Having Fun

Changes and Goodbye

sfeley@gmail.com — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 06:40:33 GMT

I just threw my wedding ring into the duck pond. I want you to know, Ms. Eley, that I will always love the woman I married. I had faith in her, and trust in her, and she justified that faith and trust many times over. She was there for the best times and the worst times of my life. She made me a better man.

You are not that woman. I don't know what happened to you, or why. I'm sure I played a role in the changes that made you so afraid, so unable to give or receive trust and love. For my part in the hurt and fear you're feeling inside, I'm sorry. But I don't think your hurt is about me. Your fear isn't my fault. And it only makes things harder for both of us if I keep believing I can help you, or that you'll ever again treat me with the kindness and respect you gave me for seventeen years. I'll miss my Anna for the rest of my life. But she isn't coming back.

I would like to be friends. I am going to stop assuming it's inevitable, but I am here if you ever want me. Treat me like a decent human being, and I will do the same. And of course I will be the best father I can possibly be for our children. You're a great mother too. I don't think we've ever doubted our mutual love for Alex and Harper, and I do trust that our relationship about the children will remain positive and constructive.

I think I'm ready to give up on you now. I will try to be more businesslike and less emotional toward you from now on. My faith and trust are no longer extended. I suspect that will come as something of a relief.

Whoever you are, I'm sorry for the inconvenience I've caused you. If you ever run across my Anna inside you... Please tell her I said goodbye. I wish I could tell her myself.

Thank you for your time.

- Stephen Eley

Shop Vac

sfeley@gmail.com — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 13:29:29 GMT

So I went to the Jonathan Coulton concert last week. With my dearest (afeley), my sweetie (kitanzi), her husband (autographedcat), and a dozen or so of our closest friends.

It was a good show. Really, it ought to be billed as the "Paul and Storm and Coulton" concert, because they're so much more than just an opening act. Anna said she liked them better than Coulton, and I think that's fair; they certainly brought a lot more energy than he did. Still, they were all good. Anna and I had some tension that I'm not going to talk about right now; we resolved it later. The interesting thing about it in this context is that this is the second time I've been to the Coulton concert with some screwed-up circumstances just before the music, and it's the second time the show was good enough to make me forget all about it for a while.

Anyway. One of the songs he played was "Shop Vac." If you haven't heard it yet, you should listen -- this post will make a lot more sense if you do.

The next day, I Twittered this:

One concert annoyance: why do people laugh and shout out during "Shop Vac?" That song is TRAGIC. It's a tearjerker. Does nobody else get it?

I got some good responses to that. And yesterday Kit told me that autographedcat had done a followup LJ post from my Twitter. I just finished reading his insightful analysis and all of its comments. I don't read LJ regularly enough; I should have known already that he'd done it.

It's fascinating to see so many perspectives on the same content. Rob thinks the song is funny because it's true. Others in his comments find the protagonist of the song utterly unsympathetic, or criticize Coulton for dissing the suburban lifestyle, or simply revel in the ironic dissonance between the song's melody and lyrics. These are all thoughtful opinions worthy of respect. I'm not sure everyone clapping and cheering at the concert thought about it as deeply. If they did... Well, then I still disagree with them.

I'm pretty strong in my own views of the song. I don't think it's funny at all. I don't think it's a 'fuck you' to suburban culture, even if Coulton himself said so. The artist's intention only has to inform my interpretation of the song if I choose. I know what the song is about, at least to me, and it's not disrespectful and it's not funny.

I think it's tragic. Suburbia itself is just a placeholder in the song. It's the Walter Mitty tragedy. It's about the pain of mundane living, Thoreau's 'quiet desperation,' and the subtle alienation and soul death that can sneak up on us all when we're too busy thinking about our immediate velocity to worry about our position. I think putting oneself above the song's carelessly cruel narrator is a dangerous sort of arrogance. We all risk shutting out our awareness of our own feelings and the feelings of the people around us. Saying we'd never do that is asinine. And laughing at it is...well, it's crueler to me than the guy with the shop vac.

I'm ~~offended~~ upset by the laughter. Granted, no one else has to agree. I don't think this is a matter of "I'm right, you're wrong." I may have had the impulse to stand up and yell at people during the concert, but I didn't actually do it. Objectively, I know that my interpretation and feelings on the song are no more valid than anyone else's.

But they're no less valid either. And I wanted to share them. This song hurts. Not because I think I really am that guy in the song. But because I'm afraid of becoming that guy. And I think it's something most of us, the peer group most likely to be reading this post, ought to be more afraid of.

Comments welcome.

QOTD

sfeley@gmail.com — Mon, 04 May 2009 05:10:14 GMT

"Mr. Penn, before I met Jessica I was engaged to a young woman whose parents insisted that prior to our marriage we speak with a Jesuit. They wanted to convert me, and had in mind putting me under the fire of a large gun. The engagement was broken off later, for other reasons, but we did manage to see the Jesuit. We had lengthy discussions and disputations. He became a rabbi."
— Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

Penguicon

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:24:25 GMT

This cartoon by A. Payne (who is awesome) pretty much sums up my time so far:

(That isn't a particular girl, by the way. Or if it is, Payne didn't know her and I'm not tellin'.)

Having a great deal of fun. Making a lot of friends with the staff folk, and while they all deny it, this may be the best-organized smallish con I've yet seen. Great guests, diverse schedule, best con suite ever (free meals and beer for all con attendees!), a clear badge-ribbon signal system for those of us who like to flirt... It's a win. I'm definitely going to get Anna to come with me next year.

And you should come, too. Yes, you. I'll be looking for you!

Steve Eley, by Cheyenne Wright

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 21:21:20 GMT

Holy crap. I just got my first piece of fan art:

It’s a birthday present by Cheyenne Wright, colorist for Girl Genius and frequent narrator for Pseudopod and all sorts of other coolishness.

He gives me more hair than I have in real life. And I’ve started to put on more weight again. (Last night’s birthday dinner at the Highland Tap didn’t help.) But still. I’m stoked.

Now I’ve got to find some suspenders.

QOTD

sfeley@gmail.com — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 05:02:50 GMT

"How do I know," asked Isaac Penn, "that you are not moved merely by vanity or curiosity. How do I know that you aren't here for the sake of the money in this family?"

Peter Lake was in full possession of himself. "I was an orphan," he said. "Orphans don't have vanity. I'm not sure why, but one needs parents to be vain. No matter what my faults, I tend to approach things with a certain gratitude, and those who are vain have little ability to feel grateful. As for curiosity, well, I've seen a lot, too much in fact. Curiosity has no bearing on the matter. I don't know why you brought it up."

"And money? Do you know why I brought that up?"

"Yes, I thought of the money. It excited me." He smiled. "It really did. I had escalating dreams--of being your right-hand man; of doing all the things that men of power and wealth have occasion to do; of wearing a different suit every day, and clean linen. I became a senator, President. Beverly lived. Our children were great in their turn. The articles on us in the encyclopedia were so long that they took up most of the volume 'L.' All around the country there were monuments to me, of marble as white as snow. In the end, I confess, I was flying about the universe. Beverly and I touched the moon, and flew off to the stars. But, mind you, after a few hours of this, there was no place else to go. After just a few hours of walking with kings, I was very glad to be Peter Lake, of whom no one has ever heard, completely anonymous, free.

"Mr. Penn, the only people who want that kind of stuff are those who are too stupid to imagine it and then be done with it. Now, this may sound strange to you, sir, and it's new to me (within the last few days, as I see it), but I want responsibility. That, to me, is the highest glory. And I love Beverly."

--Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin

The Girl

sfeley@gmail.com — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 06:13:58 GMT

I’ve known kitanzi for years. We’ve run into each other off and on, maybe a couple times a year, at various friends’ houses. She remembers that I asked her out the first time we met. It was at a party at Mark and Rachel’s, one where Dance Dance Revolution was the focal point, and given that I was younger then, I must have been either wired from silly dancing or moved by her to unusual boldness. I told her she was cute and asked if she’d like to have lunch. She declined; not out of any displeasure at the invitation, it was just that she didn’t know me.

She remembers this. Her husband remembers it, and my wife remembers it, and Mark and Rachel remember it. They’ve all told me about it with some amusement. I did not remember it at all until I was reminded. My memory sucks.

Thanksgiving Day, a couple of months ago: I’d finally gotten tired of feeling sorry for myself in the wake of the second heartbreak from the Professor, and I felt like coming out of my shell and being social. Our friends Brian and Suzan were having a friends’ Thanksgiving feast, and we went with Anna’s brown sugar brownies. Kit and her husband (autographedcat ) were there too. She’d brought this pumpkin trifle with an insane amount of rum in it. As usual, I thought she was really cute. I felt there was a bit of spark there. (Yes, before I tried the trifle.) I stayed close to her through most of the evening, and before she left I asked her to lunch again. This time she said yes.

Since then we’ve bumped around in the dark, we’ve seen dead people, and she’s introduced me to her world (Emma Bull and Tanya Huff are very cool people to hang out with, by the way). I’ve been reading to her: some of my stories, and then Gormenghast. She’s smart, she’s mature, she’s enthusiastic, she’s a clear communicator, she loves bad puns, and she kisses well. I didn’t think I’d ever meet a woman who appreciated my puns.

Anna likes her, and Rob likes me. I can’t go to their place without being lent more books and movies. Last time they sent me home with Animaniacs to entertain Alex. Ah, nostalgia. And I’ve paused from reading their copy of Winter’s Tale to write this. It’s a breathtaking book.

Things have gone very easily and very well. For a while I kept thinking it was too easy. She the same thing: she felt like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It took me a while to figure out why I felt this way. It’s simply the first polyamorous relationship I’ve had that didn’t start out with a handicap. She’s local, and we’re both poly-experienced, and there are no spousal trust issues on any front. Everything’s out in the open, including our past baggage. It’s refreshing and wonderful, albeit not what I’m used to. (She kissed me on our first lunch date because she felt like it? It’s supposed to be harder than that! There’s supposed to be drama!)

I don’t doubt that at least some of it is rose-colored NRE glasses. It won’t continue drama-free forever. That’s probably fine. We seem to be comfortable with each other’s personalities and intentions, so hopefully we’ll make it through that. And if not… Well, I’m having fun right now. I’m feeling more balanced this time, I’m not going overboard and losing sight of work or family. So I think it’s all good.

I just wanted to talk about her a bit, since I hadn’t yet. She’s probably blushing like hell as she reads this. I hope she’s doing it at work, on her iPhone; it amuses me to think of her trying to hide her buoyancy from her coworkers, and failing. If I’m right, she’ll have her revenge on me later.

And that’ll be fun too.

You’re cool, Kit.

Minor prescience

sfeley@gmail.com — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 05:11:46 GMT

Years and years ago, when we first saw Timecop, my friend Rich and I started making fun of what we perceived to be the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie pattern. Thin plot, excuse to start fighting, Van Damme gets more and more hurt and keeps fighting until things go ludicrous. We decided the ultimate distillation of the JCVD experience would be to dispense with the plot and just get on with the fighting. The whole thing would happen in one warehouse-sized room, and for 90 minutes bad guys would just come at him. He'd get injured, he'd lose arms and legs, until finally he's limbless and hanging by his teeth from a chandelier and still kicking ass anyway. Together we joyously shouted:

"Jean-Claude Van Damme is Jean-Claude Van Damme in Jean-Claude Van Damme: The Movie!"

We thought this was hilarious, and for a couple of years it was a recurring joke.

Then today I stumble across a movie blurb for this:

Yeah. It actually happened. Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Jean-Claude Van Damme in a movie that's effectively named "Jean-Claude Van Damme." From trailers on YouTube it looks like the plot isn't quite what we'd predicted, it looks to be a self-referential comedy of some sort, but still. Seeing it made my head swim.

Now if only my predictions for a made-for-iTunes pay-per-episode continuation of Firefly would come true...

QOTD

sfeley@gmail.com — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:17:50 GMT

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

- David Gelernter, Machine Beauty: Elegance and the Heart of Technology
(via the 37 Signals blog)

End-of-year thoughts

sfeley@gmail.com — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:27:20 GMT

(Yes, so it's five days after New Year's. Your point?)

2008, for the most part, sucked. It sucked rigorously. It sucked Dalmatians through a garden hose. Were it not for certain events and people, it would trap light within its event horizon.

I can say with full sincerity that it was the worst year I've ever had. I began the year deeply in love with three women who loved me too. I lost one of those relationships on January 1, and another a month later, on my birthday. (That second loss reverberated throughout the year, with echoes and harmonics that kept some of the joy, and then a lot more of the pain, fresh and sharp and kept me from letting go for far too long.) I did keep my marriage and my family intact and strong. Anna and I have had our problems this year, but it hasn't threatened the idea of us.

I lost two jobs. One was absolutely my fault. I deserved to get fired; I bought my boss lunch that day and thanked him. The other one wasn't, it was just a breakdown in the client/contractor relationship. But it led to my current gig, which is the best job I've ever had. A year ago it would have been ludicrous to suggest that Anna would have to warn me off of overworking. Now I find myself motivated to give much more than I need to, and I'm loving it.

It was a bad year for my mental health. It was the first year that mental health was even something I needed to think about. I had some pretty bad moments. I went through three psychiatrists, two therapists, and a neuropsychologist who called me "fascinating." (I was not flattered.) But I did manage to scrape through without seriously hurting anyone else, and only moderately hurting myself. My ADD is being treated, and I suppose I am lucky in that my depression and anxiety are the kind that make me go "Wow, depression and anxiety suck, I'd better solve this" rather than wallow in them. Or maybe it's just me being stubborn. Whichever, I'm generally doing better. Lexapro and Buddhist meditation work well together.

The year sucked. It sucked enough that when Anna asked me quite innocently on New Year's Eve what I thought of 2008, it gave me an odd sort of panic attack and nearly fucked up my evening. I didn't want to think about it. I wanted it behind me. I wanted to carry the good stuff with me and not look back at where it came from.

But of course that isn't really helpful. And it isn't honest.

There is good stuff. I'm feeling like I'm starting 2009... Well, I don't want to say "In a good place," I thought that at the end of 2007 too. But I think I'm stronger. I know myself better. A lot better in some ways. I'm more aware of healthy balance. I'm employed at a stable place where I'm empowered to be creative and succeed. I have a new relationship with a cute, smart woman whom I've known for years (hi kitanzi ) and proving so far that I can have fun and be emotionally open without going overboard. I am passionately in love with my wife and fiercely in love with my kid. I haven't kicked all my bad habits (staying up too late, for instance) but I'm taking some steps.

I usually have to make mistakes and get slapped for them at least a few times before I really learn. Last year was a whole lot of mistaking and slapping.

This year I'm in the game.

A geekier blog

sfeley@gmail.com — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 18:22:00 GMT

Since I'm starting to get more into technical and programming stuff; since I'd like to say some things on it discoverable by certain programming communities; and since posting too deep on Merb or Rails seems to make a lot of people here go "Whathuh?"... I've started a new blog. It's at:

http://extraneous.org

Right now it's just quick-and-dirty. I may eventually try to figure out a way to do postbacks to here on personal bits, or just keep them separate, or... Well, I dunno. Something. I'll worry about it later. But go there if you want to see me geek out.

Letter to Wycats

sfeley@gmail.com — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 05:52:49 GMT

So I’ve been a Rails geek for well over a year now. And then I went to Merb Day Atlanta and lo, I was converted. I liked the cleanness of Merb. I liked the incredibly flexible routing engine. I liked that it had a much more “blank slate” feel to it.

Of course a lot of that is Shiny New Thing syndrome, and the difference doesn’t even matter any more because now Merb is going to be Rails, but whatever. That’s not the point of this post. The interesting moment came at the end of the day: Yehuda Katz (leader of the Merb project) gave the closing keynote, and one of the things he mentioned Merb needing was a good content management system that could integrate with applications. This was something I’d been kicking around in my head already – I like some of the ideas of Radiant in Rails but feel its architecture is a bit backwards in some ways – so I spoke to him afterwards about my needs and whether there was anything already going on. He offered a few opinions on the state of current CMS projects, then gave me his card and said “E-mail me.”

I did. The following is the text of the e-mail I sent to Yehuda on December 8th. He never responded. I take no umbrage at that; he’s a busy guy, and I’ve fallen down on most of my own e-mail at Escape Pod. But I’ve continued to toy with these ideas, and over the Christmas week I’ve begun committing some real code to the project. I’m sharing the e-mail in the hopes that others may have useful thoughts about this.

From: Stephen Eley seley@aarweb.org
Date: Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:09:26 -0500
To: ykatz@engineyard.com
Subject: Merb Day - thoughts on a Merb CMS

Dear Yehuda,

It was a pleasure meeting you at Merb Day Atlanta. I’m the guy who spoke to you after your keynote, saying I had an academic society site to rebuild and a Merb CMS would be a very valuable component. You gave me your card and asked me to e-mail you. Hi.

I’ve done some serious thinking since then about the philosophy you expressed: that what’s needed isn’t just another Rails-like app, but a framework like MerbAuth built on strategies and “communication primitives.” I’m curious A.) whether you know of any work already being done in Merb toward that goal for content, and B.) if you have given any thought already to what that interface layer ought to include for basic CMS functions.

I’ll give you the basic outline of my own thinking, and if you think these ideas have merit, perhaps you may be able to point me to other people or resources that could help put this together:

“Content” is any page on a Web site not generated by an application controller or slice. It’s the spackle filling in all the cracks. Any possible path might have a content page, if the information architect decides one should be there. (But controllers take precedence in the event of pathname collisions. This is a fundamental difference from the /public directory, and one reason we can’t just pipe into it as static output.)

Ergo, the CMS system belongs at the default route, either after or in place of /:controller/:action/:id. I suspect this would be best done with a defer_to in routing, although an exception controller or Rack handler could be other possibilities. Wherever it goes, there’s an invisible (never in the path) controller that shows and manages stored content.

The four basic features of a simple yet useful content system (using Radiant CMS as a model of simplicity) are rendering, editing, metadata, and authorization. Hierarchy may or may not be a fifth. These are your “communication primitives” that can be implemented by separate strategies.

A strategy should support all of the CRUD methods for rendering/editing. The main CMS controller will be RESTful; it will pass its basic work to the different strategies via defined methods.

Strategy slices can store and retrieve content however they want – from a database, flat files, another application, whatever. In addition to showing the content itself, they’ll be responsible for delivering new/edit forms, other pages to manage errors, workflow or other optional features, etc.

On rendering, all strategies will be tried in order until one doesn’t return nil. If none do, it’s a 404. Edits and deletes will pick the same page that a render would. For adding new content pages, either rules can be defined or the user can be presented with a choice.

Application layouts should be used by the main CMS library to wrap content, so that there’s no obvious difference between content and app output. Defaulting to the main layout is obvious, but eventually there ought to be some mechanism (I don’t know where) for specifying an alternate layout.

The content system ought to be able to retrieve and search on page metadata (author, title, last updated, etc.) and provide helpers to the main application so that they can be used in layouts or other app views.

Authorization feels like a different set of choices unto itself, and should not be bound to the content strategy. I know there’s work on a MerbAuthz plugin; the content library ought to leverage that, or whatever other standard rises up.

Hierarchy is very common in the real world: sites are trees and pages have child pages. But I can’t decide whether children should be nested resources with a separate set of add/remove/list primitives, or whether it should just be a side effect of page path, with child listings just one more piece of metadata. I’d value your opinion if you’ve made it this far. >8->

Page state, versioning, and approval workflow are common CMS features, but they’re not external-facing and don’t warrant communication primitives. The individual strategy can implement them if it feels like it.

I’ve been speaking of ‘app output’ and ‘content’ as if they were exclusive, but in future iterations, it could be possible to have both on the same page: app views could invoke helpers that yield content from the CMS wherever the developer wants it. This could make inline help, etc. easier to edit.

…That’s what I’ve got so far. Any thoughts? Is there anything vaguely like this in progress that I could contribute to, or would you suggest I invent this wheel in Merb? Like everyone else in the world, I have too many projects in too little time, but if that’s what it takes, it’s what it takes. I just need to get this Web site off of the shitty ASP-and-Microsoft-Access (no kidding) base that it’s on right now, and I want to do it right the first time.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Stephen Eley
Director of Technology
American Academy of Religion
404-727-7972 (O) 404-727-7959 (F)
http://www.aarweb.org

Looking back on that e-mail now, some of it I’m already looking at and saying “Yeesh, I really worked to make that too complicated.” I have a slightly different vision now. But it’s where I started, so I submit it for your consideration. I’ll talk more about what I’m actually doing in a near-future post.

QOTD

sfeley@gmail.com — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:14:51 GMT

"There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
- Sir Anthony Hoare, Professor of Computing, Oxford University (creator of the Quicksort algorithm)

Merb Day Atlanta, Part 7: Closing Keynote

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 22:20:31 GMT

Yehuda Katz. The keynote is called "Merb 2.0: The Long March Into the Future." Core values of Merb:

Performance:

Benchmarks show Rack's a lot faster on Thin than Mongrel, on a "Hello World" call.
The built-in Merb router (i.e. using defer_to) is almost as fast as Rack on a direct return.
Once controllers are involved, it gets a lot slower. This is where speed could be improved -- not view templates, but simply getting to the controller.
"As close to the metal as possible; or as close to the metal as you want."
Performance testing with KCacheGrind. (Wow, that's a cool interface.)
To do profiling, declare use Merb::Rack::Profile

Concurrency:

"The concurrency curve" -- the mroe threads you have, milliseconds per request should flatten out.
MRI and JRuby are very similar in concurrency handling with Mongrel; Glassfish handles a much higher thread load.
Thread safety is a core value of Merb. But some features of Ruby are simply not thread safe. (E.g. Ruby autoload. Thus it's being taken out of Merb.)
"Shared state hurts puppies."
To ensure thread safety, use Thread.current ("global variable that's local to the thread") instead of class attributes.
Better yet, pass your state around instead of putting it into variables.
Use mutexes -- it locks hash states to make non-atomic operations atomic. But use them sparingly. (E.g. for global cache.)

Modularity:

"Modularity is impossible to determine from a set of talks like today." (Because the purpose is to show how to get up and running, not how to build complex applications that need separation of concerns.)
Merb's dependency structure is highly configurable. You can remove all dependencies and still have a Merb app.
Overriding behavior is more structured than it is for Rails plugins: some methods are marked @overridable and some aren't.
Some API functions are marked as 'public' and some as 'private.' Public methods have a strong commitment that they'll continue working.
Examples of overridable methods: _filter_params, _template_location.
Template loading itself is modular: by default it looks for files, but you could override to get templates from the DB, from a string at the bottom of the code, wherever. (Use _load_template_io.)

Good Ruby Citizen:

Rubygems sucks in certain ways (dependency failures), but it's getting better. (By pushing it and breaking things, they're fixing core Ruby features and making rubygems better.)
"Working with community == helping the community."
E.g. Rack middleware.

Where This Is Going:

Apps as a first-class concept. "Make it so that slices are just regular applications."
Slices right now need special configuration; fix it so that all configurations are global but can be overridden.
Need a good CMS application. (I say: "Yes yes YES.")
Resources as a first-class concept. Models and controllers shouldn't need to be passed to each other; let it all be bundled together, and authorization, etc. I.e., don't have to specify controllers that just do the default behavior.
Core principle: "Simple cases can't get harder."
Further improve the Merb server. Monitoring facilities, etc. in the short term.
Dynamic worker pools in the long term. Perhaps remove the need for Nginx or another Web server. (E.g. Swiftiply.)
Phusion Passenger 'could one day be awesome,' but does a lot of guessing.
"We want to be able to go onto a server with nothing on it, spin up a Merb server and you're running a bunch of processes."
Self-managing cluster.
Internationalization. (Make Ruby 1.9 and Merb work better.)
Localization is harder. Need a few different schemes.
Feed syndication, flat pages, route directly to a view and skip the controller.
Even better resource() helper.
Authentication, authorization, user management -- "Communication primitives."
Tailored stacks. Designers want a framework that's "a bunch of HTML slots"; Web shops want better drop-in slices; etc.

Whew. Drinks or go home and eat with Anna? I'll see what John and Mel want to do.

This was a fun day.

Merb Day Atlanta, Part 6: CouchDB

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 21:11:58 GMT

I'd looked into CouchDB a while ago, and think the idea is amazing. I started to play with it a little bit for an experimental slush-submission app, but decided the integration with Rails was too primitive and losing all the ActiveRecord magic was too high a price. I might think about it again.

CouchDB is not a SQL relational database. It's document-oriented: every document can have totally different attributes.
It's not suited for every application, but really complex data structures work better with something like this where you can serialize them, instead of having a ton of null fields in a table.
Replication, version control, and a REST interface are all central to the way it's built.
Everything is stored as JSON hashes.
And queries are Javascript functions. Literally. If you want to find anything in it, you write a new Javascript function to do it and store it in the views document. (This, to me, was the intimidating part.)
CouchREST is a simple Ruby wrapper API to access CouchDB and handle simple key and view creation. This is good; when I watched the Peepcode Screencast a while ago, having to make all the views and determine in advance how the data would be retrieved sounded like more work than just sticking with ActiveRecord.
CouchDB sorts all new data according to its views upon insert. So writes are slow but reads are fast on defined views. 'Temporary' views, i.e. on-the-fly queries, tend to be slow.
There's no record locking in CouchDB. Because it's designed to be distributed, it assumes conflict will happen and you can specify how merges will work.
Hmm. The '_rev' revision number cannot be used for version control at the application level. It's just for conflict resolution, and old revisions may get flushed. That bursts one of my illusions.
Heh. The admin utility that comes with it is called Futon. It's built totally in HTML and Javascript.
They're trying to demo this stuff, but the guy's terminal font settings are practically invisible on the screen. This is why it's good to walk through things before you present.
Right now there's no user authentication built into CouchDB. Hmmm.
Because you can build your whole app in Javascript, you could have true peer-to-peer Web apps.
I asked if there was a drop-in ORM provider for Merb that would let you use CouchDB instead of DataMapper or ActiveRecord. They misunderstood my question and though I was just asking "Can you use CouchDB with Merb?" Yehuda Katz clarified that ORM providers in Merb have other requirements.

The nutshell I'd heard before is this:

SQL databases == static data structures, dynamic queries
CouchDB == dynamic data structures, static queries

Next up is Yehuda's closing keynote.

Merb Day Atlanta, Part 5: Slices

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 20:11:31 GMT

Here's where Merb starts to get pretty different from Rails.

Slices are small apps that can be included in an app and distributed as a gem.
Easy to integrate if written properly. They can stand on their own, or be embedded.
You can add them in the dependency.rb file like any other Merb dependency.
Same directory structure as a standalone app, as well as a 'lib' directory that includes the gem configuration stuff.
The 'config' directory is generated, but doesn't get packaged in the gem. That's how the standalone/slice stuff works.
Sample code at http://github.com/markpercival/quickadmin
Layouts can be specified with a default in the lib/slicename.rb file.
That's also where metadata and additional routes get prepared.
Integration issues: it's hard to call 'before' filters, etc. on stuff in slices because they aren't methods in the main app. The solution proposed is to create a mixin and include it in the main app module at init time.
You can put stuff in a /slices directory of your app, and that takes precedence over gems or the app itself.
Build and test the base functionality first, then worry about integrating it into a gem.

The rest is on Merb-Auth:

Authentication is pretty much the classic use for slices.
Merb-Auth is a strategy-based authentication mechanism based on a combination of a slice, several strategy mixins, and a library of core methods.
The library gives you the ensure_authenticated method for 'before' filters.
Not being logged in and trying to access a protected resource is an exception. The exception object calls unauthenticated which handles it with strategies.
You can specify several strategies (OpenID, password, HTTP Basic, whatever) and you're authenticated as long as one of them returns success.

Oh, and Merb doesn't have plugins. It's all gems, of which slices are a particular type. In Rails terms, slices would be closest to Rails engines (which, I was amused to hear just yesterday, are being added to core in the next version of Rails.)

Merb Day Atlanta, Part 4: Routing

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:35:43 GMT

The guy doing the presentation on Merb routing is a bit of a nervous speaker, which is too bad because the subject is one of the things I wanted to know about most.

Route matching can include regular expressions. Yay.
You can match on subdomains just by referencing the subdomains[] array. This is great -- I've done some Rails stuff where the domain name is part of the identifier, and it's annoying to have to look it up in the controller.
REST resources include the Rails Standard Seven actions, but also an eighth "/delete" action which is supposed to pop up the "Are you sure you want to delete that?" yes/no question. Hmm.
There's a resource() helper that you can call instead of url() that cuts things down a bit, but I'm not totally clear on the difference just from the talk. I'll have to read more.
You can make pretty URLs by including an :identify => option in the route. Then it'll use that attribute of the model instead of the ID in the generated paths. (Although it's still params[:id] Seems cleaner than a lot of the 'pretty permalinks' plugins in Rails.
You can have a defer_to route that executes any code you like at runtime to determine where things should get routed.
Yehuda Katz (one of the Merb core committers) is right in front of me and he's correcting the presenter on some deprecated routing techniques and things he suggests that are "accidents" of the way the request gets passed.
Merb's routing doesn't have any of the recently-controversial memory issues that Rails routes have, because they aren't a great big data stucture. There's just a single method that does all the routing.

Merb Day Atlanta, Part 3: Haml

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 19:08:46 GMT

The first post-lunch presentation was about Haml. He had an hour scheduled, but took half an hour. It would have been 15 minutes, except I raised my hand and suggested he talk about Sass too.

I've been using Haml for all of my views for ages now, so I didn't learn too much on this one, but it's still nice to see the way I've been doing things validated. If you aren't familiar with it, Haml's essentially a dumb abstraction on top of ERB that replaces HTML-style opening and closing tags with indentation conventions. Which doesn't sound like much, but it makes views (or any other Web page code) a lot more readable. Sass does something similar for CSS, with a couple of other goodies like constants, math, and partials.

Readability matters. Beautiful code matters, not just to feed programmers' egos but because beauty enhances productivity. Haml is one small but effective contribution to that.

Not to mention I like the attitude of the subcommunity. How many technical documentation sites include things like "wildfire of chicken" or "Let's take that fucker and make it a Haml haiku!?"

Merb Day Atlanta, Part 2

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 17:00:23 GMT

Last hour of the tutorial.

Web services have a cleaner syntax in Merb, but they're basically done the same way.
Merb picks its format based first on the file extension, then on HTTP content negotiation. (I.e., the "Accepts:" header.) But what I'm wondering is: do any clients of anything commonly set those HTTP headers? When is this better or more likely than asking for product.xml, etc?
DataMapper has an 'automigrate' to automatically build your development tables from your model specs but everyone says you should still use migrations for hte production database. Three people (incl. me) asked if there was a task that worked like automigrate but would spit out a migration file instead of doing it in the DB directly. The answer was "No, but someone should ask for it and we'll see if it gets done by the end of the day." I Twittered it.
The Merb core code is pretty readable.
I like the cleaner method names. It's not url_for, it's url. It's not render :partial => "blah", :locals => {:foo => @bar}, it's partial "blah" :foo => @bar.
Views are turned into methods in the controller when first called at runtime. So the V and C of MVC are basically the same block of code. Makes things really fast.
Okay, so Merb is using a replacement for 'rake' called 'thor'. Which is fine, but some tasks are in rake and some are in thor. That's confusing. Pick one and stick with it.
They're talking about Rack now. I know it's cool, but apart from "Use Rack and don't worry about it," how do we use this knowledge?
--Oh. By sticking in middleware layers so that you can do special things for special sorts of requests.
So the thing Merb was built for in the first place: render_then_call or run_later for true multithreading and actions to defer later on.

Lunchtime!

Merb Day Atlanta, Part 1

sfeley@gmail.com — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 15:47:45 GMT

Okay, so let's try this liveblogging thing.

I'm at Merb Day Atlanta -- a one-day workshop to teach Merb to folks who are already experienced with Rails. I'd heard a good bit about Merb; it was designed to be a lighter, more modular framework that wouldn't have the size, oddities and historical cruft that Rails carries with it.

I was pleasantly surprised: I'd expected not to know anybody, but my longtime friends John and Melinda are here. I'd worked with John at the company I got fired from in February. Seeing them again makes the day more fun.

This morning is the tutorial part. Thoughts so far:

The two presenters are good techies but very amateur presenters. It's clear this is the first experiment at this.
They're dealing with the sample code by pushing to GitHub constantly and then expecting people to pull. Works fine, I guess (as long as GitHub doesn't have performance issues) but they're not really making it clear when there's been a change. Maybe I should just write a one-day cron job that pulls every couple of minutes?
...Except that as much as possible I'm trying to write the code in my own directory and then typing it in. Again, mostly works fine, but they need to slow down at one or two points.
Merb really is smarter at some of the simple stuff. I set the config to use_template_engine :haml and suddenly the generators are spitting out HAML instead of ERB. Lovely.
Action arguments? Also lovely.
SLICES! Yes! This is exactly what I was thinking of for my site architecture at work: a lot of smaller apps that can interact with each other, separate things like single sign-on, and share layouts and a bit of routing. Single sign-on was the example they used. This alone could be reason enough to do more of the system in Merb than Rails.

More later. I need to finish the authentication part of this. Should just take a few minutes.

The Day Job

sfeley@gmail.com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:03:26 GMT

I've made reference to this in a bunch of places, but I don't think I've given the full explanation anywhere. I wasn't trying for mystery; I just didn't take the time. Here's what I'm doing these days:

Since the end of August, I've been the Director of Technology for the American Academy of Religion. A lot of my friends are flabbergasted that I'd work anywhere with "Religion" in the title, given my vocal agnostic leanings (not to mention my notoriety with invisible pink unicorns). But this isn't a religious group per se; rather, they're the academic society for professors and grad students in most branches of theology. It's a really diverse crowd.

I got the job thanks to puck, via kittyavatar. I can honestly say it's the best job I've ever had. Working for a non-profit is cool enough, but this is a small staff of dedicated and really intelligent people with literary leanings. (How many breakrooms have a running Scrabble game that everyone takes way too seriously?) What we're doing is critical to our members' careers, and it turns out accountability to people and empowerment to excute my own decisions is what it takes to really keep me motivated.

It's pretty tough work. My main project is to replan and totally rebuild the Web site, which is currently running on (don't flinch) Microsoft Access databases. Right now I'm really the technology resource, so I'm having to be troubleshooter, programmer, and strategist at the same time. It's hard but fulfilling; I'm operating at an executive level but also keeping my hands dirty. I like it. The way my predecessor built applications was Byzantine, but we're already delivering features beyond what any comparable academic society has on their sites. If I can simplify those features and reimplement them in Rails or some other decent technology, we could be onto something really innovative and important for general knowledge sharing.

I also have a large office with a full-length window in a building surrounded by trees. It's on the Emory University campus, which is lovely. And although we're an independent 501(c)(3), we outsource our HR through the university, so I'm technically an Emory employee and have access to all their benefits. It's like being a particle and a wave at the same time, whichever's more convenient.

So that's what I'm up to. It's one reason I've been way too busy lately. But it's good. This is a job that's making me want to work harder and put in more hours than I've technically had to; it's motivating me not just to slide by, but to do good work because I'm the only one who can do it. I haven't had that feeling with a job since...

(*pause for thought*)

No. I've never had it.

Retreat

sfeley@gmail.com — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:38:49 GMT

Spent the last couple of days in an unlikely place: the Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery in Conyers. I've been feeling for a couple of months that I needed some time alone; I do a lot of dumping my issues on other people but I'm not very practiced at just being comfortable with myself. After a while the need became intense enough that I stopped making it a theoretical "someday" and acted on it. There was no special meaning in my choice to do it at a monastery -- I just knew about it from a friend, and I knew they offered private retreats with no strings attached.

What I did:

Thought.
Meditated. Doing Buddhist meditation on the marble floor of a vast chapel with 60-foot vaulted ceilings was a chilly but enriching experience. (I scribbled a note at one point: "A small room is characterized by its walls. A great room is characterized by its empty space. What kind of room am I?")
Read. Mostly Pema Chödrön's When Things Fall Apart, which turned out to be excellent. She's a remarkably clear writer, and I kept finding things in each chapter that were directly relevant to where I was at that moment. Thank you erikted for the lend.
Walked in the rain. It rained the entire weekend, which was a minor shame since I was hoping to go out and look at the stars. Oh well.
Bought a bonsai tree. Charming little jade tree. These monks make and sell a lot of bonsai. (Also fudge and fruitcake. I will vouch that it's good fudge. The redemption of my soul would not have been sufficient incentive to try the fruitcake.)
Attended some of the services. Sat in the choir stalls and joined in the chants for one of them. That was enough. Listening to the chants was lovely, though. I mentioned the chapel was big, right? The acoustics were phenomenal.
Wrote. Mostly notes to myself; the point of the retreat was to have dialogue with myself, after all. My notes are scattered and wouldn't make sense to anyone else, but I found them valuable. Apparently I have a lot to teach myself. Also a 13-page letter to another that will never get sent, completing an exercise given me on separate occasions by afeley and cunningminx.

A few things I learned:

Catholicism still doesn't make sense to me. That's not a criticism of the religion, or the monks there, or anyone else who's Catholic. There's a lot of beauty to it, and they did a wonderful service, letting a heathen like me stay there and do my thing. I just don't get it. The social hierarchy, the structure of the service, even the nature of the praise. I have very intelligent friends who've converted to Catholicism for strong personal reasons. I think that's great, and anything that helps a person do more good for themselves and the world is a Good Thing. I'm just more sure than ever now that it's not for me.
If anything, the weekend made me lean a bit more towards Buddhism. Not just because of the Chödrön book. I've been going to the Atlanta Shambhala center for a few weeks now for sitting meditation; I left the retreat early this morning so I could make it there again. Trungpa Rinpoche's style of meditation has been doing me some good. It's relaxing, it does connect me to the present more (which I need), and I find the philosophy of it very practical. It's also welcoming to skepticism, which I have a lot of. I expect I'll say more on this later.
I need to be a lot easier on myself. I deserve to like myself, and I should forgive myself for failures more than I do. I should forgive others, too; when I have trouble with that, it's usually part and parcel with forgiving myself.
I can stay off the Internet for a little while and the world doesn't end. I should stop using it as a distraction or crutch as much as I do.
"Silence" is relative. A monastery and a retreat house that are supposed to be silent...aren't, really. But that was partly up to me as well. Sometimes listening to someone else who needs to talk is a better way of being good to myself than staying in my head.
Sometimes, when you're onto something deep, it's important to write it down. And sometimes it's more important to stop writing and watch the duck at your feet who wants to eat your pants. (Not a metaphor or koan.)
I'm really not that bad off. And I'm not that weak. It's living in my head so much that makes me think I am. Living in the world more should help.

That was my weekend. How was yours?

WCOTD

sfeley@gmail.com — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:27:24 GMT

(From Medium Large.)

Happy Thanksgiving.

Bicky Eley, 1920-2008

sfeley@gmail.com — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:09:51 GMT

This is the eulogy I wrote for my grandmother and delivered at her memorial service Friday night. It may not be of interest to anyone else, but here you go.

I've been asked to speak about Bicky on behalf of her family: her sons, Jim and Bob, her daughters-in-law, and her grandchildren and great-grandchild.

I keep a journal on the Internet -- a blog -- and a couple of weeks ago I posted the obituary which my father had forwarded to me. I received an anonymous comment: "I knew Bicky as I lived on Pomona Avenue while a young child and graduated from PTHS. My older brother Pete went to school with Jim. What a lovely person she was! You sure are lucky to have had her as your grandmother."

I still don't know who that person was. I thought it was remarkable that someone with close ties here would be reading what I wrote from halfway across the country; but more than that, it's evidence my grandmother made an impression on everyone she met. She blazed her own trail through the world, and the world remembers her.

The biographical details of her life aren't what I'm here to talk about, but some of them are interesting for showing her uniqueness and strength of character. Her nickname is one she had all her life; as an infant, her older sister couldn't pronounce the name Elizabeth, and called her "Bick-a-Bick." Which became Bicky. This might be the first sign of one of her strongest traits: if she liked something, she'd stick with it her whole life. She was well-traveled; her father's career and then her husband's took her across the country; from Delaware to Washington State, and Colorado, and settling for over sixty years here in Pompton Plains, before living her final years in San Antonio. She visited us when my father's job had us living in Japan and Korea. She often talked about Dupont, Washington in those last years, and she was very proud of having gone to Washington D.C. for a ceremony for her house, which had the first FHA home loan.

She was a divorced single mother, working two jobs and raising two boys in the 1950s and 60s, when such things just weren't done. It must have been a difficult challenge. But I asked my father, and he said if it was a hardship to her, she never showed it at home. Her cheerfulness, her pride in her children, and her energy never wavered. By all evidence her strength never wavered in the community either. When she made Pompton Plains her home she made it _hers._ She became the first female recreation director, and pushed for sporting programs for girls at a time when that wasn't widely accepted. She brought her own passion for swimming to the town; as my Uncle Jim said, everyone here who learned to swim, learned at P.V. Park.

Others who are speaking tonight will have more to say about her service as town clerk and her status in this community. What strikes me about it is that she shared her devotions. She was opinionated and stubborn -- sometimes to a fault -- but she was never mean-spirited. She was highly individual, but never inward-focused; she chose her interests carefully, but once chosen she spread them far and wide. And she was never, never shy. She was the biggest extrovert in my family, and one of the friendliest, most positive-minded outspoken people I've known. It could be fairly said of her that her personality was bigger than she was.

That outspokenness was her strongest influence on me. When I was asked to speak here, and looked back over my memories of my grandmother, one moment -- one defining scene -- came most clearly to mind. When I was young, I was a fairly timid child. I was always apologizing, always wanting to get out of people's way. One afternoon when she was visiting us, we were in the kitchen, and I was helping her with something. I don't remember what; it might have been making Bicky's Cookies. (Anyone who's ever met Bicky knows Bicky's Cookies.) I must have made or imagined some mistake, because I got embarrassed and started mumbling that I was sorry. And she just stopped and looked at me -- even though she was taller than me then, it felt like she was looking me straight in the eye -- and said, "You shouldn't say you're sorry so much. Stand up for yourself. You know when you've really done something wrong, and if you haven't, don't apologize."

My first instinct, of course, was to say I'm sorry for apologizing so much. But her words stuck with me. Backed up by her example. And it made a profound impact on me. It shaped my own individuality, and I think some of my own strengths. What she said was just how she lived her life: always standing straight, always sure, and fearlessly unapologetic. She knew what she thought. She knew what she _liked._ And she never backed down. But she made it positive. She used her convictions for the good of others. That was how a little old lady -- that's how she described herself my entire life -- that's how she left so many impressions. That's how she could fill this church tonight.

My last words about her, I think she would find appropriate. She was a firm supporter of Scouting -- both her sons were Boy Scouts, and that example carried to me. She made Bicky's Cookies for my Eagle Scout ceremony, and having her tell me she was proud of me was a good moment, because I knew she was the type of person who'd only say it if she meant it. It's a fundamental principle of camping in Scouts -- one that I think means as much as the Boy Scout Motto -- to always leave a campsite better than you found it. I think of her life, and that's what I think first.

Bicky Eley was an individual. She was strong, she was principled, she was giving. And she changed me -- she changed many of us -- by her example. With her life, with her tenure in this world, she left the world better than she found it. That's the best thing I could ever say about anyone. That's enough.

God be with her.

QOTD

sfeley@gmail.com — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:35:45 GMT

Matt Ruff, Fool on the Hill:

George nodded. "The big problem with messages like that," he told her, "is that you can make them clear as a bell, in letters ten feet high, impossible to miss, and readers still don't get the point. Shakespeare was a kick-ass storyteller, but look what's happened to Romeo and Juliet. Almost everyone forgets that the play was a tragedy. Tragedy, that means Fate doesn't like you, but nine times out of ten it's you who makes the final screwup. These days we call a lovesick man a 'Romeo'; you'd have to be pretty sick, though, to really want to be Romeo. He was a punk kid; in the story he kills two people in a passion and he's directly responsible for the death of a third. In the last scene he kills himself over the loss of a woman who isn't even dead, and then she wakes up and follows his example. The double suicide is the unforgivable part; it's not touching, it's dumb. They gave up hope, and that means it's not even a love story, it's an immaturity story."

"Mature people despair," Aurora suggested.

"Never completely," George insisted. "Mature people make mistakes, they have breakdowns, they lose, but they never stop looking for the chink in the wall of Fate. The only time they suicide is to save another life; otherwise it's just quitting. That's a children's escape."