Mutterings

Here’s the product I’ve been working on for the past 2+ years. We’ve been working on it furiously for the last 3 months to get it into an IBM friendly form and it was finally publicly announced this morning. Actual product availability will be in the near future.
WebSphere Business Services Fabric

[Read more →]

Heatmap-based click analyzers are a pretty cool idea to determine how users are navigating your site. Corunet has a guide to building your own heatmaps using Javascript and Ruby and Crazy Egg has gone and built a product out of it that you can use on your own site. Nifty.

[Read more →]

Migrations are a neat feature in Rails but they are documented pretty superficially; only the most basic features are documented - everything else requires much googling and gnashing of teeth. This post is an attempt to limit your dental bill.
The most basic feature is create table:

create_table :products do |t|
[...]

[Read more →]

The mess of code generated by Rails model scaffold has always been one of my biggest peeves. Django got it right and it was this feature that made me recommend Django on several occasions to friends building webapps. Well, I’m not a fan of the Python language so I was hoping that the [...]

[Read more →]

Rails isn’t the only NG framework out there. Others have overlapping functionality with Rails, with their own strengths and weaknesses.

Symfony for PHP5 - the language and the framework are much more verbose and far less elegant due to the lack of metaprogramming within PHP itself. Ruby can dynamically add methods and accessors to objects [...]

[Read more →]

I was recently asked to give a summary of advantages/disadvantages in Ruby on Rails vs Java.
Advantages
Extremely developer friendly in that RoR is designed to maximize developer productivity. Java is a compiled language, meaning that the source code must be compiled into binary form and then that binary code must be packaged into a single [...]

[Read more →]

The Maven guys asked me again to join the PMC (the Project Management Committee, the core group of people responsible for an Apache project). I turned them down the first time, citing lack of time but this time I accepted. It really just means that my vote is binding (i.e. if I vote [...]

[Read more →]

Microsoft Windows has a new ‘exetremely critical’ security bug that is being widely exploited now.
Abstaining from a behavior is the simplest way to avoid any repercussions from that behavior. By the very fact that you are reading this, I think it is safe to say that you, dear reader, have decided that browsing is [...]

[Read more →]

I have been working a lot recently with Apache Maven 2.0 as we are trying to move away from Webify’s in-house build system. Well, due to all that work I have been nominated to be a Maven SCM committer. A committer is someone who is trusted with write-access to the source code for [...]

[Read more →]

Apparently drinking 4 Tecate (the mexican equivalent of Budweiser) is like dropping the atom bomb on my digestive system. I’ve never felt so miserable 18 hours after drinking a few beers. On the positive side, at least it only cost me $4 to get sick as a dog.
Since I got next to nothing [...]

[Read more →]