o(ther)l/log

So Rails is quickly approaching THE dreadful status of 1.0. Interesting changes in this last push: database agnostic schemas are an interesting additions, which is likely to trigger some advances in the Rails RAD/IDE field. Stubs scripts, plugins, better session control and initialization changes are good improvements.
But for my own, small, personal use, rake freeze_gems - which embed a specific Rails version for deployment - is going to be most immediate and helpful change.

I'm not convinced by the new Google Reader. The interface looks bulky and inefficient. The 'lens' trick is a good idea when you're quickly browsing the latest posts in your feedroll, but it's really missing context. You don't really have an idea of which feeds have been active, no overview of what's the current state of your subscriptions. With just a few feeds this is workable, but for a medium/large subscription list, it's problematic.

When you bring the 'your subscription pane', you do get information about your feeds, but the UI makes it quite disconnected from the reading part. A lot of screen real estate is competely lost just by displaying the feed URLs - which are almost totally useless in this context. The import and search process is unreliable, even for OPML files.

I was really impressed by the gmail interface, so much better than others webmail solutions. The most interesting feature of gmail was the 'archiving' part, which is the soft underbelly of other webmails - which are basically inbox-readers. And the rest of the UI brings a very fluid and lean experienceI. have the exact opposite feeling with the Reader: it's ok for browsing the last 20 posts, but the rest of the UI looks like a screaming 'hey, I'm a web 2.0 app' sign, sacrifying a lot to usability. When I observe gmail or gmap GUI, I see very few 'moving parts': it's a traditional web experience - on steroids. Google Reader is more a strange hybrid between a web app and a client-app-in-browser.

Or maybe I'm already blasé of ajax UIs ? I smell some overengineering here. Update: ok, I've been unfair. Using Google Reader with your common use case to be mostly aggregated feeds is quite nice. My usual pattern is more feeds/group of feeds focused, which is not the sweet spot for Reader, so I was a bit biased by the use of my desktop app.

Latest items on the hacklog:

• Write a small GUI tool to parse and emit stats from RoR log files. These files are not really structured but the term color markup should help.
• Fed up with less than satisfactory solutions, I'm writing my own app for personal finance. Cocoa, bindings, leaving the door open for CoreData. A lot of discussions with V. about that, there must be some ways to approach this differently from all the very form-based, cumbersome things I see in other apps.
• A growing fascination for RDF data stores, and the ongoing meme about having an agile, rails-like framework with a RDF datastore instead of an ActiveRecord / SQL thing. Not totally convinced for now with the idea of being driven by an OWL model. Let's dig into this deeper.
• After an email exchange with Karl, I'm toying with the idea of adding a alternate RDF representation for MindFood. Should be easy.
• The GCC/CIL summer project apparently made great progress but was not completed. It would be a worthwhile piece of the puzzle. But apparently Ruby.NET was comitted a few days ago.
• On the Java front, it seems that dynamic (typing) languages are on the radar for Mustang. Good to know. But the mandatory-MS-and-CLR-bashing is quite childish, and when you remember the opinion Sun had about other languages than Java on the JVM, it's a bit ridiculous to read things like "you can program [the CLR] in whatever you want, as long as it is basically C#"

Oh, and I tweaked the look on MindFood. Eh, Nuby on Rails said that "Every modern Ruby on Rails site should feature some kind of gradiated background and probably some little diagonal lines somewhere, although that’s kind of late-90’s retro". I still have to found where to put the diagonal lines.