In case you missed my initial announcement, I’ve stareted a link blog called Of Interest. That seems to be where I’m spending most of my energy currently, mainly because it gives me an opportunity to link out to a lot of the weblogs I read without having to write posts here at rc3.org (which feel kind of heavy). At some point I’ll integrate the two sites, but for now there’s not even a link from the rc3.org home page to Of Interest. ...
This morning I decided I could no longer wait for the official universal builds of Firefox and Thunderbird, so I downloaded the unofficial builds here. I’m actually sticking with Camino for now, because it felt a bit faster than Firefox in my 10 second trial run. Thunderbird was, for some reason, one of the slowest applications under Rosetta, but of course the universal build is blindingly fast. Don’t wait to upgrade. ...
When I started my new job last year, one of the most exciting things about it was that we would be writing several applications from the ground up, and that it would be my job (in part) to decide which platforms to use to write these applications. I’ve been working for roughly five years writing Java/J2EE Web applications, but when the time came to pick a platform for this project, I chose Ruby on Rails. The last product I built was a huge pile of business logic with a very thin Web services layer on top. For that one I’d probably choose to use Java again. These applications are mostly content management tools, and play perfectly into the strengths of Ruby on Rails. ...
The MacBook Pro is hot, and by that, I don’t mean that it’s the subject of much lust and attention. I mean that you could use it as a portable camp stove. After using mine for a couple of weeks, that’s my one big complaint. It’s fast, it has worked like a charm, and the display is wonderful. The problem with it is that the area where you place your left wrist when you’re typing gets rather hot in normal usage. It’s distracting enough that I sometimes sit and think about what applications I’m using might be causing it to heat up. Trying to change your usage patterns in order to make your computer run cooler generally isn’t ideal. ...
John Udell recaps a talk at ETech arguing that what the world needs is not standards documents but rather standard implementations. In other words, rather than writing a specification for the Atom protocol, in an ideal world there would be standard, open source implementations of libraries to produce and consume Atom documents. It’s an interesting idea in theory, but how can we have one true implementation when there are so many languages and platforms out there? If the one true implementation of Atom is written in Python, the Java programmer has to create the implementation by reading the one true implementation’s source rather than reading a standards document. ...
This is a somewhat obscure Ruby on Rails question, but I thought I’d ask it anyway. Is it the case that the code that reads test fixtures into your database ignores any settings you apply to your models? It sure looks to me like if you point a model at a table name other than the default using set_table, or override the default connection information to associate a particular model with a different database, the part of the testing framework that reads the fixtures just ignores it completely. That seems like a somewhat huge limitation to fixtures, which are otherwise very useful. ...
The other day I mentioned a problem I created for myself using CocoaMySQL. There were a number of mishaps involved, but the end result was data loss. Basically what happened is that I unintentionally told CocoaMySQL to run an alter statement on a table in a production database which zeroed out all of the data in a particular column. I was, in fact, just trying to look at the structure for a table and clicked in the wrong place. Then, poof, the data was gone. Of course, aside from the issue of how to get back as much data as possible, the question is how to prevent such data loss in the future. One problem is that the development and production databases live on the same server, and I generally accessed them with the same account. (Not root, but still an account with all privileges for both databases.) When I connected with CocoaMySQL, the production database was selected by default. This meant that I was putting myself in a position to mess up the production data even though there was no reason to assume this risk. I immediately created a new account with access only to staging, which makes mistakes that could destroy production data much less likely. ...
As a general rule, I prefer to have my computer randomly select a screen saver rather than using any one screen saver in particular. Unfortunately, some of the screen savers on my MacBook are really useless, because they use data that I don’t have on my computer (like iTunes album art). So what would be great is a screen saver that lets you select the set of screen savers from which to choose, rather than just using all of them. Anybody heard of such a thing? ...
I always watch the Oscars, but of course I was especially interested to see last night’s show because I am a total Jon Stewart fanboy. Anyway, the show sucked, and I’m not sure whether Jon Stewart was at fault. Either he was the only redeemable bit, or he was a big part of the problem. Either way, it was awful. About halfway through I pledged to myself not to watch next year, because it was just that boring. I didn’t get the sense that the audience was eating up Stewart’s jokes, even the ones that I thought were pretty funny. ...
This morning I’ve discovered that a lot of the Unix-ish stuff on my MacBook is dead, due to problems with libraries that think they’re on the wrong architecture. For example, Quicksilver is crashing due to problems with Perl on the MacBook, and Darwinports won’t work for similar problems with TCL. Oh, the pain of being an early adopter. Once I’ve figured out how to solve the problem I’ll update this entry with what I did. ...