If you weren't paying attention yesterday, Rails 1.1 was released. Some very cool stuff including in it. I upgraded a couple of projects I'm working on without any problems. One nice thing which I realize isn't much, is that now the migrate Rake task gives output as to what it is doing. That can be very useful if you created a few migration scripts but hadn't run them yet.
Here are some more posts about it:
Rails 1.1: Loaded with 37s extractions
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rest, rubyonrails
The business unit I'm in here at $WORK recently hired a new EVP, Craig Forman. We had our first all-hands this morning and even though it was over the phone, I definitely get a good vibe as to things we'll be doing and directions we'll hopefully be going.
Coming from Yahoo! is definitely a plus in my eyes as they have more of an engineering-centric culture than we do.
You can check out previous posts of his on his Yahoo! 360 blog.
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earthlink
You normally don't think of game programming as a hotbed of agile practices but this paper presented at the Game Development Conference shows how test-driven development can be done in the gaming world.
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agile, gamedevelopment, testdrivendevelopment
ArmchairGM has a great post talking about the influences of technology in baseball, both on the field and off. It looks at the early baseball games on computer systems to the impact of LASIK eye surgery.
John Wiseman is porting Ferret to Lisp. Ferret of course is a port of Lucene from Java to Ruby. As he says, it will be interesting to see how performance compares.
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search, lucene, montezuma, lisp
So, the craziness starts in about an hour. I had an idea going home last night after reading Chris Messina's little bit of snark about companies and results. The actual content of his post is something I want to deal with in a later post, the idea of where you end and the company begins. For now, though, I want to talk about the Madness.
It lasts just over two weeks, an intense sprint from start to finish. The winner survives six games with the knowledge that a misstep in any of them will result in their going home for the year.
In honor of that focus, I'm proposing Developer Madness. Basically, just pick a project and focus on it exclusively for the next two weeks. This can be a work project or personal project. It doesn't really matter. Or maybe it's better to have one at work and one at home. Who knows? That's up to you.
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developermadness
Fun interview with Joshua Bloch about his new book with Java puzzlers.
Metaweb is a new infrastructure company headed by Danny Hillis and spun out of Applied Minds, Inc.. John Battelle has a bit more about their funding as well as a look inside Applied Minds. I didn't realize Applied Minds was in Glendale, obviously not very far away. Not sure about Metaweb though.
One interesting thing is in their job listings. In posting for Software Engineers, they ask a couple of questions which need to be answered when sending in your resume. I think that's a cool thing since it gives both sides something to base their initial decisions on.
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metaweb
Dan Sandler, creator of FeedTree has put together a nice little Python script called Calcium.
Basically, it will take any links coming from Digg and send them to CoralCDN which allows them to be cached before the multitudes overwhelm a site. Very cool stuff...
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rss, feedtree, calcium
ESPN writer Pat Forde gives his bracket breakdown for the Madness. One piece of advice that I hadn't heard before was this:
So after you pick your Final Four, do some quick addition on the seeds of those teams. If they add up to less than seven (say, two No. 2s and two No. 1s) or more than 15 (say, a No. 8, a No. 5, a No. 2 and a No. 1), start over.
Give your picks a quick glance...
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marchmadness, brackets
A former co-worker has started a new blog, has_many :through which is focusing on his use of Rails.
His two part look at the new has_many :through pattern which will be in 1.1 is a great overview. Definitely something to check out if you find yourself not wanting to constantly use lookup tables or if those lookup tables don't really make sense for your model.
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rubyonrails
Brian Oxley shows a cool pattern for JUnit tests when wanting to deal with Exceptions. I like the throwing of the IllegalArgumentException as opposed to the traditional NullPointerException. Keep those for unforeseen problems.
Brian Dennis points to a new O'Reilly article, Using REST with Ajax. I didn't realize that an Ajax call can make PUTs and DELETEs as well as GETs and POSTs. That could really be a very powerful thing.
Last fall, I mentioned an idea of using the XP methodology of using story cards up on a wall for personal development. Well, I started doing it this week and so far so good.
Right now, I have found project headers and then individual tasks underneath them. Each task is something simple enough where it can be done without dependencies. I do not necessarily mean that the task is simple, just that it can be stand-alone. I think it's helped me this week to keep my head clear of the little things and just focus on the code in front of me. I look forward to seeing how it continues.
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agile, xp, storycards
It's time again to clean up the tabs in my browser. Here's some of the stuff I've been keeping my eye on...
Excerpt from interview with Dean Kamen. I'm going to need to pick up the issue of Make so I can read the full thing. Some of his comments about wasting time and working on the most important thing really hit home. They reminded me of Paul Graham's essay on procrastination, the good kind and the bad. Joshua Porter has an extended excerpt from the interview in his article about product innovation. I think it should be posted up on the wall of any place creating things.
A couple from Terra Nova: a look at whether players in WoW actually utilize the social dynamic and Lipsticking the Chicken.
Ian Kallen doesn't understand the fuss about the recent companies built around code search engines. He points to an ONJava article dealing with Lucene that I had forgotten about.
Some thoughts on Ben Franklin Tom Peters as well as his 13-point plan for virtuous living.
Seth Godin talks about edges and clusters in relation to products and services.
Rails 1.1 is getting Integration Tests which really well-done at least from the snippet posted.
Dave Astels announced that a new version of rSpec is out. It's his Behavior Driven Design tool. I still need to look into it more as well as finish reading his initial paper on it.
Jeremy gives some thoughts on Edgeio. I hope to have some longer thoughts about it as well soon. Also check out his earlier post on publishing to the edge.
Greg Linden puts together a good overview of the various opinions about manual vs. automated tagging. Also, the big 3's vision of the future of search.
Bill de hÓra shows the need for Data Classes as opposed to the blanket statement of don't use them. More on it from Tony Coates.
Ben Hammersley reminds us that no matter what technology you use, the only thing that matters is getting some into a user's hands.
The Lucene Web Service API based on Atom.
SQL Databases and Internet applications
Eliminating the Non-Essentials
Blog about creating little languages in Python.
Building Decision Trees in Python