RjSteinert.com

I steer clear of IDEs with feature sets that only end up slowing down development time because of the system footprint they have. When I spotted the drupal6complete plugin for Vim I feared it might slow down Vim. I gave it a few tests and I've found a negligible footprint with the drupal6complete plugin added. Whenever developing in Drupal I usually have a browser window open with api.drupal.org open but with drupal6complete, it may replace up to 90% of my visits to api.drupal.org. I'm looking forward to seeing if it helps speed up my development in the next few weeks. If I like it I may take the time to set a plugin up for Drupal 7.

UPDATE: It looks like Apple is serving HTML5 players if the browser you are using supports the h264 format natively. The Quicktime Player is a fall back if the format is not supported. Thank you to anonymous for clearing this up. Also, thank you for all the attention from HN, I had 2,000 unique visitors yesterday :).

Today in my RSS reader I saw a link to the iPhone 4.0 official video and I thought, "Oh boy eye candy!" What I got was a big fat "Download Quicktime to view this video" message. My heart sank. Not because I wasn't going to be able to watch the video on my unsupported Linux platform, but because it was suddenly clear that Steve Job's rejection of proprietary web standards (Flash) was completely selfish. Who is he to criticize Adobe for promoting a proprietary web standard and then shove his own proprietary video player down consumers' throats?

The Federal Government is the worlds largest consumer of information technology and yesterday they announced they would be moving Recovery.gov to a 'cloud', thus saving taxpayers an estimated $750,000 during this budget cycle. That's an impressive number but... which cloud are they moving it to??? Does the Federal Government have their own... designated cloud?? Is a designated cloud really a cloud?

Read Vivek Kundra's (U.S. Chief Information Officer) post here

From my weekend of hacking for Sunlight Lab's Great American Hackathon I built a plugin for jQuery that allows you to take any data source, any graphing library, and output the data using one jQuery.graph() function. A great use case for this plugin is for mashups with multiple data sources and the need for many ways to graph that data. The catch is, the only supported data source is the EPI API and the only supported graphing library is Flot :). To move forward on this project we'll need a lot more people to write data and graph adapters for the jQuery.graph() function to use. I have no immediate need myself to write adapters but will be using the jQuery.graph() framework for future projects. I'm crossing my fingers you'll consider using it too so every time we need to use a new graphing library we don't have to repeat the legwork of forming our data into each library's own picky way of accepting data. Less Data Manipulation! More Beer!

• Check out the jQuery Graph's project page on GitHub

Back in December of 2009 Joe Mayer created a database and API to access the Earth Policy Institute's data for the Sunlight Lab's Great American Hackathon. I had the chance to help out by troubleshooting cross domain request issues and created example graphs using the Flot javascript library for the jQuery javascript library.

In particular I graphed wind and photovoltaic energy production over time for a handful of the top producers. I found that in recent years the U.S. had pulled ahead as the top producer of wind energy (as of 2007) but we are way behind in photovoltaic energy production (as of 2008). Note the data is not per capita which leads me to the conclusion that Germans and Spaniards must be walking around with solar panels on their heads... Seriously though, we can do better.

It just occurred to me that since you can manage the position of a View between fields on a node type when using the "Views Attach" module, it could more aptly be named the "Views Field" module (or Views CCK if you want to incorrectly call something CCK but give Drupal 6 people a good idea of what it does).

In the View:

On the corresponding content type's Manage Fields screen:

Two weeks ago I was reading another Drupal optimization article and then a Mozilla post on their JIT (just in time) javascript compiler for Firefox when I had a brief moment of clarity. Why the hell isn't there a PHP compiler out there? A quick Google search later I found a handful of PHP compilers. Ok...

Debating the merits of Ruby vs PHP with a friend a few weeks earlier, my friend made the point, "You're going to hit the wall a lot faster with a noncompiled language." (Note that Ruby is an interpreted language but they do have some successful JIT compiler projects). While websites like Facebook have proved that websites running PHP can be scaled, I know plenty of Drupal sites that could use a speed boost. So why aren't these compilers being used I ask? Well, the logical conclusion could be perhaps be that PHP is not necessarily the bottle neck of on most site's system. In my experience more often MySQL has actually been my bottleneck, but PHP still takes a slice of the cake. If PHP could run faster, why the hell not compile it?

Well, Hallelujah our prayers may be answered thanks to Facebook who reportedly has rewritten the PHP runtime. There is some speculation out there as to exactly what that means, but the consensus is leaning towards a legit PHP compiler.

The CleanTown.org grant application for Knight Foundation's 2010 News Challenge has been made public on NewsChallenge.org. Please show your support for the project by giving it high ratings! :-) The formatting on the News Challenge website is a little wacky so I posted the application on CleanTown.org.

CleanTown.org is officially coming out into the open. CleanTown.org has a grant application going public soon for the Knight Foundation's, 2010 Knight News Challenge and efforts are ramping up for private Beta Testing. Check out the full post on CleanTown.org.

I found an interesting post from Paul Lutus, the author of Apple Writer. I enjoyed reading about how he preferred living in the woods and his speculations on lost human interaction. In his last section he argued the following point:

"I believe the computer age favors the individual and that resistance to the individual work style is the last gasp of the dying industrial age."

I disagree with Lutus that working in teams is dying work style. Computers, especially since the popularization of the Internet, have enhanced our ability to communicate thus making collective efforts far more effective than ever before. While an individual's efforts can benefit through productivity by their very own way of doing something, the Internet allows us to collaborate on a mass scale.

We make sense of this massive collaboration by setting standards and guidelines. Take for example a team of 20, 5 of those people may find those guidelines unacceptable thus sacrificing productivity of the whole team. But in a group of millions, like we have on the Internet, you will find thousands of people who find those guidelines acceptable thus allowing thousands of individuals to work harmoniously together.