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Archive for the ‘Media’ Category

I wonder if Axe Cop is what Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood had in mind when they talk about creative play for children. If you haven’t read Axe Cop yet, go there now to right this injustice. I’ll wait. See, he’s a cop and he’s got an Axe, and he partners up with all these superheroes to fight the likes of Dr. Stinkyhead, King Evilfatsozon, and Vampire Man Baby Kid. The kicker is that it all comes from the head of a 5-year-old Malachai Nicolle and drawn by his 29-year old-brother Ethan.

This comic is just pure fun. Axe Cop runs into wish-granting unicorn-babies, robot zombie worlds, and rides a rocket-powered dinosaur dragon named Wexter (who has guns for arms). Best of all, he defeats bad guys with his axe. Although this is all springing from the mind of a small child, parents groups would be outraged if something like this ever made it to television. The main character is literally an axe-wielding maniac. He uses violence to solve his problems, not words.  His all-birthday cake diet sets a terrible example of healthy eating habits. Worst of all, he only has one girl on his team. Talk about gender stereotyping!

As long as I could remember, adults were always trying to impose their insecurities on kids’ playtime. I can distinctly remember as an eight year old finding out what the words “violence” and “influence” meant from a TV Guide column. GI Joe, Transformers and Robotech were supposed to influence me to commit violent acts. Even as a kid I could tell this was pure garbage. It’s a children’s cartoon, not mind control! In fact, I remember many episodes warning against the dangers of mind control.

The problem is we don’t recognize childhood for what it is. We’ve got this idea that childhood is an idyllic paradise free of problems where everyone plays nice and no one calls anyone names. Malachai is a nice, normal 5-year-old boy who did what any 5-year-old boy would do when presented with the opportunity of infinite possibility. He took the most extreme elements he could find in his world and mashed them up into a story that’s entertaining for him and everyone else on the internet. If we really want children grow up to be more creative and think for themselves, we need less social engineering and more Axe Cop!

That phrase was a mantra to me growing up. It was trumpeted by every third children’s book, my school’s curriculum, and even a few He-man and GI Joe PSAs. I understand now that it was an subtle attempt by all these institutions to instill ideas of racial and sexual equality into my fragile little mind. For the most part, it worked. We don’t judge people or things by their appearance today. Unfortunately, we’ve gone so far as to think that appearance doesn’t matter at all.

You might say this is our society evolving. I say it’s willful ignorance. Why? Appearances are a part of our decision making process. You wouldn’t trust a personal trainer with a beer gut, and you wouldn’t step into a house that was swaying in the wind. How can we critically think if we don’t account for information we take in through our own eyes?

This goes beyond using appearances to keep our personal safety. The forces of aesthetics influence our culture to this very day. If we pretend they don’t exist, we can’t understand how our society works and we’ll ultimately lose control of our culture entirely.

The technology community is making much ado about the personal information land-grab that Facebook orchestrated recently. Basically, information that was formerly protected by your account’s privacy settings was now linked to public pages. This would make it easier for marketers to target users and possibly allow Mark Zuckerberg to finally make a profit. Those who were attracted to Facebook for its privacy features had been officially stabbed in the back.

Is anybody surprised by this development? Facebook has rallied almost half a billion users under service that charged absolutely nothing. Consider to time and money it takes to manage a user base of that size. The interface complaints alone could fill an entire rack server. Clearly, something had to give. Facebook needed money to survive, and that user info was the only way to get it. This leaves us with a question: Can free web software be trusted?

It’s the same trap that foiled many internet start-ups in the 90′s. Computers made the transit and storage of information literally too cheap to meter. It doesn’t make sense charging for a service that you put no effort into providing. Your competitors will just undercut you. However, just because one aspect of your business is plentiful enough to be free, that doesn’t mean the whole thing should be. Websites still need hardware and active management to provide any services at all. Free web software should only be a platform for other paid services that can support the free stuff.

Facebook’s example underlines the need for day-one monetization, if not profitability of any web service. Google, Craigslist, Flickr and Livejournal all have paid components which support stellar free services. There will always be free open source alternatives for the Facebooks of the world, but the time it takes to have software that is easy to use and Just Works™ will always require some kind of cash. So if you have website and you put a price tag on some of its features, don’t think of it as selling out to the man. That money is a symbol of trust and reliance on your expertise. If you can fulfill the promise of that symbol, then the world will beat a path to your door.

So you’ve got joined a ruby club, installed the software,  signed up for github and Heroku, and finished some tutorials. Where do you go from there, Rails Developer? It is now time for you to choose a project to work on.

Projects are best way to learn a programming language because it forces you to apply your knowledge. Memorizing the API is all fine and good, but it’s not going to matter much if you can’t orchestrate it into something tangible. As I said, it’ll become your resume when you want to use Ruby on Rails professionally. Furthermore, the market for subscription-based web software is exploding right now. Your project has the potential to make you rich. Even with a small customer base of, say, 200 customers paying $20 a month, you are bringing in 6 figures of revenue with almost no marginal cost for more customers. Watch this presentation by DHH if you need more convincing.

The project I’m working on (for the purposes of this blog series, at least) is called Dramathea. It’s a website where community theater companies can promote their shows online. I plan to monetize it by selling preferred access to the front page and taking online ticket sales. It started out a few years ago as a PHP project, but now that I’ve discovered Rails, I think it would be a great way to learn the framework. Here are some tips that will help you choose your own project to work on.

1. Keep it Simple

37signals is making millions right now with this philosophy. Your project shouldn’t be complex, even if you are planning to monetize it right out of the gate. No one is going to use your software if it has the learning curve of a Boeing 747. This is probably the hardest guideline to follow because any application can turn into an over-bloated mess within a 10-minute requirements meeting. Have a core function, like listing plays in a certain city. If your users demand more features, by all means, add them, but make sure your site still does that one thing it was supposed to do.

2. Tempt Failure

The rush of gambling doesn’t come from winning alone. Losing a grand at blackjack and then doubling down is the experience that practically built Las Vegas. I don’t know if Dramathea is going to make any money. Community theater people are known for being cheap, so why would they spend money on my site when they could advertise on facebook for free? Then again, what other website is completely dedicated to community theater? What if my site is the easiest to use? I don’t know what’ll happen when I ship this site, and that’s all part of the fun.

3. Solve Your Own Problem

Many web app success stories come from people solving their own problems. My problem is finding live theater in the Fraser Valley. What’s yours?

3. Follow the Stress

If you can’t think of your own problem to solve, look around you. Listen.  It could be in conversations with your friends and family. It could be on threads in Reddit. Keep an eye out on fmylife.com. Wherever you find stress, headaches, and inefficiency, you will find your project.

5. Don’t Worry About People Stealing Your “Idea”

Industrial progress is being held back by myths like the Coca-cola formula and KFC’s 11 secret herbs and spices. You can’t really own an idea any more than you can own the equation, “2+2=4″. What you can own is the work that makes the idea a reality. You have to maintain the data, manage hosting, market to your initial user base, and yes, code the thing in the first place! Anyone who says you can make money from your ideas alone is probably selling you something.

6. Ship

As you can see from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s l337 coding skills in 2001, it doesn’t matter where you start on the programming totem pole. You’ll be known by your time spent with the framework and the code you post on the internet. Those faltering first steps will only serve to inspire the developers yet to come.

Feel free to post links to your projects in the comments.

Here is the address for Dramathea: http://www.dramathea.com

Here is the github repository: http://github.com/jstrocel/Dramathea

The controversial chairman of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, has made plans to announce a pay subscription model for his publications to be viewed on the iPad and other such devices. The plan is expected to include the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and the New York Times and will expand into News Corp.’s entertainment properties.

All I have to say is: Good for Rupert Murdoch. News Corp lost 5 billion dollars last year. You could say he’s only doing this because he’s old and the pay subscription model is the only thing he understands, but really it’s either this or shutter the newspapers entirely. That move would certainly cause more shareholders to flee, further reducing News Corp.’s share price, causing him to shut down more divisions, and on it goes until the company implodes. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t kind of situation.

It’s going to be interesting to see if this works. Subscription based services have failed in the past, but that was at a time before you had online payment methods like paypal and 1-click. Today, millions are being made through subscription-based web software, a situation unthinkable in the last decade. It’ll also be a true test of where political opinion lies in the world today.  There was a time when companies like News Corp. could hide their inviability through cheap debt. Now thanks to the recession, we are actually going to see if people are willing to pay money to keep the conservative echo chamber alive.

When people hear the story of Vicky Harrison, they are quick to comfort themselves with all kinds of qualifiers. They leave comments like, she left school, she had mental issues that weren’t reported on or she took the easy way out. None of them seem to address why this had to happen. Vicky had been looking for a job for almost 2 years after leaving college. After over 200 rejections, her self-worth was so low that she took her own life.

I’m not asking why she died. I want to know why she had to send out 200 applications in the first place. Does this system of finding a job produce better workers?

Vicky’s plight is not unique. While the article was from the UK, here in BC the unemployment rate for 18-24 year olds is 15.9 percent, almost twice the provincial average of 8.1 percent. Her suicide is probably just a symptom of thousands, possibly millions of young people who might be suffering debilitating mental issues because they can’t find jobs.

It doesn’t make sense. A generation ago, people that age were getting married and having kids on top of starting careers with things like pensions and a mandatory retirement age. In all likelihood, they were less educated than the current crop of young adults. It’s like we’ve gone from a culture that worshipped youth to one that completely abhors it.

It’s tempting to blame the demographically larger baby boomers for this, but this has been going on ever since Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” was published 20 years ago. I think it has more to do with the fact that we live in the most policy-choked, paternalistic, and gentrified labor system ever produced by human civilization. There are so many rules and regulations in private companies that they end up killing all initiative and decision making. No one wants to bear the cost of training new and unproven workers in that kind of situation.

I don’t know how we’re going fix this system, but we can start by admitting that it’s broken. Most young workers are going to have to find their fortunes outside of official channels like resumes and reference letters. It’s cruel and dangerous to tell them otherwise. Change will come, but it’s not going to be found in the company handbook.

The Famous Alamo Drafthouse Movie Theatre announced its plans to do away with line-ups.

Gay Visitation Order shows how Obama brings big change with small actions

10 things the internet has ruined or killed and 5 things it hasn’t

A sarcastic essay on How to Write about Afghanistan

A fascinating look at the man who guards the Stanley Cup

A Reddit thread looks at the things you learn in Jail

John Kricfalusi asks why mediums have arbitrary rules

The Keep Calm and Carry On Poster Generator

Some handy dandy HTML5 demos

An Elevator industry job in Queens, New York attracts 750 applicants

If you happen to own your own website, you may have installed google analytics to track your web stats. You might write a kickass post that’s been dugg, retweeted, or otherwise talked about on your favorite social media site and thought to yourself, “I know there’s a spike happening in my traffic, but I want to see it nooooow!”

Well, whine no longer, my friends. It’s Woopra to the rescue!

Woopra is a real time website tracking service. You can either install its javascript code directly into your site, or install one of the many CMS plugins developed for it. You download the multi-platform desktop client and voila! You have real time access to all the visits on your website. You can sort users by geography, by referrer, and  just about any other statistic you can track. There’s a feature coming soon will enable to initiate live chat sessions with visitors on the site.  Woopra is also free up to 30,000 pageviews a month. Be careful though, watching your own meteoric rise to internet fame can be addictive.

My friends, it is time!

No longer shall we labor under the iron heel of spaghetti code, protected methods, and proprietary software. We must make a perilous journey to that golden land where all variables are objects and REST rules supreme! Today, we shall become: Ruby on Rails Developers!

This post is the start of a weekly series tracking my progress learning Ruby on Rails. Sure, there are probably better, more dedicated Rails blogs out there, (Alan Bailward’s Thinking in Rails is a good example) but because there are so many programmers out there who haven’t even tried it, one more travelogue into the world of Rails can’t hurt.

So what is Ruby on Rails? Most large websites like facebook, twitter, and even this blog use programming to dynamically generate pages. This programming can get very complicated as these sites get larger. Ruby on Rails is a framework that incorporates some base assumptions about how data-driven websites work. This makes it easier to program these websites and make changes to the overall structure. This screencast shows how you can use rails to create a simple database driven blog in 15 minutes.

This functionality can be expanded to cover everything we use on the web. Blogging, Todo lists, shoppings carts, Rails can even be used to serve up more advanced content like games and video. So, how does one become a Rails developer?

1. Find a local Ruby on Rails club

There are quite a few Ruby clubs operating around the world. Learning on-line is one thing, but you can get so much more out face-to-face coding sessions. It’s also a lot easier to stay motivated when you are coding alongside other people. I go to the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade, which meets on Wednesday nights from 7:00-10:00pm at the Gourmet Gallery in Abbotsford, BC.

2. Install Ruby on Rails

The latest Ruby on Rails install instructions can be found at RubyonRails.org. You might run into some insurmountable problems using Rails on a Windows. Most Rails developers won’t bother troubleshooting the platform. I recommend following along with Curtis McHale‘s 2-part tutorial, The Best Windows Ruby on Rails Setup. He installs Rails by setting up ubuntu on Windows using Virtualbox. I still look back on it whenever I want to set up Linux on my windows laptop. Curtis is also a member of the Fraser Valley Ruby Brigade.

3. Get a github.com account

Github is a social coding and version control utility. It’s a good idea to post your Rails project here so you can manage your code and demonstrate what you’ve learned. Don’t worry if you are just creating copies of tutorial apps you find. Everyone passes through those first learning stages. If you want to program Rails apps for money, employers will care more about what’s in your github account rather than your years spent at the Very Big Software Company. You can find my Github repository here.

4. Get a Heroku Account

Once you’ve programmed your Rails app, where can you host it so that everyone can use it? Heroku hosts basic rails apps for free and sells additional capacity where necessary. You can use heroku as a test server before deploying to your own paid hosting (if you have any). As an example, here is a twitter clone that I wrote using a tutorial.

5. Go to Railstutorial.org

There are many Rails tutorial sites out there, but Michael Hartl’s Railstutorial.org is easily the best of the bunch. It not only teaches you the basics of Rails programming, it has instructions on how to properly use Github and Heroku so you can get real development workflow going.

Next week, I’ll be talking about my rails project, Dramathea, and the path to webapp stardom. See you next time!

You do so have  TV.

Yes, you!

You know who you are, but trust me, you’re not alone. That is why I’m writing.

So you say you don’t have TV?

Then why are you filling me in on Lost, Heroes or Doctor Who?

Those are television shows, of which you would have no knowledge unless you (gasp!) watched TV!

You start to stammer and sweat. A TV? N-no, no I would never let one of THOSE in my house.

Oh really? Then what is this strange device you are reading this post on? Is it capable of transmitting visions over great distances of time and space? Then you have what could be called a television.

Why do we still wear that derisive murmur of “I don’t watch TV” as some kind of intellectual badge of honor? How does being out of touch with one form of media make us smarter? Do we aspire to be like my wife’s English professor who walked into his lecture on September 11, 2001 and asked what was with all the long faces? That means we’ve bought into all those crazy myths our parents told about the “Boob Tube”, that it will make your eyes fall out or turn your imagination to cottage cheese. I know that TV has traditionally been a scary thing. It was a constant stream of lies pumped through colored lights, told by an arcane heirarchy of network executives that sacrifice animals to the FCC during their nightly meetings. To control what went on the TV screen required letter writing campaigns and petitions, most of which went un-noticed. Now that computers and DVRs are here, we seem to be determined to erase that unfortunate point in our media history. Just because we choose which show we want to watch doesn’t mean we get to project this facade of mental purity. Unless you are willing to completely unhook from the whole digital superhighway, call that AVI file or youtube video what it is and has been for the past 50 years. TELEVISION.