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.

Yes, I’ve upgraded to Leopard. Yes, it’s spiffy.

The headline features like Time Machine are great, but I’m loving the little details more.

For instance, the first time you go to run an application that’s been downloaded from the net, a dialogue pops up reminding you that the file has been downloaded and asking if you want to trust it. It’s a nice bit of security, and it asks you the question at the right time.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything here, mostly because I’ve been indecently busy. Well, up until last Sunday when I managed to trip over a low wall in our garden and, in the process take off a large amount of the skin on my left shin. A mere flesh wound, but painful, embarrassing and it’s left me sporting what looks like a foot long, white, elastoplast. The worrying bit is that, when I went to get my wounds dressed, the nurse took one look at my bulk and demanded a urine sample. Which tested positive for glucose. For the second time in a year. So, interspersed with getting my dressings changed at the GP’s, I got a blood test and it looks like I’m diabetic.

Some bugs are easy to overlook. One that has a habit of catching me out is a Rails filter that returns false occasionally when it’s being evaluated purely for its side effects. Here’s how I’ve started working round the issue:

Whee! Sat in my home directory is a version of typo that appears to work with Rails 2.0. I ended up giving up on the themer approach which proved to be very hard to get up and running transparently - things kept disappearing off around infinite loops, which is no fun at all, let me tell you.

<typo:flickr img=“1455226602” size=“medium” caption=“James Duncan Davidson” />

I’ve finally started uploading the scans from RailsConf Europe last week. There’s still one more roll to scan and another 9 shots in the camera, but I’m pretty pleased with the results so far. I didn’t really start shooting until about halfway through the last day. The light in the hotel was horrible and I just wasn’t in the mood, then suddenly I’d shot three rolls and was wondering where I could find another roll of Neopan 1600 at 9pm in Berlin. It didn’t hurt that I found some really nice light (at least for a black and white photographer with fast film). The shot of James Duncan Davidson above was shot using one of the large LCD screens that were dotted around the hotel as a softlight. It’s the sort of trick that can cause endless pain when you’re shooting in colour, because the white balance is such a bear, but the magic of fast black and white film means I just didn’t have to care.

What does the OED say reticence is?

Reticence: Maintenance of silence; avoidance of saying too much or of speaking freely; disposition to say little.

Pretty straightforward. When I chose reticence as one of my five nouns for programmers it was another reminder that objects are not the same as datastructures. Well designed objects keep their cards (instance variables) close to their chest. Client code tells objects what to do, it doesn’t ask them to kiss and tell. In Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, (you don’t have a copy yet? Are you mad?) Kent Beck recommends that you put your accessor methods in the private protocol unless you have a very good reason for indicating that the accessors should be used by clients by putting the accessors in, say, the accessing protocol or some other, more suitably named, protocol. (In Smalltalk, all methods are public, but you can and should organize them into protocols/categories, either by choosing some existing protocol, or coming up with a new protocol name). In less flexible OO languages, you should probably at least mark your accessors as protected unless you have the aforementioned very good reason.

Britt Selvitelle of Twitter gave a cracking talk at RailsConf Europe about scaling Rails applications to Twitter scale. It was great. Full of advice that we shall definitely be taking on board as we continue to develop amazing tunes. However, the last slide before the inevitable “Any Questions?” was the slide of the conference. It read:

During DHH’s keynote at RailsConf Europe it was apparent that there’s a great deal to like in edge rails, so I thought I’d have a crack at getting Typo up on it.

Well… that was a fun flight. We’ve missed the Bratwurst on Rails event that the Berlin Ruby folks were putting on, so it’s a simple matter of getting some sleep before heading over to the conference hotel at ungodly o’clock to register in time for the first of the Railsconf tutorials.

You know what? I’m starting to miss compulsory semicolons as statement terminators in Ruby.

“What?” I hear you say. “But not needing semicolons is one of Ruby’s cardinal virtues! Are you mad?”

We’re looking for somebody who can make Flash 8 and javascript play well together on IE 6/7, Firefox and Safari. If you fit the bill, please drop me a line at pdcawley@bofh.org.uk with a pointer or two to examples of your skills and you, me and my boss will have a nice little talk.

If you’ve been running on the Typo edge recently, you’ll be all too painfully aware that there have been issues with the cache being flushed at the wrong times and not flushed at all at others. Which is not a happy state of affairs.

Remember back when I wrote about metaprogramming and programming being the same thing?

Well, Libraries, Domain Specific Languages, Domain Agnostic Languages, Pidgins, YAML, .INI files and the like are all the same thing. They’re all notation.

Reification: The mental conversion of a person or abstract concept into a thing. Also, depersonalization, esp. such as Marx thought was due to capitalist industrialization in which the worker is considered as the quantifiable labour factor in production or as a commodity. - OED