erratic

For years I thought 'teh' as a spelling for 'the' was some l337 speak hackerism but it dawned on me last night that if you're typing really fast like they teach you in 10th grade you're fingers will already be poised over the top row so slipping the 'e' before the 'h' would be very common if you're thinking faster than your typing. Kind of like how I always type 'of' instead of 'or'. It's a very persistent defect in my self-styled 4-finger hunt and peck mannerisms.

Error handling in rails is very technical. The TextMate Backtracer Plugin has been invaluable to me in my development in recent days, yet it only gets me to the file(s) when something is amiss in the code.

Building and running tests is one way of confirming the functionality of your application, and I’m learning the power of good testing, be it quite slowly and with a lot of errors.I’ll get there.

Here is a short list of things I had to consider when flopping from code to browser during development and things kept blowing up in my face:

• Ruby/Rails has RESERVED WORDS. If you have a class/table that isn’t playing nice make sure you aren’t naming it with one of these. This is tantamount to pouring sugar in your gas tank. And then driving in reverse at full speed. While wearing a blindfold. With your hair on fire.

• Column names in your tables need to change with alterations to any class/model names, as well as any has_many/belongs_to associations along with any model inclusions in your controllers. If you’re not to invested in the code it’d probably be easier to regenerate a fresh app with the correct model/controller name. Running ./script/destroy (the arch nemesis of ./script/generate) can help in crime scene clean up, but you still have all those pesky symbols/variables/methods with the poison name throughout your app patiently waiting to spurt their demonic ire. Exterminate them with aggression.

• An objects information will carry from request to request in the session but you still have to stuff it into an instance variable inside whatever controller method is being called upon. I have a tingling sensation in my unmentionables that suggests session customization and databases can smooth out this bumpy road, but this strains the withering tethers of my sanity upon contemplation. I can only learn so much each day.

• Getting compile errors means you’re trying to bake a duck with a hammer on a string in a pail of kittens. It won’t work. Ruby/Rails doesn’t know or particularly care what you are trying to do, but how you are going about doing whatever it is you are trying to do will never, ever work no matter what. Get rid of whatever you added since the last time it worked and try again. Remember when you went to grandmas house and you had to take off your shoes and you weren’t supposed to go out into the field because you’d get muddy? Yeah, Rails has grandma rules that sometimes take all the fun out of life and make your feet cold.

Throwing away code is a part of development, just as throwing away designs is a part of being a designer. Having the willingness to let go of what’s not working makes room for what will. Even if what that is is nowhere to be seen at the moment.

Cleverness makes me giddy. When you can't innovate - imitate! idiotis.ms Cleverness or me-too fanboy wanna be like the cool kids chaff? In any case it is deliberate and useful to at least one person.

Say you were to start compiling data meaning to form qualify-able value measurements. During this effort you may surmise certain characteristics of _ambitious laziness_. One time when these dudes in suits and shiny smiles tried to get me to carry rocks for their amway pyramid one of them used this play on words in his argument to convince me to get everyone I know to buy cleaning products and this awful chocolate-oat-wallpaper-paste snack food. There were other products, but that really doesn't pertain to this story. His oratory kicker was the revelation that riches where apples on the trees of our orchard of friends. We could be _rich_ I tell you _*rich*_ if we would sell some soap, get some people to buy some soap and then convince them to sell some soap and before you would know it you'd have a suds army you could admire from atop your big 'ol pile of money. That my friends is the ambitiously lazy story. Now the actual post: When rapidly developing an application you might, say, rapidly mock up an interface in photoshop to gain the confidence in transmutability of your concept to actual reality and approval from the client of your direction before code is written. Usually these mock-ups include screens of forms and other pretty things. Being how I be I've created a psd of generic form elements as they would look in a few major browsers with the default styling. I made a html file with the form mark up, opened it in a few different browsers, captured the screen, and compiled all of them into photoshop file, chopped, diced and pureed. TaDa! Screenshots are awesome! Generic reusable form elements for rapid screen mock-up/pre-prototyping Just the basics. Nothing fancy. These will be useful as a quick and dirty source of stock generic form elements. By no means is it a comprehensive compilation of all the available styles and/or elements and their multitude of configurations. Garrett has some sweet documents for streamlining/standardizing other aspects of a project life cycle.

A podcast feed of the Bar Camp Dallas presentations that were recorded in the main is now available care of Alex. Chris told me at the unconference: "Release it to the community and let them get it out there." Here you have it, the power of community.

Audio of presentations I recorded at BarCampDallas is available now. I did some quick and dirty mixing on the tracks. If you would like uncompressed versions of any of the files email me or comment and we'll work out a way to get you the file(s). I look forward to future events with other dallas tech types. See you there!

I was at BarCampDallas on Saturday and my contribution was recording audio of some of the presentations. We also ran a firewire cable from my gs400 to Alex's Powerbook where he set up a quicktime broadcast that ran for nearly 7 uninterrupted hours (except for the sleep mode/demo mode snafu's in the beginning). It was a sweet guerilla set up. I used a $3 clamp I got at Big Lots to secure my mono-pod to a folding chair. There was no room for a tripod so it worked really well. I was energizing be getting to meet up with like-minded technology professionals and I look forward to future events. I'm also excited about the dallas.rb group Adam is cooking up for the first Tuesday's of the month. It's gonna be pretty sweet to get to learn from local wicked smart rubists. I hope I get my learn on enough to be a useful contributer to projects. *Coming up:*
Audio of the presentations I was able to record will be linked on the wiki just as soon as I sit down with soundtrack pro and do some simple editing and compression on the files.

I've launched the queerly hostile http://work.inkdeep.com in an effort to invoke a sense of urgency within myself. I'm not lacking for contract work at the moment, but all of the movers and shakers say you have to sell sell sell! So here's to inverse desperation and levity! May the lucrative offers topple my levee. Hark! I cast my eyes upon yonder legal tender! Let us sail to the land of consuming!

I have models and controllers and database tables and :has_many and :belongs_to all tying it together with ActiveRecord but I wanted to take one column of data from each row that was related to one of my other models through a has many relationship. Boy did I make it a lot harder than it needed to be.

Typo. Subversion. Switchtower. Dreamhost. All things that taste great, taste great together. After 3 days of begging for table-scraps of knowledge at irc#rubyonrails, pouring over the switchtower book at rubyonrails.org and crying myself to sleep at night with the screen image of topfunky's shovel dreamhost switchtower deploy recipe burned into the back of my retinas I can tell you that cake is good. But not for three meals in a row. All I've eaten for 3 days is svn+rake deploy and pain. Utter defeat at the hands of technology obviously beyond the scope of my heightened intuitive abilities. I've been in a 15 round prize fight with terminal and switchtower tag teaming my designer/wanna be developer ass. I am fucked up. But the site is back for the time being.