Welcome to this week's edition of the Change Log, episode 0.0.4. Today is November 29th, 2009. I am Adam Stikoviak. And I am Win Netherlands.
Very cool. Win, what do you do, man? Tell me about yourself. I am a designer slash developer slash designer slash developer.
OK. Still trying to figure that out. Have you? What are you doing to figure it out?
I am designing and developing. I'm cool. And where can people find you and reach you and all that good stuff? Easiest ways to find me on Twitter at penguin P-E-N-G-W-Y-N-N and I blog at winnevelin.com.
I like the country, right? Just like the country without the S, which usually I get does a country named Netherlands. How cool? Very cool.
Very cool. What about you, Adam? Oh, you know, I wrote this company called Handcrafted. It's sort of evolving at this moment.
But Handcrafted is my launch pad for doing much like you do design and development work. We're also dabbling in some social media work. Obviously, website building, design, all that good stuff. But I also do a podcast called Web 2.0 Show.
If you don't listen to it, you probably should. It's web2oShow.com. On Twitter, it's Web 2.0 Show. And I do this great podcast called the Change Log with you, Win.
And if you wanted to reach out to me on Twitter, you could add a stack. And if you want to tweet us at the Change Log. It's the Change Log Show on Twitter. We appreciate retweets and direct messages and polite, beautiful emails at hello, at the changelog.com.
If you'd like to submit a story, you can submit it. Submit at the changelog.com. Very cool. Very cool.
So what we have, what's our lot today? Oh, we've got a lot this week, which is surprising given it's a holiday week. But we've been busy this first week on the Change Log. First app, Google Chrome.
Google Chrome, Google Chrome. There's lots of stuff going on with Google Chrome. I think they just changed their name to, well, they just announced Change to Get to Chromium OS because they're taking it from being proprietary to open source, which is really awesome. And obviously, why it's on the Change Log?
A lot of stuff coming out of Google lately. We had our interview with Rob Pike this last week with Google Go, the new programming language. And he mentioned Chrome OS and that. I was actually, even though we got listed on my combinator on the news site there, I was really happy to see that commentary back and forth on there.
It was really pleasing to me to see people listen to the episode and kind of adjust it and then come back to my comment and start commenting. Oh, absolutely. So you said it back from OS? I was contemplating buying one of those Dell V10s or whatever.
Those little netbooks. Little minis. Yeah, I mean, for just under $300, it's not a bad buy. And if you can get the operating system on there for nothing, for free, you've got yourself a portable, full fledged netbook.
And with what they're doing with Wave and what they're doing with other things, I have high hopes for what this is. It's changed in the game for sure. Now we're going to go into operating system wars and browser wars again, of course, and communication usages, like using Wave versus Twitter or Facebook or some other way to communicate. I'll be anxious to see how designers can sink their teeth into it and really make it look a little bit more static than the current demos that I've seen.
We really scaled back in lightweight, as far as user experience. We've seen any of the demos and YouTube. I've seen some of them. They all seem, I mean, they're OK, I suppose.
They do have some user interface experiments listed on the Chromium OS site, which you can go to Chromium.org and browse around there. There's a couple links there for it. Not too bad. I think it's a developing product.
What's cool about it, though, is that it is open source, you know, and that if you don't like the design of things, you can have all the up and new design. You can always fork it. Yeah, fork it. Well, actually, here you can't, because they do all their source code management with McCreel, right?
Right. You know, that's one thing. Normally, when you end up on an open source project and it's hosted a Google code, it seems like it just immediately slows down as far as finding documentation and information about it. There's just something hard to navigate from you with Google's code hosting.
I must prefer GitHub or any of those. I, it would be really interesting to see Google begin to migrate to using Git and more importantly supporting GitHub. I'd like to see what that would do for GitHub. I know it's done a tremendous favor for the Ruby community.
That's usually where I'm involved in code to be able to fork projects and submit patches. And it's really effortless for project maintainers to take code from other people from the community and integrate it back into the main line effortlessly. A lot easier than a subversion and some of the other tools out there. Yeah, I'd be interested to see what some of these projects that are hosted on Google code could do if they did make the jump to Git.
Yeah. Well, I guess one disclaimer too about before we move on from Chrome OS or Chromium OS or whatever, it really becomes, because right now it's being called Chromium OS. But I guess news sources are still headlining Google Chrome OS because that's a good powerful headline. But one thing to keep a note of is that it's actually not ready for consumers to use.
It's still in this developer-only stage. I think they're going to find that confusion. A little bit just because in some of the demos that I've watched on YouTube, the Google guys themselves have made the comment that Chromium is Chrome. Yeah.
But if you're really interested, they have a mailing list at our blog article on a change. Like you check that out, there's a link out to the mailing list as well as Chromium.org, the code base. Actually, you know what? I'm going to take that back because I'm looking at an article.
I don't even think about it. But the code base for Chromium OS is in Git. Is it really? Yeah.
Go look at the article. Check that out. It is. Yes, code base Git.
That's so odd that it isn't Git. But maybe they're not noticing on code.google.com. Because that was one of the points that Rob made last week. Yeah.
Yeah. Maybe we have to talk to them. Maybe we can get an email over to them and ask them why they chose Git. That's really interesting.
Maybe that's a important thing to come. Maybe. Maybe. What's up?
What's next then? Handbrake. Oh, ninth four released with 64-bit support. You became a great fan?
I actually am. Yeah. I back up all of my DVDs. I actually do it a unique way instead of, I don't know, this unique way.
I have a specific setting in my handbrake. I pop my DVD in, pull it up. I choose a specific setting. I dump the one file.
And I used to do it to the MKV format, which I'm sorry. I don't recall what that short hands for. But now I actually do it to .mp4, I think is what it is. Let me confirm that.
Final on more compatibility with the MP4 than me. Well, you know what I like about it is that it opens up in QuickTime, especially those QuickTime and it's super fast. And it also takes all the chapters of the DVD and puts them right there so I can just jump. In QuickTime I can just jump from chapter to chapter.
So while you're backing it up to one file and it does shrink it significantly down from like four or five or seven gigs down to usually around a gig or a little bit more. So if you're someone like me who's a fan of Drobo and you have a Drobo in your house and you have one store for these things, I have one store for all my movies with kid movies and adult movies, not like those kind of adult movies. Non-cartoon movies. Non-cartoon adult movies.
You know, I'm down from those to one file and I'm saving huge space and I have Boxy running on a Mac Mini, Stipperton-Liver Room. Jennifer and I both use the Boxy app on our iPhones because we both have iPhones. So it gets really easy to break away from Comcast and those cable people and they're bad. It's just mainstream TV is so, what, 2006, man?
It's 2009. I've seen your setup with Drobo and some of the other apps that you use. It definitely needs to be a blog article on www.adamsacoviac.com. It's my home media setup because you've got the most methodical library system for updating all your media that I've ever seen.
I'll do that for sure. Actually, it's .m4v is what those dumpouts do from, and those are compatible with, is that right, m4v? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, m4v. Well, I'm looking at some of the volumes. m4v is one of them and mp4 is another one. I'm thinking, I think it dumps out m4v's and the average file system.
Let's see right here. Curious case I've been button was 2.6 gigs, blood down was 2.2 gigs, 50-ferted states was 1.5 gigs, so you're kind of seeing a picture. It's around a gig and a half versus 5 gigs, so that's nice backup. And really, you can't see a difference.
And I can only imagine I haven't tried out the 64-bit handbrake of these released yet. The cool thing about what's happening here is that instead of taking two to three hours to dump out your one file, it's actually doing it almost in real-time DVD time, so you're probably getting around the actual time of the actual movie. The in-code time is significantly less, in terms of faster. You know, it makes the story news where the guys out there listening is, it's been such a long time coming for a handbrake release, and this changed a lot of shows over a thousand changes.
Wow. That is just, that's the same. And remember, boys and girls, handbrake is only to be used to make legal backups of media you already own. Absolutely.
Yeah. Why would you, no, don't do anything like that. Don't steal. Don't steal.
All right, let's move on. What else we got? One of your stories, functional cocoa applications using WebKit. Well, you know, I'm a fan of Henrik.
Forgive me. I don't even know the fella's full name. I'm going to talk about this, whatever, quick and check it out. I hope that I said that right.
He's something I've been a fan of for a while. He actually has a popular fork of Jekyll that supports Hamill, which is where I kind of noticed him. I plus he also runs this very cool blog with a pug sitting there. It's a pug drawing that his, I think it's a girlfriend did it.
Little off top, but it's called the pug.max. So he has a very good blog. You can check him out, Henrik.nyh.se. Jekyll Beanie, meaning the static page generator?
Yeah. Yeah. Tom Preston Warner's T.P. Dubbs is his awesome blog, blog aware incarnation called Jekyll.
Very cool. But the reason why I post this was simply because Henrik talked about it. I gave him a hat tip on the blog. I forget if it's noteworthy to him, it's noteworthy to us.
And his Twitter, his tweet, was, Cuckoo UI looks like a Coke UI. Cuckoo UI looks interesting. Cucko apps using WebKit makes you want to code a decent Cucko. So I imagine if he's looking at it, it's newsworthy and why not.
I don't actually use Cucko. So WebKit seems to be everywhere these days. Yeah. It's still lots of good stuff.
Behind Safari, behind a number of projects out there. Do you ever download the WebKit nightly? No. And they have the sparkle update engine that's popular in a lot of macOS applications.
And it was a glad an implement of that feature so you don't have to manually pull down the nightlies anymore. But it's really fun to see the progress of the WebKit engine that powers Safari on a nightly basis to see us three support that they're adding. Cool. You get a chance to do that.
Well, I'll make sure I do. I'll let you know when I do. I have any questions. I know how to reach it.
As you told me earlier. I think. That's right. What's next?
Rails 2.35. And this is a minor release that has some XSS vulnerabilities patched in it. I'm going at a freshcup.com for giving us the unofficial change log on this one. Since the Ruby and Rails site was a little slow to get the nodes out there.
Mike does a number of things in the Ruby community to promote Rails and bring people into the community. But it kind of begs the bigger question, where's Rails 2.3.0? Right? We promised this at Rails Conf this year and still haven't seen it.
I'm sure that they're doing something awesome and it just takes patience. Now, hopefully it'll arrive before the next version of text meet. Yeah. Or expression engine.
Yeah. Sure. Those are two promise next versions too. Well, I like to.
I guess not so much on the Rails front, but I also noticed you have a nice, you paste a nice homage to Mike at your one of your recent blog articles when you're Thanksgiving articles. Yeah, I did. This side of the plug earlier for my cup freshcup is much like the chain log. It's a link aggregator for just hot Ruby links that are out there.
I'm not sure where he picks up all his info. But usually I'll start my morning is seeing what a juicy links. Mike's got out there. Pretty cool.
Before we move on. We've got a couple of bullet points there for us. What in there's important? And some Ruby 1.9 capabilities still personally haven't made the full time jump to Ruby 1.9 for my projects of you.
I don't know. I run Ruby and whatever's on the system is what they give me. I'm not quite that bad, but you know, I just don't keep up with the versioning of Rails quite as much as anyone else might. Simply because it's just not the piece that I'm always intimate with.
Sorry. Gotcha. You're just an unfrozen front end developer. My Ruby and Rails world frightens you.
Yeah. Well, that doesn't frighten me. It's just, you know, somebody else is always taking care of it. And I guess that's the lazy developer me.
I'll change one down. Sure. I'm a good developer. And one thing I noticed before our note before we move on is on this Rails 2.35 article on the changelog.com.
You'll see the GitHub statistics for this repo since it is a link to a GitHub repo. Rails has been 4,732 times and has 4,529 watchers. And if you go out and either fork it or watch it right now, those numbers will update because we're pulling those numbers live from GitHub. That's true.
That's a good note to make because whenever you look at any of these links out to GitHub or point of those stats live. I just love that feature. I love that feature too. I really hope that the audience and the readers of the blog appreciate it.
And I had to ask the question back up, people are like, what GitHub integration? You have your GitHub aware? What do you mean? I'm like, will you see this little fork icon, a little watcher icon there?
Well, that actually means forks and watchers. Oh, really? I think our icons are better than what GitHub chose for theirs. The other day when we were trying to test these numbers and you were telling me where to find the links and from their icons it wasn't.
What's it? What's it? What's their links meant? Right.
Wrestler. Rest client library for Node.js. This is kind of a two for article. I guess we should first discuss Node.js, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And I'll load down for Node.js. Can you find it?
Node.js.org. And what it is is a- We've only been on the maybe Node.js, not Node.js. Node.js.org. Is my accent?
No, it's not your accent. It's just a quick because earlier when we were talking before we started Chit Chat in here, and you said that I actually went out to Node.js.org. Node.net. Node.net.
Node.net. That's it. I can tell you about that. I've invented IO for V8 JavaScript now.
I guess we have to back up in further V8 JavaScript as a cool project from Google. It's a JavaScript engine that powers the Chrome projects we talked about earlier. Oh, really? This is very similar to Sinatra at first glance here.
They mentioned a couple other Ruby and Python projects, Twisted and Event Machine. But it's basically just a way to write a server-side lightweight HTTP server using JavaScript, since it leans itself to writing a vented code in this way. So it's got a pseudo DSL where you just crank open some listeners and VSM methods can send data back to the browser. We have a really lightweight web server running.
I'm anxious to see where this is headed now with Wrestler. On top of this, this is from Dan Webb. He can be found at Twitter.com slash, I believe, Dan Wrong. Dan Wrong?
Yeah. You ever follow Dan's stuff? I did a little bit, not long ago, but I'm not a deep fan of Dan's. For no reason, just not.
Dan's forgotten more JavaScript than I'll ever learn. I was starting to do Dan's project that allowed you to do a bunch of JavaScript in prototype before I found the joys of jQuery. So back in the day, which is what? Back in the day.
Back in the day. Like two years ago? Exactly. Just about three years ago now.
Open source moves fast. It's true. So he's written an HTTP client library for Node.js called Wrestler that allows you to quickly implement a REST client on top of it. So I guess the newsworthy angle here is that people are starting to build projects on top of Node.js and it's got some momentum and we'll see what sort of projects are built with this thing and see what sort of run server-side JavaScript can make.
Since we posted the storage to the Watchers have gone up significantly. I think it was like, would you say it was like 10 Watchers? A Watchers first? Yeah, it was.
And I'm going to take credit for every one of those. Alright. Alrighty. Riot.
It's extremely fast running unit testing framework. This is one of yours. Yeah. Again, I'm going to steal some thunder but I'm a big fan of JEG 2 on Twitter, also known as James Edward Gray 2.
The second I guess. He's written some books that I've read. I've actually read half of his power editing with Textmate book and I'm a fan of his blog even though I'm not much of a root because I think the guy is super, super passionate about writing awesome Ruby code. He's somebody that definitely isn't worthy in the community.
Every event I've ever been to that's involved Ruby. I guess L.S. Ruby conference, I've seen him there. He spoke at both of them.
He's a special community. He posted us on Twitter and simply because he's following it, he said I make commits to Riot and Colorize today and once they're our brand releases of both, Riot will be promoted to my favorite Ruby testing library. So I figured he's talking about it. It's newsworthy.
That's a crowded landscape. So that's quite a statement. Yeah. I figured if he's talking about it, why not?
Ruby testing is like he says it's a crowded landscape. There you go. Riot. Yeah.
Yeah. I saw that. You know, it's amazing to me how similar a lot of these syntax are to RSpec and Cucumber. Hopefully we can mix and match a lot of these vocabularies and use them interchangeably.
It doesn't really matter what's doing the testing under the hood. We are testing and we're kind of maturing as an industry. It's kind of funny though that you mentioned Cucumber and even RSpec because if you go and check out the, if you go to the link from that blog article to get out and check out the actual readme file, he goes in and talks about, oh my God, why did you write this? And so he's even got some background.
He's starting a project. You're not excited. I'm reading verbatim by the way. You're adding the tests, you're adding factories, you're adding this, you're doing that.
And before you know it, you've got 3,000 plus lines of test codes, 1,000 assertions and things are getting slower and slower. So the point of testing and even TDD or test-driven development, you're trying to start with tests before you really get into your code, right? So you've got all this stuff that's preventing you from, I guess, getting to actually coding, right? And if that slows down the process or that, if that becomes more complex than it should be, you've got some failures.
I think he took us that back and said, well, what should we do? And this is a solution to, you know, should have RSpec and it's awesome. We'll check it out. Check it out.
Thor gets. Another one that got you excited. Make development easier. Yeah, I took a peek at this.
And one thing that I liked about Thor get was, obviously, the Thor is really easy to use. Like you said, if you come into Ruby class, it's pretty easy to write a few different Thor commands. And Thor is from white cats? Yeah.
Yeah. And what really got me excited about this was that it was, you know, easy to do open new branches. It's actually more part of a process. And he even explains that in the reading, is that, you know, the tests are designed to run a particular workflow.
So if you're working against a particular upstream or a single upstream, let's you get push even, you know, if you're using SVM, your workflow, you do get SVM, the commit. And well, in this workflow, you know, master's typically your upstream. So it kind of defines a certain workflow. And this is the workflow I think I follow, right?
If you're going to make a change, you branch, you make all those changes against that branch, that topic branch is they call it. And when you're ready to take that back into the mainstream, back into master, there's a certain process. So you have these commands, obviously, that you do that. But with these Thor commands, it makes it really, really, really simple to do.
So you just say Thor get cold and open to open a new topic branch. And then when you're ready to go back to master, you just say, obviously, get our Thor, get cold and close, and then name the branch. So it's got a nice little process there. It's really neat.
I like writing these Thor scripts because I'm not much of a bash command line guy. But I can write Ruby. And so it's open up a whole nother world of scripting for me. And I love the way that you can install these Thor scripts directly from GitHub just by passing the URL to the script and passing the raw equals true, which will tell GitHub to serve up just the raw text.
Pretty neat stuff. Something that actually didn't make it to the change log blog, but it should probably be mentioned. There's a couple other Thor tasks on GitHub that I sort of hunted down that led some additional functionality to what this Thor get is doing. I think there's obviously there's no GitHub support with this, but it's faving a certain workflow.
I think that's why maybe why those things aren't in there. Yeah, if you want to find neat Thor scripts for your own use, just do a GitHub search for Thor. You'll find a lot of folks will have a Thor task or Thor scripts repo that has a number of Thor scripts in there and usually arrange my topic and file. Yeah, very cool.
Alrighty. We've last up this evening is Web Roar, Ruby Rails application server. So yet another Ruby stack. You have another.
Well, let's just rewind. How many have we seen since we started? At least I started Ruby development back in 2006. Web Rick was the first one.
Right? Mongrel. And then we had Finn. Finn.
Yeah. Passenger. Passenger, which I'm still on Passenger. I'm using Passenger.
Unicorn is another player in this space that's getting some press lately. Yeah. And that's actually, I'm glad you mentioned because they have some benchmarks they point to that are pretty significant. It shows how Web Roar is kicking some butt over some of those ones we mentioned.
And they are based on their benchmarks, so they encourage you to do your own benchmarking and try to prove them wrong. But they left Unicorn out. And Unicorn, from what I understand, is super, super fast. I guess the only experience I've had with Unicorn is when GitHub is pissed off.
And I see that Ringo Unicorn. It looks quite angry. You ever seen this? Yeah.
I think I've caught that once or twice. Yeah. But I see it less and less. This version of the rack space seems to be running pretty smoothly since they moved over.
It should also be mentioned, too, that there's a hat tip to, uh, let me try and say his name the right way. I even had a hard time saying it when we interviewed him on the Web 2.0, Ili Gregoric. Is that right? I think that's right.
Yeah. So he runs post-rank. One of the community won a Ruby Hero award two years ago. Super, super guy.
So I saw him tweet about it. And I thought, you know, hey, if I was talking about it, you know, he says it's pretty promising. So why not pull it into the mix? It's brand new.
It's only been released in a couple of weeks at most. So it's nice to see people trying to make this environment faster because I think, you know, one of the biggest things we hear, right, is Ruby, Rails can't scale, right? So if we need something to run to faster. I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with that term.
Oh, really? Just some sort of problem with Rails scaling? I don't know. Maybe.
You know, it's just, you know, we're on the street, you know. Yeah, I give you the.com. I give you the ITA.com. So this is blogging.
It's quite popular. If you're not a subscriber, you should be. And if you're a listener author that actually has done some benchmarking with Web Roar against Unicorn, I'd be really interested to, even though I'm not a Rubyist per se, or whatever, I think it would be nice to hear some feedback from you guys if you have done some benchmarking as Unicorn. That's pretty much the line of this week.
If you've got a story for us that we should cover on the Change Log, email it to us at submit at the changelog.com, or just write up your browser and go to the changelog.com slash submit and send us a link to that cool new open source project or recently revved project that we should know about and share with the community. Absolutely. And I guess what's come up next week for us? I guess we'll assume in a couple days, who we talking to?
We have an interview with Document Cloud. Yeah. We've covered a couple of their stories already. Right.
And then on the roadmap, hopefully we'll catch up with the MongoDB guys. And then some other surprises for the end of the year. Absolutely. Well, stay tuned.
Thank you for listening to this edition of the Change Log. Be sure to tune in weekly for what's fresh and new in open source. Also, visit the changelog.com to follow along, subscribe to the feed and more. Thank you for listening.
I'll get around myself for the first time.