09.23.07 - 02:36pm
Derek Sivers of CDBaby kicks ass. He got a sophisticated and very very user-friendly, efficient, straightforward e-commerce system (including the back-end systems) written in PHP. Based on what I’ve read, he’s up there with Phil Greenspun in my opinion; that is, he’s among those who understand strategy and customer service and low-level technology and are [...]
09.22.07 - 11:47pm
acts-as-tsearch is pretty cool, except for the fact that it uses Ruby (app layer) instead of PL/pgSQL (DB layer) to update the tsvectors that are indexed for full text search. That means that fixture data gets inserted without being full text indexed. D’oh!
Here’s some code that changes that.
08.19.07 - 11:37pm
We developers and other nerdy folk are used to using strange and klunky applications that do something special, and we’re used to that trade-off.
Eclipse is an IDE so it’s hard to imagine it not being baroque and difficult to use, requiring weeks of effort to become productive. JBidWatcher has saved me a lot of money [...]
08.16.07 - 05:05pm
Ruby faster than Python and Perl! cries the headline. This is based on a benchmark that tests “i = i + 1” in a loop, so it’s a particularly useless benchmark, even in a world of benchmarks designed to test unrealistic scenarios that make the benchmark author’s product look good.
08.02.07 - 08:37pm
From what I’ve seen, Rails’ weakest features lie in the way it prepares the test database and test data, and Ruby’s Test::Unit isn’t much better than the awful but ubuiquitous JUnit that Java developers are accustomed to. I set out this week to impose my preferences on Rails in this area, and that took some [...]