Ruby On Rails – Not As Happy
So I’ve been getting into Ruby on Rails and things started out well, had the basis of an application up pretty quickly and now I’m starting to get into the logic of the app rather than just pulling values out of the database and displaying them. Productivity is droping, very rapidly.
The problems all seem to come down to the lack of a good IDE. Specifically:
- I have no idea where the definition of methods etc are. Are they inherited? Are they dynamically generated by something?
- I have no idea where the documentation for stuff is. Is it at api.rubyonrails.com, is it on ruby-doc.org, is it buried somewhere in my gems installation?
- Navigating files is just too slow.
It wouldn’t take much of an IDE to fix those problems just display a nice list of files in the project down the side with tabbed editors, then have the ability to select a method, variable, etc and jump to it’s definition or it’s documentation.
Funnies
It’s really worth subscribing to “kazem’s” cartoon feed for some quality geek laughs. Occasionally he turns into a bit of a Sun shill (he does work for Sun) but mostly it’s just general laughs from a (software) bug’s life. Fortunately there’s now a happy little orange icon linking to the RSS feed – it took me ages to find it originally as it was in no way linked (it’s here for the record).
The New Technorati
Ugo Cei commented on the new technorati interface and while I think it’s an improvement over their previous attempt, it still needs work. Searches work consistently now, but it’s still way too hard to find the RSS feed for the search and there appears to be a few bugs which prevent you from getting access to one at all for some searches.
Oh well, looks like I’ll be using the Feedster integration with NetNewsWire for a while longer. I did send them some feedback which hopefully made sense, I’m not really sure how to accurately describe the problems I was having with finding feeds.
Virtual Server Options
While this site is graciously hosted by Iain I’m in the process of developing another site (non-blog) and the more I think it through the more likely it is that it’s going to drive a not insignificant amount of traffic and I definitely want it to be snappy all the time (as opposed to slowing down when Iain decides to download too much at once). At the same time I keep playing with different technologies from J2EE to Ruby on Rails to custom perl apps and whatever else, so being able to set up whatever I want is a pretty big bonus. Sounds like a virtual server might just be the best bet but I really don’t want to spend much money.
This Is Why I Hate Marketing
Hey I stopped short of saying this is why I hate marketers…
How many more Microsoft sites will open without RSS? Sigh.
Sigh, Microsoft opens another cool but lame site. Cool cause it’s for digital photographers. Lame cause it doesn’t have an RSS feed. After Gnomedex these kinds of lame sites will look even lamer! When will Microsoft’s marketing departments get the memo? EVERY site MUST have RSS from now on. Got it? No? Pay attention to Dean Hachamovitch’s keynote at Gnomedex, OK? He runs the IE team.
Playing With Ruby On Rails
I’ve been developing a fairly dynamic website using Ruby on Rails for the past week and I’m really quite impressed. I’d had no experience with Ruby before so I had to learn a new programming language and a new webapp framework but I’ve gotten going without too many problems and am already at least as productive as I would be with J2EE (possibly more so).
Like most things though, it’s definitely very possible to create really awful looking code in RoR though most of the time the easiest way is very maintainable. I was quite surprised to see how big a mess the code created by the salted_login generator was. It appears that instead of putting in effort to keep the views to purely display, the author tried to minimize the amount of stuff in the views. Thus, instead of using HTML to create form elements which would have been simple, readable, maintainable and work in WYSIWYG editors, a helper function was used that output a complete table row with localized label and the form field. What’s worse though is that the helper function is about as readable as a perl script. It’s pretty simple to rewrite the view using plain HTML and then the helper function can be deleted entire without understanding exactly what it does. One would hope you don’t need to write code like that to achieve internationalization – this project doesn’t make sense to localize anyway.
Idiot Drivers
Yesterday morning as I arrived at work about 6:30am, a taxi was dropping off an elderly gentleman and parked halfway across our driveway in the process. This is not particularly uncommon for idiot drivers to park across our driveway being that we’re next door to a couple of ATMs that people like to “just quickly run to”. As such, I shook my head, squeezed past and went into work.
About an hour later the secretary from the lawyers upstairs comes into our office and asks if we could assist an elderly gentleman up to their office since he’s apparently early for his 8:30am dentist appointment (the dentist is also upstairs). This is the same guy who was being dropped off at 6:30am and has now been out in the cold for an hour wondering how he was going to manage to get up the stairs and into the building.
How Much Bandwidth Do Search Engines Take Up?
There are an awful lot of search engines out there and they all try to index as much of the web as they can, as quickly as they can. For this site, search engines seem to cause more traffic than anything else:
| Top 20 of 720 Total User Agents | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| # | |||
| 1 | |||
| 2 | |||
| 3 | |||
| 4 | |||
| 5 | |||
| 6 | |||
| 7 | |||
| 8 | |||
| 9 | |||
| 10 | |||
| 11 | |||
| 12 | |||
| 13 | |||
| 14 | |||
| 15 | |||
| 16 | |||
| 17 | |||
| 18 | |||
| 19 | |||
| 20 | |||
Now admittedly a lot of those hits will result in Not Modified responses but still, when you expand this to every site on the internet, that’s a lot of HTTP requests being fired around.
About That MySQL “Benchmark”
I’m sure I’ve mentioned numerous times that you should pay no attention to benchmarks, and apparently the benchmarks Anandtech used in their recent PPC vs Intel article were pretty bollocks too. So if you read or heard about that article and now believe that threads on OS X are too slow, you should read this response from Ridculous Fish. You should also read the first comment (which was the only comment when I read it). Then you should return to the real world and forget about all this nonsense.
Is Apple Switching To Intel?
I hope not. Not that I don’t think the Intel chips are superior at the moment, but because I really don’t want to have to deal with all the problems of major architecture changes – particularly such a major shift as PPC to Intel. That’s a major headache for developers and a whole heap of compatibility problems for consumers.
Worse than that, it’s yet another platform for us to test on and there’s already way too many of those.
Online Photo Resources
Mostly so I remember this later, this article lists a bunch of good online free (and royalty free) photo archives.
Scoble Proves My Point
Not so long ago, I said that people tend to use Windows because of Microsoft’s monopoly more than because they actually like Microsoft. Apparently, when Scoble asks them why they run Windows, these are the common responses:
Have you ever gone up to people and asked them why? I have. And the reasons people give are quite varied. Yes, “my boss gave me this” +is+ a common answer, but it’s only one I hear maybe one out of four times.