Thanks to Amit and the crew at Photojojo, I ran across this video / presentation from this year’s SIGGRAPH.

Rizr launched this for you to play with it as well. And here is the original paper: Seam carving for content-aware image resizing [20 MB PDF]

Very cool!

I’m migrating one of my main e-commerce sites from php to Rails. Coming from a few years of Java and php makes me really appreciate this framework’s rapid development cycles, as well as strict MVC approach.

Note: this is a technical post, it assumes you’re interested in, and familiar with Rails.

Rails wants to be RESTful. Many sites and books go into depth explaining REST. Last year’s Railsconf keynote by DHH can give you the big picture of CRUD and RESTful applications. (Be sure to follow along with the pdf slides, while you watch the video).

Look at an existing mature project (Beast) to learn how to make RESTful models

Nitty gritty RESTful implementation details have been hard to find. So I started searching out open source projects that are known for good design. And I read the code.

Beast is a forum program written in Rails by Rick Olson and Josh Goebel. Best of all, it’s a great example of a REST application.

I’m a visual person, so I created the chart below to help me get the hang of what the Models and relationships look like in Beast. Big bold squares are actual database backed objects. Dotted squares are just regular models.

Please contact me if you catch an error or omission.

Here’s how you use the diagram

Right now, browse here: http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/beast/trunk/app/models to the Subversion source of Beast. Back already? My you’re fast. Read over the different model objects. See how they relate. Think about what’s been abstracted into additional Resources, rather than creating actions willy nilly in the controllers.

Then check it out and run it in your local environment. Even if you couldn’t care less about the (quite nice) forum software that it is, it’s good to learn by taking it for a spin.

But I think I need more actions than CRUD gives me!

As DHH said in the 2006 Railsconf keynote, sometimes you think you need another non-CRUD verb to your controller. Say you have a Forum that has Users and Topics. Some users want to monitor topics. At first blush, you may want to add an action to Topic. You’d then post to /topic/monitor/123 to start monitoring topic 123.

There is another way.

Relationships, events and states can all be models. When a new topic is to be monitored, you’ll GET to /monitorships/new to get the new Monitorship object form. Then POST to /monitorships to actually create it.

Models are more than things.

In college I was fortunate enough to fly - and float - on NASA’s “Reduced Gravity Student Flight Opportunity Program” (R.G.S.F.O.P. for …short). Basically you get in an airplane and climb and dive from 24,000 to 34,000 feet. The peaks of this roller coaster ride create weightlessness… watch the video for an explanation and more.

Yes, this is a little off topic from my usual investing podcast. But isn’t this NASA program awesome? We showed this video to several hundred students in elementary and high schools. I think inspiring students to study hard, technical topics is a wonderful thing for any country’s educational system.

-JAW
I’ve been wanting to upload this for a year now, and I finally got to it. If you like what you see.. leave me a comment. I’ll post more videos. (-; And thanks to NASA, our many, many, many, sponsors, as well as Professor Tan!

International issues often seem very far away. Yet amazing and groundbreaking things are happening… such as the following.

Mike Fay flew over Africa at 500 feet and took 92,000 pictures. My friend Michael the pilot and film school student told me about this.

Fay wants to convince policy makers to invest in natural resource management for the promotion of peace. Sounds odd? Perhaps not. He alleges that Darfur, Rwanda, and many other troubled areas in Africa have resource depletion as a hidden cause. Would convservation help preserve peace and prevent human rights abuses? Read the article here, or watch the really, really good and short video here.

I like to look a bit more in what he has done. And how he arrived at this incredibly fascinating position in life.

“Fay drummed up support from various sources—the Human Footprint lab at WCS, the WILD Foundation, the Bateleurs (an Africa-based organization of bush pilots volunteering for conservation), and, as chief financial sponsor, the National Geographic Society.”

I find it interesting who he got involved… and the varied life stories of the people behind; the pilot slash optometrist and the Mario Scherer pilot slash Kosovo war crimes investegator.

“Fay arranged collaborations wherever possible with local conservationists, field scientists, or national agencies, assisting them with their aerial-survey needs as well as adding data to his own comprehensive trove.”

In order to be successful anywhere, you must arrange collaborations.

He also used some awesome technological mashups such as geotagging the photos, saving them to a tree terabyte drive on the plane, and using a Tablet PC to annotate them during the flight.

Post your comments on what you think about this guy, his political ambitions, or the breathtaking pictures/videos.

And please, take a few seconds to look at the video.