congrats to TCBTB

Congratulations to The Cast Before The Break on getting a spot on the Bamboozle line-up this coming weekend. I know you guys have worked your asses off to get to that festival - have a blast with it!!!

Great show this bast weekend in Oneonta, it was excellent to see you guys again! I can't believe you opened with Understanding the Universe - it was the first time I saw it live and it sounded great.

Kick ass at Bamboozle!

goruco2008

I attended GORUCO yesterday.
What a great time; great presentations, great after party, great people.
I didn't bring a camera, but others are tagging photos from the event.

Some of my highlights of the event:

Bryan Helmkamp's Story Driven Development. I've looked at Rspec a number of times, but have never gotten my butt off of standard rails unit test. The new story telling framework and webrat integration with Rspec has inspired me to schedule some time to look at this again. I really liked the feel of the "given some situation", "when this happens" "then I expect these results" syntax. And the webrat dom integration to fill in form field with syntax as simple as "fills_in last_name" with 'shaw' " looks sweet.

Giles Bowkett's - presentation. OMG! As soon as this is up on confreaks check it out. I really can't begin to explain this presentation, you have to see it to understad. Make sure the kids aren't around or at least the headphones are on. He was on a rant about VC firms being muppet f'ckrs that was pretty hilarious.

Chris Wanstrath - Forbidden Fruit - Ruby's parse tree. I'm a fan of his Ambition project and enjoyed hearing him speak.

Ezra's Merb 'All you need, none you don't' - I've been keeping an eye on merb since Ezra first started publicly talking about it. So, hearing him speak about it was cool. However the really really huge news was the information about what his is doing for Rails. This is huge news. Ezra is taking what he has learned from writing merb, and giving back to rails. He has been hacking away at Rails ActionPack and is removing the legacy cgi dependencies. He has reworked action pack to play nicely with Rack, and in doing so has supposedly made some improvements in the size of the rails mutex lock. This is really huge news. He mentioned that he is devoting something like his next 6 weeks to work on getting this stuff wrapped up and into rails core. I just realized that he blogged about this too. Wow!!!

The after party was a blast! Engine Yard hosted the after party at the Tribeca Grand; open bar, wi-fi, wii gaming, and general meet and greet stuff. Before the night was over I got a chance to say hey to a few of the guys I was looking forward to meeting.

Great event!

rails input text size - redo

A few days ago, I posted about using the DEFAULT_FIELD_OPTIONS const in Rails to override the default options which include a field size of 30. In that post, I put the const definition in my application_settings.rb initializer. While I do like to put all my application const definitions here, in this case it was a slight problem. Well things worked, but there were warnings at app start up that I missed about the constant already being defined. Duh... my application_ruby isn't loaded until after rails is loaded, which is a bit late.

In this case it probably makes more sense to revert back to the old environment.rb that we now try to keep our paws out of. So, I added the following to my environment.rb, and now I get the desired result without generating const already defined warnings.

module ActionView
  module Helpers
    class InstanceTag
      DEFAULT_FIELD_OPTIONS = { }
    end
  end
end

specifying rails input text size

I was bothered recently when building some forms by the default size attribute of 30 that the rails text_field form helper method adds by default to all text fields if one is not specified. More times then not, I don't want a size attribute specified, unless I explicitly provide one. Otherwise, my desired behaviour is browser default text box, which will then be presented with style.

Rails, makes this simple; just override the default values in the DEFAULT_FIELD_OPTIONS constant.
I did this by adding the following to my application_settings.rb (I've gotten in the habit of putting a lot of my constant definitions here instead of cluttering up environment files with constants)
ActionView::Helpers::InstanceTag::DEFAULT_FIELD_OPTIONS = { }

This works because the InstanceTag class in the form_helper.rb file checks to see if DEFAULT_FIELD_OPTIONS has been defined before it defines it for you. Opening up form_helper.rb shows me that the only defaults in this constant are { 'size" => 30 } so, I'm good just to set it to an empty hash in this case.

stupid phone calls

This is why I don't pick up my phone most of the time when it rings during the day...
I answered a phone call today that by the caller id was obviously a sales call, but the phone kept ringing and it was driving me crazy. 

Me: hello

Caller: ~...this is Dell Financial services, we apologize for the inconvenience but we called to tell you about new options available with dell protections plans. Unfortunately, all of our agents are busy. We will have to call you back at another time.”

Me: hang up phone and stew in frustration, never wanting to purchase anything from Dell again.

I realize this is not just a Dell thing. My guess is that it is probably another company altogether that Dell outsources these "up sale" phone calls to. But, you know what Dell? Little crap like this really pissies me off. 

So, I get interrupted from what I was working on, get my butt up out of my chair, run to make it before the 3rd ring so it doesn't go to the answering machine, and worse of all loose my concentration on what I was working on. I do this so Dell's customer service calling queue can tell me that: a) they called me, but b) don't really have the time to speak to me. 

Are you kidding me? Why don't you just come out and say "Mr. customer, your time means nothing to us, our time means everything to us" 

iZoca

Towards the end of 07, I started flirting with a thing called iZoca.

Jeff first introduced me to his idea in November, but it took a month or so for me to admit that I was infatuated with the plan. My involvement became official in December, but just a nights and weekend capacity while I paid the bills with my existing contract day job work.

That all changes today! I'm now making a full-time run at this iZoca thing, and I'm convinced that we are building something great. Our team is small, but very motivated and all very excited about what we are doing. Our board is incredible, and I am humbled to be involved with such a great group of people.

There isn't much I can say about what we are building just yet, but stay tuned. Give us a visit at www.izoca.com to learn more, and if you feel compelled you can register for some beta info and we will inform you when it becomes available later this summer.

From a technology standpoint, here is a list of things important to us:
Ruby - oh, how I love Ruby
microformats
OpenID
iCal
semantically meaningful markup
valid xhtml/html
unobtrusive JavaScript

And some of the tools, utilities, frameworks, etc. getting us there:
Ruby on Rails
MySql
HAML
JQuery
git (this is new on our list, and I didn't believe the hype until I tried it
myself; now its an important part of the list)
Capistrano
VIM
Firefox Developer tools, Firefox Firebug
espresso

cool stuff. cool people. cool approach. cool ideas. long days. longer nights. start-up
lifestyle. Wow...these are definitely some exciting times!