Pragmatic Paddy

I was watching the “Sexy Back” video today. I thought that a femaile sung the song, apparently not. So I did a search about the song’s production. I ran into this site Pro Audio Review. The site details the song’s production. Who knew such a site exists.

Most programmers I know hate the term web 2.0 .   It sounds like something a sales guy would say.  I have seen ads for programmers that say “If you love what web 2.0 can do, but hate the term, we are the place for you”.  It just all sounds so synthetic.

There is new stuff happening with web apps.  There is more participation now then there was in the late 90′s.  The UI is better.  Tech people like all that, but why don’t they like “web 2.0″?

Web 2.0 is a finite judgement of something that is very fluid.  In fact one of the hallmarks of web 2.0 apps is there lack of version numbers, constant revision and improvement.  The term is out of place, something out of the last decade when MBA’s decided what a product would be, in total contrast to communities and user generated content.

It’s painful, very painful.  I need to get better with the command line client, but I still miss Tortoise.  SCplugin simply doesn’t work on Macintel, not even the pre-compiled nightly build.  For a while I used svnX but I’m still not that impressed with it, because its a standalone application.  A friend recomended smartSVN a standalone java app, I haven’t tried it yet.

For now I am using tortoiseSVN under windows on my shared folder.  Yes it is an utterly inellegant solution.  Yes I’m paying 256 + megs of ram just for a version control client.  But most importantly, YES VERSION CONTROL IS THAT IMPORTANT.

Right now I’m thinking of writing my own tortoiseSVN clone with applescript and shell scripts.

In my web 2.0 class at Cooper Union, we have talked about what enabled web 2.0,  Sanford’s argument is Moore’s law.  I have a slightly different take.

None of the things we are doing with web 2.0 are particularly new in computers (other than video), what is new is the medium.  Computers could drag and drop graphical elements in the 80′s, they could communicate with one another in the 70′s and the 80′s, they could accept user generated content in the 70′s (think data entry clerks typing into terminals connected to a mainframe).  Hardware wasn’t the primary limiting factor preventing web2.0 type apps in the mid 90′s , programmers were.

Programmers had a lot to get used to with the web in the mid 90′s, writing portable code was more important than ever before (HTML/Javascript) and there was a whole wealth of possibilities that most programmers hadn’t wrapped their minds around yet.  Some were there, Slashdot especially pops to mind.  But on the whole it took them a while to familiarize themselves with the concepts of interactive community oriented sites, and get the basics firmly established (dynamically generated pages, web servers communicating with databases).  Once they did, and saw other people building web 2.0 type apps they said “Hey this isn’t that hard, I can do that” and they did, thus we have now have a lot of web 2.0 apps now.

I have stopped procrastinating… here it is

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