Hacking The Valley

Embedded Fonts Set the Tone for Your Site

August 26, 2010

I’ve always paid attention to the way a text page looks. Done right, a well laid-out page can get you in the mood to read. The Web is displayed on low-resolution computer screens (low comared to print and film), and specialized digital fonts have been developed to look decent on your LCD screen. Microsoft has done a superb job of creating legible low-resolution fonts and they have prevailed—everyone is familiar with Verdana, Arial, and now Candara, Calibri, Cambria, and Consolas.

Fonts display differently on Windows and Macs. Apple has chosen fonts that display well using their font-aliasing and display strategies: Lucida Grande and Gill Sans do a great job with text.

But after 15 years I’ve grown tired of these fonts. Fortunately, recent developments in embedding fonts, and the emergence of good unencumbered open-licensed fonts, have made it possible to employ new fonts that are independent of browsers and operating systems. We can embed fonts in CSS. This means that every user using a modern browser can see your page as you want them to see it.

Google provides an interesting selection of free WebFonts, and FontSquirrel provides dozens of well-designed fonts for embedding, all of them with an unencumbered license. The font I am using for this web site is a FontSquirrel package called TeXGyreSchola which is based on the fabulous TeX Computer Modern and Latin Modern fonts. I use thenk font when I’m creating PDF files using the incredible LyX document editor.

If you’re a font junkie like me and care about the look of your text, check out these resources and learn how to set a personal tone for your web pages.

RESOURCES

Keep hacking…

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Digital Media — Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

August 22, 2010

in Musings

Most readers of this post are consumers whose gift to posterity will be the little carbon footprint they leave behind. We used to say simply ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I make this observation because most writing these days is in the form of Tweets, Facebook Likes, digital images posted to Flickr, and comments on other people’s blogs.

If you’re one of the Happy Few who want to write about your life, or write for posterity, putting your thoughts down on paper is the best option. Good quality paper is extremely durable. With a little luck it can last 500 years or more. Even cheap pulp novels and comic books can last 100 years. Just go to any self-respecting university library or even a vintage shop like Half to Have It in Half Moon Bay and you will have no trouble finding books, magazines and newspapers a century old. The Green Apple Bookstore in San Francisco has thousands of paperback books older than the oldest digital media. Old books are everywhere and many of them will be around for centuries after the Technological Singularity makes us all obsolete.

Digital and electronic media have much shorter lifespans than paper. Any serious writer should think twice before entrusting a life’s work to a Mayfly digital technology. The library at U.C. Davis lists some guidelines for archival storage of electronic media:

Magnetic Tape: 15 years at 68 degrees
DAT Tape: 3 years at 68 degrees
CD/DVD: 20 years at 68 degrees
Hard drive: 7 years

Consumer grade CDROMs, after burning, may have a lifespan as short as 3 to 5 years. Data on hard disks should be recopied every 7 years to avoid data loss as their magnetic particles inexorably drift toward entropy.

Every thought I can articulate is safely tucked away in my Moleskine notebooks where I write with a simple lead pencil. A thousand years from now archaeologists will still be able to read my scrawl. Your flash drives and CDROMs, however, will have oxidized, and though your thoughts were wittier than mine, and you had a better way of turning a phrase, your work will be forgotten and my humble notebooks may yet inspire an new Ozymandias.

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Out With the Old, In With The New

July 6, 2010

in Editorial,PHP,Ruby,Smalltalk

Today I transferred a lot of data—not MB, but good old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon pounds. I moved a 1,000 pounds books while changing my office from a code monkey room, filled with computer books, to a study, filled with real literature. My first love happens to be 19th century French literature (Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert) and I have many, many books that I want to get back to after a 15-year hiatus.

I’m going to hang on to many of my PHP and Ruby books because I’ll need them for my work, but the others books, as wonderful as they are, will have to find their own way in the world; some will find a home in the attic bookcase simply because I can’t part with them, and the rest—I’ll have to find them a new home.

Below are some photos of the chaos. On the left are the computer of the books I moved out, and on the right are the literary books I moved in. The pug (Taco) is part of the swap, as he, like me, has a degree in Comparative Literature.

Book Swap as Metamorphosis

Computer books are out.

Literature is in.

As I was going through all the books, I counted about 100 O’Reilly books. Nice job, O’Reilly guys. You really helped me learn about Unix and Linux, Perl, Ruby and PHP, and everything that goes along with them. It’s been great doing business with you.

Keep hacking…and here’s an idea for you hackers, if any of you got past the word “literature” in the first paragraph: every now and then try reading something besides a programming/how-to-get-rich book. It doesn’t have to be “litearture”; just read something outside of your chosen occupation. It’ll broaden your horizons, and that’s a good, sustaining thing.

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Printing Your Digital Photos — Do It Yourself or Go Pro?

July 5, 2010

in Editorial

Time-saving Summary
In my opinion, don’t bother doing any photo printing yourself. Your’e better off having your pictures printed professionally.

Before Digital Cameras
Before photography went digital, consumers had two options for getting their film developed.

Take them to the guy at the Drugstore; he would send your film to Kodak. You’d come back in a week to get your pictures.
You could learn how to use a darkroom to develop and print the pictures yourself. Did I mention that you would have to convert a spare room to a darkroom? What, no spare room? That’s OK. You can set up the enlarger (expensive) and the bulky chemical trays in your bathroom or kitchen. Don’t forget the blackout curtains. By the way, it’s illegal to pour those used chemicals down the drain. You have to dispose of them in an environmentally safe way—because they are all extremely poisonous.

Use iambic pentameter, go to jail.

Color Printing is a Monster
When color film became popular, there was only one option for getting your prints: you took them to the drugstore and they would send your film to Kodak. As technology became more sophisticated, Kodak and Fuji moved the developing and printing to the drugstore. You could get your pictures an hour. Instant gratification (almost), but you still had to leave your house. Bummer.

Printer Makers Hit the Jackpot
When HP created desktop printers (LaserWriter), and later inkjet printers, they had a Satori moment: frame their products as photo printers. You, Joe Six Pack, didn’t have to wait even a minute to get your vanity shots developed: you could print your pictures yourself, dammit. Best of all, you didn’t even have to leave your house.

Another benefit, which we dont’ like to talk about, is that now you could print up those porny shots you took when you were getting it on with your girlfriend/wife/boyfriend. Nice!

Home Printing in a Nutshell
You just need to do a few things to get started printing your very own pictures on demand.

Buy a digital camera for, say, $200
Oh, yeh. Buy a computer, too. Add $750.
Then buy a printer. The good thing about printers is that they’re really cheap. $100.
Then buy more supplies when the sample ink and paper are gone. Paper is about $15 for 25 sheets, and ink is $36 per dose. The industry calls paper and ink the consumables, because you consume them lickety split. Did I mention that consumers (who consume) pay about $20,000 per gallon for the ink their cheap printer is spitting out?
Now you can print your pictures. Oh, the exposure on that one sucks. Better print it again. Hey, there’s a streak on that one! More consumables being consumed.
When you quickly go through all your ink, you buy more. You quickly realize that your are spending more on stupid refills than you spent on the printer.
Total cost for the first 100 pictures (after which you get bored and never print another): $1,146, not including sales tax. Digital photography rocks for HP (and the other players in the game)!

Why You Should Use Professional Printing Services
There are huge reasons to use professional printing services rather than roll your own:

Professional printing is cheaper than home printing because you pay by the print. This means…
You can get any size picture you want without buying a $25 box of paper.
Professional prints are much higher quality than do-it-yourself photos because they are using printers that cost $500,000 vs your flimsy $99 printer. And, the Pros use Kodak Endura or Fujifilm Cystal paper that you can’t even buy.
You never need a printer or paper or ink. No consumables, which makes you a wise consumer.

The Downside of Professional Printing
Professional services do have a down side that you might find unbearable: you have to wait a few days to get your prints. But you will soon get over that qualm and enjoy your perfect, professional prints.

Finding a Good Printing Service
There are many good online professional photo labs, so I won’t recommend any particular company. You can do a Google search for photo lab and get a good selection. In fact, you’ll find the service that I use listed right there in the top 5 results.

Keep hacking…

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E-learning Is Not Deep Learning

July 2, 2010

in Editorial

After three years of teaching online courses in two California community colleges, I’ve concluded that my online courses do not achieve the deep learning that is possible in a classroom course. From what I have seen, online courses are best suited for short-term topics where students learn Just What You Need to Know, Just When You Need It.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen makes this case for face to face education, and I agree with him:

E-Learning: An Oxymoron?
I continue to believe in the linear, author-driven narrative for educational purposes. I just don’t believe the Web is optimal for delivering this experience. Instead, let’s praise old narrative forms like books and sitting around a flickering campfire — or its modern day counterpart, the PowerPoint projector — which have been around for 500 and 32,000 years, respectively.

I continue to write books, and I continue to develop training seminars, because I believe these media are best for deep learning of new concepts.

We should accept that the Web is too fast-paced for big-picture learning. No problem; we have other media, and each has its strengths. At the same time, the Web is perfect for narrow, just-in-time learning of information nuggets — so long as the learner already has the conceptual framework in place to make sense of the facts.

Every time a classroom course is replaced by an online course, we all lose something of great value, something that we won’t get ever back.

Keep hacking…

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The Neo-Luddite in Me Meets the BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh User Group)

June 30, 2010

in Editorial

The Berkeley Macintosh User Group
In the early 1990s I tried writing some hardware reviews for the BMUG Newsletter. The Berkeley Macintosh User Group was an extremely enthusiastic group whose membership included John Draper (Captain Crunch) and and Eric Brewer (Inktomi founder). At the monthly meetings some big names showed up to talk. Steve Jobs was there, and Guy Kawasaki, and even Bill Gates.

Acceptance
BMUG had a BBS (my first online experience, in fact) and put out a semi-annual “newsletter” that eventually grew to about 600 pages per issue. This was before Internet and PDFs. My first submission (an article about speeding up a Mac Plus) was accepted and published. I was honored to have my breezy prose appear in company of technical articles written by real programmers and engineers.

The BMUG Fall 1992 Newsletter

My smarty pants article about the Brainstorm Accelerator for the Mac Plus

Rejection
My second submission was rejected. I was surprised because I considered it quite a bit more clever than my simple hardware review. However, on rereading in today, it’s plain to see that Mac enthusiasts would never embrace my gentle, over the top, Neo-Luddite disenchantment with their lovely Apple gadgets.

Here it is, coming at you from 1993.

The Emperor’s New Gadget

Calling all writers! Before you jump start your bank account to buy that Mac II stop a second to take a look at this. You might decide to stick with your Smith-Corona manual.

My inescapable conclusions:

Use a computer only if it’s a gift. But be alert; any computer will quickly become a monkey on your back. Beware especially the hefty MS-DOS gorillas.

Once you figure out that no one in his right mind is going to give you a Mac and you can’t stop yourself from getting one, buy the cheapest Mac possible. The figures are conclusive: the faster the Mac, the less time you will have to write your novel.

Though your bones will inevitably ache for one, never buy a Laserwriter. One hour’s printing will set you back $3,000. Get the lousy ImageWriter for $30 per hour. Expect never to be satisfied with it.

Never upgrade either system software or applications. You will lose months learning new tricks you don’t need. In addition to losing time, you will be forced to buy more RAM. In the end, you will end up with a slower, less reliable computer; your II will become a Plus; your Plus will become a Kaypro II.

Never buy Fontastic; you will fritter away thousands of hours before you wise up: you will never make better fonts than Adobe.

Never buy fonts. use only the Courier font that comes with the Mac. New York editors, the only editors who can make you rich and famous, want manuscripts to look like they were punched out on an IBM Selectric.

Forget about desktop publishing. It’s for daydreamers. The whole point of writing the G.A.N. is to get a real publisher to market your book and make you rich.

Never use a thesaurus or thesaurus software; no thesaurus will ever suggest a word that’s better than one you can come up with yourself.

Never buy computer games of any sort; before you come to your senses Shanghai or Dark Castle will eat enough of your life to write two novels.

Never believe the advertisers or reviewers of computer hardware and software; they’re paid cohorts, hardware junkies, or fanatical anti-Neo-Luddites.

Never forget that the greatest novels, plays, and poetry were written with pen and ink or a typewriter. To date, no great novel has been written on a computer. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Balzac, Tolstoy, Joyce, Proust, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Miller—all used physical means to wrestle their thoughts onto paper. Before them, Homer used the spoken work alone—words so memorable that listeners were compelled to preserve them in the Collective Consciousness.

Finally, never buy a computer. Never accept a computer as a gift. Never get hooked in the first place.

Redemption
As I reread my little turd of an article, I re-experience my feelings about the dubious value of technology. Part of me clearly suspects that all the cleverly marketed, beautiful silicon cleverness coming out of the Valley will turn out to be a colossal waste of my time. The other part, which is writing this article on a shiny new iMac, tells me to get over it and join the 21^st Century.

Keep hacking…

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How I Learned to Love the Linux Desktop

June 23, 2010

in Editorial

After 15 years of waiting, I have a Linux desktop that I’m happy with. I think it’s time to write a homage to the Linux window managers I’ve used over the years.

But first I want to apologize to all the programmers, famous and anonymous, who poured so much of their time and talent into making Linux the fine system it is today. I’ve made some mean and nasty remarks about KDE, Gnome, FVWM over the years, and I have to admit that I never once considered the dedication and hard work of the hackers who contributed to the FOSS cause. In honor of the giants on whose shoulders Linux now stands, I want to share my humble observations about the Linux desktops I have known, through good times and bad.

(Note: Most of the images below come from XWinman.org and http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html.)

Before the Linux Big Bang

Xerox Alto

The Xerox Star (1980) looking very contemporary.

The graphical user interface was created in the 1960s and was refined and commercialized by researchers at Xerox PARC. As you can see from the picture of the Xerox Alto (1980), the gui hasn’t changed since 1980. When the Linux 0.95 kernel was released with X-Window support in 1992, the gui interface was already 25-years old.

The descendants of Xerox PARC—Sun OpenLook, Machintosh, NextSTEP and, yes, Microsoft Windows—all preceded the X11 desktops that we use with Linux. Here are a select few of the gui desktops that influenced the design of X11 desktops.

Sun OpenLook

The Sun OpenLook Desktop circa 1989.

The Sun OpenLook Desktop in 1996, looking a little too blue.

Many a Original Gangster Unix hackers earned their stripes on SunOS. The Sun OpenLook desktop served as the inspiration for many X11 desktop managers we see in the Linux world. The xclock app running in the top corner is still a fixture on many Linux desktops. You will immediately notice the distinctive (wicked-looking) resizing handles in the corners of each window. These always looked to me like something a Roman soldier might use to enforce Caesar’s will.

CDE

The CDE (Common Desktop Environment) was based on TWM.

The CDE desktop was developed by a consortium of Unix companies —AIX, Digital UNIX, HP/UX, Solaris, UnixWare, and others. CDE’s clean looks were widely imitated by Linux desktop designers. The control panel at the bottom of the screen was a predecessor of the various “docks” we see today.

NeXTSTEP

Tim Berner-Lee's NeXTSTEP Desktop. You can see some of the first web pages in existence.

The NeXT desktop environment was called NeXTSTEP. I loved everything about the NeXT computer. It was, in my 1985 eyes, the epitome of hardware and interface design. It remains my sentimental favorite after 25 years. One of the notable features about NextSTEP was the use of Adobe Display Postscript to render the entire desktop–a stunning achiement in 1988.

NeXT abandoned the hardware business in 1992 and became a software company. In 1996 Apple rehired Steve Jobs and paid him $400 Million for NeXTSTEP, which eventually evolved into the FreeBSD-based OS X we know and love today.

The First Linux Desktops

TWM

This charming fellow is TWM, a.k.a. Tom's Window Manager.

This pretty face was what we saw in the first Linux desktops. Though TWM doesn’t look like much and couldn’t do much, it did give us the power to open multiple xterms. This alone made it useful enough. Most of the window managers that followed TWM were built on TWM’s open source code.

CTWM

CTWM (1996) is a variant of TWM.

CTWM was one of the many TWM variants. I’ve included it as an example of why software guys should hook up with designers when they create the look of a product. Desktops like this one, though it may have been beautiful in the eyes of its owner, would never attract Windows or Mac users to the Linux desktop.

FVWM

FVWM stands for F Virtual Window Manager.

By 1993 everyone was tired of TWM. Robert Nation, the creator rxvt, hacked FVWM out of the TWM code and released it to the world. FVWM became the basis for many window managers, including Afterstep, Xfce, Enlightenment, Metisse and others. If you installed Redhat in 1995, FVWM would have been the default desktop. I never found FVWM to be fun to work with. Compared to Windows and the Mac, it looked a little too primitive.

The Wannabes

One persistent trend in Linux desktops is the desire to mimic the look of commercial desktops, especially Windows, NeXT, and OS X. I believe that imitation of good examples is acceptable. We were all aware that our X11 desktops weren’t appealing, and we looked to the commercial products for inspiration.

FVWM95

FVWM95 trying to look like Windows 95.

FVWM95 was a good imitation of Windows 95. The window decoration uses the classic Windows minimize, expand, and close buttons. The Start button makes its appearance on the Linux desktop. Imitating Windows was a step forward for the most part. Notice that the Linux text is bitmapped, not anti-aliased as on Windows 95. Jagged text was the Linux curse and contributed to its reputation for being unpleasant to look at.

Amiwm

AMIWM is an Amiga look-alike.

In 1985 the Commodore Amiga was the most technically advanced consumer computer available to mere mortals. If you wanted to edit video production, you used the Amiga and Video Toaster software. In 1985 the Amiga had a 32-bit processor, high-end graphics and sound chips, and a multi-tasking OS. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it.

AfterStep

AfterStep (1996)

AfterStep was a noble effort to bring the NextSTEP look to X11. The most notable feature was the Dock applet. Note that some of the menus use gradients. This example is unfortunately cursed with “Engineeritis”, with a sensational purple lightening background. I would guess that the owner of this desktop was very proud of his handiwork.

WindowMaker

WindowMaker Desktop (1998)

WindowMaker Desktop looking good (1997).

In the line of NextSTEP copycats, WindowMaker was one of my favorites. It had a more sophisticated look than AfterStep. In the hands of someone with a little design talent, good things could happen. This blue example looks amazing to me even now. I won’t claim that this color scheme is particularly functional, but it is a nicely designed desktop.

As with most of the early desktops, configuration was accomplished with a challenging mix of gui interface poking and low-level configuration file hacking.

KDE, GNOME, and Xfce

Xfce and KDE arrived in 1998 with Gnome following in 1999. These three desktops are still available as options with most Linux distributions, and each has it’s loyal fans. Each has evolved to become sophisticated, good-looking, and functional. I have always been partial to KDE.

Xfce

Xfce (1998) cloning XP very nicely.

Xfce disguised as OS X Jaguar.

In this screenshot we see that Xfce successfully imitates Windows XP. Though Linux can steal the look, it still does not feel as good, to me, as Windows or OS X. Part of my perception is the result of the driver software for the mice and keyboards. Linux mouse drivers, in my experience, lack the slick ballistics of Windows and OS X.

KDE and Gnome

KDE showing what it can do. Yikes! (1998)

Gnome looking very sensible. (1999)

KDE and Gnome are the two most popular Linux desktops at this time (2010). KDE has the philosophy of offer the user many configuration options, and Gnome presents a more locked-down (some say dumbed down) approach, with fewer configuration options. Chances are, if you like Gnome, you’ll think KDE is a mess. And if you prefer KDE (as I do), you’ll find Gnome too restrictive. I’ll put it into an analogy: KDE is to Gnome as Perl is to Python.

Linux Gives You A Choice

In the World of Linux Desktops we are fortunate to have choices. We can make our desktop look like whatever we want—we can even make it look like Vista if we want, or, if we want a Sci-fi or video game look, we can have it. And if we want something stodgy, we can make it happen. If you have accessibility concerns, as I do, Linux has a solution. It’s true that too many options can give us design schlubs the power to make an ugly mess. But that’s just the price of having a little Freedom of Choice.

Thanks to all of you Linux and X11 hackers who have given your time and wisdom to the FOSS cause. I appreciate it, and I promise I’ll never bitch or whine about my Linux desktop again.

Keep hacking…

My KDE Desktop

KDE can dim the distracting inactive windows.

KDE on Mandriva running a Squeak Drunken Walk simulation.

Here are a few shots of my current KDE desktop configuration. Because I have a minor vision problem (gross astigmatism) I have trouble reading text on wide, bright backgrounds, so I prefer a muted theme. Compiz allows me to create a desktop that minimizes contrast problems. These screenshots were taken from my 1920×1200 HP monitor.

More Resources

Due to space and time constraints, I’ve omitted many interesting desktops. If you’re interested in seeing all of them, I highly recommend that you go through the XWinman.org site to get a feel for the enormous energy that went into creating the desktop managers we use today. If you’re interested in reading more about the history of graphic user interfaces, check out the encycolpedic http://toastytech.com/guis/index.html

If you want to see what other free-thinking Linux hackers are doing with their freedom of choice, check out these great resources:

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Mandriva Linux Wins My Big Fat Gratitude

June 19, 2010

in Editorial,PHP,Ruby,Smalltalk

Over the last few days I’ve installed a smorgasboard of *nix distros, trying to find one that will work with my hardware. I was looking for a recent distribution with a decent desktop, either KDE or Gnome. My hardware is a pedestrian HP desktop that is so anonymous and faceless that I don’t even know it’s name. It has an NVidia graphics card, an Intel NIC, and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. You’d think that this kind of generic iron wouldn’t be a problem to find an OS for.

The Candidates
The lineup consisted of Fedora, Ubunto, openSUSE, Mandriva, CentOS, and the non-Linux FreeBSD.

Mandriva
This is a no suspense post, so I’ll just say that the winner was Mandriva. Everything about it worked perfectly with my system. It recognized and configured my hardware, had up to date versions of the software I need (PHP, Ruby, Python, Rails, etc). It had one flaw: I didn’t like the way it looked. You have to understand that I’m a sensitive artistic type and I found the color schemes garish and over done.

Fedora
So, I installed Fedora. All went about as well as Mandriva with the installation, but when I came to compiling Ruby 1.9, I started getting missing dependency errors by the dozens. Being a man of action, I bailed on Fedora.

Ubuntu
Next I installed Ubuntu, and it went on the my hardware like a dream from the Live CD. However, when I rebooted, I had no network. I had experienced this problem before with Ubuntu, and I was hoping that I wouldn’t see it with 10.4. I scrounged around the Web and found some bug reports about this problem and threw in the towel. Being an artist, I’m also decisive.

CentOS
So, I installed CentOS, which I’ve heard so much raving about. It’s a conservative strain of Linux (think RHEL), with stable software that will not be updated frequently. I liked the idea that centOS 5.5 would be around for 5 years and I wouldn’t be hassled with daily updates. The nice thing was that KDE 3.5 was a desktop option. I liked 3.5. But the story turned sour when I checked ruby and found a terribly outdated 1.8.5, and I need 1.9. I downloaded the Ruby 1.9 source and began the compile. Whoa. Lotsa errors. Lotsa out of date C libraries. I would have to upgrade the system libraries to compile the software I needed. In effect, I would have to turn centOS into Fedora. Not gonna work. Being an artist, I’m also very economical with how I fritter away my spare time.

openSUSE
Next openSUSE. The Live CD loaded and ran nicely. The network was cool, and all the libraries were current. It all looked good until the installation process failed. Over the years I have experienced many an aborted installation with openSUSE, so I know this was no fluke. I was outta there in a flash.

FreeBSD
After all of the Linux installation failures (except for Mandriva), I installed FreeBSD. As you may know, FreeBSD is the Unix behind Mac OS X, and I’m quite familiar with that. I had high hopes. The installation went well, but the X-windows installation was choking on my NVidia card. I could have run the machine as a server, but I wanted a desktop, dammit. That last thing I want to do with my spare time is get a messed up X-windows system working. I jumped ship.

Back to Mandriva
I swallowed my pride and reinstalled Mandriva, then spent the day fixing the desktop well enough that I my eyes don’t hurt when I look at it. Everything works well enough—I’ve got networking running. I’ve got Ruby 1.9, the latest version of PHP, Squeak, and Lispbox running. I’m now officially good to go. No more fiddling for me.

It’s been fun taking a tour of Linux and FreeBSD land. Try it the next time you have a few days to spare. All of the distros are awesome in their way, but you may find, as I have, that there is one particular version that works best for you. You just have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your princess, or prince, as the case may be.

Keep hacking…

Mandriva openSUSE Fedora FreeBSD CentOS Ubuntu

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Blogs Should Have Comments … or Not?

June 16, 2010

in Editorial

If you have a blog, you’re supposed to have comments, right? The more comments you get, the more traffic and buzz, right? Of course, you know in advance that the Unhappy Angry People will be there to drop a turd into the pool to get attention, right? This is Freedom of Speech, and we’re all entitled to express our opinion—and all that line of reasoning. Cleaning the pool from time to time is just the price you have to pay to have a presence on the Web. Everyone gets to read the precious jewels that drop from your finger tips, and everyone gets to have their say, however lunatic.

You can always drain the pool, as Tim Ferris does: require commenters to identify themselves.

I never publish comments without real e-mail addresses, and I have no problem with deleting and banning users. I treat my blog like a gathering in my home. Polite and productive debate is great, but I have no time for rude people in my living room. I set the rules–spit acid and nonsense somewhere else. Allowing BS on your blog is a disservice to your readers, in my opinion, and it reinforces the type of behavior that does nothing but breed more idiots.

Or allow only positivie, supportive comments, as Robert Scoble does.

Yes, I am now approving every comment here. And I will delete any that don’t add value to either my life or the lives of my readers.

This is a huge change for me. I wanted a free speech area, but after having a week off I realize that I need to make a change. That, I’m sure, will lead to attacks of “censorship” and all that hooey. Too bad. I’m instituting a “family room” rule here. If I don’t like it, it gets deleted and deleted without warning — just the same as if you said something abusive in my family room I’d kick you out of my house. If you don’t like that new rule, there are plenty of other places on the Internet to write your thoughts. Start a blog and link here. Etc. Etc.

Wait a minute! There’s another road—you can disable comments altogether and let your content speak for itself. John Gruber of Daring Fireball has a taken this tack from the beginning, and he’s taken flack for not providing a platform for his readers to rebut his statements.

I like his response to Joe Wilcox, who accused him of “not being a man” because Daring Fireball doesn’t have comments.

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? And if there aren’t any comments on DF, how are DF readers “adding to the noise”? (I realize, alas, that DF readers do sometimes leave noisy comments on sites to which I link. But how is that an argument for allowing comments on DF itself?)

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

I vote for Daring Fireball, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking, no comments is a great approach for a successful blog, but can you realistically expect a new blog to survive without the comments to build a sense of community? Will such a blog thrive, or will it languish in anonymity if readers can’t add their 2¢ of praise or slander? Will good content really conquer all? Or does the wisdom of the Mob pave the road to readership?

Tell you what, for this post, I’m turning comments off.

Keep hacking…

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Vim and SCP: How to Edit Files on Remote Servers

June 2, 2010

in Editorial,PHP,Ruby

When I have to edit files on remote servers I use Vim paired with scp. The SCP protocol, along with SSH, are members of the OpenSSH family of encrypted communication protocols; on Unix-y system, scp is the SCP client, and ssh is the SSH client. Both ssh and scp are normally installed by default on OS X and Linux.

OPENSSH ON WINDOWS
On Windows we can install the PuTTY family of SSH clients to obtain SSH and SCP for free. I will not be discussing PuTTY in this post.

A second option for Windows users is to install Cygwin. Cygwin is a Linux-like environment for Windows that offers great Linux functionality and the Bash shell. If you have Cygwin installed, you can use the code below without modification.

EXAMPLE
If I have to edit my application_controller.php script on hackingthevalley.com, I can open my terminal (Terminal.app on OS X and xterm on Linux) and enter a command that will allow me to edit the file across the network through an encrypted connection:

vi scp://username@domain.com//users/username/phplib/controllers/application_controller.php

That’s a mouthful of a command and not a bit easier than starting up Flow (on the Mac) or FileZilla (on Windows) to do the same job. However, a little Shell scripting can transform that hairy, drawn out command into a simple function that does all of the heavy lifting.

In the code below I first create a function (viremote()) in a file named .functions. Once I have a library for my shell functions, I can load that file automatically every time I start my shell. I’ll describe how to do that later.

SHELL FUNCTIONS
Here’s an example of a simple shell function. Replace the pertinent details (username and domain name) with your own.

# File    : .functions  (This is an invisible file)
# Creator : Douglas Putnam
# Path    : $HOME/.functions
# Desc    : Bash shell functions. Edit files remotely with Vim and SSH.
# More    : The Linux Documentation Project http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/
# $Id: $  (version control tag)
# Usage:  viremote remote_file_name

viremote () {
    if [ $# = 0 ]   # $# is the number of agruments and '=' means "equal to"
    then
        # Open File Browser in HOME directory on remote server
        # protocol   user    domain      path
        vi scp://username@domain.com//home/username/
    else
        # $1 holds the name of the file on the remote server
        vi 'scp://username@domain.com//home/username/phplib/'$1
    fi
}

We use it like this:

. ~/.functions  # load the functions into the shell

# edit /home/username/phplib/app/controllers/application_controller.php
# on domain.com
viremote app/controllers/application_controller.php

MAKING IT PERMANENT
Sourcing the file (. ~/.functions) makes the functions available for the current session. What we want to have these functions available every time we log in. To make this all work automatically you will have to modify your Bash startup file (.bash_profile) to include the .functions file. Here’s how:

Create the .functions file in your HOME directory. This file will hold your functions.
Add this line to your .bash_profile in your HOME directory:
```
# in ~/.bash_profile
. ~/.functions
```

Happy hacking with Vim and SCP…

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