see a puffin eat a fish

I’ve been twittering as a couple of different entities lately and have spent less time here. Right now there’s a lot going on and i’m doing my best to not become another casualty of this economy. Here goes: Recently there were two NPR sightings (err hearings?) connect to me, a pledge week promo I did close to two years ago when I toured NPR in DC and I heard my old coworker Dave on MarketPlace no less, talking about finding a job through social media. Go Dave! I’m still working on Plodt, we’re collaborating with the Eurovision people this coming spring. I hear the Russians always win because they cheat, no surprise there. I’ve also been working on a smart energy project which is super fun. It’s interesting, timely and I get to work with my friends. Not much more I can ask for.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Latitude lately and what it means both for the FireEagle badge (Y! Brickhouse RIP) and location based social media in general. I haven’t tried Latitude because it isn’t on the Jesusphone yet but real time location exposed to the Google network creeps me out. Maybe i’m just becoming an old fogey. We all turn the corner at some point.

In the current online video landscape of ustream, justin.tv and seesmic, WayMarkr is old news (not to mention incredibly poorly supported). But when we put it together a few years ago, it was way ahead of its time not to mention open source meaning people could do whatever they wanted with it. It’s cool to see that people are still building on top of it:

Thanks Carolina for the link!

I’m going to echo Shawn’s prediction that this is the year of the no-laptop. Although the jesus phone has innumerable annoyances (how about letting me run more than one app at once without voiding my warranty?) the ushering in of the “real web” on mobile devices now makes using a mobile device the primary options not the fallback. There’s a shift from “oh you’re on your laptop? i’ll use my phone then” to “I’ll look it up using my phone even if there is a laptop around”. I’m having disorientating moments where I expect Safari on my laptop to auto complete a url when in fact I used my iPhone to look something up. I have a mental model that certain sites can only be visited with a laptop based browser but that’s all changing now.

I haven’t been keeping up with the Fire Eagle badge ever since I got my iPhone. There’s no ZoneTag for the iPhone and the Fire Eagle iPhone apps that are available just aren’t a compelling use case for my daily interactions. They feel forced. But i’ve been getting a lot of interesting emails from people using the badge and I just checked my access log. There are tons of people using the Badge. Very exciting. Here’s a great user story that reflects exactly why I put the badge together in the first place:

> I just wanted to thank you for the Fire Eagle Badge and let you know that I
> have what I think is a pretty interesting use case. My parents are sailing
> from their normal berth in Annapolis, MD to Florida and then on to the
> Bahamas this winter. I have been maintaining a blog for them with a map
> showing their whereabouts – updated in real time with their GPS coordinates
> via a cellular data connection. When they go offshore they will not have a
> data connection so they purchased a SPOT satellite messenger-
> www.findmespot.com – primarily for safety, but also for tracking. SPOT
> offers a proprietary shared map page, but nothing I could put on their
> blog. They do integrate with Fire Eagle, however, so I linked them to a FE
> account and put your badge on their blog so they can be tracked offshore as
> well.
>
> Anyways, thanks again. I’ll probably be tweaking the layout of the map in
> the coming days. I’ll be sure to let you knmow if I find anything
> interesting while playing.
>
> Sam
>

Thanks Sam!

You can see the blog here.

Sometimes you stumble across a piece of software that just changes the whole nature of the game. This is one of them. I’ve been dealing with Rails memory leaks for weeks now. Granted part of my problem is that I don’t have the time to devote to being a full time administrator, i’m too busy writing the code, but either way these leaks have been driving me crazy. I went so far as to install this blasphemous piece of software but outside of the unfortunate name and the innumerable puns it creates (let g-d control you deamons), cycling mongrel instances when memory usage peaks is no way to run a website.

I got so irritated that I rewrote the site in PHP. Yes, I did that. Looking at PHP code makes me tense up but PHP has very tight coupling with Apache and I can’t remember the last time anything I wrote in PHP ran out of memory. The process was made slightly more palatable by using CakePHP, which is a sad, sad MVC Rails-like framework in PHP. For every line of Rails I am used to writing, I write 12 lines of CakePHP. Shoot me now. But CakePHP never crashed with the same load and back end data store so I resigned myself to putting stability over my own happiness. PHP it would be.

Then, ok get this, THEN I find mod_rails! And it works, and it does exactly what it says it will do and it is such a cinch to install. It’s a tighter coupling with Apache and my site hasn’t crashed in a long, long time. And my site is fast. And I don’t have 16 little mongrel instances running for which I have to figure out memory allocation and it knows about Rails caching implicitly, I could go on and on. This module is the best.