You know, I’m sure, how good fresh baked bread smells. But, good as that smell is, the real pleasure for me is the way it sounds.

Joss Whedon writes strong female characters, he’s the mind behind some of my favourite TV ever and he’s a wise man. Here he is reacting to seeing camera phone footage of the murder of Dua Khalil Aswad on CNN almost alongside the trailer for Captivity:

The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

“I’m sorry.”

What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority - in fact, their malevolence - is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.

You should read the whole thing. Seriously.

Dress for success: wear a white penis

While I’m tilting a windmills, I should just like to tell all those people who bang on about ‘metaprogramming’.

Windmill tilting time again I’m afraid. Blame chromatic and David A. Black.

Control.TextArea.ToolBar.Textile.js is currently rocking my world and, if you wish to comment on anything in this blog, will shortly be rocking yours I hope.

For years I’ve managed to dodge learning JavaScript. People have told me it’s a fine language with some dodge implementations. Friends have built an entire business model in the language, and I’ve continued to treat as if it were The Sound of Music (I’m 39 now and I have managed to completely avoid watching that film).

Wow:

It’s definitely fun to commit a major rework of something that’s been bugging you to SVN. It’s slightly less fun to check it out in your production server and have it fall over until you remember you to retweak the environment.rb file.

Last year, you would have been forgiven for thinking that Typo was pretty much dead in the water as an ongoing project. Typosphere was a placeholder, changes were few and far between, the app was a bloated monster. So, people switched, in droves, to Mephisto the new, (and excellent) kid on the block. Heck, even Tobi, the original author of Typo, has switched.

Let’s say you’re running tests against your rails application and a test fails.

When you read Christopher Alexander’s ??A Pattern Language, the patterns within the language are interdependent and ordered from big patterns down to small ones. Each pattern has a number and wherever one pattern refers to another it’s referenced with both the pattern’s name and its number.

From Extreme UI Testing:

So, since I couldn’t sleep, I’ve been hacking on the routing drop in replacement.

Those of you who’ve been reading attentively will be aware that I’ve been working on a drop in replacemen for a chunk of Rails’ routing subsystem. You will also be aware that things have gone a bit quiet on that front.

On Monday I was down in Brighton for a Brighton Coding Dojo where I had a crack at doing Kata four in Smalltalk.