Comment here.

Even in the Rails community Twitter have put their foot in it several times and, IMHO, haven't got huge credibility. They moaned about not being able to share database connections and then a very able guru known as Dr Nic (he is a Ph D. - and a lovely barking mad person) showed them they didn't know what they were talking about in about 10 lines of code. Hell, even I knew what they were saying didn't sound right and I had only been using rails for a couple of months then, but I have been database programming for the best part of 20 years.

I've also used another of their messaging tools, called Beanstalk, and it sucks. We are going to throw it away. It comes with a Ruby gem to allow you to talk to it and rails plugin that adds stuff to the Active Record class - the plugin breaks active record beyond repair - useless. I wrote a 100 line add-in that allowed you to make asynchronous calls using Beanstalk. I looked at their plugin and the code was nasty.

We're replacing Beanstalk with a very simple daemon that comes in a hundred lines of code or so, is traceable, and works. Very sceptical about Twitter stuff after this experience, and it's a shame they're held up as an example.

We aren't a web 2.0 company. We just use Rails to get stuff done really quickly. If there was a faster development framework we'd use it. But I never want to go back to Java, it slows you down and gets in the way.

http://francis.blog-city.com/java_is_bad_for_your_brain_talk_at_barcamp_manchester.htm

Bootnote

Luke pointed out that beanstalkd does its job very well in the right context. The problem we had was that it was very hard to see what it was doing and it was difficult to debug things and a simple daemon that picks the next record from a stack of database records and processes them one at a time was better for us. See his comment for the great things they've done with it. Horses for courses.

I've been reading number watch a lot recently. It fits with my world view very well, I started out my proffessional career in the 1980's with a degree in Applied Statistics and computing. Whenever I hear one of the meedja panics, most recently about chlorine, I know in my heart it is rubbish but don't have the energy or the time to look into it. The guy who runs this site does and presents a very good case indeed. I really recommend you look at this presentation and have a think about what he says.CORRELATION IS NOT CAUSATION. I think a lot of people need to understand this properly. I think I'll buy his books when I'm feeling less skint.

I've been working my way through Dave Thomas' video presentations on Ruby meta programming, really interesting and putting all kinds of ideas in my head. I'm probably going to buy most of the Pragmatic Programmer's videos. I was thinking of learning another programming language, as is advised in the Pragmatic Programmer, but think there's still a lot of Ruby to understand after seeing these. The first one is the best explanation of where object oriented programming comes from and how it works I've ever seen. Also, as a Sun Certified Java whatsit it's even more obvious that Java is only half way there at best.

I'm also going to resurrect  an old project called pharmarketeer (already own the domain) and try and get it live using Rails. I've recently opened a small account on github to do my version control, probably going to start using it for my writing too. I used to use svnrepository and when I went there to cancel my account it was annoying to see that they do git too, but haven't bothered telling their customers. I probably wouldn't have gone to github if I'd known, but they do allow 5 private repos against svn's one, but svn allow unlimited collaborators and were about half the price.

Deb is finally home after a month with whistlestop turnarounds before she went off to the next thing. Jon off to scout camp. I spent most of today working because I got behind working from home on Friday because of a long and boring saga about keys that don't work some times. I've changed the lock for a new one.

Bed time, gotta get up and do my meditation practice. For some bizzare reason it seems to be harder to get it done at the weekend, even though you nominally have more time. Probably because you have more time, you waste it.

later.

Then we had the sexual revolution of the sixties, in particular reliable contraception. This blew away a lot of preconceptions about things on the back of a terrible war where women had started to do jobs that were nominally only for men. Women could have sex as much as they wanted without risking pregnancy. This meant that they could start to move away from their biology and start competing with men directly. It also blew away the myth that women are scared of sex, in fact they were scared of pregnancy, a much more difficult thing for them to deal with than some idiot leaving a trail of sperm everywhere.

This economic trend was the basis for the feminist movement. There were simply more women not being the housewife, and having jobs and careers of their own. More women were career minded, were limiting their families and so on. This meant that they wanted the closed doors and glass ceilings that men had put in their way removed. They were right, it was wrong and unfair. Of course, it wasn't a conspiracy by men, it was just the way things were, but that doesn't suit if you want to be angry.

There was also a vigorous and correct campaign to protect women from predatory men and exercising their right to dress and behave how they see fit. No-one argues with this, it was right and just. An unfortunate and dangerous sub current of this was that all men were potential rapists and predators, and all men should be watched carefully. A justified wariness and caution around men you don't know well, given that they are in general about half again as strong as a woman of the same size, was turned into an ideology. All men were rapists, and could not be trusted.

Let us pause here and restate that: All men were rapists, and could not be trusted. This is exactly what was being said in radical feminist magazines. Women should unite, become lesbians, and only use men for brief purposes of procreation. Men are now the enemy. The anger ran very deep, it was becoming hard to be a heterosexual man in certain radical circles. To be fair a lot of the radical men were unreconstructed sexist pigs who needed to marry their professed politics and their behaviour together. But were they some kind of dangerous, sex-crazed enemy? No. They were just men. Men who love and respect women, when you kick their soap boxes away and challenge them to think more deeply. We laugh at the alleged Victorian notion that table legs should be covered up in case it inflames men's 'base' desires and then act like it's actually true.

It sounds completely crazy doesn't it, making an unavoidable biological division into a political platform, a basis for hatred? But it is the way radical feminists used to write and think. Interestingly, this was the hotbed that the student activists of the 80's and 90's lived inside. You have to ask yourself: who got involved in politics and eventually got themselves elected? Who took the political gauntlet away from the male cabals and trod the boards, knocking on doors and building political parties? Women, educated, articulate women. Good thing too! But, the dangerous thing was that they had been infected with at least some of this suspicion of men.

A lot of laws, particularly those around divorce and child custody, were rewritten to be fair to the woman. They acknowledged her role in creating a family and that she should have half of the assets. This is not a bad thing. It might appear to hurt some men but it is very fair, compared to the way it was years before. But now men are denied access to their families, they are demonised when they try and ensure that cash is distributed fairly. They are a dangerous annoyance that needs to be kept away from the purity of the family. They are no longer allowed to be part of it. This is a caricature, of course, an aunt sally that you can throw rocks at if you want to. But it follows on from them being the enemy, in fact they are becoming the enemy of society at large.

It is utterly insane to say that, condemning half of society to being the enemy. But you look at the way a man can't take a photograph on the street, or pick his children up without being scowled at suspiciously, or be seen anywhere near a playground on his own. It's true, in some senses. When we had a friend and her child round recently I was shocked by feeling unable to give him a hug – where the hell did that come from?

The other thing about this is – what happens to boys? You will be a man, but while you are growing up men are something to be scared of unless they are your dad (assuming you know who he is). Even male teachers are suspect. Then you grow up and what? Become a bad person? It almost gives them a licence to behave how the hell they like because that's what's expected. Think about it, think about the lack of authority and respect for men in general, for others, for anyone but your small circle of acquaintances. Is it surprising a lot of young men (and women too) are such dangerous idiots? They have been infantilised, they have had their role models replaced by selfish useless people idolised by airhead meedja for as long as it suits the editors.

Where is the father or grandfather or whoever who commands respect and people listen to, who could intervene and knock sense into heads? Dead and gone. The same is true of the mother and grandmother too, the nanny state knows best, and is always fair in her dealings with people. Everyone has been infantilised – the big STOP sign stands across relationships between generations. Yes, it's stupid, it has created a generation of twenty-somethings with their teeth still in the teat who don't know how to behave towards each other. How do infants behave? Self-centred and quite often incapable of understanding others' feelings – does this sound familiar? Seeing the other person's point of view, taking it into your heart when you deal with others, is part of growing up and yes, it hurts, but it hurts for a reason. No, let's just treat other human beings as onanistic aids on some hedonistic rush to death.

Now the state intervenes between men and women as a matter of course, it has to rake its lowest common denominator paws across families and decide for the parents how best to bring up children. It is extremely risk averse, this means that it's easier to say no to everything in case you become one of the vanishingly small number of problem cases. This causes great pain for a lot of people, and their children, for the sake of not a lot. Another STOP sign has been created between men and women when relationships break down. Of course, this was originally justified because the state was supporting the families of "absent fathers", sadly the families quite often don't have anything more than they did, except the legal bill landing at the door of the parent the state can find.

Then we have the rise of the CRB culture, another risk averse mentality. Men in general are not child molesters, they are as revolted and angered by it as anyone else. A vanishingly small number of them should be locked up and kept away from children. Instead of using common sense, assuming innocence until proven guilty, of making sure situations where accusations could arise (or misdemeanours actually occur) do not happen, we have a pile of rote behaviours and rules that protect no one and breed suspicion and distrust. The bad guys just go round them and protect themselves. A child goes missing and is spotted by a lone man who will not take it by the hand and try to return it – eventually it is kidnapped and murdered by someone else, someone evil. Is this good? Is this right? Never. But the guy who could have helped was afraid to, and twenty years ago he would have done so without thinking. That stinks.

Yes, teachers and people who deal with children a lot should be checked. But the guy or gal who checks your application forms for your driving licence? Or the one who takes the money in the post office? Why? Risk aversion. The guy walking down the street on his way home from work? Every guy or gal who's got past the age of 10? Where the hell does it stop? Tattoos or marks on the forehead saying you've been checked – or the other way, like the branding of vagabonds in the seventeenth century?

Where does this lead? Licenced mothers and fathers, everyone has a CRB check, a biometric ID card and is recorded somewhere on a huge DNA database – the state pushing the barriers between people so far that every relationship is a subject of the barrier, the STOP sign, and a bunch of paper pushers control your life completely on the basis of some rules that are very fair, but not even slightly compassionate. The state doesn't have compassion, it is scared of risk, it interferes where it shouldn't for the best of reasons. There are places where the state should not intervene and this is one of them.

Yes kids, bad things happen, and no amount of laws and hand-wringing can stop it. Yes, often they hurt and are very hard to bear – it's called the human condition, sorry. You can minimise the danger by learning how to be an adult and where the limits are, but the pain that comes from falling out of your mother's womb can't be ducked, hard luck, there is no get out of jail free card in real life. A lot of the time there isn't anyone to blame, either, so don't bother looking. The bad guys should be punished when they are caught. Only a fool would argue with that, but politicians have to be seen to be doing something when the meedja gets all hysterical and quite often they should just say shit happens, sorry, if you can find some way to stop it happening I'd love to hear it. But that would mean admitting to not being perfect or being able to do something about things that are actually unavoidable and we can't have that, can we?

If you don't start from compassion, from a belief that everyone is entitled to happiness and the causes of happiness, if instead you start from knowing what's 'best' for people and you attempt to force this on them even when they don't want it then the world is a cold, cold place. A place of rules and regulations that mediate everything, where the default word is NO when you try and step outside or past them because that's the easiest course and it means no one has to think or admit to feeling. A place where burning the wrong person at the stake is OK because they will go to heaven anyway. A place where hedonism is the best path to follow because there is nothing beyond your own trivial pleasures, where no one else matters, where we are nothing but the sum of divisions and ignorance – but you dare to question the rules or step over them slightly, even out of ignorance, and you will end up in prison or on some register where you can't get a job. Seriously, think about it a little, and get the teat out of your mouth.

I'm ready to be burned at that stake if I have to be to stand up for my beliefs. But let's just stop now, and not go there. Please? Men are just men. Women are just women. People are just people. 99% of us are decent, caring and honest, and that's the truth.

If you are feeling down and oppressed by the world, well, how about getting the world to confirm that it hates you? Or that things always go wrong in a drearily predictable way when you interact with certain people?

The game is simple:

1. Take some task you do collaboratively with others often. Packing to go camping, or some project deliverable. It doesn't have to be work related at all: a lot of people do this in the comfort of their own homes.
2. Decide on your none-affirming goal, e.g. I always do all the work for X,  or, people won't take responsibility and be self-sufficient.
3. Change the unwritten rules of the social interaction very slightly so that you can catch them out, e.g. don't ask for any help (or ask when it can't be given because of some other constraint), or, don't pack the stuff (say towels) that you always pack for everyone.
4. Crucial part of the game here. Don't tell anyone about 3.
5. Let the unsuspecting individual(s) make the "mistake".
6. Shout a lot.

Stop it, just stop it. Make sure everyone knows what is expected and check they still understand what it is as the process is running. No-one fails and no-one shouts, life is much easier. People are a little stupid sometimes, and they have short attention spans for stuff that bores them, and what's important to you may not be to them. Hard luck. I have been in several (failed) relationships where this game was played a lot. I think a lot of the so-called war between men and women is about this, it's silly manipulative stuff and should be avoided. It's an easy trap to fall into though, usually when you are down and want to prove something about the world. Keep it at arms length and smile when you catch yourself doing it. And stop it.

I've also noticed that when people complain a lot I want to say things like "well, at least you managed to find something to complain about, be grateful you are doing something you enjoy." Constant complaining is another setting up to fail in a different guise, and it's bad for your mind. Stop it, just stop it.

... and that's why I use RoR. 90% of the "anti" opinions here don't get it. It's quick, it has a low entry barrier, and, if you want the Ajax stuff, it's very easy to do simple things. If you want stuff that scales to the moon then you use a technology that will do that - d'oh!

Ruby has also got lots of nice utilities to do SOAP and so on. It just works and it doesn't hurt. Integration with other services (.Net or Java) is a breeze and you can get help really easily from other people in the community. In general there is only one way to do something (because the language is young) and it does what you want. Compare with Java - 25 frameworks with alpine learning curves (XML or properties files - let's have both!) before you can do anything. It *used* to be simple and pretty easy to get things done but the signal to noise ratio is really painful now and getting worse with every "improved" J2EE implementation from the big vendors. Me no want no stinkin' entity beans - they leave a stain on your teeth.

I am a Java certified web developer and wouldn't go back, except for the cash. It used to drive me crazy: make a change, run Ant, deploy the WAR file, waste 20 minutes doing nothing. Get shouted at by PHB for reading El Reg while all this was going on. This is typical if you work on a legacy system.

Now I can just get stuff done, and that's all I want. I'm really keen on the whole JRuby thing, where the Rails app will just run from a WAR file and use all the sexy scalability stuff that the Java people have spent so much time and energy on - but I'll happily use it at one remove, thanks.

... how many of you go back to the pre-web days? I do - graduated in 1987, I've had to practically start again 3 or 4 times in the last 20 years - Unix before Linux, X-windows, dumb terminal to client-server, pre-javascript web tech, javascript, hand crafting your own stuff in raw html, Java, PHP, Java again, Rails. All I've ever wanted to do was deliver systems that work and meet real-world problems in a usable way. Be able to go home at the end of the day feeling I've achieved something and the people who use the stuff I wrote can do their jobs more effectively and not be dehumanised by it, hence my dislike for techie arrogance, which I see all the time.

2.0 is a Tim O'Reilly marketing thing, because he saw a lot of problems with the current technology and wanted to have some kind of dividing line to help people distinguish between things. But like the man at ucov says: no business model, no idea what people want, groovy idea that recycles some stuff other people have already failed at = failure. I'm with Paul Graham on this one - work on something boring and painful (for the punters) and you will see the rewards. Shiny isn't necessarily good[1]. You seem to have bought the marketing hype.

I applaud people's enthusiasm - I want technology to work and help us get out of the social and cultural ruts we're beginning to die from (a rut is a grave that hasn't had the ends filled in yet). Debate is healthy and really useful. The best "manifesto" is something people find useful and the culture that coheres around it. I'd rather work on that than an essay, any day.

F

[1] for some reason line from "venus in furs" started going through my head when I wrote that, must get new prescription for meds.

Didn't realise that phorm were the timewasting bastards who were behind 121 - spent many a happy hour trying to get rid of their viral nonsense from a machine my then 10 year old son was using (no idea how they got past him not being an administrator).

Can I send them a bill? I think they also managed to hijack firefox a while ago by putting in a bogus (and invisible) add on so I had to trash everybody's settings directory to get rid of it.

DEFINITELY send them a bill, and then a summons through the county court for my time. Anyone else want to join in?

I am a Rails developer who uses a proper IDE (Netbeans for Ruby) and Windows. Installed Cygwin to give me the bash shell and the other tools I need to talk to our Linux server backbones. I started on Unix/Sun workstations, went to client/server stuff then on to web. DHH is a kid, bless him, and hasn't yet lived through the next big change that will make him realise he has to start again. I've done it maybe 5 times in the last 20 years. Experience of one's own ignorance makes one humble. He's on a high now. Losing your job is a great and unwelcome teacher, believe me.

I don't get the Mac thing, either. If you don't want windows Ubuntu is fine, has the sexy desktop thing and runs on more powerful kit that costs a quarter of the price.

download mind map here (save as)

I tried to embed the map in an applet - but the downloaded applet doesn't work and locks the site up. There is a Flash reader but I lost the will to live Java, eh?

You can get freemind here. 

Defensive programming

http://francis.blog-city.com/what_defensive_programming_is_and_isnt_logging_the_right_t.htm

This one's about 'C':

http://francis.blog-city.com/at_the_feet_of_the_master.htm

Java is the new 'C' parts 1 & 2 

http://francis.blog-city.com/at_the_feet_of_the_master_1.htm

http://francis.blog-city.com/at_the_feet_of_the_master_1htm.htm 

J2EE is incoherent

http://francis.blog-city.com/cohesive_libraries.htm 

Java schools

http://francis.blog-city.com/java_schools.htm 

Java as a text processing language - note the comment about merely trying to open a file

http://francis.blog-city.com/java_as_a_text_processing_language.htm 

Java and XML

http://francis.blog-city.com/java_finding_nodes_with_xpath_and_how_to_dump_out_xml_dom_as.htm 

I was getting this:

undefined method `to_f' for {}:HashWithIndifferentAccess

This was happening in the after_create method. We have a table that lists fields and what validation is needed, we use this to pick out the value in the record so we can apply the validation function to the value if one has been given.

field_value = self.send(field_name) # Error was thrown here

I fixed this by calling self.reload at the beginning of the method that does the field scanning. I think that ActiveRecord doesn't refresh its attributes hash after save and the error came from it expecting the value to be of a particular type... I don't like calling reload, but can't find a method that will refresh the attributes hash.

Bootnote

Discovered that this was the result of sending nils in the hash passed into the create method, as it came over the wire as XML and was then incorporated into the params array, unlike the conventional post method, which puts empty strings in there. I wrote a one-liner to remove the hash elements with nil in them and everything started working. There was also another nasty bug which was putting the HashWithIndifferentAccess thang into any empty strings.

params.delete_if{ |k,v|  v.blank? }

Eschew bullet points - they are there to prompt the speaker
Use diagrams and pictures - people think in pictures
Give handouts - That's where screeds of text belongs.

I read a paper that says one of the shuttle disasters was indirectly caused by powerpoint bullet points. A key engineering point about checking for damage was hidden in a 6 point font on a slide about 15 slides in. The engineering company was ruled by salesmen and the only way they could communicate was using it. Instead of producing a proper technical report that everyone could read and discuss at a proper meeting NASA were handed a BS powerpoint full of tiny fonts and missed this - it cost a lot of lives and money. I *hate* bullet points.

Also, the font size should be half the age of your target audience - another reason to use pictures.

1. Catch people doing things right and sincerely thank them for it.
2. If they are doing things wrong, take the blame and then redirect their energy where you want it to go.
3. Praise improvement, however small.
4. Don't forget to catch yourself doing things right.
   

I have no idea why I am so angry about this. Perhaps because I have a maths-based degree and I know what the word that means a problem can be solved is? Anyway, I suppose a Christmas diary entry is in order.

Very quiet. Didn't do a lot, but we did make a point of going out for walks and even had a paddle on the Dee one day. Rosie walked back up with Jon because he didn't want to go back in the canoe. I paddled the thing a good mile against the current. Also, because I was chatting, I didn't notice that I took the long way around one of the bends in the river where the current flows faster. Ho hum.

Went for a nice walk at a country park near J7 of the M56 (Daresbury rings a bell). It was a deer park reserve and we had a very pleasant walk. Went back to a pub called the Old One Hundred and had a meal. Food good but service a bit variable.

Very average new year with the family. I got a bit bored and wanted to go to bed. We had a bagatelle (sic) competition that whiled away some time. I have had a bit of a head cold and my sinuses have been giving me serious gyp so I wasn't that keen on all this staying up being grown up stuff. Jon stayed up and saw it in with us. Deb had taken herself off to bed. We did have a laugh at times, Jon laughing so hard he cried.

Spent today painting Deb's room and having another meal as mentioned earlier.

I'm getting a bit fed up and bad tempered now, would like to see people off home and get some time with just the family.

My problem with my feet and ankles has come back. Very sore. Think I need to get rid of the weight I have put on in the last month and start doing my exercises again. Maybe get a stepper machine from ebay or some such.

Forgot. Bought a freeview box. More choice but still a lot of crap. Still tend to be watching CSI, some stuff on BBC2 and C4 and not a lot else. Nice to see Channel 5 in the clear without the snow. Quite like the UKTV History channel. I'd like BBC 3 more if they showed something other than Little Britain which keeps taking funny ideas and overcooking them. I could write that stuff if I had no shame, but I do. I hated the thing about breast feeding the groom at a wedding, just a gross-out pubrescent fantasy with all of the comedy of a broken limb in traction.

Love to all and a happy and prosperous new year. Back to work soon.]]>