Imapenguin Blog

Boeing built the X-37 in the 1990’s to be an unpiloted, autonomously operated vehicle to go into low earth orbit. It was abandoned by NASA and transferred to DARPA in 2004.

The X-37 is scheduled to be test flown by being dropped from the White Knight launch platform which is the same plane design that carried SpaceShipOne to it’s historic feat of reaching “space” and thus winning the Ansari X Prize.

Okay, so the real fix is to freeze 1.0 into your vendor directory. The quickest way I know how to do this is to get into your Typo root directory and do:

rails .

This will try to reinstall rails, say no to overwriting everything but the Rakefile (you zipped up the whole thing just in case right?). After letting it recreate your Rakefile (that you backed up since you have stuff in there):

rake freeze_edge REVISION=3303

Restart whatever you are using to serve rails and that’s it!

Email me at mike@imapenguin.com if you have a better way or need help.

Photo from nasa.com

“The shadow of the moon falls on Earth as seen from the International Space Station, 230 miles above the planet, during a total solar eclipse at about 4:50 a.m. EST March 29. This digital photo was taken by the Expedition 12 crew, who are wrapping up a six-month mission on the ISS. Visible near the shadow are portions of Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea and the coast of Turkey.”

See more here and here

I upgraded our production systems this morning to Rails 1.1. We had tested all of our apps extensively with the last few pre-releases so we felt good about doing this the first day. We run extensive usage tests with the Rails testing framework and all the apps both the public apps and the ones we run privately for companies pass with flying colors.

About 10 mins. after the migration, someone emailed me to say the blog was down. I thought “crap, I forgot to check Typo on 1.1”. Sure enough it’s broken. So we searched through the logs and found that if we commented these lines out of our environment.rb file, typo works enough to limp along:

Controllers = Dependencies::LoadingModule.root(
  File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'app', 'controllers'),
  File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'components')
)

I got caught up in the day and never got back to it. We’ll send a fancy Imapenguin Mug to the first person who posts a good explanation and/or fix.

This is just too good not to repost, the guys on the ISS will get to see the eclipse tomorrow from orbit. I hope they take about a million pictures!

Space Station Crew to See a Real Moon Shadow: “Crewmembers aboard the International Space Station will have a rare opportunity to witness the Moon’s shadow racing across the face of the Earth during a total solar eclipse tomorrow.

(Via SPACE.com.)

“The biggest upgrade in Rails history has finally arrived. Rails 1.1 boasts more than 500 fixes, tweaks, and features from more than 100 contributors. Most of the updates just make everyday life a little smoother, a little rounder, and a little more joyful.”

Upgrading to 1.1 is a snap do:

gem install rails --include-dependencies

then update JavaScripts for RJS:

rake rails:update

while inside your project.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge” – Albert Einstein

I’m working with one of my reps this morning on closing a sale we thought was lost. The customer waited until the end of the quarter for the purchase because he knew he’d get a better price. This is the IM exchange between Lisa (the vendor rep, I changed her name) and I:

Lisa: So, we should get this today! Fantastic!

Me: I think so. He just asked for the fax number.
Depends on what his process is.
I’ll drive over there myself next week if he doesn’t send it

Lisa: LOL… that’s hilarious..i’m sure he’s love that…


PO Pick-up service!

Me: Hey, it’s PO pick up with a smile

I’m going to Patent that!

Always the entrepreneur

There is an interesting piece of Ajax magic in Ruby on Rails called the “In place editor”. It’s implemented in just a few lines of code (shown here in the now classic “rails blog example”):

# Controller
  class BlogController < ApplicationController
    in_place_edit_for :post, :title
  end
# View
  < %= in_place_editor_field :post, title %>

This creates a really nice for field where you can click on the value and edit it in place. Cool huh?

Of course, there is really annoying catch. It bypasses the validation functions of rails. So you can edit in place, but it breaks a major (and very important) function of the framework. To quote David Heinemeier Hansson, “this is not beautiful code”. In fact it’s downright ugly and I’m disappointed that it’s even in the main distribution of Rails at this point. It’s even documented as breaking validations.

To make matters worse, the “fix” is to implement your own method for the in_place_edit function and basically reimplement validations in the controller

WHAT?

Ruby on Rails touts itself as a framework to “Make happy programmers”. This is ugly and should be viewed as the sort of thing that does not belong in the stable release of Rails.

Is bleh a word? It conveys my feeling perfectly, so at least here on this blog, it’s a word for today.

I’m not going to say where I saw this recently, but it’s not an isolated incident. I was on a web forum for a beta book and it’s the sort of place where your title quite frankly does not matter. Not even your name matters. The whole point of this particular forum is helping the author finish a book that you find useful.

This particular person spent a whole lot of time explaining his credentials as a PhD and professor and blah, blah, blah about how he was qualified to make his comment and critique about a particular part of a BETA book. He went on to sign his name First Last, PhD.

What is it with these people?

Now, let me be perfectly clear that I’m not knocking PhD’s. I’m knocking the sort of people who sign every email with Dr, so and so, or Magna Cum Laude – Yale 1961 (it was 45 years ago for Pete’s sake, have you done anything interesting since then?). It’s a web forum! Nobody cares about your title. Your comment will count and get noticed if you actually have something interesting to say, not just because you signed it Blah Blah, PhD.

I think this set me off because in this case and in so many others, this person seemed to say “even though I’m a novice at this thing you’re writing about, and you’re the expert, my credentials in this other field give me special permission to say this particular thing about how you did this”.

Honestly, it would have been more effective to say, “Yo, Mr Author, I don’t get this part, would it work if you put this in here?”.

Says the same thing, less annoying and you don’t even have to spend $100K in school to make that comment.