It seems odd to me that many of the major text editors still have such poor ruby on rails support. I’m currently trying out a bunch of different text editors and the none of the three I’m using now have any form of rhtml support.

So goodbye Editpad Pro, UltraEdit and SlickEdit. It looks like there’s only a meagre handful of editors with actual decent rails support on Windows so I’m going to see if I can find me a new favourite editor.

grep is a nice little tool which oddly doesn’t have the -R argument like every other linux utility to recursively search through sub directories. Google reveals that it’s possible to couple find with grep to simulate recursiveness however, a major annoyance with using recursive grep on a SVN project is that you get duplicates from the .svn folder.

This little alias creates a recursive grep that ignores the .svn directory.

In your .bashrc, add the line:

alias rgrep="find . -follow \( -name ".svn" \) -prune -o -print | xargs grep -Hn"

Logout and log back in again and rgrep foo should find foo in the current directory and all sub directories

The New York Times has a story about the-horrors-lurking-in-your-home, in this case, granite countertops.

As is pro-forma, around the middle of the article, they bring in the expert to pontificate and, in this case, it was especially, infuriatingly, stupid.

David J. Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University in New York, said the cancer risk from granite countertops, even those emitting radiation above background levels, is “on the order of one in a million.” Being struck by lightning is more likely. Nonetheless, Dr. Brenner said, “It makes sense. If you can choose another counter that doesn’t elevate your risk, however slightly, why wouldn’t you?”

The chances are tiny but why take the risk? Well, precisely because the chances are tiny.

“Walking in an open field increases your chances of being struck by lightning. If you can walk anywhere else, why would anyone walk through fields?”

Because we don’t care about the risk of being struck by lightning, it’s such an insignificant factor in our lives and so are these “deadly” radioactive countertops…

Designing the Bumblebee Labs Theme

When it comes to this sort of thing, I usually take the lazy way out. There are so many designers vastly better (both technically and visually) than I am out there, spending all day making kick-ass-fabulous wordpress themes, it would just be a shame to not take advantage of them. I’d almost consider it doing them a favor.

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Ira Glass, that distinctive voice on This American Life, has a video manages to distil into words a process that I’ve been observing for a long time about taste and the creative process:

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It began, as it usually does, with sketches. Cocktail napkins, receipts, small animals, whatever happens to be on hand at the time. This is a glimpse into my design process – a rare and unadulterated look at how I do what I do.

In this case, it was a napkin on Hang’s kitchen table.

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Being a computer scientist by background, one of the things which I’ve always been keenly aware of is issues of scale, not only of computer systems but also of human systems. As organisations grow larger, layers of beaurocracy and organisation are needed just to keep things on track and get the job done. When done well, each of these things has a clear task and purpose but they also involve an inevitable tradeoff of time taken away from actual production.

One of the challenges I’ve been facing establishing policy at this early stage is what formal procedures and mechanisms should we put in place to safely navigate between the twin pillars of informal cowboy style development and rigid, stifling control freak management. At the moment, my inclination is to lean towards slightly too much procedure over slightly too little because I’m also treating this phase as a learning experience.Part of the reason to implement these systems is so that we can learn to use them and be familiar with them and understand the individual nuances (aka: frustrations) of each one.

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The most recent xkcd comic reminds me of a interesting phenomena I’ve observed…

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My cellphone dictionary doesn’t contain any profanity. Whenever I want to send a text message which contains swearing, I need to laboriously enter in the word letter by letter and it’s a pain in the ass. Once I get over the brief annoyance though, I can’t help my smile a little every time I do it because it’s just all so… quaint.

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I despair that, even over a decade into developing for the web, so many companies still get the obvious, basic small things completely and utterly wrong. Here’s a tip for any aspiring web developers: Make it as easy as possible for me to give you money. When I want to pay you for your product, don’t make me fill in another damn registration form and send me an email confirmation before I can continue. I want to give you money but I have a short attention span. Make it too frustrating for me and I get annoyed.

I’m not even pretending to say anything original here. This has been said by people far more eloquently by far more experienced people than me. Still, the fact that so many companies manage to thrive despite so many of these obvious flaws shows the obvious potential still left untapped by the internet. If people are willing to put up with such a hostile experience, imagine what it will be like when we do it right…?