Jicksta.com

This feature has been in trunk for a while so it’s time to bring it into the limelight.

Let’s say you’ve a really fancy Ruby on Rails web application with which you wish to integrate your new Adhearsion app. Though you may only need five or so of the thirty models that exist within the app, they’re inter-related somehow with has_many :through, belongs_to and a dozen other SQL fragments sprinkled about. That’s no good—looks like it’s all or nothing. Oh, and you’ve eight Rails plugins installed, of which five heavily modify ActiveRecord’s internals for your obscure purposes. That’s no good, either. Looks like it all of Rails or nothing.

You can now do this “all of Rails” integration extremely easily in Adhearsion. When you create a new Adhearsion app with trunk, you’ll see the following option in config/startup.rb:

config.enable_rails :path => “/path/to/your/rails/project”, :env => :development

And voila! Just uncomment this line and point it to the appropriate path. Adhearsion will do the rest.

Still more features to blog about! Stay tuned…

I get dizzy when I think of the flash flood of memories 2007 has been. I remember what I was doing precisely one year ago as if it were yesterday:

Sitting in my cozy dormitory bedroom, the first signs of relief set in as the stretch lasting almost two months was coming to an end—I was tying up the loose ends of my first publicly released version of Adhearsion. The start of the stretch was marked by my irreverent albeit desperate sneaking into Astricon 2006, the big Asterisk conference held ironically just six miles away in downtown Dallas at which security was surprisingly lax. It was there that I first demoed an alpha of Adhearsion to respected players in the telecom industry. My demo’s reception motivated me to pursue Adhearsion further, potentially toward something big. Through connections established there, I was invited to the headquarters of Asterisk’s corporation Digium twice, wrote an article for Linux Journal magazine, and got my first notable Adhearsion speaking opportunity at Emerging Telephony 2007. That was the tipping point.

Since those days I’ve spoken at eleven more conferences and tech meetups, collected hundreds of business cards, written an Adhearsion chapter for O’Reilly’s Asterisk book, and visited three other countries and fifteen states on Adhearsion-related business. To afford the absurd amount of travel, I took up an interesting style of living I later labelled peer-to-peer living: I had no fixed residence and considered myself, basically, homeless. Throughout my travels I managed to develop a support network of individuals with couches to spare for a few days or a few weeks. Needless to say, this all came as a shock to this boy from Texas who had never been out of the South.

This fruitful year is now over, the name Adhearsion is more widely known and, as of last week, I live in a fantastic part of beautiful San Francisco. After twelve months of testing myself and countless days of personal reflection, I’ve confidently decided that Adhearsion is my career now.

Big ’08 holds a lot. In addition to continued development, I want to bring in sub-contractors to assist on increasingly substantial consulting projects and encourage others to start their own independent Adhearsion consulting practice. If you’re a Ruby developer either with VoIP experience or a genuine, keen desire to gain VoIP experience, talk to me. My email address is in the right column of this blog. If you’re a company needing a better phone system or a startup with some telephony component not yet developed, talk to me too and let’s see if using Adhearsion makes sense.

I’ll continue promoting Adhearsion in ways other than speaking at a dozen conferences. Think screencasts, video podcasts, writing, and a revamped website. Development will continue regardless of whether I have work. My first order of business is to get the version 0.8.0 gem out the door. For those that don’t want to wait, you can play with 0.8.0 in Adhearsion’s trunk.

Happy new year folks! Let’s make 2008 the year the telecom industry really changed.

The telephony industry sickens me. I make it a point to follow things closely. I sift through the nauseatingly boring Del.icio.us VoIP feeds, catching the occasional library I hadn’t seen before that mildly captures my interest. I hear that SuperBigComm has bought TinySmallVox every week or so. I subscribe to the feeds of the VoIP’s biggest bloggers (of which there are surprisingly few) and usually read their posts last, procrastinating the tedium. I don’t unsubscribe and keep the faith because I want to believe this industry is going somewhere.

But last night my feeds agreed with my doubts. Resounding through the VoIP blogosphere, O’Reilly announced they have cancelled their Emerging Telephony conference and blog. To help paint the picture, Emerging Telephony was widely considered to be one of the actually fun, innovative conferences every year in this space.

Therein lies the problem. Too little fun and innovation exists in this industry to make a full conference out of it.

Remember the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the omnipotent Q places all of humanity on trial for being a savage, inferior species? Q asserts that the years since the first time he placed humanity on trial has been squandered with virtually no progress toward enlightenment. I’m convinced Q was so pissed off because of this ridiculous blemish in our history. We are a savage, uncivilized race apparently.

This is a frustration I’ve had since I created Adhearsion. The framework’s name reflects my attempt to unify this godforsaken wilderness. I’m herding cats and fighting the good fight simultaneously.

But I’m not giving up yet.

There are many wonderful things brewing under the covers of the new version of Adhearsion. It’s a maverick, opinionated approach but it may just work. The effect could be truly disruptive:

• A significantly next-generation approach reaches hackers who can finally develop actual open-source VoIP applications.
• An open-source ecosystem forms.
• More people become professional VoIP developers.
• Additional global expertise increases the number of open-source VoIP applications.
• The ability to host the applications becomes predictable and inexpensive through standardization.
• Startups form around new applications.
• A few startups succeed and contribute back.
• Years of contributions improves software quality and lowers barrier to entry.
• Disruptively innovative companies catch big telecom companies with their pants down and chip away at their market share.

The fight will be a long and difficult one, though the next baby step is to get Adhearsion v0.8.0 out the door. Near the end of the this month I’ll outline the changes in the new version of Adhearsion which should see a release by RubyConf on November 4th, 2007!

On August 10th I gave a presentation about Adhearsion at the Ruby Hoedown conference. Despite only two hours of sleep the night before, I think it came out quite well.

The ConFreaks guys were there and recorded my presentation. It’s completely available online on their website here. It can also be downloaded in AVI format at 640×240 or 960×360.

Here are a few snapshots from my talk:

Poking through my del.icio.us web design feeds one early September morning, I stumbled across one site bookmarked with the description “CHECK OUT THIS GREAT DESIGN!”

Totally falling for Mr. CAPSLOCK’s effectiveness, I obeyed. “MindPetals.com, the young entrepeneur’s network” caught my eye and my eyebrows shot up. Coincidentally, this was just around the time I was forming my company Codemecca, making me a new, young entrepeneur.

I emailed Mind Petals’ owner Dave Askaripour and we’ve been keeping in touch ever since. He’s recently entered the printed newletter market and, for his first issue, he asked to interview me on the great growth of Codemecca since we first met.

The interview’s now on the Mind Petals website. It’s a good read – go check it out and snag his feed!

And I can’t wait. The conference is going down early next year and caters to the high-end Telecom world. The biggest names in the industry will be there and will get to see all the exciting work I’ve been pouring into Codemeccca. What a great opportunity!

I’ll be giving a ninety minute hands-on workshop showing why Adhearsion rocks by example of a fictitious new Web 2.0 service starting with VoIP integration. What’s more, speakers get free tickets. I had a blast at Astricon 2006 here in Dallas and ETel I’m sure will become a lifelong memory. Just looking at the lineup this year gets my mouth watering.

I’ll be holding a free Defeat DRM sticker distribution next Tuesday (October 3^rd) for those interested in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. Since there was such a demand in the Dallas area for stickers, the Free Software Foundation’s DRM Elimination Crew has sent me a roll of 500 warning labels and 200 other stickers for me to distribute around the metroplex.

I want to see some creative uses of these stickers next Tuesday. Here are a few ideas for those wishing to participate:

• Hand them out to shoppers going into electronic stores, talk to them about DRM, and ask them to wear the sticker whilst they shop – ask to take their picture wearing the sticker.
• Go into the store and hand them out to the assistants and say “Hi, I’m here with regional management, and I need you to put these stickers on all the Blu-ray DVDs we carry. Can you do that now please, it’s very urgent. We have a consumer inspection team arriving here in 30 minutes. When your done, come and see me, I will be in the office”
• Give them to people you see wearing the white ear buds. Tell them not to buy from iTunes.
• Put them on the Microsoft computers at work or school and let your colleagues know that their devices are infected by DRM.
• Give them to friends and ask them to do the same.

If you live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and this sounds like something you’d like to attend, visit our page on the Defective by Design website to sign up and keep up to date with what’s going on.

Everyone else can read more about this controversial subject by checking out this page about DRM.

Thanks to the University of Texas at Dallas’s Association for Computing Machinery, I will be teaching a Ruby seminar on campus. If you live in the Dallas area or would like to make it, contact me via email through Jicksta “at” Gmail.com.

The seminar is publicly described as “Learn to program with Ruby for fun, the web, and the enterprise” because I will be making the seminar useful for everyone. This includes everyone from the quintessential hacker programming simply for fun to the IT manager wanting to explore the benefits of using the Ruby technology.

I’ll be covering by example the language’s syntax, its idioms, its perks and what you need to comfortably get started coding. Each example will be taught for its usefulness, the breadth of knowledge required to understand it, and how well it applies to improving a business model.

If you haven’t checked out Ruby, this a great opportunity. Tell your friends and spread the word!

So Mike and I finally decided on an official company name after months of deliberation. Our choice was a possibility that’s been right in front of out face since the beginning, but the neurons apparently never connected properly.

We’re Codemecca.

This was a domain name I registered, oh, like two years ago based exclusively on my lust for its awesomeness. Until now it’s not been put to much use.

It’s actually the perfect name for us: coders drawing things together. No public word yet on our project, but it’s coming soon—mid-September soon.

Every programmer is guilty of it. Fumbling with someone else’s software we get egotistical, enraged, eccentric — call it what you want — and think Argh! I can write this better!

More times than not, these very programs are enormous software packages like the Apache web server, the Linux kernel, or actual programming languages themselves.

But love is blind so we open our text editors and begin pounding out the code. Weeks of somewhat fruitful work ensue until we crash and the ambition is lost. We realize You know, they really did do a good job writing that.

This is what I call the Caveman Complex. Mentally, most of us just can’t stand using someone else’s code not knowing what’s going on behind the scenes so we reinvent the wheel continuously. Perhaps it’s the hacker spirit wanting to learn how a system works. Wait, actually, it’s exactly that.

A perfect example of the Caveman Complex is the Linux operating system. Perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of the open source movement, Linux remains very ambiguous behind the scenes to most because any good operating system should. A software developer’s prime directive must be to make their system painless to use. So how do we hackers get our fix on the nitty-gritty? Why, we make our own Linux operating system! This occurs so frequently that many outsiders simply don’t take Linux seriously — with good reason. Frankly, no one should take these spin-offs seriously. Tying this segue back, these outsiders must understand how programmers think: with a Caveman Complex! Only Linux distributions backed corporately deserve trust. Everything else is just us goofing off. We’re programmers. We can’t help ourselves.

But how detrimental is this mentality? Conventional wisdom suggests reinventing the wheel is awful. Economically, this redundancy constitutes inefficiency. As the rambling futurist on his soap box would affirm, if we’re to continue our major leaps forward, our efficiency should be improving, not following the habitual tendencies of our engineers to toy around. Since we programmers are a key foundation on which technological progress depends, inefficient habits are absolutely taboo. Or are they?

I say this hacker spirit — this Caveman Complex — is as necessary to society as the developers themselves. These feelings of curiosity and exploration, albeit inefficient, are what make programming fun and, most importantly, are what teach programmers. Any seasoned coder will answer the question “How can I learn a programming language?” the same way: “Sit down and start coding!” What they code doesn’t matter as much as the fact they’ve actually begun the process. Mistakes must be made before they can be learned from.

So if our Caveman Complexes should be nurtured, how do we respond? Should executives financially fuel this drive to work on personal projects? Some do, but most shouldn’t have to. Those to whom programming comes naturally will do this unconditionally in their free time. In fact, in today’s competitive world, programmers are perhaps living testimonies to natural selection. Keep it alive or fall behind.

Programmers, to you I encourage tinkering. I encourage writing your own relational database management system when MySQL can outperform what you produce in every possible way. I encourage writing your own MP3 meta-data decoder when realistically you can’t allow for the tiny modifications made by the innumerable different encoders used over the years. I encourage writing your own Xorg window manager that might save you 0.2 seconds when you want to open a bash terminal. Society needs you to!

Always remember: Keep it alive or fall behind.