Project Euler

I've found a fun new site. Project Euler is a huge set of math+programming puzzles of increasing difficulty, starting out pretty easy (solved by tens of thousands of participants) and going up to puzzles that haven't been solved yet.

They're quite fun. Each one touches some aspect of mathematics, and requires some programming smarts to get it working. But don't worry if you're not cluey on maths. They start out fairly simple, and you can google for information about the math behind the puzzles if you need more.

Each puzzle has a specific, numerical answer. You submit the answer to prove you've solved the puzzle, and the site keeps track of how many you've done. It also gives you access to a forum for each puzzle - where others share their code or insights into how to make the program more efficient. Most puzzles also come with a short pdf to explain the maths behind it - generally showing you how to analyse the problem or prove the formulae behind the most efficient algorithm.

Each puzzle has been constructed so that the correct program/solution is expected to run in under a minute... and for many of the puzzles - that means you'll have to rethink how your program works to get in under that time.

Anyway, I think it's an interesting challenge to play with. Here's my score so far:

Link: How to ask a blogger for backlinks

An excellent new post on kissmetrics about How to ask a blogger for backlinks and reviews.

It gives some great tips about how to be professional and non-spammy, and stands in stark contrast to my own recent experience.

...and no, they didn't ask me to write this :)

Shower ambassador!

A shower company called Grohe came up with a brilliant Social networking strategy that has people talking about their products.

They began by setting themselves up with a Grohe facebook fan page, with a competition. 1000 people would become "shower ambassadors" for the company - sent one of their stylish rainshower icon showerheads as long as they filled in the standard "tell us why you deserve to be a shower ambassador" forms.

I dutifully filled it in - I thought they looked kinda funky, and free stuff is always neat... and then forgot all about it, until yesterday morning when the postie arrived at the door with a shiny new shower head!

Awesome!

So, I've tested it and I think it's good. It's very stylish and would look right at home in most bathrooms - you can pick from a wide range of colours to suit. It's definitely a "rainshower" style head: very gentle; and eco-friendly as it uses less water for a very broad effect. It even has an extra-eco-friendly button that lets you use even less water... and the head comes with this set 'on' straight out of the factory - so they seem like they're serious about being eco-friendly.

Of course the really clever thing about this was the campaign itself. From the information they've posted me, it's clear they intend to get the message spread far and wide. The shower head came with a page of information suggesting that you share "thoughts, pictures and videos on our facebook page... your blog or your Twitter account".

Through the competition, they've made it a fun thing to do and share, and I wouldn't be surprised if they picked people solely on their social-media-integration. Apart from running their competition through facebook I vaguely recall they also had fields for your other social media accounts... which I'm sure is why I got picked.

Clearly these guys are switched on the the power of viral marketing - and aren't afraid to ask people to do it... but it's more than that. They also seem to realise that the best way to get people to spread the message is to put their actual product in the hands of the people most likely to spread the idea.

They've also got the be remarkable idea down pat. They clearly picked a product that was wroth talking about: an iconic, shower-head with a vibrant colour and notable green-credentials. Part of their success here, was making it *personal* to the individual participants. When filling out the competition-form, you got to pick your favourite colour[1] showerhead. This is such a small thing to do - but with great effect as it lets people feel they have the power to choose. I don't think most companies would think of doing this when it comes to items that they are, remember *giving away for free*. But it's such a powerful and brilliant strategy, when you think about it.

Grohe want people to talk about their product - and especially they want them to talk about how much they *love* this product... Letting a person choose their preference (just like they were buying it), means that it isn't just some random item that rocks up at your door, but something that *you chose* and is already personal before it even appears - thus increasing the likelihood of giving it a thumbs up...

All in all, I'm quite impressed by their strategy. Moreso even than the shower-head itself - which is, btw, quite funky.

[1] I picked their dark-blue - I like blue bathrooms.

National Novel Writing Month

It's November - and that means it's time to whip out a pen and start a frenzy of writing in the hopes of finishing up a new masterpiece... or at least 50K of whatever comes to mind during this month of madness.

It's National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for short). The site was slashdotted for the first day and a half, but the servers seem to be taking the load now - which means we have a chance to actually update our wordcounts and read the forums.

NaNoWriMo is a personal challenge to start writing a novel on November 1st and aim to have 50,000 words by midnight on November 30th. Last year there were over 100,000 participants - of which 15,000 passed the 50K mark by month's-end. I was one of those 15K :)

Here's a link to my author page so you can see how much I've done so far this year. I'll also add a wordcount widget onto the blog for the duration of the month (should be there in the left-hand column).

It's heaps of fun and it's open to anyone. So, if you're up to a unique kind of personal challenge, join us in our month of writing. Or just come along and see what all the fuss is about!

More thoughts on Rails-doc 2.0

I'd been re-contemplating the Rails-doc 2.0 site and had begun to write a post about the minor annoyances I found, when suddenly up popped a new post by Jeremy on rubycorner.

I guess I'm not the only person whose experience was akin to: "OMG wow! *click* *click* hang on..."

My annoyances from rails-doc 2.0

There's not a lot wrong with rails-doc 2.0, the following are merely annoying.

Click depth

One of the benefits of the previous rails-doc site is that it's all there at your fingertips all the time. Rails has a deep hierarchy and now the only way into it is to search randomly. This can be fun - the auto-prompter is pretty good... as long as you know exactly what you're looking for. But on the old site, if you can't quite recall what you're looking for, you can browse down to the list alphabetically until you find it. With the new site you have to delete your old search and continue to try other names. Search helps, but having a browse-alternative is also helpful.

Another problem with deep click-hierarchies is that you can't get as much information at once. On the original site, all the methods are on the same page - and all you need do is click the anchor or scroll down to them to get a feel for the whole class. You don't have to keep clicking through and back if you want to look at each of the methods.

Searching code

...requires code-sensitive search. If I type "default_error_messages" it means something entirely different to a search with the words "default error messages" somewhere in the body.

version consistency

If I chose version 1.2.6 for the ActiveRecord class, chances are pretty strong that I'll want to keep looking at version 1.2.6 when I click through to the methods... or anywhere else, for that matter. I think there's a strong case for persisting the chosen version.

Is there really a problem?

As you might notice, these are just GUI annoyances not real issues, as such. So is there really a problem?

Jeremy points out that user-added notes are all well and good, but what we need is for the actual real rails-doc to be updated. That isn't going to happen here (at least with the current incarnation). His proposed solution sounds great - and I'll look forward to its release. Perhaps he should team up with the rails-doc.org folks ;)

But has it got anything right?

Jeremy actually stated this succinctly:

"If I’d known that all we needed was a good looking RDoc app, I could’ve fixed the problem a while ago."

Lets face it, we're geeks and we love shiny new toys... Rails being the epitomy of the shiny new thing. So yes, rails-doc 2.0 got one thing absolutely right - it provides a pretty interface that is easy and fun to explore. That's often all it takes folks like us to start contributing - so they got that right.

Rails doc 2.0

Finally some decent documentation for rails!

Like a number of rails enthusiats, I read Jeremy's blog post with a bit of trepidation. Mainly about the decline of rails blogging, it also points out the distinct lack of decent documentation for Rails... and firmly points a finger at all of us for not contributing to making it better. The worrying point is the conclusion that rails will decline in popularity due to a lack of available, comprehensive documentation.

Luckily, Rob Anderton has put my fears to rest. Rob's post has pointed me at the new Rails doc project. I've only just begun to investigate the site, but I can already tell it's far more useful than the standard Rails API I've been relying upon.

For one thing, it links the documentation to the version of rails you're using. This alone would have saved me a few hours of annoyance trying to get a method to accept parameters that are only available in a more current version than what's on our production server. :P

It also has a really neat keyword-search interface that prompts you with reasonable guesses, and a way for the community to add to the documentation (yay)!

All in all, it shows a lot of potential. So lets get cracking on building the doco up to a standard that developers in other languages have come to expect.

Death by powerpoint

Check out this amazing powerpoint presentation* on making amazing powerpoint presentations!

* no, you don't often get to say that.

Link: 21 Ruby Tricks

Not an article, just a link to a good one. Peter Cooper has written a nice article named 21 Ruby Tricks You Should Be Using In Your Own Code. They're pretty neat! Most of them had me nodding along, but there were several that made my eyes widen in appreciation.

Selling yourself tomorrow to buy today

Wow - I just read a really thought-provoking piece on The Register titled: Privacy? Forget it. Sell your brain and desires to the highest bidder

It discusses the future intentions of companies seeking to buy your purchasing habits; and provides insight into the reasons behind Phorm, Facebook's Beacon, and many of the cutting-edge market-data gathering machines out there.

Nothing new you say? So thought I until I got through it all - it's a fresh and entertaining angle on an argument that we may have heard a lot about - but which still has room for improvement. Well worth a read.

Here's a snippet to get you started:

All around us the toasters are getting smarter. Sadly, we don't seem to be keeping up with the program. We remain poor schlubs.

In the good old days, a toaster was just a toaster. It warmed bread and issued the odd electrocution. Tomorrow's toaster, however, brings with it a new set of functions that travel well beyond bread.

As we hear it, the toaster of the future will contain more silicon and communications systems. It will have sensors that can detect an upcoming failure, and alert you, via e-mail perhaps, to order a new toaster. Or maybe the toaster will order a new version of itself from the internet if you've enabled the self-upgrade feature. That future toaster may also talk to other gadgets in the home. Perhaps they'll agree on when they should shut down to save energy or to avoid a fire. Maybe they'll agree on the next brand for their upgrade cycle and make sure you get matching stainless steel appliances throughout the home or that your current penchant for pastel kit is obeyed...

Read on...

Google Geek Girl Dinner

Getting together with a whole bunch of geeky women and talking about interesting developments in IT in a toy-filled environment. That's a great way to spend the evening! Especially with speakers such as Rob Pike, Lindsay Ratcliffe and Stephanie Hannon.

Google provided the venue and catered the event. Google's Sydney office is right in the centre of town. It's a friendly, open environment full of geek toys (eg a Guitar Hero setup in the cafe) as well as wonderful and interesting people to chat with. We had a brief tour of the office, including being shown the Google rule of thumb that you should never be more than 100m away from chocolate at any time.

Then Rob spoke about the future tech trends, and a few things google is working on. Apparently there are lots of other applications in the works that he couldn't talk about, but promised they'd be amazing.

Lindsay followed with an entertaining overview of the process of bulding Customer Experience. Especially in having to translate between the very different world-views of the technical developers, the creative designers and the problem-focussed business people.

Finally, Stephanie gave a great overview of the GeoWeb - showing all the various ways in which people use mapping technology to share geographically-based information. Including such programs as Google Outreach's Crisis in Darfur project which overlays the sites of burned-out villages on satellite imagery to underscore the extent of the genocide occurring there.

I was really enthused to meet such a variety of interesting women from a wide range of technical backgrounds. Geek women are almost always a minority in the IT world. It's rare to have more than one in a development team, and so the chance to meet up to share both technical and cultural experience is a great opportunity. I suddenly feel that I'm not alone anymore. I even met one lady who shares my interest of someday going into space

GirlGeek Dinners has been instituted to support women in the IT community - to provide opportunities for women to create strong networks with others in the field, and to attract more young women into the the industry. There is A GirlGeek blog to let you know when events are scheduled, and a Facebook group if you wish to keep in touch with the others.

I enjoyed the evening and look forward to many more to come.

2.0 update or not 2.0 update: Is Rails 2.0 ready yet?

I had a play with converting one of my smaller playthings... er projects over to Rails 2.0 the other day. So far I see no convincing reason to convert yet. There were some small improvements, but I came across a couple of glaring bugs that make rake test incredibly painful to use.

When I find the specific ticket-numbers again I'll include them here, but to briefly describe the issue: The bug caused the setup method not to be called (ever) in unit tests. This meant that tests didn't get their fixtures fresh after every test. The several attempts to fix this issue somehow interfered with another bug that caused the controller not to be loaded in the functional tests.

Both of these situations are so impossible to work with that I'd recommend steering clear of Rails 2.0 for a short while.

I can see it being worthwhile using Rails 2.0 for new/greenfields projects - and putting up with the bugs until the Rails Core Team figure out how to fix them. But I would seriously recommend against it for any pre-existing project - especially one that is currently in a commercial/production environment. The pain of having to convert a complete test-suite over to work around the bugs (or to convert it all over to RSpec) isn't worth the effort just yet.

Conclusion: Yes, but not yet.

Presenting Rails

Ok, so this post was going to be how I gave an absolutely rocking presentation on Rails to my local LUG group (SLUG).

Unfortunately, I was giving the second talk and the first one began late and then ran way over-time. So my talk was pre-empted. The SLUG team were really nice about it (they even bought me dinner), and I'll be running it next month instead.

I certainly can't fault them - the first talk was on the cool OLPC project. I was interested in listening myself. Besides which, an extra month will give me more time to polish the talk and prepare that demo I'd meant to organise...

Anyway, I did want to mention a really cool talk I stumbled over while researching other Introductory Rails talks. Jim Weirich gave this talk and has a lot of reference material available here, but what I wanted to point out the neat slide software he used.

It's called "The Takahashi method" and is a XUL file that runs in your browser. It lets you write simple and effective slides with an image or a few words on each. These give great impact to what you're trying to say.

The data file for the slides is simple plain-text markup, so it's ultra-quick to write up your slides from your presentation notes.

Here is a link to Jim's slides and data. See how punchy that is.

Anyway, that's what I would have used... if I had the chance ;)

Social overload

So, just how many Rails social sites are out there? Seems everyone and his dog is in the process of creating a new one. I suppose this shouldn't be really surprising given how deeply entwined Rails is with the "Web 2.0 revolution"... but still.

Here is a shortlist of my current profiles:

Working With Rails

By far the best of the lot. It seems to have been around the longest - and if you're not on it, you're not anybody. This is the site that features the luminaries of the Ruby and Rails world. It also seems to be in active upgrade mode atm. They've just added a whole bunch more features.

Network of Ruby Freelancers

You can't access this site without registering. The concept is that this site marrys up freelancers with firms looking to hire. It's still a bit rough-and-ready, but it's only really just been launched. Still, there are already over 50 freelancers listing on it. They also cater for sub-contracting, allowing you to quote your sub-contract rate so other freelancers can pass their work on if they're overloaded.

Rails for all

I find this site to be way too complicated. I really like the navigation options (something that WWR is missing), but once you start trying to get to actual data, things aren't intuitive. It's also not as stable as it could be (the search fell over for no reason). There's a lot of potential here, but I think the developers tried to swallow too much at once. It has about the same level of functionality as WWR, but is far less dependable.

Freelancers on rails

Not a social-site per se, but a google-group intended for conversations about freelance rails contracting. Mentoring, tips and experiences. The members are pretty helpful and the topics cover a wide range of issues within freelancing. Worth joining if you're a freelancer.

Technorati

Ok, so this definitely isn't a rails-specific social site, but there are a lot of rails-specific blogs available here. I probably don't need to say more.

Linuxchix Rails talk

I gave my first ever talk at Linuxchix on Monday. It was an overview of Rails. I kept it informal as we're never sure of the venue or how many people will turn up. As it turned out there were around ten people and we sat in a fairly noisy area outside of Gloria Jean's at St Leonard's.

It apparently went quite well, given the location and the necessary informality. I briefly went over why Rails is so appealing to businesses and what it actually does to help a developer build a web app. I ended with a vague discussion about MVC architecture and took a few questions. People seemed particularly interested in the causes behind Rail's reported slowness: which unfortunately I don't actually know. So I'll have to research that for next time.

I had a few positive tips for improvement come out of it too. Mainly it was suggested that I tie the talk together with a narrative element - as people naturally respond to stories. It gives people a hook to hang onto as they follow the points you're presenting. Slides or a demo would have been good too - but that was a limitation of the venue.

Afterward, of course, we all headed off to SLUG and some interesting talks, including one on how AV was used during LCA, and another on the Google Summer-of-code project.

BusyBusy

I haven't died - I've just been busy.

First with my new contract with SugarStats.com I sadly fell ill on the first day, and left myself that day to try to recover. But I gave in and just struggled to work through the mild flu for the rest of the week - I can't sit abed for too long when there's work to be done. That filled in the rest of the second week of January.

Secondly was LCA - what a fantastic week! Keynotes and lectures from amazing speakers, cool shiny toys to play with and wonderful social evenings amongst the cool hackers that flocked to the con. I think I'll go every year from now on! I have yet to watch through all the amazing talks that I missed (while watching other amazing talks, of course). I also have some cool ideas for stuff I can contribute to Open Source... as well as several ideas for blog-posts that I'll type up - as my backlog.

The beginning of this week has been filled with the housework needed to get my house back into shape after a week of 8am-10pm days, followed by several more days working on my contract (which has been extended so I can do a few more things). In any case, I'll try to get down a few more posts in the next couple of days.