Jay McGavren's Journal

The limitations of software...

“Just be aware that you can’t stay more than 32,767 days at any one hotel.” –The developer across the way from me

Just had my second randomly-started conversation on Ruby of the day. Seems like everybody wants to program in it, but almost nobody actually does.

Doesn’t matter; with the kind of mindshare the language is getting, major corporate acceptance is probably less than a decade away.

Here’s yet another glimpse into my daily train of thought - my del.icio.us bookmarks page.

HTML: http://del.icio.us/nephariuz RSS: http://del.icio.us/rss/nephariuz

I use “Lazy Sheep” (http://ejohn.org/apps/sheep/) to add stuff. It’s a JavaScript bookmark that I simply click when I’m viewing an interesting page, and it’ll add it to del.icio.us with tags borrowed from other users. Yes, I’m probably helping pollute the site with lame tags in some cases, but I wouldn’t submit at all if it weren’t for this shortcut. At some point I’ll go into the account and clean things up a bit.

So, anyone else have a del.icio.us/Furl/othersocialbookmarking account? If not, get one!

There’s a store called Half Price Books near my work that carries used media, including a small games section. I found a copy of “Magix Music Maker” for PS2, and at $7 I figured I could just write it off if it sucked.

It doesn’t - from an hour’s work last night I have the skeleton of a damn catchy tune. (I’ll be spamming everyone with a link once it’s polished enough.)

My success there inspired me to see what the MTV Music Generator franchise had been up to lately - another $7.50 on Amazon got me a used Music Generator 3 for XBox. I’m still pretty proud of at least one of the pieces I put together on the Playstation original, so we’ll see what can be done two versions later.

There Is Only One Way To Do It

Ruby on Rails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/) lets you create a skeletal Web application with a few simple commands. How? By making the author give up some power of choice in how the application is constructed.

This is not, in my opinion, a bad thing. Choices made by a single developer (especially newbies) rarely reflect best practices.

Now comes Maven (http://maven.apache.org/) which seems to do the same thing for Java apps. Could this be the start of a trend?