Shanti’s Dispatches

There’s a lot of innovation still happening in Ruby on Rails.

Edge Rails: Now with a Built-in XML Sit-ups Ab Machine!

See this post for some of the things in store for the next major release of Ruby on Rails.

This commenter made a funny XML Sit-ups reference in relation to one of the new features of edge rails:

does the Hash.create_from_xml method mean that Rails does XML sit-ups now?

j/k Seriously, this is great.

When it comes time to implement an API in your Ruby on Rails app, well. it already *was* pretty darn easy to do so.

Rails Core & all of the RoR committers just keep making it simpler and simpler to do all this stuff that used to be considered fancy, but is now almost the de facto standard for webapps these days.

How to know you are in a bubble:

A company doing only a million a month in revenue turns down an offer for $1.4 billion.

These guys are crazy. I either hope they did the right thing, and eventually get bought out for more than that… or get their arrogance shoved back in their face by having a bubble crash around them, with only paltry acquisition offers ($100M or so would be palty after a $1.4B offer!) left on the table.

Of course.. I hope the 2.0 bubble keeps going strong another 1-3 years.

Man, I wish I had the balls at 18 to have pulled something like this off.

A friend of mine in St. Louis is becoming a major player in the solar manufacturing industry.

His latest product, which is a pretty neat idea, is a Solar-powered Scoreboard.

Note: this was written a while back but was sitting in my drafts section. Worth a read if you are coming from a Microsoft background at all.

About two years ago, I implemented a billing system in ASP and SQL Server. It took about a month and a half to get fully flushed out.

Even so, we still experienced intermittent problems with it that drove our salespeople batty. (we could never replicate the problem in-house, since we didn’t have a test lab)

The requirements were, however, different, since we needed to charge cards in real-time in the ASP scenario.

With Sprout, though we might at some point need to do that for certain things (i.e. re-enabling locked, past-due accounts), we generally have the luxury of billing people as needed. (on the backend, at a time of our choosing)

Billing Systems on Rails

The system we just knocked out at Sprout took only about a week. Though, Charles had been working on the requirements for quite some time.

Requirements really do help us programmers. That way I don’t have to idle on IM, asking my manager every 5 minutes about some minutiae of how the system should be implemented.

Yeah - you can always plow ahead and just do things your way… but once you’ve been burned too many times from just doing that, you tend to seek out a little more guidance in the future.

Our system at SproutIt is also a lot more robust than my previous ASP endeavor. Our Sprout system includes a really robust notification system that includes:

- three days worth of charge failed notices
- three days worth of no card present notices
- Activation reminders (signed up for a paid plan, but haven’t entered a card yet, etc)

Hopefully we won’t have to send too many of these various types of notices… but it helps to be prepared.

Rails Productivity Numbers Legit?

Much has been bantied about re: productivity and rails (10x productivity boost, oh my!). Let me just say that I think a 10x number is pure hogwash.

However, even if it were only a 50% increase … that would be incredible. Can you imagine going to a decent manager and explaining that you can get 50% more done if you just use X technology? They would be crazy to ignore that possibility.

In all reality though, I think the number hovers somewhere between 1.5 and 3. That is, you can sometimes get things done in Rails that it would take you three weeks in PHP, or ASP.Net, for example.

Now, Rails productivity vs. Java/J2EE? You’re probably 4-6X as productive in Rails compared to such a bloated monstrosity as J2EE.

Did you know that some people on the planet actually do not own computers? I heard a rumor about that but think it’s just an urban legend.

Actually, I just ordered my girlfriend a new dell laptop.

I would pretty much die of Internet addiction (not to mention the inability to pay the bills) if I didn’t have a PC (or Mac — the terms are pretty much interchangeable now after the Intel switch), let alone an ever-growing stable of 4-5 boxes lying around the house.

Dear Kofi Annan,

Please put these on your TODO list:

Eradication of World Hunger, an AIDS Vaccine, and a PC for every man, woman and child on the planet.

That should just about do it.

Thanks.

- Your friend in the website business.

Staging servers freakin’ ROCK. More over at the SproutIt blog.

One thing I love about Ruby is that usually adding a module is as simple as:
> gem install ferret

In your ruby class:

require ‘ferret’

That’s it!

I just found out one of my monthly PHP scripts was failing because ‘curl’ was not installed on the server.

Does PHP5 handle this better? I just had to recomple PHP just to get ‘curl’ to work. Crazy.

My desktop PC is just about 3 years old now. Though I do all my Rails coding on my mac mini screen, it’s great to be able to seamlessly move my mouse back and forth between my PC and Mac via Synergy.

My only complaint with Synergy is that every few days the copy & paste functionality between the two computers stops working & I have to restart the app (takes just 30 sec).

But yeah my PC is pretty slow, anyone out there own an AMD Athlon 64 X2 system?

I hear they are supposed to be a lot faster than the similarly-priced Intels.

Shopping List

HP Pavilion Media Center a1350n PC, refurbished (refurbished is less than ideal but I’ll take my chances)

OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Platinum System Memory

Ever take a welcome break off from reading/commenting/participating in blogs for a while, only to return and get this kind of annoying, sick feeling in your stomach?

I’ve had it happen several times. I finally put a finger on it — it’s the same feeling you get when you attend a top liberal arts school filled with a bunch of blowhards.

Now, onto the reasons… why blogging is like attending a top liberal arts college:

• Everyone thinks they know more than the next person about whatever happens to be the subject
• No one’s afraid to speak their mind, even on subjects they really know very little about
• Traditionally taboo dinner-table conversation subjects that can lead to heated debate (such as Politics, Religion, etc) are not off limits
• In fact, taboo subjects are an encouraged topic. You’re supposed to be learning from one another, after all. But do you really? =)
• When someone gets a factoid wrong, there’s never a shortage of asswipes around who will correct you (*ahem* factcheck your ass, as they say these days)
• College: you brag about your SAT scores, until you realize it really doesn’t f’ing matter anymore. Blogs: you brag about your traffic, # of links, or amount of ad revenue your blog generates. (only, you keep doing so because you still think it matters)
• College: when confronted with someone who actually does know more than you, just throw out an amorphous concept like ‘post-modernism’, ‘deconstruction’ or ‘nihilism’ to pretend like you know what you’re talking about. Blogs: throw out a buzzword like Web 2.0, Ajax, User-Generated Content, RSS, Squidoo, Wikis, etc
• College: there was always some hot new party every weekend at a new location. Last week’s has already been forgotten. Blogs: there’s always some hot new story or meme making the rounds, quickly forgotten and tossed into the dustbin of Technorati
• You develop a huge network of ’semi-friends.’ People you kind of know and could say “What’s up?” to at a party or as you pass by in the virtual comment halls. Upon graduation (or abandoning a blog), you will never see or interact with any of these people again in your life.
• College: there was never a shortage of cheap beer. Blogs: there’s never a shortage of cheap, one-liner comments. “great post!”, “i agree. blogged at: …insert-reblog-post-url-here…“

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