supersonic feet

I was checking out Flagr today, an AJAX site built around Google Maps that allows people to effectively stick pins on the map with descriptions of places of interest, so people can see where to visit when in any given place.

It’s a bit sparse at the moment, but as you do I decided to check out my locale, so started zooming into the vicinity of Newcastle. There were no notes added yet, but more interesting was that Gateshead was showing up quite far out, with no sign of Newcastle until you zoom in pretty close. This is quite weird considering the relative status of the two cities (which as mentioned before, are slowly merging anyway), but it’s not a flagr thing - Google Local has obviously decided that Gateshead is the more prominent location.

New to me that is, it’s been around for years.

More random browsing yesterday sent me in the direction of a handy blog post describing how best to set up jEdit for efficient use with Ruby and/or Rails.

Following his advice and downloading most of the suggested plugins, it seems jEdit might indeed be a nifty editor for Ruby/Rails. It adds some features that RadRails is missing (for now), though it does lack one or two nice things that RadRails has.
Two of the key reasons I can see myself using jEdit for a while instead of RadRails are:

• Window splitting/cloning - this was probably my most appreciated feature in the Zend IDE for PHP. Being able to split files into two views of the same file in the same workspace is invaluable when working on long files where you need to constantly jump between code at the top and bottom of the file, or where you need to work on two or more files at the same time (e.g. Raisl controller, models and views).
  The splitting/unsplitting isn’t quite as easy as in Zend (took me a while to find the tiny arrows for hiding a split frame/window), but it’s much better than not being able to do it at all.
• Colour preferences - I have a feeling I’m just missing something here with RadRails and I’ll be honest, I haven’t bothered looking too hard. I like to have a black background to my text editor and then appropriately colour the various keywords. I can’t find a way to do it in RadRails, but jEdit and Zend both let me.

I’d like to think I’ll go back to RadRails at a later date though, as it has Rails-specific things like the Servers tab for quickly starting a local Webrick server and the Generators tab for getting even more lazy so you don’t have to get into a console, find the right directory and then type out the commands to generate scaffolds and the like.

I might start using jEdit for PHP as well, though I’ll see how it goes. The only real reason I’m contemplating this is that my Zend support just ran out and there’s no way I can afford a few hundred dollars to renew it. That would be fine, but it seems the latest version of Zend I have installed (5.1) runs painfully slower than the previous version. Even on my dual-core Athlon64 at home with 2GB of RAM, Zend is now running very slowly (pauses between typing characters and them appearing on screen, etc.).

Well, this blog has started getting more and more comment spam recently that I’ve had to moderate, so I finally got around to installing Akismet. Akismet is a service/plug-in for WordPress that is meant to combat comment spam by maintaining a databse of the latest spam techniques and comparing your blog comments against it to see whether they’re dodgy or not.

Hopefully it’ll be effective and I can get back to being intrigued whenever the “Please moderate” emails arrive again, rather than groaning at the potential of another spam comment to deal with.

Anyway, if you make a legit comment that my new-fangled spam detection incorrectly decides must be spam, get in touch and I’ll try to recover it.

After mentioning the Optimus Mini Three in January, I then forgot to keep an eye on it for the final announcement that it would indeed be produced, but I was reminded today while looking at the pre-release screenshots of Shopify (also looks quite nifty, will have to try and remember to check that out when it’s launched now).

The Optimus Mini Three seems to be in production now, to be released on the 15th of May. The price is discounted until the 2nd of April (presumably to avoid conspiracy theories on April 1st following the near mythical status of the Optimus keyboard) at $100 (will go up to $120).

As cool as it does still look, I think I’ll hang on for the full thing rather than spend 60 quid on what is in the end three animated buttons.

My brother got me to go to a talk/discussion session with Steve Grand (of Creatures fame) last night and it turned out to be very good.

The talk was part of the AV Festival, taking place across Newcastle/Gateshead (they really are slowly turning into the one city), Sunderland and Middlesbrough and was entitled ‘Artificial Life and Virtual Reality’. The base point of discussion was whether anything generated in a computer can ever be ‘real’, with a focus on intelligence/consciousness in a computer.

Considering the talk and following discussion spanned two hours and isn’t exactly light going, it’s quite hard to summarise, but basically Steve Grand says that a computer program can never be written to have a ‘real’ intelligence/consciousness/whatever you want to call it, but that a computer can (theoretically, with a powerful enough computer some time in the future) simulate an environment in which a ‘real’ thing can emerge: if you can model and simulate every atom in a person’s body within a computer, with the basic rules that apply to those atoms, then you should effectively have another version of that person, as the interactions of the atoms combine to create that person, their memories, etc.

I no doubt explain it particularly poorly, but then that’s why I’m not off being paid to give talks or write books on the subject. I do have a bit of an interest in artificial intelligence from working at a computer game studio and then writing my degree dissertation on path-finding for computer games though, and I have to agree with Steve Grand that all ‘AI’ work so far is not in fact intelligent, it’s just giving the impression of intelligence through a series of tests.

That’s pretty obvious - especially within the computer game world, where not much processing power can be handed over to the AI - but it’s got me to thinking about this theoretical point in the future when we might be able to have ‘real’ intelligence emerge through the creation of a suitably complex simulation of atoms/particles. If we could create real intelligence within a simulated world, what limits should we then put on its application?

Once we got to the point where we could generate a game world suitably complex that we could insert copies of people that could think independently, it would open a debate over whether they could continue to be used in the traditional way for computer game characters - often to be shot at or otherwise killed. If they have real intelligence, they surely have real feelings and so should not be subjected to being shot at for the entertainment of some ‘higher beings’. The argument could be there that in the end they’re still just lots of ones and zeros flying around in a computer, but as Steve grand pointed out last night, in the end so are we, just replacing ones and zeros with protons and electrons.

Luckily I don’t think it’s a problem we’ll have to contend with too soon (though you never know).

Anyway, Steve’s talk and his answers to a very wide range of questions afterwards were great, so kudos to him and kudos to my brother Christian for making me go see someone I’d never really heard of

Last year I bought the Pragmatic Programmer’s book, “Agile Web Development with Rails” by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson. The Pragmatic Programmers have the cool method of allowing the purchase of their books before they’re finished, in which case you get access to the latest ‘beta’ version of the book as PDF.

This is a great way for people to get at the essentials of a book they’re waiting for as long as they can look beyond the odd rough edge that has yet to be ironed out before the book goes to print. It also must generate a reasonable amount of extra income for PP, as they charge extra for the beta book service (fair enough).

Anyway, the Agile Web Development book has been great for me recently as I’ve finally got around to tackling Ruby and Rails, so when browsing the Rails website and I noticed another book from the Pragmatic Programmers on Rails, I thought I’d check it out. It’s still ‘in beta’, but I’ve gone for the beta/hardcopy combo and am waiting for my download to be available of the beta as the book looks a very handy follow-on from the Agile book, despite being a different author.

The new book covers more advanced techniques than the ‘Agile’ book and will hopefully become just as handy.

This is scary, some people are starting to use Flash sensibly after all these years!

Browsing the newest additions on w3csites, I came across 9thwave New Media’s new website. The site has valid XHTML, semantic markup, a ’skip to content’ link and a small Flash header that has a nice picture, cool little animation, but doesn’t interfere with the usability of the website.

If you don’t have Flash, you get a substitute header image and a link to download Flash if you want.

This is an example of Flash executed with restraint and with an eye on accessibility while still looking good, so kudos to 9thwave.