peat dot org

Banksy spends some quality time in New Orleans. Article and photos at Juxtapoz.

For the last couple of months I’ve spent a little time each week with the OpenSolaris team at Sun, putting together an Amazon EC2 image that makes it easy to deploy and experiment with Ruby on Rails.

They released the AMI last Friday, but I’ve been too crazy busy to make an announcement. Here’s the official word, and here’s my take on it …

My goal with this project was to help people get a Rails app running as quickly as possible. We set up this AMI so that you can get your hands dirty with Rails if you don’t want to spend the time installing everything on your home system or server, and it’s an inexpensive and easy introduction to OpenSolaris if you’re curious.

All the requisite goodies are pre-installed: Rails 2.1, Mongrel, PostgreSQL and MySQL, Subversion, Git, Capistrano, and a few others choice gems. You also get DTrace built into Ruby, if you’re keen on that sort of thing.

There’s also a sample Rails app in your home directory, and a pre-configured SMF file that serves as a handy introduction to the very handy Service Management Framework — the OpenSolaris system for managing daemons and other server processes.

Working with the OpenSolaris AMI team was a lot of fun, and in particular I’d like to give a thanks to Prashant who did most of the hard work getting everything set up.

I spent this morning adding i-name support to the open_id_authentication plugin. Until it gets merged with the master repository, you’re welcome to take a look and tinker with my branch on Github: http://github.com/peat/open_id_authentication

What is an i-name? It’s an alternative way to identify yourself through OpenID. Instead of using my DNS based OpenID (peat.myopenid.com), I can use my i-name (=peat) … it’s a lot shorter, and it’s not explicitly tied to a specific company or location.

Interested? Read more about i-names over here.

Are you a web developer?

Do you want to create little apps for the iPhone, but not too keen on picking up Objective-C and Cocoa?

Check out iUI — a CSS/JS framework that lets you write web pages that behave like iPhone native apps.

I built a demo app this morning in about two hours. It’s an anonymous micro-forum … really simple stuff, but fun to play with!

http://ib.peat.org/

I’m headed down to San Francisco for the weekend for three days of nerding at iPhoneDevCamp 2, from August 1st through the 3rd.

When it comes to native iPhone development, I’m still neophyte — but I’m pretty savvy when it comes to building web apps and web services, so I’m on the look out for projects that might need a little love on the server side of things.

I’m keen on meeting some great people and getting my learn on. If you’re headed to iPhoneDevCamp, drop me a line!

Mark Shuttleworth was gracious enough to give me a few minutes of his time.

In other news, my quest to discover what people are doing to change the world has it’s own website, change.peat.org!

Mark Shuttleworth is in Portland and will be giving a talk at the Mission Theater tonight — I’m totally pumped about it, and you should be to. Why?

Mark founded and manages the Ubuntu Foundation, which aims to produce a high quality desktop and server operating system that is freely available all over the world.

Translation: he created one of the most successful Linux projects out there, with the aim to make computers easier to use, cheaper to buy, and more accessible to the rest of the world.

Mark also formed HBD Venture Capital, a business incubator and venture capital provider and Canonical Ltd., for the promotion and commercial support of free software projects … In 2001 he formed the Shuttleworth Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to social innovation which also funds educational and free and open source software projects in South Africa.

Translation: Mark puts his money where his mouth is, and is investing in other businesses that increase the adoption and awareness of open source software.

He’s also a cosmonaut. How cool is that?

Register here, or RSVP on Upcoming!

“What are you doing to change the world today?”

I’ve asked this question on Twitter almost every morning for the last couple of weeks, and I’ve received some pretty cool answers from artists, coders, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and the like. I’ve had a good response, so I want to cast the net a little wider.

As an experiment, I’m going to interview a few more people over the next couple of weeks, and share their responses here.

Want to contribute? Want to be interviewed? Know someone who you’d like to be interviewed? Leave me a note and we’ll get things figured out!

Holy crap. Every week there’s a miniature gold rush when a new microblogging site is released. Twitter proved the market, and the concept is so simple that anyone with an elementary web development education can put up their own site. And, apparently they are.

So, Twitter kicked the whole thing off, and it’s a compelling system because it’s incredibly simple, and very accessible (web, IM, widgets, SMS, etc). It’s also pretty flakey right now. More on that later.

Immediately after Twitter’s user base “hockey sticked,” Pownce and Jaiku jumped on the scene, with a couple extra features, like pulling in photos from Flickr and whatnot.  [ed: turns out Jaiku launched a few months before Twitter, my bad]

FriendFeed joined the fray at around the same time, adding a veritable raft load of ways to track and comment on posts from other sites.

Then Plurk leaped into battle with it’s headless Doglephant and wildly different user interface, provoking Love It or Hate It responses from everyone who tried it. They don’t pull in other content, but they do allow discussions to grow around specific messages, and they added the concept of karma — more participation means more karma, and extra little toys to play with.

This week, Identi.ca showed up with a back to basics story, and a twist. It’s pretty much just like Twitter, and people want to give it a shot because it seems to be more reliable (more on that later). The twist is basically a marketing move: the software that powers the Identi.ca site is an open source project, so anyone with software chops can use it to create their own micro-blogging community.  Heads up, internal communications people.

Now, regarding reliability. A slightly flakey experience is not a big enough factor to drive away the masses. None of the above sites are Twitter killers, because Twitter has a critical mass of users who have shown that even if Twitter is unreliable, they’ll stick it out to stay in touch with their friends. Will it frustrate early adopters with short attention spans, and rabid interaction habits? Sure. Will they totally abandon Twitter? Not likely.

My prediction? Twitter is going to stay king of the microblogging universe for the next few years, and that universe is going to get much, much bigger. Like Gary Vaynerchuk said on his swing through Portland — “You think there’s a lot of people using Twitter now? Wait until Oprah gets on Twitter.” Hopefully, the fine folks at Twitter are planning for such an event.

I expect that we short attention span, early adopter types are going to stick with Twitter, but spend most of our time on FriendFeed. Why? Because it’s such a powerful aggregator. We’ll continue to sign up for any social web app that shows up on the radar, and we’ll use FriendFeed to track and manage all of our discussions.

[update: The Wife just knocked on my office door and informed me that the buyer backed out moments before they sealed the deal.  Sigh.  We're following up on other offers, but if there's anyone out there in Internet land who wants a kick ass car, ping me immediately!]

We sold our little red Mini Cooper today. It was a bittersweet transaction, but it was the right thing to do — the baby seat doesn’t fit in the back seat, and having insurance and car payments on two cars just isn’t worth while for a family with no commuters.

That said, practicality can’t substitute for personality, which the Mini has in spades. It’s small. It’s cute. It’s red. It’s zippy, and it has big “52″ stickers on the doors (I still haven’t figured out why). Little kids point and yell “race car!” when it drives by.

We’ve been Mini nuts since we bought our first in 2003 (a silver Mini One), so I suspect we’ll pick up another when we move beyond baby seats and our boring family sedan gives up the ghost. Maybe a Clubman. Maybe there’s a hybrid in the future?

Here’s to you, 52!