Playing With Ruby On Rails
I’ve been developing a fairly dynamic website using Ruby on Rails for the past week and I’m really quite impressed. I’d had no experience with Ruby before so I had to learn a new programming language and a new webapp framework but I’ve gotten going without too many problems and am already at least as productive as I would be with J2EE (possibly more so).
Like most things though, it’s definitely very possible to create really awful looking code in RoR though most of the time the easiest way is very maintainable. I was quite surprised to see how big a mess the code created by the salted_login generator was. It appears that instead of putting in effort to keep the views to purely display, the author tried to minimize the amount of stuff in the views. Thus, instead of using HTML to create form elements which would have been simple, readable, maintainable and work in WYSIWYG editors, a helper function was used that output a complete table row with localized label and the form field. What’s worse though is that the helper function is about as readable as a perl script. It’s pretty simple to rewrite the view using plain HTML and then the helper function can be deleted entire without understanding exactly what it does. One would hope you don’t need to write code like that to achieve internationalization – this project doesn’t make sense to localize anyway.
Idiot Drivers
Yesterday morning as I arrived at work about 6:30am, a taxi was dropping off an elderly gentleman and parked halfway across our driveway in the process. This is not particularly uncommon for idiot drivers to park across our driveway being that we’re next door to a couple of ATMs that people like to “just quickly run to”. As such, I shook my head, squeezed past and went into work.
About an hour later the secretary from the lawyers upstairs comes into our office and asks if we could assist an elderly gentleman up to their office since he’s apparently early for his 8:30am dentist appointment (the dentist is also upstairs). This is the same guy who was being dropped off at 6:30am and has now been out in the cold for an hour wondering how he was going to manage to get up the stairs and into the building.
How Much Bandwidth Do Search Engines Take Up?
There are an awful lot of search engines out there and they all try to index as much of the web as they can, as quickly as they can. For this site, search engines seem to cause more traffic than anything else:
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Now admittedly a lot of those hits will result in Not Modified responses but still, when you expand this to every site on the internet, that’s a lot of HTTP requests being fired around.
About That MySQL “Benchmark”
I’m sure I’ve mentioned numerous times that you should pay no attention to benchmarks, and apparently the benchmarks Anandtech used in their recent PPC vs Intel article were pretty bollocks too. So if you read or heard about that article and now believe that threads on OS X are too slow, you should read this response from Ridculous Fish. You should also read the first comment (which was the only comment when I read it). Then you should return to the real world and forget about all this nonsense.
Is Apple Switching To Intel?
I hope not. Not that I don’t think the Intel chips are superior at the moment, but because I really don’t want to have to deal with all the problems of major architecture changes – particularly such a major shift as PPC to Intel. That’s a major headache for developers and a whole heap of compatibility problems for consumers.
Worse than that, it’s yet another platform for us to test on and there’s already way too many of those.
Online Photo Resources
Mostly so I remember this later, this article lists a bunch of good online free (and royalty free) photo archives.
Scoble Proves My Point
Not so long ago, I said that people tend to use Windows because of Microsoft’s monopoly more than because they actually like Microsoft. Apparently, when Scoble asks them why they run Windows, these are the common responses:
Have you ever gone up to people and asked them why? I have. And the reasons people give are quite varied. Yes, “my boss gave me this” +is+ a common answer, but it’s only one I hear maybe one out of four times.
Any Jabber Experts Around?
Currently at Ephox we use MSN Messenger for a lot of communication but the servers are somewhat unreliable and it would be nice in some cases to be able to tie conversations into various internal systems (for instance, when talking about a bug it would be nice to “invite” the bugzilla bug into the conversation so that the conversation is logged). There’s a bunch of other things I’d like to play with but don’t know where to start. For the following, please ignore privacy issues, this is for company related conversations only and I’m aware of the privacy issues and will deal with them in time – I just want to play with the idea and see how far it can go first. Something like archives could potentially be written so that only the participants of the conversation can access the archive.
Coolaid for Table 3!
Scoble just doesn’t get it sometimes. Here’s a tip – there’s a difference between using Windows and liking Windows. Most people hate computers in general – they don’t like Microsoft, they don’t give two hoots about Apple (though they love iPods). Most people these days are forced to use computers. Most people aren’t qualified to evaluate which computing platform is better for them and can’t be bothered learning how to do so (when was the last time you met an average Joe who could accurately identify even a couple of key differences between OS’s).
Where Has All The Spam Gone?
I got my first SpamKarma report on comment spam for symphonious.net in over a week today. It reports no attempted spam whatsoever. Previously I’d been getting almost a hundred attempted spam comments a day and now suddenly it’s stopped. I’m pretty sure I didn’t change anything and I don’t think my comments are broken (though I had to relax the spam protection a while back as it was blocking comments with more than one link which caused problems for a couple of people). Course if my comments are broken, let me know below….
Another Win For The Full Text Brigade
Great to see Ugo Cei joining the side of good, er, those with full text feeds. Shame to hear about the cause of it but I’ll definitely be reading a lot more of Ugo’s writings in the future – the barrier to entry is now much lower. There’s no need for me to decide if I’m interested in the post based on a short summary, I start reading and don’t stop until I get to the end or get bored. Essentially the impetus is now on my to decide I don’t want to read the entry instead of on deciding that I do.
iTunes Can Sure Upsell
Somehow I got the song Your Feets Too Big stuck in my head and since I don’t have a copy, I went searching the iTunes music store. I found the original Fats Waller version but decided I liked the version from the new cast of Ain’t Misbehaving, The Fats Waller Musical more and added it to my cart. Then of course iTunes recommended I buy the entire album (all Fats Waller hits) and after a sampling the various songs I succumbed and bought the lot. It’s very good.