My career started in the late 90's and I worked exclusively on Windows. The average Mac users that I knew annoyed me. They were always complaining about incompatibility and they typically knew less about computers, in general, than Windows users. As it turned out THAT was kind of the idea. Steve didn't want the average user to know about the specs of their machine, he just wanted them to have the best experience possible. It wasn't about specs, it was about experience.

I didn't fully grasp that until October 2008, when I gave my wife an iPhone 3G for her birthday. I had the AT&T Tilt at the time and was pretty damn excited about the prospects of writing apps for the windows mobile platform. One problem though, I couldn't take my hands off her iPhone (literally) and it actually sparked a few arguments (sorry babe). I quickly made the decision to switch to the iPhone and have never been happier or more confident in a decision.

That iPhone purchase led me to other iPhones, my first MacBook, a MacMini, a couple Apple TVs, and an iMac. I couldn't be happier with ANY of those purchases. I didn't feel that any one of them was overpriced; in-fact, I priced out my iMac against the same computer (if assembled from mid-range parts at a very reasonable online retailer) and my iMac ended up being cheaper, after OS/software licensing fees.

Steve Jobs changed my life in the 80’s, but it took 20+ years for me to find out. He had a vision, he sold it, and he delivered. I will be forever grateful for the influence he had on the industry, the world, and eventually me.

I am deeply saddened by the loss of this truly remarkable man. I was not ready to see him go. My deepest condolences go out to his family and loved ones.

Thank you Mr. Jobs.

Errors/exceptions should be descriptive and specific.The more (relevant) information you can give me about what's going sideways, the better. I think custom exception classes play a critical role in providing this information. You can load them up with data that's relevant to the error and they can bubble up with that information until they are caught and at that point the the data they're holding can provide hints as to how to fix the problem. If you use the standard errors/exceptions, just changing the message of the exception, you will find yourself doing a lot of string comparison/manipulation in a catch block in order to figure out what the error is, and wether you can handle it.

Integration tests are crucial to ensuring that the system is working from end-to-end, but should be used sparingly due to the fact that they typically are: long-running, more difficult to setup, more brittle, and quick to increase in number and complexity. My typical integration test suite includes 1 happy-path test and 1 sad-path test (the most critical), while every 'contract' between classes will have tests for the interesting pre/post conditions.

On occasion, I'll write a throw-away test fixture who's sole purpose is exploratory testing of a new 3rd party library/module that I want to get familiar with before adding it to my project.

Last night I had an epiphany: What if I provided a different favicon for each environment instead of the same one for each? A little research and I discovered that I didn’t have to have a file name favicon.ico, I could name it whatever I wanted AND you can use file formats other than .ico.

 favicon.png

 favicon-staging.png

 favicon-development.png

127.0.0.1 new_project

127.0.0.1 other_project

127.0.0.1 sandbox

5by5: http://5by5.tv/

• Back to Work: http://5by5.tv/b2w
• Hypercritical: http://5by5.tv/hypercritical
• The Talk Show: http://5by5.tv/talkshow
• Build and Analyze: http://5by5.tv/buildanalyze
• The Dev Show: http://5by5.tv/devshow
• The Pipeline: http://5by5.tv/pipeline
• Briefly Awesome: http://5by5.tv/brieflyawesome
• On the Internet: http://5by5.tv/ontheinternet

TWiT Network: http://twit.tv/

• this WEEK in TECH: http://twit.tv/twit
• Mac Break Weekly: http://twit.tv/mbw
• this WEEK in GOOGLE: http://twit.tv/twig
• Tech News Today: http://twit.tv/tnt

This Week In...: http://thisweekin.com/

• This Week In StartUps: http://thisweekin.com/thisweekin-startups/ 

Other sources:

• The Ruby Show: http://rubyshow.com/
• This Developer's Life: http://thisdeveloperslife.com/
• Mac Power Users: http://macpowerusers.com/
• Herding Code: http://herdingcode.com/
• Hanselminutes: http://hanselminutes.com/

It's a lot of listening, good thing I have a dog that likes to go on walks...

If I were Jeff and Joel, I'd be pissed. And though I understand that they want to be a community player; I think that taking a step back, they'd see that allowing these sites to use the data dump this way is clearly not in the best interest of the community.

That being said, recently Joel posted a link to a chrome extension which (upon loading a site which is shamelessly using the data dump) will redirect you to the appropriate StackOverflow page. Here's the link https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gledhololmniapejefjfocffkhoamlll# and it worked like a charm for me. Hopefully it continues to do so.

Unknown alias name: 'default'

Turns out, RVM wants you to set your default version of ruby. Running the following command appears to have fixed the problem for me.

rvm use ruby-1.9.2 --default

Essentially, the domain has a Parent class (called Parent) which has a collection of Child classes (a property named Children which is an IList). The NHibernate mapping is setup as a lazy-loaded collection, which is very performant when the collection of children is small, which you'd typically find when doing unit testing or integration testing. The bottleneck starts showing up as soon as parent.Children.Add(newChild) is called and the number of children is sufficiently large enough to cause a delay while lazily loading the children.

The simple fix is to setup a bi-directional association between the objects and make sure the cascade goes in both directions.  Once that's done, change 'parent.Children.Add(child);' to 'child.Parent = parent;' and flush the changes to the DB. Now, this change will not help very much if you are going to do queries against the Child collection before persisting the changes to the database (since the child won't be in the collection until a query is done to pull the collection out), but it will keep you from pulling all the Children from the database and into memory in order to simply add a new item to the collection. The next time the parent is loaded and the 'Children' property is referenced it will lazily load all the children, including the new record.

To sum it up: If you have a collection that's lazily loaded, and the 'Child' has a reference to the 'Parent', you're better of setting the 'Parent' of the 'Child' than adding the 'Child' to a collection in the 'Parent' since NHibernate is going to load the other 'Child' objects of the 'Parent' before it performs the Add().

1. How much busy work is avoided by using Conventions, which is probably why certain projects in the .Net and .Net OSS communities are rushing to add Conventions.
2. One should probably know what the Conventions are before diving into a project that uses them.

So I did a quick google to get a list of the Conventions and found this post on Ruby on Rails Naming Conventions.

Here's the summary of the post, just in case it ever get's taken down.

Model Naming Convention

Table: orders
Class: Order
File: /app/models/order.rb
Primary Key: id
Foreign Key: customer_id
Link Tables: items_orders

Controller Naming Convention

Class: OrdersController
File: /app/controllers/orders_controller.rb
Layout: /app/layouts/orders.html.erb

View Naming Convention

Helper: /app/helpers/orders_helper.rb
Helper Module: OrdersHelper
Views: /app/views/orders/… (list.html.erb for example)

Tests Naming Convention

Unit: /test/unit/order_test.rb
Functional: /test/functional/orders_controller_test.rb
Fixtures: /test/fixtures/orders.yml