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Scratching an Itch Again

Well, today’s been fun. For appropriate values of fun. I’ve fought shy of doing politics in this blog so I’m not going to rant about the evils of theism, nationalism, Bush, Blair, Hizbullah, Israeli foreign policy, eejits who plot to blow up aeroplanes or any of the other things you’d expect a soggy liberal like me to get exercised about. Life’s too short.

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Working round the Rails showstopper

So, it turns out that the rush released Rails 1.1.5 doesn’t actually fix the security problem. Worse, it seems that the problem lies somewhere in the nest of serpents that is the routing system. It turns out that some of the magic that lets everything work in nice ways doesn’t do enough to make sure that malicious people can make everything work in nasty ways.

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A weekend in August

If you were to ask me what my current preoccupations were, the top three would probably be breadmaking, ruby and folk music. This last week has been a pretty decent week on all three fronts.

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Ruby 'til 6

Oh, I say. It seems that Sam Ruby is another member of the “Ruby ’til [Perl] 6” club.

I like Ruby a lot. For the kind dynamic OO/Functional coding style that I espouse, it’s a better Perl than Perl simply because it’s so much less verbose (I got so tired of always unpacking the argument list, it tended to put me off applying the Composed Method pattern anywhere near often enough).

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How do you find me?

Are you reading Mark Dominus’s Universe of Discourse and if not, why not?

Mark’s one of the cleverest and most entertaining guys I’ve ever met; if you get a chance to attend one of his courses, you really should do it. Your mind will be expanded. Which is by the by, but hey.

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Typo 4

Yay! Not only have we released Typo 4.0.0 at last (big news: massively improved feedback spam protection and much, much easier installation), but I’ve brought this blog back to the bleeding edge (complete with further improved feedback management).

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Desperately seeking remuneration

The ‘gizzajob’ post

In the unlikely event that you’ve been wondering where I’ve been this last while, I’ve been busy with one of those long dark teatime of the soul affairs, all the while baking bread.

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Spiers and Boden

<typo:flickr img=“151759163” size=“small”/>

If you haven’t been to see Spiers and Boden yet, you really should. Monday night’s gig at the Cumberland Arms was fantastic. Great songs and tunes and, just as important, great rapport with the audience. Anyone who can take what’s potentially one of the most boring songs in the tradition - The Prickle Eye/Holly Bush and make it a blistering encore piece must be doing something right.

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Code Ownership Dies Hard

Martin Fowler has posted an overview of the ways in which different projects can handle Code Ownership on his blog. As usual with Martin, it’s a thoughtful piece coming down strongly in favour of an agile solution (Martin argues persuasively that strong code ownership makes it much harder to improve the code - or make it worse, but let’s assume that we know what we’re doing).

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Jealousy...

Once upon a time, when the world was young, Apple announced their 17 inch G4 Powerbook with a huge screen and blisteringly quick 1GHz G4 PowerPC processor.

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Write your own Typo sidebar

If you’ve been following typo development on the trac you’ll have seen that I’ve been niggling away at the Typo sidebar system and I haven’t finished with it yet. The changes waiting in my current SVK repository are rather substantial so I’m going to give you a preview of them here.

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Scratching an Itch

Some time ago, around the time of the Typo themes contest, someone, I think it may have been Scott Laird, wrote a nifty little sparklines textfilter.

It’s a really cunning piece of code, the problem is that, to make it work, Scott had to make some dramatic changes to the way textfilters work which, in turn, meant we had to change the way we got at the htmlized versions of our content. Before sparklines, you could do content.body_html in your view and it would just work, generating the html as required. After the change you had to do content.html(controller, :body), which I'm sure you'll agree is rather gruesome. So we wrapped it up in a helper method, letting you do: article_html(article, :body), which is only slightly less gruesome.

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And... relax...

Rails 1.1 got released on Sunday.

Lots of hosting services upgraded.

Typo, both the ‘stable but old’ and the bleading edge versions, didn’t get on with Rails 1.1. For quite spectacular values of ’not getting on’. So, we ran around like headless chickens for a bit, gradually refining the incantations needed to get your existing typo installation working again - rake freeze_edge VERSION=3303 does the trick if you’re still having problems - and then Scott, Kevin and I spent the best part of a day nailing down the issues.

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If you test it, I will patch

I’ve been working on Typo this weekend, mostly going through open tickets and deciding whether to apply patches.

There’s plenty of potentially good patches in the queue, but too many of them give me The Fear.

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