If you follow the Ruby blogs, you will probably have seen a bunch of programmers attempting to do something akin to Haskell’s maybe, or the ObjectiveC style, message eating null.

I am not a rock star. I am a computer programmer. I think I’m quite a good one.

Remember the good old days? The days before Google? The days before Altavista? The days when a 14k4bps modem was fast? Did I say good old days?

Recently I’ve been thinking about the way that patterns on different scales interact with each other. If you read Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, the first pattern in the book is Independent Regions, which are talked about within the context of a World Government, so it seems like a huge pattern. And it is, sort of, but it’s scale invariant - it applies at the level of countries, but it also applies to states, cities, neighbourhoods, streets, houses and arguably even rooms within those houses.

At work, we’re looking at adding the Atom Publishing Protocol in a few places where it makes sense. APP’s got a lot going for it - the spec is a great example of how to design a Resourceful API and is worth reading even if it’s not an immediately good fit for your application.

Martin Fowler is writing a book about Domain Specific Languages and, because you could never accuse Martin of a lack of ambition, he’s trying to write it in a reasonably (implementation) language agnostic fashion.

I’ve been busily adding AJAX features to the work website, and I got bored of writing Form handlers. I got especially bored of attaching similar form handlers to lots of different forms on a page, so I came up with something I could attach to document.body and then plug in handlers for different form types as I wrote them.

… timing. You either have it or you don’t.

Right, we’ve cut a Typo 5 gem and it’s on rubyforge and heading to various mirrors I hope. Frédèric’s writing the release notification which will be appearing on Typosphere Real Soon Now.

So, if you’ve been watching the Typo tree, you’ll see there’s been a fair amount of activity on it since Rails 2.0 got released. There’s a new default theme replacing the rather creaky ‘azure’, and a fair amount of work on getting our code compatible with the current state of Rails. As we work on this, it becomes apparent that Typo’s code is getting horribly brittle. I have said before that there’s been several places where we’ve zigged before Rails zagged, and we’re paying the price for that. It doesn’t help that our test coverage is distinctly ropy either - and I’m probably guiltier than most for letting things get into that state.

Here’s a problem I first came across when I was about 13 and helping do the stock check at the family firm. The parts department kept all their various spare parts racks of parts bins. Each bin was ’numbered’ with an alphanumeric id. We had printouts of all the bin numbers along with their expected contents and we’d go along the racks counting the bins’ contents and checking them off against the print out. What confused me at the time was the way the printouts were organized. Instead of the obvious ordering, “A1, A2, A3, …, A99”, the lists were ordered like “A1, A10, A11, …, A2, A20, A21, …”. After a bit of thought I realised that the computer was sorting the numeric bits of the bin numbers as if they were just sequences of strange letters. A bit more thought made me realise why, post computerisation, people were starting to use bin numbers like “A01, A02, …”. Computers were more important than people so, in order to make sorting things easier, just add spurious leading 0s to make the number field a fixed width and Robert’s your parent’s brother.

Worrying about test coverage when you’re doing Test- or Behaviour-driven development is like worrying about the price of fish in Zimbabwe when you’re flying a kite.

Has anyone written an Atompub client in JavaScript yet?

Do you have a PC, Xbox 360 or anything else that will run the Valve Orange Box? If so, get hold of a copy and fire up the Portal subgame.

So, we’re doing a cobranding exercise at work. The idea being we serve up a branded version of amazing tunes in a subdomain of our partner, their users get a skinned version of the site that feels like part of the partner’s site, we get an influx of new users and everybody is happy. One aspect of this is we’re using the partner’s site to handle authentication.