threehv

A while back Brightbox honcho, Jeremy Jarvis, tweeted about his best three decisions of the past two years. All three were big decisions (OK, two out of three).

Which got me thinking. It’s been almost two years since my last big decision (to quit my job and go freelance so I could work with Ruby full-time). Change is pretty much the only thing you can be sure of so you may as well make things happen rather than passively sitting by and waiting for them to happen to you.

Meaning it’s probably time for a big decision. But what is it to be?

A conversation between me and my (14 year old) daughter:

Me: Are any of your friends “into” computers? You know, writing stuff, making websites, coding?

Daughter: I think [girl's name] is. She does layouts and codes for web stuff.

Me: Really? Interesting. But just her then?

Daughter: Yeah.

Me: So why aren’t more of your friends into that sort of thing?

Daughter: I dunno. Just not that bothered I guess.

Me: What about the boys you know? Are any of them into computers?

Daughter: No, not really. Just [girl's name]. Why are you asking?

Me: Well this guy did a presentation at a conference with some saucy images on the slides. And now a load of people are up in arms saying “it’s this sort of thing that makes women not get involved with technology”.

Daughter: Oh no, it’s nothing like that. It’s just not very interesting is it?

Lesson learnt today.

Apparently, underscores are not part of the standard for a host name. However, your browser (and DNS server and all the links in between) will accept underscores in the host name.

But, when you have Safari set to “only accept cookies for sites that I visit” the underscore in the cookie’s host will cause Safari to silently discard the cookie. Leaving you with a strange log-in bug that seems to defy explanation.

The solutions – make your host name compliant with the standard. And until you can do that, switch Safari to “accept all cookies”.

Recently I’ve been playing around with Balsamiq Mockups. This is an application that lets you chuck screen designs (for web pages, desktop applications or iPhone applications) together very simply and quickly.

Balsamiq Mockups

The UI is pretty straightforward – create a screen, select some controls (via drag/drop or by typing in a name) and place them where you want them. Each control can then be roughly edited (for example, the table control lets you put comma-separated values in) so that you can make it look something like the expected data.

I have to say that it’s a pretty good application. It’s the first thing I’ve found that comes anywhere near the convenience of a whiteboard (or even better a piece of A3 and a 6B pencil). Even more amazing is that it’s also the first Adobe AIR application that doesn’t want to make me gouge my own eyes out in frustration at its non-standard user interface.

So, overall I have to recommend it (and if you ask nicely, they may even give you a free copy).

Is it better than a piece of paper? No.

Is it better than everything else I’ve tried on a computer? Yes.

The wonderful Dominic Hodgson has finally got around to setting up the website for Techietubbies – our largely shambolic (but highly entertaining) tech podcast.

Last week’s episode is up there already, hopefully more to come very soon.

Tomorrow I’m actually going to do it.

I’m going to change the tools that I use to code in Ruby for the first time in four years. You see, I must be one of the very very few Ruby-programming Mac-users that doesn’t like Textmate.

This is pretty much heresy to most Rubyists.

I used to think I didn’t like Textmate because of the single window interface. Multiple windows could be positioned exactly where I want them (that window only has a couple of lines in it so I can keep that tiny and see both that and that other file at the same time). Tabs are all the same size for each file and you can’t keep them arranged as you want them.

But then I bought the MacHeist bundle. And got a little web-developer’s editor called Espresso. I really like MacRabbit’s CSSEdit so was looking forward to trying Espresso. And like it I did. I even got over my tabbed interface problems (maybe nicely styled tabs with a list view beats ugly tabs with a drawer). But there was a problem. Espresso is crap for Rails development (despite Elliott Cable’s ruby “sugar”).

So, having been spoilt by an “integrated” editor, but still not liking Textmate, where could I go? Coda, by Panic, was where. And I have to say I really like it. It’s not perfect, it’s taken me about a week to get my head round how things hang together. But it deals with ruby and rails and is extensible.

Which is enough to make me shell out the $99. And change the way I work pretty fundamentally.

When dealing with people (whether friends, family, customers or suppliers), remember: there is an absolute world of difference between “I think that’s rubbish” and “it is rubbish”.

One is a statement of opinion, the other is likely to get people’s backs up. Words and phrasing are important to people.

It’s why naming in computer science is hard.

It’s why people are better than machines.

Myself and Team Brightbox spent the weekend in Edinburgh for Scotland on Rails last week. Here is a quick micro-review:

• Ruby is all about the testing: most of the talks were about testing, test-driven development, or even better, behaviour-driven development. I certainly think that the Ruby community leads the world when it comes to this form of software development (good job I’m obssessed with it eh?)
• The next most popular subject for talks (a long way behind in second place) was scaling. Nothing too radical here; sensible design will see you a long way and the real bottleneck will end up being your database
• The best talk was Dave Thomas explaining the Ruby object model. I finally know what Ruby’s eigenclass is (hint, it’s the same as the metaclass or singleton class). It’s also nice to see how elegant Ruby is internally – your current context and scope only changes in a class definition or method invocation, which is really sweet. But not as good as Smalltalk, where class definition is a method invocation, so the model is even more elegant.
• The venue, Pollock Halls, was OK, but the chairs were a bit uncomfortable for a whole day of sitting down, there weren’t a great deal of power sockets and there was a Wifi failure at one point. The food was good, even if I didn’t know what some of it was (and there was free Irn-Bru – no stereotypes there :-))
• Overall, I really enjoyed it. I met some interesting people, learnt some new stuff and had a good time. You can’t ask for much more than that.