John Topley’s Weblog

I just got a skeletal Ruby on Rails application running on a Java Virtual Machine using JRuby:

—This is running on Windows XP which is running in a Parallels VM which is running on my Mac. To recap: it’s Ruby on Java on Windows on Mac OS X. Who could have predicted that a few years ago! Next steps: hook up a database and try to deploy a Rails application to a servlet engine. I think this could be very useful in future!

I absolutely love this spoof commercial from the Rails Envy guys, so I make no apologies for embedding it here in case you haven’t seen it yet!

I just noticed something that Flickr got exactly right—you don’t have to give photos a title. My process for using Flickr is usually:

1. Upload a batch of photos to my account, marked as private
2. Use the Organizr (did they drop that name?) to add the photos to a new set, or an existing one
3. Go through the new photos adding any individual tags as appropriate
4. Make the photos that aren’t really bad public and try to come up with a title

It’s that very last step that I find really increases the cognitive load; so much so that I often just give lots of photos the same title. I can’t quite bring myself to have public photos with titles like IMG_0970.JPG. I got to thinking that I never had to give physical photographs a title when I put them in an album, so why should Flickr make me do so? Then I tried it, found out that I don’t have to and smiled. Expect to see lots of anonymous photos in my Flickr photostream in future.