Guide to pants off living
November 2005
Mojo The Sock Monkey
Monday, 21 November 2005
This is very cool and very cute. "The Story of Eh" is a new comic book about Mojo the Sock Monkey a adventures worth of short cartoons illustrated by Kevin Cornell. You've got to check out the toons that are on the website. I think this book would make a great Christmas gift.
Posted by travo at 1:24:54 PM
Fire at the old factory
Sunday, 20 November 2005
Woah, to top off an already exciting weekend, the old factory across the street caught fire. Check out all the action on my flickr photo album.
Posted by travo at 9:53:17 PM
Scheiner on Sony
Friday, 18 November 2005
Bruce Scheiner must have long distance x-ray vision, his perspective on the Sony DRM Rootkit is damning.
If your tin-foil hat was twitchy you'd probably start to wonder what other kinds of nasties are on our computers that are ignored by the AntiVirus companies we trust to protect our machines and networks.
Posted by travo at 9:10:18 AM
Engaged!
Thursday, 17 November 2005
Hooray! Meli and I are now officially engaged. I know that some of y'all kinda knew that something was happening, but now it's official since we got the jewels. Or Jools as they're known around here.
Check 'em out in all their glory on Flickr.
Posted by travo at 6:37:04 PM | Comments (4)
Weighing in on the Ruby Debate
Wednesday, 16 November 2005
Since Jonno is practically inciting a riot among the Java / Ruby / Aglie / Oh-my-God-my-head's-so-pointy-I-could-take-someone's-eye-out folk. I thought I might lend some observations from another perspective.
I've been following the SvN Blog over at 37 Signals. These guys are creating quite a stir with their applications Basecamp and Backpack among others which use Ruby on Rails and also implement some AJAX technologies as well. They love Ruby on Rails. They are designers.
Why is the fact that they are designers important? Firstly, 37 Signals is a small team of people working remotely around the globe. You could probably loosely term them an agency.
From my experience, people in agency type environments like to do things quickly. Really quickly. Especially if they, as a team, have some momentum behind their ideas. This is not necessarily restricted to designers either. Programmers love to get cracking on a good idea. In any programming language, if the idea is good.
Designers though are restricted by their toolkit. Sure there might be one or two nerdy type designers who have sussed out html / xml / css, hell even a little javascript thanks to what they've learnt using flash and studying the code of Joshua Davis. But they're still designers; they haven't got the same kinda mileage as a real nerd who has been programming commercially. So their focus isn't necessarily going to be on the same kinds of things as programmers.
37 Signals have been getting excited and writing in their 'Getting Real' column, the same kinds of things that the Agile crew are excited about when it comes to rapid software development; short release cycles, closer customer contact and better applications that end users actually want to use.
So why is Ruby on Rails important here? Because unlike ASP.NET / C# / Java designers can learn it quickly. It is a fairly semantic language. This can enable them with the power to create applications and use terms like 'Object Oriented' and 'Scalable' to help promote and sell their finished products.
ASP.NET just doesn't make sense. C# is wanna-be Java. These two things, make it hard for designers to turn their highly creative ideas into reality.
I think that morons exist everywhere and they are both platform and language independent. For mine, I wonder whether or not Ruby on Rails is popular among some programmers because they're lazy; since this language is an 'easy way out' of learning 'grown-up' techniques.
Posted by travo at 8:52:12 AM | Comments (1)
Shuffling Along
Wednesday, 09 November 2005
I have a heap of my own music ripped to my hard drive at work, about 20Gb worth. I realise this is much less music than many folk I know, but heaps more than most... None the less, I love to listen to albums - all the way through, all the time. But I've been struggling to find stuff to listen to among the hundreds of albums that I have ripped.
So, for the first time I've loaded the entire library, nearly 5000 songs, into the WinAmp playlist and hit shuffle.
Rock.
I'm suprised how much I'm enjoying this. But I'm not surprised how well my eclectic tastes have been blending together; The Beastie Boys followed by some Buddy Guy then by some Garbage, Tenacious D followed by some Perfect Circle. It's really quite cool.
Posted by travo at 3:16:39 PM
Sony DRM : Will Somebody Please Write a Case Study
Tuesday, 08 November 2005
The Sony DRM Rootkit saga is currently one of the most fascinating pieces of 'current affairs' to affect everyday consumers. Unfortunately, this is not something that you'll see on ACA.
I wish my buddies would weigh in on this as I'm very interested to hear their takes on all of this. I'm not sure that it'd entirely interest them, it's probably a conversation to be had over a few beers. Though I'm worried their response might me "Meh" and then more of the same buzzing, whirring and clicking they've been making about WoW since last December!
None the less, I'd like to know about the company that was contracted to write the DRM stuff. They certainly smell like the kind of organisation that talks big when it comes to things like security, but could they possibly be a bunch of hacks who have made some horrible design mistakes.
The opportunity to participate in DRM solutions for a company like Sony is on that would need to be dealt with in a careful and considered process. You're not just creating some pretty little apps to run on some 14 year old's 'putey, you're participating in a large scale corportate effort to control the replication and consumption of digital content.
You'd have better put your thinking caps on and had a good hard thing about what you're about to embark on.
Unfortunately, as demonstrated by Mark at SysInternals (a newly discovered blog, nice one) there doesn't seem to have been a great deal of forethought put into this project. None the less, I still call upon someone, anyone to write a case study, many case studies possibly, which deal with the design mistakes, the business communication response from First 4 Internet and the big fish; Sony's thinking behind engaging some backwater development company to solve one of their most pressing problems: DRM.
Posted by travo at 8:41:43 AM | Comments (1)
Lone Ranger
Thursday, 03 November 2005
I've been working as a team of one for nearly six months now and I think I'm starting to get a little concerned about my sanity. More importantly I'm getting concerned about my skills.
While I'm lucky to be able to work within a much broader team of pretty nice people with good skills, they're not even remotely aligned to what I do - designing web apps, writing code. Which makes for pretty difficult peer review. I like peer review, in fact I benefit greatly from it. The others in the team would disagree, but the review I've been getting lately is for my 'pretty picture' and visual design work - and I appreciate this. But I fear that my programming and app design skills are going south.
The question I guess that needs to arise from this is, 'well Travo, where are you going?'; frankly I don't know. Still, after all these years, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. Today, I'm still bobbing around like a cork in the ocean.
Crap.
Time to make a plan. Time to start talking about the 'C' word. Yup, time to have a think about my career. Eeeeeeek. But I really like bobbing around like a cork in the ocean.
Posted by travo at 9:45:23 AM