Fox.com now has a trailer for season 6. Check out at 24trailer.com/

This isn’t news (this video was made available by the Lost Experience). I just hadn’t seen it yet. So, you Lostees who haven’t been in the Lost Experience, enjoy the fruits of others wasted time (i mean labor).

It’s been eight months since I met Ruby for the first time. I feel like I’m spoiled as a programmer now. But, honestly, sometimes I just take it for granted. I thought I’d take a mental trip back in time to the days when I was a PHP programmer and recall what I was amazed by.

December 2005
setting: sitting in front of a warm fireplace in Columbus, Ohio

“This book is so cool,” referring to Agile Web Development with Rails. “It’s so amazing that these high level operations are really all you have to think about. It’s like I can actually think conceptually and write code at the same time. These scaffold generators are cool, but I don’t really understand how they work. And what’s this iterator thing all about.”

March 2006
setting: sitting on a warm balcony in Orlando, Florida

“This book is so cool,” referring to Agile Web Development with Rails. “I wish I finally understood how all of this testing stuff works. Those Ruby on Rails podcasts are intense. Those people on that program are intense. What’s all this about meta-programming? Oh, well, one of these days. But until then, at least I’ve got an enterprise app under my belt. This would have taken me three times as long in PHP.”

July 2006
setting: sitting on a warm porch in Lewis Center, Ohio

“This book is so cool,”
referring to Agile Web Development with Rails. “These Ajax Scaffold Generators are so cool. I just built a time-tracker for my new company in a day. It’s nice that Rails has built in support for Ajax. I remember wondering in PHP how the heck would I do that all too often. I’ve got to finally read Rails Recipes. I just hate reading pdfs. But now I’ve finally got it in a book.

October 2006
setting: sitting in my warm office in Lewis Center, Ohio

“This book is so cool,”
referring to Agile Web Development with Rails. “I can’t wait for the second edition to come out on paper. I should really read that testing chapter again. I wish test fixtures weren’t so brittle. One of these days I’ll understand it better….”

On the whiteboard in my office I have a list of obstacles for a site I’m working on (and really the net today). My list is really long, well, actually it only has one element in it, fragmentation.

I define the issue of fragmentation as following:

fragmentation is the byproduct of a distributed democratic work environment and/or systems that try to reduce complexity through modularism. While it seems like separation of concerns makes sense to solve individual unrelated issues, it turns out that issues are more related than we originally thought.

Every time we say, the easiest way for us to do such and such is to do something new, we are most of the time incidentally adding to the issue at hand.

If we can solve this problem the world will suddenly feel more natural. Aggregation (allowing you to piece together relevant pieces of your life) is a partial solution, but it only partially fixes the problem because it depends too much on the user’s intelligence and ability to arrange their own life. We need to be more of an integrator and a relater to solve this ultra-pertinent issue.

Kelly and I always scoff at these kind of ads in the newspaper. Porcelain fire-breathing dragon plate. Pink-Princess doll with real hair. This one we had to do a double-take. I personally like the star made of bones.