jpreardon.com

There is a great article in the Times about fixed gear bikes. It offers a quick peek into bike culture and introduces a few of the people that make it interesting. Don’t miss the interactive feature which includes some spectacular photographs over audio of the above mentioned people.

Bikeblog wonders if this sort of attention is a good thing or not. Fixed gear enthusiasts, and others, have long complained about inexperienced hipsters riding breakless, fixed gear bikes. So, the thought of thousands of trendies trading in their hybrids and vintage cruisers for fixies is not a pleasant one. This will probably not happen until a vacuous article appears in the Style Section. Shortly after the Style article (and maybe a piece in New York Magazine) there will be a high profile incident on the loop in Central Park involving a track bike and, perhaps, a bugaboo. This will lead to an almost unanimous, citywide call for legislation to outlaw the on-street use of track bikes. Until then, fixed gear bikes should be able to fly under the radar.

For a few, somewhat less spectacular, photos and no audio, check out my pictures from the 2005 Cycle Messenger World Championships.

Contrary to the title of this post and my understanding of Google Alerts, RSS or Atom feeds of Google Alert emails are not available. This is too bad since I am always looking for ways to reduce what arrives in my inbox.

While RSS and Atom feeds of Google News searches are available, they will not provide the same information as Google Alerts. The email alerts default to a comprehensive search type that searches the web, blogs and groups in addition to news. Blog search has the same sort of feed mechanism, but web search and group search do not.

It would be nice to have a feed of the comprehensive search. Further, the ability to manage several different alerts from one page would be much easier than managing a bunch of feeds. I’m not sure why Google does not offer alert feeds. I can’t imagine that they are worried about the hit to their systems. It would also seem that the things that they already offer feeds for (news especially) would be more likely to draw opposition from the content creators than web and group search. Perhaps they will offer this one day in the future.

Time Warner Cable and fon are entering an agreement that will allow TWC broadband customers to set up fon routers on their connections.

fon customers install a special fon router that splits their broadband connection so that the subscriber gets their internet while a slice of it is available as a public hotspot. As consideration for serving as a wifi hotspot, fon users can use other fon hotspots for free while they are out and about. Those who don’t have a fon router at home can pay a nominal fee to access a fon hotspot.

You might remember that I wasn’t too hot on fon’s recent campaign to give away routers to people situated near a Starbucks. This was mostly because I thought that ISPs (like Time Warner) might be more likely to enforce their terms and conditions that disallow sharing if they knew the subscriber was turning a profit. This deal, while details are still sketchy, would solve that problem since Time Warner and fon would be splitting the fees and cutting the subscriber out of the action altogether.

There could be a huge benefit to the subscribers here in that, according to the BusinessWeek article, Time Warner has 6.6 million broadband subscribers. That could represent a huge increase in the number of fon routers out there one could connect to. The more hotspots, the more likely one might be able to find one where they need it.

via slashdot

During Mayor Bloomberg’s Earth Day Speech he stated that he is seeking a pilot program to implement congestion pricing in Manhattan:

In setting the fee, there’s no magic number, but it has to be high enough to encourage more people to switch to mass transit and low enough not to break the bank – for businesses and for those who have to drive. Based on thorough analysis and the experience of other cities, we believe that an $8 charge would achieve these goals. There are many different ways that this system could work in New York.

As a test run, we will seek state authority for a three year pilot project, and we are very optimistic that, in working with state officials, we will secure hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding for it.

This was just one of the PlaNYC 2030 proposals he spoke about today. Hopefully this congestion pilot project can begin before the end of Bloomberg’s final term as Mayor.

It sounds like Mayor Bloomberg is about to propose congestion pricing in Manhattan. The official announcement might come on Sunday. If he does propose congestion pricing, it will still be far from becoming a reality since there will be plenty of resistance.

It’s great to see the mayor getting behind this. Without his support, it’s doubtful that anything will happen on this front. So, let’s hope he does announce this officially on Sunday.

Rather than enjoying a long awaited Spring Saturday in New York, I was at the first–and hopefully annual–Gotham Ruby Conference. Although the great weather was enticing, the conference was well worth the day spent indoors. The fact that it was at Google’s NYC office didn’t hurt.

The organizers of this conference deserve a huge, collective pat on the back for a job well done. This was one of the best organized events I’ve attended. No small task for a group of people that have day jobs and many extracurricular activities. Nice work all.

Here are my brief notes, for more detailed coverage of the talks, check out Bryan Helmkamp’s blog.

Adhearson: “Build your own PBX on a Weekend” (video)
Jay Phillips

Adhearsion is a Ruby layer on top of Asterisk. This talk got a lot of people in the room excited about the possibility of doing VoIP with Ruby. That’s good because Jay said he would like to hook up with some rails developers that are interested in Asterisk integration. This is very cool stuff. I personally would welcome one of the items off of Jay’s “future” slide: RSpec testing… for a PBX!

Resources:

• Adhearsion
• Asterisk
• sipphone.com for cheap POTS/VoIP integration
• voip-info.org for general VoIP information

JRuby: Ready for Prime Time (video)
Nick Sieger

JRuby is a version of Ruby that runs on the Java Virtual Machine. JRuby running in interpreted mode is still a bit slower than C Ruby. However, in compiled mode, it tends to run a bit faster in many cases. Release 0.9.9 should be available next week.

Going Camping (video)
Jeremy McAnally

Camping is a web microframework (4K) and in short, it’s “Rubylicious”. It is a MVC framework, but unlike rails, all of the application code goes in one file by default. Camping is good for those occasions when Rails is just too fat. Some other differences are that views are constructed in Markaby rather than ERb and Camping defaults to SQLite but using another RBDMS is certainly possible. Jeremy is working on porting some other very useful Rails modules to Camping.

Categorizing Documents in Ruby (video)
Paul Dix

This is a topic I am currently very interested in. Document categorization is used quite a bit for spam detection today. It is also quite useful for language identification, news categorization and sentiment detection.

At a very high level, the steps for machine categorization are as follows:

• Get training data
• Document preprocessing
• Feature selection (optional, increases accuracy)
• Train the Classifier
• Test and update

Yes, that is very high level. Once again, get the details of the talk here.

For those wishing to get started with document categorization, Paul suggested the Naive Bayes Classifier since it is fast and forgiving. He said he would post has posted some of his categorization code on his site, including his Chi Squared feature selector.

Contexts, Mocks and Stubs. Oh My! (video)
Trotter Cashion

Trotter’s talk was very detailed and chock full of examples, my notes are quite sparse here though. The best thing I took away from it was to avoid going nuts when writing tests. Basically, test thoroughly and ensure good coverage, but be careful not to write too many tests or make them too brittle. Also, sometimes it is better to create a class for testing rather than to use mocks and stubs.

He also pointed out Ryan Davis’ Functional Test Matrix which looks quite interesting indeed.

Business Natural Language Ruby Systems (video)
Jay Fields

The idea behind Business Natural Language (BNL) is to put the power of changing business rules into the business expert’s hands rather than involving software developers for every change. Jay’s BNL site explains this much better than I can, so I won’t attempt to go into detail here.

One final note: Having the Lightning Talks directly after lunch was a great idea. It can be difficult to stay focused, or awake, during a long presentation after lunch. Short, five minute presentations by different people keep it lively.

Technorati tag: goruco2007

Want to try something new without quitting your day job? Vocation Vacations might be the answer. Rather than telling your boss to shove it, you can take a couple days off and try your hand at something else. The Vocation Vacations site has a diverse list of dream jobs including gigs like Cheese Maker, Brew Master, Photographer, Pro Wrestling Color Commentator and Alpaca Farmer.

“Middle Manager” is conspicuously absent from the list. If you are interested in that, drop me a line and I’ll see if I can hook you up. Your foray into management will be a cheap vacation you’ll not soon forget.

via Slashfood

Unlike what we might think of as traditional web services (e.g. send some information to a server, get a map), some of Amazon’s services expose big iron infrastructure through simple interfaces. Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is an unlimited supply of (really) cheap disk space. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), still in limited beta, promises processing power when needed. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) allows systems to communicate with each other.

Given these services, it is conceivable that one could string together a fairly large system without purchasing any hardware or software to support it. Mitch Garnaat, an Amazon Developer, demonstrates this ability with his Mass Video Conversion Application. Mitch’s application is pretty straightforward, but it shows how scalable application can be built with relative ease.

Add Mechanical Turk to this mix of web services, and things get even more interesting. Mechanical Turk is not particularly germane to the mass video conversion application mentioned above, but there are many systems that simply won’t work without a lot of human processing power. A Mechanical Turk Workforce could be particularly effective for short term projects that require a lot of people. For instance, Amazon uses Mechanical Turk to identify the best photograph from a set of similar photographs.

These sorts of web services reduce the high costs associated with bringing CPU and/or storage intensive applications online. With these barriers removed, we should see some interesting projects that otherwise would have difficulty getting funding. Others are also likely to join Amazon in the market to provide these and other services. With more than just Amazon in the game, we should expect to see more and more applications that leverage these technologies.

Mass Video Conversion Application via Simon Willison’s Weblog

I recently switched my home phone service from Vonage to Earthlink. Unlike other stories I’ve heard, this transition was pretty seamless.

There seems to be one last hitch though. Earthlink wants me to update my account information. How do I know this? Their automated system calls me daily and leaves a fairly dry message. Since I had already gone online to update everything, I happily ignored and deleted this message every day. Given my friend’s miserable experience with calling Earthlink customer service, I was avoiding the phone call to them.

A few days ago, in an attempt to end these annoying calls/messages, I phoned up Earthlink. Surprisingly, I found myself speaking to someone relatively quickly. I only needed to jump through three or four menus and I was through to “Andrew”. He was a cheery fellow that seemed more than happy to solve my problem. Unfortunately, either Andrew didn’t really listen to what my actual problem was, or it was not within his power to correct it. His advice: “Just disregard the messages, you’re fine.” Thanks Andy.

I hung up the phone fully expecting to get yet another call from Earthlink’s automated system the next day. Now, if the performance of Earthlink’s customer service division is measured on accuratly setting customer expectations, they scored an A+ on this one. I got another call from Earthlink the next day. It was time to try another path here.

Even though all of my account information was correct and I didn’t owe Earthlink any money, I decided to go online and change my credit card information. The idea here was that by changing some key account information, their system would stop calling me. No luck though, there was a another call. I ignored it thinking that it might take a day for their databases to sync up. Still no luck, this morning (Saturday), at 8:00, I received another call.

You might see how this annoyance is moving me from satisfied customer to irate customer. Luckily, Earthlink cares enough about its customer service to ask me how my phone call with Andrew went by way of a satisfaction survey. The survey they emailed to me was short and included the standard multiple choice questions. It also included the obligatory comments section.

I took the opportunity to explain my problem, again:

Your automated system calls me daily and states that I need to update my account. The fellow I spoke to on your customer service line confirmed that my account has been updated for weeks. His solution to the problem was “disregard the message”. He then moved on to the part of your call center script that indicated he should attempt to sell some more of your services. I continue to get an automated call each day. If anyone actually reads this comment, I’d love to know about it. Shoot me an email at xxxx@xxxx.com.

We’ll see if anyone at Earthlink is actually reading this stuff. Once again, my expectations are low so they should have no problem meeting them. My next step will be to test out Earthlink’s call blocking feature to see if I can block calls from them. It might not even work, but it is going to be worth trying if they can’t get it together over there.

Update 2007-04-10: Earthlink customer service called me bright and early this morning. This time I actually picked up the phone and talked to someone. It was a very informative call. He told me I have a zero balance on my account. Thanks. Hopefully, that will end the daily calls.

Dabble DB lets customers change the colors of their interface. Lots of web applications allow that. But how many automatically pick the interface colors based on a custom logo?

Obviously, this feature took a fair amount of thought and work to implement. However, regardless of the underlying complexity, the end result is a really simple way to make Dabble DB easy to customize and nicer to look at. Sweet!

via Simon Willison’s Weblog