Apple’s new Airport Extreme could not be simpler. Plug it in, run the Airport Utility and viola, 802.11/n. Next thing was to attach a big USB drive to it. I plugged the drive in and up popped a message telling me a new volume was available. Typed in my password and blam, big ole network volume is online for anyone on the LAN. Sweet.

Like it or not, Adobe’s Flex platform is going to gain significant steam with developers over the next 12 months. That may sound obvious, but of course it can’t be, since I only realized it myself just recently. Many of you currently into Flex think it’s already everywhere, but it’s not. Flex developers are still few and far between. And many of them are rummaging around looking for their first real project.

I expect that most of the best new Flex developers are not going to come from a Flash background, they’re going to be dragged kicking and screaming from some other environment involving AJAX and Rails or Django. It’s the “kicking and screaming” part that’s going to delay the broader adoption of Flex. This is admittedly an uneducated hunch, but I’d wager that any sort of consistent corporate adoption of Flex will take at least 18-24 months. Tariq Ahmed’s post on the results of his Flex survey seems to offer some validation. His conclusions are interesting. And yes, why would I, a moderately advanced developer already comfortable and productive using something like Rails, be motivated to switch? As Tariq says, I’d go from “expert to newbie” for no immediately compelling reason. Add this bit…

“Flex is an interesting uptake experience. As a newbie, it’s amazing. With a few lines of code you can make these wonderful interfaces, but it doesn’t take much for a beginner to hit the massive 2 mile high brick wall if intermediacy.”

…and you’ve got some formidable speed bumps.

That said, Flex is coming and there’s nothing you can do about it. My interest in Flex really hit critical mass when reading about Apollo. Contrary to popular thought, every application known to man shouldn’t be moving all the way into the browser. I’m beginning to loath web apps. They continue to improve, but without really good OS integration (cross-app drag and drop, file system access, services) they’ll never have everything I need. With any luck Apollo will give us some of this. We’re already beginning to use Flex at Fusionary, and I doubt that will be slowing down any time soon. Should be fun, but I hate being a newbie again.

It’s the little things in a sysadmin’s life that can drive him to drink. Example? Certainly…

Been fighting a problem for days with Flash loading XML generated from a Rails app. Worked fine everywhere but IE 6. For some reason, the XML just would not load into a Flash movie. Tried everything, versions of edge Rails, Mongrel, Apache proxy issues, you name it. Running telnet sessions into Apache and watching headers fly by was where most of yesterday went. Decided to look at anything that might affect what was being sent over the wire and found that disabling compression (via mod_deflate) fixed things up nicely. So, moral of that story, if you’re proxying Apache to Mongrel and dishing up XML from a Rails app, don’t use output compression.

Second, I needed to configure SSL on an existing Apache 2.2 install. Built everything, reconfigured/rebuilt apache, added the directives to http.conf and poof! everything started segfaulting. On a whim I moved the LoadModule directives around and found that the mod_ssl directive must go before the php5_module loads. Like so…

LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so

LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

Sheesh.

Freebird may be a cliche, but damn! it’s still got a kickass guitar solo. And by the way, guitar solos are not self-indulgent tripe - they’re music and we could use a little more of that these days.

And someone has been kind enough to put together links to videos of the 20 greatest guitar solos ever.

Seth Godin, like pretty much everyone else, wants an iPhone. He also suggests that perhaps Apple hasn’t actually, as Mr. Jobs claims, reinvented the phone. He then presents a list of features that a truly reinvented cellphone would have. Odd thing is, I don’t want any of his suggested features. I think Apple has reinvented the cellphone not by introducing a bunch of new capabilities I may or may not need, but by dramatically improving the way I already interact with my phone. I hope this turns out to be the case. Reminds me of how I felt about the original iPod.

Jessica won the “Best Smile” award in her school’s mock elections. I thought I’d post the above image to make sure the whole thing doesn’t go to her head.

Tinderbox is driving me nuts. Try as I might I just can’t seem to get rid of it.

Why would I want to get rid of it? Well…

• It’s kind of ugly and looks like an unfinished Carbon app.

• It’s hard to learn.

• Getting data out of it is supposed to be easy, but isn’t.

• The website is really, really unattractive and difficult to navigate.

• Mr. Bernstein is, in my opinion, wasting time making a Windows version instead of making it a great Mac (Cocoa) app.

• There are no user forums, only a wiki which sucks as a communication tool. This limits the user community.

I hate to admit how many times I’ve thrown up my hands and decided to move everything to VoodooPad, Notebook, Journler, OmniOutliner, Curio, or any number of other sexy Cocoa-licious note-taking apps that come along.

And yet I always end up back in Tinderbox. Because…

• It never, ever crashes.

• It doesn’t use much RAM or CPU

• It’s a killer outliner, better than the rest

• The Map view works very well as a Mind/Concept mapping tool

• Search is instantaneous

• Agents and Prototypes and clones make it completely powerful

• It can do anything if you need it to, but stays out of your way when you don’t.

So it looks like I’m not leaving Tinderbox just yet, but I do have a couple of wishes…

• Please use forums instead of a wiki for community communication. I promise everyone will be happier.

• A better, no configuration necessary export. Make it work like VoodooPad or Notebook and don’t make me think about it if I don’t want to.

• Just a little UI work would go a long way. The map view needs some lovin’ and some drop shadows ala OmniGraffle.

• How about an easy-to-apply Strikethrough font option.

• It would be acceptible to not use Tinderbox to manage the Tinderbox web site if that meant it could get a much-needed design overhaul. There are cheap, crappy products that have significantly better web sites and that’s just wrong.

• Any improvement in OS (Mac OS that is) integration would be nice.

• Screw the Windows version

That’s it. I love Tinderbox.

Now that’s Christmas. I may have it made into one of those corporate inspirational posters - “Teamwork” or something.

“It’s a harp fer chrissakes!” was my reaction each time I’d read another reviewer fawning over Joanna Newsom’s Ys. What use could I have for a silly retro dandelion-and-fairies harp playing waif? Armed with an iTunes gift certificate and being a sucker for all things recommended, I decided to see what the fuss was about. Three minutes into the opening “Emily” I knew I was listening to something unique. Twenty minutes later, after “Sawdust & Diamonds” I realized I’d for the most part stopped breathing.

The album is on it’s 4th time through and I don’t see any reason to listen to anything else just yet. Like listening to someone read an ancient fairy tale while dreaming, it’s completely mesmerizing.

Told, the meteorite is the source of the light

And the meteor’s just what we see

And the meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite’s just what causes the light

And the meteor’s how it’s perceived

Awful atoll

O, incalculable indiscreetness and sorrow!

Bawl, bellow:

Sibyl sea-cow, all done up in a bow

Toddle and roll;

Teeth an impalpable bit of leather

While yarrow, heather and hollyhock

Awkwardly molt along the shore

This post from Kiko guy Richard White is a healthy read. In it he dispels the idea that once Google (Calendar) got into their game, folding was the only option. Turns out there are a lot of non-Google reasons for Kiko’s demise. As usual, I found a quote which relates to the less-is-more attitude I’m so fond of…

Too many features killed the cat. It didn’t look it at first, but if you played around with Kiko 1.0 for 15 minutes you found out that there was a lot of functionality under the hood. Problem was that we felt we needed to bring all of that functionality over to Kiko 2.0. I mean you can’t cut features between versions, right? Wrong. We should have cut features, probably about 40% of them and launched.