MixedContent

Depending on where one lives in the country, you may or may not be aware of the rise in popularity the single speed, fixed gear bicycle. For the uninitiated, this is a bicycle with one speed and a fixed drive, meaning every time your wheel spins around once, your pedal also goes around once. Often featuring no brakes, the rider stops the bike by simply locking up their legs, causing the back wheel to suddenly stop spinning, and the bike to skid to a halt. These are track bikes that are designed for the velodrome. On city streets in the Mission (in San Francisco - where I used to live), these types of bikes are so ubiquitous, it’s as if there are road blocks set up on major bike paths, turning away bikes with gears. “Sorry man, you need to have a fixie to ride through *this* neighborhood.”

But what’s going on here? Why on earth would hipsters in skinny jeans be riding these brakeless death traps through one of the most hilly cities in the world?

Riders will often justify their decision to ride a fixie by stating that “Fix gear bikes require less maintenance” (This is true, but you also have no brakes, so I feel the maintenance issue is a bit of a red hearing) or “The feel of the ride is unbeatable” (As long as you’re not going up hill, or trying to stop quickly), but really, I think something else entirely different is going on.

I have a hypothesis. To illustrate my hypothesis, consider the peacock.

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Male peacocks have incredible tail plumage in all kinds of bright, iridescent colors. These tail feathers serve no immediate practical advantage, and in fact, actually acts as a handicap. The tail feathers are essentially advertising to other peacocks, “Look. I have this ridiculous plumage that gives away my location to potential predators, and I’m still alive! Therefore, my genes must be very good. Want some of me? I know you do…”. For the peacock (and it’s tail feathers), it’s all about how much can you handicap yourself and still survive, because that’s how a peacock will attract the best mate. Check out Amotz Zahavi’s landmark paper in the Journal of theoretical Biology for more details.

Moving back to fixed gear bikes, the way I’ve started to look at the phenomena is that individuals - usually young males - are “handicapping” themselves by removing brakes and gears, and essentially advertising to potential mates “I have no gears, and no brakes. I live in the hilliest city in North America, and I’m still alive. I must rule. Want some of me? I know you do…”

So really, I think the fixed gear bike craze is simply the evolutionary process of sexual selection run amok.

Posted on: 09.12.06 | 3 comments

I’ve always been a fan of the “small pieces loosely joined” approach to building simple web apps. A little bit of something from here, hook it up to there, and voilà! Sometimes something useful can spring into existence.

With the coming ski season (which I’m really excited about) I was spending some time on the Whistler Blackcomb website checking out the conditions, and I happened to notice a few public data feeds. One of these feeds contains the status of all the lifts on Whistler and Blackcomb, so of course, I had to hook it up to Twitter. The WhistlerBot updates its twitter stream every time a lifts status changes, and from my visit to the ski hill last weekend, it seems to do so in pretty close to real time.

When I was on the hill, I turned on mobile notifications for just this account (so I don’t get distracted with other Twitter noise) and now my pocket will vibrate whenever the Peak chair changes from standby to open, for example. No one likes to ski in a tracked out bowl, right?…

While I was at it, I also threw up the slightly hilarious, but still useful isthepeakopen.com and gave the WhistlerBot its own home.

Hope other folks find these useful too.

Posted on: 09.11.17 | no comments

I recently launched a new ecommerce site using the open source package Magento. This is the first site I’ve worked on that uses Magento, so I thought I would jot down some of my early impressions.

- Tried the online demo, and loved the user experience and admin dashboard. Very polished UI for an Open Source project. (+1 for Magento)
- Huge download (-1 for Magento)
- Convoluted download process and scant details for the SVN checkout (-1 for Magento)
- The Zend framework. Magento is built on the Zend Framework, and in my opinion, the Zend Framework is like a hole in the head. Everyone has their favorite flavour of ice cream, so this is really just my personal preference, but coming from something like Rails to the Zend Framework is like running full speed into a brick wall. Does one really need an XML configuration file to point to the location of other XML configuration files? Yeeessh (-2 for Magento)
- Decent web admin tools to add products and create a catalog. Clients could (mostly) grok it. (+1 for Magento)
- Pretty straight forward to theme, although it could be easier. (+1 for Magento)

Totally subjective and largely meaningless score: -1 (Magento’s weaknesses slightly outweigh positives, in my opinion)

So in summary, Magento is a large, (overly?) complex code base with a great admin and frontend user interface. It’s fairly easy to skin, but I found developing custom functionality a drag. Keep in mind, this was the first Magento site I’ve built, and there’s always a learning curve for every project.

My biggest complaint though is something that I have trouble even articulating. It’s a “vibe”, if you will. Having worked on the Drupal project for a number of years, I have seen first hand how an open source project can (and should) be run. The Magento team could learn a lot from looking at the development processes that projects like Drupal and WordPress employ. For example, with Magento extensions, in most cases, it seemed to not be possible to download actual source code, but rather, you had to enter a key and then Magento would download the package for you. In almost all cases, it feels like the actual source code is kept away from end users. Where is the place to file, and track bugs against various extensions? Where can I browse the source code online? How can I contribute bug fixes? To me, an open source project should be more then trial ware, with an option to upgrade to a premium edition. Open source software is largely about community development, and I don’t see an active developer community hacking away on Magento.

Other alternatives: (open source) Ubercart, Spree (Monthly fee) Shopify, FoxyCart

Posted on: | 2 comments

Bob Lefsetz is nothing if not controversial. But you just can’t argue with the man, can you? His words have the unmistakable ring of truth. For example, his latest post on careers for musicians is awesome in it’s bluntness and totality - a must read - and is Lefsetz at his best.

Everything fast shortens the length of your ultimate time on stage. Every endorsement, every sponsorship, takes years off your career, just like smoking takes years off your life. Your audience needs to believe that THEY own you, not the man. That if you’re beholden to ANYBODY, it’s them!

Posted on: 08.07.03 | no comments

After the recent news regarding Metallica’s prima dona behavior, where they’ve forced bloggers to remove (positive) reviews of their new album, I’ve drafted the following chart to help my fellow geeks understand the lay of the land.

Metallica == Microsoft (closed, proprietary systems, active disdain for customers)
Radiohead == Apple (just works, listens to customers)
Trent Reznor == Linux (totally hackable, but can be tricky to configure)

Posted on: 08.06.10 | 3 comments