Bittorrent.com, the first endeavor in legalizing Bittorrent, launched recently. I was pleasantly surprised that they didn’t put a really large badge on the frontpage saying, “if you’re not in the US, please leave.”

Following the example of the ever successful iTunes Store most, maybe all, of the purchasable video content is marked ‘US only’. Alas. Not deferred by the tag I tried to purchase something by clicking one of the big red ‘Buy’ buttons. Then I found out how they secured the shop against non-US customers.

I could really see myself renting Clockwork Orange for 3 bucks, I hope they fix the form validation when they start selling content to the rest of the world. And when they’re done fixing the validation they might also want to look into the other slight problem.

Again a great meeting. I was amazed to see how much Rails is being used these days.

A little less than a year ago at the first meeting, only a handful of the developers visiting were using Rails professionally. This time I not only wasn’t able to find anyone who was not yet getting paid to write Rails code, but I also talked with folks from three different startups using Rails; soocial, SugarStats, and Wakoopa.

The last few weeks we noticed the dreaded question marks on our sites running against MySQL 5.0. We thought we did everything to make sure our servers, databases, tables, clients and connections understood UTF-8, but somehow connections to the database were reset back to Latin1 after some time.

Instead of trying to fix the problem in Rails/Ruby/libmysql I decided to squash the problem in the MySQL server configuration. By default we were seeing this:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character\_set\_%';
+--------------------------+--------+
| Variable_name            | Value  |
+--------------------------+--------+
| character_set_client     | latin1 | 
| character_set_connection | latin1 | 
| character_set_database   | latin1 | 
| character_set_filesystem | binary | 
| character_set_results    | latin1 | 
| character_set_server     | latin1 | 
| character_set_system     | utf8   | 
+--------------------------+--------+

So I set the following in /etc/mysql/my.cnf:

[mysqld]
character-set-server = utf8

[client]
default-character-set = utf8

Which forces all the encoding to go to UTF-8 by default:

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character\_set\_%';
+--------------------------+--------+
| Variable_name            | Value  |
+--------------------------+--------+
| character_set_client     | utf8   | 
| character_set_connection | utf8   | 
| character_set_database   | utf8   | 
| character_set_filesystem | binary | 
| character_set_results    | utf8   | 
| character_set_server     | utf8   | 
| character_set_system     | utf8   | 
+--------------------------+--------+

In the latest Venture Voice episode Fred Seibert talks about Channel Frederator. A little ashamed never even having heard of what sounded like a really cool cartoon channel, I immediately checked it out when I reached the office.

After watching the first few minutes of what looks like it’s supposed to be a great cartoon I gave up in disgust. If you ‘really love cartoons and the people who make them’ (as they say on the about page), then why do you make them look this awful?

Heavy combing (‘hmm, I wonder what this de-interlace checkbox is for?’) with lots of low-bitrate encoding artifacts on top. Yuck.

Granted, you can download a higher bitrate mpeg-4 version that looks better although it still has the combing artifacts.

We’re very happy to welcome Norbert Crombach to the Fingertips team. He started this morning.

Norbert has been working with Ruby on Rails since the very first public release when a good friend – who has since moved to Io – convinced him Ruby really was better than Perl.

Norbert always struck us as a talented and extremely bright developer who seemed to be doing very well on his own. He did however get fed up with the business side of running his own company, which made him decide to join us so he could spend more time doing actual development work.

For the next few months Norbert will be working remotely from Eindhoven while he’s trying to find a place to live here in Amsterdam.