Conflict Gets Attention

I rather enjoyed an article by 37Signals posted today here.

My favorite comment in the article is a note about the reality of conflict. If you shout "fight!" in a bar, droves of people will come running out the doors.

Conflict breeds attention. Frankly it wouldn't even matter if you had Urkel fighting Bill Gates, it would still capture everyone's attention.

That started me thinking about the reason why people enjoy conflict so much. Is it the ability to identify with a winner/looser, to root for someone, the raw energy of the fight, the feeling of vicarious participation, the ability to witness a moment that steps outside of the state of contract (that we will do no violence) and creeps briefly into a state of nature or war.

Certainly one element that conflict provides is vicariousness, if that is a word. It's the ability experience all the raw feelings mentioned above without having to suffer the black-eyes of the real deal.

So I suppose bringing that element over to marketing. If one can create a sense of conflict and engage their primary demographic in the cause, then one can create a tremendous source of viral marketing in that you can engage a core group who identifies with you (the victim hopefully) and can shout "fight!" on your behalf.

Empty Projects on OS X

Reproduced from a RadRails.org post:

I have finally been able to reproduce the empty project bug on the Mac. Basically, the issue was that nothing would happen when creating a new project from within RadRails. We also didn't help things but not showing any output or information from the "rails" running in the background; this has been fixed since then. The problem was that for some reason even if you have the rails command on the path say in "/usr/local" the eclipse process launcher would not pick it up. There are two solutions to this:

1. Do a symbolic link from /usr/local/bin/rails (or wherever you installed it) to /usr/bin/rails

2. Set the rails gem location to the prefix of where your rails binary actually lives. So if your rails binary is in "/usr/local/bin/rails" set the gems location to "/usr/local" because it just looks for that prefix plus "/bin/rails".

The last option is kind of a hack because we meant for that to be the location to the actual rails gem directory for use here and for other things but as it turns out running bin/rails from the gems directory doesn't always work. Anyway, this problem has been annoying and I had not noticed it because I was symbolically linked from /usr/bin/rails. The changes to the preference pane and helpful output of the rails command that gets run to create a new project have already been committed and will be available in the forthcoming 0.7.1 release. We are still working on configuring the new beast of a server and will be migrating all of our tools over soon. Next step after that is to finish off the new radrails.org which is going to be pretty sweet.