Rob's Weblog

RailsDay 2005 Results

Well, the results are in and the winners announced. After seeing the winners (and the runners-up and honorable mentions), I was initally sad that our JEWEL project wasn't among the 11 teams, but the quality of the interface to most is certainly better than ours. Perhaps next time we'll be able to put a more polished application together in a short time. It is rather amazing to think that some of these applications were done in 24 hours. Even more so when some of them are by a single-person "team."

Congratulations to all the winners!

There's nothing like a deadline...

Now I know that I have to dig into Rails. I've agreed to do a presentation on Rails for the consultants at SARK in August. Since the majority are Java programmers and many have only recently been introduced to AJAX techniques at a similar presentation in June, I'm hoping the audience will be forgiving. I tried an impromptu demo about a week ago and stumbled through for two hours -- remembering which items are singular and which are plural for the generators trips me up every time.

I'll post the resulting presentation as a PowerPoint slide show if it looks like it can stand by itself. I'm really going to have to take a look at the new Rails movie (and upgrade to 0.13.1, of course) before I get started.

Keep your fingers crossed for me!

Yeah, I'm a Nerd

Although at MIT it's spelt "gnurd". There are some of these on-line tests that I just can't help but take. When John wrote of his score

Pure Nerd

73% Nerd, 21% Geek, 21% Dork

Other than wondering what it means to score 115% on a Nerd/Geek/Dork test, I suppose that's reasonable.

Percentile Ranks

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 78% on nerdiness
You scored higher than 17% on geekosity
You scored higher than 26% on dork points

RailsDay 2005

Well, it's not too often that I feel that I'm the lightweight of a programming team, but when working alongside Jim Weirich and John Wilger on a 24hr marathon using Ruby on Rails that was what I expected. I don't think it turned out too bad. I'd only picked up Rails a few times between a couple XP-Cincinnati meetings and two different Rails tutorials. Going into RailsDay I knew I would learn a lot, but even I was surprised.

John, Jim, and I met Friday night at Panera to write up some story cards (we considered using actual napkins, but went with Jim's 4x6 index cards). At the time it seemed like a very good idea ‑ John wanted to jump right in at Midnight and Jim and I were comfortable with beginning at 7am. I think we ended up completing only about one-third of the cards and realized by Saturday evening that YAGNI is a very important concept. We undid or threw out several bits and pieces that turned out to be too much to do in a single 24hr session.

The day turned out to be much more about Rails than about Ruby. I never had to refer to my pickaxe book (did I mention that I was sitting next to Jim?), but needed to jump into the Rails API docs several times particularly as the contest was approaching the end. I have a tremendously enhanced understanding of the Rails framework now ‑ some of the magic has been laid bare, but I feel that I've only glimpsed its true power.

We were able to get some of the Ajax features in place; crudely, but that's due to time constraints as much as anything. Of course, there were many things that we didn't even start. (YAGNI!) Tests were at times extremely useful and we realized that testing probably should have been given more attention throughout the day. (Yes, Scott, we're listening.)

Both teams are grateful to Mark Mansour of Fusion Alliance and Lisa Kaminski of SARK for securing the meeting room, providing breakfast and lunch, and lending moral support.

Well, I'm going to show off JEWEL to my family now and then take a peek at some of the other projects (when their server resumes working).

Time for a new Browser?

I can't remember which blog I was reading that pointed me toward Mozilla Firefox but the more I use it, the more I like it. I've been an Emacs user for nearly twenty years now and have always preferred keystokes to mouse clicks. When I was looking for a keystroke equivalent to the context menu's Open Link in New Tab, it wasn't obvious. So I thought, "Well, Enter opens in the current Tab, so maybe Ctrl+Enter or Shift+Enter will work." Tried Ctrl+Enter, and it worked. (I later tried Shift+Enter and it opens the link in a new window which agrees quite nicely with the Shift+Mouse1 behavior.)

The tabbed windows are great, too. I tend to have a stack-based and interrupt-driven mind. (If you're not a CS gnurd, then you might not get it.) Openning a link in a new tab lets me continue on the current page while "saving" the link for later (and getting it loaded in the background).

It's also pointed out at least one CSS problem and at least two JavaScript problems in my web pages internally at work and on the Countryside Torpedoes site that I manage. I've been lazy with IE for too long. I used to test everything with Netscape Navigator and IE, but I never saw any hits on the Torpedoes site from a non-IE browser and IE5.5 was the standard at work. If I start using Firefox as exclusively as possible, I'll have to keep the consistency with IE and that will force me to be more careful (and standards-based).

Edit: One of the most obvious problems was the use of document.all.foo without verifying that it exists. The real problem is that document.all isn't supported by Firefox. The simple fix that seems to work for both IE and Firefox is document.getElementById('foo').

Give it a try:

MacBook Pro

Well, I'm jumping off the [Apple][] cliff. I just put in my order for a MacBook Pro. The *guys* at the Apple Store said that ordering online might be a bit faster anyway and would allow more configuration opportunities. Adding a cinema display was just too much although I'll probably get an LCD monitor for a second screen.

[Apple]: http://www.apple.com/

I was pleasantly surprised to be shown a $100 rebate on a Mac+Printer when purchased together. The HP Deskjet 6840 that I already had my eye on was among the eligible printers so one is on its way, too. The printer will likely be delivered within a week, but I'll have to wait a few weeks for the MacBook Pro. Of course, it will be very cool to be among the first to have one!

Estimated Shipped By:    FEB 24, 2006
Estimated Delivered By:  MAR 03, 2006

37 days and counting...

Seeing the Light of Dependency Injection

Well, the third (fourth?) time's the charm. After reading Jim Weirich's blog of Dependency Injection In Ruby, I think I finally am starting to see where the benefit comes. Thanks, Jim! The example he presents is sufficiently complex to make the point. I've run into a similar situation at least twice in the past and just knew there "must be a better way." (It also makes me bump Ruby up the "gotta learn that" list a few notches.)

Backpack

I love Backpack™ from 37signals. I particularly like the fact that I used a drag-n-drop feature today without even realizing that it was new. The old way of reordering list items wasn't too bad to start with, but dragging them up to the top (since new ones always start at the bottom) is so much cooler. Now I'm really going to find some time to keep playing with Rails!

Adventures In Packing

Well, I actually can fit clothes for a week into the same bag as my scuba gear. On the way out to San Francisco, the bag was 58#, but the United agent let it slide. Unfortunately, on the way back to Cincinnati I wasn't so lucky and the bag (now weighing in at 68#) was deemed overweight and I had to pay the $25 charge. I actually considered buying a small, cheap bag from a street vendor near Fisherman's Wharf earlier in the week so I could check two bags that would each be under the 50# limit, but I decided to risk it. I had already looked up the baggage limit before leaving the house after weighing my packed bag and discovering it was 57# by my home scale.

I sent my pictures in for Kodak Sea Processing yesterday so I should be posting some by the end of the week.

Monterey Bay Diving Center

Alright, I'm diving! After finding several boats that aren't going out on 9/11/04, I found one that is. I'll be doing a 2-tank dive trip with Monterey Bay Diving Center. Now I just have to check two bags because there's no way to pack for a week in the same bag as my scuba kit.

Diving Monterey

Well, I hope to at least. My idea to dive with Cypress Charters has fallen through. They have an all-day dive trip for some deep (tri-mix) diving regardless of what the web site still says!

OK, I'm going to call a bunch of places today and find a boat!

blogChalking

This is my new blogchalk:
United States, Ohio, Deerfield Township, Lakeview Estates, English, Rob, Male, 36-40, Scuba. :)

WikiHome

This is the start (I think) of a wiki (What's the date?)

CSS Class names used in blosxom flavours

dateheader used to style the date (from date.flavour) title to style the title of the weblog (from head.index)

Getting Started

OK, having spent too much time reading other weblogs and wikis, I've decided that I need a bliki to simplify the boundary between my professional and personal web usage. I have a local page (i.e., file) on my "work" laptop that started life a few years ago as my Netscape BOOKMARK.HTM file (and still has that name). I also have an extensive list of Favorites in IE on my "personal" laptop. I'm finding that there is an increasing overlap in my finding sites when I'm on one machine that would be nice to have "remembered" on the other. I'm starting with bloxsom since it seemed to be /simple/, Perl- and CGI-based, compatible with Cincinnati Bell's FUSE web hosting, and simple. (Did I mention that it looked simple?) Once I got the stupid setting for $datadir figured out (it's not what you'd think) for FUSE.net, it just worked!

What about Wiki-ness?

I really want the /edit anywhere/ functionality of a Wiki (like TWiki which is Perl/CGI, too)