Late to the Party: Category Personal

Aptana Studio 1.0 Released!

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 12:41:00 +0000

Wow it's been quite a while since I last posted. In the meantime I've been working hard on RDT and RadRails at Aptana and the job has been great. I'm very lucky to have found a way to work on the open source projects I love full-time.

In that vein I'd like to announce that we've released the 1.0 of Aptana. This release is important for a number of reasons. First, we think the product is good-to-go for everyone. Second, we're announcing a Pro version of the IDE. This version is for users who want to support the project so we can keep going, or who want the extra features and perks that come with a license: nightly build access, priority support, IE Javascript Debugger, SFTP/FTPS support and all sorts of other goodies. The support, nightly builds, SVN access also apply to the other components of what we're now calling Aptana Studio: RadRails, iPhone, PHP and AIR. So if you want to be on the bleeding edge of RadRails/RDT development you'll probably want to look into getting a license.

Keep in mind that while we do offer a pro version for those who'd like to support us or the extra stuff, we are still shipping the same codebase (minus the commercial features) as an open source project under GPL. And we plan to remain an open-source company with an open source product. Here's hoping that model will work for us!

Aptana backs RDT, hires me

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 16:41:00 +0000

I'm proud to announce today that Aptana has hired me to work full-time on RDT, RadRails and integrating that work with their existing Aptana IDE which focuses on CSS, HTML and Javascript.

This announcement means that RDT will now have commercial backing (but will remain open-source and free!) and that you should see RDT and RadRails move forward at a much quicker pace than in the past.

This is also great news for RadRails users and Rails developers in general as integrating the two will give you code completion, outlines, help, debugging and much more across the entire stack - from model to controller to the HTML, ruby code, CSS and Javascript that make up your views.

RadRails dying off?

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:02:00 +0000

Kyle Shank of the RadRails team has mentioned that he and Matt are both working on a web startup. Looks like the priority of RadRails is lower for them - after all, RadRails doesn't make money.

It's a shame that this sort of thing happens, but I can't say I'm all that surprised. I've been working on RDT for nearly 4 years now and I can definitely say that people just don't pay for free things. You can beg for donations, but you shouldn't expect them. Given the amount of time and effort - and the sheer number of downloads - it just doesn't pay the bills to run an open source project that passively solicits donations. I estimate the per-user donations for RDT to be at about 1.4 cents*. And if we take out the one large donor? .00071 cents per user.

That doesn't quite cut it for rent and food, unless of course you get the entire world to use your product.

I wish Kyle and Matt well and hope that others from the community step forward and help lead the project onward.

Update: Looks like RadRails isn't dying off - it's getting new ownership.

* This estimate assumes we count RadRails users as RDT users, because RadRails contains RDT. It also uses just the raw zip downloads from Sourceforge for both projects. There is a large number of users we are not counting here who have downloaded via Eclipse's update site mechanism, and who use RDT from other distributions available.

SVN and SVK

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 13:38:00 +0000

Dear Lazyweb:

I would like to take an existing SVN repository of a project (like say, Typo), check out a tagged version, create local modifications and save the modified version in a local/home SVN repository(my blog). Later, I'd like to sync up the local version to a new tagged version of the original repository (Typo), handle any merges locally and then check in the result into my local repository again. Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum.

Is SVK the right job for this? Has anybody done something like this? Essentially its the equivalent of creating a branch on a SVN repository but having that branch in an entirely separate SVN repository instance. I don't have experience with this, so I'd greatly appreciate any pointers anybody out there might have.

Steve Jobs says Apple would love DRM-free music

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 20:51:00 +0000

Wow. Steve Jobs has posted an open letter on Apple's website essentially calling for the big four music companies to abolish their restriction that music sold through iTunes be done with DRM. This combined with hints from Bill Gates that he'd love to see DRM dropped as well, may actually move the discussion to the right players - the music companies themselves. (After all, not only have they pushed for DRM, they actually blackmailed Microsoft into giving them money for every Zune sold!)

It's nice to see the big technology companies are starting to push for the right thing - even if it is because the hassle of keeping up the DRM and recent court battles have pushed them into this position.

RDT gets Refactoring support

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 16:37:00 +0000

Well the cat is out of the bag: Mirko Stocker and his cohorts have committed their refactoring support to RDT's Subversion repository.

This means we'll be able to roll out 0.9.0 with this support. Right now we're working to get it integrated into the build process, so that it will begin showing up in our new builds. I'm pretty excited myself, because I've had little chance to try out their work.

This refactoring support joins other recent work in RDT which allows us to do some occurence marking of variables, code completion and other exciting features (thanks Jason!). There's certainly a long way yet to go to get the tools polished - for instance we still have a hard time doing code completion (or much else) on a file which is being edited while the syntax is temporarily incorrect (the JRuby parser is great, but not so forgiving) - but we're constantly marching forward.

Look for 0.9.0 to come out sometime this month (we're aiming for the 15th)!

Rosie our cleaner

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:00:00 +0000

So, I was lucky enough to get a Roomba Discovery for Christmas from my parents. My wife and I both love her and we've decided she'd be named Rosie.

My father also grabbed a strange TV remote alarm, which is supposed to learn your remote's infrared signals for turning the TV on and off and then send that signal when the alarm goes off (thereby waking you up by turning your TV on). It also should be able to learn the Roomba power/clean command.

But it won't.

Or at least it says it's got it by flashing it's little red lights, and when the alarm goes off those wonderful little lights go off again - but no movement from Rosie. I can't get it to actually learn the TV remote control either, so I guess it's no fault of Rosie.

So, dear lazyweb, are there any other cheap solutions for setting Rosie up on a timed schedule to clean my house while I'm away? Or do I have to buy some accessories from iRobot (which will be more expensive)?

Google Summer of Code Swag

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 12:22:00 +0000

Hmm what is this mysterious package?

It's my Google Summer of Code T-Shirt! That feeling you're having - pure jealousy.

Note to Subaru Marketing: Part Two

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:33:00 +0000

Dear Subaru Marketing:

Hello again! It's been two weeks since we last spoke, and I miss you already. As I mentioned then, I appreciate your efforts to market your vehicles in my area and your attempts at regional advertisements. Since that time you've introduced a new ad referring to I-95. While I'm no expert on geography, I'm quite sure that I-95 runs by New York City and just barely touches a corner of our state - the opposite corner from where you are advertising. Here, I've provided a helpful illustration:

I-95 is the red winding line. Rochester is located at the tip of the arrow.

Perhaps you are trying to save money by referring to a 1,927 mile long interstate highway that spans the entire east coast and running the ad in all those markets as "local". While this is ingenius, to reach Western New York you would likely want to reference I-90, or as we New Yorkers call it, the Thruway. It has the added bonus of stretching the entire continental US's northern states.

But those are really just semantics, after all you've discovered a way to make "regional" ads that span a huge swath of the country. Maybe you can subdivide the audience into similar niches beyond region by referencing very specific interests. Targetting such a niche would make the listener feel unique and passionate about your product. I suggest using in-jokes about Seinfeld, or maybe sharply dividing the audience and creating passionate responses by professing a love of puppies and babies.

Sincerely,
A member of your target audience

The Reverse Captcha

chris.a.williams@gmail.com (Chris) — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 13:42:00 +0000

Tim O’Reilly posed an interesting side-question on the O’Reilly Radar blog in a write-up on Google’s Image Labeler.

This is an interesting variation on the Turing test, in which humans generate and grade tests that most humans can pass, but current computer programs cannot pass. Is there another variation in the future, in which computers generate and grade tests that computers can pass, but humans cannot pass?

I’m not sure of the applicability of such a test, but the idea is intriguing none the less. I would think that there are plenty of problems that would be too difficult to solve by a human, but they are based on the assumption that a time limit is given for the production of a solution. You could simply give a very difficult mathematical question with a subsecond solve time.

One possible example without a need for a time-limit: a picture with a randomly generated steganographic message embedded and a text field with no explanation - computers fill it with the embedded message, humans would likely try to ascertain the image’s contents as the answer. Sort of a reverse captcha. The assumption here is that the algorithm for generating the random message is truly random, or not able to be reverse-engineered and the next value guessed by a human (sort of like those random card shufflers in Vegas that aren’t supposed to be beatable).

In any case, the idea is thought provoking. Anyone else have examples?