Derek’s Diary

I have moved my blog from Blogsome to WordPress.com and merged to it my old blog at Bloglines.  Please update your feed reader to the new feed address.

This is the second time that I’ve moved my blog.  I originally hosted it at Bloglines, but then moved it to Blogsome in February, 2006.  Thsi time, I decided to merge both my original blog at Bloglines and my Blogsome blog to WordPress.com because WordPress.com uses a more recent version of WordPress that has better blog editing and management tools and it seems to be more responsive.  For example, I find that WordPress.com saves and updates blog posts much more quickly than does Blogsome.

After having been closed for almost three months from early August to late October, I was happy to learn a little over a week ago (better late than never) that Cinéma du Parc has re-opened its doors to Montreal fans of independent and international film! Though gone are the tattered movie wall posters and the little plush chairs that lent the small theater its quirky and rebellious charm, its new owner, Roland Smith, remains committed to presenting quality alternative films to those Montrealers, like myself, who have grown tired of the endless stream of mostly forgettable and brain-numbing Hollywood blockbusters.

To mark the opening of the theater (and to save some money), Desiree and I each bought a $40 movie card that allows each of us to watch eight movies before April next year. So far, we’ve watched three very different and unique films:

• Nadia’s Journey
• Bobby
• A Year in the Death of Jack Richards

Sadly, when we attended the evening showing of each of these films, most of the seats in the theater were empty. Though I try to remain optimistic that this is just a sign that not many people are yet aware that Cinéma du Parc has re-opened and that this time the theater will have a much longer and successful third life, in the back of my mind, I can’t help but think that the empty seats are a bad omen that the theater may once again just fade away into Montreal repertory movie theater history.

Let’s hope that its fans will not let that happen! Support quality film in Montreal and please buy more tickets to Cinéma du Parc!

Further reading:

• Third time lucky?

Two weekends ago, Desiree and I spent a chilly, but memorable long weekend in Québec City where we bought two Quebec City Museum Cards for $40 each and visited several museums in the Old City:

1. Musée du Fort
2. Québec Wax Museum
3. Musée de la civilisation
4. Château Frontenac
5. Musée de l’Amérique française
6. Traverse Québec-Lévis

For museum fans, the Museum Card is a pretty good deal. Each card allows you to visit 23 different museums over three days and includes two public transit day passes, each worth $5.40. On weekends, each day pass lets two passengers ride, so our four passes effectively allowed us to travel for three days.

Our first night in the Québec capital, we had a comfortable stay at Auberge Michel Doyon. For our second night, wanting to be nearer to the Old City, we decided to stay in a private room at the Auberge Internationale de Québec, a very clean and secure hostel just inside the stone walls of the Old City. Of the many hostels in which I stayed in Europe, Ottawa, and the Atlantic provinces, the hostel in Québec City ranked as one of the best.

Last weekend, I attended BarCamp Montreal where a mix of tech-savvy Montrealers gave informative and entertaining presentations on diverse topics that included:

• Art collection
• Artistic games
• Network Journalism
• Public domain audio books
• Electoral systems
• Project scheduling
• How ASPs are killing free software
• Wiki travel guide

A common theme of the presentations was harnessing the potential of the Web for conversation, collaboration, and group participation. I went to BarCamp to listen, to learn, to discuss, to question, to be inspired, and to network, and I was not disappointed. After attending the conference, I realized that the technology community in Montreal is alive and well, but perhaps more artistic and media-oriented than the tech communities in Ottawa and Silicon Valley.

Did you know that Grande Bibliothèque (BAnQ) provides Québec residents with free access to Safari Books Online? This service lists books for online reading from publishers such as Addison-Wesley, No Starch, O’Reilly, Peachpit, Prentice Hall PTR, Que, and Sams. I found a few Ruby related O’Reilly titles that I recognized:

• RJS Templates for Rails
• Ruby Cookbook
• Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
• Web Services on Rails

Though the Grande Bibliothèque Safari subscription allows you to search all books and read any book online, unlike a regular Safari subscription, it does not allow you to download individual book chapters for offline reading.

Last night, a small group of Ruby Montreal members met for the second Ruby Montreal Minga. Though there were just three of us in attendence compared with the eight who attended the first meeting, it was a more personal and focused meeting. We reviewed chapter 4 of the book Agile Web Development with Rails, Second Edition and started chapter 5. We plan to meet again in about two weeks to continue where we left off.

In case you don’t know, Ruby Minga is group of Ruby enthusiasts in Montreal who meet regularly to study Ruby programming related topics.

On Sunday, Desiree and I enjoyed a sunny day of apple picking with two school bus loads of Flipinos at Les Vergers Petch along Le Circuit du Paysan in Hemmingford, Quebec. We also stopped to buy meat at Boucherie Viau, a popular Montérégie butcher, and at Vignoble du Marathonien for wine tasting.

Further reading:

• Quebec’s cider houses rule

I was a bit premature in declaring my Typo installation a success. Though my Apache Web server virtual host configuration was correct, I was missing one important piece of the solution. In order for http://blog.derekmahar.ca to be accessible to a Web browser on the Internet, I had to add a DNS ‘A’ record to my DNS name servers at ZoneEdit.

Now that my Typo weblog is running and visible on the Web, the next step is to configure its theme and migrate content from my blog sites here at Blogsome and Bloglines. Unfortunately, unlike Wordpress 2.0, Typo does not yet provide a means to copy content from one blog site to a Typo blog site.

Further reading:

• On Switching to Typo (From Wordpress)
• Wordpress vs Typo

I just installed the Typo blog engine on my website in about 45 minutes, which included the time it took to configure the Apache proxy, but did not included content customization or migration from my existing blogs. Even though the installation includes an example Apache proxy configuration template, the proxy configuration took about 80% to 90% of the total installation time. However, installing Typo itself was practically a no-brainer:

$ sudo gem install typo
(answer a few yes/no prompts)
$ sudo typo install /var/www/typo

These two commands install Ruby on Rails (if it’s not already installed), Mongrel, Typo, SQLite3, and some additional Rails plugins. Starting Typo was equally painless:

$ sudo typo start
$ sudo typo start /var/www/typo
Starting Typo on port 4231
$ ps -eaf --width=2000 | grep typo
root 15286 1 5 15:41 ? 00:00:01 /usr/bin/ruby /usr/bin/mongrel_rails start /var/www/typo -d false -e production -P /var/www/typo/tmp/pid.txt -p 4231

The first time that you load the Typo blog URL into your web browser, Typo asks you to enter a user name and password, and then promptly takes you to the Administration page. The Typo Administration page looks pretty slick and provides options similar to those that Wordpress offers, but it’s far more responsive than Wordpress at Blogsome. I’m not sure whether this is because Typo is more performant than Wordpress or because Blogsome has misconfigured Wordpress or their web servers. In any case, my Typo is snappy!

Interestingly, this post took me about 45 minutes to write, or same amount of time that it took me to install Typo. Wow, that’s fast!

In Language Wars, Joel Spolsky advises development managers to heed the masses and build their next Web application using an industry proven programming language with which his or her team is most familiar.

I find two ironies in Joel’s argument. The most contradictory and amusing irony is that Joel does not follow his own advice: he developed FogBugz, his company’s flagship product, using Wasabi, a language that one of his developers invented in-house. Wikipedia knows the Wasabi GUI application framework in Winamp, but not the programming language. If Wikipedia has never heard of Wasabi, would you expect any programmers to know about the language?

The second and more subtle irony in Joel’s article is that despite calling the programming language debate a waste of time, Joel goes ahead anyway and adds to the debate! By denouncing the debate in advance, Joel vainly tries to shield himself from the criticism that he is wasting his readers’ time. However, if Joel truly felt that the programming language issue was a waste of time, after saying so, he would written no more. Instead, he fires the language war torpedoes.

So is the programming language debate just a waste of time? No way. After correctly specifying software requirements, making the right choice of programming language(s) in a project can lead to significant gains in productivity. This gain may be due to the strengths of the language itself, but more often, it is a result of the runtime environment, frameworks, toolset, mindset, support, and community that accompanies a language. So, discussing the merits of existing programming languages will lead to the development of new languages with unique features that more effectively help programmers solve new or exisitng problems.

Joel should have advised his friend to evaluate several languages and environments, compare them using custom criteria, and choose the one that best matched those criteria. Sadly, I find that most development managers, like Joel, are quick to dismiss alternative programming languages in favour of the market dominant or most popular programming environment. Often, this is not because the language is better, but because those managers have no experience or knowledge of any other programming language. We see IT managers exhibit this same behaviour when they choose the familiar and market dominant Windows to run on their computers while rarely even considering the alternatives. The solution? Teach IT students how to use many programming languages and operating systems. That way, when they become managers, they’ll be better equipped to choose the one that best suits a given project or task.

Further reading:

• Loudthinking: Fear, Uncertain, and Doubt by Joel Spolsky
• Loudthinking: Was Joel’s Wasabi a joke? (Update: Nope!)
• Readers on comp.lang.ruby respond to Joel’s article in Joel Spolsky on languages for web programming.
• In From Java to Ruby: Risk, Bruce Tate discusses the risks of using Ruby instead of Java.