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I’m going on a short trip over the weekend, so activity will be lacking around here until next Tuesday. The good news (for me) is that I’ll be escaping the stifling heat for a few days.

One problem with getting a new mobile phone is that it takes awhile to get used to answering a new phone. This is my first flip phone, and while I have no problems opening it normally, when it rings I can’t seem to adroitly answer it. I guess I just need to take more calls in order to improve my flip phone skills. Overall, though, I can’t believe I didn’t have flip phones all along. I keep my phone in my pocket, and the flip phone is a lot easier to deal with than the candy bar phones I’ve had in the past. ...

There’s an interesting list of 10 questions for programmers that a guy named Stiff sent out to some famous programmers. You can read their answers on his blog. You can read my answers here (not that I was asked to provide them). How did you learn programming? Were any schools of any use? Or maybe you didn’t even bother with ending any schools :) ? I started learning programming when I was probably 11 years old, on a Commodore 64. I’ve continued to learn more about it off and on since then. I was a Management Information Systems major in college, but I didn’t learn much programming there. Pretty much everything I know is self taught. ...

This is only a test. Update: If you’re seeing this in a feed, there’s an instant messaging box in this entry that you can use to talk to me via Meebo.

At the job, we run several instances of MediaWiki that we use for internal collaboration and to produce content that will eventually be published on a public Web site. My job generally involves building custom content management systems for various types of content. I chose to build them using Ruby on Rails. Because all of our users are already getting used to MediaWiki, we thought it would be cool to support MediaWiki’s markup format within our custom applications. ...

As I mentioned the other day, I ordered an unlocked Motorola Pebl on eBay on July 21. Yesterday, it arrived. The purchasing process was simple and painless. I bought via “Buy it now” and paid immediately, and two or three days later I got my tracking number via email. It was shipped UPS ground, so it took several days to get here. The shipping costs were outrageous. The sellers on eBay compete viciously on price and pad their profits with absurd shipping costs. I think they charged me $30 to ship my phone, and shipping costs from my seller were actually on the low end. ...

I was trying to fix a bug a few days ago and my initial fix involved nested loops. The code pulled some random values out of a list and added them to another list (creating wrong answers for a multiple choice question). I of course forgot to check for duplicate values, introducing a bug. The humbling thing about software development is that I still routinely make mistakes like this after ten years of getting paid to write software. ...

I’ve mentioned Rails migrations in the past. They provide a way to script database schema changes so that you can keep them in version control and roll back versions of a schema if necessary. One thing about them though is that eventually your list of migrations gets huge. (We’re up to over 20 of them in some of our applications, and there’s no reason why we might not have over 100 some day.) ...

Tim Bray says something in his post on Ruby that I have observed as well: For people like me, who are proficient in Perl and Java, Ruby is remarkably, perhaps irresistibly, attractive. If you know Java and Perl, you can start using Ruby pretty much immediately. His impression of the Pickaxe book is the opposite of mine. He thinks it’s above average. For me, not so much. He misses his IDE. I find that I miss it less than I thought I would, but then again, I use TextMate. Tim will be giving in to TextMate pretty soon, I’d guess. ...

One of the commenters on this post suggested trying Akismet for spam filtering. Installing the Movable Type plugin and signing up for an API key took about 5 minutes, so we’ll see how that works out. Adding a simple keyword filter seems to have gotten rid of my most persistent comment spammer, so I feel dumb for not having investigated the spam prevention measures built into Movable Type a lot sooner.