Advogato blog for fxn

11 Oct 2008

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:24:09 GMT

shlomif, that'd be a warning due to an otherwise confusing response. That one is fine, and perhaps it would be better to get back a different page. When an email is involved for example I say it was sent and that people check their spam folder. No prob.

When I edit a task in Things there's no silly message saying "task successfully edited". The task view changes, it is there, it is obvious. You as a developer believe web apps have different user-interfaces, and in this particular aspect of the user interface I don't agree they have to be that different.

I don't mean you should write no warnings, I say you should choose which ones make sense. I feel people abuse and there's inertia to put "Product was successfully modified" gratuitiously.

10 Oct 2008

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 07:46:30 GMT

Conferencia Rails 2008

The Conferencia Rails 2008 is taking shape. Yesterday the program was published with a great deal of good stuff.

Besides technical talks you'll see some case studies because this conference by tradition leaves room for explaining websites built in RoR, no matter whether they are commercial, so that people can share experiencie in everything that involves using Rails for a living.

Obie Fernández will close the conference with a keynote on Friday, and me myself will open the conference with a keynote on Thursday.

6 Oct 2008

Mon, 6 Oct 2008 16:49:11 GMT

User was successfully created

Why so many webapps confirm to the user that some action was successfully done? Of course it was!

Look at your desktop applications, your editor does not bug you saying "File saved!" constantly, iCal is indeed almost completely silent. You warn the user when the disk has run out of space, right?

I think those messages come from the insecurity the developer feels about the amount of failure points between request and response. Perhaps some are just repeating the pattern seen elsewhere. But that's not the user's business, you warn when you fail.

17 Sep 2008

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 21:17:05 GMT

Rails Guides

Rails Guides has started with great speed, I am amazed. There are several guides being written in parallel and more reviewers have joined the project.

There are two guides already published: Rails Routing from the Outside In, and Rails Database Migrations. I think this project is no doubt going to make a difference.

Semester at University of Barcelona

I gave today the first class of the semester at the University of Barcelona. The group is full. We gave an overview today and distributed people in two groups for exercices. This course will start at a low pace unfortunately because next Wednesday is a local feast, but then it will be non-stop up to the end. (Except perhaps for the Conferencia Rails 2008 to be held in Madrid in November.)

Open Source Activity

I am involved in a few things for the forthcoming months. Besides the Perl course at the UB I'm reviewing Rails guides, submitting patches to Rails now and then, organizing Euruko 2009 and Spanish Perl Workshop 2009, preparing a talk about Active Record internals... No time for being bored :- ).

11 Sep 2008

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:05:45 GMT

Essay: Towards a universal language

As much as I love Catalan, I wonder whether Internet may be an inflection point towards the gradual emergence of a universal language.

I have mixed-feelings regarding the premise that human languages have a value as cultural patrimony. Languages are a historical accident, they arise essentially because people communicate with people in a small radius and that makes things diverge. It happened that evolution gave us languages, but for me that's heritage with no intrinsic value. On the contrary, for me it means separation.

Languages are a symbol for nations as well, when someone gets conquered the language of the victorious is imposed, and the one of the defeated persecuted. That's destruction. No value over here to look for, well not for me anyway.

When communication is the goal people forget about that, and just jump to whatever works. Normally that's English. If you speak English with people at a conference you are not perceiving your local language as being attacked, or your rights as a citizen of somewhere being violated. You just speak with people and whatever works is fine, because language is then just a mean.

I think it could be the case that the globalization in communications brings as a consequence a fix for Babel. When my daughter grows up she will be able to make online friends in the entire globe. I think next generations will gradually detach from the emotions we associate to languages nowadays, and by themselves derive towards something that works. I mean that's not going to be imposed, decided, or voted, in my idealization that just happens. English may be the de-facto standard due to its inherited inertia.

I believe that's gonna happen, and that would bring us to an epoch where humankind is bilingual in general. Communication and transportation will be much ubiquitous, and people will naturally speak some universal language, together with their mother tongue.

I wish those mother tongues eventually die or last as a cultural curiosity of past times, and people can freely communicate all over the Earth.

2 Sep 2008

Tue, 2 Sep 2008 00:18:44 GMT

Rails Guides

There's a new project that aims at producing Rails documentation as a series of guides called Rails Guides.

A wish list of topics to cover is published. People may pick one and write a guide, if that one is accepted he gets a prize. Details in the rules of the page linked above.

I think Rails will benefit a lot from this initiative, and I am very pleased to be a reviewer, together with Rails core member Pratik Naik and Hongli Lai, author of the outstanding Phusion Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition.

Writing this from Berlin, ready for the RailsConf Europe 2008 that starts tomorrow morning.

28 Aug 2008

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:01:50 GMT

Contributing to Rails these days, a few code and doc patches.

21 Aug 2008

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:23:17 GMT

Gotcha: Ruby and Perl conflicting regexp flags

Both Ruby and Perl have /m and /s regexp flags, but they are different in each language.

To have the dot match newlines you use /s in Perl, but /m in Ruby.
To enable multiline mode, that is ^ matches beginning of line, you use /m in Perl and nothing in Ruby. In Ruby that's the only existing mode, you can't switch it off, ^ asserts beginning of line always. Beginning of string is \A and end of string \z or \Z as in Perl.
If that was not confusing enough, Ruby has a /s flag which means the regexp is in SJIS encoding.

4 Aug 2008

Mon, 4 Aug 2008 09:15:29 GMT

Adam Kennedy in Barcelona

Perl wizard Adam Kennedy is doing a tour thanks to a TPF grant, and was with Barcelona.pm last Thursday. He gave a talk about PPI, a distribution of him that solves a hard problem.

After the talk we went out for dinner and had a great time. It was a real pleasure to meet him.

26 Jul 2008

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 11:00:21 GMT

Hat Tip at Frederick Cheung

I admire the public work of Frederick Cheung.

He for example has been giving first-rate help at the rubyonrails-talk mailing list for a long time. Giving support in mailing lists, IRC, or Usenet is not something all people are able to do at that level. Of course you need to be correct and give quality answers, but also you need to have true respect for any question, of any level, and you need to have an intuitive way to guess the level of the OP from a few clues in his wording to tailor your response appropriately. That comes from a genuine willingness to help, to contribute, and from other skills not everyone in public forums have. Excellent job there.

Frederick has been also an important contributor to the Rails core. His work there ranges from small patches, to the entire non-trivial rewrite of eager-loading that saw the light in Rails 2.1.

In addition, he has started a series of articles in his blog that cover fundamental Rails stuff in-depth. For example, everyone knows params in Rails, but I think any developer, no matter he's an apprentice or an expert, should read this recent article.

Keep up the good work Fred!