Mutterings

I’ll be giving a talk on ActiveScaffold at the June meeting of Austin on Rails on Tuesday, June 12th. I hope to see you all there!

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I hope you enjoyed my DeveloperWorks article on ActiveScaffold 1.0. If you have questions or comments about the article or related technologies, please feel free to post them here!
Errata

The current_user_method configuration in Listing 22 is incorrect. That config.security… line needs to go into the global configuration in app/controllers/application.rb along with the current_user method.
The [...]

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Joyent has released its new Slingshot technology which allows for Rails applications which work both online and offline. This has the potential to be a huge deal. What’s the worst part of Excel? Collaboration is near impossible - you need to swap spreadsheet snapshots with others back and forth while changing the [...]

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mencoder is an incredibly flexible tool but like most flexible tools, suffers from an overabundance of options, parameters, documentation and possibilities when all you want to do is make movies that Grandma can play. For instance, mencoder’s standard mpeg4 video codec requires DivX to play on Windows, so it’s useless to most people. [...]

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OpenID looks to be a very nice, lightweight identity system. With OpenID, you are identified by a URL, in my case http://perham.net/mike. Anyone can request this URL and get an HTML page with headers that point to my OpenID server.

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server” />
<link [...]

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A central tenet of software engineering is “reuse, don’t rewrite”. Unfortunately there are a number of political and social realities which force developers to rewrite the same feature over and over. One example of this is authentication and authorization systems. I find myself having to write the same code over and over [...]

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Skype 3.0 was released last week. Since I don’t have Skype installed on my IBM laptop, I decided to download and try it out. So far it’s a mixed bag. Although nothing serious, it displays a lack of UI polish seen in previous releases. It does have a nice new “extras” [...]

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One of my pet peeves is when sites disable the maximize button when opening a child javascript window. If you want to remove this ability, just go into Firefox, type “about:config” in the address bar, find “dom.disable_window_open_feature.resizable” and double click it to set it to “true”.

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DHH doesn’t like constraints, triggers and stored procedures in the database. He’s a smart guy and I agree with him on the latter two but I strongly disagree with him on the first point. There is a reason why you put validation in your ActiveRecord model and not in the Controller/View - because [...]

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Vista DRM is one reason why I plan on never buying Windows again. Think of the man-years of engineering time Microsoft must have spent on this “feature” and remember: DRM provides no worthwhile functionality whatsoever to the consumer!

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