Ruby Programmers having a fight

What the fuck is this?

Merb is launched and DHH suddenly has a load of “Rails Myths” posts up on his blog. Like this sly little dig:

it shows the great power of being an full-stack framework

Wycats responds with a slightly less sly dig:

For the moment, these differences are the reason that Rails will continue to dominate amongst developers seeking to build apps similar in scope to apps built by 37Signals. I suspect that Merb will pick up steam amongst developers looking to build innovative apps leveraging the latest and greatest Ruby techniques and libraries.

Zed responds angrily to a mistake by DHH (which DHH subsequently corrects).

I admit I’ve not had much time to look at Merb in detail; the times when I have played with it my impression has been “it’s much the same as Rails but done in a different (probably cleaner) way”. I love the fact in Rails that everything comes in one bundle (apart from RSpec :-), I love the fact that Merb gives you choices (even though I don’t have the time to research those choices), I like the fact that the two frameworks are now feeding off each other.

But the thing that impressed me most when I came to Rails was how nice and friendly the Ruby community was. But, it would appear that that was an illusion and massive egos are in charge. Discussion is good. Adapting your ideas in the face of competition and change is good. Having a massive pissing match because my framework is better than your framework is stupid. I wish you would all just shut the fuck up.

Smalltalk is one of my favourite languages but a decent Smalltalk implementation that fits with your native window manager is hard to find. The point of GNU Smalltalk is that it works “headlessly” (Smalltalk invented the graphical user-interface and the integrated development environment so this is quite a departure), so I can still use my favourite text editor and run stuff from the command line. Just like Ruby!

However, it’s taken me a couple of hours to figure out how to simply connect to a database. But now I have, here it is:

• Install GNU Smalltalk (in my case using MacPorts):
  sudo port install gst
• Start GNU Smalltalk and create a working image:
  cd /Users/rahoulb/source/st
gst
st> ObjectMemory snapshot: 'work.im'.
• Ctrl-D to exit Smalltalk and then restart using your new image:
  gst -I work.im
• Load the DBI database driver:
  st> PackageLoader fileInPackage 'DBI'.
  Load the MySQL driver:
  st> PackageLoader fileInPackage 'DBD-MySQL'.
  Save your image so you don’t need to reload these packages again:
  st> ObjectMemory snapshot.
• Open a connection to your database:
  st>con:= DBI.Connection connect: 'dbi:MySQL:dbname=mydatabase' user: 'myuser' password: 'mypassword'.
  Grab some data:
  st>results:= con select: 'select name from customers limit 10;'
• Bask in the glory of your data

On Sunday morning, I awoke to find an email from a web-site monitoring service that I use, stating that a client site was down. The email was sent at 5am. It was now 10am and I had no computer, a mere GPRS connection and a hangover. Not good.

However, I fired up TouchTerm (an SSH client) on my iPhone and connected to the server in question. Connect OK. Good. Then I type sudo monit status to find out what state the server is in. All services running OK. Then cat /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/rails-mysite. This lets me examine the web-server configuration file; and I can prove to myself that I had set up aliases for the site (so that the same site is also available on an alternative web address). I then used Mobile Safari to connect on the alternative addresses and everything works fine. Lastly, I write an email to the client stating that the site is down but nothing at my end is wrong - could it be a DNS problem?

iPhone with TouchTerm

Later that day I got an email from the monitoring service stating that the site had returned. And on Monday, the client tells me that their registrar had had a failure and all of their domain names had gone down for the day.

Still, I think that’s pretty good; Sunday, with a hangover, pro-actively investigating a fault on a customer’s server, on a telephone and an antique net connection.

Safe and Secure - Image by frko: http://www.sxc.hu/photo/962334

The problems started when two other developers joined the team. Within a week we repeatedly had the issue of two people editing the same file at the same time and one of them losing their changes. So we devised our own source control system. Every file had a piece of cardboard with its name written on it, about 2cm by 10cm. These were stuck, with blu-tak, to a wall. If anyone wanted to edit a file they must stand up, go to the board, take the piece of cardboard for that particular file and stick it to their monitor. So we had an at a glance view of who was working on what and also made sure that the files were kept safe.

Since then I’ve used Visual Sourcesafe (don’t laugh). To my mind, it’s not completely awful, but I could never get my head around branching and merging. I then moved to Subversion which is both incredibly simple to use and free. And I understood branching and merging, but it was just a bit too long-winded to use.

However now I, like all the Rails-kids, use git. Which is both great and awful. It’s taken me weeks to even begin to get my head around it. I still lose code every now and then. But it’s so easy to branch and merge; for the first time, branching is an integral part of the way I work. There is danger in branching though. With svn it’s easy to see which branch you are in - it’s the folder name. In git, it’s not so easy.

So, my extremely smart colleague, David Smalley, showed me this amendment to your .bashrc (or in my case .profile):

function parse_git_branch {
  git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}

export PS1="\u@\h:\w\$(parse_git_branch)\$ "

The function asks git which branch we are currently in. We then set PS1, the variable for the command prompt, asking it to show the username, host, path and branch.

So, if you are not in a git-managed folder you see:

rahoulb@monster:/Volumes/src$

And if you are in a git-managed folder you see:

rahoulb@monster:/Volumes/src/bb-billing(master)$

So now you have no excuse!

Photo by frko

Brightbox Messages between myself and John Leach

Sometimes you have a moment where you know that you’re on the right path.  

I was hunting through an archive of work done for Brightbox and found this message trail.  I had just tracked down a bug and posted a small screenshot of the fix.  

John’s response let me know that this would be a great place to work.  

Sometimes, it just feels right.

Thanks to Ashley Moran for talking it through with me.

UPDATED to use Slideshare to display the slides.

Unfortunately, when I tried to install this on my fresh Leopard box I got:

Error installing mysql:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

Followed by a load of guff about options.

After a bit of searching I found a post on the Rails blog with some potential alternative commands; mostly about Windows installations but also some for OSX.

Of these, only one worked for me - and that was:

sudo gem install mysql — –with-mysql-config

Note that that is double-dash space double-dashwith-mysql-config.

Despite being probably the greatest cartoon character ever created, it has to be said that Wile E does not figure in my all time top-three cartoons. It should be noted that there is no Pixar, Dreamworks, MGM or even stinking Disney in this list - it’s Warner Brothers all the way:

• Number 3: The Three Little Bops
  The story of the three little pigs, told in Jazz. “Sturdy place this house of bricks, built in 1776, high-class place with a high-class crowd, sign on the door ‘no wolves allowed’”
• Number 2: Sylvester and Tweety in “Birds Anonymous”
  Cat at Meeting: “I used to be a three bird-a-day cat, till BA helped me”
  Sylvester: “From now on, birds is strictly for the birds”
• Number 1: Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in “What’s Opera Doc?”
  Elmer Fudd: “Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit”
  Bugs Bunny: “How will you kill the wabbit?”
  Elmer Fudd: “With my spear and magic helmet!”
  Bugs Bunny: “Your spear and magic helmet?”
  Elmer Fudd: “With my spear and magic helmet!“
  Bugs Bunny: “Magic Helmet?”
  Elmer Fudd: “Magic Helmet!“
  Bugs Bunny: “Magic Helmet?”
  Elmer Fudd: “YES MAGIC HELMET … AND I WILL GIVE YOU A SAMPLE!“

Nice to see that, after writing this article and searching for links, two of the three have been nominated for Oscars. So it’s not just me!

[1] Link via Daring Fireball

UPDATED: link to a video of “Birds Anonymous”

But they are wrong.

Mozilla should be worried. Even Apple should be worried. But Microsoft should not.

You see, if Chrome is successful it will take search revenue (from the little online search box) that Google pays to Mozilla and Apple every time you click on an advert (as opposed to a search result).

But that’s not Google’s aim.

Their aim is “fire and move”.

Just as Microsoft prepares an assault on Google’s search and advertising business, Google distracts them with an assault on the Windows desktop. A classic Microsoft ploy (see the Win16 API, the Win32 API, the .Net API) turned against them.

So, how do you respond to fire and move? Well, that’s the real question.