geek!daily

Reflections on moderated blog comments

Ran into another blog today with misleading, subjective assertions about topical content and which moderates all comments. It's made me realize that, if you intend to blog about current events with any integrity, you absolutely must unmoderate comments and be ready to fight the spam. Otherwise, you've risk starting a monolog, not a conversation, and the web has enough monologs.

At best, the practice of moderating comments on opinion pieces is ill-advised and inconsiderate; at worst, it's self-serving dishonesty — you should just turn off comments entirely so we all know it's really a monolog.

Long Time, No See

I'm on the plane to Salt Lake City for Mountain West Ruby Conference and am fairly excited to get the chance to see several people I haven't seen for months. In all fairness, the only reason I'm not "really excited" is not seeing my family for two hard travel days with very little sleep likely to happen; sorry, Carl, Cobie, and the rest of you, but Beth, Sam, and Cassie have my heart.

I also realized that, since I joined LinkedIn's Light Engineering Development group*, I've been so busy that I haven't blogged anything significant. While I've been silent, my team and I created LinkedIn's first fully public-facing Rails app, LinkedIn Mobile; I've also been thinking and learning about OpenSocial, microformats, digital identity, web services and discoverability in social networks, and scalable web architecture for both Rails and J2EE.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to start posting a bit more again; if we're both lucky, there'll even be some code. =]

*Light as in "lightweight and agile," though it's fun to say, "Yeah, we make light. There's another team responsible for making dark."

Growl for Entourage (via Applescript)

So I went looking for a way to connect Microsoft Entourage (yeah, I'm in Exchange land now) with Growl for notifications. In theory, there are many ways, all of them Applescripts. In practice, I couldn't find one that worked properly ... so I grabbed the best one I could find and hacked it from there. I've put it in my public subversion repo, so if you need it either ctrl-click and download or use svn to nab it.

Reading my referrer log ...

... and if I were a writer in search of material, I'd write about:

• rFacebook and Facebooker
• Scoring more points playing Werewolf on Facebook
• Blocking notifications from the Werewolf app on Facebook
• The location of the slides for RubyConf 2007 (okay, I'll do that one next)
• MP3 streaming servers (huh? Oh, yeah, right.)
• Infinite sessions in the Facebook API
• Mock Ajax
• The Superwall API (oh, wait, I did that one)

Such googlebaiting. Tsk.

A Mild Leopard Hangover

I installed Leopard last night and, after a few hours, left it doing its TimeMachine thing. It was an overall good experience. Here's my quick notes:

• I did an old-style backup of my disk by rsyncing it to an external drive. This doesn't make the Migration Assistant a happy camper, so I got the joy of hand-copying the bits I wanted back over. I now know more about the contents of the Library than I ever wanted.
• My basic four apps (TextMate, Terminal, Firefox, and Thunderbird) all just picked up where they left off, prefs and all (see above). Yay!
• My calendar, tasks, and address book all reverted to some earlier time. I think I missed some Library things. Joy. Well, they're backed up (and on my Treo and Google Calendar). I'll work it out this week.
• I've finally got Spaces! Used to use You Control Desktops, which did one thing I can't seem to do in Spaces: different wallpaper per space. Someone's got to have figured this out.
• No iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, or iWeb? I must have missed something (maybe the memo)
• Had to be sure I got all my dotfiles over (I'm a pretty shell-oriented kinda guy)
• Changing my login shell to tcsh turned out to be long and painful, but it's done for now ... until next time ...
• My /etc/hosts is pretty heavily hacked, so that had to come, too
• MacPorts: copy or reinstall? I opted for the latter. I'll be refinding things for months, I'm sure, but I want to try to start with the Leopard Ruby I've heard such joy about and go from there.

Haven't yet gone through the fun of BootCamp, though I'm oddly looking forward to it. I'm going to see if that plus Parallels can cope with Vista on a partition yet (and how bloaty it'll be to have an Office install on the Vista partition).

TypePad 8 my homewerks.

I had a nice live blog going on Jeremiah Robinson's talk and then I didn't.

I'll have to read the slide show and riff on it later.

Grrr.

Changing Feeds

I'm twiddling my feeds, so if you're subscribed to the old one, you'll want to change over to:

http://feeds.geekdaily.org/geekdailyblog

That'll go active sometime this weekend (18-19 August).