Install 64 bit Ruby On Rails and MySQL on OS X

because it's fast!

For a project that I am starting I wanted to use Rails and MySQL so I decided to install for source that I compile myself for both. It was amazingly easy and satisfying to have both compiled and installed on my machine for development. Hivelogic has some really simple easy to follow blog posts on how to do both. If you are wanting to compile and install either Rails or MySQL on your Mac from source code then I recommend you check them out.

Installing MySQL on Snow Leopard

Installing Ruby, RubyGems, and Rails on Snow Leopard

Ruby On Rails

Bike photo by piston9 / CC BY 2.0

Thoughts on Personalizing the Web Browsing Experience

Network WorldDave Kearns of Network World recently wrote an article titled “Personalizing the Web browsing experience” where he talked about what he had recently learned from Kynetx and shared his excitement for the future of context sensitivity. I thought it was a good article and wanted to share my thoughts in reply to his article.


“It’s really exciting to think about all the possibilities there are when you can create applications that act proactively based on contextual information that is available. Because the ability to create a contextually sensitive experience is soo new we are only seeing applications that are scratching the surface. We are in, what I like to call, the “baby sitting in a highchair throwing Cheerios” stage. As the concept of building a contextual experience grows and the technology that facilitates that spreads, we will see amazing applications that will blow our minds. The funny thing about all of this is, we will eventually look back on these times and wonder how we ever got stuff done with out context sensitivity.”

Geek and Poke Meets Kynetx

Geek and Poke

kynetx

One of my co-workers recently tweeted, “I really want to know how I missed this web comic. Hilarious!! http://bit.ly/7das6F“. That got me thinking about how much people do miss from their favorite comic sites or any site on the web for that matter. Of course you can subscribe to RSS and get all their updates but those who valiantly use and keep up with their feeds know how quickly it can become overwhelming. But what about all of the people who like sites or products but don’t know how to set up an RSS reader or who just don’t want to? How do you get your content to those people all the time without them having to type in your URL?

With Kynetx!!

With Kynetx you can customize the users experience on your website AND ANY OTHER WEBSITE YOU DESIRE!!

Are you getting excited yet? Are you listening or paying attention?! Are you thinking about the possibilities??!!!

In this example, if a user really loves the comic “Geek and Poke” why not make the content available to them anywhere they go on the web in unobtrusive manner? In fact, if you do it well, the users will be giddy with the results and love your product even more! It’s a little known secret that people actually like advertising. THEY DO! People love to buy stuff! What people actually hate is irrelevant and irritating ads that are in their faces. I took 3 sites and customized the users experience based on the context that they really enjoy the comic “Geek and Poke”.

  • Google.com
  • CNET.com
  • CNN.com

Here are the after and before photos of what the user will see as they visit these sites.

Geek and Poke on Google.com

Geek and Poke on Google.com

Geek and Poke on CNET.com

Geek and Poke on CNET.com

Geek and Poke on CNN.com using Kynetx technology

Geek and Poke on CNN.com using Kynetx technology

All the user has to do is download an Information Card into their Card Selector on their computer!

Check out this presentation by Kynetx to learn a bit more. (Make sure you watch it full screen. It looks much better!)

If you would like to try it out for yourself, drag this bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar: Geek & Poke or click to download the information card below to your card selector.

Geek and Poke Information Card

Geek and Poke Information Card

Just visit any of the three sites with the card installed or click on the bookmarklet while on that page and you to can see the magic happen. ; )

The Context of a StackOverflow Junkie

I have been having waaaaay to much fun since I got into Kynetx. Many of my friends have been asking me “what does Kynetx do?” and “what is the purpose-centric-context-sensitive web?”. Well, it takes a bit to explain so I’ll show you just a small glimpse of what it all means.

If you love stackoverflow.com then you know how helpful it can be when you are looking for answers to your programming questions. Why not, if you are a StackOverflow fanatic, have all of your search results  augmented for what you like? Here is a drop dead easy way to tell your browser, “Hey! I really like getting search results for Stack Overflow so bring them to my attention.” Now that is context sensitivity! You can do the same thing for anything you like and it’s easy but the awesomeness doesn’t end there! Search result augmentation is just child’s play compared to what could be done. We are going to be seeing a complete rewrite of the advertising industry as we know it! Now you need to see this in action for yourself. You will need 2 things: 1) a card selector from Azigo 2) the information card for StackOverflow

Mac AzigoLite Card Selector

AzigoLite Card Selector

StackOverflow Info card

StackOverflow Info card

Install the card selector, import the info card into the Azigo card seloctor and away you go. Now open up Firefox and do a google search for What’s your most controversial programming opinion?

Instead of the plain Google results you are used to, you now get a stack overflow icon to the right of each result that is from a stackoverflow.com domain!

google_resultsThis was all done with 11 lines of Kynetx code. Like I said before, this is just the beginning. We can write code that can put anything anywhere we want based on what the user wants. I plan on writing a Kynetx app that will place my latest blog posts on the front page of cnn.com for my parents so they can keep up with what I am doing when they go get their news.

From the beginning, billboards, newspapers, radio, and tv advertising has been a shotgun affair. Advertisers and companies broadcasting their ads to anyone and everyone they could. We, the users, have had to suffer through decades of irrelevant and poorly targeted advertising. Kynetx is bringing to the table the technology needed to turn the tables for all of us to rise up and take control of the advertising that we see. I have come to learn that people don’t really hate advertising, we just don’t like irrelevant and obscene advertising. Blasted advertisements are ineffective mostly because they lack the ability to understand the context of the receiver. If you can get people to willingly subscribe to advertising that they want… well, then you have something! I know this has been short and probably all over the place so let me share one more example that happens to be the first Kynetx app that I wrote.

Being able to keep everyone in a company motivated and tuned into the same goals can be a task to say the least. You could blast out emails, bring it up in meetings and blah blah blah but that sucks and it doesn’t work that great. What if every employee’s browser knew that they were an employee and injected a slide-out tray with the company goals and up to date progress for those goals while they were surfing the web? I wrote a Kynetx app for that! It only shows up on a few domains and allows each employee to see our Key Performance indicators. I also threw in there at the bottom a notification of how many tweets mentioning the company and how many questions had been asked on our stackexchange site since the day before. CONTEXT RULES!

kynetx.comexpandedThis is just the beginning and I have done a terrible job of explaining it to you so I hope you will ask lots of questions and come back for more posts explaining and showcasing the awesome power of the purpose-centric-context-sensitive web.