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I like Ruby on Rails, but the design is sometimes inconsistent.

For example, consider the “text_method” parameter to the collection_select helper method. The argument forces you to call a method on the model object which returns the text which is used in the select list. That’s ok when you only want to display a single field from that object, for example “name”. It’s not ok if you want to display something more complicated, because then you’re putting display logic into the model. You’re supposed to use helpers for that! Since doing it right would make it ugly and more complicated, I end up giving in and doing it the wrong way by adding a method to the model. It frustrates me.

This blog is notably lacking in the subjects of music and art, so to help remedy that here is a video of the classical guitar duo I had the delight of hanging out with this weekend. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXMOB1BvpwY

They are amazing musicians, not to mention hilariously funny and smart. Besides hearing a totally INTENSE and inspirational performance, I got to hear really funny and endearing stories about their adventures. Susana is from Spain, while Alexis is from Greece, so they’re doubly interesting to talk to.

Unfortunately, writing about it tends to deflate the experience. But I will update if they are in Chicago again. Until then, check out their website http://www.duomelis.com/

Delicious firefox extension – intelligent tag grouping to cut down on size of menu
Sage – load feeds by opening an rss of rss feeds
Particle system research. Bird for website redesign.
Embattle – write gtd to identify unresolved issues

I’m curious. Who knows the origin of the word “heredoc” or “here document” to refer to a way of representing string literals? It seems like such a strange name.

Where have I been? Well, France and Spain to name a few. Until I get a computer desk, be satisfied with the latest article in the news about my company: Navteq charts growth of maps via technology

Today has been a buggy day at work.

First, I tried again to get Java Web Start working on an application. It launches JWS, but then my application hangs leaving a javaw.exe process in the background. From some searching on the forum, it seems that other people are having the same problem. In fact, it may be due to a bug in Java Web Start, which means there’s nothing I can do about it.

Next, I’m having a problem with Selenium tests on a PHP application which uses sessions. It took me a while to figure out why my test user would get logged out immediately without any error messages when running tests with the Test Runner instead of the Selenium IDE. I have ini_set(‘session.referer_check’, ‘stuffhere’); set to improve security a bit, but when I run the test suite through the Test Runner, $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] is set to the Selenium Test Runner’s URL, which obviously fails the referrer check. And since errors were being pushed to a session that was immediately lost when the referrer check failed, I wasn’t seeing any errors. So what’s my solution? Well, for now I’ll have to disable the referrer check. It can be spoofed anyway… That means changing a fair amount of apps though… bleh.

This article by James Clark, the Technical Lead of the original XML Working Group, puts into words exactly what I was thinking when XML first came out and was being touted as the be-all end-all of data interchange formats. For years I haven’t been confident in my knowledge of XML to vocalize my disenchantment with it, so hearing a similar opinion from the horse’s mouth is rather comforting!

Found via ongoing

Coming soon: Embattle

Via Warren Ellis: video of Jeff Han demonstrating a massive multitouch system:

Well, here’s a first post to christen my new domain name and website. We will see whether this WordPress thing works out.