Ramblings on Ruby on Rails
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OK, just finished porting my toolbox to OS X. I’ve gotten rid of all those dumb text files and generators, as they were really only needed under Windows.
I ported some stuff to take advantage of my Ruby utilities library, and threw out a lot of cruft. Here’s what made the cut…
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Found a folder in the Quicksilver catalog that was indexed to infinite depth, adding hundreds of (wrong) entries and blocking the correct ones. I can actually use it now that I’ve fixed it.
Not being able to navigate without the mouse was actually stressing me out quite a lot. Feels like I just surfaced for air. Gasp!
Maybe I’ll be navigating around Rails projects in a more coordinated fashion eventually, but right now I’m finding myself doing a full-project search for a string I saw in the rendered page somewhere. I don’t have to worry about whether it occurred in a template or a partial (or someplace else it really shouldn’t be), I’m just taken to the right place.
Jef Raskin promoted tossing out folders and filenames and so forth in favor of just searching the text of documents. He argued they’re overhead that people don’t use anyway. And seeing the rise of Google and desktop search (not to mention witnessing my own behavior), I think I agree.
Rode along to Six Flags with Jennifer and Bryan - lotta fun. The wait for the X2 was ridiculous, especially considering it was like a 90 second ride, and there were zero lines for the rest of the coasters. At least we got some cool photos while in line… The Flip Mino video camera I got as a Christmas present from Integrum took some impressive video while on the coasters themselves. (Er, that is, it would have, if we had broken the rules and brought it, which we would never do.)
In a happy coincidence, Eric and Hitomi just moved less than an hour away from there, so we got to combine trips and visit them. We didn’t get to do conveyor sushi (that restaurant was tiny and packed) but we hit another sushi place, and even Jennifer and Bryan tried some sashimi. (Pretty brave considering Bryan got some bad fish a while ago.)
On the way back Diana fought her way into a crowded outlet mall and emerged with one of those shamelessly self-branded Coach purses for $70 (which I’m assured is a great price). Hey, if she can get her shopping fix at a discount, I’m all for it.
I’ve always flown into LA in the past, so I didn’t know the drive was so beautiful. Pasadena, especially, is a place I’d like to go back and visit at some point. Guess that’s next trip!
So many of our websites and applications and business processes share at least some of the same functionality. So many of them have redundant implementations that aren’t versatile enough to re-use. If we could somehow reduce that redundancy… I think the benefits of the reduced maintenance cost would completely offset the drop in performance.
How about go to Six Flags, flagrantly violate their posted rules, and take it on the Goliath coaster?
Waved bye to Lenny and Diana and resumed work after our holiday BBQ… Then had a good laugh when I scanned my Twitter feed…
enjoying the #integrum family holiday lunch, lots of little kiddos running around
Been playing DJ on the office jukebox with my 5-star songs for the past couple days… There were many nodyaheads and people signing along to my Audioslave and Ben Folds Five selections yesterday, so I guess I’ve got okay taste in music. Don’t think today’s Fluke songs went over as well, ’cause someone switched it out at some point. Oh, well.
Diana of course went nuts on the avatar editor for XBox Live as soon as it was released, poring over makeup, glasses, shoes, and everything. I dread the day they release paid content for this thing - she’ll buy as many shoes as she has in the real world. And after she was done with her own avatar, she moved on…
Lenny’s as short as we could make him, but you get the idea.
Is it just me, or are Cucumber tests in combination with Webrat really brittle? I’m generating messages to go in my inbox, and they weren’t showing up because I forgot to make them “from” the current user. I can’t say:
Given I am on the messages page #BAD And there are 4 messages #BAD
…because that would load a page with no messages on it. It has to be:
Given there are 4 messages And I am on the messages page
Not as versatile as Cucumber advocates seem to be promising. Maybe I’ll get used to this kind of stuff over time, but right now I’m encountering/generating way too many head-scratching bugs to be productive.
