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what I find most frustrating is that finance institution buy extremely overpriced and brittle software from renowned vendors not because of technical excellence but for risk management: they want a supplier to blame when something goes wrong.

the problem with this is that nowadays suppliers are stronger in defending themselves from such blames than they are in writing good software.

furthermore, the software being sold is very pricey and the cost of customising it often exceeds the cost of the software itself.

then, 9 times out of 10 the issues lie in the customisations, and that doesn’t surprise, as the institution will be using most the custom parts as those are the ones they need most. here the vendors have even more grip in demonstrating that it’s the customer requirements’ fault, and not their crappy software, that confuses the concepts of “database” and “application server”.

I try to counter this by writing solid, robust software using open source components, giving back when possible, perfectly filling the company’s requirements, well integrated and reasonably cheap to maintain. slowly, this can help in abandoning vendors and building in-house know-how.

I find this crucial because the quality of software sold by some vendors is very very low, and getting worse.

I wrote a Ruby library[1] that builds on Active Record and implements SCD-Type 2 using updatable views and INSTEAD OF triggers.

It has its pain points, mostly related to how hackish the AR insertion is, but it works quite well and the approach ensures that any INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE triggers bookkeeping of the history tables.

[1] https://github.com/ifad/chronomodel

I also like bare-bones stuff, and I am currently evaluating this https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/json-formatter/bcj... that is fast, easy on the eye and minimal. Haven't reviewed the code tho.

try:

  git://github.com/{user}/{repo}.git

or

  https://github.com/{user}/{repo}.git

anyway, not working right now for me (Italy)

EDIT: working, give it 30 seconds to start.

Can you please remove the anchor from the submitted URL? Thanks.

video/image hosting is not the point, it's community that counts here: youtube is just a vehicle to deliver your video to more eyeballs, because poking around youtube is easier for the joe user, rather than poking around the 'net. also, as others have pointed out, bandwidth is cheaper for google rather than for the private VPS that hosts your site.

Jamendo is quite a different beast, because it's a CC label, not a music sharing/streaming medium.

Actually it uses the flex framework (as you can see by looking at the scrollbars and the tooltips) that then produces an edible binary .swf for the flash player :).

Back to the topic, as a music site developer myself, I can assure you that everything (except streaming[1]) you see on grooveshark can be implemented using XHTML, a JS framework (I love jQuery über alles) and an HTTP backend. Wheter or not do it depends mainly from the target of your audience and the browsers they use, because to achieve 100% browser compatibility, especially when dealing with older IE versions, imposes a bit of headbanging over their quirks and issues. Another point is performance: on older machines, animating big elements on the page (like grooveshark does) causes flicker and a clumsy experience for the user. The last point is maintainability and integration: after all, flash software is another piece of the stack you have to coordinate, implement, integrate and deploy.

So, it's a bit controversial which path to choose; on our project we're following a mix of the two, by reducing the flash implementation to the bare minimum to accomplish streaming, upload (ajax upload via iframe is a bit of a mess) and a set of JS interfaces to implement the rest of the interface via XHTML. Similar to http://playlist.com 's approach.

The last consideration that comes to my mind is purely ethical/political: I prefer to use open standards and contribute back to open projects via source code, and not be forced to use closed technologies and tools and contribute back via cash, having to read clumsy documentation, little opportunity to improve anything, and the list could go on and on.. :).

[1] Luckily this is gonna change with HTML5!

I may sound like an utopian, but I think that being satisfied in what we do and how we accomplish it is the only goal to target, to be happy and satisfied. One should always seek for happiness through efforts, no matter how hard it may seem: I believe that good ones will always give you back the same goodness you were able to spend, no matter how bad the context is.

I also know that not everyone likes to do its best, and many are simply looking for the "easiest" way, but this implies abiding to some kind of lunch bell, as you described. But you're not this kind of person: it seems that you're still able to dream and tend towards something better.

So, good luck with your future projects and give good karma, you'll receive it back! :).

Maybe because the average human is inherently lazy and doesn't want to re-learn how to use the new UI? Or maybe because the average human is pleased when something does never change? Or, maybe, because the average human loves being a whiner? :)

That's not true: he was able to write the right software at the right time[1], when nobody else had will/time/whatever to scratch their own itch. The Mongrel HTTP library is today the de-facto standard for running Rails applications, and on it companies like Engine Yard based their business.

Like was previously said in this thread, he's a passionate hacker, and puts his passion on his sleeve. While I don't particularly appreciate the excess of harsh in his posts, I consider it no different than Torvalds writing "You're full of shit" on LKML.

The main problem here is about the "people" perception about whate they find "written on the internet", and their constant need of finding an hero to follow: in this scenario, if you're a respected and known developer, you simply cannot ignore your influence on the "crowd" and you have to measure the harshness of your writeups.

I think that the one that best described this situation was Antonio Cangiano, on his blog post "Let's all grow up": http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/01/28/lets-all-grow-up

[1] http://markmail.org/message/g6e4loorw3p7plsk