Daily Archive for September 5th, 2007

Quotes from “The Rails Edge”

Published
by
jk
on September 5, 2007
in Personal
. Comments

One of the more interesting things I’ve read today.

The Rails Edge: Quotes and Notes

Definitely lots of little morsels of goodness here. A few of my favorites:

“Java is the blunt scissors of programming” — Dave Thomas

“The key to metaprogramming is understanding self. Isn’t that the key to life” — Dave Thomas

“Unless you understand the SQL code that Rails produces, your app will suck.” — Chad Fowler

“Rails deployment made you feel dumb. It was hard and then it still didn’t work” — Mike Clark

“I’m running, like 7000 Mongrels right now” — Ezra Zygmuntowicz

“Do the dumbest, simplest thing that almost works” — Stuart Halloway

“If you can’t test it, then it’s not a beautiful design. If you can’t test it, it doesn’t exist” — David Chelimsky

Google Reader: Updated?

Published
by
jk
on September 5, 2007
in Web Applications
. Comments

Do my eyes deceive? Is that an actual search bar? AND a collapsable sidebar?

Oh man, this is hot. Yes, I’m totally geeking out.

Was this implemented before today? I must have consciously ignored the top bar because Google Reader never really used that space up there anyway.

Oh, another… the loading text is in the center top, rather than in the corner like it did before. Makes more sense than having the loading text cover up some of the top navigation like it did before. And the loading gif adds a little bit of animation to it all.

Good job, Google. Now… to catch up to them…

EDIT: So yes, there was an update. I guess I was ahead of the pack on reporting this one… One more feature that I forgot to mention was the new 1000 post cap, rather than the 100 one. So now, I know exactly how behind I am. Until I hit 1000+.

I hope that never happens.

Got the Ball Rolling

Published
by
jk
on September 5, 2007
in Project Ideas
. Comments

The weekend was a blur. It went by too fast.

I made a trip to Madison, Wisconsin, where I met up with Amir to get this feed reader project off the ground. We didn’t code all the time, of course. We got a chance to see Superbad while it was still in theaters (when I first saw the previews for this movie, I knew I wanted to see this with the big Manj himself). I finally got a chance to play Metroid Prime 3 as well (which was cool).

I was happy to get the ball rolling. In the end, we didn’t get a lot of code down, but I felt like a lot of the foundations were laid into place… So many things I felt like I took for granted while running through the Depot application using Locomotive…

Deployment of Rails Applications

But alas, this weekend has really pushed me to even more topics I need to quickly learn. Deployment of Rails is an amazingly tricky issue, and I have yet to see a coherent blog post on it. Hence, I bought the eBook Deploying Rails Application. Looks like a very good resource for all things Rails deployment.

Currently, we’re using Dreamhost (because it’s free, since Alex was cool with us using it) with FastCGI and Apache2. I hear it’s not the way to go. Oh the choices run the gamut from Lighthttpd, Mongrel, Pound, Nginx, blah, blah, blah.

Looks like one of the good ways to go is: Pounding Mongrel Light(tpd)ly

Something about Lighttpd rocking Apache, minus load balancing, which is taken care of by Pound…

Yes, I’m still confused. Much to test and learn.

Naming the Darn Thing

I really liked names that had to do with water due to the phrase “river of news”. “Firehose” and “Fire Hydrant” were suggested. We even went the tongue-in-cheek route and tried to name it something to do with garbage… refuse, debris, detritus… Foreign words… Latin words… I mean, this wasn’t the first naming session for this project.

In the end, we decided to not really belabor this issue any longer, and ended up just coming up with a standard way of naming milestones. Of course, this had to be funny, since it would be used internally.

We ended up with: Words that have to do with Christopher Walken sketches on Saturday Night Live.

Yes, I agree. It’s hilarious.

Of course, the first milestone project name had to be called “Cowbell”, from the infamous Blue Oyster Cult sketch involving “Gene Frenkel’s” (Will Ferrel’s) hilarious usage of the cowbell in the song “Don’t Fear the Reaper”. And who could the producer be? None other than Bruce Dickenson (). Yes. The Bruce Dickenson.

Why is this man so funny? I don’t even know if he’s trying… I wonder if he… talks like that… in real… life.

Or was that too Shatner?

The Date

Heck, I don’t even remember when I got the idea to do something silly like this. But I do remember coming up with a cool looking launch date not based on anything but the fact that it was a cool looking date. (For those of you wonder, that date was 07.07.07)

Regardless of what might have come before, September 1st, 2007 it is. The day when “Cowbell” started.

Time to put my pants on, one leg at a time. Except, once my pants are on…