I’m currently sitting in the Denver international airport after a great Titanium lab session at 360iDev - horrendous network connectivity aside, it was a good event and we had several people stop in over the 4 hour session. We went over the basics of Titanium Mobile and talked about the benefits of Titanium even for grizzled iPhone development veterans.

My favorite story of the event is a student who stopped in - a college age developer named Connor. Connor works with his brother and father in a family-owned web development consultancy called Freshtaps. How great is that? I hear the family that codes together stays together. He and his family are primarily front-end HTML/JavaScript and UI designers, but were looking to get into iPhone development because they are getting opportunities from clients to build apps for the platform.

With Titanium, Connor was able to start hacking an iPhone app right away using the skill set he already has. For Freshtaps, that means that they can pursue development opportunities themselves that they would have otherwise needed to contract out. Their market gets much bigger when they can build cross-platform mobile applications for iPhone and Android (and soon more platforms), which means more opportunities to grow their business.

Seldom do people in today’s diverse economy get to see the direct benefit of their product to other people, so I feel very fortunate to have met Connor. My hope is that Freshtaps can use Titanium to make the most out of their family business. Good luck guys!

Feel free to play the video below for dramatic effect while reading this post.

So if you’re in any way connected to the Ruby development community, you’ve heard about the sudden departure of the enigmatic and eccentric _why from the whole of the internet, deleting his web sites, code repositories, and other works overnight. Especially among my esteemed colleagues in the local Ruby community (pride of Mongolia!), there’s been a heated moral debate over his actions. Should we should consider _why a self-centered ass for taking his ball (meaning source code of course - like programmers know what a ball is…) and going home? Should we simply be grateful for the time we had with _why?

On that question I am mostly ambivalent, since when you get something for nothing it is difficult to criticize the means in which it is provided. Was it kind of dick move to abruptly can several popular open source projects and resources with no warning? Yes. Were we lucky to have _why’s code, writings, and other works at all? Yes. Both points of view are in my mind totally valid.

What the whole situation highlights is the fluid, alpha status of so many Ruby open source projects. Take a look at your Rails project today - how many gems do you depend on that are on version 0.x? How many gems or plugins that you depend on have a single maintainer? My guess is that between both questions, the answer is at least one or two. This is probably due in large part to the simple fact that Ruby and Rails are experiencing a relatively recent surge in popularity, and for that reason many derivative works are also young. In time, I would expect that much of the fragmentation and confusion in the Ruby open source community will dissipate - in fact, that process has already begun.

In any event, _why’s disappearance serves as a cautionary tale that any developer working with open source (especially Ruby) needs to be aware of, myself included. Maturity and community are important considerations when deciding what code goes into your project, because tomorrow _why, Jamis Buck, or mislav might not be there to do your work for free.

I recently ran into a fun problem as I was using jQuery to parse an XML document that contained namespaced nodes. I first tried something along these lines: $(xmlDoc).find("namespace:tag").text();.

FAIL. This shouldn’t work since : is a special character in jQuery selectors. So as per the instructions in the Selectors documentation, I escaped the colon in the tag name: $(xmlDoc).find("namespace\\:tag").text();.

FAIL. Using jQuery 1.3.x, this fails in all WebKit browsers. WTF? After some Googling, I figured out a round-about way to get at this tag using an attribute filter for nodeName:

Attribute filters, FTW! Hopefully if you find this post first, it will save you some time.

Incendiary comments and misinformation have been flying from the left, right, and center as the congress and President Obama try to extend health insurance to those 46 million Americans who lack health care coverage, as well as improve the quality and efficiency of the health care system. Notwithstanding the ludicrous claims by some that Obama and the Democrats intend to institute a forced euthanasia program on our seniors, there are plenty of legitimate counter arguments and cautions to consider during this process. In particular, many folks (on a sliding scale between the anti-socialist paranoid and the fiscally conservative) are concerned about a public health insurance option.

One criticism of a public health insurance option is that it will force private vendors out of the health insurance marketplace. The argument here is that with a government-run health insurance option, private insurance vendors will be slowly forced out of business because they can’t compete with an insurance program that is subsidized or paid for by the taxpayers. After all, how can you compete with free (or at least, very very cheap)? While I respect that this criticism is based on a particular view of the economy and not the mad ravings of a cable news pundit, I don’t think the facts support this assertion.

For starters, a government-run, non-profit public health insurance plan will not be free to its members. People participating in the program will need to pay premiums to support it, although I would be surprised if there weren’t some kind of ‘pay what you can afford’ dimension to the public insurance option. We can assume it will be affordable to many Americans (why have one at all if it were not?), but it certainly won’t be free.

But even if the public insurance option were bankrolled at 100% by the taxpayers, the private sector competes with free or cheap government services (and effectively!) all the time. Our education system is one example. While the government provides free and/or cheap primary, secondary, and post-secondary educational opportunities for all Americans, private institutions can and do compete against public schools all the time. How? By providing a service that is in some way superior or differentiated when compared to the service provided by the government. And in so doing, those institutions have needed to improve the quality of their offerings and optimize the way they do business in order to compete with the government’s free option.

Now I should say that I am not holding up our public education system as a model of government efficiency - far from it. I am merely demonstrating one example of how the private sector continues to compete with affordable (in this case, free) public services.

The point here is that businesses in the private sector have to compete with free (and cheap) all the time, and not just with government competitors. The technology-oriented readers who are the primary audience for this blog can attest to that. Microsoft Office competes pretty well against Google Docs, I would argue. Apple happily dominates the over $1,000 laptop market as Toshiba churns out $300 Windows PCs. Scrappy little Oracle is holding its own against Sun/MySQL. It’s not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle compete against vendors who provide similar products cheaply because (they would argue) they provide a better value for many customers.

If insurance companies fear the public option, it is because they aren’t prepared to increase the quality of their services or optimize their business to compete against a low-cost vendor. If they do those two things, then they will survive just fine. If they don’t… well, we’re probably better off without them.

UPDATE: I should say that while the content of this post hardly breaks new territory, this is my on the record response to some friends of mine who routinely mock my Apple fanboy status and ask why I overpay for hardware.

Over the last few months, Microsoft has been airing ads touting the value of PCs as compared to ‘expensive’ Macs. I applaud the effort from a marketing perspective, as they could not allow Apple to dominate the airwaves with their clever series of Mac versus PC ads. The main thrust of the ‘Laptop Hunter’ ads is not to sell the PC experience, but rather to promote the value you are getting by choosing a PC. Most consumers you talk to will tell you off the cuff that a Mac is more expensive than a PC, but what does ‘more expensive’ really mean? Is Apple just inflating the cost of their hardware because they feel their designer label is worth it?

The answer of course is no - while Apple hardware starts at a much higher price point than many Windows-based laptop computers, a PC with similar characteristics to a Mac will cost almost the same. For demonstration purposes, I set out to build a PC that matched the characteristics of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. To compare, I spec-ed out a Dell Studio 15 laptop and an HP dv6t series laptop using their websites’ respective configurators. I got as close to the same rig as I could, trying to get the little details right like the backlit keyboard, the right processor and options, etc. Here’s what I came up with, reporting the major ‘retail’ specifications:

13-inch MacBook Pro ($1,199)

• Processor: Core 2 Duo (2.26 GHz, 1066 MHz frontside bus)
• Hard Disk: 160GB 5400rpm
• RAM: 2GB (1066MHz DDR3)
• Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce 9400M (256MB shared memory)
• Wireless Support: 802.11n
• Battery: 60w Lithium Polymer battery (~7 hours of life)
• 13” display

Dell Studio 15 ($1,019 after $243 ‘savings’)

• Processor: Core 2 Duo (2.4 GHz, 1066 MHz frontside bus)
• Hard Disk: 500GB 5400rpm
• RAM: 4GB (800MHz DDR2)
• Graphics: 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4570
• Wireless Support: 802.11n
• Battery: 85 WHr Lithium Ion Battery (9 cell) (~5 hours of life)
• 15” display

HP dv6t series ($1,017.99 after $150 ‘savings’)

• Processor: Core 2 Duo (2.26 GHz, 1066 MHz frontside bus)
• Hard Disk: 320GB 5400rpm
• RAM: 3GB (DDR2)
• Graphics: Built-In Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD
• Wireless Support: 802.11n
• Battery: Lithium Ion Battery (12 cell) (~7 hours of life)
• 16” display

The PC build outs might at first seem like clear winners for a couple of reasons:

1. They feature larger numbers in the RAM and hard disk category
2. They feature larger displays
3. They are ~150 dollars cheaper

In terms of price point, they certainly have the Mac beat, albeit by a relatively small amount. And the hard disk size difference is certainly striking, but with disk space as cheap as it is today, color me unimpressed by that difference. But despite the larger displays, hard disks, and RAM totals, both PCs feature lower quality, slower performing RAM, batteries that either don’t last as long as the Mac or adversely affect the laptop’s form factor, and inferior graphics card technology. By comparison, the Mac features high quality components across the board. Even on paper, the value difference in terms of dollars spent is almost a wash.

Of course none of this takes into account the more intangible elements of hardware selection. I recently went PC shopping with my Dad (pushing 60 now), and while we ended up buying him a $300 Toshiba laptop that served his modest computing needs nicely, he very badly wanted to go with a Mac. He appreciated the quality of its physical construction and was enamored by the design of OS X. His exact words were “I knew it was a better computer before I turned it on”. Well said, old man.

While it is certainly possible to buy a cheaper PC than a Mac, you can’t find a PC of comparable quality for much less, even when just considering on-paper descriptions of the hardware. When you start to factor in the quality of the overall user experience, the difference comes into focus quickly.