Mobile Dad

One thing I have gotten use to in ubuntu and os X are the transparent console windows. I like to tail logs or watch webrick running while doing other tasks plus it is cool. CMD.exe on Vista still looks like crap. I figured they would have “glass-ifed” the interface but nooo MS kept it simple. Thankfully someone else loves transparent windows as much as I do and made a great substitute. Marko Bozikovic created Console that not only can be transparent but adds tabs! I am no longer crippled by the lack of detail MS seems to be providing for power users!

Also I highly recomend IE7Pro for IE7. Nice addition and recovery of you web session from a crash. Firefox has been doing that for awhile, about time IE can, with the help of a plugin. Fiddler is a cool tool to trap all web traffic to analyze problems with your app. About the only thing useful MS has built is the Developer’s tool bar. More to come as I try be a full convert to the MS world.

Well I shifted my personal development box over to Windows vista. Not bad, everything installed as expected. I used this great walk-thru I found on the web for setting up Rails on a windows machine. It was easier to get the dev environment up on a windows box than my ubuntu install. I hate to admit that but gotta give one point to Windows for ease of installation.
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As I play with rails to see what I can do with it, I am noticing a small but determine voice out there that is screaming bloody murder on Rails potential. In fact, in the dashboard of WP, I notice Matt linking to a couple of articles on why Rails suck. Jumping into Rails is easy enough for anyone, I can testify to that, but what happen when you grow? That maybe something I most likely will never experience but there are programmers working on this problem right now. CDBABY creator went to Rails and BACK TO PHP. Twitter is running into performance issue as they scale. It seems all the “magic” of rails of hiding the crap you do not what to deal with actually taxes the server greatly upon higher traffic loads. There is a great post on Rob’s blog that puts together why Rails is not the cure-all that many, including myself, believe it is. Though I do not agree with his love for ASP as I had issues with that environment during my days at Colorado College.

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I missed the second day of the Lone Star Ruby Conference to be with my mom. No regrets, mom and I are tight, plus hanging out with fam is alway good. However returning to work Monday, Bob told me that Zed was very entertaining and he IRC’ed his keynote that he gave on Saturday. Unlike Friday’s keynote by Charles Oliver Nutter, which he went into this whole pep-rally-like speech to never give up, Zed Shaw, the creator of Mongrel, gave a hearty speech about why keynotes suck. As I reviewed the irc, he makes valid points that we, the tech community, should expect more when we gather. Basically the method of disseminating knowledge to others is not a very good one. Talking heads for 45-60 minutes does not give the listener much to build on. Any talk attended only has a few nuggets of information which you latter scape the web to discover more. It seems conferences today only give you new keywords for your daily searches. Zed must have been fun to watch, I bet his keynote did not suck…

For the most part the conference was ok. If I was further along as a developer, I may have understood more, but then again Bob said he really did not get anything new out of this. I would have liked more implementation talks but then again, this conference was not geared towad that.

Outside of meeting a developer I may be working with, there was no reason for me to be there. As I get older, I am becoming more critical of how my time is spent. If task requested does not help me with immediate work or interferes with family time, I rather not do it. I now understand the whole grumpy old men mentality, because I am becoming one. Be gone and let me be!

Three things you need at every developer’s conference: code examples, coffee and food. Food choice for the day was pizza, something you just cannot go wrong with. So far the conference is really geared to experienced developers. As a budding one, many examples blew passed me but at least conceptually I am there. Abstraction and correlation has always been my strengths so thankfully I am not buried like I thought I would be.

Most interesting talk so far was the “Changing your mindset: Getting starte with test-driven development” by Patrick Reagan. Write the fail test and then code a solution, what a simple yet novel idea that I never thought to do before but I worry on how much this would add to the development cycle. I will try the process tonight and see if I can think like an HP RPN calculator. Who knows, maybe I will be able to actually code vs the hack jobs I do now.