A Fresh Cup

This is only peripherally related to the subject of this blog (my search for a new career) but it’s a topic that fascinates me. That may be because I spent many years involved with smart passionate people who were fighting like hell to protect their personal privacy from the looming spectre of Big Brother. Now I’m on the fringes of other communities of smart passionate people who seem intent on taking whatever shards of personal privacy they might have left and deliberately destroying them by putting their entire lives on the Internet. I’m talking about more than just the rise of blogging and Flickr and Twitter (where you’ll find me as MikeG1) and all the other outlets for the extroverts of the new millenium (minor digression: I think we actually need a new category for folks who are introverts in “real life” but extroverts on line, but that’s a topic for another day). The part that’s fascinating me tonight is lifestreaming – the idea that since all this stuff we’re throwing on line ends up in RSS feeds, we might as well combine it all into a single personal master feed and be done with it. As far as I can tell Jeremy Keith gets the credit for the name, though with the number of tools already out there, the idea was definitely in the air.

Intelligence agencies used to spend a bundle on the sort of painstaking assembly of apparently unrelated facts to draw a conclusion, and here we are handing it to them on a silver platter. I dunno; on the one hand, it all seems sort of creepy, on the other it seems inevitable. After all, anyone who wants to can already subscribe to the half-dozen RSS feeds that describe my life, so why not make it easy for them? And we’re clearly in the early days here, where only the technical weasels are playing with this stuff. If it catches on, we can bet on all sorts of unanticipated outgrowths:

• recombinant lifestreams where people steal bits of other people’s feeds to make themselves sound cooler
• spammers finding a way to sneak ads into our lifestreams (in return for bandwidth?)
• couples combining into a single lifestream
• shortly followed by a messy lifestream divorce
• some automatic Web 2.0 service (“hey, your lifestream is similar to X’s, you should meet!”)

Anyhow, if you’re interested in this stuff, either as a fascinated observer or a potential participant, there are a whole mess of tools out there already (you knew I couldn’t do a blog entry without linking to a bunch of tools, right?). Here’s what’s crossed my radar so far:

• FeedGrab – A plugin for the ExpressionEngine blogging engine that can merge multiple RSS feeds into a single stream.
• Jaiku – Focused on creating a “presence stream.” So you can add whatever feeds you like, but it only shows title, time, and source on Jaiku itself, and you click through to get to the original item.
• Planet Venus is a newsreader that works by intermingling multiple RSS feeds together into a single “river of news.” Edward O’Connor uses it to hack together a lifestream here .
• Profilactic is a “digital life aggregator” that you point at all your online identities. Then it automatically builds a mashup of them all. It can also search out and keep track of mentions of you on the Web.
• Slife is an OS X app that tracks your desktop interaction with apps like Mail, Safari, and iChat, so you can keep track of things that don’t even generate RSS feeds. This gives you a client-side record which you can then choose to share with the world through their Slifeshare site.
• SuprGlu – Lets you take a batch of RSS or Atom feeds, apply a template, and republish them as a Web page to make a sort of recombinant blog.
• Yahoo Pipes – With its ability to mix RSS feeds together, Pipes lets the tinkerer build their own lifestream, though sorting is a bit iffy at the moment. Jon Rowett has hacked together an example .

(Thanks to Emily Chang for a couple of links).

SQL Editor is an entity relationship diagram (ERD) tool for OS X with a tie-in to Rails. This might be of interest to folks who want to bring complex database designs into a Rails app, though I think there might be some mismatch there between the idea of big design up front and Rails more agile TDD approach. Anyhow, the idea is that SQL Editor lets you build this:

And with a single save operation get this:

SQL Editor certainly doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the high-end ERD tools I’ve used under Windows, but for a $69 shareware package it’s serviceable enough. In addition to generating Rails migrations, it can export DDL for MySQL, Postgresql, or Oracle, as well as reverse engineer existing databases via JDBC.

As I switch more of my computing life over to the Mac (it’s now home to most of my e-mail accounts, my calendar, my task list, and some of my Web work, as well as the bulk of the Rails development I’m doing), I find myself accumulating bits and pieces of software. It’s dangerous to draw any conclusion based on the small exposure to Macs that I have so far, but it seems to me that most of the Mac apps I’ve looked at are more visually polished and have more internal coherence (i.e, they do one thing and do it well) than most Windows apps that I’m familiar with, but they also tend to have less inherent functionality. On the whole I’m very satisfied with the Mac experience (especially on days like today, when my main Windows development box blue-screened five times).

Stereotypes and sweeping statements aside, it might interest some other Windows refugees to have a list of some of what I’ve found it reasonable to install so far:

• Adium (free) is a reasonable enough multi-network IM client. It’s still a bit lacking in functionality compared to “Trillian”http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/ on Windows though.
• Chamonix (free) is a CHM file viewer. Not as pretty as Chmox but more functional.
• CSSEdit ($29.95) is a real find; this CSS Editor is way more functional than anything I’ve worked with on the Windows side.
• EasyTask Manager ($19.99) is my choice for task lists at the moment. They oversell the GTD-ness of the application, but they have one key feature I can’t live without: recurring tasks.
• Firefox (free) remains my browser of choice. I can’t imagine doing without its wealth of extensions in favor of anyone’s native browser.
• Growl (free) is somehow far less annoying, perhaps because it’s more consistently a standard, than any of the “toast” notification options on Windows.
• Navicat ($99) is doing for a MySQL GUI client for now. It’s got a ways to go, but it’s better than doing everything with the command line tools.
• NeoOffice (free) is so far handling my light word processing and spreadsheet requirements on the Mac. I’ll probably have to revisit this as I move more office work over, but I have no intention of letting a Microsoft product on to this box.
• OmniOutliner Pro ($29.95 upgrade price) is taking care of my unstructured text and list needs. This is a category I’ve always kept some application or other busy in, so it was good to see lots of choices here on the Mac. This one clicked for me better than Yojimbo or Tinderbox though they’re both intriguing as well.
• Pukka ($5) is a del.icio.us client. That’s not a category of software I thought I needed, but it’s very well done and useful.
• QuickSilver (free) has actually gotten me using a keyboard-driven program launcher, something none of the Windows entrants in the field ever done. I’d like to see it pick up some of the Web-driving goodness of DQSB on Windows (I know, I could program a lot of that in myself but I’m lazy).
• Shrook (free) will probably be my RSS reader when I move my feeds over. Everyone raves about the look of Newsfire but trying to read 400 feeds in that UI would drive me mad. NetNewsWire probably has the right functionality but I’m not going to subject myself to Newsgator’s software registration system.
• TextMate (€39) is just as fabulous a prrogrammer’s text editor as everyone says it is. It’s obvious why people are trying to clone this for the PC.
• Twitterific (free) does absolutely nothing for my productivity but it’s fun to watch all these random people wander by on my screen.

At the start of the year I switched my e-mail client from Outlook to Thunderbird on the PC. Yesterday I made another transition – I’m now using Apple’s standard Mail app on the Mac to read my mail. I considered using Thunderbird on the Mac, but while it’s a reasonably serviceable client, Thunderbird just doesn’t have the fit-and-finish or feature level of either of the native applications.

I looked at using Emailchemy to bring my existing archive over from Thunderbird, but it didn’t do a good job converting the Thunderbird 2.0 beta files (after importing the files into Mail, it claimed all the messages were on the server, which was very odd considering that the mailboxes were POP, not IMAP). Ultimately I decided that it didn’t matter, as I’ll have access to the archive on the PC for the foreseeable future.

Overall, my first impression is that Mail is way ahead of Thunderbird as far as polish and functionality go, but somewhat behind Outlook in functionality. On the other hand, it’s not as much of a bloated pig as Outlook either, and after using it I’ll probably discover some things it can do that Outlook can’t. Adding in MailTags takes care of several big missing chunks of functionality, and Growl notifications are nice as well. So for the moment I’m happy.

There’s a good-looking set of instructions over at My Preferred Rails Development Environment (via dzone). In it, Yehuda Katz walks through the basic install steps for Eclipse, and then configures it with a set of plugins to speed Rails development.

I’m not going down this road myself at the moment, though. When learning a new language, I prefer to stick fairly close to the bare code and do a fair amount of typing (and even, dare I say it, some cut and paste) as I get the syntax locked into my brain. So right now I’m still mainly working in TextMate . Mileage varies, though, so if you’re a hardcore IDE person it’s nice to see how easy it is to set up a powerful free one for this stuff.

• SQLGrinder is another DBA tool, this one using JDBC for connectivity. $59 to register. My initial attempts at using it to connect to a MySQL database on a different machine weren’t successful, but then, so far everything I’ve tried to connect to a MySQL database on a different machine have been unsuccessful.

• BuildFactory is a continuous integration tool that runs on the Mac, integrated with Subversion and various editors. $35 to register. I don’t need this yet, but might come in handy in the future.

Yeah, so the world doesn’t really need Twitterific , but then, there are many other mildly fun addictions it doesn’t need either.

James Higgs has been on the PC-to-Mac trail longer than I have. His Mac OS X applications I use post has plenty of links that I’ll be checking out (though, thankfully, I think I’ll be able to avoid putting MS Office on my Mac).

I’ve still been putting my personal 20% time to reasonably good use. Tonight I deployed LarkWrite – a new home for my personal journal, with software custom-written in Rails. I kept an online journal for five years or so and then got too busy and got out of the habit, but it’s time to get back into it again. The application is just barely functional enough to use right now – it lets me enter and markup and display stuff, and has a few different display modes, and probably has some bugs as well. But I’m reasonably pleased at how it’s coming along, and considering that it’s still under 200 lines of code I’m happy with the implementation as well.

I’ll be tweaking on this one and adding features for a bit. When I think it’s in a more ready state I’ll make the source available as well. Then it’s on to the next application.

Another cool resource: cheat sheets features close to 100 command-line cheat sheets for Ruby and associated coding – the one on Capistrano helped me out immensely tonight, and I’ve got my eye on a couple of others (TextMate for Rails, for example). You can access them all online in HTML glory, or

 $ gem install cheat

will bring it into your local system where you can access the cheat sheets directly from the command line.

RuseWiki is a Rails-based wiki with strong antispam features. Apparently not released yet but available via SVN. Not that I need a wiki for anything at the moment, but you never know.

Sometimes I miss the obvious – though I linked to Komodo IDE a few days ago, I completely missed ActiveState’s free Komodo Edit , a lighter-weight version of their product without the additional debugging, team, and other features (comparison between the two tools is here). Looks like this may answer the question I had a while ago about finding a decent CSS editor for my Linux environment. Though I’m more than happy with CSSEdit on the Mac side of the house, I’ll definitely be taking a look at this one for its cross-platform (Mac/Linux/Windows) goodness.

The new version 4.0 of Komodo is out. It’s got all sorts of spiffy features for dynamic languages (Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, TCL) as well as Rails support. But you know, right now I’m just not feeling the need for a $245 IDE for Rails development. Of course that may be just because I’m only doing little baby applications so far, but at the moment lightweight tools (like TextMate) are doing fine for me.

RubyFurnace is an online repository for Gems and Rails plugins. There are quite a few there already to browse through. I’m guessing more tools for finding the best and most applicable to your own projects are still to come. (via dzone

Mosquito is a Mac application that can be scripted to go through a Web site, supplying input as necessary, and saving screenshots as it goes along. The author suggests using it as a tool for checking that CSS changes do not screw up your site rendering, without having the bother of manually going through every page. (via dzone