Bruce also linked to a newsweek article with similar sentiments. As I started reading this one I was thinking it was quite refreshing to hear the “chill the fuck out” message coming from the mainstream media:

However, if you scroll down just a little bit, you see that Newsweek can’t take it’s own advice as they attempt to generate a little more advertising revenue with a scary picture of a terrorist and an alarmist link:

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised the media can condemn politicians for “tough-guy bluster” and in very the same article advertise a link to the 10 scariest terrorists they can find. What does surprise me is that anybody takes this hypocritical rag seriously enough to pay for a subscription to it.

Word Count

Drag this link up to your bookmarks bar and click on it and it will tell you the number of words you’ve typed into all of the text areas on the page. It reports the count back using the internal name of the field, but that will usually be enough to figure out which field you’re typing in. It also counts the number of words you have selected in the web page, just because its easy to do. I hope this helps somebody else out there meet arbitrary post length guidelines.

They missed a translation and another couple don’t fit in the space and just run off the page into oblivion. These bugs are annoying to fix, but at least they are easy to find: Just change the locale on your computer while you develop. Only one person on the team really needs to do this.

I have my computer’s language set to spanish, so I notice these problems right away while testing, which is certainly something you should do for at least a round of QA before you ship, but preferably while you develop. You can make it fun if you write a pirate locale or something, but you should absolutely be running your app in a language other than english before you can even come close to calling it finished.

By sheer coincidence I also had my credit card number stolen about a week prior to switching. This is important because I was on AutoPay with AT&T on that card, which I obviously cancelled as soon as I heard it was stolen. Today, I get an e-mail from AT&T that says I’m $67 (a full month) overdue on my account, plus a $1 late fee. When they tried to bill me for the full month of September, the credit card declined and they didn’t get paid. So I call them up this morning to get this resolved and without even asking for a bill reduction, the phone rep says he’ll go ahead and “manually pro-rate” the account down to $32, which sounds about right to me. AT&T was happy to auto-bill my account for $35 they knew didn’t belong to them, hoping I wouldn’t notice it.

So this is just a reminder that when you switch cell companies mid-month, they’ll happily bill you for the entire thing if you don’t call and remind them not to steal from you. Also, I’ve heard reports from friends that T-mobile did the exact same thing, so this is probably widespread across the cellular industry. Call your old wireless provider when you cancel. The number-porting auto-cancel is certainly convenient, but it could also cost you quite a bit of money, especially if you cancel early in your billing cycle.

This is infuriating to me, especially considering how badly yahoo got burned in the media after that UTenn student “hacked” Sarah Palin’s e-mail address. I really wish that people would stop doing this, or at least make it not mandatory. Even Time Magazine had an article about how stupid these questions are.

So please, internet, I’m begging you to stop doing this.

This is not a surprise to me, because this is the reason I’m planning on leaving AT&T as soon as my original iPhone contract expires next month. What is a surprise is that they’re still allowed to advertise as having “More bars in more places.” I think they get away with this by crafting their messages to emphasize that they have better coverage “worldwide.” Which is not really true anyway since they just piggyback on other carriers’ networks, and then charge outrageous rates that range from $0.79/minute in Canada, $0.99/min in Mexico, $1.29/min in most of Europe, all the way up to $2.29/min in Japan, and $2.49/min in the U.A.E., which has the most cell phones per capita of any country in the world. But hey, they just say they have the bars, not that you can afford to use them.

Not that I am a much of a globetrotter, but T-mobile has probably the same international coverage as AT&T (since AT&T likely uses T-mobile’s European network extensively), and their international roaming rates are mostly cheaper as well, $.49 in Canada, $0.99 in europe, $1.49 in Mexico, $1.99 in Japan, $1.99 in UAE.

So my plan is to switch to T-mobile as soon as possible and give the HTC Magic/MyTouch Android device a try. And if I don’t like that, I can always fall back to my trusty 2G iPhone, which is already unlocked for use outside of AT&T’s crappy network.

from American Airlines <AmericanAirlines@na.info.aa.com>
to my@email.address
date Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 9:26 AM
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This is exactly the opposite of what I wanted to happen. Whoever came up with the idea to send an email to confirm that you will receive no more emails should die of ghonnorea and rot in hell.

1. Our libraries were mature
2. They could be developed independently of a certain project

Number 1 is nice because the libraries don’t need to be updated often, so you usually only needed to spend time getting them set up at the start of a new project. Number 2 was true because our libraries usually revolved around authentication/single sign on and they were maintained by an entirely different group in IT. This is more typical of large enterprise development.

So when I wanted to do something similar for our rails/js libraries, I initially turned to gems and plugins. Either of these solutions would work fine for our modifications to Ruby, and we do currently maintain 2 internal rails plugins that handle our ruby convenience methods and also some changes we’ve made to rails (that haven’t made it into core rails yet….). We keep those plugins in separate subversion projects, and everything work great.

Now enter Javascript. We write lots of javascript. Many times as much as we write ruby. The Javascript also tends to be dirtier than ruby, and we run into a lot of problems that are much harder to reproduce so I usually prefer to test changes to the libraries in the context of the applications that use them. This JS code is also very immature and changes frequently, often daily. The traditional method of developing a library on the side and updating it occasionally breaks down for this case, so the situation for the JS libraries is the opposite of the traditional way I described above:

1. Immature code that changes frequently
2. Development depends on applications that use the library

It turns out that there is a nice property that is supported by subversion called externals. This allows you to set a directory in one repository to link right to another repository. You can make changes to the library right there, commit it back, and then go run update on a different project and it will go grab the changes. This is perfect, except for one thing. Say I branch off of trunk to write a big new feature that ends up adding a lot of code to the Javascript UI library. This branch may take a few weeks to finish and the whole time I’m committing new code to the javascript, which gets propagated to trunk everytime I update, which could certainly introduce bugs that we might not want in other branches.

This leads me (finally) to the point of this post. I solved this by writing a rake task to “freeze” and “unfreeze” the library. When it is frozen, the library just stays at a version we know to be stable. When you want the latest code, or if you need to make changes, you unfreeze it and test. We’ve been using this solution for a few weeks now and its works really well, so I decided to post the rakefile that handles installation and freezing of a javascript library, called ‘jslib’ by default.

external_js_library.rake

Now I can do cool stuff like

rake jslib:freeze

which makes sure that the library stays at whatever version it is at right now forever, or until I issue:

rake jslib:unfreeze

which sets it back to HEAD and updates. I don’t think this is a replacement for gems/rails plugins, but it does a very good job of handling our shared javascript library. Thoughts?

I’ve always loved pizza, and in my quest to make pizza at home that tastes better than pizza I can buy, I purchased “American Pie” by Peter Reinhart. The book is an interesting read about Peter’s search around the globe for the perfect pizza (which, incidentally, he finds at Pizzaria Bianco in Phoenix), but it also contains recipes for every type of pizza crust imaginable. I tend to agree with Mr. Reinhart as I usually prefer thin, crispy crusts, ala Napoletana. But I though I’d try something different the other day, so I made his Chicago-style cornmeal deep dish crust in a 9 inch cake pan. It was the best pizza I’ve made at home so far. The cust wasn’t too dry, it was oozing with cheese, mushrooms, sausage, and pepperoni, and I could only eat a slice of it before I was full.

The nice thing about this crust is that, according to Reinhart, it doesn’t benefit from a night in the fridge, so you can make this one on relatively short notice (only about 3 hours of total rise time). I’m glad I made enough dough for 2 pies