Random thoughts from the mind of Marcus Ramberg

Oslo rooftops at sunset

2007-11-15T23:07:50Z

Oslo rooftops at sunset
Originally uploaded by Marcus Ramberg.

With the winter coming to Oslo, it's dark before we leave work, and it feels a bit depressing, but the great sunsets gives a little consolation.

This one was shot from the window of my office in Mølleparken, Oslo

Wise words about PHP

2007-10-15T10:41:10Z

11:38 < RandyWalker> what's wrong with php? :O
12:09 < hachi> I mostly have issues with the syntax and extendability of it.
From my point of view it's a language that does a few things
well, but when it does something badly... it's bad enough to
drive me mad.
12:11 < hachi> I mostly treat it like a templating language now. I wouldn't try
to write an IRC server in it
12:13 < hachi> I do reserve the right to change my personal opinion of this
later though.
from ##marsedit@irc.freenode.net

mojomojo has a new home.

2007-06-29T00:58:02Z

The SVN repo is now available from http://code2.0beta.co.uk/mojomojo/svn/ . Expect a CPAN release soonish.

Catalyst swag to hide your shame

2007-06-17T20:16:11Z

Love Catalyst? Now you can show your support, and further Catalyst development at the same time, by shopping t-shirts from our our Cafepress store. Income is used to pay for features throuh the 'I wrote a new feature for Catalyst and all I got was this lousy t-shirt' program.

Tumbling along

2007-04-24T14:05:44Z

Shiver me timbers - the orgins of the jolly pirate term.
Cats Can Has Grammar - Trends in intarweb language.
369 and counting - Need to move a flea circus?
UnixJunkie - Blog about unix and mac stuff by a google engineer.
TMNT Theme song - This accidentally got stuck in the mind of a developer at work.
uncovering web 2.0 - The horrors of web 2.0 done wrong.
MacFUSE 2.5 - Now allows you to eject ssh filesystems on timeout.
Norwegian Wood - We just bought concert tickets for friday, looking forward to Korn!
Perlitist - Cool tech blog about perl and other web technologies.

New maintenance release of Catalyst-Runtime.

2007-03-15T13:36:08Z

This week we pushed a new Catalyst release to cpan. While it doesn't contain any revolutionary news, it has some neat performance improvements and bug fixes that makes it well worth the upgrade. Check out the release announcement here.

From twitter

2007-03-13T10:04:48Z

davehodg: ilmari just pointed out today is today is 13/3/7!

In case of paranoia - restricting max upload size

2007-03-13T09:56:33Z

In case you are paranoid about people uploading 2 gig kitty-porn to DOS your server, like zamolxes, and you are running lighttpd like any sensible person (read 'me'), here's the option to restrict the max size of post requests:

server.max-request-size 104857600

would restrict it to 100 megabytes. If you need a smaller size, just ask google :)

How to update your primary key with current DBIx::Class CPAN release

2007-03-08T12:58:38Z

10:41 <@mst> marcus: 
    $obj->result_source
        ->resultset
        ->search($obj->ident_condition)
        ->update({ id => $new_id })

From the #dbix-class channel on irc.perl.org

Further evidence that Microsoft still didn't get it: video.msn.com

2007-03-01T16:27:57Z

So, as part of my development of iwatchthis.com, I've been researching the various video sites out there. Youtube, Google Video, and most of the minor sites out there does this is a fairly similar way. Almost everybody uses a flash player (With DivX as a honorable exception, requiring a download, but providing high-res content), so I guess you could attribute the video boom to Macromedia/Adobe, who made this trivial in recent versions.

Apart from that, some sites do blunders in navigation, sometimes going overboard with AJAX :) Others have sucky title-tags, Most of them tries to lead you into their site by showing you related videos, Lots of them use tags to caterize content, alot of them provide a comment system. All in all, the content is the largest differentiator for these sites, with some getting bonus points for good design solutions.

Last week, I worked on adding support for http://vids.myspace.com on http://iwatchthis.com/. Despite their trademark hideous design, they also mostly fall into the above group. The 'Myspace.com' title that appears on every video page isn't really search-engine or bookmark friendly, but that's a fairly common mistake in this segment. This week however, I'm looking at a site that's really decided to reinvent the whole concept of video sites.

Fair enough, http://video.msn.com/ does sport a Beta tag, but in recent years, we've come accustomed to seeing those on several web apps out there, and it's a bleak excuse for major design flaws. Screwing bookmarkability and navigation is just the start of it.

Welcome to AJAX hell. Leave your 'back' button at the door. Of course, MS provides a patch for this problem.. However rather than using the common 'bookmark this' link to give a bookmarkable URL, they do a neat bit of Javascript fuckery to open your browser's bookmark toolbar. Never mind that some of us like to use online bookmark managers like magnolia,delicious or stumbleupon. Scratch that. never mind that the javascript pile of crap actually bookmarks whatever page you landed on in the video site, be it the frontpage or some video link a friend sent you, not the video you are currently watching. Admittedly, I am a Firefox user on a Mac, and this app might be shooting sparks out of it's ass in MSIE 7, but I didn't get very impressed.

On my test of the site, they also seemed to have some serious infrastructure issues. When I tried to watch some of the music videos listed on the sidebar menu, I got a screen says 'The Video you requested is not available'. They did manage to show me the ad first tho. While we're on the subject of ads, Microsoft's use of AJAX has facilitated another "innovation". You can't switch videos during ad play. It just ignores the click. This means that if you change your mind about which video you want to see just after clicking the link, you have to wait while the 10-15 video sequence plays, then watch another 10-15 sequence before you hopefully get to the content you wanted to see.

After the 'not available' video, MSN Video goes on to display another neat "feature". Rather than giving me the option to pick some related content to continue with, MSN picks for me, determining that the appropriate followup to not seeing a Pink video was a report from the Anna Nichole Smith verdict, the current non-issue raging in the US press. Gee, thank you Microsoft!

As a final insult, MSN has decided that the 'embed' feature that every other site out there provides to allow videos embedded in blogs and other web sites was a blind path. That means I don't get to refuse to support them on iwatchthis, they've refused to support me. Oh well. I wish MS good luck on their continued voyage as a iceberg floating through cyberspace, isolated from all the others. Wonder why they fear Google, huh?

Angerwhale officially released

2007-02-12T11:58:03Z

Congrats to Jrockway on releasing Angerwhale. Angerwhale is a filesystem-based blog with integrated cryptography, built on the Catalyst framework.

You can get angerwhale on CPAN.

Communication

2007-02-12T11:42:19Z

12:36 < Alias> Andy: Please give rjbs/marcus repository access so they can add 
          Module::Install support to Module::Starter?
 < Alias> sheriff: Can you make you purl replacement see that someone I'm 
          talking to isn't in the channel and pass it on automatically?
 < Alias> your
 < Alias> marcus: When sheriff comes online can you pass that on to him? :)

Macfuse rocks!

2007-02-01T23:45:52Z

I noticed Macfuse showed up on the hotlist at iusethis recently, and decided to check it out.

This stuff rocks. You can transparently r/w mount dirs through ssh with a gui client. For instance that, means I can open remote webapps as projects in textmate and work on them. They also have a NTFS driver that lets you mount windows drives, and a spotlight driver that lets you mount smartfolders as normal file systems very easily.

I recently saw this video, which shows of a lot more cool stuff that seems to be coming for macfuse. RSS filesystems, picasa webalbums and more. Looks really neat.

Soap as in simple object access protocol

2007-01-12T14:12:04Z

After a few weeks of mad scrambling to try to interop with one of our partners' SOAP web services, I found This post pretty hilarious. :)

Hashing passwords on user creation.

2007-01-04T08:53:56Z

If you use Catalyst auth with hashed passwords, here's how to create the digest in your DBIx::Class user class automatically.

sub store_column {
my ($self,$col,$val)= @_;
$val=Digest::SHA::sha1_hex($val) if ($col eq 'password');
return $self->next::method($col,$val);
}

When websites go wrong

2006-12-05T19:14:27Z

19:07 < seumas> Sometimes I'd like to ditch my site and put my energy into a
new idea or something. But there's that whole "but I've spent 8
years on this!" thing. You don't want to give up something yo
put so much work into. Even when it's bad for you.
19:07 < seumas> I guess my website is like an abusive relationship.

Got something cooking

2006-12-05T11:32:07Z

Coming soon to a browser near you

Couple of Catalyst powered sites.

2006-12-04T21:31:22Z

Even tho we haven't got the holy buzz of Rails, people seem to be putting up new Catalyst-powered sites all the time. I'll try to mention some as I hear of them in the future, here's a couple to get you started

www.discvrevolt.com

21:17 <bert_> it is for independent artists to be able to easily sell card at 
              their live shows, and fans use them to dl songs from our site 
              when they get home...
21:18 <bert_> site went from concept to production in 3 months...
21:18 <bert_> you guys here helped us through the rough part, none of us had 
               used catalyst before this...
21:18 <bert_> we really appreciate your help

Let's get dugg

This is a neat blog powered by a new Catalyst-based blog software called Typeface. Typeface is downloadable right now, so feel free to check it out.

My software listings

2006-12-01T23:02:06Z

Lists like this one makes me very happy. Wonder how I can encourage more people to make them :)

imakeprofile: making it easier to manage your iusethis apps

2006-11-27T15:03:36Z

This nifty new app sends a list of your applications you have installed and compares it to your apps on iUseThis.com. Presenting you with a list of applications you prefer but haven't installed. Great to use when installing applications on another computer or after a reinstall.

read more | digg story

research assistant?

2006-11-16T12:32:15Z

17:19 <@maciej> you are like ADD research assistant
17:32 <@nrrd> Alas, not the 34DD research assistant you wanted

Dispatch by request method

2006-11-13T07:50:05Z

I often find myself needing to make actions that should only be dispatched to by the POST method, or writing dispatch logic to distinguish between POST and GET in my various methods. It would be nice if the Catalyst dispatcher could handle this for me directly. However, we should probably support the whole HTTP spec, and adding those would pollute the attribute space pretty badly. Thus I suggest that we add a prefix, like do_POST or require_DELETE to the dispatch value. The other alternative is to add a method attribute, which would make the api look something like this

sub admin : Local Method('POST') {}

Obviously, it would have to match against specific methods first, then fall back on a generic handler without a specified method. Any other thoughts on the API?

New Catalyst maintainence release on monday

2006-11-03T05:45:14Z

When I come back from my long-weekend in Trondheim

Another Catalyst blogger

2006-11-02T11:13:56Z

10:54 < TomPie> my first blog post about catalyst: 
                http://thomas.pietrzykowski.de/blog/?p=1 :)

Looks very promising :) We'll make sure he's added to Planet Catalyst soon.

From the textmate changelog this morning.

2006-11-02T09:34:59Z

[REMOVED] TextMate no longer pays tribute to human sacrifices, rape, nor does it show a picture of the God of the deaths in your dock -- ticket 945BEB5D

Pity, I kind of liked the God of the deaths...