Binary Balance

Not so long ago, I was talking to a family member who was interested in ways that they could sell an electronic version a book they’d written and this got me thinking about selling electronic files online.

Of course there is a huge number of options for selling files online, but most work off a model that places the online store as the central focus. Come to the online store, buy a file and leave. I had a different interest: with the plethora of ways that even non-technical people can create a ‘website’ of some kind for themselves these days (hosted blogs, Twitter, a Facebook wall, etc.) what about a site that just provides a facility to upload a file and then gives back a URL that can be used however and wherever one sees fit? I named my idea Filelike and with this post, I consider it officially launched.

Filelike is simple by design and my intention was that it should largely speak for its self. So for the rest of this first post on Filelike, I’d prefer to talk about the ideas that Filelike embodies to me. I don’t call Filelike a ‘startup’, I see it as the first in what I intend to be a series of MVP, bootstrapped side-projects, that will be collected under my umbrella business: Binary Balance. Read more...

It’s been a while since I’ve had the dubious pleasure of using IE as my default every day web browser. The last version of IE that I had any large amount of contact with was IE 7 (pretty early after its initial release), and the best thing I can say about IE 7 is that it wasn’t quite as crap as IE 6. But that’s a bit like saying that Hitler wasn’t quite as crap as Stalin. Recently, for reasons out side of my direct control I have once again been required to take up IE (versions 8 and 9) as a regularly used web browser and I am honestly a little surprised at how terrible it still is. I really expected more from Microsoft by now. Read more...

In March this year, I finally jumped on the tablet bandwagon and got myself the new iPad, the Wi-Fi + 4G model. I purchased the iPad outright mainly so that I would have maximum flexibility in choosing a data plan to go with it. So not long after, I began researching mobile data plans and was pretty appalled by what I found.

Now I was already aware before making my purchase that the new iPad’s 4G capability wasn’t compatible with Australia’s 4G network provided by Telstra, this sucks but I wasn’t too upset. I had initially thought I would likely go with one of these pre-paid options I’d heard of, I was looking for something around the $30/month mark at most, as I have Wi-Fi at home and just needed something to get me by when I’m out and about. On the face of it, a pre-paid, no lock-in kind of deal sounded pretty appealing, but that was until I started reading the fine print that seems to come standard with pre-paid mobile data plans in Australia. Read more...

A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from my ISP to tell me the email account attached to my ISP plan had been broken into and was being used to send spam. They understandably were forced to change the password on my account and called to let me know what had happened. This marks the first time in my relatively long history of Internet use that I’ve had an account broken into and it was something of a wakeup call for me. Read more...

Note: if you just happen to be interested in knowing possible causes for the ‘no id given’ error message in Ruby, go to the last paragraph of this post.

I don’t have reason to do a lot of Ruby metaprogramming myself, although being a Rails user, I surely receive a lot of benefit from it. Metaprgramming is used extensively in Rails, the most visible example I can think of is the ActiveRecord Dynamic Finders.

Working on my current pet project, I had occasion to do a little metaprogramming in a similar vein to the ActiveRecord Dynamic Finders. I have a model with two sets of paperclip attachments. One is for when an attachment is first uploaded to my server and the other is for when the attachment is subsequently moved to Amazon S3 for permanent storage. The file stored on my server is deleted after successful transfer to Amazon S3. Read more...

The information equivalent of a nuclear bomb detonating over the Shima Hospital that is SOPA / PIPA last week would seem to have put a rather large question mark over the future of the these proposals (thanks to Wikipedia et al.).

Of course, copyright reliant industry’s troubled relationship with technology isn’t new. Historically, it’s been something of a slow-motion rear guard action over the years as technology steadily makes it easier and easier to distribute information. But previous attempts to combat the inevitable seem very quaint now that the stakes have been well and truly raised.

They say there’s only two things that are certain: death and taxes. Well, taxes is a given I suppose, unless you happen to be in a position to mostly lobby your way out of them. Death on the other hand is a little harder to lobby against at present. The Death card in the traditional Tarot deck (as watchers of The Simpsons or readers of Promethea may recollect) is often interpreted as representing change or transformation. In truth, perhaps the one universally inevitable condition is change. Following on from this, I thought I might try an analogy that incumbents such as the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) could find some affinity with: At present, the movie/TV industry is like the T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. Once more or less invincible, now they find they are smack in the middle of the molten ore of advancing technology, transforming themselves into all the past shapes stored in their memory in a desperate attempt to avoid their own destruction. Read more...

I was recently reading a blog post entitled ‘How to work from home without going insane (purple monkey dishwasher)’ by David Tate.

The post has a lot of good advice and observations in it, relevant to my interests because working from home is something I aspire to be doing more of.

In the section on interruptions, where – referring to adjusting from the more typical office environment to working from home – David writes:

What you will realize is that outside of your normal distractions your body has learned to not focus for very long on anything.

I stopped at that sentence for a moment, because whenever I come across someone talking/writing about how they have trouble focussing – and I come across this reasonably often – it makes me wonder why I usually don’t have this problem. Read more...

There’s not a huge amount of Debian specific Ruby/Rails tutorials on the web. I’ve written a few in the past and with the release of Debian Squeeze and the recent official release of Ruby 1.9.3 I thought it might be time to do another one. Read more...

In my previous post I wrote about how I have now made the switch – full time – to Chrome as my default web browser. I’d just about managed to sort out all the extra functionality I needed from existing Chrome extensions, but there was one little Firefox Add-on that I found myself missing, it’s called Backpack Pages written by Ben Mills. Read more...

Late last year, I wrote a post entitled ‘Is it time to chrome my web browsing?’ wherein I took a look at how Chrome stacked up in comparison to Firefox, specifically in relation to the Firefox Add-ons that I used and could not do without. At that time, I decided that – for me – the day was not yet ripe for a move.

Fast forward to ten months later and the situation has changed. For the last four months or so, I’ve been trialling Chrome as my default web browser for both day-to-day browsing and development. Enough time has passed now that I can say with some certainty that I won’t be going back. And it seems that I am not alone as Chrome is set to overtake Firefox as the second most popular browser before the end of this year. Read more...

For what amounts to a long time in the short history of the Internet, Google has been a synonym for large scale. I vaguely remember a quote from a Google employee who – when talking about their work and just how early they need to start thinking about scaling a system up – said something like ‘One day you get something kind of working and the next day you have 5000 users’¹. There’s not many places where a developer is forced to deal with scaling issues basically from the very beginning of a project. Google developers must scoff at warnings about premature optimisation.

The amount of data that Google stores for people and about people is impressive, mindboggling, constantly growing and more than a little scary. The launch of Google+ adds a new dimension that depending on your perspective, could exponentially add to the scariness factor of the information Google is keeping on us.

Every now and again a horror story will come along which deftly highlights the fact that ‘customer service’ and ‘Google’ appear to be mutually exclusive concepts, at least as far as the general public is concerned. Accounts disabled, important data or one’s entire online identity lost, with no recourse. Certainly #FirstWorldProblems if ever I’ve heard one, but none the less I don’t think calling them horror stories is an exaggeration. Read more...

A couple of weeks ago, I read a post by Brandon Hays called ‘Why I still don’t contribute to open source’ wherein Brandon lays out his reasons for not yet having contributed to any OSS projects. To reiterate Brandon’s points:

1. There’s no certification, ceremony, or merit badge that says, “you’re ready to contribute to OSS”.
2. It’s not obvious where to start.
3. Guidelines often make a maintainer’s life easier, and mine harder.
4. Open source is for people who are better at this than me.
5. Trying to contribute and failing makes me feel stupid.
6. There’s no time.
7. It’s pretty lonely.

I found Brandon’s article interesting because I can definitely relate to a lot of what he says.

How do I know I’m ready to hack on an open source project? And if I’m not ready but jump in anyway, won’t I potentially just be broadcasting my stupidity across the Interwebs for all to see? How do I know where to start? The code base seems so intimidating and I know nothing about it. Are any hazing rituals involved? Those guys are so much better at hacking code than I’d be after ten lifetimes, how the fuck did they get so smart? Or am I just really retarded? I’ve got my own stuff I want to work on. All these sentiments I’ve felt at one time or another.

But recently, I’ve started contributing to open source projects anyway. Read more...

Read an interesting book recommended by a friend the other day: Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff. The main thrust of Rushkoff’s book is that all media, all forms of communication, starting at speech, moving on to the first examples of an alphabet, to the printing press and now to online communication have a bias and one needs to be aware of a medium’s bias when communicating through it. Bias in this context meaning that each medium tends to elicit particular attitudes and behaviours from it’s users.

If I can attempt to paraphrase, Rushkoff infers that this last communication revolution based upon the computer is a very important one, because now we’re actually getting to the point where the tools we are creating are taking on the characteristics of living things. They’re not quite living things yet though and at least until the hypothetical singularity manifests, the people who program these almost living tools will continue to take on an increasingly important role. Conversely, in the years to come those who do not at least have a basic idea of how programming is done will be at an acute disadvantage (politically, socially, financially, culturally) much like the illiterate following society’s adoption of the written word. Read more...

It seems that social media is everywhere today. Live tweet our show using the hash tag ‘#WhyJustWatchWhenYouCanCriticise’! There’s other websites as well as Facebook? But how do do your friends know about your inane comments on those ones?! One could be forgiven for thinking the read/write web is getting old hat these days. Web 2.0, how unfashionable an epithet for use by today’s modern web hipster. Read more...

Following on from my ‘Getting to sleep’ post, now part two of what apparently will be at least a two part series on sleep related topics.

My introduction to lucid dreaming came at an early age. When I was four or five, I used to have this recurring nightmare. I was in my childhood home, quite a large house built down the side of a slope, it had two stories, plus a lower basement/flat level that was probably about half the floor space of each of the two floors above. So I used to have this dream where I was being chased around the house by a Wampa from The Empire Strikes Back¹. There was a central wooden staircase that connected all three floors of the house and it was constructed in such a way that there was a fairly large space between each step (or so it seemed to my child sized sense of scale), the kind that can make one slightly wary of climbing if you’re unfamiliar with it, something to do with the perspective of seeing through the steps as one climbs them. To this day, I still have a distinct memory of crouching silently on the staircase, a few steps from the top, looking down through the gaps and seeing this giant monster walking past on the level below, looking for me. Read more...