Month: August 2008

You have the key

August 17, 2008 /

Oh little one
You walk so far alone
Carry things from long ago
Knives of memory and gentle strangers

Don’t they always say:

You can’t buck that feeling
Can’t escape what you were
Not escape tomorrow
Because of yesterday

Turn again
See the keys of happiness
Once again that golden thread
Live without regret

Don’t they always say:

You can’t buck that feeling
Can’t escape what you were
Not escape tomorrow
Because of yesterday

You have the key,
You have the key my darling
You have the key, little one
Let go of yesterday

Don’t they always say:

You can’t buck that feeling
Can’t escape what you were
Not escape tomorrow
Because of yesterday

Fingers slip on precipice
Now falling far and fast
All your lessons done
Learn to smile

You have the key,
You have the key my darling
You have the key, little one
Let go of yesterday

You have they key of happiness

It’s a real shame that Twitter is used to bash Rails

August 13, 2008 /

Comment here.

Even in the Rails community Twitter have put their foot in it several times and, IMHO, have’t got huge credibility. They moaned about not being able to share database connections and then a very able guru known as Dr Nic (he is a Ph D. – and a lovely barking mad person) showed them they did’t know what they were talking about in about 10 lines of code. Hell, even I knew what they were saying did’t sound right and I had only been using rails for a couple of months then, but I have been database programming for the best part of 20 years.

I’ve also used another of their messaging tools, called Beanstalk, and it sucks. We are going to throw it away. It comes with a Ruby gem to allow you to talk to it and rails plugin that adds stuff to the Active Record class – the plugin breaks active record beyond repair – useless. I wrote a 100 line add-in that allowed you to make asynchronous calls using Beanstalk. I looked at their plugin and the code was nasty.

We’re replacing Beanstalk with a very simple daemon that comes in a hundred lines of code or so, is traceable, and works. Very sceptical about Twitter stuff after this experience, and it’s a shame they’re held up as an example.

We are’t a web 2.0 company. We just use Rails to get stuff done really quickly. If there was a faster development framework we’d use it. But I never want to go back to Java, it slows you down and gets in the way.

http://francis.blog-city.com/java_is_bad_for_your_brain_talk_at_barcamp_manchester.htm

Bootnote

Luke pointed out that beanstalkd does its job very well in the right context. The problem we had was that it was very hard to see what it was doing and it was difficult to debug things and a simple daemon that picks the next record from a stack of database records and processes them one at a time was better for us. See his comment for the great things they’ve done with it. Horses for courses.

Writing

August 3, 2008 /

I finished my radio play off today and will be sending it to the BBC next week. Quite excited about it but not really holding out a huge amount of hope because there is’t a lot of point getting too worked up about stuff.

I’ve been reading number watch a lot recently. It fits with my world view very well, I started out my proffessional career in the 1980’s with a degree in Applied Statistics and computing. Whenever I hear one of the meedja panics, most recently about chlorine, I know in my heart it is rubbish but don’t have the energy or the time to look into it. The guy who runs this site does and presents a very good case indeed. I really recommend you look at this presentation and have a think about what he says.CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. I think a lot of people need to understand this properly. I think I’ll buy his books when I’m feeling less skint.

I’ve been working my way through Dave Thomas’ video presentations on Ruby meta programming, really interesting and putting all kinds of ideas in my head. I’m probably going to buy most of the Pragmatic Programmer’s videos. I was thinking of learning another programming language, as is advised in the Pragmatic Programmer, but think there’s still a lot of Ruby to understand after seeing these. The first one is the best explanation of where object oriented programming comes from and how it works I’ve ever seen. Also, as a Sun Certified Java whatsit it’s even more obvious that Java is only half way there at best.

I’m also going to resurrect  an old project called pharmarketeer (already own the domain) and try and get it live using Rails. I’ve recently opened a small account on github to do my version control, probably going to start using it for my writing too. I used to use svnrepository and when I went there to cancel my account it was annoying to see that they do git too, but have’t bothered telling their customers. I probably would’t have gone to github if I’d known, but they do allow 5 private repos against sv’s one, but svn allow unlimited collaborators and were about half the price.

Deb is finally home after a month with whistlestop turnarounds before she went off to the next thing. Jon off to scout camp. I spent most of today working because I got behind working from home on Friday because of a long and boring saga about keys that don’t work some times. I’ve changed the lock for a new one.

Bed time, gotta get up and do my meditation practice. For some bizzare reason it seems to be harder to get it done at the weekend, even though you nominally have more time. Probably because you have more time, you waste it.

later.