Blog posts

However much we buy into the adage that hardware is cheaper than developers, we all still need to make our code as responsive as possible. We tune the database, we refactor our code, and try to find the optimum balance between developer time, code legibility, and performance. In the process, many of us have found that rails’ rendering, particularly the Erb library is one of its slowest parts. Enter Erubis. ...

Slacktivist has a link to, and some salient commentary on the astonishing speech by House Minority leader John Boehner, in which he argued that the current ‘war on terror’ began with the US Embassy hostage taking in Iran in 1979. It’s a fairly obvious part of the ongoing propaganda build up that seems increasingly directed towards military action by the USA against Iran. But one thing Boehner opens himself up to is an immediate counterpoint that if we’re going to trace the conflict back to 1979, perhaps we could go one step further and look back to 1953 when the United States and the United Kingdom acted to stop the spread of democracy around the world with Operation Ajax. ...

Steve and Jonny both beat me to the punch, but that doesn’t reduce the value of linking to the video for Duke Special’s “Freewheel”. Duke Special’s sets at Delicatessen (our ‘acoustic night’ in Reading) were some of the highlights of running that event and it’s fantastic to see him/them winning such well deserved attention. One of the many things I’m looking forward to about moving back to the UK is getting to see them play more regularly. ...

There’s something going round, with people sharing the list of gems they have installed locally. To be honest, I’m not quite sure why, but I decided to join in and who knows? Maybe it’ll inspire me to write a little more about a few of my favourites?. So without further delay… abstract (1.0.0) actionmailer (1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.3.0, 1.2.5) actionpack (1.13.2, 1.13.1, 1.13.0, 1.12.5) actionwebservice (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.0, 1.1.6) activerecord (1.15.2, 1.15.1, 1.15.0, 1.14.4) activesupport (1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.1) acts_as_searchable (0.1.0) acts_as_versioned (0.2.3) atom (0.3) builder (2.0.0) cached_model (1.3.1) calibre-bbcode (1.0.0) camping (1.5.180, 1.5) camping-omnibus (1.5.180) capistrano (1.4.0, 1.3.1, 1.2.0) cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.1, 2.0.2, 1.0.0) cheat (1.2.1) daemons (1.0.4, 1.0.3, 1.0.2, 1.0.1) ebayapi (0.9.4, 0.9.3) erubis (2.1.0) fastercsv (1.1.1, 1.1.0, 1.0.0) fastthread (0.6.3, 0.6.2, 0.6.1, 0.4) ferret (0.10.14, 0.10.13) flickr (1.0.0) gem_plugin (0.2.2, 0.2.1) gruff (0.2.8, 0.2.4, 0.1.2) hoe (1.1.7, 1.1.6, 1.1.2, 1.1.1, 1.1.0) hpricot (0.5, 0.4.92, 0.4) icalendar (0.98, 0.97) isbn-tools (0.1.0) json (0.4.2) libxml-ruby (0.3.8.4, 0.3.8) markaby (0.5) memcache-client (1.2.1, 1.2.0) metaid (1.0) mime-types (1.15) mofo (0.1.2) money (1.7.1) mongrel (1.0.1, 1.0, 0.3.17, 0.3.13.4) mongrel_cluster (0.2.1, 0.2.0) mt-capistrano (0.0.2) mysql (2.7) needle (1.3.0) net-sftp (1.1.0) net-ssh (1.0.10) paginator (1.0.8, 1.0.7, 1.0.1) parseexcel (0.5.1.1) piston (1.3.0, 1.2.1) production_log_analyzer (1.3.0) rails (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.2.0, 1.1.6) rails_analyzer_tools (1.1.0) rake (0.7.1) rcov (0.7.0.1) RedCloth (3.0.4, 3.0.3) rfm (0.1.0) rmagick (1.15.2, 1.15.0, 1.14.1, 1.14.0, 1.13.0) Rubilicious (0.2.0) ruby-openid (1.1.4, 1.1.3) ruby-prof (0.4.1) ruby-yadis (0.3.4, 0.3.3) rubyforge (0.4.0, 0.3.2, 0.3.0) rubyosa (0.2.0, 0.1.0) slave (1.2.0, 1.0.0) sources (0.0.1) sqlite3-ruby (1.2.1, 1.2.0, 1.1.0.1) streamlined_generator (0.0.5) tattle (1.0.1) termios (0.9.4) tzinfo (0.3.3) uuidtools (1.0.0) wirble (0.1.2) xml-mapping (0.8.1) xml-simple (1.0.10, 1.0.9) ZenTest (3.4.3)

Over the Festival of Faith and Music weekend, Sufjan Stevens will be playing two shows. The earlier show will be for festivalgoers only, while the second is a general public show and has sold out. In fact, it sold out so quickly that tickets can now be found on ebay. It’s somewhat amusing to see tickets for a show you’re involved with (and an artist you’ve watched come up from playing to much smaller audiences) being sold in this way, but also frustrating as it’s certainly not fair to those who become priced out of seeing their favourite artists. ...

I find much to enjoy in Orion Magazine, but sometimes there is an attitude within its agrarian approach which I find somewhat distasteful. That is a tendency to write off communication technology without seriously considering its context or the ways in which it can be channeled into positive uses. Lowell Monke’s piece " Charlotte’s Webpage: Children and Computers" is a case in point. While Monke is not entirely negative about the use of computers in education, he does leave half-developed research hanging and ignores contextual details that could run counter to his argument. For example early on in the article he notes: ...

This summer, my wife and I will be moving from Grand Rapids to the UK. That’s going to involve selling a lot of our belongings and, of course, our house. We decided that some of these much hyped web tools could be put to good use helping us out with that. So we pressed wordpress into even more use, and over at going… going… you can find a gradually developing listing of what we’d like other people to take off our hands. In a big step, I just listed our house on the site. ...

For at least the past two years around Oscar time I’ve bemoaned the fact that it’s so hard to get access to short films, even those nominated for Academy Awards. Last year Apple picked up some of the slack by making a few of the films available for download through iTunes, but this year there’s a more interesting offering. Oscar Torrents provides summaries of all the nominated films and links to torrents (the files you can feed into bittorrent software, see wikipedia for an introduction) or youtube pages for the films. Not every film is available, but there are enough to give anyone a good overview of what’s up for awards. ...

Moving from Grand Rapids to the UK, as we’re doing this summer, is going to involve selling a lot of our belongings and, of course, our house. We decided that a good way to do that would be to set up a new blog. So over at going… going… you can find a gradually developing listing of what we’d like other people to take off our hands. In a big step, I just listed our house on the site. ...

Wednesday’s post on acts_as_locateable didn’t do much to explain what the patch to the plugin’s methods was doing to allow us to pass extra arguments to ActiveRecord#find. The secret is in the *, or array argument. A normal method will have a fixed number of arguments: def simple_method(first, second, third) puts "#{first} : #{second} : #{third}" end simple_method('one', 'two', 'three') >> one : two : three and sometimes we can develop that by allowing default values for those arguments: ...