Jamie Thingelstad

I’ve been diving big into Ruby on Rails this week with this class I’m taking. One of the things I found right away is you need to have the Rails API documentation very handy. The main site is api.rubyonrails.com, and frankly it’s horrible. Luckily there is a great alternative at RailsBrain that uses AJAX and all sorts of spiffy fun to make the API so much more usable. Today though I was getting frustrated because I had a slow internet connection and things were taking forever. Enter the solution, a site-specific browser.

My friend Kent came up with this idea, so credit to him for it, but I know he’ll never blog about it and I want to share the love. RailsBrain allows you to download the API documentation as a zip file. It is simply a collection of files and can be served without a web server.

Unzip the files to a location of your liking and then launch fluid. Here is the setup window. For extra fun, I took the logo image off of RailsBrain to use as the application icon.

After doing this hit create and you’ve got a brand new shiny application that runs local, will work offline, is never going to be slow, and can be launched easily via your launcher of choice.

Plus, you can now alt-tab to it easily. Wow! Great idea Kent! This is really great, and it is blistering fast!

Today was day two of Rails Studio. Dave Thomas and Mike Clark really ramped up the fire hose today. We continued working on our project site and today worked through creating our own forms, working through ActiveRecord and creating relational mappings and passing things around from page to page. We also went through routes and mapping URLs around to the appropriate controllers. Powerful stuff.

I really appreciated the long block of time spent on using REST in Rails 2. I was very impressed with how integrated REST is into Rails applications right out of the gate. If you use the default routing and scaffolding you instantly get REST operations on all of your models. Wow.

The hardest part of todays class though was just working through the plumbing of getting related data sets working around a data model. We were adding reviews to our event application. I’ve done this before in a number of languages and frameworks, and Rails 2 does this better than any of the ones I’m familiar with.

Today tied up the fundamentals to building 95% of all web applications. We’ll wrap it up tomorrow with user logins and filters, as well as handling deployment to production in the real world. I’m really happy I took the time to do this.

Last November I decided to pull the plug and wish Twitter “buh-bye”. Those that follow me have realized that I’ve returned to Twitter. So, what gives?

I’ve settled on a few simple things to make Twitter work for me.

Don’t Stand in the River, Take What You Want

I’ve stopped using Twitter over SMS and don’t expect to start. My main Twitter access is via the wonderful Twitterific on the Mac and Hahlo on my iPhone. I’ve found that I need to keep SMS traffic down and limit it to mainly texting with other people. Twitter on SMS became obnoxious. The problem for me is that SMS creates a queue of unread Tweets that you need to catch up with. This is what I refer to as not standing in the river. Instead, just dip in when you wish. No worries if you missed a bunch of stuff. It’s old anyway.

Don’t Protect Updates

Here is the thing, protecting your updates just creates this sense that you could create a private tweet. There is no such thing. Remove the protection and just assume everyone reads your tweets. The other impact of this is that more people will follow you because they can see your tweets. More followers also makes Twitter more fun.

Follow More People

Perhaps the corollary to the item above; start following more people. This seems odd since the first impression is “Hey, isn’t that going to make it more of a problem?” Well, that would be the case only if you stood in the river. I choose to dip in when I want, so I’m free to follow a larger group of people. This also makes Twitter more interesting, since distance helps.

Get Distance

Following people on Twitter that you see all the time is fine, but, start following some people that are thousands of miles away.

So, you may be wondering what a site-specific browser is. In a nutshell, it is just a web browser that is packaged with some specific functionality or extensions to work with a specific website. I think this is going to be an interesting area over the coming years. If you think about how both Quicken and Money mesh the web into their applications, that is a very tiny sliver of a SSB.

If you are a Mac user, you can have your very own SSB’s to your hearts content. Fluid is a program for your Mac that creates SSB’s. You launch Fluid and with a couple of commands it creates another application that becomes that SSB. Why do this? Well, there are a number of reasons.

Long Lived Web Applications

If you are a web application user for GMail or Yahoo! Mail you’ve probably had multiple tabs open and had a page on another tab cause the browser to crash. With a poof your mail disappears.

If you are using an SSB the SSB is in another process space and is protected.

Keep Focus

The SSB is locked down to the domain you specify. If anything in that domain links you out to another domain, that will launch out in your default browser.

Integration With Your Desktop

The reasons above are why I created SSB’s for both Basecamp and Backpack. Another benefit? I can now quickly launch them via Quicksilver and they appear in my alt-tab sequence just like they were a real application. There is a good write-up on the 37 Signals blog about how to set this up, with nice graphics to use for icons.

I find this user experience really changes how you work with these web applications.

I’m the newest member into a small book club that only counts tech geeks in its membership. The first book I read in the club was Edward Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence.

I was really excited to read this since I’ve been to Tufte’s lecture twice before but I will sheepishly admit that I hadn’t read any of his books. They look really good on the book shelf though! 🙂

Beautiful Evidence had some really good moments, but it also had some not-so-good moments. All of the members of the book club had issues with the book. Those that have read his other books felt it wasn’t up to par with the others. I really liked the chapters on labeling and sparklines, but there were several parts that just seemed to ramble.

I’m not going to rag on the book. It wasn’t bad – I guess I just expected something more.

Looking forward to South by Southwest being over and Twitter returning to normal.

I’m in Denver today for the first of three days of Rails Studio. Rails Studio is one of the Pragmatic Studio classes offered by Pragmatic Programmers. This class is being taught by Dave Thomas and Mike Clark. I really enjoyed our first day.

I was a little surprised by how many people there were in the class. I expected about 20 and it’s nearly twice that. I think I counted 37. And, sadly, as all things programming go there were only two women. As the father of a little girl this lack of women in technology disturbs me more and more. The accommodations were as you would expect – decent hotel conference room, setup in rows of tables. I would love it if Pragmatic would spring for a second projector and do a dual display given the number of people in the room. Not necessary, but would be nice.

The first day was split in two halves. We started with a very quick dive through Ruby itself. I was really happy they did this since it answered many “huh” moments I’ve had when looking at Rails examples. The overview also left me with more respect for Ruby, independent of Rails, than I had when I came. The morning finished with a quick run through model-view-controller, MVC. It was also put together well and explained more clearly than I’ve seen before.

The afternoon was spent working on real Ruby on Rails code and managing our way through an example project. There was less time in labs, hands-on coding, than I expected. But that didn’t take away anything. I left the afternoon actually feeling like I understand the flow of control in Rails and can make my way through the stack. Given the surface area of Rails I feel pretty good about that. I also particularly liked that Mike and Dave were giving very fresh, current information on some of the big changes in Rails 2.0.2.

I’m going to start hammering out my own project as well so I can dive a bit deeper. Look for another update tomorrow.

Here is a little piece of free software that you don’t realize you need for your Mac, particularly your MacBook laptop. Caffeine is a free utility from Lighthead Software that just sits in your menu bar does one thing very well. If you click it’s coffee cup it fills with coffee and your Mac will not go to sleep, the screen saver will not engage and the screen will not even dim to preserve power.

Sure you could click a bunch of things to do this, but Caffeine makes it painfully easy to engage at will. Why do you want this? Anytime you want to watch a video clip, or read a long blog post, I find it great to click and not worry about my screen dimming away on me. Working on a complicated problem that you need to just stare at and analyze? Click the coffee cup.

I use this way more than I ever would have expected.

Really happy I didn’t waste time and money to go to SxSW for soap operas and parties.