[update: next hearing on the case is scheduled for 2008/01/17. looks like yet another pre-trial hearing before the big show. justice moves slowly in this case.]

Brandon Antron Rolle, the man accused of killing Ronald Gentile in Miami last year finally goes to trial today.  The killing was the subject of a crime investigation show "48 Hours" that I saw on cable (probably in reruns) a few weeks ago.  Ronald Gentile was in Miami to see his son and was returning to his hotel after dropping the son off at work when he made a wrong turn in his rental car.  His stop to ask for directions turned into a mugging that became a murder.  The fingerprint lifted off the car belonged to Brandon Antron Rolle, a felon who had been released from jail only months prior.  Rolle was also identified as the man who tried to sell Gentile's driver's license.

The murder made national news and reports about it could be found on a handful of websites but nothing about the disposition of the accused could be found.  What happened to the accused?  Looking into the Miami court system, I found that Rolle's case had been slowly making its way to trial, with much pre-trial work being done first.  Today is the hearing date.

Brandon Antron Rolle is a guy who received one chance too many.  The sad reality of criminality shown by "48 Hours" is that same people commit crime after crime until they get caught for doing something serious enough to put them away for good.  Perhaps this senselessness of the innocent suffering until the inevitable was the motivation for Philip K. Dick's Minority Report.

Rails stopped routing http requests the morning after everything was working fine. I was running demo exercises from the Agile Rails book and didn't seem to do anything that could have messed up the installation. Downloading and symlinking to the books own app code didn't fix the problem.

"no route found to match "/store" with {:method=>:get}"

attempting to debug:

>> rs = ActionController::Routing::Routes
>> rs.recognize_path "/store"
=> {:controller=>"store", :action=>"index"}

routes.rb seems fine:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id.:format'
map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
end

Everything looks good where is the problem? I googled and found a post pointing out spurious routing problems in Rails 1.2.3 and a suggestion to change boot.rb to remedy it:

root_path = Pathname.new(root_path).cleanpath(true).to_s

to

root_path = Pathname.new(root_path).cleanpath(true).realpath().to_s

That suggestion did not work for me. Desperate to get my Rails show back on the road, I did the obvious:

gem uninstall rails
gem install rails

Bingo!

MySpace's effort to emulate the distinguishing status updates feature of Facebook went down quickly after introduction and remains down:

The function that you are currently trying to use is disabled and will be back shortly.We are making some minor changes to this section so please bear with us until we can get it back online.Please do NOT email me about this. Just wait it out. Jul 13, 2007 -Tom

While the typical MySpace user surely hasn't noticed the blip, social networking observers are keen to see whether Facebook has any enduring competitive advantages over MySpace.  The friend status feed has been a unique feature for the upstart network, and according to the FB corporate blog, a technological achievement.  How well MySpace makes the shadowing move will reveal the depth of their technical bench.  Are they a decent media company first but far second as a technologist to the leader as Yahoo is to Google, or is that characterization false?

MySpace has never made any deep innovations.  Their technical competitive strength in the war against Friendster was the ability to engineer scalability.  While Friendster choked on their open source platform, MySpace outran them with ColdFusion on steriods.  Friendster couldn't deliver pageviews or messages and had to cap the friend list at 500, while MySpace's scalability allowed it to foster a laissez fair environment that placed few bounds on the creativity of its users, who under this liberal regime made the system a runaway success.

In this round against Facebook, scaling the mundane -- delivering page views and messages -- is now a problem widely solvable.  The magic is in the innovations that require mathematics and computer science, problems that cannot be solved with simple algorithms and by eliminating bottlenecks or throwing more commodity machines into the webfarm.  Facebook makes much of the social graph, and I suspect the term is more than a mere metaphor.  The innovations on Facebook probably rely much on graph theory and other beyond engineering domains.

Anybody can put computer scientists or mathematicians on staff but is that enough against a technocracy running on all cylinders?  The technology gap between Yahoo and Google is probably two years or so -- and never narrowing -- and worth billions and billions in market cap.  How MySpace recovers from this stumble will indicate the size of their gap.

(Initial coverage of the MySpace stumble)

There's plenty of unofficial APIs for MySpace floating around but despite acknowledgement from MySpace management of Facebook's powerful interface and its popularity with developers and meek promises to counter with a similar move, we haven't seen anything yet... until now.   The web album services interface on http://media.myspace.com/services/media/albums.asmx gives a hint of a fuller API.  The following operations are supported for web albums:

To give you a taste and to have an archival excerpt in case the page disappears, the following is a sample SOAP 1.2 request and response for GetAlbumsSlideShow:
<pre>POST /services/media/albums.asmx HTTP/1.1
Host: media.myspace.com
Content-Type: application/soap+xml; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: <font class="value">length</font>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap12:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap12="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
<soap12:Body>
<GetAlbumsSlideShowResponse xmlns="http://myspace.com/services/media">
<GetAlbumsSlideShowResult>
<MiniAlbumSlideShow>
&lt;AlbumId&gt;<font class="value">int</font>&lt;/AlbumId&gt;
&lt;Hash&gt;<font class="value">string</font>&lt;/Hash&gt;
&lt;Title&gt;<font class="value">string</font>&lt;/Title&gt;
&lt;/MiniAlbumSlideShow&gt;
&lt;MiniAlbumSlideShow&gt;
&lt;AlbumId&gt;<font class="value">int</font>&lt;/AlbumId&gt;
&lt;Hash&gt;<font class="value">string</font>&lt;/Hash&gt;
&lt;Title&gt;<font class="value">string</font>&lt;/Title&gt;
&lt;/MiniAlbumSlideShow&gt;
&lt;/GetAlbumsSlideShowResult&gt;
&lt;/GetAlbumsSlideShowResponse&gt;
&lt;/soap12:Body&gt;
&lt;/soap12:Envelope&gt;</pre>

(via)