In writing my bio for Portland on Fire, I mentioned that I’d hidden my first name upside down in the “Read Me” file icon used on Macintosh during the late 1980′s: millions of people clicked on this icon to get help, and as far as I know, none of them noticed my name. The Wikipedia page for TeachText (the application I’d written which provides this icon) doesn’t mention this trivia (nor that I wrote it!).

After several years, TeachText was replaced by SimpleText, written by Tom Dowdy; Tom rightfully replaced my name with his; I’m just happy he kept the same style of icon. (I do rib Tom that TeachText was only 19K, where SimpleText was several times that in size.)

UPDATE: Sadly, I learned recently that Tom passed away. I’ll miss him: like many people I got to work with at Apple back then, he was smart and fun. I looked forward to seeing him every year at Apple’s developer conference, where we shared the distinction of being the only “Stump the Experts” experts who’d attended every session of that panel over the years.

I just wrote up a bunch of notes on the Chandler wiki about remote debugging with Wing (the Python IDE), having just finished a session where I fixed a problem that only occurred on an automated-build machine hundreds of miles from here (with two firewalls between me and it).

The Wing docs treat remote debugging as an “advanced topic”, but it really works well once you get over the setup hurdles. Even if you’re just doing remote debugging from a different machine on your desk, it’s a real boon when working on UI code to not have your debugger’s mouse and keyboard interfering with the target’s mouse and keyboard… so give it a try.

I’ve given up and signed up at Twitter – you’ll find my stream of quotidian updates linked from the sidebar on the left, there, as well as here. (I also set up a stream forwarded from Celebrity Death Beeper – I won’t know if it’s working until someone famous dies, though.)

I just got a Chumby, primarily to let me create this widget to run on it: it’s a clock that displays predictions of when the Portland Streetcar will be passing the stops nearest my home. Green dots are northbound; red are southbound. Armed with this, I know exactly when I need to leave the house to avoid a long wait.

(I wrote this using OpenLaszlo – I started with a “clock” demo of theirs, and added some dots and a bit of data retrieval. Click here for this widget in its own window.)

RailsConf inspired me to be more vocal in the community, and one way is for me to share some of the problem workarounds I’ve come up with. Here’s the first one, and I’m posting it in spite of being ashamed of it!

I use an automated mechanism to set up my Ubuntu machines from scratch, but I’ve had trouble with getting “gem install” to install the right version of binary gems: in spite of my efforts to script it, it’s been installing “mswin32″-platform gems under Ubuntu. There’s already a discussion on the RubyGems list about this, but I don’t have the experience with the gems architecture to help drive the decision; in the meantime, I needed a fix.. (more…)

I came from a background of web applications, and after OSCON last year, I spent some time looking into Django, mostly because I’d heard a lot of good things about Rails, and Django was said to be “like Rails, only written in Python” (the language we’re using for Chandler).

I’d initially been put off by Rails’ self-proclaimed “opinionated” nature, worried that their “convention over configuration” would only work for the things I wanted to do that aligned with what they expected.

So, as a learning experiment, I rewrote my film-festival-scheduling application in Django. I liked it, but once I was done I decided to look into Rails, to see what was different about it. Also, I’d gotten to the point that I wanted to add some AJAXy features to the scheduler, but Django didn’t have direct support for any particular AJAX library. That forced me to pick one myself, so I started looking at the most-visible four or five libraries out there (Dojo, Prototype/script.aculo.us, etc.).

Dojo looked the most interesting at the time, but I noticed that Rails had picked Prototype and script.aculo.us — and when I looked at a tutorial or two, I saw that the integration looked pretty tight. This enticed me to watch the Rails tutorial video… which inspired me to look again at the Ruby language, and it all seemed pretty cool.

So, I rewrote the festival scheduler again, in Ruby, using Rails. I found that the “opinionated” nature of Rails doesn’t seem to get in my way; actually, it’s just the opposite: I learned quickly that if I was banging my head against the way Rails worked, I was probably working against Rails, and that there was probably a better way. There usually was, so this newfound sense of smell really helped me get productive quickly.

(I’ve got more work to do on the festival scheduler, but I do expect to open it up to others before too long. When I do, I’ll announce it here.)

I’m still working away at OSAF on Chandler – I’ve just been playing with Ruby and Rails in my spare time. I don’t expect that to change, but you’ll see more Ruby/Rails postings here than Chandler postings – I’ll keep my Chandler contributions on the Chandler blog and mailing lists.

I spent part of Friday and Saturday evening at DCamp, an event devoted to connecting developers and designers for a series of ad-hoc conversations. It was the first of this new kind of un-conference that I’d attended.

My favorite session was Sarah Allen’s talk on Cinematic Web Design: the idea that interaction design can learn a lot from cinematography was backed up by a few great demos of her work on Laszlo applications and a clip from Casablanca. I’ve had trouble buying into all the Web 2.0 hype, but several notions from this talk are helping me sort the important ideas from the chaff.

I also took notes at a talk on Friday on usability in open source software: one of the key thoughts here were that one of the reasons that open source software UI design is so generally bad is partly because designers don’t really have the “currency” it takes to get to leadership roles on open-source projects. Coders can contribute patches, then become committers when their patches look good, and committers can become leaders; designers have trouble participating in this trust economy. (The schism between mantras was also pointed out: developers “scratch their own itches”, but designers avoid the thinking that they’re their own target users.)

Overall, I had a great time: I met several new people and had several good conversations.