baldwin yells at his daughter. You know, useful stuff.

Get Smart

We always knew it.

Tony Kornheiser is one smart guy. The reason he runs the best sports radio on the air is that it isn't purely about sports. Mr. Tony is at least as passionate about music as he is about sports. He invites people to talk about movies, while other people just blah-blah-blah about Terrell Owens or Barry Bonds or any number of bad boys of sports. They put up rhetorical questions, invite callers to phone in questions, where they invariably beat down on them, wondering why they bother with calls.

Tony dispenses with all that. He doesn't take calls. Listeners may want to hear themselves on the air, but they aren't paid to come up with bon mots and witticisms in print. They aren't paid to have great insight. It's not that they can't, it's that so few of them really have something smart to say.

Today, Tony was talking to the sardonic Washington Post movie reviewer, Stephen Hunter, discussing the latest Kevin Costner movie (I hadn't heard of it) called Mr. Brooks where he plays an urbane serial killer (sounds familiar, Mr. Hopkins). In it (must like the film Copycat) there's a younger character that wants to imitate and learn from the master.

Hunter points out that it's about being cool and who's cool enough to do these grisly deeds, implying Costner, the upper class guy is, and Dane Cook, the wannabe somewhat-lower class guy, lacks this.

Then, Tony makes a really smart comment that shows (unlike Arsenio) that he's listening. He says "So he must kill this other guy". If the other guy is annoying, and the lead guy is a killer, it seems to follow that he should get his just desserts, no?

And even if it doesn't happen, that it makes sense for it to plausibly happen is insightful, far beyond what the average person would say, as they'd be totally uninterested in the movie.

And that's why I listen to Mr. Tony.

The Simple Life

Take a look at the following video:



The guy who did this goes by the name "DaxFlame". I think I've seen his videos once before, and didn't pay too much attention to it.

Your first impression might be "can a person be more annoying?". But why would you say this? Then, you start to think "Oh, oh, he probably suffers from mental retardation". Indeed, if you can watch the entire "vlog" (DaxFlame does a video blog), he's ecstatic about seeing the most beautiful woman ever (a lifeguard).

He said he had gone to a slide, and tried to go down real fast. He wants to go their as often as he can (but his mom probably won't let him). He thinks she's noticed how he was sliding so fast.

And the reaction is "You're kidding, right? That girls thinks you're a total weirdo, a mommy's boy" and so forth. You're not comfortable with the guy. Yet, he's so infectiously exuberant as he is socially awkward. His speech stutters. He thinks of something he wants to say, but changes his mind, and says something else, and this happens several times in a sentence.

Then, you think, why should I react this way? It brings you to regress to middle school or elementary school where socialization means trying to fit in, to figure out what's normal or acceptable, and sometimes failing. If you're repulsed (initially) by DaxFlame, it may be for exactly this reason. This was the kind of person you didn't want to be, even if DaxFlame doesn't know any better.

So you wonder if those strong childhood reflexes, your sense that you shouldn't react like this because you're a frickin' adult, are more powerful than you imagine. You realize that as mature as you are, some things are burned in from experiences as a kid. Is this experience quintessentially American, brought about by the kaleidoscope of growing up in the US?

Then, you might say, as awkward as he is, there's something oddly beguiling about what he does. And you might see that he has fans.

And then, your mental thought-experiment is jerked to reality. And you say, "Can I really trust anything I see on YouTube?". And, so here's a follow-up video:



This is done by another guy, named Derek Sigafoo. Apparently, he also "vlogs".

He's certainly less socially awkward, more typical of someone you might meet. There's perhaps an obsessive-compulsiveness, which earns big-time geek points, as he tries to figure out whether DaxFlame is as he appears, a somewhat mentally challenged, but overly excitable fellow, who has engendered a bit of a following, or whether, like Lars Von Trier's The Idiots, he's trying to reach his inner idiot, realizing in some bizarre stroke of genius, how to capture this total awkwardness into an act, and produce fresh material.

Derek investigates this showing he has mad geek chops, and finds some evidence (not terribly strong) that DaxFlame is more of a put-on than he appears to be. But, even Derek makes a compelling argument. He says "I love DaxFlame! Even if he's not real, I'd still watch every episode.", because there's some vaguely real about what DaxFlame does. If he's faking it, you don't feel completely offended (I'm sure you could if he were trying to push buttons), but instead he forces you to re-evaluate what you think about someone like Derek, and if it is indeed an act, it's due to strong observations about how people are.

And of course, the slightly scary thing is, that if you know enough geek types, you realize that this kind of mental retardation is honestly that close to the kind of social awkwardness (or as Lance might say "Asperger's!") that you might see in a geeky fellow. That being bright in a computer sort-of-way can sometimes be at odds (at least amongst us Americans--is it cultural?) with being smooth with da ladies.

And even Derek's follow up shows another facet of this, and of both their needs to be online, and for the kind of online communities to care enough to watch.

Indeed, are the lives of those on the edge, vlogging about themselves, the future of entertainment?

More Cats

A better example of the kind of cat craze sweeping geekdom. A montage of kitty posters.

Sweet Revenge

For a long, long time, I'd avoid artificial sweeteners. The pink stuff (saccharine), the blue stuff (aspartame), the yellow stuff (sucralose). No sir, give me real sugar (or, sigh, high fructose corn syrup).

But then I started gaining weight, because as a software engineer, I didn't move a whole lot, and I ate out a whole lot. This lead to weight gain.

So I reluctantly started to have diet sodas, and to get my coffee with Splenda (the yellow stuff). All the fake stuff do something that's practically insidious. Since the three sweeteners are extremely sweet, often you only need a packet, possibly two, to get it as sweet as you want.

If you try to get it that sweet with sugar, you need at least twice as much sugar. You need 4 relatively large packets, rather than two rather slim packets.

And that's where they get you. Because one day, they'll run out of the artificial stuff, and you'll reach out to get the sugar to sweeten that tea or that coffee, and you'll put two packets in, and drink it, and then realize it's not sweet enough, then add two more packets, and say, OK, that's pretty sweet, but then think "OMG! I'm going to get so fat eating this much sugar!"

By making the stuff much sweeter, you need less of it, and only when you compare it to how much sugar you need to dump in to get the same effect do you feel the tremendous guilt of sugar.

Of course, you could be strong. You could stop eating sweet things altogether. But you're not strong. Once it's sugar-free, you might drink two, three, four, five, heck, six cans of soda a day. The sheer guilt you would have drinking regular soda disappears. You convince yourself that the soda you're not drinking allows you to eat other foods more freely.

And so you gain weight. And then you think, "Well, I really can't stop drinking soda now, can I? It's the one thing that's got no calories". How many people have really lost weight by drinking diet soda? Not too many, I'd imagine.

Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta get some of that yellow stuff more my coffee.

How to Improve Wikipedia

Wikipedia gets a bad rap. Since anyone can edit it, people do. Yet, it's often filled with pretty timely information, faster than real encyclopedias can manage.

But sometimes I want to see what's happened to the page. There should be some way to scrub through the various settings. Perforce (a version control system) has a feature with a horizontal scrollbar, where you can move it across timelines and see the various changes. That feature would be neat, as would a way to play the changes in slideshow format at pause it when you want to see it.

What do you think?

Turtles All The Way Down

I was attending a conference, and the speaker used the phrase "turtles all the way down". This is a bit obscure, so I'll explain. Apparently, someone, perhaps an atheist, perhaps someone believing in evolution, or some such was talking about the Earth being round.

This woman proclaimed that the Earth was not round, but was carried on a turtle's back (that's digging to some old mythology). The speaker, being clever, (it's alleged to be mathematician, Bertrand Russell) asked the woman "Ah, but what does the turtle stand on?". She said "Very clever, young man. But I have an answer! It's turtles all the way down!"

Despite this odd explanation, it's seen as a kind of infinite recursion/regression.

Of course, you could read Wikipedia (which I consulted).

Japanese Beer for Kids

Sing along!

Who Jumped on the Ruby on Rails Bandwagon?

Ruby on Rails was released around Fall 2004 by one David Heinemeier Hansson. He had been working on an application for 37Signals and extracted out a web framework. I heard of ROR in Fall 2005, so maybe a year later. Dave Thomas was already extolling its virtues as part of No Fluff Just Stuff. I heard DHH give a tutorial on it during ETECH in March 2006.

I attended Railsconf 2007 in Portland last week. I was curious to see who was attending. With 1600 attendees, I barely met half a dozen people, which is very tiny.

Among the things I pointed out was the numerous white folks at the conference. I think I eventually counted about 4-5 African Americans, though I'd be willing to believe the number was 2-3 times that much. I saw some Indians, some Asians, some women, but really, white males dominated this conference.

Does that mean ROR is racist or sexist?

I know. It's a silly remark to make. Ask yourself who would jump on the ROR bandwagon? You realize several things. First, ROR, as the first "R" so boldly says is "Ruby". Ruby, as you can tell by its name, is not Java. It's not C#. Heck, it's not even ASP or PHP. It's not C, nor C++. It's not even frickin' Scheme. This means that anyone who learns it is on their own, unless they want to create a RUG (Ruby User's Group).

Contrary to popular belief, not every working software developer is all that keen about what they do. As a profession, we have the dubious distinction of working in a field that reinvents itself every five years, and that's rough. It's not surprising that the video game generation has done so well as programmers, because they've learned to negotiate the minefield of learning to play one new video game after another. They learn that each game has new aspects, but all their old skills aren't useless, and can be applied to make heads or tails of this new game.

Still, most developers are content trying to do their job, and aren't particularly fascinated by learning new things, especially since many do maintenance code work. From that, a small percentage actually likes to learn new things, and from that, an even smaller percentage is willing to take the leap to work in this new arena. Sometimes, they're "lucky". The choice is made for them from above.

But what about everyone else? Those are the folks that make the leap to Ruby and to Rails even when no one else is doing it. And then, they have to shell out some bucks to attend Railsconf. Even folks on the Rails Core group didn't attend Railsconf, so you can imagine a reasonably hardcore developer might not bother to make the trip.

All told, the average Railsconf attendee is far from average. Someone work works with Ruby on Rails or is at least sufficiently fascinated to attend a relatively pricey conference. It's perhaps not surprising that this weeds out a fair number of people who could attend. Women, minorities, even those you might expect in larger numbers (Indians, Chinese, Korean, etc).

Dave Thomas pleaded with the community in his closing keynote to reach out. Surely he understands that the community, as is, is as new as new can be. These are the Pilgrims who abandoned culture to live in backwoods America, who gave up conveniences to rough it. It shouldn't be surprising that the community doesn't look like the community as a whole.

The question remains: how stable will this community be? Are they committed to it for a period of time? Or will we look for the next shiny new thing in 3-4 years? Java is now entering its 12th year (or so) of popular existence. Will Ruby and Rails last that long (yes, yes, Ruby was released prior to Java, so in that sense, the answer is already yes--but I mean in the popular sense).

How will this community evolve? When will it begin to reflect the development community at large, and will it begin to redefine what the community looks like?

Culture and Baseball

Recently, despite a win, Daisuke Matsuzaka, the hundred million dollar pitcher from Japan, issued an apology despite a win. Indeed, Matsuzaka has had six wins in a row, but his ERA is above 4 during that stretch, which, to non-baseball types means that, yes, he won, but mostly because his team scored more than his opponent.

A pitcher is, effectively, a defensive player. His goal is to prevent the other team from scoring. However, if his own team is prolific at scoring, he doesn't have to be so good. Even so, for the money he's paid, Matsuzaka felt a bit ashamed, and did what a Japanese player would do, which is apologize.

Shame is a big thing in Asia, and the Japanese apologize for things that Americans wouldn't. An extreme example was Hideki Matsui of the New York Yankees. He had broken his arm during some play, and apologized that he had broken his arm. Again, par for the course for the Japanese, but an American would claim that it wasn't his fault, and there was nothing he could do about it.

American baseball commentators generally find such apologies quaint, if not amusing. I'm sure the commentators chalk such attitudes up to cultural differences, even as they may not fully comprehend it. After all, how many people take the time to study another culture. Perhaps Matsui and Matsuzaka are expected to issue apologies. It is the correct thing for them to do, to accept blame for even things that are out of their control.

Americans are slowly becoming more multi-cultural. We eat at a variety of places. Pho, sundubu jigae, iddly, pad thai are now part of vernacular of those who stray beyond burgers and pizza. We try to gain some sense of how other cultures work, even as it's tough for some.

Baseball was something the US used to export to other countries, and we saw it as quintessentially American. Now that those exports have come to the US to be in the big show, we are beginning to reap international results from seeds sown afar. And while we figured they'd be the one adapting to us, meeting folks half way seems like a good idea.

Ruby for a New Generation

Man, I'm blogging a storm today. I think I'm trying to outdo how many entries I had last month. I'm blogging at an average of a post a day, but today I have like 5-6 posts alone.

In my last post, I said Java succeeded because it's being taught in high schools and colleges. If Ruby (and Rails) would like the same success, they need to seriously encourage high school kids to embrace Ruby, and with it, I hope, test-driven development.

Chad Fowler and the guys at Ruby Central are pushing this notion of a giving community, though charities. Dave Thomas implored audiences to make a tradition of giving to charities at conferences like Railsconf.

But it's time Ruby and its community start to help itself in this charity. Just like the tennis industry wants kids from the inner cities to learn to play tennis (many of those kids opt to play football or basketball instead), the Ruby community ought to think of ways to talk to high school kids and encourage people to develop Ruby on Rails projects.

So here's my idea. Create a Rails school for high school students. Alas, it's a little too late for this summer, but next summer would be an ideal time to get it set up. Heck, open it up to college kids too.

I'd even volunteer to do it.

Well, volunteer isn't quite the right word =).

Is Ruby (and Rails) Overly Hyped?

It was, what, 1995. Maybe 1994. The World Wide Web had the biggest assist that lead it down to the road it's been on ever since. No, not the search engine.

Mosaic.

Mosaic was the graphical browser, the predecessor to Netscape, which begat IE, and eventually Firefox and Opera and other lesser known browsers.

Nearly hand-in-hand with the advent of the graphical web browser was Java. Java was originally conceived as a language to be used with a precursor to WebTv. C++ was seen as too difficult a language to work with. Sun's language experts stripped away some of the nastiness of C++ and created Oak, which was rechristened Java, and then retooled it for the Web.

At the time, people thought Java was overhyped, but the hype worked. It created a huge web industry. You know, enterprise Java solutions. And I'm not talking about Kirk and Spock and the rest.

I suppose, Microsoft being Microsoft, released it's .Net environment, and when Sun said Microsoft could no longer develop Java, they simply created C#, which is basically Java, though some claim a nicer Java.

Since then, there hasn't been anything that's been hyped like Java or C#, at least, language-wise (Ajax and some web technologies were hyped).

Until now.

Well, until three years ago. In July 2004, David Heinemeier-Hansson, of 37 Signals, released Ruby on Rails. He created a web framework built on Ruby.

Now, Ruby was a bit obscure then. I had heard of it. At the time, there was Perl, Python, and lagging way back was Ruby. But you could get a book on Ruby, which is presumably how DHH found out about it. The three are considered "dynamic languages", though Python and Ruby fit that category more truly than Perl.

They've been denigrated as mere scripting languages that don't do what "real" languages like Java, C++ do, which isn't really true. Most of these languages have an interpreted environment and avoid strong typing. While this sounds horrendous to lovers of strong typing, it does create simpler code, even if, I imagine, it creates nastier code to debug. This is why TDD (test driven development) has been pushed so heartily, to overcome what is an obvious problem.

Java's success lead government agencies and real companies to adopt the technology, and because so much effort was put into it, Java's reality matched the hype. No one invests that kind of energy to dump the technology. Even now, Java technology (say, Struts) from 5 years ago hangs around today because companies are loathe to pick up the latest technology.

And one can't underestimate that Java was picked as the language for the AP exam, which means that many a college and many a high school picked it as the language to teach students. This was a huge coup, because that meant many hundreds of thousands of students learn Java.

Not every college has been quick to adopt Java despite all that. There's still plenty a college that adopted C++ back in the 90s and has not bothered to switch, mostly because academics, being academics, aren't interested in following what industry does. They often lag way behind wondering why they have to keep learning new stuff. Aren't they the experts now? Goodness, another language?

Still, even as the AP exam flirted with C++ for what? Ten years? Sometime in 2002 or so, the AP exam moved to Java, so they aren't likely to adopt Ruby anytime soon.

The Ruby Revolution may be hampered by that, but that might be OK for now, because C++ was around for a few years before colleges adopted it.

One can argue that Ruby, a language that was around since 1994, but wasn't around the US "popularly" since around 2000, but really got its big push with Rails.

I had been wanting to learn it for quite a while now, and hope to make a push soon to learn more of it. I understand the basic syntax, but haven't had a good program to write until now (well, I'm still deciding what to use).

Railsconf, i.e., a conference helps out. Even a big site like Twitter helps Rails fame. But, I don't know whether the industry is fully prepared to embrace Ruby and Rails. What helps are two efforts: JRuby and Iron Ruby. Both Microsoft and Sun see Ruby as the next step. Will it really be the case? I think it's so new we won't know for sure for a while, but as long as their is enough hype, more and more people will try it out.

Currently, the future may be this homesteading idea, the one put forth by Nathan Talbott, which is letting small potatoes software consultants putting websites up. This almost makes programming a kind of social engineering kinda thing. But is that enough? You get momentum with big companies that invest a lot of money and labor and eventually inertia that will keep Ruby in people's views.

Several things would help Ruby's popularity. One is the adoption of Ruby in high school curriculum. I don't see that happening soon, so the next step is a grassroots attempt by the Rails community to push that downwards, to get interest among the youth.

Hmm, I think I'll blog on that next.

Sony vs. Apple

I just read this article about Sony vs. Apple.

In a nutshell, it says the Apple Store does its job much better than the Sony Style store. I blogged about this a year or so ago, and I'd agree. Sony Style gets so many things wrong that it's hard to believe they can't see it.

First, Sony has too large a product line, and they have boring names. Apple has names like Ipod, Macbook, and Macbook Pro. Sony has names like DSC-W50. Heck, I had to use Google to look up the name. I can't even recall it. And I own the frickin' camera!

Sony's staff tries to be hip, wearing those earpieces, staffed with youth-hip, but they aren't particularly friendly. And this is just one store. I brought in coffee once (I think), and they seemed upset at this. Most bookstores now figure that if there is an accident with food and drink, they'll eat the costs, because the irritation factor is far greater than the actual number of messes that occur.

Apple runs tutorials on using the Macs. They have a Genius Bar. I recently had a positive experience with a guy helping me install XCode, a code base for the Apple so large that I couldn't conveniently download it anywhere. Since Sony doesn't control its own software (using Windows, of course), it would not be helpful in this regard.

This is one of those cases where Sony simply doesn't get it, and why, more than likely, their stores will never be as popular as Apple's.

Japanese Human Art

Much like the Japanese Matrix Ping Pong, using people dressed in black against a black background.