When I was young (really young), my aunt told me we shouldn’t buy Nestlé products. The company was distributing free baby milk formula samples in third world countries, causing the mothers’ own breast milk supply to dry up. The mothers would end up not being able to breast-feed their own children and thus spending all their money (if they had any) on the artificial formula. This wasn’t the only reason for the boycott but that was what I was told back then. So I started to boycott Nestlé. Since I had no money to spend elsewhere, I convinced my family to be the executioners in my boycott.

A few years later I was working on a website project for Greenpeace when I stumbled upon the StopEsso project.

The greenhouse effect and its connection to global warming were by then a known and proven phenomenon. Almost everyone agreed, including some of the most vocal former opponents. Well, except one company and – coincidentally – one president¹.
The message of the StopEsso project was sad:

Exxon [ExxonMobil, whose brands include Esso and Mobil] is doing more than any oil company to block international action on global warming. While the rest of the world tries to stop global warming, Exxon spends millions of dollars sabotaging US participation in the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to reduce climate-changing gases. We need to stop Exxon to stop global warming.

I had never been a green fundamentalist, nor even an activist. I support green values but don’t like people throwing stones at each other or burning fox cages no matter what the cause. But reading that text really hit the nerve. Our Esso credit card never got renewed. I’ve never voluntarily filled up at Esso stations ever since. I wanted to make an impact, even if a small one. Dammit, I wanted to do the right thing.

At the same time it seemed that Nestlé hadn’t really changed their habits. Shipping millions of liters of still water thousands of kilometers to a country with endless ground water supplies clearly indicates they just don’t care. In 2004, the largest ice cream manufacturer in Finland was bought by Nestlé. It has made the boycott really hard (I’m an ice cream connoisseur) but I’m trying to stay true to my heart.

Even though I feel these incidents have made me do the right thing, my hands still feel tied. The power of word-of-mouth is strong, but still local. Internet has helped to get to the information, but the information is still fragmented and doesn’t necessarily have the impact it would deserve on a company. If there are more companies as unethical (and I would be kidding myself believing there aren’t), where would I find that information?

It should thus come as no surprise that I was fertile ground when two crazy guys from southern California, Ryan and Rod, wanted me to build world’s first social responsibility exchange with them — a site that would bring the power back to the people, for good. I knew right away this was what I wanted to do.

Meet dotherightthing.com.

The site will be open for public in a few months. In the meantime, sign up at dotherightthing.com to get the most recent news about the project. You might even end up as a member of a private beta… and don’t forget to subscribe to the RSS feed.

¹ Partly due to their lobbying, it took four years and a movie by an ex-vice president for a layman to even acknowledge the problem, not to mention to take action.

Finally, rubyonrails.fi has seen the light of day. It’s still pretty rudimentary, sporting the default Mephisto theme, but already has its first articles published. We also set up a Finnish Rails wiki, which will hopefully be accessible through wiki.rubyonrails.fi in the near future. So if you speak Finnish and are interested in Rails, head on over and fill the blog and wiki with questions.

Warning! Only for geeks/ruby heads.

If you’ve been sick like me or somehow else missed the rise and fall of Rails Blob (R.I.P.), you’d better check it out. It’s pretty weird how hysterically funny pieces people can write with the help of typos and (a lot of) inside wisdom.

Since people seem to be so concerned about the lack of buzz around RailsConf Europe, I’ll officially start the buzz here. Ok, not officially, and not even start, since David already kicked it off a few weeks ago. But I’ll enumerate a few reasons that make the steep price worthwhile, for me at least.

Today’s reason: Kathy Sierra

If you haven’t heard about Kathy Sierra or her blog Creating Passionate Users, you must have been living the last year your head stuck in a dark place. Kathy is one of the very few writers that can write compelling, useful articles every. single. day. No wonder she’s been one of the blogging rookies of the past two years, rising from zero to Technorati Top 100 hero in no time at all.

If I would have to select a single blog I would be able to read on a desert island, that would probably be Creating Passionate Users. Sorry, all you great Rails, hacking, web standards/design and business blogs. But I just can’t think of a blog with as universal appeal to a hacker-designer-entrepreneur-geek as Kathy’s. Her writing just clicks. And if she’s even distantly as great a speaker as she is a writer, seeing her keynote live is probably alone worth the torture of hopping to Stansted in a cramped Ryanair seat.

Rails is all about programmer happiness, and there is no better way to celebrate that than the living embodiment of passion opening the conference.

If you’re doing any Ajax development on Rails and haven’t yet dug into RJS Templates, you’re missing out pretty badly. Unfortunately the documentation for them has been sparse at best. The first even fairly comprehensive material that I found about them was in Jens-Christian Fischer’s unofficial Rails Reference. Then came Cody Fauser’s O’Reilly ebook RJS Templates for Rails that brought a bit more meat around the bones. Now, for all you “show, don’t tell” people (to which I belong), my friend Geoff (of Nuby on Rails and Rails Podcast fame) has started a new service called PeepCode, which provides quality screencasts about Rails development. And, lo and behold, the first part of the series is RJS Templates:

This 50 minute Quicktime video tutorial shows you how to use the basic RJS methods from scratch. You’ll be adding to your skills and using RJS to make more responsive and interactive applications.

Go try it out! There is a free 2-minute sample available.

With Rails, the split is that opinions go into core and
options go into plugins.
— David Heinemeier Hansson in Rails-Core

If you have ideas on how to best use the funds raised by the Caboose Documentation Project effort, please post them to the new Caboose Documentation Wiki page at Stikipad.

Late as always:

Congrats Rails and thank you, David, for having been able to share the two years of beauty and passion. There’s nothing better than a guilty pleasure. Here’s for many more years to come!

Now that Scoop started, I’m going to follow the pack:

Beginning Ruby on Rails E-Commerce is one of the reasons it’s been so quiet on this channel during the last months. We’re writing the last chapters now and the book will hopefully go to print in September, so there’s not a whole lot of waiting time left anymore.

Our goal was to make the book a bit different. It is a how-to book, going through building a complete E-Commerce site. So if you’re into learning by doing, you might enjoy it. We also wanted to promote the good Rails development practices. That’s why we use test-driven development always when it’s appropriate, teaching the different testing approaches in Rails on-the-fly. And since Apress is also the publisher of Joel, it would have been a pity if we couldn’t have sprinkled a bit of humor in the book.

If you want to be notified when the book is out, please do fill the following form and we’ll keep you up to date. We won’t share your email address with anyone and the mails sent to the list will be strictly related to this particular book.

After a magnificent week sunbathing and orienteering in Gotland, we finished the week by moving our stuff from the well-served jlaine.net mansion to our new home. I always tend to be really tired after week-long training camps, but topping it off by two days of hauling things over has got the better of me. I’m thus closing this office now, wishing for two things:

1. A long night sleep.
2. A fast broadband delivery to the new apt. Until then, I will be heading a mobile office from cafes and universities around Tampere.

Oh, and did I mention the just ripened raspberries in our new garden?

[UPDATE] I finally settled on an ADSL provider and the connection should be live mid next week. The lead time for an installation ranged from a decent 9 days to a staggering 6 weeks, which is pretty amazing for a flip of a switch (there is no work needed on site). I’ve been burned by the unreliability of ADSL a few times before, so I was contemplating getting a business broadband and circumventing the aging phone lines altogether. However, with prices starting from 400€/month for a 4/4Mb connection I decided I would settle for an 8/1Mb ADSL (for 10% of the price) for now and see whether the service has gotten any better.