Tag Archive for 'rails'

Another Weekend of Code

Published
by
jk
on December 11, 2007
in Project Ideas
. Comments

This past weekend was well spent, inside. Good thing I had enough food to last through the insanity that is freezing rain.

Definitely made some headway into what I wanted to do with the projects I have. Wrote some code, but mostly throwaway. Looked into a lot of the new Rails 2.0 stuff, but only to realize how little Rails I know period. Also added a third to HanMeta, and I hope to keep adding more people as time passes, and… you know… as I get grander ideas. I’m sure I’ll tap on some shoulders as time passes.

And hopefully, soon enough, LLC is in the future. Need a lawyer and an accountant… yikes.

And that’s all the update I have with regards to HanMeta. I have some nice wrist support gloves to aid me in my wrist painness and it feels like they are working.

Quotes from “The Rails Edge”

Published
by
jk
on September 5, 2007
in Personal
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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

Got the Ball Rolling

Published
by
jk
on September 5, 2007
in Project Ideas
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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…

Another Reason for NetBeans and Ruby

Published
by
jk
on September 4, 2007
in Web Development
. Comments

As posted previously, I’ve been looking into other alternatives to doing Rails, other than the industry-standard TextMate, and it seems like NetBeans is a viable choice.

Now I have another reason to use NetBeans (although, it seems like it’s a little bit slow for my tastes): Collab.

Reading through some more XP documentation, I come across the lovely page on Pair Programming. This isn’t something new, but I didn’t know that XP stressed this so much. I just kinda thought it was something you do if you can… but hey!

All code to be included in a production release is created by two people working together at a single computer. Pair programming increases software quality without impacting time to deliver. It is counter intuitive, but 2 people working at a single computer will add as much functionality as two working separately except that it will be much higher in quality. With increased quality comes big savings later in the project.

Emphasis are mine.

Wow. If that’s the case, I better start doing some more pair programming somehow. And seeing how the three team members on the project (Amir Manji, Derek Remund, and I) who are all four or more hours apart… I need something that’ll give me this wonderful ability.

I’ll continue to write on this IDE as I get more chance to play around with it.

EDIT: Of course, if I was smart enough to think things through, I would have checked if the same was implemented on Eclipse. Turns out… it is. It’s called “Eclipse Communication Framework“.

Frick on a Stick. I have to sit through both of these impressive Java IDE’s? Netbeans vs Eclipse?

The More I Look Into the Past…

Published
by
jk
on August 28, 2007
in Personal
. Comments

… the more I see the importance of what’s to come. And yet, it’s funny… I keep just staring into the past for more clues about the future.

I definitely had the case of the Tuesdays, if you get my drift. Things picked up at the end, but man, it just wasn’t a good day. Legacy code kills.

Just recently, I’ve been talking to a lot of people I’ve lost in contact with. I had mixed feelings whilst talking to them… a concoction of happiness and anger, intermixed with a twinge of bittersweetness.

My left wrist is definitely acting up. I feel like I should see a doctor lest I be crippled for life with carpel tunnel. And that wouldn’t bode too well with the career I have in everything Internet ever.

I’ve been voraciously reading up on the feeds. There are a few technical stories you should be on top of. Hopefully, my Google Reader feed is doing you guys a favor.

As with everything else that isn’t PHP or Symfony, I’ve not really had time to dive too deep into it. It might be because Rails was my first MVC framework or that Symfony is basically a not-so-perfect copy of Rails, but I feel pain every time I encounter a roadblock in programming in Symfony. Routing really annoying in Symfony, and the folders… they still annoy me. Maybe I’ll get used to it still.

I guess I should put something of interest with this post. I guess I’ll leave you with this picture from the Minnesota State Fair.

Deep Fried... Snickers Bar... on a STICK

Suffice to say, it was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever digested. I’m glad I just got to nibble on it, at least… so I could still be alive to tell the tale.

Yeap. It’s another random post.