I spent the weekend at the UK Sacred Harp Convention, singing blood curdling hymns to the glory of god, very loudly with a hundred or so others. Great fun so it was. There’s something joyous about hollering out a hymn that opens with the line “And am I born to die?” and ends with the stanza Waked by the trumpet’s sound I from my grave shall rise And see the Judge in glory crowned And see the flaming skies

Jay Fields responds to on Ola Bini’s Evil Hook Methods? about the common ruby idiom that lets us write: class Fruit include DataMapper::Resource property :id, Integer, :serial => true property :name, String property :notes, Text, :lazy => false end What Ola and Jay don’t like about that is the way that a single include DataMapper::Resource actually adds class methods to Fruit because the implementation of DataMapper::Resource.included looks like: module DataMapper::Resource def included(module) module.

If you asked me to name my favourite radio and TV comedy, the odds are very good that Geoffrey Perkins had a hand in most of them. When I found his obituary in this morning’s Guardian I felt almost physically winded. I never met him, I don’t know anyone who did, but he was someone who helped to make the world a pleasanter place to be in. My thoughts are with his family and friends, who are no doubt even more gutted than I am.

Ruby’s primitives (Strings, Hashes, Arrays, Numbers - anything that has a literal syntax) are fine things. But that doesn’t mean you should use them everywhere. You’re often much better off wrapping them up in your own Value Objects. Something I was working on at Railscamp this weekend threw up a great example of why it makes sense to replace primitives with more specific objects as soon as possible. Tom Morris asked me to take a look at Rena, an RDF/Semantic Web thingy.

If the last post about our Javascript issues didn’t put you off, then you might be interested to know that we’re hiring. If you’re an experienced, test infected Ruby on Rails programmer with some Javascript and a real world consumer website or two under your belt, and you’re happy to work in Newcastle upon Tyne, then we definitely want to hear from you. I’d probably be interested in at least hearing from you if you’re an experienced dynamic language programmer who has only recently made (or is considering making) the switch to Ruby and Rails.

Usability testing is wonderful. But wow, its humiliating. I’ve spent the last few weeks working on the Amazingtunes in page player. Amazingtunes is a music site, so we need to play music. However, we don’t like the way that most music sites work; either the music stops as you go from one page to another, or the player is a huge Flash app running in its own window. There has to be a better way.

I’ve just pushed a just about usable (but horribly untested) port of Vassili Bykov’s very lovely Smalltalk Announcements framework onto github. It’s a very raw port at the moment (the interface isn’t what you’d call idiomatic ruby yet), but I shall be working on that soon. Documentation (beyond a synopsis in the readme file) is nonexistent, but I reckon that there’s the core of something useful there (I’ve got plans for using it in Typo as the basis of a Wordpressesque plugin architecture and I need it for my Sooper Sekrit Project too…).

When, in the course of learning about Haskell, I reached the point where I thought I understood what Monads were for, I wrote about it. In the comments, Seth Gordon observed that: There are two kinds of people who try to learn Haskell: the people who give up because they can’t figure out monads, and the people who go on to write tutorials on how to understand monads. I remembered this today as yet another git tutorial rolled by in my newsreader.

Sometimes, for one embarrassing reason or another (usually involving chaotic branch merges…) a database migration can get leapfrogged. When this happens, it’s tempting to renumber the leapfrogged migration, but that breaks any servers where the migration didn’t get renumbered. Here’s how I dealt with it recently: class MaybeOldMigration < ActiveRecord::Migration def self.up unless old_migration_applied? OldMigration.up end end def old_migration_applied? # Checks that the schema looks as it should # if the old migration got applied end end Yeah, it’s a hack, but it’s a fairly robust hack.

IE’s a pain. The particular pain I want to write about is its pickiness about Javascript object literals. Consider the following Javascript object: { success: function () {…}, failure: function () {…}, } If you’re used to programming in Perl or Ruby, that trailing comma’s perfectly fine, in fact leaving it there is sometimes considered good practice because it makes it easy to extend the hash, just add a new row and leave another trailing comma.

Back when I was writing the occasional “How do you find me?” article, I would get some weird ads showing up. On one occasion, I commented that the searcher had obviously just typed a homework question into google and expected an answer. All the ads on that page ended up being for sites that would write your essays for you. “Hmm…” I thought, “That’s not good.”, and set about adding those advertisers to the block list.

Terry Pratchett once observed that a character of his was anorexic because every time they looked in a mirror, they saw a fat person. By that measure, I’m anorexic, though I tend to avoid mirrors. By more objective measures, I’m morbidly obese - 6’ tall, 346 pounds; the Body Mass Index calculation is never going to give a good number. To listen to some sections of the press, I might as well be public enemy number one.

When they tell you to stop because you’re reinventing the wheel, ignore them and carry on building a better mousetrap.

I’m just back from the first Scotland on Rails conference, and a jolly fine conference it was too. Much kudos is due to Alan, Graeme, Abdel and Paul. It was hard to believe that this was the first conference these guys have run and I think all my fellow delegates hope it won’t be the last. As I said in the Pub on Saturday night, I’d had a talk proposal knocked back and, in that situation, it’s terribly easy to find yourself sitting in a session thinking “Bloody hell, my talk would have been better than this!

There’s always a moment, in a perfect tragedy, where you dare to hope that maybe the heroes are going to break the surface tension of the plot and escape. That perfect moment in Romeo and Juliet where, no matter how often you’ve seen it, you hope that this time, Juliet’s message will reach Romeo. Or, when watching Cruel Intentions, you find yourself hoping that the writers have managed to wangle a happy ending.

Who came up with the javascript scoping rules? What were they smoking. Here’s some Noddy Perl that demonstrates what I’m on about: my @subs; for my $i (0..4) { push @subs, sub { $i } } print $subs[0]->(); # => 0; Here’s the equivalent (or what I thought should be the equivalent) in Javscript: var subs = []; for (var i in [0,1,2,3,4]) { subs[i] = function () { return i; } } alert subs0 // => 4 What’s going on?

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. Generally, by about the 3rd time you’ve written if foo.nil? ? nil : foo.bar … end you’re getting pretty tired of it. Especially when foo is a variable you’ve had to introduce solely to hold a value while you check that it’s not nil.

I am not a rock star. I am a computer programmer. I think I’m quite a good one. You are not a rock star either. 387,000 matches to that query. Can we all just… I don’t know… grow up please? Mutter… grumble… chunter… I’m 40 you know! Updates I have it on reliable authority that James O’Kelly is a Ruby on Rails Rockstar that would make a great addition to any team!

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? In those days, the web had to be discoverable ‘cos it sure as hell wasn’t searchable. The big, big enabling technology of the web was the humble Go somewhere else. Placing the links right there in the body of the document turned out to be exactly the right thing to do.

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.