February 2012
1 post
PGError: ERROR: date out of range for timestamp
Note - this assumes you’ve enabled the pgbackup plugin in Heroku - as it does the full database backup for you for free - I suggest you do it right now!
Oh, the fun I just had with this one. One of my clients’ systems started throwing this message over the last week or so.
I’m lazy so I was using sqlite for my development database and Heroku’s Postgres for live.
So,...
January 2012
2 posts
3 tags
Rails for Designers
This is a short post to help designers who aren’t familiar with Rails understand their way around it enough to change things and work with developers. It assumes that you know CSS and HTML and aren’t scared of HTML that has embedded code in it.
The structure of a Rails app
Rails is a Model/View/Controller system.
Models are business logic, and storing things in databases
Views...
Neil Gaiman: Another bit from an ancient blog →
One of the drawbacks of the World’s Best Porridge Recipe for those purposes is that it’s slightly chewy, which is part of the charm. Having experimented with porridge recipes for years now, this one sort of came together in a bunch of “what if I tried…”s that actually worked. You need two…
November 2011
3 posts
1 tag
Dead Time at East Didsbury
Sometimes time is dead time; you have to wait and hope that it will pass
Dangerous thought - how good it would be to edit your life away, but how would that be good?
Once lost it doesn’t come back, whatever it might be
So this moment is of waiting and not exactly enough, or not moving forward to where you would like to be:
So what?
Is it really that different from all the other...
Everything not contributing to learning is waste →
Comment on Jim Highsmith's article "Velocity is... →
October 2011
6 posts
Fredit inline rails view editing →
looks really interesting
Oh hell yes, no more crap →
Post explaining the personal side to the software craftsmanship movement.
My Article "old mistakes in a new guise" →
Article I wrote and put on the Magrails site. Enjoy.
False Analogy - meh
Just had a stupid Twitter spat with someone about the analogy that asking someone to predict the number of bugs is like asking a chef to predict the number of people who will fall ill.
It’s hard to discuss things in 140 characters, particularly if the individual is some kind of pedant who just can’t be wrong. I used the term false analogy, which was originally coined by the long-dead...
How I Fast Test with Rails →
June 2011
3 posts
Chapter 4 of Grtz now available
This is my comic SF novel – however it mostly takes the rise out of corporate culture … have fun.
1 Bay Sick Training
2 Down Sizing
3 Lumpy
4 Any Colour you Like
Buddhism and Depression
Note I write this back in 2009, and was leery of making some of the things here public. I have decided that it’s better to think of others first and not worry about it. I hope this helps.
Contents
Dedication
Introduction
The ground of depression The centre of the universe
Blaming others
Mental poisons
Heavy mind
Calming the mind
Reality and you – some things to muse on: Impermanence
...
The Warm Gun on sale now
Back in the 1980’s I wrote a dark novella called The Warm Gun. It’s not autobiographical in a plot sense, but some of the things in it did happen to me. The horrendous beating at the beginning of the book, for example.
The machine it was originally written on died and I had a copy of it on paper, so I scanned it all in and then converted it, I did have the beginnings of a new draft as well.
I...
May 2011
1 post
Namespaces in Rails 3 and respond_with
Assume we’ve got a namespace of Customer and in that a controller for Organisations.
This doesn’t work
class Customer::OrganisationsController < ApplicationController
respond_to :html
def update
@organisation = Organisation.find(params[:id])
@organisation.update_attributes(params[:organisation])
respond_with [:customer,@organisation]
end
end
It redirects to the...
April 2011
1 post
Magrails Survey Results
Total responents 40
This is a temporary home for this while the main site is built.
Would you attend an Agile Charity Day (there will be a Ruby one anyway)?
Answer
Count
%
No
5
12.5
Yes
35
87.5
Would you prefer a one or two day conference?
Answer
Count
%
Two
11
27.5
No preference
14
35.0
One
15
37.5
Would you like to be on a panel for a balloon...
March 2011
1 post
Bones
Once
A star died
Made the things bones are made of
All changes
Little star
My teeth
February 2011
1 post
Agile Heart: 2nd Essay: You Ain't Gonna Need It...
This article is part of what made me start on trying to organise the Manchester Agile Rails Conference – if you’re interested in it happening please fill in the survey. You Ain’t Gonna Need It (YAGNI) – vs flexibility The best software I’ve ever written is the software I didn’t write. I use Ruby on Rails – you’re probably sick of hearing this by now. But one of the things I really like about it is...
January 2011
3 posts
Good practice check list for code
This is a reworking of a list I created a couple of years ago for a client. Hope you find it useful.
Contents
Object-orientation
Dry and Shy
Tell don’t ask
The law of Demeter
Object Composition
Ruby considerations
Replace case statements with behaviour
Fat model thin controller
Short methods and classes
General points
Magic Numbers
Let Boolean be Boolean
No Surprises
...
Review of Seth Godin's Linchpin: Are You...
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Seriously, if you want to know why your children’s school seems to not be teaching them to think, if you want to know why you hate your job, read this book. Our entire education system is built around creating good factory workers, who have no initiative and do what they’re told. You may sit in a call centre or push numbers...
Review of Tom Peters' The Circle of Innovation:...
The Circle of Innovation: You Can’t Shrink Your Way to Greatness by Tom Peters
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Had this book on tape and listened to it many times back in the early noughties. I was writing a blog post about “The Agile Heart” (http://goo.gl/aBCae) and quoted from it, so I got a second-hand copy from Amazon to verify the quote, my tape player having gone the way of all flesh a while ago....
December 2010
3 posts
Comment left on the Register about Kindle stats
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/27/amazon_holiday_sales_stats
It works and comparing it with an iPad is silly, it costs less than a quarter of the price. I was interested in an iPad for reading stuff (have actually read a ton of things on my old iPhone) and the Kindle made economic sense.
Kindle will also do a Steven Hawking reading thing, which I plug into the car. Not brilliant, but means...
Agile Heart: 1st Essay: What is Agile?
This is the first in a series of essays about what it means to be an Agile Practitioner, at least from where I stand. Agile has a venerable history and started from a sense of dissatisfaction with existing practices and methods. I’ve heard lots of people say that they’ve “done Agile” and it didn’t work. I overheard a project manager saying that it doesn’t work, or only works in certain situations,...
first post from my new phone
I just got myself an HTC Desire and logged in here It’s interesting how I feel more comfortable using it compared to my now pretty crusty iPhone 3G. Still a bit laborious to type anything long on it but I think I’ll get up to speed quite quickly.
November 2010
2 posts
I'm tired of being led - student fees, lies and...
Leadership
I think less that 20% of the UK population approved of the Iraq war (the Afghan one was unavoidable after 9/11, so let’s leave that out of the discussion). At the time there was a lot of hocus pocus where Tony Blair was said to be taking an unpopular decision for the right reasons and people need to be led in times of crisis. This is code for we don’t give a shit what you think, we’re...
Fun with Cucumber and ActiveRecord after Rails 3...
I was using Rails 2.3.4 (2.3.10 wouldn’t do logging in as a different user for some annoying reason).
In my data model a story can have many fragments (which in turn can have many gates out)
I had an idiom where I was forcing the ID’s of things to be something I knew, so I could do things like this in my cucumber scenarios:
Given story 1 exists
And story 1 has fragment 1
And I am on story...
October 2010
6 posts
Decided to work on non-software project for a...
I started a comic novel GRTZ way back in the day and have been thinking of adding some more stuff to it, and working on it for a while. I need a break from doing software in the evenings because I can’t concentrate on it.
Here are the existing chapters:
1
2
Have a peruse if you want, I will be posting more over the coming few weeks.
New stuff
Lumpy
I suppose this is chapter 3
Imported...
Ruby and Rails 2010: Corey Haines
Thoughts from Software Craftsmanship
Corey Haines
Pair programming started in 1946!
Definitive source of information – googlefight. Says it’s good.
TSA – top secret information. Kept erroring out.
Travel visa for Australia – rejected for a Visa
New term Softwared! Follow Glyn Vanderberg – glad I’ve got the skills feel sorry for the folks who don’t. @glv
This is US!
All written our fair...
Ruby on Rails 2010 notes part 2
Concurrency: Rubies, plural
Elise Huard
Moore’s Law finally hit in 2002. Multiprocessor response, plus non-uniform memory access. Important to be aware of concurrency.
But … forget all that (mostly)
Concurrent programming != parallel computing
Thread level paralleism vs instruction level
Not orderly more like a stream of cars on a busy road that soldiers in lock step.
Scheduling
...
Ruby on Rails 2010 notes part 1
Mildly incoherent, but here they are:
Culture of Testing
Jon Yurek, Thoughtbot, @jyurek
Testing & version control not taught in school, no reason not to. Java testing getters and setters – insane. Culture of Ruby is to test/TDD.
Coming of age blog
Then framework
Contrib factory_girl/shoulda. Out the box very limited. Then we found cucumber. Didn’t like at first, but then having a story....
Seecodez - a code review manager
Seecodez is a project I’m working on in amongst the million other things I’m doing at the moment. I’ve decided to set up a Rails 3 project on my little Evo machine that I can take with me and work on when I’m waiting for things. I use the Evo rather than my MacBook when I don’t want to lug the damn thing about or worry about it getting stolen as the Evo only cost me a few quid.
It’s interesting...
Moving to a Rails-based blog engine, Enki
Blog City, who used to host this blog, decided that they’d had enough but didn’t seem to tell anyone who had a subscription that was about to lapse. Thanks guys, I’ve been a customer of yours for over 7 years!
I was planning on moving to another site eventually, but not right now because I’ve got too much to do. I was concerned that I was going to lose all that effort, and potentially useful...
April 2010
1 post
Mac: You don't have access to / on this server
Posted about my fight with my Mac, so next person might benefit from it on my company site: http://www.pharmarketeer.com/2010/04/02/apache-strangeness-on-mac.html
March 2010
1 post
Debugging cucumber scripts, cucumber and devise...
Non Rails/Ruby people may as well ignore this one!
Sometimes you need to see what the web server is sending back, when I’m working on rspec scripts I can print things out (which messes up the pretty output) but then see where my assumptions are wrong. I needed to be able to see what was in the response so that I could work out what was wrong. It’s annoyingly easy when you work out how. You need...
November 2009
5 posts
Comment left on review for Feeble Paradox
http://www.newstatesman.com/television/2009/11/high-drama-flint-king-paradox This is the Beeb’s feeble response to Flash Forward – can’t be bother with that either, but at least they have writers who can write. Best bit was trying to wake the sleeping tanker driver by standing 50 metres away and shouting, instead of driving right up to the bridge and using the car’s horn like a normal person...
Heroic Failure on the 13th of November
Had you down for Heroic Failure on the 13th of November Could you oblige? RSVP to me We’ll have tiffin on the lawn, eat small tiger for tea Measure nose to tail Will be slightly longer than the other one you see? Tasty tiger don’t eat me no more than necessary Yeah, you said you’d be there one time I sighed All my fault Reciprocate the failure Send card embossed with lillies No sympathy ...
Ok, I'm not perfect and I still get angry - but...
I suffered the misfortune of sitting next to an extremely inconsiderate man on the train on Sunday. I was subjected to 2 hours of having my leg felt and the paper snapped and wafted in my face by the most irritating elbow wielding person I’ve ever sat next to. I think he was trying to get me to move. He had his wife and child with him (at least I think it was his child, I don’t think I saw him...
Tumbleweed Interview Candidates
In my present role helping a team become more agile I was asked to help with some interviews. We must have talked to about ten people. The profile is relatively unusual: Object-oriented PHP with MVC and some Oracle PL/SQL. Unusual but a lot of people claim to have at least some of it. I’ve helped conduct at least two interviews where you ask a straight question related to a claim on a CV e.g....
TDD is effective if you look at the right things
http://theruntime.com/blogs/jacob/archive/2008/01/22/tdd-proven-effective-or-is-it.aspx It’s nothing to do with the initial development. All about the long-term viability of the code. You can’t refactor or maintain something if you can’t prove your changes have’t broken it. I do believe that the code is better, as long as each test comes directly from the specification, it shows you have...
October 2009
1 post
Ballmer not the darling of the stock market
Comment left here. MS is a statistical outlier. A lot of its success was accidental and also built on allowing piracy in markets it could’t control in the early days. Ballmer/Gates so what? You get one of these companies every generation or so and they hang around for a long time and Wall Street or the City of Lahndahn try to make everybody else be like them when that business model only works...
September 2009
1 post
For and Against Test-Driven Development
Comment left here. I’ve been training people on TDD and the first thing I said is you need to start from the functional spec and then (maybe) create a technical spec that is used to drive the tests. Understand the problem first – and then the tests are just part of writing the code as a whole, no biggie. Writing small tests for small bits of code make you think small, with short well focussed...
August 2009
1 post
Next life
These old teeth When ground Will be dust again And how happy I will be To shuck off this old form and its aches and pains Things done wrong already and for always wrong It can’t forget, just recycle and chew on the Old bones of pain To move on to something new But the mistakes will still belong to this little me This flotsam This bubble on the edge of a wave Lose particulars but not consequences I...
July 2009
2 posts
Rails authlogic: can't use OAuth and OpenID...
I’m trying to use both openid and oauth with authlogic. Looks like I can’t. The plugins both override the active record save method and call the block you associate with it in the controller (this is done so that it can go to the external website and come back without a double render – very clever stuff). Prob is both will call the block, so you’ll get a double render. Can’t work out how to only...
Free!!
I’ve finally been made redundant, which means I can apply for the dole and get my mortgage protection up and running. Had a lot of fun trying to get a machine that was running Microsoft stuff so I could use the on-line forms to set up a tribunal to try and recover the £11k they owe me. It just would’t work on my Ubuntu machine and then, when I booted it to Windows it started playing up. Meh. I’m...
June 2009
5 posts
Busy getting things ready for biz - happy!
I am renting a host slice at slicehost.com. I decided to use these guys instead of one of the millions of places like hostgator or site5 because I end up with a web host that’s entirely under my control and I can use Apache’s multi-site thing to host several low-volume sites on there without it becoming expensive, plus have somewhere clients can go see what I can do. I also have total control of...
Strange situation - will work for money
I’ve still not been paid and must now be owed the best part of £10k. The company I still nominally work for is bust but has’t been wound up yet so I can’t get a P45 and the redundancy £. Bizarrely, if I resign I will lose it and become just another creditor. I wo’t have a P45 and can’t sign on so my mortgage protection wo’t kick in because I made myself “intentionally unemployed”. So...
Archive fragments published
Finally! The direct url is here. Here is the blurb from the back cover. We find ourselves at some time in the future “After the Revolutio”, following the trials and tribulations of Jay, an adjuster/investigator for WorldNet. Jay tries to solve the mystery of a priest drowned in his font and is pursued by the shadowy figure of Kervas. Before the Revolution Odine was trying to understand...
Archive Fragments ready for launch!
I redid the text based on my proof copy and am now pretty pleased with the result. I created a new version of the book and have ordered 5 copies to see what they look like. After that I will start o promoting the book here and other places and see if people will buy it. Quite excited.
Domain name shift to francisfish.com
I’ve just set it up so the primary domain here is www.francisfish.com. Remarkably painless, I set up email using google apps a while ago so now my vanity project is complete. The old domain will still work. I have lots of google goodness I don’t want to lose. The next thing to do here is put some links up to my books so (hopefully) people will start buying them, or at least reading them. I’m...