3.75 Reasons Jonathan Coulton Is More Interesting than Radiohead

In Jonathan Coulton’s Portal post, I find 6 things very interesting. He:

  1. was commissioned (I’m assuming) to write a song for a video game ($$$)
  2. likes the video game (is this an ad or a recommendation to his fans?)
  3. includes the lyrics in the post
  4. includes the chords in the post
  5. thanks the video game dev team
  6. recommends another game with a great theme song that

3.75 of them are for JC’s fans. He didn’t need to include any of them. Others haven’t and wouldn’t. This to me makes Coulton a far more interesting and fan-oriented musician than Radiohead simply removing the middleman.

LATER:
Tonight, my iPod randomly pulled an almost-exactly-one-year-old Coulton/Hodgeman/Sound of Young America interview from my Unlistened Podast playlist. Quite good. Hodgeman even discusses Minnesota State Fair food.

The New Dad Book Needing To Be Written

We’ve Got Money, What We Need is You
A New Dad’s Family Handbook

The first time around, we picked up the stereotypical new parent books. If any of you are having your first child – you only need one of those books. Go to the bookstore, page through them all, buy the one that makes you smile.

Chances are, it won’t be The Expectant Father or any other of the “serious” New Dad books. As my college roommate warned – all those books do is amplify the sense of financial inadequacy (all?) new dads feel and the need to double the instinct to “provide”.

Unhelpful.

There needs to be another book – one encouraging being present in the new family.

Any candidates?

UPDATE: Dan Brown recommends Be Prepared: A Practical Handbook for New Dads. A second?

RE: Crushing the life out of the iPhone ecosystem

A couple years back, after ‘getting’ the idea of having all my favorite audio with me at a moment’s click – I had grown bored of my then new 40gb iPod. A few minutes of searching and I found Doc Searls link about the iPod Platform. Suddenly, I was neck-deep in podcasting. Even in those early days, the open, informal, deep-dive nature of podcasting made my iPod interesting again in a way the closed iTunes Music Store just didn’t.

From another early days MN podcasters – emphasis mine:

“As a stockholder, I’m concerned about the command-n-control, draconian measures being exhibited by Apple around the iPhone and what that is doing to any semblance of an iPhone ecosystem. I’m also bored with a stock iPhone and was really enjoying what the ecosystem was delivering.” – Steve Borsch

I’ll be excited about the iPhone when it’s more of an ecosystem and less of a museum artifact. Looks like that time will be in February 2008 🙂

Framing Rails Tests: Tests are Requirements

I’ve ignored Rails Tests for too long. In fact, I’ve skipped over Test chapter in Agile Web Development with Rails in both the first and second editions. After fighting with the same bug over and over again, I knew now was the time for tests.

On the surface, tests seemed very un-DRY1 – like I’m writing the code twice – once to make it work and again to make sure it works. Rails is so good at minimizing dupliation and using scripts to generate things that might be duplicated – shouldn’t the generation of tests be auto-generated2. Plus, if I’m continually refactoring code and I have a test for each method – feels like I’d be continually rewriting the test. Argh. I’m too lazy for that.

This morning as Ben helped me fix a previously hidden bugs via a single functional test3 he framed tests in a way that finally clicked: Tests are requirements.

Also known as the Test Driven Development approach and it’s attractive for a number of reasons:

  1. Eliminiates separate, external, no fun, and less DRY, documentation
  2. Encourages tests to be written early and in English
  3. Puts the focus on refactoring the code, not keeping the tests synchronized.

1. Don’t Repeat Yourself, a core programming principle from early Ruby advocates.
2. I know they are when using the scaffolding. I haven’t found scaffolding to be useful for anything other than Wow-ing people in screencasts.
3. We didn’t even need to run the test to identify and fix the bug. But we did. Passed.

FeedHub: HAL, er MAPE, Filters Your Feeds

Graeme pointed me to FeedHub – another next generation feed filtering service. On first glance, it reads like FeedRinse – import a bunch of feeds, apply some filters, drop the resulting aggregated feed into your regular reader. The difference, FeedRinse’s filters are manual and FeedHub’s are automated.

My first hiccup with the FeedHub service: Registration.
Right on the top of their main page is a sign-in form with an OpenID link. I click it, authenticate, and enter my OpenID url and receive an error.

Huh? I guess they don’t automatically create my account – even though they have everything they need from my authentication to do so. Hmmm.

Back to the main page to cick the big ‘Register’ button – then another OpenID link. And a button to upload my OPML. Three attempts later, the OPML file stuck. Then they asked me questions about how much of the items I wanted, I chose “the most interesting stuff” (how do they know?) which seemed far more useful than “60% of the items”.

I then loaded up the feed url they gave me and was reminded:

“While you can normally expect to see new content in your feed every 3-4 hours, it will currently take 24 hours to start getting content in your new feed.”

While I wait for the propreitary, trademarked mPower Adaptive Personalization Engine to do it’s magic, I caught up on some early reviews of the service:

“One problem: for me it doesn’t work. It doesn’t pick the stuff I’d really like to read from my feeds. Almost none of the items match my link blog, for instance.” – Robert Scoble

Confirming what I’ve said before – I’m not confident with computers identifying what’s relevant or interesting to me. Spam is easier – there are patterns. I’m not convinced interestingness does.

UPDATE:
My lone FeedHub feed updated and it pleasantly surprised me. At the top of each item in the reader is a FeedHub control bar with a number of links including one I’ve only seen in one other service – 'don't show items like this'. Yeah for FeedHub. I’m less enthusiastic about the meme-organizer it feels more like a distraction and oddly disconnected from the reading process.