andrew carter

RailsConf 2008 - Day 1

Andrew — Fri, 30 May 2008 01:23:32 +0000

I’m at RailsConf 2008 in Portland. Today was the tutorials day.

I went to two sessions. First was on refactoring. I think I’m pretty good at this already but I did pick up a few tips. They used an agile project management tool called strac. I didn’t agree with all the tips but I did get better clarification on when/how to do mixins cleanly.

The second session was a pretty big disappointment. I went to a talk on testing for developers. It just wasn’t well done at all. The presenter assumed we knew RSpec and he rarely explained what exactly he was doing. I readily admit that my Rails testing practices need improvement. I was hoping to get a little more hand holding on the right way to do it. This session didn’t deliver.

Tomorrow the main content gets underway. I’m looking forward to the talks. It feels like OSCON but the focus on Rails topics will be fun. And I’m bringing my laptop tomorrow. I tried the lightweight approach today but too many times I wanted to try something out or looks something up. They should rent out those Nokia handhelds for conferences. iPhone isn’t enough and a laptop is sometimes too much.

Barack Obama in Seattle

Andrew — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 06:50:24 +0000

Barack Obama will be holding a rally in Seattle at Key Arena on Friday February 8. I’ve been behind Obama since it was first rumored he would run. I’m hoping to sneak away from work to hear him on Friday and I’ll be there with my wife and my daughter on Saturday to caucus for him.

My XO Laptop is on the way

Andrew — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 07:18:23 +0000

I’ve been a supporter of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project since I first heard of it. When they announced the Buy 1 Give 1 program in November, I signed up on the first day. I did it both to support the program and to satisfy my own curiosity. I think the laptop is an extraordinary accomplishment. It may help redefine what computers need to be.I also have a 3-year old daughter. She is already adapting nicely to technology. We regularly use an iMac for a few learning games, music, photos, and some videos. I’m amazed at how fast she has picked up using the mouse and generally interfacing with the computer. I’m very interested in putting the XO laptop in her hands and seeing what she can do. I hope that it can be a tool for her to be introduced to technology in a positive way.Today I got an email with my tracking number for the XO. It’s in Portland and set for delivery tomorrow.

Seattle Sounders of the MLS

Andrew — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 04:20:47 +0000

Seattle is finally getting an MLS franchise! It’s been painful to see places like Kansas City or Salt Lake get teams while Seattle was hung out to dry. I think MLS will do very well here. It only makes sense for the A-League champion Sounders to move up to the MLS. And if we have to trade the Sonics to get MLS here, I say it is a good trade. The NBA is a ghost of the Michael Jordan league of old.Â

Gmail becomes … useful

Andrew — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 04:44:28 +0000

It only took like 4 years but finally, Gmail has IMAP support. Way to go guys! Nothing wrong with being last I suppose.

All kidding aside, this is a very long overdue change and in my opinion makes Gmail legitimately useful. I’m glad there is a web interface but it is not as good as Mail.app or Thunderbird. And IMAP makes Gmail much more useful on the iPhone. Cool.

24 Hour Party People

Andrew — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 05:40:01 +0000

I watched 24 Hour Party People this weekend. It’s the story of the post-punk Manchester music scene led by Factory Records, Joy Division/New Order and the Happy Mondays. The movie was pretty good. The best thing about it was reminding me how incredible Joy Division was. Go listen to Unknown Pleasures and tell me it isn’t still incredibly ahead of it’s time.As a side note, there appears to be an independent film on the life of Ian Curtis called Control. The trailer looks very good.

Radiant CMS

Andrew — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 04:45:48 +0000

I’ve been working on a website the past few days using Radiant CMS. So far, I have found it to be an excellent lightweight framework. The core concepts are very straightforward and there is minimal abstraction from the underlying Rails application.CMS in general is a dirty word to me. It conjures up pictures of heavy beasts like Drupal. Don’t get me wrong - Drupal has its place and time. But not for most one or two person sites. You can totally avoid a CMS system altogether as it is not hard to build up a little Rails application. However, it is harder to hand it off to non-Rails people to update regularly.Radiant is nearly the perfect blend. It uses intelligent structures for organizing the components of your site while leaving the underlying Rails structure available. So far, I have been able to do most of what I want via the built-in admin interface. It stores the bulk of your content in a database.The general philosophy is to create one of three pieces - pages, snippets, or layouts. The choice of pages is great. Many CMS systems make it difficult to get to what you really are building - web pages. Instead, Radiant lets you get right to work on the page content and uses helpers for rendering the finished pages.Pages are composed of parts which are regions of content on a page. For example, most of my pages have a body part (the default) and a sidebar part. Layouts are the templates shared by multiple pages. Layouts map very closely to Rails layouts. So you can easily use the same design patterns. I have a layout for the normal web pages and one for the RSS feed. The last piece is a snippet which nicely map very closely to Rails helpers. Again, use the same patterns. My snippets include a header, footer, and navbar.In addition, Radiant has a concept similar to ERB - radius. These tags are filled in by Radiant. For example, you can get all the child pages of the current page via radius tags. You can get other attributes like the title, author, or date. Finally, there is a nice navigation helper set of tags that lets you build an intelligent navbar.Radiant supports several different markup meta languages like Markdown, SmartyPants, and Textile. I’ve had a little trouble mixing the Radiant tags (radius) with these. They might only be useful for parts that aren’t dependent on the radius tags.There are a couple things I don’t like. First, you can’t easily re-order your page hierarchies. I had to create a new page and copy content to move it in the tree. Also, if you want to do news items or blog posts, you treat them as pages. I think it might be a little better to somehow push these into a separate posts concept. The interface with the style sheets isn’t the best. Stylesheets are simply pages as well. This works except that it is tedious to put the CSS changes in if you want to use another tool like Coda or TextMate. The last problem is that all the structure and content are mashed together in the database. Ideally, I would like to have the structure parts in source control (templates, containers, snippets, stylesheets, etc) and the actual content in the database. It might be possible to hack Radiant to do this but so far I haven’t had the motivation to do so.Overall this is a nice site development platform. It isn’t strictly a blogging system and it doesn’t have the massive list of features of other CMS systems. It is a great choice if you could write the site by hand but don’t want to spend that much time or effort. To see a full-featured example, checkout the official Ruby language site. It is built using Radiant.

Nerd Test

Andrew — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 04:04:51 +0000

I think I’m actually proud of these scores …

Maui Vacation

Andrew — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:46:32 +0000

We went to Maui last week for a vacation. Just thought I would share a cool picture from the trip.

iPhone Pricing

Andrew — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 06:08:02 +0000

Not a good PR week for Apple. Between the NBC split-up and now an unexpected $200 price drop on the iPhone, they are getting lots of negative press instead of attention to the new products.I’m not sure what to think. Of course, I’m feeling a little burned with a $200 price drop so soon. I knew the price would fall over time but not in 60 days. I do hope that Apple does something to appease the early adopters. They shouldn’t have to do it but they don’t need the ruckus. I don’t like my phone any less and I knew I was paying way too much to get it. My wife on the other hand is more than a little annoyed. Note to Apple - you really screwed the Wife Factor for future purchases big time. And make no mistake, that’s a big deal.The bigger question to me is why such a big drop in price? Looking at the lineup, the iPod and iPhone prices do make sense. None of them now seem outrageously expensive. There is a clearly a seat being kept warm for a 16 GB iPhone around $499. I tend to think that this is tightening up the story for selling into the last half of the year. But it could also mean that they are either aggressively trying to win market share with iPhone or they aren’t selling good enough.The new devices seem ok. I’m not blown away. I am happy that my iPhone is comparable to the iPod Touch. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything the iPod offers. The nano seems a little weird but I’ve never thought much of the nano anyway. I would like to have seen a 2GB shuffle. I actually use my first gen iPod shuffle more than my iPhone. It’s not sexy but it does the job very well.What I really was hoping for was iTunes HD. Apple better get HD downloads soon or they could find the video business in trouble. I have to wonder if this wasn’t part of the NBC issue. The AppleTV becomes a must have device as soon as you can feed the thing with HD content. Right now, it’s a nice music/photo player (and way overpriced). If they had HD downloads, they could start to displace DirecTV and cable companies. And I’m sure that scares plenty of companies in Hollywood.