Jay Fields responds to on Ola Bini’s Evil Hook Methods? about the common ruby idiom that lets us write:

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.

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. It’s only syntax after all.

Usability testing is wonderful. But wow, its humiliating.

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:

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:

IE’s a pain. The particular pain I want to write about is its pickiness about Javascript object literals. Consider the following Javascript object:

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.

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.

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!”, but not at this conference.

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: