www.nickhodge.com

Excel­lent video from the Google engEDU series.

A talk given by Alex Wright; excel­lent his­tory of Inform­a­tion The­ory: The Web That Wasn’t, espe­cially hyperlinking.

Spend an hour and listen. Good his­tory. I am prob­ably going to Amazon his book, Glut

Tool­man­tim, the wonder-super-rock-god-of-Ruby-on-Rails in Sydney has released I Work On The Web.

If you feel inclined, add yours to the Flickr Group

Show your real face. More than text.

Web Dir­ec­tions South is going to have about 600 attendees this year accord­ing to John All­sopp. Wow. This inter­net thing must be good.

Dis­count pri­cing of $895, $100 off, ends this Fri­day at mid­night. Hurry up and grab your tick­ets. http://www.webdirections.org/

Nom­in­a­tions for the second McFar­lane Prize for Excel­lence in Aus­tralia Web Design also end Fri­day http://mcfarlaneprize.com/

At the Hill and Know­lton “Sur­viv­ing and thriv­ing in the next dec­ade — Tech­no­logy Pub­lish­ing” Break­fast Bytes this morn­ing, a group of emin­ent pan­el­ists in pic­ture above, from the left:

• James Tuck­er­man – Pub­lish­ing Editor, Ant­Hill. New rel­at­ively magazine about ideas, money and skills. Pre­vi­ously more print than online, but adding new online pro­jects later in 2007.
• Heather Craven — Dir­ector of Mar­ket­ing & Com­mu­nic­a­tions, Cir­cu­la­tions Audit Board,
  Aus­tralian Cir­cu­la­tion Bur­eau. Sub-committee research­ing digital.
• Brian Haverty – Edit­or­ial Dir­ector, CNET Net­works Aus­tralia : Read­ers first, video and text style publishing.
• Tony Sarno – Editor, APC. Adding new online APC pro­jects later in 2007.
• Peter Roberts – Man­aging Editor, BRW. Part of the Fair­fax group, around since 1857. Noted that http://www.afr.com/ relaunched this week, and closed con­tent model AFR Access continues.
• Andrew Kirk, Hill and Know­lton: Chair

The theme from the morning’s panel and Q&A is that “there will be a mix­ture of online and print” and that “online and print” read­ers are treated as dif­fer­ent read­ers by the big-names. My per­spect­ive as a cor­por­ate online/citizen journ­al­ist is slightly different.

Like the quint­es­sen­tial invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ists: Wood­ward and Bern­stein learnt: fol­low the money. In the above list­ing of pan­el­ists, notice where their stated invest­ment is going. It’s online.

From a tra­di­tional publisher’s per­spect­ive, the busi­ness is about employ­ing journ­al­ists to gather hid­den facts, con­nect, ana­lyse and write stor­ies. People buy the paper (atoms) to read the stor­ies and maybe their eye­balls will stray onto an advert­ise­ment. The mar­ket­ing groups of com­pan­ies buy these pos­i­tions on the paper in the hope that the right eye­balls are enthralled by the product and/or ser­vice — and buy the product. The core of a publisher’s job is man­aging the com­pel­ling con­tent such that a spe­cific audi­ence is cre­ated that advert­isers value.

The web is no dif­fer­ent, except that any­one can be a pub­lisher, and out­source the rev­enue side (advert­ising) to Microsoft or Google. Large pub­lish­ers, such as Fair­fax, are unhappy that their expens­ive infra­struc­ture is sub­ver­ted online: Peter Roberts men­tioned twice that Google made $200 mil­lion in Aus­tralia without invest­ing in the content-side.

Peter Roberts also com­men­ted on one of his com­pet­it­ors, Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report, hav­ing only an online mech­an­ism but suc­cess­ful busi­ness model. My per­spect­ive is that Alan’s busi­ness is suc­cess­ful as he is seen as a respec­ted and inde­pend­ent entity within Australia’s fin­an­cial com­munity. Alan Kohler is a trus­ted brand.

The Gad­get Guy, Peter Blasina’s ques­tion near the end sum­mar­ised the morn­ing for me: What does the future really look like? Each of the rep­res­en­ted panelist’s organ­isa­tions (maybe with the excep­tion of cnet) have their busi­ness strategies weighted toward print, and the brand-value that print brings.

Peter Blas­ina comes at this with cred­ib­il­ity as a true multi-channel brand and per­son­al­ity: print, online and TV — and sur­mised that the com­ing gen­er­a­tion will change the face of the print publisher’s world. And they know it.

The future for pub­lish­ers is where the eye­balls are. And eye­balls are not going to be in print, it is going to be online. Eye­balls stay longer where this is trus­ted value, and most import­antly where there is a com­munity. Read­ing a magazine is an almost high-latency feed­back medium; where two-way inter­ac­tion is slow if attemp­ted at all.

Demo­graph­ics of the eye­balls are chan­ging to more online: younger read­ers being digit­ally nat­ive and older gen­er­a­tions hav­ing more time to explore online; with more females than males desir­ing a com­munity and inter­ac­tion rather than pass­ive accept­ance; high band­width con­nec­tion to per­mit TV, Radio and Print being equal online mediums.

Whilst I have no research to back this up, I am going to state it here. A com­mon refrain from print pub­lish­ers is that “Radio did not replace news­pa­pers, and TV did not replace radio” as their back­wards look­ing per­spect­ive on why online will not replace these old media. My argu­ment is that the inter­net can replace the media styles: with web pages, pod­casts and vid­casts. As Rupert Mur­doch is quoted as say­ing: “Big media no longer con­trols the conversation” 

James Tuck­er­man knows his read­ers, and I think has a plan to cre­ate value in Anthill’s com­munity. He under­stands the emo­tional con­nec­tion that he has with his read­er­ship. James also stated there are “pop­u­la­tion lumps” at birth-years of 1949, 1974 and 1985. Accord­ing to the ABS, there is another pop­u­la­tion lump in the 2005–7 range too. My sug­ges­tion is to watch Ant­hill as a pub­lisher. They are start­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with their community.

A Ques­tion about Second­Life, the cur­rent “craze” in Aus­tralia poten­tially due to a visit in meat­space by a Linden Labs per­sona, res­ul­ted in Tony Sarno say­ing that “many PBL man­age­ment have vis­ited Second­Life”. I fear it is because of the gambling dens rather than the com­munity aspect. About 20% of the audi­ence of largely PR and tech­no­logy industry attendees had logged into Second­Life, of which most had logged in once.

So, in industry par­lance, what is the tip-on for online? It’s the com­munity. Com­munity is the new Brand.

Time to get ser­i­ous on my res­ol­u­tions. Well, at least one any­way; I’ll start the waist shrinking/walking later. It’s Thursday Geekout time!

Inspired by Robert Scoble’s Podtech.net live.com gad­get post­ing, and a gen­eral feel­ing that gad­gets are where it is at for non-professional pro­gram­mers like myself.

So, first port-of-call http://gallery.live.com/ then on to the Developer cen­ter

Decision time: what to gad­get up? A Cricket gad­get is under­way. I am sure that one of the vari­ous national reli­gions of foot­ball will fol­low come March. For weather I can use my real win­dow to look out­side. (note: grow­ing up on a farm, you learn to read the weather by look­ing through the win­dow at the clouds). Neil Finn Lyr­ics!

So, there is some magic back-end code that is pulling the data from a small data­base, and ren­der­ing text smartly onto a ran­dom Neil Finn image. This will be the first step. No need to con­fuse myself with too much shenanigans just yet.

Off to the Developer’s Guide, and down­load the examples from the .zip. Oooh, css xml javas­cript. Easy. I have a loc­al­host web server run­ning, so that’s no stress. Text editor open, cod­ing music in the ears.

How to test out the gad­get? OK, I need Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2005. Now is a good time as any to test it out. There is a method of har­ness­ing your local gad­get to Inter­net Explorer and the live.com serv­ers to test out before embar­rass­ing your­self pub­licly! Hmm, seems like you can dir­ectly access the test har­ness with the cor­rectly formed URL. There are three ver­sions of this URL that I can find.

OK, it seems that the live.com gad­get test­ing Javas­cript har­nesses, Inter­net Explorer 7 and cross-site script­ing are in the midst of a con­spir­acy to stop test­ing. Time to hit the pro­duc­tion serv­ers with the code.

This post­ing on the new Gad­gets for­ums helps: just go straight into live.com, cross your fingers!

Works first time! After an hour of clean­ing up and renam­ing things as per the recom­mend­a­tions, here it is:

Click: live.com Neil Finn Lyric Gadget

Fur­ther com­ment live.com gad­gets are simple to cre­ate. XML file mani­fest, or list of what’s import­ant; a CSS file to style your con­tent and the Javas­cript. This Javas­cript con­tains the logic of your gad­get which is essen­tially insert­ing HTML into the stream. It can gather text extern­ally to gen­er­ate this HTML into some­thing more inter­est­ing than a picture.

In deploy­ing the small Ruby on Rails applic­a­tion on an old Dell 8200 run­ning Debian-sarge, I decided to see how the applic­a­tion would per­form under load.

Apache comes with a great little applic­a­tion meekly called ab. ab is a small command-line tool that slash­dots your web applic­a­tion, and gives you a nice meas­ure (in pages per second, amongst other things).

Meas­ur­ing the per­form­ance of the Dell 8200 using the Mon­grel web server vs. my Mac Book Pro run­ning the same ver­sions of all the stack of soft­ware (except, obvi­ously the OS) — the speed dif­fer­ence is 16x. Now as these machines are about 4 years apart from each other in the Intel-world, 16 is exactly what you would expect: the per­form­ance doubles every year. Very wise pre­dic­tion from 1970 that con­tin­ues to drive this whole crazy industry.

What has this to do with Com­pound­ing interest? Exactly 22 years ago one of my kind, late great-uncles star­ted a bank account for be with the grand deposit of AU$200. Which I’ve sub­sequently for­got­ten about.

Mum found the Deposit book­let some­where, and sent it to me. Today that account is worth about $640. This is a com­poun­ded interest rate of 5.4%. In another 22 years it will be worth AU$2,023 at the same rate.

Now, if it had com­poun­ded at Moore’s Law over the last 22 years: the amount in the bank would be a grand $6,276,211,921,800.

Now I know why I work in IT, not finance!

What a fun few days! I repor­ted earlier I was in the midst of Ruby on Rails. The small pro­ject is com­ing along fine. Even though I could quickly build in Python or PHP, its time to learn and immerse myself in a new lan­guage — and more import­antly, a new platform.

This plat­form is more than just code: it is also the con­cepts of ver­sion man­age­ment, agile devel­op­ment, fast deploy­ment and easy roll back.

So the configuration:

Debian-sarge: from a new base install. Added to this is sub­ver­sion for ver­sion man­age­ment, post­gr­esql for data­base stor­age. Tweaks are required to get this part work­ing and ready for Ruby on Rails.

As Debian has a strict policy for “stable” pack­ages that can be installed into their stable OS, you have to munge /etc/apt/sources.list to point to serv­ers con­tain­ing “test­ing” or “unstable” pack­ages. This causes heartache as there are all sorts of bits-and-pieces on these serv­ers that may con­flict. So frankin­stall time.

What is “frankin­stall”. I am sure the lin­guistic source is from “franken­stall” or “franken­stein”. Basic­ally, you down­load the sources, ./configure && make && make install your­self. The res­ult is a half-package man­aged deploy­ment, half source com­piled and installed — leav­ing the admin­is­trator to mas­ter the sys­tem. Thank­fully, 18 years of Unix means that this seems the best, anyway.

Then comes the myriad of con­fig­ur­a­tion files:

As I planned to deploy behind Mon­grel and Apache; I had to upgrade to Apache 2.2 (to get proxy_balancer), Ruby 1.8.5 (to get the latest Mon­grel 0.3.13.4 with Mongrel_cluster 0.2.1) and Cap­istrano for remote deploy­ment. Apart from the source, the best resource for all this text file tweak­ing is at Coda Hale’s site, with some extra double-cross check­ing from Rimuhosting’s wiki.

As I have split our Debian server’s IP into dif­fer­ent parts for secur­ity, some extra work was required on the application’s deploy­ment under Apache (essen­tially, get­ting Vir­tu­al­Hosts cor­rect) and ensur­ing that the /log/ dir­ect­ory was cor­rectly linked to the cur­rent release in the applic­a­tion deployment.

In the end, our Debian server now is a source-code repos­it­ory and applic­a­tion deploy­ment plat­form — with a mongrel_cluster for mul­tiple users behind safe and secure Apache.

So why do all this?

Today Liam is using Gary’s Mod to build a cus­tom envir­on­ment in Half Life 2. Dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion, dif­fer­ent tweak­ing I guess.

Inter­est­ing read about the future of Web Applic­a­tions; and spe­cific­ally their arche­types, by Matt Webb.

From applic­a­tion design, to applic­a­tion size, loc­a­tion and other bits.

Looks like a loss for the AU world as Amber MacAr­thur is leav­ing Call For Help (which she is a co-host with Leo Laporte) for some obscure Cana­dian TV chan­nel. (as seen 6.30pm on the Fox­tel How To Chan­nel).

I should have learnt this fully years ago. A good source of info is here: Javas­cript and Level 1 DOM manip­u­la­tion of HTML. There are some “things” I want to imple­ment that can only be done using these meth­ods. Look­ing into the his­tory, it looks like there are many deep dark secrets. Such as Tantek’s hack: how to fool older browsers by tak­ing advant­age of bugs. Interesting.