Category Archives: Technical

Calling the US from Europe with Skype

I arrived in Germany this morning. Before I left I setup our home machines in San Francisco with Skype so I could call home without having to pay. We had our first Skype converstation this evening using an open wifi … Continue reading

Posted in Technical | Comments Off on Calling the US from Europe with Skype

Rails schema migrations… wow!

Managing code versions, unit testing, building releases from a branch, etc… are generally well understood processes where you’ll find numerous organizations following similar practices. Now go to the database schema and every company seems to have a different home grown … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby | Comments Off on Rails schema migrations… wow!

Here's hoping Radrails takes off as a Ruby on Rails IDE

In my hunt for a good Ruby IDE I’ve tried almost all of the Ruby IDE’s I could find. After using a variety of them I’ve lately been switching between Radrails and JEdit with the Ruby plugin. As a Java … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby | Comments Off on Here's hoping Radrails takes off as a Ruby on Rails IDE

Validation belongs in the domain model, not the MVC framework

In the Java world validation almost always seems to happen in the MVC framework. For example submitting a form causes some validation to occur on the form and then if all checks out the domain objects are populated and saved. … Continue reading

Posted in Software Engineering | Comments Off on Validation belongs in the domain model, not the MVC framework

Cloaking, no need to be ashamed

Cloaking, the process of showing a user one view of your page and a search engine crawler another view of your page is (I believe) a fairly common practice that’s been hotly debated in the past and discouraged by search … Continue reading

Posted in Search Engine Optimization | 3 Comments

Rails has some great generate commands and a whole lot more!

If you’ve played with Ruby on Rails you’ve likely used script/generate to scaffold a simple CRUD application (including controller, views, helper, database fixtures, unit test, and functional test) as follows: ruby script/generate DomainModel Controller In my side project to learn … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby | Comments Off on Rails has some great generate commands and a whole lot more!

The pain of redeploying makes for better TDD

Dions thought provoking blog entry on Refactoring tools are fantastic and overrated inspired me to think more in-depth about the deploy/redeploy nature of Java web development. He makes the point that while tools like IDEA have great refactoring, that other … Continue reading

Posted in Java | Comments Off on The pain of redeploying makes for better TDD

Tabbed terminals for Windows redux

As I’ve written about here before, I’m always on the lookout for a good tabbed terminal for Windows that I can use to run multiple cygwin/bash shells locally. Running Screen in my Rxvt or alt-tabbing between 8 terminal windows just … Continue reading

Posted in Desktop | 2 Comments

Ruby needs "my" for variable declaration and scoping

I’m still digging Ruby as I plug along over the weekends working on writing a Bliki as an exercise to learn Ruby and Rails. One lesson many of us learned in the Perl days that seems not to have made … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby | Comments Off on Ruby needs "my" for variable declaration and scoping

Ruby on Rails is my new favorite web stack

I’ve been using Ruby on Rails on and off for personal projects and just finished working my way through Agile Web Development with Rails and Programming Ruby. Before I go on I would like to commend Dave Thomas and David … Continue reading

Posted in Ruby | Comments Off on Ruby on Rails is my new favorite web stack