Nokia's new N97, I was hoping it would be the next great phone. But looking at a review in AAS, it looks like they totally blew it on the keyboard. There are only three rows of keys, which means that the space bar is in completely the wrong place. Gak!

ZDNet UK notes that the touchscreen is resistive instead of capacitative and apparently this results in a substantially less appealing touch compared to the iPhone. Yet another strike against.

Finally, I note that the camera is still the 5MP unit in the N95. I have that camera. It's good, but it's not great.

Despite the fact that the new home screen looks really cool (and much better than iPhone) and that it actually has keys, this means that we're not looking at the next great Nokia device that I was expecting. My search for a great device that combines a huge touchscreen and a decent keyboard/keypad apparently will have to continue.

StartupCampWaterloo6 will be... is ... was. Yesterday in fact.

In presentation order:

1. Ultrasaur RM kicked things off with a great 30-second pitch "Your sysadmin is hacking your server. How do you stop them?" ... they tried last time and were denied, so the moral is, try, try again. They were first pick this time.
2. Thinkpanda with coolest logo and a demo you can't get into right now... an interesting tool for social bookmarking (my words, not theirs) which reminded me a bit of delicious and looked like it would be great as a part of groupware like Base Camp.
3. Neverboard Studios... these guys had a pretty cool looking iPhone game and were like, how the hell do we get attention for this thing? They want to charge $$ for it but are worried that they'll never break through the attention barrier. We bounced that one around the room for a while... hopefully had some useful advice... Afterwards at the bar I suggested that they lace the sound effects of their game with profanity in the hopes that Apple will ban it, and ride on the publicity from that. And if they do let it through, people will want it— for the same reason.
4. Kaimera Media with a concept for a theme park ride video capture system—like the thing that captures a photo of you on the roller coaster, but video. kiosk that burns a DVD for you on the spot. Definite win for simplest, best developed business plan of the evening.
5. Primal Fusion, definitely known around the Waterloo startup community for being pretty well funded and definitely brainy. Demo, which I've tried the private beta on their first product, and while it's interesting, I think there's a lot of what they've done that's not exposed in this version that needs to be in the next before it's clear what they are achieving. By the way, I cheated on including Primal Fusion in the sequence because Mark missed the 30 second pitches. I've been power corrupted. But I suffered accordingly, as my discussion topic was pushed off the end of the agenda. I won't give up though... I'll have another one next time.
6. Pager Duty was I think my favorite of the evening, although obviously they didn't do so well on the 30 second elevator pitch or they would have been farther up the presentation order. Very simple, to the point—if you need to have people on call, they will make sure that people are effectively notified with a simple service-style web system.
7. Giftah has what looks to me like a solid plan, allowing you to buy/sell excess gift cards and they take on the guarantees. Interesting discussion, including acknowledgement that they do have larger, better funded competitors in the USA like Plastic Jungle ... how to get traffic, etc.

I suspect you'll be seeing some of these companies around in the future doing cool stuff.

Oh yeah—and if you were there remember to take advantage of the Communitech Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program definitely—just call them. Say I sent you :-)

Also, we REALLY need a single unified calendar of events and it looks like watcamp.com might provide.

Possible idea for next time: handing out red cards to anyone who says "Facebook". Also, giving a prize for provoking the best discussion.

Thanks to the Accelerator Centre for providing space, and Tech Capital, Sun Microsystems, and Communitech for food & drinks. This is a totally non-profit venture and all labour is volunteer :-) My posse is Jesse and Mic.

% uptime
 00:59:46 up 607 days, 14:13,  2 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.17, 0.36

no wonder I found a lot of wacky old processes running on there...

You need something called "password sync" ... obvious right?

This will help:

Unix and Samba password sync on Debian Etch

...only took me an hour to figure out how to get logging working and decode the obscure error messages....

This is probably what you want to do if you get this:

Authentication for user FAILED with error NT_STATUS_WRONG_PASSWORD

So there I was, watching the Incredible Hulk titles again in slow-motion, because I'm always curious as to what the special effects people write into the various fake news stories and computer graphics. Sometimes it's funny. And I came across this little easter egg which seems to have been missed by fans on the net.

Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. Command are never mentioned in the film. He's part of the comic team Fantastic Four I think (I never really read a lot of comics as a kid, sorry...) which I guess will be having a film some day. Anyway, here's what it says:

Nick Fury
Shield Command
Code RED
New York, NY 060584

Details: Classified. Subject is THREAT LEVEL RED, surveillance only.
The Bruce Banner manhunt is still not over.  This shadowy figure re-
nowned as a doctor and professor at the Culver University Science De-
partment has once again slipped through the authorites hands and is
still on the run.

That's verbatim by the way. Apparently the letter was never on screen long enough (just a few frames) to warrant a thorough spell check.

How come Marvel puts their logo on their movies, but DC Comics doesn't?

I have a theory about this one. Because they can easily go to Matching and turn it off temporarily. But I think that some people leave it on, because they want the ego boost, even though they're going to shut down the match anyway.

The Restful Authentication plugin seems to be the standard right now, although I'm staring to wish I'd tried something else, maybe AuthLogic... because restful_authentication is kind of poorly documented. One serious error of ommission is how the hell do you update your tests so that you can run them on controllers that require a logged in user? Well, I have had the pain, and so you can have the quick answer, here it is.

Assuming you are using ActionController::TestCase ... first edit test_helper.rb:

  # Add this helper function to test_helper.rb
  # It will allow you to run any block under the aegis of
  # a controller of your choosing. This is not something 
  # that is possibly by default
  def run_with_controller( controller_class )
    old_controller = @controller
    @controller = controller_class.new
    yield
    @controller = old_controller
  end

Now you can use that helper method in your test cases, in the setup function do this:

  def setup
    run_with_controller(SessionsController) do
      post :create, { :login => "george", :password => "monkey" }
    end
  end

What you're doing here is simply making a POST to the Restful Authentication SessionsController to "create" a new session, pass in a login/password that exists in your fixtures. And that's it.

By the way, if you chose to install with RSpec because of the dire warnings that old fashioned tests will be out of date, but aren't currently using RSpec for you other tests, you should copy the rspec fixture data into test/ so that you get the right password hashes. Tricky...

So Merb developer Matt Aimonetti made a presentation at GoGaRoCu heavily laden with soft-core pornography and some people got upset. In particular, a woman got upset—Sarah Allen. It didn't help that she was one of only six women at a 200 person conference. Holy shit!

Don't put sexual images of women in your slides. If you must do it, then put just as many sexual images of men in your slides. Be fair. Unless of course you're presenting to a club that only allows male members. Which in a way is what pisses off the women who are reacting to this incident—because it implies that Ruby/Rails/whatever is a men-wanted-only club.

If I had been there, I suspect I would have walked out. I've walked out of presentations, movies, plays, etc. for less. I have low patience no pride.

Why the lucky stiff posted a summary of women rubyist's reactions, and there's discussion aplenty there and elsewhere on the net. Hopefully the positive outcome will be a community that is more aware of issues that differ between men and women, and therefore has more women in the future.

I binned apache finally on semacode.com. It was easy. A little bit of "this is really the last straw" frustration with mod_rewrite and I ditched it.

I've been threatening to leave you, apache, for years. Ever since I first cursed your horrid rewriterules, I knew that it would never be the same between us. You were good, once. You weren't just "a patchy" web server, but a scrappy one... once. But 2.0 you just didn't live up. You didn't fix your big warts. You got flabby. Even the decision by your developer team to finally remove the default MIME type didn't redeem you in my eyes.

No, it was just one poke in my eye too many, when you insisted on unencoding my percent encoded URLs before passing them to the rails/mongrel proxy, and there was just no way to make you stop doing it, no matter how many googles I searched. And so I said: enough is enough. Everyone on Rails uses nginx now, and I will too. I'm tired of learning how to sacrifice chickens to the apache configuration gods. Bring me something new, clean, shiny, fast, and easy to configure!

Learning how to configure nginx took an hour on the outside—it's very easy and keeps all the good parts of apache's syntax and throws away the complete crap. It even allows me to compress stupid blocks into one-liners! :

  if (-f $document_root/system/maintenance.html) { rewrite  ^(.*)$  /system/maintenance.html last; break; }

Isn't that gorgeous! I agree. And so the "engine x" russians get my love now. It's all over. Sayanora. End communication.

Intelligent online cartoons:

• xkcd. yes everyone already knows about this one. IPv4 space (notice how apple has as much space as all of japan? trust me they don't need it). how pure is your scientific discipline? frequently a bit ... odd.
• Basic Instructions. How to make a good impression at a job interview. How to converse with someone you don't want to talk to. Scott Adams experimented with him in turning it into a print cartoon but it just wouldn't fit into the restricted size.
• Savage Chickens. Peace and wisdom. Dachshund. My most recent discovery.

There's plenty of crap out there. Can you add any other good ones?

Trying to encode URL parameters on Mac or iPhone? Frustrated because NSString stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding encodes non-URL characters but leaves the reserved characters (like slash / and ampersand &) alone? "Apparently" this is a "bug" apple is aware of, but they haven't done anything about it yet, and so, here is a solution that actually works.

Try this:

  NSString * encodedString = (NSString *)CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes(
    NULL,
    (CFStringRef)unencodedString,
    NULL,
    (CFStringRef)@"!*'();:@&=+$,/?%#[]",
    kCFStringEncodingUTF8 );

As an example, @"'Decoded data!'/foo.bar:baz" will become "%27Decoded%20data%21%27%2Ffoo.bar%3Abaz".

Obviously you would use this, not on the full URL, but just on the parameters.

Well, apparently I've achieved the vaunted and much-desired "trusted user" status on DKos. That means I can rate people down, as opposed to just up. I'm probably not going to do it much, just like I rarely troll rated people when I had privs on SlashDot (back when /. was interesting...)

Daily Kos probably gets as much traffic as /. did back in the heyday, but their rating system is much different. Ratings are simply thumbs up as far as normal users are concerned, so the higher the number, the more recommended that comment is. Whereas in /., every comment was rated from 0-5. /. allowed you to quickly filter to view only comments above a specific level, which filtered out a lot of gunk but also meant that most people were actually reading less. This I think probably led to a situation where important and interesting comments were not seen by many people, and it was almost a competition for cleverness, etc. Whereas the system on DKos leads to much more of an actual dialogue.

Anyway, what lead to this was my analysis on the subject of the 46-page 2005 "torture" memo by White House "attorney" Steven Bradbury, which you can read here, if you have the stomach for it. (it's really nasty stuff, to be honest, and I felt ill after reading it and writing about it).

Update: trusted user status is gone! Thank god, the stress was getting to me.

There's an excellent guide to Rails 2 that I'm reading through right now, but I don't like this bit:

    if @comment.save
      redirect_to post_comment_url(@post, @comment)
    else
      render :action => "new"
    end

It's much better like this:

    render :action => "new" and return unless @comment.save
    redirect_to post_comment_url(@post, @comment)

They do exactly the same thing, but mine is 2 lines instead of 5, and mine clearly eliminates the exceptional/error case first, and then leaves you to see the normal case. In fact, I virtually always code this way when I can, deal with the error cases first, and return, and then the rest of the function is an un-nested normal case handler.

So I just made some major updates to the software running this site, which for now I'm calling "Simplelog-X". And the source code for simplelog-x is now on github.

This will probably interest people who are running the original SimpleLog by Garrett Murray which he no longer supports (and incidentally it doesn't run on Rails 2.x). Simplelog-X also has quite a few other changes aside from working on (presently) Rails 2.2.2, all of the details are in the README.

I'm not going to annouce this loudly just yet because I still have a whole ton of my own site files in the public directory, and I need to move them to public/system I guess and get them out of the repo but still capistrano-friendly.

I was just making a lot of changes and it struck me how much more I know about Rails now than when I started this journey...

So Dubai isn't a wonderland and actually is a vast petrol- and credit-funded nightmare that is on a knife's edge of sinking into the sands, forever gone? I'm shocked! Who could have thought it.

If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out of water. "At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil..." he shakes his head. "We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive."

— The dark side of Dubai (in The Independent) via The Cartoonist (see also Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down)

Here's a thought. Don't build a big city in the middle of a desert. And here's a prediction: Dubai will be gone in 50 years.

I absolutely hate the latest Facebook redesign. And, for the record, I loved the last one, so I'm not some kind of knee-jerk negativist. The new facebook removes the single most important feature, the live news feed. Facebook's major contribution to the online world was the live news feed. Everything—updates, pictures, interests, links, notes, etc. etc. etc. all in one time-sorted feed. It was brilliant, and obviously I think so since I make some kind of minimal replication of it on my own front page.

And now they have removed it. The new... thing ... whatever it is .. that I get is more like twitter. I don't need another twitter. I already have twitter. What I want is my live facebook feed. Now, if I want to see what photos people have been tagged in, what apps they have been using, etc., I don't know what to do. The right hand side seems to have some stuff there ... but I can't filter it.

Now what kind of idiot would destroy their company's chief asset in an eyeblink? When you've got something that good, you don't change it, you nurture it. Look at google's home page. They are so careful in making changes. They do statistical A/B tests on every single change they ever make, and only keep the ones that make people's results better. When they make a change that sucks, it's also minor and gets rolled back quickly. So my point is this: for FB to ruin their own user experience is really out of the ordinary and insane.

Who would do such a thing? Only a tyrant who's lost touch. Which means Mark Zuckerberg has become a tyrant and lost touch. For evidence that he's become a tyrant, we can look at the following evidence:

Gawker: A tipster tells us that Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff reacting to criticism of the changes: "He said something like 'the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.'" Another tipster who has seen the email says Zuckerberg implied that companies were "stupid" for "listening to their customers."

TechCrunch: Facebook says this is about getting a CFO with public company experience ("We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience."). Which is complete nonsense (and poorly thought out nonsense at that), because [Gideon] Yu, after a short stint at YouTube and an even shorter stint at Sequoia Capital, was the treasurer and SVP Finance at Yahoo. Which is very much a public company.

For evidence that he's lost touch, well, there's plenty. As of now over 1 million users have gone to the trouble to install an app specifically to complain about the new layout. I know that facebook has ~ 175 million users, but that's still a HUGE user backlash.

Now apparently they are going to roll back some of the changes... we'll see how that goes. Presumably at a company of that size the investors are going to force Zuckerberg to back down. See this Joy of Tech comic for an idea. But people are also going to compare Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs of the 80s, when he was forced out of Apple for being an asshole.

Let's be completely clear on this. Steve Jobs WAS an asshole in the eighties! My impression is that the film Pirates of Silicon Valley is quite accurate. And from working at Apple during Steve's second coming, I can say that he still could be a real asshole, the kind that gets things done and doesn't have patience for idiots. The difference is, that Jobs never did anything really stupid to his user base.

So, what's going to happen now? I suspect that Z won't back down very easily, and that we're going to see more conflict, clashes and problems in the future. It's unfortunate, and I hope that wiser heads prevail and FB recovers the truly awesome user experience that it used to have.

Update: Gawker thinks Zuckerberg should go. Strong stuff.

And Business Insider: Mark Zuckerberg has begun "believing his own hype," a source says. He believes he is the genius the magazine covers say he is. Mark has always been an executive who made life difficult for those he disagreed with. "Mark is a very demanding person to work for, if you screw up, one day you are in, the next day out, persona non grata," says one former employee. Now that he thinks he's Steve Jobs, he's unbearable.

Yup.

Got a new server.

The old box, was a Penguin Computing rack-mount purchased in 1999 or 2000. It had a PIII and was totally maxed out RAM-wise—at 512 MB. Anyone who's tried to run rails on a box with that much ram might understand why I had occasional downtime. mongrel would just give up sometimes. Trying to install new gems was fun as well. Still, the old box had a good run.

The new box is a Dell R300... Core 2 Duo... RAM is at 4GB right now, max 24. And we've gone with RAID-1 since we don't really need the space but like the redundancy.

Also, we switched from debian to ubuntu. Ubuntu is a bit less secure but a hell of a lot easier to deal with in terms of package management and installation.

When I was just a young tyke, getting beat up by my peers every day, I retreated to the little school library to immerse myself in visions of the future. Little did I know that some day the mythical year "2001" would come and pass in a blaze of ... nothing spectacular. Well anyway, I think it's fun to look back at those visions of the future and look in awe at the coolness of how we should now be living.

My absolute favorite of all time series was called "World of Tommorow" by Neil Ardley, who also collaborated on the famous "How Things Work" with another of my favorites, David Macaulay (see him talk at TED!).

I love how Ardley saw us with huge gigantic wall-sized computers completely taking over our houses:

Or maybe you'd prefer to see what the tank of the future will look like (n.b., it's robotic!)

Playing holographic games could also be fun...

And there's more—two whole books are online: World of Tomorrow - Health and Medicine, and World of Tomorrow - School, Work and Play. I want my wall-screen TV.

I just acquired an "APC AV H15 Home Theater 1500VA Power Filter and Power Conditioner", which is usually just called the APC H15. It's a pretty popular device basically to smooth out the AC power for home theatre type systems, and also protect your equipment from any kind of bad power juju. Some people buy these kinds of things to make their speakers sound better, but my system probably isn't good enough to notice at this point. My concern was that my apartment has bad power, and I've been having random computer shutdowns, blown lightbulbs, and even weird lines in my new LCD TV. Fortunately I got this silver H15 less than half price because they're moving from silver case to black case.

To me the most impressive thing about this kit is that it's HEAVY. 25 pounds as a matter of fact. So naturally I wanted to crack it open to see what the hell was inside.

Here's the front and back. Click on any of these pictures and on flickr click "All Sizes" to see 5 megapixel full resolution versions (ID parts to your heart's delight).

Three easy screws gets the top off. NB If you've been using it there might be "hot" components inside (electrically speaking) even if it's unplugged. This one was fresh out of the box. Don't touch anything unless you know what you're doing.

So, not just an empty case then. What the hell is that huge thing in the middle?

Looks like a massive toroidal core transformer operating as a constant-voltage transformer if you ask me. Provides voltage regulation and surge protection at the same time.

Some ceramic capacitors. Don't know what they do, beyond storing power.

The yellow/green toroidal things are Common Mode Chokes and reduce line noise. The red box is a surge cube relay (surge protection) and the blue boxes are Interference Suppression Film Capacitors for EM noise. I googled it.

And finally, here's the back panel.

If you must have more, you can visit my flickr photoset with 37 detailed images...

The Shape of Things That Hum is a series of 11-minute short documentaries about different electronic instruments. It goes through a bunch of classics, most I recognize the sound easily but never knew the name or the story. Here's the proper order:

1. Minimoog, the grand-daddy analog synth of them all
2. Vocoder, making a voice sound like a synth
3. Roland DX-7, the first proper digital synth
4. Roland TR-808, early drum machine
5. Roland 303, a sort of bass synthesizer
6. Various subjects
7. Akai Sampler

The whole thing was first broadcast in 2001, in Britain, maybe Channel 4? I'm not sure. In any case it seems to have been more or less ignored, and it's definitely a sort of niche appeal subject. At the moment it seems like youtube/google video is the only source, but let's hope that someone out there will make a torrent with proper quality at some point.

Here's a link to all of the episodes, the best quality I could find. Click on "More from this user" to see them all. Or just google for the title if you can't find it there.

Check out this artist hiding out in an Ikea store using a unique urban camouflage. Watch as he disappears in plain sight!

This Japanese clothing designer has another safety-minded approach: a vending-machine dress.

And finally, something I really wish I could buy. A sure-fire way to hide on the street when life just becomes too much:

It comes complete with vents so you can look out and watch the world go by while you hide and wait for your therapist.

I just wonder how you get into it without being noticed...

Cross-posted in my Daily Kos diary, where it will be almost certainly ignored (because kossacks mainly care about breaking news).

A Metaphor

Suppose I had a car company, Woodside Cars, Inc., and we discovered an amazing new way to power cars using a miraculous substance called unobtanium. We'd roll out a line of new cars, and everyone would buy them, because they never have to be filled up. People would buy shares in the company too. The cars are great, they're well made, they save money, and have a high resale value. But then, after 3 years, suddenly the cars start to fail. It's mysterious. Some of the unobtanium is corrupted. It's unpredictable. Some of the cars just stop, others keep going. Overall there's a 50% failure rate but no way to predict which ones will die and which will keep on going. Suddenly the resale market vanishes, no one wants the cars, and the stock price collapses overnight.

Why did the stop price drop so precipitously? The problem with unobtainium existed all along. But no one knew about it. One morning everything was fine, Woodside Cars was worth $50 billion, the next morning, it was worth $25. The details aren't important, the important thing is: the world collectively decided that the company wasn't worth as much as they thought. The wisdom of the market took care of the rest.

Now we might pity poor Grandma Joe who had her life savings tied up in Woodside stock. But only stupid people invest their net worth in the shares of a single company, right? Not so fast. Many people had their money in Woodside. Woodside has been making cars for 70 years and has always been stable before. Even charities, and small companies, have their money in Woodside shares. In fact, millions of people had their money in Woodside. Fortunately, they still have half their money left.

And then the lawsuits start. People are mad that their cars are broke. They start a class action suit. And it looks like that suit could drag down Woodside's remaining business in regular cars, even though those regular cars run on gasoline and electricity. This is bad news for Woodside shareholders. They run the risk of Woodside's "toxic business" dragging down its regular business and making their shares worth a big fat zero.

So the government steps in. "Woodside is too big to fail" say prominent business leaders and politicians. "Just think of the economic damage that it could do." First they loan Woodside money to buy back the bad cars, and then the split Woodside into two companies – one to carry on with the good business, and the other one to deal with the broken cars and the lawsuits.

Of course, in reality very few people would put all of their money in a company like Woodside. Woodside was free to develop and trade in new kinds of cars, based on any kind of fuel they like. Banks, on the other hand, have restrictions. They are regulated and insured and subject to constant scrutiny. Banks aren't companies... they're banks.

They used to be.

Now they are companies.

In fact there's even a phrase for it: the "shadow banking system". It sounds scary, and it should because it's regular companies, with all of their exposure and foibles, pretending to be banks. These so-called "financial services companies" are just as innovative and subject to unexpected losses as any high-tech, manufacturing, or services company, just as they wormed their way into the heart of the world's monetary system.

Too big to fail? Yes, Dorothy, they are too big to fail. Like Woodside, if they fail, suddenly a lot of individuals and businesses – perfect good citizens who truly believed that they were investing their money wisely – are going to be broke. And through no fault of their own. The effects will spread. People who never touched a Woodside car will suffer.

Yes, the executives should be axed. Yes, the regulations should be changed. But the company is really a bank, whether it's Woodside Cars, or AIG, and needs to be treated as such. If it's allowed to fail, then the economic costs will be massive. Certainly the company made mistakes, and there's good reason to punish it for that. But. They didn't break the law. Unobtainium was legal when it was introduced. Maybe it shouldn't have been, but it was.

Of course the real situation is much worse. It's like unobtainium has been added to the fuel of every car that anyone makes or drives, except that no-one knows which cars are good and which cars are bad. Unobtainium has become so essential that there's no way to quickly remove it from the transportation system – it will take years. Car companies are struggling to figure out which of their suppliers have tainted parts. Even the government can't figure out which parts are good and which are bad.

That's more like the actual banking crises. Unobtainium is bad debt. Oh, there's a million ways to name it – CDOs, MBSs, CDSs, etc., etc., but it's all fundamentally bad debt. These shadow banks, running amok, have infected the entire system. When no one knows which accounts are good and which are bad, they won't borrow and they won't lend.

The knee-jerk reaction is to save the system by destroying it. Let them fail. That is short sighted. All of our so-called money is inside these companies. If they fall, we fall. Yes, we must fix the system, punish anyone who broke the law, and  change the rules so this won't happen again. But that's a very big job and won't happen overnight. In the meantime, unobtainium has infected the system so badly that it needs heroic measures to stave off total collapse.

Next time I'll talk about why the fundamental rules of executive compensation created this problem, and how I think they must be changed to make sure this "never happens again".

Maybe someday, Apple will make it easy to rotate manually into a landscape view. But right now it's been causing me enormous headache with hideous frames issues. Running an app in landscape the whole time is easy, but doing just some views in landscape is insane, especially if you're trying to switch while in the middle of a navigation controller.

However I've found an easy solution which is to use a new window. Just reset the whole view problem. You can then fake out the navigation bar using the method of your preference. Here's the bare bones. For me, I'm going from a tableView, click on an item and get a "results view".

// In ResultsListController, a UITableView delegate:
- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
  ResultsViewController * resultsViewController = [[[ResultsViewController alloc] initWithNibName:@"ResultsViewController" bundle:nil] autorelease];
  resultsViewController._recordIndex = indexPath.row;
  UIWindow * window = [[UIWindow alloc] initWithFrame:[[UIScreen mainScreen] bounds]]; // this is a leak!
  window.backgroundColor = [UIColor redColor]; // just for debugging
  [window addSubview:resultsViewController.view];
  [window makeKeyAndVisible];
}

Now ResultsViewController has its own NIB, and the view is set to be sideways in IB.

// In ResultsViewController
- (void)viewWillAppear:(BOOL)animated; {
  // First rotate the screen:
  [UIApplication sharedApplication].statusBarOrientation = UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight;
  // Then rotate the view and re-align it:
  CGAffineTransform landscapeTransform = CGAffineTransformMakeRotation( degreesToRadian(90) );
  landscapeTransform = CGAffineTransformTranslate( landscapeTransform, +90.0, +90.0 );
  [self.view setTransform:landscapeTransform];
}

// Connect your "back" button in the results view to this:
- (IBAction)back:sender; {
  // return screen rotation to normal:
  [UIApplication sharedApplication].statusBarOrientation = UIInterfaceOrientationPortrait;
  // Get rid of the window, and the "normal" window will re-appear from underneath
  self.view.window.hidden = YES;
  [self.view.window resignKeyWindow];
}

Easy as cake!

UPDATE: There's follow-up Q&A on the iphonedevSDK forums.

So last night was StartupCampWaterloo5—the Original Startup Camp with the Best Format(tm). We had on the order of 60-80 people in attendance. We didn't do formal count of startups this time, but there were 12 proposed demos on the whiteboard, and I know of at least 3 other groups that were represented. As usual we had a keynote speaker: Mark Evans, who among other things runs the mesh conference in Toronto. He usually talks about social media, but he focused for us on communication, highlighting good and poor first impressions and public communications strategies of various websites.

Twelve people/groups put themselves up for doing a session, and gave 30 second pitches about what they wanted to discuss on the theme of starting up. We did our approval voting, ate food (thanks sponsors!) and had time for the top 4:

• Kareem Shehata showed us his new Aeryon Labs Unmanned Aerial Vehicle—sadly he did not yet have government clearance to fly it, but it's a serious piece of kit and he had some kick ass videos. It's controlled via a Google Maps style interface. We talked about business models. http://www.aeryon.com/

• I led a discussion on the subject of where to get Free Money from the government. Suggestions included SR&ED, NSERC USRA, Various OCE programs, Youth Employment Strategy, Ontario Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit, MS BizSpark, Youth.gc.ca - $15K for employee < 30, OMDC, Ontario Interactive Tax Credit, Services Canada (summer jobs)... and to look at the recent techcapital blog post.

• Avery Pennarun "eql=data" a project he's working on to make MS Access databases web accessible. Business model was a bit of a question mark but interesting technology and Avery gives good talks. http://eqldata.com/

• Grigory Kruglov—a UBC student current on co-op at RIM - talked about his business venture Outwick.com. It's aimed at collecting information about events like concerts, cultural events, public parties etc. and making it easy for people to find events at the time & place of their choosing using data mining, tagging etc. Very interesting, and we had a cool talk about viability, how to commercialize, etc.  http://outwick.com/

We also ran a live twitter stream on the main display using #watcmp. Afterwards many of us adjourned to Molly Blooms to imbibe the beverages of our choice.

Thanks to my co-instigators Jesse Rodgers and Mic Berman, and to our sponsors: Accelerator Centre, WatStart, Sun Microsystems, and Tech Capital Partners who provided space, support, and food!

PS And I almost forgot—Graham Hardie shot video and promises to put it online!

It seems like the truth is slowly emerging about all of the horrific things that went on during the boom times and are now emerging from the muck as the swamp is drained. Someone like Bernie Madoff can always cover his debts while the market is rising, but suddenly his ponzi scheme fails when it crashes. It seems that there is now a laundry list of semi-legal crap that is similarly being outed.

A lot of these terms might sound like stupid jargon but they are actually useful jargon, because they are the name for a specific thing, and that thing is fucking up your bank account and making you lose your job.

You should probably already know a few terms of useful "jargon". To start off with, "debt" is not just what you have on your house, it's something you can buy and sell. The value of the debt is based on someone (a ratings agency, a market)'s assessment of how likely to be fully paid over time, and how much the interest is. So the "best" debt (most expensive) would be say a government bond at 10%. Options (e.g. call and put), and Short Selling (which is much like a "put option"), these are both kinds of Derivatives. Briefly, options and short selling allow you to make a stock market trade where you benefit if the stock goes DOWN. Think about how evil that is for a moment, will you? Normally you only buy shares if you think they're going to go up. Derivatives is a broad category, including options, which allow you to trade things on the stock market which aren't actually company's shares. So, you can trade options, or you can trade debt, or the price of oil in 10 years, or whatever. "Downside risk" is the bad stuff that happens if the market does poorly, people default on loans, or whatever.

Secrecy

Underlying all of the below is that no-one knows what the fuck is going on. Most of these tricks don't require reporting to anyone, any market operator or regulator. You can mess with the stock market in so many ways without telling anyone. Maybe the insiders at the other big financial companies on Wall Street will figure it out or hear rumours. But the general public, and even CEOs of normal companies, rich people, readers of Wall Street Journal, normal people, poor people—know nothing until years later.

Naked Short Selling

You can short sell stock you don't own? Are you kidding me? Have a look at The Story of Deep Capture. Basically, I own a big financial company, say a hedge fund, and I want to kill your company. So I short your company and naked short sell it, which adds massive number of shares to the pool, driving down the prices of the existing shares. Then I transact my real shorts or put and make a killing while your stock suffers big time.

Credit Default Swap

OK, this one is a kind of insurance. I loan money to someone but I'm not sure if they'll pay me back. They might go bankrupt and default. So, I get "debt insurance" (like a CDS) and if the default happens, you the insurer pays me instead. Except that CDS isn't exactly like insurance, because (a) I don't actually have to be the lender and (b) you don't have to actually be a regulated insurer. In addition, there is no central place where CDSs are tracked, and you can resell them on and on, making it VERY confusing to know what they're really worth. Which is one of the reasons why banks won't borrow or lend right now, because they have no idea what their CDSs are worth. And of course, they are priced based on "normal" default rates, which go out the window when there's a crash. Why is that a big deal? Because EVERYONE has their money in them ... CDSs were recently valued at $55 TRILLION. Needless to say, Bear Stearns, Lehman and AIG were huge into credit default swaps.

Collateralized Debt Obligation

Wonderful stuff. Long ago, in a galaxy far away, the bank that loaned you money was personally responsible if you defaulted. But no longer. Now that bank can package up your loan and many others into a "CDO" and sell it to other people. Theoretically they will tell you which CDOs are good debt and which aren't so good. But, to be honest, they don't care. They sell someone else the debt, and then it's not their problem anymore if the borrower defaults. So, people get sloppy. And then, the various companies that are supposed to asses the risk in a CDO did/do a very bad job of modelling the downside risk. So when for example the housing market drops by 20% suddenly the CDOs are completely underwater and no one knows any more what they're worth. Maybe they're worth nothing. Who knows? And it doesn't help that some CDOs are actually made up of ... you guessed it ... other CDOs.

Synthetic CDO

Hey, let's kick it up a notch. The above are so boring. They're not, you know, complicated enough. So the financial geeks decided to make CDOs which contained, not actually debt, but Credit Default Swaps! Get it? Hilarious eh? Why would anyone want to do this, I don't know.

The Annual Bonus

I think this one is ultimately responsible for all the others. Financial company performance by the executives is measured on a YEARLY basis. That means, if you are CEO or whatever and you are making a decision, you think only at most ONE YEAR OUT in terms of what it will do for your company. You never think beyond a year, because you are getting paid in at most one year for your decisions, never beyond that. As long as you get your bonus before the shit hits the fan, you're laughing. I think that if these financial firms re-arrange their compensation system so that decisions have to bear fruit for a longer term—maybe 7 years—a lot of the shenanigans would never have happened. You could do that, for example, using employee stock options, locked-in shares, and I'm sure that the wizards can figure out other ways as well.

Well there you have it, my shit list for the financial market circa 200X. And if you want to read so much that your head will explode, try The Economists's Jan 22 Special Report on the Future of Finance. It's 25 pages (in the magazine) and the index is on the right side of your screen. See especially When markets turn. And don't be scared to learn a little more financial jargon. It might save us all next time.

Update 1: And let me add just one more thing. The banks don't know what their own assets are worth. In case you didn't get that above, a lot of banks own a lot of CDOs, CDSs, etc., etc. They don't know what they're worth. That's why there's a "credit crisis" ... they don't trust each other, because they don't even trust their OWN balance sheet. No one will borrow or lend. And that's just how bad it is.

Update 2: You might find useful this video on CDOs and this one on CDSs from Marketplace.

Image from worthbak.

How great is this. You can use any language you want in your MacRuby projects. Want to add in some code you already wrote in Objective-C++? No problemo!

Check out the cool screenshot below which shows everything in action! (You might have to click on the full post view to get the picture).

Also, you might be wondering how to get full bi-directional bridge going on between Ruby and Objective-C/Cocoa. In otherwords, how do you call/access/include/import/require your own Objective-C classes from Ruby and your Ruby objects from Objective-C? It's actually done sort of automagically. If you have a Ruby class Foo and a ObjC class Bar...

(You seem to have to use NSClassFromString(@"FooController") to avoid getting a linker error. Apparently the bridge is not yet running at compile/link time. Also, you (seem to) have to type your bridged objects to id in ObjC, although maybe there's a way around both those limitations that I don't know about yet.)

# Foo.rb
class Foo
  def foo
    puts 'FOO'
    bar = Bar.new
    puts bar.bar
  end
  def baz
    return "BAZ"
  end
end

// Bar.h
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
@interface Bar : NSObject {
}
- (NSString*)bar;
@end

// Bar.m
#import "Bar.h"
@implementation Bar
- (NSString*)bar; {
  id foo = [[NSClassFromString(@"FooController") alloc] init];
  NSLog(@"%@", [foo baz]);
  return @"BAR";
}
@end

And you will get this output when you call Foo.foo:

FOO
2009-02-10 02:46:28.017 Untitled[37257:10b] BAZ
BAR

Boing boing boing! Enjoy!!!!

Hello! I've got a big update for this post, so skip to the end for the goodness!

I use WYM Editor for editing my posts, it's awesome, there's only just one small thing that I don't like about it, which is out of the box it doesn't allow you to copy/paste embed tags like you would use to embed a flash video, youtube video, etc. into your posts. It actually strips out embed tags if you try to put them in.

Why they would not support this, is out of my mind, I can't understand it. There doesn't seem to be any sense in it. Oh well, I know javascript and XML so I can fix it right? Sure, why not.

So, here is a patch that enables basic support. You can switch to "HTML mode" (i.e., the mode where you can see the sourc code, 2nd button from right in the standard view) and paste in some embed code, the stuff you get from YouTube that looks like this:

<object width="480" height="295">
<param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/jzHBszZn6uo&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1"&gt;&lt;/param&gt;
<param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param>
<param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param>
<embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/jzHBszZn6uo&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="295"></embed>
</object>

The embedded item might or might not actually appear in the preview mode at that point. Don't worry about it. Save it, view the final result, it should be there.

It would be nice if the developers would take this and build it in so that you can actually copy/paste them in the "normal" way.

Here is the patch, apply it by hand, or copy/paste it into a patch file and apply using the patch command.

Index: wymeditor/jquery.wymeditor.mozilla.js
===================================================================
—- wymeditor/jquery.wymeditor.mozilla.js	(revision 119)
+++ wymeditor/jquery.wymeditor.mozilla.js	(working copy)
@@ -80,10 +80,11 @@
     
     //replace em by i and strong by bold
     //(designMode issue)
-    html = html.replace(/<em([^>]*)>/gi, "<i$1>")
-      .replace(/<\/em>/gi, "</i>")
-      .replace(/<strong([^>]*)>/gi, "<b$1>")
-      .replace(/<\/strong>/gi, "</b>");
+    // this messes up embed tags—changes them to ibed
+    //html = html.replace(/<em([^>]*)>/gi, "<i$1>")
+    //  .replace(/<\/em>/gi, "</i>")
+    //  .replace(/<strong([^>]*)>/gi, "<b$1>")
+    //  .replace(/<\/strong>/gi, "</b>");
     
     //update the html body
     jQuery(this._doc.body).html(html);
Index: wymeditor/jquery.wymeditor.js
===================================================================
—- wymeditor/jquery.wymeditor.js	(revision 119)
+++ wymeditor/jquery.wymeditor.js	(working copy)
@@ -2068,6 +2068,17 @@
     "13":"dl",
     "14":"dt",
     "15":"em",
+    "embed":
+    {
+      "attributes":[
+      "allowscriptaccess",
+      "allowfullscreen",
+      "height",
+      "src",
+      "type",
+      "width"
+      ]
+    },
     "fieldset":
     {
       "inside":"form"
@@ -2243,10 +2254,11 @@
     {
       "attributes":
       {
-        "0":"type",
+        "0":"name",
+        "1":"type",
         "valuetype":/^(data|ref|object)$/,
-        "1":"valuetype",
-        "2":"value"
+        "2":"valuetype",
+        "3":"value"
       },
       "required":[
       "name"
@@ -3449,7 +3461,7 @@
     this.block_tags = ["a", "abbr", "acronym", "address", "area", "b",
     "base", "bdo", "big", "blockquote", "body", "button",
     "caption", "cite", "code", "col", "colgroup", "dd", "del", "div",
-    "dfn", "dl", "dt", "em", "fieldset", "form", "head", "h1", "h2",
+    "dfn", "dl", "dt", "em", "embed", "fieldset", "form", "head", "h1", "h2",
     "h3", "h4", "h5", "h6", "html", "i", "ins",
     "kbd", "label", "legend", "li", "map", "noscript",
     "object", "ol", "optgroup", "option", "p", "param", "pre", "q",

The Big Update

Thanks to Maxwell Scott-Slade for commenting and pointing to his even more improved version on his blog. I've taken his & my work, added the ability to support flashvars attribute (required for flickr embeds among others) and forked the wymeditor svn repository into GitHub. Get WYMEditor that supports flash on GitHub.

If you want to use it, just:

% git clone git://github.com/sbwoodside/wymeditor.git
% cd wymeditor/trunk
% make

The result will be in build/build/wymeditor.tar.gz.

Here's how to use iPhone SDK to make a button hold it's on/highlighted state when you click on it:

- (IBAction)badButton:sender; {
  badButton.highlighted = YES;
  if( _hasChosen == NO ) {
    _hasChosen = YES;
    [NSTimer scheduledTimerWithTimeInterval:0.0 target:self selector:@selector(badButton:) userInfo:nil repeats:NO];
  }
}

On simulator it looks perfect, but on device there's a brief moment when it goes white before it goes blue/highlighted again.

The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is about life, the universe, and everything, ... and the fact that it makes no sense. Life makes no sense. Nothing that happens makes any sense. There is no purpose, to meaning, no answer, just an endless series of coincidences, catastrophes, and occasionally good times which we just have to put up with until we die. This is the thesis of HHGTTG, and also a good bit of Douglas's other work.

The story is told through the Book, or rather, the Guide. The Guide is the voice of the narrator, who spends most of his time talking about the book, that most famous of all books to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor Beta, and which the narrator notes, is the subject of the whole story in the first place. Arthur is just a new reader of the book, Ford an old writer for the book, and the other characters embody it's general philosophy: that the universe is fucked up (Marvin), and you might as well just try to have fun (Zaphod).

All of them have essentially zero control over their own lives, even when they think they do. Trillian and Ford seem to have wilfully chosen to just hang on for the ride, and Zaphod seems to be doing the bidding of unknown voices in his brain. Even the hyper-intelligent trans-dimensional aliens can't figure out what to make the answer to the Ultimate Question, or prevent a bunch of bungling bureaucrats from messing up their shot at obtaining the Question. I'm not trying to belabour the plot here, just point out that it makes sense only if you realize that Douglas is trying to tell you that it doesn't make any sense at all. The Big It. Everything. Nothing Makes Sense.

It's like that moment in the Simpson's when the lawyer invokes the Chewbacca Defence. It doesn't make sense. That what the Hitch Hiker's Guide is all about.

So you can't shoehorn that into a movie about romance and character development and happy endings. All of the best material, what Douglas created, is the ultimate joke of the pointless randomness of life. And that's not only what Douglas' story is about, but what the book inside the story is about. That's why the backbone of any good retelling of the story must make the book itself the central fixture and the backbone of the narrative. Keep as much of Douglas's precisely crafted dialogue in place as possible, and don't worry too much about plot or character development. Make sure that when the audience finds out that the answer, after all that time, searching, questing, is 42, that they laugh in the knowledge that it doesn't make any sense, and it doesn't have to, and you'll feel better if you don't worry about it and just go along for the ride.

And maybe, after the pointless early demise of the author himself, in a fashion so fitting that it ought to have been written by him, we'll eventually get an ultimate movie version that does justice and helps us all feel a bit better about losing him before he could write so many more great works.

Crazy eh?

Bachelor

The PC Police missed that one.

It was a mac shareware company that made some great games: Scramble in particular, was a lot like the current Word Challenge game on Facebook, and then there was Spin Crisis, and a CHM reader called Chimp... and now they are gone without a trace. Their old domain takes you to some band.

All I know that isn't available on google is that when I emailed them, the response was from Shawn Henry. Shawn, if you're out there—what happened?

Update: Here's Sphera Software's home page on the Wayback Machine. It identifies the following people as having been part of Sphera: Shawn Henry (head programmer, student in Ottawa), Neale McDavitt (graphic designer, Montreal), Michael Keogh (musician, Ottawa), Anca Szilagyi (wordsmith, Brooklyn). It looks like several of them were students, and maybe the company broke up when they graduated.

Unfortunately they didn't leave forwarding addresses. But I'm sure you can find some of them if you google.

I'm writing an iPhone app in Cocoa Objective-C and really wishing that I could be writing it in Ruby instead (cocoa-ruby on iphone anyone?).

Take this one line:

    if( ! [foo isEqualToString:bar] ) {

Oh yeah, I can really tell what that does by glancing at it... not! But here's the equivalent ruby:

    unless foo == bar

Shorter, more obvious, easier to write, easier to read and maintain. Why does Cocoa need to be so wordy? Even [foo equals:bar] would be better. But no, that would be too ... ambiguous. I don't know. isEqual: is defined in NSObject but who knows what highly dangerous or unexpected result it would have between two strings. Maybe it would only be true if they were the same pointers, or copy: results. No one in ObjC land seems to be thinking about making syntax easier for the programmers, do they? And why don't we have overloading???

For example, if we had method overloading, you could easily have different versions of equals: (or isEqual: if you must) that handle NSString*, NSWhatever*... of course this would require the compiler to be smarter, and the runtime to be smarter, and who uses Objective-C other than Apple ... no one, that's who. Hey, here's an idea—why not ditch ObjC wholesale for Ruby? It's not like Ruby is going to be, you know, slower. Well, of course it will be slower in the C sections.

At least now with "Fast Enumeration" in Objective-C 2.0 we can do something like this:

    for( NSString * bird in [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"owl", @"parrot", @"partridge", @"pigeon"] ) {

Although again, it's really annoying that there's no convenience syntax for creating an array. How hard would it be? Not very hard, that's how hard. In Ruby it would be simply:

    for bird in ["owl", "parrot", "partridge", "pigeon"]

At least we have convenience syntax for NSString * animal = @"Bandicoot" right? I suppose we should pray at the altar for that one and hope they never take it away...

Finally, I have to kiss good-bye to any kind of interesting use of first-order functions and closures. Technically Objective-C CAN actually do dynamic function calls at least, but it's so bloody wordy that I rarely use it unless forced to. I can't use the lovely map function in Objective-C which adds considerably to my line count.

But wait, Apple is adding closures?  ... why don't they spend the effort on making Ruby Cocoa better instead? Or maybe give me garbage collection on the bloody iPhone.

Hilarious video, great animation, Lego + Eddie Izzard in the Death Star Canteen