If you've ever talked to me about my opinion on OpenID, you'll know that I don't exactly believe in it. Now it's not that I think any part of the technical implementation of OpenID is flawed in any way: that part of it is rock solid. My problem is how OpenID full on assaults user experience. If you choose… Keep reading
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Life is a lot like a box of chocolates. Or maybe it’s just a stream of consciousness. Little bits left along the path, lost in the woods. But someone picked up the bits and made them whole again. Welcome to Kyle’s life — streamlined.
Side projects, manifestations of ideas, and the general art of pursuing knowledge created these. Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, and a flurry of other acronyms power them.
These are my children left ’round the web.
I had the need recently to deploy a merb app. Since this whole project is about trying new things (merb, rspec, etc) I thought I might as well give Vlad a try. Unfortunately, as most things sysadmin go I ran into some bumps. So I thought I’d write it out so future googlers have less of a problem getting things going.
Now that I’ve gone and left my job, one of my mandates to myself was that I was going to take all of these random projects of mine seriously. So what’s the first step? I have to figure out a way to make at least some of these projects profitable. The first step in my mind is to try out private ad sales.
The idea of a design exercise is nothing new, but I recently read a tweet from Cameron Moll that made me rethink about how I really work through the design process.
When I first started programming, my only goal was to get things to work. Now that I’ve gone past how to get things to work, I’ve reached a new point in development: maintaining my own code. I never thought that things like documentation were important when you’re dealing with your own code. I mean, you know what you’re thinking, right?
One of the most interesting bits of information from SXSW for me was a small conversation I had while walking to Dinner with Jakob Heuser from Gaia Online. We were discussing frameworks and scaling, and more or less his opinion was that frameworks don’t scale. Don’t matter if it’s Rails, Django, Symphony — they don’t scale in a general sense. I agree with him completely, but let me qualify that a bit first.
A while ago I set myself on a personal mission to learn Flex. I know myself around HTML, CSS, and Javascript like a pro -- but to be honest I've never been a fan of overly "strict" programming environments like Flex. Actionscript 3 is a strongly-typed language, and the the rest of Flex is all XML files. It was a hard transition to me (being a huge fan of loosely typed languages like Ruby). As a result, I was having an increasingly difficult time picking up Flex — so I opted to pick up a book.
On July 10, the Smashing Pumpkins released the first album they've released in what feels like decades (oh, wait...). I desperately wanted to see them play with the opening tour, but despite the fact that they played for eleven days straight in San Francisco, the tickets still sold out within a few minutes and I missed my window. Show or no show, I picked up the CD the day it came out and overall I've been very pleased.
I first saw The Used play at the Boardwalk in Sacramento around the summer of 2000. It was one of the most memorable concerts of my life: a small club, tons of girls, three inches from the speaker and the stage, and a lineup that was unbelievably badass. At the time, The Used were just the third opening band of the night. NobodyZero (now defunct), some unmemorable band, The Used, and then finally Fenix TX headlining.
Almost a year ago The roots came out with Game Theory – which in my opinion has quickly become one of the best hip-hop records of all time. I'm not a huge hip-hop fan, and I don't claim to know the full extent of the scene. But I do know good music when I hear it, and this is damn good music.
The Shape of Punk to Come is a revolutionary album. Not only is it truly genre-bending, but it's a damn good album to listen to. I must admit, the first time I heard the album I was a skeptic. I just thought it was a bunch of crap thrown onto a CD. My mistake was listening to songs, and not the album as a whole.
On the web since ‘98, web professional Kyle Neath provides resources, tips and commentary on all things web. Here you’ll read about topics covering design, programming, copywriting, and information design.
To the left, you’ll find tips & resources related to web development, and up above you’ll find the most recent featured commentary. While you’re here, don’t forget to check out the reviews, Kyle’s stream, marks and of course his projects.
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All my little projects that I leave scattered around the web. Some for profit, all for fun.
