Social Web

Solitary Confinement and the latest YouTube bans
I'm amazed at the web2.0 and social networking revolution. So are several governments and employers, but in a different way. Instead of jumping on board and seeing the realization of "We the People," governments have cracked down on the usage of social networks. Which makes sense if you're going for the totalitarian thing like Morocco or Tibet or China, but does not make sense if you're a soldier far from home 'fighting for freedom' in Iraq.

What crime did these soldiers commit that they must be cut off from their friends and families back home and be held in some sort of electronic solitary confinement? Seriously, these soldiers already have it bad enough. (Story at Washing Post)

I also find the reasons given by Navy Lt. Denver Applehans troubling: "The idea behind it is to have the bandwidth available to mission-critical areas." So you're telling me that our government -- which drops thousand dollar bombs and flies million dollar fighter jets -- doesn't have the resources to get enough bandwidth?


Famous For 15 People
Oh, and speaking of the social networking revolution, David Cushman at Faster Future has an interesting piece called Famous for 15 People. (link) He contrasts this with the idea of being famous for 15 minutes. This previous paradigm set forth by Andy Warhol supposes that the world will pay attention to each person in the world for 15 minutes.

With social networking sites, people are famous to each other. I can be on my friends' "Top 8," but not on the world's top 8,096. I recognize members of my favorite bands riding the NYC subway, while fellow passengers sit obliviously. Saxon Shore is famous to me and a relatively small number of fans.

Cushman's insight helps make sense of the deluge of information and music and blogs and videos on the web. As a reader, there is so much content worth my time but only the stuff that interests me will retain my attention. As a writer, only a few people will find any of this meaningful. But as Cushman points out, "The community of readers of this post are small in number. But they are absolutely the right ones. This post is not intended to be famous for 15 minutes. That would have little value to you or I. If it becomes famous to 15 people, 15 people who are willing to contribute to it, share it, change it ENGAGE with it, own it... then we 15 may discover value we never knew we could share."


Cheers. And may technology aid your social nature.

Facebook Developer Platform

So it's here. The Facebook API. I think this is the future honestly. Web platforms.

Instead of going to several different sites for different social things, users now go to one website for all social applications: Facebook has video now (send quick vid messgaes), photos, Last.FM *cough* i mean iLike, groups, causes, and shared RSS feeds.

Facebook API is also great for businesses. Instead of making a website with so much value that users will want to navigate all the way over to their website, the new business app is available right there on an established website with millions of users.

The Possibilities
- Weather block on friends pages
- RSS Feeds (though somebody implemented that before I did)
- SourceForge/Subversion integration,
- Digg.com replacement

I'm looking forward to sharing all the concerts that I go to on Facebook. I've been putting my list of pending shows in my "Fav TV Shows" box because I don't watch TV.

The Problems
iLike is actually massively slow right now. Perhaps it's the 20,000+ users all joining at once.

The Future
Facebook apps will take over in the same way that RSS feeds have. RSS feeds helped both the authors to have a bigger audience, and audience to read more authors conveniently. Websites built on aggregated content is the future. Digg.com, AppleTV, piratebay.com, and youtube.com all seem to point this this way.


Facebook seems to have the de facto monopoly on this market as far as I know. MySpace certainly isn't doing this. I'm waiting for the anti-trust law suits to start showing up in a year or two when Facebook buys Yahoo instead of Yahoo buying Facebook.

Ruby Documentation, Editors, Platform, and Blogs

I've been working on my first Ruby on Rails project, and I feel like a complete n00b. It's a completely different paradigm from Java. A very big difference between Java and Ruby is that Java is documented very well in comparison to Ruby. There are swaths beginner tutorials available on the web. And many screencasts. But good documentation is difficult to find. Or when it is available (gotapi.com), it doesn't say exactly what I'm looking for.

Haha - I expressed this frustration to a fellow member of nycruby, asking him where he goes for documentation. He said that Ruby changes so much and so fast that he reads blogs to learn things. Yeesh! He was generous enough to share a list of blogs with me.

Aside from being a pedagogical tool, good documentation provides an all-in-one easy bookmark of all the things I've learned. Since that doesn't exist, I'm going to try to blog the things that I learn about Ruby in this blog as an aide to myself, and hopefully a few others.


editors
Here's a few things off the top of my head. I invested the 39 euros for TextMate. That's a steep price for a text-editor, but everyone seems to use it and love it. It's pretty much all I've been using, so I like it, too. My previous development-tools-of-choice were Emacs and make. I like development tools that don't do too much for you, and TextMate fits this bill perfectly, while providing many pre-built macros for a plethora of languages.

platform
In order to follow the Ruby crowd further, I've stopped using the Dell laptop they gave me at work for development, and started bringing in my PowerBook G4 nowadays. I can't stand developing Ruby on a Windows machine anymore.

SQLite3-ruby vs SQLite
Here's one thing that I learned today after much stressful googling (I really stress too much when I develop): sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby is the command to install the SQLite3 bridge on Mac OS X. SQLite3 comes with Mac OS 10.4, so I did not understand what the problem was.

blogs
Oh, here's the list of Ruby blogs that Allen gave me.

http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/
http://eigenclass.org//hiki.rb
http://www.loudthinking.com/
http://jroller.com/page/obie
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/
http://pragdave.pragprog.com/pragdave/
https://railsexpress.de/blog
http://redhanded.hobix.com/
http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/
http://www.robbyonrails.com/

Super Collider

I've been really into synthesized music lately. Perhaps I mean to say something a bit more specific than that. I've been really into Joy Electric lately and that has got me watching synthesizer tutorial videos on Youtube, trying to understand these wonderful blurpy sounds.

Synthesizers, such as those made my Roland or Moog, are expensive. And large. I just recently bought an Alesis Firewire mixer, and wouldn't be able to justify buying a new piece of hardware.

There are several software synthesizer emulators available, I'm sure. But they would probably cost money. Thankfully I came across Nyquist and SuperCollider. SuperCollider and Nyquos both are interactive interpreter environments for coding synthesizers based on sine waves and saw waves, etc.

Nyquist is a project of a professor at Carnegie Mellon. Because the language Nyquist has a Lisp-like syntax, I got kinda bored with it quickly. As much as I love functional languages, I don't naturally think that way. Or something. Nyquist files can also be played in Audacity, which is nice.

SuperCollider's language, on the otherhand, is imperative. It uses the Open Sound Control API instead of MIDI. I also like the interface a little bit better than Nyquist. Plus the Cmd-Shift-? key sequence for in-program documentation is quite useful.

Right now I'm wading through the intro tutorials to Super Collider. I'm so eager to figure this stuff out! Being able to take a Sine Oscillater and pass another Sine Oscillator in to control the frequency of the first oscillator: now that's cool! There are also exponential functions, line functions. I need to learn how to sequence all these things together to make a song, now that I've learned how to make basic blurps.

My Eno-inspired goal is to make some sort of generative music: music that makes itself based on random events.

Instead of pining for my very own analog synthesizer, I'm going to head down this path of open-source frequency generators. Programming my computer will probably be more flexible than programming a piece of hardware.



Both are free downloads. Both are available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux.
SuperCollider link: http://supercollider.sourceforge.net
Nyquist link: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/music.software.html

First Post

Technology moves forward rapidly. I hope to add my view points to the huge mix of information already out there.

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iPhone Wishlist

If you haven't noticed the look of fear on Steve Balmer's face, let me be the first to tell you that Apple, Inc is delivering the iPhone late June. An iPod, movie player, Wi-Fi web client, and mobile telephone all in one package. Apple.com has the scoop.

Although already full of awesome and useful features, here are some tweaks I would want.

- A text-editor. When on the go, it'd be sweet to not only have the iPod notes, but to also be able to edit these notes on the go. The interface wouldn't be that difficult to come up with: it could be the text-messaging interface, but with a "save" button instead of "send."

- To view photos in landscape mode, simply turn the iPhone on it's side and it's Wii-like accelerometers will automatically switch the perspective. What if I turned the iPhone on its side while texting. Would the screen go into landscape mode with a wider keyboard?

- In the same way that cameras on cellphones made cheap YouTube videos of favorite musicians, and recorded the evidence of automobile accidents, a microphone on the phone could spice up the life of the wandering musician or reporter. I expect that a microphone would be featured in later generations of the iPhone, especially after the camera gets upgraded with video capability.

- Longer battery life!