DISQUS

Strange. I almost think it has to be a bug or a false positive on the part of Blizzard's exploit detection. Even assuming someone cracked a given user's password, are they also paying to reactivate it? How is an inactive account exploiting anything?

The annoying thing is that I've tried a few times to re-activate my account, and they keep wanting me to fax them (FAX!) a copy of my driver's license (I guess to prove that I'm me?). I don't have a fax machine; so I've procrastinated for about a year now.

I'm probably better off. :)

Er, Drive. Viking Drive.

I'd have to play with it a little more. Also, as I consider my use of the word "intuitive", I suppose I'd need to expand that to "intuitive in a way that I hadn't considered previously", which could be open to the interpretation that it isn't really that intuitive after all. Or, that it's intuitive after you know how it works, which is a bit of a tautology itself.

Then again, it's always possible that I simply fell for the lure of something new and shiny... it's not as though that's never happened. ;-)

But from a cursory look, I do like Io, it's quite interesting. What would I use it for? I've no idea, at this point. But not everything needs to be completely utilitarian...

@dhh, exactly. It would seem to me to defeat the whole purpose if you were using a "custom" version. Especially all the handy features that come from rails being distributed as a gem, and being able to automatically update it, etc, etc. Running a unique fork would invalidate a lot of benefits.

Thanks for stopping by!

That's a good point, but...

My understanding is that 37Signals is currently running most apps off Rails Edge, which anyone else could do also; see David's tweet about this.

I think it would defeat the whole purpose of some of the benefits of using Rails if they were using a "different" version. Now, their servers and perhaps many plugins may well be finely tuned and customized, but their version of Rails itself is certainly the same as you or I could use.

Obviously I can't "know" that, but that is what David said, and I can't imagine any possible benefit to changing only their version, and not Rails Edge (the development version) itself.

Sounds like a very cool topic; open source tech support has the additional challenge of being more or less voluntary, rather than paid positions.

In some ways it would seem that the passion which drives individuals to contribute for free would help to keep support civil and kind, but in practice I expect you have some of the same problems... since the only time you interact with your users is when they are complaining, and possibly are causing their own problems by Not Having Read the [Free] Manual, it would still be quite easy to gradually get a skewed perspective of your users.

Ro, I'm with you, don't disagree with your points at all.

Like I said, though, I just wasn't aiming for that level direct analogy with the original comparison.

Yes, a better analogy might have been that, say, frameworks are to programming in general as poetic forms (such as a sonnet or haiku) are to poetry in general. Maybe.

@ro; I know the analogy is a stretch, but keep in mind, I was talking to my mom, who neither knows about nor cares about the details which would make the analogy perfect. She was just curious what this "Ruby on Rails" was that I was using.

For what it is -- a non-technical explanation of a framework -- I still think the analogy works pretty well. As a perfect one-to-one analogy... no, of course not. ;-)

While I'm thinking about it, camping seems more like the haiku of frameworks...

EDIT: apologies to those whose comments only just appeared now. For some reason akismet wanted to call them spam...

@martin Well what do you know. That would explain the traffic spike.

Nice; I was assuming there was a better way to do that. Thanks for the tip! Apparently, I need a regex refresher.

That's good to know... yes, sadly, I was looking for an actual icon, program, or option to open a terminal. But still... I think the first thing I would do is load Ubuntu (eeeUbuntu, as the case may be) on the little thing instead of its default. :-)

@mrben ahhh, Xandros. It's very customized... and it is interesting, but not usable if you actually want to have, you know... a terminal. It's possible there's a way to enable that, though I didn't see it when I looking...

@Trisha, I agree, 512 really is still enough for most tasks; if 1GB were available, though, I think I'd go for that instead.

Also, if you're considering moving to Ubuntu as a main OS, check out Linux Mint also. Mint basically is Ubuntu, made even more user friendly, and enabling quite a few handy features by default.

According to Gizmodo, you could run Vista on it... just not very well. ;-)

But anyways... yeah. Realistically, I think it would still need to have a little more RAM for me to want one. Also, I think I'd want to use one for a couple days before deciding to own one. It's cool that it's that small, but I'm not sure how I'd really like using/typing/web surfing on a laptop that tiny.

All the same, a very cool little machine.

Man, you don't need to apologize. I totally understand. It's tight here, too, which is why I almost didn't go... :)

Yeah, I think it's worked out well, hopefully will be an educational (albeit short) trip.

Thanks!

I still can't see how Microsoft acquiring Yahoo would be good for anyone... except maybe Microsoft.

But, in the case that the acquisition actually happens... hopefully, I could be wrong.

I've been using it for a few weeks now on Mac, Windows & Linux. Have had no problems, and actually fixed several issues I was having with FF2.

Greasemonkey was my must-have extension, but I was able to find an updated version in the Greasemonkey-dev forums that works with FF3.

Hey, we just got back from Mexico, too. Other coast, though (Cabo San Lucas). However, our honeymoon 6 years ago was near Tulum (Playa), and we did visit there. It's a cool place.

For what it's worth, even if I *do* stick with the new URL, I plan to leave this blog here. For posterity, and all that.

As for change... what can I say? I thrive on chaos.

Of course, if I start beginning messages with '@davewiner ', that only leaves 129 characters to write with. ;)

Exactly. I also tend to indent code religiously regardless of the language I'm using. I'm even finicky about html that way; it just makes things easier to find, parse, etc.

Hm. Maybe you're right. Except I was hoping to avoid the ugly circa-1996 graphics and animated gifs that I would normally associate with the term "webrings"...

Cool; thanks for stopping by!

I'm following so many people now it'll take awhile, but I'm assuming it will be worthwhile. :-)

Good points, Garrick. That's one of the reasons I think there won't be any real push to try to unify the format of feeds; it's not hard just to support the all the current formats.

I probably just liked the idea of using YAML, and let that snowball into this post.

@mrBen... yeah, I'd agree. And for those reasons, I've no plan to attempt to create a new standard.

One thing that prevents it from being a free-for-all graffiti layer: when you give it a try in FF2, you'll see that you can pick and choose which "shifts" you see posted over any web page. In other words, you can pretty easily ignore trolls and vandals within Shiftspace.

Yeah, I had noticed that greasemonkey doesn't work with FF3 yet, which is why I'm not using it yet. Soon. :)

Hey, thanks to you both for commenting. Since I'm interested in this sort of thing generally, I'm very interested in what Shiftspace is doing. Hopefully over the next few weeks I'll get a chance to dig a little deeper into what you've been building.

I like the openness; I think that will be an important component of anything that would attempt to build a metaweb. Not simply an API, but an open platform.

I've some more thoughts on the whole topic, but it's getting late. In the meantime, I look forward to seeing what happens with Shiftspace .