As of late, though, I’ve been relegated to the relatively, well, primitive? land of PHP.  As a language that started life as some kid’s web page maker and had stuff bolted on over the years to keep it relevant, it does a hell of a job.  Still, it’s kludgey.  I often find myself re-creating complex functionality to get myself back to a more abstracted way of working, which is what I personally prefer.

So, recently, with the impending wrap of my current project, I went back to take a look at the state of the state of Rails.  I must say that I’m a bit concerned.  The way that project is progressing down its philosophically heavy-handed path reminds me very much of how I felt about J2EE a few years back– just about when local and remote references to EJBs started wrecking everything.

None of this is to say that you can’t still do all kinds of neat stuff with Rails, and for that matter, I suspect that one can just ignore all this RESTful, resource-oriented stuff and just make a web site.  On the other hand, the nature of Rails is that once you depart from the common convention, you’ve isolated yourself.  Convention over configuration, donchaknow.

I worked with Rails for years, and my most recent foray into a refresher barely sounded familiar.  Rack?  CSRF?  Datamapper?  Whu?  I guess it’s good that Rails is continuing to progress, but I must say that as someone who qualified as a zealot not too long ago, the esoteric nature of the conversation leaves me feeling like its going the way of so many successful technologies in the past– the priesthood gets so familiar and proud of themselves that they run off leaving the parish wandering around confused.

That is to say, it’s not the introduction of new methods and technologies, it’s the opacity of them.  I did a little reading in some of the discussion areas on the topics, and the conversation was often summarized as: “You don’t get it?  You don’t DESERVE to get it!”  One interesting sideline was the apparently universal outrage over some guy who used a porn site as an example for a talk at a recent conference.  Um… don’t care.

Ah well, I guess I’ll download the most recent PragPub book and see if I can catch up.  Still, I hope this doesn’t end the way I’ve seen these things go in the past wherein the adepts ride their philosophically inscrutable rightness right in to the dirt.

HOWEVER, I have run into a new thing that points out the danger of all of these pre-packaged kits that are the norm now.  I decided to use Google’s API to call some of their snazzy graphing bits.  These, too, are very cool.  Set up a few data points, some parameters, and bing!  (the sound, not the site), you’ve got a lovely interactive graph!

Unfortunately, there’s *something* in the interaction of the $(document).ready of jQuery and the google.setOnLoadCallback that does not play well together. Load the google code, and the jQuery stops working.  No error.  Nothing.  Just… no jQuery.

Now, at this point, I’ve got jQuery sprinkled liberally all over my site, and so the jQuery.noConflict approach is probably out of the question, since I’d need to go through and replace all the $ references with something else.  I think.  Who knows?  Maybe not.

There’s the problem.  I have no clue what the problem is.  There’s no way to know without hours of googling and trial and error to see what might, possibly, perhaps be the offending conflict.  So… what are my choices?

• Suck it up.  Just accept that the pages that use the Google jsapi bits don’t get jQuery love.  Actually, this might be a reasonable solution given my limited use of the stuff, but it isn’t very intellectually satisfying.
• Go all Google.  My understanding is that I can actually load jQuery via the Google API.  There’s several benefits to doing that including less load on my server, potential caching benefits, and less worrying about versioning.  Still, what just happened there?  I’m stuck with Google?  Aren’t they a private, for-profit corporation?  Didn’t we… uh… wait…
• Pitch Google and go with some other solution.  There are lots of graphing solutions out there.  Again, though, this buys me several hours, at least, of research and retooling of the site.  Besides, then I can’t use their stuff.  I *want* to use their stuff.
• Run away.  Just quit my job and flee.  Get a van and a hippie girl.  Get high and drive down into Mexico.  I speak Spanish pretty well.  I’m pretty handy fixing stuff.  I could probably make a living if I just defaulted on my loans.  Sounds awesome at the moment, but my kids would be sad, and I suspect I’d feel stupid pretty quick.

Sigh.  Ah well, back to it.  I guess it just goes to show you that no matter how much pre-packaged goodness is out there, you still have to know what you’re doing.  Too bad.

And then I was handed the corporate-issue Windows XP laptop. Hm.

I mention this only because I know that, at some point, I had similarly strong opinions on the choices people make about their computing platform. I may have even thrown out the off-handed jibe at others for those choices. To them, I apologize.

I’ve made it no secret that I don’t care for Windows– at least up to, and including, Vista. I’ve yet to indulge myself in Windows 7, which gets good reports, in general. Having paid for and experienced a lot of suffering at the hands of such winners as Windows ME and Windows Vista, I think it’s fair to say that my opinion is hard won.

That said, Linux is so flexible and open as to barely operate at times. I’ve documented some good times that I had when the decision was made by some member of the open-source anarchic syndicalist commune that two video cards of different manufacture shall not be supported– or my logs filled with indecipherable memory abstraction errors or multipath disk naming voodoo that defied translation.

Then there’s the Mac. Remember all those colorful generation-one iMacs making little flower shapes on the commercials? Let us summarize that experience with the phrase “frowny face monitor with Xs in its eyes.”

Right now, I run Linux on my desktop with Windows in VirtualBox, and I tote around a MacBook. I am pretty happy. They all do what I need in the appropriate context.

Is one better than the others? I don’t know. For what? Linux video editing is a joke. Mac’s open/closed schizophrenia and high cost are off-putting. And I can’t tell if Windows, itself, is spyware or just all the stuff that mysteriously installs itself at every turn.

On the other hand, my Linux machine allows me very complete control of about any conceivable option and is customized to my liking as a DesktopServerHybrid just how I need it. The MacBook has never crashed and is light, very well-built, and functional, particularly for multi-media applications. Lastly, there’s very few, if any, applications that I can’t get to run on Windows if all else fails.

My point is this: you like your Windows? Good for you. You don’t like Linux? Fair enough. Macs are for emo blogging wannabes? Maybe. Does any of it make any difference whatsoever to anyone? Not really.

Mocking another’s computer is as pathetic as mocking their sexual orientation or height. The more sure you are that I’m wrong, the more you likely need to take a Stuart Smalley look in the mirror and let yourself know that it’s OK for us all to be different. We’re good enough, we’re smart enough, and doggonit, people like us.  Yes, even people who use Macs.

Not really.

I find that I get a lot of use out of my own notes (kept in Zim!) and the blogs of other propeller-heads.  I’ve stopped writing in my other blog for the time being for reasons I won’t go into, but I feel the need to write about… something.  There’s two things that I know much about: backyard farming and technology.  I’ve been a computer dork literally since programs were stored on rolls of paper, paper cards, and formatted graph paper looking stuff (RPG FTW!).

The other blog was about gardening.  This one’s about technojunk.

These days, I’m a consultant– typically engaged in some variation on the theme of technology and marketing.  Sometimes more technology.  Sometimes more marketing.  To be honest, I can be ambivalent about both.  The whole of idea of “progress” seems pretty ludicrous as we’re destroying the only planet we have and showing no signs of letting up, and it’s unusual, unfortunately, when marketing doesn’t mean selling people stuff they don’t need by stretching the truth to its legal limits.

But technology is in my blood, and I’ve resigned myself to that.  I been fiddling with computers in one form or another since I was about 13.  Maybe younger.  I’m 43 as I write this.  30 years.  Amazing.

As I mentioned, I get a lot of use out of the technical notes, reviews, howtos, and what-not of other netizens.  I figure it’s about time that I contribute something useful to that body of knowledge.  That’s what my really good new blog is about.

The principles are something like this:

• Nothing written here will be influenced by cash or prizes.  I’ll take cash and prizes, but it won’t influence what I say.  In fact, I’ll probably end up getting sued.  Ah well.
• I’m writing for people like myself in that I still believe that human consideration and decency is worth something, even if the person being addressed has not R’d T FM. (Read the f*cking manual.)  In that spirit, I will mercilessly purge comments or users who act like incorrigible asses.  Oh, except me.  My blog.  I get to act however I want.
• I hope also to write in a way that normal, non-complete-geeks might get something out of it.  Obviously, if the topic is logical volumes or stateful packet inspection, that’s kinda hard.  If it’s a new router, though, I should be able to tell a small business owner what I thought of it without trying to demonstrate my leet speek.
• I will not dumb down.  See above.  I think there’s a happy medium.  That’s usually what I shoot for: technical accuracy and literary clarity.
• I reserve the right to establish additional principles as history demonstrates their need.

There ya go.  Welcome to Rian’s Really Good Technoblog.  I hope you get something useful out of it.  Me too.