I took a trip to Portland recently to traipse through OSCON. I was mostly in the exhibition hall with all the great schwag and company booths– many which had posted job announcements. While there, I was once again frustrated by a trend I keep seeing. The trend can be described as an “arms race of job announcements,” and has gotten to the point where it’s difficult to find a development job listed by a company that is not seeking a “ninja,” or a “rockstar,” or some similarly absurdly described candidate.
Smart …

This is just a post that may help me stop being stupid. Writing it may help carve it into the permanent portion of my memory instead of the “forget about it and then periodically have to think twice and remember that you did something stupid” portion.
It’s a small thing, more of an annoyance than a real problem. Something like my tendency to forget “end” after blocks (a Python holdover) and to assume that zero equals false (a sort of “everything else” holdover).
It boils down to this:
belongs_to is singular,  you stupid …

This post is mostly a whiny diatribe on how I’m a stupid idiot.
Mostly, when I code, I focus on logic: algorithms, object models and other back-end stuff. All the stuff that’s hard and doesn’t give any sort of gratification to the front-end developers or users because, well, it’s not on the front-end. The stuff I like to code are the elegant binary-keyed dictionary structures that route water in multiple simultaneous directions in a hydrologic model. It’s the stuff no-one sees.
Consequently, because I hate the design side,1 my apps generally look …

This weekend, during my wife’s birthday celebrations, I talked with someone about my recent programming exploits, including how much fun I’m having programming web applications in Ruby on Rails. The response:
“Sure, Ruby’s fun, but it’s not really useful. It’s a cute scripting language, but it can’t scale.”
Until recently, this was an opinion that I agreed with. Hell, it was actually something I told other people.
One day, I realized why I agreed with it.
Now it’s just an opinion that makes me want to smack someone.

If you’re trying to use RSpec with Autotest in a Rails app, and get a strange error:

invalid option: –autospec
Test::Unit automatic runner.

Usage: -e [options] [-- untouched arguments]

Check whether you’re using the RedGreen colorizing gem. It seems that this conflicts somehow with the setup. The good thing is that I can turn that off and still work well since I have the autotest-growl plugin installed, so I see Growl notifications of my tests.
Hope this helps someone’s frustrated Google results.

Recently, I started working on a new project where people will need to enter city/state, as well as university details. The reasons are unimportant here except to say that entering this into a database using an input field is problematic if you need to use the database later in a programmatic fashion. It only takes one person accidentally entering their city as “New Yrok” for your database calls to start screwing up. The best thing you can do is give people a choice, and force them to use it.
I debated …

I’ve been getting really grumpy lately because strange things keep happening when I try to build Ruby apps– specifically on Rails. It turns out that some of my problems weren’t due to my horrible lack of competence, but instead to the fact that the Ruby installation on Snow Leopard (installed from Xtools) had some weird things going on with regards to Gems. I thought I’d throw it up here because I tend to have problems more than once, and my blogs are as much a pensieve as they are anything.
So, …

Alright, this may be obvious to you real rubologists, but I’ve only been programming in Ruby for about a week, and Rails is still a framework where I have to rebuild my projects frequently because I bork them so bad.
My hope is that there’s someone else who’s as clueless as me. If that person is out there, and happens to get strange errors with Rails, maybe using Authlogic, maybe this will help.
ActionController::RoutingError in Users#show
Alright, so you’re building a Rails app, and you have no damn clue what the …