Jason Wong

Judy took me to one of Erasure’s 5 incredible nights at the Independent. This venue accommodates 500 people, making this the most intimate concert I’ve been to for such a large band.

Audience breakdown was 20% asian, 80% other :-). Females seemed remarkably (30%) outnumbered, and I didn’t notice a large gay contingent. Pretty dramatic difference from previous Erasure concerts.

The show was incredible, as always, with 3 costume changes, lots of sweat, jokes, and loud, heartfelt, electro-soul. Not as fun as their “Cowboy” tour, but that’s because that’s my favorite Erasure album. It probably didn’t help that I hadn’t bought the Nightbird album before the concert (but I did afterwards). They played all the favorites – Blue Savannah, A little respect, Oh L’Amour, and covered about 20 songs.

While not nearly as nice as the images some of the people who brought Digital Rebels will have, here are a few images from my phone (sorry for the lack of thumbnails):

The Pragmatic Programmers just released a “beta” of the first book on Rails, Agile Web Development with Rails. Publishing a book can take several months between the 90% done version (what’s the analogy, the last 10% is 50% of the project?) and tree format(which is years in Rails time), so David & David put out an early release. The beta concept allows publishers to a. get feedback, allowing users to submit content, grammatical, spelling, and code related bugs by those most interested in the content b. gauge demand for their product c. receive early revenues, for the book in PDF format (you can choose to either buy the PDF, or the PDF+Book (when it comes out). Most importantly, eager fans get a sneak preview of a work in progress, and that generates both buzz and goodwill. As for the piracy issue of PDFs, there’s this nice bit of personalization at the bottom of every page, saying “This BETA-BOOK is prepared exclusively for Jason Wong.”

For the publishing industry, this is incredibly advanced.

The Apache Logs default to common, which give neither referrer (where did this person come from?) nor User Agent (what kind of User came by – did he use Mozilla, IE, a newsreader?) information.

To get this kind of information, set your CustomLog in the apache httpd.conf for your Virtual Directory to to “h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %b \”{Referer}i\” \”%{User-agent}i\””, also known as combined.

A search for Jason Wong ranks my blog at #3, where I had absolutely no ranking 3 weeks ago, obliterating 1,249,997 other references to Jason Wong.

Quick lesson on Search Engine Optimization(SEO):

Getting a high page ranking on Google depends on multiple elements, the most important being the relative importance of the sites that link to you. Relative importance is the quality of the link, how many pages link to them, who links to them (a link from Apple.com is more important than a link from limegreenhatchbacks.com), and how many people they link out to (the fewer the better).

I received links from friends fairly quickly, and my post about my experiences w/Voiceover was covered by MacSlash and MacSurfer, resulting in a quick move upwards.

On to number one!

In an effort to avoid disappointment, I’ve been keeping my expectations as low as humanly possible, despite what Kevin Smith says. Here’s one from the New Yorker.

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones. True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

I should have woken up earlier. Sigh. Will be in shape and awake next year. From the SF Chronicle

and a fishnet-clad Darth Vader may still be out there… Darth likes to load up on lots of carbs and lots of alcohol,” the Dark Lord said about five minutes into the race as he lifted his mask to pound a Jello shot laced with tequila.

“This race is my chance to fight for Darth Vader’s transgender rights,” said the plastic-light-saber-wielding man also known as 28-year-old Sergio Montoya of Houston. “I told Luke I’m not just his father but that I’m also his mother. I’m his mother trapped in his father’s male body.”

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Boolean Search.

Hallelujah!

My father is visually handicapped, from retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disease that began to take away his sight when he was a teenager. When I heard about Tiger’s support for the visually impaired through VoiceOver, I got pretty excited. Not only because it was another opportunity to get my dad on some pretty cool software, but also because he hadn’t been really able to take advantage of the Internet on the PC, other than email. The Net’s been a transformative technology for me, and he will easily soak up the tools out there.

We are using an iMac 1.8 Ghz G5 as the learning environment (Thanks, Mom!). There’s no perceptible system slowdown running Voiceover w/the other applications, to my surprise. Very nice.

To start, I pasted the VO help files into emails so my Dad could read them in his PC-based screen reader. This was NOT a huge help. There are so many commands, he’s going to have to spend some time learning all of them. Thankfully, he’s got an incredible memory.

To prep the Mac for a visually handicapped user, you should do a couple things. a. Create a user for them. This serves as a “sandbox” where they can have their own environment to use b. Install Quicksilver and any plug-ins you want (use menu interface, as it gets out of the way). Even if you’re not visually handicapped, install Quicksilver. It’s incredible.

We chose to start small today – learn how to switch users, so we don’t disturb my mom’s environment, and then launch and work with a couple of apps. Time’s limited, so we’ll get more in depth on apps on another day. The workflow is something like this: Command-Space to activate Quicksilver, (Spotlight is moved to option-space, as I use qs about 30x more than sl) dad enter. This switches to user dad, and he then types in the password. Command-F5’s to activate VoiceOver, and command-space Saf to run safari. Navigating web pages is going to take some training. It seems that a great number of sites aren’t Section 508 compliant. I’m not very fond of using command-option arrow to move around the different parts of the screen, but key-comboing is something he’s used to.

A few lessons in today’s session with Dad. a. Apple is in desperate need of a voice based tutorial. This should teach a user how to get around the basic OS X applications on OS X, including Mail, Safari, and (gasp!) Office. There’s no way anyone can get around this thing without substantial help. Even sighted, I’m not picking this up super-quickly. b. Office does not appear to be VoiceOver friendly, and neither is Pages. I’ll have to investigate this further c. Quicksilver makes Voiceover 10x more usable.

I was told that Apple had a blind person in QA, testing Voiceover for over a year. What’s more, he was using the 12” Powerbook, with the lcd removed, making it the lightest Apple laptop ever built.

Thanks to my incredible girlfriend, I had the most delicious birthday ever! She obviously knows the way to my heart(sigh).

The morning started with breakfast in bed, followed by lunch at Swan Oyster Depot. There was an incredible half-cracked crab, scallops, clam chowder, six oysteres, and a combination seafood cocktail. All of this was very fresh (Swan ships their seafood to restaurants around town), and very delish! (Imagine me imitating Rachael Ray. Shudder the thought.)

Following this, Judy brought me to the Exploratorium, which turned out to be boring in the front, and fun in the rear, kinda like some… Anywho, it was a good time!

My parents took me to Acme Chophouse for dinner, which is now my favorite steakhouse, crushing the House of Prime Rib, where I had a bad experience my last time there.

Did I mention Judy got me a pair of tickets to see Erasure? She’s the best and then some!

I turned 29 on May 7th. Looking forward to another great year!

David Hansson’s, of 37 signals, and the birth-father of Rails is in town for an Ajax conference this week, so he, Florian and I went to Sakana for some sushi (excellent!), and Ireland’s 32 for the meetup.

As I drove around the block to pick David up, I wasn’t sure whether to expect a Tom Cruise Hollywoodish aviator glasses movie star, a normal guy, or a mad scientist. Cool, normal guy with genius and enthusiasm underneath. Pretty much like his blog. We ended up parking farther from the sushi restaurant than he could have walked from the hotel. Lame.

In regards to Rails, both Basecamp and Backpackit use the latest drops of code from SVN, which means they’re on the nightly build. That says a lot for stability, but I still won’t touch non-releases, cause I’m not l33t like that.

There was a long discussion about the value of innovation, and keeping firms small, (less than 8 people), and a super-long discussion about the negative value of venture capital, and their dampening effect on ideas. The tradeoff generally being commercialization vs. innovation and agility. Obviously a one sided discussion, with Railers and Rails consultants in the room.

With Rails, it’s fairly easy to create a profitable business with 2 people (one UI/Designer), one developer. And there’s the revolution. Millions of ideas, both diamonds and dirt, come to fruition because a small, flexible team whack out a beta in man-weeks, and a 1.0 in man-months, rather than man-years.

Day 2 on Tiger. The upgrade went smoothly, and indexing my hard disk for Spotlight only took a couple hours (I just let it go when I went to sleep).

First impression: The OS is 15% faster. Safari’s more responsive, moving windows, and everything else seems a lot smoother.

I found Spotlight to be extremely useful for email, but I’m not using it for much, other than that. I think it’ll get more useful as I get used to it. I’m still reliant on Quicksilver for apps, and have moved SL to option-space with QS back to command-space.

Dashboard apps are neat, and will be more useful as people write more widgets. I’ll build one this weekend.

My dad called me from the office to ask what the command to get VoiceOver working was, on my mom’s iMac. I’m looking forward to walking him through using a Mac, for the first time.

Oh, the RSS Screen Saver is bad ass.

Overall, I think it’s good, and worth the money for the speed boost alone. As long as I don’t crush my laptop, I’m going squeeze at least one more year of use from my 1 Ghz TiBook (on the way to a G5!).