Brilliant Corners

I can’t keep from messing with this site, and at the same time I’m not writing any new posts. How sad is that?

I always get too caught up in the smaller details. And it’s not just with this site. At times I think it happens with everything I do. That’s something I guess I need to work on, but then will I get caught up in the little details on that, too? :)

What spurred me to mess with this site (this time) was comment spam. Spam, spam, spam. I hate it with a passion. Well, I hate it enough to get something done about it here on the site.

With the help of the askimet-ror Rails gem and a peek or two at the Mephisto code, I think I may have a solution that should keep most of the spam off the site. I’m crossing my fingers.

I’ve been quite busy with projects that I’ve been doing with bluemonk creative that I haven’t had the chance to do much else. I also need to work on my time management it seems.

Also: capistrano is niiiice.

I have yet again relaunched this weblog. This time I’ve done away with weblog applications that others have written and have rolled my own (yet again).

This time I’ve written a very simple weblog app with Ruby on Rails. It doesn’t do anything fancy, but that’s all right with me. I needed a simple project to get my Rails chops back in shape.

There are still a few things that may break or not work, but I think I’ve taken care of all the important stuff. If you do get an error or anything, please let me know.

Now that Ruby on Rails 1.0 has been released, I realize I better get back to coding, or I’m going to be left in the dust, again. It’s happened many times before; I’ll start to get interested in something new that’s just come out, and maybe tinker with some code for a while, only to get busy with something else. Then, while everyone else is riding the wave and showing all the neat things they’ve built, I’m left playing catch up. I really don’t want that to happen again.

Thanks to work, I have a limited, but free, account at Safari Books Online. Ruby is still not a hugely popular language (though thanks to Rails, that’s really changing), so there’s only a couple of Ruby books on Safari. So, for the next few weeks, I’ll devote some spare time to going through Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days. It’s several years old, and may be somewhat outdated, but it’s the best they have. I own the Programming Ruby book, but it’s not as much tutorial as it is a reference book.

I’ve learned enough Ruby and Rails to get a few projects off the ground (like my neglected photolog) and a few other half-started projects here and there. I want to learn more, so I can do more. So, here we go!

 % ruby -e 'puts "Hello World!"'

I’ve finally done it: I’ve contributed to the open software movement. Well, let’s qualify that a little bit: I’ve contributed a very small patch to an open software project.

As I started getting the hang of the new Drupal beta, I came across a bug; a bug bad enough that it made a major function (commenting) un-usable. First, I reported the problem. Then, after a few hours of looking closer at the code, I found where the issue was, I corrected it, and then put up a patch. Today, Drupal’s lead developer applied my patch to the main source tree.

Yes, it was just a small patch in a very large codebase, but it’s not too bad to start off with baby steps, right? Plus, it was nice being able to check off one of my “things” over at 43things.

Curt Hibbs puts together an excellent overview of all the good things about Ruby on Rails.

A Ruby on Rails IDE. It’s still early in development, but it looks like it could be useful.

Garrett Dimon expresses his appreciation for Ruby on Rails, garnering some excellent comments from other PHP and .NET developers.

Gina has started a new weblog, Spun, to focus more on web development topics. When I first came across her Scribbling.net site, I loved the tech writing she was doing. But over the last few years, Scribbling has become an outlet for her more personal writings. Her personal and fiction writing is fantasic, but at times I missed the nerdy Gina. :)

This looks to be a pretty thorough comparison between the two currently-hot MVC frameworks, Ruby on Rails and Django (via lhl).

Michael Buffington spells out his reasons for switching to Ruby on Rails. My list would be almost identical, except should replace all his mentions of ColdFusion with Perl or ASP/VBScript.

Things have been quiet here because I’ve been spending just about all my spare time on a Ruby on Rails photolog application. You can see the results of the first public version here: http://kindofblue.com/

I really don’t want this weblog to fill with entries only about Ruby on Rails, but I’ve got to tell you: it has really won me over. The more I learn, the more I’m surprised at how easy it makes putting up a complicated application together rather quickly. I hit quite a few roadblocks when working on the photolog, but more often than not, all it took was a quick pointer from Erik Benson and then I’d get it. Then even more things would make sense.

It takes a bit of trial and error to get the hang of Ruby and Rails, but once you do, you really won’t look at web development the same way again. Honest.

Writing ASP (Active Server Pages) sucks. All I want to do, is to add one array to another. Sounds easy, right? Well, with ASP it isn’t. Not by a long shot.

But first, and just for contrast, let’s see how PHP does it:

$array1 = array("12","35","45");
$array2 = array("334","355","456");
$new_array = array_merge($array1, $array2);

Nice and simple, right? Okay, now how about Perl?

my @array1 = ("12","35","45");
my @array2 = ("334","355","456");
my @new_array = (@array1, @array2);

Wow! That’s also pretty brain-dead easy. But, I’m writing about ASP here, so let’s move on to that example:

Dim aArray1(), aArray2(), aNewArray(), iArrayCount, iInArray
aArray1 = Array("12","35","45")
aArray2 = Array("334","355","456")
ReDim aNewArray(0)
iArrayCount= 0

' Note that this below is part of a bigger loop where depending on input, I may
' have to add arrays together several times in one go. So, multiply the code below
' like ten times and that's what I'm dealing with.
If (UBound(aNewArray) = 0) Then
   ReDim Preserve aNewArray(UBound(aArray1) + 1)
Else
   ReDim Preserve aNewArray(UBound(aNewArray) + UBound(aArray1))
End If
For iInArray= 0 To UBound(aArray1)
   aNewArray(iArrayCount) = aArray1(iInArray)
   iArrayCount= iArrayCount+ 1
Next
If (UBound(aNewArray) = 0) Then
   ReDim Preserve aNewArray(UBound(aArray2) + 1)
Else
   ReDim Preserve aNewArray(UBound(aNewArray) + UBound(aArray2))
End If
For iInArray= 0 To UBound(aArray2)
   aNewArray(iArrayCount) = aArray2(iInArray)
   iArrayCount= iArrayCount+ 1
Next

I rest my case.