All roads lead to Rails

I believe my transition from stuff-white-people-like-reader-and-laffer to finder of the perfect ultra low maintenance, very high thought value Christmas gift, is a transition complete.  At $10 each, I picked up ten of these cards for all my close family.  Each recipient will log in to www.charitygiftcertificates.org, and then select from more than 100 charities to give the money.  The dotorg keeps a dollar from the ten, and allows distributing the nine amongst one to three causes.

I don’t purchase many gifts for others, mainly because I’m poor, though I do keep an eye out for things that they would like.  Here it seems transcendent.  The best ten dollars I ever spent, including tip, got me a classic Princeton haircut on South Seneca in Wichita.  This could be the best hundred dollars.

Like many, I follow David Heinemeier Hansson on Twitter.  Today he pointed to an addition to edge Rails that will enable the following.

"one two three".split.second == "two"

The response from the reddit.com crowd is foaming rejection of an “unuseful addition.”  Visit rubyonrails.org, where you’re clearly greeted: “Web development that doesn’t hurt.”  DHH is a genuine genius.  You can see the beams of light looking at his picture.  He knows that this makes development less painful, especially for beginners.  I work with plenty of strings (to my enjoyment) but, probably like you, I don’t know a lot of regex.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that programmers tend to fear obsoleteness more than the neoconservatives.  Something like this comes along, and promises to keep more college freshmen from dropping out.  It makes entry into the field just a bit easier, more “user friendly.” It’s pure convenience, and the world might be more perfect for everyone without any convenience at all, but we have come to know and love and mainly depend on convenience. Heinemeier Hansson wants convenience to be a path to improvement, not a path to the end of the world as we know it.

There’s plenty of time for regex Junior year, uphill both ways.

While I realize my blog doesn’t rank at the moment, and until two months ago I thought Google PageRank equated to no more than useless sidebar filler, a sort of participation stripe for bloggers, I aim to triangulate this post for a precise demographic. (About my awakening, I listened to one hacker call Google’s PageRank system something like, hum, a great humanitarian achievement?) One takes note.

So I checked on some videos I put on YouTube a while back, and it seems that one of them has found a place among 13-17 year old US females. I made the short video, “Quick Repeatable Background Images,” actually, with the usual suspects in mind, your 18-25 year old males. It was heartening to see that I could provide value to whom the same Google hacker would concur he’s never heard is an easy play… teenage girls.

After two months the video has about 400 views. I decided to make a new video about the current Ubuntu Linux.. everyday use and a few dos and don’ts, resulting in something I’m pleased with as a subtle improvement on the first small success, but at 19 minutes was rejected by YouTube.

Instead of running off a list of “key” words (’trigger words’ is correct, you see)— instead of that, my three reasons to watch the video.

1. Computer skills rule
2. Windows sucks
3. Asking anonymous geeks for computer knowledge also sucks

Presented ad-free in quality lo-fi

Everyday Ubuntu Linux (now easier than ever)

coachtvblog.com

This morning I spent an hour growing aggravated trying to find a solution I had already found a couple weeks back.  Using ActiveRecord without Rails requires at least this much code.

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'active_record'
  require 'yaml'
  require 'app/data_model.rb'

dbconfig = YAML::load_file('config/database.yml')
ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(dbconfig['development'])

The problem was that the top entry with the working solution I needed, YAML::load_file was missing, or wouldn’t load. Maybe a leprechaun hijacked my browser because I could have looked it up in the documentation, but the top result would not load in my browser, at any rate. I looked at twenty other sites before finding an old, working file on disk. So yes, it’s my intention here to greet you to this post by way of Google search.

And if you’re like me — relatively new to programming, need help with lots of these little puzzles, have ever enjoyed playing Nintendo — you must visit stackoverflow.com.

Welcome to my blog. Mostly I will express unqualified opinions with a fully-qualified identity. No less.

What about the title? I’m a web developer working with Ruby on Rails.