Cause for celebration.

Those of us who only really showed up to the Ruby and Rails party in 2007 (and viewing the build a weblog in 15 minutes video the year before doesn't count) are happy to show up to the party. There's plugins to do everything under the sun, good books on interesting topics are showing up regularly, user groups are either already established or are popping up everywhere, it's a great party. Especially if you're a serial entrepreneur like myself and you're looking to build websites with lots of features quickly and you aren't going to get a lot of help from a huge crew of people to do it.

So maybe Rails is a ghetto. Maybe it would suck to be a consultant in it right now because there's not enough jobs yet or rates aren't where they should be. Maybe I would have developed strong animosity between myself and some other developers/writers because I got in too early. But frankly I didn't and I love it. Working on LOL.com was truly the first web development experience I have ever really enjoyed. Yes, Enjoyed. Oh, I still love Java and it's my go-to language for heavy data lifting. But Rails is it for my web development. I can go to a web development project and like it and then come back later and not wince at what's I did. Sure, I'm making novice mistakes, but even those aren't proving that bad to clean up.

Before I clam up again, there's two other things I'd like to say:

1. Zed Shaw singles out Dave Thomas for a lot of vitriol in his rant. I can't speak to any of that. Maybe he is a horrible person, maybe the Ruby book he wrote sucked horribly. But, I have read his Rails book and it's not a bad book at all. I've gone back to it many times already. I have a lot of other Rails books at this point. Several of them aren't very good at all, so it's not just my ignorance of what other Rails books are like. Nor is it my inexperience with programming books. I've been a professional developer for 20 years now. I know programming books both bad and good. I can stand up and say that Agile Web Development with Rails is pretty good.

2. Everybody who has seen the explosive growth of Ruby and Rails over the last couple of years eclipse their favorite language/framework (e.g. Python, Groovy, PHP, etc.) seems to be blogging or commenting this idea that Ruby and Rails isn't really that great, it's just hype. It's only a committed few who have something to gain from you adopting Rails (i.e. a book to sell, consultant hours, etc.) who are promoting something that is snake oil.

   Seriously, how stupid do you think we all are? I've been doing professional development since 1985 and doing it full time since '87. Do you really think that I and thousands of others can't tell when something works and it doesn't? I did HTML when the only browser was NCSA Mosaic and ASP websites to build DevGames.com and then later GameDev.net in 1999. That was painful. I can tell the freaking difference people. This works and it works well. I might not pick it for building the next version of eBay because it wouldn't stand up to the load, but I would pick it for building the early versions of the next site that will become as big as eBay because it will offer that site lots of fast growth and flexibility.

Someday I hope to have one of the high end packages like Lightroom or Aperture. That's not going to happen anytime soon, and it does nothing for the vast majority of users who need a tool like this for all their pictures who aren't going to sink a couple of hundred bucks in software to act as their digital shoebox.

But last year and again this year Mac software companies have come together to do a group sale of their software for a single purchase price at MacHeist. It increases their profile, it donates thousands of dollars to charity, and it gives you one hell of a bargain. This year you can buy no less than eleven different software titles for only $49. It included several I had already coveted, two of which both sold for $49 individually. That gives you an idea the kind of bargain we are talking about here.

All the software is regular licenses for you. You can upgrade it, etc. just as if you had purchased it directly from the vendor at full price.

Meanwhile I'm going to be playing with iStopMotion.

But here comes another solution. BitNami has a project called RubyStack and it is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X running on either PowerPC or Intel chips. According to their readme, it installs:

• Ruby 1.8.6
• RubyGems 0.9.4
• Rails 2.0.2
• ImageMagick 6.3.5
• Subversion 1.4.5
• SQLite 3.5.1
• MySQL 5.0.45
• Apache 2.2.6
• PHP 5.2.5
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.2

Heck, that's an even better collection of stuff than Locomotive offered. You're ready to build most any kind of website with that collection. I'm about to install Leopard myself so it's going to become kind of moot, but if you try it out and have good or bad experiences with it please leave a comment to this post so everybody knows how well it works.

However, if you're using Ruby on Rails to do your web development these days then you know that Rails is already well integrated with the JavaScript libraries Prototype and Scriptaculous. If you're like me, you don't want to give up that easy integration and you may still be too new with Ruby and Rails to figure out how to use YUI's JavaScript parts instead. Anybody doing a website that is for Internet use rather than internal business use can't afford to use both sets of libraries on their pages because of bandwidth and time costs. But that doesn't mean you have to throw all of YUI out. After all, there's still the CSS!

YUI offers four CSS files at present:

I used them on LOL.com and was very happy with how uniform they made my pages look across different browsers. It's usually hard work to do a layout with many parts to it and lots of formatting and test it various places. With YUI CSS I was able to do it once and do some fairly light testing and still get a very consistent look.

I really hope somebody does continue the project for a while. The Ruby on Rails site suggests a long series of steps you can follow to compile Ruby and install Rails on your Mac. It works but it really has nothing to do with developing a website. It's just one more impediment to keep somebody with an idea from getting started developing that idea. Apple saw that and includes both Ruby and Rails with OS X Leopard, the latest version of the operating system that runs on Macs, but for the many users still on the last version we still need an easy quick start for a while longer.

After a very long gestation period, version 2.0 of LOL.com is finally ready. It's a complete rewrite from scratch using Ruby on Rails and it's quite an experience for me. I haven't rolled out a new site (excluding this blog) since GameDev.net in 1999 and LOL is a big change because it's very much a product of the Web 2.0 environment. Like YouTube for video or Digg for links, it's all about you and the other users contributing the jokes and funny pictures and then voting to decide which ones are best.

There's a huge list of changes and improvements due for the site in upcoming months as I try to make it easier for people to get what they want, understand what the site offers, and make it offer more fun stuff to do.

Expect to see:

• A list of the top jokes
• Commenting on the jokes
• Creating of accounts just for LOL.com (i.e. you won't have to have an OpenID for the people who don't want one)
• Watching for jokes by friends or favorite people
• Live preview as you enter a joke

I want to give a huge shout-out to Fipi Lele for all the ideas I stole and to all the sites from which I lifted one thing or another. Please know that while there's hardly an original concept in there now (or in the list above), I have many ideas that I'm not revealing today that will be fun and different from what anybody else has.

Of course the best thing you can do is go visit LOL now and come back often. Vote on jokes, add your own, etc. But you can also help if you link to LOL.com in your blog, from your MySpace, Facebook, etc. pages. Tell friends about it and share links with them when you find funny jokes or pictures.

In addition RiffTrax he's paired with two of his old MST3K buddies, Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy to do a new straight-to-DVD series where they play "The Film Crew" and they do a show basically the same as the old MST3K sans puppets. They riff on the film, they interrupt to do skits, etc. There are four in that series and I'm hoping that there will be many more yet to come:

Feel free to buy them from Amazon through these links in order to help fund my own habit.

No doubt viewing the success that Mike has enjoyed with these endeavors none other than Joel Hodgson and pretty much everyone else associated with MST3K in its early days have decided to do their own movie riffing project called Cinematic Titanic. They haven't produced anything yet but the announcement is out there and it's a fantastic crew behind it. Just remember, the longer the Hollywood writer's strike lingers on, the more people like Joel, Trace, Mary Jo, etc. will need to work on something like this either to pay the bills or just to keep busy writing. Oddly enough, a quick end to the strike could be the worst thing for this particular project.

The only possible misfire project I've seen so far is the new MST3K.com site. There the old producer of the series (and voice of Gypsy the robot) and one of the writers are taking a stab at some animated pieces using the robots from the series. The two I watched were... well, horrible. But they own great stuff (the name, the logo, the website, the robots, the theme music) so there's no reason they can't start off in a fresh direction and create something great.

Here's a cool interview with Mike Nelson about all the recent announcements. Notice that while a lot of people would like it to all be about some kind of competition between the various groups, he is very welcoming and seems to look forward to having more material available if only because it might increase the visibility of RiffTrax and The Film Crew.

I bought a 24" 2.0Ghz iMac and I'm damn glad I did. I now have FreeBSD (i.e. Unix) under the hood rather than something "kinda like" an operating system and I've got a great looking and easy to use front end on top of it. Back in October of 2001 I said I would make my switch from Windows to Linux by October of 2006. Well, I was a year late and I had the wrong operating system. However, I did use Linux for an entire year from mid 2003-2004 in my first experiment with it. I learned that there was stuff I missed though, stuff that I became more dependent upon in later years rather than less.

I like to take photos and there's just not a lot of mediocre photo software on Linux, much less good photo software. Also, I got my first iPod and became rather used to iTunes as my preferred software to deal with that. So I could have stayed on Windows, gone to Linux but given up software I wanted, or a third choice which was what I chose. The Mac offered all the software I was interested in and a better operating system. It also had the advantage of being very very well supported for Ruby on Rails and Java, better supported on Ruby on Rails than Windows is in fact.

After having used it for several weeks now, I can see that I clearly made the right choice.

I hardly ever play any online games so the fact that I went all the way to the end on this one should tell you it was enjoyable and well done.

I don't see how they will be able to maintain the production values of the first episode but I'm not sure they really have to. On this show it's really about the writing, the wonderful cast, the characters, and a concept that seems to allow them a lot of interesting places to go in the future.

I haven't seen anything I've enjoyed this much from the first episode since Lost and Heroes. Look for the show on ABC Wednesday night. Unfortunately the first episode doesn't seem to be available on their website. I hope they get it up soon. It is a really great pilot.

I got to see Aimee Mann a while back so I'll have ticked a couple of my must-see artists from my list. Also on the list: The Decemberists, Radiohead, Nellie McKay, and The White Stripes.