Joe Merante's Blog

Hadn't blogged in a while, this article using the feudal analogy for our relationships with Internet service providers seemed ripe for some quick, caffeinated midday comments. The article's main point is that we are merely vassals to our feudal big tech lords, hoping for the occasional mercy and protection engendered by trust alone, voluntarily benefiting from the convenience and redundancy of ubiquitous, mostly reliable service without the headache of managing our own security configuration. And most of us tend be ok with that or maybe even consider it progress. Agreed, so far. My primary gripe is the failure to analyze or contrast the companies' respective terms of service or actions with respect to very different products and relationships, which makes a scarier sum than the individual parts might reveal. It also misses the opportunity to point out areas most in n eed of change , not to mention many counter-examples of which the author must be aware. For example, he s...

All year I've been telling myself I should start writing about coding on this blog, whether specific work on different apps or helpful resources for Ruby, Rails and other adventures. I've been telling myself a lot of other things this year too! I've mostly documented and semi-organized what I've been working on, it's just a bit scattered. One ongoing set is the Prepared.ly wiki which I've been trying to complete for easier consumption and to document its various features so it's easier to redeploy. I've also listed and summarized some of the coding projects here . A feature request for the geribrewster.com online store came in, so I decided to make a Drupal custom module for it yesterday. It's posted on Github now, along with a related Rails app I've been playing with. The Read Me in the repository does a good job of explaining the business reason for it, and the code is commented with what's going on. More detailed coding posts to foll...