A friend recently introduced me to Couch Surfing and it is an amazing concept. The idea is to reunite people interested in learning about other cultures, meeting diverse and interesting folks and travelling dirt cheap.

Though some people can’t resist the urge to try and use the site to find cute potential mates, the couchsurfing FAQ is clear that it is not meant as a dating site and its users will quickly snap you back into proper behavior if you try this… so don’t bother. However, if you’d like to have some awesome conversations with open minded and adventurous people, there’s no better way.

As a couch surfer, you have access to thousands of places to crash in pretty much every country on the planet. More importantly, when you’re surfing your host will be there to give you the inside scoop on his or her hometown: you’ll find out where to shop, drink and hang out, what to visit and what to avoid and generally get a crash course on living as a local.

As a host, adventure comes to you. You get to meet travelers, learn of different cultures, hear lots of interesting tales and, often, rediscover your own city by seeing through the eyes of a newcomer.

Finally, as a CS member, you can join any of the many discussion forums and participate in all sorts of activities, from random parties, hiking expeditions, community kitchens and more–all in your own city.

The Couch Surfing site is open to all and is free… well, it’s member supported so you’re encouraged to donate (specifically through the verification process). But you don’t have to and can get started right now by creating an account and setting up a profile.

Give it a spin and you’ll be hooked.

The Problem

Psychogenic is pretty much a Linux shop. The technologies we use–such as MySQL, PHP, Perl and Apache–all work under multiple operating systems but development, testing and, most of the time, deployment all happen on Linux boxen. That is, with one exception: design and integration.

To date, everyone on the design and integration sides of the enterprise have been Mac or Windows based. In most cases, the will was always there to switch but the problem has been the tools they rely on: specifically, PhotoShop and DreamWeaver.

Although there’s a definite learning curve involved in switching from PhotoShop to the powerful Gimp, we’ve found that the Gimp is more than enough for our requirements. The major thorn remaining was DreamWeaver.

DreamWeaver, in our opinion MacroMedia’s finest offering, has been at the core of all our integration work. Unfortunately, DW is still unavailable under Linux. The truth is that 95% or more of our HTML integrators’ work could be done with any plain text editor. But the remaining 5%, such as using the built-inWYSIWYG to visually inspect a page and quickly jump to a particular table cell, offers such great gains in efficiency that its been impossible to drop DreamWeaver.

We have often discussed using CodeWeaver’s CrossOver Office to remedy this situation. CrossOver

allows you to install your favorite Windows productivity applications and plugins in Linux, without needing a Microsoft Operating System.

However we’ve resisted this approach for a number of reasons, not the least of which include the extra layer of complexity (and possible problems) as well as the purely philosophical objection to encouraging a product that doesn’t support our OS of choice.

The Solution: Quanta Plus

A recent discovery has changed all that: Quanta Plus!

Quanta Plus (or Q+ to friends) is a feature rich web development environment. Its list of features and interface are so compelling that Helene, our lead integrator, jumped on the chance to use it after a short trial run and she is now our latest 100%-Linux convert.

For a complete description of Q+, you’re better off perusing the documentation and tutorials or, better yet, the program’s own help system. To give you an idea, here are the aspects that have impressed us most, so far:

Multiple Views

Quanta Plus allows multiple views of your document including:

• "VPL" (Visual Page Layout), a WYSIWYG view;
• Source editor;
• DOM tree (structure view).

The most useful view to date has definitely been the split VPL/source editor, with the WYSIWYG view on top and text editor below (as depicted above).

Text Highlighting and Auto-completion

Syntax highlighting is available for HTML, JavaScript, XML, ASP, PHP, Perl and many other languages.

Quanta Plus also provides for a lot of handy autocompletion, including for HTML tags (e.g. <p>), the tag’s available attributes (e.g. align) as well as possible values for the current attributes (e.g. center). You can see an example of the autocompletion popup in action, in the image above. <Opened> tags are also </closed> automatically.

Autocompletion is available for other languages, such as PHP–and this can automatically include custom values, for instance for the methods available in an included class. Wow!

Full PHP Support

This includes not only advanced PHP autocompletion (which works for externally included PHP classes as well), but also a complete indexing of functions in the DOM view and tie-ins for a real-time PHP debugger (using Gubed).

Project Management

Full support for a host of management features, like project creation, updating from and committing to CVS, accessing local or remote files (through multiple protocols including FTP and "fish" for secure connections) is available.

Online Help

In addition to the Q+ help itself, the program provides quick access to full documentation for:

• HTML 4.01;
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS);
• PHP; and
• Javascript 1.3.

Preliminary Conclusions

We are still testing this addition to the Psychogenic toolkit but are quite impressed so far. Quanta Plus fills an aching need on the Linux desktop and we believe we’ll be using it, and hopefully contributing to its growth, for a good while. Try it out!

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, first released in 1976 is almost 30 years old–but it is far from being dated.

Here is a bit of the blurb from one second edition’s jacket:

Our genes made use. We animals exist for their preservation and are nothing more than their throwaway survival machines. The world of the selfish gene is one of savage competition, ruthless exploitation, and deceit. But what of the acts of apparent altruism found in nature - the bees who commit suicide when they sting to protect the hive, or the birds who warn the flock of an approaching hawk ? Do they contravene the fundamental law of gene selfishness ? By no means: Dawkins shows that the selfish gene is also the subtle gene. And he holds out the hope that our species - alone on earth - has the power to rebel against the designs of the selfish gene.

The books main argument and focus is the idea of “replicator power”, a replicator simply being a thing that can make copies of itself. A replicator can be anything, from an autocatalytic molecule (one that facilitate the appearance of molecules similar to itself) to the most prevalent form of replicator on this planet, the gene.

Dawkins put forth the fact that in any system where replicators exist, the ones with the greatest fecundity, longevity and fidelity will prevail (increasing their numbers the most). Add to the mix the occasional copying error and you get evolution, where certain errors will hinder replication but, once in a while, a transcription error will actually make the replicator more successful. In a world of limited space and resources this leads to a sort of competition, an arms race between replicators: those that evolve spread, those that don’t are eventually used for spare parts.

When seen in terms of replicator competition, it becomes clear that natural selection doesn’t operate at the level of the species or even the individual–it’s all about the survival of genes. The book goes on to detail how this deceptively simple assertion, that evolution is the outcome of competition between the replicators in the world, is used as a founding principle–a way of seeing the world which provides a clear view of Darwinism and allows a host of thorny issues to be resolved. Why do organisms devote time and energy, potentially at the cost of their lives, to procreate? Why do many animals expend resources helping their sibling even sometimes participating in raising their progeny?

Seen from the point of view of genes, these all make perfect sense. A set of genes that cooperate to make an organism likely to procreate ensures that multiple copies of itself will be unleashed into the world–eventually, any organism will be destroyed, so it makes sense to make backups… A gene which encourages a sense of kinship between siblings is also more likely to spread: there’s a 50% chance that any gene you have is shared with your little sister, so if you can forgo a meal at the cost of some discomfort which saves your younger and weaker sibling’s life then you’ve again acted in a way to maximise the number of your genes in the environment, even if it goes against your own self-interest. In this way, Dawkins demonstrates that even altruistic behavior can be explained in terms of “selfish genes”, replicators only interested in maximising their own survival.

Reading this book was, to me, equivalent to learning the principle of conservation of energy in physics: it is a simple tool that clarifies all aspects of evolutionary biology. The hard part is getting the right mindset to use this tool, and Dawkins does a fabulous job detailing and demonstrating the implications of the idea. At times, it felt a bit overdone and I caught myself thinking “ok, you’re preaching to the choir… let’s move along” about half way through but you can’t blame the author for creating such a solid foundation (and it was written 30 years ago… perhaps a number of these ideas have filtered through to the shared consensus at some level that wasn’t present in the 70s).

One of the most thought provoking chapters is at the end, when Dawkins speculates about other types of potential replicators. These musings have lead to an explosion of research in memetics (one mind blowing book on this subject is Susan Blackmore’s Meme Machine, the subject of an upcoming review here).

I thoroughly enjoyed the read and recommend it to anyone interested in evolution, biology or the motive forces behind what we call life.