zerosum dirt(nap)

I was feeling kind of meh last week, so I decided I’d take a day off from the paid projects and hack out an ‘app-in-a-day’ microapp. If you know me, you know that this is something I talk about doing all the time and publicly advocate, but rarely find the time to actually execute on ;-). I’d really like to change that, and devote more time to my own projects this year.

Of course, the hardest part about doing this sort of thing is coming up with a concept that can be created and deployed within the timeframe you have available. For the Rumble, we gave teams of 4 people 2 full days, and lots of prep time. But in this case I wanted to see what I could do with a designer in, say, an afternoon, without any advance planning at all. Just for fun. So I chatted up my designer friend Ty and we came up with the concept of a really simple Twitter-based dream journal, that would display random tweets that had to do with what people were dreaming about. Nothing fancy, sort of a rip off of OhMyScience but without the science. Because who needs science, right?

Ty whipped up a fun single page Goodnight-Moon-inspired design and I wrote a tiny amount of code to morph my Sinatra app template into a Twitter keyword aggregator, and about 3 hours later tweetdreams.org was ready to go. It may not be the most innovative or featureful website you’ve seen this week, but it’s cute and was fun to build and a few people have said some nice things about it. Frankly, that’s enough for me.

The moral of the story is that you don’t have to do something earth-shattering, massive, or insanely innovative to enjoy doing it. If you’re feeling kind of down or like your current work projects are neverenders, block out a day and bang out a microapp. Just shipping something will often make you feel better about yourself, regardless of the complexity involved. Don’t be afraid to call it ‘v1.0’ and move on to the next one. On the web, nothing is every finished. And that’s a good thing.

So yeah, check it out if you’re interested. The sub-100 lines of source, sans Ty’s awesome theme, is also up on teh GitHubs if you wanna make your own Twitter-fueled microapp.

There’s a good thread going on over at Hacker News today regarding music for coding sprints. It’s interesting to see that a number of people, like me, have trouble concentrating when listening to music with prominent lyrics, whereas others thrive on it.

A lot of people also seem to really dig electronica. I guess that’s no big surprise. It’s never done much for me, personally, although there are a few electronic pieces I do really like (NIN’s Ghosts being a recent example). Being an ex-hc/metalhead I gravitate more towards melodic post-rock stuff and the occasional poppy masterpiece.

Here’s some stuff in my current work playlist:

• Explosions in the Sky
• Mogwai
• Castor
• My Bloody Valentine
• Elliott
• Pinback
• Isis
• On The Might of Princes
• Jesu
• Portishead
• Dredg
• National Skyline
• Pelican
• Low Frequency In Stereo
• Radiohead
• There Were Wires
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• Mouth of the Architect

Yes I know some of these bands have lyrics. But they’re so fuzzed up or unintelligible that my brain doesn’t seem to process them while working, so all is good. And in the case of bands like Elliott and Pinback and Dredg, the vocals are prominent but somehow almost feel like more of an instrument. Also seems to work. Kind of strange, I guess.

• Evan Williams writes about how to evaluate a new product idea
• Giston -- a piston lookalike for git
• Gitosis -- host and manage a git repo, with access control, easily/safely...
• RSpec 1.1 is Released -- with support for Rails 2.0.1+ and the new RSpec story runner (!)
• Rails 2.0.2 is Released -- includes sqlite3 as the new default database and an important fix for RubyGems 0.9.5
• Merb 0.4.2 is Released -- performance enhancements, etc.

• FreeBSD 7.0 is is going to own scaling. Srsly. RC1 should be available this week.
• Rails 2.0 RC1 is here. Have you fixed those deprecation warnings in 1.2.5 yet?
• Heroku is coming next week. Holy crap those screencasts are cool. So the future of building and hosting webapps looks a lot like Seaside, eh?
• More Heroku coverage and commentary by Giles Bowkett.
• The Great Merb Speedup. Keep your eyes peeled for 0.4.1, things in this camp keep getting better and better.
• Interesting critique of OpenSocial from Tim O'Reilly.
• Google's OpenSocial API Blog, because it's the new hotness.
• Using OpenSocial with Ruby on Rails, because hey, you're curious, right?

So have you heard the new Radiohead album yet? What did you think? And more importantly, what did you pay for it? ComScore estimates that 2 out of 5 of you did. They released a study today suggesting that, during the month of October, 40% of visitors were willing to pay an average of $6.00 for the digital downloads. Click that link for the full details. It’s also interesting to note that US consumers were will to pay more, on average, than the rest of the world.

The press is having a field day with this, and opinions are mixed. The ‘glass is half empty’ point of view seems to be that, holy crap, there are a lot of freeloaders on the ‘net.

No kidding, really?

On the other hand, the ‘glass is half full’ folks point out that, hey, people are actually willing to pay for stuff, and that music on the ‘net still has a perceived value after all.

I’m siding with the latter camp. Official sales figures won’t be released until after the holidays, but shit, I think these initial estimates are fantastic. Moreover, I think they show tremendous potential for non-compulsory tipping for digital goods in the public space. Software and media piracy is only a problem because of how we perceive and hope to profit from selling media on the web. Labels don’t need a new type of DRM, they need a new approach to what they’re selling. It’s information, and once that information is out there, it’s free, regardless of how much you perceive it’s worth to be. Magazine publishers figured this out a while back, and make their money through online advertising.

What Radiohead has done is adapt, and prove that, at least to some extent, a donation-driven model can work here. Of course, public radio beat them to the punch by at least 50 years, and they’re not the first band to sell music online, but it certainly signals a big win for those of us who believe that all web users aren’t freeloading scum. Even if the average user is a freeloader, the point is that the band can make enough from their efforts such that producing art for public consumption is profitable.

Anyway, the average worldwide price for all downloads, including freeloaders, was $2.26. I’d love to know what the bands’ actual per-album net was on their previous album, 2003’s Hail To The Thief. I’d be shocked if it was much higher than, say, $6.00 (update: this article estimates that it was probably between $3 and $5 USD). Personally I paid about $7 USD.

Oh, and the album is pretty good too.

Not-so-random things you need to know about:

• New Ruby Logo Unveiled
• NetBeans 6.0 Beta 2 Released
• Datamapper ORM (add Merb, stir, & bake at 300 for gooey goodness)
• Git + Sinatra Web Framework (great screencast!)
• Using MacPorts Ruby and Rails after Upgrading to OS X Leopard
• Microplace (eBay-backed microfinance on Rails)
• Google OpenSocial to Launch on Thursday?

Someone rings my cell phone at 7AM this morning and asks "is this Nicholas"? I answer "yes", because well, that's my name. Then they hang up.

Apparently I'm not the only one this has happened to. Isn't it good to know that there are communities for just about everything on teh Interwebs, including strange paranoia-inducing phone spam? But just who the fsck are these people anyway, and what in the world was the purpose of that? Sigh.

In unrelated but positive news, the Sox destroyed the Indians last night 11 to 2, winning the ALCS. Yes, I am a fair weather fan.

[3:44pm] strager: BUKKIT is the array type.
[3:44pm] zapnap: O RLY?

Wow, Google Street View is totally great. And, as expected, some funny shit gets frozen in time at street level. Google is watching! Be cautious where you go, what you do! Try to remain calm, don't lose your head over it.

So here I am in sunny Oregon. Around 1PM I hop on a train headed to Portland for RailsConf 07. Came out a few days early to catch up with my good buddy Ty in Eugene and work on the startup idea we've been banging around. And do some hiking, drinking, and dissecting of Heroes too, of course.

I kind of love being out here and yet still having my internal clock set to east coast time. I wake up "early" for a change, and bang out a nasty chunk of work before anyone else here is even awake yet. Otoh, I feel like an old man when I begin to falter around 11PM. Heh.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the conference. I'll be attending the tutorials day tomorrow, specifically the scaling session with Joyent's Jason Hoffman as well as David Black's 'Routing Roundup'. If you see me, say hi.

We've been hard at work lately, so blog updates have been a little more infrequent than I'd like. But in the meantime, I thought I'd post some books I've been reading. All come highly recommended.

• David A Black's Ruby For Rails - Essential Ruby/Rails reading. How did I get this far without it?
• Founders At Work - Working on a startup? You should be.
• Seth Godin's Small Is the New Big - Learn how to be remarkable. Or at least, how to market your remarkability.
• Y the Last Man - Damn, Brian K Vaughn rules. Plus, he likes The Eels. And he's writing for Lost now, too. Read this, even if you don't read comics.

What were you doing for those eight and a half minutes? Was it mean, was it petty, or did you realize you were sorry And that you love them?

It’d be nice to think we could get it right down here just once. G*d bless the Plan.