Preston Lee's Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Cool Daily Links

    • SearchMe.com :: Google search meets Apple’s “Cover Flow” for the web. Smells hot to me.Â
    • iPhone SDK Gets Interface Builder :: Now it’s actually fun to learn about native iPhone application development.
    • Upcoming Free iPhone Development Webcast
    • Monoprice.com :: You need to buy your random cables from these folks. I started using them last year and couldn’t be more pleased with the price and quality of the CAT 6, DVI and FireWire cables. Shipping isn’t free, but it’s reasonable, and if you wait until you have $100 in needs before placing an order, well worth it.

  • Rails 2.0: selenium-on-rails routes.rb fix

    When I updated a few projects to Rails 2.0 last year, selenium-on-rails stopped working … some issue with routing and the lame way selenium-on-rails adds its routes. I didn’t spend the time to figure out exactly what the routing problem was, but did manage to hack a quick fix into routes.rb. This feels like the Wrong Way for an ultimate fix but it at least solves the immediate problem. Shove these rules into your routes.rb and the /selenium path should start resolving again…

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  • Welcomed To The RRoD Club, Part 2

    The RRoD 360 repair process has been straightforward so far. (After all, Microsoft has certainly had an ample volume of opportunities to improve it.) The online repair form was straightforward, and my empty pre-paid shipping box arrived yesterday._mg_9894.jpg

    Everything needed to package the console for return was included: a plastic bag for the console, padded foam, large strip of packaging tape, shipping label, small form (in English and Spanish) and clearly written photographic instructions. Paying for door pickup would have been nice, but that’s not a big deal. I’m off to drop it off at UPS right now.

  • In The News

    OpenRain affiliate img surf‘s Mugr facial recognition services have been receiving some press lately. Here’s the lowdown of what’s been happening..

    Mad props to the Mugr team for the thrill ride thus far!

  • Conspiracy Theory: Blue Man Group Recruits Seth Godin

    When I saw Blue Man Group at the Venetian I knew one of them looked familiar. It was none-other than entrepreneur Seth Godin! Ok, probably not. But there is a resemblance, no?

    Seth Godinseth_godin.jpg

    Blue ManBlue Man

  • Zen And The Art of Software Design

    Japanese Tea Garden
    As you sit on a bench with a hot cup of jasmine tea in the middle of the Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco Park, you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the tranquil beauty of the garden that surrounds you from every direction. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon. I arrived at the garden expecting a wonderfully uncomplicated demonstration of Zen-like simplicity in design after seeing some very provocative pictures of Japanese Zen Gardens online. In this respect, I left disappointed.

    The garden is brilliantly beautiful, but its beauty is achieved by bombardment of the exotic, rather than elegant simplicity. In the attached photo, for example, the frame almost bursts at the boarders with colors and plants. Very pretty, but is all that really necessary? Does each plant in the photo really serve a purpose that would be unfulfilled in its absense? Would the garden be any less beautiful with half as many plants? The tree from the Six Feet Under opening sequence is plenty inspiring on its own, even though it’s the only thing in the frame.

    I liken the gardens design to the conception of many software systems, particularly many F/OSS projects. Doing less, well, seems to often go undervalued in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience and satisfy all the I-would-use-it-only-ifs presented by the potential userbase. Take this screenshot from easytag, for example. Does this look easy to you? To me this looks like an ugly, unusable piece of shit. Granted, the software appears powerful in that it allows you to customize your process to a very fine level of detail, but wait.. isn’t this software supposed to be easy to use?

    To me this functionality is an example of a speculative generality code smell, combined with a very developer-oriented project culture the equates more features to better software. The vast majority of the important cases trying to be achieved here could probably be accomplished without trying to allow for every single possible permutation of tags that is mathematically possible (at least in the user interface).

    Less: It’s the new more.