Ponderings

One of the systems I've lately inherited makes heavy use of Mongo for data storage, a data system I've not used previously. So, when the boss called tonight and said that his boss needed counts of an object in our system by state in the next 10 minutes my thinking went something like...

No problem, that's a simple SQL group-by....Oh, wait. This is mongo. Oh, crap! How do I do that?! It's a function; Map...Something.

I've joined the Cult of Mac.

For several years now, I've been running Ubuntu Linux on all my personal machines. I loved the freedom of Linux, that I could recompile the kernel to do things exactly as I wanted. I took elitist joy at the puzzled looks on non-tech people's faces when I told them I ran Linux (and then had to explain what Linux, and often an operating system, was). And, to be quite frank, I loved not having to fork over a ton of money for software.

The thing is, while I loved that I could recompile the kernel, I really hated that I so frequently had to. The wireless card in my netbook didn't play nicely with Linux, so each time I updated the kernel had to roll in a code patch and recompile the kernel to get it working. To get my printer working required another recompile. Trying to sync my ipod to my music collection, while it didn't require a recompile of the kernel, required three separate programs one of which had only a command line interface. Don't get me wrong, I really like the command line, but it's just not the right medium for controlling an ipod.

Maybe it's a sign that I'm getting older, but I don't want to invest time and energy into making my computer work any more. I have things I need to accomplish on my computer and I need to know that when I sit down to do them, the computer will cooperate with me. I have neither the time nor the energy for mucking the computer for the sake of mucking with the computer.

So, after a brief flirtation with Windows 7 (I was weak, I admit), I ordered myself a MacBook. I've only had it about a week now, but so far it's everything I hoped it would be. It has a Linux style command line that handles all the command line tools I love, like grep, curl, and tar, and ... stuff just works! To connect to my home wireless-n network using WPA2 security, all I had to do was enter the passphrase. I didn't have to recompile anything or go digging through the forum posts for solutions; it just worked. It even comes with PHP, Python, and Apache pre-installed.

I'll still keep a Linux box around the house for some things, but I don't see myself going back from the Mac anytime soon.

Drupal Voices 175: Clay Shirky on Social Media Theory and Drupal

In his interview for Lullabot's Drupal Voices series, social media guru Clay Shirky made two points I found especially interesting, both of which have direct impact on how we design social sites.

DrupalCon Chicago is done. Now it's time to unpack, review and condense my notes, and begin to sort out how to integrate everything I learned into my processes going forward. In subsequent posts, I'll expand on each of the points below, but my goal at the moment is to lay out the biggest things I'm bringing back from the con.