“Wisdom of Crowds” Needs a New Name.

Awhile back I wrote about the concept of wisdom of crowds. And I referenced a great explanation of the dangers of its extremes. After a bit of thought, I’ve determined that “wisdom of crowds” needs a new name. Or rather, we need to do a better job communicating its uniqueness from other types of group thought. “Mob rule” is a bad thing, and it sounds bad too. “Group think” is also bad, but it doesn’t sound as bad as “mob rule.” Mob rule isn’t wisdom, group think isn’t wisdom, and, quite frankly, we need to realize there is objective wisdom that “the crowd” misses.

Let’s not kid ourselves. A lot of us make unwise decisions every day. Just because there are more of us doesn’t mean we’re suddenly wise.

“The RPC server is unavailable” and “Access is denied” in Windows Printer Sharing

I really don’t like system administration.

I ran into an odd issue today with Windows Printer Sharing. My parents have a desktop with a USB-connected printer, as well as a laptop. I could connect the laptop to the shared printer just fine and print to it. However, whenever I would restart the laptop, I would get “The RPC server is unavailable” or “Access is denied” when trying to print again. After a lot of searching and checking the typical firewall and services settings, I discovered that the computers were simply in different workgroups. Once I changed the workgroup on the laptop to match the desktop, things worked perfectly.

Thought I’d post this in case anyone else on the Interweb has the same issue.

Rails Refactoring and Deprecation

I’ve been using Ruby on Rails exclusively for over a year now, but have used other web frameworks for longer periods of time (classic ASP, ASP.NET, and J2EE). Rails is unique in many ways, and if look hard enough online, you’ll find its qualities spelled-out for you.

Deprecation is one quality that isn’t spoken of much, but it’s one of my favorites. The Rails core team is adamant about doing things the best way possible. When it sees a better way of doing things, it immediately starts removing parts of the API that don’t meet that standard of perfection. Developers offload deprecated functionality into plug-ins that give teams time to migrate aging code, but the deprecated code doesn’t stay in the main code base for long.

The other frameworks I’ve used have kept deprecated API calls in for extremely long periods of time. Some I don’t think will ever disappear. These other APIs allow developers to continue using inefficient, poorly-designed, and overall bad code however long they want.

Rails isn’t simply doing things the best way possible, it trains its developers to do the same. I like that.