The Codebelay Blog

Blog

  • Honorius, Lifestream and kPicasa

    We are all like the Roman emperor, Honorius, who watched hoards of barbarians approach the gates of Rome. He knew that whatever Rome was was coming to an end.

    The same thing can be said about Web 2.0.

    If I look at the permanent hires happening right now they are happening in the iPhone app world. Zynga is still hiring like gangbusters if you got the LAMP stack and/or iPhone app experience.

    As of today, looking at the TechCrunch Layoffs ticker there are about 78,000 techies out of work.

    What’s a techie to do?

    Yesterday, I looked at two WordPress plug-ins: Lifestream and kPicasa. I am currently helping out Conscious Fashionistas with their WordPress site.

    Here’s the skinny.

    Lifestream is perfect if you want to get any of these social networks onto your WordPress:

    For me, having twitter and flickr is plenty.

    If you know PHP, then you have the additional flexibility of being able to insert this piece of code to make your lifestream show up wherever you want:

    lifestream();

    kPicasa doesn’t have the flexibility and focuses solely on Picasa, Google’s photo service, but it’s great if you don’t want to bother with PHP and just want to get pictures from Picasa up on the web.

    Anyway, as the holidays near, and you want to share pictures or microblog, these two WordPress plugins are great.

  • Dirty Little Secret or a Chat Over Coffee? The Tech Industry on Drugs.

    “We are all on drugs,” Weezer declared in 2005 with their second single off the Make Believe album. The LA Times seems to agree, proclaiming five years prior in an October article that “drug use is rampant in the high-tech work force” and calling it “the dirty little secret of the dot-com world.” The questions now posed are as follows: who cares and is this a problem?

    California became the first state to legalize the medical use of marijuana in 1996 with the passing of Proposition 215, and, as everyone knows, California is home to one of the major hubs of the tech industry, Silicon Valley. It seems an easy correlation to make between a tolerant state and a high-stress job industry. (Though for the record, and to be fair, the other “cyberstates” Texas, New York, Florida, and Virginia do not have medical or any kind of marijuana legalized.)

    One source I spoke to who works in the computer gaming industry said that almost everyone he has met in the industry “smokes (or otherwise consumes) marijuana occasionally. Usually socially but some use it as a crutch due to the stressful nature of the work.”

    Several have mentioned using party drugs like cocaine, ecstasy and speed recreationally but I haven’t seen it myself–definitely rarer, like on a wild night out (e.g. during conventions out of town). A lot of people have tried LSD. I’ve also met a few in the industry who have experimented with harder or more unusual drugs, including ketamine and mescaline (off the top of my head).

    Two other sources felt that the usage of marijuana among coders is no different than among non-coders, one going on to say “as people age, the percentage of pot smokers lessens, as does the use of other drugs.” Another source who has never tried illegal substances himself said he did not see smoking marijuana as a “big problem.”

    We often work long hours on difficult problems and you simply can’t do the work if you’re heavily under the influence. Several heavy pot smokers I’ve known have also been some of the smartest and most productive I’ve worked with. People seem to use these drugs to unwind, to blow off steam, and I’ve never seen anyone have trouble keeping it out of the workplace. If people have substance problems it’s more likely alcoholism.

    With regards to “harder” substances, one of my sources told me that he’s “seen a number of coders experiment with psychedelics; maybe moreso than coke/hard drugs.” Another added that “it’s really only higher management types I’ve run in to that use cocaine, not coders.” All sources seemed to agree on this point, one phrasing it like this: “In terms of coke, I think some people may have tried it, but I don’t know any people using it on a regular basis. Seems more of a financial/biz/exec thing.” And another went on to say that he is “[n]ot sure why cocaine isn’t a bit more prevalent. Stimulants are a coder’s friend. I would imagine that speed would be more tempting. But it seems that caffeine manages to fill the need for most.”

    According to TestCountry.com, drug abuse in the high tech industry is not terribly common. They put “current illicit drug use” at 3.6% among computer programmers/operators, and “current heavy alcohol use” among the same group at 2.7%. Among computer and data processors, they state 6.1% for “current illicit drug use,” and a whopping 16.2% for “current heavy alcohol use,” which would seem to back up my source in the computer gaming industry.

    If some of our brightest minds are getting high, and it doesn’t seem to be affecting their work, then is this truly a problem? I would say it depends more on the individual and less on the drug. In the words of P. J. O’Rourke, “no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. “ People can become addicted to anything, after all, especially legal substances, like alcohol, or activities, like sex or video games.

    So are drugs a problem for people in the tech industry more so than in any other industry? Statistics would seem to say no, not really. TestCountry scored it less than manufacturing and retail (which comes as small surprise to me, having spent the last ten years of my life in that industry). After speaking with my sources, I’d have to say that, on the whole, not a lot of people really do seem to care, as long as it doesn’t interfere with work. And can’t the same be said for anything?

  • CSS Based Web Design — 5 Years of Saving Lots of Money

    In 2003, a website launched that opened the eyes up of web developers everywhere. That site is css Zen Garden.

    If you go to the site, you can click on different links on the left and get a different design. The beauty of this is that the re-design for a website can be just the time it takes to do the CSS.

    This has saved folks LOTS of money.

    How can you save money as a biz dev person or a non-techie?

    1. Send your design team to css Zen Garden. Do they understand what’s going on that would save you so much time and money.
    2. Can you swap out the CSS in my current design in under 5 minutes?
    3. Use CSS / HTML mockups and not photoshop as a standard for judging how close to done the site is.

    If they set your expectations with a photoshop document or can’t swap in the design in less than 5 minutes, you are being ripped off and will be sorely disappointed.

    The last two parts are so important because it is the difference between going over budget 2x versus having a little in the budget for unforeseen extras.

  • Why I Joined the Long Now

    I’ve been reading the book, Anathem, as well as siding with the idea that the calmest and most rational way to lead life is with the long view. I am not saying that there is no magic to being in the now. Personally, modern society is too focused on the now and the near future instead of the long view.



    That’s why I joined The Long Now Foundation.

    Anyway, as a member, I get this cool looking, stainless steel card, preferred seating at seminars, and access to their videos. Kinda sounds like a pr0n site. lol.

    I think it’s great to support an organization that has debates about biotechnology, and future upcoming crises, e.g. the environment, food and energy shortages, and historical forces.

  • Gaia Online: a new kind of Internet socializing

    If you like to gamble, race cars, assemble jigsaw puzzles, go fishing, play pinball and paper dolls, all while chatting with your friends, have I got a site for you! If you haven’t heard of Gaia Online yet, you will again soon. According to an article on GigaOM posted in April of 2007, Gaia’s formidably diverse forums are “second only to Yahoo in popularity,” and this was over a year ago.

    Once lumped in with websites like Neopets, Gaia is now popularly being compared to Facebook and MySpace. But while Facebook and MySpace (among others) encourage users to post actual photos of themselves, at Gaia, users create their own images, and continue to re-create them every sixty seconds if they wish, through the use of avatars (the “paper dolls” mentioned above). Only a small fraction of users include pictures of themselves in their profiles and signatures, which I see as a huge plus in a world where anonymity would seem to be the safest route.

    However, having a unique, nearly fully customizable avatar represent you in the forums and world of Gaia offers users the chance to have a face and personality that other message boards and online forums do not. Most Gaians keep their avatars largely consistent (same eyes, same hairstyles, but with a few costume changes), making Gaia’s users recognizable to each other, just as people are in real life.

    Sure, Gaia likes to tag itself as “the world’s fastest growing online world hangout for teens,” but to me this seems like wishful thinking, and not because Gaia isn’t growing quickly (it is!), but because out of the ten people I briefly surveyed, only one of them was under the age of twenty, and only two had never before heard of Gaia.

    Back when Gaia first started in 2003, it was largely a hangout for anime fans and gamers who enjoy the occasional bingo cash game to find each other, chat, and share links. Founder Derek Liu probably best explained Gaia’s growth when he was interviewed in the site’s early days: “It seems that the growth of Gaia relied mainly on the word of mouth from our users.” And boy, did users talk. Gaia’s popularity as an online forum spread quickly, and continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Survey says that the current largest draw for Gaia, however, is its games.

    Gaia’s website currently offers its users Cards (blackjack or 21), Slots (slot machines), Rally (a car racing game), Jigsaw (puzzles), Word Bump (for word geeks like myself), Fishing (I hope this doesn’t need explanation), Pinball (see note for Fishing), and Electric Love Factory (“fast paced puzzle action” according to the site). Many of these games allow users to “share a room” and play the games not necessarily together, but at least in a single window where they can see each other’s avatars and chat, an option that my two Gaia-uninitiated said would be a draw for them. As one twenty-one year old young lady put it, “it makes it fun to communicate with others while gaming.” The other (this one twenty-two) agreed, adding, “That sounds cool.” The latter also said that she would probably post in the forums, while the former did not think she would use that feature.

    Gaia’s latest foray into online gaming has to be its most ambitious draw of all time, that being into the world of MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) with the recently released zOMG!, brought to us at last by the hardest working team I’ve ever seen. (If the juvenile, netspeak title is a turn-off to you, you are not alone. Many Gaians prefer the original title of the project, Battle, and still commonly refer to it as such.)

    For someone who has dumped untold amounts into other MMOs, like World of Warcraft and its expansion the Burning Crusade, the largest perquisite Gaia’s MMO offers is that it is technically 100% free. For those impatient folk with expendable income (you know who you are), Gaia offers something called Gaia cash that may be purchased with real money. Five dollars gets you 500 GC, which can then be exchanged for items used in the game (though I, personally, have yet to see a reason anyone would do so given the high level of drops in the game of those very same items).

    Like the rest of Gaia, the MMO is, well, cute. Perhaps the biggest turn-off to older potential users is the site’s overall cartoonish appearance, but then, that can also be a draw to the right people. (The cool ones.) But don’t let the cute stop you from trying out an enjoyable little MMO that really costs you nothing more than your time to play. How many of you play Ragnarok Online and/or Maple Story? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

    But the best thing about Gaia isn’t the games or the avatars, but the community created by both. Let me briefly share with you my little story. I joined Gaia just after it first started in 2003, and met one of my now closest friends in the writing forums. She lives in California. I lived in Michigan. At Anime Expo in 2007, I attended a gathering of Gaians where I met another user who is now not only a dear friend, but one of my roommates. In fact, four of my five roommates have accounts on Gaia, and I now reside in California. It was through Gaia that I made these connections across-country that eventually made me decide to relocate.

    I guess what I am saying here really boils down to this. If you spend time on the internet visiting social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, go to gaming sites like Yahoo! Games or Games.com, or are too poor to support your MMO habit any longer, you should definitely give Gaia Online a try. You never know where it might take you.

  • The Best, Agnostic Way To Make Money In Tech

    The one thing disappointing about teaching Ruby is all the idiosyncracies with any modern scripting language.

    Very often a project will fail because of some random, idiosyncracy in a particular piece of technology. Very often, the idiosyncracy is just an excuse.

    So, what is the best, technology agnostic way to make money in tech?

    Learn one algorithm, learn it well, and then apply it to a problem that saves a lot of money.

    We live in a world of plenty bubble sorts, select sorts, and even the rare bogosorts just begging to be turned into cash and time saving quicksorts.

    The trick is learning how to do that in a business setting. More on that later. For now… learn one of these:

    Or choose your own and really, really figure out how to turn it into a business proposition.

    Why?

    Believe it or not, a lot of companies with cash have this sort of thing going on:

    while not InOrder(deck) do Shuffle(deck); #lols

    So if you could just choose one algorithm and turn it into a business proposition, which one would it be?

  • A Comparison of Ajax Libraries


    go to the table!

    November 12, 2008

  • I Voted For Obama and Biden

    I’ll be having folks over to watch election coverage.

  • Codebelay Needs Bloggers

    Hey Folks,

    I’ve been following the advice Jason Calacanis laid out about blogging as close as possible. He was asked what was the sing most important step in monetizing a blog network and he answered, “Create world-class content every day for a year.”

    I confess that I have not been that religious about posting, but I’ve been posting consistently during the week. Unfortunately, I’ve started doing freelance work and don’t have as much time as I’d like.

    I want to continue to provide really interesting, quirky and beyond the bleeding edge articles about the tech world. We would be the kind of team that already has been messing around with CouchDB, Erlang, or newLisp way before others would think it was cool or profitable. We would also be the sort of team that avoids the false and gilded bullshit that creates a zombie army of fanboys or fangirls. Seriously, that stuff is lame and counter productive. Instead, we would be a little Oasis of exploring and humanizing technology.

    If you want to be:

    • part of something where you can say what you think about the tech industry
    • like to write about tech
    • want your writing to be a part of a cool community

    Then I am interested in you.

    My site has been growing since following Calacanis’ advice, but I’m realizing that I can’t do this alone.

    Please send a writing sample and why you’d like to join in the fun that is CodeBelay.

    Cheers,
    Barce

  • Redboxing with Rails: Modal Windows FTW

    There’s a great lightbox plugin for Ruby on Rails called Redbox. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work out of the box, but here’s the patch for redbox.js:

    Replace:

    Element.setTop(window_id, boxTop);
    Element.setLeft(window_id, boxLeft);

    With:

    $(window_id).style.top = boxTop + “px”;
    $(window_id).style.left = boxLeft + “px”;

    Remove or comment out:

    Element.hide(‘RB_loading’);

    Remove:

    <div id=”RB_loading”></div>