Erik Schonfeld, writing in this month's Business 2.0, has a good take on both the commercialization and free distribution of short media clips using examples of Jon Stewart's CNN "hurting America" clip, etc. I have written before about my desire to see more "grass roots" media development since I am more than tired of what mainstream media offers up ('reality TV' - yuck!). Here are a few links that are worth checking out: Sundance Festival , iFilm , YouTube.com , and Google video . I have been having lots of fun posting my pictures on Flickr and when I have time I have been thinking of "down editing" some of my video works to very short segments and decide on which public web portal to use.

I received the book The Reasoned Schemer last week. The authors use the same socratic teaching style (ask questions of the reader) that they used in the Little Schemer to introduce the implementation of logic programming using a functional programming style. I can just feel my brain twisting a little from new ways of thinking about old problems. I mostly use object oriented programming (Java, Ruby, Smalltalk, and Common Lisp's CLOS) so it is healthy to switch to a functional programming style if only for research and learning projects. Anyway, this is an awesome book.

I have been hosting markwatson.com for almost 10 years on the same server using just plain old HTML and a little PHP. It will take a while (I am super busy working on a Ruby book, and some consulting projects) but I am switching the site over to Apache 2.0x + FastCGI + Rails. I will eventually also be using some Java web services on another server for some live demos. I have kept the structure of my site the same for years to avoid broken links, etc. I have decided to restructure my site, and to heck with broken links, etc. This is an easier decision to make now that many people navigate the web using search instead of bookmarks. I hate to break old links, and I will be a little careful, but change is good. I really enjoy writing, and I have been thinking of doing more web content writing instead of distributing my free web books as PDF files. About 8 years ago, I experimented with an online Java/AI tutorial using a few Java applets for live examples. I don't use applets anymore, ...

France and Germany want to compete locally with Google and Yahoo which makes sense. Setting aside hype about web 2.x, internet bubbles, etc. I think that we can agree that the future prosperity of any country depends strongly on home-grown technology, a great educational system, and a (relatively) honest government to promote commerce and free trade with fair laws that balance public and business interests. (Huge and economically inefficient military superpowers are so 19th and 20th century. I hope that economic superpowers will be our future: economic efficiency making militaristic inefficiency irrelevant. Economic superpowers do not, by my definition, necessarily have to be large countries or corporations: I am talking about the efficiency and wealth generated per person.) Every time I hear about a country starting a national program adopting Open Source, I also think that they are doing the right thing for long term economic and technical power. Really, what country should depend s...

You can download Mongrel here . This is a project by Zed Shaw that is interesting: like WEBrick, but with some low level C code and considerably better performance running servlets. While I think that Rails is great stuff, my interest in Ruby is driven more by the Ruby language itself. I am working on an Enterprise Ruby book right now and only about 20% of the book is about Rails and the rest covers 'Ruby coolness' in general. I continue to be amazed at how quickly non-trivial programs can be written and debugged in Ruby. Anyway, good job Zed - I really like WEBrick because it is light weight and an simple platform to program to for all sorts of services and Mongrel looks like another tool that I will use a lot.

Old habits die hard. I am writing a set of Ruby classes for handling a variety of document types and my first inclination was to start to design a class hierarchy to factor out common behavior for processing different document types. Specifically, I am handling Word, OpenOffice.org and AbiWord documents. After a little thought I realized that the only common behavior is uncompressing and reading XML files for OpenOffice.org and AbiWord. Also, I only need one public method for my application: given a file path to a document return the plain text from the document. Anyway, I will start with writing 3 unrelated classes - one for each document type. They will all implement one method signature for retrieving plain text for a document file. I am likely to eventually factor out some common code for processing OpenOffice.org and AbiWord documents, but I can put off that decision (it is better to refactor after you understand a problem better).

I have been even more into work and writing lately because of my shoulder separation (it has popped out twice in 8 days - ouch). I usually divide my time equally between friends and family, work, and wilderness hiking. Being sidelined from hiking for a while, I am depending more on social activities and work to keep life interesting. I have been following the EFF's and other warnings about activating the multi-PC search and file sharing for Google Desktop version 3. If Google supported this functionality also on Linux and OS X (not just Windows) I would absolutely use it for my own stuff (book projects, free web books, design and implementation artifacts for open source and my own fun programming projects and research, etc.) but never for directories containing customer projects. I think that Google will likely support some features of the Google Desktop on Linux and OS X - and when they do sure I will enable saving my stuff on their servers. Netflix has been getting some negative ...

While Apache has the advantage of coming pre-installed on leased servers and virtual servers, I am way more enthusiastic about using lighttpd as the front end for Rails applications. For one thing, all you need to do is install the Perl Compatible Regular Expression and then lighttpd, and then Rails will automatically and painlessly use lighttpd in development mode. Installing lighttpd and Rails in production mode is also easier than dealing with Apache ( here are good directions ). Although what I am going to say next goes against common Rails wisdom, I would also like to add that it sometimes makes sense to deploy in production mode with WEBrick. Here are a few application specific details that might make you decide, at least for a long while, to just use WEBrick: You need your web application to run in a very low memory environment (like a virtual server with a very small amount of allocated memory) You expect a small number of concurrent users Most content is dynamically generated ...

Wow, three subjects in one blog entry, such a deal. As those of you who are my friends know, I took a nasty fall hiking back down a local mountain yesterday. Scary at first because I had no feeling for 20 minutes in my right arm - then the feeling came back, and the pain was manageable, and I started counting my blessings that I got away with a bit of carelessness. Things were OK for about 2 hours, but then my right shoulder popped out (dislocated), and it hurt like a bitch until I got it popped back in. My wife then insisted on taking me to the hospital ER last night - probably a good thing because they put me on pain medication so I slept well. Anyway, I hope that this does not slow down my work finishing up my new Ruby and Ruby on Rails book (and a few consulting jobs I have right now). Slashdot had a pretty good discussion on virtualization today. I have used virtualization tools for years to cut down development and testing costs, mostly being able to have a collection of prepared...

I am just about back to using a Mac full-time as my desktop (but with a Linux test server in my office closet and 2 leased Linux hosted servers). Google's Mac support is greatly appreciated. Speaking of Mac support, I must admit a bit of hipocracy: I complained to Microsoft this week about their live.com portal not working with Safari and then remembered that I don't (yet) support Safari on my KBdocs.com web portal. Note to self... Anyway, I have been getting into spending real test/try-it-out time on all the major new web portals - I like to see where the big players are going, maybe get some ideas, etc.