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

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” />

What does the OED say reticence is?

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.

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?

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

I’m reading ??Beautiful Code and it’s very good indeed. However, you have to feel sorry for Tim Bray - his chapter, “Finding Things” is excellent, as you’d expect. The only problem is, he’s following Jon Bentley, author of that perennial classic, Programming Pearls. It’s been a while since I (re)read anything by Bentley and I’d forgotten how good his prose was.